Scream (2 page)

“Yes, so you can work out the details of who gets to stay here when I go. He said he wants to live here six months a year and you said that was okay, that you would only stay here half the year.”

“But . . . I have to call him and tell him now? You're not dead.”

“Oh, it can't just be something he doesn't know about! That wouldn't be right, would it now?”

“Um . . .”

“We will organize this tomorrow. You will call your brother and tell him I have disinherited him and it's all going to you. Of course, I want to remind you: your dogs, they can never come in the house! You will have to design a big fenced area and they will live outside in that area. But you will have to have it specially protected or your dogs will be snatched and eaten. And we can talk about other things. My debts. You are going to have to come up with two hundred twenty thousand dollars to pay the bank, after I die. Do you have that kind of money?”

I head for bed as his eyes narrow. He's trying to get me to stay. “How much money do you have?”

“Oh, gee. Not much!”

“How much?”

I'm gone.

When I get up it's late. “Good morning! You missed my drug dealer visiting last night!” he says to me.

I get a cup of coffee. “What time did he show up?” I ask.

“Oh, I don't know.”

Willow comes down. She has the upstairs room, the loft. It didn't used to have a wall on the far side. There was once an open space dropping ten feet to the cement floor of the workroom, and it was right on that edge where the guest bed was placed. Then his last wife, Gigi, wanted the loft room for her loom, so eventually I guess she paid for a wall.

“I just told your mom, she missed the drug dealer coming last night!” he tells her.

“Yeah, Mom,” she says accusingly. “You went to sleep too early, Grandpa's dealer had to make some other deliveries but he did get here eventually, right after you went to bed.”

“Yes!” Dad says. “He is a nurse, so he had to wait until his shift was over to come by!”

Dad has made pancake mix and we are supposed to cook our own pancakes—he's got a frying pan full of oil a couple of inches deep. I don't want a deep-fried pancake. Tim and Willow don't like pancakes . . . they don't really eat breakfast.

“Nobody wants pancakes?” Dad's pretty angry. He hasn't smoked his morning bowl yet.

I can tell he's trying to keep his grumbling to a minimum, but I am slightly worried. He may lash out at me later, you never know with him. I should have made the pancakes and had everybody sit down and eat them, but honestly . . . I didn't want to get into that trap. If I insist that Willow eat, she will bitch that she doesn't want to. Tim is still asleep. If I wake him, he will get up, eventually, but will not eat anything, either. He will go outside to smoke a cigarette. The two of them will be irritated by me. Whatever I do, it's going to be wrong. “I will have a pancake, Dad. Do you want me to cook?”

“You have to call your brother and tell him he will not be inheriting my property. And I need to know: If you're going to live here, what are you going to do about your dogs?”

“Dad! I haven't even had a cup of coffee yet!” What I do have is a throbbing headache.

“You don't have to sound so vicious, Mom,” my daughter says. “Grandpa's just trying to help!” Her tone is of irritation with me and indignant support of old Gramps. That she even gets to consider him her grandpa! This guy only came to the city twice in her entire life to see her, his only grandchild. The other times, we had to drive to see him and then stay in a motel.

I remember when I was growing up he used to write me letters, signing them “Julian” and adding in a P.S.: “I don't know whether to call myself your father or your boyfriend.” “Dad” was not an option, at least not in his letters.

Tim finally emerges from hibernation. He gets his coffee and smokes a cigarette, which he has to do outside even though Dad smokes marijuana constantly inside. Plus, the house is heated by wood-burning stoves, so nothing about this environment is smoke free, but whatever.

Willow goes out in the canoe. For the moment I have managed to avoid calling my brother, Sam—his only son, the only other child apart from me—to disown him.

dad, guns, and pot

D
ad goes up to his room to smoke pot before giving the tour of local colleges. It's Labor Day weekend and there are a lot of colleges in the area for Willow to look at, since she'll be applying soon.

It's already very hot. Willow is cranky in the backseat next to me. “See that house?” Dad says as he drives down the snaky winding road that leads to town. “That house is where my friend Bruce lives. When I got divorced from Gigi, I brought my guns to him. I said, ‘Bruce, you keep my guns.' ”

“Why did you want him to keep your guns?” I say.

“I didn't feel comfortable having them in the house. I was depressed.”

I have heard this story before, when Gigi left him. She was young, maybe five years older than me.

For a long time Dad tried to figure out what had gone wrong with this marriage. He decided that she had left him after twenty-five years because she did not want to look after him when he got old. “Gee, Dad,” I said, “do you think maybe you shouldn't have kept saying all the time how great it was that you had a wife who had to go to work and support you while you got to stay home and play?”

“What?” Dad said. “No. No. No. Gigi liked to work.”

Nobody else is listening to Dad. I can't help but think: What does that mean, you asked somebody to take your guns because you were “depressed”?

If I had a knife I might say,
Please take my knife from me. I am going to murder someone with it.
I might say,
Please take my knife before I stab myself
. I would not tell people,
Please, take my knife, due to my depression.
I can still have a pair of scissors in my home, even though I am depressed a lot.

“So . . . does your friend still have your guns?”

“Huh? Oh no . . . I got them back. I sawed off my shotgun. But it was crooked, so I asked the chief of police to help me saw it off again. The police chief sawed off the barrel of my shotgun and then . . . the gun didn't work!”

The police chief had sawed off the barrel incorrectly, maybe it was at a slant, I don't know. I don't know what Dad's talking about. He's driving and Willow is cranky, grumbling in the way only a seventeen-year-old can: it's too hot, she doesn't want to go look at colleges, she's got a headache, she's hungry. Tim is in his own zone next to Dad. His body is in there in the front, but . . . he's not exactly there. “And so, I took the shotgun home. Then I went to the gun store and I asked them there, can you fix this gun? Well, the chief of police came in, the same one who had sawed it off incorrectly. And he saw I had the shotgun and he said, ‘You can't have that sawed-off shotgun, it's illegal!' ”

I'm just not following this.

We do a drive-by of these colleges. There's the University of Massachusetts, Smith College, Amherst College. We get out and walk around, but it's the end of summer and the heat has made the trees shrivel up. There are a few students on campus that Willow doesn't like the look of. She doesn't like the look of any of the campuses.

So it's a lot of driving around from place to place. Tim wants to stop and buy tobacco. We park the car in the center of town.

“So Julian, where can I buy tobacco?” Tim asks.

“At Augie's,” I say.

“Augie's!” Dad says. “Augie's closed thirty years ago.”

Dad gives Tim directions to some other store. We wait in a fast-food chain place and drink soda. Willow is hungry but she is not going to eat fast food, she wants something different.

And now Dad wants to go back to his house because he is coming down hard. He needs a toke, a puff, a bowl. The hot and hungry and hormonal teen is a bad thing, but I am probably more afraid of the dad. I am trapped, stuck in a pool of rage while everyone around me has a little nuclear meltdown, except Tim, who is oblivious. He's down the block, ambling along. He has no idea that there is multigenerational seething here. The thing is, if he were here and I were the one stalling everyone, he wouldn't notice, either.

He is so lucky! He doesn't have to be in a rage, nor does he appear to notice the rage of others. He gets to live on a nice planet, the one called Planet Oblivion. Is it because he is a Brit? The only time he ever gets angry is when I say something. Then he explains that I am paranoid or wrong.

In all the thirty years I have known him there have only been two people he has announced he didn't like. Two people, out of all the thousands he has met, dined with, talked to. He is friendly, outgoing, warm, interested in others—if only I could be a little bit like him. But no. Try as I might, for me, other human beings are a blend of pit vipers, chimpanzees, and ants, a virtually indistinguishable mass of killer shit-pickers, sniffing their fingers and raping.

At last we are back at Dad's house. Lunchtime!

My family doesn't want berries and yogurt for lunch—we have been coming here for fifteen years as a family and they have never wanted berries and yogurt for lunch, but that's all there has ever been. Somehow Tim and Willow find bread and cheese, fill their plates, and hack away at it.

I am surprised Dad is keeping cool. All my life he went nuts if you didn't sit down and “do” a meal like human beings, with plates and forks and spoons, all at the same time. Dad even dumped one girlfriend, years and years ago, when I was about the age Willow is now, because she went into the kitchen (they were living together by then—Dad made her get rid of her dog first) around lunchtime and she got some food out of the fridge and ate it. Dad didn't say anything at the time. He went off in a black rage. But very shortly after this he threw her out.

Dad is right, though. It is civilized to sit down and eat off plates, together, as a unit. Of course, in all these years I have not been able to get my family to do this at home. I tried, believe me. For years I said to Tim, “Look, we have a little kid, can you get home at six o'clock one night a week so we can have dinner together as a family?” But he never did. The subway was always delayed. Something or other was always happening.

After I visit him, Dad usually sends me a hate letter. I have hundreds of them that go back decades. I already know this one will be about how my family did not sit down for lunch or offer to make lunch, but just went to the refrigerator and got out cheese and ate it with bread!

I'm whimpering now thinking about this future letter. “Dad,” I say, “I can't make them sit down for a normal meal, I'm sorry.”

Dad nods. I can't believe it, but he seems to accept that it is not my fault. Of course, I will still probably get a hate letter from him. Sometimes he writes to tell me that my mom was a lousy fuck. Sometimes he writes to tell me I am worthless, that I will never amount to anything. Sometimes he writes to ask me for money to reimburse him for what he spent when I was growing up, or in college.

But for now, I am safe.

Dad goes to his room and great spunky wafts of smoke curl out from under his doorway. When he returns, he is pacified. He is not so high that he's in the giggly touchy-feely state, but he's calmer, happier, not furious with me. I know there will be about an hour's peace this afternoon, then he will have a nap and then it will be time for dinner.

Tim and Willow go out in the canoe. Dad sits out on the deck with me. It is very beautiful to look out over his swamp. “My friend Bruce—the one I gave my guns to when I was depressed—is going to come over for dinner after you go. He's about to have open-heart surgery.”

All of Dad's friends are in bad shape. The men come over a few times a week to share a bowl and admire his property. Dad's other friend Josan is dying, but fortunately Josan has a wife with a hundred million dollars who threw him out but rented him an apartment and hired a nurse to look after him.

But Bruce is a young man who's going in for open-heart surgery and is afraid. “He thinks he's going to die on the operating table.” Dad laughs maniacally. “But at least I already got my guns back!”

I don't know if he's forgotten that he told me earlier that day, but he launches into the sawed-off shotgun story again.

“I keep it upstairs, in case someone comes out here.”

“Who, Dad?”

“If there was a nuclear war, people would come up here from the cities. I have to have a way to protect myself and keep them off. If someone was looking for drugs. Once, two girls came here. They knocked on the door and said they were looking for their mother.”

“They drove miles down the dirt road and then turned onto your dirt driveway and drove another mile until they got to your house? Then they got out of their car and knocked on your door and said they were looking for their mother?”

“Yep.”

“Did you know their mother?”

“I don't know.”

“Who were they?”

He shrugs.

Before dinner, Dad goes to his room to smoke (the fourth time that day? or maybe the fifth?) and after dinner, when Willow, Tim, and I are sitting there, Dad decides . . . to tell us about his guns.

His sawed-off shotgun is illegal, he keeps it under his bed—I think—and maybe some other guns up in his closet? He is just . . . on and on, and I am learning he has a lot of guns, how many I don't know. But I do know that he gave his guns away and got them back because it is the fourth time that day I am hearing this story.

The evening passes. I don't know what we do, do we play Scrabble? Are we all sitting on Dad's bed on the beaver blanket, watching a movie on his giant TV screen? Dad starts talking about his guns again. He's mumbling, to himself, and it dawns on me: Daddy's nuts!