Making Nice (22 page)

He was struggling a bit as I approached, breathing heavily and spitting bay, yelling that he wasn’t wearing his sea-leg and that I’d ruined it, and his cellphone, and that I was a dumb fuck and a regular fuck and an idiot, and balls and goddammit, shit!, what the fuck was I thinking? Nothing, I said, frightened by this thing looking at me all mad and drippy. I wasn’t thinking anything. And then, from some cerebral fold I didn’t know about anymore came a joke I remembered him making once when I was kid, him in the kitchen hanging up the phone and telling my mother the news about a friend of his, a fellow amputee, whose wife had just found him facedown in their backyard pool. “He had one arm,” he told her. “Probly kept swimmin’ in circles.” Then they both cracked up.

“What the fuck are you smiling about,” he said, wringing the bottom of his shirt out and flicking water at me. “It’s not funny. Dipshit.”

“I know that,” I said. “I know.”

*   *   *

The next morning we left for the airport two hours too early, like always, stopping for a last egg sandwich and coffee from the Oakdale Deli. You can count on a long line of landscapers and bricklayers and construction grunts anytime before nine, blue-collar guys with green-stained or paint-splattered boots, everybody shit-talking about the Mets sucking except for us. I’m not sure what my father was thinking because I was leering at a cheaply framed picture on the post behind the counter. It was of a kid in army fatigues cradling a machine gun across his chest, unsmiling under a helmet and mirrored wraparound sunglasses. He was the SAW gunner of his unit, two weeks this side of twenty when he was killed in combat in Baghdad a year earlier. I knew all this because I’d gone to his funeral. His name was Matt Bachman. Marc’s kid brother.

It was a major town event, the fire trucks and police escorted the long line of cars from the funeral home to Calverton National out east. It was raining, I remember, and all these soldiers were there to do their flag folding and gun saluting, the rest of us huddled under a tarp together with horrible hangovers, silently watching the whole thing save the occasional wail, the occasional sniffle. A gang of bikers were fifty yards off under a stand of trees in case those religious right shitheads from Westboro showed up with their “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “AIDS Kills Fags” signs. They didn’t, and a small part of me was disappointed. Emotions were high—they usually are with me—and sometimes it’d be nice to have someone or someones deserving to let them out on. Instead it comes spilling over on the un-or-only-half-deserving, and I end up feeling horrible after. I wonder: What is wrong with me?

They renamed the road Matt grew up on after him and planted a tree in his honor at Idle Hour Elementary. A tree. I’d since spotted his picture all over town—behind the bar at The Wharf, behind the counter in 7-Eleven, above the register in Mr. Video … now here it was on a post in the town breakfast spot with the caption:
He protected us, and loved our Deli.
I couldn’t believe it. I turned to my father. “Can you believe that?” I said. “What the fuck is that? I don’t know what to make of that.”

“Make of what?” my father said.

“That. The picture. Why don’t they just put ‘He was a hero and died for our heroes. He died for macaroni salad.’ I mean you gotta be kidding me, man. That’s fuckin’ crazy.”

“They’re just tryin’,” he said, “to honor him.”

“You wanna honor somebody that’s one thing, but don’t cheapen it by putting your fuckin’ brand on his corpse. He’s dead.”

I looked again at my father, who shrugged and wiped his hands on his pants. Then I made for the door.

“Where you goin’?” he asked.

“Outside,” I said. “I’ll be outside.”

“You want me to order you somethin’?”

“No thanks,” I said, bells jingling as I walked out, bells jingling again when I swiveled my head around and marched across the parking lot and pushed open the door of the town flower shop to say hi to Mrs. Patel, the Indian woman with teeth like Indian corn. She had a wonky eye, too, and I was terrified of her as a kid, but had since come to consider her the kindest person around. She was so upset at the news of my mother’s passing she got teary-eyed at the sight of my brother and sister and me walking into her shop. “I’m so sorry,” she said to us then. “Your mother was a wonderful woman. She really loved you guys. I remember her at the PTA meetings yelling at Mr. Mauro about the after-school programs…” She went on about her, and not once did she spew the usual stuff about her being at peace, with god, in a better place now … all the horseshit people say to each other. It all seemed very genuine, and even more so when she pushed the arrangement she was making—I thought for someone else—across the counter at us, insisting we didn’t pay. I’d maybe seen her a half dozen times in my whole life and talked to her less than that, and she had said a few kind and true things and gave us flowers and hugged us.

It was the same this time, her coming around the counter and offering a hug and excitedly asking what I was doing back in New York, how things were going in California. How could she even know I moved there? I told her about Fatlegs and that I was here to check on the old man. “He’s OK,” I said, but she seemed to know exactly what that meant and squeezed my shoulder.

“Tell me about your brother’s baby then … Marie, was it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s right,” I said, and a few minutes later I was on my way out the jingling door with a handful of Gerber daisies wrapped in crinkly plastic. She tried to give those to me for free, too, but I threw a twenty on the counter and made a run for it, then waited in the parking lot for my father, who not long after came out of the deli and seeing me there with flowers got a disappointed look on his face. “We don’t have time,” he said.

“We have plenty of time,” I said, “and we’re fuckin’ going, and I don’t give a shit if I miss my flight.” He fidgeted in protest. “We’re fuckin’ going. It’s on the way.”

“
OK
,” he said, dragging out the
kay
. “Jeeze.” I pushed myself off the hood and circled to the other side of the car as he clicked open the locks. We both climbed in and shut the doors, one and two, thunk thunk, again with the echo as he started digging through the brown bag, the grease already soaking through and darkening it.

“I got you one,” he said, pulling out a sandwich wrapped in white butcher paper. “No cheese. Salt and pepper.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Coffee, too,” he said. “Careful, it’s hot.”

I took both and thanked him again, then watched as he reached into the bag a third time and pulled out those mini-cartons of orange juice they give you with every sandwich. He handed me one, then the other, and I laid them in my lap and turned my head toward the window so he wouldn’t see me tearing up like a fuckin’ baby.

The drive was long and quiet, the greenness of Long Island summers passing in the windows. The cemetery especially, its manicured lawns golf course green, the grass about bursting with it as we circled and circled, looking for her plot, my father pulling over when we finally found it.

“You coming?”

“No,” he said, and when I pressed him a little he just shook his head and looked out his window. “Sad.”

I got out and wandered over to the oak she’s buried near, found her grave, and stood silently over it with a mostly blank mind for a minute or so, watching a squirrel make its stop-and-go way to a plain-looking concrete fountain with a single jet of water shooting up out of it. It hopped up on the fountain’s edge and ran around it, hopped down and disappeared behind. I watched for a while, but couldn’t see where it went. Then I started crying.

“It’s the worst fountain I’ve ever even seen, Ma,” I said. “I hate it. I hate it. Oh man, I hate it so bad right now.” Then I got hysterical, like a baby, like Fatlegs, like I was rubber-chinning and couldn’t catch my breath until I remembered to tell her what I came to tell her, that AJ had a daughter and she’s not retarded. “He named her after you,” I said. “Kid can’t even hold her head up yet, just shits black stuff and cries and it’s Marie this Marie that, Marie Marie Marie. It kills me. Every time they say it there’s a pang and my heart starts chewing tinfoil.”

The squirrel came bouncing back into view, then a second squirrel came out, and there was some chittering and tail-moving before they charged each other and rolled around on the grass for a while, then ran up the tree and leapt around the branches.

“They seem really happy, though, and Jackie’s doing her art thing down in New Orleans and looking like a total lesbo like, you know, when girls are trying to be tough but just look like little Fonzies? That’s how she looks. But I’m proud of her, and I banged two of her friends a while back. And Dad’s still Dad. Every time I ask he says, ‘Don’t worry about me. I know how to suffer.’ I worry anyway. And I forgive him everything. ’Cause he can’t help it, same as I can’t help it.” I searched the tree branches again. “Same as these fuckin’ squirrels can’t help it.”

Just as I said it though the squirrels stopped their bickering, but not before they stirred this crazy-looking thing the color of sherbet from its hiding spot, a dragonfly dragonflying its way over and landing on the Gerber daisies I was holding. It just hung out there with me for a little bit looking like orange and raspberry with see-through wings, and after a while I tried to get it to climb onto my finger but it took off toward the fountain, flew half a lap around it, and headed off someplace else.

“Right now he’s sitting in the car about a hundred yards from here, probly eating Ritalin and pissing in a Snapple bottle. He didn’t come over ’cause he can’t, and ’cause he thinks it’s useless, that you’re dead and that’s it. I’m sure he’s right. But on the off chance you can hear me then maybe you can have dead-person powers too, and if that’s the case then you should give me those powers ’cause I need them. I know it’d be fairer to spread your dead-person powers around to all of us, but Jackie and AJ are doing fine already and Dad doesn’t want help, he said so himself, plus he made your life harder than it had to be. And a little’s not gonna do anybody any good, but if you gave me all the powers it could really turn things around for me. I really am sorry for every shitty thing I ever did. I was just so angry back then, but I’m pretty sure guys go through a second puberty between twenty-eight and thirty-two and become pussies, so I’m a pussy now. I get emotional when I see jewelry commercials—it’s horrible. I don’t know how you broads live like this, it’s hard to get things done when you’re thoughtful and having feelings all the time. Point is I need help getting things done and moving on and being happier. Also I wanna have sex with more girls, Ma, like a lot more … pretty girls on bicycles with baskets, pretty girls wearing dresses with pockets, waitress girls and bartender girls and a black girl, like really black. I really wanna fuck a black girl, Ma, and an Indian girl, and Mexican girls and French girls, and I wanna fuck Japanese girls and Iranian girls and feisty brunette girls, and blond ones and redheaded ones, and I wanna fuck strangers. I wanna fuck a whole bunch of strangers, Ma, strangers that are girls because girls make things better, and worthwhile, and I want things to be better and worthwhile. So if you could stop my hair from thinning that’d be cool, and protect me from diseases and save all the animals in the whole world, also kill my enemies and the enemies of my friends and that’s it, amen, I miss you, here’s some flowers I bought ’em from Mrs. Patel she looks like shit.”

Then I wiped my nose with the back of my hand and put the daisies down, picked ’em back up and took the crinkly plastic off and stuffed it in my back pocket, then put ’em back down and weaved my way back to the car and my father, a process that felt familiar for a reason I couldn’t figure until now. It felt like walking through a parking lot.

“Well?”

I didn’t answer and eventually he nodded, and we sat there in quiet recognition and mutual understanding of things being difficult for six full seconds.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I didn’t tell on you.”

“Tell on me for what?”

“For being messy and taping her toaster shut. You know she’d hate that.”

“Big fuckin’ deal,” he said, then mumbled something into the steering wheel I didn’t hear. I asked him to repeat it. “It keeps the fog out,” he said. “The flea fogga fog.”

“So you do know it’s poison then.”

“No,” he said. “’Cause it doesn’t taste good.” Then he started the car and took his fake foot off the brake and slowly rolled us through the super-green toward Southern State, then winded us west to the airport.

*   *   *

We of course got lost at JFK and had to turn down the radio so we could read signs out loud and confuse each other until we ended up in short-term parking somehow. I told him to drop me off wherever and I’d figure it out. He pulled up to a crosswalk and stopped, and I got my bag out of the back and leaned in the window and took inventory of my father, the bumps and bulges of his prosthetic leg pushing at his pants above his knee, his oversized shirt tucked in and his alligator clip suspenders and belt, his toupee, the bottle of Ritalin in the cup holder, a Snapple bottle on the floorboard under his feet for him to piss in. The bag from the bacon and eggs and the crinkled up butcher paper. The coffee cups and orange juice cartons and tiny pebbles in the floor mat. His ruined phone was velcroed to the dash and there were stump socks all over the back seat along with crossword books and mail he’d never read. I tapped the roof.

“OK,” I said. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Yep. Safe trip.”

“Thanks.”

“OK kid.”

“OK.”

“OK.”

I tapped the roof again and turned toward the terminal, because we could’ve said OK to each other forever but I wouldn’t believe it, not really, because it wasn’t true.

Then I set my mind on getting where I needed to, which turned out to be the next terminal over. I jogged the distance and arrived sweating and out of breath, my shoulder burning from the bag strap as I rushed and waited and waited and rushed, and got to my gate ten minutes before the flight departed but it was delayed. I put my belt back on and waited an hour to board, the prop plane to Philly mostly empty and the flight attendant—a veteran take-no-shit lady with an up-close face like a bell pepper going bad—was kind enough to put me in the emergency exit, my own row. Then we waited, and it got hotter and hotter, and as we rolled back from the gate the pilot came on to tell us we were twenty-sixth or -seventh in line for takeoff like it was good news. By then I was really sweating, the whole time looking out the window at the parade of planes lined up, big ones and little ones filled with people like me, people trying to get someplace and away from another.