by Craig Nova
My father tried to avoid this decision for as long as he could, just the way he avoided everything else in his life. His reactions compensated, or so he thought, for all his failures of decisiveness. It made him think, when he got out of some physical mess, that he was still a pursuit pilot in World War II who had just done the impossible once again.
So, he turned toward the young women in their bikinis, their skin a little moist in the hot sun, their arms and breasts covered with light, their hair bright as only youth can make it, all filaments, the flash of promise itself. Then he turned toward the Frisbee player, who had now landed and who looked at the oncoming car with an idiotic acceptance of the facts: there he was, arm out, holding a pink toy while he was getting ready to die. He smiled a sort of apologetic smile and closed his eyes.
My father then jerked the wheel the other way, and the car slid sideways on the grass, the rear end coming around like a sling filled with a rock, and this sideways motion, actually the beginning of a spin, let him get around the kid with the Frisbee, between two young women in their bathing suits, who now sat up, holding their tops with a modest tug. My father went into the Charles River, where the first two tires hit the mud and then the rest of the car flipped right over, the water coming up in a silver spray.
The car sank.
A couple of sculling boats rowed over to where the car went in and the scullers sat there, oars trapped between chest and knees as they stared at the dark water, the rising bubbles, and an oil slick. The young women in their bikinis came down to the water and the Frisbee players did, too.
“Jesus,” said one of the boys. “Did you see that?”
“A close one, all right,” said another.
“All right,” said one. “I’m going in.”
The car was upside down under the water, and the door was about a foot into the mud of the bottom. The Frisbee player held onto the door handle and pulled, and while he was suspended in murk of the Charles River, the light came down in long, yellow, chemically tinted rays. My father hovered, his face in a bubble of air that was at the bottom of the car, although it came up as far as the window. The air bubble was getting smaller.
“Push,” said the Frisbee player. “Push,” although under water it came out as “Hooosh, hooosh.” My father swung around and put his feet against the door, and then the player came up to the surface.
“I need help,” he said.
One of the young women jumped in, too, and then she hovered in front of the window. She joined the young man, both outside the window where my father went up and down, into the bubble and then back to the window so he could look out, like a fish in an aquarium, with eyes that never really seemed to show concern about anything, not even dying. The young woman’s hair floated around her head and she brushed it away with a sort of sultry, impatient gesture. My father took a deep breath in the bubble and dropped down so that his face was just opposite hers, only the thickness of the glass between him and pink, full lips on the other side. Then my father went back to pushing all the harder.
The bubbles rose to the surface with a steady quality and broke into the pale air with a constant tick, tick, tick. Then a tow truck that had been going along by the river stopped and a young woman waved it over. The truck driver backed up over the grass and unhitched the hook of the winch, which one of the young men attached under the Cadillac, to part of the frame, and the driver threw a lever. The winch made a shrill grinding, and for a while it looked as though the car wasn’t going to be pulled out of the river but that the truck was going to be winched into the water. The oil slick was pretty big by now.
Then the car emerged from the water, dripping like some kind of monster, half machine and half animal that was climbing from the slime of the river onto dry land to give birth. My father kicked through the window and the last of the water rushed out, like amniotic fluid, and he slithered out onto the grass.
“Weren’t you scared?” said one of the young women.
“Scared?” said my father. “I can hold my breath forever.”
“Oh,” said the young woman. She hitched up her top a little more.
“Come on,” said my father. “Let’s go up to the Wursthaus for a drink.”
“I don’t think so,” said one of the young women.
“Why not?” said my father.
“I’ve got to study,” she said.
“Oh,” said my father. “That. I wouldn’t worry about that.”
“I don’t think you need anything more to drink,” said the young woman.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said my father. “Just look at this mess.”
He walked over the grass, his sneakers filled with water, which made a steady squish, squish as he came up to the sidewalk, went up to the boathouse, crossed the street, and walked up to the Wursthaus in Harvard Square. He was still there when the Cambridge police came in. Both of them were in uniform, and while one was young and fit, as though he spent his off-hours biking along the river, the older one was heavy in the stomach and his skin seemed as pale and gray as an oyster. Their leather belts creaked, and their radios made some static that was interrupted every now and then by a dispatcher’s uninflected voice.
“Jesus, Chip, you’ve got to stop doing things like this,” said the older one.
“Come on, Billy,” said my father. “Sit down.”
“Jesus, Chip. You’ve got to listen.”
“Not yet,” said my father. “Not yet.”
“When,” said Billy Meerschaum, “just when is that going to be?”
“You’ll see,” said my father.
“We’re going to have to cite you,” said the other, younger cop.
“What for?” said my father.
“Leaving the scene of an accident,” said the younger one. My father read the cop’s name tag, white letters on black plastic.
“Drunk driving,” said Billy Meerschaum.
“I’ve been here having a drink for a while now,” my father said.
“You did that on purpose,” said the young one.
“Prove when I had a drink,” said my father. “I know the law.”
“Yes, Chip,” said Billy. “But there’s more to life than that.”
“You’re kidding yourself,” said my father.
The cops stood next to the table where my father sat. The Wursthaus had a sort of woody quality, and the dark wainscoting had a shine to it from the years of greasy food that had been cooked there. But now, according to what Billy Meerschaum told me at the funeral, the place seemed somehow frozen or suspended, as though this moment, which had come at the end of a lot of moments with my father in Cambridge, was a variety of milestone; that while my father had been stopped for drunk driving and had even attended a course for people who had been arrested this way, he had never run into the river before.
Meerschaum wrote out the ticket, just for leaving the scene of an accident. At the top, in his block printing, neat as an architect, he wrote, “May 25th.” Then he passed it over.
“In the merry month of May . . . ,” sang my father.
“We could arrest you,” said the younger cop.
“Shitload of paperwork,” said my father. “And what would it accomplish?”
“Not much,” said Meerschaum.
“So, why don’t you sit down and have a drink, like old friends?” said my father.
“I’m not your friend,” said the younger cop.
“I’m going off duty,” said Meerschaum.
The younger cop gave him a look and then said, “Fine.”
Billy Meerschaum sat down. My father told Meerschaum a joke about a Russian gymnast and a French seagull, and it was so obscene that Meerschaum, a man of forty who had been a cop for fifteen years, couldn’t tell it to me at the funeral without blushing.
Then my father got up and started walking home.
He went through Harvard Square, where the panhandlers sat here and there on the sidewalk, one with a sign that said, “Blind and with
cerebral palsy, hit by fire engine . . . ,” and where a man, known as the Raver, stood in the middle of the sidewalk and spoke, in a loud clear voice, about how he had been up in a flying saucer and that he had learned from the aliens, who were wearing uniforms of people who worked at Burger King, something called Zen and the Art of the Cosmic. He said, for instance, that life was just a breath, that it came and went. This is how, he said, one could appreciate the beauty of the stars. Here was the way, he said, the shortness of time is what makes for the possibility of beauty.
My father came along in sneakers that were almost dried out, but still making a little sound like a washing machine that won’t drain completely.
The driveway of his house was filled with cars, and even from the street my father heard the students who had come into the house, at his forgotten invitation, to have a piñata party. They were used to his forgetting. My father taught diplomatic history and had made friends with his Latin American students (all the better to say, one afternoon, “Hey, Cedro, here’s an old friend from Washington I’d like you to meet—a good guy”), and they came every year near the end of May to drink and celebrate the spring with a piñata, tequila, and food that came from the cuisines of Argentina (steaks, mostly), Central America (fried plantain), and Mexico (tacos with cilantro).
My father came into the house and then to the backyard, where the piñata was suspended from the frame for the awning of the porch. Ten or so students stood around, dancing to Mexican brass, and when my father came outside, they shouted, and one of them, a dark-haired Mexican woman, took him under the piñata where they danced and where the other students formed a circle around them. The students had made margaritas and now the pitchers were almost empty, covered with little rills of water where the mist on the glass had condensed. All of the students had been drinking on empty stomachs, and they had gone from nervous sobriety to outright hilarity, faces red, eyes bloodshot, shirts untucked, straps of dresses off shoulders. My father came in and drank the last of the margaritas. It was a May afternoon, warm, seductive, right at the end of the academic year.
The piñata was bright red, covered with small curls of shiny paper, and its legs were stiff. The head of the thing was like a small ironing board, and its eyes were as dark as a can of black shoe polish. One of the students pulled on a rope as the students blindfolded one and then another, making jokes about bondage and how it was done in Buenos Aries after dark. Then they went after the piñata with a baseball bat. The students couldn’t have hit the piñata if it had been hanging there like a balloon, let alone being moved up and down on a clothesline through a pulley. But here is where my father’s reflexes came in.
They blindfolded him and gave him the Louisville Slugger, and he stood there, in the middle of the circle of the men and women from Latin American, mostly short and overweight, some with bad skin, all of them swaying back and forth. He listened to the pulleys as the clothesline that controlled the piñata ran back and forth, the squeak of the pulleys mixed in with a little rumble, too. He waited until it was on its way down and then, anticipating where it would be, he took a good cut.
I often think that the explosion of the piñata was like that in the middle of his head, in the depths of his brain, which took place just then: the red piñata exploded, and the candy inside was wrapped in red foil, so that it appeared like drops of blood as it soared upward from the power of the swing, the bits of candy forming perfect arcs against that spring sky. The piñata broke, and the shreds of starched newspaper from which it had been constructed showered down too, the print, the bits of black and white photographs all appearing like memories that one could almost recall or that were in the midst of somehow being forgotten. The gray flak with red centers, the heat of the desert sand, a first kiss with a woman who wore red lipstick, who pressed herself against him so he could feel her heat. Then the red candies hit the patio with a light tinkling, a rain of shiny, moist-looking clots. Then the students ran to pick it up and my father fell.
My father used to love to do this, to fall down, and he often did it when he first came home or in the midst of a party like this, and so the students didn’t think much of it until he began to wet his pants. He refused to answer when they asked if he was all right, his mouth moving in an awkward, fish-like way. The students dropped the candy and called an ambulance and they called me, too.
I got there just before the ambulance, and when I came onto the patio my father opened his eyes and stared at me for a moment. He strained against one dead hand, as though it was tied to the ground, and then he gestured slowly with the other. I leaned down. He still smelled of the Charles River, the drinks in the Wursthaus, the margaritas, too, but this was his usual scent. That is, his scent without the oil and piss of the river.
“Are you all right?” I said.
“No,” he said. “This is it.”
He strained against that one arm on the ground.
“Not much time, Frank. Too bad, since I know you’re in trouble. Jesus, it must be something if you are coming to me.”
“I was going to talk about it today.”
He tried to swallow but had trouble and then gagged.
“It’s getting buzzy, you know that? Your face looks like it was done as pointillism. I bet you didn’t think I knew words like that.”
The ambulance made its mechanical barking, not close yet, about a half mile away.
“So, do you want to tell me you love me?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, why don’t you?”
“I love you.”
My father cried, but tears appeared on just one side of his face.
“Here’s the best I can say. Pick your spots. You think in Poland when I told you about that guard that I was brave? I know you think that. But it wasn’t that way.”
He drooled, and I wiped it with my handkerchief.
“Don’t waste the time,” he said. “Nothing but dots. Here’s the way it was on that road in Poland. I knew I was going to die anyway if I didn’t do something. And the guard thought he might buy a little goodwill. A chance for a deal. See? Pick your spots.”
The ambulance arrived.
“Just dots now,” he said. The men in white coats arrived and a woman, too, who pushed through the crowd to show that she was in charge. They brought in a sort of gurney and lifted him onto it with a rough, sudden gesture. The ambulance had its siren on as it went down the street, although everyone knew there was no reason to hurry.
The time of death was called at the hospital.
The world had been anchored by my father’s existence, even down to its colors, the stink of the smoke in the air, the way women walked on the streets, the way light fell, the intensity of the shadows. In some subtle, pale way these things had changed, not so much in appearance, although there was a little of that, but in a more mysterious sense of not being so dependable. And, while the colors faded a little, and the stink of exhaust suggested the underworld, I turned into Christ Church in Cambridge and sat at the back.
A wooden bench, white walls, light coming in the windows, all at once ordinary and new, or at least different. The essential fact was the invisible wall between me and a man I wanted to talk to: maybe that is why the colors faded and the air seemed heavy. I opened the book in the shelf of the back of the pew ahead of me, and came to this:
1.How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? For ever?
How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?
2.How long shall I take counsel in my soul,
Having sorrow in my heart daily?
How long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?
3.Consider and hear me, O LORD my god:
Lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death;
In the light, in the musty silence, in the sound of the street, I found that while my beliefs were gone, that didn’t stop my longing for a minute. All I had was that infinite desire for comfort, so unrequited, and the words printed on that onionskin paper that, for generation
s, had been so desperately handled.
[ CHAPTER FOUR ]
AROUND THE CORNER, in the Burger King, the young men and women moved back and forth from the counter to the kitchen where the sandwiches came out wrapped in wax paper or in those little boxes. The air smelled of french fries. I got a cup of coffee and then sat down by the window. A young woman, in one of those uniforms, came up to the table to wipe it down, since I had sat there, without thinking, after two junkies had been trying to eat a hamburger.
Still, the clatter and movement in the Burger King was at once reassuring and appalling: the sucking of the last Coke out of a cup through a straw (like a small death rattle), the crinkle of waxed paper, the laughter about a joke or comment, the shouts from the back of the kitchen, the alarm of a timer, as though the buns were on life support. And to make the collection perfect, my cell phone chirped, too, as insistent as a cricket on a hot night. I guessed word about my father traveled fast.
But, of course, I should have been thinking of my grandmother, Mrs. Mackinnon, who would have known that fate, that intricate machine of the gods, was just showing me an aspect of my own problems, which, of course, had at their heart the certainty of a scandal.
The caller ID showed Tim Marshall, a good friend, deputy inspector of the Boston police, hair the color of a silver dollar, face with a rose tint, blue eyes fatigued with one too many bodies found in the trunk of a car at Logan Airport, but still cheerful, in a way, and a man who would mean his condolences. He’d given enough of them.
