A Calling for Charlie Barnes Read online

  “Easy, darlin’,” Dickie replied. “We’re the good guys.”

  Two porpoises presently appeared on a glass ocean doing tandem jumps in front of the setting sun. I became instant best friends with a cool guy who walked out of the water with his surfboard, swinging his long wet hair around and around in order to attract my attention. Yep, we were in Florida, all right, and I was never lonely there. The cool guy and I, and the two porpoises, too, taking tiny steps on their tail fins, joined Dickie and Charley on a front lawn full of flamingos and palm trees. We gazed up at the house as who should emerge but Ronald Reagan himself, there to welcome us all to Florida and to wish Dickie good luck in the War on Drugs. After personally tossing down the house keys, he gave us one of his wet-eyed Gipper smiles while a hologram of Jesus Christ began to flicker beside him, beamed directly down from a break in the clouds, and we all put our hands over our hearts and pledged allegiance to the flag before shooting our guns in the air.

  And that was that. We got along great. Glen Glamour was erased, Charlie Barnes forgotten. We needed no one but Dickie from that time forward. He was every bit the savior that Charley Proffit, desperate to reverse a historic run of broken marriages, hoped he’d be when they tied the knot after only three months. He was never confused or tormented by the sudden presence of so many stepchildren, he never stormed about after drinking too much, and he always managed his finances. We have family reunions to this day where we will step off the plane and just sort of merge, if you will, like an amoeba, because being a “blended family” doesn’t cut it; we must be one.

  After our move to the Keys, I saw Steady Boy only on Christmases and summer vacations. When it came time to part again, unticketed Charlie would take a pre-9/11 stroll through security with us so that we could spend our last remaining minutes together. We huddled at the gate in abject misery, a boy and his best friend disconsolate at the prospect of another long separation. Our tears fell to the bolted-down chairs, a tiny ashtray at the end of each arm. I lived for my time with that man. Before boarding began, always ten rows at a time, inevitably sweeping me up in some early round, we would repeat like a mantra the date when we’d next see each other, fixing all our hope on that, all our happiness, our whole calendar year, which was the only way we might survive the hell of a fresh parting.

  Now, with or without pancreatic cancer, he promised to pick me up at O’Hare like old times. I knew the routine. He would pull up to the curb outside Arrivals and wait for me, playing a game of cat and mouse all the while with some weary Chicago transit cop. If they caught him idling, they’d force him to circle, and he hated circling. There was only one thing he hated more than circling, and that was paying for airport parking.

  The child of divorce and the parent without primary custody know these interstitial places well: the curb, the corridor, the terminal parking lot. It is there where you embrace, you shed tears, you thank God for reuniting you—or curse God for tearing you asunder once more. All the while, the elevator dings, the custodian sweeps up, the traffic cop urges you to get a move on. That day, however, we weren’t menaced by anyone. I came out with one bag, dropped it, and threw my arm around him. I hardly recognized him, he’d lost so much weight.

  “You came.”

  “Of course. You called. That’s how it works.”

  “Tell that to the others,” he said.

  “You look good, Chuck.”

  “And you’re a liar.”

  “All right—you look like hell.”

  “That’s more like it. But you, my boy … you’ve never been handsomer.”

  We had hold of each other throughout this absurd and happy exchange, and now we buttoned it up with a final embrace. There was his aftershave again, his bony shoulder blades. He tossed my bag in the trunk while I admired the Porsche.

  “Sweet ride,” I said. “Sudden windfall?”

  “It’s just a loaner,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what, Jake. I know exactly what to do with it.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “I gotta get it back to my mechanic. But there’s just so much going on …”

  We got in and he showed me the key to the Porsche—itself an antique beauty. Before turning the engine over, he prepared me for its pleasing roar. He pulled out of Arrivals with a nice little torque, punched it into second, raced around a slowpoke in the right lane, and next I knew it was all open road. His touring cap suddenly flew up as if caught in a twister and tumbled away in the mirrors, and when we turned to each other, we howled with dumb delight. He didn’t invite the loss, but he found a way to enjoy it. Then he did what he always did when I was new again and he was happy to see me: he reached over with a smile and touched the hair on my head. He was sure he would be dead by Monday.

  39

  That was when he was scheduled for a procedure called the Whipple. If the name suggests a carnival ride—“Step right up, boys and girls, and take a whirl on the Whipple!”—it was in fact a last-ditch attempt to save his life by removing the diseased pancreas, small intestine, gallbladder, and bile duct before sewing him back up and seeing if it held. A massive medieval ordeal, and the side effects were terrifying, like coming to late at night and finding three men in ski masks standing over your bed: you don’t know what you’re in for, you just know you have to submit. He was scared.

  Difficult as it was to admit, I knew he wanted Marcy there with him more than anyone. It ate away at him that she remained in Texas, caring not if he lived or died. I don’t think Chuck had any idea just how badly Charley Proffit—it will be easier to distinguish them if, from time to time, I call him Chuck—had run him down during Marcy’s formative years, drilling into impressionable Marcy that her biological father was a phony and a deadbeat, and how much better she might do to consider Dickie Dickerdick her real dad from then on. That will always take its toll. I for one owe Charley Proffit a great deal, but she poured a lot of poison in that girl’s ear. Chuck wanted Marcy to love him like she had at nine years old, but she was twenty-five years removed from being daddy’s little girl and still nursing a grudge that properly belonged to her mother. Only I could see any of this clearly.

  So I really had no choice in the matter. On the Friday before his surgery, I flew down to Houston, rented a car, and took the Pasadena Freeway out to Deer Park.

  She was surprised to discover I was in town. She told me it was a busy time. I understood; I’d given her no warning. She said she’d call me after she got off work and maybe we could get a drink.

  “But I thought you quit work,” I said.

  She didn’t really answer me. I checked in at my hotel, and once inside the room went through the proofs my editor had sent me for a book that would publish in May. I got so absorbed in the task that I looked up at some point, momentarily unable to recall where I was or what I was doing there. A generic room, a nowhere view … was I on assignment? Private travel? In the States or abroad? The phone rang. Marcy’s voice immediately returned me to … where was it? Deer Park, Texas. Good God—Deer Park, Texas!

  We met at a sports bar and took a table in back.

  “Been a while,” I said.

  “Has it?”

  “Six years.”

  “That long?”

  Marcy still awed and frightened me. She hated me a little, I think—though nothing like she hated Dickie. She and I would bike up and down the sun-beaten streets of Cudjoe Key together hour after hour, bored out of our minds, but we couldn’t go back to the house because Dickie had banished us for committing some infraction against his bachelor furniture. He wasn’t a bachelor anymore, but he sure wished his couch and love seat to be treated as the furniture of a bachelor, the sofa cushions always aligned just so and the pillows plumped up. Marcy took more offense at this than I did and despised Dickie for it. “He’s supposed to be a cop, but he’s just the cop of his stupid fucking furniture,” she said to me behind the Tom Thumb convenience store after I’d stolen, at her urging, two packs of gum and some beef jerky. No one que
stioned me. I don’t think Marcy had any clue what life could be like, although I agreed that Dickie was no Charlie Barnes.

  Marcy and I rarely discussed our time in Florida. Too remote, too strange an experiment to bring up in casual conversation—and too unhappy. Charley Proffit, chasing romantic redemption, was led by one last lyre to the water’s edge, where we all might have drowned. Maybe Marcy did. I couldn’t say. I did know she was angry, that a lot of her anger was still unprocessed, and that she seemed to reserve most of it not for her mother and stepfather but for Steady Boy, who had let her down. Had he been a more dependable Danville son and Old Poor Farm employee, our little Florida interlude might never have come to pass.

  Dickie worked historic narcotics, those drug deals so monumental as to reorganize street life, penetrate the heartland, kick-start the prison-industrial complex, and acquire names: the Santiago Run, the Ramirez Load. These were subsequently talked about the way people talk about moon landings and no-hitters. Dickie, the dime-bag Dragnet of rural Illinois, had somehow been tasked with dismantling these living myths back into their component parts—names of players, time of night—and handing down indictments, letting it be known that not even history was beyond the reach of American justice. He was almost immediately in over his head.

  But Charley Proffit was happy. Unlike Chuck, Dickie was no dreamer. He was a man of action. He led interrogations. He tithed to his church. He earned a salary the moral way: not through schemes and handshakes but surveilling and policing. Like Charley herself, he was a world improver and not likely to quit the improvement trade for a few dollars more at Waukegan Title. This was all part of God’s plan and what made a good man. Charley Proffit found it so refreshing, she confused it for the second coming itself.

  We would get off track if I followed for much longer the endless island afternoons and the occasion that broke the spell: Dickie’s son’s molestation of Marcy over the summer of her eighth-grade year and Dickie’s refusal to do anything about it. I don’t mean to suggest he did absolutely nothing. When Marcy came to her mother with news of what happened, it was the middle of October some four months later, and Dickie immediately booked a flight. He returned to Danville to have a talk with the young man, whose name was … I suppose I could completely obscure his identity as I’ve done with his father and save myself a lot of grief, but I’m inclined to call him by his real first name, to serve up the only justice he’s ever likely to face, and so Justin it is. Justin Dickerdick was a disaffected little punk who is now, everyone will thrill to learn, a Florida state trooper. Just as I spent some of my summer vacation with Charlie, so Justin spent some of his summer in Florida, and apparently that summer, while the adults were at work … well, it took place in their bedroom, on their waterbed. Dickie set off for Danville vowing to use all his penetrating policeman’s cunning to get to the bottom of things. Fifteen and terrified, Justin swore up and down that Marcy was a willing and eager participant in all that occurred in the house on Cudjoe Key, and Dickie sided with Justin.

  It was just that easy. He did not press the matter. He wanted to believe that his boy was innocent—and that he was came as a great relief to Dickie. (It goes without saying this would be the standard of law and order for the next twenty years for at least some portion of the state of Florida, as the lawman leaned on his hunches and wants more than he did facts and proof. Another fiction writer, perhaps?) Dickie needed to believe that Justin was a normal, healthy heterosexual young man and that Marcy, a troubled kid, was a secret tramp—a figure he recognized from the Bible, deserving of forgiveness, but a hungry little whore all the same, as most women were for Dickie, just as in his mind Black men were always pimps or dealers.

  There is much to be said about America’s future troubles residing right here in this episode from ’87 involving Dickie Dickerdick and his son: the denial, the impunity, the scorning of fact and testimony, the cycle of shaming and enabling, the outstanding crimes that go unredressed, and the legacy of abuse that would require an actual second coming by a better man than Dickie to begin to heal the hurt suffered by women like my sister. Charley Proffit fared little better. The child abuse investigator’s child had been abused. In her home. While under her protection. There is no understating the devastation this delivered up to someone who, until then, considered herself invincible. She wanted to kill Dickie’s son. She wanted to kill Dickie, too, but the minor especially. One can’t, however, go around killing minors.

  When a child was in Charley Proffit’s care, that child was ipso facto protected, immune from the world’s hell. Justin put an end to that illusion. Charley could do no more to protect a child than your average Joe could, and in fact, when it came to her own children, whose safety was axiomatic, she might have been at a disadvantage compared to the average Joe, who knows instinctively that hell can happen anywhere, to anyone. Justin revealed her righteous and virtuous life to be a lie. She failed as a mother and she failed at her calling, which here were one and the same. She certainly failed as a judge of men’s character and as a romantic who sought to be made whole by one. She failed at life as surely as Steady Boy had—and might not have failed had she just stayed with him. This was a bitter pill. She was ripped apart and had no one but herself to sort it all out. She consulted lawyers, took Marcy to see experts. She couldn’t stand the sight of Dickie and stayed away from the house. I was alone with him there more and more. I tried keeping myself busy. There was school. And I found work in the kitchen of a place called the Eatery—I was tall for fourteen. Dickie put in for a transfer to Pensacola. But this strictly factual account of the life of Charlie Barnes has strayed off course for too long. I’d like to think they were doing me a favor when they abandoned me to my own devices. With protectors like these, who needs predators?

  “What are you doing in Texas, Jake?” Marcy asked me at the sports bar in Deer Park.

  “Your dad has cancer,” I said. “Thought I’d pay you a visit, ask if you might come home.”

  “And where is home, Jake?”

  “Schaumburg,” I said. “105 Rust Road.”

  “Schaumburg,” she said. “I had no idea.”

  To me, yes, it was a no-brainer: home was where he put his remote controls on a TV tray and where a hot shower atomized his cologne and the steam sent it rushing down the hallway into every room.

  “Is 105 Rust Road really home for the great Jake Barnes?” she continued.

  “‘The great Jake Barnes’?”

  “I hear you wrote a novel,” she said. “You and Charlie make a good team.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “You both enjoy telling stories. That’s all it means.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Let’s say I’m prepared to believe that he actually does have cancer this time. He didn’t know it when he lied to me.”

  “He was confused,” I said. “And then he was cornered. He didn’t know how to come clean—not to you. He’s desperate to have you think well of him.”

  “You find it so easy to let him slide,” she said, “and I find that so maddening. He makes bad decisions and tells lies, but to Jake Barnes, he can do no wrong. You look at him like he’s some kind of myth, like he’s … I don’t know what. Part Fred MacMurray, part Hugh Hefner. He wears the best suits, the best colognes—as if that’s enough! For the rest of us, Jake, it’s just not enough.”

  It was true that Charlie wore the best suits, double-breasted beauties from the eighties with wide lapels made of tweed or wool and lined in silk. He had retired many of them as their cuts aged and fell out of fashion. Besides, men were no longer expected to suit up as they once did, and he had retreated into khakis. But back in the day, Steady Boy was one sharp dresser.

  “Do you remember that one suit with the …”

  I began to describe the particular suit I had in mind. Marcy cut me off.

  “We are not strolling down memory lane in a bad-suit parade.”

  The waitress came by and took our
order. I make it a point not to drink alcohol and asked for a club soda. Marcy ordered a vodka martini and the waitress departed.

  “Come home, Marcy,” I said. “He needs you.”

  “He made a fool of me, Jake. I’m not coming home.”

  “It’s an incredibly difficult surgery. Anything could happen.”

  “I won’t reward him for accidentally not lying.”

  “So come see the punishment he’s about to endure.”

  “He’ll be fine. You know that. He gets away with everything.”

  “Come home.”

  “I won’t.”

  “It would mean the world to him.”

  “Why do you care so much? Oh, God,” she said. “Don’t start crying.”

  She waited for the moment to pass.

  “Look, Jake,” she said. “It’s touching that you love him.”

  “Just come home!”

  “I’m not coming home, ya freak!”

  We both had raised our voices. But that was not what embarrassed Marcy. She looked back at me almost right away.

  “Oh,” she said. “Sorry, Jake.”

  At the Houston airport the next morning, I purchased a ticket for the identical flight into O’Hare that I would be taking in an hour’s time, only for the following day and in Marcy’s name. Then I emailed it to her with one final impassioned plea that she change her mind. I told her how rigorous the Whipple procedure was. I reminded her that there were no guarantees. Even if he did make it out of surgery, his recovery was far from assured.

  She did not confirm receipt, nor did she redeem it.

  40

  I flew back to Chicago in time for Chuck’s surgery. The night before that anxious occasion, I invited Jerry to join me for dinner at the Morton’s in Rosemont.

  I arrived early. The maître d’ showed me to a plump red banquette, the adult equivalent of a bouncy castle. I felt like a respected gangster. I ordered a martini—not to drink so much as to supplement the decor, blend in better. Waiters came and went. Silver sconces lit the gelatin prints hanging on the walls. Someone had been eager to make this suburban chain steak house look like Frank Sinatra’s living room.