by McNay, Dan
He, at least, won’t be freezing his rear off out there. She came back and found him still knocked out on the couch. Checking the dryer, she looked at his clothes. They would have to be washed again with lots of bleach. She threw them in the trash. The Goodwill was open now.
She’d chance it leaving him alone. Locking him in, she went off to buy him new clothes. It took a while. Once she was there, she decided she might as well buy him several of everything. When she returned at noon, he was up and pacing back and forth from the living room to the kitchen and pulling on his hair. The McDonald’s lunch helped. He sat and gobbled. She brought in her bags of clothing and then gathered up the stuff from his shopping cart that was still in the back of the truck and carried that in as well, leaving it in its bundle in the blanket on the kitchen table.
“I’ve brought you some new duds. Your clothes were too old. You know how to dress yourself?” she asked him.
She threw underwear and a pair of jeans at him. He managed them ok. The shirt was a problem. He let her help with that and a belt. He actually looked pretty good. Tempted to try running a comb through his messy strands of hair, she decided it might freak him out. She would have to sneak up on him with a pair of scissors to trim him when he was asleep. Then she suddenly realized his beard stubble was hardly there. Had he been shaving all this time? Weird. You’d imagine he would slit his own throat or something. She had shoes and socks, but she didn’t give them to him. She was afraid he might get the idea to run away.
“You look good. Almost like I remember you.”
He was quiet.
“Cat got your tongue?” she asked.
“Thumb got your tongue?”
Ok.
“I brought your stuff from your cart.”
He just looked at her. Bringing the bundle from the kitchen, she put it all out in front of him on the coffee table. There was a lot of trash. She put the blanket on the floor and tossed the empty bottles there. The cans as well. In a bag, she found a cigar box. He was interested in that. Inside were some photos and some postcards. The photos were of Paris, but there were no people in them, only store fronts and houses and a tree.
“Did you take these?” she asked.
He shrugged. The postcards were not written on or mailed. Five of them were of the French Quarter in New Orleans.
“Where did you get these?” she asked. “Were you in New Orleans?”
He shrugged again. It would be too weird if he had been there. She decided that maybe these were things he had just taken out of people’s trash or found lying on the street somewhere. In another bag was a camera. It looked like there was an uncompleted roll in it.
There were a lot of odd bottles, medical prescriptions, hand lotion, a small ketchup: all empty. She added these to the throw away pile and then retrieved the one prescription bottle that had a pharmacy name from Main Street in Paris. It had her father’s name on it. It was dated from December of the previous year. It was Chlorpromazine.
“So I know this one is yours,” she said.
“Snowy mommy snow mama,” he told her.
She called the pharmacy. They gave her the name and number of the doctor that had prescribed it. In a few minutes she was on the phone with the doctor. Small towns.
“Oh, yes,” he told her. “I treated him. Your mother had brought him in. He didn’t keep his follow up appointments, or request refills from the pharmacy. And your mother died. I guess I thought some other arrangements had been made for his treatment, or something else had taken place.”
“Can I bring him in?”
“Certainly. Let me give you back to my receptionist. I’ll ask her to get him in this week.”
And she made an appointment for the next day.
“You were hanging out with Mom?” she asked her father.
“Snowy mama.”
“Snowy mama,” she repeated back to him. “Why are you making sense suddenly?”
* * *
Her father was amazingly docile the next morning when she loaded him in the truck to go to the doctor. There was no conversation between them. His responses were all just one or two words that didn’t make much sense, so she just got tired of trying to talk to him. What did he know? Did he understand she was getting him help? There had to be something to his calm cooperation. He followed her direction out of the car and into the waiting room and then into the exam room without any hesitation.
The doctor was her age, gray hair tousled. Overworked probably. The examination went quickly. He ordered blood tests.
“It’s good to see you again, Mr. McIntyre,” he said after the exam. “Bring him to my office next door, when you have him dressed.”
He patted her father on the shoulder.
They were seated in overstuffed chairs in front of his large desk. There were medical records and journals in piles all in a small mound on the side where her father sat. She wanted to move her father over so he could see the doctor as he spoke, but the chairs looked immobile.
“So, I’m renewing the prescription for the Chlorpromazine. You should see quick results on that front in just a few days. We had his hallucinations under control before your mother passed. Deidre, I want you to understand that your father has terminal acute lymphocytic leukemia. We had guessed that he might have another year, but he is well past that prediction. When he was cognitive, he declined all of the more drastic forms of intervention, such as radiation or chemotherapies. I can give you options for care.” He handed her a booklet. “Please look at this and call me with any questions you have. Bring him back in two weeks.”
“Ok,” was all she could get out. She wanted to cry.
They stopped at McDonald’s before she took him home. Locking him in, she ran back to fill the prescriptions.
This was making her dizzy. Her old bitch mother had taken him in and was trying to help him? Why would she do something like that?
* * *
She kept watching and waiting to see what was going to happen to him. It appeared he was having trouble talking. She would try to get him to say something, but he would stutter and say something she couldn’t understand and she would ask him to repeat it and he would just shake his head. The television was perpetually on and he seemed content to be parked in front of it. He did whatever she directed him to do. The second day brought his ability to stand in the shower and wash himself without her help. The third morning he dressed himself.
The pamphlet about the leukemia was helpful, but depressing. He was going to die. Pretty soon. There was a list of symptoms and she racked her brains trying to remember if she had noticed them. Shortness of breath. Nosebleeds. Easy bruising. It had been difficult to see anything under the grime of living out there in the bushes. Why hadn’t she looked through his stuff earlier? Wasted time. Why hadn’t her mother left a letter or written her in New Orleans? Or told someone else besides the doctor he was here?
She was going stir crazy. She didn’t feel right leaving him. The nagging awareness of the body buried out there under his marker didn’t make her happy. Edward and Jack and probably the sheriff were in on it, with Winston as an accomplice. So this was just the new version of what she encountered upon arriving here. Except it was now a murder instead of a rape. Her father was proof of the crime. They hadn’t been aware he was alive and here. Now they were. She needed a project.
She brought him into the garage and sat him down in a cleared circle and began unpacking the boxes before him. Maybe recognition of something from the past could quicken whatever the pills seemed to be doing. She would ask him about clothing and ceramic elephants and books. He just shook his head. Handing things to him just made him more confused. It could be that all this stuff was collected after he disappeared. She had been seven. Thirty-two years. She was asking him to remember things he had never seen.
When the boxes uncovered the front of the old player piano, he got up unsteadily and climbed around things to sit on the bench before the keyboard. He began to play, a little slowly,
tentatively at first and then he got braver. The piano was horribly out of tune. But he was all right. She had forgotten he could do this. He played an old rag time song. Then a Frank Sinatra tune. She found herself wanting to sing along. On and on. He was smiling. And getting fancier and faster. He looked happy!
She jumped at the knock at her front door. It was loud. She ran out to answer, but stopped to peek out the window. It could be the fucking sheriff. It was Sarah. She opened the door.
“Thank goodness,” Sarah said. “I thought you were dead or something.”
“The piano,” Daydee told her.
“I can hear it. It sounds really bad.”
“It’s out of tune. Come see,” Daydee said.
They went to the door to the garage. Her father didn’t even look up.
“Who is this guy?” Sarah asked.
“My father.”
Sarah eyed her.
“You sure? I thought he was out there in the cemetery.”
“Yeah.” Daydee didn’t know what to tell her. But she trusted her. “Winston thinks Edward’s father is buried out there.”
“Jesus.”
“Well, it was after your divorce, right?”
“I try to think of myself as a good person,” Sarah said. “I’d like to think that I would try to stop bad things from happening.”
“He’s a sociopath. He can lie and make you believe it,” Daydee said.
“It was before the divorce. I warned you.”
“This town was a cesspool when I ran away,” Daydee said.
Sarah took her face in her hands and gave her a long gentle kiss. Daydee didn’t resist.
“Anyway, the quilt party is tomorrow night at six. We’re going to do it in my real estate office because there’s more room. I’ll come get you if you want.”
Daydee told her ok, thinking that her truck left parked out front would make it look like she was home. It would only be for a few hours. He seemed content in front of the television.
She walked Sarah out. As she started to close the door, she realized that Edward was standing, leaning against the door of his car across the street. Sarah was parked several yards in front of him. Quickly closing the door, so they wouldn’t know she was watching, she went to peek from window curtains. Edward stood to confront her friend. They exchanged angry somethings. Sarah shoved him. He almost went after her as she walked away, but glanced at Daydee and then climbed in his car instead. It started but sat there. Sarah opened her trunk and took out a baseball bat, turned and walked back to the front of his car. Swinging, she took out a headlight. Nothing happened. Sarah walked back, replaced the bat and climbed in. The black sedan pulled out ahead of her. Sarah waved at Daydee in her hiding place before she drove off.
The piano played on and on.
Chapter sixteen
The next morning, the coffee was already made when she stumbled out to the kitchen. He was snuggled on the couch in front of the television with a cup in his hand. She was a bit frightened. She joined him in front of the morning news.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Howdy.”
“Are you sane?” was all she could think of to say.
“It’s being as heavy as a whale and some fella holding you down to the bottom of the sea. But everythin’ around now is the room and you.”
“Can we turn that off or turn it down?” she asked. This was so bizarre.
He obliged by turning it off.
“Do you remember the last six months?” she asked.
It seemed to take him a while to put the words together before he said them. He had a five second delay in answering everything.
“Yes, ma’am. You been good to me. I’d be dead or someone would have run me off if you hadn’t showed up.”
“My mother was helping you?”
“That she was. I was up in Chicago. They told me I had hardly a year. So I called your mama and asked her if I could. This was where I was raised. It’s home, even though it wasn’t most of the time.”
“It’s hard to believe,” Daydee said.
“She hardly could speak of you. There was that Christmas card. You were in New Orleans?”
“All of my life,” Daydee said.
“I’m sorry I missed out on it.”
“I didn’t know where you were. I just imagined you living out on the street, crazy, just like I found you. She wouldn’t talk about you,” Daydee said. “She was such a fucking bitch!”
“I was in a home up near Davenport for the first piece of it. Then the state sent me to this halfway house and I was out on the street after that went belly up. I could manage well enough to find food and a little money, but I got locked up for scrappin’ with a cop. That’s where I got real treatment. When I was in prison.”
“I wish I had known,” she said.
“How could you? New Orleans a rough place?”
“I survived. It wasn’t always easy. But it can be a beautiful place. I was thinking of going back.”
He started to cry.
“I’m so sorry,” he finally said.
“I never blamed you. You were crazy.”
“It was a long life?” he said.
“You play what you’re dealt,” she said. She retrieved a box of tissues for him. “Hey, you feel up to a picnic today? It’s still ok outside in the daytime. We just have to dress warm.”
“I was staying out at the cemetery office before some fool locked it up. I was hiding out. Do you know about the marker with my name on it?” he asked.
“More than you do maybe. There’s a property that Mom still owned out on a lake on the corner of the land that belonged to Aunt Eunice and Great-Grandma. Nobody would see us out there.”
“I probably need to vamoose before your mother’s friends find me.”
“They already know you’re here,” she said. “You know, I just had an idea.”
* * *
The sun was high in the bright blue sky. They parked and walked about at the edge of the lake, but it was too cold to sit out and eat lunch on a blanket. He was shivering, something she had never seen him do before. Returning to the truck, she started the engine and turned the heater up. They had coffee in a thermos.
“Do you know this guy?” her father asked. “The Chief of Police?”
“I’ve met him a couple of times. He was always hanging around after the sheriff left. I looked him up in the phone book. We can go to the downtown office or try to talk to him at home. We go lay our cards out and ask for his help.”
“If he’s in with them, they’ll know you are going to make trouble,” he said. “It would be easier for me to just drift on out of here. Chicago was all right.”
“You owe me for a hell of a lot of Big Macs. I’m expecting you to work it off,” she told him.
“You want to go up there together? You have the money?”
She unwrapped the sandwiches she had made and handed him one.
“There’s stuff here, Daddy. The farm and the house and it’s all still in probate. And the goddamn cemetery. I’d have to come back for the court stuff. Edward would certainly know when I’d have to show up here again. Who’s going to run the cemetery? My doctor for the baby is here. I’m not going anywhere. And neither are you.”
“You don’t owe me nothing.”
“What about those Christmases when I was little,” Daydee said.
“I don’t remember. You recall that far back?”
“You were the only one that ever cared about me. To the rest of them I was an inconvenience. I was a stray dog that they would have taken to pound if they thought they could get away with it.”
“I was crazy back then.”
“We didn’t have Christmas any more after you left,” Daydee said.
“Your mother had me put away.”
“I wish it could have been different. But it wasn’t.” Daydee smiled at him. “Why on earth did she decide to help you?”
“I’m not sure. I was dying. Maybe she figured
it was going to be a short and sweet fix. Maybe her ass was covered if I died here, so she could cover it up by hiding my corpse after. I think she knew she was close herself. That card you sent was sitting on the desk out at the office forever.”
“What happened to it? I didn’t see it.”
“It’s in my stuff somewhere.”
“There were postcards from New Orleans in your stuff. Did you get down there?”
“Nah. I must have found them somewhere and thought they were pretty.”
* * *
Daydee and her father went to see the Chief of Police. The office was a tiny brick building attached to the Paris Fire Department and the fire truck garage. There was a big flag pole out front on its little lawn. Not a big department. She had called ahead and made an appointment. They seemed friendly enough. Just being close and talking to them made her edgy. Sleazy cops were out there everywhere, a whole lot of them in New Orleans.
But this was a small town, and she was hoping for the Boy Scout type.
As they were walking up the sidewalk, Rob came out the front entrance. She was just going to ignore him, but he stepped in front of her.
“I tried to make you feel welcome in this town, but you continue to screw things up.”
“I don’t have anything to say to you,” she said. “We are here to see the Chief of Police.”
“Good luck with that!”
Suddenly her father was in front of her, poking his finger at the sheriff.
“You leave her be,” he said.
He looked like a hound dog growling at a grizzly bear. His hand was shaking. Rob hit his own open palm with a fist.
“Give me an excuse, old man.”
“You have plenty of excuses,” Daydee said. “Really? Out here in front of the world? A pregnant woman and her feeble father?”
Rob looked around. Daydee grabbed her father’s elbow and navigated them around him.