No Regrets, Coyote

by John Dufresne

  Oliver joined us. He had on orange and teal sweatpants, flip-flops, and his 2008 family reunion T-shirt, which featured a silkscreened photo of Oliver Hardy in bowler and tie, and beneath the photo I’M WITHSTANLEY. His walnut-brown hair was damp and slicked back. He smelled of talc and bay rum. He kissed Patience on the cheek. She sneezed. He made himself a White Russian and plopped down on his La-Z-Boy. The story of the Halliday tragedy came on the news. I noticed Perdita Curry standing behind the police department spokesman. Venise joined us, shook her head, and put her hand on Oliver’s shoulder. She said, “What in God’s name would drive a man to kill his own family?”

  I said, “Maybe he didn’t.”

  “They said he did. Weren’t you listening?”

  “On Christmas Eve.” Oliver shook his head and tsked.

  I said, “I was there, Venise. Last night.”

  Patience asked me why I was there. Oliver said he couldn’t understand how a man could murder his children. Dad said he could think of several reasons. Patience said she’d read about this aquatic parasite that enters your brain through your ears while you’re swimming and eats away at the gray matter until you become insane and essentially do the bidding of the parasite, and you become capable of horrific and inexplicable acts of violence.

  Dad said, “Most of them are ungrateful.”

  Oliver said, “The wife was most likely having an affair, and he caught her at it. He snapped. End of story.”

  I wondered why the police spokesman suggested the murder-suicide scenario when it was forensically too early to make that determination, wasn’t it? I knew he was probably correct, my concerns notwithstanding, but thought he might have been more circumspect.

  Dad said, “You bring them into the world. You take them out.”

  Venise had fifteen kinds of mustard on the table. Creole, Dijon, English, Meaux, Bavarian, Chinese, honey, ballpark, horseradish, chili, Bahamian, wasabi, deli, Dusseldorf, and Sarepta. I carved the wizened ham and placed a slice on each plate. Oliver grated milk chocolate on his sweet potato casserole. Venise muted the TV but kept the remote by her salad plate. Dad reached for the biscuits and knocked over his red wine, and Patience hurried to sop it up. Venise said, “I’ll have to toss out the tablecloth now.” Then she had us lift our plates while she made a show of taking off the tablecloth and stuffing it into the trash. “Like I’m made of money,” she said.

  “Let it go, Venise,” Oliver said.

  Patience complimented Venise on the garlic mashed potatoes and the squash. Venise told us about her upcoming colonoscopy and her anxiety about the unpleasant gastrointestinal preparations. She said the medical procedure was Oliver’s Christmas gift.

  “The gift of good health,” Oliver said.

  Venise said, “I’ve always wanted one.”

  I said, “What did you get Oliver?”

  She said, “What do you get the man who has everything?”

  “Nothing,” Dad said.

  Patience said, “Well, that’s sweet—the colonoscopy—if you think about it.”

  Oliver smiled. “What I really got her was a mobility scooter.”

  “That way I don’t have to chance there not being one available at Publix,” Venise said.

  “Three wheels, electric, quiet as a whisper, straw basket up front,” Oliver said. “It’s the Celebrity edition.”

  “And I got him golf clubs,” Venise said.

  “You golf, Oliver?” I said.

  “Not yet.” He told us how much he was enjoying his retirement. “Best decision—” He looked at Venise. “Second best decision I ever made was going to work for the post office.” Oliver quit high school because of his many intractable anxieties, but then managed to get himself a scholarship to MIT after he built a machine that could read Braille and scored an 800 on the math portion of the SATs. And then he quit MIT in his senior year after making a perfect score on the civil service exam. He went to work for the post office and, with his future now secure, began to relax. Oliver told us he spent a lot of time these days playing WorldWide Scrabble and shopping on eBay. He told us he’d just won an auction for a Tesla Shield, a pendant that emits a positive tachyon field. “Inside the pendant is a lost cubit caduceus coil.” He raised his brow and nodded like we might be familiar with the coil and its amazing properties. He said it was all based on the principles of sacred geometry, zero-point energy, orgonomy, and harmonious frequencies of light.

  I said, “What does it do?”

  “Keeps you from aging, from getting sick, makes you stronger. Lots of things. You know how our DNA acts as an antenna for light energies, right?”

  Patience and I cleared the table and tidied up while Venise and Oliver hooked up the karaoke machine and Dad wandered around the house opening doors. When I asked him what he was looking for he told me he forgot. I led him back to the couch and his drink. Patience loaded the dishwasher. She was of the scullery school that insists every bit of dinnerware should be scrubbed and rinsed before being put in the machine. Dad sang a halfhearted and halting rendition of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” that included the lines, “Bring us some friggin’ pudding / And a bottle of beer.”

  Patience told me she was attracted to men in wheelchairs, and she wasn’t sure why, and did I think that was peculiar? I said, Just men in wheelchairs? She said, Lately. And I was reminded of my coincidental airport reverie from earlier that morning—the man encumbered with carry-ons—and how these synchronies seemed to happen a lot in my life. I’ll dream about a guy I worked with thirty years ago, and then I’ll read in the paper the next morning that the guy’s father died. And in the father’s obit I’ll learn that the old colleague is married to a woman named Janet, and they live in Orlando. Or something about a person’s appearance or behavior catches the corner of my eye. Her whimsical hat or a bounce in her walk. When that happens I’ve come to expect that I’ll see that person later on that day, maybe in the express lane at Publix or in the car next to mine at a red light or Rollerblading on the Boardwalk. For about a month last year no matter where I drove in South Everglades I found myself at a stop sign or red light behind the same Ford Focus with the Florida tag: FLA *PGH. It was like I was following him.

  I scraped leftovers into the sink and started the disposal. “When did you become aware of this attraction?”

  “I think it all started when I re-saw James Stewart in Rear Window a couple of years ago. I sound crazy. I know it.”

  I said, “You’re not crazy.”

  Venise belted out “O Holy Night.”

  Patience asked me if I could harmonize. I told her I knew what harmony meant and how it should sound, but had no idea how that sound was achieved. We sang anyway. We did “Good King Wenceslaus” and then we all exchanged gifts. I gave Dad a portable CD player and a box of CDs of old radio shows. Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Fibber McGee. I’d gotten Venise and Oliver a gift certificate to this Brazilian restaurant that they adore. Dad handed out his phone cards and then got this pinched and sour look on his face. When he eased himself up off the couch, it became evident that he had forgotten to wear his Depend. Fortunately, I had brought some along. Venise screamed and stormed off to her room. I took Dad to the bathroom and got him into the shower and his clothes into a plastic trash bag. I told him I was taking the soiled clothes to the car, and I reminded him to wash every square inch. I put a towel where he could reach it, said not to waste all of Venise’s hot water.

  I stuffed the soiled clothes in the trunk. Carlos called and said he wanted to meet for lunch on Monday. I told him I had a ten o’clock. He said he’d pick me up at eleven-thirty. I told him I’d meet him at Oppenheimer’s. Oliver handed me a pair of polyester running pants the color of cheddar cheese and an olive-green velour something or other. I said, “What the hell is this?”

  “A shrobe. It’s got the cut of a shirt and the fabric of a robe. It’s the latest in leisure wear.”

  When I got back to the bathroom, Dad was standing there in his diaper and sucki
ng his thumb. I said, “Don’t do that, Dad. Please don’t. It’s creepy.”

  He said, “Wah! Wah!” And he smiled.

  I said, “Don’t,” and handed him the clothes. I got him dressed, and we said our goodbyes. Venise was in her room with a migraine. Patience gave Dad a kiss on his cheek. I told her I hadn’t been depressed at Venise and Oliver’s wedding. I’d been unhappy.

  On the drive back, Dad said he felt humidified. He repeated the word and shook his head. “Not humidified.”

  “Humiliated?”

  “Bingo!”

  “Let’s stop for a drink. It’s early.”

  “Nothing’ll be open on Christmas.”

  “The Wayside’s open.”

  “I’m dressed like a rodeo clown.”

  “You’ll fit right in.”

  We sat at a table by the unplugged jukebox and beneath a poster of LeBron James. The TV over the bar was muted. The Heat were playing the Knicks. I got myself a beer and Dad a VO and water. The bartender wore a pair of plushy antlers and a red clown nose that lit up when I left her a tip. I recognized the man and woman at the bar as the couple who sold the Journal-Gazette at the corner of Cypress and Main. They spend so much time standing in the sun that their tanned skins look like hides. A cigarette dangled from the woman’s blistered lips. The Wayside ignores the state’s no-smoking-in-public-buildings law. It also has a “Two Boswell” rule posted outside the entrance. Only two of the six Boswell brothers could be in the bar at the same time. Apparently, three is critical mass for the Boswells, and they inevitably begin pummeling each other and anyone else who tries to stop the brawl. I handed Dad his drink, and we toasted making it through another year.

  Dad told me that lately Mom and Cameron had been visiting him at night, and sometimes he just wanted to sleep, but they refused to leave and kept gabbing about the stupidest things like the price of skirt steak at Winn-Dixie or about how Father Aucoin has been hitting the sauce pretty hard lately. He said, “I like it when Winston visits.” Winston was our bulldog when I was growing up. “He curls at the foot of the bed and lets me scratch him behind the ears. And he farts all night long.”

  The bartender chatted with someone on her cell phone and nibbled at a bowl of beer nuts. I told Dad, “One and done,” and walked to the bar to order our nightcap. I switched to cognac. Back at the table Dad said, “I was never able to make your mother happy.”

  “You tried.”

  “And she doesn’t let me forget it.”

  I walked Dad to his suite and set his gifts on the table. “I’ll take it from here,” he said. I studied the family photo on his bookcase. It was taken twenty-five or more years ago at a seafood festival on the beach. We were all there: Mom and Dad, Venise and Oliver, Cameron, some gaunt and gorgeous but haunted woman Cameron was dating, Georgia, and me. We were sitting at a long table, wearing plastic bibs and brandishing wooden mallets. Dad pretended to hit Mom with his. Mom wore large wraparound sunglasses over her eyeglasses and looked like she was ready to do some spot welding. She had a wide-brimmed straw bonnet and zinc oxide on her nose. The mallets were for smashing the shells of the all-you-can-eat boiled crabs. Venise was slim. This was the day, I remember, when a massive earthquake struck somewhere in Central America. Georgia had her hair done in braids. I wondered if she still sucked her thumb and still fell asleep when she rode in a car.

  Dad was crying at his table, tapping his knuckles on his forehead, sniffling. I asked what was wrong, and he looked at me and shook his head. I held his arm and told him it was okay. But what did I think was okay? “Tell me what’s going on,” I said. “What are you thinking?” He pushed me away.

  I have this belief, or maybe it’s a wish, that if you can just say everything that’s on your mind, if you can express everything that’s in your heart, if you can articulate your every thought and feeling somehow, you will be cured of your torment and relieved of your pain. You’ll come back to life. I don’t know that anyone’s ever done that, of course, and I know that words are not available to some of us. And sometimes I know it takes too damn much effort to try to speak when all your systems have shut down, when death seems like your only hope, and you would welcome death if it came for you but you’re too spent to chase after it.

  Dad said, “I fell out of bed one night. And a week before that I fell out again.”

  3

  My client Wayne Vanderhyde sat slumped on the middle cushion of the brown leather sofa in my office. He studied the framed Edward Hopper print on the wall opposite. Automat, 1927. “Not very subtle, are you?” he said.

  “What do you see there, Wayne?”

  “A woman surprised at how rancid her life has turned out to be.”

  “And what’s she thinking, do you think?”

  Wayne tapped his finger on his chin, sat forward, and told me I should never ever show my weapon to anyone unless I planned to use it.

  “My weapon?”

  “I don’t mean your rapier wit or your eviscerating insight. I mean your pistol.”

  I told him I didn’t carry a pistol. I didn’t own one, and I had never fired one. He shook his head and advised me that that was information that no one should ever know. “Not anyone.”

  Wayne stocked groceries at the Publix on Cypress Avenue. He confessed to having no career ambition. He didn’t want to move up in the store’s pathetic hierarchy, as he put it, not even to assistant common-area manager. “What would be the point?”

  “That depends on what you want in your life.”

  “What do you want?” he asked me.

  “To be better than I am.”

  “That shouldn’t be hard.”

  “And yet it is.”

  “All I want out of life is to be able to live like a normal person. That’s why I’m here.” He had said so at our first session three weeks earlier.

  “Define a normal person for me,” I said.

  “You.”

  “How am I normal?”

  He smiled, looked at the ceiling, and shook his head. “Diplomas,” he said. “Desk lamp. Coffee table. Sofa. Matching socks.”

  “Guilty,” I said.

  “I’m dull. I don’t enjoy people. I fly off the handle at the drop of a hat.”

  “How does that make you feel?”

  “How the fuck do you think it makes me feel?”

  I let him settle back on the couch and said, “So you want to be a therapist, is that it?”

  He smiled, crossed his arms, and raised an eyebrow. He was wearing blue running shoes, jeans, and a blue V-neck scrub top. I asked him about the charm he wore on a silver chain around his neck—a pair of metallic eyes. He said the charm was a milagro meant to heal his eyes. He had macular degeneration, a genetic gift from his parents, who both had it. Not bad so far, he said, but a time bomb.

  He told me he didn’t believe in God except when he needed someone to blame or someone to cure him. He wasted his time watching TV and surfing the Internet. Porn, mostly. That and he played an online game called The Kingdom of Loathing. “I can sit for hours and not shift my lazy ass. I have these weird fantasies.”

  “Weird how?”

  “That I don’t want to talk about.”

  “Would they be sexual fantasies?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  I said, “You called me on Christmas Eve, Wayne. I think I detected alarm in your voice.”

  He nodded.

  “What was going on?”

  Wayne looked at me out of the corner of his eye. He pursed his lips, raised his left eyebrow. Could he trust me? he wondered. He said, “I opened the door to the master bedroom in an empty house—”

  “An empty house?”

  “On DeSoto Street. Nine hundred block.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s my new hobby. You told me I needed to get out of my house. So now I explore vacant homes.”

  “What do you do once you’re inside?”

  “Snoop around. People always leave
things behind when they move. I take souvenirs. A grapefruit spoon, a child’s drawing. And sometimes I leave things. I’ll write an anonymous love letter and hide it in the back of a kitchen drawer for someone to find someday. Scribble sweet nothings and sign it, Your secret admirer.”

  “And on Christmas Eve?”

  “The Parkers lived in that particular house. I found their mail on the kitchen counter: electric bill, phone bill, Car and Driver magazine, circular from Bed Bath & Beyond. What do you suppose they mean by Beyond?”

  “The Parkers?”

  “Dave and Deb. I know they owned dogs. Big dogs. Two retractable leashes still on their hangers in the kitchen. Deep scratch marks on the back door, inside and out, about yea high.” He held his flattened palm at eye-level. “The Parkers had grown so used to the dogs they probably couldn’t separate the funk of dog odor from the ordinary smell of the house. But if you were to move in, you’d have to rip out the baseboards and the wall-to-wall and hose the place down with Lysol and bleach, and even then Klink and Schultz would still be with you, and their stench would remind you of the long-gone Parkers, living now in some FEMA trailer the government set up for evictees, and you’ll wonder if they ever drive by the house and see you through the window and weep for the life they have lost.”

  “And the empty bedroom?” I said.

  “It’s night, of course, and I’m not foolish enough to open the door with my flashlight on and lose my invisibility. I ease the door open and see that the room is flooded with daylight, and that the light stops right at the doorway. That’s the first surprise. Across the room, crouched in a corner, is an enormous male lion staring at me, snarling, ready to spring, and then he shakes his ass and pounces.”