The Death of All Things Seen (31 page)

Norman looked across as Joanne said, in a quieting conspiracy, ‘I’d stake a wager there’s not a woman of childbearing age in a vicinity of ten miles. I’m Queen Bee.’

She made a buzzing sound that immediately annoyed Norman, but he just smiled.

Norman was writing on a napkin with the logo of Captain Cody. A hot, radiant sun fell across the table. He was aware of other convergences. Helen’s sickness had been uncovered at a buffet like this, the single greatest debt paid out of her will, the six-minute Medevac airlift that cost $11,000.

Maybe Captain Cody’s was tied to a medical conglomerate. It seemed feasible. These cheap eateries, the hook, given there was a great trawl in the catchment of monies associated with end-of-life care. Everything else here was the lure – the sun, the palm trees, the beach and the sunsets.

There was no great hurry. The tickets to Disney were for the following day. They whiled away almost two hours. The sun grew in intensity until the asphalt wavered.

Norman regretted having declined valet parking with the reflexive opinion it was a great trap when tipping was at one’s discretion, and the service that much better for there being no set charge, no social frontloading of fees or hidden taxes. It’s how they liked it down here. You were underwriting nobody else. Individual rights remained intact. In tipping, you helped the economy while equally inflating your own benevolence for a dollar bill stuffed into the brown hand of a valet.

There were refills on the refills on refills, or that’s how Joanne described it in rising and coming back with another Pepsi in a beaded goblet in keeping with pirate booty. She held the Pepsi up like a chalice. This
bad choice
would end back home, but this was the grail of an earned vacation, a souvenir goblet to cherish and bring home for ninety-nine cents.

Toward the end, a garish fluorescence eventually killed the tropical mood. The waitresses were off smoking in a booth. Grace walked the aisles and eyed Captain Cody, circling him, prying. He was a great source of curiosity.

The waitresses got a kick out of it, while another waitress in her sixties, some castaway beauty of pageants, a one-time mermaid who had not fared so well on land, came out in waders and hosed down the remaining ice with steaming water, and the magic that had been the shanty beach shack was laid bare.

*

Norman took his time, observing and writing everything on napkins, to the amusement of Joanne, who wanted to see what he was writing.

He said shielding it, ‘You’ll read about it eventually.’

Joanne had aspirations of appearing in print. It ennobled her life to be in the discerning eye of someone reckoning with life’s great mysteries. She said this, while eying up a dessert, a key lime pie still beached on a sandbar not yet cleared.

Norman watched her rise, feeling in her absence what aloneness might feel like.

He had followed up on Nate and the enigma of his sudden return to Canada. It played in the deeper reaches of his mind yet. A month and then two had passed, before he uncovered Nate Feldman’s online obituary.

Nate had died of kidney failure related to medical complications arising from water contamination by legacy mining operations close to his property, the case in the courts, in a protracted battle of legal motions. Nate’s wife Ursula was referenced. She was a named plaintiff in an ongoing suit against a number of mining operators.

A week after he had uncovered the obituary, the law offices of Weatherly, Sutherland, and Saunders contacted him. Nate Feldman had bequeathed a set of reels and a projector to him. It was not formally disclosed how Nate had come into their possession, though, in procuring the reels, he learned that they had been bequeathed by Helen. Nate had traveled to Chicago to procure them.

What the reels revealed, well, it explained Nate’s abrupt disappearance.

Norman watched the tapes while Joanne was out. He kept them from her. He came across Mr Feldman holding him for the first time. Mr Feldman might have been King Solomon tasked with the great accounting of whose child this was. It changed little. Norman determined it shouldn’t change anything. Walter Price was his father. What he thought of his mother, well, his feelings were less generous, but then who was he to judge?

There was a sum of money bequeathed to Norman, and, upon receiving it, he sent a sum to Kenneth and wished him the very best. He was open and candid in what he had the Latino secretary transcribe, as he dictated a letter and authorized the legal transfer of funds to Kenneth. As for Thomas Strait, there was money sent to him as well, in the great discharge of what had been earned, not by him, but simply bequeathed him. There was the offer of bringing Sherwood up to Chicago in the summer for a ball game.

He was aware of the secretary’s beauty as she wrote this all down, and aware, too, of her subtle alignment with Nate Feldman’s wife, Ursula, a shared beauty. It could not have gone unnoticed by Nate. There was, on the Internet, a blog of Ursula’s writings connected to the circular spirituality behind existence. Norman had read it and gained a view into how Nate Feldman had been saved, or reoriented, in the sphere of his wife’s influence.

He had a great and abiding sympathy for what it must have felt like, being Nate Feldman, and arriving at that point where your wife appeared incarnate, here and there, though, in the end, it was not enough, and Nate had sought a reunion with his wife on the other side of life.

He might have said something to the Latino secretary, but it would have been inappropriate. She laid claim only to the professional front of Weatherly, Sutherland, and Saunders, and he better understood her presence, her divested interest in how she might have otherwise lived, in finding a man, whereas now she existed as something beyond reach, and, if you could withstand her influence and not spend your time trying to fuck her, if you could go about your business, then you were a man of great restraint and moral conviction.

Obviously, Weatherly, Sutherland, and Saunders were all that, all three of them. They had set Eve among them. They had their war pictures from Vietnam proudly displayed on a wall, alongside their law degrees.

*

Norman looked out on the wavering heat. It seemed like the continuation of one long life really. Florida had been an abiding dream of his father’s, a retirement here discussed when Norman was young, so he had a scenario in his head that his parents were, in fact, down here. It wasn’t hard to imagine. There had been no closure, no ceremony. He had just not seen his parents in a long time, in the way relationships continued over time and distances, and in the divide of a past life from a present life.

In thinking it, he was not unlike Nate Feldman and his wife. He had read Nate’s blog, his appeal for a reunion with his wife, whose native name meant ‘Something Good Cooking by a Fire’. The name held within it such an invocation of what a man might want in the closing dark of a hunt, the succor of food and companionship.

Norman set his hand on Joanne’s hand when she came back with her key lime pie.

He was a man with a singular interest, with no other apparent qualities, and Joanne, for her part, was satisfied that, between them, they would see this through in the apportioning of civility and good manners. This was not discounting love. It was just arriving at it in a way that was out of fashion, when time and understanding were most often needed.

They might go down along the coast for a cruise to catch the sunset later. Joanne had brochures guaranteeing sightings of manta rays and prices circled in a comparison with other brochures. She had a book of coupons and their AAA card that guaranteed 10 per cent off all listed prices.

Norman let her manage it. He would get on whatever boat he was told to get on.

Joanne eventually got the check, peeling her legs from the sweat of the vinyl seating. She suggested that they all use the bathroom before leaving, in a testament to all-things practical.

In the offing, Norman stared at Grace still preoccupied with Captain Cody in the quiet investigation of life and its mysteries. There was a box inside him, hidden, containing every word he ever said or would say.

For a moment, Norman was again left alone in a drifting euphoria, entering a liminal emptiness that was not emptiness at all, but the process of life. He imagined his parents caught up in a generational entanglement of new worries. Walter wading though the new economy of geriatrics teeming with predatory financial advisors trawling the pension funds of former union zealots turned conservative, all united against a welfare state intent on supporting so-called bums and welfare mothers; retirees submitting to the sway of latter-day Tea Party conservatives, with their mega-church ministers calling for moral accountability, tough love and lower taxes.

It was in his head: a trailer park with a low-maintenance pea gravel lawn, their life aligned with the so-called last of the greatest generation, patriots turned scrupulous coupon cutters, who had seen their influence extended in the hanging chad debacle that would determine the course of a new imperialism, emboldening further the would-be 9/11 hijackers logging their flight class hours along the Florida panhandle, box-cutters in hand – the box-cutter the great Excalibur of the disenfranchised.

It was not come to terms with fully yet, the great wound of 9/11. He had seen it in the cast of flags and bumper stickers down through so many states. At play in the collective consciousness, still, the terrifying truth that, in a country where God was asked to confer his blessing, bags had been packed, wives and children kissed, cabs hailed, and all dying before the in-flight service began. Though the stories told were not those stories now, but invariably, the outlier stories of those who woke up too late, the late connection, the hangover, those without upgrade points. In these isolated stories of survival, Jesus’s mercy was made known, and not so the improbable sequence of actual events that got the rest to their appointed death with the assuring sense in their hearts that, on that day, there was a God watching over them and determining their destiny all along.

*

They made a dash across the furnace of the shimmering asphalt to their rental, to the delight of two parking attendants witnessing it. The car roiled in a wave of heat. Joanne had on big-framed black Jackie Onassis sunglasses. Norman saw just her smile and not her eyes. Yes, they should have paid the dollar for parking. All life was not a scam.

Out back of Captain Cody’s, a screech of birds hung over two Hispanics emptying plastic containers of an icy slush of leftovers. A pelican, its wingspan immense in arresting flight, landed, its low-hung belly like a transport carrier.

The busboys fed it amidst the clamor of seagulls, the pelican’s bill filling with a turgid bulge in a tidal wash, as one busboy hosed and the other threw it a flotsam of shrimp, crab leg, oyster, pot roast, and all manner of salads, beets, and slaws.

Then the pelican, in a waddling gait, crossed the scorch of asphalt, seeking flight.

Buoyed on an uplift of unseen thermals, an indiscernible aerodynamics was suddenly made apparent, the tuck of the head and spread of wings, so this majestic creature might go for a very long time out over the ocean caps, Norman Price, made mindful of so many things in life, what might be achieved on the right thermal, with the right attitude, and aware he was riding such a thermal, and in the midst of great flight.

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M
ICHAEL
C
OLLINS
was born in Limerick. He holds a Masters of Study in Creative Writing from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois. Collins was the 2010 Captain of the Irish National Team 100K. He earned a bronze medal at the 2010 World Masters Championships. Other victories include The North Pole Marathon, The Last Marathon and The Everest Marathon. Running and writing are his twin passions.

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