Duke of Deception (21 page)

I got Leatherwork and Law, Traffic Safety and Salesmanship, but Pioneering was beyond me. Still, all this didn’t come to nothing. Under the rubric
Awards and Honors
I kept “Life Scout, one badge short of Eagle” on my résumé till after I left college. And I learned in cold type that masturbation caused neither madness nor warts, but merely revealed mental distress, wasted time, and made a boy unfit for games or the company of his fellow Scouts.

A hundred days after my father came home from Turkey, Boeing, in Seattle, bit at his résumé. The pay was six-fifty a month, less
than he wanted, but it was another chance, and he prepared to leave the day the letter came. We were to follow when he found a house in a good school district.

Duke loaded the MG and told Toby and me to care for our mother, just as he always did when he went away, which seemed to be every time I thought we were safely together again. I begged to go with him, promised I wouldn’t get in his way, would keep him awake on the road, would be his navigator. I thought if I asked this carefully, using just the right words, he’d take me, so I asked every which way, but he didn’t relent. Finally he let me ride with him as far as downtown Sarasota, and let me take him to the Rexall for a sandwich. I said he needed fuel for the long drive.

There were no tourists in August. The town was stifling, empty sidewalks and melting blacktop, just another tropical backwater. The drugstore was air-conditioned to arctic temperature. I felt the frosted leatherette booth through my shorts and T-shirt, and looked at my father across the table from me, relaxed, not at all eager to get moving. I wanted us to stay where we were forever. I ordered my way through the menu, canned pea soup, hot turkey sandwich with stuffing and mashed potatoes scooped out like a volcano and filled with thick tan gravy. My father gave advice:

“Turkey in these places is lousy. It’s turkey roll. Next time order hot roast beef, rare, and if it isn’t rare, send it back.”

I guess I have been unhappier, more frightened, but I don’t know when. My father saw this. He said it would be all right, we’d all be together in six weeks, life would be better, I’d like Seattle, hell, you couldn’t get more than half a mile from the water in Seattle even if you wanted to. I asked if Mother would like Seattle and Duke said sure, she’d love it, just so we were all together. He squeezed my hand, and then I began to bawl, tried to shove mashed potatoes and stuffing in there to shut myself up, but it was no good. My father stood up, and I thought that was it, there he went, here I was, this was all there was going to be. But he came around the table and sat beside me, put an arm around me and hugged me, kissed the side of my face, didn’t let me go while he talked.

“Christ, a lot of it’s been bad, a real bitch. A little while, be brave, it will get better. I don’t like this, either. I won’t let it happen again.”

I asked again if I could go west with him. He shook his head and I tried to dry my eyes. I saw then that our waitress and another were looking at us, giggling at my old man with his arm around a big kid like me, kissing me, wearing his rimless specs and a tweed hat, looking nothing at all like a regular at the Rexall, or any place.

“You can pick up the tab,” my father said, mock-punching my arm. “Here’s a tenner, you figure the tip. Spend what’s left on a flick.”

And then so fast I couldn’t even say goodbye he was gone, out the door, and I sat there, staring at the waitresses. They turned their backs, and I picked up the ten and left without paying. The full August heat blasted my face and dried my eyes. I could hear the high whine of the MG’s little engine as my father changed gears. I looked down the street toward the noise, but he was gone.

I walked up the street to the gift shop where I had been caught shoplifting. I stole a wooden alligator for my brother and a postcard for my old man. The postcard showed a kid and his father fishing in the Gulf, pulling in some huge goddamned thing, a marlin or tarpon or something. I didn’t hide the card, just walked out with it.

The rest was squalor. Mother made friends with a German whose G.I. husband beat up the woman and shot into their bedroom window when she locked him out of their cabin, a mile from us. The woman was forlorn and hysterical, with wild hair and astonished eyes. She hid with her nine-year-old daughter in our house a week after my father left. The daughter played doctor with Toby, and I played doctor with her. I was rather old to play doctor with her. Then the woman and her little girl moved to the cottage next door. The G.I. came every night after the bars closed, cursing and threatening, revving the engine of his pickup, honking its horn. A policeman answered my mother’s call, but this was an old movie for him. He told Mother the woman could have had the guy
locked up long ago, but she wouldn’t press charges against him.

“She hates him and she loves him,” the cop told my mother, winking. “He must have something she likes, whaddya think?”

A few days after my father drove away, my mother took a job at a Dairy Queen on the Tamiami Trail, dealing cones for fifty dollars a week, wearing a paper cap. I asked when we would leave for Seattle.

“Never. We’re not leaving here. I’m going to divorce your father.”

This was not Birmingham now, where a little boy was led gently to the realities. My mother described her wishes, but didn’t justify them. She had had thirteen years to think about leaving her husband. She was thirty-two, and it must have seemed like a now-or-never option. I guess I asked her why she had misled my father, who had left Sarasota believing his wife would follow him west. If I asked her she didn’t tell me, she was too busy to answer my questions. My mother worked ten hours a day, six days a week at the Dairy Queen, and at night she took typing lessons, to better herself. I wanted to telephone my father, but Mother said she couldn’t afford long distance calls; besides, she didn’t know his number.

I hitch-hiked downtown a lot, and haunted travel agents. They were indulgent to a twelve-year-old kid, business was slow. They told me the fare to Seattle, train and bus, one way. I kept the fares in my head. One agent asked why didn’t I fly, so I got the dope on planes too.

I told my mother I’d find the money to go west to my father. Somehow. She’d stare at me then, and I’d ride my bike to Midnight Pass, and fish in the swift current between the tail of Siesta Key and the head of Casey Key. I’d walk the beach with Shep. It was deserted except for jelly fish left by the ebbing tide, and the gnawed hulks of horseshoe crabs, buzzing with sandflies.

School would begin in two weeks. Next door the man in the pickup wheedled his wife into opening the door. They laughed for a while, played the radio loud. Then he beat her up. The little girl
must have slept through it; I never heard her voice. So the days and nights went.

The last night I lay in bed sweating, listening to frogs croak out back. There had been much rain that summer, and this had brought a red tide and a plague of frogs. There were so many frogs near our house that cars speeding to Midnight Pass at night sometimes skidded on them. Midnight Pass was a makeout spot. I lay awake thinking about girls. My mother was supposed to be at typing class, and I was minding Toby. I left my bed. I wanted to lie in the living room, where it was cooler. A window fan hummed in the living room. I had lit a lamp for my mother in there, and light leaked beneath the crack of the door shut between the living room and the hall outside my bedroom. I opened the door, but they didn’t see me. I didn’t see everything, just my mother and a cop’s gun hanging holstered from a rocking chair in front of the door I had opened. I shut the door, returned to bed, fell asleep. It was all over.

I told my mother next morning I wanted to go to my father. She didn’t argue. Okay, she said, you’d better fly, it’s safer, I don’t want you crossing the country alone on a bus or a train. We’ll have to find out what it costs, and when the planes leave. I know the cost, I said. Delta, I told my mother, left Tampa that night, stopped in Atlanta, went on to Chicago. There’d be a long layover at Midway, then Northwest to Bismarck, Great Falls, Spokane and Seattle. Okay, she said, okay, you can go tonight.

No malice, tears, promises, yelling, apologies. I hitched to Sarasota that afternoon to buy a boat and outboard, told the dealer to put them on my account, just like Duke would say it, and send them to me air freight, care of Boeing. The dealer ran his hand through my hair before he laughed me out of the shop. The plane left on time from Tampa. Before I boarded, Mother stuffed twenty dollars in my pocket, and reminded me that we’d first driven into Sarasota a year and a day ago. I didn’t hate her, and she didn’t hate me. But except for three brief meetings I didn’t see her again till I was twenty-six.

Not long after I left for Seattle Ruth Atkins, who had promised
my grandmother on her deathbed to keep an eye on me, tracked Rosemary to the Dairy Queen, and broke in line ahead of the customers. She challenged the pretty blond lady in the paper cap:

“How could you have sent him away? To that awful father! What were you thinking of?”

And what could my mother say? That I wanted to go, which was true. What she said in fact was this: “It was just too much for me. I couldn’t keep it going.”

It still hurts her: “Sending you to Seattle was a dreadful business on my part, because I hadn’t contacted him before you left.” So the arrival was messy. I spent twenty hours at Midway, eating hot dogs and drinking root beer, and I arrived sick in Seattle. There was no one there to meet me. My father had left on a two-week vacation three weeks after he began work. He couldn’t be found. Travelers’ Aid took me in hand, got hold of my mother and gave me for a few days to a Boeing colleague of my father’s.

It was all right, I wasn’t scared. I was happy. I was where I wanted to be, it would be fine, I knew it. But for my mother it still requires explanation, and she offers it: “I didn’t call to tell him you were coming till after you left Chicago because I didn’t know what he’d do. Maybe he’d come back to get me. Maybe he wouldn’t take you.”

I
T
was what I longed for, but I can’t reconstruct our reunion scene. I remember my father disapproved of our lie that I was eleven, to get a half-price airplane ticket, but he disapproved even more of our having paid cash for it. So unquestioning was my trust in this man that it had never occurred to me, when I landed in Seattle and he was not there, that he would not find me, soon.

Perhaps my father told me, when he came for me after a few days, where he had been. Probably he was cast down by the news that my mother was quits with him. But I remember no despair, no anger. He seemed unambiguously happy to see me. Right away he looked to my needs. I had landed in Seattle with a single gladstone, a bag my father called a “bulldog,” a battered leather satchel with worn brass hardware that had belonged to his father. The day after my father picked me up at his colleague’s Mercer Island house he bought me clothes and a white runabout powered by a five-horse Evinrude, just muscle enough to lift the hull on a plane. The boat was mine to use as I wanted, as long as I promised my father, honor-bright, to wear my life jacket. I kept the promise; I understood that my father would forgive me anything except a broken promise or a lie. Truth, he told me, was our most powerful bond. I knew never, never to lie to him. The truth made everything between us possible, he told me. I believed what my father said, but I had to train myself in casuistry to distinguish between the
crucial truths he told me and the petty farragoes he sometimes used—necessarily?—to confound shopkeepers and clerks, people outside our lives.

It must have rained sometimes during the eighteen months I lived in Seattle; they say it never stops, except now and then in August. But I remember only sun and snow, Mt. Rainier looking down on Lake Washington and Puget Sound. I must have had trouble in school: my transcripts describe a bothersome boy with shabby grades and a terrible stammer who frequently visited the principal, the speech therapist, and the psychological counselor to account for his many
C
s and
D
s, his
F
s in Latin and metalworking. I remember friendly school chums, teachers with pale, broad Scandinavian faces, who taught without accents at the spanking new junior high, Nathan Eckstein.

Nathan Eckstein was not only new, with electronic learning aids and a gym whose basketball hoops had nets, it was also said to be the “best” junior high in Seattle, with the “nicest” boys and girls, and to send me there Duke endured a tough commute from the University District in northeast Seattle way south to Boeing. Maybe he didn’t mind; he still loved to drive the MG, especially since he had installed an exhaust cutout for a straight pipe that made a daunting noise when police weren’t around to hear it.

At first we lived in a rooming house in the University District. We camped out in a clean single room, sleeping in a double-decker, my father on the bottom. Before school started I spent the few hours when I wasn’t exploring Lake Union and Portage Bay in my new boat reading magazines: I became engrossed in
Sports Afield
and
True
and
Argosy
and
Field & Stream
, especially the rifle ads. I thought I wanted a lever-action deer rifle, one of the Marlin or Winchester 30-30s I studied in full-page four-color ads. My father assured me I was wrong, I didn’t want to kill deer.

“Okay,” I said, “can I kill a rockchuck? A smaller rifle will do it, with a scope.”

My father asked me what a rockchuck was, and I explained it was a little woodchuck that lived among rocks, in the mountains.
My father told me of course I couldn’t shoot at a rockchuck, so I never got to be a hunter.

I read
Argosy, True, Yachting
(which paid some slight attention to motorboats) and two others,
Quick
and
Confidential
, which I hid in the foot of my sleeping bag. Offsetting these periodical revelations of an impure world was the influence of some students who roomed in our building, with whom my father was friendly. They were good to me, as entertained by my show of sophistication as by my innocence. One was Ted Holzknecht, captain of the University of Washington football team, a
Collier’s
All-American center. He brought me to a couple of Husky practices, where I told Ted’s teammates that I was tight with Ted Williams, the guy who played for the Red Sox. Perhaps they knew of him? I had a ball signed by him, somewhere in Florida.