The Constant Heart (31 page)

The fire burned to nothing more than a gray-tinted crimson and I got some water in a collapsible bottle that my father had brought and poured it over the last of the coals, which turned black and cracked into a pattern like the one you see on the bottom of a dry lake.

We put everything else, fly rods, vests, tent, sleeping bag, into the packs, although I kept the pills out. My father wanted another of the strongest. “It feels warm, Jake,” he said. “Like being in love. If you take enough.”

 

 

AS WE WENT back down toward the road, MD said, “I'm not going to make it. I can tell.” We went on walking, stopping to rest, and even sleeping for a while. I went down to the stream and dipped up some of the black water onto my face. In the middle of the night, the jets came by, close to the landscape, lit only by the crimson disks of their engines, the color of the streaks in the dark like lines made with pink fluorescent ink on a black
background. Like the sign on the top of the Palm. Or like the light in those pictures from the Hubble of shock waves and illuminated dust. We turned and went along the stream some more.

MD and Scott kept looking backward or to the side, or at anyplace that seemed particularly impenetrable. Sometimes they just stopped and stared. Could the cops be up here? Had the pilots seen anything? We stopped, too, and listened. Every now and then a dry rustle came from the brush. Bear, coyote, wolf? They all were interested in carrion, and maybe we still carried the scent.

 

 

THE FENTANYL, HYDROMORPHONE, Sufenta, and Oxycontin sat on the dashboard, their bottles the color of iodine, the pills inside like small pebbles. Like peas you'd shoot through a peashooter. My father woke after an hour and wanted two of each and then two more of each when the first dose didn't work. I was half asleep when he grunted and touched Sara, who gave him three more of each. Then she leaned against me, her hair against my face, her skin having the scent of that beaver pond where she had bathed, her breath so constant, not sweet so much as exciting, as the scent that came from her underarms and from the neck of her shirt. I let it enfold me, like the most comfortable duvet, and slept against her, too. Then my father's grunt came and we reached for the pills, the bottles of which cast long shadows, since we had slept for six or seven hours.

Across the way, MD and Scott slept, too. It was as though something was in the air, since at one moment we found that we were all looking at each other. My father, Sara, and I
stared at MD and Scott, who were awake now, too, and thinking things over.

“Jake,” said my father. His voice was rough, as though he had been shouting, but maybe that was just because his throat was dry. He told me that this was one of the difficulties he was having: Everything got dry, even when he drank a lot of water. He guessed that meant some organ, the colon, wasn't working anymore and that water wasn't being absorbed the way it should.

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you awake?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“It's not clear with these guys. What are they going to do?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“You've got to get that straight,” said my father.

“They could say one thing and do another,” said Sara. “They're thinking right now how to lay this thing on me.” She swallowed. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

“Don't,” said my father.

“Why did I ever go to that fucking Radio Shack?” said Sara. “Just think the trouble I could have saved you.”

“You went because you needed a TV,” said my father. “Where's the crime in that?”

“Look at them,” said Sara. She gestured to MD and Scott. “If you think we are unsure, they are clueless. Take it from me.”

“Yes,” said my father. “That's probably right. And maybe it makes them dangerous. Jake. You've got to think.”

“I'm a little hazy,” I said.

“Not like me,” said my father. “Three more. One of each.”

He swallowed them with the last of the water.

“Takes about twenty minutes,” said my father. “That's a long twenty minutes.”

Sara took a handkerchief from the seat and wiped his forehead, which was very wet now, not silver so much as a sort of wet cement gray.

“Ah, shit,” he said. “I'm not sure just money would do it. To keep their mouths shut. Sooner or later, they'd run out. And they'd say or threaten to say that you killed him, even though it was me. Then what?”

“I'm thinking,” I said. “I promise you. I'll work on it.”

“But what?” he said.

Sara and I stepped into the afternoon air, which was at once gray-yellow, like cat fur, and warm, too. She ran her fingers over my beard and said, “If you are going to think, then make sure you consider the nasty things. Things you didn't imagine possible.”

“I've got a different idea about that than I used to,” I said.

MD was scratched, the lines on his face that must have come from cane thorns looked like strings of small rubies, and his blond hair was greasy and stuck to his head. Scott's blond hair was showing black at the roots. Sara tapped on the window and MD rolled it down.

“We didn't mean anything up there,” he said. “Bo was always a little high-strung. You know, he was always going to the resource room when he was in school.”

“While he lasted,” said Scott.

“How long was that?” said MD.

“Eighth grade,” said Scott. “Then they let him fall through the cracks. And not a moment too soon.”

“I guess,” said MD. “See?”

“See what?” said Sara.

“The guy was fucked up,” said MD. “Doesn't have anything to do with me.”

“Who was holding me down?” said Sara.

“Look,” said MD. “I'm going home. Maybe talk to a lawyer. See? Maybe you're in a lot of trouble.”

“I wouldn't try it,” said Sara.

“We've got to consider our options,” said MD.

“Maybe I've got a story to tell, too,” said Sara.

“I didn't do anything,” said MD. “I'm pure as the blowing snow.”

“Driven snow,” said Scott.

“Whatever,” said MD.

The engine in his truck turned over and caught. The ATV was still up in the woods someplace, and soon, I guessed, it would look like the farm equipment, that harrow and harrow seat, up there by the well, rusted, being absorbed by the earth. MD rolled up the window, turned on the air conditioner, and pulled out of the parking lot, hitting “home” on his GPS device. Even through the closed door the voice of the device was one of an Australian woman, who sounded drunk, which I guessed was right, since in Australia they measure distances in six-packs: one six-pack down the road, two six-packs down the road.

M
Y FATHER'S HANDS were cool, but not cold, although he had obviously made that sound, like the clerk in the Radio Shack, and so I didn't have to hear that. All I had to do was hold his hands and feel them get colder. It had a time-lapse quality, as though he had a fever and the fever broke and then he had a chill that turned into that coldness that just couldn't be warmed, no matter how hard I tried, no matter if I held his hands in both of mine and put my face against them, too. After a while the coldness began to pull on me, to leave me with the facts: At least that cement color was gone, his skin pale now and with a bluish tint, like a shadow in the snow. As I held his hands I knew there was no way, not even to myself, to describe what it is like to hold the cold hand of a man you loved, none, aside from the sense of how large and empty the universe really is, and how you think of small things, like the way he liked to make tacos for me.

He passed them over, in a napkin, and gave me a bottle of RedHot sauce.

I put my arm around him and pulled him close and then just sat there, hoping that my arm and chest would warm him up, but they didn't. Sara knocked her head against the window.

Let those of you who think you know what grief is consider the touch of the cold hand of a man you loved.

I rolled down the window.

“Oh, oh, oh,” said Sara.

“I loved him,” I said.

“Oh, Jake, I can see why,” she said.

I didn't want to call an ambulance and so we drove to the nearest town, Barkerville, one of those mill towns that seems to exist in spite of itself, since mostly it was a collection of brick buildings with broken windows and brick walls covered with graffiti, like Knifer-201, The Monster's Monster, and other things that seemed all bluff, although I wasn't so sure. Sara covered my father's face with the fleece blanket.

As we got closer to Barkerville, the clutter was more intense, but somehow more dull, too, since my father wasn't there to see it. He always said that Barkerville had that name because it was a dog, but of course, he said, right after that, “You know I'm just joking.” It didn't seem like a joke anymore.

At the emergency entrance of the local hospital, where two glass doors in an aluminum frame looked like they were ready to open, Sara and I got out of the car and took the fleece away and picked the bits of grass and twigs, leaves and leaf clutter off his clothes and his face and then Sara took a handkerchief out of her pocket and licked it with the tip of her tongue and cleaned those streaks of dirt and dark marks, which could have been from anything, tree bark, oil from the ATV, or just that
odd dirt that seems to come from no place when you have been fishing for a few days away from a house or a road. She put the handkerchief into the water that ran from my eyes and used that, too, to scrub at some of the marks on his face, and then when he was clean, or as clean as we could make him, we went inside and told a nurse, in a starched uniform and a big hat, that there was a problem outside. The nurse looked at Sara and me, and said to a man in some green scrubs, “There's a dead body outside. Call Jack.”

I
MADE THE CALL from my father's car in front of the hospital. The music in the ashram came through the cell phone of the panjandrum or general greeter or whatever she was who answered the number I had. The music sounded like Ravi Shankar, and I couldn't believe that this was still something that was played, but I guess the ashram or Crystalville or whatever it is (the brochure for the place called it a site of “spiritual safety”) played this as a sort of acknowledgement of timelessness, which, in the ashram, had a half-life of about twenty years.

So I listened to it as the greeter went from one place to another and asked if anyone knew where Dolores was. That was my mother's name, Dolores. Although she had another name now, Sweet Butterfly, and they asked for Sweet Butterfly, but I knew they were looking for Dolores. I heard that she was doing her afternoon
jhana
, and that it was not a good time to bother her. I said it was important. The greeter, the one with the phone, asked me, with a condescension that was at once saccharine and hostile, what was important? I said that
Dolores's ex-husband had died. The voice said nothing was more unimportant than death. Then more sitar music.

“Please,” I said.

“So desperate,” said the voice. “Can't you be more quiet?”

“I'm going to count to three,” I said. “Then I'm going to get pissed. You know what that means, you fucking bitch?”

“Jake,” said my mother as she took the phone. “Is that you? May you be blessed.”

“I've got some bad news.”

“There is no bad news,” she said. “Only news.”

“Well, that's one way of looking at it,” I said.

I told her my father, her ex-husband, was dead, and she let the sitar music play for a while.

“Well, I didn't know he was sick. Heart attack?” she said.

“You could say that,” I said.

“Don't be snide,” she said.

“I didn't mean that,” I said. “I just meant he was tired near the end. He'd been pretty sick.”

“Well, he never called me,” she said.

“I guess he didn't want to upset you,” I said.

“I wouldn't have been upset. That is what the ashram is for. Do you want to send the body here for a ceremony?”

“I was hoping you'd come home,” I said.

“This is my home, Jake,” she said.

“Can you walk away from that music?”

“Sure,” she said. “Sure. It would do you good to listen to it.”

“He wanted you to know that he left the money he promised. He knew that Frankel would get some of it.”

“Money. Maybe we will buy a retreat at Big Sur. Frankel's
real name is North Star. North Star likes it there. How much is it?”

“I think about seven hundred thousand dollars,” I said.

“Are you getting some?” she said. “Maybe that should come to me, too, don't you think?”

“Sure,” I said. “I'll send it. Do you want cash or a check?”

“Cash. I'll probably make a contribution here,” she said. “Baahir, our leader, doesn't like the ugliness of banks and checks . . . ”

“OK,” I said. “I'm asking you to come to the ceremony here.”

The music came across the phone.

“I guess you're going to have the body cremated, right?” she said.

“Yes. And then I thought I'd take the ashes someplace to spread them.”

“That stream he was always going to, right? Furnace Creek? Well, Jake, will you do me a favor? Will you do that without me? It's better that way, don't you think?”

“Sure,” I said. “Well, I thought I should call.”

“Send the money when you can,” she said.

“Sure,” I said.