Without being unduly bitter about it, Richard had always wondered why the offspring of Nicholas who had settled down and lived exemplary, stable, churchgoing lives in the upper Midwest were viewed as carrying on the man’s heritage and living according to his example, given that the single most celebrated episode in the man’s life had been beating a bunch of storm troopers to death with an improvised bludgeon.
IN THE AFTERMATH of Patricia’s death, when long-absent Bob, or a lawyer representing him, had sent them a letter containing the startling news that he’d be seeking custody of Zula, the family had held a little conference. Richard had attended via speakerphone from British Columbia. Speakerphones normally sucked, but the technology had served him well in that case, since it had enabled him to roll his eyes, bury his head in his hands, and, when it got really bad, hit the Mute button and stomp around the room cussing. John and Alice and their lawyers were being perfectly rational, of course, but to him they’d seemed like a town council of hobbits drafting a resolution to demand an apology from the Ringwraiths. Richard, at the time, was in regular contact with motorcycling enthusiasts who had a branch in Southern California, euphemistically describable as “active.” Through their good offices, he got a line on some private investigators, unconventional in grooming and in methods. These then made it their business to learn more about Bob’s private life. When the Bob dossier had reached a pleasing thickness—heavy enough to make a flinch-inducing thump when casually tossed onto a table—Richard had climbed into his crappy old diesel Land Cruiser and driven straight through from Elphinstone to L.A. There he had checked in to a hotel, taken a shower, and put on exactly the sort of bulky leather jacket he would use to conceal a shoulder holster, had he owned one. He had dropped off the Land Cruiser for an oil change and taken a taxi to a specialty auto rental place that had been recommended to him by an actor Richard had met in the tavern at the Schloss when the actor and his entourage had been up in Elphinstone for a movie shoot. There he had rented a Humvee. Not a Hummer, that being the pissant pseudo-Humvee then (it was 1995) available in the civilian market, but an actual military-grade Humvee, seven feet wide and, once you figured in the weight of the subwoofers, three tons heavy. Blasting Rage Against the Machine’s “Know Your Enemy” from its formidable aftermarket stereo, he had showed up half an hour late for the showdown at the Denny’s and parked in the handicapped space. He had known, from the moment he’d spotted Bob’s slumped profile through the window of the restaurant, that he had already won.
It was a disgrace. A bundle of the cheapest tricks imaginable. That, in and of itself, would have convinced a better man that Richard was only bluffing.
Richard’s future ex-girlfriend of the moment had spent several years with her nose pressed up against the glass of Hinduism, and he had been subjected to much talk of avatars, maia, and so on. By showing up in this avatar, Richard was manifesting himself in exactly the way that Bob had always imagined him. And to the extent that Bob was now a declared enemy of the family, Richard was in that way becoming Bob’s worst nightmare made flesh.
The gambit had worked. But Richard had not been comfortable in that avatar, to the point of wondering where the hell it had come from. What had come over him? Only later, after talking to Bud and meditating on the story behind the Medal of Honor, had he understood that he had been manifesting, not as an avatar of Richard, but as an avatar of his whole family.
THE FOOTBALL GAME did not exactly end but, like most of them, reached a point where it was simply unwatchable. Almost everyone left. Richard pulled up a chair and sat at his father’s left hand. It was just the three of them then: John, Nicholas, and Richard. Patricia was fourteen years dead. Jacob had been born much later than the others, when Mom had been at damn-near-menopausal age, and everyone understood that he had been an unplanned pregnancy. He was neither dead nor here, but in Idaho, a state often confused, by bicoastal folks, with Iowa, but that in fact was the anti-Iowa in many respects, a place that Iowans would only go to in order to make some kind of statement.
Richard had practically no idea as to his father’s true state of consciousness. Since the last storm of ministrokes, he’d had little to say. But his eyes tracked things pretty carefully. His facial expressions and his gestures suggested that he knew what was going on. He was pretty happy right now sitting there between his two oldest sons. Richard settled back in his chair, crossed his ankles atop the bearskin, and settled in for a long sit. Someone brought him a beer. Dad smiled. Life was good.
RICHARD AWOKE AND made efforts to silence his phone, only to find that the local climate had sucked all moisture out of his fingertips, which could not obtain virtual purchase on the tiny affordances of its user interface. Through some combination of licking and breathing on his fingers he was able to get them damp enough that the machine now grudgingly recognized them as human flesh, responded to his commands, and became silent.
He groped for his reading glasses and tapped the Calendar button. A green slab rushed out of the darkness and made his white chest hairs glow in viridian thickets. His eyes came into focus and read its label: ROAD TRIP: SKELETOR.
Zooming out to a longer time scale, he saw good color omens: no red at all for the next fortnight, and four solid days of green—the color of business—coming up.
Blue was the color of family and other personal activities. Yesterday, for example, had been a sixteen-hour blue tombstone labeled RE-U.