Willnot (13 page)

“Which you took literally enough to seek me out.”

“I had the feeling it wasn’t figurative, Lamar. Nor simple sentiment.”

So: Code again?

And Bobby was still around. Why? I walked off wondering.

A while later, I was leaving Radiology after checking pictures of ten-year-old Dominic’s dislocated hip when Vinny approached me. A small wonder, since he rarely left his office.

Joint problems in a young person are particularly worrisome, prompting all manner of speculation about skeletal defects, congenital conditions, the possibility of RA, spondylitis, or one of their ugly cousins.

“I heard you were in house,” Vinny said, “wanted you to see this.”
This
being a letter on Forward Foundation stationery.

Dear Mr. Parelli:

It has been my intention for some time now to write and thank you for the excellent, concerned care I was fortunate enough to receive at Bielecki Hospital. I cannot overstate this—the care, or my appreciation—in light of the fact that your concerted actions saved my life.

Following recovery and intensive physical therapy, I am back near 100% now, soon to ship out again with the crew to
an excavation site in Turkey, where we will be investigating tales of an entire village population killed and buried in a single grave. I’m very much looking forward to getting back on the horse.

Once again, please accept my profound thanks, and please pass thanks along to Dr. Hale and, in turn, to your entire staff.

Sidney M. Patmore

P.S. Seb Daiche has asked that I convey to Dr. Hale his apologies that we were unable to be of more help with the bodies there in Willnot.

Richard and I arrived home within minutes of one another, poured a couple of glasses of pinot noir, and headed out to the patio, where he told me the car was running smooth as glass, he was as of today acting principal, and his predecessor had threatened the school board with litigation. In turn I told him about Sunil, the report on the bodies, and Mr. Patmore’s letter. Darkness nudged at every edge. We sat watching the flash of diaphanous wings against light bleeding from the house behind us. Presently I went in to pee, Richard to refill glasses. Coming round from the kitchen, he stood in the bathroom doorway.

“Two-fisted?” I said.

“Always carry a spare. Buddy system. Plan ahead for possible spills.” He gestured in slow motion, so as to minimize sloshing, with the left-hand glass. “If you need help putting that away …”

“Not at the moment.”

I finished and we went back outside, where Dickens looked on intently, pondering whether chasing moths was worth the multiple efforts required. A bat shot into sight like a thrown grenade, scooping up insects at light’s margin, just as suddenly gone.

As though magically summoned by my mention of it, neurology moved in to supplant sniper collecting and coded signals as patients presented with:

A painful, progressive ringing in the ears and—patently—balance problems, strongly suggesting Ménière’s disease;

Blurred and double vision, muscle spasms and general fatigue, symptoms so nonspecific that they might be anything, or nothing, but that in the context felt to me like MS;

Tremors and a gait that, given their nature and the patient’s age, given also the constant circular motion of index finger and thumb called pill-rolling, almost certainly indicated Parkinson’s.

All these oddly enough in two days, before we fell back to the accustomed run of virus, rash and sniffles, angina, blood where blood shouldn’t be, UTIs, asthma, menopause, prolapses, loss of feeling, swellings, and pain. Performed an emergency appy in there somewhere, set an arm, and sent a three-year-old with wandering eye to vision therapists at University Hospital.

Meanwhile the days proceeded much like a master pratfaller tripping over hassocks, chairs, and folds in the carpet on his way
across the room only to recover, again and again, in the last moment. Groups of every sort, religious, regional, political, fraternal, went on beating at the tribal drum, rallying to themselves all those who believed, felt, and dressed like them. And all of us went on seeking some form or fashion of Camus’s invincible summer.

Wearing his new hat as official Bossman and to the chorus of “When am I supposed to find time to teach,” Richard’s daily stories now were not of students and course work but of tempests brewed painstakingly in teacups, eggshell egos, counselings, and intercessions, so when on a Wednesday I arrived home to find him doing a fair take on Wednesday’s child filled with woe, I assumed it to be more of the same.

But Nathan, the ant-mill kid and twelve-year-old freethinker, had gone missing.

Nathan ran the household when their mother was at work. Fixed breakfast, saw sister Chloe off to school properly and on time. But that morning, Chloe roused when her radio alarm went off and found a note on the kitchen table saying he had to get away to think about things and her breakfast was over by the stove. Chloe ate—toast and a plain omelet swaddled in aluminum foil—and was almost done with the Cheerios she’d got for herself when she thought she might ought to call her mother at the diner. Mom called the school. Acting principal Richard caught the call.

So everyone, Richard said, is looking for Nathan.

At which point—we were sitting in the kitchen—I glanced up and saw a young man passing by the window as he stepped onto the porch. I went to the door and opened it before he could knock.

“Nathan,” Richard said.

Bobby stood beyond, in the yard. “This is where he asked to come.”

Richard gave the boy a quick hug and, realizing who Bobby was, introduced himself, shaking hands, as they came in. Nathan sat at the table. Bobby remained standing against the wall at (I couldn’t help but notice) an angle well out of line of sight from the windows.

I got bottles of water from the fridge for both of them. “Not every day that two missing persons show up together on our porch.”

“You’re okay?” Richard asked.

Nathan nodded, emptied his bottle in two gulps.

“We need to call your mother.” Richard went into the living room for his phone, came back and motioned Nathan to follow him.

“I got your message,” I said.

“From the pastor.”

I gestured toward the front room, toward Nathan. “He
is
okay, right?”

“Fine. Confused.”

“About?”

“Come on, Doc. He’s smart. Sees what goes on around him, how it doesn’t fit what he’s told.” Bobby looked out into the yard. “Hope you don’t mind my bringing him here.”

“We appreciate it. Richard was worried.”

“And hope my having been here doesn’t bring anything else down on you.”

Richard stuck his head in the door to tell me he was going to run Nathan home.

“I’ve been staying out in the woods,” Bobby said. “Living off the land for the most part.”

“With your tablet.”

“Your pastor friend let me recharge.” Saw in his grin a flash of
the Brandon I’d known as a boy. “I don’t know how much you may have figured out about what’s going on.”

“Not much. That the FBI’s not alone in looking for you. When you got shot you said it was an old friend saying hello.”

“I could count on my thumbs the number of times Carlos ever missed what he set his sights on. His handlers know it too, but what’s to prove? And getting taken down by local law—which is every bit as unlikely as Carlos missing the shot—then having to skip out, that takes him out of the picture.”

Bobby finished his water, held up the bottle. “You have recycle now, right?”

“In the pantry, green bin.”

“Both of us,” Bobby said, coming back, “declined to do what we were told. Carlos was smarter about it. Anyhow …” He stood where he’d been before. Not a half inch difference. “I came across the kid out there, couple of miles from anything, in a clearing that looked like it was a favorite spot for someone a long time back. Remains of a picnic table gone gray and spongy from exposure, rocks that made a kind of cook pit, part of a Styrofoam cooler with onions growing out of it.

“He looks up when he hears me, asks ‘Is it okay for me to be here?’ Okay by me, I tell him, and it’s public land, but maybe there are parents, teachers, who are worried about him?”

“What was he doing out there?”

“Sitting. Checking out his shoes. Listening to the wind. My old friend Dell would say he was trying to feel himself a part of the world again, instead of apart from it. I think he was just trying to get the noise out of his head.

“We had a long talk. You don’t meet up with many kids—hell, with many people, period—that want to talk about anything real. Most of it’s dead air and white noise, he kept saying.”

I waited. Listening to the wind myself, I guess.

“What got said’s between the two of us, Doc, ought to stay that way. Two guys sitting together out in the woods away from it all, both carrying stuff you’d think with the gap in age, where we’ve been, couldn’t possibly be more different, but you look close and it turns out not to be very different at all.”

Bobby’s head shifted suddenly as he peered out into the yard. He was silent a moment, then turned back.

“Not that I think there’s much need to say what we talked about. Never took you to be in the amen corner for the great myth of progress.”

“True. But I’m surprised—”

“That I’m still around? Me no less than you. Not sure why I came, or why I didn’t leave the way I started to. Used to be so sure about things. You know, Doc …”

Traffic sounds on the street outside, a truck or heavy SUV. Bobby listened as it passed.

“You always think it’s going to be some huge moral decision.”

“The twenty-minute slam.” When he shook his head, I went on, “Someone my father knew said that’s how he wrote a hundred TV shows. Whatever the character believes, by twenty minutes into the show it folds up on him. Everything he knew was wrong. And because of that, in the last five minutes his life is changed forever. Not like that, huh?”

“Except for the change part. I knew what I was doing, the weight of it. All I wanted was to stop.” Bobby straightened. “I’d better get along.”

On the porch he turned back to say, “I hope your boy works it out,” then stepped off into the yard and within seconds was part of the night.

My dear Lamar,

It’s been a long time, I know, and I’m sorry. Not that I haven’t been thinking about you—ever. So much conspires to pull us away from what’s most important.

Could it really be that a year has passed since I told you I was moving to Kentucky? Back to Joe’s cockeyed, weird and weirdly beautiful South. We’ve bought a house far outside town (the town itself is full to capacity at just over 500 souls) where, sitting outside in morning or late afternoon, it’s not difficult to imagine that we’re alone, safely tucked away from all of civilization’s gears ceaselessly grinding us down. And from memory’s doing the same.

Fiona fares well. No question that she misses Eldon, thinks of him constantly, but it’s been months since I heard her weeping at night in her room. Robbie has recovered perhaps as much as he shall. He’s 12 now—again, hard to believe. Therapists taught us, before we moved, everything we needed to know to continue his daily regimen. He walks unaided, can see to his own needs as far as hygiene, eating, dressing and such. He does
fine as long as language connects to what he can touch or see, or almost: objects, routines, time of day. Whenever talk or events list toward the abstract he simply stands there. Not looking confused, or any different at all, really. Time out, more or less. Waiting for the world to get back on track, knowing that in time it will.

No day goes by but that I think how impossible was Fiona’s choice in ending the pregnancy, her and Eldon’s child inside her on the one hand, Robbie’s extravagant needs on the other. None of us can ever know how that feels.

Well, you could.

The people here before us, longtime renters, had fig trees. We’ll let them go to ruin, no doubt, but they serve to remind me of those you liked so much when you were small. What—six or seven? Back in Arkansas. You’d sit in them for hours. It was like being inside a rib cage, you said.

Is there ever a line between regret and memory, Lamar? How do we find it?

Robbie has Richard’s love for animals. Each afternoon at five he goes to the kitchen, gets down the bin of dog food, and puts out three bowls of it, one red, one blue, one green. A raccoon is waiting and steps up immediately, evidencing no shyness whatsoever. The last time it came there were babies following it. Other regulars include a badger Robbie calls Adger (he can’t form the b sound), a tiny yellow female cat missing most of one paw (Little One), and (as yet unnamed) a remarkably mellow skunk that tolerates and is tolerated by both Adger and Little One.

I do still hear from some of the old crowd. They ask about you. A lot of them are going or gone, of course. Do you remember Irv Palander? He wrote that series where the stove and clocks
and other household appliances are always talking to whatever the guy’s name was—correcting him when he sets the temperature wrong, doesn’t flush the toilet or wash his hands, drinks too much or stays up late. He calls every now and again. The phone will ring, it’s quiet for a moment or two, then he’ll say “Another one’s down, Clara.” And it’s Henry up in Minneapolis, or Carol in Connecticut, or Kentucky Kim. No more adventures on the ice planet, their bows and arrows and energy guns are put to rest, the dystopia’s shut down, their ships never again to kick-start.

I guess what they say is true, at some point when you look in the mirror you see the past. I’m sitting here thinking how many years I scolded you, when you went off to college, when you were interning at Beth Israel and doing your residency, for not writing. And now it’s me who doesn’t write. A year! I will try to do better, I promise.

Meanwhile, if you’d ever consider coming for a visit to this wonderfully godforsaken place, there’s a spare room—even if we might have to send pictures so that we’d recognize one another. I might even, given the occasion, be driven to cook.