“And only one right way.”
“If that.”
When they got to my grandfather’s place, Devaughn was sitting on the front steps smoking a Tiparillo. My grandfather was seven minutes late. “Sally’s going to drive me today,” he said.
Devaughn looked genuinely confused for a few seconds and pretended to be confused for a few seconds more. Then he looked a little hurt. He had not said so, but my grandfather could tell that the guard had started to enjoy their expeditions into the ruins of Mandeville.
“She know how to kill a snake?”
“Why don’t you ask her yourself?”
Devaughn looked at Sally.
“I know you aim for the legs,” Sally said. “Right?”
Devaughn hauled himself to his feet. He stood on the doorstep, rocking back and forth, crunching the plastic tip of the cheroot between his teeth.
“Yes?” my grandfather said.
“Least you could do’s pay me for all the time I done wasted.”
“What am I, Warren Buffett, I don’t have that kind of money.”
“I mean today. This morning.”
“I cost you an hour of Devaughn Time.”
“’s right.”
My grandfather gave him a ten. Devaughn folded it and folded it again, then slid it into the Tiparillo box that he carried in his shirt pocket. He nodded to my grandfather and touched the bill of his cap to Sally.
My grandfather unlocked the door to his condo and stood aside to let Sally in. There was a small foyer that opened onto the living room. They were separated by a partition wall about waist-high. Along the top of this partition, posed like a row of duck decoys on display bases, six large-scale models re-created the history of the space shuttle program in order of construction, from Enterprise to Endeavour.
“Spaceships, huh?” Sally said.
“Shuttles.”
“Uh-huh.”
My grandfather went into the kitchen and got out the waffle iron. Then he told Sally he was going to change into his snake-hunting clothes. Sally didn’t say anything, or if she did, neither of them recalled it to me afterward. She had gone on into the living room and was trying to get her head around it. There were, as she would later put it to me, rockets everywhere. On every available horizontal surface: the coffee table, the bookshelves, on top of the television set. French Arianes, Japanese Mus, Chinese CZs, an Argentine Gamma Centauro. The expanse of wall that carried from the living area to the dining area beyond, which in Sally’s unit was taken up by a large hutch full of china, and in other units was often occupied by family photo galleries or earth-toned batik prints of Israeli and biblical scenes, was here taken up by four glass shelves mounted on metal brackets from just above the terrazzo floor to within fifteen inches of the ceiling. These held models of known Soviet launch vehicles, from the early R-7s that had put Sputniks aloft to the Proton. On another, relatively small shelf on the wall over the television was a collection of American rockets: the Atlas, the Aerobee, the Titan. Sally didn’t fully grasp all of this, and even when she glanced at the plaques mounted on each base, the names and designations meant very little to her. She could see the incredible detail, the antennae and hatch hinges, the care that had been taken with paint and identifying markings and national symbols. It was all very impressive, but in her view it was not necessarily admirable.
In the dining room table during the first years of my grandfather’s residency, there had been a proper dining set that was, to my knowledge, never used. At some point he had gotten rid of the chairs, shoved the table to one side, and put in a workbench. Sally looked at the orderly chaos of plastic and wire on the workbench, the rows and columns of little plastic drawers, each labeled with a bit of masking tape on which an enigmatic hand had scrawled something like ailerons or rearview mirrors or bushings.
“You made all these?” she called out. She was not able to keep the note of horror out of her voice. It was not that she had any particular objection to hobbies and hobbyists—they were hardly rare among her cohort or in the units of Fontana Village. But in the scope, depth, and singular-mindedness of my grandfather’s focus on rocketry and in the degree of painstaking detail he brought to bear, there was such naked obsessiveness that she was appalled. Not, again, because she had any objection to obsessiveness—on the contrary. When it came to art, she thought, the more naked the better. In the execution of her own paintings, she relied on obsessiveness and the compulsion to keep going, dig deeper, push further.
(“I guess it was just, well . . . Rockets?” she told me. “The whole Freudian aspect. I mean, the decor of this man’s house is basically nothing but phallic symbols.”)
But not quite. She lifted the sheet and looked at the model of LAV One that my grandfather had completed the day before they met. She knelt down to see it from eye level. She tried to imagine herself driving that tiny rover around the rim of the moon’s northernmost crater. She couldn’t manage it.
“How the waffles coming?” my grandfather said.
He came clomping out dressed in blue coveralls, black waders, and a pink-and-green madras bucket hat from the lost and found, courtesy of Devaughn.
“Oh no.” Sally stood up and turned to see what was making all the noise. “No, dear. That is not at all what you wear to go on a snake hunt.”
“It isn’t?”
Sally shook her head. “Think you know everything,” she said.
For a while she vanished into his walk-in closet. There was a pole on either side, but the left-hand pole was bare of clothes or hangers. The right-hand pole held scattered guayaberas and pairs of slacks and the charcoal suit he had worn to my grandmother’s funeral and every funeral since. He heard a mock-bitter sigh that did not sound entirely mock. Then he heard her raucous seagull laugh. She came out holding the aloha shirt that I had given him as a joke, palm green with topless brown hula girls who varied by color of lei. She handed him the shirt on its hanger without comment, and a pair of chinos. While he took off his boots and coveralls and put on the clothes she wanted him to wear to the snake hunt, he heard her talking on the phone. When he came out of the bedroom a second time, she was holding a Sputnik in her left hand like the skull of Yorick and using its accurately mirrored surface—an effect painstakingly achieved—to check the state of her hair bun. She looked him over. “Much better. Much more effective,” she said.
As she returned the Sputnik to its place, taking care with the four prongs of its long antennae, its identity seemed to register with her. “I was living in California then,” she said. “First husband. I remember one night there was a party going on, if you looked up you could see it, this moving pinpoint like a star in a hurry. People were afraid it might have a bomb or be a weapon of some kind, remember? Some bozo tried to convince me to sleep with him because the death ray was going to come down and vaporize us all.”
“And what happened?”
“He was right, we all got vaporized.”
“It was the booster rocket that you could see,” my grandfather said. “To be precise. You needed binoculars to see the satellite itself.”
“Let’s definitely be precise. What’s this one?” She leaned in to read the plaque. “Sputnik 2. The one with the dog?”
“Laika.”
“Laika! Right. And this one?” She pointed to a model of a satellite that looked something like a cruder version of the familiar space capsules of the manned era. “Lunik 3.”
“It took the first pictures of the far side of the moon. No one had ever seen it before.”
“Because it was so dark?”
“That’s a misnomer.”
“Oh, is it.”
“It all depends on how you define dark.”
“Indeed it does,” Sally said. “Now let’s go hunt that snake.”
She drove them to the shopping center in her Mercedes. Daimler and all the rest had used more or less the same type of slave labor as the Mittelwerk, and my grandfather disapproved in particular of Jews driving German cars, but it
was a beautiful thing, with its stacked headlights and its grille like a chrome jukebox. Its six cylinders bubbled like mountain water over rocks. Anyway, it was 1990, and he would soon be seventy-five, and there was no use and certainly no virtue in holding on to a grudge. The Jews had outlived Hitler and he had outlived von Braun.
He was not accustomed to being driven by a woman who was not his daughter. Even when my mother was around, he generally did the driving. He surrendered the role to Sally along with his qualms about German automobiles and his doubts about the soundness of her ideas when it came to hunting pythons.
She had placed an order at the Italian delicatessen next to the Piggly Wiggly. Bread, a salami, a container of olives, a container of artichoke hearts, a container of stuffed hot peppers, three kinds of cheese, hard, soft, and semi-soft.
“What, no semi-hard cheese?” my grandfather said.
“That’s you,” said Sally.
She had two folding beach chairs in the trunk of the car along with an old wool blanket. He stood while she hung the chairs from his shoulder and then led her to the padlocked gate.
“Now what?” Sally said.
He did something odd then. He set the chairs on the ground beside the grocery bag with the food. He knelt down in front of the lock, working hard not to grimace or grunt. He put his ear to the padlock and twirled the dial to the left a little ways. He put an air of concentration on his face.
“You can hear it?”
“Sh.”
He stopped at the first number and then went on with the safecracker routine until the padlock sprang open.
“That is very impressive,” Sally said gratifyingly. “I’m really impressed.”
“Once you know how.”
“So they change the lock every time you come, I guess? That’s why you don’t bother to just memorize it?”
“You,” my grandfather said, “are a sharp cookie.” He swung open the gate. “After you.”
He led her onto the grounds. They walked up the road toward the old clubhouse drowning in kudzu, then bore to the left. The road stayed more or less clear until you reached what had been the clubhouse parking lot. They sat down in the folding chairs and spread napkins on their laps. He laid the salami and the cheeses on his lap and took out his pocketknife. He sliced off half a dozen roundels of French bread and passed them to her. She cupped them in her hands. He peeled the papery skin from the salami. She fed him a stuffed pepper while he worked, and then an olive.
My grandfather had finally gone to see the specialist his doctor had referred him to, and the news was not good. He knew he would have to tell Sally about it, but he was afraid that when he did, she would decide—and he would not blame her—that she was just not up to crawling down that road again.
“I’m going to make you a perfect bite,” my grandfather said. “That’s what my daughter used to call it.”
“What’s that?”
“A little bit of everything all together.”
“That’s exactly what I want. Make me a perfect bite.”
He sliced a thin wedge of the semi-soft cheese and laid it on a slice of bread. The salami went on that, and the whole thing was topped with an artichoke heart and a sliver of hot pepper. He passed it to her.
“Perfect,” she said.
He made one for himself. There was a strong breeze moving across the grass and through the leaves of the Australian pine and melaleuca trees. An airplane passed overhead, trailing a banner that reminded the public to go wild by consuming some product. It was seventy-two degrees.
“You see?” she told him. “This is the way to do it.” She leaned over and planted a kiss on his cheek, and he took advantage of the opportunity to kiss her back, on the mouth. She slid her chair nearer to his to make it easier on her arthritic shoulder. He took hold of her by the waist and lifted her out of her chair and onto his lap. He heard a creak in his own shoulder, and the canvas seat of the beach chair groaned under their combined weight.
“Who was president the last time you just sat around necking with somebody?” Sally asked him.
“Gerald Ford.”
“Richard Nixon.”
Out on the road beyond the trees and the gates a car tore past, scattering Cuban trumpet by the fluttering handful. He kissed her at the salt cellar of her throat. The open collar of her shirt released a cloud of Opium perfume that literally dizzied him. He laid a cheek against the scrollwork of her clavicles and tried to collect his thoughts. He remembered having read that the temple of Delphi, home of the ancient oracle, was built over a geologic fault that released vapor from a seam of hydrocarbons far below the surface, that the sibyl’s trances and prophecies were effects of ethylene intoxication. He hoped that he was not about to start talking some kindred type of nonsense. He closed his eyes and helplessly imbibed.
“I love you,” he said.
He felt her tense and, when he lifted his face, found that she was looking at him with a puzzled, even doubtful expression, as if his words had been particularly oracular. It was the truth, though, so what could he do about it but surrender.
There was a rustle in the scrub about twenty feet from the clearing where they had lunched. A snap of branches. My grandfather got to his feet. He watched the brush where he thought the sound had come from. His nostrils flared, and he caught a whiff of rotten egg, or maybe it was more like the smell of flowers left to rot in a vase of water. He could feel each hair on the back of his neck standing erect. Something light-colored passed among the spaces in the tangle of brown branches and dark green leaves. He reached for the snake hammer.
“No,” Sally said. “Let it go.”
He gripped the handle and flexed his fingers restlessly along its lacquered surface. He had been thinking for a long time about how it would feel to bring the hunk of lead down onto that skull with all its needle teeth. Looking back from the rented hospital bed in my mother’s guest room before he died, my grandfather conceded that he was probably looking forward to smashing the snake’s skull. He had been repressing his anger from the day he entered the Wallkill prison, and there was no doubt that since then, right up to last week’s diagnosis, life had afforded his anger ample fuel. But the truth was that anger required no trigger or pretext. It was sourceless, a part of him, like yearning, curiosity, or sadness. Anger was his birthright. It was hard for him to surrender that longed-for crunch of bone.
“It’s very charming how you have sworn revenge on behalf of my late husband’s cat and taken on this noble quest and so forth. But to be totally honest, it’s sort of irritating, too. I don’t need you to be my paladin. I don’t need to be rescued. And I promise you, kiddo, I’m never going to love you back until I am absolutely persuaded that you are not the kind of person who would beat a snake to death with a sledgehammer.”
“I see,” my grandfather said. He put down the hammer. He went back to the chair and stood behind Sally with his hand on her shoulder.
The rustle and snap got very loud and resolved themselves into a padding kind of rhythm, paws moving in sequence, and then an animal broke into the clearing. At first my grandfather was uncertain in his identification. It came stepping out of the brush, gray fur streaked with brown and black. At first he thought that it might be a very large and well-fed raccoon, but it didn’t have that flat-footed gait.
“Oh, good Lord,” Sally said. The animal stood still. It made a sound like a bullfrog. “Ramon.”
The cat’s forehead and neck were caked with blackened blood. His socks were dyed pinkish brown. He appeared to have lost an ear, and his tail had a buttonhook kink. His belly hung nearly to the blacktop.
“You got fat, Ramon,” Sally said.
The cat replied with another irascible croak. Sally got up and started toward him before my grandfather could prevent her. The cat bared his teeth and growled, warning her off. My grandfather wondered if the cat might be rabid, if he would have to use the hammer after all, and if, should he sky or brain Ramon, Sally would never be able to lov
e him.
“You smell just awful,” Sally told Ramon. “You’re fat and you stink.”
The cat paced a lopsided figure eight of indecision. There seemed to be something wrong with one of his legs. He moved stiffly and his leg turned out.
“He has holes in his face.”
“Tooth marks.”
“Oh my God. He got into a fight with the python.”
“There hasn’t been a missing pet in a month,” my grandfather said. “I think Ramon might have won the fight.”
“Ramon!” Sally said admiringly. “Oy, his poor ear,” she called over her shoulder. “And his tail, do you see? He’s a mess. You really think he killed it?”
“I think so.”
“So much for that big shtekn you’ve been dragging around the swamps for weeks.” She took another step toward Ramon, and the cat abruptly seemed to lose interest. He turned and hobbled back into the leafy darkness among the trees.
“Oops. That’s it? He’s gone.”
“That is a tough fucking cat,” my grandfather said.
Sally called after the cat once, then again in the loud South Philly holler she had used on the night they met. “I guess he’s happy.”
“I can’t believe he beat me to it.”
“Are you jealous?”
“I’m annoyed.”
Sally came over and put her arms around my grandfather. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You want to maybe kill Ramon instead?”
“Not today,” my grandfather said.
Sally leaned his head on her shoulder. She didn’t say that she loved him back, and he never told her about the shadow in his gut, then or on any of the few, happy days they subsequently spent together.
35
A little over a year later I passed through Coral Gables to do a reading in support of my second book. At that time Books & Books was crammed into a few hundred square feet of pink stucco down the street from its present location. Lack of space was not an issue in my case, but it meant there was not a lot of room for folding chairs. If you drew more than a minyan of elderly Jews, combat for a place to sit down could be savage. The people who did show up for my readings in those days were often not entirely strangers to me, and among the combatants at Books & Books that night were a few who knew me as my grandparents’ grandson: The dentist who had repaired my grandmother’s teeth after her arrival in Baltimore. The neighbor lady at Fontana Village who had made such a strong play for my grandfather’s attention—at least in my view—with her version of Horn & Hardart’s macaroni and cheese. An old buddy of my grandfather’s from Shunk Street days. The former sales director of MRX.