Aloft

ten

U S E D T O H A V E N E I G H B O R S down the street named Guggenheimer, George and Janine, a couple right around I my age with a bunch of kids and longhaired dogs. They moved in just after Daisy died and lived there for eight or so years.

From my point of view they were a happy, sprawly, boisterous lot, always playing lawn darts or Wiffle ball, the hounds racing around and almost knocking over the kids, George and Janine constantly attending to their house (the same ranch model as mine), either sweeping up or landscaping. Despite what seemed their constant activity, the yard front and back (they had a corner lot) was always kind of a mess, pocked with plastic toys and dropped rakes and bags of Bark-O-Mulch and lime. It really didn't bother me at all, because after a while as a professional landscaper you get sick of the totally clipped and manicured look, and don't mind a guy who looks after his property himself, even if he does it half-assed and badly, which is how George Guggenheimer did it, though with obvious ambition for the place, given all the projects he'd start. There was the new paver brick walkway, and the hedge of arborvitae, and then undoubtedly the most difficult thing he tried, which was the koi pond in the backyard, spanned by a miniature Japanese-style bridge.

The paver brick walkway turned out okay, if you wanted to be charitable, mostly because you couldn't see it from the street.

Up close it was completely uneven and buckled, some spots so high or low that you could hardly go the length without stubbing your toe and tripping. The arborvitae hedge lasted about three weeks after he put it in, about thirty ten-gallon plants, the victim of both too shallow planting and overwatering.

Naturally I'd given him some neighborly advice about both projects and he even wrote down some of the finer points but I suppose in the end it's about execution and attention to detail and George wasn't the kind of guy you'd let hammer a nail you were holding, or maybe even dig you a hole. This last skill was part of the problem with the koi pond, which looked great to start, with fat orange and pearl-colored koi and blooming water lilies and a faux-rock waterfall that played Hawaiian-style music whenever someone approached. It was George's finest hour, but only for about a week. The pond began to drain after one of his older boys tried to guillotine a koi with a garden spade, missing of course and slicing through the liner. I advised George to completely empty the thing and patch the liner when it was totally dry but he went ahead with some supposedly special un-derwater "glue" he found at a pool supply store and proceeded to kill all the fish (they bloated up and turned black in the face).

This would have been okay had he stopped right there, but the younger kids were crying all day about the poor dead fish and Janine was pissy and probably withholding sex because of the moody kids, and George decided next in his know-nothing homeowner wisdom to cut out the part he'd glued. He ended up punching a hole in the underlying concrete shell he'd laid in too thin to begin with, discovering in the process a large sinkhole right next to the pond hole, where the old septic system had been and mostly still was. He would have done something about that had he not had the egregious fortune of having a wicked summer storm surge in that night, raging with lightning and thunder and three inches of rain. In the morning the sky was perfectly clear, the ceiling unlimited, though I knew something was awry because when I picked up the paper at the end of the driveway I could smell an epic rot, like some dirt of prehistory, and when I walked over there after breakfast a crowd of neighbors had already gathered at the back of George's house, all holding their noses, peering into what had been a smooth back lawn but was now a huge jagged trench running from where the koi pond had been all the way to the street, the Japanese bridge smashed in half and lying mud-soaked in the trench.

Really, you could have filmed All Quiet on the Western Front right there at the Guggenheimers'.

George was down about it certainly but with extra mopiness, and after the crowd thinned out and the sewer guys told him the ballpark figure for the job he took me aside and said he might not survive this one. I told him to laugh it off and just write the check (just the way you would blithely say in any "nice" neighborhood with a bit of resignation and no veiled pride), that he'd fix the mess and get another koi pond, this one bigger, but he just shook his head and sat down on the wet lawn and in a real breach of suburban decorum began to bawl like a baby. I crouched down beside him and held his shoulder for a half minute until he piped down a little, and I told him the way I used to tell all my worried, scared clients (and there wasn't anybody who wasn't), in my laconic captain-of-the-squad way to pull it together because this was one we were going to win. I immediately regretted using "we" because he hugged me with his sloppy face and I think he assumed that maybe I'd get the guys from Battle Brothers over with a couple of earthmovers and backhoes and roll out fresh sod. Before I could say anything else or backpedal he said they were financially shot. I asked him what he meant by that because like everybody else it seemed the Guggenheimers were spending what they pleased and on what they wanted and so that automatically meant they were making the money, too, but he said it again, they were shot, fucking shot, the directness of which surprised me, as you never hear in neighborhoods like this how everything was about to fall apart.

I felt bad about it, which automatically meant that I would call him the next day to "check in" and commiserate from a distance and then promptly make myself scarce for two or three weeks, which is exactly what I did, your basic poor-fuck-but-damn-glad-it-ain't-me routine, but then it happened that the very night after the koi pond debacle George stopped for a gallon of milk at the Dairy Barn and bought a lottery ticket and won, won pretty big, not one of those mega-million games but a kind of jackpot they don't seem to offer anymore, where you get a set amount of money each year for as long as you live. It was promoted with a slogan like "Salary for Life," and was $100,000 a year paid with a wink every Labor Day, an amount that in those days wasn't just plain vanilla upper-middle-class living, and for the Guggenheimers it was a ticket to ride high.

Like me, George had inherited his livelihood from his parents, in his case a couple of long-established dry-cleaning stores in Kissena Park, Queens, but he'd done a thorough job of running them into the ground, not to mention ignoring the new competition from all the Korean and Chinese owners coming in. The truth of the matter, as he told me the day before, was he'd been planning to sell the businesses and get into some other line (what that was going to be he didn't say), because he was out of equity and cash and was carrying a hefty debt on his ranch house and the cleaners, and was just about to step into the crosshairs of the collection agencies and banks, which is exactly the appropriate time in our good culture to throw away your last few bucks on a 20-million-to-1 shot.

There was a short segment about the Guggenheimers on the Eyewitness News, George and Janine looking sweaty and stunned as they held either end of a big cardboard check, the amount for which I noticed wasn't a number but a question mark followed by a lot of zeroes, the point being the sky was the limit. Right away they sold the dry-cleaning stores (to Koreans, of course) and did the smart thing and paid off their most pressing debts, consolidating the others through one of those sketchy New Jersey mortgage outfits, and then setting about to fix the sinkhole in their backyard. But soon enough the spending geared up. They hired Battle Brothers to bulldoze and clear-cut the property and plant and lay everything in totally fresh.

George traded in his old cars for a couple of brand-new Mercedes convertibles, his (silver) and hers (red), and when they went out as a family they had to take both cars and jam the kids in each.

Janine it turned out was very much into modern art and design and began buying a lot of stuff from local galleries, sculp-tures of figures either really skinny or really fat as well as Cubist-style and Abstract-ed paintings featuring the same kind of figures, and furniture from Maurice Villency and Roche-Bobois that was sleek in form and always cold and uncomfortable, the program in fact not so dissimilar to what Eunice has done over at Château Battle. The house itself was completely razed and done over and in the end not so strangely it was almost an exact replica of the Guggenheim Museum, 1/5 scale, with a big circular parking garage — inspired turret dominating the massing and hardly any windows. The concurrences didn't in the least occur to Janine or George, as neither had been to the museum, nor by extension any surname irony, the facts of which made you pull for them all the more, as they were simply enjoying the found fruits of their good luck.

And maybe it would have all gone swimmingly, had George not been involved in a frightening little car accident just before another year had passed. While driving on the Southern State Parkway he was rear-ended, the front of his convertible accor-dioned in, too, when he was thrust into the car in front. George was banged up pretty badly and got forty stitches in his face and hands and spent a night at the hospital for observation of his concussion. After a few days he was fine but I suppose he got to thinking about his brush with death and what that would mean for his Salary for Life, and pretty soon you hardly saw him driving and then even walking in the neighborhood. He called me up one day and asked if Battle Brothers could put up an eight-foot chain-link fence around the entire property, which we did, and he had house alarms and cameras rigged up, and before long he was hardly ever outside in his own yard, fearing that he'd catch some deadly virus like AIDS, which was just coming into the news then and was still mysterious enough to keep you wondering. George even began to stay airlocked in his private bedroom suite (he'd moved out of the master because Janine was naturally venturing out to shop and ferry the kids around and see friends, and was thus a ready importer of contagion), and grew more and more distrusting and fearful of anything having to do with the outside world. So it came as no surprise that after a year of this Janine divorced him, taking the kids to what I hear is a nice gated golf community in North Carolina, where Janine looks after the central clubhouse. George still owns the house, I believe, though he moved out long ago, to where nobody knows.

Of course, I'm thinking about George at the present moment not because I had so much feeling for him (which I did, aplenty, in a knowing, down-the-street neighborly way that had to do with our shared existence of familial and realty responsibilities), but because I, perhaps like George Guggenheimer, am beginning to see this sprawly little realm as laden with situations not simply dangerous and baleful; it's the fact that no matter how fast or high you might keep moving, the full array of those potentialities are constantly targeting your exact coordinates, and with extreme prejudice. And while this is self-absorption in the classical mode, I must admit Rita was right, I did think I'd banked a life's worth of slings and arrows after Daisy, maybe even enough to safeguard the next generation, maybe to wash back, too, on the one previous. But Theresa's illness and now my father's almost magical disappearance are new instructions from above (or below or beyond), telling me in no uncertain terms that I cannot stay at altitude much longer, even though I have fuel to burn, that I cannot keep marking this middle distance.

I am not even mentioning the latest turns in Jack's financial totterings, which compared to these other potential calamities would seem downright welcome if they were the only things we had to consider and deal with, but, to be honest, something about his trouble pushes me right up to the very limits of my tolerances for what life can sometimes unsparingly orchestrate.

With Jack it has to do certainly with the issue of legacy, namely the fucking-up of said thing, which if we come right down to it is what we secretly find most compelling about legacies (yes, even our own), not the pleasures of bestowal or some rite cycle of being, but rather the surprise diminution that in the not-so-fetching opera of our lives comes in the inglorious rushed finale, the wondrous aria by a brash new tenor, who can hit every soaring note except the one that counts. For there's nothing as deeply stirring as familial failure, cast across time.

And the skinny of that failure is this: Jack has sunk the ship.

If I may be business-channel-like about it, let me say that he is accomplishing it with a highly effective one-pronged strategy of capital overinvestment. Namely, everything he has been buying for the company, from the new cube vans to the five-ton haulers to the mini-backhoes (equipment we always leased per job or week or perhaps for the season at most), he has been buying outright with the idea that Battle Brothers would be sub-leasing to itself (in the form of paper subsidiaries) in a complicated (and no doubt sernilegal) cash flow optimization/

accelerated depreciation scheme that he did not bother to vet with crusty old Sal, dealing directly instead with an offshore banking firm registered in the Caymans or Nigeria or Uzbek-istan or some other such "republic" where generally accepted accounting principles are held in an esteem equal to whatever national constitution was drawn up for them by do-gooding wonks at the IMF. Not that I understand exactly what's happened, but the result is that with the long-anticipated slow-down in work (due to the sluggish economy, plus the intense competition of late, as every hammerhead and his ADD-afflicted, Dremel-wielding brother have gotten into the home improvement business in the last ten years), he's no longer able to pay off the debt service on the machines and getting no real or even "accounting" profit back, meaning he's sinking in shit both ways. This would not be so big a problem if he could sell the rigs anywhere near cost but everybody demands a huge discount these days and it's almost not worth bothering, except that there's a whole bunch of office equipment and technology and software and other high-priced gizmos that become obsolete a few seconds after you plug them in, which it turns out nobody wants at any price, and that Battle Brothers seems to own enough of to open our very own Staples store.

The other day, for a minor example, when secretly called in by Sal to look over the ledgers for myself, I happened to stub my toe on what I figured was a funky coffee table Eunice had ordered up at full suggested retail but was actually a gross case of five or ten thousand floppy disks, brand-new and still in the shrink-wrap, meant originally for backing up every last trans-action of our business. They now have been superseded of course by compact disks that hold many multiples the data and will be cheaper eventually though not soon enough for us. Predictably I happened upon in the supply room gathering dust the floppy disk drives that were recently changed out, piled forlornly with their cables hanging out and tangled like the viscera you used to see troughs of at the butcher's, though all those sloppy kibbles and bits were turned into something somebody somewhere wanted, and duly got, eventually, whether they knew it or not. All of which makes you sort of worry if our wondrous civilization has evolved to the point that we've somehow abrogated that particular law of thermodynamics concerning the conservation of all energy and matter, as it seems that what we're coming up with now is made so that it can't possibly be used or reintegrated after the initial burn. It's pure by-product from the start, slickly marketed and apotheosized as essential for mass sale to a well-meaning guy like Jack Battle, and finally reposed as mere foot fodder.

I've already detailed the extensive corporate headquarters—

style renovations to our once humble garage, costs that surprisingly were not mortgaged and amortized as they normally should have been but instead (for the purpose of a discount ne-gotiated by Eunice) outlayed in cold hard cash, cold hard cash something the business is quite low on in reserves, so low in fact that our usually cuddly banker at Suffolk National has begun sending chilly missives concerning our insufficient and recently missed payments on the seven-figure note Jack took out shortly after I stepped. down from the helm. Apparently Jack has been attempting to refinance this hefty note (okay, it's $3 million, twice as much as Sal suspected), but even in this age of before-you-even-ask-for-it credit he hasn't yet found any takers, partly because he spent way- too much for a nicely treed four-acre parcel of land directly behind our property (he was itchy for a major expansion right from the get-go), though mostly because the property itself has come under suspicion of being an environmental hazard.

I'd always feared it was our original property that might go afoul certain green regulations and standards, but it seems the previous owner of the new plot had a big-time commercial photofinishing business in Hicksville. For the past twenty-five years he dumped the chemicals and other liquid unsavories from interests he had in a string of instant-lube centers into an old well on the property, which he neatly bulldozed over and sealed and covered with fill and fresh sod. This would be bad enough except that the local homeowners whose properties abut in a ring this new one of ours are now filing a lawsuit claiming health problems (one, of whom not so ironically being that girlfriend of mine from youth, Rose Cahill, who actually lives in that same house now with not one but two supposedly autistic adult sons), their experts and also now county and state and probably soon federal environmental safety inspectors drilling for soil samples and testing surrounding well water for heavy metals and radicalized chemicals and oils, such that our nice big little family business with its surfeit of plant and equipment is now, given the potential liabilities, worth pretty much zilch.

Though Sal, bless his randy old soul, insists this isn't quite as bad as it sounds.

Apparently there are certain protections having to do with declaring bankruptcy that will shield us for a while from legal action and foreclosure, plus we now have our own representa-tion, too, serving notice to both Mr. Mercury Water and our alarmist neighbors, namely (this time), mirabile dictu, Richard Anthony Coniglio, Esq., who was completely gentlemanly when I (ready to grovel, ready to beg) phoned him. Richie instantly conferenced me in on a call to his underlings, scrambling those fast jet associates Kim-ster and Kenton from the deck of the Fortune 50 multinational they've been defending (against the outrageous claims of some greedy supposedly ruined Microne-sian fishing village) and vectored them screaming into our own modest fray.

The key now, of course, is to delay and delay and delay, and delay some more, let everything and everyone stew in the procedural stays that we litigious Americans have perfected into high performance art. Richie has even been so generous as to offer to bill us only for his associates' hours, and not his own, and though it's unclear pro exactly what/whose Bono is inspiring him into such magnanimousness, I would like to think it's a feeling that we're alumni of sorts, brothers from the old neighborhood and even linked via Rita in that way men are when they do all they can to crush each other and only then intimately glimpse the reflection of their own vulnerability; Probably closer to the truth is that we're at the general point in our lives when almost all the heaviest lifting has been done, and you can finally begin to measure yourself not solely by the usual units of accomplishment but by the plain stupid luck of your draw in a macrocosm rigged with absolutely nothing particular about you in mind.

One might be wondering how it is that I've learned about these goings-on, given that I haven't talked at all to Jack since he came by the house last, which is certainly the case, and I could say that Sal has been the mostly disinterested informer and go-between and facilitator, which is also the case; but it should be no surprise to anyone who has been a father or a son, or for that matter born into any kind of real family at all, to hear that Jack and I haven't discussed said huge subject, or endured any lingeringly awkward moments because of it, or even plied each other with subtle, passive aggressions that would steadily accrue on the cellular level until one or both of us up and burst in a cascade of recrimination and vitriol. For all I can see, he's continued to show at work each day at 6 N.M. sharp and gone about addressing Total Dissolution with some help from Sal while making no attempt to hide from me what's been happening, knowing full well that I know full well, and not agoniz-ing (at least publicly) about what any of us might think. Of course, I don't know what's going on in his head, or in his household (though I'm almost certain Eunice has no inkling, as she'd have been all over me with directives from her command-and-control center of a pearlescent white Range Rover); whatever he's thinking or feeling I do have to say, gotta say, that I'm kind of proud of the boy, goddammit, not for fucking everything up of course but for soldiering on as he has, for just trudg-ing ahead with old-fashioned head-down dignity, plowing forward like one of those ice-breaking ships in the Arctic, whose prow is harder than it is sharp.

Too bad that what lies ahead in the visible horizon are just floes and more floes, with ice fields re-forming in his wake, supplies and fuel running dangerously low, and morale undoubtedly dwindling besides (the Discovery Channel, it turns out, does indeed corroborate with life on the ground); and although I've said I'm at a limit as to what I can stand to witness, the first question for yours truly must be why I'm not doing more to bear necessary heat upon this situation. Pop, in my place, would certainly rain fear and misery upon Jack's suppliers, and lay off half the crews and the entire office staff (except Sal, who would have to answer the phones, too), fire-sell anything that couldn't otherwise be used to dig a ditch or lay in brick or fix one of the machines, and then force-feed the Suffolk National guy and his wife double porterhouses and vanilla-y merlot at Ruth's Chris, instead of perching here as I am in my God seat and bemoaning, bemoaning. Truth is, Pop would be referring to this as Our Problem, Our Mutual Assured Destruction, Our Shit Sundae, and he'd be digging in with the same gusto he'd have for my mother's self-admittedly mediocre cooking ("You're welcome to make the sauce"), which he groused about nightly but always accepted seconds of, and even thirds; vis-à-vis Jack, even at his age he would have thundered with disbelief and anger but then stood by him and taken on whatever load needed bearing and generally gotten hopped up on the disaster of it all, because, unlike me, he could never stop believing in the significance of the enterprise, he could never look on that stolid grimy box of a four-bay garage and see anything but the shape of a glorious lifework which the Fratelli Battaglia literally put up one brick at a time.

Jerry Battle, it must appear, can let the mortar pit and crumble. He can stand by and watch the gutters overflow, the water pooling against the foundation. He can gaze yet a thousandth time upon the buckles becoming waves in the asphalt yard, only to pick up the phone and speed-dial ahead for his three-soft-taco lunch. And though all of this (semi-) metaphorical illus-tration is pretty much the bare fact of it, and frankly how I had always wanted it to be, duly punched out for the very last time, no matter what, I can't now loll around and let Jack sink lower in the icy water, and not because I give a hoot about Battle Brothers. I don't. I never did. Pop always knew that, but he didn't mind, because through luck and happenstance and my sagely ever-passive hand, business tended to get done. So it squarely depresses me now to think that Jack might have thought I did care, which has to be my fault entirely, and perhaps explains the lengths he's gone to trying to make the business worth more than it ever possibly could be worth. No doubt that I should have derided his interest when he was in college and asked to work summers for us; I should have mocked it as dummy's work, an idiot's errands, said anything that might have plumbed his core anxiety about himself, which he has always harbored, instead of letting him join and then eventually become foreman of one of the landscaping crews, and then hang out after they rolled back in at the end of the day and drink beer with the mechanics, when he was the boss's son but a regular guy and so maybe too readily accepted and admired.

And while I know Jack was never headed for a fancy law associate's position like Richie's Ivy League minions, or was an intellectual sort like his sister, I'm damn sure that he could have made a perfectly fine sales rep for one of those big pharmaceu-tical companies, or a valued young executive in some corporate human resources department, taken full advantage of his athlete's natural poise and fealty to the team for the cause of gen-teel and estimable profit. That would have been good by me, for sure, though I must acknowledge, too, that I never pushed Jack away from Battle Brothers too assiduously, namely because—

surprise, surprise — I actually didn't mind the idea of his taking over someday, if that somehow meant Pop would get and stay off my back about The Future, thereby committing the sin of tendering one generation's dreams for the illusory expectations of another, which is no doubt a practice wretched, and shameful, if time-honored.

I ' M N O O D L I N G all this about at the moment, or trying not to and failing, sitting here on Pop's made-up bed in his room at Ivy Acres. I'm waiting for the head administrator to drive back in from his home in Cold Spring Harbor after normal business hours and explain to me how an eighty-five-year-old man with limited mobility walks off a twenty-acre campus without a trace and then isn't missed for an entire night and day. He's going to do so because I've threatened his assistant that otherwise he'll be speaking exclusively to a jodhpur-clad partner of Whitehead Bates in the morning, and the duly confused/impressed assistant immediately slipped off to a secure phone and called his boss.

Jack, meanwhile, has gotten it into his head that he's going to drive around the county checking the bus depots and diners and the dozen or so local Starbucks shops because Pop had their coffee once and thought it was a revelation and might now make some kind of crazy coot pilgrimage there, as if he were going to hire on as a barista before he kicked off, which after I considered for a second didn't seem that far-fetched a notion.

Paul has accompanied me to Ivy Acres for moral support, but after an hour of waiting here in Pop's room he's all but talked out on the incompetence of institutional structures and systems and turned on the television instead, switching with the jump button at the commercials between the Discovery Channel (Wild Predators) and HGTV (Before and After renovations).

The combination, as you might expect, proves remarkably soothing to yours truly, as all I need to forget everything else is a good meaty nature channel show where the ants and the termites are about to wage total arthropodan war.

"I only like the Before," Paul says. "At least the old place had some wool to it. Some shagginess. Now everything looks as if it's been bikini-waxed."

"Most people like that."

"I guess. What bugs me even more is how they had no qualms about destroying everything, even the good stuff, like that great fireplace."

"That was a beauty."

"Sure it was. You know better than anybody that you can't buy that old brick anymore. And the newel posts of the stair-case. Did you see how that guy took his sledgehammer to those?

He found that pleasurable."

"He was loving it."

"No kidding," Paul says, getting excited, maybe even agitated. "There's no respect anymore. People want what they want and they want it now Nothing comes before them, literally or in time. Everyone is Client Zero."

"Numero Uno," I say.

"Chairman Me."

"A Solo Flyer."

"Exactly," Paul says. "They think they can go anywhere and do anything, as if none of their actions has any bearing except on themselves, like they're in their own mini-biosphere, all needs self-providing, everything self-contained, setting it up like God would do himself. It doesn't matter that there are people on the outside tapping at the glass, saying, 'Hey, hey, I'm here. Look out here.'"

This stops me for a second, as he's striking closer to home than I'd prefer. Then I realize why Paul isn't quite acting like himself, which I assumed had to do with Pop being missing and all of us feeling anxious and moody. He's talking not about me but about his wife, Theresa, who, if you think about it, has done a pretty spiffy job of shutting out any chance of real inquiry, any real debate, who hasn't let by more than a few loose atoms of dissent, the only surprise here being that you'd think her seriously empathic prose-poet husband would have been asked to help steer from the beginning.

Theresa was feeling a bit tired, and so despite her wanting to come along I'd somewhat forcefully suggested she remain back at the house, just in case Pop managed to make his way there. In fact I scolded her, finally getting sick of her merely humoring my opinions. This I feel bad about, as she's looking washed-out of late, as though the blood isn't being fully pumped to all parts of her body. Her coloring is all wrong, her face appearing as if it were lighted from within by an old fluorescent tube, an unsteady flicker in her usually bright eyes. And I should really say A L O F T

she's been feeling tired all the time, though of course not breathing a word of complaint; I've just noticed her lingering a bit, in whatever armchair she's sitting in, or leaning with discernible purpose against the kitchen counter, or sometimes not showing up at all for breakfast, even after Paul goes back to their bedroom to let her know the herbed omelets are ready. In fact I would say she's not eating half the food she normally would, with Paul and me taking up the slack, as evidenced by our sudden fullness of gut and cheek.

Sometime last week I went into their bedroom after they'd gone out to shop for maternity clothes, as I was searching for some of the Cessna manuals in the closet, and noticed crumpled in the wastepaper basket a threefold informational booklet like the kind you see in plastic holders beside the magazines in the doctor's office, though this one you probably got from the doctor himself in the privacy of the exam room. It was a general introduction and overview of symptoms and treatment of non-Hodgkin's disease, which is among the most treatable of cancers, assuming, of course, that it is treated, with some combination of surgery and radiation and chemotherapy, depending on the particular stage and expression of the disease. But the thing that got me was a single-sheet insert that was also crumpled up inside the booklet, titled "Non-Hodgkin's and Pregnancy." This basically outlined what a pregnant woman would normally do, with those in the first trimester advised to terminate the pregnancy and pursue treatment, with those others postponing treatment — and only if the disease were slow-developing-delivering early (32nd to 36th week) by cesarean, then immediately employing a vigorous regimen to attack the disease.

Theresa is just now into her 22nd week, obviously making no plans for anything other than a full-term delivery. It isn't hard to figure out that she's doing none of the recommended above (no matter the progression of the cancer, which might be spreading to who knows where), and judging by how tightly the literature was balled up, is not about to stray from her self-charted course. If I think about it, this episode with Pop has at its best provided a diversion from my children's troubles, diversion being perhaps the most ideal state of existence.

"Perhaps the best thing," Paul says, looking nearly angry now, his fleshy cheeks ruddy with vim, "is that pretty soon we won't have any true Befores, only Afters, shiny and virtual Afters. This host won't have one decent thing left to destroy, and he'll have no choice but to cancel the show."

"Maybe it'll be called After the After," I say.

"After the After doesn't exist," Paul says grimly. "Not for me anyway."

"Sure it does," I say, instantly sounding a bit too much like I'm trying to convince myself of something. "Look at me. I've had a whole life of After."

"Is this when Theresa's mother died?"

"Sure. When it happened I thought everything else would fall apart. I had no idea how I was going to raise the kids and still run Battle Brothers. For a couple months there nobody wanted to get out of bed. We'd get wake-up calls from the principal's office at the kids' school. Then I met Rita, and she saved our lives. Rita was After the After."

"You were lucky, Jerry," Paul says. "My life's going to be too sorry to save."

"Look, son," I say, in the gravest in-all-seriousness mode I can muster, "she's not going to die."

For a second Paul's eyes desperately search me, as if I might know something he doesn't. But then he sees that of course I don't.

He says, "It's good of you to say that. You should keep saying that."

"You ought to, as well."

"I know. Keep reminding me."

"Okay."

"You're not exactly like Theresa always said you were." Paul says, "She's always complained about you a lot."

"Hey, hey, a lot?"

"Well, much less these days. Actually not at all, lately."

"But before."

"Yes. She griped regularly how you'd run roughshod over anybody whenever things got troublesome for you, or something got in your way or made you work harder than you had to.

That you had this supernatural ability to short-circuit dealing with the needs of others, so well in fact that people generally avoided any attempts to involve you."

"She couldn't just say I was 'lazy'?"

"Theresa has her way. There was also the usual complaint about how you could never bear doing anything purely for someone else, unless there was at least some modicum of benefit to you, but that's not relevant, because what I was going to say is that Theresa is so much like the person she makes you out to be, really just the same except she's perhaps more forthright and aggressive in her stance than you are, which you'd think would invite more discourse and interplay but shuts it down all the same, and even more finally in fact. And I'll admit to you now this is pissing me off, Jerry. I'm sorry, but it really is. It makes me feel a lot of anger toward her that I certainly can't express to her but that I can hardly deal with anymore. Yesterday I made a whole spinach lasagna with this nice béchamel and I browned the top of it a bit too much. Normally that would be acceptable but you know what I did? I took it out of the oven and walked to the back of your yard and I just chucked the whole thing, glass casserole and all, as far and high as I could, and it cracked into at least fifty pieces on a pile of logs."

"I was wondering why we ordered in."

"I went to clean it up this morning, but some animal had eaten the whole thing. I just collected glass, and the episode made me angry enough again that I cut myself picking up the shards. I bought you a new dish today, just so you know."

He shows me a bandaged finger, and says, "I'm losing my grip here, Jerry."

"That's okay."

He says, "Maybe the truth is I don't want to know anything."

Here's surely something I can relate to, but it's not the moment to let him give in to the Jerry Battle mode of familial involvement, that ready faculty of declining, my very worst strength, and I have to say, "You're not built like that, Paul.

Whatever you're thinking of late about your writing, I know you can't accept being in the dark or on the 'periphery.' I've read every word you've published and even if I haven't really understood the half of them I'm pretty certain you're a guy who can't stand not being part of what's happening. I don't need a Ph.D.

or square-framed glasses to see that it's killing you to just stand by and let Theresa make all the decisions about what's going to happen. It's her body and I'm sure she's got all kinds of rationales and constructs about that to throw at you, but it's your life, too, and you probably can fling some funky constructs right back at her, plus the fact that you're miserable. Let her know that — show her. Lose your shit if you have to. We Battles only really respond to fits and tears and tantrums, the more melo-dramatic the better."

"Theresa sometimes talks about how bad her mother got, which I think really scared her. She sometimes still has nightmares."

"Really?"

"She had one last night, in fact. Her mother was a very intense woman, huh?"

"Really only at the end," I say, realizing that I'm instantly defending myself, and trying to forget the picture of my daughter at the tender age of five, sitting at the dinner table with cheesy macaroni in her mouth, too fearful to even chew as Daisy chopped cucumbers for the salad furiously at the counter, white-and-green log rounds bouncing all over the floor.

"I'm sorry I'm so focused on myself, Jerry," Paul says. "Here I am talking to you about your not-so-well daughter, and now your father is missing."

"I'm doing all right."

"It most seem as though things have taken a strange turn."

"They're both going to be fine."

"Yup." Paul smiles, nodding with hollow vigor and optimism, all welcomed, and I join in as well, and it's enough good gloss between us to make me feel that I can believe whatever either of us might say, or propose. For while Pop is presently MIA, I have this strong conviction that he's not in any real trouble, that the old gray cat isn't so much wounded or confused or fighting back feral youth in whatever cul-de-sac or strip mall he's lost in, but rather delighting in the open possibility of the range, perhaps in fact sitting in a coffeehouse lounge, chatting up some willowy chai-sipping widow. The only detail gumming up the works is that it doesn't seem that he left with anything but the clothes he was wearing, save for his Velcro-strap black orthopedic walkers, his last outfit being his polka-dot pajamas, which you'd think the sight of in public on an unwashed and unshaven old man would prompt any number of citizens to alert the authorities.

The home show ends and I browse channels. Paul excuses himself to get some tea from the dining room. I find an animal program that I've seen before, about the lions of the Serengeti: the "story" is of a crusty old male lion they (the producers, the native bush-beaters, the cinematographer?) named Red for the color of his mane, which, apropos of nothing, is exactly the hennaed hue of Kelly Stearns's last self-dye job. Red has long been the dominant male of the pride, showing his appreciation of the hunting prowess of his lionesses by serving them sexually whenever they are in heat and then spending the rest of his time power-dozing and snapping at flies and sometimes chasing off the younger upstarts or killing some death-wishing hubristic hyena who thought he could carry off a cute cub and get away with it. Red has apparently ruled this lair for a long time, but is now being challenged by a very large mature young male newly arrived on the scene, named Nero (for no specific reason), who is making forays into Red's territory, sniffing at the females, and generally making a show of himself as an electable new king.

Red, of course, hitches himself up and out from the sorry shade of his acacia and charges the interloper, driving him off, but only temporarily. Nero comes back that night, and although there's no footage of the battle, the next morning we see that Red has been badly mauled, his right hindquarter slashed nearly to the bone, his mane matted with his own blood, a deep gash in his jowl. He's limping off to an old den, maybe the one where he was born. Nero, meanwhile, is holding court by the tree, spraying it liberally with his stud juice, receiving unctuous groveling licks from the males and females, and brusquely mounting most of the latter. The King is dead. Long live the King. The last we see of Red, he's lying on his side, slowly pant-ing in near-death, too weak to even shoo the multitude of flies who swarm about the huge hind wound in a teeming shiny quilt of black. Before nightfall the pack of vengeful hyenas picks up his scent, and by the morning Red is but a rickety boat-shell of ribs and hide; he's not even an appetizer for the scrawny young jackal who's scampered by too late, and later on birds will take the scattered tufts of that arrogant hennaed mane as thatching for their nests.

Maybe Pop really is in trouble.

Maybe he really is lying face down in a roadside ditch.

But if he is, I have a feeling he's only doing so because he's hiding from state troopers patrolling the roads for him, which they're presently doing (this definitely not the standard operat-ing procedure for missing persons but courtesy of Rita's highly placed sheriff friend), Pop ducking at each spray of headlights so he might enjoy a few more hours on the lam. And instead of feeling sorry for himself as I expected he would (as I no doubt would be feeling for myself), at least he's goddamn doing something about it, even if it is completely stupid and dangerous; at least he's taken hold of the moment angling away from him and typically wrenched it back his way.

I used to hear stories from my uncles about him when they were young, how they'd get into some serious rumbles where they lived up in Harlem against marauding gangs of micks and kikes and niggers, everybody using whatever was at hand, broomsticks and chains and tops of garbage cans as shields. My uncle Toe said it was like a fucking Wop Coliseum in the alleyways up there around 135th Street, these barbaric knock-down brawls where it seemed somebody was definitely going to get killed but the worst thing that ever happened was when Big Anthony Colacello slipped on a pile of horseshit as he was about to clock some poor Irish kid and hit his head on the curb and didn't wake up for two whole days. When he did he was exactly the same except he'd lost his sense of smell, and they'd play pranks on him like spreading limburger cheese on the back of his collar as they were on their way to skipping school.

Apparently Pop was the best fighter of their gang because he didn't mind getting hurt and had no fear of anyone. He would just lower his head (thus becoming Hank the Tank) and take whatever punishment he had to as he pushed in and waited for the guy to tire before counterattacking with a viciousness that surprised the crew every time. Pop I guess was a lot angrier then inside and out for the usual reasons of privation and poverty and general mistreatment by family members and people in the street and at school and by the authorities, which these days you'd call racism and discrimination but then was known as the breaks, how it was, your miserable fucking life.

No doubt these days they'd have identified him and his brothers and cousins and the rest of their street-clinging crew as "at risk" youth and placed them in special programs with teams of sociologists and educators and therapists evaluating their intelligence and home life and probably diagnosing them with all kinds of learning and emotional disorders and prescribing medicines and skills-building regimens, finally buoying them up with grand balloons of self-esteem that they might float high above the rank fog of their scrounging dago circumstance, to land somewhere in the sweet-smelling prosperous beyond.

Pop certainly did, as did almost every last one of his generation's Battaglias, with the exception of his cousin Frankie, who died of a freak heart attack at nineteen, and then another named Valerie, who from the age of eleven smoked like an iron smelter and came down with lung (and liver and brain) cancer a month after her nuptials and was in the grave before she could even conceive a child. For if you took an accounting of all who proceed us, our alive and semi-alive relations from Forest Hills to Thousand Oaks to Amelia Island and to everywhere else they've rooted themselves with a vengeance, you'd have some kind of portfolio of golden twentieth-century self-made American living, all those spic-and-span houses and Gunite pools and porcelain- and crystal-filled curio cabinets and full-mouth braces for the kids and the double wall ovens set on timers to bring the roast rosemary chicken and casserole of sweet-sausage lasagna to just the right crisp on top as Dad pulled the white Lincoln up the driveway, their contribution to our Great Society being the straight full trickle-down to my generation of Battaglias and Battles and Battapaglias and the rest of us with the sweetheart deal of a Set-It-and-Forget-It existence. Like everybody halfway decent and useful I of course recognize that one's character should rightly derive from privation, crucibles, pains in the ass, and so I guess my only semi-rhetorical question is from what else does it come, if there's always been a steady wind at your back, a full buffet as your table, and the always cosseted parachuted airbagged feeling of your bubbleness, which can never brook a real fear?

Pop's pop was one of those stumpy, big-handed, gray-haired fellas in coveralls you still spot every once in a while shimmying up on a neighbor's roof to repoint the top of the fireplace chimney, because guys like Pop and then me didn't want to learn the skill and they could never retire because there was no one else who knew how to do the job and they could never not take the call. In fact maybe Pop and I have more in common than I know, because really he had little interest in building garden walls and cladding Manhattan townhouses in limestone or doing anything like what Nonno was doing, whom I know he loved like a God but considered not a little backward and igno-rant and lucky that he had him as a son. Growing up, Pop was smart enough to see how everybody was moving to the suburbs into their own houses with big yards and patios and pools and paved driveways, and he knew that the owners would be working too hard in their regular jobs to come home on the weekends and want to take care of it all. So against Nonno's wishes he moved the business out here to the suburbs, mostly dropping the bricklaying part (only stick-built, clapboarded houses out here) and shifting the focus to landscaping and yard care, which for a good many years was a veritable gold mine for the Battles, because he kept his early clients and moved along with them to bigger and bigger places right up until they died.

Pop was pretty magnificent then, this when I was a kid tagging along in the summers and he was in his prime (Bobby was just an infant). He'd stand there at the start of the day on the bed of his truck, hands spread atop the roof of the cab, calling out the jobs and saying who'd be working on them and with what foreman, exhorting the guys to do the job right (because if you do it right you don't have to remember to be honest) and then giving out a few loose bucks to those who were making the grade, cracking jokes the whole time and praising everybody and being the studly captain of the crew. When everybody had their marching orders he'd slap the cab and say, "All right, fellas, let's roll 'em out." The trucks would start up in a sweet dieselly cloud and he'd lead them out of the yard in a column like he was fucking Field Marshal Rommel. On the job I'd watch as he glad-handed the customers and was tough on them, too, and I'd have to say that whatever I know about common commerce and people I know from him, how he'd convince some guy to line his pool with real tiles instead of the cheaper rubber liner for the sake of standards and posterity, appealing to what pushed the guy out here in the first place, which was an idea about the destiny of the good American life and how each of us had a place in it, guiding it along. If George Guggenheimer had been his neighbor he would have been his best customer; Pop would have had him put in two koi ponds instead of one, with a waterfall in between, and then maybe an entire au-thentic Japanese garden, with a Zen sand pit and a manicured bamboo "fence" and a couple of those baby red maples that look so delicate and weepy, never for a second allowing George to entertain the idea of doing anything himself but feeding the fish (and maybe not even that), and definitely going over there after the lottery win and slapping some sense into him about not being such a pathetic, fearful, neurotic twitch of a man.

With the women he dealt with Pop was a natural charmer.

He'd always compliment them on their clothes or hair even if they were just standing there in their housesmocks, and they'd often offer him coffee or if late in the day a cold can of beer.

He'd always — always — accept, and if he felt particularly good or if there had been a problem with the job he might sing a few bars from Puccini or Verdi for them, his brassy tenor voice reaching me outside as I waited on the stoop or in the truck if it was raining. Sometimes, of course, I'd have to wait a very long time. Once I wandered around the back of one property to see if there was a swing set or basketball hoop and I saw Pop and the lady of the house balling away on the deck lounger by the pool Pop had just put in with Spanish blue tiles laid on the bottom in the shape of a schooner, Pop's big pale ass bobbing up and down between her doughy, stippled thighs and her heels (she was wearing brown spikes) digging holes into the cushion, where she was trying to get some traction. I was too young to think too much about it, and to be honest it never bothered me as it might have. I wasn't angry for my mother's sake, because she seemed as though she knew, and maybe because Pop didn't make a big deal of it or try to sell me a story. All he did was buy me a special high-flying kite I'd been asking for The Big Bombardier, which I flew whenever the wind kicked up the littlest bit or a summer storm was blowing in.

I sure loved that Big Bombardier.

And maybe if you asked him Pop would proudly say he was the colonist, the pioneer, the one who had to clear-cut the land and fight tooth and nail with the natives, and that I'm the settler, the follower, the guy who grooved the first ruts in the road, the one who finally overflowed the outhouse shithole, who has presided over the steady downward trend of our civilization perhaps just now begun its penultimate phase of entropy and depletion. And if you're Theresa or Jack or Rita or anybody else (or even me for that matter), you could easily extend the argument to include the other collations between us, our frank father/son successions, that he's the racist to my apologist, the sexist and womanizer where I'm the teaser, canonist to popularist, stand-and-deliverer to recliner. And if I'm obliged to bring in the customary automotive metaphors, Pop must be one of the last of the great American sedans, those wide-body behe-moths, possessed of egregiously wasteful power, overarmored, fuel-hungry (ever-desirous), picking off on his way to the store every doe and dog and rabbit and squirrel without showing as much as a dent, when I'm doing everything I can to prove that I'm something other than an early '80s model from a fallen De-troit, something big and bulky on the outside but alarmingly cramped within, with scandalously poor gas mileage and rickety suspension, though trimmed in buttery leather throughout, and with an AC system that could cool Hades. And in this sense, maybe Jack is the last hurrah of our golden Pax 13attaglia, the burly all-terrain multitasking machine that will go anywhere it pleases, but it looks more and more as if he'll soon have to retro-fit himself with fuel cells and narrow bicycle tires, shrink down the sheet metal into one of those pint-sized helmet-on-wheels jobs that are sadly the norm in London and Paris and Rome.

And if I may for a moment jump back to the previous metaphor and the (de-) moralizing story of Red I will say it is not Pop's story and in fact probably not even mine, but rather Jack's and Theresa's and Paul's and maybe yours, because it's the jackal and birds with whom we departed, skittering over the dust-dry plains after the great lion has roared and we hyenas and buzzards have split up the rest, and what is there left but the merest shaving of the splendid, just enough of a taste to pang the knowing belly?

Paul returns with his tea, as well as with the Ivy Acres administrator, whom I met on the first day I deposited Pop and have seen in the parking lot a couple of times since, a guy named Patterson. Patterson is a sleepy-eyed, semi-balding, mid-forties white guy in no-wrinkle khaki trousers who could pass for a lot of us out here, fed a bit too well on big Australian shiraz and rotisserie chickens and super-premium ice cream, who buys shelled pistachios only and snacks on them in his big Audi out of sheer crushing boredom, who'll go down on his wife as long as she's just bideted, who is easygoing except when it comes to the bottom-line expediency of his life, which, to nobody's credit, he can usually find in peril everywhere, at home or at the mall or here at work.

"Good evening, Mr. Battle."

"What the hell is going on here, Patterson?"

Patterson makes as if he can't hear that particular register, and just stands there a second waiting for the air to clear. "It's good that you and your son-in-law have come in."

"Good? I want to know how you let this happen, and what you're doing about finding my father."

"Why don't we sit down, Mr. Battle. If you please," he says, ushering Paul and me into chairs, while he sits at the foot of the bed. "Let me inform you of what's transpired so far, and the actions being implemented."

I'm annoyed by his sneaky tactic of cutting out any culpabil-ity in this mess, keeping it all in the passive, and then backing up the conversation, which is of course what I myself would do with a customer whose job we'd maybe messed up. But despite recognizing this I don't call Patterson on it, mostly because I understand that Pop's run is not Patterson's fault exactly (if at all), and that he's had to drag his flabby ass out of the lounger and tape the rest of whatever jackass-glorifying TV show he wasn't closely watching. I even almost feel sorry for him because his is just the dicey situation our litigious scapegoating civilization tends to put you in, when you've been installed at the big controls just long enough to absorb the most serious trouble, while bearing no real power at all.

Still, some chump's got to represent, and be punching bag for the rest, and so I say, to get the discussion snapped back on terms of my liking, "Look, Patterson. You had better start doing more than some good informing, or you're going to have a major action on your hands. My attorney's Richard Coniglio, senior partner at Whitehead Bates, who has constant wood for this kind of thing."

This seems to freeze up Patterson, like he's actually heard of the firm, for he breaks into a wide why-me smile and clears his throat and kind of hitches himself up, balls to gut, like some pitcher down 3–0 in the count.

"There's room for calm here," Patterson says, collecting himself. "Our experience leads us to believe that your father is likely fine, if what he's done is just wander off."

"Your experience? How often does this happen?"

"Almost monthly, Mr. Battle. Ivy Acres is not a holding facility, a prison. Sometimes people forget that fact. We consider our community members to be adults, and as adults they're free to move about, come and go on the shopping shuttle, take outings with friends and relatives, really do as they please. We're talking, of course, about our members housed in the main part of the facility, and not those in Transitions, who aren't as independent or mobile."

"I thought you had a pass system."

"We do. But it's only so we know where members are and how long they'll be out. When people don't come back we wait twenty-four hours and almost always they were at a niece's house and stayed over after dinner, or they just lost track of the time and missed the last shuttle and checked into a hotel. It has been very rare during the time I've been here that there have been issues."

"I think you should tell us about those," Paul says. "Just so we're aware."

"That's privileged information, I'm afraid."

"Well, everyone tells me I'm a privileged guy," I say, without the scantest levity or irony.

This doesn't intimidate Patterson, certainly, but I can tell he is beginning to plot out the best course for himself, trying to cal-culate whether he ought to toe the company line and say nothing more or maybe turn a little state's evidence right here and now, see if he can't ride the fine middle course and slip through this thing without any serious damage. I'm wondering, too, whether this might be one of those moments that I as an American of obvious Southern Italian descent might take advantage of (given the cultural bigotry/celebration concerning certain of our neighborhood associations), and suggest to Patterson that he'd do well to tell us whatever we want to know, lest the firm of Whack, Rig & Pinch arrange a special late-night deposition for him, dockside or alleyside or maybe right in the garage of his Cold Spring Harbor colonial, when he's just about to roll out the garbage container to the street. I really shouldn't, in deference to Pop, who can't stand any such talk, despite and perhaps because of the well-known fact that the Battaglia brothers got their start paving and walling the properties of certain connected guys at their second-home mansions in Brookville and Lake Success, but I warn Patterson he'd better start plain "wising up," and "stop being such a punk." Patterson now clears his throat again and says, "Unfortunately the two people involved clearly intended to leave the campus. They took specific measures."

"Like what?"

Patterson ahems. "One of them ground up three bottles of sleeping pills and mixed them into a milkshake at a diner, where he was found dead in the men's room. The other was a woman who took our shuttle to the mall and shopped for most of the day. But instead of returning on the bus she somehow made her way up to the roof and jumped off the top of Saks."

"Christ.."

"Besides those instances, Mr. Battle, we've had only success.

Now, you wanted to know what we're doing about finding your father. The police have been notified, of course, and we've also hired two private investigators, who are out searching for Mr.

Battle right now The lead investigator called me as I drove in, and so far they can confirm a sighting of an older man of his description."

"Where?"

"At the Walt Whitman Mall. In fact this very morning. A security guard apparently escorted him out, as he wasn't appropriately dressed."

"Escorted him out where?"

"Just out. I asked this, too, but the guard didn't note where the man went."

"Did he say what the man was wearing?"

"I believe it was trousers and a pajama top."

"Fucking great. That was Pop."

Paul says, "At least he was fine as of this morning, which means he got through last night on his own."

"It's a whole other night tonight," I say, thinking how good

it is that Jack is driving up and down the Nassau-Suffolk border scouring every park and playground and strip mall for his grandfather. As I've noted, the thing about Jack is that he has never been in the least lazy in his life; I can't remember an instance when I asked him to clean the gutters or shovel the driveway or set the dinner table and had him groan or shuffle his feet or do anything but get on the job, the same as if I'd suggested that we throw a football around, or maybe go to Shea Stadium, which we did only once, when a customer of mine gave me a couple of playoff tickets in 1973 (Jack was thrilled because he got Rusty Staub's autograph). Jack's trouble has been of course that he tends to respond not wisely but too well, like a cricket that jumps whenever you touch him; it doesn't matter that he might be perched on the edge of some chasm. This is not my way of intimating once again that I think Jack isn't the bright-est bulb on the tree, because even if that were true it doesn't matter in the least. Let's face it, for most of us in this more-than-okay postbellum Western life, smarts really don't count for a tenth as much as placement and birth, the particular tra-jectory of one's parturition, and if there's a genuine flaw to Jack's character it's no secret he gets too focused and purposeful for anybody's good, and especially his own, for it would never occur to him to lift the hatch and just bail out before the groundrush stops everything dead.

"Maybe Jack will find him," Paul says, as usual reading my mind. "I'll call and let him know about Pop being sighted at the mall."

He doesn't know Jack's cell number (nor do I), so he takes my phone outside the building to speed-dial him while I reacquire Patterson, who appears a bit sodden all of a sudden, like he's just come off a chartered fishing boat on a chilly, mist-spritzed day, like he'd pretty much give anything to get back home and pull on his flannel pajamas and crawl into bed. And though in fact I have zero interest in suing anybody ever, and can't think of what else to have him do save piss away his time keeping me company while I fret about Pop in my backslidingly diffuse and scattered manner, I say, anyway, "You're going to make this come out right, Patterson, or I swear once my attorney gets busy you'll be lucky to run the nut-and-candy cart at Roosevelt Field."

To this Patterson is mum, his lower lip pressed up tight against his half-exposed top teeth, so that he looks like a big bald, worried rodent, and I'm ready for whatever sweet load of sunshine he's going to try to blow up my ass, thank you very much. But presently Paul appears in the doorway, and then Jack, bearing what looks like a pile of dirty laundry in his arms, laundry with sneakered feet. I realize he is carrying Pop, wrapped up in a soiled — and very smelly — bedsheet.

"Pop. ."

"He's not dead," Jack pronounces, evidently responding to my expression.

Pop moans with trenchant exasperation, as he always does.

He's alive.

"He's pretty out of it," Jack says, laying him down on the bed. The top of the sheet flops down, revealing Pop's face, which is sunburned and badly peeling. "He told me he didn't sleep for two days."

"Where did you find him? At a mall? A park? Not at Starbucks. ."

"Right outside here," Jack says. "I was parking the truck and I saw something move in the pachysandra by the duck pond."

"What the hell do you mean?" I turn to give Patterson a look, but he's already gone, yodeling something from the hallway about finding the house doctor.

"He was back over there, where that other section of the home is."

"Transitions," I say, picturing him grimly looking in at Bea from the window.

"He's probably very dehydrated," Paul says. "And in shock."

Jack says, "I pinched his skin, and it's pretty bad. I asked him and he said he had been drinking water. But I didn't see any bottles. Maybe from the sprinklers. Or the duck pond."

"Oh Jesus," I say. "Is Patterson getting a doctor?"

"I'll go find him," Paul offers. He runs out, leaving the three of us in the room, posed like in one of those neo-Classical deathbed paintings, the acolytes deferentially arrayed at the great man's torso, his mouth twisted in the last mortal coils of agony, his eyes cast upward to the Maker.

"Can you two give a guy a little room here?" Pop hoarsely blurts out, hacking up some very gluey spit. Jack cups his chin with a tissue and Pop spews it out. "And instead of trading all your medical theories, how about a goddamn glass of water?"

While Jack fetches one from the bathroom, I try to take the dirty sheet from him, but he won't let me.

"Come on, Pop, it's filthy. And so are you."

"I like it this way."

"You smell like cat piss. And other things."

"I don't care. It makes me feel alive."

Jack gives him two glasses, and he bolts both down, which is probably not ideal, and hands them back to him for more.

"What the hell did you do these past two days?"

"I walked by day," he says, intoning not a little prophet-like.

In fact he seems too tranquil, and steady, for what he's obviously weathered.

"I guess you didn't get very far, with your legs bothering you."

"Just to the gate," he says. "I was just going to take a short walk at first. But then some kid drove by and asked if I needed a ride, and I told him I did. He dropped me off out in East-hampton."

"You went out that far?"

"That's where the kid was going."

"Didn't he wonder why you were wearing a pajama top?"

"Hey, he was wearing a shirt with cuts all over it, like it got run over by a combine. Plus he wasn't too swift."

Jack brings the glasses back full and hands them to Pop. "So what did you do out there?"

He bolts them down, again. "Like I said, I walked. I walked on the beach, all the way out to Montauk Point."

"That's got to be fifteen or twenty miles at least. You really walked all the way?"

"Well, I almost got there. I could see it, that's for sure."

I ask, "Did you have any money? What did you eat?"

"Of course I didn't have money. I was just going out for a little walk, remember? Plus I'm kept a pauper, so I have no freedom. And if you want to know, I panhandled."

"You begged?" Jack says, crinkling his forehead, like his mother sometimes did.

"It's not below me," Pop replies, glancing at yours truly.

"Nothing's below me."

I say, "So you begged on the beach in the Hamptons."

"Yeah," he says. "Most people wouldn't part with any dough, but they were decently generous with the food, which I ate but didn't like. Sushi, some other rolled thing they called a 'wrap.'

This is what people bring to the beach. And how come everything has to have smoked salmon in it? Nobody appreciates an honest ham sandwich anymore."

Jack asks, "Did you sleep on the beach?"

"Oh yeah. It was real nice, sleeping outside. It wasn't too cold either. In the morning some cops gave me a ride to town. After I got together enough for a doughnut and coffee, I hitched a ride back from a guy in a Jaguar. I think he thought I was some nutso billionaire like Howard Hughes. When I got back here I didn't want to go inside right away, so I lifted a sheet from the laundry service truck and camped out."

"You could have told somebody, you know."

"What, that I was going to sack out with the ducks? The jerks here would have called you, and you would have called some shrink, and all of you would have gotten together and sent me to a place where they have metal grating on the windows."

"I wouldn't have," Jack says, most =helpfully. "Next time, you can come stay with us. I'll set you up on the deck with a pup tent."

"I need the open air."

"Fine, then, anyway you want it. Better yet, you can come stay with us now if you like."

"Oh yeah? You mean it?"

"Why not? You have a month-to-month lease, right?"

"Ask Mr. Power-of-Attorney. Hold on, I gotta use the head."

We help Pop out of bed, but he bats away our buttressing and goes into the bathroom.

"Of course it's month-to-month," I say to Jack. "But shouldn't you talk about this with Eunice?"

"What makes you so sure I haven't?"

"I know you."

"You think you do."

"Well, have you?"

Jack says firmly, "She'll be fine with it."

"But you ought to make sure, don't you think, before getting him all excited? Besides, I don't know if it would be the best thing for him."

Pop calls out, "I'll take the guest room with the big TV, okay, Jack?"

"Sure thing, Pop."

"Are you hearing me, Jack?"

He stares right in my eyes. "The best thing for Pop, or for you?"

"For me? For him to stay at your house? Christ. I don't know what that means. I really don't. And I'm thinking about you, kid, especially you. You've got a wife, and kids, and a big house to run, and a business to. ."

". You know, the one with the big tube TV. ."

"Sure, Pop, sure," he says, and then to me, "To what?"

"What?"

"To what. A business to what?"

"You know what."

"Tell me, Dad."

"Forget it."

"Come on, let's hear it."

"I said forget it."

Jack gives me a look — or actually, he doesn't, which is a look in itself — and for a scant moment I feel myself tensing my neck and jaw for what I'm intuiting will be a straight overhand right, popped clean and quick, and I actually shut my eyes for a breath. Of course nothing comes, nothing at all, and when life flips back it's just Jack gazing straight at me, his mouth slightly open in his way, with that resigned enervation, like he's waiting for a train that always runs late.

"Well, don't worry about it," he says. "It's going to be okay."

"I won't," I say. This sounds as empty as it is untrue, but like most men we accept the minor noise of it and try to move on.

But presently we don't have to, as Paul and Patterson and a light-brown-skinned guy with his head wrapped in a bright purple cloth — presumably the doe enter the room in a rush, though they're momentarily frozen by the sight of the empty bed; Jack points to the bathroom, where we converge, Tack first.

He knocks, calling for Pop, and then opens the door. Pop is sitting hunched on the edge of the tub, grasping his arm.

"What's the matter?" I ask.

"My arm hurts. And my neck. It's like clamped inside."

"Please let me in," the doe says, pushing through. But just as he does, Pop sharply groans and pitches forward with sheer dead weight, and it's only because of Jack's quick reflexes that he doesn't smack his face on the hard tile floor. He and the doc gently turn him onto his back, and the doc gets to work, 100

percent business (definitely a welcome change of pace), checking his vitals, trying to track the pain, with Pop wincing as fiercely as I've ever seen him, tiny tears pushing out of the corners of his eyes.

"What's wrong with him?" I ask, all of it in sum beginning to spook me. "Shouldn't we call an ambulance?"

Paul says, "It's already coming."

The doc tells Patterson to alert the hospital to ready a cardiac team.

"He's having a heart attack?" Jack says.

"Possibly," the doc answers. "But we won't know how bad it is, or even what it is, until we get him to the hospital." He asks Pop if he thinks he can swallow some aspirin, and Pop nods.

Patterson is sent to get some. When he returns with them, Pop takes two, crunching on them like children's tablets, and lies back. The doe now regards him more generally.

"Why is he in such a miserable condition?"

Patterson says, "This is the gentleman who left the premises."

"I see."

"Can't you do something for him?" I say.

"There's nothing else I can do. We simply have to wait for the ambulance."

But now Pop sort of yelps, and claws angrily at his neck, like there's something ditch-witching its way out of him. Jack holds him steady and then eases him back clown, and for a moment he seems to calm, but then all at once his whole body becomes sort of warped and rigid, like a sheet of plywood that's been soaked and then too quickly dried. He rests again, his eyes shut. And then it starts again.

"Steady him now," the doc says, he and Jack quelling the new tremor. "Steady him. Steady. He'll make it through."

Paul is nodding in assent, but in fact it looks to me like Pop's going, really going. Going now for good.