Another Perfect Catastrophe (3 page)

My father shouts to the men looking at the blueprints. “Mind if we go up there? For maybe five minutes?”

They look at each other. “Who the hell are you?” one of them says.

“I'm Tommy Kesler.”

The three of them stare, waiting for further explanation. When none is forthcoming, one of them shrugs and points to the signs posted on the side of the little trailer, with AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY written in big, red letters.

My father slumps back down in the seat. “You know, your mother would have liked this. She was always a big Noah fan.”

“She was? Mom?” This seems weirder than his own sudden interest in Bible stories. I can recall not one conversation about religion around our house, except when the Baptist church sent out one of their SWAT teams, who sat my mother down in the living room (Dad was off selling pools), handed her tracts and opened their Bibles, bludgeoned her with hell and eternity and my own little eight-year-old unsaved soul, hitting her over the head with it. When they left, she slammed the door, tossed the tracts down the coal furnace vent, and told me the only problem with full-immersion baptism was that they bothered to yank them back up.

“Well, I'm guessing she was,” Dad says. “Who wouldn't be?” The men high up finish lunch and begin working again, pounding thick hammers on the corners of the girders.

My department chair leaves a note in my box saying he'd like a word with me, which means students have been complaining. Twice now, Kenny Pecora has not shown up for class. For once, I wish he had, because I spent the hour reading and talking about an Elizabeth Bishop poem, the one about the armadillo and the fire balloons in Brazil, which my father put into my head by torching the Porta Potti. For the first time in a good while, I actually paid attention to what I was saying.

At home, as I pull up behind the Vette and get out of my car, I find a woman sitting on the front porch. She calls out “hello” and waves to me.

“Can I help you?” I say.

“No, I'm fine,” she says. I stand below her on the bottom porch step, looking up at where she sits in the glider. She is a handful of years older than me, a plump, round-faced woman, though pretty and dark haired. She is working a crossword puzzle in
TV Guide
, filling it in with a golf pencil.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “Who are you again?”

“Tommy didn't tell you?” she says. “I'm Wendy, the home health care nurse.”

“No,” I say. “Tommy didn't.” I stand gawking at her, feeling stomach-punched.
What if?
I think. But no, he has pulled similar stuff before. The first month after he invented his cancer, he shaved off his eyebrows and rented a wheeled oxygen tank from a medical supply house.

“Where is he, anyway?” I ask her.

“I think taking a shower. He's really a sick man, you know.”

My heart wobbles. “Why do you say that? I mean, what's your assessment?”

She shrugs. “Well, he said he is. Who would lie about that?” She lifts a bottle from beside the rocker and takes a dainty sip of St. Pauli Girl. I take a good long look at Wendy the home health care nurse, wondering where in hell he has found her. She smiles and asks me if I know the name of Red Skelton's lovable yokel, Clem something.

I find Dad in the kitchen, his hair wet from the shower, cooking eggs and hash browns.

“A home nurse?” I say to him.

“You know, she has never been out to see the ark, either. It's like New Yorkers, they live there forty years and never see the Statue of Liberty.”

“Dad…”

“Toast or English muffin? Wendy took me to the store. Well, I took her, but same thing. You got another letter from the lawyers.”

I shrug. “Why do you think you need a nurse? And what kind of nurse drinks beer at three o'clock in the afternoon?”

“I asked her to drink beer with me. Part of her job. That and watch some TV, a few hands of hearts, a shoulder rub or two.” He folds the omelet, then flips it in the air.

“She isn't a nurse, is she, Dad?”

“If you mean the
Good Housekeeping
seal of some university big-shot degree, then no. But ‘nurse' is just a
function
, Billy. A plumber could be a nurse, a cowboy or a baker could, too.”

“Or a contractual college instructor,” I say. I see what he's up to: he wants to shame me into letting him stay on, into midnight reminiscences, into feeling sorry for him in his relatively old age by hiring someone when I fail to do it.

“Hey, who's making dinner here? Who cleaned the house today, you or me?”

“So where did you hire your nurse? From the local bakery or the local cattle drive?”

He flips his omelet, twice this time, catches it, slides it out onto a plate. “She works for an escort service. But it is just escort, Billy, no hanky-panky.”

I shake my head and half laugh. “Dad, this whole thing is hanky-panky.” I help him butter the toast.

He looks around the kitchen. “What whole thing?”

“Your reason for coming here, your cancer. All just more of your stunts. Problem is, I'm not really entertained by it anymore.”

“So I come here to make amends, and this is how I'm treated.”

“I don't want you to make any amends,” I tell him, and it's true. What's the point? Everyone has amends to make, so no one does. They all cancel each other out.

Just then Wendy walks in and opens the refrigerator for another beer. “Kadiddlehopper,” she says.

I look at her. “Pardon?”

“That was the answer. On the crossword.” She is a little bit drunk. Dad finishes fixing the plates and we sit on the counter barstools to eat. We don't say much. Wendy continues writing in the answers to her puzzle. Finally Dad interrupts the scrape and ring of silverware.

“Wendy, tell Doubting Billy here your opinion of my condition.”

“Dad…”

“Well,” she wipes her mouth, slips the pencil behind her ear. “Your Dad is not well, Billy.”

“Is that an official diagnosis, or did you find that in
TV Guide
?”

She laughs, her face flushing deep red, then retrieves her pencil.

Dad sets down his fork, folds his hands. “You want to call my doctor, smart guy? I'll give you the number.”

I look at the shadow of dark ringing his head as his hair grows in, sunburn peeling the tops of his ears, the hard set of his mouth. “Yeah, I would like to do that. Give me the number. Does he have a name, or do you need to think about it some?”

He borrows Wendy's pencil and writes a number down on his napkin, still looking at me. “Dr. Snelson,” he says. “You'll be sorry.”

Wendy holds up her hand for us to be quiet. “‘Early-TV pie guy, Soupy
blank,'”
she says, reading from her puzzle. “Does anyone know?”

An hour later I'm sitting on the bed with the cordless phone in one hand and the napkin in the other. Dad and Wendy are talking in the living room, where I left them watching some movie of the week, sitting on the couch drinking beer and holding hands like teenagers. I punch the numbers for Dr. Snelson and get his machine, a woman's voice reminding me of regular office hours, telling me to go to the hospital if I need immediate attention, or to call the doctor's pager if this is an emergency. I write down his beeper number, wondering briefly what the difference is between an emergency and needing immediate attention.

Sitting there on my marriage bed, I start to punch in the beeper number but with one tiny swerve, a little joggle in my brain, instead allow my fingers to punch in the number for the watercolorist's house. Laney picks up on the second ring.

“I think my father has cancer,” I tell her.

“Very funny, Billy. I said not to call, okay? I mean it. I'm trying to be decent about this.”

“No, really. I think he really does have cancer.”

She is silent a moment.

“So you've talked to his doctor then, right?”

I look down at the folded napkin. “Not exactly.”

“What then?”

I stop for a minute, trying to think what evidence I actually do have. “I had to move back the seat on the Vette when I drove it. Way back.”

“Dammit, Billy—”

“And he hired a home nurse. Sort of.”

I hear her draw in her breath and let it out, and I can see from the sound of it the way it puffs her bangs up and away from her eyes. “You are two of a kind, you know that? And this is a new low, Billy. It really is.”

“Laney—”

“Listen, I didn't want to go along with this, but Dennis installed caller ID for me and from now on if it's you, I'm not going to pick up, Billy, okay? You understand me?”

“Who's Dennis?” I say. This is enough to make her hang up, which she does with the softest click of the phone.

In the living room Wendy the home nurse is asleep on the couch with her head tipped back and mouth open, the TV muted, my father just sitting and looking at the faces on the screen.

“I need to drive her home,” he stage-whispers to me.

“Let her stay,” I say aloud. “She's out anyway. Toss a blanket over her, and we'll fix her pancakes in the morning.”

“Good enough.” He nods and we look at each other, then the TV, the faces moving their mouths.

“You can take me out, though,” I finally say.

“Kinda late for a drive.”

“I want to see them,” I say. “Together in that house. I want to look in the living room window and see them sitting on the couch, like you two, holding hands.” I rub my mouth with my fingers. “I think I need to see that.”

He clicks off the TV and Wendy stirs a little, mutters in her sleep. “I think you like the idea of seeing that,” he says. “Two hours afterward, you'll feel like an idiot.”

“I can go by myself,” I say.

Ten minutes later we're in the Corvette moving through the night toward a subdivision named Rolling Hills. Dad is driving, smoking another of the cigars he had all but given up since he pretended to have cancer. When we finally find the right address, the house is dark and still. On the side porch is one of those ultraviolet bug-zapping lights. We sit in the dark with the engine idling, the house quiet and sleeping, the bug light giving off an electric buzz every few seconds. The watercolorist has a mailbox shaped like a red barn, a canoe strapped to his Volvo. A patch of dandelions grows beneath his drier vent. There is nothing to see.

“You're right,” I say. “Not even two hours, and I feel like an idiot.”

“Not much to it, is there?” He pats my knee. “There never is.”

I shake my head. “Let's go home.”

We take off down the quiet streets, and Dad reaches under the seat between his legs and then plugs in a cassette tape of Irish music, filling the close car with flutes and guitar. As he taps his fingers on the dash, it occurs to me that what I know of him is just some little edge of who he actually is, a tiny percentage of him. In all the photos I have from childhood, my father is always a blur, jumping into the frame at the last second, or out of it, the top of his head or side of his face cut off. He is like that still, always.

“What I want to know,” he says suddenly, “is why you two never had a kid. That might've been the glue you needed.”

“I wanted to wait until I got away from the community college, landed a real teaching job.” I shrug. “In its own clock-punching, dental-plan way, it
is
real, I guess. And I wish we had now, so there'd be some connection. This way, everything is so damn
clean
. She packs, and she's gone.”

He nods but doesn't answer. I notice that while I've been talking he's gone past the Braddock Road exit and is heading toward Cherry Hill Road, toward the ark.

“All right, what's with you and all this Noah stuff?” I say. “Have you gone religious on me?”

He waves the back of his hand, then looks at his cigar and tosses it out the window. “Nah, nothing like that, son. I just like the way the story's lasted so long. I mean, it's how old? God knows. One website pegged the thing on the Babylonians and those other guys, the Sumerians, and here we are in the space age, telling it all over again with steel and cement.”

I don't bother pointing out to him that we are about thirty years past the space age. “The eternal verities,” I say.

“And what's that, professor?”

“Faulkner, talking about eternal truths.”

He frowns. “Hell, I don't give a tinker's damn about the truth. And I don't care if it's a story or a good lie or a fairy tale or what have you. The longevity of it—that's your meat and potatoes.”

He looks over at me, to see if this has made an impression. “Besides,” he says, “those bastards today wouldn't give us a fair look.”

“And?”

“I want to see it. Up close.”

“It's trespassing, Dad. We could get in real trouble.”

“Doctors gave up on the radiation treatments two months ago. I'm supposed to care about trouble?”

I shake my head, look out the window into the dark. “Dad…”

“Did you make that phone call, Billy? To Snelson?”

“Nope.”

“You going to?” I see him looking at me, cutting his eyes.

I think about this while he slides up to the top of the exit and does not even slow down for the stop sign, swinging out onto the narrow road. The napkin with Dr. Snelson's beeper number is still folded away inside my pocket. I wonder if anybody ever
once
called my father's bluff, over anything. But no matter what news I get from the doctor, dialing that number will mean either that I don't believe my father's truth or I don't buy into his bullshit. I don't know which would wound him deeper. “I'm not sure,” I tell him. He starts to say something else, then changes his mind.

The reds and browns of the structural steel are all rendered black against the deep blue of the night sky. We get out and walk toward the ark, the only light a yellow bulb, no brighter than a nightlight, on the side of the construction trailer. The path turns from gravel to mud, my shoes sinking in. Down across the hill from us, sparse traffic slips along the highway, the truckers gearing down for the long climb into the mountain.