Blood Relations (23 page)

He had watched her go obediently down the hall, a plump girl in a big lavender sleep shirt. At the end of the hall she turned and looked at him. Night, Dad.

Sam felt bad about yelling at her, and he had his knuckles on her door, about to knock, but he didn’t know what in hell he would tell her. He went back down the hall to Matthew’s room to turn out the light.

On Frank Tolin’s instructions, Dina had been organizing Matthew’s school records, yearbooks, snapshots, crayon drawings and handmade Mother’s Day cards, reports from his psychiatrists and counselors-a sad exhumation of every scrap of information she had saved, and she had saved them all. Sam refused to take part. It terrified him beyond explanation. Dina pierced him with her own: You’d rather believe in accidents. It lets you off the hook, doesn’t it?

If this wrongful death suit were ever filed, Frank Tolin would recreate Matthew Stavros Hagen as he had never existed in life. Maybe he had a few problems, but really, don’t all our teenagers go through rough times? The defense wouldn’t dare alienate the jury by ripping into the dead boy’s parents, sitting side by side at the counsel table holding hands and wee”ping. In his final argument, Frank might show the jury a series of framed photographs. Mr. and Mrs. Hagen’s son at birth, at age two, age five, ten, and so on. Here he is in his Cub Scout uniform, here on his soccer team. And here, the happy family on vacation in Colorado. But the last frame would be blank. Frank would walk slowly past the jurors holdin it in his hands. How do you measure a parent’s grief, ladies and gentlemen, as you look at this empty frame?

Love quantified. Grief translated into cash. The deeper the grief, the higher the recovery. Sitting in Frank Tolin’s office, jaw clenched, Sam had found the idea revolting.

At the door to Matthew’s room, Sam reached in to turn off the light but dropped his hand by his side. Dark blue carpet. Single bed, chest of drawers, desk and bookcase.

Dina had taken the lurid posters down, but other than that, it was the same as when Matthew had moved out, a year and a half before he died. Now there were some open boxes on the floor, and neat stacks of folders and envelopes on the bed.

Sam used to get sick with rage, opening this door, the chaos hitting him in the face. Clothes that lay where they’d been dropped, a beer bottle on the windowsill, school papers crumpled on the desk. Three thousand dollars’ worth of stereo and video equipment, CDs scattered on the floor. A bass guitar and amp, used for a month then forgotten. Matthew standing bare chested in the center of the room, laughing, his face contorted and shiny with tears, the barrel of a Colt pistol at his temple. Hey, don’t worry I’ll blow my brains out, Dad. I don’t have any, remember?

Sam was twenty years old when he flew home by army transport to see his father, Lewis Hagen, for the last time.

The old man was lying wasted to bones on white hospital sheets, his belly tight with a swollen liver, and his eyes yellow and filmy. It made Sam queasy, although he had seen worse where he had just come from.

The eyes rolled to see who was there. “Hey, Sammy.”

Then a dying man’s reedy voice. “It’s my boy.” The nurse looked around and smiled. Lewis said, “Damn. Don’t he make a picture?”

Sam’s parents had divorced before he could walk.

He and his mother, born Lily Hirsch, had lived with her elderly aunt in Borough Park, Brooklyn. When he was ten, his mother died and none of her family could take him.

The neighbors came by to say how sad it was, how terrible for Lily’s son. Sam sat with his great-aunt and her adult children on the mourning bench and drew himself in, numb with misery, while relatives whispered in the kitchen. Impossible, they said, to give him to his father.

Lily’s shame, the man no one ever mentioned. She had gone to Miami Beach, a trip with her parents. A pretty woman, but almost thirty. How they met-who knew?but they had to marry. Of course it hadn’t lasted. Lily came home with the boy and kept house for her parents till they passed away, and now what? Who would take him? Not so smart, this one. Too quiet. She had insurance.

That would help.

Sam’s cousins glared at him from across the room, kicking the heels of their shiny shoes on the horsehair sofa, making their opinions known. Three days later, Lewis Hagen showed up in a coat too thin for New York in November. He was a towering man with a wide face, an older version of the blackand-white snapshot Sam had seen by accident in his mother’s dresser drawer. After her death the picture had vanished, and he’d been afraid to ask where it had gone.

There were discussions in the front room with the door closed. Shouts. Outrage and threats. Finally, Lewis Hagen tossed Sam’s bag into the trunk of his car and told him they were going to Winter Haven. “You know where that is, kiddo?” Sam shook his head. “It’s in Flor’da.” Lewis was driving a Ford convertible with red upholstery and dings in two fenders. He squealed the tires taking off, and Sam looked backward until they turned the corner and the house was gone. His father lit a cigarette. He had freckled, sunburned hands. “I’m sorry about your momma. She sent me your picture. I should’ve wrote you, and I’m sorry about that, too.”

They stopped at a motel in New Jersey and picked up a woman named Fay who had kept Lewis Hagen company on the trip north. It took two days to get to Florida, stopping overnight with Fay’s relatives in North Carolina. By the time they reached Georgia the top was down on the convertible, and Sam took his coat off. The second night he lay under a blanket in the backscat, the wind roaring around him, and watched Fay’s fingernails scratch through his father’s thick brown hair, heard her singing with the radio. The telephone wires along the road rose and fell, and the moon passed overhead. It would be years before Sam found out that his mother’s life insurance had been worth nearly fifty thousand dollars and that Lewis had pissed it all away.

At sunrise they rolled into the scraggly yard of a concrete block, ranch-style house. A grove stretched out behind it, rows and rows of bushy trees and hard, green citrus, the land gently rolling, the dirt gray and sandy.

Lewis Hagen made a living off oranges, tangelos, and grapefruit. If the crop was bad, he did auto repair work.

He drank; he couldn’t keep a woman; and he lost more and more acreage a year to citrus blight or freezes. He was a brutal man, not for the enjoyment of it, but because that was what he himself had known.

At school, Sam was tormented for his accent and his shy, clumsy manner. Finally Lewis Hagen took off his belt and beat him. He couldn’t stand a whiner. If Sam came home again with bruises and hadn’t knocked the crap out of the other boy, he’d catch it again. By the time Sam reached junior high his voice had settled into Florida Cracker and no one dared touch him. His arms and legs were muscled from climbing up and down ladders carrying canvas bags of fruit. His hands were callused, and the thorns on the branches drew blood. Like his friends, Sam learned how to use a shotgun and a .22 rifle. He got his restricted drivers license at fourteen and learned to drive on the jouncing, sandy roads between the orange trees. He wore his hair in a crew cut and played tackle for the Winter Haven Blue Devils. A big boy, six-two, two hundred pounds, still not big enough to whip Lewis. Sam might have earned a scholarship, but he studied just enough to stay on the team. There was no point in going on; he would own the grove someday.

Lewis worried about the communists. He was opposed to antiwar protesters and forced integration and would get drunk worrying about it, although there were no hippies in Winter Haven, and the Negroes made few demands. He would get drunk to ease the pain from the shrapnel he still carried. He showed Sam his Purple Heart and let him hold the Luger he’d taken off a dead German soldier.

He mortgaged the grove, then stayed too drunk to make the payments. Sam worked thirty hours straight during a hard January freeze, tended the smudge pots, hired pickers, yelled at them, pushed them hard, nearly failed his senior year, but took care of the bank. Then Lewis signed another mortgage that spring. When Sam screamed profanities and threw a bottle of Jack Daniel’s into the yard, Lewis went for him. Sam knocked him down. Lewis got up, spat out a mouthful of blood, and hit Sam in the storn ach. They continued like that until Sam saw that his father would die before he stayed down. Sam was the first to stop. But something had shifted, and Lewis Hagen left the running of the grove to Sam, then seventeen.

In the summer of 1967, Kenny Davis, last season’s Blue Devils quarterback, was drafted into the army. In February they sent his body home in a steel coffin and gave his mother a folded flag. At the funeral somebody gave a speech about patriotism and there was a 21-gun salute. Sam and four other boys on the team got drunk that night and the next day drove to the recruiting office in Tampa and signed up, ready to go after graduation.

Lewis shook his hand and told him to be careful.

Vietnam was even hotter than Central Florida, and wetter. Sam found himself running through tangled, steaming underbrush, with an M-16, two ammunition belts, a Claymore mine, and half a dozen fragmentation grenades.

Sliding down a wire out of a chopper. Churning up a hill in the red mud through the rain that drummed steadily, without letup, on his helmet and poncho. Sam was halfway through his second tour before he slowed down and saw what it was. After his lieutenant, talking on the radio next to him, pitched backward, a neat red hole through his eye, the back of his head gone. After Sam saw body bags by the hundreds loaded on the same C5As that had arrived with hundreds of fresh troops. After Sam’s squad chased a Cong guerrilla out of the jungle. Sam raked the thin walls of a hut with automatic rifle fire, then went inside. He put a boot under the body and turned it over. A boy about thirteen. He had known when he pulled the trigger, but he couldn’t stop.

A couple of months later, Lewis was in the hospital for the last time, and Sam took emergency leave. He wore his uniform with three service ribbons, a unit crest, and a combat infantryman’s badge, and on his left shoulder the 101st Airborne patch, the Screaming Eagles. His boots and belt gleamed.

Lewis smiled: thin lips pulled back over protruding teeth. “Damn. Look at this boy. Ain’t he something else?”

He lifted his hand to cradle Sam’s face in his dry palm.

Sam barely held himself together. He pulled up a chair and sat down, and told his dad it looked like the war had turned around all of a sudden. They had the North Vietnamese on the run now, nearly pushed back across the DMZ, and it wouldn’t be long before all the guys would be coming home.

This late in the season, fashion shoots in Miami often began at dawn to avoid the heat of midday. Caitlin waited in the tiny open-air lobby of the Century Hotel to join the caravan to the site. The production van led the way, followed by a rented Lincoln carrying the client and his people, and then by Caitlin in her car, crammed with her equipment. Ali Duncan, who would help Rafael Soto with makeup, sat in the passenger seat with a camera bag on her lap. Two models followed Caitlin in their car, and Tommy Chang’s Jeep brought up the rear. Today would be the last shots for the fall catalog of Narragansett Traders, a Boston sportswear company. Caitlin got the job because they liked the work she’d done for them last year.

Now her camera was set up on some flat ground fifty yards or so from a ten-foot-high ridge of white sand and rock, which had been tossed there years ago by dredging machines. Virginia Key was home to scraggly woods, a nudist beach, some rundown boat shacks, and the Central District Treatment Plant, the county’s main sewage facility. Low, concrete buildings lay toward the west beyond a chain-link fence. There was no odor, or else the residents of Fisher Island would have raised hell. That exclusive piece of ground lay just north, a landscaped, Mediterranean fantasy of red-tiled roofs and yachts tied to private docks. Miami Beach was out of view beyond it.

Caitlin had a crew of three today: two photo assistants and Rafael Soto. She would have no problem paying them. This was the last day of a four-day shoot at fifteen hundred per, before expenses. Not great, but not bad, either. Caitlin had known top fashion photographers to pull in twenty-five thousand a day. They would shoot dozens of rolls. But she had never seen Richard Avedon waiting around next to a sewage plant to do sportswear for a catalog.

Caitlin and the art director stood under her umbrella and went over some photos from yesterday, which they had taken at a marina. She heard the crunch of gravel and glanced up. Frank Tolin’s green Jaguar was parked next to her own car. The door was opened, a flash of chrome and glass in the early morning sun.

The art director’s expression turned sour under the brim of his red baseball cap.

“He’s a friend of mine. He won’t be in the way.” Frank had come to shoots before, but only when invited. She didn’t know what he was doing there. Two nights ago they had argued, and she hadn’t heard from him since.

He walked around the Jaguar with a cup of coffee from McDonald’s and sipped it as he propped one booted foot on the bumper. He knew to stay where he was. He contented himself with a nod in her direction.

Caitlin sent the boys to check the exposure. Tommy Chang had brought a friend from photography class to help out. JeanLouis scurried up the rocky hill with the meter. Blond coils of curly, sunbleached hair bounced on his head. He and Tommy were dressed about the same: no shirts, baggy shorts, big sneakers. Tommy, whose bandanna kept his hair from blowing into his eyes, was attaching the Polaroid to the telephoto. The people from the catalog company and the production staff, average age well under thirty, stood around talking, waiting for the models.

When the art director went to check on something, Caitlin crossed the road to talk to Frank.

He finished the last of his coffee and tossed the cup into some weeds. “I’m not going to stay,” he said. “I told Marty Cassie I’d meet him this morning.” Frank smiled with one side of his mouth, his mustache tilting. “He’s going to push me to sell the building to those Jordanians he found the other day.”