“What kind of setback?”
Galeotto huffed and tried to prop himself up. “Went a little nuts,” he said, and coughed again. “Was low . . . and hopeless. Couldn’t conquer . . . my appetites . . . and then I fell sick. Don’t worry … I plan to get on top of it.”
Mac imagined renting a dumpster, taking heaping armloads of junk to it, and hearing the reverberant thunder of chucking it in. He saw a cleaning crew vacuuming and scrubbing, all the things you could do for an aging relative if you had one all your own. He wondered if the man would let him help.
Whoa. Why did he want to help?
Just then Glen could be heard coming their way, accompanied by the clicking of Sonny’s nails. Glen pushed his way into the room with a tray.
“Got a nice meal fixed here. My job’s to keep him in food—only no donuts or crullers! This guy beg me for ‘em, he point his little gun at me even, I gotta say no. He’s just a kidder.” Glen laughed. “He got a good heart.”
“Not . . . that . . . good,” said Galeotto.
Glen said, “I’m telling you, they got flounder, they got little sand sharks, they got swordfish! But I like catfish the best. Don’t even taste like a fish. Probably taste like cat!”
Sonny lapped at one of the plates on the floor while Glen set down the tray and came over and helped Galeotto sit. Mac helped, too. His hand reached under the man’s arm, and with all his muscle he struggled with his half of the man to prop him up.
But who needed a father when you were all grown up?
“Some for you, too,” said Glen, giving Mac the second plate. “Come on, Sonny. Got scraps in the kitchen.” The two retreated, and Mac heard from the other end of the house the sounds of various pots and pans crashing into a sink.
Mac looked at the plate. There was a big piece of fried fish coated in a batter with flecks of herbs in it. Two large spears of cooked broccoli sat on the side.
“I like . . . the way … he does . . . the crust,” Galeotto managed to say.
Mac was hungry, so he cut a piece with his fork. The atmosphere in the room wasn’t mouthwatering, but the fish was tender and sweet, tangy and well seasoned. Somehow it was hitting the spot. “Those two, they’ve been good to you?”
“The woman’s … a kind soul,” replied Galeotto. “Rubs my rotten . . . old feet every night.”
“They say they don’t have insurance, and they have some health problems,” said Mac, gulping some fish.
“I’ll try. I’m broke. Get this.” He masticated loudly. “All I ever wanted . . . was to run a restaurant!”
“You mean, you’re not interested in publishing?”
“Not really. I wanted … an Italian place. With a Moroccan twist. My uncle . . . Tino . . . gave me recipes. Lots of black olives. Oranges. Tagines on every table. Waiters in djellabas. The works!”
“What stopped you?”
Galeotto was growing more animated with a little protein in him. “You want … a list … of my mistakes? It’s a long list.” He began to gasp and cough so hard he sounded like a harmonica, and Mac listened and watched in horrified silence. When the paroxysm ended, Galeotto scooped up his pad and scribbled out: I USED TO BE
AS SLIM AS YOU. WATCH YOURSELF.
“I definitely will,” Mac replied.
SMOKE?
“Yeah. I know I shouldn’t, but—”
QUIT. I HAVE EMPHYSEMA, AMONG OTHER PROBLEMS. TAKES THE PLEASURE OUT OF LIFE.
“I bet.”
“Open that drawer,” Galeotto croaked. “I want … to show you something. Right at the front, underneath, an . . . old photo.”
Mac made his way to the dresser, set down his plate, and yanked the stiff drawer. It was crammed with unpaired socks. He parted them and saw a photo at the bottom of the drawer. “This?” he said, lifting it out.
“That’s it,” Galeotto said. “Look at Mom and Pop. And look . . . at me!”
Mac brought the photo into the window light. It appeared to have been taken in North Beach, on the stucco porch of an apartment building. A small man in an oversize delivery uniform and a very short woman with a massive bosom flanked their son, a giant grown-up between them. Galeotto stood head and shoulders above them in an ill-fitting suit, sleeves and pant legs far too short, but he cut a good-looking figure despite it.
“My confirmation day. Borrowed the suit. . . from my cousin. Look at us!”
“Looks like your dad had to work that day.”
“Drove his van . . . across town … to get his picture taken next to the suit,” Galeotto spluttered. “Well, go on—say it! Isn’t it shouting at you?”
Galeotto was up on his elbow now, expectant. Mac could see his ravenous features well for the first time. The eyes were brown, like acorns in the autumn sun. “I’m not sure what to say. You were poor, is that what you want me to know?”
“Yes, we were poor, but no,” said Galeotto, irritably.
Mac looked at the picture again. “Are you trying to tell me you were adopted?” he ventured.
The man fell back onto his pillow, and the bedsprings groaned. “Bravo. It doesn’t take a genius.” He laughed quietly. “Charlie was the first … to say it to my face.”
Charlie again. “It’s my studied opinion,” said Mac, “that Charles Ware is ninety percent shithead.”
Galeotto snorted.
Mac gazed down at the boy with the short parents and short pants. Was this a preemptive strike? An attempt to explain himself before Mac pinned him with blame? “So what was the problem with being adopted?”
“Just thought. . . you’d want to know,” Galeotto wrenched out. “Now I need … to rest . . . my voice.”
“Fine,” Mac said. His nerves were on high alert anyway, lest Carolyn walk in. He made his move for the door, ready to go find her. “I’ll be seeing you.”
“Wait,” whispered Galeotto. “I gotta ask . . . your mother ever—” The hack resumed, causing the man to suck hard and long on his inhaler. “She ever . . . talk about me?”
Now, on top of everything else, he had to stoke the behemoth’s ego? “No. She didn’t. Ever. Say anything.”
“I see,” gurgled Galeotto. “Tell . . . the old man … to piss up a rope.”
Funny how mad he was at the old hulk. “What do you expect?” Mac said. “You could have worked a little on the outreach. I sniffed the world’s butt for a few half-assed clues. I ended up at the Wares’ house in San Francisco, and even then it was messed up. I guess no one wanted to blow your cover.”
Galeotto said, “Meet. . . Carolyn Ware?”
There was something unpleasantly lascivious about the question. “That I did.”
“What . . . did . . . you think?” gasped the beast.
“She’s okay.”
“Yes,” coughed Galeotto. “She’s that. She’s quite a bit . . . okay.”
Mac glared at him. The catfish was bottom-feeding in his stomach. “So what happened?—You met my mother when you were married?”
“Let’s not . . . get moral about it.” Galeotto wheezed. “I . . . had a thing with your mom. She was a very . . . sexy . . . woman.” He began to smile. “My God.”
Mac blushed. “In Paris, twenty-three years ago, summer of a certain film festival.”
The dreamy face lingered beneath the shaggy beard. “That’s where it was.”
“And later, you knew that she’d had a child? Me, in other words?”
“Yes, I did.” And with that, he held out a hand. But Mac pointedly did not take the hand offered him.
“You did nothing about it. You let your idiot friend support us like we were charity cases?”
The man had been looking at Mac gently, with something almost like affection; these words caused him to draw back. He rubbed his eyes a moment, and coughed.
“It’s to be expected . . . that you won’t feel much for me,” Galeotto muttered. “I’m glad you seem … to have turned out well.”
“I could be the worst person in the world, little would you know.
”
“Be strong,” Galeotto said from the dark headboard.
“I can’t believe this. You complain you were adopted.”
Galeotto was breathing hard. He stroked his beard as if it was a pet. “MacGregor,” he uttered. “Who ever told you . . . that Charlie Ware . . . supported you?”
Mac now wished to escape the room more than anything. He needed some air. It was all too much.
“He did.”
“And you think . . . he’s to be trusted?”
“Why?”
“Did you make . . . out … all right?” Galeotto asked.
“We got by.”
“You were supposed … to be comfortable. Don’t get me wrong … I know I . . . didn’t do well for you. But it was from me. . . that money. I had to . . . keep the paper trail away . . . from my wife. Charlie took care of it … to spare me . . . the risk.”
Mac ran his hands through his hair and felt sadder than ever. So much had been disguised. “Great, good job, you’re to be congratulated, you did the right thing, Dad. I’m impressed. By your integrity. You’re a paragon of virtue. I hope to emulate you. By your example I’ll be a great man. But hey, didn’t you ever want to meet me?” To Mac’s surprise, his voice broke saying this.
The mammoth looked up from the bed, as a child might who wants to stay home from school. “I . . . tried. Charlie said . . . she didn’t want . . . anything to do with me.” He cleared his throat. “Besides, you had a good situation.”
Charlie.
“You . . . like baseball?” Galeotto said. “The Giants are … in San Diego today.”
“I don’t want to talk about baseball!”
“I live for it.”
“I’m a Red Sox fan.”
“Give me my radio, would you?”
Mac picked up the cheap little radio off the bedside table, and Galeotto put down his plate and grabbed it and turned it on and began to spin the knob, filling the air with small explosions of static. To Mac’s surprise, the man set down the radio and sobbed.
The sight of such a pathetic and stranded person wetting his pillow and beard was worse than anything Mac had come across so far. He found some sort of rag on a chair, handed it to the man, sat down on the end of the bed. He made a note to his older self—Don’t end up this way. Whatever it takes. He grabbed the radio from Galeotto and fiddled around. “No wonder, it was on FM,” said Mac, finding the keyed-up voices of the game. Seventh inning, Giants up by three. “Maybe they’ll pull it off today. Here you go.”
Galeotto took the radio and held it to his chest. He closed his eyes.
“I’ve wasted . . . my life,” he whispered. His cough was worse now, as if the lungs were vomiting. But lungs were full of all kinds of narrow passageways and crawl spaces, and so their attempts to free themselves of debris weren’t as efficient as a good old barf. The man sweated with the effort.
Mac picked up Galeotto’s pad of paper and wrote down his address and phone number. “I’m going now,” he said, tossing the pad onto the mound that was Galeotto’s stomach.
“Will you . . . come again?”
“I gave you my number. We’ll see how bad you want to stay in touch.”
“It took some guts . . . coming here,” Galeotto murmured. “I like that.”
Mac felt ashamed that the compliment meant something to him. Ashamed that the fat arm and body felt cuddly in a way he’d never had the chance to know.
“You know . . . those 1970-model. . . campers?” Galeotto gasped as Mac gathered up his rug. “No bigger . . . than … a pickup truck?”
“I guess.”
“Keep your eyes . . . open . . . for one of those. I’d like to … do a few . . . trips while I . . . still can.”
“You want me to get you a camper?”
“If you . . . win the lottery,” Galeotto heaved.
Through the dark hall, he left the man alone. On the way he smashed into a troglodyte posing as a bookcase and toppled a stack of volumes onto the floor. He pushed on to the main room, looked again at the piano covered in jars, and opened the door into the bright afternoon sun. He couldn’t see a thing for a moment and wondered if Carolyn was out there somewhere, staring at him in his blindness. If she had been all along.
One last thing. He poked his head into the kitchen. Glen was wearing an apron and scraping a frying pan over the sink.
“I’m going,” Mac said numbly.
“You take care,” said Glen.
“The catfish was really good.”
“Secret’s to soak it in apple juice, lime, and a little cayenne. Keep it in the refrigerator so it’s cold. Bread it real good and drop it in hot fat, you get a real nice seal with all the flavor trapped inside. Oh, and don’t forget the salt and pepper. A shake for each bite.”
Mac stared at Glen’s apron, wet with dish suds, crusty with flour. “I’ll try it sometime.”
“Come back, I make it every week. Big man loves it. ‘Course, he likes all my cooking.”
“He’s my dad,” Mac blurted out. He wouldn’t have too many chances to make a splash with the news.
“No kidding! Why didn’t you say so?”
“No big deal.” Ha!
“He don’t have much family. I thought maybe the girls was family, but they set me straight. How come you never showed up till now?”
Mac said, “I got a late start. How long you worked here?”
“ ‘Bout two years.”
“He getting worse?”
“ ‘Bout the same,” said Glen.
“He ever go outside, anything like that?”
“I take him out every morning, he like the sunrise. Sometime we see gophers popping up, he like that, too. He like the smell of the grass even when it dead. He sit in his chair and pull weeds from it.”
Glen set his grill pan back on the stove, polished the top of the stove with the dishcloth, then hung it on the oven handle, as the kitchen, unlike the rest of the house, was shipshape.
“Glen—one last thing. Those guys out there, who are they, anyway?”
“Friends from Center,” he said. “Don’t worry, they not addicts anymore. They real nice.”
“Center. What’s Center?”
Glen’s answers were unblemished in their sincerity. He told Mac he had been sentenced to night classes at the local rehabilitation center after his second DUI a few years back. Since then, he’d cleaned up his act. He liked the big guy, and the only bad thing about working for him was that he was really working for someone else, some higher authority issuing orders and edicts through Carolyn. Their paycheck arrived on time, but everything around the place was managed on a shoestring, because the man with the purse didn’t open it wide enough. The guys from Center did odd jobs to store their cars there and just to have a place to barbecue and hang out. The horse was the only thing around getting any attention. The horse had its own dentist who made house calls! What was that saying about looking a horse in the mouth? Glen wondered. Because if ever there was a horse’s mouth to look into, this was the one.
His mother’s voice: “Avenge me, and these will help you do so.” How did finding Galeotto avenge her? What was to avenge? What twisted vision of family connection had he stumbled into now? Staring out at the man’s acreage, Mac felt more foolish than ever for thinking he could forge a relationship based on the passing of seed. The burrs in
his socks would come home with him and fall off on the ground and grow fescue and wheatgrass. Nothing more than that: random, buckshot biology.
Down below, in jodhpurs, a white blouse with pearly studs, a helmet, and black boots, Carolyn Ware was smoothing the black horse’s muzzle. Rubbing its neck and chest. Molly sat atop the horse in an identical outfit, and Carolyn appeared to be instructing her on the fine points of making a jump. She gave the horse another pat and backed off; Molly gave the glossy flank a slap with her crop and jumped the hurdle before her. Dust rose as if a grenade had gone off. Then the girl pulled the reins and brought the animal back around to
Carolyn, who produced a treat from her pocket. More brushing and stroking, Molly digging in her heels; the knobby horse legs trotted and ran and bent at the knee, and the hurdle was tried again.
“Walk on!” he heard Molly cry. He could see her kicking the animal.
The rug was itching his arm. It was worn and faded and ugly, why hadn’t he ever noticed? He had been trained to see everything through his mother’s deluded eyes. What an act it would be to denounce this rug forever. He didn’t need to keep it, he didn’t need to give it away; just because his mother thought it was great didn’t mean he had to!
He veered down the driveway into the parking area, and he thrashed it on the ground like a bag of bones, an unwanted child, over and over and over, tried to tear it with his teeth and then gagged with the fibers on his tongue. He spat dust and rubbed grit from his eyes. In the lot full of cars, there was a gas can. His rug would now go up in smoke. And it was time. Exalted, he poured vaporous fluid from the can and made a sodden log of it, and from a tiny match light watched the old thing roar into a blaze. Felt the rightness of the cremation of it, as it burned steady, turning gray. A line of smoldering remains.
He couldn’t face Carolyn right now. He put one foot in front of the other and walked. Away from those paddocks as golden as a summer evening in California, sun in his face.
Half claimed. Half disgraced.
some point in the future, Mac would have the wherewithal to remember this day with something akin to pride. A rite of passage, as it were. A necessary one. The one he’d been deprived of. But that would not be for a while. For now, he was driving back at dusk through the forest, over the mountains, to 101 and the approach to the bridge, pushing his hair out of his face.
To establish normalcy, he called his cousin as soon as he was in range.
“Hey, Fran,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“Spitting,” said Fran.
“Why?”
“I have too much saliva all of a sudden. It’s some rare condition that some pregnant women get.”
MacGregor Tells the World Page 20