Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery (17 page)

The loser was a black woman with a twenty-ounce Diet Dr Pepper on her desk. She looked at me for maybe an eighth of a second, but that was enough. “Morning,” I said.

She sighed, probably kicking herself for that eighth-of-a-second eye contact. “With you one minute.” Jamaican.

Twenty minutes and nine signatures later, I waited in a private room just back of reception. The Jamaican had said Doctor Lin would be with me soon.

I looked around the room—half office, half lounge—at a desk, a couple of chairs, an old sofa the color of a Band-Aid. The big window that looked out on the parking lot was barred.

Then I took the most comfortable looking chair, spun it to face daylight, and waited for my father.

He’d always claimed they called him “Fast Freddy” Sax, but in Mankato I never met anybody who remembered the nickname. He ran tracks in Rochester, Tomahawk, Sioux City, Sioux Falls, sometimes Waukesha. Quarter-mile, third-of-a-mile, some paved, mostly dirt.

When I was eight he stopped kidding himself about racing fulltime and took a job as a welder.

When I was eleven he left me and my mom and moved to Milford, Massachusetts. Claimed he’d found work as an engine builder with a Late Model racing team that was going places.

When I was thirteen I bullied my mom into letting me move east to be with him. Whatever part of her wasn’t broken when my father left finished breaking when my Trailways bus pulled out of Minneapolis. She’s been fuzzy ever since. Pills, I think. She has her church group and Wednesday afternoons shelving books at Mankato Public Library and not much else.

Three days after the bus dropped me in Milford, I knew my father was a drunk and a liar. He hadn’t been an engine builder for any race team—he was a gopher, sweeping the shop floor and fetching coffee. And he was drunk all the time, so he couldn’t even do that right. They canned him.

A welder can always find work, but a drunk welder never lasts long.

I more or less flew solo from there on out. I ate a lot of grilled cheese. While my friends were looking forward to their learners’ permits, I was shuffling checks and working collection agencies to keep the phone and electric and gas on—most of the time. I couldn’t stop the eviction notices, but in Massachusetts an eviction notice doesn’t mean shit. You can last eighteen months easy if you play it right.

When I was fourteen, I figured out the only sure way to keep Fast Freddy Sax around: I taught myself to drink. We had some good times.

Then some bad ones.

He’s spent the past twenty years panhandling in Vermont during the summer, then in Jacksonville, Florida, all winter.

When I won my first televised race in Martinsville, Virginia, he saw it on ESPN and hitchhiked from Brattleboro to my race team’s shop to ask for money. I guess he figured I was rich, or would be soon.

But he’d taught me more than he knew; by then I was a flat-out drunk myself. I lost my ride not long after, started my long slide.

I stared through the barred window, put my feet on the sofa, thought about the last time I saw him. Five years ago, six? He was begging at a stoplight near a Massachusetts Turnpike toll booth. Cars stack up at the light, so there are usually three or four bums working it.

The bums there are always black, so when I spotted a white one, he caught my eye. He wore a lunatic’s beard, a real stranded-on-a-desert-island job. Underneath it, though, he looked familiar. I thought,
It couldn’t be
. But my stomach, dropping away, was telling me something else. I needed a closer look, so I caught his attention and waggled a buck.

He saw it and hustled to the minivan I was driving back then. As he neared, he stuck out the
HOMELESS MISSION
can the bums use. We locked eyes.

It was my father. He’d dropped thirty pounds, and filth covered the part of his face that the beard didn’t. But I recognized him, all right—he was my
father
.

He recognized me, too. And smiled.

It was a shy smile. Like when a kid moves out of the neighborhood, then visits with his family the next summer. The smile says
Everything’s the same, but everything’s different.

The light changed. Boston drivers aren’t patient: I got two seconds of courtesy before people started honking.

I ignored them. “Fast Freddy Sax,” I said.

My father said nothing. Instead, he slapped the pockets of the raincoat he wore. Soon he pulled out a little notebook and a golf pencil.

More honking, some hollering, too, as the light went red. I ignored it all.

While my father worked his pencil I fished my wallet out again, pulled all the money I had, stuffed it in his can.

My father tore off a notebook sheet and put it in my hand, saying nothing but making that shy smile again.
Everything’s the same, but everything’s different.

The light turned green. I gassed it. In the rearview, I watched my father step to the curb and wait for traffic to bunch again. Far as I could tell, he didn’t look my way.

At the next red light I looked down at the paper he’d folded into my hand. It said
IOU
.

I thought there must be more, blinked away tears.

But that was all it said.

I heard a doorknob and took my feet off the sofa. Noticed I had my wallet in my left hand and the scrap of paper in my right. I carry it. I don’t know why. I looked at it.
IOU
.

I stuffed the paper away, rose, turned.

Doctor Lin was a woman. She was Chinese and five-two, and she couldn’t weigh more than a buck-ten. She was reading from an aluminum clipboard, stethoscope over her shoulders the way they carry them. She kicked the door closed as she signed the bottom of her clipboard sheet, then looked up.

Most doctors’ eyes are hard. Smart, but hard. They don’t let you in; they bounce you back. Doctor Lin’s eyes were not like that. Instead they were warm, amused, like she was still thinking about a joke she heard out in the hall.

She said she was Vicky Lin and stuck out a tiny hand. We shook. I said my name.

“Only son of Fast Freddy Sax,” she said. “The scourge of the midwestern NASCAR scene back when men were men and helmets were for sissies.” Her eyes smiled. “To hear him tell it. Is there any truth to his story?” She looked pure Chinese but talked pure California. Not Valley Girl–Surfer Dude California. Educated California.

“A little truth and a lot of bullshit,” I said. “Does he sell it well?”

“Well and often,” she said. “He had a couple of patients asking for his autograph. Also an orderly.”

I said, “So he’s … how is … can he…” Then my knees went weak and I sat down hard.

She asked if I was okay, if I wanted water. I said yes to both. She ducked behind the desk, came up with a bottle of Poland Springs, and handed it to me. Then she sat behind the desk, watched me open and sip.

“I apologize,” she said after a while. “I started off all wrong. This is a big deal, and I failed to treat it as such. When did you last see him?”

I told her about my father begging for a buck at the intersection. I almost told her about the IOU—she was the kind of person I wanted to tell that story to—but held back.

She asked more questions, medical-history stuff. I couldn’t tell her much, but I could tell her he’d been a drunk at least thirty years. I didn’t have to tell her I’d inherited that, but I did. She wrote while I talked.

When I was done, Doctor Lin tapped her teeth with her pen, the teeth white like in a toothpaste commercial. Everybody has white teeth these days.

“Given what you’ve told me,” she said, “you may be pleasantly surprised when the orderly brings him in.”

I waited.

She said, “Your father is stone-cold sober.”

“No fucking way. Pardon my French.”

“No fucking problem,” she said, warm eyes smiling. “I’ve heard worse. Indeed, I’ve heard worse in the last fifteen minutes. But it’s true.” She glanced at her clipboard. “Your father was picked up at a rest stop on I-Ninety-one. He was digging through trash cans for food, scaring off customers apparently. The manager of the McDonald’s called the state police.”

“When was this?”

“Four days ago. Your father told the state police he’d hitchhiked from Vermont—”

“That sounds right.”

“—and he was confused and agitated. They checked his record, found a long history of incarceration and institutionalization, assumed he was drunk or on drugs, and brought him here.”

A long history of incarceration and institutionalization.
My chest felt tight. I stared at nothing.

“We took him in Thursday, late,” she said. “And here’s where the glimmer of good news begins, Mister Sax. I observed your father, studied his records, and set in motion the usual tests. Your father remained confused and agitated. He maintained he was sober and had been for some time, but I didn’t believe him. He was, after all, telling these fanciful stories, and he exhibited symptoms of delirium tremens. The DTs?”

“I know what they are.”

Her eyes lingered on me before she went back to the clipboard. “The point is, we Doubting Thomases ran your father through the usual tests and procedures, and I’ll be damned if he isn’t sober.”

“Hard to believe,” I said, and thought for a few seconds. “So why was he Dumpster diving? Why was he confused, all that?”

“Malnutrition. Dehydration. Thirty or more years of intensive alcohol and drug abuse.” She finger-ticked as she spoke. “Your father’s not an active alcoholic at the moment, and I’m afraid he’s not eligible for inpatient treatment here. But he’s not doing well. Sometimes he’s cogent, sometimes he’s incoherent or childlike.”

“You’re saying he’s a wet-brain.”

“Thirty or more years of intense alcohol and drug abuse,” she said, making a tiny shrug.

There was a quiet knock, a turn of the knob. A huge dreadlocked orderly stepped in. Behind him came my father.

He was smaller than I remembered.

“You’re bigger than I remember,” he said.

Doctor Lin nodded at the orderly. He stepped out and closed the door.

“No beard,” I said.

“They shaved it when they deloused me.” My father rubbed his chin. “Feels funny.”

Neither of us said anything for a while.

It was like looking at myself. He was three, four inches shorter and thirty years older, and his teeth were a lot worse than mine. Otherwise, he looked like me.

“I’m off the sauce,” he said.

“I heard. How long?”

His mouth started working, then stopped. He rubbed his hands together. He looked to Doctor Lin, then back at me. Then did it again.

She said, “Days and dates giving you trouble, Fred?”

My father nodded.

I said, “It doesn’t matter, Pop.” Looked at Doctor Lin. “Can we go?”

“After you sign thirty or forty more forms.”

I thought she was kidding. She wasn’t.

*   *   *

During the ride we were mostly quiet.

At a stoplight my father said, “Your truck?”

I nodded.

He looked around the interior. “Nice.”

Then we were quiet again.

*   *   *

I took him to Charlene’s and watched him eat two egg-and-cheese sandwiches from Dunkin’ Donuts. He sat at the kitchen table wearing green scrubs they’d given him at Cider Hill, chewing like hell with his lousy teeth.

I said, “What’s your shoe size?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know your shoe size?”

“Go twenty years without buying a pair of shoes, that’s how.”

“What was your shoe size twenty-one years ago?”

“Ten and a half. Why?”

“I’ll buy you some clothes.”

He nodded and polished off the last sandwich. Then he looked around. “Nice house,” he said. “Not yours, though. This is a woman’s house. Your girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“You live here?”

“Kind of.”

“It’s not a kind-of question. Yes or no?”

“Fuck you.”

He looked at me awhile, then nodded. “I won’t begrudge you that,” my father said. “Fuck me.”

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later he was showered, naked, asleep in Jesse’s room. I’d pulled the curtains while he climbed into bed. “Room dark enough?” I said, and heard snoring. He was out cold. “Guess so,” I said, and headed for the door.

But stopped. I looked down at my father. He could use a haircut. His was mostly gray, but it was all there. And it was clean now.

I reached and touched my father’s hair. His snoring hitched. I pulled my hand back, then soft-footed out the door and down the hall to Charlene’s room. I pulled the curtains in that room, too.

I like to pray in the dark when I can.

I hit my knees, closed my eyes, set my forehead on the yellow comforter.