The Constant Heart (18 page)

“What's that quiver in your voice?” I said.

“Nothing. I was just thinking about old times. Well, Jake,” she said. “I hope you catch some fish.”

She hung up.

A
T THREE, MY father's car was right there, in front of his house. In the backseat, behind the driver, a lot of Xerox copies of scientific papers were piled up. You couldn't see them in the rearview mirror, and maybe he didn't want to see what was right behind him, not gaining on him, but something he couldn't get away from, either. The title of the first paper was, “Rate of Esophageal Sloughing in Bone Marrow Transplants with Mitrix and Zanosar in Mixed Doses.” On the floor behind the passenger's seat a fleece blanket, a color the high-end catalogues called burgundy, covered another pile, or at least it covered something, and I guessed it was a stack of the worst of the papers, or the ones that showed mortality rates that were just about complete, 99.9321 percent. The survivors had probably been misdiagnosed. I wondered why he didn't just throw those away, but that was my father: He'd read one of those and try to discover if the order of the dosages was wrong or if another gene in the compatibility test was needed to make the match right.

The house was empty when I came in. A house that is lived in by a man alone has a particular atmosphere, not a smell exactly, but a sort of scent of loneliness, or the air of longing, or maybe it is just the fact that air is only moved a very little bit (in the morning and evening) and so it takes on a quality that is like a tomb. Instinctively, you hesitate, or pull back.

I told my father that I would call my mother.

“She's going to have to know,” said my father. “I'd rather not do it.”

But he said she had dropped her cell phone in the toilet and he was going to send her some money for a new one and she wanted a Droid. Did he think he should get her a Droid?

“If she wants a Droid get her a Droid,” I said.

“She says the ashram has good Verizon coverage, even though it's up on the hill above Berkeley. You must know the place.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They don't keep the brush cut back. It's going to burn right to the ground.”

“Does a swami get insurance for an ashram?” he said.

“This is a California question,” I said. “But I guess. Although it would cost a shitload if they don't cut the brush. Is your fishing stuff in the car?”

My father had laid out the bread for four sandwiches, and so eight pieces of bread were there, sort of like the cards on a blackjack table, and he sat there, hands in his lap, looking at the mayonnaise, then the turkey in a plastic bag, then the lettuce, then the baggies (the American chemical industry's gift to crime), as though he could will these sandwiches into existence. So I put them together, cut them in half, just the way he liked them, not like a triangle, but like two rectangles, put them in a baggy, and then put some bottled water and two
cloth napkins in a backpack. In the bathroom medicine chest three bottles stood, fentanyl, hydromorphone, and Oxycontin, ninety pills in each bottle. They'd fit right in my vest, next to the box I had for the Adams tied on a #22 hook. I took them all. A bottle of Sufenta was also there, which we were supposed to save for the end. I took that, too.

I drove.

My father sat next to me, and the way these things worked is that we didn't talk about the reason for the trip, not right away, as though we had to get away from the place where the trouble was to talk about it. Still, we went out on the strip, past the clutter, the AutoZones and tire joints, the used car lots, and the rest, the Applebee's, which looked like a three-dimensional foil package for a bargain pack of condoms.

We could have gone on the highway, but he liked to go along the blacktop out of town where you could still see the farm stands, although now, in the fall, they didn't have much to sell. Mostly some hothouse flowers and some potatoes that had been left over from the summer or that had been kept in a cellar until the price would go up. What you saw now were the empty shelves with a few big onions with silky skins that had that coppery color of some women's elegant underwear. Earlier, corn would be piled up, with the kernels looking like butter, and the tomatoes as bright as lipstick, and the carrots would be piled up, orange and green and somehow constant. Now, though, it was fall and the shelves of the farm stands were empty and showed that off-white color the planks of the shelves had been painted and which was dusty and like the color of the Xeroxed paper on the backseat. Like the belly of a snake.

“Do you feel sick?” I said.

“I get out of breath. And I feel sick in the morning.” He stared at the cars ahead of us. “Like I could fall down.”

“Do you feel that way now?”

He cleared his throat. Blinked.

“I never lied to you, Jake. Yeah. I'm glad you're driving.”

The blacktop hummed under the car.

“That makes it worse. You know, giving up. Being afraid. Not going about your life, like driving a car.”

This is the fight that men make: being afraid and not showing it. Just standing into it, as though fear were a wind. “What are you going to do?” I said.

He gestured to the backseat, where the Xeroxed medical papers sat, the gray whites of the pages looking somehow fishy, or like something that had had fish wrapped up in it. On the floor, just behind him, was that fleece blanket, which I wanted to ask about but which he seemed to avoid, and so I kept my mouth shut.

“Nothing to speak of in those papers. Decreased mortality measured in weeks, not months. No mention of pain. Or much about side effects of some new drugs. You know, quack, quack, quack. Thirty-nine percent of patients show a 16 percent improvement. Thin gruel, Jake. Especially if the lining of the esophagus sloughs off after the marrow transplant and the anti-rejection drugs. Do you swallow it? The lining I mean? Or do you just puke it into a bowl?”

It seemed to me that the fleece blanket moved when this business about the lining of the esophagus was mentioned. Or that a sound came from under it, but I guess this was just my imagination. Everything seemed to move a little, like when you are a kid and have been twirling around.

My father had a fair amount of life insurance and some money put away in a retirement fund. The house was almost paid for, and he had a pension, too, that my mother would be able to collect. He figured he owed it to her, anyway. He had made a will that was up to date. He had seen Jackie Crandall, his lawyer, and there were no loose ends. In fact, it was the perfectly tidy manner in which an orderly man would leave his affairs. He was not vain about it, but matter of fact, as though these things were items in a well-packed bag. That was that.

The Palm, with the sign that said ALL NUDE WOMEN ALL THE TIME—AMATEURS EVERY THURSDAY, still stood in its cracked asphalt lot, still closed. A neon sign stood on the roof, the supports of it crosshatched like an oil derrick. The neon tubes described the trunk of a tree, which was yellow, and from the top some enormous green fronds hung down. I guessed it would look vaguely tropical if it were on, at night, but the place was closed.

“Look at that,” said my father. “Still not open. Pull in here. I can go back in the bushes there. That sumac. To take a leak. I've got to do that a lot.”

The inside of the car had the indefinable air of disaster, part of which, I guessed, came from the Xerox paper that gave off a sort of mechanical whiff, a constant air of indifference: It didn't care, or the machine didn't care if it copied good news or bad, the evidence of a cure or the results of another study that has come to grief. And along with that a slight breathing sound filled the air, on the verge of something like tears, as though I was imagining my own, and so when I couldn't take it anymore I got out of the car and walked along those places
where the grass was growing through the cracks in the parking lot. My father stood at the edge of the asphalt, the surface sparkling in the afternoon light, the reddish flowers of sumac there with a sort of dusty quality, as though death, which is what I thought of them being a sort of announcement for, wasn't cold but dusty. My father strained, waited, strained again, and said, “Fuck. It feels like I've got to go but I can't.”

“Can you take something for it?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I can take something for it.”

He zipped up and said to me, “Sorry, Jake. It's just that you never think it's going to happen, you know. That this thing that's waiting is somehow never going to spring on you and then it does.”

The cars went by with a sort of rubbery hiss, the big rigs shifting down and doubling up the rpms, like a thumping that was more final than before.

“I wonder what they'll be taking up on Furnace Creek,” I said.

“Emergers,” said my father.

He put out his hand, not to take mine, but as a gesture: the futility of this moment, the fact that he loved me but didn't know what to do, how to die properly, without making a mess. Was he thinking of putting stones in his pockets and walking into a stream? Was that the solution? So we waited in the ebb and flow of possibilities like that, the trucks shifting down as though they were coming up to some barrier, some border that required a complete stop. The sky was a misty blue, as though a fire burned a long ways away.

“Thanks for not saying anything,” said my father.

With my father, sometimes it's all silence, but it's not just
the silence of nothing, but the silence of restraint. There's a big difference.

The man with the European leather coat and the hair that looked phony but must have been real, his stomach hanging over his belt, his black pants wrinkled, closed the front door of the Palm, turned, and locked it with a key that was on a ring that held twenty or more, as though he were a trustee in some ancient prison. He stared into the distance, too, beyond the sumac, as though something were there for him, too.

“You missed amateur night. I told you, remember?” he said to us. “Was really something. We're going to do it again. In another month. That sign is just to bring the geeks in.”

“A month,” said my father. “A month is a long time.”

“Yeah,” said the man. “Here.” He put out his hand. “My name is Judah.”

“A month,” my father said.

So that's what we were talking about. Everything was becoming more clear, although it was an odd clarity, since while the details were becoming more certain, the implication, that is the disappearing of a human being and where he went, not the body, but the part that told jokes and stood up to things, that was a sort of essence, was more mysterious than ever.

I'd have to track down my mother, out there in the ashram or commune, or whatever the hell they called it now, Crystalville, or Auratown, and let her know. She'd be glad about the insurance money. Her boyfriend would be, too. High times. My father knew, of course, that the boyfriend would get some of the money. His name was Jack Frankel but he had an ashram name, something like North Star.

“Come back then,” said Judah. “You'll be amazed. Just amazed.”

“It's a little hard for me to be surprised these days,” said my father.

“Give it a try,” said Judah.

He took a blue handkerchief out of his pocket and held it with his fingers that had a couple of gold rings on them, and blew his nose while keeping his eyes on the distance, on that vague mist beyond the sumac. A semi shifted down, and the little lid on the smokestack opened so that a stream of black smoke, like from a crematorium, came out.

“Those trucks,” he said. “They make too much noise. Smell everything up.”

Judah sat behind the wheel of his Mercedes, his eyes still on the distance, and then he ground the engine, an
arrrah
,
arrrah
,
arrrah
, then waited and did it again and finally he got out and opened the hood and looked in and said, “Those goddamned Germans. Where are they when you need them? You know where I come from? Yugoslavia. My grandfather had some stories to tell about the Germans. My mother came from Yugoslavia.”

He slammed the hood.

“Psssst. Hey. You. Yeah, you,” he said to my father. “Does your car start?”

“I guess so,” said my father.

“I got a favor to ask,” said Judah, moving across the empty parking lot.

“What's that?” said my father.

“I got to get to my mother's funeral. And my car craps out.”

My father touched his back. He didn't say a word: All that
was simply between him and me, and we didn't say a thing about it, even when we were taking someone to a parent's funeral. Maybe that's how sons love their fathers: by keeping their mouths shut at particular times.

Of course, it's the kind of thing you learn from a father you love, such as his patience when he hadn't gotten a job that he had applied for and then had to listen to his son rave about it. That's how it worked: I'd make a mistake, see what my father had done when I had been making an ass of myself, and then I'd never do it again. Just the memory of silence was enough.

M
Y FATHER DROVE and Judah sat in the passenger's seat, where he blew his nose again and then both of them stared into the distance. I knew, when I pushed my leg against the fleece, who was there, maybe just because of the way the flesh gave, but before I pulled it back, the Xeroxed medical papers about the sloughing of the lining of the esophagus had to be moved back with the fishing things. One study was called “Mortality and Complication: Marrow Transplants.” Liver damage, kidney failure, a rash on the inside of an artery, the usual titles of medical papers. They made a pile next to the fly rods, waders, vests. The fleece was domestic, warm, comfortable, and ordinary. I pinched the corner and tugged. Sara's red hair and freckles showed as she looked up.