Making Nice (20 page)

After all it was all his, and he did with it as he pleased. But that was the thing—this didn’t please him. This was surrender. After Mom died he’d simply given up on most things. Still, it was never mine, so what right did I have to be angry?

But I was, and it was the second shower curtain that reminded me that I was, and it was the second shower curtain that reminded me that whatever little I managed to accomplish here was going to come at great personal cost. It reminded me that this was going to be
difficult.

I pushed it aside to look through the shampoos on the rotting sill, grabbed a bottle of dandruff stuff, and squirted some onto Steve’s head who meowed but that’s all when I did so, then soaped myself up with it and little by little turned the hot water completely off until my dick got small and Steve started shivering. I stepped out refreshed and shook my way into my shorts and opted to air-dry outside, away from the fleas, where I found and pulled an unbroken plastic patio chair into the garage and sat there in the middle of boxes and bikes and boat parts, that outboard engine with the spider web for a gas cap, and listened to the neighbor’s sprinklers tick their afternoon semicircles around the lawn while I waited for my father to get home from work some forty minutes later. His car, a new Toyota hybrid, already had a magic-markered skull and crossbones on the front bumper and a zip tie holding something in place. He stepped out and groaned his way to standing, smaller and frailer than ever—his denim shirt two sizes too big and his loose pants belted
and
suspendered—and more ridiculous thanks to a new yellow-and-gray toupee on top of his head. I hugged him and told him he looked great, and he told me I looked grumpy and gay and asked what I was doing in the garage.

“You got fleas, man. You need an exterminator in there,” I said, thumb-pointing at the house. There was a short back-and-forth about it that ended with him saying he’d just bomb ’em again.

“With what?”

“With a flea fogga,” he said.

I tried to explain that that doesn’t work, obviously, and that if he did set one off we’d need to be gone for like five hours. He had no idea what I was talking about.

“Because it’s poison, dude,” I said. “You can’t breathe that stuff.” My eyes ran zigzags over him as I waited for a response that never came, eventually settling on a speck of sauce on his shirt. Then I knew. “You have. You’ve been breathing that stuff.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “It says on the can it’s fine.” Then he shook his head and started toward the house, more wobble in his walk than I remembered, stopping halfway across the patio and turning around. “I don’t want anyone in the house…”

“And why’s that?” I said.

“’Cause then I gotta clean it.”

“I’ll clean it,” I said. “Problem solved.”

“No one goes in there!” he yelled, and stalked off toward the back door screaming at me to leave him alone and let him die already, a tactic I’ve been familiar with since junior high when me and my brother would go out for fast food with him Wednesday nights and listen to him bitch about our mother being a bitch. Still, his life now seemed so depressing I was starting to believe he actually did want to die, because I probably would, and I followed him into the kitchen and asked if he was still taking his antidepressants. He wasn’t, he said, because they made him tired.

“You know dead is like being super tired forever, right?”

“Dead is like being left alone forever,” he said.

“OK, sure. But I’m your son and I love you and I’m not gonna leave you alone, and if you don’t hire a fuckin’ exterminator I’m gonna keep you on life support for a decade and invite people over to the house every day. Friends, enemies, the fuckin’ mailman … I’ll put up a sign in 7-Eleven that says, Hey, Everybody, come over. And when everybody comes over, you know what they’ll see? They’ll see a very clean house and another sign with the word
asshole
on it, with an arrow pointing to your fuckin’ face, and next to that I’ll hang a picture of your actual asshole—’cause I’ll be able to take one when you’re in your coma—and then we’ll all play a game of Photo Hunt that no one will win because they won’t see a fuckin’ difference you asshole.”

“I don’t want strangers in here!”

“I realize that,” I said, and watched him dig through his pockets and drop pennies into a margarine container filled with coins and old keys, the old keys bothering me in a way I have trouble articulating. Not then but weeks later I would tell this to my sister and wonder aloud if it’s possible to reverse-engineer locks for them, and Jackie would say I don’t know but art can be a version of that; the painstaking process of building highly complex mechanisms for otherwise useless keys from our pasts.

“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t nice. I’m trying really hard to be nice and help you out here, and I’m trying even harder to not punch your head off, but it’s difficult because I’m pretty sure they’re the same thing, you dumb dick.”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” he said, the opening of his victim monologue. “I can’t do anything right, everything’s my fault…”

“Yes! It is! This is
your
mess. You made it. And now you have a granddaughter. Do you think AJ’s ever going to bring Fatlegs here to see you? ’Cause he won’t. ’Cause it’s disgusting and flea-infested ’cause you put a fuckin’ flea collar on Steve, and no one’s used those since 1987 so I’m pretty sure he’s retarded now. His brain’s broken, like yours. You need to get Frontline or Advantage or something.”

He stuck his middle finger in my face and left it there and said, “Where do you get it?”

I stuck my middle finger in his face and left it there and said, “A pet store.”

“OK. Let’s go to a pet store.”

“Great. Let’s go to a pet store.”

“Great.”

“Great.”

And we dropped our middle fingers and went to a pet store but it wasn’t great, the whole there-and-back arguing over whether or not country music is for white people with patriotism problems, stopping only once and briefly to regard a curious piece of roadkill in the middle of Montauk Highway. The body of the bird—I assume it was a crow—was not there, most likely on the front grille of a car in someone’s driveway or dragged off by a raccoon or possum or some other urban scavenger, in any case, gone. One wing was all that remained, ripped from the bird on impact and sent spinning down to the concrete, where it lay glued to the ground by some yellowish-white tissue. With every eastbound car it flapped up, every westbound one down—up and down and up and down—and as I craned my neck to watch it go it seemed somehow alive, like it was trying to achieve lift. That or waving like a trained seal.

My father was nineteen when he lost his leg in a motorcycle wreck in Charleston, South Carolina. That was his word,
lost
, as if it was something that could be found and recovered. Growing up I liked to imagine his disembodied leg on a beach somewhere, tanned toes wiggling in the sandy foam. I even went as far as to write it letters on occasion, the usual stuff, family updates and childhood triumphs—I hit the game winning double; I punched Brian Kalinski in the face between classes and got suspended; I fingered Marisa Muller in the bushes at Bay Road—each one stuffed in an envelope addressed
LEG, Charleston, South Carolina
, with proper postage but no return address. It had been about fifteen years, maybe more, but there in the car I considered writing it again to say hi.

Back at the house I wandered around looking for Steve but the only thing I found was more mess. I went to ask my father if he’d seen him but instead inquired about a torn lampshade on a bladeless ceiling fan on a half-completed jigsaw puzzle on a broken chair in the dining room. “Lee’me alone!” he yelled, then stalked around the kitchen jerking open cabinet doors like he was checking to see if I’d glued them shut or not. He eventually found what he was looking for, a flea fogger, which he set off and tossed in my direction like a grenade. “You fuck!” I said, then fled coughing out the front door to call for backup, Tara answering the phone and doing her best to talk me down, which didn’t work ’cause I find her voice annoying and ’cause when she asked what was wrong I said, “This place is more fucked up than your vagina is what.” She coughed and hung up, and when I called back my brother answered.

“Hey bro,” he said.

“Hi bro,” I said.

“How bad is it?”

“Well the house is trashed and flea-infested and he just tried to kill me with chemical weapons.”

“No, I mean the toupee.”

I gave an honest assessment—it looked like someone glued fake hair to a jerk’s head—and told him about the flea fogger while tossing a pinecone onto the garage roof and catching it when it rolled off, but eventually it got stuck in the gutter. He said he’d talk to him, and did, and it resulted in our father agreeing to hire an exterminator as long as I cleaned up the house, which is how I spent day two of my recon mission: vacuuming. Also: sweeping, scrubbing, paper-toweling, sorting, pile-making, Steve-hunting—he was in the basement taking a shit on some fallen fiberglass insulation—and throwing things in the garbage, then hiding the garbage in the garage so my father wouldn’t sort through it when he got home from work. By the time I was through my lower legs looked like something the Hubble Telescope captured, a far-off solar system, a distant galaxy, a constellation of fleabites. I was pretty sure I had the plague and lung cancer, so when the ponytailed dude with the mini-keg of poison showed up and told me I’d only need to be gone for four hours I decided to make it more and caught the train to the city to put some distance between me and there, to get some perspective on things, also to drink my head off—which I did in a Midtown bar I don’t remember the name of, staring at a jar of olives, and a jar of cherries, and a jar of lemons, and a plate of sugar, and a jar of limes going brown around the edges.

*   *   *

My father picked me up at the Babylon station in the morning and asked why I was back so early. I said it was because I wanted to spend time with him, and he literally flinched. “You’re my Dada,” I said. “My Daddykins. Your balls made half of me, so we’re bonded forever through all of eternity, and no matter what you do I will always be your firstborn son, and I will always love you and worry about you no matter what horrible and selfish things that you do. I forgive you your trespasses, and I hope that you forgive me mine. Amen.”

“Knock it off,” he said.

“Only because I love you,” I said, smirking at the heat haze doing its shimmering thing on the highway in front of us.

“Be a good day for a ride up the river,” my father said.

“Yeah. It would. If only we had a boat.”

“I got a boat,” he said. “Bought it off Wally Johnson a few months ago.”

He’d never mentioned this and I thought he might be joking me.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“And it works?”

“Yeah.”

“And it’s in the water?”

“Yes.”

“And we can take a ride?”

“If you shut your fuckin’ mouth.”

“Deal,” I said and shut my fuckin’ mouth, and we pit-stopped for bathrooms and beer and headed to the dock to take a ride.

*   *   *

The boat was straight from the seventies, a sixteen-foot, gel-coatless and oxidized blue MFG covered in pine needles, a rusting can of WD-40 on the dash. A poor replacement for the boats I grew up with but I was more excited than not anyhow. He climbed aboard and started tinkering with I don’t know what, making a production out of the very uncomplicated process of starting up a sixty-horse Evinrude outboard, I think to try and demonstrate his seamanship or something, his mastery of all things marine. I don’t know, but I went along with it as he twiddled about, instructing me on the This and the That and the key-safety thing, saying, “You gotta put this here before you start it or else it won’t start, OK? And this is the throttle, and the warm up lever, and this is the choke,” he said. “You gotta push it in here, like this.” Then he pushed the key in a few times, the carbs clicking away behind us as he did so.

“Yes sir captain sir,” I said, stepping on a stuck up sprinkler head and feeling nostalgic all of a sudden, which I try not to do and usually don’t. But this was how it was when I was a kid.

“And this is the radio and the bilge pump switches,” he said.

“Yes sir,” I said, climbing aboard. “It’s
hot
out here.”

“And the nav lights…”

“Yeah … can see that too. Want a beer?”

“Are you listening?” he said. “This is the … the…”

“What about that?” I said, pointing to an Oakdale Hardware bucket with a crushed-up diet-soda can and a screwdriver rusting in rainwater in it. “What’s that for?”

“Shut up and pump the fuel primer, smart-ass.”

I crouched and did as I was told, and he started the engine and throttled it up, the Evinrude spewing a gray cloud of exhaust that hung in the air in front of me like some kind of specter from my past, because it was some kind of specter from my past, the sight and smell of it recalling for me the summer days when I was six- or seventeen and he was fifty-something and we were both happier people.

And before I knew it we were slowly motoring our way up the mile and change of Connetquot River without a word, preferring instead the sound of the Evinrude doing its job of propelling us through the brackish brown water, sipping beer and searching the pine and maple roots on the muddy banks for the painted turtles I remember sunning themselves, the painted turtles that would splash down as we passed by on our family voyages to Fire Island or further, the sound of our wake slapping the shore. But there were no turtles now, or trout or perch or snapper, not like there used to be anyway, no crab traps marked with soda-bottle buoys, no fathers and sons on the docks with chicken, string, and net. When I think back on that trip now I don’t even remember hearing crickets or cicadas, just the engine grumbling low and dirty, the exhaust bubbling up through the murky water as we went. The nature of the place, as I knew it as a kid, is all or mostly all gone now, and as we motored up the river it made me sad to know it.