Dedication
To the women in my life:
Mother, sister, daughters, wife
Epigraph
That man’s father
is my father’s son.
—SECOND HALF OF A RIDDLE
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
About the Author
Also by William Wharton
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
AAA CON is the first name in the phone book of most large American cities. This outfit arranges drive-aways; searches out people to drive cars for delivery from one place to another.
My son Billy and I are waiting in the L.A. AAA CON office. I’ve had my medical exam, deposited a fifty-dollar bond, filled out forms and given references. Billy’s too young to take a drive-away; the minimum age is twenty-one. A car’s already been assigned to us and we’re waiting now for them to drive it up.
Billy’s excited because it’s a Lincoln Continental. I dread telling him he isn’t going to drive. I’m not a super-responsible person, but I’m that responsible, especially with someone else’s fifteen-thousand-dollar automobile.
So I’ll be driving all the way across this huge country and I’m not looking forward to it.
The office here is grim. These places are only processing centers; nothing’s spent on carpets or fancy furnishings. I figure they make a hundred bucks or so on each car they move cross-country.
Finally, the beefy fellow at the desk calls us over. He asks what route we want and agrees to 15-70-76. It’s the least trafficked by trucks because of the high, unfinished pass at Loveland. After that, it’s double-four most of the way.
We’ll be delivering this car to Philadelphia, my old hometown, then we’ll take a plane to Paris. Paris is our real home now, has been for fifteen years.
Half an hour later we get the car. It isn’t new, maybe two years old, deep maroon with a black vinyl top; flashy-looking affair; looks like a gangster’s car. We’re delivering to somebody named Scarlietti, so who knows, maybe we’re driving a bump-off car.
This must be the twentieth time I’ve driven cross-country; more than half those trips Drive-Away.
One time we moved a pale yellow Chevy Impala convertible. That was in the days of convertibles, before air conditioning and stereo. We tied our kids in that car with jump ropes so they couldn’t fall out, then zoomed west to east mostly on 66, top down, wind, sun in our faces. The kids could fight, scream, play, holler, make all the noise they wanted; we couldn’t hear a thing. It was almost like a honeymoon for Vron and me.
We got good mileage on that Chevy, too. But this Lincoln’s going to put me down an extra thirty bucks in gas. At least we’ll be comfortable; it’s no joke beating a car three thousand miles across the whole damned country in eight days, and I’m getting too old for this kind of thing.
The part I’ve been dreading comes after we pull out with the Lincoln. We need to pick up our bags and say goodbye to Mom. Billy’s jumpy, too. We know it won’t be easy; nothing’s easy with Mom; but considering all that’s happened this is going to be especially hard.
We ease our giant floating dark red boat up Colby Lane. A car like this isn’t designed to move around narrow, old fashioned residential streets. Dad bought the lot here for twenty-six hundred dollars about twenty-five years ago. He built the house himself at a total cost under six thousand bucks; it must be worth over eighty thousand today.
We park on the driveway and go inside. Mom’s dressed to kill, looking damned good for someone who’s had two heart attacks in the past five months. Still, she’s weepy around the eyes, pale; walking with her new peculiar shuffle. It’s as if she has a load in her pants and is balancing a book on her head.
She starts straight off crying, asking what she’s going to do when I leave; insisting she’ll be all alone, because, according to her, Joan, my sister, doesn’t care if she lives or dies.
I’ve been listening to Mom complaining all my life, especially during the last months. I keep thinking I’ll get immune to it; I should be thoroughly inoculated after fifty years, but sometimes it still hurts. Sometimes I really listen and sometimes I can’t take it anymore. This time I’m only numb.
I wait until she slows down. I tell her again how some things must be. I need to go home. It’s been too long since I’ve seen Vron and Jacky. I can’t spend the rest of my life taking care of her and Dad. She knows all this, we’ve been over it enough.
Billy stands in the background listening. He starts turning television channels, looking for something, anything. I can’t blame him. Mom keeps at it. I’m nodding my head as I work our bags to the car. She’s also pushing a child’s lunch box filled with pills on us. It’s her way of showing love, taking care, making us feel dependent.
But we do finally get away.
The next part’s even tougher. We cruise up Colby to the convalescent home where Dad is. The home is only a block from my parents’ house. We chose it so Mom could be near. We experimented with another place but settled on this one. It has its limitations but Mom can walk here when she wants. It probably isn’t good for Dad but nobody can deny her this.
We park around the corner and go in. The smell is something I’ll never get used to. It’s a combination of the smells in a men’s room and an animal shelter. When I was sixteen, I worked for a small-animal vet. I’d come in mornings and hose down the cages, wash out all the dog and cat crap from the night before. This is a combination of those smells, plus the smell of general decrepitude.
I never knew what the word decrepitude or corruption really meant. As kids, we used to say piss, shit and corruption. Now I know. Corruption is when something is being corrupted; rotted by bacteria. These poor, old people here are being corrupted, rotted, decayed. The result is decrepitude, being wasted, worn out, used up.
Smells like this are hard to cover. All the carbolic acid, strong soap and aerosol in the world won’t do it. This is the smell of death, the going back to earth none of us can avoid.
A German-born brother and sister run the home. People couldn’t be kinder. Of course, they’re doing it for money, lots of money. The cheapest you can have a shared double is twenty-five bucks a day. But I wouldn’t do it, night and day, day in and day out. I couldn’t.
They tell me Dad’s still in the same room but they don’t think he’ll know us; he’s under sedation. I’ve accepted this; sedation is the best thing for him now, anything to make it easy. There don’t seem to be any real, practical, permanent answers. There’s no room for him in this world anymore. I know something about old age now. You’re old when most people would rather have you dead.
We walk along the hallway looking into rooms. We peek in at thin, worn shells of human beings; people with oxygen tubes on their noses and catheters coming out from under bathrobes. They’re propped up in bed or sitting in wheelchairs. It’s only afternoon, but they’re all dressed in bed clothes. Some are hunched over, listening to radios or staring at television sets; mouths open, mostly toothless. As we go by, some look out, latch on to us with their eyes, like prisoners peering from cells. I feel guiltily healthy, young
, with an unending future. How must Billy, beside me, feel at nineteen?
Dad’s on the men’s side; so stupid to carry that farce to this point in life. He’s in a gigantesque kind of crib. He’s lying in the darkened room with the drapes drawn. His eyes are open, fixed on the ceiling.
There’s a roommate. The man is deaf and smiles at us. They chose him on purpose because sometimes Dad screams out in the night.
All together, Dad’s been in this place two weeks. He came out of the hospital again a week ago. He’d begun dehydrating.
I look down. He’s somehow dead already; yellowish skin but not a wrinkle. He’d lost so much weight, then gained some of it back; now he’s skeleton thin again.
We lean close over him. I say hello. He hears and turns his eyes but there’s no recognition. He stares at our eyes just as a baby or a dog does, not expecting anything, only seeming fascinated in a passive sense by the eye itself. He’s gripping and ungripping, twisting the blankets and sheets the way he does most times now. It’s a constant tight turning; nervous movements. Sometimes he’ll grit his teeth and bear down, pushing one side against the other, trying to make it all hold together. But right now he isn’t too active, only twittering with his fingers, maybe proving to himself there are still things; that he’s still here and alive. He looks past me and speaks through quivering lips.
“I have to take a piss.”
This is so unlike Dad. He never used those words. It’s hard seeing Dad in this condition, saying “piss” in front of Billy. If he knew what he was doing, it’d never happen; he wouldn’t even say that to me.
We pull a catch lowering the side rail to the bed, help Dad swing his legs out. I slip his robe over his shoulders; his slippers onto his feet. He’s wearing socks. He has no catheter yet. I’m hoping he can stay off one long as possible. He’s so privacy-conscious, a catheter makes him go downhill fast. Having nurses check and change it is degrading to him. When they do use one, it won’t be indwelling, only a condom you slip over the penis with a tube into a bag; at least it won’t hurt.
Billy and I lift Dad up and he grabs hold of us. His fingers, hands and arms, though shaking violently, are still strong. We help him slide across the gray asphalt-tile floor to the small bathroom. He’s moving one foot in front of the other, but only with enormous concentration. In the bathroom, he leans over the toilet with his hands against the wall. He’s not looking at us, only into the toilet. He spits into the bowl; but he can’t piss.
We stand there and nothing comes. Billy looks across at me. I flush the toilet thinking it might help but Dad only spits again. He never spit, I know of, or maybe he’s always spit in the toilet, a closet spitter. Actually, I never saw him even go to the toilet till these last months.
I figure we’d better maneuver him back to bed. But, when we try taking him away, he has a tight hold on the pipes over the toilet. He has such a tight grip his knuckles are white. I try unlocking them.
“Come on, Dad. Let go of the pipe.”
He won’t. He won’t look at me either; he only bears down and grits his teeth. I try undoing his hand, opening one finger at a time, the way you do with a baby when it grabs your beard. Then, suddenly, he lets go and latches on to another pipe. This pipe’s the hot-water line; his hand must be burning but he holds on tight with manic fury. Billy’s pulling at his other hand.
“Come on, Gramps; let go! Come on, let go now.”
I’m almost ready to give up, call for help, when we finally pry him loose. We turn him around. As soon as he’s turned away he seems to forget the pipes. We try working him through the doorway but he goes into his usual hang-up, checking molding, running his hand up and down as if it’s some new thing he’s never seen before. This is a man who built his own house from the ground up and has done carpentry work since childhood. These days, it’s almost impossible to move him past any doorjamb; but we manage.
We slide him to the bed, sit him down, take off his robe and slippers, then help him lie back. As usual, he’s afraid to put his head down. I cradle his head in my hand and lower him slowly onto the pillow. He’s deeply tense. He stares at the ceiling and his mouth starts moving, chattering, his lips opening and closing over his teeth, up and down with a quivering, uncontrolled movement.
Strangely, Dad still has all his teeth. Here he is, a seventy-three-year-old man and he has all his perfectly beautiful teeth, somewhat yellowed, long in the gum but not a filling. I’m already missing six, and Billy beside me has several teeth missing, three root canals, filled with gold and porcelain-covered. If anyone ever X-rayed Dad’s head and Billy’s, not seeing anything else, they’d think Dad was the young man.
He continues staring at the ceiling. I stroke his head, try to calm him. He holds my hand and squeezes it hard. He gives me a good squeeze as if he knows, and then squeezes again. I like to think of those squeezes as the last real message Dad gave me.
We go outside. I’m barely making it. For some stupid reason, I don’t want Billy to see me crying.
When we come out the door, who’s standing there leaning against a tree but Mom. She’s pale and breathing hard. We run over to her. She’s got that damned lunch box in her hand. We’d forgotten it.
She puts one of her digoxin pills under her tongue. She’s in a bad state, gray-white. She gasps out her story of how she’s worked her way up the street, stopping and popping pills so she can fight her way to us.
I can’t hold myself back.
“Mother, it couldn’t be that important. It’s insane for you to run up here with a box of pills. You’ll kill yourself for nothing.”
But she had to come. She knew we were only up the street, here with Dad, and she wasn’t. She couldn’t stay away.
We help her into the car and drive home. I put her to bed, make her take a ten-milligram Valium. We go through the entire goodbye scene again.
I signal Billy to get in the car. I tell Mother, firmly as I can, I must go. I say goodbye, kiss her, turn around and leave. Joan has finally found somebody to come twice a week, and she herself will come twice more; still, I feel guilty into my very soul.
Our plan is to head straight toward Vegas, packing as much desert as possible behind us during the night. Summers, it’s damned hot out there even in an air-conditioned car.
We begin having trouble before we get near the desert. We’re twenty miles from San Bernardino when the voltage indicator starts flashing. The only thing is to turn back; we might make it to L.A. but that’s about all.
We pull into a garage I know on Pico Boulevard. The voltage regulator is shot, has to be replaced, a minimum hundred bucks, parts and labor. Damn!
I call AAA CON and tell them what’s happened. They tell me to call the owner, collect. I do that. After considerable shuffling around I get an OK. This means money out of pocket but we’ll get it back when we deliver. The garage says the car will be ready by morning. I get a few extra days travel time from Scarlietti, too.
We can’t go back to Mother’s. I don’t think I could sleep again in that back room, too many bad memories, bad nights. Marty, my daughter, lives near the garage so Billy and I hoof it over there.
Marty gives me two aspirins and puts me down in their bedroom. I can hear them, Marty, her husband Gary and Billy in the front room watching TV, a rerun of Mission Impossible.
I have a tremendous yen to cry. Twice I go into the bathroom, sit on the toilet, but the way Dad couldn’t piss, I can’t cry. I spread-eagle on the bed and it catches up with me; I’m gone.
Marty and Gary sleep on the floor and Billy sleeps on the couch. I have the only bed in the house all to myself. We sure have nice kids.
We’re all up at seven for breakfast. Both Gary and Marty need to be at work by eight.
When I call, the car’s ready; but the bill’s twenty-five dollars over estimate. We walk down and pick it up.
We cruise out Wilshire Boulevard. I bid a silent farewell to L.A.: all its artificiality, the sugar-coated hardness. I can’t say I’m sor
ry to go; it’s been a rough stay. I know I’ll miss Joan but I’ve learned to live with that.
We drive into the sun, due east. Then out through San Bernardino and up over the pass.
Coming down the other side, heading toward Vegas, maybe a hundred twenty miles outside L.A., an enormous dog dashes in front of our car. I jam the brakes but they don’t grab straight and we almost flip. Lucky there isn’t much traffic because we rear-spin and I hit the dog anyway. He thumps front left and bounces off right. I pull up on the shoulder and we run back.
The dog’s spinning around; his hindquarters are smashed. He should be dead but he’s twisting and howling. It’s hard to look or listen; he’s snapping and we can’t get near. It takes almost five awful minutes for him to slow down and die. There’s no collar or identification so we drag him off to the side of the road, into the bushes. It’s some kind of German shepherd, big as a wolf. We take out the tire iron and use it as a shovel to dig a shallow grave in the sand. We cover it with dry grasses and pieces of brushwood.
There’s not a mark on the front of our car. It’s incredible the difference between machines and animals. We must’ve hit him with either the tire or the bumper. Back in the car, we don’t talk much for the next hundred miles.
Then, about forty miles this side of Vegas, there’s some kind of motor-cross race up on the hills beside the road. Billy’s excited by this so we stop. I stay in the car. To me, it looks baked, barren, violent, but this is terrific for Billy. Everything that’s attractive to him—the unfinished, random quality, the rough-and-ready atmosphere, the noise, the smells—only reminds me of things I don’t want to remember. At Billy’s age I had too much of it, enough to last more than a lifetime. Comfort gets bigger as I grow older, comfort and the illusion of predictability.
After ten minutes, Bill’s back, eyes flashing in vicarious thrill; he’s seen some new four-stroke he’s never seen before.
An hour later, we roll into Vegas. The town’s just had a flash flood. Caesar’s Palace is thick packed clay up to the terraces. The parking lots are caking mudflats. It makes even more obvious how Vegas, plumb smack in the middle of a desert, is an insult to nature.
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