The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Page 9

  Hoping to please, Jesse had settled a few miles away from his parents, buying a run-down Depression-era farm and making it into something, rehabbing trucks and tractors from the thirties and forties. But through all of this his father’s judgment loomed. Tune an engine, plant a tree, plow a field, break a horse, it was wrong. Only the Judge knew the right way.

  Gid, too, was wise to their father’s verbal snares—of course the question was a trick—but he was less susceptible than Jesse. He had left town, coming back only when his marriage ended, the recession hit, and he lost his house. His daughters refused to speak to him until he promised to quit drinking, but he would make no such promise. If he had to stand for one principle, let it be his refusal to bend. He had always been less prone to take the old man’s opinions to heart. He wanted only to be done with the moment and get on to the game.

  Neither son had answered his sidewinding question, but Abel had moved on. What none of them knew, least of all Abel, who believed he was in full control, was that he teetered on the brink of delirium, that at any given moment he would find himself either in robust possession of his considerable wit or adrift in the land of the lost.

  The room was quiet except for the monitor’s tick. From across the hall came another patient’s moan and it tripped something in Abel. Again he broke down. “My sons,” he said. He couldn’t get his breath. Something was wrong, something was off, and whatever it was it was deep. “Boys,” he asked, “where is your brother?”

  Assuming he meant Billy, Gid answered, “Snowstorm out there. Buses aren’t running.” Billy used a cane because of his bad hips.

  “I mean Nick. Where is Nick?”

  Neither brother could meet his gaze. Finally Gid said, “Dad, he’s gone.”

  “Well, where in red-hot Hades has he gone?” It would be like the feckless Nick to slip out when the going got rough. “He was here last night.”

  The stanchions kicked in with a mechanical gasp. Jesse cleared his throat. Gid scratched at a patch of tetter on his neck.

  The night before, Abel had been laid out on a marble slab—a bier, it was—under the dome of a darkened planetarium, his body draped in gauze, torches—or were they stars?—flaring around him. Doctors and nurses ringed the slab, stuck needles and quills and blades into him. They chanted in a strange language that he realized he, too, could speak, and into all of this he’d gone spiraling. Pig-iron ingots shackled to his legs and arms, a cannonball gate weight attached by a screw eye to the back of his head, he swirled down through shimmering dust past the dead of all eras who waved him on—his father, a favorite brother, FDR and Herod Antipas, John Wayne and Genghis Khan, Cochise and Christ, General Tojo, Marco Polo, the great William Blackstone, men all, the evil, the good—as he spiraled and sank. It came to him that every night, deep in the haunted adyta of hospital time, a switch was tripped so that the wards became caves where mysterious rites were performed. This was the great secret of medicine, a spanking white gloss on the dark world of witch doctors and shamans, and it was given to him to spread this knowledge. He vowed, as he spiraled downward, to remember it all, to remember what he’d seen, what he’d learned, but of course he forgot. It would not be for several months, as he stood on a rise gazing into the summer night sky, that a fragment of this vision would return to him and he would again, if only for a moment, know what he knew.

  Suddenly a light had glared into his eyes and in the superior knowledge of the dreamer he understood that the light was ancient, illuminating the IV tubes that ran up his arm and into his gown, causing the monitor to glow through all time onto the man who once had been a boy brought up on the King James Bible but who in one terrible instant on an embattled island in the Marianas had shifted allegiance from God to science, refusing ever after and out of principle to say grace over the meals his wife prepared. And now at the end of his days in one single flash his insight made union of science and faith, its logic immaculate, the elusive Higgs boson he’d hoped would be found in his lifetime residing in him, and this understanding came in the person of a being named Jeff, darkly bearded, garbed in phosphorescent white robes, bearing a psalter, who stood by his bed and put a comforting hand on his forehead. He’d felt exalted, felt sought out and found, anointed and shorn and returned to the fold, the Sunday School boy in wool knickers and bow tie, head smelling of Lucky Tiger hair oil, the coolness behind his ears the all-but-forgotten feel of his mother wet-sprucing his hair.

  Now, from the pocket of mind that stored the words to “Invictus” and the floor plan of the train depot in Blackstone, Virginia, from which in 1944 he’d led a signal crew from Fort Pickett to the Pacific coast, from the pocket of mind that remembered the terrible lay of the cliffs on Saipan and the halls of the army hospital on Oahu where he’d lain with a broken back reading Shakespeare’s plays came Lear’s plea: O heavens, If you do love old men, if your sweet sway Allow obedience, if yourselves are old, make it your cause; send down, and take my part!

  Believing he had said these words aloud, he again reached for his sons’ hands, but both boys had made themselves busy, Jesse by squaring a box of tissues on the nightstand, Gid by flicking the clicker of a giveaway ballpoint that read “Air Capital Computer.” What he had actually said, in the cramped tone of a gurgling gut, the word for which—borborygmus—he’d known and used in the world-before, was “Wee wye warry wahr.”

  Over their father’s body Gid caught Jesse’s eye, but before they could respond Abel shook his head violently. “Haven’t I told you time and again that one boy’s a full boy, two boys is half a boy, and three boys is no boy at all!”

  The phrase came from their grandfather, who used it teasingly to describe the foolery that resulted whenever he hired a pack of young boys to work around the stockyards, but in his own father’s voice it sounded like a curse. Jesse’s gorge rose. Warmth crept into the tips of his ears.

  Abel tried again, thinking he was saying, “All I believed and have failed to believe is united in me, and all the power you ever desired runs through your own veins. And it comes down through the ages through me, through your father to you and to me through mine. Through the veins is the truth revealed to the brain and the heart, do you see? Through the blood. For a long time my brain was not connected to my heart, but now it is. And the beauty of this is that Jeff is in charge. You’ll see him around these halls and you’ll know.”

  Jesse studied the ridges and valleys of the white woven blanket that covered his father’s body. Gid sucked his teeth. They heard his voice, but they could make no sense of what he was trying to say until he asked, “Now, where did that pig get off to?”

  They assured him that there was no pig anywhere about. Big? Did he mean big? Did he want the nurse?

  Agitated, Abel pulled at his gown, trying to sit up straighter. “I am telling you there are indeed atheists in foxholes!” Then, seemingly out of nowhere, clearly, in full frightening command, he growled, “Don’t patronize me. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Dad, it’s all right,” Gid said. He had stood up to head for the door.

  “Well, it’s obviously not all right! Have I been such a bad father?”

  Jesse swallowed hard. His mouth went dry. To keep it from quivering, he worked his jaw. Bull’s-eye, he wanted to say.

  Gid looked at his own grip on the door handle and thought, Frickin’ bingo. He wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, else, but he made no further move to leave.

  Abel felt pressure in his left frontal lobe, as though his brain were calcifying, creaking and cracking as it separated from skull and shrank in on itself. Headshrinker, he thought. Hoo-haw. Only a hotshot could make such a connection. In his sons’ scalded expressions, he saw his opening, and he understood with the vision of a soothsayer their deepest need, which was to believe he had ruined their lives.

  He considered his boys. Jesse had always been an easy touch. As a child, when someone else cried, he would blubber up. Waterworks like an artesian well. Even a whimpering dog could set him off. He n
eeded to man the hell up. Peel off his “Kick Me” sign. Gid was as tough as the hide on a windfall black walnut. He needed to be cracked so that his concrete head couldn’t waylay the rest of him, as it heretofore had.

  “Have I?” he asked again.

  Heart racing as always when his father’s mood turned combative, Jesse stared at the knees of his jeans, wishing he had the strength to walk away. Gid felt for his flask to reassure himself it would be waiting when this was over.

  “You think I’ve done wrong by you, do you?” Both of them, the soft and the hard, appeared shaken, and all because he had exposed the lie they needed to believe.

  Again Gid scratched his neck, this time with his pen. The question was too bald, too weak, but at the same time overheated and paranoid. What was the old man’s strategy now? Gid couldn’t figure it, but if you turned it a certain way, buried in the question was the admission that he had in fact ruined them. Or at least he knew they didn’t trust him. And why. This was enough for Gid; he was done. With the wisdom that sometimes came to him in the shining hour before a buzz gave way to blotto, when the reminder of common humanity came dependably to the fore and his heart opened wide to take in all beings, himself among them, opened so wide it almost hurt, he understood that although his father had cast himself as Oz the Great and Powerful and that fear and idolatry and his own slanted press had caused his children to see him the way he wanted to be seen, the man was mortal, was flawed. He knew it and Gideon knew it. And both of them knew that their flaws were the same.

  Chili powder and two #10 cans of pinto beans, Gid recited to himself, proud of his recall, tipsy though he was. “Dad,” he began, prepared to tell the old man what he wanted to hear. One final time he patted the old man’s knee, this time more firmly. “Dad, it’s all right. You’ve been a good father.”

  In a way, Gid reckoned, if he took the long view, this, too, was true. Their father was stubborn, confounding, a hero. A gentleman-scholar. A jackass. A one-man wonder and a geezer. A softhearted, hardheaded son of a bitch, depending on mood, but nothing could change him. He was who he was and would be who he was to the end. If there was some kind of lesson in that, then, hey, lesson learned.

  Gid took his cap from his pocket and put it on. Touching the bill, he said, “Gotta go,” to his brother and with the sense of a burden lifted or at least allayed he left the room. Avoiding the waiting room by taking the stairs, he hurried through the building and made his way to his beater, a whiskey-burned ’92 Plymouth, to head south toward Jesse’s place. He felt as good as he’d felt in a long time. Ready to drink to his own pardonable faults. And with time enough to make kickoff.

  Jesse sat forward on his chair, juddering a leg, wanting to leave as well. Something held him, he didn’t know what. After Gid had spewed his lie and bolted, their father had smiled weakly and then had gone to sleep. Jesse sat through several cycles of the anticlot machine and a vitals check from the nurse. Outside, dusk deepened.

  Down on South Broadway was a dive called the Stumble Inn, and behind the squat cinder-block building a thicket of thorny bodark trees provided enough cover to hide his truck. The blow and go was gone from his dashboard but his own Breathalyzer cheater, the AlcoHAWK, was still in the glove box. He could be careful. He could watch what he drank—two beers max—stay under the legal limit, and be all right. On the other hand, the AlcoHAWK’s double AAs were more than likely dead. He’d have to stop for batteries. How weenie-ass could you get?

  And how could the old man just lie there and ask them the million-dollar question and then go to sleep, maybe for the last time? How could he slip, scot-free, the knots of resentment he’d tied? Outrage rose in Jesse at how many times he’d been hurt, at the years of feeling hardly-ever-good-enough and not once perfect. And he had unanswered questions. Had his father ever hated himself? Ever felt guilt? Had he been unfaithful? Had he taken a life? Thought of taking his own? Had he ever thought he was a failure?

  His father stirred, opened his eyes, and looked blankly around the room. He rasped a word that Jesse interpreted as “Water.”

  When Nick was alive and they were little kids and would threaten, during a fight, to kill each other, his father had a method for teaching them the terrible power of words. Mishearing his term for Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment, they called the practice Harry-Carry. The Judge would frog-march them to the cutlery drawer, pull out a case of ivory-handled steak knives and present them, saying, “You want to kill each other? Gentlemen, choose your weapons.” Several times Jesse and Nick had gone so far as to draw knives and brandish them while the Judge stood by, making no move to stop them. Nick was a gambler, his bet always that Jesse would cave first, which he always did, dropping the knife and sniveling like a big Baby Huey at the prospect of murdering his brother.

  Did the old man really want water? The doctor’s orders were NPO, nothing by mouth. The IV supplied him with fluid. Was he really thirsty, or was this yet another test, another standoff that he, Jesse, would fail?

  His father gestured with his tape-and-tube-covered hand toward his open mouth. His tongue was coated, white.

  Jesse stood, unsure of what to do. With the sudden rise to his feet, his field of vision blackened, closing in like an old-timey camera’s aperture, and he had to wait until the darkness lifted. He was hungry, angry, lonely, tired, all four at once, the conditions AA taught him that could lead to acting on impulses he would later regret, but he didn’t care. The words rose from his gut and before he could stop himself he had said, “You sorry old bastard. Who in hell did you think you were?”

  The Judge blinked hard. An odd look came over his features, a look that was part shock and part delight, part triumph. “Attaboy!” he whispered hoarsely, trying to raise his tethered hand to pump a fist, failing. “Attaboy!”

  “Oh, shit, Dad,” Jesse said. “Just … shit.” He would not be right with his father. He would never be right. He didn’t know yet whether or not he would pull his truck behind the bodark trees and yank open the Stumble Inn’s door or whether or not he would drive past and go safely home, but he knew he would never be right. He didn’t know yet that he would not fall off the wagon, at least not this night, or that when his fall came it would not just come but would be on him like paint, and if there was a reason for it, it would feel more like a miracle cure for the long scourge of blame. He knew only that for the rest of his life he would take from his memory the matter of his father and worry it the way his little blind barn dog worried a possum carcass, rolling in it to keep the good stink alive.

  He hadn’t for a minute believed that his father approved of his outburst or that the “Attaboy” was sincere. But this, too, was the Judge’s way—a last-ditch turnaround that made it appear that all along he had intended an outcome. Against such shape-shifting, no one could win. Jesse laughed. He guessed it didn’t much matter what he did. Maybe it never had. The old man would be the way he was regardless. He would always win and it didn’t mean jack and this was the great big joke Jesse’d been falling for all his life. He could fight it or he could move on. Without knowing why he did so, he put his hand on his father’s brow and in a gesture that anyone with a less troubled history might have said came solely from love and an unguarded heart, surprised himself by leaning down to kiss his forehead.

  The kiss pleased Abel in a floating and general way, but he had already forgotten the argument. He had moved on to a moonlit night on a promontory on Saipan where figures scurried far below on the beach. They weren’t GIs or Japanese soldiers running sorties; the island was secured. After a last banzai charge by the Japanese army, thousands of the island’s Chamorro civilians had jumped from the cliffs to their deaths, but some remained, under American occupation. The little group below, starving women and children among them, was likely comprised of these poor souls, scavenging for food. His captain had ordered him to escort up the hill a chaplain who wanted to be shown what went on at night on the island. On the climb, the beet-faced Church-of-Christer from Kent
ucky talked of Japanese blood, of torture, how he wanted some teeth, maybe an ear. For a time they watched the activity below, and then the chaplain dared him to shoot, to pick them off one by one. Tired, in pain from a back injury he’d been trying to gut his way through, galled by the cleric’s hypocrisy, and never thinking he would hit anything—Abel had squeezed the Enfield’s trigger, more to rise to the dare and blast the obscene leer from the chaplain’s face than for any other reason. The figures below scattered, all but one, which fell to the sand and was still. The chaplain wanted to clamber down to the body, but Abel shouldered his rifle and walked away. Later he told the captain that he’d fired at a pulatatt bird that had spooked him, but seven decades past the shot still flashed behind his eyes, and he couldn’t—he wouldn’t—forgive himself.

  From the cliff he moved to a late spring afternoon on the Ark River near where he’d grown up, and in his mind tornado sirens moaned and the sky loured darkly and the light went arsenic-green as out into a field of golden wheat he walked, grown older than he’d ever thought to be, to dare a scudding funnel cloud to seize him, take him in the vortex so he could feel its power, send him like a flatland Ahab sailing full speed for the world ahead, where the sorrows of the present world could never reach, where Jeff, who loved him after all—oh, after all—waited to take him home.