by Chris White
“Drank another seven months and ended up back in the hospital.”
“Seriously? I’m sorry, man.” The tiny light reappears, less tiny now, in the trees. “Do you see that?”
“Had to quit all over again.”
Adrian watches the light.
“One night there was a rainstorm. I was listening to the radio and eating chicken rice soup, about to turn fifty years old, and I call my ex-wife on the phone and . . . and I tell her I’m sorry for all the things I did. I name some of those things but I don’t name the rest.”
He’s leaving things out again. Napalm or desertion, a maimed civilian child.
“She forgave me though. Said she did anyway. I was a drunk, you know, the whole time I was married. Nobody had to tell me that. I know what I was.”
Know thyself, thought Adrian. Do no harm.
“It’s what I did to my son,” the man says. He wags his head, disagreeing with someone Adrian can’t see. “What I did to my boy, that was the worst of it.”
It was what he did to his son.
“That’s the thing I could never say.” The now-zigzagging light is gaining.
“What was it?” Adrian asks. “What was the thing you did?” He listens to the man’s anxious breathing.
“I took his mother out from under him.”
The storm rumbles from inside the trees. Raps on the insides of their trunks.
The words are a hoarse, jagged rush—“Anything I tried to do for her, he jammed himself in between us. Smart as a whip, loyal as a Boy Scout. Made me look about as crass and meaningless as a pornographic fucking postcard. I called him a ‘momma’s boy.’ One time I called him her whore.” He tries to swallow. “When they left me, I couldn’t take it. So I came after.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Adrian whispers.
He didn’t recognize him. Didn’t recognize the voice, now gravelly and broken. The face, scarred by fire and hidden in the gloom.
Adrian ekes out, “What are you trying to do?”
His father is hunched so near he can hear the fabric of his jacket as he shifts. The cavalry is coming.
“I found you,” Dean says low. “Like you did me.” He cradles a loose fist in his hand, like it’s injured. “Online.”
Adrian is a child again, everything rushing in without his consent. His feet are strangely light against the ground, like he needs to run.
“I’m working, not drinking. I look in on you. Read what you say. Sometimes I make a post if I know you’re on, so maybe you see it.” He smiles, but starts to shake like a washing machine on its last legs. “Then June dies . . .”
Adrian strains to conjure the cyber trail of the last weeks in his head. He can’t make sense of it. Hadn’t he been the one to establish communication—in Kingston, after the funeral? “Did you . . . Did you even see those birds?”
“Yeah,” Dean answers, kneading his fist. Then he mutters, rasping, into his sleeve, “most of them. But I remembered that Wood Stork you saw with June. And, you know, the woodpecker.”
Adrian closes his eyes in the dark.
Dean nearly whispers, so Adrian hardly hears. “I had to get you here.”
“Why?”
Dean pivots on his hip, heavy boots pulling at the tarp. “You looked at me like I was some kind of a monster.” He shrugs, his face coiling against a buried sob, only the unscarred parts of it moving, cracking into fissures when he squints over at Adrian, like he did on the icy driveway, a briefcase in his hand and no jacket, boring a hole through Adrian’s chin.
“She never did anything to me, did she?”
Adrian waits. The forest waits.
“No,” his father says, tears thick in his eyes. “No, she did not.”
The constant, maddening static goes suddenly silent.
Adrian is almost entirely unaware of Dean, as a chorus of emotion swells in his chest, the harmonic convergence of which can only be described as joy. His mother. His only mother, come back to him. Then, so fast on its heels, like a computer program searching for a virus, his brain begins checking and rechecking a lifetime of compromises—hurried breakfasts, nonexistent good nights, the absent summers of his adolescence, the abbreviated visits of his early adulthood, the chaperoned outings with his children, the dwindling phone calls, the empty years, the funeral—shot through with the poisonous sludge of a lie.
Dean chokes out, “I was . . . twisted up with what I couldn’t have.”
To locate all the sullied memories, Adrian thinks, to burn them clean and release them, whole, back into the world, would take up every hour he has left. It isn’t even the same world anymore.
Dean struggles to stand, legs spread wide to steady himself. He looks out into the forest, his breathing ever more labored, and he lumbers away. “I’m sorry,” he says, as if to someone in the darkness ahead of him. “Adrian, I’m sorry.” And he’s out of sight.
Adrian shouts, “Where are you going?” but the approaching light has arrived.
It flashes once, accompanied by one perfect gunshot—a long whistling, a BOOM, and a prolonged flash like the atom bomb.
Stunned, half-blind, alarm clock in his ears, Adrian can just see Dean drop to his knee with one hand over his heart. Both his palms hit the ground.
Adrian runs into the black woods toward his father, but his boot wedges between stump and scrub oak and, as he tumbles forward, he hears his anklebone snap. He screeches, goes down with the pain.
A flare slithers up beyond the longleaf pines—lights the oil barges on the Sound, Adrian’s wrenched leg, a dozen soldiers in dark clumps, Dean crumpling to the ground, rolling onto his back, mouth agape.
Someone far off screams, “What the fuck?”
Adrian drags himself toward Dean, ankle searing, heaving over branches and thorny brush, through weeds and briars, along slicks of mud. A globe of light lands on his hands, sweeps into his eyes, then crisscrosses its way to Dean. There is the scratch of walkie-talkies and something progressing clumsily through the jungle.
When Adrian finds his father—the pain in his ankle rushing his foot, his calf, his knee—he collapses again, panting and gasping, inches from Dean’s rutted face. He smells the coffee and alcohol, fear and fatigue on his breath. He recognizes him now. He’s the one who lurks, desperate and weary, beside the water, who searches for birds and can’t sleep, with heavy-knuckled hands, dark-tufted eyebrows, a face like a forest leveled and burned. Afflicted with lies. Breathing one minute, extinguished the next.
An approaching soldier shouts something in their direction, but Adrian knows what to do. Bracing himself with his uninjured leg, he unzips his father’s jacket. He places the heel of his left hand on Dean’s chest and covers it with his right, touching him for the first time in twenty-five years. He thrusts down, hard, the weight of his whole body behind it. Then again, and again, he thrusts, counting in his head—his raw palpitating pain beneath him, bound to him—as the lumpy, lifeless form rebounds.
As soldiers gather around, a racket of walkie-talkies in the trees, Adrian lifts the heavy head. He inclines the salt-and-pepper chin toward the sky, pinches closed the nostrils, and covers the mouth with his own to make a seal. He delivers one powerful breath into the idling lungs—tilts the head, lifts the chin—delivers another . . . Then compresses the chest again, four, five, six—counting—fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen . . . his own spittle a slick film across his father’s cheeks as he counts in grunts and the leaves and sticks crackle and break.
On the twenty-sixth thrust of the twelfth cycle, a helicopter lands, but Adrian continues to thrust in the awful wind of it—twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, a rib fracturing under the heel of his hand—and breathes once, and once again, into the old man’s lungs, until Dean is lifted out from under him, placed on a gurney, and carried away.
• • •
At Eglin Air Force Base Hospital, Dean is rushed to the OR, and Adrian’s broken ankle is verified. It’s the fibula this time, but they can see from the
X-ray the ankle had never healed properly from his injury as a child. Once he’s fitted with a CAM walker boot, given metal crutches, and written prescriptions, they tell him he should come back in a few days for a cast, once the swelling has had a chance to run its course.
“I understand you saved your father’s life,” the nurse says, a gray knot spilling from the back of her head.
“What?” Adrian asks. He can’t hear anything. His ears are worthless now.
She hands him a plastic Eglin Hospital bag, raising her voice. “Here are your father’s soiled clothes.”
“I’m from out of town,” he mumbles, but he takes the bag as the nurse picks up her clipboard.
“Do you want to stay here at the hospital while your dad’s in the OR, or do you have somebody who can pick you up, maybe get you a shower and fresh clothes?”
He stares into the graphic on the biohazard bin, at the three black, partially closed circles converging on a center circle, pulsing with the afterimage of the grenade simulator. “Why don’t you lie down and be still?” the nurse says, and helps him to the white paper pillow. “I’ll be right back.”
• • •
He’s in the bathroom with his mother, four or five years old. She’s wet and soapy. She pulls him into her body, while he wails at the blood dripping from his finger. From the knife. The knife he’d been using to carve a potato into a swan.
Adrian’s breaths come in gasps, but she is so beautiful, his savior, as she finds a washcloth underneath the sink and wraps it around his hand, saying, “Okay, sweetheart, breathe. I’ve got you.”
From down the hallway, his father’s voice calls, “June?”
She shouts, “We’ll be out in a sec,” shower water cascading behind her.
“What’s going on in there?”
Dean rounds the corner to find Adrian dripping wet and red-faced, one hand resting on his mother’s naked shoulder, water dripping from her nipples to his bare feet.
“Adrian’s—” June begins.
“Sonofabitch!” Pushing her aside, Dean grabs Adrian, slipping and squealing by the collar.
“What’re you doing?” June calls out, grasping a towel to her torso.
“You’re a boy, you understand me?” Dean shakes him so hard his teeth clack together. “Your mother’s naked!” he bellows. He shoves Adrian out of the bathroom at the shoulder blades, repeating, “You understand? Answer me!”
June whimpers, “Dean.”
Adrian urinates into his pants, nodding his head as a dark stain blooms along his leg.
Dean watches, catching a glimpse of his own eyes in the foggy mirror, and turns away from himself with an expression of revulsion, as June finally calls out, “He’s hurt! Can’t you see that?”
• • •
Lying on the hospital cot, his mouth in a crusted dry O, Adrian stares up at the ceiling until the images have cleared. The memory that had merged with his father’s lie. The blameless thing in the bathroom. His mother’s nakedness. The humiliation and the fear.
He turns onto his side. He can see his face in the mirror over the sink, full of what he’s done, like his father’s face had been, even then, all those years ago. He takes in the creases of his brow, his cracked lips, his ruddy cheeks, his hair, matted with dirt and sweat. He looks around the examination room, where symptoms and causes are revealed.
Raising himself up on his elbow, he opens the bag of Dean’s clothes: heavy muddied pants, wet socks, a dull-white tee shirt, and a work shirt. They’ve obviously kept the jacket and boots on the off chance he will survive.
He takes out the shirt printed with “Eglin AFB” and finds something stiff in the pocket. It is a plain white envelope with his name printed on it, written in his father’s hand.
Chapter Sixteen
* * *
Adrian’s plane doesn’t take off until late afternoon, so he sits alone on a bench at the boardwalk overlooking the Gulf. His ankle is counting out his pulse in swollen beats. He’s decided to feel it.
As he sat in the waiting room the day before, while Dean was under the knife, a trim older woman showed up with a tanned complexion, long shorts, and running shoes that squeaked when she walked. She said she wanted to introduce herself. Her name was Marilyn Whitehead, she said, and she was a friend of his father’s. She was very concerned about Dean but said he’d been wanting to talk with Adrian for a long time, and she hoped it went well. She looked as though she’d been crying.
Adrian moved a box of tissues someone had left on the chair next to his, and she sat down. They sat together like that for some time, watching a set of twin toddlers tear up magazines.
Adrian couldn’t help himself and asked, “Are you two . . . together?”
“We’re old enough to know we’re lucky,” she said, “to have someone appear out of nowhere to care whether you come or go, to have someone to eat a meal with or call you on the phone when you’re not even expecting it.”
“Are you married?” he asked, thinking how he couldn’t picture any of it, this tidy, sane woman choosing his father.
“One time over dinner, he asked me if I would, and I told him, ‘I never want to be your wife.’ I cried with happiness, like I never had at my own wedding.” She looked over toward the double doors to the OR.
Adrian found himself awkwardly nodding as though he understood, wanting to take her hand in his.
“That way,” she said, “there’s never a day after which, like the people in the church, you’re ‘saved,’ not the kind where you believe redemption is guaranteed.”
Now Adrian waits for afternoon. Dean is in intensive care, stable. The breeze off the Gulf is a little crisp, the sky sleepy. A congregation of white ibises strolls along the shoreline. Fearless, gregarious birds, with their long red bills. If they could talk to Adrian, they would. Tell him a joke. Keep walking.
• • •
“Would any of you be willing to trade seats with our Dr. Mandrick? He’s got a leg injury and needs a little extra room,” the flight attendant says with a malevolent smirk, then looks from one passenger to the next as if hypnotizing them into cooperation.
“I thought you had to be able to help people get out if you were sitting here. He can’t even walk,” says the woman in 14B with the triple wedding band and the Staten Island accent.
“Sometimes we have to make an exception.”
Adrian doesn’t speak for himself. He knows he’s the last person in the world who should be taking up a seat in an exit row.
The earnest young man in 14D asks, “Where’s his seat?”
“Six F, window seat, first class.” The flight attendant’s impatient now. He has people to strap in, overhead compartments to close, seat backs and tray tables to bring to their full upright and locked positions.
“I’ll do it,” the boy says. He gathers his things from under his feet while the flight attendant takes Adrian’s crutches from him to an invisible closet up near the cockpit.
Adrian edges his way in, everyone shrinking into their seats as he passes as though he’s carrying a virus. This must be what it is like to get old, he thinks, gratefully lowering himself into the seat. Taking up valuable space with your infirmity, praying for the compassion of others more vigorous. Now he can stretch out his leg, anyway.
He lays his head back and tries to relax. Everything is smooth, not quite audible, warmer than is comfortable, then cooler and staler, intimate, anonymous, and within minutes, they are off. The Panhandle grows more distant by the millisecond, its shimmering arteries and scrubby banks and roadways. As the plane lifts into the clouds, Adrian gets a glimpse of the watery disc of the Gulf; then it’s gone, and he is groundless, drifting, his head tipping forward, jerking back, listing to the side.
The dunes of the Midwest are a wasteland of crumbling roads. A woman Adrian doesn’t know sits in a canoe with no water under it, far out in the distance where the desert meets the insomniac eye of the sun and the dust twists into funnel clouds. Where are the childre
n? They’re lost, where the sun pricks harsh like needles and the wind blows with no seeds in its fingers. There isn’t so much as a dragonfly or lizard under this sun. How could he have left this to chance?
He and his mother lift broken trees from across the jungle path, searching under road signs and car tires and dried pitcher plants. She has on her cuffed brown shorts and a dark-blue bandana. This is back when there were children. They dip into a corridor of trees and it gets dark. A firework explodes in the sky and there are drones along the hillside, all lined up for dinner like hungry men at a soup kitchen. When the next firework goes off, it’s just them again, his mother and him, searching under welcome mats, searching under hubcaps, searching under kneecaps and the lids of biohazard bins.
“Sir?” she says, pushing aside the broken pieces of cloudy brown glass. “Would you like something to drink?”
The flight attendant’s cart has passed Adrian’s row and the man sitting next to him is pouring Beefeater into what looks like tonic or club soda in a plastic cup.
Adrian wipes his mouth on the back of his wrist and sits up a little taller in his seat. He has the envelope from his father in his hand. He looks out the window. They’re following the dusk across the country.
He presses on the bubble light over his head so it shines on the white chalky paper. He slides his index finger under the flap.
Inside the envelope is a folded piece of old, blank stationery. Inside the piece of stationery is a single photograph of him as a child.
He is standing half-submerged in swamp water, looking over at the crossed arms of a cypress. His face is stretched wide with an open-mouthed smile as he points with his whole hand, like a magician toward a rabbit. Atop a low branch, in stark blue-black, white, and a powdering of red is an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.
The bird’s head and upper body are slightly blurred. It’s in the very moment of taking off from the tree. One of its wings is just out from its side, the other is almost fully extended, the ebony plumage on the leading edge of the open wing followed by a long, wide, white trailing edge at the back. Adrian remembers now clearly how it poked its beak in and out of the cavity it was perched before, looking for beetle grubs, and how its head bopped back and forth on its long neck just before it flew away from the old tree. This exuberant bird.
