We were packed close together in the front seat. On one side of me, George, his body pumping out waves of heat like an Arizona highway. And on the other, the object of George’s feverish passion. My hipbone touched Luke’s and when he spoke he jiggled his leg and his knee hit mine over and over.
“How come you never admitted you were my father?” I asked him, as if for the first time. I think I really did imagine he would finally answer.
“What makes you think you needed a father?” said Luke. “You had Esther, you had Irv. That’s a pretty nice launch.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I was thinking about my own father, a while back,” Luke said. “I don’t even have a snapshot of him. I can’t remember his voice, or the color of his eyes. I sort of remember him being big, but that’s because I was so small. The only memories I have of him are some sleepless Jewish raccoon shuffling around the house in a dirty bathrobe and torn slippers. I remember his tears—strangled, pathetic, lonely tears. I remember the garbage on the floor. The smell of beer—I think it was Pabst Blue Ribbon. I don’t think they even make it anymore. He was so out of it he couldn’t keep his cigarette lit. He’d take it out of his mouth and look at the tip and shake his head, like it was some great inscrutable mystery why it wasn’t burning. When he fired the gun into his mouth he was resting his head against the bedroom wall. He blew his brains out, but they didn’t have anywhere to go. Some of them slipped down the back of his shirt.” “I—m sorry.”
“But I lived my life. I went on.”
“I know you did.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“I am. I’m trying. This is how I’m doing it. I’m not like Felix or Tess.”
Suddenly, I couldn’t tolerate George’s obvious obsession with Luke and his hanging on to every word the great man said. I turned sharply toward him and said, “Would you mind giving us a little privacy?” And with that, I straightened the rearview mirror. “My father and I are having a private conversation.”
“I’m right here,” said George. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Then be less overt about it. Have the decency to be ashamed and sneak it.”
“I didn’t know you were such a hard-ass, Billy,” Luke said, smiling with what certainly looked like pleasure. He cupped my knee, and then left his hand there for a few moments, without moving it at all, without the slightest cover or justification; he wasn’t warning me, he wasn’t making a point, or trying to be funny, he was just leaving it there for no particular reason.
I had a thought to take his hand and press it to my lips, but I didn’t have anywhere near the courage that would have taken. And then, a few moments later, he removed his hand, folded it into his lap, and closed his eyes. He let out a long, breathy sigh, permitting the second half of it to puff out his cheeks and then letting the rest of the air out in little, rhythmic bursts—it sounded like “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”—until his lungs were empty. It was what a man does when he is completely alone.
11
AS SOON as we entered the hospital, a sense of urgency overtook us. Luke and I hurried down the hall, our footsteps clacking in unison against the white vinyl floors. We passed an orderly dragging two empty gurneys behind him. We pushed through a set of swinging double doors so quickly that they crashed into the walls.
When we were some fifty feet from Mother’s room we saw Little Joe Washington sprawled out in a chair, sobbing into his enormous hands. I stopped; I knew she was dead, that she had slipped away in the time it had taken us to organize the ambulance. I was paralyzed with loss; my grief seethed at the very bottom of me. Luke touched my elbow, by way of telling me to wait. He strode over to Little Joe, with that rolling cowboy gait.
“Joe,” he said, blunt but merciful, like a pulled punch.
It was the first these two had seen of each other since Joe’s day in court, and then it had only been briefly, as Dad, dressed in shameless psychedelia (blue silk pants, a silver shirt, wraparound glasses with silvered lenses), testified and destroyed his own case. Sitting with his legs crossed, his pointed right toe lodged behind his left heel, his skinny arms wrapped around his chest as if for warmth, Luke faced the judge and spoke to him directly. “Justice is a beautiful thing, Your Honor, and a judge like Solomon—that’s King Solomon, Your Honor, not Solomon Burke—he leads his people to righteousness, just like Jesus Christ or Che Guevara. But let’s face it. We aren’t here to talk about justice. We’re here to talk about money. Little Joe wants money. I got money. So let’s pick a number and get it over with.” By now, Luke’s lawyer was pulling out his own wavy white hair, and Joe’s lawyer was tugging at Joe’s salmon- colored sports jacket, trying to prevent his client from rushing the witness stand and crushing Luke’s head between his massive hands.
And now Joe was standing again, but this time he threw his arms around Luke and pulled him close, the way people will when death makes our squabbles so small, when it suddenly seems that our grievances and competition make as much sense as cattle vying for position in the slaughterhouse. Joe embraced Luke with the passionate magnetism of life itself, was as full of power as a box of lightning. Luke hedged his emotional bet by patting Joe’s back with a certain aloof heartiness, but then that gesture spent itself and he just held on. “Oh man, oh man,” they both murmured, so you couldn’t tell Joe’s voice from Luke—s.
“What’s going on, Joe?” he asked. “What’s happening with Esther?”
“She’s awake, Luke. Her eyes are open and she asked for Billy.”
I staggered forward, almost falling. It was not as if a great weight had suddenly been pressed upon me, but that it had suddenly been removed. The lack of burden, this magical removal of the freight of feeling that since Esther’s accident had become as much myself as my smell or my shadow, disoriented me. I was, for a moment, insubstantial, Mayakovsky’s Cloud in Trousers.
I made my way past the two of them. I grazed against them both, deliberately, as I passed, and I felt their fingers on my back. She was alive! As the fear of having lost her subsided, I began to sob.
When I entered her room, Irv was seated next to the bed, and he, too, was weeping. For a moment, I thought a hideous error had been made and that my mother had died, but then I saw her eyes were open and looked at me through her bandages. It was as if she had come back from the dead. The dead had awakened—but with what body? Though she did not, could not, move her hand, her fingers stretched toward me.
“Mom,” I said, touching Irv’s shoulder as I passed his chair, and falling to my knees at her bedside. I was afraid to touch her, afraid to hurt her, and still a little fearful that she might not be real. I placed my open hand on the sheet. She was looking directly at me—her eyes at once saintly and bewildered, as if all of her worldliness had disappeared during her long sleep, and she had awakened innocent, a holy fool, a messenger from the eternity she had just eluded.
“Oh, Billy,” she whispered, “you’re here.”
“Oh, Mama, Mama, I’m so happy.”
“I lost control of the car, Billy.”
“I know. It’s okay. You’re going to be fine.”
“I don’t feel like myself. I know everything I know, but I know it inside someone else’s body.”
“We’re going to take you to the city, Mom.”
She nodded. Her eyes were starting to close.
“Luke’s here, too, Mom,” I said. I immediately wanted to take it back. It wasn’t what I meant to say. I don’t know what I meant to say. But it wasn’t that. I think I just wanted to keep her attention. I didn’t want those eyes to close, ever. But this talk of Luke was where we’d left off. Perhaps she hadn’t heard me. I glanced guiltily back at Grandpa, to see if he had heard me mention Luke, but now he had his handkerchief out and was drying his face.
A few minutes later, Mother drifted back to sleep and I went to the waiting room to find Luke and Little Joe. They were facing each other, seated in bright orange molded plastic chairs, p
ractically knee to knee. Luke was speaking, with nervous, emphatic gestures, and at first I thought they were fighting, but when I got closer I realized they were debating prophecies.
“The thing is,” Luke was saying, “the Bible is real specific about dates, and the whole thing goes in progressions of five hundred years. All right, we can leave Adam and Eve and the Flood of Noah out of it.”
“I don’t see why we would do that,” said Joe.
“We’ll just concentrate on redemption. Without redemption the Bible’s just a history book. Redemption. That starts with Abraham, the human father of the Jews.”
“And the Arabs,” added Joe, shaking a finger at Luke, in a more or less good-natured way. “What is that? Genesis or Galatians? ‘Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham.’”
“But listen, listen,” said Luke. “The next big thing was the Exodus—and guess what? Five hundred years after Abraham. The first Passover, the parting of the Red Sea, the Law of Moses—”
“Luke? Joe? I think we better get the show on the road.”
“I’ll tell the doctors,” said Joe, slapping his big knees and mightily exhaling as he stood. “It’s up to them to get some people to put her in the truck.”
“How is she?” asked Luke.
“She’s okay. She’s sleeping now. But I talked to her.”
“Is she in pain?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Does she know I’m here?” asked Luke.
“Yes.”
“Do you think It’s okay for me to go in and see her for a minute?”
“Yes. I do.”
He stood up, but made no move toward her room. He was afraid to go in.
“Luke,” I said. “She loves you. She always has, and I guess always will. I don’t know what it means to her, or what it means at all. But I do know that.”
He nodded and kept his gaze on me an extra moment. By way of thanks. The directness of the gesture, and how natural it seemed, the manly understanding it implied, its secret cargo of history and missed opportunities, accusations and evasions, and the single thing that pulled it all together, the love of Esther we both shared—all of it went through me like a quiverful of arrows, and I was dying, dying of happiness. For that moment, I was getting what I had always so blindly and ceaselessly desired; yet I was not so besotted to fail to note that I was getting it at a price dearer than any I had ever dreamed of paying.
LUKE and I sat up front with George, and Grandpa stayed with my mother and David in the back. It had taken hours to finally get her out. Esther had been silent, more or less unconscious, since I’d spoken to her in the hospital. Her eyes had remained shut, the lids motionless, while Joe and two nurses loaded her into the ambulance, under the edgy, disapproving supervision of some young doctor who was a stranger to all of us. The nurses unhooked her IV, wrapped the tubing around the chrome pole, for no better reason, it seemed, than that it was the hospital’s property and it wasn’t to leave the building. Luckily, there was equipment in the ambulance—IV bags, rubber tubes, needles, oxygen, antibiotics—and Irv and David had her hooked up long before we were on the thruway.
When we’d first gotten back into the ambulance, George had the radio on. Luke and Wendy Crabtree singing “Shiva the Destroyer,” recorded at the Martha’s Vineyard concert, was just ending. As Luke slid into the front seat, he glared at George, and George reached to turn off the radio. But before he touched the knob, the disc jockey’s voice came on.
“He’s here, folks, right here in the beautiful Hudson Valley.”
“Wait,” said Luke, and George slowly moved his hand away.
“Luke has left the Leyden Hospital,” the radio voice was saying, “and our informants tell us he is in a Van Fleet Lodge ambulance heading down to New York City.”
“Oh Jesus,” said Luke.
“It wasn’t me, Mr. Fairchild,” said George, his voice quaking.
“What difference does it make now?” said Luke.
“It wasn’t me,” George said again, and I was pretty sure he was lying.
We drove in silence. It was the end of the afternoon, nearly evening. The blood-orange sun hovered above the river. The orchards were in bloom. The black shadows of old barns lurched across the green fields.
I looked back at Irv. “How is she doing?”
Grandpa waggled his bony white hand back and forth.
George sat bolt upright as he commandeered the ambulance around a traffic circle. He seemed unused to driving, unsure of himself. His hands gripped the steering wheel with lunatic force.
“See that?” Luke said. “Goddamnit.”
I looked out the window. An open field. A Ford dealership. Traffic signs.
“See what?” But as soon as I said it I realized what he meant.
A few cars, pickup trucks, and vans were idling along the road’s rocky shoulder. As soon as we passed them, they fell into line behind us. I looked out of the sideview mirror—and saw myself: lined, haggard. I adjusted the mirror and then it clicked into view, the sight of a procession of cars.
“That was quick,” I said.
Luke pressed his lips together, a picture of grim, pessimistic acceptance. George sped up, but what good did it do? The closer we came to the thruway, the more cars there were following behind us. How many were there? There were perhaps no more than a couple dozen, but it seemed like hundreds.
As we approached the toll booth, Grandpa noticed we were surrounded. “What’s going on here?”
“They know It’s me, Irv,” said Luke. “Cocksuckers.”
George stopped at the toll gate, cranked down the window, stuck out his hand to receive the light-blue perforated toll ticket. But as soon as he reached for it, the attendant, a stocky woman in a denim shirt, pulled the ticket back.
“Can I get your autograph, Mr. Fairchild?” she called out, in a harsh, slightly accusatory tone, as if she were a cop asking to see his license and registration. Behind us, voices were calling Luke’s name. Whistles. Whoops. Honking.
“God almighty,” Luke growled. “Let’s go! Now.”
George didn’t give the matter a moment’s consideration. He stepped hard on the accelerator and sped through without the ticket. I watched through the mirror: every car raced through after us; none of them stopped for their toll cards, none of them gave a rat’s ass about the law—like starving hunters, like hit men.
With Luke urging him on, George sped onto the approach to the southbound thruway, going over eighty, as if there were any chance at all of outrunning the fans behind us. They felt like a forest fire gaining on us, implacable, without intelligence, at once chaotic and monolithic. When we were on the thruway itself, we passed still others who had been lying in wait for Luke. People sunning themselves on the roofs of their cars and vans. Who knew how long they’d been parked along the side of the six-lane highway? A guy standing in the bed of a red pickup held up the Cash Machine CD and when we drove past him—the cars full of fans were already slowing us down—he side-armed it at us. The plastic case opened midair; the sun glinted on the silvery disk before it hit the pavement and was crushed beneath the tread of God knows how many tires.
“Luke?” Grandpa’s voice was tired, fearful. He was straightening himself in his fold-down seat, after having just put his ear next to Esther’s lips to hear what she was trying to say. “Esther wants me to tell you that It’s good to see you.”
“Yeah?” His face colored. He bit down hard and breathed through his nose, in manly sublimation of emotion, but not without its own lone-wolf nobility. Like a tethered dog, my heart lunged toward him, pulling its choke collar ever tighter. “Tell her It’s good to see her, too,” he said. “Tell her It’s real good.”
Grandpa whispered into my mother’s ear, stroking her forehead as he repeated Luke’s words.
“Mom?” I said, turning in my seat. Grandpa and David were adjusting the oxygen flow. They looked worried, they looked grim; s
ome silent communication of a crisis brewing seemed to pass between them. Had Death wandered back into her hospital room, found the empty bed, and then rode the wind to find us here?
Either from exuberance or with the hunting instinct of a pack of dingoes, many of the cars that had been chasing after us had by now passed in front, and we were surrounded. I could not tell how many of them there were, but I felt a sudden and hideous kinship with each of them. They were pursuing Luke, just as I had, and still was, and if it was so clear to me that they wanted him to fill some terrible emptiness in their own lives, then what would it take for me to understand that my own reasons for tracking him down were not altogether dissimilar?
We were just a couple miles from the next thruway entrance, where there would undoubtedly be more cars waiting for Luke. We were going to be absorbed in the pack.
“What station were you listening to?” Luke asked George. “We have to call them and make them tell everyone to get off the roads.”
“I don’t know,” said George. “Like ninety-four point something.” He blinked rapidly, licked his lips. “I’m sorry.”
Was he apologizing for having called the radio station himself? I still don’t know the answer to that one.
Luke switched on the radio; it came on loud, and his voice from twenty-two years in the past filled the ambulance. He turned the volume down. The station was giving Luke’s arrival the full treatment. Nothing was beneath them. They were playing “Esther.”
I came to the city
With my poverty complete
With flies on my forehead and sores on my feet
You were the red maiden
In a castle so cold
No one could buy you with silver or gold
Esther, oh Esther
You dazzled my eyes
The Rich Man's Table Page 23