Christ, I’m a mess—groggy, blubbery, slobbery, easy-to-tears. Crying at the stupidest things: Jenga, Godzilla. I blink away wet salt again. I didn’t see weepiness in the list of sleep-deprivation symptoms. Hard to say what gets me this time—the sheer eight-year-old perfection of that question…or that he asked me…or maybe the fact that his little conscience has led him to paint an apology for his antagonist, his Prince Chuck. He stares at me, waiting.
God, they want so little, these shits; they don’t care about money, big houses, private schools, darkness and light. All they want is answers. And sugared cereal.
“Well.” I wipe at my eyes. “Godzilla would win. You know. Because of the fire.”
“The lasers,” he corrects. “Yeah.” He stares hard at the painting, sighs. “That’s what I said. But Elijah said that Godzilla is made up, so Tyrannosaurus would win.”
“Well, that’s just a lack of imagination,” I say. “Some people are literalists. We can’t hold it against them. Not their fault, champ.”
Franklin nods in agreement. “What’s for dinner?”
I glance back across the hall, at our closed door. “I’m thinking pizza.”
Franklin’s eyes follow mine to our closed bedroom door and he nods.
So I make one phone call, and just like that, we’re eating pizza at 6:30. What is this world? You tap seven abstract figures onto a piece of plastic thin as a billfold, hold that plastic device to your head, use your lungs and vocal cords to indicate more abstractions, and in thirty minutes, a guy pulls up in a 2,000-pound machine made on an island on the other side of the world, fueled by viscous liquid made from the rotting corpses of dead organisms pulled from the desert on yet another side of the world and you give this man a few sheets of green paper representing the abstract wealth of your home nation, and he gives you a perfectly reasonable facsimile of one of the staples of the diet of a people from yet another faraway nation.
And the mushrooms are fresh.
I send Teddy upstairs to see if Lisa wants to join us for this tiny miracle. I tell him to let her know that I got fresh peppers and mushrooms on our half, her favorite. She declines. She tells Teddy she doesn’t feel well.
“What’s she doing up there?” I ask, as nonchalantly as I can muster.
Teddy shrugs. “She’s in bed. She’s sick.” He doesn’t meet my eyes.
Dad stares into the winter-black back window as he chews.
“You like the pizza, Dad? Or do you prefer the other place?”
He stares down at the pizza as if he was unaware that it was pizza.
“Pradeep Duncan got Guitar Hero for his Wii,” Teddy pretends to tell Franklin. Here it comes—Teddy’s regularly scheduled, ten-year-old consumer confidence report, his pointed survey of all the expensive and inappropriate gadgets, games and movies that other fourth graders are routinely being given by their cooler and more loving parents. He gives this quarterly report only to his brother so that Lisa and I can’t launch into any kind of lecture about his age, or the fact that we can’t afford such things, or how, even if we could afford them, it wouldn’t matter to us what other kids have.
“And his stepdad lets him watch the Saw movies,” Teddy continues.
“No way!” says Franklin. Then he shakes his head. “I wouldn’t want to watch those.”
“Dude, I would,” Teddy says. I wonder: where did Teddy learn such indirect communication? And…Dude? I picture him outside the 7/11—
Above us, the floorboards creak. My eyes go to the ceiling. Up there, the bathroom door opens and closes. After a minute…a flush. The bathroom door opens. She pads across the floor. The bedroom door opens and closes again.
My phone buzzes. I glance down at it. Jamie. Another board teeters.
I excuse myself from the table and take it in the living room.
“Hey,” Jamie says, and there’s a thumping bass behind him, and I hear someone yell, Fuck you, Larry, and then there’s a burst of laughter, and Jamie says, “Slippers, we’re having a rager over at Larry’s, yo! You should totally come over, man.”
Rub my brow.
Jamie goes on: “We gotta go to Weedland and get our shit tonight anyway, right?”
Jamie has piggybacked a smaller buy on top of mine. Okay, so here we go. I glance at the black watch on my wrist. I suppose there’s a certain point where there’s nothing more to fear. Once you’re not just a drug dealer but a narc, too…what the hell have you got to worry about? That is the one good thing about the bottom: at least it’s the bottom. “Yeah.”
“Cool,” he says. “Just come by Larry’s and get me, yo.”
“Okay. About an hour?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll just be chillin’.” And then Jamie laughs. “Oh, man, Chulo just bit it. He’s totally fried, yo.”
“Isn’t Chulo always fried?” I ask, even though I’ve yet to figure out which one is Chulo.
Jamie laughs. “No shit, huh?”
I hang up and go back into the kitchen. Dad and the boys are at the table, eating quietly. I slide back into my chair. Here we are. Three generations of doomed Prior men.
Teddy resumes his consumer-spending report: “Tommy Parnell? He’s got two Wiis.”
“Two? No way!” Franklin says. “What’s he do with two?”
“One at his mom’s house and one at his dad’s house.”
“No way!” Franklin says again.
I could buy five Wiis with the money I spent on treated lumber. Thirty-five with the money I spent on dope. Maybe I can tell Randy and Reese it was all a mistake. I wanted to buy Wiis, not weed.
World teeters. “Look, guys, I gotta go somewhere after dinner. You stay here with Grandpa. Let Mom rest unless it’s something important. Okay?”
“Can we watch a movie?”
“Get your pajamas on first, and don’t forget—”
“What happened to me?”
Teddy, Franklin and I all look up, across the table at Dad.
“What’s that, Dad?”
His eyes narrow. “Why am I here?” He pats his empty pocket for cigarettes.
Veins pop in his forehead. His eyes drill into me. This happens sometimes; all of a sudden Dad will come in sharp, like a distant radio station dialed in on a clear night.
“You just got into some trouble, Dad. It’s gonna be fine. Don’t worry.”
I used to get excited by these occasional glimpses, used to think it meant that my Dad was back, and I’d hurriedly brief him on everything that had happened while he was away—as if he’d been in a coma—or I’d try to get information out of him—what did he remember about Charity and her boyfriend? But the station always went away again, and I’d just have to brief him again two days later, so I quit trying to bring Dad up to speed. I’ve learned to simply stall, make small talk until the clear reception goes away again. It usually takes only a few minutes.
Dad stares at me, waiting for an answer.
“Look, it’s nothing we can’t handle, Dad. You had a little trouble, but everything is—”
He spits as he says, “Goddamn it, Matt! Will you tell me what the fuck happened to me?”
I look over at the boys—pizza slices frozen halfway to their mouths. Then I look back at Dad. He used to yell at me sometimes like that when I was a kid, but his real anger was directed at my mother. She used to say that Dad didn’t yell about anything she did; it was her existence that pissed him off. I was twenty-six when he finally left her. Lisa thought my nonchalant reaction odd; but I suppose I expected it, because I never asked for an explanation. From either of them. Mom talked to my sisters about it—she said Dad left because she wouldn’t let him smoke in the house. I guess Mom never talked to me about it because she sensed that I would intuitively side with him. Maybe, even then, she saw in me the same unraveling gene.
Dad stares. For once, the sharp eyes aren’t going away.
I glance over at my boys, who are waiting along with Dad for an explanation. Sigh. Oh, what the hell. “You met a girl, Dad. In
Reno. A stripper. You took her back to the ranch in Oregon. She stole everything, your money…credit cards…everything.”
The boys, of course, have never heard this heartwarming family story. Teddy’s eyes are huge. His grandfather knew a stripper? He looks over at the old guy with new-found respect.
Dad nods: go on.
Funny—it never occurred to me to ask my father why he left Mom. If anything, I might’ve asked why he stayed all those years. I always felt like he was buzzing with something dangerous, banging against the walls, teetering, and he could just tip over at any time and be gone. To me, it felt like we were only renting the man. All those days he put on that tie and those coveralls; I knew he’d have to leave eventually. The fact that he made it until my sisters and I were gone from home seemed like an accomplishment. He moved to a tiny house on fifteen acres along a dry riverbed in central Oregon, a place where he could smoke all the cigarettes he wanted. In four years, I only visited him there once:
Dry Falls
Dad’s land is scabbed and pocked
river channels that forgot not to die
couleed ditches and hard veined cracks
of channeled dust in his razored cheeks
near a broken Case, stranded plow
tooth long lost in an Army row
burns on his forearms from an engine
blown in a falling corral of brown grass
spotted with implements too rusted to name
let alone use—wet nose betraying
disease in his lungs like the fresh pack
in his left breast pocket like the chipped
paint barn its corrugated roof curling
at the edges and a woodstove chimney
jutting through black shingles, fresh pack
in his left breast pocket above a
smoke-choked beater grown over
from neglect, two faint tracks in long weeds
shot up around the burned GMC
the old man still dreams he drives
big right hand on the black shifter knob
fresh pack in his left breast pocket—
And I wonder if we don’t live like water
seeking a level
a low bed
until one day we just go dry.
I wonder if a creek ever realizes
it has made its own grave.
Dad stares at me, waiting for the rest of the explanation—what happened to me.
“I don’t know, Dad. Maybe…you were embarrassed that this girl took advantage of you…ashamed or something. But you didn’t tell anyone. By the time I got there, it was too late.”
Mom spent a decade alone, convinced that Dad would someday return—“after he’s had his fun.” She died without ever speaking to him again, in a sunny hospital room, surrounded by her kids, mumbling in her morphine about terrorists. As far as I know she only mentioned him once, the last day, when she said that she couldn’t wait to see him in heaven. My sister said, “But Dad’s still alive,” and Mom just smiled, as if that was exactly what she meant. That day, hospice was delivering a hospital bed to her house, but she didn’t make it home. One of my sisters joked later that she couldn’t bear having that mess in her house. I left my crying sisters, went home from the hospital and climbed in bed. We’d just moved to this house. Without a word, Lisa climbed in beside me and nestled in behind my knees. We slept like that for a couple of hours and then I got up and called Dad in Oregon. He answered on one ring. I could hear the TV in the background. He listened, sighed, cleared his throat, thanked me for calling and hung up.
He didn’t come to the funeral. After that, Dad seemed to withdraw and I suppose I let him. Life was busy, and then my own collapse began and I looked up one day and realized it had been months since I’d heard from my father. When one of my sisters called to tell me that Dad’s phone was disconnected, I drove to Oregon, and that’s where I found him—like this—early-onset, post-Charity, un-showered, unshaven, unhinged, disoriented, dazed…alone.
“The doctors say you’re suffering from early-onset dementia,” I tell Dad, “which is just another word for senility.”
He leans across the dinner table, nods. Go on. The doctors said that being alone probably hastened his decline; without people to talk to synaptic paths grow over with weeds, and yet, every once in a while, he finds himself on a bare stretch of one of those old trails. Like now.
“The good news is…it’s not Alzheimer’s. Your memory is just…well…it comes and goes. In fact, I’ll probably have to tell you all of this again tomorrow. Or I won’t. I’ll just say a bunch of stupid shit. And you’ll just watch TV and forget you even asked.” I try a reassuring smile. “And hell Dad, maybe that’s just like the rest of us. Maybe we all forget everything the minute we learn it. I don’t know.”
Dad sometimes brings the remote control to the table. He always sets it next to his plate, like a fourth utensil, just to the right of his knife. It’s the same brand of universal remote that he had at his house in Oregon. Dad was terribly disoriented when he got to our house—until he saw we had a look-alike remote control.
Now, at the mention of the word TV, he picks up the remote and stares at it, as if it contains the answer to this thing he’s been trying to understand. Then he sets it down in its place…so…gently. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my father be that gentle with anything.
He looks up at Teddy, at Franklin, and then at me.
And the light goes out. I can see it in his eyes. The station is gone.
“You know what, Dad…it’s okay…it’s all going to be—”
“What kind of man was I?” he rasps. And he pats his empty breast pocket.
“A good one,” I say, voice cracking. I look down at my plate; feel the boys’ eyes. These people. Are they trying to kill me?
I look up blearily. Dad has picked up his remote control again, and is staring back out the black window. He takes a deep breath, then lifts the pizza to his mouth and chews. He looks over at me like a stranger, this good man who spent forty years losing the people he loved, and then, in only a few months, managed to lose himself. (We live like water…)
My gaping sons no longer gape at their grandfather, but at me. I guess they’ve never seen their dad cry before. I wipe my eyes, smile. I don’t know what to tell them: Boys, pay attention to your mother; mothers have a million things to teach you. But fathers? We only have two lessons, but these two things are everything you need to know: (1) What to do and (2) What not to do. I look from the boys down to the dark watch, jutting from my wrist like a tumor. And my bleary eyes drift up to Dad’s black window and my own faint reflection in it.
CHAPTER 25
The Last Time I Remember Crying, Haiku #4
I WAS AN ADULT
When my parents got divorced
Or so I was told
CHAPTER 26
On the Spiritual Crises of Confidential Informants
THERE IS, INDEED, A rager of a party going on in Larry’s fetid apartment and the first thing I see is the answer to why there were pizza crusts all over the furniture and floor the other day. The second someone finishes a slice they are obliged to yell, “Fuck you, Larry,” and throw the crust at him. It’s a tradition here in low-rent Neverland, where no one grows up and where no one ever has to eat his crusts. For his part, Larry ducks each crust, and says, “Fuck you!” back whenever someone actually hits him, never taking his eyes off the video game he’s playing, in which he negotiates dark hallways and shoots zombies on the big screen with another dude, both of them leaning in and working the controllers (Why does a guy making eight bucks an hour have a better TV than me?) and the whole apartment smells like a stale quiche of socks, garlic, sweat and weed—little huffs of smoky clouds surround clustered kids—all clad in tight black or in bright baggy sportswear; the bass whumps, crusts fly, beer bottles tink and I’m not in the door ten seconds when I’m passed a spliff, little wisp of forgiveness curling off the point, and I very nearly hit that shit—b
ut no. Thank you. I hand the joint back.
I do take a warm beer (I am that kind of man) and it goes down easy. “Who’s got a piece? You got a piece?” asks a red-eyed kid I’ve never seen before, and at first I think he means a gun, “I need a piece. Anyone got a piece,” but then I remember that a piece is a pipe and I shake my head no and the kid moves on, working the room, “Who’s got a piece, I need a piece.” There are twenty people at this party—including six girls, and I’m happy for the fellas—six actual females at their party—happy for Larry, for the guy with the Festiva whose name I don’t know, for Chulo, whichever one he is…happy for the red-eyed piece guy who squeezes my shoulder and says: “Damn! Slippers, so you chillin’ or what?”
“Yes.” This is what I am doing—chilling.
No sign of Jamie, but I spot Skeet, same sweat suit as before, exiting a bedroom, arm on the waist of a dull-eyed girl in a leather coat—and I think, parentally: you can do better, Skeet—but he introduces me proudly. “Yo, Lana, this our friend, Matt, he like a doctor, some shit.”
“Hey,” Lana says, with a tilt of the head.
“Nice to meet you,” I say back, and I think of telling her that I’m not…like, a doctor or some shit, but what would be the point? Businessman, doctor, unemployed business reporter, failed poet, confidential informant? Really, what’s the difference?
“Wish I knew you was gonna be here, yo. I would’ve brought your loafers.”
“That’s okay,” I say. “Do you know where Jamie is? I’m supposed to meet him here.”
“Yeah boy, he hookin’ you up, or what?”
Hookin’ you up. It sounds worse than I imagined. I look at Lana. She chews her huge wad of gum rhythmically, turning it every other chomp with her tongue.
Larry calls back over his shoulder without taking his eyes off the zombies, “Jamie went on a beer run, man! Just chill, Slippers, he be right back, yo.”
Yes. More chilling. I want to talk to Skeet alone, but I promised myself I’d wait until after Weedland. Whatever I do, it’s got to be after Weedland. My nine grand. I glance down at my black watch. They’re not necessarily parallel paths, of course—what is right and what is best.