“Oh? Well . . . like I was saying . . . yer ma must be right proud. Yer a credit tae her. So ye are. Well . . . maybe ye can help us. The polis here are worse than useless, and thae folks at the immigration dinnae seem tae have a clue either.”
His voice coalesced then with his anger and frustration. “Nae wun cares whither he’s alive or deid. Nae wun’s bothered. His Ma’s close tae tears all the time. She cannae sleep nights. We need tae know, Tommy. Whit’s happened tae oor Keith? Nae wun’s telt us shite here. We need tae know one way or another.” His voice grew softer. “He’s been a worry tae us fir years now. But his Ma, she cannae stop lovin’ him. Cannae just let it go. At least we always kent he was alive. Now we dinnae even ken that. We need tae know whit the hell’s happening!”
So I took a deep breath. And then I spoke.
“Can you tell me about him, Mr. Pringle?”
As I listened in the indistinct haze of the early morning, a summer sun peeked like a truant over the edge of the willow tree in the small courtyard at the front of our townhouse.
I sat barefoot at my desk, in a faded Ralph Lauren denim shirt and loose khaki trousers, sipping at my Starbucks coffee, fiddling with my burgundy Mont Blanc pen, every once in a while writing on a notepad, mostly a list of the things I would need for my trip: a new Gillette Sensor Excel shaver—would it come with a small container of shave gel and enough blades for the trip? Clinique soap, Colgate toothpaste—what size made sense? Whatever anti-perspirant was on sale, because, in my experience, they all tend to work the same.
At the rosy-hued beginning of our marriage, my wife Patricia would smilingly regale her lunch friends with my countless little eccentricities. This kind of snippy behavior is expected of newlyweds, and Patricia, in truth, had ample fields of opportunity to draw from, notably my supreme indifference in some areas and my dogged, persnickety insistence on minutiae in many others. As Patricia would testify, the juxtapositions were fleet and baffling, and the accompanying logic often markedly suspect.
For example, I write only with black ink, and try to use only expensive pens when possible. I buy cheap white sports socks from drugstores. Watchbands must be leather at all times except for sports activities. Clothes must be made of cotton. Shirts must fit very loosely. Underwear shall be white and full-cut and boxers are strictly for exposure on low-grade sitcoms. All shoes will be expensive. Yet haircuts can be economical. Cars must be exorbitant, but must also be proven to be worth every penny.
I have endeavored to explain much of this more than once. Cheap shoes are quite obviously no bargain, and expensive haircuts only mean the application of more styling mousse.
As I say, all this used to amuse her, but I suspect that the cumulative effect has been as grains of sand in shoes; a gentle hinting at sunny beach pleasure at first, then a mild irritant, and ultimately a discomfort that finally necessitates the removal of said footwear.
So I wrote in black ink, with a costly writing instrument, and I picked up my watch by the camel skin watchstrap and glanced at the time, before realizing that the calm I usually find in the cocoon of the familiar wasn’t there this time.
But I did have a fallback.
There was a loud howl through the open bay window. Was it hurt or happiness? I couldn’t really tell. But it did signify the arrival, in nannie-tow, of the first unruly infant at the play park.
And I could watch them play.
Then I remembered Jimmy Pringle.
Jimmy spoke in a more deliberate manner now, his bitter, inarticulate, unfocused rage choking him up on occasion, and masking his meaning. But he dearly wanted to be understood, to lead me through fifteen years in the life of his missing son Keith.
Keith left school at eighteen, which was an achievement only half the children in our town high school were able to manage. There existed a large whisky distillery nearby, which claimed most of the early leavers at sixteen, to bottle, pack, and blend, and to stand curve-backed before a long rattling conveyor belt eight hours a day, in silent deference to a product that ironically was denied the legal enjoyment of for two more years.
For those able to resist the insidious lure of time-and-a-half on Saturdays and Sundays, there were universities located in the two nearby cities. There was also a lowly polytechnic sulking in red brick and glass, offering courses of a less academic but conceivably greater practical application.
Keith Pringle went there to study at eighteen.
His parents were less than affluent, but the noble Labour government of the time saw fit to provide him with a full grant.
This was in the gentle years, before the reign of the Iron Lady, when the chronic wasters were ruthlessly weeded out, and education was strong-armed into becoming a privilege instead of a right.
Keith studied journalism at the poly for close to a year then dropped out to roadie for a punk band I had vaguely heard of on a tour of continental Europe. He abandoned the road soon after, to live with a Greek girl on a white-sand beach near the town of Oporto in Portugal. He lived rough by all accounts, but happily, if his few brief postcards home were any indication. He was young and the nomadic life sits especially well on the young. The sand was bleached and warm during the long days, and it was forgiving to pliable bones at night.
Keith and his girl fished from the harbor walls and cooked their catch over a fire at dusk, surrounded by friends. Someone had a guitar. Someone else had a jug of cheap red wine, and someone else doubtless had a joint to share. The water was still at twilight, an unreal mirror of relentless blue, and his girl was soft, dark, and very pretty.
That she was also a small-time drug dealer, or else her possessive former boyfriend was, only became clear later. Maybe she was just mean-spiritedly set up by him. Keith wasn’t very sure.
But either way, she had come to the attention of the local police, and although Keith wasn’t convicted or even charged, he was no longer welcome in Portugal.
Once he was back home he spent an indeterminate amount of time squatting in one of the big cities in the south. He moved from house to house. Ahead of authorities, and contractors, and property owners, and, sometimes, the wrecking ball.
The squatting periods were broken up by stints on well-meaning friends’ floors or house-sitting during university vacations. These interludes often ended badly as charity is almost impossible to give and to receive without tearing decent friendships apart. He would stay too long, or eat too much, or clean up too infrequently. It was an endless list, that really only functions as emotional longhand for: we no longer like you because the nature of our friendship has forever been altered.
He was a house guest for a college professor one summer, in a pretty thatched home on a famous river with a tall willow tree at the bottom of the garden that dipped arthritically into the slow flowing waters.
The professor, an art historian, liked to host parties where he could provide the lion’s share of the bold and witty talk, and where the presence of at least one genuinely dissolute bohemian was required to titillate his callow, well-heeled students.
This gig came with a supply of drugs, and required only the very occasional night in the professor’s bed, with the professor’s tired wife, while the professor watched the one-sided bout from the safety of the sidelines.
For long spells, Keith seemed to exist in some counter-cultural demimonde. His dole money kept him after a fashion. He attended folk festivals all over the country, hitching on the side roads, occasionally working in farms as seasonal labor, berry-picking in the summer months. He even managed a hard stint in a northern fishing town on the lobster boats.
There were women rather often, but they tended to tire of him quickly, and almost every coupling managed, like his house-guesting, to end on a sour note.
One girl even went as far as to change the locks on her cottage. Afterward Keith sat in silent protest on the grass outside her front door for two days and night
s, cross-legged, lost in some passionate inner mantra of unrequited love. When a complaint was eventually filed, poor Keith was moved on.
The last time Jimmy Pringle saw his son was three years ago, in the dull heart of the winter. Even at first glance it was clear that Keith had lost a lot of weight.
He came home for a week and stayed for seven, and as he silently, without any outward show of gratitude, ate his way through the family fridge, his mother washed every piece of clothing he possessed and hung it on the line outside on the few fine drying days.
At the end of the seven weeks, after a bitter and senseless argument in which both men inexplicably took things very personally, Jimmy Pringle gave Keith fifty pounds he could barely afford and, crying like a child who had broken a new bicycle on Boxing Day, threw his only son out of the house.
He was deeply sorry now, he told me, and I had no reason to doubt him.
When he had finished, I told Mr. Pringle my intentions. I told him I would keep in touch. He mumbled something in reply but I wasn’t sure what. He had talked and talked and now he was quite tired, and he was suddenly aware that I was little more than a stranger, and he perceived that in recapping his son’s life he had exposed his failures, or what he imagined were his failures, to an unknown and unsympathetic light, one that could conceivably damage him.
When he at last hung up the telephone, I was certain it was to cry, because his pain was a lost thing that, once he had found it, would hurt him again and again.
Even this early, Patricia wasn’t home, but she had left a note taped to the laser printer in my office.
She was to be shopping at a mall north of the city with a friend who she didn’t bother to name. Then to a concert. Then to dinner. She might sleep over at the friend’s or she might return later tonight. She had thought to cancel a dentist’s appointment, one I had doubtless forgotten.
She closed her note by hoping I had a nice time.
I folded the note and put it in the inside pocket of the jacket. I folded the paper so that it was flat. So that it didn’t wrinkle the material of the jacket.
For the rest of the morning I shopped, pausing at the store for the laptop, and picking up money at the bank. I bought gasoline and mints and a map of Michigan at an Amoco station that offered a cheap car wash with a fill-up. They promised soft cloths and mild soap, so I took a chance.
I had packed my bag with mostly new clothes, a pair of jeans, some shorts, khaki trousers with cuffs, three cotton shirts with long sleeves, a faded denim shirt, some white underwear from Bloomingdales, T-shirts, an older pair of Reebok cross trainers and an even older pair of Timberland boots.
I bought a box of floppy disks and CDs by Shawn Colvin, Patty Larkin, Patty Loveless and Trisha Yearwood.
In the drugstore, the ingredients listed on the back of the store-brand shampoo were the same as the expensive brand.
Standing at the checkout counter I bought a thick spiral notepad on sale and a three-pack of Snickers bars on impulse, and felt absurdly happy with myself for the indulgence.
Hovering close to outright giddiness, I had to keep reminding myself about Keith Pringle, telling myself that this was not an adventure.
At a traffic light I sat in the car and once again succumbed to stupid, inappropriate happiness.
Keith. I said sternly to myself. Keith. For God’s sake just think about Keith. But the novelty of my predicament was intoxicating; I had no definite plans, other than to nose around and try and pick up his trail. I always have a definite plan. I had no hotel reservation. I always make a reservation. There would be places to stay along the highways. I felt sure there would be. Doubtless they would be rank places. I never stay in rank places. But they would do in a pinch. Was I in a pinch? What exactly was a pinch?
Had I packed spare batteries for the laptop? I had.
I should have called Keith’s aunt today. That was simply lazy. Or outright cowardly. But Jimmy Pringle had been hard enough. He was a lost man. I would call the aunt tomorrow from wherever I was staying. What was her name again? I never forget names. Bridget? Yes, that was it. Bridget. I would call her tomorrow.
Did I have my phone card?
I did.
It was tucked inside my wallet. I carry very few cards inside my wallet. A driver’s license. Two credit cards. And money. I don’t require a lot of paper, notes to myself, reminders, receipts for things, things I will forget that I bought, things I might not realistically be able to afford to buy in the first place, and should very probably take back for a refund.
I don’t need reminders.
I don’t forget things like that.
It just isn’t something I do.
And, when you get right down to it, I can afford almost anything.
Then the traffic light changed.
SIX
In the summer months, the Interstate highways are plagued by construction work, and I made painfully slow time as I headed north. It took close to two hours to clear the southern edge of the city and the state, heading east along the industrially smudged tip of the lake, and another restless, finger-tapping, station-to-station hour to cut across the anonymous corner of Indiana that stands spoiled by and subservient to the nearby big city.
At the first rest stop in welcoming Michigan, I pulled in beside a dark-blue Ford LTD with no hubcaps and mud-splattered Mississippi plates.
I bought an orange juice from a vending machine, and ate one of my three Snickers bars with the windows of the Mercedes all the way down and the map spread out across my lap.
The gentle shifting of three tall trees and lightly spinning litter—a Burger King bag—suggested a slight breeze.
With a splutter of static I lost the last respectable radio station just as Sheryl Crow was leaving Las Vegas.
In another hour I planned to turn north and follow the edge of the lake, with perhaps three more hours driving after that, although it was difficult to tell, as the roads grew smaller, two-laned, plagued by upstart small towns, and paper distances became dishonest.
A Latino man, close to my age—perhaps a little younger but cheated out of his youth by deep lines and pain—sat on a blanket with two small children, both girls, no older than six or seven, and ate what looked like fast-food chicken from a paper bucket. The children were sharing a huge soda with a cartoon character I didn’t recognize, on the side.
The man himself had nothing to drink. He ate his food sparingly. His jeans and polo shirt were of some vintage designer label no longer desired.
They were obviously poor.
They belonged to the tired bulk of the LTD that sat rusted out and uneven on nearly dead shocks and bald tires.
When the man lifted a small piece of chicken to his mouth his hand shook violently. Instinctively I found myself looking away. The older child did likewise. But the younger one, maybe she was three years old, stared at the man, who was undoubtedly her father, with eyes that were dark and bold and ageless, and an expression that was impossible to read.
I got out of the car and walked over to them. I handed the man my remaining two Snickers bars. Before he could say anything I walked back to my car, climbed in, turned the ignition, gunned the engine savagely and drove quickly away, carefully resisting the urge to glance back in the rearview mirror.
A rich man impulsively gives away a dollar’s worth of melting chocolate and the world goes on much as it did before. The Latino man hasn’t won the state lottery, and his car is still a thin inch away from the metal graveyard reserved for Detroit’s once shiny chromed-up dream-stealing machines.
Would it surprise you very much to know that I desperately want children of my own?
Patricia and I had been as selfish as any other newlyweds as we began our marriage in the deliberate isolation of our first home—a stark white condo filled with good light and very little else—and laughingly declared the darling little
monsters to be quite incompatible with our self-centered life plan. Kids were for the drudges, we sagely opined, for those inching ever closer to their dotage, stained and harassed in their station wagons, driving from cold, shiny malls to swim team practice to costly orthodontists.
We were giddy in our arrogance, and complacent, knowing that we could so easily change, given the time that stretched expansively out before us, and the hormonal disturbances of which we had heard tell. So, like the wise new marrieds that we were, we were more than happy to wait, and perhaps reevaluate at a later time.
And now there was no later time, because I knew, without asking, that Patricia felt no different today. She didn’t want a child. Or, at least, didn’t want a child with me.
I thought of the two children on the blanket, their fast-food-slicked fingers holding the melting chocolate bars, eating as fast as they could, in the cheating summer heat.
I wiped their cheeks with a used tissue and took the crushed wrappers from their hands and dutifully found a trashcan. I ushered them into the car as they sweetly protested, still intent on playing, on prolonging our little picnic. I strapped them carefully into the back seat of the sensible car, a sturdy four-door Volvo or Saab saloon, before pulling slowly, gently away.
And a single wet, worthless tear slid down the length of my cheek.
The children run and fall and run again in the play park outside my bay window in the summer months. Made boisterous in the sunshine, they play without any of the restraints my life has assumed, and they make a mess, spraying their sand, bloodying their knees, and howling like little banshees for the short time it takes a grown-up to administer a kiss, or apply a miraculous Big Bird Band-Aid.
I watch from my window.
I suspect that they could teach me to be messy, and I suspect I would like that.
As I headed north I passed the edge of a small town.
There was a phone that worked by the side of the road, with a directory intact, outside a shiny pizza place that was hiring delivery drivers at a full dollar over minimum wage plus good tips.
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