The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (26 page)

“Scott,” said my mother, “please let these men take you to the VA.”

“I’m not going to a hospital. There’s nothing wrong with me.” He considered the matter further and added, “It’s Christmas!” And there was real dudgeon in his voice. Christmas was sacred to Scott: it meant family and good food and booze and carols and Christ and an overall serenity that was otherwise missing from his life.

“Christmas is canceled this year,” said my mother.

“Well,” said Scott, “Christmas is
on
as far as I’m concerned.”

I sighed again, a definitive sigh, a sigh that called for an end to the whole charade. With reticent dignity I approached the older cop and asked where Scott would be taken if not to a hospital. The man replied at length. He said that Scott would be taken to the end of the long gravel driveway leading to the main road, where he’d have to wait for a cab. And yes, the cops would keep Scott company and make sure he got into the cab. In a kindly reminiscent way, the man went on about various contingencies that sometimes arose in this sort of dispute. He took no account of Scott’s presence as he spoke, though I could feel Scott’s stare on the back of my neck. At one point I turned slightly and Scott managed to lock eyes with me (the cop was still talking) in a way that was, I think, meant to intimidate and yet also appeal to my finer feelings. His eyes were brimming with hatred, with love, with sadness that it had come, at last, to this.

“I bet you’re enjoying yourself,” he said.

“It’s one of the worst experiences of my life,” I replied.

This sounded maudlin and a little craven, but I was mostly in earnest. It was a bad time, all right. But then, too, such a remark was precisely the sort of thing you say if you’re posing as the Good Son, the mature one who only wants what’s best for his long-suffering mother and so on. Which is to say, I
was
enjoying myself rather.

“Well, it’s almost over,” said Scott. “For now.”

“You hear that?” I asked the older cop, who closed his eyes and nodded. He was a decent man who found such matters regrettable.

The cops took over from there. The younger one followed Scott to his room and stood in the doorway while he packed his things. Now and then the man chuckled a little nervously, and I knew Scott was trying to charm him, to win him over with jokey bravado: “Well,
this
is a hell of a note! Frankly, I hope those two get
coal
in their stockings . . .” Drawers opened and shut with judicious restraint, wire hangers tinkled lightly. Finally Scott emerged with his duffel bag flung over his back; he looked as though he’d decided to find the whole thing amusing, though I could tell he wasn’t amused. He dropped his bag in the living room and turned to the cops.

“I want you guys to know,” he said, “that I find your professionalism commendable. You couldn’t have been more courteous and kind, and I want you to know I’ll never forget it.”

On the simplest level, Scott was being sincere—the policemen
were
nice blokes. On another level, he meant to contrast their niceness with his family’s vicious duplicity (at Christmas no less), suggesting that someday, perhaps, he’d be in a position to repay both kindness and cruelty. On a final, murkier level, he was casting ahead to some future court hearing:
No, the defendant was perfectly polite. He seemed genuinely perplexed and saddened by the whole . . .

“Scott—your presents—” said Marlies, gathering them out from under the tree. When Scott seemed hesitant to accept them, she dropped to her knees and began packing them expertly in his duffel bag. Two things occurred to me: one, that only my mother would dare take such a liberty, and two, that Scott was traveling light under the circumstances (he hadn’t packed the rest of his liquor—this for the sake of appearances, no doubt, though I found it ominous).

Finally he stood at the kitchen bar consulting the Yellow Pages for a motel. “That place is good,” the younger cop suggested, tapping his finger on a particular listing. “Clean and cheap and kinda in-between here and the city.” Scott nodded and phoned for a reservation; then he called a cab and gave the dispatcher patient directions to our remote location. Hanging up, he stood there shaking his head, as if the whole business were simply too bizarre for words.

“Ma, you’re not really serious about this,” he said. “C’mon. I’m your
son
, for crying out loud. It’s Christmas.”

“You brought this on yourself!” said my mother, with her stolid Germanic fondness for platitudes.

“Oh yeah, and life’s been so
good
to me,” he said.

I could restrain myself no longer. Sneeringly I pointed out—not for the first time—that it was always
life’s
fault as opposed to Scott’s own.

He took a step in my direction. The older cop saw me brace myself and grabbed Scott by the arm. The younger cop, a little hesitantly, took the other arm, and Scott went comically limp in their grasp. As they led him toward the door, he leaned back and bugged his eyes at me:
“See you soo-oon!”
he called, with loony menace, and then he was gone.

THE FIRST ORDER
of business was buying a gun. My mother had nothing but an old varmint rifle that looked as if it hadn’t been fired since the Alamo, and besides there were no bullets. After checking the Yellow Pages (still open to the motel listings), we drove to a sporting goods emporium on the interstate, where I explained our needs to a bearded fellow in the gun department. He wore a camouflage jacket and squinted intently with one eye.

“What you need it for?” he asked, when I mentioned that I hadn’t fired a gun since childhood and didn’t want anything fancy.

“Self-defense,” I said. “To shoot, you know—people.”

“Nuh!”
my mother protested.

The man nodded and ducked under the counter, coming up with a snub-nose pistol in a chamois cloth. “This here’s what you want,” he said. “Smith and Wesson .38, just point and fire.”

I paid with American Express and presented the neat plastic gun case to my mother. Merry Christmas. Then we went to a Chinese restaurant and discussed strategy over martinis and spare ribs.

“Okay, so you’re holding the gun,” I said. “What do you say?”

“ ‘Sit down.’ ”

“And if he doesn’t? What if he comes toward you?”

“I
shoot
him,” she said, and took a giggly sip of gin.

We were both feeling the strain, but I enjoined her to be serious. I’d warned her and warned her and
warned
her about Scott, and now look what had happened! With tipsy solemnity I added that if she ever let Scott into her life again,
ever
, I’d wash my hands of them both.

She nodded a trifle absently. “Fine.”

“Fine what?”

She shrugged. “Scott’s not as bad as you think. It’s not all black and white, you know. There’s a little gray!”

“
There’s a little gray
. Gosh, I hadn’t thought of that! Got a pen? I want to write that down . . .” Thus my father used to mock her platitudes. She smiled reminiscently. “Look,” I said. “From now on—and I think your cats would agree with me—it’s all black. No gray. If you want to indulge grayness, you do it on your own. Understood?”

She nodded.

“Okay. So you’ve got the gun. What do you say?”

“ ‘Sit down.’ ”

“And if he doesn’t?”

She thumped the table with a meaty fist. “I
shoot
the bastard.”

IT WAS GETTING
dark by the time we stopped at Walmart to buy bullets. A spindly blue-vested adolescent yanked out a tray of cartridges and said that these here (pointing) were the hollow-tipped kind and that’s what we wanted. “Goes in like that,” he said, making a little half-inch hole with thumb and forefinger, “and comes out like
this
,” whereupon he described a bloated grapefruit with both hands. We bought a box of twenty-five. “So much for just winging him,” I remarked.

I should add that earlier, as we were leaving the restaurant, I’d called Scott’s motel to see whether he’d checked in. He hadn’t, or else he’d done so under an assumed name. Probably, though, he was lurking around the house somewhere, waiting for us to return, and if our luck had
really
gone south he’d managed to find a gun of his own. One remembered his time as a marksmanship instructor in the marines. My mother pulled off the gravel driveway, and we took turns firing into a pond embankment. Fat gobs of mud spattered on impact; a dark curtain of birds flushed into the air. Somewhere, perhaps, Scott was listening.

The house was a vague silhouette in the powdery twilight. When my mother stopped the car I rolled out the passenger side, literally rolled, in the manner of some intrepid TV cop; half-consciously I thought if Scott were watching from his hiding place, he wouldn’t be able to restrain his laughter and then I’d have the drop on him. Cocking the gun at my ear, I scampered like a troll from bush to bush, casing the house—peeking in windows, pausing in a crouch to fan the gun at the darkling woods, and so on. Finally I made the entire circuit and gave my mother a thumbs-up. She hopped out of her car and trotted with awkward haste up the icy path, fumbling in her purse for the house keys. An oddly poignant sight.

It took a while for the adrenaline to wear off. We turned on every light in the house and closed the curtains, triple-locked the doors; then my mother poured herself some brandy and made phone calls: to a Realtor friend who could get her a deal on a fancy alarm system—indeed could arrange for installation first thing in the morning if not that very night—and to various others who knew Scott and promised to let us know if they gained some inkling of his whereabouts. After the last phone call, my mother drank off her brandy and joined me on the couch, where I sat watching TV with the gun in my lap. A few minutes later the phone rang. We stayed put.

“I think it’s pretty poor,” Scott’s voice slurred over the machine, “pretty fucking
piss
poor that I have to spend Christmas in some fleabag motel. I’m thirty-eight years old,” he added, and lapsed into a long drunken silence. My mother started to get up, and I pulled her back down on the couch.
“Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,”
Scott began to sing,
“alles schlaft, einsam wacht . . .”
At last he sighed, took a drink (ice tinkling), and hung up.

So he was, it seemed, at some motel—doubtless a real fleabag rather than the “clean” place suggested by the cop, since Scott didn’t mind a certain kind of tidy squalor and of course he’d want to husband his money for liquor and drugs. That was reassuring. My mother and I laughed a little, and even waited somewhat hopefully for Scott to call again and perhaps sing another carol.

The rest of the evening was pleasant enough. We sat around drinking Scott’s liquor and opening a few early Christmas presents. My mother had some kind of Hopi prayer stick or incense wand, and at one point she lighted this and walked all around the house—a wobbly but dignified saunter—waving smoke at whatever remained of Scott’s spirit. One by one her cats came out of hiding and joined us there in the living room as though nothing had ever been amiss.

Scott called again around 3:00
A.M
., and roughly four times a day after that. Drunk or sober he was unrepentant, but not really vengeful: as usual he tried alternately to sweet-talk our mother and make her feel guilty, but she only kept repeating that mantra about his bringing it all on himself, which must have driven him up the wall. I worried she’d relent as soon as I returned to New Orleans, but happily Scott was arrested on a public-drunk charge and back in jail by the new year.

part V

the calm mid-heaven

O
ne good thing about that last harrowing Christmas with Scott was that it led, for a time, to reconciliation between my father and me. We hadn’t spoken in almost two years when I called him that day at his office to let him know I’d just bought a gun—this shortly after I’d learned that Scott hadn’t checked in at the “clean” motel. I asked my father if maybe he’d be willing to hire a private detective to find Scott and follow him around, or better yet arrange via his friend the DA for Scott to be arrested on some trumped-up charge. Though Burck kept his own counsel with regard to these rather wayward suggestions, he was calm and kind and comforting to talk to. He asked me to keep him posted, which I did, and we met for lunch a few days later.

Talking about Scott became more and more painful for my father, and it was understood one didn’t broach the subject without his implicit consent. Sandra, however,
liked
to talk about Scott, as he remained a danger as long as he was alive and it made sense to inquire about his whereabouts; also he was just a fascinating subject. My father was still at his office in the city when Mary and I arrived at Breeze Hill for a visit—our first—so we sat in the kitchen with Sandra and Kelli (whom I hadn’t seen in six years, since that awful ski trip to Santa Fe), chatting, easily enough, about Scott.

“Listen, you guys,” Sandra said, lowering her voice and edging closer in her chair, “I’ve never told this to a soul—well, I’ve never told your
father
. . .”

Kelli nodded. She knew what was coming.

“But one time, Scott
kissed
me.”

Mary glanced at me with furtive puzzlement:
What’s wrong with that?
I remained poker-faced.

“You mean he kissed you on the cheek?” I said. “Or what?”

Sandra slowly shook her head. She pulled her chair a bit closer. “He kissed me on the
lips
,” she all but whispered. “He kissed me with his
tongue
.”

Kelli chuckled in a worldly sort of way. She’d lived in San Francisco for some ten years by then and was little fazed by the endless oddity of human conduct.

“It was right after we moved here,” Sandra said. “I think it was the first time Scott spent the night . . .”

Her voice became a little rushed and flustered as it occurred to her that my brother had been welcome at the ranch right up to the time he went to prison almost, a time when I myself—a schoolteacher of decent repute—would have been escorted off the grounds by hired hands, Jack barking viciously in my wake.