A Calling for Charlie Barnes Page 15

  Jerry had no intention of joining Barbara and me the next day in the waiting room of Rush Memorial. As with Marcy, I thought this shortsighted, a little vindictive, and very dumb. We are here, you idiots, to forgive one another. But I didn’t often try to correct Jerry when he was prepared to make a mistake. Who was I before that man’s resolve? A nothing, a hanger-on. Of all the ways to be wounded. I sent back the serrated knife on my cloth napkin. I had no genius for sawing.

  From the beginning of time, Jerry was more of a story told to me than a man in the flesh. Jerry is going to college. Jerry is on the road with his band. Jerry studies a book called the Bhagavad Gita. That kind of story. Eventually, Jerry acquired the breadth and status of a myth. Jerry has taken a vow of silence. Jerry is learning to fly airplanes. Jerry is moving to Spain.

  Now it occurs to me, and I say it reluctantly, that Jerry was a disappointment. I held him in high regard, he intoxicated me, I felt divinely favored to be associated with him, he was a towering giant … but he was also an extravagant liar entering middle age aggrieved and on the verge of homelessness.

  I did not see this latest, vagabond version the same way his father did, as a sad falling off from the IT manager for a regional bank who funded his 401(k) and took the train to work. No, this latest iteration or phase of Jerry Barnes, a man of iterations and phases, was in fact the full flowering of what made him absolutely extraordinary. His pauperization had been entirely his own doing, one sign of the principled conviction that guided his life. He could not be bought. His soiled T-shirt, his recycled denims, his diving into Dumpsters, his dispossession of money and a mortgage and a good credit score were all ennobling responses to the same concerns Charlie had for his country. Only Jerry was not content to read the paper and work out his rage and heartbreak in quiet contemplation. He was a prototype of the sort of activist that would take root in America a few years hence, first in Zuccotti Park, then around the world, occupying the financial districts of New York, São Paulo, Hong Kong, and London and culminating in a global movement that continues to protest inequality to this day.

  If I had a bone to pick with this engaged and agile patriot and preacher of sorts, my admirable older brother, it was the unrelenting persistence of the bone he picked with Charlie. For such an enlightened man, he sure did choose to live in the past. As I anxiously awaited him, turning my gaze continually to the front door, so eager to greet him, to be enfolded in his big bear hug, which always smelled faintly of peppermint and leather and marijuana smoke, nevertheless I reaffirmed my belief that he was way too hard on Charlie. He was even something of an ingrate, cavalier with his inheritance. He and Marcy both enjoyed warring with their father, and with themselves. It was a stupid war against tendency, habit, received trait, the hand-me-down expression hard to reckon with in the mirror. In Jerry’s case, his lifestyle, principled though it was, was also an attempt to overthrow everything that reminded him of Charlie—an attempt, in essence, to enact the inversion of the plot of the New Testament, which, to take things one step further, I believed captured the dynamic between a lot of troubled fathers and sons: the young man nails the old god, his father, to the cross in an effort to redeem the world.

  I had every intention of beseeching him with an unabashedly emotional appeal. I loved him. I loved Charlie, too. And I believed that just beneath the stupid grievances, there was a great deal of love between the two of them. I would ask him to put aside those grievances just for the time being and to join us tomorrow in the hospital waiting room, to lend the old man some moral support while butchers in surgical scrubs cut him to pieces and then stitched him back up, from ass to elbow.

  But stare at the entrance all I might, Jerry never showed.

  The old man was waiting up for me when I made it back to 105 Rust Road.

  “Come on,” he said. “Take a ride with me.”

  “Where to?”

  “Fill up on gas.”

  Learn these two lessons well, kids, if ever you wish to become a suburban father: all lights must be turned off whenever you leave the house, and always keep your gas tank full, even if it requires a late-night outing. This latter rule applied not just to those cars Chuck owned but to loaners, too, apparently. We climbed inside Rabineau’s Porsche and followed Rust Road around the bend to Shore Drive and out to Roselle, where the strip malls, drive-throughs, and gas stations of Schaumburg, Illinois, flourished in pallid light even as it approached midnight.

  “I want to talk to you about the wedding,” he said.

  “What wedding?”

  “The one I’ve mentioned to you a couple of times in the past,” he said. “The one between my parents.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That wedding.”

  “If you ever decide that it’s something you want to write about, I hope you know you have my permission.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I got the impression that, for whatever reason, this was part of his idea of putting his affairs in order before going into surgery the next day.

  “I would just ask one thing. It happened. So you should tell it with that in mind. No need to fancy it up. They were forced to exchange vows. They got nothing sweet to eat afterwards. Let the facts speak for themselves. Historically, Jake, no one in my family has been very good at telling the truth. If you asked my mother right now how she met my father, she would make no mention of a cornfield. She would manage to rise above the dementia to let you know in no uncertain terms that they met on Sunday morning in the pews of the Church of the Nazarene.”

  I saw the gas station he liked in the near distance. He put his signal on before downshifting.

  “What if, one day, I wrote about you?” I asked him. “Would the same rules apply?”

  There was a long pause while he considered his answer. Shadows passed over his face as he took the turn into the station.

  “I think it should be a factual account,” he said. “Why not? Somebody needs to correct the record!” He laughed as we slowed to a stop. “Yes, if you decided one day that you wanted to write about me, Jake, you’d do me an honor if you just told the truth.”

  He put the car in gear and killed the engine, pulled the hand brake.

  “But that’s not what I really wanted to talk to you about,” he said.

  We weren’t out in the night to top off a gas tank. We were there so that we could talk privately, away from Barbara.

  “I was really hoping Marcy could do this for me, Jake, but it doesn’t look like Marcy’s coming home, does it?”

  “It does not,” I said.

  “So I’m going to tell you something I don’t like admitting to anyone. It embarrasses me. It embarrasses me a hell of a lot. But I need something done, damn it, and Marcy’s not coming.”

  He paused to gather his strength.

  “Fact of the matter is, son, I had all my teeth pulled when I was twenty-four, and now I wear dentures.”

  Did he really think I didn’t know that?

  “But they’re not going to let me wear them when I go into surgery tomorrow.”

  “How come?”

  “Damned if I know. But if I complain about it much louder, they might just decide to leave a little cancer behind before closing me up again. Never bitch to a waiter right before he delivers your soup, if you know what I mean.”

  I liked that, and laughed.

  “So that means I need somebody to find them when it’s over and put them back in my mouth. Can you do that for me? I don’t want Barbara seeing me without my teeth.”

  “Barbara doesn’t know you wear dentures?”

  “Why would she?”

  “You guys have been together for, like, fifteen years.”

  “Barbara and I do not delve,” he said. “We do not plumb the depths of each other’s souls. I’ve tried that, it doesn’t work. Better to leave certain things alone. It’s good to maintain a little mystery in a marriage. It might just be the secret to our success.”

  “But would you really call that a succe
ss?”

  “Hey, Jake,” he said. “You gonna do this for me, or what?”

  We woke at five the next morning.

  I dressed and went downstairs, where from the sofa I signaled my readiness to walk out the door. No one wants to make a man late for life-saving surgery.

  “Experts at exports.” T-R-U-T-H.

  Barbara was the next person to come down. I dropped the crossword puzzle when she appeared, not in her customary scrubs but done up for the occasion, as if a silk blouse might banish ill luck. We had greeted each other the day before—warmly, I suppose, though I had no illusions that she really wanted me there. I presently joined her in the kitchen, where, it must be said, she did ask me if I wanted a cup of coffee. Whoa, what’s next? I wondered. A welcome-home banner and a wet kiss? I graciously accepted her kind offer, and we fell back into silence. She washed a dish, wiped down the countertop, straightened the napkins in their holder, hung a hand towel from the oven door, removed the milk from the fridge … in these minor tasks at that laconic hour, I thought I caught a glimpse of how she was when we weren’t around and bringing our prejudices to bear, and it seemed to me that she had a very different take on 105 Rust Road from Marcy’s or Jerry’s or even Charlie’s. It was not the site of a permanent battle or a temporary station to be upgraded at the first opportunity. For her it was home. Where she woke, made coffee, tidied up. Where she confronted misfortune, too, and in her quiet way. In fifteen years, I had never seen her or that house. I’d seen only a thousand compromises.

  Ten minutes later, we were out the door and driving on the highway. From my place in the back seat, I watched him work the gearshift (his hand as familiar now for its liver spots as for an old memory of how big they once seemed next to my own) and recalled how he taught me, at twelve, to shift gears from the passenger seat of the Saab. I would reach over with my right hand, shadowing the angle of the shoulder belt as it plunged toward the buckle, and take hold of that shuddering stick skirted in soft leather as I awaited his command. “Okay, third gear’s next … ready for third?” As he engaged the clutch, I did my best to unlock third gear, which contained within it all the mysteries of a manual transmission, without throwing it into second and revving the engine, or reverse and wrecking the whole machine—an adventure that began in tandem with him, his hand over mine, until I got the feel for it, after which we hardly exchanged a word as we tooled down the street at one with that car. There was joy in our conspiracy—a child shifting gears, why, that had to be against the law!—and conspiracy in our joy: father and son drove that car together. This sentimental memory brought with it not only the pleasure we made of running errands, not the smell of the old Saab alone, but also the long summer itself, the hot days, the full weekends, the relief at his physical presence, the renewal and delight, the apartments, babysitters, popular songs, trips to the amusement park and strolls through the mall, and all the late-night movies we watched. As dawn broke wide open in the blue sky above I-290, a pale proleptic moon hung off to our right, a little tear in the scrim, a trapdoor, a miracle, but out of reach for the likes of us, a marvel and nothing more. He took Barbara’s hand after shifting into fifth, and they held on to each other in silence for the length of the ride.

  He was admitted, prepped, and shaved, his identity confirmed and reconfirmed, and once up on the gurney swam in the hospital gown they gave him. The surgeon stopped by to say hello, a short, strapping man whose wiry build suggested strong nerves and eternal life. He had made it clear to the patient during the consultation that what he was looking for upon opening him up was stage II-B cancer; anything more would imply that the tumor had spread to the major arteries, and he would be forced to simply close him up again. In a fit of good humor that I understood was intended to disguise his mortal fright, my father said to him what he had been planning to say since the morning the witticism had occurred to him, unbidden in the middle of a shower.

  “II-B or not II-B,” he said. “That is the question, eh, Doc?”

  The surgeon smiled and patted his shoulder.

  Barbara followed the man out, presumably to ask one last question or to receive a final bit of reassurance. In the silence that followed there was the unmistakable drone of pure terror. He wanted out of there. He tried smiling.

  “I’ve been false, Jake,” he said at last.

  “False?”

  “I need to face facts,” he said. He was talking more to himself than anything. “Make some changes in my life. Get real with myself. I was real once. I could be real again. Listen to me, son. Listen to me: if I get out of here—”

  “You will, Chuck. You will get out.”

  “If I live—”

  “But you will.”

  “Then I make a solemn vow to you right here and now. I will be a better man.”

  The orderly came for him ten minutes later.

  While Under

  41

  Hitchhiking into Key West … the blimp over Cudjoe called Fat Albert keeping one eye on Cuba, the other on Cartagena, Dickie Dickerdick had been inside it … Monte’s Fish Market, Mangrove Mama’s, the antique biplane at the Sugarloaf Lodge … cars parked down by the mangroves on Big Coppitt, mostly fishermen, the occasional masturbator … the military dead zone just after Rockland Key where the naval station sits, my nose fried to a crisp … Cubans fishing along the pedestrian paths, five, ten rods lined up in a row, the pink of the red snapper drowning in a dry bucket … “Free beer … tomorrow” painted on the face of the Stock Island bar … Mercedes and her husband, Paul, they owned the Eatery … sweeping the sand from the flagstones for $3.35 an hour just before the morning rush, returning South Beach to itself as the beachcombers slowly stirred … pausing to watch the waves hit the breaker, you could see all the way to Cuba on a clear day … running down Duval for café con leches, one for Paul, one for Hazel, one for Billy Ray … Mercedes demonstrating how to properly scour a cobbler dish after it comes off the buffet … the line cook saying to me, “Do you know what jailbait is, boy?” … fruit smoothies, fried plantains, conch chowder—all exotic to the kid who grew up going to state fairs and corn festivals … the crackhead, a former publisher of the Key West Citizen, whose morning ritual began at the Eatery and whose hand shook lifting the coffee cup to his lips … the Poles, Cubans, Bahamians, and hippies who showed up at South Beach around ten and did not leave it again until cocktail hour … don’t be confused by “South Beach,” a small clutch of sand on lower Duval next to the Atlantic Shores motel and a crumbling pier—worlds away from its Miami counterpart … cracking eggs for the next morning’s buffet into five-gallon buckets with Mohawk Dave, the breakfast cook, he later died of an overdose … busing tables with Blind Richard, he died in a boating accident … Hazel smoothing out her dollar tips at the end of a shift, she died of ovarian cancer … receiving the week’s deliveries, boxes of produce, sacks of potatoes, and carrying each item into the walk-in or dry storage … learning from Charlie (different Charlie, hockey player from Ottawa) how to thicken a gravy using cornstarch, he was stabbed to death in Bahama Village … watching O’Neil clear the mounds of seaweed from South Beach with his backhoe, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound … sharing a rum and Coke, my first, with Snake in his empty one-bedroom on Flagler, hard to say what happened to that guy … the three Polish brothers, not a word of English between them, manning the kitchen for Paul at night, as hardworking as they were mute and pale … the dough hooks spinning in the Hobart, mesmerizing … a stink that attached to me after a shift, a Dumpster stink and grease coating … Ms. Kaltran asking how things were at home, she disappeared off Big Pine in ’89 … Principal Menendez, with his million-dollar smile and gold herringbone chain … the Spanish instructor Hernandez, made to roam from classroom to classroom with a wheeled cart full of props and slides … our mascot, the hammerhead shark, a full-size gray one outside the main entrance, made of welded metal, the least waterborne thing on earth … doing my homework at the McDonald’s on Roosevelt, or in the bright
stands at Bayview Park … sleeping rough on occasion, between stilts, or on Smathers Beach … the names of bars painted directly on the stucco facades, doorless doorways leading into the adult darkness … Captain Tony’s, the Hog’s Breath, the Full Moon Saloon … feeding quarters into video games in the open-air arcade on Duval, getting propositioned, offered booze, weed, ten dollars to suck a dick … coconut trees and banana leaves … weaving dinner plates and top hats out of palm leaves as the Jamaicans taught me to do, selling one to a tourist in a Cubs cap … putting him securely in the past, as I had Danville, Charley Proffit, the house on Vermilion—why? … recoiling from the unremitting press in Key West of adult content, sex toys in the windows, phalluses marching in the Fantasy Fest parade … yet also going through puberty, sneaking peeks down tourists’ shirts, they hated wearing bras on the island, on their honeymoons … crashing on Ella’s couch, she had a son who was killed in Vietnam, until her roommate, the Eatery line cook who queried me about jailbait, woke me with his hard-on … AIDS everywhere, in the ranks of the waitstaff, hospitality workers, Conch Train conductors, moped repairmen, the tourists themselves … watching Billy Ray die of AIDS … watching Billy Ray, the queen of wit, who weighed all of a hundred pounds, put his lips on the spout of the orange-juice dispenser and blow giant bubbles into the thick liquid to disperse the accumulated pulp, then opening the spout to watch the juice flow freely again before returning it to the buffet and its “thirsty bitches” … watching hundreds of the unsuspecting from Kansas and New Jersey fill their little juice glasses … Mallory Square and the man who walked on broken glass, the man who walked across hot coals … the capsized boat with the garbage-bag tarps at the end of Houseboat Row, gone now with the video stores and the salt ponds … sneaking into Sloppy Joe’s to take a leak, in the middle of chaos, on the edge of losing it … being called to the principal’s office, believing I’d been caught, this would all finally end, they would send me north or put me away, but being told instead that I had won a countywide writing contest and would be treated to a canoe trip through the salt ponds with Jimmy Buffett, a musician of some kind … meeting Jimmy Buffett … Jimmy had a puppy, he ordered us a pizza, he had hired a Jamaican to do all the paddling … the moped I bought for seventy-five dollars from Hazel’s fat boyfriend, a man with zinc on his nose … trying to throttle, brake and steer one-handed, difficult to do with so low a center of gravity … but needing to get from South Beach up Flagler over to Roosevelt into Whitehead bight to sluice the boats returning from their charters for two lousy bucks a pop … leaving Cudjoe for the last time … looking for trouble, starting to find it … smoking cigarettes, shoplifting … learning from Mohawk Dave how to cook and inhale … thinking I didn’t need Charlie, thinking I didn’t need anyone … being detained outside the Eckerd drugstore with a greeting card down my pants, a greeting card, while in my wallet there was over a hundred dollars in cash … the arresting officer saying, “Well, son … is there anyone you can call?”