The 500: A Novel (12 page)

This was the first time it was just me and him, one-on-one, no celebrations, just the rut of the everyday. I could tell he was trying to get me back, fix up our father-son thing the way he’d Bondoed that Cutlass. I had been avoiding him.

I’d been through this already, with my brother. I hadn’t seen him in years; last I heard he was living in Florida. He didn’t show up for any of my dad’s got-out-of-jail parties. Even though Jack was the one responsible for me nearly getting sent to prison when I was nineteen, I’d always tried to be the nice guy, the one who would call, the one who would turn the other cheek and keep the family together. Even after he left it to me to shoulder all the debts from my mother’s treatments, however much I wanted to, I didn’t shut him out. That was a mistake. He’d blow into my life every few years, resuscitate the good old times and keep me out at the bar until closing. It was always fun, at first—who doesn’t want to hang out with his older brother?—but eventually I’d recognize that the grifter was closing the noose around me, scamming me for cash usually, or just a place for him to hide out with whatever crew of rejects he was currently tangled up with. Con men count on your decency, your kindness. They use it to get close and then use it to hurt you. After he’d done it to me half a dozen times, I cut him out of my life, ignored his calls, the appeals to family and pleas for help he had always used to worm his way back. And once he realized he couldn’t get anything out of me, I never heard from him again.

With my dad, I wasn’t that severe. The way I figured it, I’d more than done right by him by having Henry Davies pull the strings to get his parole. I was having a hard time with all the buddy-buddy shit. I wasn’t going to just let him off the hook for what he had done to the family, but I wasn’t going to torture him about abandoning us either. Think about whatever unpleasant chore you’ve been meaning to take care of but know you never will: cleaning out a basement or an overstuffed closet, throwing out old clothes. That was me and Dad. Mostly I just wanted to avoid the whole thing. But my father kept calling: tenacious but never pushy. Like me, he had will in spades.

“Let me get cleaned up,” he said. He led us out of the garage. In the woods behind the gas station there was a thirty-year-old trailer with a picnic table out front, along with a few camp chairs and a grill: his home.

The guy who owned the gas station, an old friend of my dad’s named George Cartwright, was letting him stay there and manage the place. Since only two or three guys worked there, managing usually meant pumping gas and pulling dents.

The inside of the trailer was so neat it was a little disconcerting: everything stacked at right angles, the bed drum-tight. The desk was covered with accounting textbooks and double-entry ledgers. A dozen ramen packets lay on the counter.

He saw me looking. “George has me doing the books now,” he said. He’d studied accounting in prison, even got a bachelor’s despite every obstacle thrown in his way. Prisoners aren’t allowed money, hardcovers, or the Internet. He’d tracked down a retired finance professor from a Quaker school through God knows how many letters and somehow managed to work his way through the credits. It sounded a little like my story, except a hundred times harder. The more I realized how similar we were, the angrier I got at him for being a fuckup. And at myself, I guess, for being too nice, for giving him a chance to work his way back into my life after all that had happened.

I studied him for a moment in the fluorescent light. He still had his hair the same way, a little long in the back, though not quite a mullet. It was gray now, but he looked healthy. He must have kept himself in shape while locked up. He still had the build of the sprinter he’d been in high school. A jagged scar ran from the corner of his mouth up his cheek. If you asked about it, he always said he cut himself shaving in prison, gave a nervous laugh, and changed the subject. The scratchy
Magnum, P.I.,
mustache I remembered from when I was a kid was still hanging on his lip, and he wore a lot of brightly colored zigzag Cosby sweaters. It looked like he’d just taken a time machine from 1994 to the present day, and for all intents and purposes he had.

Sixteen years is a long time in, and it showed. There was the ramen and the jumpiness. He didn’t like being touched. He’d stand in front of a door for a half a second, then laugh at himself; he was used to having to wait for someone else to open it. And the first time we grabbed food—we went to Wendy’s—he was completely overwhelmed by the menu, all the options. The guy had been told exactly what to eat and when to wake, sleep, walk, shit, and shower for sixteen years. He’d nearly forgotten how to make choices. You could tell he was in serious culture shock from the look on his face when somebody made a
Seinfeld
reference or told him to Google something or when he heard ringing noises coming from the pockets of people around him. He was usually the first to crack a joke about it, at least, and put everyone at ease.

He’d told me to meet him out here and then we’d go out for dinner, and he was a little cagey when I tried to find out where. I drove. He didn’t have a car, so he was basically trapped at the gas station, though Cartwright had told him if he could get the Cutlass running he could use it.

He directed me along the way. It was about a half-hour drive, and I think I figured out where we were going before I let myself acknowledge it. He was trying to engage me with old stories about Mom. They were classics, but he had picked the absolute worst subject to try to warm me up with.

I guess I could have told him as we got closer to the spot, but I didn’t have the heart. I pulled up to a block of red-brick buildings in Old Town, Fairfax.

It was gone: Sal’s. It was a great Italian place. Or it might have been terrible, for all I know. I was ten the last time I went there. The food didn’t really matter; more important, it was where we would go whenever the family had the money for a splurge. When my mother and father began dating, decades ago, they had often gone to Sal’s. They would take me and my brother there when we were young, then get nostalgic for their courting days and stand up and take a dance or two by the bar and embarrass their kids.

Jack and I would plunder the garlic bread and they’d be in their own world, like teenagers, laughing, throwing in the occasional dip or twirl, but mostly just sticking close, my mom resting her head on my dad’s shoulder.

It was our place. Once, anyway. Now it was a dog spa and a Starbucks.

My dad got out of the car and stood in front of where the restaurant had been. I stayed on the sidewalk nearby, and I thought he might break down. Just watching him, I felt a golf ball in my throat. I thought if I didn’t get out of there, I was going to start the waterworks myself.

“You all right, Dad?”

No answer. I was going to put my arm around him, but I didn’t want him to freak out again, so I just waited.

“Dad—”

“I’m fine, Mike.”

“Come on, I’ll take you someplace. There’s a decent steakhouse on Twenty-Nine.”

“No,” he said, his breath short and gravelly. He sounded like somebody had knocked the wind out of him.

“Please, I—”

“I don’t have time, Mike. I’ve got to get back by ten.” He sighed and shook his head, then laughed a little. “To make curfew, if you can believe that. It’s part of the parole. I’ve got to call this computer thing from my home phone.”

“You’ve got to eat, Dad.”

He rubbed his five o’clock shadow for a minute.

“Fuck it,” he said. “You want to go to Costco?”

Two minutes later we found ourselves at a metal table inside a giant floodlit warehouse. I’d thought I’d misheard him at first when he said this was where he wanted to eat, but all he wanted and had time for was a couple Italian sausages with peppers and onions, and a Coke. They were damn good. And there were only four things on the menu, which probably made it a little easier on him.

We took a stroll through the aisles, and I tried to figure out what the hell the old man was up to.

“This place…” my father said. He had the face—the awestruck smile—of someone visiting the Grand Canyon for the first time.

It started to make sense. Prison jobs, if you can get a paying one, start at twelve cents an hour. A tube of toothpaste costs five bucks in the commissary, and to get it he’d have to fill out a little form and wait a week for it to come back. To him, Costco, with the glare and the screaming kids and the housewives’ kamikaze carts, was heaven.

We talked a little as we rounded the frozen-foods corner. He’d been working on getting a shot at the CPA exam. He consistently aced the practice tests, but anybody who’d been convicted of fraud was barred. It would take years to provide “evidence of rehabilitation,” and the examiners still might shaft him, but he didn’t care. He was going to claw his way back up. He’d been trying to go to the library to get the phone books he needed to find the addresses and phone numbers of the state accounting boards so he could start sending letters and making calls, but going to a library meant missing a day of work, which was out. The guy’s life was like a pile of pickup sticks, each little thing weighing down another and weighed down by the next, a solutionless mess.

“You can look them up online, Dad.”

He looked at me a little askance.

“With the computer?”

“Yeah. On the Internet.”

“And I attach the Internet to the computer?”

I grimaced. “Kind of.” It was like explaining color to the blind, but I think I eventually got some of the basics across to him. I told him I had an old laptop he could have.

“You need anything else while we’re here?” I asked. “Stock up. Something besides ramen?” I figured that was part of why we came here, but I could see instantly I’d hurt his pride by implying he needed a handout. He swallowed it, though, just looked a little sad.

“No,” he said, “I’m fine. You’ve done more than your share, Mike. But thank you.”

He checked my watch. “I should get back,” he said. “It’s almost lights-out.”

Back at the trailer, he walked me inside and handed over an envelope. There was a thousand dollars in it, some twenties and tens, but mostly ratty-looking fives and singles.

“I’m going to make good,” he said. “On the debts, for Mom. I fucked up, bringing those Crenshaw sharks in. That should never have come down on you.”

“Keep it,” I said, and held out the envelope. He didn’t take it. “It’s paid off.”

“What?”

“The debt.”

“For how long?”

“Forever. It’s paid off. All of it,” I said.

“But what about school? You should take care of that first.”

“Paid off. Save your money, Dad.” I put the envelope down on the peeling veneer of the countertop.

I didn’t want to do this, to get angry, to deal with it all. I just wanted to put the past behind me. But the money, and hearing him talk about Mom being sick, and him thinking if he just repaid the debt, everything would be fine: it set me off.

Because every time he mentioned Mom, I would remember her, and I would try to picture her the way I liked to: making the sly face she always had when she was about to crack a joke. I’d fight to keep that in my mind, but her cheeks always hollowed out, and then the color disappeared from her skin. And I ended up thinking about her at the end, with this chilling rattle in her chest and her face all waxy and her mind gone on morphine, calling me by my father’s name sometimes, and sometimes asking me who I was and what the hell I was doing in her room.

And it’s poison, but you can’t help tasting it: What if I had somehow been able to get enough money to send her to a really good hospital? What if she’d had a decent husband and insurance? What if? Would she still be around?

“You can’t make good on what happened,” I said.

“Everything’s paid off?” he said, still puzzled. And then he straightened up to his full height and tried to act fatherly, like he was about to ask me if I used condoms or something.

“Listen, George Cartwright told me you’d been asking about the trade.”

Oh, fuck. Not this. Not now. George was a bit of an expert in B and E and could get you any tool you’d ever need. When I was at my dad’s first glad-you’re-out-of-prison party, I asked Cartwright if there was any way to crack the Sargent and Greenleaf padlock that Gould had on his locker at the Met Club. Just out of curiosity. And so apparently my dad thought I had paid off everything by robbing the fucking Pentagon or something and now he was going to play scared straight with me.

“There’s no free lunch, Mike. What are you into?”

“A good job. That I earned by being smart and busting my ass. Are you,
you,
going to tell me how to keep my nose clean?” I looked around the trailer, like it proved my point. “Unbelievable.”

“I’m just saying, Mike. Don’t get caught up being somebody’s bagman. You try to play the game, run with the big-timers, you can get burned. You can only trust your own people.”

“Dad, please.” I was trying to keep calm, to watch what I said. It would have been easy to kick the guy when he was down, to point out how pathetic he was. The truth was brutal enough. “Why don’t you knock off this bullshit honor-among-thieves thing. You think because you kept your mouth shut and did your time you’re some kind of fucking outlaw hero. You’re not—”

“Mike, I couldn’t—”

“Because you didn’t know how to play the game, Dad. You could have talked. You didn’t have to go in for twenty-four fucking years. To leave us high and dry. Who knows, maybe then Mom wouldn’t have—”

I stopped. But the damage was done.

He was just standing there, eyes shut and nodding his head like he was saying yes. I was waiting for him to snap, start sobbing or come after me, but he just stood with his eyes closed, breathing fast and short.

“Maybe,” he said. He started rubbing his jaw. “I did the best I knew how.” I thought he was going to cry, but he choked it back.

“I know I can’t make things right, but just don’t shut me out, okay?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Please, Mike.”

I took a few deep breaths and steeled myself. “I’ve got to go,” I said.