Authors: Owen King
“Shit. It’s Peter. I should take this.” Mina unsnapped her belt and craned over Sam to jab the button to open the trunk. The guitar ring blared again. “You can just set my stuff inside the door, fucker. Thanks.” With that, his sister hopped from the car and ran toward their father.
It was bullshit, wasn’t it? He felt light-headed in the moistness of the early day. It was bullshit. Sam was not relieved; he was astounded. His sister had told him the worst possible lie. He had driven all this way. It wasn’t even ten in the morning.
Sam stepped out of the car. “Mina,” he called after her, although he had no idea what he wanted to say to her, what he could say to her. “Mina—”
“My children!”
His father’s voice was a bell clap; Sam flinched.
“Gotta take this, Pop,” said Mina, waving her cell phone. She pecked the old man a kiss on the beard, gave Tom a quick one-armed hug, and spun away. Her boots thumped up the steps to Tom’s front door, and she disappeared inside.
“All right.” Booth shook his head. “Isn’t she wonderful?”
“Yup. She’s a cool kid,” said Tom.
“And who is that alarmingly handsome young man standing over there beside the little red car?”
Tom said he looked familiar.
■ ■ ■
The soggy grass squished under Booth’s heavy tread. His cane plunged and swung in a happy, vigorous rhythm. His beard was patched gray and white. As he moved, a slice of trembling belly peeked from between the flapping tails of his white shirt. Sam thought he must have crossed the three-hundred-pound threshold since the last time they were together. The old man was grinning, and his teeth were big and stained.
Sam rocked on his heels. Of course it was bullshit. He raised a hand. “Hi,” he said, and found himself smiling numbly in return. Sam thought: When have I ever been happy to see him? “Hi,” he said again, and his crackly voice didn’t sound like his voice.
As his father’s arms were raising, opening wide, Sam decided, I might as well, and he moved into them. He pressed his face into the massive chest, smelled the soap and hair and cologne and cigars and the fried eggs the old man must have eaten for breakfast; he let his mouth and
nose slide across the shoulder of Booth’s wrinkled white shirt. For a moment, he let go.
■ ■ ■
“I am so, so glad you are here, Samuel. When Mina told me you were coming, I was so pleased.” Booth’s breath was hot on his ear; along with the eggs, Sam smelled onion, pepper, and ketchup. “It’s been far too long. I’ve missed you. I’ve wanted to call you, but—I love you, you know, Sam.”
Sam imagined throwing it all into a fire: the absences, the lies, the betrayals, the disappointments, every bit of it, and watching the emotional junk melt and clench and disintegrate, until there was only a patch of scorched grass. Nothing would be the same; everything could happen differently. He wondered what it would have been like if Booth really had been dying, and for an instant, he regarded the idea with wistfulness. It would have simplified things. Sam saw himself holding Booth’s elbow, helping him totter up a flight of steps to a pair of glass doors. He imagined saying, “I love you, too.”
Sam took a breath. “You don’t have terminal stomach cancer, right?”
“What?”
“Mina told me you had terminal stomach cancer.”
A low sound rose up from the depths of Booth’s chest, the rumble of large, unseen machinery. They continued to hold each other, swaying in the driveway. As long as he didn’t know for sure, Sam didn’t have to let go.
“Stomach cancer?” asked Booth.
“Stomach cancer,” said Sam.
“No.” His father sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“Ah, fuck.” Sam removed himself from his father’s embrace. He retreated a few paces down the driveway. He guessed it might make him feel better to kick something, but there was just the car, and it was a rental. His head lolled back, and he gazed up into the thick ashen sky. “Fuck,” he groaned.
“But I could die any second. I’m overweight,” said Booth. “And old. I abhor exercise. I’m really, terribly fat.”
“Hey. Don’t say that,” protested Tom, who was standing nearby.
Booth continued to tick off his ailments. “I have high cholesterol, bad circulation. Heart attack, diabetes, prostate cancer—I’m in the sweet
spot for any number of potentially fatal afflictions, Samuel. I’m out of breath constantly. Something will take me out soon, I’m sure.”
“I don’t want you to die, Booth.” A light drizzle began. Pellets of water pecked Sam’s unwashed hair and hit his forehead. A bead of water dripped down his cheek where Tess had touched him with her hand. In bad Oscar-type movies, characters stood in the rain and were metaphorically cleansed. Sam didn’t feel cleansed. He felt wet and crummy. “It’s just been a rough morning, okay?”
“Factually, we’re all dying, all the time. From the moment of conception, we are dying,” his father continued.
“I don’t like this, whatever it is,” said Tom. “I feel like I’m living all the time, goddammit. I don’t care what you people say.”
■ ■ ■
Eventually, Booth ushered his son out of the rain and into the shelter of the rental car. Sam was damp and drained. He wanted to go get his sister and shake her until she explained what was so hilarious about stomach cancer. This desire had competition from another, equally strong craving to find a cool, dark room and go back to sleep for another three hours.
(Tom had become about as grumpy as he ever did and stalked off. “I think there’s something in there that needs hammering,” he said, and retreated to the house.)
According to Sam’s father, Mina had called late the previous evening to say that she would have to come and stay with him in Hasbrouck, in the wilderness, for the foreseeable future, because Sandra was in the loony bin, her boyfriend was gay, and Sam was a selfish asshole who didn’t care about anyone except himself.
“But that’s all I know!” professed Booth. “And the details are unimportant. I’m just so very happy to see you!” He was jammed into the compact’s passenger seat like a football into a baseball glove. His chin rested on the backs of his hands, which were themselves planted on the bulbous brass head of his cane. The cane was somehow stuck between his gut and the dashboard.
Sam turned on the heat so they could dry out. The car filled with the must of his father’s wet cape. Through the windshield was a view of Tom’s airplane hangar/four-car garage.
“Why couldn’t she just ask me for a goddamned ride? Why drag me out of bed at the crack of dawn and bring stomach cancer into it?”
“Your sister’s going through quite a difficult time. You must try and be as forgiving as you can. You know the situation with Sandra’s mental health, and I’ve not been as constant a presence as I should have been—as I plan to be—and she’s run a bit wild. Also, bear in mind that Mina’s seventeen. She’s ankle-deep in the thicket of young adulthood. And look, I don’t want to stick my nose where it’s not wanted, and I’m not taking sides, but I think she may feel that, in the past, you’ve behaved a tad autocratically with her.”
Sam asked his father if he was referring to the matter of Peter Jenks. “I wanted to scare him off.” Sam couldn’t believe that, on top of everything else, his sister had tattled on him to Daddy.
“I know, but the film you showed the young man . . .” Booth shook his head. To gain a better handle of Mina’s outrage, he had rented the controversial film, the one about the saintly woman’s grotesque trials—and eventual demise—at the behest of her demonic husband. “I have to tell you, I did not care for it. It was nicely made, but—I don’t think ‘disquieting’ is too strong a word. Perhaps that says more about me than the picture. I don’t know. It’s hard to find the entertainment in martyrdom.”
“I told you,” said Sam. “I wanted to scare him off.”
“It was a laudable instinct, too. She is young for a boyfriend. I’m merely trying to offer my sense of what your sister is feeling.”
To have his instincts ratified by Booth did not make Sam feel better. It was well established that his father’s instincts sucked.
“She pepper-sprayed two people this morning,” Sam said. It seemed only fair to return the favor and tattle on her.
His father’s expression turned rueful. “That does sound excessive. I’ll have to speak to her about that.”
“Wait, though. Mina is going to stay with you?” On its face, the idea shot straight past the impracticable up into the stratosphere of the impossible before plummeting like a lead weight to the fathoms of the bathetic.
“Yes.” His father nodded on top of his hands. “You object?”
Sam ran his tongue around his teeth. “I’m sorry, Booth, but it’s going to take me a little while to wrap my head around that one. You know you
won’t be able to get by, like, asking Tom to water her once a week? If she stays long enough, you’ll have to get her enrolled in school somewhere. You’ll have to drive her places and pick her up or else get her a car. You’ll have to make sure she does her homework. All that shit.”
“Yes. I know.” There was a susurration as Booth turned the cane, working the tip lightly against the fabric floor mat. “You know, Samuel . . . I owe you a very large apology for—well, for a great many things. And I do apologize.”
His father’s neck, Sam noticed then, was skinny, an old man’s neck. The skin was loose there, like pulled dough. There were a couple of liver spots, too. They resembled burn marks on paper. If you looked at it from another direction, the morning hadn’t been a false alarm but a dry run. The old man’s protests weren’t completely hollow; sooner or later, he would die.
The relentless furnace of this world
.
“But we’re not dead yet, are we? We have some life yet, don’t we?”
“Booth.” Sam heard the optimistic pitch in his father’s voice and redirected his own gaze out the streaking windshield. “Let’s just keep things moving forward.”
“Fine, good,” said Booth. “Ever forward.”
“Thank you,” said Sam.
The wipers ticked back and forth.
“So what are you doing now?” asked his father.
■ ■ ■
The way to the recording studio took them through Hasbrouck proper in the light drizzle.
Not a great deal about the town had changed since Sam’s childhood. The head shop had slid a few storefronts southward on Main Street, but the canvas awning retained the same skipping Jerry bear, trembling in the wind and sweating streaks of rain; the record store was gone, but no new business had taken its place, and the yellowed album covers sat in the picture window. The library was where it had always been on a corner, and the bank was right where it always was, on the opposite corner. Likewise, in its accustomed place was the pawnshop, where Sam had cashed in his Nukies, among other valuables, one afternoon in the autumn of 2002. Although
OPEN
signs hung in most of the doors, the interiors of these places appeared dusky in the rain. The street had the destitute air of deck furniture left outside in winter.
How often had Allie driven this same way, in this same muddy weather? Sam found himself marveling at how many years she had been dead, as if it represented some sort of accomplishment, to be nothing. It was easy to envision how Allie would have responded to that idea: “Kiddo,” she’d say, “I guess I’ve finally found my niche.” Sam wondered what it said about her that he still knew exactly how she would let the air out of him; then he thought maybe it said everything.
Booth, sitting in the passenger seat, was taking snoring breaths, but he wasn’t asleep.
In the cupholder, the cell phone rattled for the third time since father and son had left Tom’s driveway.
His father had invited Sam to “attend” him in “the course” of his “rounds.” Although the use of the verb “attend” was in the context predictably grating and Boothian, after he’d traveled such a long way, it seemed perverse to leave right away. If he were to do so, Sam had no idea where to go or what fire to attempt to put out first. Mina was mad at him, and he was mad at her. It was Sam’s assumption that Tess was furious at him. Jo-Jo knew about the affair with Polly and wanted to cut off Sam’s hands and put them in a special box. Wesley was probably all fucked up. Even Tom seemed irritated.
It was more proof, if any further had been needed, that people were hard to please and easy to hurt, and the problem was exacerbated, not lessened, by how well you knew them.
A couple of hours with Booth seemed for once to be safer than anything else.
They stopped at a red light. The phone ceased buzzing, beeped. His father cleared his throat. “Your communication device, it seems to want for some attention.”
“Yeah.” Sam picked it up, glanced at the readout:
Tess Auerbach
again. The problem, he decided, was that he was stuck in the wrong reality. In another reality, he had gone home with her, made love to her, convinced her to admit that she was wrong about the scene in
Dog Day Afternoon
being improvised, made love to her a second time, slept in, had breakfast, and made plans for the future. Sam was not a little envious of his other self. He noticed that his hand had crept from the wheel to lay fingers against the spot on his cheek where Tess had touched him.
“I saw an extraordinary French film yesterday, Samuel,” said Booth.
The light changed, and the phone resumed ringing. Sam inhaled and returned his hand to the wheel. Booth said left, and they were moving again.
“It’s called
Quel Beau Parleur,
which apparently translates to
What a Good Talker You Are
. It’s about an unremarkable man who finds that all the women in Paris are absolutely desperate to screw him. I loved it.”
“That sounds like every French movie, Booth. Sorry about the phone ringing. I’m trying to figure out what to do about that.”
“I don’t suppose you could just turn it off,” proposed Booth.
“I could,” said Sam. “I haven’t decided.”
His father tapped his cane against the seat well. “A woman, I assume? How serious?”
Sam hesitated, then figured, Why not? If Booth had anything going for him, it was that he was no one to judge.
“Hard to say. I like her. I mean, I don’t know her that well. Or at all, really. But we had a moment. She’s intelligent. Cranky, but in an appealing way. Physically attractive. We hit it off, but it got overly personal, and I sort of split on her. I’m pretty sure she’s super-pissed at me, and justifiably so.”