I set the framing hammer down. “You might have to finish without me,” I tell Dad.
“Well, look here,” Lt. Reese says as he walks up the sidewalk. “If it isn’t the guy who managed, in twenty-four hours, to fuck up a six-month investigation.”
“I’m sorry.”
He laughs bitterly. “Don’t apologize. I told you what would happen if you fucked up.” Then he looks past me. “Hey, I know that pile of shit. Is that Frontier Fort number two?”
“Yeah.”
“I built the same thing for my kids. Ten years ago. Wife didn’t want them falling out of a tree. They played in it for twenty minutes and haven’t been in it since. But the stupid thing will be there fifty years after my house falls down. Why are you making it in your front yard? Who builds a goddamn fort in his front yard?”
“That’s just where my dad started it.”
“And who builds a goddamn tree fort in November?”
“My dad…he’s kind of senile.”
Lt. Reese looks past me. “All that wood.” Shakes his head. “It’s easy to build, but it’s twice as expensive because of all those four-bys. Thing’s a waste of trees.”
Then the lieutenant calls past me. “Hey. Grandpa! You gotta use the twelve-inch spikes for the last row!”
I turn. Dad is, indeed, holding a six-inch spike.
Lt. Reese walks over and picks up the plans. “I know it says to use shorter spikes, but you need this one to go through the floorboards, too. See?” He grabs the drill, puts in the longer bit and deepens the hole, then takes a longer spike and sinks it while Dad swings the hammer and drives the spike through. It makes a sharp report that echoes down the street. I flinch each time he hits it. Lt. Reese steps away. “See?” he says again.
Lt. Reese sits on the porch and watches us cut the doors. “I can wait,” he says.
And so, with the sun burning off the morning fog, supervised by the surly lieutenant from the regional drug task force—who occasionally calls out instructions (“Reverse the drill!”) my father, my sons and I successfully build Frontier Fort Number Two in my front yard.
We’re leveling the sidewalls when Lt. Reese says, “Hey. You got any coffee in there?”
I go inside to make it, but in the kitchen I see that Lisa has already made a pot. I get a cup for Dad, one for Lt. Reese and one for me. We sit on the front porch, holding the warm cups in our cold hands, watching the boys play in their finished fort. It’s bulky, but not at all roomy; like everything in life, Frontier Fort II is both bigger and smaller than I thought it would be. There are no secret rooms. No Murphy beds or home gyms. Not even a roof. It’s just some square walls sitting on a smaller square a few feet above the ground. Even the boys aren’t quite sure exactly how to “play” in it, or how to play anything without a controller in their hands. It strikes me that I am at least two years late in building my boys their treeless tree fort.
We sit on the cold porch, steam from our coffee in our faces, watching the boys jump from the walls.
“So did you get him?” I ask. “Dave?”
“Get him?” Lt. Reese laughs. “We could’ve arrested him any time we wanted. God, you really are stupid.” Then: a sigh. “Idiots turned themselves in, just like we were afraid they would. Lawyers called this morning. They all want deals. We’re fucked.” He sips at his coffee. In his disappointment, I remember what Randy told me and I think I finally understand: the last thing they wanted was to arrest Dave and Monte, to shut down the operation. With their grant running out at the end of the year, and their emergency budget presentation coming up, what they really needed was some reason to keep the operation going so the task force could get two more years funding. They needed tape of me pretending to buy Monte’s business, so they could string the thing out for a while. But I panicked and blabbed and ruined the whole thing.
Lt. Reese finishes his coffee. “We should get going. There’s a lot of paperwork.”
I pull the watch from my pocket and hold it out to him. “And this. Is it—”
“Yeah.” He shrugs. “Just a watch. With a backlight. It was Randy’s idea…he figured you’d get suspicious if you didn’t think you were wired up. I wanted to put a fake body wire on you but Randy thought you’d piss your pants so he came up with this James Bond bullshit.” He takes the watch, puts it in his pocket. “I guess this is what happens when you’re pushed for time. You make mistakes.”
“What’s going to happen to those kids,” I say. “To Jamie?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about him,” Lt. Reese says cryptically. I think this confirms what I figured out last night. That if I was OH-2…there had to be a-1. “So Jamie was—”
He just smiles. “Don’t ask me that.”
“None of those guys seemed like criminal masterminds,” I say. “Even Dave wasn’t as bad as you made him out to be. I think he was just caught up in it, like I was, over our heads.”
“Caught up? Over your head?” This is apparently the wrong thing to say to Lt. Reese, who spins on me, his old shitty self. “You were dealing drugs, fuck-nuts! You know the definition of a fucking drug dealer, Slippers? Someone who deals drugs!”
My boys have looked up from the tree fort. I hold up my hand to quiet Lt. Reese.
He continues more quietly: “The only difference between you and Dave? Is that you sucked at it. You think you’re different ’cause…what? You got kids? “Cause you used to have a job?”
Lt. Reese hands me his coffee cup, sighs. “You know the worst part of what I do: nobody ever deserves it. Nobody ever thinks they’re wrong. You’re all a bunch of assholes walking around crying, ‘It ain’t fair…I didn’t mean it…I got a bad deal.’”
“Amen,” says Dad.
Lt. Reese and I both look over at Dad, who rocks back and forth, staring off into space.
Lt. Reese reaches over and pats my father on the back. Then he stands. “You ready?”
“Can I go in and tell my wife?”
Lt. Reese looks at his empty cup. Sighs. “Get your dad and me some more coffee first.”
I get them each a cup. “Five minutes,” Lt. Reese says.
I nod. I don’t see the boys in the fort, so I walk over. They’re sitting on the floor, cross-legged in opposite corners, like boxers between rounds. They’re playing their Gameboys. Fifteen minutes in their new eleven-hundred-dollar fort and they’re back to playing video games.
“I love you guys.”
They look up, confused. “Okay,” Teddy says. I step into the fort. It really is solidly built. I feel strangely…proud. I bend down and hug them. Even Teddy hugs me back, awkwardly, but I’ll take it. They don’t ask where I’m going.
“Bye Dad,” I say. “I’m going to jail.”
He toasts me with his steaming coffee.
Then I start back toward the house. The stairs creak under my feet. The door to our bedroom is closed. I start to knock—then I grab the knob and open the door. Lisa looks startled. She’s staring out the window, chewing her thumbnail, her phone at her ear. Wearing her heavy coat. She looks back and sees me. Her eyes are red and bleary. “I have to call you back,” she says into the phone. She closes it and turns to face me.
Our big suitcase is open on the bed. Nothing in it. I don’t know what this means. Has she not packed yet? Or changed her mind? Or is she expecting me to go?
She looks up and I catch her eyes—green, frightened.
I look down at the bed underneath that suitcase. “Lisa…I…” What do you say? Where do you start? “I am so sorry.”
CHAPTER 30
After 7/11
BANKRUPTCY TURNS OUT TO be like an outdoor concert Lisa and I went to once. The gates were thrown open suddenly and we sprinted down this hill, way too fast, the crowd out of control, and I squeezed Lisa’s hand and we ran, but we could’ve slipped so easily, fallen, gotten trampled. “Don’t look back,” I just kept saying, “just keep moving forward.”
It turns out they have a Chapter 7 and a Chapter 11 bankrup
tcy. I try not to dwell on the significance of the numbers. After disaster shopping for a while, Lisa and I decide to go with Chapter 13 (all of these prime, odd numbers…alone out there…disconnected from the pack), which is bankruptcy for people who are making some money, but not nearly enough to meet their debts. It’s not a great deal, but it’s certainly a better deal for us than for our creditors. The court takes everything we have, which is not much, and divvies it among the sharks. Anything we were making payments on goes back to the lenders—even our living room furniture, which we were close to paying off, even our dryer. Then we get to start from scratch, only with less stuff and with shitty credit. A few years ago, shitty credit wouldn’t have mattered; we could’ve bought Graceland. Now…the conservator assigned to our case feigns trying to help us keep our house, but there’s no way. When the packet from Providential Equity finally arrives, it turns out we can’t even get into their mortgage modification program. The numbers aren’t even close to penciling out and now that I have a conviction, for possession of narcotics with intent to deliver (I’m out on probation), we are no longer eligible. So, just months after giving me a reprieve, my friends in Benicia—Gilbert and Joy—end up with my house. It doesn’t help my case with Lisa, either, that I withheld not only being a drug dealer, but also the letter about our house being foreclosed. I wish she were angry, but all I get from her now is fatigue…cold, indifferent resignation.
The day before we are officially served with eviction papers by a sympathetic Sheriff’s deputy, we have a big garage sale, and watch people haul away the shit we should’ve gotten rid of years ago. It’s almost cathartic. I think Lisa does pretty well with her compulsive shopping boxes, maybe even turns a profit on the plush toys. I’m happy for her. The boys sell a bunch of their old games and toys, too, and make enough to buy a Wii. I’m happy for them, too.
And then…we move. Or at least I move, with the boys, to a two-bedroom apartment in a shrub-covered 1970s triplex on a busy street twenty blocks from downtown.
Lisa needs some space. Some time. The old me would’ve pointed out that they’re really the same—space and time, on a four-dimensional smooth continuum that theoretically allows for even more dimensions and explains such phenomena as time-dilation (although this relativity doesn’t explain the munchies) and I’d have been halfway to string theory as she was loading up her car. But the new me—quiet, humbled—just says, “Okay.” And, “Take as long as you need.”
She moves in with Dani, although I imagine she spends her nights at Chuck’s. We agree that I’ll keep the boys in the apartment with me for the time being, until she gets settled. Since my apartment is near her optometrist’s office, Lisa will come by after school every day and stay with them until I get home from work—which is often quite late. When I get home she goes to Dani’s—or to Chuck’s. I don’t ask. This way, we hope, our split will disrupt the boys as little as possible. Sometimes when she’s there I’ll walk to Dad’s nursing home—which is less than a mile away—and watch TV with him. The boys aren’t happy about any of this; we tell them that sometimes Moms and Dads just need a little time apart, but they know. They take turns with self-pity and surliness, like video game controllers they hand back and forth.
I’ve yet to go back to our old house since we lost it…but Lisa confesses that she sometimes drives through our old neighborhood. I wish she wouldn’t torture herself that way. One night, when we’re having pizza in the apartment with the boys—we decide to keep having dinner together once a week, for their sake—Lisa tells me with disdain that our house sold at auction for three-fifty, two thirds of what we owed. “Doesn’t that make you furious?” she asks.
It might make me angry if I drove by the house and saw for myself, but since my car went back to the bank I travel by bus now and it would take at least one transfer and…I don’t know…I guess the truth is that I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to be reminded of all that I lost, all that I gave away. I slowly replace the furniture that we lost or sold at our garage sale with second-hand stuff; I hook the boys’ Wii up to an old 19-inch TV. After our second dinner with the boys—fish sticks and fries—Lisa teases me about my latest purchase: an orange couch with cigarette marks on the arms. I explain they were out of moss green, cigarette-burned couches. The apartment’s best feature is a balcony, which is built at tree-level, and when we’re done with dinner we move our chairs out there and sit. I tell Lisa that I can’t wait for spring, to sit out there and watch the boys ride their bikes. She smiles politely.
On the grass in front of our triplex is the big wooden Frontier Fort, which I had moved over from the house. The boys hardly ever play in it but there are two rotten neighbor boys who are younger (and who swear like teenagers) and they seem to like it. And I like having it there.
Teddy hates sharing a room, but I think Franklin likes it. He sleeps better with someone else in the room. Every morning I walk them to school, and then take the bus to Earl Ruscom’s real estate office building, where he’s opened the little headquarters of Biz-Daily Online (I was able to talk him out of the awful name Can-Do Times) in a little twelve-by-twenty room, consisting of—for now—two desks and a white board. When I accepted the job I had to admit to Earl that I’d been arrested and charged with possessing and intending to deliver marijuana. Earl’s eyes narrowed and I steeled myself for trouble. “No shit? You were dealing weed?” Then he leaned in close. “Can you still get some?” I told him that I couldn’t. He hired me anyway.
My old dying newspaper just keeps laying people off—half the staff is now gone, including Ike, who has gone back to school to be a teacher—so there’s no shortage of writers for me to hire to do upbeat freelance stories for almost no money. In spite of Earl’s mandate that we write “positive business stories,” we find ourselves doing a lot of stories about businesses going under. I think we might last a couple of years ourselves before Earl gets tired of losing money and I have to write a cheerful story about our own demise.
Every time I take the bus to work, I recall how our old house was around the corner from a bus stop, how I used to watch that big bifurcated bus roll past every day without giving it much thought; I certainly never thought I’d be on it. I do remember seeing people at the stop and sometimes I’d catch their eyes, think vague thoughts about their lives, and get a surge of my old atrophying empathy. What were their lives like? Was it awful to be so poor? I’d see kids sitting with their parents, waiting for the bus, and I’d feel worst about my own pity for them, my passing-by-at-forty-miles-an-hour-in-heated-leather-seat pity.
The first time I waited for the bus I felt self-conscious, as if I were watching myself with that same pitiful detachment. A car went by my stop and I saw myself in a woman’s eyes as she passed: Look at that poor guy in the nice wool coat. What do you suppose happened to him? Could it ever happen to my husband? On the bus that day, I sat next to a large woman reading a pulpy novel. I started to read over her shoulder—I couldn’t help it; it was a sex scene—but she moved the book. It felt as if everyone on the bus saw through me.
At the next stop a woman, maybe nineteen, got on, followed by a little boy no more than four, and a rail-thin man with the gapped smile of a meth-user. The boy had one glove on his right hand and was holding up his left hand—red, bare and cold—while his mother finished a lecture that must have started long before they got on.
“Because I told you not to lose it, that’s why! Gloves ain’t free, TJ. That’s your last pair for the whole winter. You just gonna have to wear that one.”
“I don’t know what happened to it,” the boy said with great wonder. “It was on my hand.”
“Well it ain’t now,” his mother said. They moved down the aisle toward the back of the bus, mother in front, boy in the middle, father behind, and as they passed me, the little boy turned back to his father. They were in this together. “It’s okay, Dad,” said TJ. “Look.” He smiled at his own cleverness. “I got pockets.” And he shoved his bare hand in his pants pock
et.
The father put his hand on his son’s head and made eye contact with me, smiled proudly, and I swear to God I have never felt such shame—such deep, cleansing shame. I put my judgmental face in my spoiled hands and I wept quietly. The woman with the sexy book got up and moved to another seat.
Christ. It is the only unforgivable thing, really…to feel sorry for yourself.
The next day I took a pair of Franklin’s old gloves and put them in my messenger bag. I carry those gloves in my bag every day now, but of course I’ve yet to see TJ or his dad. In the meantime, whenever I feel like a failure—not an uncommon feeling—I take those gloves out of my bag, imagine that father touching his boy’s head and hope I’m half as good a man.
After being assessed by the nursing home, my own good father has been moved to the memory unit. It’s paid for by Medicare and his VA benefits. I’m not going to pretend that he’s happy—but he has his remote and one of the cable networks has begun showing The Rockford Files every day at 11 a.m. Dad has built his day around that. His clear memories come in fainter now…I wonder if he might be better off when they don’t come in at all. One day Lisa offers to pick Dad up and bring him over for dinner. I gladly accept. On Dad’s second visit, she even cooks, makes him chipped beef; but he asks her not to make it anymore. Says he doesn’t like it.
What he does like is the treeless tree fort. He and I sit on the balcony and watch the cursing neighbor boys climb around on it, Dad laughing every time they swear: Fuck you, Travis! Fuck you, Alvin. Dad loves this show; he doubles over like Travis and Alvin are Martin and Lewis, funniest thing he’s ever heard.
Teddy and Franklin go to a little public school four blocks away but I made sure the new apartment was in a better district than the little Sing-Sing school in our old neighborhood. The boys seem okay with their new school. They miss their friends but they love not wearing uniforms. There’s even a Math-Quest team at the public school.
Biz-Daily exists only online for the first month, but when we finally finish our first print issue, the thing is gorgeous. We sell out of it. I can even imagine the thing making money someday—if companies can ever afford to advertise again. In the back of our first printed edition are two features that I pushed hard for, both of which turn out to be popular, the Stoned Stock Analyst, in which I make random picks under the pseudonym Jay Wollie (he’s already up four percent by pushing fast food stocks), and The Poetfolio, which I write under my own name: