The Fugitives (30 page)

“Dr. Leung says that you contacted him.”

“That’s right.”

“Why did you need to call him?”

“I had questions.”

“Ask us.”

“I wanted to hear the doctor’s answers.”

This was only partly true. What I wanted to hear was the doctor himself, to get a sense of the person in whose hands my parents had placed my father’s life. The answers themselves were perfectly frustrating. Apparently my father’s primary care physician was exactly the wrong person to ask about his health: he couldn’t say. He didn’t know yet. Cases like these could differ greatly, as could their prognoses. Recommendations for postoperative treatment would be made by the neurosurgeon, and that treatment would most likely involve an oncologist, or maybe a hematologist, and most definitely a radiologist. I could almost hear Leung, a cardiologist, sidestepping any knowledge of the case, as if I might accuse him of deliberately implanting the tumor in my father’s brain. In a way, I felt that his evasive hesitancy was denying me the dismal prognosis I required.

I needn’t have worried: the neurosurgeon, a man about my age named Suresh, who exuded all the assertive confidence one would hope to find in someone who opened people’s skulls and cut into their minds, was as blunt as Dr. Leung had been noncommittal: “Surgery’s finished. It was successful; the tumor was well defined and close to the surface, and your dad’s recovering in the ICU. But you should know that from the look of things it’s likely a metastatic tumor, from cancer cells originating in the lung. I’ve sent a frozen section to the lab for analysis but I ordered a chest X-ray before surgery because I had a hunch. There’s a shadow there, definitely. My guess, adenocarcinoma, but we’ll see.”

And with that unhopeful information and the memory of my father, as feeble as a premature newborn and as surrounded by life-maintaining and monitoring equipment as one, I returned to New York.

LET HIM LIVE.
Let him live and I’ll do whatever you want. Let him live and I’ll be good. Let him live and I’ll live without ambition, without greed, without lust, without envy, without pride; I’ll live as a wraith or a saint: the patient father, the perfect husband, the devoted son I have not been. Let him live and I will accept poverty. Let him live and I’ll accept my own illness and death.

And even as I pledged these things I inserted, as I once had done while working as an insurance underwriter, various exclusions, escape clauses from these obligations: I will do what you want, but not consider devout observance or worship; I will be good, but reserve the right to define that term for myself; I will have no ambition, but will continue devotedly to pursue my work; no greed, but I will strive after what I feel is due me; no lust but in my heart; no envy or pride but that to which I am entitled; a wraith or saint but one who eats, and drinks, and fucks, and walks the earth as a man; the patient father except when engrossed or otherwise engaged; the perfect husband but ever-cognizant of my wife’s flaws; the devoted son but still a thousand miles away and much too busy to call; I would accept poverty but not court it, my own illness but not a serious illness, my own death but at a suitably old age, compos mentis and surrounded by family and with time to put my affairs in order—in the end, the bargain I attempted to strike with God was no bargain at all, certainly not one I would have accepted if I were the creator of the universe, and appropriately enough God destroyed my father; and in retaliation, or at least I have come to think of it as retaliation, I destroyed my own life. It was only weeks after returning from that visit that I began my affair with Susannah, as if I intended to show God exactly how angrily disobedient I could be. God already would have known, of course. God would say, “Free will, champ.” Or, “The occasion of sin, champ.” He had his own exclusions in place.

SALTEAU

E
VERYBODY
eats smartberries from time to time. Nanabozho would tell you that he makes it a habit to eat them every day. The most interesting thing about smartberries is that although you can find them almost everywhere, people, being people, often don’t know where to look for them. Nanabozho, on the other hand, always knows where to find them even when it doesn’t look as if there are any. Here is a story about the very first time a human being ate a smartberry, and it was because Nanabozho, the trickster, decided that the time was right for people to learn about them.

One day, Nanabozho was walking along the lakeshore when he encountered another traveler. They walked together a way, passing the time, and then, the conversation momentarily having flagged, Nanabozho made an idle comment—perhaps it was about the sky looking as if it might rain, or how it was probably a good day for fishing because of the way the trout were rising to the surface—and the fellow traveler remarked, “I’ve always wanted to ask you, Nanabozho, how you came to be so smart. You always know everything that there is to know.” And Nanabozho considered the question for a moment, and then answered, “Well, friend, it’s because I eat smartberries every day without fail.” And the man answered, “I’ve heard of all sorts of berries where I come from, but I’ve never heard of smartberries.” “Very well,” said Nanabozho, “come with me and I’ll show them to you.” So the man followed Nanabozho into the bush, where Nanabozho walked around in little circles, looking and looking at the ground, and urging the man to do the same. “What am I looking for?” the man asked. “Ah, I forgot,” said Nanabozho. “I forgot that you hadn’t eaten any yet and weren’t yet smart enough to know what to look for.” And this made the man even more eager to find and eat some smartberries. All at once, Nanabozho came to a halt. “Aha!” he said. “Here’s where we’ll find some smartberries!” But all the man could see was a rabbit trail, and he began to protest, but Nanabozho put a finger to his lips and so the man found his patience. After following the rabbit trail for a little way, Nanabozho bent over and began picking up what appeared to be rabbit droppings. The traveler wondered whether Nanabozho had taken leave of his senses, but he remained silent, so eager was he to eat smartberries and become smart like Nanabozho. Finally, after gathering a handful, Nanabozho bade the man to cup his hands and he poured the little lumps he’d gathered into them. “Here are smartberries,” said Nanabozho, “you try them now.” So the man filled his mouth with the little lumps and began to chew, but the taste was so horrible that after a little while he had to spit them out onto the ground. “What the hell was that?” he asked, angrily. “Those taste just like shit!” And Nanabozho looked innocently at the lumps on the ground, and remarked, “What do you know? Those are rabbit turds! They aren’t smartberries after all! But don’t you feel smarter?”

25

S
ATURDAY
afternoon I found a message on my machine, staticky and unintelligible but also distinctly menacing. The only phrase I even came close to deciphering sounded something like, “Even a stone predator got to floss out the crap from between its fangs.” When I checked the caller ID, I discovered that the number belonged to the Avalon Diner in Sugar Land, Texas. I didn’t want to think about it, or about Dylan’s warning, and I was feeling sort of recklessly bored, so around mid-afternoon after I’d had a couple of drinks I drove to Charlevoix to see Salteau at the Smelt Fry. The high school gymnasium where the event was held was crowded and hot, with an acrid smell of smoking oil, fried dough, and fish. At a station in the corner several men wearing aprons and paper hats stood dropping battered smelt and onion rings into deep fat fryers and lifting sizzling smelt and onion rings from them in wire strainer baskets, emptying the cooked food into aluminum pans that were kept piled high, while a long line of people stood waiting to be served. When Salteau came down off the platform that had been erected for the performers, he removed his hat and placed it on the edge of the stage, and somebody came and handed him a paper plate of fish and onion rings and a cup of Faygo pop, talked to him for a moment, and then left him. Salteau put his plate on the stage beside his hat, sipped from the cup, mopped his face with a bandanna he took from the back pocket of his jeans, and then replaced the hat. He took his plate and began to eat, slowly, meditatively, one hand hovering over the food on his plate. He gazed at me.

“I know you,” he said. “Cherry City library. How’d you like the PG-13 stuff?” He lifted a smelt, looking at me, and put it in his mouth. “Think I can tell stories to little kids about eating shit?” He laughed. Then he scrutinized me. “How long you been here from New York?”

“How’d you know?”

“I’m an Indian.” He shrugged. “Where’s your friend? The Indian girl?”

“Indian girl?”

“That girl I’ve seen you with lately.”

“I think she’s Asian.”

“She’s an Indian. Give me a break.” He reared back a little and studied me from under the brim of his hat.

It occurred to me that I had no idea. I’d made my assumptions and filled in the background (as usual). I’d invented a pair of hardworking immigrant parents, mom-and-pop store owners, high-achieving kids, maybe a dermatologist or dentist among them. It always seemed important to have a story, even if it was a stereotype.

“Maybe she is. She never mentioned it.”

“Some are like that.” He shrugged again. He picked up another smelt, then dropped it on the plate.

“This place smells like shit,” he said. “Come on, let’s go outside.”

He hitched up his pants and I followed him through the crowd to one of the exit doors, which let us out into an asphalt schoolyard. The door slammed behind us and we stood alone in the dusk, the eastern sky a flat, even lavender. Three crows hopped near an overflowing garbage can. One abruptly took flight and landed in a nearby tree, where he called to the others.

“So you like the stories, huh?” he asked.

“I do,” I said.

“I heard ’em all right here,” he said. “That’s where I’m from. Horton Bay. You know those three Ojibway in the Hemingway story? The ones who catch Nick Adams’s dad in a lie about whose timber washed up on his land?”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “I know the story,” I said.

“Those were my cousins and my great-grandfather,” Salteau said.

“The Indians?”

“Yeah, Ignatz. The Indians.”

It seems to me that to assert an identity as someone else’s fictional character is among the strangest forms self-abnegation can take. Ultimately, those who feel that their identities have been borrowed are flattered—insulted, maybe, but flattered. Hemingway’s Indians are depicted as thugs and half-wits; their calling out of Dr. Adams on the timber whose theft he is attempting to conceal has more to do with the unwillingness of one of them to work off a debt than with their misgivings about the ownership of the wood. I remembered what I’d said to Kat at Gagliardi’s, about how there were probably a thousand people in the region claiming a direct connection to Hemingway’s life and work: under other circumstances, I would have assumed that Salteau could see only his stake in a historic imagination.

This was different. While the coincidence wasn’t completely impossible (or so I tried to tell myself), I couldn’t help feeling that a creation of mine had taken physical form and appeared before me. I asked, “Have you been here your whole life?”