Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  He hopes he does have grandchildren. That’d be something anyway. And maybe they don’t know anything. Maybe they’re still little kids.

  But he’s getting greedy. He is. If Susan does have kids, or even one, why would she let him meet them? He’ll be lucky to even lay his eyes on her.

  He glances down at his daughter’s picture taped to the dash. Its bottom has started to curl, and she’s shifted slightly to the side. He reaches over and presses his thumb to the Scotch tape, pressing it hard, leaving it there longer than he knows will do any good whatsoever. There’s the blare of a car horn, and he looks back at the road, brightly lit and unwinding.

  Maybe driving straight through isn’t such a good idea. Daniel’s eyes burn, and his lower half feels sewn into his seat, and he’s driving slower than even his slow pace. Three times since crossing over into Georgia, cars or pickups have come up fast on his rear and flashed their lights then laid on their horn as they passed him, two on the left, one on the right. He’s driven by signs for Pooler and Garden City and Savannah, Tybee Island, Pembroke, and Richmond Hill. Once more they pull him back to the war between the states, and again there comes that rising dread that he’s driving back through time itself. But he’s been doing this his whole damn life, ever since he first went down.

  It’s true, but so did ten thousand other men. Him and Pee Wee Jones. That one afternoon he and Daniel were playing checkers on Jones’s bunk, Pee Wee had just taken one of his kings and said, “You wanna take that move back, Danny A, but you cain’t.”

  “Nope.”

  “Uh-uh, what’s done is done.”

  “Yep.”

  They were quiet awhile, studying the board. Pee Wee’s hair had started to go gray at the sides, and behind him, taped to his wall, was one of his pencil sketches, this one of a naked woman with an Afro and her hands on her hips and her legs spread like she was daring anyone not to look.

  “If I could go back I just never would’ve drank that gin. I didn’t even like gin, but I drank it. Next thing I know I’m waving heat in my daddy’s face. Twenty years of getting beat down and beat down and beat down and no more, I suppose.”

  “You shot him?”

  “I shot ’em both.”

  Danny didn’t ask who he meant. You didn’t do that. And now Pee Wee’s eyes seemed to be miles and miles from somewhere else, and Danny double-hopped two of Pee Wee’s homemade men.

  “All I can think about is going back and emptying that bottle before I ever touch it. I must’ve played that over ten million times. I still buy the bottle, but then I dump it out into the street and I walk home and that is that.”

  Danny didn’t say anything. Or maybe he did, but Daniel doesn’t remember that now, only that he’d missed Pee Wee when he was bundled back up to Walpole for going after Polaski for calling him stupid nigger one time too many. And then Danny was stuck with the rest of them, with cons like McGonigle, who if he ever went back in time only went there to feel that thrill again or whatever the hell it was he felt when he’d—what? Did Daniel really think he was better than him? Yes, because McGonigle only regretted getting caught.

  Up ahead, past a sign for Fort Morris Historic Site, there’s another sign—gas, food, and lodging. Daniel checks his rearview, but there’s only a lone pair of headlights a quarter mile back. It must be close to ten o’clock and it’s a weeknight, most of the good citizens probably in bed right now. He misses his trailer, the fan blowing warm air over him, a light rain on the tin roof. And what’s his daughter doing right now? It’s a question that for many years he stopped having in his head. He’d like to say that never happened, but it did. He just stopped thinking of her. In many ways she became like the characters in his books on tape when he was done listening to them. It was like they left inside him only the dried husk of what they’d been, a locust’s shell stuck on tree bark.

  Except all those other husks were truly empty and hers never was.

  Did she read his letter alone? Did she wait till her kids were in bed first? Or did she open it right there in her professor’s office? And how did he start it? He remembered the first part, but what came after?

  My dear daughter Susan,

  Ive got no right to call you these things.

  That was the way to start, wasn’t it? Wouldn’t she want to keep reading, knowing right off that he knew that? But what came next? And why did he have to go into all that shit about him and the Reactor and Captain Suspicion and all that other shit? Did he want her to feel sorry for him? No, but she needs to know how he was, that he was—what? A boy? Just a jealous little boy? A boy who now wants her to take care of him.

  Did he? Does he?

  The exit’s coming up on him, and he steers into the right lane, his headlights on a torn trash bag on the side of the road. Clothes have spilled out, a purple sweatshirt and a white pair of pants, and it brings him back to trash left on the beach. The court paroled cons to where they committed their crimes, and Daniel hadn’t minded living with his mother, but it was bad being back on the strip. She’d sold the Sea Spray and bought another cottage on the north side of the Midway three blocks from the water. His first day out, it was early spring, and he’d gone for a long walk. There were patches of snow on the asphalt and the sand, the strip boarded up for the season, though by the looks of the place there was no real season anymore. His father’s masterpiece, the Broadway Flying Horses, was gone, sold to someone, Daniel later learned, who packed it all up and shipped it to the West Coast. The arcade was half empty and half gone, too, a condo built on stilts where the Dubies used to live. That first afternoon, that’s as far as he’d walked. He could feel his and Linda’s old cottage four blocks south like a vibrating sac of poison inside him and if he walked there it would have split open and moved through his veins to his head and heart.

  And the strip looked smaller somehow, the buildings shorter, the beach sand shallower, the water dirtier-looking than he’d remembered. But the worst of it all was walking toward the Himalaya and not seeing the Himalaya. Instead, there was a new building there on iron piers. It had long, high windows and a wraparound deck with shiny steel railings. On the side of the building was a faded banner from the season before, The Outlaws, August 10th–September 13th. Daniel stared at that a long while, then he turned and walked fast back to his mother’s cottage where she stood at the stove in her buttoned-up cardigan talking to herself while she stirred the Irish stew she knew he loved.

  “Yes, I washed them, don’t tell me I didn’t.” Between these words to no one, she hummed a tune he didn’t recognize and she did it in the high, wavering voice of a woman older than she was, only sixty then, though her back and shoulders had already begun to slump and he stood there thinking that he had done that to her, this piece of shit whose one bright and shining moment had been in a plywood and plexiglass booth eight feet above the asphalt, hovering there like the moon itself, like it would always be there the way the moon would always be there and he’d be remembered as one of the kings in red who had risen to it with his voice, the one good thing he’d ever been given. And now some backhoe had crushed it down in a day.

  Soon he found work with a painting company up in Portsmouth. He was thirty-nine years old then, and his boss was ten years younger, a big friendly kid who’d dropped out of college to make money. He’d gotten a contract for thirty new condo units on the Piscataqua River, and he had a crew of six, most of them loud boys in their twenties Daniel ignored as he worked. At lunch, they would gather in what would soon be the lobby of the building, and they’d sit on the floor and eat. At dawn every day, Daniel’s mother would pack him a meal of two baloney sandwiches, a bag of potato chips, and two or three chocolate chip cookies she baked from store-bought dough. But the boys he painted with talked too much about the good times they’d just had or the good times they were about to have, all of it having to do with booze and bars or the new ride they were about to buy, or some ball game he didn’t even know about, and at every lunch break they always g
ot around to talking about women, the ones they’d fucked or would like to, and it was like being back in school again, on the outside looking in, except these boys didn’t seem to know one thing about anything, especially about how wrong and hard things could get, so at lunch Daniel stopped eating with them and instead would stay in the room he was painting, eating his mother’s sandwiches in new paint fumes that made everything taste like that too.

  Those boys didn’t like him for that. One night, standing out on the sidewalk at the end of their hours, Ricky, a skinny kid with an entire arm tatted over with green dragons, said, “What’s the matter, Ahearn? You too good for us?”

  Daniel had turned to him. The kid was smiling, but his eyes were not, and the others, including his boss, were watching. Daniel could feel the Reactor’s heat drop to his hands, Danny happy to end this before it began, but he was a parolee now, and besides, Danny was dead and gone. Daniel was about to say that he just liked being alone.

  “Knock it off, Rick,” their boss said. “He’s a better fucking’painter than you’ll ever be.”

  “Hey, I’m just busting his balls.” Rick lit a cigarette then turned and walked down the sidewalk, smoke drifting over his shoulder. A few of the others were talking about where to go for a few beers and some important basketball game, and Daniel could see his boss wanted to do that himself.

  “Sound good to you, Daniel? We’ll grab some wings.”

  But those early months out, Xenakis had laid an eight p.m. curfew on him. He had to get back. “No, my mother’s sick.”

  His young boss looked only mildly pissed off and put out. He told the others to order him some wings, he’d be there in an hour, and he and Daniel drove quietly down the highway in the work van that smelled like dried caulking and dusty canvas tarps. It was what Danny’s life had smelled like, too, that and the ocean and the damp sand of the beach, and here he was fifteen years later right back again in the dark heart of where it had all gone wrong. He needed to leave, and leave soon.

  “Your old lady’s not really sick, is she?”

  One of the van’s headlights wobbled slightly, its shaky light on the highway ahead. Daniel stared at it. “No.”

  “That’s cool, you got other plans.”

  “I got a curfew from my PO.”

  “You do time?” The kid’s tone was as upbeat as ever, but Daniel could feel a thickening of the air between them, and he wasn’t sure why he’d told him. Maybe because he was lonesome. Maybe he thought he could be a friend.

  “Yeah, I did time.”

  “Drugs?”

  Daniel stayed quiet. If he told this kid the truth, he’d probably lose his job. If he told this kid the truth, he’d never be his friend.

  Things changed after that ride. Daniel’s boss was still respectful to him and often praised his brush and roller work, how clean and efficient his lines were, but he did it too carefully, like he was afraid to rub Daniel the wrong way. And he probably told one or two of the others on the crew too, because they started looking at him like he might be a scorpion not far from their feet. This was no good. At least when he had his own painting business he mostly worked alone, and he was better alone. He’d always been better alone.

  At night he and his mother would sit in her small living room and watch TV. She liked the old shows with the old actors in them like Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball and her husband with the Spanish accent. For every stupid thing Lucy did, Daniel’s mother would laugh. But it was hard to watch a happy couple doing happy goofy things together, and Daniel would stand and go to his bedroom, which was also his mother’s sewing room. After Liam died, she took up making things, mainly dresses for young girls she gave away or sold to a shop owner up in Seabrook. Hanging on hangers on the back of the closet door were over a dozen little dresses, and Daniel would lie back on his bed, tired from the day’s work, his bedside lamp on, his mother laughing in the other room, and he’d stare at those dresses. Daddy, I’m here. See? I’m here. He put in for a transfer as soon as he could.

  And he needed a job where he didn’t have to talk to people. That barbershop in Boston wasn’t the best place for that. He’d work his eight hours, cutting hair and shaving faces while trying to make small talk, but he had a rep as the quiet one and his regulars would tease him about not having an asshole because he had no opinions, either, even on the Celtics or the Bruins or who he wanted to be our new president.

  Daniel slows his Tacoma and peers at the possibilities. To his right is a lighted gas station island, a Holiday Inn just beyond it, a Fairfield Inn just beyond that. But to his left is the dark rise of a hill and at the top there are two more motels, a Marriott and a Hampton Inn. The second one is the name of the beach just north of Salisbury back home, and he likes that it’s on a hill where he might find a room overlooking whatever there is to see. He accelerates up the hill, still thinking about telling his PO how he wanted to work someplace else doing something different. Xenakis stared at the unlit cigarette he was always holding between two fingers.

  “What else can you do? Furniture, right?”

  “Yeah, caning.”

  Then came those good years in that shiny little town he never should have left.

  Andover had a central square and all its buildings were made of repointed brick with granite lintels over plate-glass windows that never seemed to be dirty, new dresses or suit jackets or skiwear hanging on the other side. There were fine restaurants that posted their menus in lighted glass boxes near their front entrances, and only late-model cars were parked at the curbs, the men and women who drove them looking like they’d gone to college and gotten good jobs in tall buildings down in Boston or else worked in banks or law offices or car dealerships here in town. After his PO okayed it, he got work refinishing furniture in a warehouse just across the town line in Lawrence, and he rented a room off Andover’s central square in the back of a house full of small rented rooms like his. It had a kitchenette and a bathroom and small table and bed, and it looked out at a narrow lawn that sloped down to thick hedges ten feet high. There was a two-car garage and a concrete driveway, and after only three months of refinishing tables and chairs and old desks and nightstands, Daniel’s boss, a warm Dominican named Hector, gave him a raise and Daniel told him he was even better at caning. Hector started telling customers and soon Daniel had his own work space near one of the cracked windows overlooking the river. There he weaved damp strips of cane under and over themselves while Spanish music played on a boom box out on the floor behind him, the other guys shouting out in Spanish to each other while he worked, and he’d look out at the sun on the brown river, and it was good being alone again.

  One night he dreamed about his father. In the dream Liam was standing on the strip in his white painter coveralls smiling at him, waiting for his son to catch up because Danny had the tools and Liam couldn’t do anything without them. Except Liam wasn’t angry and impatient the way he would’ve been in life. He was warm and calm, like the two of them had all the time in the world. And Daniel woke to the first light of dawn seeping from the sides of his pulled shades, his father’s long, silent absence feeling like a broken bone he’d never set.

  He should’ve gone to his funeral. Except everybody knew him. They knew what he’d done. And he should’ve stayed in Andover, where he got treated with nothing but respect, where he was Ahearn the Caner, or just Daniel, and when anybody who knew his work said his name it sounded solid to his own ears, like tapping the walnut leg of an old Victorian and feeling no rot whatsoever.

  All those years down in Andover his mother had never seen his place. One or two Sundays a month he’d take a cab up to see her after she went to church, and the two of them would sit in front of her TV and eat the dinner she had to’ve gotten up before the sun to cook. Usually pork roast and canned gravy and bottled applesauce and frozen peas she boiled till they were nearly mush. She’d always been better at breakfasts. Sitting in front of whatever was on, probably an old movie on the old movies channel in the old
times when it seemed that every man wore a suit and a hat and every woman wore a dress and pearls, it was hard not to feel like Danny expelled from school again, Liam off at work, just the two of them, Danny the troublemaker and his mother who loved him no matter what he’d done.

  One afternoon, his plate empty, he looked over at his mother as she watched what she watched. She still wore her apron over her church clothes, and her thin hair was matted in the back. In the soft warmth of that sofa with his full belly and slowing breaths, he could feel how he was as much a part of her as if he were one of her arms or legs or kidneys and liver, that she could no more push him away than she could cut off her own head.

  And he never got that from his own wife. He didn’t. And so it was his mother’s fault.

  That’s what he was thinking then. He was. That her devotion to him ruined him for any other woman. That he’d expected his Linda to put him first too. That maybe his mother shouldn’t’ve been so good to him all the time.

  Then the Andover years had slipped down the drain out to sea and she was eighty-three and then she was gone. His parole years were behind him then. He could come and go as he pleased, but for three months he lived in his mother’s cottage off the strip, though he never walked around there again. With some of the money she’d left him, he bought the Tacoma, and he started driving down to Port City just to go walking. But it was different there. No one knew him. He wasn’t Ahearn the Caner, he was no one.

  The courthouse just south of downtown. It was a red-brick three-story box overlooking a sunken pond where ducks lived and where Canadian geese stopped and rested every fall on their way south. There were tall maples and oaks, and around the water were benches bolted into concrete pads with the brass plaques of donors sunk into them. It was a place he’d only glimpsed from inside the courtroom forty years before, but now he’d walk down there and feed the ducks and try not to feel as if he were floating naked in deep space, his dear mother his last living cord to anything good or familiar, cut and withered and buried in Long Hill Cemetery three miles from the beach and within earshot of the highway. It’s where Liam was buried too, his granite stone low and stubby with just barely enough room for his name.