Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) (9 page)

I sit down on the chair and press my palms to my eyes. I squeeze the sides of my head to keep things in. When I look up, a Mexican woman in pink scrubs is mopping the floor around me. “Don’t get up,” she says. “You’re all right.”

I say, “This is my father.”

She nods and smiles, then works her way gradually out of the room.

I push down the bed railing and lean over it so my forehead touches his sweat-soaked sheets. “Hi Dad,” I say into the mattress. “It’s me. Hi.” I pause and search my brain. “It’s pretty outside,” I say at last. “The leaves are changing.”

The machines hum and beep.

And so I decide on a lullaby, something he always sang to me. “
I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me…”

I
n the waiting room frail old Neil is making a scrapbook of press clippings, recording the news of the world for the wife he is losing. She has always been addicted to newspapers, and Neil is sure she’d hate to miss out on any developments. His sister-in-law is here too now, carrying her Bible everywhere, even to the bathroom. These are the last days; no one can really believe Neil’s wife will see another remission. But we can’t just do nothing in here.

“How about this one?” I say, tearing out an article about the apartment bombings in Moscow.

“She’ll like that,” Neil says. “Thanks.” His scrapbook has a page for each day of this stay, and the cover, when closed, rests at a forty-five degree angle.

Scratching his goatee with hesitation, John hands him one about Al Gore and Bill Bradley in New Hampshire. “How’s this?”

Neil nods and thanks him, but puts the clipping off to the side.

“A Republican, eh? I’m sorry.” John’s smile astonishes me. Yesterday I heard him say
brain damage
to someone over the telephone. One moron in a pickup truck can steal half his wife’s brain and body, and he still thinks to tell my mother that her sweater matches her eyes.

MSNBC interviews a man in New York who was trapped in the elevator of his office building all weekend with nothing but a roll of Life Savers and six cigarettes. They have set the camera up in his living room, because he’s too traumatized to leave the house now. He may file suit.

Walter Payton dies.

Shellfish are floating up in the Gulf of Mexico.

I’m afraid to leave the bubble of this hospital, and I’m not the only one. John has borrowed his brother’s camper and parked it at the back of the parking lot so that he never has to go home.

My father’s doctor wants to speak to us in his room. When we go in, the leg cuffs are off, and the doctor has drawn two lines on either side of my father’s left shin. “Put your hand here,” he says, but my mother backs away like a spooked animal.

I step up and put my hand there on his leg. It is hard as a baseball bat.

“It may be,” Dr. Lessario says, “that the muscles are just so swollen that they’re forming a kind of tourniquet here.” He runs his pen over the blonde hair on my father’s calf. “In which case we’ll just make two vertical incisions here to ease that pressure.” This is the best-case scenario; he offers it only to pretend there is hope. We believe him. The other possibility is that the tissue in his leg is already dead, is already poisoning the rest of his body.

My mother folds her arms and nods, inhaling. They’ll be cutting away at him tomorrow.

C
erveza.” My father raises his empty bottle. He is free of the hippie resort at last, and has found a reasonable spot on the beach, where people are laughing and eating. “Una más.”

The waitress pulls a pen from her hair and nods without making eye contact. As she heads to the bar, he watches the back of her dress, the sway of her hips. When she opens the refrigerator, several bright green lizards rush out and scatter across the floor.

At the next table three surfers and a shady local are playing poker. It is night inside the bar, smoky and dark; little white lights are strung along the tented ceiling. But there are no walls, and outside the sun is high, and the sand’s too hot to walk across. My father wipes his face with a coarse napkin. Somewhere out of sight a heavy metal can drops through the workings of a pop machine, and he’s thirsty. “Whew,” he says to the surfers. “It’s a son of a bitch out there.”

They tilt the light over their table to shine it in my father’s face. “You want something?”

“No.” He shrugs. “Christ.”

“Just kidding,” the smallest surfer says. He looks no older than fourteen, but he has silver caps on his front teeth and a bowie knife in his lap. “You want to play?”

They each have fifteen or twenty cards in their hands and car keys on the table.

My father is the luckiest man he knows.

“You got a car?” the tall one asks, pointing at the keys.

“One better.” He pulls his chair to their table, working from a memory of something he maybe once had. “I’ve got an airplane.”

Outside an old, dark-skinned woman in a pink outfit walks her cow along the beach, with a long rope tied around its neck. The weather is shifting; the wind kicks up and inflates the woman’s loose shirt like a sail.

T
hey cut off his leg today and put him on some new kind of sedatives so he won’t stir toward consciousness again for a while. While he slept, while he dreamed, they cut off his leg, and if he wakes up, we’re going to have to explain what we’ve done to him. At 2:00 a.m., unable to sleep, unable to keep my eyes for too long on this new shape of his, I go out to the parking lot because there’s supposed to be a meteor shower. But the lights everywhere make it too bright to see anything, so I go around to the back of the hospital, hoping for more darkness. I climb up on a cement retaining wall at the darkest part of the lot and nothing shines above me, but below me a ramp leads down to the dumpster area. They have different colored dumpsters for hazardous and non. They make a lot of garbage here each day, and I think, is it in there? Is it in that one, or in that one?

“Hey risk taker,” John’s football-coach voice booms from the ground beneath me. “You ought to come down from there.”

I can see his cigarette glowing in the night.

He climbs up next to me and we sit hanging our knees over the cement wall without speaking. “Neil’s wife died.” John rubs his hands over his large stomach, smoothing his sweater down. “I thought you’d want to know.” Behind us, on the other side of a wooded patch, the cars rush down New Ballas Road, where even at this hour people have places to be in a hurry.

I think of her scrapbook, of all the useless news clippings. “Oh.” I can’t find any words. “Oh, man.”

He nods. “She fought hard.”

“Yeah.” The pavement around the dumpsters is littered with scraps. I think of old Neil driving home alone, stopping at all the yellow lights in caution, pulling into his driveway and into his empty bed.

“How’s Lorrie doing?” I ask.

John shrugs, then pauses and shrugs again. “They say she’ll go to a regular room soon.”

“That’s great news.”

“Sure it is.”

“Do you not want to talk about it?”

“Nope. Nope, I do.” The meteors have started bursting overhead, laughing down at us. “Today she pointed at me.”

“Yeah? That’s good, right? That’s good.”

He nods, then points at the dumpsters. “It stinks over here.” He lights another cigarette and looks skyward. “I could really go for a drink.”

“I hear that.” The wind gusts through my hair, and a thought occurs to me. “Hey, wait. Come with me.”

I pop the trunk of my parents’ car and shove my father’s golf bag aside. The sight of his paired-up golf shoes knocks all my breath out. I step back and shake the thought from my head, then push them deep into the recesses of the trunk. “Here.” I pull out a six-pack of Miller Lite. “My father’s stash.”

“Lord have mercy,” John says. “Where’s that lady with the Bible?”

We sit on the bumper of my father’s Cadillac and the beer goes right to our heads. When John was seventeen, he says, he inherited his grandmother’s ’67 Eldorado. “Sky blue,” he says. “Big as a house inside. Lorrie and me took it all the way to Alaska at ten miles to the gallon.”

He tells me he’s afraid to drive his car now. It’s not the other people, he says; it’s not the common, easy fear of winding up beside or behind the wrong driver. It’s him, he says. It’s the thought that with one dumb slip of the hand he could kill someone. “Or worse.”

I realize I’m staring at him, mouth gaping. I close it, look away. I understand.

He shifts and shrugs. “What’s your dad like?”

I would like to tell him that my father tucked me into bed at night and took me for bike rides. That he taught me to fish or smoke or mix drinks, that he knew my nightmares or at least my phone number. But he didn’t. I rub my eyes. “He liked to burn things.”

John sets his beer down dramatically. “What?”

I sip my beer through a smile and nod. I have what can be a funny story. “He burned up a car once.”

“A car?”

“Well, not to the ground or anything. But he tried. He would have liked to. It was a lemon.”

John’s laughing now, so I tell him about the Ford Country Squire wagon with bad timing when I was eight, and the country road at sunset and the gas-soaked rags my father kept throwing on the burning carburetor. I tell him about the kind little man who pulled over and ran across the road with his fire extinguisher and how my father shoved him away and glared into the fire, declaring, “Just let it burn.”

I don’t tell how I cowered against my mother in the ditch, crying, waiting for the explosion I feared was imminent. How I wished she would stand up and stop him. How when I asked her, years later, what had happened that day, she said,
Nothing. What fire?
She couldn’t remember a fire. And I knew then I was alone and she was not to be trusted.
The station wagon? I don’t know. I think we sold it
, she said. But my memory of that day in the ditch was firm: Her eyes were riveted on my father and those flames, which kept dying out anyway amid all that metal machinery. It must have thrilled her to know that a man that wild, that untamed, had chosen her and stayed so long beside her.

I tell John, “After that my friends and I started calling him the God of Fire.” We would tower over any item of frustration, sentencing our broken toys and dolls:
Let it burn.

“You mean, like, what is it, Zeus?”

“We didn’t know Zeus from Moses,” I say. “At that age.”

I tell John about the bonfires he used to build, big as sheds, and the fireworks he shocked the neighbors with every year, and not just in July. I describe his great, suntanned, muscular form squirting lighter fluid onto dwindling campfires, chopping down dead trees, burning boxes and magazines, anything paper, while grinning like a delinquent into the flames. He had a great booming laugh I could hear from any hiding place.

“God of Fire.” John chuckles. “Tom, is it? Tom Kernes, God of Fire. It’s got a ring to it.”

I nod. It does. I don’t tell how once, near the end of a party, he picked me up by one hand and foot, swinging me around and around in dizzying arcs toward the bonfire. I don’t describe my fine white little-girl hair ripping through the dark like a torch as he shouted over my squeals,
Should I throw you in the fire, Ellie, should I?
I don’t mention the liquor-sweet scent of his breath or the panic gripping my heart as his hand slipped and I wet myself, begging him to spare me. And that laughter of his, that crazy, infectious laughter working so hard to prove that this was fun.

“It’s Prometheus, I think,” I say.

John touches my knee. “The gods don’t die, Ellie. They almost never do.”

Y
ou fucked with the bull, puto.” A man named Arturo plunges a final kick into my father’s stomach. He has no wallet to take, no car keys, no airplane, of course, so they have beaten the lesson into him. He writhes on the ground and groans until they lose interest and leave him alone on the beach. He’s been slashed down the middle and is wet there, and the inside of his mouth is raw with punches. He feels himself falling away from it all, losing hold in the dark, but then shakes himself awake. They are twenty feet away when he gets to his knees to dig into his pockets. He finds the long strap of the duffel bag in there and pulls it out length by length, coiling the strap beside him, until with one last tug the canvas bag pops out, much smaller now, but just as heavy as before.

He stands up and begins swinging the bag high over his head like a lasso. With every turn it grows larger and larger, and he lets out the line until the bag whoops through the air like a great vulture bearing down. Arturo and the surfers hear the noise at their backs in time to turn and face it, but too late to duck. They are caught full-on in one swoop. The bricks scatter free of the bag on impact and ricochet off their skulls and jawbones, off their shining teeth. The canvas bag drifts to the ground, deflated, but the bricks sail off, bloodied, high into the sky. One strikes an electric line before falling. It makes a quiet
pop
and sends a shower of sparks into the trees.

My father limps over to the bodies and rifles their pockets for cigarettes. In the tree above him a family of spider monkeys has gathered to see about the commotion. They dance through the limbs, chattering angrily, casting their minstrel faces down at him. “Whooo,” the big one says.

My father inhales deeply, looking from the bodies to the monkeys and back again. He casts his match down at the tree roots. “Fuck you and your mother.”

He stumbles down the beach away from the bodies but tires before long and stretches out on the sand with his head in the weeds. He is bleeding. He has lost a lot of blood, and his insides are mangled. The waves crash in nearby, and he blinks at the heavens, thinking there might be an airplane flickering above. “Hey,” he moans, raising one limp arm to wave. “Down here.” He smiles and shakes his head.