“I think you want me to say beauty is in the bank. In the faces on the money.”
That shut him up. He wrote me off. I could see it in his eyes. But if I’d had to I could have seen it in his ears or hands or hair. I could have looked at one fingernail and told you I’d once again squirted away my chance to be his son. He always gave me a chance and then always, within minutes, saw me fail. I was used to the process. It gave me a sick thrill, if you want me to be frank.
Part of his silence owed to his disease, whatever it was. He woke with a bang but petered out fast. He wouldn’t say what disease he had. The doctors knew, and they’d told him. But he felt they lied just for fun, if for no better reason—projecting his own relentless untruthfulness onto others. His dishonesty wasn’t weakness: it shaped his faith, helped constitute his creed. He believed strongly in the efficacy of lying. He valued falsehood as a tool. The truth he feared as uncontrollable once you let it out. But he knew the difference between the two.
“Well, it’s Higgins and Tom Aiken”—two environmentalist lawyers—“my personal Rawhead and Bloodybones. If half their rat-shit buddies weren’t on the Coastal Commission I could subdivide down to square meters and build clear up into the clouds. They figure to stall. Get the game called for darkness. They think I’ll roll over dead. Not hardly! Hand me that phone.”
“It’s damn near six P.M., Dad.” I always get western in his presence.
“Dial me a number.”
I put the receiver into his tiny clawing grasp and punched the buttons he wanted. “Give me a minute, please,” he said, covering the mouthpiece.
Banished inside of sixty seconds? I may have achieved some record there. I left him to his shenanigans and went down the hall to the toilet. The one-man barbaric horde, he’s in yet another war. Everybody knows he’s a crook. Big deal! Who cares? My father not only knows the difference between right and wrong, but he’s also willing to live with it, and let others draw their own conclusions about him. Not me.
Not me—I’m the Mole Person, hiding from the truth in any hole, here, for instance, in my father’s upstairs bathroom, on the shady side of the house, half-dark and quiet and cool as its tiles. A small chamber, but with me in here it holds magnificent structures of natural growths, the big fat systemic organism of my deceits. Maneuvering through my lies was like hopping faster than the eye could follow from branch to branch across the roof of a jungle, a jungle cultivated to cover up earlier lies, the whole business lacing back delicately to find its mother-root in my first lie, completely forgotten now, and never to be discovered by anybody else, the lie to cover my first little crime, also forgotten—no, I swear I didn’t take the cookies—or, more probably, a whole childhood fashioned to avoid the question of the cookies in the first place, my every move, to this day, warped around the absence of getting caught, the void where there should have been my arrest and trial and punishment: a new route to school planned in order to avoid the boy who owned the stolen cookies, and a reason invented to explain the new route to whoever might ask, and evidence concocted to demonstrate that the reason isn’t a lie—I need the exercise, I’m going out for track and field—and then a career of track-and-field events and long practice in a sport that doesn’t interest me, and a new personality shaped, a false persona who thrives on track and field, who loves running (But I do love running. Don’t I? Or else why spend so much time doing it?) and hurdling over the intricacies of his falsehoods toward this day, Tuesday, September 4, when I’m ready to commit murder to deal with my mistakes without actually correcting them because…because I don’t want to correct them. I can’t survive the correcting of them. I just want them erased.
My father would never have understood these things. Even now, if he’d found himself in my place, he’d have crawled out of bed and somehow gotten, he and his sawed-down Winchester shotgun, up the hill above Anchor Bay to put a third eye in Harry Lally’s forehead.
He called from his sickbed, “Somebody hang this thing up! Hang this sombitch up for me, damnit!”
Donna was standing at the turn of the stairs as I headed toward his room. “Yes?” she said. “Yes?”
“Tell her to get lost,” he said as I entered. Donna must have heard this, because she didn’t appear. I put the phone on the table for him, and he said, “I’d hate for them to win the last goddamn battle.”
I pulled up a chair and unfolded the paper, the Barron’s.
He said, “Didn’t it come yesterday?”
“I don’t know when it came. I picked it up today.”
“You know how you talk to me, you little pissant? Like all the other little pissants on earth now. Like I’m old and fizzled out in the brain.”
“I don’t think you’re fizzled in the brain.”
“You repeat my words, like these are the key words…It’s hard to explain. Read.”
While he rested and caught his breath, I read out loud about this and that, the conclusions to be drawn from certain upswings and the stance most profitable given the tenor of the times (all of it obviated by the week’s events in Kuwait, and nothing that would help my kind of money trouble certainly), glancing up once in a while at my sick father with his zero face. His eyes were open, but I don’t know if he was listening to this stuff any better than I was.
“How’s Winona?”
“I haven’t seen her. We’ve talked on the phone. She got back.”
“Why hasn’t she stopped by to see me?”
“Because she doesn’t like to see you like this. It nauseates everybody as a matter of fact.”
“Did she file the divorce?”
“She did. I don’t have the money to fight it.”
“I’ve written her a letter.”
“Concerning what?”
“I’m yanking her up and kicking her legs out from under.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve straightened her mind out on a few things, is all. She’ll see what it means to discount me. And you, meanwhile, you’ve been seen drunk in public with that gypsy runt.”
“I have?”
“Your hedge-whore.”
“Melissa.”
“Do you dispute the appellation?”
“Hedge-whore, no. You’re very colorful.” You who have lain with them endlessly.
“By God, I won’t see my line carried down through that bitch’s scabby sluice!”
“No danger of that.”
“You say! Because she says! She ain’t fixed. She’s deceiving you.”
“Is this new information? Or the same old misogynist paranoia?”
“I base my suspicions out of experience. A woman without guile in her thoughts has guile aplenty beating right down in her bones. You poor elongated day-old infant! She’s got your brain sucked down to your pecker and the blood squoze out in that tight little kennel of hers.” He mumbled the last of this. He’d lost interest in my follies since the shadow of the death-bird’s wing had covered him. The carrying forward of his line, that was his passion now, that and somehow controlling his sons and his dough and his land from beyond the grave. I doubt he cared, really, which particular wench or wattle mothered his grandchildren, so long as somebody did.
“Father, I want to talk to you again about the timber.”
“The timber stays. I’ve seen to that. It’s deeded in now. Nobody harvests them redwoods.”
“Ten thousand acres! For God’s sake, let us just thin them! A forty percent reduction wouldn’t change the profile!”
“You can take the windfall out with horses. There’s plenty in there, and it’s all redwood, don’t matter if it’s been on the ground awhile. But I don’t want no fifty mile of skid road cut through there, or no timber cut neither. The day I bought my first woodlot I swore an oath: that someday I’d own ten thousand acres of trees that would stand forever.”
“Is it this?—no, let me ask this, I want to understand—is it maybe that you want to take it all with you? Is your secret myth this Celtic thing that
you have to preserve your own land to live on in the afterworld or something? Your own patch of earth in Valhalla?”
“Valhalla? That’s not Celtic. And I’m a Welshman, anyway! And I don’t explain it to you because you’re idiotic! Deprived of oxygen, I’m sure, back in the womb of that harlot who spawned you. Just be aware that I’ve sworn an oath. And my word’s good.”
“I’m aware.” I stood by the window again listening to the sea and hoping he’d sleep now and never wake. I didn’t understand how somebody who wanted to string the world’s loveliest coastline with the cheapest possible motels could also be passionate about a bunch of redwoods. And it hurt me that I didn’t understand, because this was my father.
I didn’t want to clear-cut. But we could live in comfort forever off a periodic thinning, my brother and I—Winona too, and Melissa—once we’d built the roads.
“The Hospice people called me again.”
“Hospice? You mean—”
“The morbid pissants, the voyeurs of death, yes, them’s the very sombitches I mean.”
They’d been after him for a while to let them ease his death. Fat chance! If anything was going to be hard, it would be this old man’s dying.
“Close that window, will you son?”
I pulled it shut.
He said, “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
“Which time? When have you not yelled at me?”
“I hate to see my own boy kill a jug before sundown.”
“Then don’t watch.”
“You’ve got a purple mustache, you look like a child. No, don’t sass back at me. Read. Read. Read.”
I read to him from the opinion pages, amazed and depressed that I let this runt boss me. My height comes from Mother. He can’t be taller than five-eight. Today he looks half his original size, only a miniature of the mean giant of my childhood. And all the time he gets tinier. He brings to mind the Mole People who also terrified me back then. They were in a movie, on TV. Big, strong mutants living in subterranean darkness. But even so much as a dash of sunshine wrecked a Mole Person. Dragged out of their tunnels they became shrivelled, lifeless, went from Mole People to Prune People in no time at all. I think they scared me because they hinted at some sort of truth about our shy, secret selves. Now even Father seemed like one of them, groping around, seared by a tremendous light from another world. I’m telling you. Everywhere I go the people seem to be staggering, fatally irradiated. There’s a dose out there for me. I can’t duck it forever. The old man, Christ would you look at him, was proof enough of that. For he’d once established himself in my sight as a figure to blot the sun, the world’s entire sky, and now he’d ushered forth something that would shrink and extinguish even somebody like himself. He sinks to the sand before a great lonely sea—naked and old—something vast is dawning, and nothing he’s built can shelter him from its revelations. I guess I’m reading but I don’t hear a word of my voice, I’m only aware of my father and a feeling: me, my father, and a feeling.
Had I kept on reading? Or had I just stopped?
“Dad?”
Twilight was turning the pages gray in my hands.
“Dad? Are you sleeping?”
Father? Are you dead?
I watched him breathe. Someday soon somebody, maybe the woman who loved him now, would be sitting here like this when his last breath spiralled up out of his throat toward the rafters, parting the lips of a corpse.
I laid the paper on his nightstand and left the room.
The woman who loved him was waiting downstairs, sitting on a stool in the kitchen, beside the counter, raising and lowering a teabag in a little cup. I gave her the empty wine bottle, and she said, “How’s your dad?”
Or someday soon somebody, maybe one of his sons, would come downstairs like this and in answer to that question say, “Donna…” and right away she’d know.
Meanwhile the old man would probably be up there pretending to be still alive. If there’s one thing he’s been desperately hiding, it’s the terminal nature of his sickness. This love of lying, I don’t share it. I hate my lies, they oppress me. But I did inherit one of the tenets of his strange faith: I believe in boldness. Believe that boldness makes things happen, makes the unlikely possible. Therefore, don’t hedge. Bet your stack. Wager half on a long shot, you lose. But you win if you wager all.
“He’s sleeping.”
“That’s good.”
“Good for the Coastal Commission,” I said, and she smiled.
Outside I put the top up on the Porsche. I was shivering.
I have the belief in boldness. What I generally lack is the boldness itself.
Because boldness doesn’t feel bold. It feels scared, not brave. The explorer feels more and more lost, the prophet hears himself unintelligibly blaspheming.
Naturally I’m thinking about the dare I’ve taken with Carl Van Ness. But we are, at this point, just—still, at this point—just hypothetical, surely. With Van Ness out of town the reality seems to have diminished. What we’ve done up to this point is possibly only a rehearsal. I started the Porsche and, as the sound covered my voice, realized that I was talking to myself out loud, saying, “That we’ll do it seems still likely but with, how shall I put it, an ethereal likelihood…”
But how can I talk of boldness, when it’s Van who’s taking the dare?
Well, yes, because, as we know, I’m a liar, mine the kind of dishonesty that can cherish two beliefs at once, opposing ones. I can act the coward while telling myself I’m testing the limits of boldness by the same puzzling mechanism whereby we sometimes know, for instance, that it’s Tuesday, September 4, and that we have an appointment Tuesday, and yet fail to understand the appointment is therefore for today.
On the other hand, making it happen is making it happen. If I shoot the gun, am I somehow a coward because I don’t happen to be the actual bullet?
Van does his part, I do mine. We’re a lethal combo. And if Van Ness is back, and means what he says—then that’s it. Because my part’s done already.
This afternoon, while Winona helped a friend break a horse at the Say-When Ranch, I traded her bottle of Nembutal for the Zielene.
She’ll have come home tired from the stables, turned in early with two little red capsules. She’ll be out. And I’m out too. I have stepped out in boldness. Boldness. Out into dreams made real.
Each move I made now was one I’d invented months ago and played along in my head many times. How drab the real thing felt! Driving the mile into Gualala’s little strip of shops and restaurants just made me tired. The light and aromas from the pizzeria next door to the big old wooden hotel bored me, and a certain not totally unfamiliar neurotic symptom developed as I pulled in beside the hotel, the conviction that something oily had got all over my steering wheel. Inside the reeking barroom I made straight for the toilet, wiping my hands on my pants over and over. A dozen or so people drifted down the loud canyon of certain hilarities, lifting their steins or whatever. The Gualala Hotel has stood across the road from the Pacific for close to a century, and for some decades of that period stood miraculously, on the brink of falling flat on its face, but in recent years through a jag of remodellings has managed to recast itself as no longer a place where men might spit on the floors in the hallways; but men still do spit on the floor in the bar. Going into the bathroom I had the experience you have at least once a night in such a place, that of ramming up against somebody, some derelict masturbator, coming out of the stall. “Pardon,” I meant to say, and meant to step back, but my jaw went tight, the words jammed, and I leaned forward. I tasted murder in my throat, I shoved past, staring at his eyes—the same rage showed in his face, it all flared unbelievably. It was Carl Van Ness. He shouldered me aside. He stumbled away. We couldn’t stop staring at each other. He never glanced anywhere else as he straightened himself and left the bar. I was breathing hard, my chest full of a lion’s roar. Then we’ll see if our eyes are open. His were. It was abundant in his eyes: he’d been to
Winona’s house. He’d done something terrible.
Van Ness thought himself a traveller through eternity, and whatever he did to negate himself—suicide, murder—it’s all fuel for the journey, so why not? And to the mystifying question “why murder?” isn’t “why not?” just as good as a whole constellation of answers? But I have a theory why he agreed: I just bring out the killer in people, that’s all. Spend a little time with me, I’ll work on you like Dr. Jekyll’s potion—the man a few months back, for instance, in this very bar here among, I wouldn’t doubt, these same rough drinkers, the character who started out lecturing me in a peaceable way on the stages of womanhood, the progressions of marriage, and so on. But after thirty minutes inside my aura the man got hostile. As if somebody had flipped a switch and turned out the spark in his mind. What a darkness, nothing more than that. Only, I swear it, the pinpoint reflections of the jukebox in his eyes, and images from the oversized TV screen. Nothing from inside, just a lot of light bouncing off. The scene ends there in my memory, with him in his animal state being restrained while I beat it with I hope dignified haste. But how can you be dignified when you’ve just shown yourself and everybody else this puzzling trick you have of stirring up the preconscious evil muck at the bottom of one of mankind, some guy you never saw before—clink!—somebody you were toasting ten minutes before?
And here I am in the same Gualala Hotel bar and the same thing has just happened with another man, with Van Ness—and I realize it’s all that’s been happening between the two of us since the moment I watched him drown himself.
I went on with the plan, though now that it had started, going on with it seemed almost impossible. I yanked at the pay phone by the bathroom, forced a coin on it, pressed Winona’s phone number…Hello, her voice machine said in its laboring parrot-cum-gramophone falsetto, I can’t, it explained, talk in person right now… “Winona, it’s Nelson, eight P.M. Tuesday. I wanted to pick up my fishing rod. I’ll just stop up tonight and grab it”—this errand my excuse for appearing there.