The Deed (39 page)

“I already know that story.”

“Of course you do,” said his father. “The point is, my last words weren’t ‘Make us proud, son,’ or ‘I love you, Jason.’ Your mom and I just whipped around the corner and there was a car, in our lane, headed right for us. I probably said, ‘Oh, FUCK,’ or just ‘AAAAAH!’” He paused to let this sink in a little. “Jason, I’d love to be able to tell you I left you a videotape full of great advice and the secrets of life. But who knew I was going anywhere?”

“I’ve got a million things I’ve always wanted to ask you,” said Jason.

“I won’t know the answers.”

“I know,” he replied. “I get it; I’m sort of putting you together from the memories in my head. But don’t all those memories have to add up to
something?
”

His dad shrugged. “You tell me.”

Jason racked his brain; already time seemed to be growing short, and he had no way of knowing if he’d ever be here, in this place, again. “I’m tired of
doing
things,” he said. “Working, playing, buying food, taking a crap…all of it. I really don’t want anything for myself except…except what I can’t have.”

“Jason, what do you think I would have given for one more day with you?” his dad replied. “Your mom, too. You already
know
that’s true, Jason, which is why I can say it. We just got stolen away, and that’s all, the simple, brutal, unfair, cosmically stupid truth. Until you’re a parent, you can’t understand the way the love for your child obliterates everything else. So don’t bother trying. But listen: Before there was you, your mom and I were just these two stick bugs crawling around on the surface of this planet who found each other. We were so in love, we rejected the rest of the world and all our other possible futures to lash our ships together, come what may. That was an affair to remember, let me tell you, quite enough to head off into eternity with. And yet, when we had you, we gave all that up and poured everything we had into you. It didn’t even require a conscious decision.”

Jason was nodding. “I felt that.”

“You’d better have,” said his dad. “It’s a hell of a stupid sacrifice, otherwise. But, Jason, as big as that was, and as much as we loved you, you were still just a part of our story. Our roles in each other’s life, yours and ours, were always destined to fade, because that’s the way of things. Sooner or later you were going to marry and move away, drop by for Thanksgivings and to show off your kids and cars. Your story was always meant to take off on its own, without us, anyway.” He paused, and poked a dirty finger into Jason’s chest. “And if I know that, it means
you
know that.”

Jason smiled at this. The subway car was empty again, rattling along the rails, and the piercing smell had returned to wrinkle his nose. Sensing such impressions beginning to intrude on the sanctity of the scene, Jason tried desperately to hold on to the moment. “But how do I know where to go?” he said.

His dad’s gaze narrowed. “Use the force.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just kidding. Just pick something and turn your wheel toward it.”

“What if it’s wrong?”

“Then you’ll know something about yourself you didn’t know before. It beats drifting.”

Jason noted with alarm that the speaker was starting to look less and less like his father; except for the piercing blue eyes, the guy sitting across from him, gravelly voice echoing in the now-empty car, could have been any old drunk.

“I think I gotta go, Jason,” his dad continued. “But here’s one thing to take with you. We all find lots of ways to sabotage our own potential. We put sixty-percent efforts into our jobs, our friendships, our marriages. It gives your ego a fallback position. If you
really
give it everything you’ve got, then it’s a personal failure if you don’t win. But there’s a real cost to your soul each time you slack off, and in the aggregate the cost is tremendous.”

“Why?” said Jason into the pause, and the question seemed obvious, preordained by the pause itself, as if the dad persona was melting back into his own mind, and he was asking and answering his own questions.

“Because the
distance,
” his dad continued, “between who you are and who you could have been always widens over the course of your life. Nobody will ever know just how far apart they are but you…and that distance, I promise you, Jason, is the true measure of a man.”

The finality was inescapable.

“I love you, Dad,” said Jason, speaking straight from his soul.

His dad, or what was left of him in the twinkling eyes of the strange rummy across from him, smiled and nodded indulgently. “Fag.”

Jason laughed out loud, and drifted into a clear and dreamless sleep.

SOUTH FERRY
, 2:15
A.M.

He woke up in shadowy darkness and blinked three or four times, as if testing a faulty light switch. A primal fear sank into his gut with the return of cold, total awareness, as the buzz that had formerly consumed him now only loitered sheepishly at the edge of his consciousness. He was freezing; it was dark; he was still on the train, deep underground. But the train was darkened now and not moving, in some sort of mechanical limbo. A smattering of white noise echoed down the tunnel, muffled by distance, exacerbating the otherwise total silence.

There was a little light, he realized as his eyes finally adjusted to it. He turned and peered out through the window behind him. His train was on some kind of siding; the lights were station lights, but oddly distant. His track was no longer next to the station platform; he was out in the middle of some vast underground train yard. Mentally he calculated the risk of hopping off and scrambling across, but that infamous “third rail” had enough juice to drop a rhino, and he had no idea how you identified which one was the hot one.

“Oh, you fucking idiot,” he chastised himself, slamming his hand on the orange plastic seat. His body was still drunk, but the adrenaline had focused his energies; now the nausea and unsteadiness just seemed like annoyances. He leaped up and stood before the doors, tried to push them apart to no avail. “Tell me this is going to be all
goddamn
night,” he lamented bitterly.

The clang echoed strangely, too far away and an instant too late. For the first time he wondered whether or not he was alone on the train. He realized he was sweating, despite the chill.

And with that the animal fear swept over him utterly.
This is the combination that gets people killed,
he chastised himself. Drunk underground in the middle of the night, trapped on a beached train. If there
were
anyone else on the car, he’d be easy pickings.

The clang rang out again, louder and closer, then another in short order, and Jason suddenly placed the sound: the end doors of subway cars opening and closing. Someone was at the faraway end of the train, moving toward him; he’d hear actual footsteps any minute. Another clang, infinitesimally louder, steady in its progress.

His eyes had adjusted to the point where he could see dim outlines of things, and Jason decided to risk a look at the new arrival. With much trepidation, he peered through the window at the end of the car, which combined with all the others in a long, cloudy telescope that ran the length of the train. Through the window, three or four cars away, he saw a large black man in shabby clothes striding purposefully through the cars, toward him.

Jason watched his approach, entranced, as the nearing subject picked up more and more detail. Hooded sweatshirt, muscular build, sleeves rolled up to reveal massive forearms, dark sunglasses, all of it rolling steadily toward him like a juggernaut.

Heart racing, with no idea what to do, Jason stood paralyzed as the man cleared the next car and the next. He fled the window and returned to his seat only a moment before the door to his own car opened, and there he waited in dark silence, hoping absurdly that the guy would walk on through the car on his own business, without stopping. And for a moment it seemed it might happen just that way; the stranger was nearly abreast of Jason before he paused and turned slowly toward him with a diabolical smile.

“End of the line,” said the stranger.

“I don’t have any money,” said Jason, trying to sound confident but humble, wondering if it was true. To his surprise, the stranger laughed, a deep, booming Barry White laugh.

“Man, I don’t have any money either—ain’t that a bitch?” the man assured him. “The
train,
my young friend—this is the end of the line.”

Jason smiled weakly, then realized the smile wouldn’t be seen in the dark. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m a little—”

“No need to apologize—I’m the one interrupted you,” said the man, and continued on his way. “You take care, now.”

The man had almost left the car—
going where?
—before Jason decided the companionship was worth the risk. “Excuse me,” he called out. “What…what happens now?”

The man turned and walked back toward him. “Well, we set here awhiles until they turn the lights back on, and then we set some more, and then this train kinda curves around in a circle and heads back uptown again. First stop’s right here at South Ferry if you wanna get off.” He sat down in the seat directly across, dispersing the last of Jason’s father’s ghost. “My name’s Jones—Dow Jones,” he clarified, and laughed at his own joke.

“I’m Jason.”

“Well, Jason. You mind if I have a shot of your sodey pop, there?”

Jason sat quietly while Jones polished off the tequila, wiping lip on forearm after each big gulp. “Ohh, top shelf,” was his only comment, but he said it twice, just the same way.

Jason wondered if he was going to get rolled after all; he’d give a lot to have the lights go back on. But Jones seemed harmless enough, for his bulk. He wondered if the man was homeless or just shabby, wondered if it made much of a difference.

They made a little small talk, with Jones doing most of the gabbing. Jason was flustered by their different status, and couldn’t formulate even the simplest question that didn’t seem insulting or condescending on some level.
So what do you do? Where do you live?
But Jones quickly proved himself clever, confident, and possessed of a broad sense of humor that belied his obvious condition. And he took a dim view of Jason’s advertising career, fully justifying the reluctance with which Jason had confessed it.

“Now what a silly, stupid thing to be!” said Jones, triumphant.

Jason frowned, then smiled. No need to be defensive about that anymore. “It does sound stupid when you say it like that.”

Jones guffawed. “I don’t think it’s my delivery, son.”

“Well, everyone’s gotta do something, I guess.”

“You know what you should do, Ad Man? You should carve yourself a spoon. Out of wood.”

“A spoon?”

“A spoon’s a useful thing,” Jones explained. “All you need’s a flat stick, about a six-inch stick or so, and a whittling knife. And then after you carve it, you’ll own this spoon that you yourself made out of a stick.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“And then when you die, and the angels ask you if you did anything in your life that was worthwhile, why, you just whip out that spoon!”

The lights came on in short order, and the cars creaked into slow, rolling motion. Jason welcomed the sound, though he was warming to his companion, chattering now about sports and current events.