Light of Day (6 page)

“What's the matter with you?” Ainsley cried out, and shoved Jack away. “Cut it out.”

Jack came at him quickly this time, catching him low and knocking him off-balance.

“Cut it
out
.”

Jack slammed him against the wall a third time. Ainsley's head snapped back, his mouth clamped shut.

If nothing else in these most unfair twenty-four hours was unfair, it was the fact that Ainsley, who had the conscience of a cat burglar, would go home to his son, who was still alive, to a wife who accepted him on his own terms—chilled martini in the shaker, kiss on the mouth—and life would be as it always was. Impulsive and predatory, Ainsley had a son who didn't ride his bike to the park and tie a plastic bag around his head. Ainsley, himself a son of Nature's indifference, did not have to go to the morgue and identify the body. He did not have to wait for the medical examiner to perform an autopsy on his boy. His son wasn't ly
ing on a slab, dead and cold in the dark. For all that, Jack slammed him again, or tried to, but Ainsley pressed a muscled arm under Jack's chin and shoved him to the opposite wall.

“What did I say?” Ainsley cried out. “What the
hell
is your
problem
?”

The problem was, Jack couldn't beat up Hopewell for being an unsympathetic, disingenuous functionary. He couldn't beat up on the medical examiner for dragging his ass in Terre Haute, but he could try to beat up on Ainsley because the unfortunate son of a bitch happened to be standing there. But Jack didn't say that. He didn't say anything. He straightened up and walked quickly down the hall. He did not dare look back. He was disgusted with himself, and afraid of what he might do next.

Eileen was standing in the doorway when Jack got back to his office. She said, “Maybe you should go home. Please, Jack. I'm worried about you.”

“I'll be all right.”

“Then I'll stay with you.”

“There's nothing you can do here. Please. I need to be alone now. Really.”

She didn't move. “You'll call me if you need anything?”

He nodded his head.

“You're sure I can't—”

“I'll be all right. Lois is coming by in a little while.”

She hugged him. “I'll be around until commencement…”

“I'll call.”

Jack sat with the picture of Danny tacking into the wind, and with the slim vestiges of a morning in late spring when his life was whole and seemed part of a wonderful continuum, when he could reach inside himself whenever he needed to and feel the place where he and Danny were together.

 

He walked across the quadrangle carrying his briefcase and the work he'd left undone. He walked west through the daguerreotype streets feeling the heat of the sun on the back of his neck. He felt sorry for what
he had done to Ainsley. He felt sorry for Ainsley, who was probably up in his office right now, talking on the phone to his wife and friends, licking his wounds, trying to make sense of what Jack had done to him.

He walked west, past the White Brick bakery and Laine Bros. department store, the Palomino Grille, where the old-timers sat in the smoky dark and retreated into the comfortable past. He stayed clear of the courthouse lawn, the police station and the morgue, the way a kid avoids the graveyard, even in the daylight, crossed South Third Street and, a block later, the railroad tracks, and didn't stop until he came to the nameless bridge that overlooked the Wabash.

He leaned against the old corroded railing and stared at the river, to the place where it disappeared beyond the sycamores that bent over the muddy banks, to the vanishing point, where a reverse pointillism occurred: objects dissolved back into dots. He stared at the vanishing point and wondered what he was going to do now that Danny was dead. He stared at the vanishing point as though the future were waiting around the bend and if he looked hard enough and wanted it strongly enough, he could summon it. And what if the future extended its hand, natant and roseate, and carried him away? Would it matter if he knew what was waiting for him tomorrow or the next day? Would it matter if he saw the rest of his life stretched out before him? He thought he knew all of that when he woke up yesterday morning. He thought he owned a little corner of the future. The trips to Cape Cod and New York. The fishing vacations in Nova Scotia. Classes taught, lessons learned, while his son grew into a man. It was a foregone conclusion, his reservations confirmed. But inside his pocket was a poem that wasn't part of the plan. The funeral in New York was not on the original itinerary.

Jack watched the river carry the flotsam and debris on its way to meet the Ohio, taking whatever fell in its path, leaving behind whatever dropped away, endlessly unraveling, like time itself. And what was he going to do, he wondered, with all of his time?

The old girders creaked and swayed under the weight of the afternoon traffic. Jack kept staring into the distance. And even if the future is never generous enough to make itself known, Jack stared anyway,
before he picked up his briefcase and walked off the bridge and along South Third Street to Fairmont Park and the ruins.

He sat against the pitted brick near the spot where Danny had died. It made him feel close to his son, like visiting a cemetery. He reached into his pocket:

Jack pulled his legs up to this chest and rested his chin in his knees. He thought about Danny, not the boy who came here to kill himself, but Danny, eight years old, pushing his breakfast around on his plate.

“What happened to your appetite?” Jack wanted to know.

“I ate too much last night.”

“Let me guess. You talked Rosalie into ordering Mexican.”

“I didn't talk her into it.”

“Not
José Sent Me
.”

“She said it was okay.”

Jack smiled and began tapping the rhythm on the kitchen table. Danny smiled back at him, recognizing what was about to happen.

Jack started if off: “The burritos are lethal and those beans are…”

“Mean.”

“Mean beans.”

“Mean beans.”

“You can serve me Doritos, Cheetos…”

“Or Fritos. But not the beans.”

Jack laughed. “Those beans are mean.”

“Those beans are mean.”

“They'll empty you clean…”

“Down to your spleen.”

“Take the tacos with cheese-o…”

“If you please-o…”

“Or try the meat-o…”

“But not the burrito…”

“Those beans are mean…”

“They'll turn you green.”

They laughed together.

Jack said, “We haven't lost a thing.”

Danny rolled his eyes. “I know, and it made my stomach ache even
worse
.”

“No one likes an eight-year-old wise guy.” Jack clipped Danny lightly on the chin. “How'd you like to loaf a little longer and I'll drive you to school?”

“I'd like to loaf all day and not go to school.”

“Dream on, pardner. You can have fifteen minutes with your dad or you can ride the bus. Take it or leave it.”

“I'll take it.” Danny still didn't eat, but now he had that serious and solemn expression on his face. There was something on his mind and he couldn't get started.

“What is it?” Jack said.

Danny shrugged his shoulders.

“You can tell me. Is it school?”

Danny shook his head. “I wrote something.”

“Really?”

“About my friend Eric.”

“I'd like to hear it.”

“It's really dumb.”

“It can't be dumb if you wrote it.”

Danny thought this over and said, “Okay. But don't laugh.”

“I promise.”

Danny took a piece of lined paper out of his notebook, stood up, cleared his throat and looked around the room, as though he were waiting for late arrivals to be seated. “My friend Eric is eight and he's my
friend to the end. A friend to the end means you understand things the other kids don't. A lot of the other boys make fun of Eric because he's not very good at sports. They don't let him hang out with them. But Eric is very smart and funny. Last week, Eric had a birthday. When some of the bigger kids in my class found out I was going they said I was a weenie and they would beat me up if I went. They pushed me around after school all week but they didn't really hurt me. Eric told them if they wanted to pick on anyone to pick on him because he was bigger than me. They just spitted at him and they kept calling us weenies and stuff. I was the only kid in our class who went to Eric's birthday party. But his cousins and some relatives went so it wasn't so bad. When I have a birthday I know Eric will be there.”

Danny folded the paper and put it back in his book. He wouldn't look at his father.

“Come over here,” Jack said.

Danny walked around the table. Jack put his arms around him and kissed him on the cheek.

“That was a very kind thing, being Eric's friend. And that's a very beautifully written story.” Jack hugged him tighter. Danny hugged him back.

“Why didn't you tell me about the other kids picking on you?”

“I don't know.” Danny shrugged his shoulders.

“Were you ashamed to tell me?”

“I don't know.”

“You must have felt
some
thing,” Jack said, keeping his voice soft, not stern or scolding.

“I guess I was afraid.”

“Of?”

“You'd think I was a weenie because I didn't fight them.”

Jack smiled at him. “
They're
the weenies.
They're
the cowards. It took a lot of courage to do what you did. What did I tell you about thinking for yourself?”

“Only sheep follow the herd. Smart people think for themselves and do the right thing.”

“Give me a kiss,” Jack said. “I'm very proud of you. But more im
portant, you should be very proud of yourself.”

Danny let Jack hold him for a moment longer before he tried to squirm free but Jack held on to him a little bit longer than that.

He asked Danny, “May I have it?”

“Why?”

“Because I like to keep the things you write. And because it's very beautiful.”

Danny gave this some thought before he consented.

Later, driving to school with the top down, a tape playing, Danny, strapped securely in the front seat, tilted his head back to watch the sky skip by. “Dad, if you were going to do something that you didn't think I'd like, would you still tell me? Before you did it?”

“Of course. I don't make important decisions without first discussing them with you.”

“'Cause my friend Gregory is moving to Indianapolis and we'll probably stop being friends and he's real unhappy.”

“I thought he was looking forward to moving there.”

“He's thinking of running away and hiding.”

“I think he's shooting without a script.”

Danny didn't think that was funny. “Gregory says his dad wouldn't have taken the job except his new mom wanted him to.”

“It's not at all like that,” Jack explained. “They would have moved whether or not his father remarried. His father got a better job in Indianapolis.”

“Gregory says if his dad didn't get married they wouldn't be moving,” Danny insisted. “You're not going to get married and make us move away from here, are you?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw Danny sit up straight. “Do you want me to?”

“No. But Granpa married Grace after Granma Martha died.”

“That's right.”

“And Gregory's dad got married again.”

“That doesn't mean
I
will. Not without clearing it with you.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“What if I don't like her and you still wanted to marry her?”

“I don't think I could like someone you didn't like. Doesn't Gregory like his new mother?”

“He says
she
doesn't like him
or
Chris.”

“I wouldn't worry about that happening.”

“Don't you want to?” Danny asked.

“Get married? I don't really give it much thought. I like the way things are.”

“Me too.” Danny went back to watching the sky.

Eric dropped out of Danny's life after the third grade, and Gregory moved away, but Danny made new friends: C.J. Ainsley, brooding and melancholy, the opposite of his buff and gregarious father; Rick Harrison, gangly and restless; Brian Clarke, their leader and protector. And it wasn't long before the four boys became an inseparable quartet. They all joined the Scouts at the same time, and Little League. Only ten days ago, the boys came to the house to cheer Danny up after he lost the semifinals. So how the hell could Danny have killed himself?

Was there something lacking in Danny? Jack wondered. Some flaw masked by the equanimity? Was there something there all the time that stood out and said: “Your son is different from the other boys.” That said, “This is why Danny couldn't bear to live,” only Jack never knew what he was seeing?

 

Jack sat in the shadow of the ruins and looked out across the river where the sorry little tarpaper shacks were sunk into the lush soil, where the stink of boiled cabbage and sour diapers hung in the air and carried across the river along with the stink of failure, the culture of failure, a door opened and a yellow light spread across the black ground like an apology. It was just before sunset and behind dimly lighted windows there were halting shadows, which were people and their lives. Someone spoke unrecognizable words that sounded tenderly human and so sad Jack had to get up and leave.