The Old Man

by Thomas Perry

  “If you knew that, then it might have been nice if you and Dad had seen fit to stay together, or at least keep up some appearance that we were a family.”

  “When your father replaced me with a newer model a few years ago, I gave him the chance to change his mind. He didn’t, so blame him. I met this guy, as you call him, six months ago. You’re not a child. You’re twenty-six. And I’ve been single for years.”

  “Right,” said Brian. “But if you don’t think having people like this around puts your adult children at risk, then you’re mistaken. I have a security clearance, at least until they find out you’re hanging around with a man who doesn’t feel the police are adequate to protect him. Sarah, who’s just wasted two years learning to become a lawyer, may feel she has less to lose.”

  His mother studied him for a few seconds, and then said, “I guess we caught each other at a bad time. Still, it’s been good to see you, Brian. You have my blessing. Some people find that kind of thing comforting, and even important to them.” She patted his arm. “I wish you every happiness.” She stepped past him.

  He stared at the ugly beige carpet at his feet for a couple of seconds. He was distracted by the realization of how brown everything in his apartment was, all of it selected by the landlord and untouched and unadorned by Brian McDonald. He didn’t hear his mother anymore, so he looked up. “Mom?”

  There was no answer. He stepped around the corner to the kitchen, but it was empty. He glanced at the bathroom on his way back, but that door was open. He hurried to the apartment door and swung it open. “Mom?”

  She was not in the hallway. She was already outside. He started toward the outer door of the building, but when he reached it, his impulse to go out there, to run down the sidewalk after her, seemed to leave him. What did he intend to say—that he wanted her to stay?

  19

  While Julian sat alone waiting for his plane, he pretended to read the New York Times. He was actually thinking about the way his time in San Francisco had ended. The meeting with the old man had been four days ago.

  He’d had his debriefing with the senior agents, and then they had stepped out of the office into the hangar to talk. He and Harper and Waters had sat in silence. After about five minutes, Harper got another phone call, and he and Waters left the room. Minutes went by. Julian assumed that the four were conferring about something that he was not authorized to hear. After a few more minutes, he was convinced they were talking about him.

  After another half hour, Julian realized he had stopped hearing the background sounds in the hangar—the starter motors of vehicle engines, the constant hums of ventilators, and the buzz of the overhead lights in the open bay.

  He stood up and walked out of the little box of an office and stood for a few seconds. The vehicles were all still parked on the tiled floor—police cars, ambulances, mail and UPS and FedEx trucks, even a fire truck. What had changed was that the overhead lights and the ventilators had been turned off. The only illumination came from a row of small, dirty windows high in the wall, and from a single man-sized door that had been left open beside the giant motorized hangar door. The invisible fans that had been running to circulate the air were turned off.

  As he walked toward the open door, all he could hear were his shoes hitting the tiles and echoing off the metal walls of the hangar. He stepped outside into the waning sunlight and closed the door. He tugged on the door handle to prove a theory, and verified that it had locked behind him.

  From where he stood he could see the San Francisco airport buildings across about a mile of tarmac. He began to walk in that direction along the endless chain link fences, past hangars and warehouses and parking lots. The walking distance was a couple of miles, but he was alone, so he felt calm, and that distance was nothing to a man with his physical fitness and stamina.

  At the terminal he stood in the taxi line and took a cab to the hotel in the city where he had stayed the previous night. When he arrived, he found that his key still worked, so they had not checked him out and paid for the room. He opened his small carry-on suitcase and found that somebody had opened it, taken everything out, and then returned his belongings a bit more neatly than he had left them. He called the front desk to ask for a new room and a new toothbrush, toothpaste, and mouthwash.

  He made his plane reservation to Little Rock. Then he ate dinner in the hotel’s restaurant and went to bed in his new room.

  The cell phone that military intelligence had issued him never buzzed or vibrated during that night or the next two days and nights. On the morning of the fourth day he packed up, checked out, and hailed a cab outside the hotel. When the first cab stopped, he stepped off the curb. He said, “I’d like to go to the airport, please.” When he was inside the cab he said, “Delta Air Lines, please.”

  His parents had taught him the value of being polite when he was very young. If he was polite, nobody in the neighborhood outside Jonesboro where he grew up would report his rudeness to his parents and get him punished. The other benefits had come to him one at a time. The most obvious involved women, but there were others. Strangers who had not had a bad impression of a man forgot him as soon as he was gone.

  Julian pretended to read his newspaper, and then boarded his plane when his seating section was called. He sat at the window and closed his eyes. By the time the plane rumbled along and lifted into the air, he was nearly asleep. He had acquired the fatalism of people who had flown often to remote places, and the combat soldier’s ability to sleep anywhere and at any time. He slept through most of the flight to Dallas/Fort Worth, ate lunch, and stayed awake during the second flight to Little Rock.

  He liked seeing his part of the country from the sky. He knew the short flight was taking him over Texarkana and Arkadelphia toward Little Rock. He liked to watch the ground below him changing. The first time he had taken this flight, after he enlisted at seventeen, he had thought of the view as the way land would look to God—green mostly, with ribbons and spots of blue-gray water reflecting the sun heavenward.

  The plane bounced on the runway and rattled until the brakes overcame the plane’s momentum and the pilot taxied to the terminal. Julian waited for the long line of people ahead of him to stand, open all the overhead compartments at once, and bump into each other. Then they tugged down suitcases and bags that were too heavy and full for the compartments and swung them to the floor, where there was no room for them among people’s feet. When the passengers began their lockstep trudge toward the forward hatch, he plucked his small carry-on off the floor and followed at a distance.

  Julian rented a car. He was always careful what sort of vehicle he drove when he was home. Nobody had ever told him to do this. That would have been as unnecessary as telling him to think. He selected a white Toyota Corolla, because it didn’t look too fancy or too powerful. It didn’t have tinted windows or too much unseen space in back. The Corolla was the sort of car that a prudent man might drive to work.

  He put the carry-on bag in the trunk because leaving it on the seat beside him might arouse curiosity if a police officer pulled him over. A bag might raise the suspicion in a Southern cop’s mind that Julian had a hidden weapon or other contraband. The danger was probably intensified by the fact that Julian looked much younger than he was—not the sort of man who might be a state legislator or judge. Instead he looked like the sort who might mysteriously injure himself while in custody.

  Julian had fought battles, including a few with people who believed that dying would lift them to heaven in an instant. He no longer felt the urge to prove his bravery to himself, and he had lost interest in persuading anybody else of anything. He believed in arriving quietly, avoiding confrontation, and moving on without notice. His family was the only reason he ever came back.

  He felt better once he was outside Little Rock and beyond its suburbs. He drove along Interstate 40, took the exit for US 49 North, and kept going toward home. His part of Arkansas was the northeast in the Mississippi Embayment, where the l
and was rich alluvial soil from the Mississippi’s tributaries. The rocky range of hills along Crowley’s Ridge, where Jonesboro had grown up, was a border for him. There were oak and hickory forests where he had hunted, and then the flat plain where his family had built their vegetable farm.

  He drove to the farm, parked the car, and got out. The air smelled the way air was supposed to smell, as though a summer rain had just fallen and the droplets had exploded into mist. The late afternoon sun was warm and comforting on his shoulders. In many of the places he had been sent over the past six years, the sun had been another enemy. Today it felt the way it had at the end of a day when he was a kid coming home from working with his brothers and sisters.

  As he went to open his trunk, the front door of the farmhouse opened and his mother stepped out on the wide wooden porch. He remembered sleeping on that porch sometimes as a kid. It was enclosed in screen to keep out mosquitoes and deerflies, and had a pair of ceiling fans to keep the air moving on hot evenings.

  “It’s about time,” his mother said. She was the one from whom he had inherited his short stature, young complexion, and slim body. Her serene expression made her look about half her age.

  “Sorry, Mother,” Julian said. “I got called back in at the last minute for a project.”

  “You already told us your excuse,” she said. “And I still say it’s about time you got here.”

  His father appeared on the porch too. He was tall and lean, with square shoulders. It seemed to Julian that he was aging much faster than his mother. The upper part of his spine seemed to be contracting to bend him forward a little. He grinned. “I had to eat your pie, or it would have gotten stale. Nice to see you, though.”

  Julian climbed up to the porch, set down his bag, hugged his mother, and shook his father’s hand.

  “Welcome home,” said his father. “How long can you stay?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ll stay until I have to go.”

  There were more empty bedrooms now than there had been when Julian was young. He went to put his bag in the first one, but saw it had become a sewing room, so he went to the next and set down his bag. Then the three sat on the porch.

  When the sun was low enough below the porch roof to be in a person’s eyes when he looked to the west, Julian’s two youngest brothers, Joseph and Noah, and his youngest sister, Leila, walked in along the farm road that ran between the vegetable fields. At first they were just three small, dark silhouettes in front of the harsh light, and then they grew as they came closer and the sunlight began to weaken to orange.

  He could see they had been weeding, because each of them had a hoe over one shoulder and a strap over the other for the big canvas bag. He thought of those as harvest bags because when he was a boy he remembered gathering vegetables in one to dump into the baskets. He knew that right now each would hold a lunch box and a big plastic bottle for water, both of them light and empty at this time of day.

  When Leila noticed the unfamiliar rental car he saw her point, and they all seemed to walk a little faster, their feet lighter. When they arrived, Julian hugged Leila, then Joseph, and then Noah, smelling and feeling the sweat on their shirt backs. “I’m so glad to see you,” he said.

  “I see you got here just in time to see the workday end,” said Noah.

  “Just the three of you are doing all of it?”

  “Of course not,” Leila said. “We were just out there with the weeding crew. We’ve got twenty people working every day right now.”

  “Plenty of room out there if you’re still up to it, though,” Joseph said.

  “I’ll be out there with you tomorrow morning,” said Julian.

  They all went inside, and while the others took turns showering, Julian set the dinner table and talked with his parents in the kitchen. The old dining table had only about half of its places filled now that the older brothers and sisters were gone, and he asked about each of the absent ones—how they were doing, whether they visited often, when the last time was.

  Julian was up with the others before dawn, ready to go out to join the crew weeding the next patch of the farm. This one was asparagus, and if they worked hard, they could get the green beans done too. Everything on a farm came in cycles. By the time the crew got through weeding the whole farm, it would be time to start the first patch over again. Over all was the cycle of seed, weed, and harvest. Irrigation wasn’t necessary except a few times in midsummer, because the rest of the time there was enough rain, but there was a big tank at the highest point on the farm that served as a reservoir for the water pumped from the well.

  At breakfast they continued the conversations interrupted the night before. The three youngest siblings were all dating local people, and they teased each other about the beloved’s appearance, prospects, and intelligence. This went on for a while, and then Leila’s big cat’s eyes turned to the side and settled on Julian. “I heard Ruthie Straughan got a divorce.”

  There was silence for a couple of seconds. The others, all at least five years younger than Julian, waited. Leila added, “But I suppose you knew that already, or you wouldn’t just happen to think of coming home.”

  Julian said, “Where did you hear that about Ruthie Straughan?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I guess it must have been at church. Did you hear it there too?” All three of her brothers laughed.

  “I have to get all my gossip from you,” he said. “I don’t recall having been to church in a while.”

  Leila said, “The Lord finds many ways to make things known. I do my part.”

  When they finished breakfast they put the dishes in the sink to soak, picked up their lunches and water bottles, and went outside to get into one of the trucks and drive out to the fields. This was the coolest part of the day, and it was the best time to get the hard work done.

  Joseph, who served as foreman, lined up the hired workers at the end of the asparagus field, and then the Carsons picked up hoes and bags themselves, and the crew began to move along the spaces between rows, digging all the weeds on one row and then heading up the next row. They worked steadily and methodically, as people did who had been raised to work.

  They all worked until the sun was directly overhead and their shadows pooled at their feet. Joseph checked his watch and they all went to sit in the shade beneath the fruit trees and opened their lunch pails. Most of the hired hands went to get their lunches from coolers in the trunks of their cars.

  As the Carsons ate, the siblings started on Julian. “You know, Julian,” said Joseph, “I always figured you had a great big job in the Pentagon or somewhere. But I can see you’re better at weeding than you ever were. Is that what they have you doing?”

  “I can’t tell you much because it’s classified,” said Julian. “I’m sort of like the director of the CIA, except younger and better looking.”

  After a few minutes the others turned their attention to Noah, who had been refusing to tell his siblings who he was taking to a cousin’s wedding.

  They went back to work, and the stream of banter and gossip filled the afternoon, and then the sun began to go down. Leila stopped at the end of a row and said, “I’m going home. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got things to do tonight.” She shouldered her hoe, and emptied her canvas sack on the compost heap one last time. The others did the same and got into the truck, and they all drove back up the farm road to the house.

  When they made it to the house it took time for all of them to shower, change clothes, and eat the dinner their mother had made. The dinner was much as it had been when Julian was growing up. The exact combination of spices his mother always used made him remember nights twenty years ago.

  After dark, Julian spent an hour or so chatting with his parents about local people, politics, and the condition of the world. Then Leila came out to the porch and said, “Julian, can you give me a ride into town?”

  When they were in his rental car, moving along the highway toward Jonesboro, Leila said, “I don’t
know if you want to know this, but she wants you to stop by and see her.”

  It was as though their conversation from before dawn had never ended, just gone underground and surfaced again. He had no confusion about whom she meant. He looked at Leila. “I don’t know if I wanted to hear that, but I do appreciate your passing it on.”

  “Are you going to go?”

  “I don’t know yet. When and where do you want me to pick you up?”

  “I’m meeting Meg and Latrice at choir practice. Then James is going to pick me up in his car.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  He opened his wallet and found a receipt. “You got a pen?”

  She handed him a pen from her purse.

  He held the receipt against the steering wheel and wrote down his cell phone number. “If you need a ride, call me.” After a moment he added, “If you want me for any other reason too.” He handed it to her with the pen and she put them in her purse together.

  In a few minutes, he stopped in front of the church. Leila got out of the car, and then leaned back in. “That house where the Deckers used to live, next to the corner market?”

  “I remember.”

  “That’s where Ruthie is staying now.”

  “You think I ought to go see her?”

  Leila frowned. “I don’t know what your life is like now, Julian. As you said, it’s classified. If you want to, go ahead. If not …” She ended her sentence with a shrug. “Got to go. I love it when you’re home.” She hurried to join her friends, and Julian drove off.

  As Julian drove the streets of Jonesboro he passed the high school. Sometime in the 1970s it had been demolished by a tornado and rebuilt low with a peaked roof and gables on the front and a steeple that made it look like a big Howard Johnson’s.

  Soon Julian noticed that in his aimless drive, his rental car had made several right turns, and that the last one took him near the old corner market. He considered calling the farm to see if his mother wanted anything from the store, but then thought better of it. If he bought something frozen or likely to go off, he’d have to rush right home with it.