by Paul Harding
I missed those final moments of the afternoon, the loamy quality of light that illuminates the last of the day in its true suspension, and that coolness and the freshly scrubbed earth, that clean, satisfied fatigue, that savory anticipation of a hot shower and a steak and, later, a whiskey and a game of cribbage with Kate before she went to bed. I taught her how to play cribbage when she was eight, and she could beat me by the time she was ten. My grandfather had been an exceptional cribbage player, and he and his closest friend, from back when they had been boys in Maine together, Ray Morrell, taught me how to play one summer at Ray’s summer camp on Lake Winnipesaukee. I was never any good, but they always let me play with them, and always gave me grief when I lost, which was almost always, because if they hadn’t let me win sometimes, it would have been harder to be discreet about their charity in agreeing to play me in the first place. I had to relearn the game every summer when we went to Ray’s camp or went fishing up in Maine, for the most part, because I never played it on any other occasion. I have thought many times about what a strange and unlikely game it is, what a strange set of rules it imposes upon a deck of cards. There was something reassuring, and charming, in how good Kate was at it, although when she began to beat me regularly, when she was around twelve, and although she teased me about it in the same gentle way my grandfather and Ray had, I could also see how seriously she took the game, how seriously she took winning and how upset she got when she lost. I wished for her to be more lighthearted about it, but when I said something it only provoked her.
I thought about that on the night of what would have been Kate’s fourteenth birthday, November 25. I sat on the couch in the living room, eating stale cereal dry out of the box, and it occurred to me that the cribbage board was in the buffet in the dining room somewhere, with its pegs still presumably where Kate and I had left them after our last and dramatic best-of-five tournament, which I had won by one point.
I SUPPOSED I COULD dig through the deep drawers in the buffet and find the board, which was made from an old bowling tenpin cut crosswise down the middle. There was a decal of a cartoon skunk at the top of the pin, above where the pegging holes had been drilled, and whenever it looked like Kate was going to beat me by at least a full street, she’d grimace and click her bottom and top front teeth together, tap on the skunk with a forefinger, sniff at the air, and say, “Oh, Fazher! I szeenk I szmell a szgonk!”
Kate had discovered the board at a yard sale we stopped at one Saturday morning, when we’d both gotten up early and had decided to walk together to the next town for coffee and doughnuts instead of driving. The woman selling the board wanted eight dollars for it.
I reached for my wallet, but Kate put a hand out and said, “Wait. Eight bucks for that crazy thing? How about two?”
The woman said, “I’ll let you have it for six.”
Kate said, “Four dollars.”
“Five,” the woman said. Kate looked at me.
I stuck out my lower lip and lifted my eyebrows and nodded my head, to signal that that was pretty good, and Kate said, “Okay, you got a deal,” and I paid the woman.
As we walked away down the sidewalk, me holding the coffee and doughnuts, Kate carrying the board, I said, “You sounded just like your great-grandfather George back there, Kate. You’re a bona fide Yankee skinflint.”
Kate grinned and said, “I love this thing, but eight bucks?”
I washed a mouthful of the stale cereal down with a gulp of tap water from a jelly jar and thought again about how I could find the cribbage board in the buffet and bring it out and clear a space in the mess on the coffee table in front of the couch and look at the peg stuck in the dead man’s hole and think to myself, Kate put that there. That’s a little mark left in the world by Kate. I thought about how I might agonize for a while over whether I should ever remove the peg, or leave it and put it up on the mantel and make a little shrine out of it, maybe set a stick of incense in one of the empty peg holes and burn it and think about the last game we played together, ignoring the trivial, circumstantial annoyance I’d felt at the time. I didn’t want to do any of that, so I left the board buried somewhere in the layers of cloth napkins and trivets and decks of cards and candleholders and empty photograph frames and odd sheets of gift wrapping and silver steak knives, and looked for a moment out the side window in the living room at the light snow drifting in front of the streetlight onto the lawn and the driveway and the station wagon I hadn’t used in months and whose battery I was sure must be dead and wondered about what birthday presents Kate might have asked for.
I WOKE UP ON the living room couch one morning in the middle of December. The autumn had been mostly wet and mild until then. I had been taking long walks through the woods on paths lined with wet, soggy leaves that felt like vellum to step on, and up from the pagelike, pulpy folds of which little white moths innocently spun into the wrong season with nearly every step. But that morning the house was freezing. I sat up, shawled in one of my mother’s afghans, irritated at having been half-wakened repeatedly throughout the night because the afghan was too short and didn’t cover my feet and they were icy and because my dreams were full of endless, foolish arguments and wrestling matches with tireless antagonists. My breath steamed in the cold air. My throat stung and my nose ran and I was certain I must be getting sick. Half of my brain lagged behind my head rising off the couch, and I had to close my eyes and take a couple breaths and wait for it to catch up and refit itself together. The sunlight tracing the borders of the window shades detonated bursts of purple and green hydrangeas in the foreground of my vision, and my head pounded. I reached for the bottle of painkillers. I was too groggy to take any so soon, but the fog from the previous night’s pills and whiskey would burn off in a few hours and, after a long afternoon nap, I’d wake at dusk and want the night’s first dose to soothe myself. I picked up the bottle and put it next to my ear, smiled at the idea of the sight of myself half-playing a burnout, and gave it a little shake. It sounded like there were only two or three pills rattling around. My wry—romantic, even—image of myself evaporated and I shook the bottle again and listened to the rattling and tried to guess the greatest number of pills it could possibly indicate, as if the number in which I could reasonably convince myself to believe before I looked might influence the number of pills I found when I actually opened the bottle. I thought to myself, Be careful, Charlie; this is very tricky business, very fragile stuff you’re playing with here. One false move, one lapse of concentration, and you could be very, very screwed. But that very thought was the lapse itself, I realized.
My broken hand still ached most of the time. Even loaded on pills and whiskey, I could always feel pain thumping through it. The breaks were bad enough that I’d been able to convince the different doctors I’d seen to give me two more bottles of painkillers after the first. Since I had no health insurance, I saw whoever was on duty at the walk-in clinic. One doctor, a woman I was startled to realize might be younger than I, with freckles and what I’d always called a boy’s haircut, dressed in men’s khakis and a man’s blue oxford shirt, told me I needed to get into physical therapy.
“Your hand’s going to wither away if you don’t do exercises,” she said. “You’ve got to stretch your fingers, flex them, start squeezing a ball.”
“I know it,” I said. “The thing kills all the time, though, still. I still can hardly even sleep with it.” She held my hand gently in hers and moved each finger in turn by putting a very slight amount of pressure against the tip. I sucked my breath in, because it hurt, but also to convince her that my need for more medicine was genuine. I lied, “I rolled over on it the other night and it felt like I rebroke it all over again.”
“Well, here’s some information about PT,” she said. “You really need to get on it. I’m going to give you some more of the painkillers, but I also have some concerns about that. Do you think it’s becoming a problem?”
“Jesus, I hope not,” I said. “I’m scared half to de
ath of those things—getting hooked on them—but it’s really the only way I get any rest.”
“Okay. Try not to take them unless you really need one. Try to hold out as long as you can each time. Push on your pain threshold. Try taking just half of one. Try aspirin or ibuprofen instead. You really don’t want to get tangled up with this stuff. This should be the last script you get for them.”
“Got it,” I said. “And I’ll call for the PT first thing next week. Thanks so much, Dr.”—I looked at her name tag—“Dr. Winters.”
I opened the bottle and found a pill and a half. I tried to count how many pills I’d taken the night before—the two to begin, and a third I had intended to take two hours later, and another an hour after that, and another half pill an hour later, but I thought maybe I hadn’t split a fifth pill but had taken it whole, then maybe decided later that another half would be fine so long as I didn’t drink the whiskey any faster—and I could not make a clear tally. It all just blurred together.
I reached across the couch and snapped on the lamp, which was a contraption assembled in someone’s workshop sixty or seventy years before, by the look of it. It was a pewter tankard fitted with a cord and light socket and shade harp. The lampshade was sepia-colored and printed with botanical drawings labeled in French: Hypopétalie, 348. Anémone Hépatique, 304. Artichaut. Some of the words were chopped off at the ends, where the paper they were printed on had been cut and fitted into the shade: —orollie, svnanth—. The drawings and tallies reminded me of the pajama bottoms in which Kate had been cremated. The lamp had ended up in our living room after my grandmother died. It wobbled and clanked whenever it was turned on or off, and I could never figure out how to tighten it. Susan and I had been convinced that it would surely burst into flames and incinerate the house some afternoon, when it had been accidentally left on for the day while no one was home. Despite our certainty that the lamp was probably lethal, we used it all the time, with low-wattage bulbs, because it gave a pleasant golden glow to the room, almost like a cheap surrogate for a fireplace. Susan sometimes said, “It just hides the dirt and makes the worn-out furniture look antique, but that’s okay.”
I cupped my hand around the pewter base of the lamp because the morning was so cold and I thought that the pewter would be cold, too. The cold pewter made me think of the tankard stripped of its lamp hardware and sitting outside in the frosted grass in the light of dawn. The tankard would have frost on it, too, and the pewter would contract in the cold, buckle and split and release a sharp, sour metallic odor. The tankard was silvery gray and the frozen grass looked blue, like pewter made with lead, and the clouded sky behind it looked like layers of pewter alloyed with copper and bismuth and lead. Pewter is mostly made of tin, and I imagined my great-grandfather for a moment, soldering the breaks in the clouds with patches of tin. And I thought of Kate’s cremation urn, made of pewter, in the frost-tightened ground on the other side of the village. Choosing a pewter urn for my daughter’s ashes might have been the persistence of a trivial family conceit, which I remembered my grandmother invoking with the refrain “We prefer the classic colonial furniture,” which struck me at that moment as bearing witness against its own truth. The lamp now seemed surely to have been made by some company in New Jersey that manufactured cheap, ersatz colonial souvenirs, sold to credulous, working-class dupes on their crummy local weekend vacations to fake pilgrim villages, the sort through which I had suffered as a kid and romanticized as an adult. I felt terrible for my grandparents, and love for them, and deeper loyalty than ever to them for what they had given to my mother and me. And I felt both abashed and comforted by the fact that I had maybe deepened the connections between myself and my grandparents and my daughter, as best as I could, in an inadvertent, backhanded way, by having been susceptible to the notion of being a colonial son during the subdued sales pitch for my dead daughter’s urn rather than the whelp of mongrels.
In the kitchen, I saw that I’d run out of fresh coffee, so I dug around in the freezer and found an old, half-full can from what must have been a couple years earlier. The can was so cold that my hand stuck to it. I wondered what sort of metal it was made from, whether it was tin or aluminum or something else, and that made me think of the pewter tankard and Kate’s urn. Digging up the cold, grainy coffee with the yellow plastic scoop made me think of Kate’s ashes and for a moment the coffee became her ashes and I was performing the suburban variation of a ghastly pagan ritual, abominable to all good folk, during which boiling water was percolated through the ashes of the dead, her essence imparted into the water and absorbed by the person who drank the cannibal tea. As outrageous as the idea was, as shameful and gruesome, it also seemed like something that, were I to read about it in the history of an ancient culture, or to see it in a documentary about an isolated population deep in the Amazon, might seem perfectly appropriate, profound even, even blessed, and I considered that, after all, the only thing missing to ennoble the idea from morbid daydream to sacred rite was my consent, my belief. I sat at the kitchen table listening to the coffeemaker burble and steam, and then I poured the coffee into the least dirty mug I could find in the sink. Foolish as it was, I could not bring myself to spoon any sugar into the coffee. I didn’t have any milk, but that seemed as if it would have been blasphemous, too, and I swallowed the scalding drink black, strong and bitter.
The coffee helped clear my head and I thought about the pills. Dr. Winters would not give me another prescription. I did not want to get hooked but I was also not ready to wean myself from the schedule I’d adopted. As much as I conserved the pills and tried to use them to augment the alcohol, I began to panic at the thought of spending nights without the consolations of floating on that placid, narcotic-kissed ocean. I emptied the linen closet and the medicine cabinet and the cabinet under the sink in the bathroom, where I knew there was nothing besides the toilet brush and containers of bathroom cleaner, praying for some cough syrup with codeine in an impossible, crusted, brown plastic bottle from a long-ago bout of bronchitis, or muscle relaxants from a strained neck muscle, or painkillers from a root canal. I had the hope that my own simple will might be able to invoke the spontaneous appearance of a moldy pill or two, in some dark, dusty corner at the back of a closet or cabinet, as if it might be just a matter of concentration, as if, once I could take the idea and turn it in just the right way, to just the right degree, almost in the way a thief cracks the combination of a safe, can feel the tumblers drop with a minuscule twitch of the dial, I could transform the idea of a pill into an actual pill, could parlay my desire for a pill into the fact of a pill.
I spent the better part of the day crawling around closets and wriggling under beds and moving chairs and sofas, concentrating on the appearance of a miraculous dose. After scouring each room, I sat on the floor with my back against a wall, sweaty, more tired and more irritated. I’d eaten nothing all day except for the cup of ancestral coffee. But Kate was not your ancestor, I told myself. She was your heir. It must be blasphemy to assimilate the spirit of your own offspring. It should have been Kate, years from now, a grown woman, drinking the water steeped in your ashes.
By three-thirty in the afternoon, the sun was already lowering into the trees. The last of my hopes for finding drugs in the house evaporated with the day’s light. The cold that had poured into the village from the north the previous night had settled in and the house snapped and popped as it contracted in the frigid air. You are just not going to not have your medicine tonight, I thought. Although I’d considered it three or four times, I lacked the nerve to rebreak my hand. I’d thought about laying it on the kitchen table and clobbering it with a saucepan or a rubber mallet, or even holding it under my butt and sitting down on a wooden chair as hard as I could, but whenever I decided to go get the toolbox or pulled out a kitchen chair and felt the hard wooden seat, I became queasy and my nerve failed. But where can you find some pills? Where? I asked myself. And I answered, You can get some from Frankie!
Frankie
Shuey, a.k.a. Frankie the Dope, Hanky Frankie, Frankie Freak, or just Dumbass Frankie, was a kid I’d painted with one summer when I’d worked with Gus the ex-con and a few years later hired to work on a crew I put together myself. He was a tall, babyish, boneless-looking guy with long curly red hair that he let fall in front of his face so you couldn’t really ever see his eyes, like a big sheepdog. He must have had adenoid problems, too, because he always had a stuffy nose and could apparently breathe only through his mouth. He was a slow, sloppy painter and ended every shift covered in paint. It got all over his clothes and his arms and his hands and his legs, and caked in his hair, too. He took a lot of grief from the other guys on the crew, but everyone liked him and he was a good sport about the guff he got. He also could get just about any drug anyone wanted, just about any time anyone wanted it. Three of the other guys on the crew moved back and forth from the North Shore in the summer to Colorado in the winter. In the winter, they went to Vail and skied all day and took jobs as dishwashers in restaurants at night. In the summer, they painted houses during the days and worked as crew members on the sloops that raced out of the yacht clubs on the coast on week-nights and weekends. They were intense, wiry guys anyway, but they all kept going by sniffing tons of cocaine and popping any kind of speed they could get their hands on. Frankie got them most of their coke and bagfuls of amphetamines, too.
