Fitz (3 page)

Fitz feels his heart beating in his chest. This is the time to say something, but what? He hasn’t rehearsed this part. He has something to say, a little announcement to make, but he doesn’t know the words. “What I want is to spend some time with you,” he says at last. “You know, quality time. A little father-son time. Dad. That’s the word.”

Now his father is looking at him, not at his gun but right at him, as if for the first time. “Fitzgerald?” he says.

“Listen, Fitzgerald,”
his father says. He’s steering the car up Grand Avenue, away from downtown and his law offices, just as Fitz instructed. It’s the first thing he’s said since he figured out who Fitz was.

“Nobody calls me that,” Fitz tells him. It’s rush hour; traffic is heavy. There are people waiting at a bus shelter, drivers sipping from paper cups. Fitz glances at the clock on the dashboard: it’s almost nine. On an ordinary day, he’d be in Mr. Massey’s homeroom, probably listening to Caleb go on and on about some obscure bottleneck-guitar player from West Texas. But this is not an ordinary day. Fitz is still holding his gun, keeping it low, out of sight.

“I see,” his father says. Fitz assumes he’s making some calculations, thinking things through, trying to read the situation. This alleged son of his, this Fitzgerald person, what’s the matter with him? Is he high? Crazy? He has no idea.

Fitz sees a coffee shop on the next block. It’s his father’s favorite—he’s seen him carrying their cups. “Turn in there,” he
tells his father. “Get in the drive-through line. We’ll get you some coffee.”

His father does as he’s told. There are a half dozen vehicles ahead of them in line, mostly SUVs, one nicely dressed person per car. Fitz thinks of his mom, how she likes to make fun of people who drink fancy overpriced coffee concoctions—the venti-soy-caramel-pumpkin-macchiato lattes, or whatever they are. The more complicated the order, the bigger the jerk—that’s her theory. She used to be a waitress and knows all about customers and their orders. You can tell everything you need to know about a person, she says, just from watching how they behave in a restaurant, how they treat the help. When the two of them go out, his mom tips crazy amounts—the grubbier the place, the more she leaves—because she knows what it’s like.

When they pull up to the speaker, Fitz hides the gun under his sweatshirt. His father rolls his window down. He glances at Fitz. “And what about you?” his father asks. “What would you like?”

“Hot chocolate,” Fitz says, without thinking. The words just jump out of his mouth. It’s what he wants, what he gets at a place like this, but he hasn’t thought about how it might sound, what it would look like. The little gangster sipping his cocoa. He watches his father’s face and thinks,
Don’t laugh at me, don’t you dare laugh at me
. He’d rather his father shoot him than laugh at him.

His father’s face shows nothing. If he’s amused, he keeps it to himself. He leans into the speaker and places their order. Fitz notices that his father is pleasant and polite. The girl has to interrupt him and ask him to wait a minute. Then she mishears him and he has to repeat himself, twice. She’s having a hard time, but
he’s the one who apologizes. He thanks her for taking his order. It surprises Fitz a little. Especially now, under the circumstances. Because he wears a suit, maybe, because he seems like a boss, Fitz has imagined his father ordering people around at work, being abrupt with underlings. But he doesn’t bark at the girl. He’s gracious. His mom would give him points for that. He has good manners, he is capable of kindness.

And yet, somehow even this, especially this, bugs Fitz. The man can be nice to a stranger, a voice on a speaker, but he ignores his son? All these years, what prevented his father from being nice to
him
? Why didn’t he knock on the door? Why didn’t he pick up the phone and call? Why didn’t he write a letter? Why? Why? Why? It is the central mystery of his life. The unanswerable question. Fitz did not agonize over the existence of God; he didn’t ponder the origins of the universe. Sometimes he would look at himself in the mirror, an expression of pathetic eagerness on his face. He was a dog in the pound, wanting to be adopted. He’d smile. What father wouldn’t want this boy?

They edge toward the window. “So what do they call you?” his father asks, his eyes straight ahead.

“Huh?”

“If not Fitzgerald. You said nobody calls you that. You must have a nickname or something. What
do
they call you?”

“Orphan Boy,” Fitz says. “That’s my handle.”

Fitz isn’t sure where it’s coming from, this attitude, this hostility, whatever it is he’s channeling, exactly. It’s like he’s possessed by something, speaking in evil tongues. Normally, he’s respectful to adults. His ordinary, everyday self makes eye contact and never
interrupts or mouths off—usually he’s a regular please-and-thank-you machine. A pleasure to have in class, that’s the box all his teachers check. Maybe he’s trying to make up for the hot chocolate, proving he’s still a tough guy. Maybe he’s tapped a deep well of something black and nasty, like some underground oil deposit, buried deep in his soul.

“What right have you got to even say my name?” Fitz says. “Tell me that.”

“None. None whatsoever.” His father raises his hands off the steering wheel then, and Fitz tenses, but it’s not an attack, just a gesture, a mini-surrender: he shows his palms and returns them to the wheel.

At the window now, there’s a perky blond girl wearing a headset and an apron who tells them what they owe. Fitz remembers that he’s got his father’s billfold jammed in his hip pocket. He pulls it out and extracts a ten. He gives it to his father, who thanks him and passes it up to the girl.

She makes change and hands it to his father, who in turn passes it to Fitz. She hands over their drinks next, two tall, lidded paper cups. His father sets his in the console’s cup holder between them.

The girl gives them a big smile and tells them to enjoy their day. Maybe she imagines the two of them are on some nice family outing, Take Your Son to Work Day or some such.

Which reminds Fitz. “You need to call your office,” he says. He’s thought this through and has a kind of outline in his head, but he’s let himself get flustered and forgetful. He needs to get
back on track. He needs to stay focused. “Tell them you’re not coming in today.”

“They’re gonna want to know why.”

He pulls his father’s phone out of his pocket and thrusts it at him. “Tell ’em you’re sick,” Fitz says. There’s a word his mom likes. “Tell ’em you’re
indisposed
. Tell ’em whatever you like. I don’t care. Tell ’em you have plans.”

“Because you have plans for me,” his father says. “Is that right?”

“Oh yes,” Fitz tells him. “Most definitely. I have plans. Big plans.”

Fitz has always been fascinated by fathers
—the various types, their behaviors. When he visits his friends, he studies their dads, like a zoologist doing field research. He likes to catalog the various species he observes. There are the lawn-and-garden dads, guys who smell like gasoline, who spend the weekends mowing and edging, blowing leaves and whacking weeds. There are hunters and fishermen, the ones with camo jackets and tackle boxes, boat hitches on their trucks. There are the sports guys, coaches and superfans, sitting on the sidelines in their portable chairs, hollering encouragement and advice. Dads read the paper; they grill meat; they pay bills. They drink beer and watch football, remotes glued to their hands. That’s how they are on television anyway. Most TV dads are a little clueless, big kids. Bad dads turn up mostly in movies and lit class: the Great Santini, Huck’s dad—they’re angry and mean and sometimes drunk.

But this man at the wheel, his dad, is not so easy to classify. He’s got his eyes on the road, headed down Lexington Avenue now, just as Fitz instructed him, toward Como Park. If he is a bad
dad—of course he is!—it is a different kind of bad. He is quietly, almost invisibly, bad. If he were a disease, they’d call him a silent killer.

Now that phrase, it occurs to Fitz, could make a good blues song:
You’re a silent killer, baby
. It’s crazy to be thinking about songs now, in the front seat with his dad, his hand on a gun, but it’s just how his mind works—he can’t help himself. He thinks up a good phrase, hears some choice expression, he wants to write it down, fiddle around with it, see if it turns into anything worth showing Caleb.

Fitz wishes Caleb could be here with him. Caleb is peculiar and superstitious, full of tics and rituals and crazy fears—there are certain streets he doesn’t like to cross, some chords he seems to dread—but he’s shrewd, too. He sees into people. Caleb would have some take on his father. He could help Fitz see beyond the briefcase and cell phone, help him see what’s in the suit.

What’s he listen to?
That’s what Caleb would want to know. When he talks, Caleb puts a little spin on certain words—it’s like he speaks in italics. He can be so serious sometimes, people think he must be joking. But Fitz understands. That’s what makes him Caleb.
Check out the man’s
music, Caleb would tell him.

Fitz looks around and finds a wallet of CDs above the visor. He takes it down and flips through it. On top is
Rubber Soul
. It’s a record that Fitz owns and has listened to for years: the Beatles are one of the bands Fitz and his mom agree on. The Beatles—that’s their common ground.

They stop at a red light, and Fitz’s father glances over at him. “So what do you have in mind? The park?” He looks worried.
He probably thinks Fitz is going to shoot him there and leave his body in the shrubbery for some jogger to discover. Like something from a mob movie, some poor loser gets driven to a desolate location and then whacked. Fine, Fitz thinks. Let him stew. Let his lousy life pass before his eyes.

But what Fitz has in mind is a different kind of movie, a movie he’s been watching in his head. In this movie, there’s no dialogue, just Fitz and his father together, doing things. It’s a montage, snippets and glimpses of a shared life. They’re fishing; they’re washing a car; they’re shooting hoops. Some of the images don’t even make sense, at least not for Fitz—he’s never had any special love of basketball, for one thing. Maybe it’s just the best his imagination can do: probably these are scenes he’s cribbed from the movies or other kids’ lives. Somehow the particulars don’t seem to matter all that much. What matters is getting what he’s owed.

A year ago, Fitz’s mom received a good-sized check from the school where she works as a teacher’s aide: it was to make up for a pay raise she was supposed to have gotten months before. Instead of getting a little bit every two weeks, she got it all at once, a big lump of money. Back pay, that’s what it was. Maybe that’s what Fitz wants: a lump sum of his father’s time and attention. Back pay.

“First, we’re gonna check out the zoo,” Fitz says.

“Sure,” his father says. “Check out the zoo.”

Maybe his father thinks he’s kidding, but he’s not. The zoo is one of his favorite places in the world. His mom used to take Fitz to the Como Zoo all the time when he was little, probably because it was free. There were animals there he grew to love—the sea lions, the bison, all the cats, especially the snow leopard. He
loved the animals not as species but as individuals
—that
gorilla, the young male, the shy one; Buzz, the polar bear, and his brother, Neil. He didn’t just love the charismatic mammals: he loved amphibians and reptiles, too, he loved animals that were scaly and prickly, bug-eyed and menacing. Animals other kids thought were gross or uninteresting, the sloth, say, Fitz thought were simply misunderstood, as deserving of fans as their cuter fellow creatures.

“The zoo even open today?”

Fitz is still holding the CD wallet. He flips through to see what else his father listens to: the Clash, Dinah Washington, Lucinda Williams, Wilco, the Replacements, Bob Marley.

“I’m in a band, you know,” Fitz says.

“Really,” his father says.

“Really.”

“What’s it called?”

“Creative Destruction.” Fitz and Caleb went around and around trying to come up with a name. At one point, they had more than a hundred possibilities. Creative Destruction was something Fitz heard on the radio. He didn’t know what it meant, but he liked the sound of it. Caleb had been holding out for Osgood-Schlatter, which is a disease but sounds like a person. Nora Flynn was with them after school that day in the commons. They’d been trying to recruit her to sing with them, so when she said she liked “Creative Destruction,” that sealed it.

“Cool,” his father says. Fitz looks at him. Is he humoring him? Being smart? Yanking his chain—like Dominic at the playground? Fitz has no idea. He can’t read him. He regrets telling him that much.

“Yeah,” Fitz says. “Groovy.”

Fitz wonders if his father even likes his music all that much. Probably these CDs are just fashionable props, like his briefcase, a bunch of titles recommended in some slick men’s magazine.

Fitz slides the Dinah Washington out of its sleeve. He’s heard the name, probably from Caleb, the music encyclopedia. He slips it into the player, and the first track starts just as they see the first sign for the zoo. There’s some strings, then Dinah starts singing, belting it out in this amazing voice: “What a difference a day makes/Twenty-four little hours.”

“Pull over,”
Fitz tells his father.

They’re on the park grounds now, just passing the Frog Pond. Fitz can see the dome of the conservatory, a huge, humid greenhouse full of exotic flowers, shrubs, ferns, and even trees. Fitz thinks of his mom—the Como Conservatory is one of her favorite places in the world. They’ve been visiting together for years: even if they come to the park for the animals or the rides, they usually stop in at least, pay a quick visit. She loves it, and he endures it for her sake. She can look at orchids forever, and Fitz sort of understands—here, she is like how he and Caleb are at the music store. If you know the stuff, flowers or guitars, it doesn’t matter, if you love them, they are all fascinating and beautiful, the colors and shapes and smells of them. He and his mom usually talk a little about what they’re looking at, take turns playing the teacher, so now his mom knows the difference between a Les Paul and a Strat, and Fitz has learned some basic flower names. Fitz has, though he would never admit it, grown especially fond of the crooked little bonsais, the Japanese trees in pots, which seem to
him to have distinctive personalities, some of them looking feisty and defiant, others sad and apologetic.