CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
FEELING RESTLESS, WITH YET ANOTHER FAILURE UNDER MY BELT, I decided to go home for the weekend. Autumn leaves were falling and the ocean winds were blowing as I walked slowly up the long laneway leading to the house, running into Bachelor and Sykes halfway. Their barking attracted the other dogs, buoyant pack swirling around me like leaves and wind, like so much ticker tape and confetti—I felt as if I were liberating Paris instead of just going home for the weekend.
“Oh, it’s you,” Uncle Tom said, greeting me from the veranda steps, looking right past me.
“Hi, Uncle Tom.” I smiled at him from halfway up the walkway.
“Well, there’s stew,” he said. “That is, if you still like stew.”
“I still like stew,” I said.
“May I have more stew, please, Uncle Tom?” I asked. Pop, Uncle Tom, and I were in the kitchen eating dinner.
“No, you may not. I promised the rest to Gilda,” Uncle Tom said, referring to his Akita, speaking from his separate table in the corner of the kitchen, a spot he called “the bistro.” A rarely extended invitation to join him there was our family’s version of the Purple Heart.
“You can have mine,” Pop said, preparing to offer his untouched serving.
“No, Pop, I don’t want yours.”
“It doesn’t matter a bit.” Pop wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“You’re not going to actually take your father’s helping?” Uncle Tom asked, watching as Pop transferred his stew onto my plate. “What are you? The Dauphin?”
“You try stopping him,” I said, gesturing helplessly.
Uncle Tom was shaking salt on his supper.
“Another way you’re turning into your grandfather. Remember what your mother said. When she was growing up, her father always received the best cut of meat in deference to his alleged preeminence,” he said. “Solipsistic devil.”
Now that Ma was dead, Uncle Tom, ever the contrarian, was always finding reason to quote her.
“It was that way with all my friends,” I said. “Ma made a big deal of it, but it wasn’t unusual. The dad got steak and the kids got hot dogs.”
“It’s a travesty,” Pop said. “The captain of the ship makes the sacrifices. What’s happened to our concept of leadership?”
“Need I remind you people that I’m the senior member of this family, and if there’s any preferential treatment to be handed out, I should be on the receiving end,” Uncle Tom said.
“I think it should be the youngest and not the oldest who gets special treatment,” I said, kidding him.
“Say, Tom, news from home. I heard from James today, and he says they had to pull the plug on Gerald, same age as us, imagine. Gives you pause,” Pop said, referring to a former neighbor who had a heart attack.
“I don’t care what the doctors say; no one is ever to pull the plug on me. Are you two listening? I don’t care if it brings Con Ed to its knees, you keep that electricity humming, is that clear?”
“So you want to live like a vegetable?” I asked him.
“Vegetables do fine. Just set me out in the sun and water me,” Uncle Tom said.
“Where’s Pop?” I asked Uncle Tom the next day, pulling up a chair and sitting at the kitchen table as he stood at the stove and stirred porridge with a big stainless-steel ladle, a semicircle of dogs drooling at his feet. It was early afternoon, and I’d just returned from a long walk on the beach.
“He’s out running errands with your new brother.”
“My new brother? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You look like you’ve lost some weight,” he said, putting a big bowl of oatmeal on the table in front of me. “You were already too skinny.”
I heard the muffled rumble of a car coming up the laneway. I got up and went to the window. My old Volvo was approaching the front of the house, the dogs running alongside and barking. I could see Pop in the front passenger seat, hands waving in animation.
“Who’s driving my car?” I said, moving toward the screen door and out onto the porch.
“Collie, see who’s here,” Pop said, slamming shut the car door, his hands full of shopping bags. “Come give us a hand.”
The screen door banged shut as Uncle Tom appeared behind me, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jerry in the driver’s seat.
“Welcome home, Collie,” he said, smirking.
Pop’s infamous pragmatism was in an active phase. He’d been using Jerry to drive him around and run endless errands. Leave it to Fantastic Flanagan to exploit stalking as if it were a valet service.
“If he’s going to do it anyway, why not make good use of him? You might as well have the benefit of it, if you’re forced to endure the headache,” Pop said, shrugging, half smile on his face, when he and I were finally alone in the living room. He walked toward the fireplace.
“I don’t think you get it. He’s obsessed with me, Pop. He’s crazy. He follows me, he monitors what I do. He followed me home! How’d he know I’d be here, anyway?” I was standing inside the doorway, a few feet from Pop. I had the sensation my arms were flailing, though when I checked they were calmly by my side.
“I told him,” Pop said quite cheerfully, poking around the fire, adding another log to the flames.
“You told him? How did you get involved with him?” I slid down into a beat-up leather armchair, scratched to hell from the dogs.
“He called me a couple of weeks ago to tell me that he was worried about you, and thank God he did. He’s been keeping me informed about your state of mind. How else am I to know what’s going on with you?” Pop stopped the business with the fire and turned around to face me.
“Pop, you call me fifty times a day! It’s not healthy for any parent to know as much about their kid as you know about me. What are you thinking? There’s something wrong with him. He needs a psychiatrist.” I threw up my hands.
“The only people who need psychiatrists are psychiatrists,” Pop said, using his poker as if it were a pointer. “All I know is that he thinks the world of my son, and that’s good enough for me. You’re probably overreacting because of the recent trauma.” Pop’s eyes sparkled with tears, and he struggled for composure.
I averted my eyes and gulped—trying to swallow it, the thing that was always stuck in my throat. Sykes suddenly appeared from around the corner.
“What were you up to?” Pop said affectionately as Sykes smiled and wagged his tail and jumped into my lap. I gave him a squeeze, grateful for the reprieve.
Meanwhile, Uncle Tom was circling Jerry, who was sitting warily in a captain’s chair in the kitchen, spinning his baseball cap in his hands.
“Say, you don’t happen to know how to spell ‘lugubrious,’ do you?” Tom asked him.
“I beg your pardon?” Jerry said.
“Uncle Tom,” I cautioned, walking through the open doorway.
“How much do you weigh, four, five hundred pounds?” Uncle Tom persisted.
“What? You need glasses. Anyway, that’s none of your business.”
“The day you started blocking out the light from the sun is the day your weight ceased being your private business and became a matter of public concern. By the look of Collie here, you’ve been stealing the food right off his plate. I knew someone like you back home when I was a boy. We called him Big Fat Liam. We went on a camping trip and got lost, and after a few hours he panicked and wanted to start eating us, beginning with the youngest and weakest. You watch out, Collie, this one’s got instant cannibal written all over him. A flat tire on a dirt road would be all it would take and he’d be getting out the carving knife. What is that smell, anyway?” Uncle Tom was sniffing the air, his face contorted with disgust. He disappeared temporarily, reappearing with a can of Lysol in his hand that he began spraying in Jerry’s immediate vicinity.
Uncle Tom was always spraying guests with something—he once came at the Falcon with Black Flag.
“Jerry, I’m sorry, but you need to leave,” I said, choking back the cloying scent of pine.
“Fine. I can take a hint. I guess I should have expected something like this. I’m not good enough for you, is that it?” His arms were circling wildly like an unhinged helicopter blade.
“I’ll answer that question,” Uncle Tom said, interrupting. “No, you’re not, and that’s a scary proposition because God knows my nephew isn’t up to much.”
“Say, Jerry,” Pop said, following me into the kitchen, his tone almost wistful, “before you head out, would you mind picking up the dry cleaning and maybe bring us home a nice pizza pie while you’re at it? What do you think, Collie? How does that sound?”
“Great, Pop,” I said, so weary suddenly that my bones were dissolving, powder and fragments swimming in my bloodstream, blocking the flow of oxygen to my brain.
“Hold the anchovies, okay?”
Jerry was waiting for me at the front door when I resumed my shift at the clinic later that week.
“I thought you were different, but you’re not. You’re just like everyone else,” he said, using his bulk to maneuver me into the corner of the building, so uncomfortably close that I was being barbecued, marinated in garlic every time he exhaled, his purple face looking as if it were a balloon about to pop.
“It’s too bad you feel that way, but you’ve got a bigger problem than I can handle,” I said, squeezing by him as he attempted to block my way into the building.
“It’s because I’m not your kind, isn’t it? You won’t give me a chance because of my appearance and because I’m not your idea of classy.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about. What does ‘classy’ mean? Your appearance doesn’t have anything to do with it. Your appearance isn’t what offends people, believe me.”
“Don’t worry, Mr. High-and-Mighty, Mr. Pretty Boy, Mr. Money Bags, you won’t have to think about me anymore because I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to drink a quart of bleach—”
“Yeah, right, sure you are. Until they start making bleach that tastes like chocolate milk, I figure you’re safe from harm,” I said, turning to walk away.
He reached out and grabbed my arm. “Safe from harm—what a joke coming from a chickenshit like you. After all, you’re the same guy who stood by and did nothing while your brother died on the train track right in front of you. You just left him with his foot stuck and saved yourself.”
“That’s not what happened. . . .”
“Whatever. All the more money for you, is that it? Did you enjoy it, you little weasel? Maybe you’d like to come and watch while I throw myself in front of a subway so you can carry on with your perfect little world undisturbed by dirt like me.”
“That’s not going to be necessary,” I said to him.
“Why not? Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill myself?”
“Because I’m going to do it for you,” I said.
It took two guys to pull me off him.