by Noah Hawley
At Bethune his pace quickens. It is a quiet street, mostly empty of foot traffic. He reaches the fence and stops, lowering the shovel. He does not look around, but bends and takes the wire cutters from his bag. He is counting on the apathy of New Yorkers, the fact that people are reluctant to question a man who looks like he knows what he’s doing. He has done the math in his head. Thirty seconds to cut the fence, a minute to walk to the tree, maybe ten minutes to dig up the can. The whole operation should be accomplished before anyone has a chance to think twice.
If it occurs to him as he cuts the first heavy wire fastener that what he’s doing isn’t exactly rational, it doesn’t slow him down. After months of apathy and emotional navel-gazing, he has decided that the key to his recovery is to commit entirely to a course of action, no matter how seemingly insane. Make a choice, see it through. He leans on his hands, squeezing the grips of the cutters, and snaps through the two remaining fasteners. Then, before he has time to change his mind, he lifts the chain link and, grabbing his shovel, slides through.
He is in a long alley that separates the larger apartment building on his left from the brownstones on the right. He moves deliberately, shovel on his shoulder, to the side of his old home. There is a small wooden fence around it and he goes up and over. He stands for a moment scanning the windows around him but sees no one. The view is the same as he remembers. Brick walls with curtained windows, slices of New York living with its overstuffed, overdecorated quality, which comes from staying too long in one place. Standing there he is at once thirty-five and seven. He is old and young. Standing there at this moment there is no past, present, or future. There is only this place.
He drops the messenger bag, walks over to the base of the tree. It has grown in twenty years, taller, wider. But to Scott it looks the same because he has grown, too, and so his relationship to the tree remains proportional. He may as well be the boy set to bury his treasure instead of the man come to dig it up. Snow is piled on the ground around the base of the tree. Scott takes the shovel and scoops it away, exposing the hard brown earth. His breath collects in front of his mouth in puffs of white. Overhead, a cloud moves in front of the sun, and Scott places the blade of the shovel against the earth. He sets the heel of his dress shoe on top of it. In his mind he says a silent prayer, again not to God, but fate. We get so few opportunities in life to correct the mistakes we’ve made, to fix the things we’ve broken. When those opportunities arise we must seize them without hesitation. This, too, is an act of faith.
With all his might, Scott pushes down on the foot plate and almost breaks his ankle.
The ground is frozen solid.
He lifts the shovel and brings the blade down hard. It makes a ringing sound. The concussion of the blow makes all the bones in his body jump one inch to the left.
“Fuck,” he says out loud.
He brings the blade down again. This time he manages to chip a tiny spear of earth, making a hole about the size of a quarter. At this rate he’ll be digging all day. He panics a little, raising the shovel and hammering into the earth a few more times with increasing recklessness.
He should have brought a pickax.
Sirens rise in the distance and Scott freezes, but it is just another New York drive-by. This is a city of emergencies, always someone in danger, in trouble, in pain.
He continues to work, sweat breaking out on his back and stomach. He takes off his suit jacket, lays it across a bush. Using the shovel like a hammer, he chips away at the earth, the cuffs of his pants getting dirty. He is ruining his shoes. Sweat soaks the collar of his shirt and freezes in the cold.
“What the hell are you doing?”
The voice comes from the apartment building behind him. Scott whips around, a guilty man caught in a spotlight. A man in an undershirt is leaning out of his window.
“I’m trying to sleep here.”
“Sorry,” says Scott. He turns back to the hole he’s made. It’s barely three inches deep. And just like that the nerve goes out of him. For the first time he realizes what he’s doing, how crazy it is. He could be arrested. And for what? Some stupid childhood memory. A whim? So what if he stole his father’s dog tags? Who knows if Joe even cared. He was probably glad to be rid of them.
Against his will, Scott remembers the last real conversation he had with his father. It was a week before Joe died. He went to dialysis and refused to get back on the transport. He was demanding to go home. He didn’t like this new nursing home. He was sick of being institutionalized. All he wanted was to move back in with his wife, to be a normal human being again sleeping in his own bed. The trouble was he was too sick. He had broken his hip recently. He had trouble standing without help. He couldn’t walk without falling. At the same time, the lung cancer was advancing rapidly. There were more medications than a layperson could keep track of. The dialysis center called Scott on a Wednesday afternoon. His father had plopped himself down in the lobby and was refusing to budge. They asked Scott what they should do. If his father didn’t get on the bus they would have to call the police, and the police would take him to the emergency room. Scott told them to try bribing him with cigarettes. He asked to talk to his dad. The attendant handed over the phone.
“Hey, Pop,” said Scott.
His father grunted. He was like a piece of luggage, a suitcase no one wanted.
“What’s going on?” Scott asked him.
“I’m not going back there. Those people…”
There was a barely contained fury in his voice. Scott sighed. Joe had had a couple of strokes. His liver didn’t process toxins that well. There were times when he wasn’t exactly lucid. Was this one of those? Scott was at work. Everyone around him had the finely tuned hearing of a dog. He leaned down under his desk, spoke quietly.
“You’ve gotta go back, Pop. If you don’t like the nursing home you’re in, we’ll find you another, but right now you have to go back.”
“No.”
Scott could hear the resolution in his dad’s voice. You don’t survive a dozen life-threatening maladies by being weak-willed. Stubbornness was what had kept his dad going for the last few years, a grim determination not to give death the satisfaction of having the last word.
“I won’t,” he said. “They treat me like an animal there. You have no idea.”
Scott could feel his coworkers eavesdropping, all the cubicles filled with witnesses, all of them listening silently, judging.
“Look, Pop. I swear, if you don’t want to stay there we’ll find you someplace better, but right now I don’t know what else to do. I’m five hundred miles away. Just get on the bus and I’ll come up this weekend and we’ll straighten this whole thing out, okay? For me. Please.”
His dad was silent on the other end of the line. Scott held his breath.
“One night,” his father said.
“Yes,” said Scott. “Absolutely. I’ll call the social worker today and we’ll find you a better nursing home.”
He hung up and called his mother.
“I know,” she said. “He called me, too. I told him he’s not coming here.”
“I hope you were nicer than that.”
“I can’t take care of him. It’s too much.”
Scott felt a surge of anger.
“We have to find him another place,” he told his mother. “Start making calls.”
His call waiting chimed.
“Mom,” he said, “I’ll call you back.”
He took the other call. It was the dialysis center.
“We got him on the bus,” said the attendant. “I told him I’d give him a pack of cigarettes. But once he got on he started yelling. He says he’s not going back. He wants to go home. He’s in the lobby again. What could I do? We don’t kidnap people.”
Scott felt dizzy. He sat there vibrating. His supervisor was staring at him. Break time’s over. Scott chewed his lip. Maybe if he didn’t speak, if he just put down the phone and hid under his desk, the whole thing would resolve itsel
f. Maybe if he packed his things and went home, climbed under the bed, somebody else would have to deal with it. How many crises can one man handle? How many impossible situations can one man solve?
“Put him on the phone,” said Scott.
There was the sound of the attendant putting the phone down, the sound of his father shambling over. His voice, when he came on, was defiant but defeated at the same time.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Pop,” said Scott. “How ya doing?”
Silence.
“Look, we don’t have a lot of options here. I’m not there. I can’t come get you.”
“I want to go home, to the apartment, your mother.”
“She can’t…you need more care than we can give you at home.”
“I understand. She doesn’t want me. None of you want me.”
“That’s not…We’re just not equipped. You have so many needs.”
“They put me in a diaper. I tell them I can go to the bathroom on my own, but they don’t listen. I’m a grown man and I’m wearing a diaper.”
Scott’s supervisor made a get-back-to-work gesture. Scott gave him the finger and turned away. More than anything he wanted the angel of mercy to come and take him away, tell him he was free, that everything would be taken care of.
“Pop,” he said, “we’re going to figure this out, I promise, but right now you have to get on that bus. If you don’t they’re going to call the cops and the cops are going to take you to the emergency room. Is that what you want?”
Silence. He could sense his father’s panic. Joe was trapped. His illness had trapped him. His lungs were dying. His kidneys were dead. He had a hard time walking on his own. He was making a last-ditch effort to regain control over his life, and yet how much control could he get?
“I want to go home,” he said.
Scott took a deep breath. When he spoke his tone was icy, hard.
“You can’t go home,” he said. “You have two choices. Either you go back to the home or you go to the hospital. Which is it?”
He hoped that someday someone would forgive him for this, for bullying his own sick father, for strong-arming him. And yet what choice did he have? He, too, was trapped.
“No hospitals,” his father said.
“Then get on the bus, and I’ll call Mom and we’ll figure this out.”
“Come get me,” his father said. Rescue me. Take me away.
Scott closed his eyes. For a moment he indulged the fantasy. He would fly to Portland. He would pick up his father and drive to the coast. They would live in a cottage. There would be peace and quiet. There would be dignity and love. Without dialysis or medicine his father would sicken gently. He would die in a rocking chair, sitting on the porch, looking out at the surf. If Scott were a better man, he would do this for his father, and yet even as he thought this, he knew it was just a fantasy. Without the medication his father would suffer. Pain would chew through his bones. Without dialysis his body would fill with toxins. His brain would rot. There would be no bucolic passing, just a slow, torturous ruin.
“I can’t,” he said. “You’re too sick. You need to be someplace they can take care of you.”
His father’s voice, when it came, was small, vulnerable.
“You take care of me.”
Scott couldn’t breathe.
“Get on the bus, Pop,” he said. “I’ll be there this weekend and we’ll figure this out.”
His father was quiet. Scott could feel his abandonment across the phone line, could hear the realization sinking in. Joe Henry was on his own. He had made his play for control and it had failed. He would take his diaper and go back to the nursing home. He would hold his head high and return. His family didn’t want him, and he wasn’t about to beg. He would take the abuse, the mistreatment. He had survived worse and for longer.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
“No, Pop,” said Scott, you’re no bother, but it was too late. His father was already gone.
Scott lifts the shovel and brings it down on the frozen earth. He will do this for his father, return the things he’s stolen, make it right. The shovel chimes against the iron ground, shovel handle blistering his palms.
“I swear to Christ,” says the guy in the undershirt, “you do that one more time, I’m calling the cops.”
Scott stands panting. It’s no use. He’d need a blowtorch to dig this hole. He has failed. Failed himself. Failed his father. He throws the shovel into the bushes, grabs his coat and bag.
“Go fuck yourself,” he tells the guy in the undershirt, and jumps the low wooden fence. The memorial was set to begin. He shrugs back into his jacket, every move an expression of fury. He stoops and slips under the chain link, but one of the cut fasteners hooks his coat and rips it.
He stands on Bethune Street, foiled. The wind has picked up, clouds blowing in across the Hudson. His shirt is soaked through from attacking the ground and the slice of the wind cuts through to his core.
“Fuck,” he says again. It may be the only word he ever uses from here on out. His mind has seized up, like an engine without oil. The gears are grinding, motor racing, but no real thoughts come. He has failed, and for the life of him he can’t figure out what to do next.
He takes off his work gloves, drops them on the sidewalk. Shoving his hands into his pockets, he walks around the corner to Bank. He stares up at his old brownstone, and then, because he can think of nothing else to do, he sits on the stoop, his bag beside him like a sad, lost dog. He is wearing a black suit with a blue shirt and a striped tie. The stoop has been shoveled, cleared of snow, but the temperature of the concrete, the constrictive single-digit freeze, makes the step feel wet under his ass. He sits with his knees bent, elbows resting gently on the caps. In one of his jacket pockets he finds a package of Twizzlers and, buttoning his coat against the wind, he peels off a spiral-red stick and lifts it to his mouth.
How can he say good-bye to his father now? This is what he’s wondering as he sits in the cold. He watches people go by, wrapped up in Gore-Tex and wool. He watches them walk their shaggy dogs and carry their groceries in gloved hands. Every twenty minutes a Puerto Rican kid with a red knit beanie comes out of the supermarket and loads a stainless-steel delivery box mounted to the front of a bicycle, then pedals off into the slush.
Women with comically long scarves push baby carriages, navigating around snowbanks and sheets of black ice. He chews his licorice and thinks of the bar around the corner where, fifteen minutes ago, his father’s memorial began. He should stand and go, but he can’t. He’s not ready. His parents used to take them to the White Horse when they were kids, park them at a table with a coloring book or a Jumble. They would have a drink and watch the city go by.
On the street a young woman in a bright yellow coat and hat with a baby carriage passes.
“Hey,” she says, “I know you.”
It is Joy from the supermarket, and little Sam, bundled up like a hot dog in a bun.
“Hi,” he says, coming out of his daze. “It snowed.”
She adjusts her bright yellow hat. She looks like a sunflower.
“Yes, it did.”
She looks up at the brownstone behind him.
“Is this it?” she says. “The old homestead.”
He nods.
“Thirteen years. That’s how long we lived here. Me and my brother and my mom and dad. We played stoop ball on this stoop and watched the Halloween parade go by. I went to P.S. 41 and Grace Church School. My brother got his skateboard stolen by a kid with a Swiss Army knife, took him five minutes to find the blade. He kept pulling out the corkscrew, the screwdriver, the tweezers.”
“You’re making it up.”
“I wish.”
He holds out his package of licorice.
“Twizzler?” he says.
She shakes her head.
“You know what they say about taking candy from strangers,” she says. “What kind of example would I be setti
ng for young Sam?”
Her cheeks are red from the cold, the tip of her nose. He wants to put his lips to it and warm her with his breath.
“But we’re not strangers,” he says. “We met the night before last. You’re Joy and I’m Scott.”
From his carriage, little Sam watches the cars go by. Scott wonders what it would be like to be a baby again, to see everything for the first time. Would the world be simpler or more complex? Joy reaches out, takes a piece of licorice.
“Well,” she says, “if we’re not strangers…”
He smiles, watches her take a bite. Her lipstick is the exact color of the licorice. He wants to take the baby from the stroller and climb in, fasten the little seat belt and fall asleep to the gentle rolling of the wheels.
“How’s your husband?” he asks.
“Far away,” she says and sticks out her lower lip.
“But you’re fine, right? Aren’t you this sturdy frontierswoman, the only child, self-sufficient in all things?”
She paws a strand of hair from her face, tucks it back up under her hat.
“It gets cold at night,” she says. “Even us frontier women need a husband to warm up the bed sometimes. Not to mention fight off the Indians.”
He watches the Puerto Rican kid pedal up on his delivery bike. Rain, shine, snow, or sleet, people need their groceries. Looking at him, Joy notices the dirt on Scott’s pants, the ripped jacket.
“I don’t mean to pry,” she says, “but what happened to you?”
At first he doesn’t know what she’s asking—everything? The story of his life?—but then he sees where she’s looking, and for the first time notices what he’s done to his suit.
“I was digging,” he says.