We're All in This Together (19 page)

"Yes," I said.

Ty swung the car around the lot, and onto Route 5. He flicked on the tape deck. Bob Dylan piped up in a honky-tonk clatter.
Bob said he couldn't believe it; just last night they had been together, and now she acted like they never had met. The car
rolled over a fallen branch in the road, gave a bounce. Without looking around, Ty reached back and pointed at the seatbelt
by my shoulder. I pulled it down and locked it.

" 'Dammit. Janet.' Mean anything to you?"

"Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I projected it."

"Mean anything else to you?" I asked.

"Not unless you really like cross-dressing, or Tim Curry."

"Thanks," I said, still not exactly sure what I was onto, but beginning to feel the edges of it.

"Sure." My father turned onto the interstate. Ty reached back again and made a window rolling gesture. I told him to go ahead.
He put down his window. We streaked past a rig pulled over to the shoulder and blinking its hazards; water glistened off the
cut granite that walled the road. The morning air was sharp and sweet.

"Do you have a cell phone?" I asked.

"Uh-huh," he said, and passed it back.

I called my grandfather. The phone rang five times and Nana picked up. "Don't mourn, organize," she said, and gave a wheezy
chuckle. "And leave a darn message, too." The machine beeped. I clicked off.

The taxi whooshed up the off-ramp, made a left onto Dundee Avenue. I stared at the back of my father's head, his short-cropped
orange hair, sprinkled with gray. There were just a couple of more miles before we got to where we were going. I was nervous
and afraid and ready. I wasn't really thinking of him as my father. That was a good thing, maybe.

My father was a bad guy; he was an addict and a felon, a wild man screaming and gushing blood in the snow. Ty Claiborne, however,
was a middle-aged taxi driver who had given me a lift when I was in a pinch. A guy reached out, you gave him hand—and vice
versa.

We slammed to a stop at the curb and I saw Papa lying there on the lawn. I had my seatbelt off and the door of the taxi open
before it stopped.

I stumbled forward, pinwheeling my arms for balance, and pitched onto the damp turf. I got up and ran, dropped to my knees
beside him.

He was on his back, the tails of his bathrobe spread out in the grass. The breath came from his mouth in a whistle. His eyes
were glazed, holding the billboard at a diminishing angle, like the plane of building's facade. There was the grave etching
of former vice-president Albert Gore Jr., followed by the bold, true statement:

THE REAL PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

But one could not fail to notice what had been scrawled across the legend in green spray paint:
VOTE NAPER SHITHEEIS!

"It's going to be okay, Papa," I said. "It's going to be okay." Nothing in his face gave a sign that he heard me. He had eyes
only for Al Gore.

I had my father's cell phone. I started to punch the numbers.

"We already called an ambulance," said Mrs. Desjardins.

Gil and his wife were standing there, too, of course.

At that point, I wasn't aware of the details; that Gil had been writing travel articles for obscure newspapers for years (under
the pseudonymous name G. T. Flowers); that, typically, he wrote these articles about places he had never visited; that these
articles often included references to naked Europeans, stray cats, his ex-wives, and a very few other things that were of
lasting interest to him; that he had been so surprised at being accepted for publication in the Sunday
New
York Times
that he had been unable to wait the time it would take to drive to the supermarket and instead, rushed next door and plundered
the Travel section of my grandfather's delivered copy.

Nor did I yet understand that one of the main reasons Gil had continued to pluck sections from my grandfather's newspaper
was simply because he was too cheap to subscribe and too lazy to drive to the Citgo for his own copy; that another reason
he didn't like to go to the Citgo was because the manager (he of the fork-tattooed Adam's apple) had once encountered Gil
in an entirely different venue: one night at the USM campus movie theater at a midnight showing of
The
Rocky Horror Picture Show,
when Gil was dressed in leather chaps with the cheeks cut out, and riding a tricycle up and down the aisles.

Above all else, I couldn't see that the vandalizing of Papa's billboard had nothing at all to do with the Sunday
New York Times
or Steven Sugar. I was not wise to the history of Gil's relationship with Ralph Nader, to the depth of his wild devotion for
the man. It was only a few months later—after the filing of Gil's fifth divorce—that we received a letter from Mrs. Desjardins
that filled in the final blank:

To put it succinctly, she said that Gil believed with absolute certainty that he had once stroked Ralph Nader's naked thighs
at a masquerade orgy. This mystical union had, according to Gil, occurred following a lecture on the applications of Kant
to the Watergate scandal at an all-night bash at the Beverly Hills Hyatt in 1973. The man he swore to be Nader had worn a
purple Zorro mask, but Gil was nonetheless utterly convinced of the fearless consumer advocate's identity. Furthermore, Mrs.
Desjardins wrote (in a manner of phrasing which in no way belied a hint of jealousy), that it was Gil's testimony that the
masked man had returned his thigh-stroking in kind, and with all the compassion and attention that one might have expected
from a person who had selflessly dedicated his life to the public good.

At least, that was what she said.

But above and beyond such talk, I could never have guessed that Gil—funny old, dirty old Gil—possessed the capacity for the
sort of pique which he must have nurtured over the course of the years, as my grandfather carried on and on, about his unions
and solidarity and the common good. I could never have guessed at how it must have grated on him.

Which is to say, I didn't know Gil at all.

I gaped at the man. The name Tom Hellweg came to my mind, and just as quickly blew away again, like a bad smell.

Small and frail, Gil stood wearing his wife's kimono, his hands sullenly jammed in the pockets. The Richard Nixon mask sat
on top of his bald skull. There was red paint splattered on his neck and on the mask, from where my grandfather hit him with
the IL-47, a killshot from the sniper's nest in the guest room.

Mrs. Desjardins wore a pair of leather overalls, elbow-length gloves, and a driving cap emblazoned with a pink swastika. "The
ambulance should be right along." She was, as always, smiling brightly. "I think it's just a stroke."

"He wouldn't shut up about the politics," said Gil. "He couldn't take a little teasing."

I said the obvious thing, the only thing that mattered. "You were his friend."

"He never chipped in for any of my grass, either," said Gil.

"You were his friend," I said again.

He worked his hands deeper in the kimono. The Nixon mask sat on his head like a deflated pie.

"And, furthermore, Ralph Nader never owed Al Gore a goddamn thing."

The car door slammed. Ty's shoes beat across the pavement.

The old man in the kimono glanced over with a grimace.

Ty stopped beside me. "Costume party?" he asked.

"That's it. I'm going home," said Gil, and he turned, walked rapidly down the driveway, and disappeared around the hedge in
a whisper of silk. Mrs. Desjardins followed him, giggling as she tottered away on her motorcycle boots.

We were alone then, my father and my grandfather and I, on the lawn, the three of us crouched in the shadow of the billboard
of the man that should have been president.

"Papa," I said, "Papa, can you hear me?"

His eyes slid slowly over to look at me, like rusted screws being wrenched loose. The skin of his face was slack and ashen.
He opened his mouth, but he could only produce a croaking noise.

"Don't talk," I said. I pulled the flaps of his bathrobe closed.

Ty jogged out to the street to wave down the ambulance so they didn't miss the split in the avenue.

Papa stared at me. His eyes were blue and scared. A tear welled and rolled down his cheek, grooving along a wrinkle before
falling to the ground.

I grabbed his hand. "You're going to be fine, Papa," I said. I squeezed to show him exactly how things were going to be. "I'm
with you. I'm here."

He opened his mouth to speak—and coughed again. There was a hitching noise, a wet clicking, and I could see he was trying
to swallow. He started to blink rapidly, deep color filling his cheeks.

This was it; this was the part where my grandfather died.

This was the part before the part where we went to another funeral. I saw the old men in the black vinyl Local 219 jackets
lingering at the back of the funeral parlor. I heard them whisper about the time Henry McGlaughlin stuck out his thumb and
asked a big-shot defense contractor if he needed any help climbing up on it. I watched us lower another coffin into the ground
and heard everyone sing the "Internationale" while the priest stood there looking nervous.

I saw it all, and I felt it.

I still had Ty's cell phone. I dialed home.

"Hello?" I felt a surge of relief at the sound of Dr. Vic's voice.

"I think he's choking," I blurted. "I think Papa's choking."

. There was a moment of silence. On the ground, my grandfather's entire body had started to tremble, to vibrate like a tripped
wire. His eyes were rolling. I heard the ambulance siren in the distance.

"What makes you think that, George?"

"His face is turning purple. He looks like he's trying to swallow."

"Okay, I believe you—"

"—thank you, I'm sorry," I said.

He cut me off. "Not now—I'm betting that what your grandfather is choking on is a peanut. I want you to open his mouth, and
put your finger on his tongue. I want you to get your finger down as far as you can and pull that thing loose."

Papa's mouth was already agape. I plunged my index finger in, stabbing the back of his throat. I hit something hard and dug
at it with my nail. In the next instant, he gasped, and chomped down on my finger.

The ambulance whooped to a stop and the EMTs came running across the lawn.

I brought my finger up to my face, and looked at it, and saw it was crooked. I put it down and breathed and lay there. The
sun was up over the house, lighting the shingles gold. I lay there some more.

Ty squatted down beside me. "Your mother's on the phone," he said. "She wants to talk to you."

I sat up and nodded at him. He was almost an old man. When I looked at his face, I could see how I would look when I was old.
That was okay. We both had time. People live a ton.

"Mom?"

Her voice came in a rush. "Are you okay? Just tell me that you're okay, George. I need to know that you're okay."

I was fine. "I'm fine," I told her, and she gasped, and then we both started talking.

ORGANIZE!

The day the skyscrapers fall we are at the hospital. Papa has been
moved into long-term care, where therapists are helping him learn to
speak and walk again. My mother, Dr. Vic, and I sit around his bed
and watch the television in the corner of the ceiling. We eat our way
through Papa's untouched lunch in shocked silence. The old man's
face is frozen in a lopsided half smile; he always look drunk now. He
doesn't try to speak. None of us does, really. On the television, a
reporter attempts to describe the sound that a human being makes
when it free falls one hundred stories and strikes the roof of an
automobile. This description is inadequate.

At some point, the president comes on. He tells us to be calm. He
tells us everything is under control.

My grandfather begins to cry. He speaks with a helium voice
through a mouthful of cotton. "The president looks strong, doesn't
he? I think he's going to be okay. I really do." The half smile is
grotesque, and I hate myself for not wanting to look at him.