She leaves a small stack of Kennedy half-dollars on the bar as a tip. The bartender—a narrow blade of a dude with an earring and a crew cut and a tight T-shirt—sweeps them away. “Mr. Clean,” Liam surprises himself by saying. The bartender looks back and winks and shouts “Okay,” over the din. “Quiet!”
Pointing a remote into the air in a Sieg Heil salute, the bartender turns one after another of the five TVs overhead from what was the traffic feed—Liam realizes the bar’s called Traffic and the music just now being slowly turned down is “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys,” the Steve Winwood piano running down toward silence—it’s a high-concept bar, like out of a Jonathan Lethem novel. He’s here, too, with wife #3. Why does Liam know this? It’s like a dream, or some dreams, where you are character and narrator both. On television is the cock-jawed Brian Williams in a tux, looking grim. Everyone is watching.
IN THE BACKGROUND, in a bar that’s emptied, a muted, off-key Chris Wood saxophone solo sounds. “Around this time, springtime, early April, on a Saturday morning there was nothing going on,” says Liam. “Parents weren’t around in those days to entertain you, take you to things. Dad had showed me how to fish; how to dig for worms and bait a hook and be careful. So some April days there’d be a smell in the air that made me want to fish; the smell sort of said, Fish now. And I would feel that it was good to fish; it was industrious; it was natural. The fish or the stream wanted me to fish.” Liam dabs at a puddle on the bar. She stops him.
“The worms were there at the corner of my grandfather’s garden, near the burn barrel, wanting me to dig them, bring them to some other wilder reality. And so I would go and get the round-pointed shovel out of the garage and bring the green bait can if I could find it or use one of the slender Prince Albert cans my grandfather’d discarded, a small tin flask with a snap top, and I’d head down the hill to the garden. I’d turn over six or eight shovelfuls of dirt thick as fudge and wait to see the purplish worm slowly squirming, sometimes only its tip visible, nosing around blindly in the fresh cut of air. I’d pry them out with my fingers and into the can they would go, with a little tuft of grass and the black dirt.
“The bait can would go in the creel; I’d check out the pole, see that it had a hook on it, Eagle no. 9; take a few extra hooks and a jackknife; there was a can of bug spray in the creel, old and rusty—Off.
“I’d walk up the hill past Ryan’s Feed Store and up the old abandoned broken-up pavement along the brook. In the trees it was dark and the only sound was the rushing of the brook, always high in the spring with snowmelt. I’d get in deep enough and look for those pools Dad had told me held the promise of trout, as if they were lingering there, holding themselves steady and unseen beneath the surface, waiting for feed to wash through. Kneeling on the bank, I would begin the difficult process of baiting a hook, which began first with trying to extract a worm from the can; they all seemed to know how to burrow in and disappear; but one would soon be captured, and though it writhed in my hand, the barb of the hook sounded him into mindless pain and then surrender as his body, against its will and by degrees, became the meat sleeve of the barbed metal shaft.
“Plink, into the water the hook would go, the dark curl of meat tightening into a ball for a moment before unlacing and flailing there in the current. I’d wait in the loud watery din for a tug.
“When one came, it was like some stranger suddenly touching you intimately or somewhere where you did not control the reflex—a swab stick on your tonsil, the hammer tap below your patella. It got your attention right to your spine. The idea of a trout is pure muscle, the idea of twitch, muscle twitch defined against the press of the water, redefined at the end of the pole in your hand when the trout flips into the free, wary air, snapping back and forth like a wound up something, and you start marching in a controlled panic, your sneakers splashing to land the snapping catch into the brush, where you don’t care if the reel gets wet behind you or if the line tangles as long as you get that trout, furiously snapping its green silvery red-speckled body, hung up on a branch.
“You have learned to handle it—to palm the sticky cold fuselage in one hand and with the other remove the hook as humanely as you can. The blood is thin, a smear of it. It smells fishy; the worm is there, limp as a soaked shoelace. With a slight crunch, the hook is extracted and the trout, its eye dull and disbelieving, is then dropped in the creel and the top shut fast. He whops around in there for a good half hour while you recompose yourself, untangling your line, and fantasizing how many more you will get, till you don’t hear the trout moving anymore, only the roar of brook and some stones tumbling.”
“Why’d you tell me that?” asks the woman in the granny glasses, who is back.
“Because somebody shot Obama,” he says. “And I want to fuck you.”
VIII
Dad,
I can remember the first time I was exposed to people in my family drinking. It was a fantastic time for me as I was just about six years old and all was good in the world.
My grandfather had a band. A Mexican folk band made up of local friends and associates. Plymouth Indiana had a large Mexican population on one side of town, My grandparents were one of the first families to settle and work in the town. Hard working and proud. My grandparents refused to completely assimilate to white middle American life. In fact they flaunted their own culture every chance they could. Singing and dancing in the old way. Eating and drinking the same types of meals their parents had eaten Years ago in Brownsville Texas just a stones throw away from Motmodos Mexico.
My grandfather was tall and lean with hands that could crack multiple walnuts in one effortless constriction. His skin reminded me of a baseball mitt freshly oiled. His broad grin was accented by two gold teeth that sparkled at you when he spoke.
The band itself had a bass, Guitar, drums, and at lead vocals and accordion my grandfather. Nearly every weekend The kitchen would be filled with wives prattling on making tortias, drinking sweet sweet coffee, and smoking cigarettes. While the basement was filled with the men. Drinking and smoking cussing as men do when woman are not around. Playing hours of beautiful music that wafted up the stairs reminding every one who heard it that they were Mexican and proud of it.
The drinking was a mandatory affair with the stingy smell of tequila and the mustier smell of beer being mixed with the heavier smells of damp concrete and mold. Between songs of tears and songs of joy. The shots were thrown back and the beers were gulped down. The women never drank. I can remember thinking that that was odd. But the boys down stairs got roaring. The separation of the men from the woman was a good way to hide how much was actually being consumed. The woman never went down stairs. If food or coffee were needed below, it was my job to ferry between the two parties. It was as if the men were slightly embarrassed. And the woman were turning a blind eye. I can remember the guys always pissing in a white bucket in the corner. Avoiding the stares of the woman all together.
I never remember a hint of trouble. My Grandfather could hold his liquor. So could most of his buddies. Hard working former field workers all, Cowboy boots that glistened and came to fierce points. Cowboy hats with feathers and buckles. These to me were some of the coolest dudes I had ever scene. My grandfather the coolest of them all. All six foot three of him, his huge ribbed accordion hanging from his shoulder. His right foot always tapping he would work the accordion back and fourth the inside looking blood red when open and gold leafed when closed. Long slender fingers contorted over bone colored buttons. His voice would go deep and sympathetic. His Spanish flowing out of him as if from another time. Nearly gone now.
It was in that basement watching the boys jostle and drink and laugh. Through that smoke filled haze I watched with wonder knowing that one day I would be a man and It would be my turn to drink and play even maybe I would get a chance to piss in that bucket.
IX
HE IS READING AN ALICE MCDERMOTT NOVEL on the No. 2 train. He could not find a cab from Miss Trout Fishing’s Fort
Greene apartment at 3:30 A.M. So he is reading the book, which he found in her lobby—a giveaway—on his way out. He always needs something to drink or read during travel; preferably both. Otherwise, travel is intolerable; it makes his skin needle with impatience to be touching something other than fabric or air.
Liam picks up at a part where a young man is on an airplane for the first time, rising high above Queens, headed to boot camp. Ironically, he’s traveling, too. It is 1969 and the fellow’s been drafted. From the window, he looks for his neighborhood below; he thinks of saying a prayer. He thinks of Jesus’ thought the night before his Crucifixion: “Your will, not mine.” The young fellow on the plane amends the prayer to “Give me a break.” A fine prayer, thinks Liam, who slowly becomes aware that a guy on the subway is addressing him—a steady, droning voice that he has been tuning out is directed at him. What’s the guy saying? “Are you related to Dr. Zhivago? Are you related to Dr. Zhivago? Are you related to Dr. Zhivago?” That’s what he is saying. It’s a homeless fellow, with no socks, bare shins with open sores. Unkempt hair, wild beard, glint in his eye. Liam is in his fine overcoat, with gray scarf, his reading glasses, his trimmed gray beard, looking, he imagines, gaunt and hungover—did he even eat dinner? Liam’s just finished a chapter, so he closes the book.
“No,” he says to the fellow. “ I’m not Russian.”
“You’re not Russian,” says the homeless guy, delighted to be spoken to. “You’re Irish, then?”
“Yeah, I am actually.”
“Well then,” counsels this homeless chap, “say a prayer before you go to bed tonight. Say a prayer and then go to bed.”
X
NOBODY SHOT OBAMA. Somebody shot at him. It is all over the TV when he gets back. The She is already in bed. The whole event or nonevent has probably passed her by. Beauty sleep required. It is 4:00 A.M. and he can still smell Miss Trout Fishing on him, sweat and, yes, patchouli. “A bushy herb of the mint family,” she replied when he asked, “with erect stems.” That did it.
He sits in his own study. Friday’s Times sits there as well, unread. He’d sleep here tonight. He takes the CNN feed on his Mac. Over and over, barely legible to his blear eye the strip—“Breaking Story: President unhurt. Feds in pursuit of shooter.” Above that, in a loop, the now-famous Riverwalk Barbecue in Kentucky. A stage, some bare trees; a casual Barack in a light jacket bouncing lightly to a podium; grade schoolers in uniforms around him and then a shot—a shot!—not like anything else, not like a firecracker; we’ve heard shots now; we know shots—a gunshot concusses, then everything is after, a stampede; a camera takes up a good load of shoes and scuffling and dirt before catching a wheel of empty sky and the tree limbs and some man’s hat and collar before finding the stage in a crush of dark suits, then a wobbling close-up of several people leaping off stage left, getting away. The film then goes grainy and slows down as CNN focuses on the fleeing people. That’s when Liam spots his tweed coat.
XI
LIAM HAD ALWAYS HAD A THING about coats—coats and jackets. For a guy not too materialistic—not willfully, anyway; he’d traveled light in life, leaving trunkloads and boxfuls and shelves full of possessions at many an abandoned outpost like a routed fugitive—he had love affairs with his outerwear, provisioned for transit. It’s not that he accumulated a lot of coats and jackets; in fact, if he had, there would not be the kind of obsession with them that was his own. It was the very sparseness of his collection that impassioned him so. A new coat meant something; it was a commitment to a style or a spirit of acquisition that carried with it either much about who he was at the moment or who he intended to be once the thing showed up and he grew into it over a couple of winters, or autumns, or bracing springs. There was the heavy yellow leather jacket his mother had bought for him; she had encouraged him—she still a denizen of rural upstate, he the prodigal in Manhattan—to wear less black and more bright colors, “for your eyes!” she’d said, which she’d always called hazel but which everyone else thought were brown. Sure, Mom. She’d sat smoking in the car in the mall parking lot in Plattsburgh while he’d ventured into an empty Ralph Lauren and bought with her credit card a heavy leather car coat because he was connected to this place and this woman’s (fading, sweet) vision of him, her only son. Why not.
He loved that coat.
After she was gone, there was the wool brown-and-black “upland field jacket,” with deep button vest pockets for carrying shotgun shells, that Liam got from L. L. Bean. He wore this upstate as well, touring the place, his old haunts, the cemetery, the abandoned iron mine, with his son, little at the time, who was visiting. Those pockets, Liam found, as if surprised, were deep enough to conceal an eight-ounce flask for their father-and-son walks in the crisp sunshine, picking up sticks and stones and bouquets of late wine red sumac along the abandoned D&H tracks.
He loved that coat, too.
There was a reversible Italian jacket, cashmere blend on one side, faint wool check on the other; and a black cotton painter’s jacket from Paris, whose plush nap he had striven to preserve by not bending his elbows much, till he forgot. After several drafts of “My Coats,” which was the third or fourth part of a larger and eventually abandoned work featuring similarly descriptive and emotive lists of kitchens he had known, women he had slept with, ball games he had seen, and fountain pens he had had some relationship with, some therapist or another talked him out of this approach, not long after he got his fifth or six rejection from literary magazines. No one was buying this stuff.
One of the later jackets, however, was part of his roots phase (birth parents found—Donegal)—an Irish tweed. He’d always wished to have a handsome, warm, genuine Irish sport coat you could button up and wear in the brisk and rainiest weather, and he found one in an online catalog, from Cleo’s in Kildare Street. He loved it, but it fit so poorly that people commented. So he put it away, after turning himself around in front of the long mirror in the men’s room at the Old Town one afternoon. Yes, it flared out and made his ass look big; there were two vents, on left and right, which looked more like mud flaps. The left one, for some reason, through some accident of stitching, actually curled upward, as if it were a shingle about to peel off. Unsightly to have this over one’s buttock. And anyway, the jacket was too broad in the shoulders, making him look smaller than he was—like the old Irishman he wasn’t ready to be quite yet.
But it was a five-hundred-dollar item, and when son Johnny told him he was going to a Notre Dame football game with the son of the boss of the machine factory where he worked, Liam said, “I’ll send you something to wear to the game.”
And there was no mistaking that turned-up flap at the backside of the burly, dark-haired fellow vaulting off the stage at the Riverwalk Barbecue in Paducah, Kentucky, playing over and over on CNN.
LIAM KEPT WATCHING IT TILL MORNING, which came very late.
I should’ve done, I should’ve done, I should’ve done, Liam snarls to that image of himself in the mirror that just reverses all his flaws. He claws his own cheek and brings up three red trails. I should’ve prayed for my son. That was Jesus on the 2 train.
And I will; he nods to himself in the mirror, his face pain peaking righteously. At his feet, his packed bag. The sun just coming up, gilding the tops of buildings he can see out the bathroom window to the west, in Jersey City. I’ll say a prayer tonight from a mountaintop. One last look. Light off.
XII
ON THE AVENUE, IN THE SUNLIGHT, even at this hour, a Saturday in February—with the Super Bowl tomorrow!—a significant mass of traffic passes in a slow, powerful roll. Buses lug forward; cars in their steel and sprung weight maneuver—so many cabs, and leaning bikers, quick as a painter’s stroke on the gray pavement, zip between objects. Stolid pedestrians move so slowly, some locked in conflict on cell phones—that black woman—“Everything I gets is from me; if I move to Florida, it because of me; if I get a Benz, it from me; if I move apartments, it from me; if I make a life change, it from me, muthafucker. N
ot from you!”—and others, so many quintessential New York faces—great-nosed, small, dapper men with combed-back silver locks, striding as through water; a leggy gazelle with her Ford Agency portfolio canted awkwardly on a beautiful keel of a hip, teetering on heels; she’s smoking a long cigarette; a little guy looking like his dad, who walks beside him, both in Steelers gear, jabbering, comically trying to match strides. A smooth biker, haughty like some aristocrat of street travel, flies by in some conversation with the street or himself; you somehow lock visually to his left ear, yellow through a helmet hole, and follow him for a block in that small world, his pumping, what he hears. You wonder where he’s going, or what his mother thinks of him, and does he care.
Such interiority, once such a comfort, then such a danger, is, in its way, a comfort once again, though the means of achieving it, as an adult and not as a safe and daydreaming child, are toxic: We’re talking about booze.
Liam has taken a potion on the way to his garage, where he keeps, unbeknownst to anyone, his Jeep—paid for in cash. The She never knew. The garage rent billed to his studio address, and fuck the insurance—he’s careful, he needs to be discreet more than he needs to be protected—he pays for minimum coverage once a quarter, again in cash. If he hurts anyone, the aggrieved may get the place in Harrison. Life’s a risk.
His potion isn’t taken in much of a joint—not every place has the shutters up at 7 A.M., but Blue Ruin does, a place named after a Prohibition bathtub gin that’d kill you, and situated in the shadow of Port Authority and a block from his cheap garage. Tracy’s there, the barkeep, and she’s been there all night, by the looks of it. Liam can see thin lines of grit in the creases of her neck. Two double screwdrivers and a black coffee from the next-door deli—no smokes, of course—and Liam is ready to go to the mountaintop. On TV he watches every bit of every moment of the looping shot in Paducah seen round the world. And now some believe Obama really was hit. Where is he? Fox wonders. They have a reporter at Walter Reed.
The Business of Naming Things Page 13
