by Howard Owen
Now, though, he doesn’t have time.
He turns right on Second Street and follows it as far back as it goes. A chain crosses it at the point where pavement turns to clay.
Jack takes the chain off and drives on.
Brady used to come here when he was a teenager. On a couple of occasions, Jack tracked him down at the park when he was supposed to be in school. Everyone has a place where he goes when other options aren’t possible, Jack supposes. For Brady, it is—or used to be, at least—Sycamore Park.
For all he knows, his son hasn’t set foot in the park in several years, but still Jack feels that he’s here. And if he isn’t, Jack doesn’t have any better ideas.
He pulls into the gravel parking lot. The red pickup truck is at the other end, only partially hidden by a line of shrubbery.
The lot was supposed to have been paved years ago. A nature trail along the creek was envisioned. A playground, with a miniature train the kids could ride, was planned. But when the chicken processing plant at the southern edge of the town limits closed and moved to Mexico six years ago, the tax base for such grandiose schemes dried up. The only thing farther back on the back burner now is the still-nonexistent town library.
Jack walks toward the creek, to which the park gradually slopes. The lights are behind him, and he is able to see Brady before his son can recognize him. He is able to call out his name at about the same time Brady pumps the shotgun.
The gun is lowered, and Jack walks toward the water, where Brady stands on the other side of a dilapidated picnic table, one foot on the ground and one of the bench.
“I thought you were them,” he said. “As soon as I heard about the house, I ran. I didn’t know where to go. Didn’t want to lead them back to your place.”
Brady stops, his voice catching.
“I’m sorry,” he says, turning away from his father. “God, I’m sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen. Damn, I wish I could just take all this trouble away with me. I ought to just use this thing, beat Heater Curry to it.”
“It’s not all your fault. If I’d listened to you, maybe everything would’ve been OK. I should’ve gotten the damn money today.”
“Is it a total loss?”
Jack tells him they saved the bricks. He adds that it is insured, though.
“They won’t stop looking for me,” Brady says, looking back across the lot. With the lights shining in their eyes, Jack realizes his son has picked perhaps the worst place in the park from which to defend himself.
“Any reason to think they’ll come out here?”
Brady says no, other than the fact that they did do drug transactions here a couple of times.
Jack suggests that they hide the truck a little better, and then he can drop Brady off at a motel out by the interstate. His son nods mutely, obviously out of ideas himself.
“Monday morning,” Jack says, “I’ll get the money. Just lie low until then, OK?”
They drive the truck through a small opening in the trees, to a spot a hundred yards away. It won’t be seen unless Heater Curry or one of his associates comes within 50 feet of it.
Then, they get in Jack’s car and leave, putting the chain back up behind them.
At the motel, which advertises television and air-conditioning as options, Jack turns to his son. He is not 100 percent sure he will see him again, but this seems like the best plan to his 4 a.m., sleep-deprived mind.
“Brady,” he says, “is there anywhere you can go? I mean, is there anywhere that you might be able to, you know, start over or something? I mean, you weren’t going to have a place to stay much longer anyhow.”
California, Brady tells him.
Jesus Christ, Jack thinks. Yeah, that’s a good idea. California, he wants to snap at his lost son, why didn’t I think of that? Even the part of the state Jack has experienced when he was crossing the continent every week or so told him that it is the natural magnet of lost causes, a place to make the bad worse, full of people who think, from watching half-wit TV shows, that their whole screwed-up lives will be changed if they only can obtain a California license plate.
And not just California, it turns out. Los Angeles, which Jack knows is the hardened essence of all that is wrong with a state whose main export seems to be false hope.
But Brady has friends in Los Angeles, who have said he could come live with them.
“The same friends who stiffed you on the drugs?” Jack is trying to keep his voice from rising.
“They want to make it up to me.”
“Maybe they can come back and help rebuild your grandmother’s house.”
Jack knows his son wants to be an actor, and he has tolerated this, because at least there is something Brady wants to be. Before acting, this was not the case. But acting in Richmond usually is something that requires a person to hold a day job, one with health benefits and dependable money.
The idea that Brady thinks he can go to California and be an actor, in a state where everyone is an actor, where the Brady Stones keep coming through the desert, Joad-like, their jalopies loaded high with illogical hope, makes Jack want to cry.
But when Brady says that Jack has shown him the way, quitting his job and banking everything on belief in himself, he is stymied.
“I don’t know,” he says at last. Brady is still sitting, the door open and his right leg already on the motel pavement. “Let me think. Just lie low, OK? I’ll call you. We’ll straighten this out Monday morning. OK?”
Brady swallows and nods. Jack hands him three 20-dollar bills, then calls him back for a fourth one.
“Just be careful. I’ll think of something.”
In his rearview mirror, he watches Brady walk into the half-lit lobby. On the neon sign he passes under, the first two letters of VACANT have burned out, and the last one blinks on and off: CANT/CAN/CANT/CAN.
CHAPTER TWELVE
He looks at the mortgage booklet again, with all its impatient, unforgiving little pages, then back at his checkbook, where the numbers have not changed. In the past month, he has been introduced to the mathematics of the hard-pressed. Unable to pay his mortgage on time, he is charged more for late payment.
The wind is blowing oak and tulip poplar leaves against the side of the house, reminding him of how he’ll spend his weekend. Down the street, he hears the stereo on some neighbor kid’s car as well as if it were inside his house. He wonders, again, if the builders really put insulation in all the walls. Gina doubted that they had, but he hadn’t pressed the issue with Cully.
The music grows louder, and then he hears Shannon come in the front door, and it gradually begins to fade. He supposes that he should talk to her about the kind of kids she’s riding with. She’s popular enough that high schoolers, the boys especially, are glad enough to drive her all the way to their end-of-the-line home, and he knows it’s not just because she’s a good athlete. It seems as if he reads about some mindless teenage auto fatality every other day. The last one, the driver was 14. He still hasn’t told her about Bobby Witt and Posey Atkinson, about why he doesn’t drink. He hasn’t told anyone that story for a long time. He promises himself, though, that he won’t put if off much longer.
He asks Shannon who drove her home, and she tells him the names of a couple of girls whose parents he’s known most of his life. They’re both 16. Surely, he thinks, she wouldn’t lie about catching a ride with some older boy, knowing I could be spying out the front window.
He knows it’s coming, though. Just a matter of time.
He turns back to the mystery of the checkbook and the mortgage payment.
He was there before Mack McLamb that first Monday in October.
He has always tended to get lost on the trip to Mac’s office, which involves parking in an underground lot and then taking two different elevators that are separated by most of a block.
Mack’s office is on the 20th floor, second from the top. He’s all business when he’s in here, bearing no resemblance to the man who avera
ges a DWI citation every other year.
That morning, he tried again to talk Jack into waiting. He told him Cisco would come back, to just be patient and sit on it for a while.
“I can’t afford to sit on it,” Jack told his old friend. “I’ve got to have it now, Mack. I mean, right now.” And he drove his fist into Mack’s desk, not hard enough even to upset the pencil vase or the marble paperweight bearing the name of Mack’s alma mater, but hard enough to get his attention.
“Be right back,” Mack said, walking past Jack and down the hall.
Forty-five minutes later, he was on his way out again, not even pausing to make the old joke about forgetting to sprinkle breadcrumbs on the way up.
Jack returned to the motel on I-95 shortly after 11. He was able to get Brady’s room number from the day manager, a woman with a red wig, flabby arms and a goiter the size of a grapefruit. He made sure he identified himself before he knocked on Brady’s door, just in case his son was sitting on the bed, armed. He didn’t even think of it as paranoia anymore, not with his mother’s house still smoking not three miles away. All the way from Richmond, he couldn’t help looking in the rearview mirror.
Brady undid the latch, and Jack slid inside through the foot-wide opening he was allowed.
He’d even stopped at the bank on the way. They hadn’t wanted to cash a check that large, but the manager finally OK’d it, while Jack grew even more nervous. When it was counted out, he was amazed, really, at how small an impact $7,000 made. In hundred-dollar bills, he could fit it inside his wallet, as long as he wore the wallet inside his jacket instead of in his hip pocket. He’d brought along a suitcase, imagining himself flipping it open like a wise guy in some dope-dealing movie, the large bills perfectly aligned inside.
“Here,” he told Brady, handing him the 70 bills. “Take it. Do what you want to with it.” Save your life, he was thinking.
He drove his son back to Sycamore Park, where they found the red pickup untouched, with no tire tracks or footprints around it, nothing visible attached to its underside.
Brady got in the truck. Jack got out and walked over to the driver’s side.
“So?”
Brady, not looking at him, said he was going to California.
“He won’t bother you, once I’m gone. Dumb bastard. If he’d waited two days, he could have had his damn $7,000.”
Jack figured it made about as much sense as anything else. Why give the money to Heater Curry now? It won’t make the house rise back up, won’t do anything positive at all. Going to California probably won’t either, he was thinking, but it could. It was possible. Hell, anything was possible.
He certainly could have told his son to forget the $7,000, to hit the road, to drive his pickup until he ran out of gas money and then thumb his ass to Los Angeles if he wanted to, live in homeless shelters until either the dream died or he did. If Brady had been given every opportunity, if he’d had a dad who was assistant coach for his Little League team, who sat beside him helping him with his math homework, who took him dove hunting in the fall and trout fishing in the spring, he might have done that.
Of all the people in Speakeasy, though, Jack thought he was the most obligated to cut Brady Stone some slack.
And the way Cisco was going, he might as well sell some of it anyhow. The rubble of what a few months ago he had seen as Shannon’s college trust fund wouldn’t get her through her sophomore year now.
In the end, he just reached inside the cab with his right hand and rubbed his son’s shining head for their mutual good luck.
He told him to be careful, asked him if he even knew the way to California.
Brady said he thought it was west.
“I will pay you back,” he told his father, and it looked as if he were about to cry. Jack wanted to, himself.
It reminded him of the time they sent Brady off to basketball camp at Randolph-Macon while he, Gina and little Shannon went to Disney World. Brady was almost 15, and he had been to the Magic Kingdom once, when he was very small, accompanied by his father and grandmother, although he claimed not to remember.
It was not long after Carly’s one-and-only reappearance. That June day, Jack had taken his son to the dorm where the kids would be housed, and the look on his face, as he turned to walk toward a bunch of boys who all seemed to know each other, was one Jack hadn’t shaken 10 years later.
Now, in the windy motel parking lot, all Jack could muster in the way of encouragement was, “Knock ’em dead.” Even as the words left his mouth, he remembered saying the same thing a decade earlier.
He followed Brady all the way back to the interstate. He stopped just short of the entrance ramp for 95 South. Before he did a U-turn on the shoulder, he watched as Brady went past the entrance, crossed the overpass bridge and turned north, when any fool could have told him that the southern route was faster. His last glimpse of his son was of the small red truck disappearing between two 18-wheelers as it merged. He could barely make out the blare of an angry air horn.
Now, more than six weeks later, he is out of touch with both of the two people from whom he most wants information.
Brady did send a hastily scrawled postcard to let him know he had arrived, and had a floor at least to sleep on.
From Gerald Prince, though, there has been nothing.
Today, distracted by the hole that has drained far too much out of his savings and checking accounts, he has forgotten even to check the mail.
Shannon drops it on the table in front of him on her way to the kitchen.
The first envelope he sees is from The Octagon Group, a company in Pennsylvania that somehow has come to possess their home mortgage. He puts it aside for later.
The second letter has a New York City return address that begins with “Gerald Prince/Gerald Prince Books.” He supposes that Shannon didn’t notice. In the past few weeks, there has been a pronounced, studied quiet around the Stone household on the subject of Lovelady, the book that is going to solve all their temporary problems. If there is any news, he heard Gina tell their daughter last week in a voice he thought also might have been meant for his ears, Daddy will tell us. She doesn’t ask any more to see the manuscript.
Jack takes the letter and puts it in his shirt pocket. He tries to concentrate once again on the impossible numbers in front of him, but he can’t. Finally, he retreats to the bathroom. There, sitting on the toilet, he opens the envelope at last, not allowing himself to gaze directly at the expensive-looking slip of paper inside until it is fully open and unfolded, directly in front of him. That way, he can read it from beginning to end and not be distracted by words—“unfortunately,” “regretfully,” “sophomoric,” “moronic”—that might explode like grenades from the heart of the letter.
He knows that he has hope, at least. He has been told, by those in his little writing group, that the less an editor’s response weighs, the better. At least Gerald Prince wasn’t sending the whole manuscript back like a rotten fish.
He tries to read the letter slowly, but he can’t.
“Dear Jack,” it begins, “You have a very interesting book here. I have read most of it, and there are some very good parts.
“However……” Here, Jack sighs. He was hoping there would be no “however” whatsoever.
“However, I am wondering if perhaps you might want to consider writing this in the first person instead of the third. I think I’d like to hear more from the voices of Lovelady and Pettigreen. I think they would be very compelling.”
The letter goes on for two more paragraphs, ending with the belief that “this book has promise. The suggestions here would only make it better.”
Jack sits on the toilet for another 10 minutes, only slightly discouraged by Gerald Prince’s belief that Lovelady’s antagonist is named Pettigreen instead of Pettigrew.
Then, he tells Shannon he’s going for a walk.
Among the small things he misses from their life at the farmhouse is the access to open land. He could set
out from the back door of his late mother’s home and walk for more than a mile through country that was mostly wooded but not swampy, crisscrossed with barely perceptible paths he’d used since he was a boy.
From Speakeasy Glen, though, there is the swamp on one side and the winding, car-friendly streets of the subdivision on the other, bereft even of sidewalks. It is not possible to walk without drawing the attention of neighbors, one of whom brakes her SUV alongside him this day and asks if he needs a ride. In Speakeasy Glen, if you’re over 16 and you are walking, it is assumed that your car is broken down somewhere.
He takes Larkmeadow Lane toward town, with no real destination.
There is one stretch, between the entrance to the subdivision and the ’50s and ’60s brick ranchers nearer to Main Street, where nature still holds sway. As the road swings south toward Speakeasy Creek, the other branch bordering the town’s peninsula, it is met by a rutted dirt lane leading toward the creek. Here, Jack knows he might see a red-tailed hawk perching high in the bald cypress that is the area’s largest tree, or even watch deer down by the stream at the right time of day.
The late-fall sun hangs low, and he has to shade his eyes as he walks away from the road, stopping now and then to pick up a beer can or plastic wrapper. He wishes he had remembered to bring a trash bag. All kinds of people—Boy Scout troops, church groups, Wal-Marts, even a Ku Klux Klan chapter in Missouri he read about recently—adopt stretches of the big paved highways. Jack would like to adopt this little path.
He reaches the creek itself, a fast-moving stream at the bottom of a vertical clay cliff taller than he is. As he’s standing there, he glimpses movement out of the corner of his eye, and thinks it might be a deer. When he turns, toward where the creek winds around a modest bend, he sees nothing at first.
Then, not 50 feet away, on the opposite bank, he appears.
The old man steps into the open from a thicket of briers Jack would have thought impenetrable. The sun makes him a little hard to identify, but Jack is sure that it’s him. He stands there with his arms at his sides, saying nothing, smiling slightly across the water. He looks no older, and seems to be wearing the same baggy clothes he had on nearly two and a half years ago, even though it’s 40 degrees colder than it was that June day.