A Calling for Charlie Barnes Read online

  He turned in agony to face his wife. “I’m someone’s plaything,” he said.

  “Charlie,” she said. “We’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

  “I can’t die, Barbara.”

  “No one’s dying yet,” she said.

  “I can’t fucking die!” he cried. “Not now! Not yet!”

  35

  One common side effect of a diagnosis of pancreatic adenocarcinoma, that tower sniper of cancers, is a case of old-fashioned whiplash, as the stunned patient, presented with equivocal and even contradictory indications, turns away from certain doom toward total and intoxicating Dostoyevskian reprieve and back again in a few short days, sometimes within the hour. Such is the fate of one suspected of carrying a time bomb inside him, tucked between the small bowel and the stomach, the faint ticking of which can hardly be discerned until the final second or two before detonation. You have to keep in mind—doctors see different things. There are competing metrics. The same fact set might generate two or more opposing interpretations or narratives. Charlie Barnes, who had the benefit of being married to a medical professional, was in some ways worse off for it, as he became the subject under scrutiny of yet one more of the experts this particular cancer delighted in thwarting. One case in the medical literature notable for the extravagance of its cruel reversals took place at Johns Hopkins in 2003, when a patient from Abu Dhabi received seven diagnoses in two weeks, was finally confirmed in his acute pancreatitis, and died of metastatic pancreatic cancer ten days later. Another apocryphal account Karen found on the internet put GreenMonster49’s number of reprieves at no fewer than twelve before they opened him up and found pancreatic adenocarcinoma with widespread arterial invasion. Scanning technology, while awesome, remained crude, bringing certain metaphors to mind, like the bulldozer that was sent to study orchids. It simply wasn’t subtle enough, and Charlie’s diagnosis changed no fewer than four times. By the following Wednesday, however, pancreatic cancer was all but confirmed, and the next thing he knew they were admitting him; prepping him; handing him the gown; helping him climb up on the gurney; and presently he was being pushed down the corridor in the direction of the operating room. One minute given a clean bill of health; the next, laid out flat and watching the panels of fluorescent light above him tick down like steps in a duel. Might they have made some additional mistake? But no, they were pushing him through the double doors and parking him under the bright—

  “Name, please.”

  Name, date of birth, and a short wait later, a man came and hovered over him. Without knowing how, he knew the man to be his case manager at Credence Credit Corp., and that he would be doubling that day as his anesthesiologist.

  “Can you confirm for me what procedure we’re doing today, Charles?”

  “No procedure!” he cried. “Let me out of here!”

  But when he tried to launch himself off the gurney, he found his hands bound to the metal railings.

  “What is this? What’s happening?”

  “Ready to die? It won’t take but a second.”

  The case manager morphed into Aaron Einsohn, the shyster out of Aurora, who was about to cut out his heart when Charlie woke with a start. The room was dark. His heart was racing. The bleating he had confused for an alarm was his cell phone ringing on the nightstand. It was 2:37 a.m.

  “You’re a goner, old man,” the caller said.

  “What?”

  “No one survives pancreatic cancer.”

  He sat up. “Einsohn?”

  “I hope you die, you dick.”

  The phone went dead.

  The facts, momentarily obscured by sleep, came flooding back. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer earlier that day.

  Barbara rolled over in bed. “Who was it, Charlie?”

  He had made so many desperate calls the day of his diagnosis, that number could have belonged to anyone.

  36

  Things did not go as planned for Charlie after he resigned from Big Brothers in 1977. He thought little of Archie Baker, the owner of Waukegan Title, who ignored his recommendations for expansion and franchising. Steady Boy saw millions in untapped markets where Archie saw only risk. Still, Charlie hit a personal best there. He worked for Archie a full five years before the younger man had enough and gave him the ax.

  Charley Proffit of Peoria, Illinois, had never been married to a man who had been fired before. She started fucking Glen Glamour, the fine-art appraiser and Charlie’s number one rival at Red Mask. The affair didn’t conform to the morals she professed or her Christian bona fides, but if it’s consistency you’re after, you’ll have to read about a different family. No one was more surprised by her behavior than she was. Steady Boy scheduled a vasectomy and filed for divorce. Or was it the other way around? Then he laid seven three-piece suits across the spare tire in the trunk of his Newport and pointed the car north, toward Chicago. Danville had always been a bitter loaf of ashes. He needed a fresh start.

  He was still within city limits when he had a bright idea and pulled into the Palmer Bank. He withdrew by pneumatic tube a large sum from their joint account, convincing himself that she deserved it, and now sucking on the free lollipop that came with his cash resumed his travels. But by the time he hit Hoopeston, he had second thoughts: from whom was he taking that money if not his children? He turned the car around. He pulled into the driveway of the house on Vermilion and banged on the front door. Glen Glamour answered his knock in a red velvet house robe and a pair of travel slippers.

  “Hello, Charlie. Here to see Charley?”

  “You can go to hell, Glen.”

  “Sure, let me get her for you.”

  For eight mind-boggling months in 1983, Glen, a home-fitness fanatic and total turd, was for Charley Proffit the be-all and end-all of romantic possibility. He hollered up to his fiancée that she had an old friend at the door before turning back to his vanquished foe and smiling. It was during this time that my father realized Glen was wearing his robe.

  “Why, you son of a bitch …”

  “What seems to be the problem here?” Charley said upon coming to the door.

  “He’s in my robe, Charley!”

  Glen Glamour peered down at himself. “Oh, is this yours, Chuck?”

  “It’s not enough that he has my wife. He gets to have my robe, too?”

  “Give him his robe back, Glen.”

  “Sorry, Chuck, I had no idea.”

  When Glen slipped off his rival’s robe, he was revealed to be fully attired in pin-striped suit and tie. He had spied Charlie pulling into the driveway from the second-floor bathroom and tossed that robe over his work clothes before rushing downstairs to answer the door. Charlie took the robe with one hand while thrusting at her the two hundred dollars he had removed from the Palmer Bank with the other.

  “What is this?” she demanded.

  “Early child support,” he said. “Now let me say goodbye to the kids.”

  “You’ve already said goodbye to them a hundred times. What is this money?”

  “Goddamn it, I want to see the kids!”

  “Oh, the drama,” she said.

  This episode was every bit as broadly comic, the adults as close to cartoons of themselves, as I am depicting—and as I witnessed firsthand from the middle of the staircase overlooking the entrance hall. The rivalry was frightening, and Charley Proffit’s cruel indifference toward Charlie unfathomable. I ran down to him in the doorway and threw my arm around him.

  “Now, you call me night or day,” he said to me. “Your mom’s got my number and she knows to let you call whenever you want. And I’ll be back to see you every single weekend, hear me? Every weekend, no exceptions. Saturday morning, you expect me, got that? And we’ll spend the whole day together just like before. You just forget about Chicago. That’s just some place I sleep. My home is right here.” He made a fist of his hand and patted my heart. “And no stupid divorce can change that.”

  That Saturday morning, I did as h
e told me to do. I woke up at some ridiculously early hour and announced my intention to look out the window for him until I saw the big Newport pull into the driveway. My mother hated this plan. She interrupted it by insisting I eat breakfast, which I had to do at the kitchen table, far from the front window, and again when she demanded I make my bed and tidy my room, and a third time when I was forced to brush my teeth. I did these things half-assedly, testing her patience, and she made me do them over again until I had done them to her satisfaction. Then, reluctantly, I was allowed to return to the front window. He had not offered a specific time for his arrival, so I just had to stay focused on the street and on the cars passing by from both directions until one was the Newport. My mother came a fourth time into the room.

  “I want you to go out and play, Jake,” she said. “Get some sunshine. It’s a nice day outside.”

  “I don’t want to go out and play.”

  “You’re just wasting your time in here. He’s not coming. Go outside.”

  “I’m not wasting my time.”

  By then, she had discovered that the two hundred bucks he had thrust in her face was not in fact early child support but money taken from their joint account. If she didn’t understand why he had withdrawn that money only to turn around and give it right back to her, she needed no more proof that I was banking on the wrong man. I defied her, on the verge of tears, determined not to budge again from my little narrow view of Vermilion Street. I heard each car approach, the faint whirr of tire tread in the distance getting stronger until all at once the whole thing was upon me and swiftly passing by again, that same whirr winding down, fading, gone.

  “You’re wasting your time!” she shouted. “Go out and play!”

  I would not go out and play. I would not leave my place. Time crawled by. Was it an hour later, a full day, a whole year, by the time I had memorized every hole in the window screen and every dead fly on the windowsill?

  Now, guess how this ends. Just take a guess.

  He showed. There was never a Saturday he didn’t show. Every weekend, every single weekend, it was back to Danville for Charlie Barnes, back to the backwater where his past lived on, where his failure thrived, where the whole sordid mess of his early manhood began. He made the three-hour drive south through Podunk towns, past endless rows of corn, in good weather and bad, to repeat to me time and again in word and in deed: you have not been abandoned. I need you as much as you need me. You have me for life. He was broke as hell, so we spent those Saturdays doing karate kicks in a parking lot or playing games of war on a picnic table in Douglas Park. On the rare occasion he did have money, he would take us roller-skating or to the movies. It was at the roller rink in ’84 that Marcy fell and broke her arm, and so on occasion, he took us to the hospital. A lot of the time, we just went to the YMCA and shot hoops. Stan Butkus, the Danville coach with the fused spine, had nothing on Charlie Barnes. To me he was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, with that same killer hook shot and bright smile. Down on his luck, thrice divorced, driving a Detroit special ten years past its prime, by some miracle, and barring some breakdown, he would always make it back to me. For that alone, although it is a far cry from everything, I’ve never met a more dependable man than this so-called Steady Boy.

  37

  If this history of Charlie Barnes has its breaks in chronology and the occasional gaping hole—if, that is, it seems an individually curated, perhaps even highly selective account of the man, and not the straight dope, as it were—well, I wouldn’t know how to write it any other way. I couldn’t possibly hope to highlight what the man himself would have highlighted or, for that matter, present the arguments he might have presented against what I have chosen to highlight. Imagine that: for every life, not one history but as many as there are people who observed and participated in that life; hundreds, if not thousands, of accounts for just one of the billions of human beings who have lived and died, a staggering proliferation of competing narratives that, no matter how close, can never be reconciled. This explains why my account of Charlie’s life, presented here as a strictly factual one, as indeed it is, would not comport with Marcy’s, as she might choose to highlight a slightly different fact set, obscure or dismiss what I have chosen to emphasize, and add that portion vital to her that is unknown or unimportant to me. I bring this up only to suggest that I do not have a lock on the truth, provided there is such a thing, and that, in fact, when we consider the necessarily curated nature of any narrated life, its omissions as well as its trending hash-tags, if you will, we are forced to conclude that every history, including our own first-person accounts, is a fiction of a sort. Or, as Wallace Stevens put it much more succinctly, “The false and true are one.”

  He called me, of course, but I was a hard man to locate. Was I in New York or LA? In range or over the Atlantic? I had a flat in Pigneto at the time, but Italy is a confusion of phone carriers, and good luck getting reception in Pigneto. He stood a greater chance of reaching me in Bali, but I was done with Bali. I was falling in love, publishing a book. I was not nearly as married as I am now, with kids and a mortgage and all that. At that time I would occasionally hole up rent-free in Lars’s studio—the one in Johannesburg. The one in Oslo was always too cold. But I was not in Johannesburg or Oslo. I was under contract and in talks with producers, having a grand old time. I was writing stories on trains, filing assignments when I got back to the hotel. In the Cotswolds, a heaven of hedgerows and switchbacks, McEwan owns an estate where he and Annalena will have me, when the grandchildren aren’t expected, for as long as I like. There one drinks deep into the night and wakes in Arcadia. But I wasn’t in the Cotswolds, either.

  When someone did manage to finally get hold of me, it wasn’t the man himself but Marcy.

  “Listen, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, you do what you want, but Charlie’s going to call you any minute now and tell you—”

  I was getting another call.

  “Can you hold on a second, Marcy?”

  I clicked over.

  “Jake?” he said.

  He began crying almost immediately. I clicked back to Marcy.

  “He has cancer,” I said, completely stunned.

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you,” she said. “He does not have cancer.”

  I listened as she explained herself, then I clicked back to Charlie.

  “Chuck?” I said. “Are you sure you have cancer?”

  He gave me the details of his weeklong odyssey, the competing interpretations and the definitive diagnosis, the name of his new doctor and the immediate plan for the days ahead, but not without breaking down again. By the time I clicked back to Marcy, he was doing more than shedding tears. He was heaving with outright terror.

  “I really think, Marcy, that he might have cancer.”

  “He’s a liar.”

  “Liars get cancer.”

  “Do what you need to do, Jake,” she said. “It’s none of my business. Like I say, I’m not even sure why I’m calling, knowing that fraud will always have a friend in Jake Barnes.”

  “Do you have to call him a fraud?”

  “What do you suggest I call him?”

  “Your father?”

  “Call him whatever you want—he doesn’t have cancer.”

  “Okay, hold on.”

  I clicked over. He was sobbing like a child. I clicked back.

  “I really, really, really think he might—”

  She hung up. I flew home.

  38

  For a time, Charley Proffit of Peoria, Illinois, encouraged her children to think of Glen Glamour as their dad. We even called him Dad for a time. That was a weird little interval. Then she kicked Glen out and started dating a different guy, this one a motorcycle owner, which was cool, and though I loved him he failed to reach the live-in stage, to say nothing of exchanging vows with her in holy matrimony. Then came along the guy I will call, in an effort to protect his identity, as is customary in true accounts, Dickie Dickerdick. Dickie was a d
etective for the Danville PD lately hired by the state of Florida to help conduct the War on Drugs. I didn’t care for Dickie and almost didn’t get in the van. I wanted Charlie. But Charlie was busy trying to land on his feet in Chicago. He was unavailable. So what did I propose, exactly—submitting voluntarily to foster care while dreaming of a scholarship to Schlarman Academy? I got in the van. I went to Florida. I joined the Boy Scouts and learned to fish.

  What’s interesting to me about Key West is how, from Miami, it’s a straight shot west down US 1. You never need to turn right or left—a simple little bridge connects one island to the next … yet in my mind, it’s all forking path, each creeping sky-blue mile another point of no return. It’s impossible to say at this late date what Dickie Dickerdick and Charley Proffit hoped to find waiting for them there. It probably wasn’t instant disillusionment and an eventual divorce, but something more like this:

  After a short, happy zip down to Florida, the new family pulled up to paradise at mile marker 23: Cudjoe Key, an island of mangrove and slash pine, still untamed in ’85. Monte’s Fish Market and a Tom Thumb convenience store were all that was on offer. The house itself was elevated on stilts, a fantastical feature for flatlanders like us, rising like a real-life castle twenty feet in the air to protect against tidal surges. There was a private beach out back, with sand the consistency of brown sugar, a pair of cabana boys, and a nice new sound system.

  Standing in the front yard, two men in dark suits and sunglasses—Secret Service. One raised his wrist as we approached, alerting those on the inside to our arrival.

  “Oh, my God, Dickie,” Charley exclaimed as she got out of the car. “It’s the most gorgeous house I’ve ever seen!” She hadn’t looked that happy in a long time, if ever. “But how can we afford it?”