Repairman Jack [07]-Gateways (6 page)

The colors of the buildings struck him between the eyes. Standard granite gray had been banished. The palette here was way heavy on the pastels, especially turquoise and coral. The buildings looked like molded sherbet—orange, raspberry, key lime, lemon, watermelon, casaba, and maybe a few as yet untried flavors. He spotted a mall done up in what might be called rotten-lemon-rind yellow.

Further south he passed one car dealership after another, every make from every nation that exported cars, all interspersed with AutoZones and Midas Mufflers, Goodyear Tire Centers, and dozens of no-name auto parts shops. People must be nuts about cars down here.

He realized he was hungry. He saw a place called Joanie’s Blue Crab Café and pulled off the road. The place was pretty much empty—this was off-season, after all—and decorated with local crafts. Paintings by local artists studded the wall. The other three patrons were glued to the TV where the Weather Channel was showing green, yellow, and orange swirls that were supposed to be tropical storm Elvis. They were asking when the hell they were going to get rain.

An air conditioner or two might have expanded the comfort zone in Joanie’s, but that would have detracted from the funky Florida ambiance. Jack hung in there under the twirling ceiling fans and asked the waitress for a local brew. She brought him something called Ybor Gold and it tasted so damn good he had another along with a crabcake sandwich that was out of this world. This lady could open on the Upper East Side and clean up.

Belly full, Jack stepped outside. Elvis might be dumping tons of water on Jacksonville and the rest of north Florida, but down here, though the sky was speckled with clouds, none of them looked like the raining kind. The forecast was bone dry. Dry at least as far as precipitation went, but the air itself lay thick with humidity and clung to his skin like a sloppy wet kiss from a least-favorite aunt.

Back in the car he searched around the radio dial for some music— rock, preferably—but all he found was country or folks speaking Spanish or sweaty-voiced preachers shouting about
Jay-sus
.

If you want to believe in
Jay-sus
, he thought, fine. If you want me to believe in
Jay-sus
, fine too; you can want anything you wish. But do you have to shout?

He finally found a rock station but it was playing Lou Reed. He quickly hit SCAN. Through the years Jack had come to the conclusion that Lou Reed was a brilliant performance artist whose act was a lifelong portrayal of a singer-songwriter who couldn’t carry a tune or write a melody.

The tuner stopped on a dance station. Jack didn’t dance, the beat was monotonous, and he’d arrived in the middle of a woman doing a double-time version of “Boys of Summer.” He bailed when a cheesy organ attempted to duplicate Kootch Kortchmar’s riffs from the original. What had Don Henley ever done to deserve that?

Next stop, one of the country stations—“Gator Country One-Oh-One Point Nine!” He liked some country, mostly the Hank Williams—Senior, preferably—Buck Owens, Mel Tillis brand of mournful nobody-loves-me-but-my-dog-and-he’s-got-fleas-so-pass-that-whiskey-bottle-over-here-if-you-please ballad. He lasted maybe fifteen minutes on 101.9. Three songs, three singers, and they all sounded exactly the same. Was that the awful truth about modern country music? The one they’d kill to keep? One lead singer performing under a gazillion different names? Jack wasn’t sure about that part, but he had no doubt that the same guy had been singing backup harmony on all three songs.

Okay. Can the radio.

He saw a sign for Novaton and hung a right off US 1 onto a road that ran due west, straight as a latitude line. Looked like someone had given a guy a compass and a paver filled with asphalt and said, “Go west, young man! Go west!” It made sense. No hills or valleys to skirt. The only rises in the road he’d seen since leaving the airport had been overpasses.

He checked out the sickly palms and pines flanking the road. He’d worked with a landscaper as a teen and knew northeast greenery, but even healthy these trees would be a mystery to him. Dead gray fronds lay on the shoulder like roadkill while some skittered onto the pavement when the breeze caught them.

All the houses along the road were squat little ranches in overgrown yards, with carports instead of garages; they hunkered against the earth as if hiding from something. Every once in a while a warehouse would soar to one-and-a-half stories, but that was an aberration. The favored exterior shade seemed to be a sick green like oxidized copper, and here and there a pizza-size DTV dish would poke up from a roof. He’d been expecting lots of red-tile roofs but they seemed a rarity; most were standard asbestos shingles, pretty threadbare in many cases. Oddly, the shabbiest houses seemed to sport the most magnificent palms in their front yards.

Even if he didn’t know much about tropical or subtropical trees, he did know banyans; their distinctive aerial roots gave them away. The road to Novaton was loaded with them. In some stretches banyan phalanxes lined each side of the street and interwove their branches above the pavement, transforming a bumpy secondary road into a wondrous, leafy green tunnel.

He recognized a couple of coconut palms, only because of the yellowing nuts hanging among the fronds. Plants that in New York grew only indoors in carefully watered and fertilized pots flourished like weeds down here.

He passed a tall white water tower emblazoned with the town name and shaped like one of those old WWI potato-masher hand grenades the Germans used to toss at the Allies. At its base lay a dusty soccer field flanked by a high school, a middle school, and a senior center.

He passed a feed store. Feed what? He hadn’t seen any cattle.

Abruptly he was in Novaton and quickly found the center of town—the whole four square blocks of it. The directions from the hospital told him how to find it from there. Two right turns off Main Street and he came to a three-story cantaloupe-colored brick building of reasonable vintage. The sign out front told him he’d reached his destination.

NOVATON COMMUNITY HOSPITAL

A MEMBER OF DADE COUNTY MEDICAL SYSTEMS

He parked in a corner of the visitor lot next to some sad looking cacti and headed through the stifling late-afternoon heat toward the front door. An arthritic old man in the information kiosk gave him his father’s room number on the third floor.

Minutes later Jack was standing outside room 375. The door stood open. He could see the foot of the bed, the twin tents of the patient’s feet under the sheet. The rest was obscured by a privacy curtain. He sensed no movement in the room, no one there besides the patient.

The patient…his father…Dad.

Jack hesitated, advancing one foot across the threshold, then drawing it back.

What am I afraid of?

He knew. He’d been putting this off—not only his arrival, but thinking about this moment as well—since he’d started the trip. He didn’t want to see his father, his only surviving parent, laid out like a corpse. Alive sure, but only in the bodily sense. The man inside, the sharp-though-nerdy-middle-class mind, the lover of gin, sticky-sweet desserts, bad puns, and ugly Hawaiian shirts, was unavailable, walled off, on hold, maybe forever. He didn’t want to see him like that.

Yeah, well that’s just too damn bad for me, isn’t it, he thought as he stepped into the room and marched to the foot of the bed. And stared.

Jeez, what happened to him? Did he shrink?

He’d expected bruises and they were there in abundance: a bandage on the left side of his head, a purple goose egg on his forehead, and a pair of black eyes. What shocked him was how small his father looked in that bed. He’d never been a big man, maintaining a lean and rangy build even through middle age, but now he looked so flat and frail, like a miniature, two-dimensional caricature tucked into a bed-shaped envelope.

Besides the IV bag hanging over the bed, running into him, another bag hung below the mattress, catching the urine coming out of him. Spikes marched in an even progression along the glowing line on the cardiac monitor.

Maybe this wasn’t him. Jack looked for familiar features. He couldn’t see much of the mouth as it hung open behind the transparent green plastic of the oxygen mask. The skin was tanned more deeply than he’d ever remembered, but he recognized the age spots on his forehead, and the retreating gray hairline. His blue eyes were hidden behind closed lids, and his steel-rimmed glasses—the only time his father took off his glasses was to sleep, shower, or trade them for prescription sunglasses—were gone.

But yeah, this was him.

Jack felt acutely uncomfortable standing here, staring at his father. So helpless…

They’d seen very little of each other in the past fifteen years, and when they had, it was all Dad’s doing. His earliest memories of home were ones of playing catch in the backyard when he’d been all of five years old and the mitt was half the size of his torso, standing in a circle with his father and sister Kate and brother Tom, tossing the ball back and forth. Dad and Kate would underhand it to him so he could catch it; Tom always tried to make him miss.

His lasting, growing-up impressions were of a slim, quiet man who rarely raised his voice, but when he did, you listened; who rarely raised his hand, but when he did, a single, quick whack on the butt made you see the error of your ways. He’d worked as a CPA for Arthur Anderson, then moved—decades before the Enron scandal—to Price Waterhouse where he stayed until retirement.

He wasn’t a showy sort, never the life of the party, never had a flashy car—he liked Chevys—and never moved from the west Jersey house he and Mom had bought in the mid-fifties. Then, without warning, he’d up and sold it last fall and moved to Florida. He was a middle-class man with a middle-class income and middle-class mores. He hadn’t changed history and no one but the surviving members of his family and steadily diminishing circle of old friends would note or mourn his passing, yet Jack would remember him as a man who always could, as Joel McCrea had put it in
Ride the High Country
, enter his house justified.

Jack stepped around to the left side of the bed, the one opposite the IV pole. He pulled up a chair, sat, and took his father’s hand. He listened to his breathing, slow and even. He felt he should say something but didn’t know what. He’d heard that some people in comas can hear what’s going on around them. It didn’t make much sense, but it couldn’t hurt to try.

“Hey, Dad. It’s me. Jack. If you can hear me, squeeze my hand, or move a finger. I—”

His father said something that sounded like “Brashee!” The word startled Jack.

“What’d you say, Dad? What’d you say?”

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and saw a heavyset young woman in a white coat enter with a clipboard in her hand. She had a squat body, café au lait skin, short dark hair; a stethoscope was draped around her neck.

“Are you a relative?” she said.

“I’m his son. Are you his nurse?”

She smiled briefly—very briefly. “No, I’m his doctor.” She put out her hand. “Dr. Huerta. I was the neurologist on call when your father was brought to the ED last night.”

Jack shook her hand. “Jack. Just call me Jack.” He pointed to his father. “He just spoke!”

“Really? What did he say?”

“Sounded like ‘brashee.’”

“Does that mean anything to you?”

“No.”

And then he thought, Maybe he heard my voice and was trying to say,
Black sheep.

“He’s been vocalizing gibberish. It’s not unusual in his state.”

He studied Dr. Huerta for a few seconds. She didn’t look old enough to be in med school, let alone a specialist.

“What
is
his state? How’s he doing?”

“Not as well as we’d like. His coma score is seven.”

“Out of ten?”

She shook her head. “We use the Glasgow Coma Score here. The lowest, or worst score, is three. That’s deep coma. The best is fifteen. We go by eyes, verbalization, and movement. Your father scores a one on his eyes—they remain closed at all times—and a two on vocalization, which means he makes meaningless sounds like you just heard now and then.”

“That’s a total of three,” Jack said.

This wasn’t sounding too good.

“But his motor response is a four, meaning he withdraws from painful stimuli.”

“What kind of painful stimuli? I won’t be finding cigarette burns on his soles, will I?”

Dr. Huerta’s eyes widened. “Good heavens, no! What on earth do you think—?”

“Sorry, sorry.” Jeez, lady. Chill. “Just kidding.”

“I should hope so,” she said with an annoyed look. “We use a special pin to test motor responses. Your father’s score of four brings his total to seven. Not great, but it could be worse.” She checked her clip board. “His reflexes, however, are intact, his vitals are good, so are his labs. His brain MRI showed no stroke or subdural hemorrhage, and his LP was negative for blood.”

“LP?”

“Lumbar puncture. Spinal tap.”

“No blood. That’s good, right?”

She nodded. “No signs of intracranial bleeding. His heart’s been acting up, though.”

“Whoa,” Jack said, jolted by the remark. “His heart? He’s always had a good heart.”