I handed him over, then sat down carefully on the edge of the bed. Already I could feel the cooling spot where I’d carried him against my chest. I helped arrange the pillow so Sheila could get him situated. She winced as he latched on, then sighed.
“How’s your pain?” I said.
She smiled and settled back. “He makes it go away.” She tilted down her chin, watched him going to town in his little knit hospital cap, light blue with penguins on it. After a minute, she looked up at me, hid her mouth with the back of her hand, and whispered, “How’s Junior Johnson?”
“Still attached,” I told her. “As far as I can tell.”
“Don’t even joke,” she said, stroking his cheek. “Poor little bean.”
“I’m still kind of pissed they wouldn’t let me in to watch,” I said.
She made a face. “Why? It sounds awful.”
I took in the sight of my son at his mother’s breast. The curve of his cheek, rising and falling. His tiny nose mashed into her soft flesh. His big eyes scrunched up tight. My heart felt full. Because I’m right here, partner, I thought. Today. Always.
“So sweet,” she said, and touched my hand, though I was almost sure I hadn’t answered aloud.
There were flowers everywhere, most of them from people I didn’t know. Balloons floated around the ceiling like cartoon jellyfish, and tissue paper bloomed from the trash. My cousin Marie brought a stuffed panda bear the size of a husky eighth-grader. Sheila laughed and clapped her hands when she saw it.
“I feel like it’s watching me,” I told Marie on the side.
“Good,” she said. When I looked at the thing, hulking in the corner with its droopy eyes and stitched-on smile, Marie tiptoed over and kissed my cheek. “Congrats, fave cuz.”
A few of the girls from Sheila’s work stopped by on their lunch hour to coo and pass the boy around. Sheila’s parents came and went. They didn’t like me very much, but I could tell they were making an effort. That could have been wishful thinking on my part. I gave them credit anyway.
My old man stopped by for a few minutes, reeking of Winstons. He didn’t hold the boy, but he kissed Sheila’s forehead. She called him Pop, and patted his grizzled neck with her hand, and I’m pretty sure I saw relief in her eyes as we left the room.
“Little bugger didn’t want to come out,” the old man said on our way to the elevator. “Did he?”
“I guess not,” I said. It had been a tough go for both of them, nearly twenty hours of hard labor that ended in an emergency cesarean. The boy had been blue when they pulled him out, and he didn’t cry for almost half a minute. Meanwhile, in the midst of all the slicing and dicing, one of the docs had accidentally torn a hole in Sheila’s bladder. She’d be peeing through a tube for the next week or so.
My old man laughed the way he did. Like gears grinding. “Can’t say I blame him. When the hell you going to give that boy a name?”
I told him we were working on it.
“First grandson, and I don’t even know what the hell to call the little shit.”
“We’ve got it narrowed down.”
“Already, huh?”
“Take it easy,” I told him. “You’ll be the first to know.”
He screwed up a special smirk just for me.
“All right. Third or fourth to know. Definitely in the top ten.”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“Get the button,” I said. “You’re closer.”
We waited for the elevator in silence. I hadn’t seen my old man in a year or more; we’d agreed to get some breakfast in the cafeteria, his treat. I knew I’d be paying for breakfast. While we stood there, I wondered what my mother would have thought of all this. I wondered if the old man wondered. Then the bell chimed, and the doors slid open.
We exchanged places with a guy stepping out. He was about my height, better dressed, trailing a faint swirl of cologne. Blond hair combed back, damp from the rain outside. As soon as I recognized his face, my blood went hot.
He’d already recognized me. He met my eyes squarely, then looked away as the doors closed between us.
I stood inside the elevator, pulse thudding in my temples, feeling my old man’s gaze. He leaned against the rail, bit off a hangnail. Said, “Friend of yours?”
“No.” I stared at the console for a beat too long before jabbing the button to open the door.
The elevator carried us down.
The ride was slow torture. I didn’t realize my fists were clenched until I felt my fingernails biting my palms. When we reached the main level, the old man stepped out. I stayed put.
“Pop,” I said. “Rain check, okay?”
He looked at me a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. The doors slid closed again.
“Don’t worry,” the guy said. By the time I made it back upstairs, he’d already closed our room door behind him. If the sight of me coming intimidated him, he didn’t seem to notice. “I’m leaving.”
“So soon?” I said.
“I’ll be back,” he said. “You can just be ready for that.”
The guy had a name. Nathan Greenleaf. Once upon a time, he’d been Sheila’s boss at work. “Call me Nate,” he’d said, the first time we’d met. I called him Fuckface.
“Look, give it up,” I said. “You had your shot. She picked the other guy. It’s a sad story.”
He shook his head slowly, like I was too dumb to see the point.
“Fair warning,” I told him. “If I see you again, you’ll wish I hadn’t.”
A few of the nurses were starting to pay attention now. I glanced at the desk and saw one of them with her hand on the phone, a tense look in her eyes.
“Fair warning,” he said. Cool and calm. “You’ll see me again, Dan. With an attorney of my own, if that’s what it takes. I want a blood test. And I’ll get one.”
The way he talked—as if we were on some kind of first-name basis with each other just because he said so—I could feel the warning signals, familiar as a gang of bad old friends. The sudden calm in my belly. The hum in my blood. The tingle in my fingertips. The shimmery film of red all around.
I took a deep breath. Thought of Sheila. Of all the promises I’d made. I thought of my boy. My boy.
“How many times do you need to hear it?” I forced a chuckle, tried my best to speak to him the same way he’d just looked at me: like a small, sad soul. “I mean, dude. Seriously. How many different ways does she need to explain the math?”
“For a bookkeeper, her math’s a little shaky,” he said. “Or maybe yours is.”
My knuckles began to itch. “My math is fine.”
“We’ll see.” He straightened, smoothed his jacket.
I think that if he hadn’t smiled, I might have been able to hold it together. If not for that last, brief, tight, smug, little shit-eating, Fuckface grin, I think the deep crazy itch in my fists might have gone away on its own. Instead it became unbearable, and I knew I’d scratch it. I thought of all my promises, but my left arm had already tensed in my sleeve.
I heard myself say, “Blood test, huh?”
As if from nowhere, a hand fell lightly on my wrist. A leathery, strangely soothing grip. Easy does it.
I hadn’t sensed anyone approaching. But I knew the hand without looking. By the time I smelled Winstons, my fuse had fizzled, and the red film had lifted.
“So,” my old man said. He looked between the two of us, smiling brightly. “Where you figure they keep the morphine in this joint?”
Sheila had been crying. Seeing me, she wiped her eyes quickly and dummied up, put on a quick smile so forced and false that it broke my heart to see it on her face.
Her mother stood by the bed, holding the baby, swaying gently on her feet like the old pro I knew her to be, having rocked as babies Sheila, her three older sisters, and a younger brother who’d caught a bad break in Afghanistan. As I walked in, her father seemed to consider my presence a moment. Then he returned his gaze to the rain-streaked window.
/> Before stepping back into the room, I’d taken a walk around the floor to clear my head. For at least twenty minutes, I’d stood on the far side of the ward, looking through the glass at all the other new babies. I’d watched a few other new dads doing the same. I’d wondered if they’d really be able to tell which kid was theirs without the Crayola-colored name tags on the bassinets.
Sheila and her folks thought I’d missed the show. I got it. Fuckface had only been here a few minutes, and as far as they knew, I’d been downstairs having breakfast with my old man at the time. I didn’t see any point in shattering the illusion.
“What about Brandon?” I said.
Sheila sniffed, paused, turned a bewildered eye my way. Her mother stopped swaying the baby. Glanced towards her husband.
Sheila’s father looked at me again. This time his eyes had hardened. Quietly, he said, “What about him?”
“For the man here,” I said. I walked to Sheila’s mother. Touched her shoulder with one hand, my sleeping boy’s cheek with the other.
My boy.
I had never asked Sheila everybody’s big question. Long before this moment, I’d decided that I never would.
“He needs a good name,” I said. “A good name. What do you think, sweet?”
For a moment, Sheila looked at me like I’d climbed down out of the ceiling tiles. Brandon hadn’t been anywhere among the ten piles of names we’d discussed, though speaking it now, I wasn’t sure why. It had been her kid brother’s name. Why not?
Her eyes began to glisten. I didn’t need to ask everybody’s question because I could see the answer caught in her tears: I don’t know. But her smile came back, and this time it was real. That was enough for me.
She said, “Mom?”
Sheila’s mother rocked her grandson and said nothing. When I glanced up, I found her looking at me with a tenderness so sudden that it must have surprised her as much as it surprised me.
Sheila said, “Daddy?”
Her father looked at the floor.
Silence.
We waited.
At last he cleared his throat. A touch hoarsely, he said, “It’s a good name.”
“You ask me,” my old man said, “you shouldn’t had that boy mutilated in the first place.”
“Nobody asked you, Pop.”
“I mean it just ain’t called for.”
I sighed, looked out my window at the passing streetlamps, hazy yellow blobs in the cold November drizzle. “It’s a simple procedure.”
“Uh-huh.”
“They do it for hygiene.”
“Hygiene. Cuttin’ off what God gave you is what it is. Poor devil.”
“Anyway,” I said, just wanting the conversation to be over. “A boy grows up, he ought to look like his dad. Down there at least.”
My old man steered with his wrist on the wheel, Winston crooked in the first knuckles of his other hand, trailing smoke out the gap in the window. He chuckled softly, a loose phlegmy rattle in his chest.
“What?” I said.
“Damned if I didn’t tell your mother the same thing about you boys,” he said. “Guess she saw it different.”
I had nothing for that. So I let it go. Hell. I hadn’t brought it up in the first place.
The old man slowed the car, then turned off the main drag, onto a service road. The Buick’s slick tires crunched over a scatter of gravel and broken glass. Streetlamps grew scarce. Darkness pulled in around us.
“Pop?” I said.
“Mm.”
“You planning on telling me what the hell we’re doing all the way out here?”
Rain check on breakfast, he’d said forty minutes ago, talking to me on his cell phone from the hospital parking lot. He’d cruised back around after visiting hours in a dented old Buick I’d never seen before. Said he figured we could get a burger and a few beers. Maybe watch the game.
I’d said that sounded fine. Instead, he’d driven us here: a trash-blasted warehouse complex out by the airport. Not many sports bars around.
“Quick stop,” he said, turning off the service road onto a narrow strip of buckled asphalt. “Take a jiff.”
We rolled through an open gate on a high chain security fence. The old man pointed the Buick towards a corrugated steel building at the back of a weedy, chuck-holed lot. Oily rainwater fanned away from the tires as he cut across. A pair of rust-streaked bay doors grew close and bright in the headlight beams.
“Pop,” I said.
He pulled around to the side entrance, out of view of the main road. Behind the building, beyond the high fence, lay a dark empty sprawl. Somewhere in the distance, the lights of the airfield twinkled through a sheer screen of mist.
I didn’t like the feeling I was getting. Just as I opened my mouth to say so, a descending jetliner roared over us, momentarily erasing all other sound. I could feel the thrum of the big plane’s turbines down in my guts. I saw its great winged shadow cover us, spread over the land, slide away.
When it was quiet enough to be heard, I said, “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Hell, I felt bad.” The old man clapped me on the knee and killed the motor. “I never did think to bring a present.”
They’d duct taped him to a metal folding chair in the middle of the warehouse floor. Wrists, ankles, thighs, chest. A single shop light glowed hot overhead, throwing long shadows. My stomach did a slow, sick roll.
“Damn,” my brother Dave said when we came in. “I was startin’ to wonder.” He grinned broadly and hopped off a crate, pulling a pair of white buds from his ears. He shoved the earbuds into the pocket of his leather jacket, along with his iPod, came over and gave me a bear hug. He smelled like whiskey. Whiskey and Winstons. Maybe a little pot underneath.
“Congrats, little bro. Sorry I ain’t been by to see the ankle biter yet.” He patted my cheek. “But we brought ya somethin’.”
I looked over his shoulder at Sheila’s old boss, shirt ripped, blond hair a mess, eyes wide and wild above the stretch of silver tape pressed over his mouth. Call me Nate. Seeing him in the chair, centered in that puddle of hot yellow light, I felt a strange feathery sensation. Like something I’d wanted slipping away.
“Dave,” I said. Kept my voice level. Glanced at the old man. “You shouldn’t have.”
“We overdid it,” the old man said. “But what the hell. It’s for family.”
A weight in my hand. I looked down at the gun Dave had pressed against my palm. Medium frame, short barrel. Blued finish. It would be clean, I knew. My fingers had fallen into position without being told.
“Let’s jump,” Dave said. “I’m about fuckin’ starved.”
Six feet away, Greenleaf began to wheeze through his nose. We all looked. At the sight of the gun in my hand, he cried in his throat. He writhed and bucked against the duct tape holding him fast. If he wasn’t careful, I thought, he’d tip the chair over, and then where the hell would he be?
I thought of my promises. The ones I’d made to Sheila. The ones I’d made to myself.
“It’s for family,” the old man said again, as if I hadn’t heard him say it the first time.
Sheila’s parents didn’t like me very much.
They don’t know you, Sheila always said. And she was right.
They had no idea.
But standing in the cold empty warehouse, the heat from the overhead shop light warming my skin, I thought that I saw a better road out of here. I thought that maybe, in Greenleaf’s swimming eyes, I’d glimpsed a possible version of the future. The version I wanted.
Because the guy was scared. The kind of deep scared you don’t forget when it’s over. The kind of scared you don’t ever want to be again. The guy was scared, and I had six credits to go at the technical college. A job fixing computers for Sheila’s father, if I wanted it.
So I said, “You didn’t know what you were dealing with. Do you see that now?”
Three hard nods. Eyes red, tears streaming. Silver tape slick with snot and sweat
.
I raised the gun, pressed the muzzle to his forehead. Wanting him to feel it. Wanting there to be a round spot he could look at in the mirror later.
“And now you know,” I said. “Don’t you?”
More nodding. Skin beneath the gun barrel oily and pale as warm cheese.
I thumbed the hammer back a notch. The single click echoed sharply in the empty space around us. Greenleaf made a keening, huffing sound in his throat, squeezed his eyes closed. Tried to lean away.
I applied more pressure until his face turned up to the ceiling, washed in the stream of bright light from above. When I thumbed the hammer back the rest of the way, a musty reek rose up between us. I looked down. Saw the sodden fabric of his khakis matted darkly against his thighs.
“Now you know,” I told him.
And I knew we were done. There would be no lawyers. No blood tests. No worries. My boy.
I de-cocked the gun. Handed it back to Dave.
My brother looked me over. I could read the question clearly in his eyes: You sure? When I nodded, he shrugged. Scrubbed my head with his knuckles, the way I always hated when we were kids.
A plane came in low over the warehouse, filling the space, drowning us in rolling waves of noise. I turned to find the old man. As I did, I saw Dave straighten his arm. I saw the gun buck, but amidst the roar of jet engines I couldn’t hear the bang. I saw the side of Greenleaf’s head open up and cough out a dark wet wad. I saw him jerk, then go slack in the chair.
The in-riding jetliner pulled a blanket of new silence behind it.
The sharp smell of gunfire drifted faintly in the air.
I stood there.
“Shit, Gandhi,” Dave said. “I knew you were gonna be all charitable, I wouldn’t have let the prick see my face.” He snapped open a cell phone, punched a number. Said, “Yeah. The place on Giles. Bring a sponge.” He closed the phone, tossed the gun in the dead guy’s piss-soaked lap, looked at the old man, looked at me. Said, “Who’s up for hot wings?”
Blood, Guts, & Whiskey Page 29
