Aloft (38 page)

Red, of course, hitches himself up and out from the sorry shade of his acacia and charges the interloper, driving him off, but only temporarily. Nero comes back that night, and although there's no footage of the battle, the next morning we see that Red has been badly mauled, his right hindquarter slashed nearly to the bone, his mane matted with his own blood, a deep A L O F T 3 0 5

gash in his jowl. He's limping off to an old den, maybe the one where he was born. Nero, meanwhile, is holding court by the tree, spraying it liberally with his stud juice, receiving unctuous groveling licks from the males and females, and brusquely mounting most of the latter. The King is dead. Long live the King. The last we see of Red, he's lying on his side, slowly pant-ing in near-death, too weak to even shoo the multitude of flies who swarm about the huge hind wound in a teeming shiny quilt of black. Before nightfall the pack of vengeful hyenas picks up his scent, and by the morning Red is but a rickety boat-shell of ribs and hide; he's not even an appetizer for the scrawny young jackal who's scampered by too late, and later on birds will take the scattered tufts of that arrogant hennaed mane as thatching for their nests.

Maybe Pop really is in trouble.

Maybe he really is lying face down in a roadside ditch.

But if he is, I have a feeling he's only doing so because he's hiding from state troopers patrolling the roads for him, which they're presently doing (this definitely not the standard operat-ing procedure for missing persons but courtesy of Rita's highly placed sheriff friend), Pop ducking at each spray of headlights so he might enjoy a few more hours on the lam. And instead of feeling sorry for himself as I expected he would (as I no doubt would be feeling for myself), at least he's goddamn doing something about it, even if it is completely stupid and dangerous; at least he's taken hold of the moment angling away from him and typically wrenched it back his way.

I used to hear stories from my uncles about him when they were young, how they'd get into some serious rumbles where they lived up in Harlem against marauding gangs of micks and kikes and niggers, everybody using whatever was at hand,
306

C I I N N G - R A E L E E

broomsticks and chains and tops of garbage cans as shields. My uncle Toe said it was like a fucking Wop Coliseum in the alleyways up there around 135th Street, these barbaric knock-down brawls where it seemed somebody was definitely going to get killed but the worst thing that ever happened was when Big Anthony Colacello slipped on a pile of horseshit as he was about to clock some poor Irish kid and hit his head on the curb and didn't wake up for two whole days. When he did he was exactly the same except he'd lost his sense of smell, and they'd play pranks on him like spreading limburger cheese on the back of his collar as they were on their way to skipping school.

Apparently Pop was the best fighter of their gang because he didn't mind getting hurt and had no fear of anyone. He would just lower his head (thus becoming Hank the Tank) and take whatever punishment he had to as he pushed in and waited for the guy to tire before counterattacking with a viciousness that surprised the crew every time. Pop I guess was a lot angrier then inside and out for the usual reasons of privation and poverty and general mistreatment by family members and people in the street and at school and by the authorities, which these days you'd call racism and discrimination but then was known as the breaks, how it was, your miserable fucking life.

No doubt these days they'd have identified him and his brothers and cousins and the rest of their street-clinging crew as "at risk" youth and placed them in special programs with teams of sociologists and educators and therapists evaluating their intelligence and home life and probably diagnosing them with all kinds of learning and emotional disorders and prescribing medicines and skills-building regimens, finally buoying them up with grand balloons of self-esteem that they might float A L O F T

307

high above the rank fog of their scrounging dago circumstance, to land somewhere in the sweet-smelling prosperous beyond.

Pop certainly did, as did almost every last one of his generation's Battaglias, with the exception of his cousin Frankie, who died of a freak heart attack at nineteen, and then another named Valerie, who from the age of eleven smoked like an iron smelter and came down with lung (and liver and brain) cancer a month after her nuptials and was in the grave before she could even conceive a child. For if you took an accounting of all who proceed us, our alive and semi-alive relations from Forest Hills to Thousand Oaks to Amelia Island and to everywhere else they've rooted themselves with a vengeance, you'd have some kind of portfolio of golden twentieth-century self-made American living, all those spic-and-span houses and Gunite pools and porcelain- and crystal-filled curio cabinets and full-mouth braces for the kids and the double wall ovens set on timers to bring the roast rosemary chicken and casserole of sweet-sausage lasagna to just the right crisp on top as Dad pulled the white Lincoln up the driveway, their contribution to our Great Society being the straight full trickle-down to my generation of Battaglias and Battles and Battapaglias and the rest of us with the sweetheart deal of a Set-It-and-Forget-It existence. Like everybody halfway decent and useful I of course recognize that one's character should rightly derive from privation, crucibles, pains in the ass, and so I guess my only semi-rhetorical question is from what else does it come, if there's always been a steady wind at your back, a full buffet as your table, and the always cosseted parachuted airbagged feeling of your bubbleness, which can never brook a real fear?

Pop's pop was one of those stumpy, big-handed, gray-haired
308

C H A N G - R A E L E E

fellas in coveralls you still spot every once in a while shimmying up on a neighbor's roof to repoint the top of the fireplace chimney, because guys like Pop and then me didn't want to learn the skill and they could never retire because there was no one else who knew how to do the job and they could never not take the call. In fact maybe Pop and I have more in common than I know, because really he had little interest in building garden walls and cladding Manhattan townhouses in limestone or doing anything like what Nonno was doing, whom I know he loved like a God but considered not a little backward and igno-rant and lucky that he had him as a son. Growing up, Pop was smart enough to see how everybody was moving to the suburbs into their own houses with big yards and patios and pools and paved driveways, and he knew that the owners would be working too hard in their regular jobs to come home on the weekends and want to take care of it all. So against Nonno's wishes he moved the business out here to the suburbs, mostly dropping the bricklaying part (only stick-built, clapboarded houses out here) and shifting the focus to landscaping and yard care, which for a good many years was a veritable gold mine for the Battles, because he kept his early clients and moved along with them to bigger and bigger places right up until they died.

Pop was pretty magnificent then, this when I was a kid tagging along in the summers and he was in his prime (Bobby was just an infant). He'd stand there at the start of the day on the bed of his truck, hands spread atop the roof of the cab, calling out the jobs and saying who'd be working on them and with what foreman, exhorting the guys to do the job right (because if you do it right you don't have to remember to be honest) and then giving out a few loose bucks to those who were making the grade, cracking jokes the whole time and praising everybody A L O F T

309

and being the studly captain of the crew. When everybody had their marching orders he'd slap the cab and say, "All right, fellas, let's roll 'em out." The trucks would start up in a sweet dieselly cloud and he'd lead them out of the yard in a column like he was fucking Field Marshal Rommel. On the job I'd watch as he glad-handed the customers and was tough on them, too, and I'd have to say that whatever I know about common commerce and people I know from him, how he'd convince some guy to line his pool with real tiles instead of the cheaper rubber liner for the sake of standards and posterity, appealing to what pushed the guy out here in the first place, which was an idea about the destiny of the good American life and how each of us had a place in it, guiding it along. If George Guggenheimer had been his neighbor he would have been his best customer; Pop would have had him put in two koi ponds instead of one, with a waterfall in between, and then maybe an entire au-thentic Japanese garden, with a Zen sand pit and a manicured bamboo "fence" and a couple of those baby red maples that look so delicate and weepy, never for a second allowing George to entertain the idea of doing anything himself but feeding the fish (and maybe not even that), and definitely going over there after the lottery win and slapping some sense into him about not being such a pathetic, fearful, neurotic twitch of a man.

With the women he dealt with Pop was a natural charmer.

He'd always compliment them on their clothes or hair even if they were just standing there in their housesmocks, and they'd often offer him coffee or if late in the day a cold can of beer.

He'd always—always—accept, and if he felt particularly good or if there had been a problem with the job he might sing a few bars from Puccini or Verdi for them, his brassy tenor voice reaching me outside as I waited on the stoop or in the truck if it
310

C H A N G - R A E L E E

was raining. Sometimes, of course, I'd have to wait a very long time. Once I wandered around the back of one property to see if there was a swing set or basketball hoop and I saw Pop and the lady of the house balling away on the deck lounger by the pool Pop had just put in with Spanish blue tiles laid on the bottom in the shape of a schooner, Pop's big pale ass bobbing up and down between her doughy, stippled thighs and her heels (she was wearing brown spikes) digging holes into the cushion, where she was trying to get some traction. I was too young to think too much about it, and to be honest it never bothered me as it might have. I wasn't angry for my mother's sake, because she seemed as though she knew, and maybe because Pop didn't make a big deal of it or try to sell me a story. All he did was buy me a special high-flying kite I'd been asking for The Big Bombardier, which I flew whenever the wind kicked up the littlest bit or a summer storm was blowing in.

I sure loved that Big Bombardier.

And maybe if you asked him Pop would proudly say he was the colonist, the pioneer, the one who had to clear-cut the land and fight tooth and nail with the natives, and that I'm the settler, the follower, the guy who grooved the first ruts in the road, the one who finally overflowed the outhouse shithole, who has presided over the steady downward trend of our civilization perhaps just now begun its penultimate phase of entropy and depletion. And if you're Theresa or Jack or Rita or anybody else (or even me for that matter), you could easily extend the argument to include the other collations between us, our frank father/son successions, that he's the racist to my apologist, the sexist and womanizer where I'm the teaser, canonist to popular-ist, stand-and-deliverer to recliner. And if I'm obliged to bring in the customary automotive metaphors, Pop must be one of A I , 0 F T

311

the last of the great American sedans, those wide-body behe-moths, possessed of egregiously wasteful power, overarmored, fuel-hungry (ever-desirous), picking off on his way to the store every doe and dog and rabbit and squirrel without showing as much as a dent, when I'm doing everything I can to prove that I'm something other than an early '80s model from a fallen De-troit, something big and bulky on the outside but alarmingly cramped within, with scandalously poor gas mileage and rickety suspension, though trimmed in buttery leather throughout, and with an AC system that could cool Hades. And in this sense, maybe Jack is the last hurrah of our golden Pax 13attaglia, the burly all-terrain multitasking machine that will go anywhere it pleases, but it looks more and more as if he'll soon have to retro-fit himself with fuel cells and narrow bicycle tires, shrink down the sheet metal into one of those pint-sized helmet-on-wheels jobs that are sadly the norm in London and Paris and Rome.

And if I may for a moment jump back to the previous metaphor and the (de-) moralizing story of Red I will say it is not Pop's story and in fact probably not even mine, but rather Jack's and Theresa's and Paul's and maybe yours, because it's the jackal and birds with whom we departed, skittering over the dust-dry plains after the great lion has roared and we hyenas and buzzards have split up the rest, and what is there left but the merest shaving of the splendid, just enough of a taste to pang the knowing belly?

Paul returns with his tea, as well as with the Ivy Acres administrator, whom I met on the first day I deposited Pop and have seen in the parking lot a couple of times since, a guy named Patterson. Patterson is a sleepy-eyed, semi-balding, mid-forties white guy in no-wrinkle khaki trousers who could pass for a lot of us out here, fed a bit too well on big Australian
312

C H A N G - R A E L E E

shiraz and rotisserie chickens and super-premium ice cream, who buys shelled pistachios only and snacks on them in his big Audi out of sheer crushing boredom, who'll go down on his wife as long as she's just bideted, who is easygoing except when it comes to the bottom-line expediency of his life, which, to nobody's credit, he can usually find in peril everywhere, at home or at the mall or here at work.

"Good evening, Mr. Battle."

"What the hell is going on here, Patterson?"

Patterson makes as if he can't hear that particular register, and just stands there a second waiting for the air to clear. "It's good that you and your son-in-law have come in."

"Good? I want to know how you let this happen, and what you're doing about finding my father."

"Why don't we sit down, Mr. Battle. If you please," he says, ushering Paul and me into chairs, while he sits at the foot of the bed. "Let me inform you of what's transpired so far, and the actions being implemented."