A Master Plan for Rescue (6 page)

The red-faced transit cop asked me for my address, and when I said nothing, he suggested I think on it for a while, and went to talk to a couple of soldiers.

Instead, I thought about a flattened Chuckles wrapper that was next to my Keds. Wondered whether the person who’d thrown it there had saved the black one for last—the way I did—because it was his favorite. I thought about that black Chuckle long and hard, hoping to erase my address from my mind, so I would never have to walk out of this subway station without my father.

But sooner or later, I must have told the transit cop my address, because I remember walking up the stairs of the station with him, everybody else stepping back like I was some kind of bad luck.

•   •   •

I knocked on our door,
because my father had had the keys. When my mother opened it, she looked at the transit cop, and then at me. She was wearing a white shirt with no sleeves, and her black hair was brushing across the top of her shoulders at the place where her shirt ended and her tanned skin began. She was smiling, showing us the gap between her front teeth, but already, her smile was losing some of its tension.

I wanted to push the transit cop back into the hallway, shut the door on him, as if that would stop what he had to say from coming into the house. But I could hear him speaking my mother’s name over my head.

I couldn’t watch what would happen to my mother’s face when the rest of what he had to say traveled across the air to her. I pushed my way into the apartment, ran down the hallway, past the living room, where my father’s green armchair sat, still pushed close to the radio. I went into my room and shut the door.

Then, as if the only thing that had been keeping me upright had been the presence of other people, I collapsed to the floor as if I was Superman knocked down by Kryptonite.

I squeezed myself under the bed and pulled out the box of sweaters, tore through them until I found the code-o-graph. I wrapped my fingers around its thin, metal edge, clutched it as tightly as I could, as if this thing from the radio, this object my father had gone to so much trouble over, possessed the power to bring him back.

I lay on the floor, hot cheek pressed to the linoleum, taking shallow breaths. All my colorful organs—blue lungs, orange kidneys, red heart—were turning black and withering inside me. All of them, one by one, as if I was dying from the inside out.

M
y father was waked with an empty coffin. Two men from Dunleavy’s Funeral Home carried it in, then balanced it on sawhorses in front of the Silvertone. The coffin was made of the same cherrywood as the radio, and it and the Silvertone looked like a matched set. I had to stop myself from believing that from now on it would live in our apartment instead of my father.

After the men from Dunleavy’s left, Aunt May curled a rosary made out of wooden beads inside the coffin, placing it on the purple satin in the place where my father’s hands would have been if the coffin hadn’t been empty, if he’d been inside it. Then she told me to go put on my Mass pants and a shirt with sleeves.

It was too hot for the Mass pants and too hot for a shirt with sleeves, but I put them on. Before I left my room, I slipped the code-o-graph into my pants pocket.

In the two days since the transit cop brought me home, I hadn’t been without the code-o-graph. I slept with it in the chest pocket of my pajamas, dropped it into the pocket of whatever pants I decided to wear each day—which was never the shorts I’d been wearing the afternoon my father took me to Paradise. My hand was always in my pocket, feeling for the thin metal edge of the code-o-graph, spinning the propeller that would turn the letters of a secret code into something comprehensible.

When I came into the kitchen, I saw that Aunt May had made my mother put on something that was black and too hot, too. She was sitting at the table in a black dress with long sleeves, holding a coffee cup with both hands as if she believed it was about to shatter into pieces. Aunt May was leaning into the oven, poking a fork into a casserole filled with something bubbling and orange.

My mother said my name, which was more or less all she’d had to say to me in the past two days. But I didn’t need her to say many words in a row to hear the broken sound under them. A sound that let me know all her colorful organs had turned as black as mine.

She set down her coffee cup and got to her feet. She was wearing the black shoes she only wore to Mass and she walked over to me like she was unfamiliar with the floor. She came near enough to turn blurry and unfamiliar—my mother in that black dress I’d never seen before. With no warning, she wrapped her black-sleeved arms around my shoulders and pulled me against her angular chest.

My mother did not hug in this way. More often she surprised me with an arm flung across my collarbone from behind, a quick brush of her lips on the top of my head. Now I felt her breathing, her lungs—once blue—rising and falling against the side of my face. I smelled her cigarette, the cedar from the closet where she kept this awful dress, and beneath it, the improbable cut-grass scent of her skin.

I wanted to tell her it was my fault there was a coffin in our living room, that it was I who had changed our luck. But the many consonants of that confession, which out of my mouth would have been sharp and clear and not the least bit blurry, were caught in my throat.

I opened my mouth, tried to push the words into the space between my mother and me.

The oven door slammed shut. My mother flinched and let me go.

•   •   •

Our apartment filled
up with people who had come to talk about my father and drink whiskey and stand in our living room with an empty coffin.

Harry Jupiter was there, his fat face sagging with sorrow. He walked in wide circles around the cherrywood coffin, clutching a glass of rye as if it were the one thing keeping him upright. Father Barry was there as well. Father Barry who belonged at Good Shepherd now standing in our living room with all his bright white hair and his black suit that smelled of Mass incense. Father Barry making me think about the Body of Christ disappearing from the tomb on Easter morning, leaving it as empty as the coffin balanced in front of our radio.

“We drove up,” somebody said. “We couldn’t face the subway,” making
subway
sound like polio.

So many of these people I’d seen only in the portraits my father had shot of them, seen only in black and white. Now they stood in our living room sweating and drinking, looking in color much too lifelike.

I do not know if the Keener was invited, or if perhaps she was so old and close to dying herself, she knew when someone had passed and turned up on her own. She wasn’t there, and then she was there, standing in the middle of our living room, her face so collapsed into itself, it could as well have been a forgotten apple from several winters ago as a human face. So few strands of white hair covering her scalp, the only way to tell she was a woman was by the black dress that hung from her shoulders. One of her legs must have been shorter than the other, because she walked toward the empty coffin with a hitched, rolling gait, as if she was traversing an invisible boat.

No one else noticed her. Not my mother, standing close to Father Barry, her pale hands trapped inside his waxy ones. Not Aunt May, bustling about the room collecting half-empty whiskey glasses. Not one of the too-lifelike people who had come by car to stand around and not stare at the coffin in front of the Silvertone. The Keener, though, she looked at it.

She looked at nothing else, gazing at its purple satin interior and the rosary curled up like a snake where my father’s hands would have been. Looked at it as if she saw my father inside. She made her hitching way through the crowded room to its cherrywood side, circling it until she stood at the top, at the place where my father’s head would be, as though we’d been saving the spot for her.

The old woman drew a breath that seemed to gather in more than air, that pulled at something that wasn’t in the room at all. She opened her mouth, a dark hole empty of teeth, and produced a low-pitched wailing in that ancient language, the Gaeilge language of the Irish.

My father had once told me it was the language of Irish heroes. But coming out of the old woman’s black hole of a mouth, it sounded like the knocking together of bones. As if the Keener was a radio for the dead. I stared across the empty coffin at her, certain she had been sent to broadcast the voices of ghosts, transmit their undertones through the dark speaker of her mouth. Transmit them to me. The one she was looking at. The one who was guilty.

And then, I heard it,
Donnchadh
, my father’s Gaeilge name. And all the air in that chokingly hot room began to disappear into the dark hole of the Keener’s mouth.

I had to get out, get away. Before everybody knew. Before they learned it was me.

I hammered my fists on their black-clad backs. Told them all to go home, get out of here. Finish your whiskey and drive away in your cars! It was only Uncle Glenn’s hands coming down on my arms that calmed me. Only his voice suggesting everybody step back and give the boy some air. Leaning down and saying in my ear, “I’ve never been much for Keeners either, all that Irish melancholy.”

Then he put an arm around my shoulders and the two of us went down to his and Aunt May’s apartment and sat at a table covered in ruffled place mats and drank a couple of cold glasses of milk.

After a while Uncle Glenn said my name, and his undertone was so thick with sympathy I didn’t deserve, the consonant-filled confession that had been caught in my throat broke loose and came pouring out of my mouth. I told my uncle everything about the sunburnt families and the soldiers with their laughing girls and the man running along the platform with the inner tube that should have been turned in for the rubber. Then I told him about how I’d needed to explain to my father about the code-o-graph, the object he had gone to so much trouble over.

But before I could get any further, Uncle Glenn said, a Captain Midnight code-o-graph? And when I nodded, he got up, pulled open a kitchen drawer, and tossed a Captain Midnight code-o-graph onto the table.

“Where did you get that?”

“Found it in the backseat of the taxi last time I took it out.”

I reached into the pocket of my Mass pants and set my code-o-graph on the table next to his. They were identical except that Uncle Glenn’s didn’t have anybody’s photograph in the little window. Not even Captain Midnight’s.

“I was saving it for you,” he said, “but I guess you’ve already got one.” He sat back down. “From what you say, I don’t see how anything was your fault.”

“Then I didn’t explain it right.”

“You want to tell it over again?”

But telling it once had put too many pictures inside my head.

I slipped my code-o-graph back into my pocket, let my fingers spin the propeller around.

“You’ll just have to take my word for it.”

•   •   •

The first message
arrived the following morning. It had been tucked inside our mailbox, which was never locked, because the lock had been broken a long time ago, a folded piece of paper with

FGVH

written on the outside.

And

YO PGLRY ITEN JGESO

written on the inside.

It was mixed in with the electricity bill and the sympathy cards, which had been coming every day now. Cards that just from the way our names were written on the envelopes made me sorry to be us.

I took the message upstairs and deciphered it using the code-o-graph. I didn’t doubt—not for one instant—that the message could be translated with the code-o-graph. Perhaps it was because I’d already spent so many of my waking minutes spinning that propeller, running my fingers over the device’s circle of raised letters and numbers, as if I could change history if only I did it the correct number of times.

FGVH

turned out to be

JACK.

And

YO PGLRY ITEN JGESO

was

IT WASNT YOUR FAULT
.

And here is the other thing I didn’t doubt—that the message had come from my father. Such an idea made no sense, was illogical. Then again, there was the message in my hands. And what was written there was precisely what I most needed to hear. My father, with his ability to read people, would have known that. Would have sensed it from wherever he was.

Which was where? And how had he ended up there?

I put my hands on the piece of paper that had come from my father, pressing it into my cowboy and Indian bedspread, and tried to imagine what might have happened in the 42nd Street subway, after I’d taken off the glasses.

Perhaps, in the final moment of the arcs, my father had tumbled off the platform with enough time to roll out of the way. To squeeze himself into the narrow space between the track—where in less than an instant the metal wheels of the train would come screeching—and the third rail. Perhaps that’s where he’d been the entire time the red-faced transit cop had been leaning in too close to me. The entire time I’d been concentrating on the crumpled-up Chuckles wrapper. The entire time the uptown A train sat silent above him.

It was an improbable story—impossible, really—but I was a twelve-year-old boy who had lost his father. A twelve-year-old boy with a head full of radio serial dramas, dramas that depended on last-minute escapes. And perhaps more important, I wanted very much to believe it.

There was a mentalist at Coney Island who claimed to be able to tell your future. You would write a question on a piece of paper, and then he’d ask you to hold it in your hand for a few seconds to put your magnetism on it. I pressed my hand harder against the paper on my bedspread, sure I could feel my father’s magnetism, a buzzing beneath my hand.

Then I smoothed my father’s message flat and slipped it under my T-shirt, tucking in the hem to keep it from falling out. The paper felt stiff and scratchy against my chest. I got up and ripped a page from one of my old composition books, wrote

I NEED TO SEE YOU

which I turned into

Y RUUB OT LUU ITE.

Because I had to know why, once the uptown A train had pulled out of the 42nd Street subway station, once my father had stood up and brushed himself off, why he hadn’t come straight home to Dyckman Street, where I was waiting, certain he was dead.

I folded the paper in half and wrote

BGB

on the outside, which was

DAD
.

Then I ran downstairs and slipped it into the mailbox.

•   •   •

I waited all day
for my father’s answer. Leaving the Silvertone every fifteen minutes to run down to the mailboxes. Running my hand along the row of brass doors, each with a circle of holes punched into it, as if mail needed to breathe. Lifting the door of ours to see if my message had disappeared, if it had been replaced with one from my father.

It had not come by the time my mother left the apartment for five o’clock Mass, wearing the black dress that was too hot for days like this, a piece of black lace bobby-pinned to the top of her head. My mother had been going to five o’clock Mass every afternoon since Father Barry had turned up in our living room with his black suit smelling of incense.

It had not come by the time she returned, heading straight for her bedroom, as if she was worn out from standing and kneeling and repeating things in Latin.

My father’s answer had not come by the time Aunt May came up to make the apartment hotter with her cooking. Aunt May had taken over all the cooking for us. Nearly everything she made came from
Victory Meat Extenders
, a cookbook that had come out since the war began, since meat had started being rationed. Aunt May served us dishes like Pork-U-Pines and Emergency Steak, dishes that tasted like cereal and gravy. Most nights, I pushed these gray-looking meals around on my plate until she went back downstairs.