“Wow,” I said.
“Times change, son,” he said.
Then he bought me popcorn, jumbo-sized, because he was apparently easygoing with money after all, and we both munched on it while waiting for something, anything, to happen, the heat closing in on us, the popcorn falling around our feet.
Mr. Montgomery took advantage of the downtime to muse aloud about his ambitions and intentions for life, life in general, his life specifically, which, according to him, had been spent pursuing “objectives,” but for reasons that were out of his control had never been “realized.” He spoke of life not as a thing to be lived, but attained. He used phrases that sounded as if they had been gleaned from my mother’s career guidance manuals. He’d been sent to prison for a crime he had not committed but did not want to name. “You’re too young, son,” he said. It was extortion or fraud. Maybe assault or murder. Whatever it was, he’d done fifteen years. I had pieced it together from late-night conversations overheard through my bedroom door. Here was another thing that my mother had found amusing about his past.
“What was jail like?” I asked him.
“It wasn’t jail,” he said, “it was prison.”
He told me how his business plans had fallen through. He had had investment plans that had fallen through, too. He had had merger and acquisition plans. Everything had fallen through.
“I try and I try,” he said. Despite the odds, he tried. The odds were high and they were stacked against him—him and me. We were in this together. I liked being in something together with someone, but the thought of the odds being against me was troubling.
“You’ll find out for yourself one day,” he said.
In the hot sun, on the hard bench, with the popcorn running low, Mr. Montgomery marched forward carrying the trajectory of his life without much modulation in his voice. He sounded less like he was conversing and more like he was reciting. There was a very good possibility that he had said all this before, exactly the same way, to other little boys of other pretty mothers. He sat with his elbows on his knees, staring ahead at the hats. “When I dream,” he said, “I dream big.” He seemed to view dreaming as an achievement in and of itself. He saw the size of his failures as an indication of the size of his dreams. Dream small, fail small. But he was going to turn things around now that he had my mother in his life, and, of course, me. “The ship is changing course,” he said. We were lucky charms to him. He rubbed my head as a joke, which I liked. He had an idea for a patent, but he couldn’t tell me what it was yet. “I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself,” he said. It was almost a certainty that he was going to be buying a house for us.
“Would you like that, son?” Sure, I would like that.
I wanted to believe that what he was telling me was the truth, but I think I knew that it was just talk, that it would come to nothing, that his relationship with my mother would come to nothing, that my mother had gotten involved with a dud, which might have said as much about my mother as it did about Mr. Montgomery, and that in six months or so she’d be in her pajamas crying in the living room, post-breakup, berating herself—“I did it again! I did it again!”—and I’d be sitting by her side trying to console her. “No,” I’d tell her, “you didn’t do it again!” But she had.
And then Mr. Montgomery and I were brought out of our intimate exchange by the sound of chimes coming over the PA system, slow, low, and steady. The fairground fell silent and Mr. Montgomery and I stopped chewing—now was not the time for concessions. Now was the time to stand on the precipice of the profound, which was arriving by way of a procession of thirty officials, their long flowing white robes dragging through the dust of the fairground, their feet in sync with the chimes. The officials ascended the stage, standing side by side, staring out at us, as if they were a graduating class. There was a smattering of polite applause from the spectators, which the officials seemed to appreciate, but the applause was premature, possibly sarcastic, prompted mainly by the fact that there was finally some action occurring, and it died out. The silence resumed. The autumn sun was at its brightest.
“It’s the witching hour, son,” Mr. Montgomery said.
From within the group of adjudicators appeared the condemned, dressed in a black robe, with a big white beard that stood in contrast to the black robe, and a beleaguered face beneath the beard, made sallow by lack of food or sunshine, which contrasted to the murmurs of elation reverberating through the stands. The chimes reached twelve and were replaced by the sound of trumpets, martial, assertive, and prerecorded. The condemned seemed forlorn and bewildered as he made his way to the front of the stage. He moved with melancholy steps. He moved alone. He stopped and faced the audience, prepared to say his last words, which would do him no good, but which were his by right. He smiled briefly, unctuously, maybe in the hope that the thousands in attendance might advocate for him in this, his final hour, or, at the very least, find him appealing.
“Do they feed him?” I asked Mr. Montgomery.
“Don’t feel sorry for him, son,” Mr. Montgomery said. “That’s the reason the city is in this mess today.
“What’s he done?” I asked.
“Something bad,” he said.
The man was from one of the secure populations and there would be no mercy on him, unless, of course, this happened to be one of those rare and disappointing occasions when clemency was bestowed by official decree at the last second. But the chances of that happening were one in a million, and would be issued by the mayor who’d pondered it, slept on it, and then appeared on a horse, galloping in, waving the pardon in his hand, demonstrating that regardless of the crime, the populace still maintained a healthy capacity for forgiveness and redemption. No refunds, read the fine print on the ticket stub.
The condemned mumbled something into the microphone, barely audible and drowned out by the trumpets. “Louder,” people screamed, because no one wanted to miss a word after having waited so long. The screaming unnerved the prisoner and he gawked at the audience, blinking, shrugging, as if to say, What can I do? I am just one man, I am just one man alone on a stage in this vast arena. Somewhere a technician flicked a switch and the condemned’s voice echoed over the fairground, midsentence, bouncing off the wooden bleachers. “Thank you all for coming today,” he said.
It turned out that I had confused the players of the game, and this man, dressed in black, was not the condemned at all, but was a low-level administrator who was here to make the official statement regarding the city’s due diligence, etc. “This is the boring part,” Mr. Montgomery told me. The boring part was not the same as the waiting part, but it unraveled just as slowly with its list of bylaws and ordinances. Once again, the crowd grew restless. I wanted to rest my head on Mr. Montgomery’s shoulder but I wasn’t sure if we had reached that point yet in our relationship. The sun beat down on my face. “Section seven,” the man on stage said, “article two . . .” He enunciated everything. This was his moment to shine and he was going to take as long as it took. “Amendment five hundred, chapter twenty,” someone in the crowd yelled with mock formality. The line got a good laugh, and it broke the tedium, and the audience went back and forth like that—“Section one thousand, paragraph one million”—trying to outdo each other with clauses and subsections, forcing the administrator to raise his voice, which in turn caused the spectators to frolic more, and it was in the midst of this wordplay that, without any prologue, the thrilling part began.
“Here we go, son,” Mr. Montgomery said. He squeezed my elbow.
Half a dozen adjudicators climbed the stairs to the gallows, giving us a glimpse of their loafers beneath their gowns. They surrounded the empty noose, as if the noose were the thing they had come to see. Once again my view was blocked by the patrons in front of me, who were now standing and shouting. Everyone was standing and shouting. “Sit down!” someone yelled from behind. “This is what you get for ten dollars,” Mr. Montgomery said to me. I stood on my seat and then I stood on my tiptoes a
nd then Mr. Montgomery did something wonderful and unexpected, lifting me onto his shoulders with one swift gesture, and blocking the view of those behind me without apology. I wrapped my hands around his chin. His chin was rough and unshaved. The top of his head was thinning.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Right in front of you,” Mr. Montgomery said.
And sure enough, there he was, already standing on the gallows in the middle of all the commotion, dressed in a purple polka-dot uniform with SECURED POPULATION printed on his chest. He looked handsome. He looked glamorous. If they fed him, they fed him well. If he was despondent, he did not appear so. He looked like a movie star dressed as a purple clown pretending to be the condemned, and those who bustled around were the production crew, the hangers-on, fawning over him the way the crew fawn over the leading man. But these hangers-on were having trouble getting the noose over the condemned’s head, and each one had to take a turn trying to either loosen or tighten the knot, trying to get the opening wider. They were confused and inept. “Get on with it!” the crowd called, but the truth was that we had waited too long for this moment and now we wanted it to last. Throughout it all, the condemned appeared calm, even dignified. He stared into the audience, perhaps looking for someone he knew, and for a second I thought he might have looked at me, three hundred rows away.
Then the noose was slipped past the man’s curls and tightened around his neck, and he stood there as if he were waiting to be lifted up into the air on an amusement park ride, rather than being dropped downward, which was precisely what happened. He was gone in an instant, falling through the trapdoor. Not even a final wave farewell. A gasp from the crowd alerted me to the fact that this was the moment we had come to see. He disappeared alive, and reappeared dead, bouncing and dangling, his feet a few inches above the dusty fairground. If he’d been any taller, he would have landed on the soles of his shoes.
“Wowee!” Mr. Montgomery said. He clapped his hands.
The condemned’s body twitched and lurched, and then swung gently to and fro. It all seemed a bit underwhelming. It was like a magic trick that had been bumbled too many times by a novice magician. Even so, we cheered.
The body was still swinging as we filed out of the fairground and into the parking lot. It took Mr. Montgomery a while to get back on the road, what with the thousands of cars and all, lots of honking in celebration, trying to sustain the communal feeling for as long as possible. Mr. Montgomery let me honk a few times for fun. By the time we were heading home, the sun had begun to set, casting a poetic pink light over the snowcapped mountain in the distance, beyond which lay the other city. We were quiet for a while, Mr. Montgomery and I, and then I was sleepy. Mr. Montgomery rubbed the back of my neck with affection.
“Where was the blood?” I suddenly thought to ask him.
“That was just a figure of speech,” Mr. Montgomery said.
This was strangely disappointing for me, which is what I was thinking right before I fell asleep, my head on Mr. Montgomery’s lap.
Just as it would later be disappointing for my mother, who had also taken Mr. Montgomery at his word when he assured us that he would help facilitate some sort of change in our lives. But six months later, nothing had happened, and my mother had reached her limit, and was throwing Mr. Montgomery out of the apartment. “I want you out of here,” she told him one night, as I watched from my bedroom door. “And that’s not a figure of speech!” In order to emphasize her point, she threw a teacup at him. She’d meant to maim but had missed her mark, and the cup had hit the wall, surprisingly staying intact, rolling like a ball, and coming to rest in a corner by the couch by the window with the drapes wide open so that we could see out and the neighbors could see in and we could see the glow cast from the neon lights of the nail salon.
Mr. Montgomery was smiling, as if the whole episode might be comic, like going to the public library to use the public bathroom was comic. His smile made him look enfeebled and emasculated. He mustered a reasonable, “This is our home.” He sounded so imploring that I knew he didn’t stand a chance in this debate.
When I woke the next morning, he was in the living room, packing up his belongings in four empty cardboard boxes that he’d gotten off a loading dock at the grocery store. MARSHMALLOW WHIP, the boxes read. MAYONNAISE. Three-quart containers times twelve. Boxes meant for food were now being filled with clothes and mementos of the bittersweet past. He told me to be good, son, to take care of myself. Considering the way it was ending, it seemed a wise decision that I’d never gotten beyond referring to him as “sir.”
He was teary-eyed when he rubbed my head goodbye, in the same manner that he’d rubbed it when he’d told me that I was his good luck charm. So much for good luck. I was hoping he might give me a few dollars so I could have some spending money, but there was no way of asking for this without seeming opportunistic. Watching him gather his things, I saw that there was something of the condemned about him, being summoned to his own personal gallows, which in this case was the outside world, with my mother as the hangman, I as the passive spectator. As he was exiting through the front door, holding the last of the cardboard boxes, he stopped and stared back at me, his face despondent, his posture defeated. Then he put the box down and reached into his pocket, rustled around, and handed me five dollars. “Invest that wisely,” he said.
What I invested it in was my very first manicure at the nail salon, half price, where I chose tiger blossom, like I said I would, and my mother picked something called pink smoothie. We sat side by side, just the two of us, which is how I liked it.
“Your hands are so soft!” the technician kept saying to me.
“Thank you,” I said.
Through the window I could see the neon sign blinking WALK-INS WELCOME, but the letters were of course backward.
METAPHOR OF THE FALLING CAT
It was about a year after the car accident when the thoughts came back to me. They’d been gone so long that I’d forgotten all about them, but when they came back, they came back fast. They came back all at once.
I was at my get-well party when it happened. “Just for you,” my brother had said, putting his arm around my shoulder, breathing in my face. There was a big sign on the wall that said, GET WELL SOON, WALLY, but I’d been well for four months. We all knew the party was really just for my brother, just so he could show off his wife’s newfound culinary skills, and show off his Brooklyn brownstone, which he’d remodeled from scratch, all cherrywood and spiral staircase. There were fifty people milling around, chatting with their mouths full of shrimp. Most of them I’d never seen before. I wanted to make a statement by not eating anything, but after fifteen minutes I gave in and loaded up my plastic plate.
“Good, right?” one of my in-laws said.
He was right, it was good.
Up and down the spiral staircase my mother and father flitted, praising everything they saw, followed by aunts and uncles, cousins of cousins, family I hadn’t heard from in years, probably wouldn’t hear from again in years. “We were so worried about you,” they said as they passed, but none of them had come to visit me in the hospital.
Everyone was dressed casually for the occasion, flip-flops and tank tops, but I was wearing a tie, because there was a chance I might meet someone who might do something for me. “Something” meant anything other than driving a dairy truck for the city, which is what I’d been doing for two years, six days a week, before an SUV swerved into my lane at eighty-five miles an hour, at five o’clock in the morning, sending myself and four thousand eggs through the windshield. I’d broken both legs and injured my spine. Now I was collecting workers’ comp, despite having made a full recovery, lying to the doctors about my health, hoping to stretch my checks out until Plan A finally took shape. Plan A was the mystery guest I was going to meet at this party.
Prior to Plan A, however, I had had a very different Plan A. This one dreamed up during that long convalescence in which no one had come to visit me
, in which I had nothing but downtime to contemplate my life at twenty-one in a dairy truck, dressed in baby-blue overalls with my name stitched on the breast pocket as if I were a child who might get lost.
I’d made a friend in the hospital, Sylvester Y., middle-aged, with a shattered coccyx, who did mail order from home. It was good money for little work. I was envious of him, and I said so. He had a dead son of whom I reminded him. “Same hair,” he told me, “same chuckle.” It was unsettling, but I got used to it.
Together, we’d hatched our scheme one morning, six weeks into my stay, the two of us sitting around in our wheelchairs, staring at the wall, waiting for the nurses to come get us.
“So I was watching this episode of Law & Order last night . . . ,” said Sylvester, who was always watching the original Law & Order or one of its spinoffs, and then telling the patients and doctors about it as if it were real life and he had really been there and everyone else should have really been there, too.
“You ever do anything except watch TV?” I’d asked him once.
“Yes,” he said, “sometimes I look at YouTube.”
His intention had been to regale me with the details of this particular Law & Order episode, but, lolling there in the fluorescent hallway, with our minds free to wander, we’d begun to take the story apart and reassemble it, bit by bit, from the criminal’s perspective, each of us offering our own piece of the puzzle—basement entry, getaway car—until it had come together so perfectly, so naturally, that we didn’t know what we were doing until we were done. Afterward, we sat silently, breathing slowly, staring at the wall with the rainbow mural as if at a masterpiece. But now four months had passed with no word from Sylvester, chuckle or no chuckle, and my checks would soon be running out.
Two hours into my party the hors d’oeuvres were starting to get to me. I was perspiring near the bay window while a man in sandals tried to explain how we were related. “Your grandmother’s sister and my mother’s brother . . .” He had crumbs on his chin. I wanted to get away from him, far away, to get outside to where the children were playing, where the real party was happening. Through the bay window I could hear them shouting invented obscenities inspired by what they’d consumed that afternoon. “Ketchup!” they shouted. “Hamburger!” Their words held secret meaning. They responded with mock outrage. I watched them knock each other down and get back up. Nothing could hurt their young limbs. Nothing could dissuade them. The time for living was now.
American Estrangement Page 9
