B008J4PNHE EBOK (42 page)

The other two watched from the door. Christine explained to Sam that there had been an incident with Bunny involving the driveway and a reversing car. Somehow the concept of gangrene had entered the child’s head, and the stuffed animal was now expiring slowly and in agony.

“Logan’s father,” Christine said, “is useless in these kinds of situations. No imagination.” Her arms were crossed, bunching her bracelets and bangles up to the stars tattooed on her elbows. “God, don’t even let me start.”

Sam overheard Booth say, “Hmm. Yes, yes. I can see that.”

“Look at your father. It’s not this big effort for him to relate to her. He’s patient. He doesn’t try to reason with her, you know? Drag her kicking and screaming. He goes along with it. Which is why she adores him. You can’t expect a little kid to ‘tough it out.’ Because she’s not tough. She’s a little kid.” Christine gnawed at one of her thumbnails. “I bet you had a wonderful childhood.”

“I did. It was like Christmas,” said Sam. “Every day.”

The engineer rolled her eyes.

Next door to the studio was a bright, open kitchen area with a long dining room table. The old man swept off the morning papers and briskly set aside a couple of cereal bowls. He glared around; his eyebrows flared.

Sam bit back a laugh.

“Now, listen. If there’s to be any chance of saving Bunny’s life, I’m going to need a sharp knife, duct tape, cotton balls, a jar of ether, and above all else:
complete silence from all those present
.”

When the items were brought—a bottle of hydrogen peroxide was found to serve as ether—Logan kissed the stuffed animal and gingerly set it on the table. The creature’s right leg was dirty and hanging from threads at the seam. It was a medium-size bunny with black eyes, furred in tight beige coils. The child’s lower lip trembled, but she was brave and didn’t weep.

Booth scrubbed up at the kitchen sink and made a production of
holding his arms wide while Sam helped him into a red apron (a decal on the pocket showed an anthropomorphic egg in a chef’s hat, frying bacon). The old man stepped to the surgical table where Bunny lay beneath a yellow dishrag.

“Nurse,” he announced. “The scalpel—”

Sam told his father he had never seen such a heartwarming amputation.

They were in the car, traveling back to Hasbrouck. After amputating the stuffed animal’s leg at the hip, his father had patched the bunny with a massive wad of duct tape. To stem the risk of infection, he had prescribed a twice-daily regimen of potpourri misting.

“Do you suppose Bunny will live, Booth?” Sam asked.

“He’ll live. Logan doesn’t strike me as a macabre child. If she gives him his potpourri, he should recover nicely.”

“He’ll certainly never hop again, though. Is that any kind of life for a bunny?”

“Bunny never hopped before. He’s a stuffed toy.” Booth grumbled, playing along. “His sole purpose is to be loved by that little girl, and his handicap won’t interfere with that.”

“She’ll probably grow up and marry a one-legged man.”

“She’ll probably grow up and marry a damned dashing surgeon. You get this from your mother, God rest her soul. She loved to razz me, too. That’s fine, I can take it.” He thumped his cane on the floor of the rental. “But I really think you’ll like this movie, the French one. Here’s the nut of the thing: why is this man who is so dull—almost belligerently dull—suddenly irresistible to women? I can’t stress enough, there’s nothing even vaguely impressive about him. The man used to be writer—which makes sense, because writers are the dullest people on earth besides bureaucrats—but this man, our protagonist, he came down with a terrible block, so now he bags groceries. And yet women are fucking him left and right. Fucking him insensate! Parisian women of every stripe are absolutely putting this schnook through his paces—”

“Okay, I’ll see it! Jesus.” It might even be good. Booth’s taste in films—the ones he liked to watch as opposed to the ones that he appeared in—was
not inevitably horrible. However, as well as they were getting along, his father’s musings and reflections on matters sexual nevertheless produced in Sam a feeling similar to that of being nosed in the crotch by a big, slobbery dog.

“Excellent.
Quel Beau Parleur
! We should see it while you’re here. It’s playing in Kingston.”

A shuttered farmer’s stall slipped by on one side of the road. The steeple of Hasbrouck’s Catholic church sprouted over a rise. The rain had recommenced, falling in fat, irregular drops. Sam’s cell phone jiggled around in the cupholder.

“Maybe you should answer it,” said Booth. “If you’d like, you can pull over and I can get out while you talk.”

“That’s okay.” Sam wondered how mad Tess was at this point, if her wrath could be quantified. Then he wondered if it wasn’t cowardice that was keeping him from answering but the likelihood that once he did pick up, and she did tell him off, that was the last time he’d ever hear from her. His hand started to drift up to his cheek, but he redirected it to ten on the wheel. At least her other self was off enjoying herself with his other self. Where would they get together for a proper date, those alternate-reality lovebirds? If Sam’s alternate-reality self were on the ball he’d suggest they go to a Segway store and test-drive one. Sam thought Tess’s alternate-reality self would love that. The phone beeped another missed call.

Sam abruptly wished he could drop a brick on his other self’s head, drag the smug prick into a panic room, seal it, and leave him to mummify. Some guys didn’t appreciate what they had.

“You’re thinking about her, aren’t you,” said Booth.

“Yeah.” To Sam’s surprise, the observation—especially coming from Booth—didn’t bother him.

His father made an empathetic sound and, unexpectedly, didn’t prod, or advise, or pontificate. He just let the thing be. It was the kind of steady, unexcited reaction a person wanted from his father; the kind of reaction that implied sympathy but, more important, confidence that Sam would figure it out. It was, therefore, highly un-Booth-like. He wasn’t accustomed to his father being so—not normal, that wasn’t possible—acceptable.

“What is this about Mina pepper-spraying two people?” his father asked.

“I don’t know what you want me to tell you, Booth. It’s what happened. She went on a rampage.”

“Did they deserve it?”

In the hush of the car and the odd peace of the moment, Sam could summon a degree of sympathy for his sister’s actions. While the vagrant’s intentions might not have been violent, the guy had a large knife, and it was a second’s decision. As for the attack on his roommate, although Mina obviously overreacted to a minor annoyance, if you did happen to be in possession of a canister of pepper spray, Sam could see how it might be hard to resist using it on Wesley. “Maybe. But she’s on the edge of something, you know? And Sandra nearly burned down their apartment. The whole thing’s a mess.”

Booth grunted in an authoritative way. “I’ll fix it,” he said.

“What?” Sam laughed. “Mina? You’ll fix Mina?”

“The situation,” said his father.

“Okay. How?”

Booth admitted that he wasn’t sure yet. Something about the set of his lips and the quiet, half-there quality of his voice caused Sam to withhold a further expression of disbelief; it wasn’t like his father to be so contained.

They were downtown again.

“Where the Coffee Shop was, Samuel,” Booth directed. “That’s our next stop.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

Before they left the studio, Christine had given Booth a couple of bulging plastic sacks. The contents—clothing—were intended for a group, Booth said, of “less fortunate local children.” But when they pulled up across the street from the structure that once housed the Hasbrouck Nickelodeon, what Sam saw were some street people loitering under the eave.

Subsequent to its incarnation as the Coffee Shop, the theater building initially passed into the town’s hands. The details had never been clear to Sam, but his rough sense was that once Allie gave up the café, Booth defaulted somehow, or was forced to surrender it for unpaid taxes, something like that. The town used it as a warehouse for the VFD and other local entities, then eventually sold it. For a short while after that, it was a restaurant, and later, it was totally abandoned for a few years. Now it was once again a café.

While the marquee had vanished, the building otherwise appeared relatively unchanged: glass double doors, the brick facade with cement rectangles for eyes where poster frames once hung. The only thing missing was Allie, her hair tied up in a purple bandanna, poking her head out the door to remind the smokers to pick up after themselves. “Hey, scuzzy,” she’d say if she caught a person walking away from a butt on the sidewalk, “you forgot something.”

What was more troubling, Sam wondered, how a place disappeared, or how it stayed the same? A veteran of the Great War returns to the buried trenches of the Eastern Front where his comrades died and stands in a field in the sun, while grass licks at his belt buckle, and it is fantastic for him to imagine the smoke and the mud and the thundering nights. Nevertheless: regrowth is a stage of the natural cycle. Everything flesh and bone is eventually fertilizer; we know this.

How are you supposed to be old in a place that knew you when you were young? It was disorienting, like shooting a film out of sequence, the end at the beginning or the beginning at the end.

A wooden placard on a hook clacked in the wind. The placard bore the name of the building’s latest iteration:
SMOKE ME DRINK ME
. It was a hookah bar as well as a café.

Many of the bedraggled youths—tank tops, holey shorts, sandals—who clustered around the door were visibly unwashed to such a degree that they appeared singed. One girl strummed a guitar with a splintered casing. Another member of the group, a boy in checkered pajama pants, was stretching in slow motion and making circular motions with his hands, as if assessing the strength of unseen barriers. A few were smoking cigarettes. Present as well were several large, grinning, and collarless dogs that circulated among the company, nosing hands and sniffing pavement.

Booth promised that he would be only a moment. Sam watched his father walk across the street—the old man still led with his shoulders, but it was obvious that the huge body exerted a drag. His cane worked like an oar, appearing to pull him forward.

A lanky girl with chopsticks protruding from her nest of dreadlocks hooted and clapped and jumped up and down. She was barefoot. Some of the others clapped, too. Sam’s father bowed slightly to the group and conducted a flourish with his cane and approached another
young woman. Tattooed across this young woman’s face was a spiderweb, which made her features appear soldered together, yet she was startlingly pretty. Her hair was free and auburn-colored, and there was an intimation of mischief in the little smile she wore in the middle of her checkerboard face. She threw her arms around Booth.

They conversed for a minute or two, and he handed her the plastic bags. He bellowed something to the entire group, exhorting them, and jabbed his stick in the air. The young woman with the tattoo began to share out long-sleeved T-shirts and windbreakers taken from the bags.

Unable to hear the words, Sam put his own subtitles to the scene:
Ladies and gentlemen! Step right up and set your gaze upon the eighth wonder: Booth Dolan
as
a Human Being! Wonder at his sensitivity! Marvel at his responsiveness! Entirely stomach cancer–free!

The phone rattled in the cupholder again. He felt an urge to answer it. In their brief time together, Tess had demonstrated a gift for observation. Maybe she could explain what had possessed his father.

 ■ ■ ■ 

They were homeless, the “local children” who hung around outside the hookah bar–cum–café; or near homeless, squatting or splitting one-bedroom apartments four and five ways. Without doubt, there were drugs involved and probably a certain amount of petty crime, Booth said. College towns tended to draw such periphery youths. Shut out of secondary education by poverty, they were nevertheless attracted to its freedom and opportunity and romance, so they coalesced around campus hangouts.

Hasbrouck had taken a particular dislike to its bunch, his father claimed, having returned to Sam’s rental car and settled back into the passenger seat. The letters section of the weekly newspaper was a catalog of grievances against them, about the way they cluttered the street, and how their collection of stray dogs frightened pedestrians, and what they portended for the future, shiftless, stinking addicts destined to gobble at the public trough and leech from the public goodwill.

“And it’s really over-the-top, in my opinion.” As he related this information, Booth gradually became more exercised, but here he leveled off. “Because you know, they’re not any different than the young men and women with whom I made
New Roman Empire
. They’re not shiftless. They’re disenfranchised. They’re searching. They’re waiting for their
lives to start. For the lights to go down, the curtains to open, and the world to come up and the excitement to begin. They’re underfed and uninspired, that’s all. I don’t know why people can’t recognize that.”

“Sure,” said Sam, who thought he understood something about the disillusionment of the young. He’d made a movie about it.

“I got to know a few of them, became friendly with them, and now I try to make a little time whenever I can, speak with them, encourage them, hand around a few dollars. With summer over and the cooler months coming on, I thought it was time to bring them some half-decent warm clothes. I mean, look at that girl, running around on the sidewalk in her bare feet!” He threw a hand in the direction of the dreadlocked girl.

A picture of Mina came to Sam’s mind. There couldn’t have been more than two or three years between her and the barefoot girl, if that.

“That child doesn’t need to pay more taxes, she needs our support! She needs some damned shoes, for God’s sake!” Booth thumped his cane on the floor of the car. “It offends me, Samuel, how many so-called adults in this country reflexively think the worst of the young. These Tea Party people, for instance. They think everyone else is as greedy and fearful as they are, when it’s the exact opposite. Whatever happened to optimism? Whatever happened to generosity? Never mind generosity, whatever happened to decency? Whatever happened to curiosity? Engage with the future of your species, you cranky old shits!” He thumped the cane again.