“Shit fire,” he answered, “now I’ve done it, now I’ve done it!”
He had broken. No police, the phone was finally disconnected. I tried the door. Locked. Shook it hard. Locked fast. I moved back to shoulder through and as in a comic movie, it opened.
My father had shot out Jack Paar; bits of tubes and wires were strewn across the floor. He had shot out the pretty watercolors painted by Betty during their Mississippi rendezvous. He had shot out himself in the mirror. Behind the mirror was his closet, and he was looking into his closet at his suits. Dozens of bespoke suits, symmetrically hung, and through each suit a couple of holes in both pant-legs, a couple in the jacket. Four holes at least in each suit, six in the vested models.
“Hell of a weapon,” my father said.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Hell of a weapon!”
November fifth I turned twenty-one. My father had a present for me, two presents really, a present and its wrapping. He gave me his gold signet ring, the one I wear today—lions and fleurs-de-lis, nulla vestigium retrorsit—wrapped in a scrap of white paper, a due bill signed Dad, witnessed and notarized by a Danbury real estate agent: I.O.U. Princeton.
“How?” I asked.
“Piece of cake,” my father said, “done and done.”
I was due at Princeton January 15th. By then the Abarth had been repossessed and the Delahaye was still and forever a junker. I rode to Sikorsky with Nick, who drove twenty miles out of his way to pick me up and return me in his Edsel. After work the day following New Year’s I found a rented black Buick in the driveway. My father told me to help him pack it, we were leaving pronto and for good; what didn’t come with us we’d never see again. I asked questions. I got no answers, except this:
“It’s Princeton time. We’re going by way of Boston.”
I almost believed him. We packed, walked away from every thing. I wish I had the stuff now, letters, photographs, a Boy Scout merit badge sash, Shep’s ribbon: Gentlest in Show at the Old Lyme grade school fair. My father had had his two favorite suits rewoven; he left the rest behind with most of his shoes, umbrellas, hats, accessories. He left behind the model Bentley that cost him half a year to build. He brought his camera, the little Minox he always carried and never used (“handy if someone whacks you with his car, here’s the old evidence machine,” he’d say, tapping the silly chain on the silly camera). I brought my typewriter and my novel. While my father had watched television I had written a novel. I worked on it every night, with my bedroom door shut; my father treated it like a rival, which it was, a still, invented place safe from him. He made cracks about The Great Book, and resented me for locking it away every night when I finished with it, while he shut down the Late Show, and then the Late Late. I made much of not showing it to him.
On the way to Boston we stopped by Stratford, where Sikorsky had moved. I quit, told the personnel department where to send my final check, said goodbye to no one. When I returned to the car my father said to me:
“Fiction is the thing for you. Finish Princeton if you want, but don’t let them turn you into a goddamned professor or a critic. Write make-believe. You’ve got a feel for it.”
Had he read my stuff? “Why, do you think?”
“I know you.”
We drove directly to Shreve, Crump & Low, Boston’s finest silversmith. Duke double-parked on Boylston Street and asked me to help him unload two canvas duffels from the trunk. He called them “parachute bags”; maybe that’s what they were, parachute bags. They were heavy as corpses; we had to share the load.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “What’s in here?”
“Never mind. Help me.”
We sweated the bags into the store, past staring ladies and gentlemen to the manager. My father opened a zipper and there was Alice’s flat silver: solid silver gun-handle knives, instruments to cut fish and lettuce, dessert spoons and lobster forks, three-tined forks and four-tined forks, every imaginable implement, service for sixteen. In the other bag were teapots, coffeepots, creamers, saltcellars, Georgian treasure, the works polished by my father, piles gleaming dangerously in the lumpy canvas sacks.
The manager examined a few pieces. He was correct; he looked from my face to my father’s while he spoke.
“These are very nice, as you know. I could perhaps arrange a buyer…This will take time. If you’re in no rush…”
“I want money today,” my father said.
“This will be quite impossible,” the manager said.
“I won’t quibble,” my father said. “I know what the silver is worth, but I’m pinched, I won’t quibble.”
“You don’t understand,” the manager said.
“Let’s not play games,” my father said.
“This is quite impossible,” the manager said. “I think you’d best take this all away now.”
“Won’t you make an offer?”
“No,” the manager said.
“Nothing?” my father asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re a fool,” my father told the manager of Shreve, Crump & Low.
“I think not,” said the manager of Shreve, Crump & Low. “Good afternoon, gentlemen.”
We reloaded the car. I said nothing to my father, and he said nothing to me. There we were. It was simple, really, where everything had been pointing, right over the line. This wasn’t mischief. This wouldn’t make a funny story back among my college pals. This was something else. We drove to a different kind of place. This one had cages on the windows, and the neighborhood wasn’t good. The manager here was also different.
“You want to pawn all this stuff?”
“Yes,” my father said.
“Can you prove ownership?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” the pawnbroker said. He sorted through it, scratched a few pieces and touched them with a chemical.
“It’s solid silver,” my father said.
“Yes,” the man said, “it is.”
“What will you loan us, about?”
I heard the us. I looked straight at my father, and he looked straight back.
“Will you reclaim it soon?” My father shrugged at this question. “Because if you don’t really need it, if you’d sell it, I’d buy. We’re talking more money now, about four times what I’d loan you.”
“What would you do with it?” my father asked. “Sell it?”
“No,” the man said. “I’d melt it down.”
My father looked at me: “Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
My father nodded. While he signed something the man took cash from a huge floor safe. He counted it out, twenties bound in units of five hundred dollars. I looked away, didn’t want to know the bottom line on this one. There were limits, for me, I thought.
We checked into the Ritz-Carlton. Looked at each other and smiled. I felt all right, pretty good, great. I felt great.
“What now?” I asked my father.
Years later I read about the Philadelphia cobbler and his twelve-year-old son said to have done such awful things together, robbing first, breaking and entering. Then much worse, rape and murder. I wondered if it could have kept screwing tighter that way for us, higher stakes, lower threshold of this, but not that. I thought that day in the Ritz, sun setting, that we might wind up with girls, together in the same room with a couple of girls. But as in Seattle I had misread my father.
“Let’s get some champers and fish-eggs up here,” he said.
So we drank Dom Perignon and ate Beluga caviar and watched night fall over Boston Common. Then we took dinner at Joseph’s and listened to Teddy Wilson play piano at Mahogany Hall. Back at the Ritz, lying in clean linen in the quiet room, my father shared with me a scheme he had been a long time hatching.
“Here’s how it works. I think I can make this work, I’m sure I can. Here’s how it goes. Okay, I go to a medium-size town, check into a hotel, not the worst, not the best. I open an account at the local bank, cash a few small checks, give them
time to clear. I go to a Cadillac showroom just before closing on Friday, point to the first car I see and say I’ll buy it, no road test or questions, no haggling.”
My father spoke deliberately, doing both voices in the dark. When he spoke as an ingratiating salesman he flattened his accent, and didn’t stammer:
“How would you care to pay, sir? Will you be financing your purchase? Do you want to trade in your present automobile?”
“This is a cash purchase. (The salesman beams.) I’m paying by check. (The salesman frowns a little.) On a local bank, of course. (The salesman beams again.)”
“Fine, sir. We’ll have the car registered and cleaned. It’ll be ready Monday afternoon.”
“At this I bristle. I bristle well, don’t you think?”
“You are probably the sovereign bristler of our epoch,” I told my father.
He would tell the salesman he wanted the car now or not at all, period. There would be a nervous conference, beyond my father’s hearing, with the dealer. The dealer would note Duke’s fine clothes and confident bearing; now or never was this customer’s way, carpe diem, here was an easy sale, car leaving town, maybe just maybe this was kosher. Probably not, but how many top-of-the-line cars can you sell right off the floor, no bullshit about price, color, or options? Now the dealer was in charge, the salesman wasn’t man enough for this decision. The dealer would telephone Duke’s hotel and receive lukewarm assurances. Trembling, plunging, he would take Duke’s check. My father would drive to a used car dealer a block or two away, offer to sell his fine new automobile for whatever he was offered, he was in a rush, yeah, three thousand was okay. A telephone call would be made to the dealer. Police would arrive. My father would protest his innocence, spend the weekend in a cell. Monday the check would clear. Tuesday my father would retain the services of a shyster, if the dealer hadn’t already settled. With the police he would never settle. False arrest would put him on Easy Street. How did I like it?
“Nice sting. It might work.” The Novice.
“Of course it will work.” The Expert.
The next morning we checked out and my father mailed the Buick’s keys to a Hertz agent in Stamford, telling him where to find his car. Then a VW bus materialized. My father had taken it for a test drive; maybe he paid for it later, and maybe he forgot to pay for it later. My father called this “freeloading.”
We drove to Princeton in the bus, with my novel on the back seat beside a cooler filled with cracked ice and champagne, a cash purchase from S.S. Pierce. We reached Princeton about four and parked on Nassau Street, outside the Annex Grill, across from Firestone Library.
“How much did you give me last year?”
“About twenty-five hundred,” I said, “but a lot of that was for my own keep.”
“I don’t charge my boy room and board,” my father said. He pulled clumps of twenties from a manila envelope. Five packets, twenty-five hundred dollars, there it was, every penny, just as he had promised, precisely what I owed. “And here’s another five hundred to get you started.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Where will you go now?”
“New York for a while. Then, I don’t know. Maybe California. I always had luck in California.”
“Sounds like a good plan,” I said. “Stay in touch,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “Do well, Geoffrey. Be good.”
“Sure,” I said. “I won’t screw up this time.”
“No,” he said, “you probably won’t. Now don’t be too good. There’s such a thing as too good.”
“Don’t worry,” I said laughing, wanting this to end.
“Don’t forget your book,” my father said, while I unloaded the van. “I’ll be reading it someday, I guess. I’ll be in touch, you’ll hear from me, hang in there.”
He was gone. An illegal turn on Nassau headed him back where he had come from.
CHRIS OFFUTT (1958- )
Chris Offutt grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky and now lives in western Montana with his wife, Rita, and their two sons. He has written a collection of short stories, Kentucky Straight (1992), and a memoir, The Same River Twice (1993). Both works show a bizarre and dazzling strength.
Offutt, who received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, has been awarded a James Michener grant and a Kentucky Arts Council grant. In 1994, he won the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
from THE SAME RIVER TWICE
Allowing oneself to sleep in rain is the mark of a soldier, an animal, and the consummate hitchhiker. It was a skill I never fully acquired. Water weight trebled the mass of my pack. Rain gathered in my brows and ran into my eyes at the slightest movement. There is a private understanding, even appreciation, of misery when one is cold and wet at four in the morning. Dawn never seemed so precious. Birdsong meant that soon you could watch the rising steam drawn from your clothes by sun. In this fashion, I began a summer in Alabama.
The sun hung low on the horizon when the leader of a convoy came traveling my way. Emblazoned along the truck in red curlicued letters were the words “Hendley Circus, Greatest Show on Earth.” Truck after truck passed, each garishly advertising various sideshows. Horse droppings spilled from a trailer. A variety of campers and RVs followed, but none stopped and no one waved. The last vehicle trundled from sight and I felt as though I’d seen a mirage, a phantom wagon train that taunted hermits of the road.
From the west came the sound of another truck straining in low gear. The driver flung open the passenger door without stopping.
“Hurry,” he said. “I can’t stop or Peaches will get mad.”
I used the mirror to vault onto the running board, and scrambled into the seat.
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem. I’ve been on the run plenty.”
“It’s not like that.”
“It never is,” he said. “You got five bucks to loan me?”
“I’m broke.”
He slid a hand into his shirt pocket and handed me a five-dollar bill. He spat tobacco juice out the window.
“Little treat for Peaches,” he said. “She loves ’backer.”
“Who’s Peaches?”
“My best friend of fifteen years. The circus is my mistress but Peaches is my wife.”
The way the truck swayed at low speed, I figured he was married to the sideshow Fat Lady, who wouldn’t fit up front. If he wanted to haul his wife in the back, it was his business.
Barney had been in the circus all his life, a case of “sawdust up my nose when I was a little pecker.” He offered me a job, saying that I owed him a Lincoln already. Room and board were included in the wage. Four hours later we passed through a tiny town and joined the rest of the caravan, circled like a pioneer wagon train in a broad grassy vale. Barney hopped from the cab and handed me a rake.
“Clear the rocks from behind the truck, then make a path to the big top.”
Barney climbed on the rear bumper and unhooked chains bigger than those used by professional loggers. He cranked down the gate, revealing the great gray flanks of an elephant. Barney spoke to Peaches in a soothing tone, apologizing for the long trip, offering her water and hay if she’d come out of the truck. A foot extended backwards. I scurried away so fast I fell. Raucous laughter erupted behind me.
“What a fall, what a fall! Sign him up!”
“Move over, Rover, he’s mashing clover!”
A pair of dwarfs leered from giant heads on neckless bodies. One performed a handspring, then clambered onto the shoulders of his buddy. They advanced on me, my size now, flicking their tongues like snakes. I held the rake across my body.
“Rover’s got a rake,” said one.
“Let’s throw him in the lake.”
“There ain’t no lake.”
“How about a well?”
“That sounds good.”
The top dwarf kicked the lower one in the head.
“Swell,” the top one said. “You should have said sw
ell for the rhyme.”
“Don’t kick me.”
The lower dwarf bit his partner’s ankle and they tumbled across the ground. Peaches aimed her trunk high, bellowing relief at standing on earth. Barney stepped around her with a long pole that ended in a hook.
“Hey, you fricking runts,” he yelled. “Peaches favors tidbits like you.”
The dwarfs scrambled away, hopping onto the metal steps of a camper.
“I’ll make a suitcase out of her,” one said.
“Planters from her feet.”
“A dildo of her trunk.”
Peaches regarded me from an eye the size of my fist. Thick stalks of hair poked from her body like weed clumps. Her back leg held a heavy manacle that chained her to the truck.
“Stay away from them shrimps,” Barney said. “Watch out for the clowns, too. And don’t even look at the Parrot Lady. Even from behind. She can tell.”
I nodded, receiving information without the ability to process it.
“Go to the trucks and ask for Flathead. Tell him you’re my First of May.”
I moved across the field, listening to yelling and cursing everywhere. No one talked in normal tones. People were setting up sideshow games, running electric wires, unloading animals. A vast crew of men worked four trucks loaded with folded tents. Flathead’s curly hair was very short, as if to display the fact that his head was indeed flat on top. He told me to dig a donicker.
“What?”
“The donicker hole. What’s the matter, you no piss? Everybody piss. Dig two hole, you.”
He handed me a shovel and sent me to an area at the edge of the campers. Everyone ignored me. I finished my work and walked away. A man strode past me and calmly urinated into the hole.