by Susan Perabo
“Out of quarters already?” Sonny asked, reaching for his pocket.
“Nah,” Paul said. “I just got bored.”
“You can only blow a guy’s head off so many times,” Ian agreed. “I used to play those games till I saw ’em in my sleep. Finally broke the habit.”
“And turned your talents onto the real world,” Sonny added.
“Funny, Sonny. You’re killin’ me, man.”
“What’re you guys talking about?” Paul asked.
“Nothin’,” Sonny said, signaling the waitress for another round.
“Your dad here was telling me more tales about the great Captain Sam,” Ian said, rolling a cold french fry in a puddle of ketchup. “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive . . .”
“I’ve heard those stories a million times,” Paul said. “You tell him the one about the truck driver, Dad? His rig caught fire and practically his whole face fell off. When Sam pulled him out of the cab, the guy’s cheeks started dripping all over the road.”
Ian glanced down at the ketchup on his plate. “Nice,” he said. He pushed the plate away. “You know the hooker story?”
Paul glanced at Sonny, then back at Ian. “What hooker story?”
Ian smirked. “Captain Sam and the hooker. The thing with the hose?”
“Hey, why don’t you shoot some darts?” Sonny said, punching Paul lightly in the shoulder. “You like darts, right? Go see how long it takes you to hit the bull’s-eye ten times.”
“I wanna hear the hooker story,” Paul said, trying to construct a picture in his mind of what the thing with the hose might look like. “C’mon, Dad. I won’t tell anybody.”
“Later,” Sonny said.
“Yeah, like five years later, eh, Son?” Ian said.
Son? Paul thought. Who called his father Son? Not his mom, not Ben, not any of the guys at the station. The waitress appeared with two foamy beers, and Paul wondered if she had bothered to ask Ian for identification. He didn’t look sixteen, maybe, but he sure didn’t look twenty-one either. Maybe she was scared of him, he reasoned. Maybe he, Paul, should mention to her that Ian was underage.
“You want anything, honey?” she asked Paul.
“What’re they having?” he asked.
The waitress chuckled. “Aren’t you a cutie,” she said.
“Get the cutie a milk shake,” Ian said.
“There you go, quarterback,” Sonny said. “Drink a chocolate milk shake and throw some darts. That’ll be fun.”
“You wanna play?”
“No, I don’t wanna play. I thought you might wanna play.”
Paul clenched his fists. “I already said I didn’t.” He felt the bite of his nails against his palms. “Weren’t you listening?”
“Jee-sus,” Ian said. “I ever talk to my dad that way he’d smack me around good.”
“You don’t even have a dad,” Paul said. For a split second he was sorry he’d said it, was startled by his capacity for such meanness. But come on . . . Ian was all about meanness. What other way could you talk to him?
“Hey . . .” Sonny said.
“That’s right, moron,” Ian said. “I’m a fucking miracle baby. Immasculate conception. God jerked off on my mom in some —”
“Immaculate,” Paul said. “Not immas —”
“Stop,” Sonny said. He snatched a cigarette from Ian’s pack and lit it. “You guys’re givin’ me a headache.”
Paul stared at him. “When’d you start smoking?”
Sonny looked at the cigarette, took a quick puff and then stubbed it out. “I have one every now and again.”
“You just wasted a perfectly good cigarette,” Ian said. “You steal ’em, you smoke ’em. Got it?”
“I’m gonna go back to the room,” Paul said.
“No . . . hey,” Sonny said. “You want to play darts? I’ll play darts with you.”
Paul sighed. “May I have the key, please?”
“Okay. Sure,” Sonny said, digging it out of his pocket. “Probably something good on TV, huh?”
“Whatever,” Paul said, snatching the key from his father’s hand. He strode out of the pub and took the elevator upstairs. So this was how it was going to be. Six months ago, his father would have passed by Ian Finch without giving him a second look. He would not have called him a goner, no, only dismissively accepted him as just another face that was part of the grand family portrait of Casey, Pennsylvania. But now Ian was the picture. And he, Paul, was just another face.
In the darkness of the suite he saw the red light on the telephone flashing, so he picked up the message. It was his mother. She was trying to sound nonchalant, disinterested, but the tone of her voice made it clear she was angry, at the very least irritated, that Paul had neglected to call her for two days. He dialed their number and after three rings she picked up. She sounded sleepy.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Paul? What time is it?”
He looked at the clock on the fax machine. “Ten.”
“Honey, that’s one o’clock here. I was asleep.”
“Oh, sorry,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“No, no, no,” she said frantically. He imagined her thrashing about the covers, fumbling for the light. “Don’t hang up! It’s okay, honey. I was just asleep and you took me by surprise. What are you doing up so late?”
“I just got in,” he said. “We were in the bar.”
“The bar?”
“Playing games,” he added.
“Oh,” she said, relieved in her delusion. “That sounds like fun. Is your father there?”
“He’s still downstairs. With Ian.”
“How’s the movie going, honey?”
“It’s fine.”
“How’s your father?”
“He’s fine,” he said. “He’s having a good time.”
“Well, that’s nice, I guess. Is that nice?”
“You can go to sleep now,” he said. “I’m okay. Everything’s okay.”
“All right, honey. You call me soon. Tomorrow if you can. And call me when your father’s there so I can say hello to him.”
“I will,” he said.
After he hung up he undressed and sat in the hot tub, naked. He wished he were older, as old as Ian, so that he could drink a beer with his father, smoke cigarettes in the bar and listen to R-rated (maybe even X-rated?) stories about the fire station. Ian was only four years older than he was; it wasn’t fair that four measly years could make such a difference.
The next thing he knew Ian was splashing in beside him, dressed only in his boxer shorts.
“Sleeping naked in the tub,” Ian sang joyfully. Then he quickly sobered up. “Didn’t pee in here, did you?”
“Time is it?” Paul asked groggily, reaching for his shorts and slipping them on underwater.
“Time for you to go to bed,” his father said, coming into the bathroom and kicking off his loafers.
“I talked to Mom,” Paul said. “She wants you to call her tomorrow.”
Ian laughed. “Hear that, Sonny? Mom wants you to call tomorrow. Better be a good boy and do what Mom says.”
“Fine,” Sonny said. He stepped into the tub without bothering to take off his pants or shirt. His blue oxford filled with water and rode up to his chest, bobbed in the bubbles. Paul could smell the beer on him all the way across the tub.
“You look like a blowfish,” Ian said. “You bring me a beer, blowfish?”
“Get your own beer.”
“Wha’dya want me to do, crawl there? I’m a cripple, man, remember?”
Paul’s eyes darted to Ian’s left foot. It wasn’t there, and he quickly looked away. “Mom said —” he started.
“Paul,” his father said evenly. “I said I’d call her tomorrow. I’m not going to call her right now. It’s the middle of the night.”
“I know,” Paul said. “I know it’s —”
“Go get Ian a beer,” Sonny interrupted.
“
Can I stay up?”
“Sure. If you get Ian a beer, you can stay up for another half hour.”
“Can I have a beer?”
His father seemed to consider this for an instant, then caught himself. “No you can’t have a beer. Of course you can’t have a beer.”
“Just one? Half a one?”
Sonny shook his head, bewildered. “No. And you know what? I don’t want a beer either. Here . . .” He handed his bottle over to Ian. “I’m going to bed.” Without another word he climbed out of the tub and trudged out of the bathroom, bathwater raining from his pants, puddled footprints on the silver tile in his wake.
“Way to go,” Ian said, when they heard the door to Sonny’s bedroom slam shut. “He was havin’ a good time ’fore you got here.” He lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply, bounced his stump in the water, fluttering little swirls in the middle of the tub. Paul found himself studying the place where the leg stopped, midway down the shin; it looked like the end of a wooden baseball bat. He imagined the surgeons sewing it shut, how the skin must have been ripped and tattered from the ax, how they must have had to even out the edges before they stitched it, the way you had to snip along the edges of a construction paper Valentine, evening it so the front and back fit together neatly.
“You wanna give it a feel?” Ian asked, nodding toward his leg. “Or you just wanna stare at it?”
“I wasn’t staring,” Paul said.
“Give you the willies, jocko?”
“No. I just don’t like touching guys is all.”
Ian smirked. “Whatever,” he said.
Paul did want to touch it, but only if Ian was asleep or otherwise too occupied to watch his reaction. What if he made a face? What if he recoiled, yanked his hand away the way you’d do if you reached for a football in the yard and instead found your fingers buried in dog shit?
Ian splashed him. “Ain’t it past your bedtime, little boy?”
Paul scowled. “Why are you here?”
“Bar’s closed, dimmo. Where else am I gonna be?”
Paul shook his head. “I mean here here, with my father. You’re not even helping with the movie. All you do is sit around and —”
“Why the fuck would I want to help with the movie? This is my vacation, man.”
“I don’t understand why the people at the studio would pay for you to be on vacation.”
“They hafta.” Ian burped. “Part of the deal.”
Paul frowned. “What deal?”
“Deal Sonny signed.” Ian took a swig of beer. “They want his side of the story, they gotta get his permission, right? Nobody else knows the story like he knows it. So old Sonny says no permission unless they pay for us, him and me, to come out here and watch.”
Paul recalled the conversation from months earlier, the day his mother had made his father promise he’d talk to a lawyer before he signed anything from the producers. This didn’t sound like any deal a lawyer would come up with. Even a stupid Casey lawyer.
Ian singed out his cigarette in the water and tossed it beside the tub. “Pretty smart, huh?”
“Yeah,” Paul said, his head swimming. “Yeah, I guess.”
Paul awoke Wednesday morning to an empty suite. He knew they were scheduled to be at the studio at nine, and the clock above the wet bar (although it had no numbers, only thin black hands) said it was almost nine-thirty. Maybe his father and Ian had gone downstairs for a quick breakfast. Maybe they had even gone for a swim. It would be like them — like Ian, at least — to be late, especially since they were probably hungover. He dressed quickly and took the elevator down to the second-floor restaurant, a dimly lit place with plush green carpet, tinkling chandeliers, and burgundy napkins folded into perfect cones around each table. The waiters eyed him with suspicion — did he look like a beggar or something? he wondered — as he walked shyly from table to table in search of his father. No dice. He followed the signs in the lobby and found his way to the pool exit, forgot his purpose for a moment as he took in the pool, the glistening water shooting sun in a thousand directions. There were some pale kids knocking a beach ball around in the shallow end and about a hundred glowing bronze women stretched out on lounge chairs in the sun, Walkmans closed over their ears. Still no dice. Frustrated, he returned to the room. It was then that he found the note, sitting under the remote control on the glass coffee table.
Paul
You were so asleep I didn’t want to wake you. We went on to the studio. We’ll be back later.
Dad
Paul crumpled the note in his hand. What a load of crap! He was furious with himself. He had blown it. Why’d he have to mention his mother in the Jacuzzi? Why’d he have to be a baby? Ian was right . . . he had sucked all the fun out of his father’s adventure. So now he was going to be left out of all the good parts, just so he wouldn’t spoil them.
Fine, then. He wasn’t going to waste the day moping about it. He changed into his swim trunks and went out to the pool. There were some other kids there, three freckled siblings (from Leesiana, they told him), and he spent the morning goofing off with them, playing Marco Polo and cannonballing off the diving board — competing for the biggest splash — until the lifeguard told them to quit because they were drenching everyone within fifteen feet of the pool. Weary and wrinkled from water, Paul spent the afternoon in the empty pub, sucking down sodas and throwing darts. When he returned to the room there was a message from his father. The crew was behind schedule, Sonny said, and he didn’t know when they would make it back to the hotel, so Paul should go on and have dinner on his own. Paul bit his lip as he set down the phone. Again: fine, then. He ordered a steak from room service and watched two R-rated movies, drank from a bottle of beer until his stomach churned and then poured the rest of it down the sink. When, by eleven o’clock, his father and Ian had still not appeared, he went to bed.
When he was a little boy, only four or five, there was no greater thrill for Paul than that of his father carrying him over his shoulder, fireman style, to bed. Sonny would surprise him with this move; one moment Paul would be standing at the kitchen sink in his footie pajamas or sitting on the couch watching television and then — in a swooping flash of light and color — he would be upside down and squealing with laughter, his nose pressed to the small of his father’s back, a powerful left arm strapped across the backs of his thighs. Sonny would sprint wildly to the bedroom, dodging imaginary obstacles along the hallway, then flip Paul flat on his back onto the bed. Just in time, Sonny would say, wiping imaginary sweat from his forehead. Gotcha just in the nick of time. . . .
Paul dreamed of this that night and woke with a start. His father was lying beside him in his bed, propped up on one elbow, regarding him curiously.
“What?” Paul asked.
Sonny smiled. “What what?”
Paul looked at the clock over his father’s shoulder; it was two forty-five. “You just get home?”
“Been here awhile,” Sonny said. “But sorry about bein’ gone all day. Things were crazy over on the set. You dreaming just now?”
“Why?”
“You were laughing,” Sonny said, shifting his elbow. “I came in here thinking I was missing a party and there you were, sound asleep, giggling like a maniac. So I thought I’d lie here next to you for a while and watch. Didn’t mean to wake you up. What were you dreamin’ about?”
Paul was embarrassed. He didn’t like to think of his father — of anybody — watching him while he slept. But he supposed it could have been worse — he could have been crying, or slobbering. Or pissing himself.
“Remember when you used to carry me to bed?”
“Sure. That’s what you were dreaming about?”
“Yeah.” Paul shrugged. “That was fun.”
“Seems like that was last night. You know what I mean? Either last night or a thousand years ago.” He sighed. “Funny, I was just lying here looking at you thinking, when’d this kid get to be so old? When’d this kid start being a person? A rea
l guy, with his own dreams and monsters.”
“What monsters?” Paul asked.
Sonny ignored the question. “It’s like you’re mine, but you’re not mine either. When I carried you to bed, you were mostly mine. But now you mostly belong to yourself. You know what I mean?”
Was he drunk? Paul wondered. He didn’t smell drunk. And his words weren’t slurred — they were only distant, dreamy. His eyes shimmered with thought, as if he were trying to recall the face of someone he hadn’t seen in years.
“Dad?” Paul asked cautiously. “Do you like it out here?”
“It’s all right,” Sonny said with a shrug. “Why? Do you?”
“Do you like it better than being at home?”
For a long moment he didn’t answer. He scratched his stubbly chin, pursed his lips. “Home seems a long way away,” he said finally. “You know what I mean? It’s like with you. You belong to me, but you don’t. And I belong to home, but out here home doesn’t mean anything. You know, like I could say it over and over again, ‘home . . . home . . . home . . .’ and after a while it’s just gibberish. I can do the same thing with you. I can go ‘Paul . . . Paul . . . Paul . . .’ until your name’s just a sound my throat makes. Like when you’ve sung along with a song a thousand times but you know it so well that the words don’t even mean anything anymore. They’re just bits of air coming out of your mouth. You know what I mean?”
“Not really,” Paul said.
Sonny leaned back onto the pillow, closed his eyes. “That makes two of us,” he said. He sighed, was silent for a moment. Then he opened his eyes and gazed at the ceiling. “Sometimes these days I think things and I don’t even know where they’re coming from. It’s like I’m thinking somebody else’s thoughts. Like I’m . . . I’m empty. And somebody else is fillin’ in the blanks.”