Straight Man (53 page)

I feel for her, but I also wish my fiction-writing students were here. Angelo could teach them something about the nature of suspense. He’s had this narrative shotgun cocked, safety off, for a long time, but he’s a patient storyteller. He’s got time slowed down, and even though we’ve known from the beginning of the story that he’s going to pull the trigger, we’re still waiting to find out if he will. Real time, on the other hand, is moving along briskly. We’re already halfway home to Allegheny Wells, the Pennsylvania countryside sliding by gracefully, well outside the field of Angelo’s narrative vision.

“So finally I get to three, which I say loud enough for even a seven-foot Negro with no ears to hear. And here’s LeBrother. He hasn’t moved a goddamn inch. And I’m thinking, What’s wrong with this kid? Does he have a fucking death wish? Because if he does, he’s come to the right place. But I’m also thinking, You’ve got to admire the kid’s balls, even if he is confused in his head. And the more I look at him, the more I see he does look like Raschid, and I think maybe he
is
the kid’s brother after all. I mean, he could be, right? I don’t know if Raschid has a brother, but he could have, and if he does, this could be the kid. He might just be an exceptionally tall, impolite, confused, deaf, big Negro brother. How the hell do I know? Right this second I almost wish I didn’t have the shotgun in my hands, because I’ve got this weird feeling that it’s holding me instead of me holding it. Stupid, I know, but that’s how it felt.”

“I bet,” I say, because his voice has fallen and he seems to be inviting comment.

But something about the way I say this pisses Angelo off. The very sight of me has mildly pissed Angelo off for about twenty-five years, so I’m not surprised. He doesn’t much care for educated, professional people of any stripe, and my particular stripe elicits in Angelo his deepest misgivings. On his misgivings meter, I’m right up there with seven-foot-tall Negroes.

“
You
bet,” he repeats. “Let me tell you something, pally. You live where I live, nine times out of ten, you’re glad you’ve got the shotgun. You only regret
not
having the shotgun once. After that, no more regrets for you. You’ve already had your last regret.”

Lily’s grip on the steering wheel has tightened, and in her white knuckles I see a truth I’ve long known—that the world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

“Where was I?” Angelo wants to know.

“Three,” I remind him.

“Right,” he continues. “So here’s big LeBrother and here’s me, and neither of us back off an inch. This much I learned as a cop. If you aren’t going to use a gun, don’t even take it out. You aren’t going to use it, it’s worse than useless. I know better, but this is the situation I’ve got myself into with this seven-foot Negro. Truth?” Angelo pauses here, as if to suggest he’s about to reveal something shameful about himself. He can barely bring himself to say it. “I don’t want to shoot this kid. I don’t know what he’s doing still standing there, but there he is, big as life, after I’ve said three. The two eight-footers are now flat on their bellies on the sidewalk with their hands over their ears, praying out loud. They’ve gone from give-us-the-money-you-crazy-old-bastard to Sweet-Jesus-Sweet-Jesus-Sweet-Jesus in the amount of time it took me to say a Hail Mary after confession during baseball season, and I’m thinking, There’s two things I can’t do here. I cannot cut this stubborn, confused LeBrother in half. Don’t ask me why. I just can’t. I’m taking my life in my hands if I don’t, but I figure, so be it. I mean, maybe the world won’t stop if there’s one less giant Negro kid in it, but on the other hand, I don’t see it slowing down all that much if Angelo Caprice stops breathing all of a sudden. The same thing applies to me as to him, the difference being that I’m seventy-three next year and this kid is—what?—twenty? I mean, if I’m twenty or thirty years younger, maybe I look at it differently, right? Even if I’m fifty, I got good, useful years left. At fifty, I’m still strapping on a forty-five and going out in the morning and coming home at night if I’m lucky. But I’m seventy-three and I’m kidding myself if I think I’m still useful. Most days I get up, I don’t even shave. Her mother would be ashamed, but I figure, Who the hell’s gonna see me? If I go out, I shave, if I don’t, fuck it.”

“Finish your story, Dad,” Lily says quietly. “We’re almost home and we’re not bringing this story into the house, okay?”

“Whatever you say, little girl,” Angelo agrees. “The judge says I gotta do as I’m told or go back to jail, so boss your old man around all
you want. Go ahead. Only not too much, okay? Jail wasn’t so bad. Anyhow. On the one hand, I can’t shoot this kid. On the other, I know I can’t
not
shoot this gun. I’ve said I’m going to shoot it, I’ve gone back into the house to get it, I’ve brought it out and showed it to them, I’ve stressed its importance. Not shooting this gun is no longer an option. You tell somebody you’re going to count to three, by the time you get to three, you better be prepared to do something very like what you said you’d do, or the next time you say you’re going to count to three, you’re going to have a hard fucking time getting anyone to take you seriously. So I don’t have a lot of room to wiggle here. Maybe I never should have counted to three. I don’t know. But now that I’m here, now that I’m at three, I no longer have what you’d call a wide range of options. Also not a lot of time to consider the ones I do have, because after you say three, you got exactly one beat, the same amount of time it took you to get from two to three is the time you now got. The next sound you hear after three is not supposed to be four. It’s supposed to be bang. You don’t hear bang, all bets are off.”

We have arrived at Allegheny Estates now, and Lily makes the turn up our hill. There’s no cop directing traffic, no traffic to direct, no sign of the media. The William Henry Devereaux, Jr., story has run out of gas, now that the true duck slayer has been identified. “Go slow,” I say to Lily. There are several newly planted spring gardens in our neighbors’ yards. Maybe I’ll spot Occam excavating one of them.

“So,” Angelo says, winding down now. “In the time I was given, I arrived at an imperfect solution.”

“Oh, God,” I hear Lily say, and at first I think it’s in response to her father’s characterizing as “imperfect” his lunatic compromise—his raising the shotgun and discharging it into the porch roof, bringing the whole decrepit structure down on himself and LeBrother, so that the neighbors had to dig the two of them out from under the rubble. But then I see a man seated on the steps of our deck, it appears, crying. I don’t immediately recognize him as Finny, because he’s dressed in simple slacks and a button-down shirt, not his usual white suit.

My first thought is that Finny must be weeping over his own academic fate. Lily has told me this morning that according to
The Rear View
, the faculty, after learning that Dickie Pope had been canned and that Jacob Rose, a man they’d known and respected for years, would be
the new CEO, voted overwhelmingly not to strike, a decision that defeated the position urged by their own union, not to mention the interests of those faculty like Finny who would be directly affected by next year’s budget cuts. In this context I am not surprised to see Finny awaiting the return of his longtime adversary. No doubt he’s concluded, in the naive way of career academics, that a shifting wind will have caused a realignment, that we are now made allies by our shared reversal of fortune. But then I see there’s a white bundle, like a sack of dirty laundry, only flatter, at Finny’s feet. As we draw closer I see that it’s a white sheet, darkly spotted.

“Anyhow,” Angelo is saying, “to make a long story short—”

But I have already gotten out of the car and so has Lily. When we arrive at the bottom of the step, I lift up the sheet, though I already know what I will see.

“I never saw him,” Finny says, struggling to his feet like a very old man, his eyes red, anguished, swollen. “He ran right in front of me.”

God, as always, is in the details, and I see that Occam’s legs are crusted with mud, which means that he spent his night of freedom miles away at the lake, returning just in time to encounter Finny’s car.

“I’d come to see Marie,” Finny explains, referring to his ex-wife, who still lives at the bottom of the hill. “She gave me the sheet.”

I let the sheet fall back. Lily has turned away rather than look. Angelo takes her in his arms, and she lets him, and the sight of this has me right up there in the high ninetieth percentile, affection-wise, for this wonderful woman I have too long taken for granted, as Teddy warned me years ago I was doing.

“You probably think I did it on purpose …,” Finny croaks.

“Don’t be an ass,” I tell him. For in fact I have never been more convinced of the string of cause and effect, of the sequence and consequence that is destiny, than I am at this moment. It begins with a comic threat to kill a duck and ends here at my feet. Finny doesn’t know it, but he’s merely acting as the agent of Chance, the nameless footman of the drama. “Another man would have driven away.
I
might have driven away, Finny,” I feel compelled to add.

Because the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we’ll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we’ll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own.
Angelo has no more idea what his own story means than he knew what he would do until he did it. How was he to know that he would be visited by such a strange emotion in the very doorway to the home he had guarded for so long? How could he have predicted its consequence? When my poor mother came down into the cellar that afternoon and saw her son standing on a chair, how could she have had any idea that by drawing me to her so fiercely, by saving her son she set in motion our mutual estrangement, for how could we forget such a moment without distancing ourselves from each other, who shared its anguish? Only after we’ve done a thing do we know what we’ll do, and by then whatever we’ve done has already begun to sever itself from clear significance, at least for the doer.

Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, “I know you, Al. You’re not the kind of man who.”

By the third week of August I notice the leaves beginning to turn on the doomed side of the macadam in Allegheny Wells. Lily and I, without ever speaking of the matter, have taken to jogging in the early morning to avoid the worst of the summer’s heat. Sometimes we run toward Railton, other times out toward the village of Allegheny Wells, though we avoid the right turn at the Presbyterian church that would lead us past the house that used to be Julie and Russell’s. A new family moved in last week, renting with an option to buy, a flexible arrangement for all concerned. Last month Julie joined Russell in Atlanta, where, I have it on excellent authority, they are doing well. Julie has found work, and Russell has been promoted already, and I’m told they are thinking about buying a house. What they are planning to use for money I don’t know. From little things Lily says I gather that she and Julie speak almost every day. I’m not allowed to see the phone bills.

But the leaves. Yesterday, returning from our morning run, we encountered Paul Rourke pulling out from between the tilting stone
pillars of Allegheny Estates II, on his way in to campus, which is gearing up for fall semester. Since being made dean, Rourke is working longer hours, which, according to him, is fine under the circumstances. He and his wife have separated, and the second Mrs. R. disappeared clean, like her predecessor, taking with her little more than the clothes on her back. A large contingent of divorced academic men in Railton would love to know how Rourke always manages this. Some have joked that somebody should sneak into his house some night when he’s away and dig in the basement. Personally, I don’t find the disappearance of the second Mrs. R. all that mysterious. The wife of a dean of liberal arts has few responsibilities, but there are occasions upon which she cannot be stoned and barefoot. My own best guess was the second Mrs. R. liked being stoned and barefoot. She liked wearing jeans and being braless beneath her thick sweatshirts. She liked to smoke a joint and hold her breath and wiggle her toes and stare at them, none of which you can do when you’re entertaining the chancellor.

In any event their house is for sale along with half the others in the two Allegheny Estates, though I heard Rourke has rented it for the upcoming school year and himself plans to move over Labor Day into Jacob Rose’s town house in West Railton, which has also been on the market since his wedding. Jacob and Gracie have begun building on the lot I sold them in May. The house is going up fast, and sometimes when Lily and I are deck sitting, I catch a whiff of Gracie’s cloying perfume born upwards on a breeze. Lily, of course, insists that I’m imagining this.

I feared that selling to Jacob what I refused to sell to Paul Rourke might enrage my old enemy further, but, strange as it seems, I’m apparently no longer on his shit list. Jacob says that this is because the job always makes the man, a line I’ve often used on Jacob himself when he’s done what struck me as a cowardly thing. According to Jacob, Rourke has simply realized that as dean he cannot afford to have personal animosities, and so he’s had to give me up. My own feeling is—and I’ve always maintained this—that most people have a finite amount of meanness in them, and Rourke used his up with me back in June when a group of us (Jacob, Teddy, Rourke, a couple guys from biology, and me) started playing basketball again on Sunday afternoons. I may have suggested it. Basketball is a beautiful game for a tall,
graceful man like me. At times I’m so overwhelmed by its beauty that I lose touch with reality. When my shot is falling, when I’m moving across the lane and back out to the perimeter for my jumper, I forget my age and position in life. I feel like my dream self in the donkey basketball game, and in the throes of such emotion I’m prone to acts of foolishness. One Sunday afternoon in late June I made the mistake after a missed shot of crashing the boards, where I caught one of Paul Rourke’s big, churning elbows. The fractured cheekbone and black eye that resulted seem to have satisfied my old enemy. Also he seems cheered to be driving the Camaro again, his fainting spells having ceased now that he no longer has to breathe the second Mrs. R.’s secondhand smoke. At any rate, yesterday, when Lily and I encountered him at the end of our run and I pointed up at the sickly yellowing leaves on his side of the road, he merely rolled down the window, nodded at me knowingly, and said, almost affectionately, “Lucky Hank.”