The Subject Steve: A Novel (5 page)

We ended the evening of his confession in a bear hug under boulevard lights. Maybe we were both thinking of our fathers there in our boozy embrace.

This last we didn't discuss.

I cried for the both of us now, big vodka weeps. I draped myself in Cudahy's track suit, those Valhallan warm-up duds, fell asleep while a bearded coot on the tube paid out a mine shaft fuse.

"This'll fix 'em," the coot cackled.

I dreamed I was the dialogue coach at the mine shaft location.

"No, really cackle it," I instructed the coot.

Later I dreamed my body had become a kind of cavern, too. Gypsy moths fluttered by the hundreds in my obsidian belly, drove clouds of wing dust up my stone throat.

Cudahy's dream likeness walked across the black pools and guano mounds of me. He had a gold Zippo, a can of my mother's HairNet spray. Wild gouts of fire rippled from his hands.

"Relax," said Cudahy. "You're a goner."

I woke up and reached for a water glass. The coaster beneath it unfolded, effloresced, a time-lapse flower.

Do you number among the Infortunate?

Did I number?

I numbered.

I dialed right down.

The driver of the van said his name was Old Gold. He was a hairy kid with big crooked hands. Stuck on, those hands looked, maybe just for our drive. The van appeared to be a patch job, too. Mismatched doors, a yard-sale grille, a gummy coat of grayish paint. Bucket seats were bolted down where a banquette must have been. There wasn't much else. Stacks of blankets, some clementine crates. The floor was rotted through in places. You could look between your shoes, see bits of road.

"Thanks for the ride," I said.

Old Gold said nothing, aimed us toward the tunnel mouth. These ancient gullets under the river tended to unnerve me. Too much speed for a burrow-lover. No warm dirt. I longed for the peace of an upward grade, us spit back to surface air, countryside, the towns. The van bucked through the greasy-tiled tube. Sandhogs, those were the men who built these things. I'd seen shows on the history station. Some got buried under bad walls with their bologna sandwiches. Progress, the crime. Progress, the cable premiere.

"Think she'll hold up?" I said.

"Who's that?"

"This baby," I said, patted the steering column.

"No touch," said Old Gold. "No touches."

"Sorry," I said.

We eased up into daylight and I noticed thin starbursts of scarring along his eyebrow, the near hinge of his jaw.

"Are you a boxer?" I said.

"When I was a kid," said Old Gold, "my father nailed an oak board up on the kitchen door. We had to hit it ninety-eight times with each hand before supper."

"Ninety-eight?"

"A hundred, I think the lesson would have been lost on us."

"I think I understand."

"I fought Clellon Beach once."

"Never heard of him."

"You were never in the Navy."

"That's true," I said.

"I knew it was true when I said it," said Old Gold. "I don't need your affirmation. I've been mothered by fire."

"What?"

"Nothing," said Old Gold.

We drove north in new silence. Factories into farmland into forests, forest towns. We made a pit stop near a place called Mapesburg. Old Gold bought gasoline and a twin-pack of cupcakes, laboratory pink.

"You're not a veganite, are you?" he said.

"A what?"

"Because these, I believe, originate in Alabama. You know, hydrogenated."

"These are fine," I said.

"Oh," said Old Gold. "You're one of those."

"One of what?"

"Fine, fine. Everything's fine, dear. No, trust me, I'm fine."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"So, you're an I-have-no-idea guy, too. Not an uncommon combo, come to think of it."

"Hey," I said. "Cut it out. This is crazy."

"You want to know what's crazy?" said Old Gold. "Climbing into the ring with Clellon Beach. That's fucking crazy."

He threw the van into gear, gunned into good, easy speed. I felt strangely calm. I'd always been a gifted passenger. Bliss in my boyhood had been the backseat, that foliate blur, the folds of my father's neck, the way my mother, our "navigator," twisted around with her maps and her snack mix, lowered each sodium-enhanced doodad into my hand with the gravity of ancient rite.

Our family had a tradition of bleak getaways. We were always lighting out for some cold rocky coast. My father would walk out on a seawall, stand there with his arms crossed in what I took to be the existential defiance of certain dust jacket photographs. He worked for a home appliance company, wrote and edited operating manuals for juicers and drills and electric ranges, so a more gloried relation to the word might have been on his mind. Or maybe he was mulling a plunge, icy respite from life's dips and dives. Eventually he'd amble-even haunted he was one of the few legitimate amblers I've ever known-back to where my mother and I shivered on a tartan blanket, her conjuring the tidal chop in charcoal on a window-sized sketch pad.

"All my pretty ones," my father would say. "Fuckeroo'd."

I'd laugh. It was a funny word.

"Fuckeroo'd," he'd say again, and it wasn't that funny anymore.

Maybe the man had a feeling for the coming whammies. Like my mother falling in love with his cousin Manny, a guy who tended to brag about his Caddie's "nigger-locks," and her moving out to Arizona to help him run a profitable vanity press, lending her editorial hand to such titles as
Tao Jones: A Poem Cycle
and
Favorite Recipes from the Mossad
.

It wasn't just that she'd ditched him for his kin, either. Worse for my father, I think, whose mightiest praise was contained in the word "pro"-"You know, that paperboy, the Mickelson kid, he's a real pro"-she and Manny were now at the service of the amateurs, the no-talent fatheads with money to burn.

"Manny's never even read a fucking book," said my father. "Now he makes them."

"Hey," I said, home from school for the weekend, "the Wright Brothers never flew until they built a plane."

"Your flip college-boy remarks aren't helping," said my father. "I'm in a lake of fire here."

Still, my mother was my mother. I couldn't just forget all the hugs, the kisses, the granola and caramels. I took no sides over the years, or, rather, took both sides for whatever gain there was for a grown man. A few times I flew out to Phoenix with Fiona and we'd all sip fresh lemonade by the swimming pool.

"Your father hates me," my mother said once. "It's eating him up, I can tell. It's terrible. He needs to move on. Honey, if Maryse ever leaves you, remember to move on. Don't let it eat you up."

"I'll take care of him, Grandma," said Fiona.

"Do you people know something I don't?" I said.

"Hypothetical," said my mother.

"Just a scenario," said Fiona.

This mother and daughter were like sisters sometimes, doting on each other, turning on each other, teaming up. It was quite a thing to see. When that desert sun got in my mother's eyes and she did a head-on with an oil truck, I saw a lot of the light go out of Fiona. Some people get the lesson a little too early.

We flew out for the service, sat by the pool one last time, drank lemonade from a powder mix. Manny had locked himself in his Cadillac. He was hidden, mostly, but we heard his sobs, saw his boat shoes poke up past the dash.

"So, that's it?" said Fiona. "The whole thing's just a pile of random bullshit?"

"Some people," I said, "believe there's a purpose to it all."

"What, you mean like Heaven?"

"Some people," I said.

"Those would be the idiots, right?"

"I was raised to believe that those were the idiots, yes," I said. "But who knows?"

"Not fucking Grandma," said Fiona.

"Nobody can be sure," I said. "Have you ever heard of Pascal's wager? He said you might as well believe in God because if you don't, and God exists, you're screwed."

"Is that in the
Pensees
?"

"The what?" I said.

"He sounds like a chickenshit," said Fiona.

My father lost his mind with grief for the wife he'd already lost. Then he found another wife. I guess I wasn't as welcoming to Wilhelmina as I could have been. Maybe I begrudged him his new stab at happiness. I'd gotten used to the shell of the man and didn't necessarily wish the man back. It all came to some kind of head, though I can't quite remember what kind. I do recall my father's hand on my neck and a sliver of boiled leek on his lip. It's that father-son stuff. So much moist, fierce quivering muddies the picture sometimes.

My father moved to Pittsburgh with Winnie and now I got cards in the card seasons, snapshots of his duplex, his new felonious brood. Sometimes Fiona would visit him, file reports.

"He's deeply involved with a pen nib collector's club," she told me once. "The club has religious overtones but he won't reveal them. His sons-these would be my uncles, I gather-drop cinder blocks from highway overpasses. Winnie, as you know, is much younger, Amway pretty. She told me I was a winter girl in autumn colors."

"Dad," I said. "Oh, Dad."

"That's just what I always say," said Fiona.

"Feels good, right?"

I hadn't told my father I was dying. I was afraid he'd say what he always said by the seawall.

"My dad didn't have anything like a punching board," I said to Old Gold now. "He tried to make me tough in other ways."

"Funny, I don't remember inviting you to compare our childhoods. Anyway, there's nothing to compare. I've been mothered by fire."

"Why do you keep saying that?" I said.

"Bears repeated repetition."

I looked out the window, watched the world unspool. Guardrails, guardrail rivets, mile markers, thruway kill. We were in high country and I was glad of it, patches of spruce and plowed fields in the valley below us, dark hills ahead. Up here, all this majesty, maybe you could just convince your flesh to reconsider.

I took out the brochure for the Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption. The man who'd answered the phone the day before had been rather brusque. I heard wet noises, the snap of form-fitting rubber.

"Director here," he said.

We made vapid talk about upstate counties. Mostly I just listened to his voice. He had a good one, easy, kind of reedy, like a talk show host people go out of their way to persuade you is smart. I started to trust it, that voice, trust him. I wanted to fill up the void with my trust.

"Look," I said. "I don't know who you are or what you do, but I won't beat around the bush. You say you have the cure. If it's rat guts under my armpits, I'm willing to give it a whirl. Crystals and chanting, praying, tonal healing, whatever it is, I'll do it. I've read your brochure, and I've got to say, in my best days I'd be laughing my ass off. But things are a little different now. Good old Western know-how seems to have shit the bed. Everyone says I'm a goner but no one can tell me why. So, now, I ask you, a total stranger, what should I do? Tell me. Please. Consider me your willing victim."

"I think you have the wrong number."

"Is this Heinrich?"

"This is the director."

"May I speak to Heinrich?"

"You are speaking to Heinrich. You are doing nothing else but speaking to Heinrich."

"You wrote me a note."

"Yes, I did. I saw you on the E.T.E."

"The what?"

"The electronic thought eliminator."

"The electronic-"

"The television."

"You wrote me a note. Someone brought it to my house."

"That would be Naperton."

"Okay, Naperton brought the note. All I know is that you said you had the cure. I've got it right here. 'I have the cure.-H.' I deduced that the H stood for Heinrich."

"Wonderful deduction," said Heinrich. "You really are a wonderful deducer."

"I'll let that slide," I said.

"Of course you will."

"How about we get real for a minute," I said.

"I'd advise against that."

"What's the cure, Doc?" I said.

"I'm sorry," said Heinrich. "But I'm not a doctor, and, as I may have stated earlier, you have the wrong number. You seem to be in search of a miracle. I don't traffic in miracles. And I don't associate with victims."

"Then what do you do, if I may be so bold as to ask?"

"Bold? Don't be ridiculous. All I'm sensing from you is a man who doesn't want to die. That's the deadliest condition of all."

"I've had my fill of philosophers," I said. "I guess you're right, I do have the wrong number. I thought you wanted to help."

We hung there for a while.

"Wait," said Heinrich, finally. "It's not your fault you're so faulty."

"Thanks for that."

"There'll be a supply van coming back to the Center from the city tomorrow. You can catch a ride."

"How much is this going to cost me?" I said.

"Cost you?" said Heinrich. "Why, everything."

"Maybe I should tell you now, I'm broke."

"I understand," said Heinrich. "It's not a problem. Money helps, but it's not a requirement. I'm talking about everything else."

"Sounds like you've got a cult up there."

"Everything's a cult, son. If it's not a cult it's a man sitting alone in a room."

"And in return I get cured?"

"Possibly. Or perhaps what you get is a brief moment of recognition before you pass into nothingness, which technically one cannot really pass into, it being a nonstate, but which I phrase this way for practical reasons."

"Given a choice, I'll take the cure," I said.

"Given a choice, he says," said Heinrich.

Now the sun was just another money shot behind the mountain tops. Old Gold bore down on the wheel.

"I hate twilight," he said.

"How long have you been at the Center?" I said.

"Three years. I'm in the 'Lives' part of the
Tenets
, even. 'Old Gold Speaks.' Wrote it myself, except for the spelling. Estelle did the spelling."

"Three years," I said. "Long time."

"Is it? I wouldn't know. I know that if I blink I'll miss infinity."

"That's deep," I said.