The Ask (25 page)

“Pardon?”

Something dropped in my lap.

“And one more thing,” said Purdy. “I never texted any drink order. That mojito? It was a mistake. They just made a mistake.”

“What?” I said.

“Exit the fucking vehicle.”

I got out of the car, watched it tear down Eisenhower, turn onto the county road.

I held my father’s knife up to the moonless sky.

Don called late in September. I was living in the kiddie-diddler’s basement, his boiler room. It was the only place near Bernie I could afford. Maura and I still spoke, but we’d stopped going to the marriage counselor. Maura quit when the counselor suggested she take a break from having sex with Paul. There was talk of finding another counselor, one more amenable to Maura having sex with Paul, of inviting Paul to a session, even, but nothing happened. We were still, I believed, the loves of each other’s life. But that life was maybe over now.

The kiddie-diddler was a kind and extremely unstable man named Harold. He had, as I suspected, once been in radio, voiced some very famous advertising campaigns. I no longer wondered why whenever he spoke I thought of a certain laundry detergent or strawberry-flavored milk.

Harold’s brother Tommy slipped me extra cash to make sure Harold didn’t wander the streets at night. Harold had dozens of stories he told over and over again, in the way of a man who has traveled the world, or never been anywhere at all. I listened to him talk less for the delight of his adventures than his timbre, his pitchman’s pitch.

The shopping bag stuffed with shopping bags was never far from reach, but when I asked him its meaning or purpose he told me I didn’t have the proper clearance. He let me look at his
notebooks, but I couldn’t read his nanoscopic script. The drawings, far more maniacal than I’d imagined, depicted little girls in snowpants. These bundled moppets rode a magic toboggan through arctic skies. I figured my boy would be safe.

Every day I picked up Bernie at my old apartment, walked him to school. Happy Salamander had reopened. They’d booted Carl from the board. The creamery, apparently, was his new site of revolutionary practice. Maddie had been sketchy about the whole kerfuffle when she called Maura to offer Bernie a spot. We made a joint decision, as separated but equally engaged parents, to give very inexpensive experimental preschool pedagogy another go. Soon enough he’d be fresh meat for the wolf packs at the local kindergarten.

I took Bernie in the afternoons, unless Nick needed me for a job. When Nick heard about the governor’s daughter’s possible interest in his project, or at least in him as a lesson in cultural failure, he offered me work in gratitude. We did okay. For some reason the deck bubble had not yet burst, and Nick and I had evolved into a crackerjack team. I hauled the tools and the wood and undertook a good deal of the construction. Nick snacked on sausage subs and honed his broadcast vision. My body, it ached all the time. The pain thrilled at first. Maybe it felt authentic. Soon it was just pain.

I began to send out résumés. Late capitalism was a corpse, but you could still get lucky, couldn’t you? Besides, I was so unaccomplished, I could fit in anywhere. I’d never pose a threat to colleagues. That would be my angle.

Most evenings I stayed in my basement room, reading or watching television or painting. I had no illusions now. I did not expect to jet down to Miami or over to Venice after the nearly haphazard but ultimately inevitable discovery of my genius. I just wanted to see what I could do with my cache of filched Mediocre paint. My current canvas was called
Raskovian/Replacable
. I
planned to give it to Harold for his birthday, thought he might get a kick out of the giraffe bukkake. One night as I touched up the rusted toboggan in the veldt grass, my phone rang.

“Hey,” said a voice.

“Jesus, Don.”

“No, just Don.”

“Where are you?” I said.

“I’m here, bro. Home. Bangburn Balls. What a goddamn awesome feeling.”

“It’s good to hear from you,” I said. “I’ve been wondering how you’re doing.”

“I have been to the mountain, my friend.”

“The mountain?”

“Just screwing with you. I was in Texas. Visited Vasquez.”

“Vasquez?”

“Yeah, you got a problem with that?”

“No. I just thought … you said Vasquez was dead.”

“She is dead. I went to her grave. And to see her folks.”

“That was good of you.”

“It wasn’t anything,” said Don. “But I’m glad I went. You know, I’m calling because … well, I wanted to apologize.”

“For what?”

“For whatever. I know I was a rat bastard. I don’t have specifics.”

“I understand.”

“I still think you’re a leech and a shithead.”

“Thanks.”

“But my sponsor says I have to make these calls.”

“I get it,” I said. “Good. You’re taking care of yourself.”

“I’m back with Sasha now. I’m living in her place in town.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“I’m in therapy. For the stress. I have money now.”

“You signed the papers.”

“They’re just fucking papers.”

“Right.”

“I wasn’t going to get love from that prick. Might as well take the money.”

“I agree.”

“I used to think if I took the money, he won. But now I see it’s the opposite. If I don’t take the money, he wins. And my anger wins. I’m talking about my anger a lot. I have a lot of anger.”

“I’m sure that’s true. You’ve earned it.”

“Doesn’t matter if I did. I can’t keep it. It’ll just kill me if keep it. I have to man up to my inner child. Do I sound like a fag? I bet both Nathalie and Purdy would laugh at me. But fuck them. Fuck you, too. And I mean that most sincerely. That’s where I am now. You can all take the bad shit back and rot. I’m moving on.”

“This is good, Don,” I said.

“I don’t need your goddamn approval, Milo.”

“You called me,” I said. “I know—your sponsor made you.”

“Actually, I lied about that. I’m doing something a little different than making amends right now. What I’m doing tonight is getting high and calling up people to tell them what spineless twats they are.”

Don chuckled, a tiny trace of Purdy’s trace. We both hung wordless for a moment.

“You hear from Purdy?” I said.

“I signed some papers.”

“No, I mean—”

“And I mean I signed some papers.”

“Okay, I understand, Don. I should apologize to you, I guess. I’m sorry.”

“Whatever.”

“So, what’s next? You guys going to stay up there?”

“Hell, no,” said Don. “I’m trying to convince Sasha to vacate this hole with me. Like I said, I got some money. I want to travel. I want to go to Europe. Nathalie always talked about going to Europe. Maybe her dumbass son can.”

“Of course he can.”

“Yeah, I’ll just tidy up some shit around here, and go.”

“Why don’t you just go now?”

“Not till I’m squared away.”

“Okay, just so you go. It’s too easy not to go.”

“Don’t talk to me about easy,” said Don.

“Fair enough,” I said.

My eyes fell on my father’s knife. Bernie had found it in my desk last week, tried to cut his shoelaces with it. I snatched it away before he could hurt himself, but I could see its curve and heft had seduced him. He asked about its history, wondered if I would pass it down to him when he got old enough.

“Of course,” I had told him. “That’s a promise.”

But it was not a promise. I knew I had to get the knife out of my family for good. Something very important depended upon it. But I also couldn’t bring myself to throw it in the trash.

I could wrap it up in butcher’s paper, walk to the post office, and stand in line. Or on line.

“Just give me your address, Don.”

“My address?”

“I want to send you a gift.”

“Why would I be stupid enough to give you my address?” said Don, but then he did.

“Thanks.”

“It better be a good gift,” said Don, and for a moment he sounded much younger, almost as young as Bernie.

“I promise,” I said. “It will be a good gift.”

“All right, then. I guess I can cross you off my hit list.”

“Goodbye, Don,” I said, but he’d already hung up.

I never did mail the knife. The parcel sat on the table for months. Sometimes I’d notice it, think of Don. I felt guilt for not posting it. Then I figured I was saving him from some kind of curse. Then I remembered I did not believe in curses. I believed in symbols and the wondrous ways they could wound.

After some books got piled on the parcel I did not notice it at all.

Mostly, if I ever thought of Don, I just hoped he was happy.

Maybe he was in Europe with Sasha. Maybe he was dead in Bangburn Balls, but still, maybe he was in Europe with Sasha. Sometimes I’d picture them in the leafy, medieval quarter of some city, strolling through a park, sitting with a coffee, a beer, tired from walking all morning, tired in that contented way when you are moving through a land of alien pain, a land that expects nothing but your money in return for the privilege of strolling and drinking coffee and beer and being forever unaccountable for this city’s particular and ancient agony.

Maybe Don would finally know that fallen joy, the empty liberation, of drinking an espresso or a crisp white ale and then strolling along some worn battlement where young men once lay in heaps, hacked and gored by halberds and axes and pikes, smashed by siege stones, and the women and children and old men lay nearby in other shit-streaked heaps, raped, dead of fever, all this slaughter just a little historical entertainment between café stops, the horror far in the past, bound up in modes of thought and styles of hosiery humankind would never abide again.

But maybe he wouldn’t know that joy and liberation at all. Maybe he would read the plaques about the sieges and think of Vasquez’s head exploding off her neck. Or maybe he wouldn’t be able to stroll much, his humps hot and itchy, the boat-shoed feet of his girls snagging in the cobbles of every rue or strasse or avenida. Perhaps I pictured this idyll just to avoid the truth, which was that Don was probably never going anywhere.

Then again, maybe I wasn’t going anywhere, either.

Horace had been right about the parallel universe. I’d spent a long time living there. Purdy had been right about the bitterness. I had always been bitter, was still bitter, was bitter about the bitterness.

We were all of us just flushed with that feeling already fled.
But I had Bernie. I had my painting again, which could maybe deliver me some peace precisely because it would never deliver anything else. I even had a job lead. This local drug-and-alcohol rehab needed a part-time communications officer. Experience in fund-raising was a plus. Here was my chance to fail once more in an office environment. Worse came to worst, maybe I could get a discount on treatment. My hangover would hang up his gun.

No, I probably wasn’t going anywhere.

I was digging in for the long night of here.

Sometimes I wondered if Don was doing the same, and a few months after I talked to him I sent him an email.

A week later Sasha replied from her own account, no message, just a link to the
Pangburn Falls Sentinel
website. I had to wade through some home-page reports about zoning disputes and a proposal for a new band shell before I scrolled down a sidebar of older articles. I guess she wanted me to wade, but after a while I saw the headline:
POLICE CONTINUE SEARCH FOR SUSPECT IN
LOCAL VETERAN’S DEATH.

I shuddered, almost clicked the window shut.

If I didn’t read the story, if I turned my computer off right now, Don could still be okay. It was the thought of a child. It was the meaning of childhood.

According to the article, a young man had been murdered on an old logging road. An explosion heard for miles blew his truck into the trees. Pieces of the victim had scattered hundreds of feet down to the banks of a creek. Inspectors were disturbed to find evidence of an improvised explosive device, similar to those employed in recent conflicts overseas. The victim, Todd Wilkes, a native of Pangburn Falls and a decorated veteran of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, was twenty-four. The police department’s prime suspect, Don Charboneau, also of Pangburn Falls, had been missing from his last known residence since the day of the attack.

Authorities welcomed any information that could lead to his capture.