Interstate

INTERSTATE

He’s in the car with the two kids, driving on the Interstate when a car pulls up on his side and stays even with his for a while and he looks at it and the guy next to the driver of what’s a minivan signals him to roll down his window. He raises his forehead in an expression “What’s up?” but the guy, through an open window, makes motions again to roll down his window and then sticks his hand out his window and points down at the back of Nat’s car, and he says “My wheel, something wrong with it?” and the guy shakes his head and cups his hands over his mouth as if he wants to say something to him. He lowers his window, slows down a little while he does it, van staying alongside him, kids are playing some kid card game in back though strapped in, and when the window’s rolled almost all the way down and the hand he used is back on the steering wheel, the guy in the car sticks a gun out the window and points it at his head. “What? What the hell you doing,” he says, “you crazy?” and the guy’s laughing but still pointing, so’s the driver laughing, and he says “What is this? What I do, what do you want?” and the guy puts his free hand behind his ear and says “What, what, what? Can’t hear ya,” with the driver laughing even harder now, and he says “I said what do you want from me?” and the guy says “Just to scare you, that’s all, you know, and you’re scared, right? — look at the sucker, scared shitless,” and he says “Yeah, okay, very, so put it away,” and the kids start screaming, probably just took their eyes off the card game and saw what was happening, or one did and the other followed, or they just heard him and looked or had been screaming all the time and he didn’t hear them, but he doesn’t look at them through the rearview, no time, just concentrates on the gun and guy holding it and thinking what to do and thinks “Lose them,” and floors the gas pedal and gets ahead of the van but it pulls even with him and when he keeps flooring it stays even with him and even gets a little ahead and comes back with the guy still pointing the gun out the window and now grinning at him, driver’s in hysterics and slapping the dashboard, things seem to be so funny, and he thinks “Should I roll the window up or keep it down, for rolling it up the guy might take it the wrong way and shoot, if he’s got bullets in there,” and he looks around, no other cars on their side of the Interstate except way in the distance front and behind, no police cars coming the other way or parked as far as he can see on the median strip, and he yells “Kids, get down, duck, stop screaming, do what Daddy says,” and sees them in the rearview staring at the van and screaming and he shouts “I said get down, now, now, unbuckle yourselves, and shut up, your screaming’s making me not think,” and slows down and rolls the window up and van slows down till it’s alongside him, the guy holding the gun out and one time slapping the driver’s free hand with his, and then the guy points the gun at the backseat with the kids ducked down in it and crying, maybe on the floor, maybe on the seat, for he can’t see them, and he swerves to the slow lane and the van gets beside him in the middle lane, and then he pulls onto the shoulder, stops, shifts quickly and drives in reverse on it bumping over some clumps, and the van goes on but much slower and from about a hundred and then two and three and four hundred feet away the guy steadies his gun arm with his other hand and aims at his car and he yells “Kids, stay down,” for both are now looking out the back, maybe because of the bumping and sudden going in reverse, and bullets go through the windshield. He screams in pain, glass in his head and a bullet through his hand, yells “Girls, you all right?” for there’s screaming from in back but only one of them, and his oldest daughter says “Daddy, Julie’s not moving, Daddy, she’s bleeding, Daddy, I don’t see her breathing, I think she’s dead.”

There’s a funeral next day, and day after it, while his wife and their families are mourning at his house, he goes out on the same Interstate searching for those guys, wishing he’d done it in the few hours of daylight he had the day before. He drives on it every day after that looking for them in one of the road’s rest stops or in the car they drove, a white fairly new minivan, Chevy or Ford, or in any vehicle they might have now, he wouldn’t think it’d be that van, though they could be that stupid or devil-may-care — swashbuckling, he was about to call it, when he meant swaggering, the fucking hyenas. He knows their faces, what they look like and, he thinks, what they like to wear. Knows it’s a long shot finding them, that they’ll probably stay off this road if they have any reason to be on it again, drug-trafficking maybe if that’s the right term for delivering drugs from one place to another, something he’d think they’d be in, or running guns, for another thing. But then they might think this route’s the best of any because it’s big and fast, for one reason, and it’s the last the cops might think they’d be on after what they did, if they even know about it from the papers and radio and such. Because for all they know or care about later they might think they only got the windshield, big laugh, but didn’t hit anyone or hurt anyone much except with maybe a little glass. Or maybe the driver had his eyes peeled to the road, and by the time the guy finished shooting the van was too far away for him to see if he hit anything, or the gun recoiled or whatever it does, banged him in the eye, even, no matter how hard he was holding it, so he didn’t even look to see or just couldn’t if he hit anything. They also might have been so far away from the shooting the next day that it wouldn’t have been news in the papers of the place they were in or on the radio and TV stations there, not that he believes they read the newsier part of the papers or listen to radio or TV news even when it might relate to them. Or they might have been too drugged or drunk to read, watch or listen, if they do do those things with news, or just too busy getting rid of the drugs or guns they were delivering or picking up or whatever criminal activity they were going to, for certainly some kind of crime like that’s what they’re in. So, a long shot but the only shot he thinks he has at finding these men, especially the guy who seemed to start it or was most involved in it and could have easily stopped it, the one with the gun, and finding them and getting even and making them die if he can, at his hands or the state’s, and if the state doesn’t do it then he’ll come with a gun to the courthouse last trial day to do it himself, or with a hammer, or better, a pick, and especially to that guy, is the only thing right now he wants to do.

He stays on the Interstate days for about ten hours each day for weeks, south at the big bridge through his state for eighty-four miles, direction he was heading that day, turning around at the state line and back north to the bridge, and so forth, north-south, south-north, every two hours or so stopping for coffee or a snack at one of the road’s rest areas where he looks around for those men at the restaurants and fast-food places inside and then outside in the lots which he drives around looking for the van, and occasionally there for gas where he asks the attendants if they’ve seen a white minivan lately, Chevy or Ford — even though when he saw newspaper ads of the different vans he couldn’t tell the two makes apart — he doesn’t know what state’s license plate but with one or two men in it looking like the ones he describes. Hand gets better, for a while had to steer and shift with the right, which took some getting used to, at the start of the search his wife telling him it’s understandable but a little crazy what he’s doing, risking his health by damaging his hand further, raising the chances of an accident by driving so much and so many hours a day and with a bad hand and staying awake through most of it on coffee, deserting his family when they really need him, maybe losing his job and draining their savings and just doing something useless and futile, for he’ll never find them, not one in a million will he ever even see them even driving the opposite way from him, and if he does hit that once and catches up with them they’ll probably kill him first second they recognize him, for they’re pros at it with no remorse at what they do while he’s just an inexperienced hysteric, and continues saying what he’s doing is crazy but not “a little” anymore or “understandable,” but he still does it, and longer he does greater the chance he’ll find them, he thinks — if they weren’t on the Interstate before they’ll be on it now, unless they got jailed or killed since because of the stuff they’re into, for they’ll feel it’s all blown over or almost and they can ride the Interstate again because nobody’s really out looking for them — takes a week-to-week work leave always saying he’s still in a state of shock over his daughter, eventually they ask him to see the company psychologist, and when he refuses — one reason, he doesn’t tell them, that it’ll take time away from his search and another that he doesn’t think the psychologist will believe him — then a private therapist he chooses who should send the report on him to them, and when he says rest’s all he needs, no doctor, they let him go.

Few months after he started the search he sees a white minivan like the one that day going the other way on the Interstate and not unlike many he’s seen on it and a few he’s gone after because he thought he saw one or two of those men in it and pulled up alongside and saw he was wrong, and this one also seemed to have two men resembling the ones that day, around the same age as them and both with mustaches and fedora-type hats and the driver with dark sunglasses, more so than any guys he’s seen so far in this kind of white minivan, and he crosses the grass median, tries keeping his eyes on the van while he waits for a slew of cars to pass, drives eighty miles an hour to catch up with it and is pulled over by an unmarked police car and though he says why he was driving so fast and asks the cop to go after the van, is told “You have to stay within the law, whatever you’re after, and the car’s long gone from here, if in fact your excuse is on the level,” and gives him a steep ticket.

He continues his search another month, by this time his daughter and wife have gone to live with her folks in New York and he’s down to the end of the little savings he asked her to leave him when she left, when he sees on the other side of the Interstate what he thinks is the same van from the last time, only one guy in it but with a mustache and he thinks a fedora-type hat but no sunglasses. A mesh fence separates the two directions so he has to drive about a mile before he can cross in the first don’t-enter space between the fence, goes exactly sixty-five an hour in the speed lane till he sees a white minivan in the distance and hopes it’s the same one he saw more than five minutes ago, catches up, maybe the guy driving at the maximum legal speed so as not to risk being stopped by the cops if he’s the one, gets behind it in one of the three center lanes and jots down the license plate with the pen and pad he’d stuck to the dash just in case of this, from the back the driver looks like the one that day when the van drove on while the other guy shot at them, gets alongside on the left in the next center lane and looks inside. Same driver, he can’t believe it, he’s almost sure it’s him and looks hard again, he’s sure and shouts “Holy Christ, oh my God,” and slams the passenger seat with his fist and stays alongside and thinks what’s he going to do? what did he plan to? — follow him and then get the cops to grab him after he sees what house or store or whatever he goes in, no, scare the hell out of him first and then do what he can to give the guy an accident but not a bad one as he doesn’t want to kill him for it’s the other guy he wants much worse than him, and honks and the driver stays staring straight ahead, windows up, listening to some heavy beat it seems because his head’s bopping back and forth and his mouth’s moving as if he’s singing or doing something to the music with it, and he honks again and again and the driver looks in the rearview and then when he honks again, to his right and he nods and says “Yeah, yeah, me,” and lowers his window and indicates with his hand the driver should roll down his and the driver raises his eyebrows with an expression like “Hey, what’s up, man?” and he says out loud to himself “Jesus, just what I did that day, the bastard,” and honks repeatedly and the driver seems to say with his expression “What’s with you, man, what’re you going nuts for with your horn?” and he aims his hand out the window in the shape of a gun at the driver and the driver smiles and aims his hand back at him across his seat in the shape of a gun and then with his mouth seems to go bang-bang and he says “Bang-bang to you too, you rotten bastard, you scroungy rat, do you hear me?” and the driver laughs but a fake one and looks back at the road and he honks and honks till the driver looks at him and he jabs his thumb into his chest and says “Me, I’m the fucking father of the kid you killed, do you remember me?” and the driver smiles and points to his ear while shaking his head and then looks at the road again and he honks repeatedly and the driver keeps looking ahead though every thirty seconds or so sneaks a glance over to see if the car’s still beside him and gradually picks up speed and while they’re doing about seventy he crosses into the driver’s lane and slowly gets close enough to the van to bump its side once with his and then veers right and straightens out just as he’s about to lose control and drives parallel to the van about a foot apart and the driver looks alarmed and through his closed window seems to scream at him while shaking his fist “What’re you, fucking nuts, you moron? — I’ll kill ya,” and speeds up and he follows but can’t stay even as the van gets up to about a hundred and his car at the most can do eighty-five, so he just watches it till he loses it and then slows to sixty-five and keeps driving for miles, hoping a patrol car pulled the van over for going at such a high speed but either the van’s off the Interstate by now or the police were only able to catch up to it once it was off or none had.

He rides the Interstate another two weeks and then gives up; they’re probably not driving on it anymore, he thinks, or they got a different car, but now that they know he’s out looking for them and no doubt told the police he actually saw them on it, or just the driver knows — the other guy could be anywhere else, even shot dead by now, being involved in what he had to be and having exhibited the kind of craziness he did — they’re not going to chance that van or this road no matter how dumb or reckless they might be. He did ask the police that day to check on a white Ford minivan with the Florida license plate number he gave and which either has some damage to its right side or will be having body work done there, but they can’t locate any van like that in any state they’ve communication with and the Florida plates were reported stolen in Georgia a few days ago.

He phones his wife and asks her to come back, “I’m done looking for those guys and am going to get a job first thing and get my life back in order,” but she says she can’t, it’s all finished, it’s best they get divorced, for he’s shown something of himself in all this, no matter how terrible the circumstances might have been to provoke it, that she never wants to risk experiencing again. He’s talked on the phone to his daughter almost every day since she and her mother left, mostly just “How are you?” “Fine,” “What’ve you been up to lately?” “Things,” “Anything in particular?” “Nothing much,” “Maybe something new you want to tell me about?” “Not today,” “How’s your school doing?” “It’s all right,” “And your mommy?” “She’s okay, I guess,” “Why, something happen to her?” “No, everything’s the same,” “I love you, sweetheart,” “I love you too, Daddy,” and asks to speak to her now and tells her he loves her, “that’s nothing new to you, I know, but like I love no other person on earth, not even your mommy, and I loved your sister as much as I love you and will always be a broken man because of what happened to her that day with you both on the highway, do you know what a broken man is in the way I said it?” and she says she thinks she does, “it doesn’t mean split in two like a stick but is about sadness,” and he says “Though of course I also know how horrible it was and must still be for you in what happened, as horrible as anything it is for me, and I wish you were with me so I could help you and you, with just being with me and maybe in some of the things you’d say, could help me, do you understand what I mean, sweetie, or am I just being dumbly complicated again?” and she says “I understand but can’t do what you want as I have to be with Mommy,” and he says “I know, and I want you to, but I wish we could all be together again, not just with Julie, of course, but if that’s impossible, then the three of us left,” and she says “Mommy says we can’t, and I don’t know how long for, but wishes the same thing about Julie,” and he says “Probably right now you also don’t want to just be with me alone — it’s all right, you don’t have to answer that, I don’t want to put you on the spot, and do you know what that means — I mean, by that spot?” and she says “I can figure it,” and he says “Because you see it’s obvious I’m still all out of sorts over it, meaning unhappy, meaning miserable, that highway thing, which is why I say I understand why you wouldn’t want to be alone with me now, it might be frightening, though please don’t ever be of me, but I’ll be back to pretty near normal soon and then maybe almost completely normal, and almost completely normal and normal are just about the same thing, though with always a little left out for your sister, of course, which is okay and normal, and some also left out for what it did to Mommy and you, but not altogether enough with those to put me back to being even pretty near normal again,” and she says “Daddy, I don’t understand anything you’re saying now,” and he says “Anyway, what I’m saying is that when I’m back to being almost what I was, which should be soon, you can come stay with me, half with your mommy and half with me,” and she says “We’ll see,” and he says “Then just weekends, or weekends here and there and summers or a month of one every year,” and she says “I don’t know about that either, you’ll have to discuss it with Mommy,” and he says “‘Discuss,’ oh I love that, you’re getting so big and smart that that’s also why I want you to be with me now or very soon before you’ve really grown and won’t need to be with your parents anymore that I’ll just lose you naturally in a way I would have even if Mommy and you were living with me,” and she says “Perhaps, I’m not sure of that.” “You know,” he says, “though maybe you don’t unless your mommy’s told you, but I almost caught the driver of that car — that van, a minivan, a Ford it turned out to be,” and she says “No I didn’t, Mommy probably didn’t want me to,” and he says “Well, she’s likely right, but the van was much faster than our old buggy and I’m sure souped up, which is when they do something to increase the power of the car, so it got away. I was on the same highway also, though maybe I shouldn’t go further into it or even remind you of anything connected to it, but I was going to, I swear to you, smash into the van to force it off the road — I’d already bumped into it with our car — and then strangle him till he almost died or club him with this kid’s baseball bat I had right beside me in the car just for that, I didn’t care, and then hold him for the police but not kill him, as I’d really want to, for I wanted much more to get the guy who killed your sister and I thought I might force who that guy was out of him or the police might or the courts when they got this driver on trial, but what do you think?” and she says “You mean the other man wasn’t with him?” and he says no and she says “Still, you ought to stop worrying over it, Daddy — let those men alone, they might kill you first next time, they’re so bad,” and he says “Your mommy told me that so long ago I forget when, so she probably also told you, for those were almost her exact words,” and she says “Even if she did, and this is only what I now think, what you want to do to those men won’t do anything for Julie. She’s dead and you should start knowing it,” and he says “What do you think? — of course I do, but getting those men would do wonders for me, I’ll tell you, because I can’t live right knowing those guys are still around, enjoying themselves maybe, maybe even bragging about what they did and got away with and maybe even just that they forgot what they did till I bumped the van of that driver, or that they’re still doing it to other cars, though I haven’t read anything in the papers on it, though they could have switched those crazy killings to the street — that goes on all the time — or to highways in other states, which how would we have gotten news of unless it was to like ten cars in one day? but for your sake I’ll do what you say and stop worrying over it. You’re right, you’re right on just about everything, sweetheart, boy do I have such a smart right kid, but I’ll tell you a little secret — I gave up on ever finding those guys once that rat driver got away, so as I told your mommy, I’m no longer driving on the highway looking for them,” and she says good.

He gets a job and about three months later is on his way to work when he sees two men getting out of a light blue minivan with no windows except in front, both looking from almost a block away like those guys in the white van: same ages it seems, sunglasses though he can’t see from here if they’re dark, and as he gets closer to them just their faces and smiles and the driver’s big bulky forehead seem the same. He drives past slowly, they’re talking on the sidewalk, smile a big conniving-together smile and slap their right hands in the air like he’s seen athletes do after a real good play and then go opposite ways on the sidewalk he sees in his right side mirror and then in the rearview when he turns it to show more of the right and though they don’t have mustaches and have on baseball-type caps instead of fedora-style hats, they’re the ones all right, no mistake of it. He doesn’t know what to do, slowing down to almost a crawl: get one somehow and best yet the guy who killed his kid and through him the police can get the other one soon, but he doesn’t know if he’s revved up enough to do what he thinks he could have easily done or at least made an attempt to on the Interstate when he was cruising for them and which with his bumping their van he almost did. “Fuck it, the bastards,” he says, “they killed my kid — you fucking guys did and you’re both going to get it in the head,” and makes a sharp U, no cars are coming either way, which he didn’t think to look for when he made that U, cuts across the street and the driver, one nearest and heading in his direction, stops and looks at his car, and he climbs the sidewalk and starts for him with his foot now all the way down on the gas and the driver yells “Hey, what the shit — Luke!” and quickly looks around where to run it seems but he hits him, driver going over the front of the car and landing in the street and he starts for who he supposes is Luke who’s running across the street darting back looks at him, through the rearview and right side mirror sees the driver on both knees shaking himself off, front and Luke’s on the other sidewalk running away from him with no looks back now and he drives off the sidewalk, doesn’t know if he should get on Luke’s sidewalk or stay in the street alongside him till he has a clear shot at him with the car, gets on, nobody else is there and gets to about twenty feet of him with the gas pedal all the way down when Luke jumps over the front of a parked car, foot clips the hood and he tumbles to the street, he cuts into the street second he’s past the car in front of the jumped car, stops hard, looks back and sees the driver hobbling back to their van, and looking through his back window, Luke getting up slowly and holding his elbow, doesn’t know whether to turn around and head straight for Luke or back up on him hard, knocking him down, and then turn around and drive over him, “Luke, over here,” driver shouts by the van and Luke starts to run to it, almost falls and then limps to it and he shoots forward, stops, angles the car so it’s diagonally across from Luke and backs up fast as he can and Luke lunges but he jerks the steering wheel that way and hits him. Luke goes down, driver’s fumbling inside his pants pockets probably for car keys, Luke’s pushing himself up with his arms and he shoots forward, backs up and goes over some part of him he feels from the bump, goes forward so over probably the same part though just wanted to get where he could see him, thinks “Yes? no? screw him, he killed my kid and if he gets up he’ll probably try to kill me,” and backs over him with both the back and front wheels now till, and doesn’t know why he didn’t think of this before, he’s in front of Luke who’s flat out and face down and maybe dead and he screams “Killer, killer,” and floors the gas pedal and goes over him making sure not to hit his head, then makes a U, driver’s on the sidewalk looking as if he’s unlocking the passenger door, doesn’t know whether to drive up on it and hit him or just ram the van from the street, stopping it from going and maybe hurting the man, or just pull up and jump out and grab him and pound him to the ground. People have come out of some of the ranch houses, workers are standing right outside the one-story computer-graphics place, the lawn sign says, between two ranch houses and which the van’s parked near, cars have stopped at both ends of the street, driver’s got the door open and is getting into the van and he rams into it from the street, is thrown forward but head doesn’t hit anything and windshield doesn’t crack and he flops back into his seat, driver’s thrown down on the seat or floor somewhere or is looking for something there, “Gun, get him before he gets it,” he thinks and jumps out of the car and runs around the van, driver’s on his back on the seat with his eyes closed and opens them on him and he thinks “The kid’s bat, left it where?” and pulls the driver out by his legs, driver shoots his hand back to protect his head but it bumps on the sidewalk and the driver yells “Oh shit” and looks in great pain, he gets down and grabs the driver’s head, hands flinch from the blood in back of it but he says “No, fuck it,” and grabs it again and hard and driver screams and he says “You remember me, right?” and the driver says “Hey, wha?” his eyes rolling and he says “Hey, hey, you remember me, don’t you?” and the driver says “Hey, I’m hurt, don’t, no more,” and he says “But you remember me, you and your pal do, or he did, right? — open my window, roll it down, stick a gun in my face, aim it in back, shoot who the hell you want to, me and one of my dead little kiddies, right, right?” and the driver says “What? I swear. What pal? I haven’t got one. I didn’t do anything. What do you mean?” and he says “On the Interstate here — white minivan — don’t you remember me bumping it? — where’s your mustache and fedora?” and the driver says “What fedora? Fedora, what’s that?” and he says “This fedora, this fedora, my daughter,” and bangs the driver’s head against the car several times and people yell “Stop…Don’t…Enough…Someone!” and he lifts the head high and bangs it against the ground and again and hands grab him from behind and he tries shaking them off while banging the head and someone gets him in a neck lock and yanks him back while he drags the driver’s head with him till someone pries his fingers off one by one and he lets go with the last fingers and someone catches the driver’s head just before it hits the ground and they still pull him back and he says “All right, okay, I’ve stopped, you’ve stopped me, I’ll be good now and stick around for the police,” and they let him go and he sits a few feet away on the curb and wipes the blood off him on his pants and shirt and just looks down at his feet.

“Jesus, did you do them,” a man says, crouching beside him, “what was it, like you said?” and he nods and the man says “One in the street’s dead, I don’t know if you know, fucking face crushed, and other’s—” and he says “Didn’t mean to run over his face, in fact I intended—” and the man says “Well, your aim was bad, but the other looks almost finished too — cops and medics are on the way,” and he says “They deserved it, hope the alive one dies,” and the man says “Listen, for some advice, don’t go blabbing that, say it was self-defense, defense,” and he says “It wasn’t and at this point I’m not going to start bullshitting,” and the man says “Then say nothing, put your hands over your face like you’re sad, look disturbed, even, and wait for your lawyer or one given you but don’t sell yourself away and ten more years for it,” and he says “I’ll answer what they ask and if they don’t buy it, fine, I’ll swing,” and the man says “That’s what you think now, but I’ve been inside, babe, and later when you’re there you’ll hate every extra day for not doing what I say, but okay, I’m only trying to help, and lots of luck,” and the man stands and he stands and hugs him.

Police and medics come, driver’s treated on the street and taken away in an ambulance, guy’s put in a bag and left there in a special medical van with the back doors open while the police ask him what happened though say he doesn’t have to answer or can wait till he has a lawyer and he says “I was getting back at them, if I didn’t nothing ever would have happened to them, like finding them, except by accident, it’s all written down somewhere what they did to my kid that day on the Interstate, you’ll see they’ll fit the descriptions I gave minus the mustaches and there’ll be nothing about their height for I never saw them out of their van till today.”

The two have records, now wanted for this and that in other states, police photos showing them with mustaches, he refuses to hire a lawyer so is assigned one, his daughter can’t be a witness for him since she can’t even say what age around or color the men were that first time on the Interstate and thought there were three or four of them in the van, he’s convicted and given ten to twelve years for killing an unarmed man and permanently damaging the brain of another, judge says at sentencing “If you had shown one iota of remorse or expressed some understanding of the wrong you’ve done I would have sentenced you to a few years or less, given what you’ve gone through over your daughter’s death and that you’ve never been charged with a serious crime before and the men you attacked had a history of felonious activity and were wanted for robbery and murder though not of your child and who now ironically can’t be tried for these other crimes since one is dead and the other will be a vegetable for life, but what you’ve done, sir, and how you’ve acted since sends the wrong message to others similarly victimized and bereft who might want to take barbarous revenge the way you did and then the streets would even be more menacing than they are today, so I must conclude that you’re nearly as dangerous and perhaps even as ruthless as the men you call without proof your daughter’s brutalizers,” and he says “You could think that, I’m not going to take issue with you, though nobody’s going to convince me I didn’t get the right guys, but personally I feel a hell of a lot better for what I did, and to me, though it’ll be a long time before I can enjoy them, the streets have to be a little safer now, and for sure the Interstate is, not with me off them but those guys, even if that’s not at all why I did it.”

Some prisoners say they admire him for what he did for his kid and proof’s in the eye and those guys deserved it, but most others say he shouldn’t have gone so far as to try and kill them, for look what he lost: wife, other kid and his freedom, and also he couldn’t have been sure it was them after almost a year and maybe he still didn’t get the right men who might even be in this prison wanting to kill him before he finds out his mistake and tries to get them and besides, you want someone killed you get a pro to do it but you don’t try it yourself in what always for an amateur turns out to be a sloppy job or total bungle, like with his braining for life that poor slob, and where you usually end up dead yourself or in prison for years if not gassed by the state for having killed some innocent bystander or the wrong guy or even the right one. He usually says he had no time or money to hire a hit man, not that he ever would have for he didn’t want anyone doing it except himself because only he had a reason to and money for killing no matter how much someone would pay can never be a reason, and some say “For ten thou?…for twenty?…for fifty then?…you telling me you wouldn’t knock off someone you don’t know for a half million if you knew it was fairly easy?” and then if that’s the case he should have let the matter go and got on with his life and if he saw them by accident like on the road then he just should have told the cops where it was and leave it at that and at most hope for the best and if it was in some place where the guys were still there, then where, but to keep his body completely out of it.

His wife visits him a few months after he’s in, though he wrote and spoke to her answering machine plenty of times to come, without hearing anything back, and she says she’d like a divorce and hopes he won’t try to stop it and he says he doesn’t want one, of course, but he put her through such misery like leaving her stranded and almost broke and with their oldest child, besides the even worse misery by far she had over losing Julie while at the same time seeing him go nuts in his own misery and over finding those guys, that anything she wants he’ll give, every single dime in the bank and whatever assets and possessions they still might have and things like that and any arrangements she wants to make with him over Margo he’ll sign, though he hopes she’ll bring the kid to him here or have someone do it a few times a year, and she remarries a short while later and has a daughter who in a few years is the age Julie was when that guy killed her.

His ex-sister-in-law brings Margo to see him in prison about once a year once the girl turns twelve and then when she’s eighteen she visits him on her own because she wants to or knows how much he wants her to and feels sorry for him and is just responding to his begging letters for her to come for she’s all he has he says in them, all he ever will and just a few hours with her makes the next few months till her next visit so much better for him, and it’s usually uncomfortable between them for the two hours she’s there — they could have more time but he can tell by her fidgeting and face that those two hours are a little more than she can tolerate — and they don’t talk to each other much and he mostly stares at her not looking or looking at everything but him and says when he says anything, and then it often becomes a sort of running-mouth thing, how nice she looks and bigger and even prettier she’s getting, all things he knows daddies, or “fathers” now because she’s of that age, are almost supposed to be saying but with her it’s altogether true, and mature she’s sounding and also mature in lots of other good ways and how nice her clothes are or how they’re the perfect choice for her looks and physique and the weather today and how it’s not so bad in here, she didn’t ask but he’ll give her his semiannual report anyway if she doesn’t mind, the other prisoners still leave him alone for the most part for they know it’s what he wants after all he went through, and how much it means to him that she’s here sitting opposite him, he can hardly believe it after wishing for it so much the last three months and he apologizes if coming here was a lot of trouble and cost her more than she could afford or stopped her from doing something or being with someone she wanted to be with or do much more, it’s okay though, he was a kid once, or a young man he should say if he’s going to get their age comparisons right, so he understands and he won’t ever forget that she comes here pretty regularly, that she comes here at all, even, and he knows it’s not the greatest place to see one’s dad and he appreciates the effort she made in coming here but he said that, and at least once every time she’s there he suddenly starts bawling, first sniveling, then trying to hold it back, then flat-out crying or bawling but over nothing he later tells her, just happy to see her and he hopes his crying doesn’t stop her from coming to see him more and she swears it doesn’t but inside he thinks he’s also bawling because he’s thinking all he’s missed not living with her the last eight years, nine years, ten and when he sees her he sees Julie for they looked almost like twins when they were kids except for the three-year age difference and he figures this is probably close to what Julie would have looked like if she hadn’t died, or seeing her he thinks of Julie and what happened to her that day and what she looked like dead in the shot-up car, bullet hole in her chest just below her neck, expression, once he picked her arms off her face, no, that’s not it, the hole was some other place, in her neck and it was car glass in her cheek and chest, why was she up? why wasn’t she down? he’d told them both to be so why couldn’t she have listened to him as Margo did? didn’t he yell loud enough? wasn’t there enough anger and power and force and alarm in his voice to scare them to stay down? and a minute or two before when he was driving side by side with the van and looked quickly in the rearview to see if they were okay and before that when they started out on the car trip, on their way back from a weekend in New York, wife staying with her folks two more days and then returning by train, talking during the start of the ride which rest stop they’d stop at if they didn’t have to stop before that for one of them to pee, and then when they decided, which eating place there, Bob’s Big Boy or Roy Rogers or Sabarro he thinks the Italian place was called or maybe a combo of all three? and one of the last times Margo saw him in prison and when they were silent a long while with her looking at anything but him she says, something she’s always wanted to say but never had the heart or courage to or whatever it takes she says, she wishes he hadn’t gone after those men so drivenly, and that’s no joke, like her mother and she told him not to years and years ago, although okay she was just a kid then so he’d hardly listen to her but to his own wife? for what good did it do even if he’d killed both of them and they were the real men and almost more important and she’s surprised he wasn’t thinking this then, what good was he as a father after that when she really needed one, not just for the year or two after the shock of her losing Julie and all that blood and stuff but through her entire growing up, and even now he’s not there the few times she could still use him for advice and bouncing off her views or just being there for her, with or without her mother, or driving her where she needs to be before she gets her own car, or whatever real biological fathers are supposed to be good for and do for their children besides the money she could really use for college and which her mother’s husband doesn’t have or if he does he’s not going to part with so easily since he has his own biological kids with her mother and his first wife to support and he says “Money, what can I tell you? — I don’t get paid a whole lot here and they don’t have any college tuition plan for the children of their workers, but as for the rest — moral support and all — I’m here for you, I’m here, where else am I? — I’m not any ghost, and I write you almost every day, you’re the only one I do, so in that respect you have more communication with me, and even more if you’d answer a letter every now and then, than maybe most girls your age do with their dads who are all out to work half the day and then bring it home with them and things like that — just not interested, lots of them, or only interested in the things they’re not — but maybe you don’t even read half my letters, which’d be all right, being I send so many,” and she says “I do too, but not always so carefully, for I’ve a lot to do for school to earn future college money you won’t be able to give, and let’s face it, Daddy, you sometimes say the same thing in them or fairly close or repeat yourself in different ways where it becomes too repeatinglike and sort of boring if I can say — after a while there’s not a lot to write about in prison, which I long ago figured out but I guess is what this place is supposed to be for — to make you wish you didn’t do what you did to get yourself in here and to make you also want to jump back into the non-crimelike world once you get out where you can have something new to do and talk about and for gosh sake never to go back in again because of all the sameness and bad food and sleeping and no privacy and your horrible toilets and all the TVs on around you and dumb conversations and no summer vacations as you’ve joked a hundred times and that music the other prisoners play that you hate and I’m sure no women and even some fear of the other men,” and he says “True, although it could be I haven’t told you everything, though none of what I didn’t say would make me want to stay, but I also call you whenever I can and am able to afford it and you can call me at the prescribed hours when you like too but unfortunately not collect, they don’t have that advantage here either, or even from your mom’s phone, why not? — I handed all we had and owned over to her without a gripe when we split up, not that there was much, I admit, or that I regret a single nickel of it, though a little house with a big mortgage is still something if a few years’ interest on it have been paid off and the market hasn’t dropped, so maybe the least she could do for both of us — and then if it makes you feel better it should make her too, right? — is let you call me from her phone now and then, or just tell her to tally all the calls you make to me and their cost — why didn’t I think of this a thousand years ago? — and when I get out and really working, or even with the little dough I make a day here, I’ll pay her back with regular bank interest whatever that now is, but anyway, none of those I realize are the same as my being there for you on the outside when you need me and it never can be turned around to be made good, but what else did you want to tell me? — you said there was something,” and she says “You’re not going to like this,” and he says “Just say, nothing about yourself can make me angry,” and she says “Sad, though, that’s what I’m afraid,” and he says “If you’re sick, but I mean on your last leg or just very bad, then that of course,” and she says “Soon as I graduate in June I’m going to Seattle or some West Coast place where young people go, to look for work and room with girls I’ll get from the ads and hopefully get residency status there so I can go to college cheap, so to be honest I’ll be coming here even less than I have and today can easily be the last time for a while, I’m sorry, Daddy,” and he says “Well, that wasn’t too bad, I’m already recovering because I know it’s what you want and should be good for you if it’s safe, and also, since I’m out of here in less than two years, it won’t be too long a stretch between seeing you if you don’t come again but tell me where you are. Now as for what you both said not to do with those guys who killed Julie, long as we’re talking straight, going after them so one-mindedly and blindly you can say, I shouldn’t have if only because it broke up what could have been considered a fairly good marriage till then, though just losing Julie could have done that, everything because of it thrown out of whack, but it also separated me from you and then permanently when she left, though if she had stayed who knows by then when I saw those guys if I wouldn’t have been over it, so to speak, so wouldn’t have run over them and banged the alive guy’s head on the street, but truth is, and thanks for calling me Daddy — you never say that, not in ten years, so maybe it’s like, well, your final visit, sort of a planned keepsake for me — but I doubt I would’ve been that over it when I saw them, even in a killer-animal way, so would’ve done, even if your mom hadn’t left me, what I did and been given even more years because with you both not gone the judge could have said ‘Hey, he still had his family there, so his wife didn’t leave him because she thought he was crazy and he wasn’t crazy in addition because she left him and took their only other child, so he even shouldn’t more have done what he did,’ or something — I can’t put words into a judge’s mouth, they’re of another breed and their legalese is way past me. The other truth is I’m still glad what I did to those guys, the worst of the two for all time erased, for nobody in the world deserved it more but maybe Nazi butchers of a thousand kids in one day or the Japanese in World War Two with Chinese babies on their bayonets if that story wasn’t just made up to get us to hate and kill the Japanese even more, and I lots of times wish, even sometimes for that driver-of-the-van’s sake, though that feeling of good for him doesn’t last long, because he could have told the gun guy to stop, you know — he could have shouted in the van ‘Stop, there’re kids in there, stop!’—that I’d finished him off too even if it would’ve no doubt given me a longer term, or maybe I don’t wish that for I’ve probably done all the time here, plus the two years to go, I can just about take.”

Has to serve his maximum sentence, minus a few months, and is let out, returns to his old city and rents a single room, gets a job in a cheap hamburger-steak place, work he learned in prison, not the hamburgers so much or steaks at all though they’re easy enough, steaks a bit trickier, but just weighing and frying and grilling and boiling and recooking lots of food quickly and on a much larger scale and dishing it out all at once and where he was one of many cooks rather than the only one behind the counter now who has to do some of the dishwashing too. Daughter marries but doesn’t tell him where or when — she stopped writing him a few months after that last visit and her mother, when he called for Margo’s phone number and address when he got out, told him about the marriage and said “I’ll tell her you called, next time I hear from her — it could be this week or next — and if she wants to get in touch with you I’ll give her your phone number and address — what are they, and by the way how are you?” and he said “Exhausted, demoralized, done in, badly off, but couldn’t you call her today and tell her I’m out and want very much to see her, at least hear from her?” and she said “I’ll try”—has a baby very quickly he hears soon after that from his ex-wife when he calls again for Margo’s phone number or address or even her city and husband’s last name and who won’t give it, “Once again, that’s her business,” she says, “she has her ways, which I don’t necessarily approve of regarding you, but nothing I can say — I’ll keep forwarding your letters and packages to her if you keep sending them here care of me or Dave, though with the packages, since we also aren’t in great financial shape, maybe you can mail them first class instead of fourth or parcel post so we don’t have to put out for the extra forwarding cost — and Margo says, well she still hasn’t said anything about not wanting your mail, so maybe one day, I’m sure this’ll be the case — she’s still a kid, even with one of her own, and congratulations, Grandpa, I’m sure nobody’s said that to you before, and kids change — she’ll switch over,” and he says “From what — seeing or hearing from me or something deeper I don’t know about? Or just the obvious — she say she’s ashamed of my having done time or frightened because I once pummeled and killed some guy, now that she has her own child?” and she says “Wish I knew, Nat, she’s closemouthed on the subject, but you remember her as a girl — supersensitive and always a reader, never one for talk or introspection except about her dreams and books — she in fact reprimands me when I ask what gives over you,” and he says “Plead with her, Lee, please plead with her for me — tell her prison neutered and weakened me and I’ve become the most harmless of men, slapping patties, going home and reading newspapers, on my days off taking walks and going to movies and museums and in the park looking at the kids playing in the playground till it gets to look suspicious and in the zoo throwing old restaurant rolls to those birds that stand on one leg, flamingos, and all kinds of no-flying ducks — sounds hokey, I know, but I’m not saying it to make me seem even more harmless to you so you can report back to her how much but because it’s what I am, or have become — which is it? for I truly forget a lot of what I was like before I bopped those guys — for there are no friends or nothing else from before, the jobs I had where I knew people I got so far behind at in twelve years, and no doubt my prison and what I did to get in didn’t help, that they wouldn’t hire me anymore, all of which I’ve said endlessly in my letters to her, and about my harmlessness, but maybe she’ll tune into it better coming from you,” and she says “I’ll try but not to the point where she then won’t want to speak to me,” and he says “So she lives nearby you?” and she says “No, why’d you say that?” and he says “I don’t know — thought if she did I could trick you into saying so and maybe where and if she didn’t and you said so, I’d know that too, which I now do and isn’t any help to me and just shows how desperate I am to know even the slightest inkling of her and just to see her, I’m sorry,” and she says “You ever think that perhaps desperation like that is what might be pushing her away?” and he says “Why should it be? — I’m just a familyless father showing normal loss and love after so many years with probably some holdover woe going all the way back to our poor Julie, for do you ever forget?” and she says “I don’t want to talk about it,” and he says “Okay, you got other people to do it to, which I’m glad for you, plus also you’ve another kid, but did Margo tell you that about pushing her away?” and she says “In all honesty, no,” and some years later Margo calls him at work — he’d given her the number in his letters, always at the top left under his address along with his home phone number and what times and days he’s usually at either place — and says “Hello, it’s Margo, your daughter, how are you?” and he says “Margo, my goodness, oh-h-h, gosh, where you calling from, how are you?” and she says “I tried getting you at home the last few hours but nobody answered and you have no answering machine,” and he says “My hours aren’t others’, and me, a machine? but I thought I gave my work and home hours in my letters in case you did call, and they haven’t changed in years,” and she says “I don’t remember seeing them, and it’s all right to talk to you here?” and he says “For the moment, sure, I practically run this joint, but don’t hang up without letting me know where you are,” and she says “You’re the manager?” and he says “Just a cook and counterman but of long standing and so honest they know they could never get another like me,” and she says “And that was a fib about the hours — I remember now — actually, I remembered when I mentioned them before, but I didn’t jot them down, only your phone numbers and home address,” and he says “It’s okay, it’s okay, and you’re okay, everything at home okay? nothing wrong I hope with your family or your mother or other sister, the one between Lee and her new husband — new, old, her second husband,” and she says “No, I’m just calling, and listen, I’m sorry I haven’t contacted you sooner, haven’t been in contact, period, I’m not certain why I haven’t though I know it’s inexcusable and more inexcusable why I didn’t answer even a fraction of your wonderful letters,” and he says “They weren’t wonderful, they were mostly sappy and dumb and maybe too beggarlike, right?” and she says “They were very nice, no excessive demands or reproaches on me, which I could have used to get me to write back, and also for the books and things for me you sent and birthday presents for what you thought were the birth dates of my boys,” and he says “I didn’t know the exact dates, and am only finding out now the exact genders, but just the approximate ones by a month or two which is all your mother would tell me — she said you’d have to tell me yourself and when I said ‘What’s the harm if I know the exact dates?’—though I’m not blaming her—‘in fact it’ll be clearer to her kids,’ I said, ‘why they’re getting these gifts and if I know what sex they are I can get them even more fitting gifts, dolls for the boys, catcher mitts for the girls, et cetera,’ only kidding, she said that’s all she’d tell me, that she possibly shouldn’t have even said you had kids, so I just guessed the sex and exact dates, hoping, sly devil I am, that you’d send a note back not thanking me so much as correcting me, but anyway, let’s forget it, just hearing your voice is all and I’m talking too much to hear much of it, and you sound so different, nowhere near like you did, your speaking manner, use of words and proper diction — you make me feel like a dolt in comparison — you sure this is my old Margo and not some practical-joker one? only kidding again — just put up with me, honey, I’m so excited I can’t stop mouthing, but where are you, in your city, the country?” and she says “No, yours, with my husband and oldest son,” and he says “That’s right, three, and now boys, I know, and all of them you had while working plus going to school and then getting not one but two after-college degrees, your mother said, and in very difficult fields,” and she says “Rigorous disciplines, perhaps, but not difficult — I must have had the knack, just as I probably couldn’t have done the schoolwork for what you did before, what was that?” and he says “Before what?” and she says “The present job,” and he says “Dental technician, something my father wanted me to do because he thought it a field where I’d always have a job, but by the time I got out, but wait a minute, the city? here? this one?” and she says “Glen, my husband, is attending a sales rally and the parent company of his firm wanted to have it here because of all the waterfront attractions and I guess the place caters to it, so I thought I’d turn it into a minivacation for me and sightseeing trip for our son and also a chance to see the few of my friends left here,” and he says “Oh, and who are they?” and she says “People, but getting back to before, I suppose part of why, if you don’t mind my saying, though I’d like to get it out right away — that’s the way I’ve become, open like that, though I’m not saying it’s the best quality or I’m boasting or occasionally couldn’t be more diplomatic at it,” and he says “Anyway, what were you saying?” and she says “That part of why I stopped having contact with you was that I wanted to cut myself off from my old life, childhood friends included, though perhaps not Mom — that would have been too radical a surgery — to develop on my own, if you can accept that,” and he says “Okay, that’s interesting, something to think about, but speaking of cutting off, honey, and this is in no way a reaction to what you said, for there’s nothing more in life I want to do than speak to you and soon after that to meet Glen and your boy, whatever his name is,” and she says “Saul,” and he says “Biblical — any reason, or Glen’s family?” and she says no and he says “And the other two?” and she says “Dyon and Carlos,” and he says “Nice names too — after anyone I know?” and she says “No, we liked them as names,” and he says “But I thought everyone’s named after someone — I’m named after my mother’s father Nathaniel, who I never knew — he died, that’s why, before I was born, which is how you usually did it, and ‘Margo’ comes from my mother’s brother Marvin who was killed in the war, and which your mother was kind enough to go along with, but you know this,” and she says “Not the particulars, so go on,” and he says “And who because I was so young when he died you could say I almost never saw, or actually as a result of injuries from it a year later — they say he blanked out at the wheel of his car because of being shell-shocked in battle, or something like that — it’s funny how you forget — I do, when at the time it’s the biggest thing existing — but anyway, being I was the only child I knew it’s what my mother would have wanted — it pleased her till she died that you were named Margo after him,” and she says “Well what can I say? — with each of ours we took the ten best names we found in the most complete namebook, considered Glen’s surname in relation to it, and narrowed it down to two or three—” and he says “Excuse me but by surname do you mean last name?” and she says yes and he says “What is it?” and she says “I still go by my maiden name, even if it’s yours, meaning a man’s, but at least I didn’t continue the custom I wasn’t so keen on, adopting my husband’s patronym,” and he says “It’s not a bad one, our last name — one syllable, confusing to spell if you think it’s the spat or shred Fray rather than an e. But anyway, my sweetheart, I am suddenly in the thick of work with two customers, and hungry ones, judging by their faces — in fact, not wanting to be a fibber either, they came in more than five minutes ago and have been good about it but they got to get back to work too and business hasn’t been that hot, so we need them, so give me your number where you are and I’ll call back soon,” and she says “I can call you at home later — when would be the best time?” and he says “No, please, I don’t want to miss you, long as you’re here — to be straight open, you might change your mind or have a memory lapse for your entire time here, only kidding, or even lose my phone numbers — that could happen, people lose things — and not remember how to get them — place I work at is called the Corner Cafe, but no ‘the’ before it, just Corner Cafe, so listed in the directory under C, for Corner, then ‘Cafe’ after it, and on Abbott Street, like Bud Abbott and Lou Costello — Abbott and Costello they were called, but you wouldn’t remember them, an old-time comedian team,” and she says “Sure, I once saw a movie with them on TV, or maybe it was a video with my kids — something with a ghost, the humor grossly dated and somewhat trite, but they didn’t like it much either — you have to understand I’m not that young and you’re not that old, you might have had me when you were past thirty but now I’m getting to be thirty,” and he says “Not possible,” and she says “I’m telling you, I’ll even show you my driver’s license,” and he says “You mean you’re old enough to drive? — only kidding, and I want to see it, you show it when you see me, and listen, Margo, if you don’t call I’ll only go from hotel to hotel looking for you and there has to be a couple of dozen of them by the harbor now, so wouldn’t that be a waste of time? and I’d also be putting my job on the line or my bosses in a tough spot because I wouldn’t go in when I’m supposed to and they need me, as I’d be out searching for you,” and she says “I swear I’ll call, or just meet us for lunch tomorrow,” and he says “Lunch is so short — I know, fellas,” he says to the customers at the counter, “I’ll be right there — my daughter,” pointing to the mouthpiece, then the ear part, “after I can’t tell you how many years,” and the men nod, say with their hands “Take your time,” and he says into the phone “Excuse me, I had to pause for work stuff, anyway, lunch is too short and I don’t think I could get off, so what about dinner tonight, out, my treat, all of you?” and she says “Dinner? tonight? — just a moment, Dad,” and she starts talking away from the phone—“He wants to take us all out for dinner tonight”—and another voice talks, but all garbled, and then he hears nothing, her hand must be muzzling the receiver, and one of the men says “Long as you’re just standing there, Nat, start my regular,” and he says “Hold it, she might suddenly come back on, and when it’s over I’ll be extra fast, making up for what time you lost,” and another man says “At least our coffee, or mine, heck with him,” and he puts his hand up for them to wait and she says “All right…Dad?” and he says yeah and she says “Tonight, but our treat, Glen didn’t think he could get away from a cocktail party-dinner his company’s throwing, but this comes first,” and he says “Great, but my treat, I insist on it,” and she says “We’ll meet only if you abide by this one condition — it’s on us,” and he says “I’ll abide, I’ll abide, I can’t wait to abide,” and she gives him the name of a restaurant near their hotel that she heard was good—“You still like seafood, or rather, did you ever?” and he says “Anything, pizza, even, Crackerjacks — just seeing you all is all I want, food’s no consequence but I’ll eat if that’s your second condition,” and what time to meet and they meet at the front of the restaurant, he’s there fifteen minutes before, thinking maybe they’ll get there early, can’t believe it’s her when she comes in, knows though immediately it is, very slim but not skinny, taller, even, and she was tall then, filled out on top or maybe it’s what she’s wearing, no, she was still developing when he last saw her, old as she was, hips, longer legs, the fashionable clothes it seems, anyway, well dressed, pretty as ever, prettier, beautiful and not just because she’s his daughter, any man would fall for her, a decent honest intelligent man but he bets the horns also can’t take their eyes off her when she walks down the street, a kid before, woman now, nice-looking son, tall, like him and her but not his father who’s a couple inches shorter than her and she’s not wearing heels, kid a little scared of him or just shy, almost no smile, fish handshake but he’s still very young, he likes the way they dress him for the restaurant or the occasion he could say, jacket and tie, husband seems nice, dignified, polite, bright, comes from money or made it on his own ethically, somewhat square or so it seems at first meeting, clothes, haircut, company man looks like, she hurries over to him second she sees him and kisses his cheek, “I know you, you must be my dad and practically unchanged,” smiling, stepping back, “Absolutely none, you’re amazing,” introduces her husband and son, he’s dressed up too, his one tie with his one suit he got married in almost thirty years ago and wore day after day in court and it still looks good, wore it into prison just to have it when he got out, they only allowed one outfit to bring in and for them to store, dry-cleaned it soon after his release but hasn’t worn it once till now, didn’t need a pressing though, kept its shape, wood hanger instead of wire and the plastic bag never off it, heavy wool on this warm June day, trouser legs might be a bit baggy but his weight’s the same, maybe differently distributed but he can’t see, as it was some fifteen years ago and he doesn’t seem to have shrunk any, shirt is one of the two he wears at work and last night washed and hung-dried, tie he used for a few of his job interviews years before, shaved though he’d shaved at six this morning before going to work, said to himself in the bathroom mirror while shaving “Feel like I’m going to meet this love-of-my-life girlfriend of ten years ago who I’m still crazy about and she’s just split up with her husband and I think there’s a chance between us — look at yourself, that’s how nervous and scared you are,” lots of questions while they sit at their table and all have drinks, kid a Shirley Temple but he says, after Glen gives the waitress their drink order, “For a boy it’s a Jackie Coogan, I think,” and all three of them and the waitress say “Who’s he?” or “What’s that?” and he says “Abbott and Costello’s roommate and sidekick,” and Margo laughs and Glen says “What gives — old family joke?” and the waitress says “But same thing as a Shirley Temple, correct — no alcohol, dash of grenadine, a bar cherry?” and goes and he says “Could be I’m wrong and for all I know a Coogan gets club soda instead of ginger ale and maybe even a couple of drops of rye — what do I know about heavy drinking? and also Coogan was probably more Shirley Temple’s contemporary than Bud and Lou’s,” and Glen says “Pardon me again, sir, but who are they?” and he says “What kind of cloaked — what’s the word, closeted, closed-off, maybe — family you grow up in that you don’t know them? — mine we made sure my kids learned important things like that — only kidding,” and Saul says “You said ‘my kids,’ Grandpa — you have any more children after you and Grandma Lee got a divorce? Because it’d be nice knowing I have another aunt and uncle and cousins somewhere, even if only step ones,” and he says “You would have an aunt and no doubt the rest but we don’t want to go into it now — she was younger than you when she passed away — is that remarkable, Margo, can that be believed, that she was probably younger than your son here? — sweetest kid,” he says to Saul, “outside of your mother, of course — they were equals in sweetness — that was ever alive,” and starts to cry and Saul says to his parents “Did I do something?” and Margo says “Dad,” and to Saul “I’ll explain it all later,” and Glen says “Maybe one day,” Margo a dark beer, two men scotch on the rocks water in back, Glen, when they talked about what they’d have, said it first and he said “Ah, I’ll have that too though I hardly ever drink, and not before eight or nine when I do, then I have to admit I mostly just sit there in my armchair with something to read on my lap and maybe some chips or cheese on the side and slowly get sloshed, which is awful, I know, but what it has to do with, anyone but this boy can guess,” and Saul said “What does it?” and she said “You shouldn’t let it disturb you so, Dad, especially for your health,” and he said “But when your mind’s running while you’re nipping, or the reverse, what else can it end up doing and you thinking and then drinking more and more till you conk out? but I said it was only occasionally and maybe that occasionally only rarely, but because you brought it up, even that little I’ll try to stop,” what she does an average workday? done the last few years? exactly Glen do? he still doesn’t understand what that particularly is but that’s okay, he gets the gist, schools they went to? where’d they meet, something with every married couple he’s always been interested in: he and Lee, as she must know, met coming out of a legitimate theater in New York: “We both, if you can believe it — well, I’m sure your mother you can still tell just by her voice and face or at least recent past photos of it — wanted to be actors, and she, if you can also believe, picked me up: thought I was cute and maybe for a week I was,” where Glen was raised? his folks and what they do? “You think now that we know each other better you can reveal his last name?” city they live in, will they also let him in on that? heard it’s a good place, safe, slower paced, great for kids, any reason they each married an only child, at least she is to a degree? “Oh, forgot Lee had another kid soon after she dumped me, just as I would have liked to do almost immediately to sort of make up for Julie and we probably would have if we both weren’t so messed up right after and later if she had stayed, otherwise we felt two were plenty enough, one for each hand I liked to say and that’s how we’d cross streets, remember?” and she says “For me it’s too far back and possibly I’ve a block, but I take your word,” and Saul says “You said you wanted to be actors, how come you and Grandma Lee didn’t?” and he says “She to raise kids and me because I had no talent from the start and saw that in the first classes I took and I also think I was only in it to meet pretty girls, which I did with Lee so didn’t see the need for it anymore, and that happened at the standing-room section behind the orchestra at the Music Box and not leaving a theater: she asked me for the time though I never wore a watch,” questions, he has so many questions, do they mind? for instance—“Oh by the way, how did you two meet? and sorry for cutting in on myself like I have,” and she says at college in a chem lab: they shared the same Bunsen burner and sink, their other kids are like? ages and how tall they are? interested in sports more than books? that’s good, as the Greeks said or something like: the balanced life, color hair and eyes? all three inherited Lee’s honey blonde and yellow-green which perplexed the geneticists since Glen’s are supposed to be predominantly dark, “Mom said you thought her eyes the best feature of her looks so I guess we should consider the kids lucky, though they’re boys,” and he says “She had lots of nice features — I can kick myself to hell for making it so easy for her to leave, but nothing I could’ve done — I was crazed, as they say—‘nuts,’” to Saul—“since I knew but couldn’t do anything about it that nothing like finding and knocking off those guys or beating my head blue against a wall would help, and after I left my long-term residence…how much does he know?” and Glen says “Niente,” and Saul says “Niente what?” and she says “Nothing, it means nothing,” “…it was too late for a second wife if she couldn’t be another mother and I was in such ugly shape that none that young could be gotten around,” their other sons’ names again? how come nobody in their family’s got a nickname? his is Nat which he hates for it sounds like a buggy rat, but at the place he works he can’t escape from, what’re they doing this summer for vacation? “Me, I’m staying home for the two weeks I get and just sleep — I’ll be that bushed…oops, sorry again and then for the last time before for not waiting for your answer but I guess I’m in too much of a rush to let you know everything about me before dinner’s finished and you’re gone,” and she says “Don’t worry, there’ll be other times,” and he says “When, you coming in again?” and Glen says usually they go to a British Columbian beach for three weeks but this summer they’re driving to Alaska for a month and he says “Boy, what I wouldn’t have given to do either of those with my family but closer to home in the East — Maine, upper Canada or just Canada, camping and occasionally stopping off at sort of an inexpensive sea resort to sleep and eat and wash off, flying into the ocean with my two kids or if the water’s too cold, into a pool or just stepping into one and splashing and swimming around, worth almost the other fifty working weeks, why didn’t we ever do that? how come I think of these things always much too late?” and she says “Maybe we did them and you don’t remember, for I think we once went to Chincoteague for a weekend — I remember the name and wild ponies or mules by the ocean and that you got me a plastic figure of one that I slept with I loved so much,” and he says “I don’t remember but I’ll have to work on it till I do,” and what did the figure look like? how big? did she give it a name? did it have a mane? attached straps or any apparatus like that? saddle and rider? but wouldn’t if it was wild, dessert, coffee, Glen pays and gets up and taps Saul’s shoulder to and he says “Well, guess I ought to be going too,” and starts to stand and she presses his hand to the table and says “Stay for more coffee, Dad, or another beer — they have a discount record store to go to the likes of which doesn’t exist in our neck of the woods and I’m sure you’ve plenty more you want to talk over with me,” and they go, “It’s been great, Mr. Frey, and hope to see you again soon,” “Nathan, or Nat if you prefer and which I promise to answer to without asking if you like your coffee black or with sugar and milk or cream,” “What do you mean?” “Nothing, just being silly, and I saw and am such a pro that I’ll probably never forget how you like your coffee unless you switch it around from day to day,” “Nice to meet you, Grandpa,” and he kisses Saul’s head when Saul sticks out his hand to shake, and she stares at him while they share another beer and he says “What’re you staring at, do I look that funny, like a big wizened old fart? — excuse me,” and she says “Not at all, for your excuse or your supposition, this is an event and I’m remembering it and then remembering that I’m remembering it to help me not to forget, and what are you saying? — you look fantastic for your age, lean, one of those going-to-outlive-us-all vigors and physiques, a little less hair than from the photographs of around the last time I saw you, or a few years before — you didn’t take any in there, did you? and I’m not being facetious either — in most ways you don’t seem to have aged a day in twenty years,” and he says “Which ways have I, outside of my hair?” and she says “Your elbows, nobody can do anything to conceal aging elbows,” and he says “But I’m wearing a jacket and long-sleeved shirt,” and she says “I know, so maybe your humor and quick-wittedness have suffered a little too — I’m not serious,” and he says “Listen, don’t kid me, I’m just an old blowhard now, which when you think of it is not too far from being a loud fart, excuse me, must be the beer and just seeing you which is making me talk to my daughter so sillily like this, though actually talking to you alone here — before with them, Saul and Glen, I was just feeling better than I have in years — but with you now I feel less stupid, even half intelligent which I almost never feel, than I have since I went to prison, as much as I tried to keep and even advance my mind in there, but here the words, even, that have eluded me — like ‘eluded’—or I’ve simply forgotten, and just speaking them — the fluidity in the way I speak — and ‘fluidity,’ for christsake — it must be that among other things you’re the first really brainy person I’ve talked to in twenty years, at least one brimming with mental nimbleness and ideas and intelligent intelligible speech, if that’s how long it’s been since I went in, or that speaking to someone like you, even one’s daughter who I’m supposed to, I suppose, posture and lord over, that if this person — me — had something of a mind before, generates or regenerates something like it in him, but you want to know something? — and most of that was confusing, wasn’t it?” and she says “Some, but what ‘do I want to know something?’” and he says “And cut me off if I’m running on too much, and I am but if you think it’s just irritating boring stuff, but you said I should stay if I wanted to say something to you,” and she says “I said stay because there may be things, with the implication being it’s been so many years, you only want to talk over with me,” and he says “Anyway, my darling child, and you’re not getting angry with me, are you?” and she says “No, or only a little, but I’m always a bit of a grouch,” and he says “Anyway,” and takes her hands and rubs them on his cheek and kisses them, “now that I’ve seen you again—” and starts crying on her hands and she pulls them away and wipes them and says “Dad, please don’t, it’s not that it’s embarrassing for a public place, although it is in a way, or that I hate or disapprove of seeing you cry,” and he says “But you don’t know what this means to me — no, that’s too baloney a thing to say, and when I said it I wasn’t talking about just holding and kissing your hands,” and she says “I know, but what is it you want to say, because really I can’t understand you when you’re choking and coughing up tears and phlegm,” and he says “I’ve killed it for ever seeing you again, haven’t I, with all my whining and crying and sentimentalizing?” and she says “We’ll see each other again, you heard Glen,” and he says “But when I asked one or the other of you when, you went into this double- or just avoiding talk,” and she says “We’ll call, we’ll write, this is Convention City now so before you know it we’ll be flying in again or Glen will and he’ll call and if he can make it or same time you can you’ll see him for dinner or lunch and everything you talk about he’ll tell me,” and he says “But you know what I’ve been wanting to say to you now so I don’t have to, right?” and she says “If it’s not that you’re very pleased to be with me here and somewhat despondent that we’re leaving tomorrow,” and he says “Tomorrow?” and she says “The other kids, Dad…but that sort of thing, then I don’t,” and he says “It’s more, but that also, but of course, but okay, here: now that I’ve seen you, and excuse me for blubbering again, even these little tears now, but that’s good, isn’t it? not bad, for these compared to the bigger ones before for Julie and also your mom leaving me, are radically different tears, but where was I?” and she says “‘Now that you’ve seen me again,’” and he says “And one of my wonderful grandkids — let’s skip the ‘wonderful,’ he’s obviously a good kid but it’d be dumb or just what? presuming to think I really know yet what kind deep down inside—presumptuous, or anyone but his parents and later on his wife and maybe much later on his own kids at a later age could, but now that I’ve seen you, sure, and to a smaller extent, Saul, and that you seem quite happy with Glen and same with him with you and so on and that he seems like a nice guy — sweet to you and kind to the kid and attentive to you both and that sort of thing…oh, this is such silly awful straight-from-the-farty-heart crappy shit-stupid talk, and no excuse me’s,” and she says “No, go on, not so much with the profanities if you prefer, but you started, so get it over with,” and he says “Words right out of, for that’s essentially what I was going to say — now that I’ve seen you I feel I’ve done everything in my life I ever wanted to except maybe — no ‘maybe’—except to see my kids grow up before me and maybe get married at their actual marriage, the ceremony I’m saying, and maybe to have stayed married another ten years myself or at least for those years hooked up with someone else; now, as for your little sister,” and she says “Let’s not go into her again, it affects me too,” and he says “Let me just say this about her and that’ll be it, not forever, but I swear — that as for her, thinking of how old she’d be now as I did before and all the things that wonderful big brain and person of hers could be and also have done, like the marriage I mentioned and schools — medicine, I thought, since she was always so caring of people, asking them this and that when they were sick and saying she’s sorry and so on, maybe a passing phase but it really hit me, and interested in books in just looking at them so much because she was only starting to read and so curious of bugs and leaves and other scientific things — plus the kid or kids she would have had and the side things and ideas and stuff, all still in there to come out, but still knowing me through all this right till today, that it kills me, literally kills me every single day, for that’s how often—” and she says “I know, you’ve said, I don’t think of her as often as that, having my own children in a way that you didn’t after she died and still don’t have me and also that second but much younger sister Mom gave me, but I certainly think of her and miss her or sort of like you when I do, but let me tell you also, Mom says she thinks of her that way too, maybe more like I do and around the same amount or maybe a lot more than I do but not as much as you because I still lived with her and she fairly soon after had that other child, so it was equal in a way for all of us, you can say, or a little to maybe a little more than a little for you than Mom and me or maybe a lot more for you but still a hell of a lot for us too, but you dealt with it differently than us — well, I was too young to deal with it any other way than I did — but you simply handled it differently than practically anyone would and it fucked up your life almost completely, certainly I don’t see how you could have done a better job at fucking things up for yourself and us other than bashing our brains in too and leaving us for dead when we weren’t, for in most ways what happened to Julie and then what you did to those men and as a result of that what happened to you fucked us up pretty well too,” and he says “I’m sorry for what I did to you and your mother, sorrier I swear I don’t see how I could be, but tell me though, aren’t you glad, when you think back on it, that I at least, for all that I screwed up for you two in other ways, got the fucking, since you’re using the word, scum that did it — I mean, in all honesty, sweetheart, aren’t you glad I made them suffer as much as they did our darling Julie and then us in other ways because of her?” and she says no and he says “Come on, the honest truth now,” and she says “That is,” and he says “There’s got to be more,” and she says “I’m telling you, no, or not really, and if I did feel glad it was only for a day here and there and really only a half hour of those days and each one ten years apart and maybe two out of three of those sprung from some sadness or bitterness about something else, because those men were nobody to me, nothing, just filthy little pieces of shit whom I never wanted to think of again,” and he says “But they fucked up my life, as you say, and as a result, yours and Lee’s for a while, besides we won’t even say again what they did to Julie,” and she says “But they also should have been nothings and nobodies to you, that’s what I’m saying, and then everything in time would have almost been evened out and gone on okay,” and he says “Well, I’m glad and for all I know the two of you are too, especially for killing the one who killed Julie, which was probably the highlight of my life, losing her the lowest of the all-time low, the highlight in other ways, you understand, being just having you kids — I’m talking about the births and you the most for you were the first — and marrying your mother another, first knowing we’d mutually fallen in love with each other, also maybe first meeting her and sort of seeing straight off what she was going to mean and be to me and the kids she’d give, besides just little things that are big without you knowing it at the time, like climb ing up a park hill with you on my shoulders and at the top just looking out, taking a photo of you both and Mommy in a bathtub and the photo not coming out, first day I drove Julie to preschool, first day I picked you up after regular kindergarten school, driving on the Interstate with you and Julie in back playing cards or whatever you were playing”—“It was a tiny board game where the pieces had magnets, though what particular game I forget, but not checkers or chess”—“Well that trip before those scumbags drove up especially stands out among a few others, for it was so peaceful and cheerful till then, two of you getting along so well, which you did on and off most of the time, and so nice for once to have you both in the car all to myself for a long drive with a couple of rest stops — I can spoil you the way I want at Bob’s Big Boy or Roy’s, I remember thinking — and that night alone seeing to all your needs and day after next after school the three of us picking your mom up at the train, though maybe that recollection’s big only because how it turned out to be so with those two scummy men, anyway, I’m glad what I did to them, never that I can remember had a doubt even for half an hour on a single day, but a bit sorry you haven’t been glad at least once or twice or in some way said I did the right or natural thing, though I think I can understand why, but we’ll forget it for now for I can tell what the whole conversation and subject and so forth is doing to you and of course what it’s done and continues to do to me needs no further going into, am I right?” and she says “Okay,” and he says “Want to share another beer? — this is one I’ll surely remember: first time not only having but sharing a beer with you,” “You used to let me take occasional sips but I guess those don’t count, and no, I think I better go and help Glen tuck Saul in,” “But he seems a competent man and Saul a big boy,” “It was more an excuse, Dad, I’m pooped out, much as I’m enjoying this,” “Well, it hasn’t been that great for you, I can tell, but it has in doubles for me,” “Don’t speak or think for me — I have a head and it has, it’s been nice,” “Nice isn’t so okay,” “Nice is nice which to me means really good, with Glen and Saul before with you and now just us two, so don’t start ruining it,” “Ruin it like I do everything, is that right?” “I didn’t say that, but you’re at it again, making me feel like why am I staying here the extra few minutes?” “I’m sorry, my apologies, I’ll try not to — ruin it and stick my thoughts in your head and mouth and that kind of thing — speak and think for you what you’re not, but you know what I mean: I’m just, because I think I’ve ruined it with you now for maybe a long time, confused, so therefore these thoughts, jumbled and so forth,” and she says “You haven’t ruined it yet so now just stop,” and he puts up his hand in the stop sign, says “Will do, madame,” laughs, she, he pays for the beer, “‘You’re right, I won’t try to speak and think for you, period,’ is what I wanted to say or all I should have,” he thinks, puts down several bills for a tip, she fingers the money and says “Not so much,” he says “Ah, we restaurant-bar people, meaning also bartenders and even the cooks who hear the waiters bellyaching and so on, are usually big tippers, since we know how hard we work or at least the long hours and how the feet get to hurt and what it is to be tipped little for it or stiffed, but besides, for me, my sweetie, this has been one very big day, among the best in my life, which maybe doesn’t say much but it is,” and kisses the top of her head, “Still,” she says, “Glen gave a more than adequate tip already,” and takes two of the four dollar bills off the table and sticks them into his jacket pocket, “What you just did,” he says, “is something waitresses could kill you for, so let’s hope she didn’t see,” “You’d protect me,” and he says “I don’t know if I’d be able to control her, but I’d try,” and walks her to the hotel a few blocks away, “‘Maybe I shouldn’t profess to speak or think for you any time of the day,’ is all I should have said,” he thinks, “but too late, it’d seem like studied afterthought if I said it now,” points out some changes in the skyline, new tall pointy all-glass building there he doesn’t like, beautiful old full-of-ornate-work smaller one demolished for no doubt something ugly like another cement stickpin or wraparound glass suitcase on its end going up, “Change is so stupid and useless most times, what do you think? and I mean it when I say I’m only talking about architecture and let’s say hairdos and cooking fads and things,” and she says “Why, what else would you be talking about?” and he says “People and their spur-of-the-moment sometimes lifetime changing plans for their inner selves, I think, but what about the architecture?” and she says “It’s not my city anymore and I never felt much for it before and the memories I have of it are mainly bad, principally because the last ones were the worst ones so the ones I remember best, so let them change the city all they want,” “Anyway, who cares?” he says, “for none of it’s important but as a place to walk safely through with you and I guess the new modern tall hotels and such and their elevators on the outside walls like crawling bugs and the people who are drawn to it all make it more safe, and let’s face it, Glen’s company wouldn’t have held its sales meeting here if it hadn’t been for the changes in this part of town, so suddenly I’m going to have one of those spur-of-the-moment even lifetime changes of opinion of this place, though I don’t know if it’s an inner one, whatever I mean by that, and say the whole change of it is great, for you wouldn’t be here with me now if it wasn’t for what they did to the waterfront and the new convention center and hotels and restaurants and all sorts of tourist draws, individual pad-dleboats in the harbor, for christsake, the aquarium with performing fish,” sees her to the lobby, “Well, this is it, I guess,” “We’ll see and speak to you, Dad, okay?” and offers her cheek, he kisses it, takes her hands and kisses them, “What pretty hands, what a pretty face, what a wonderful girl you are, do you need any money?” “Dad, Glen and I are working people with more than decent salaries or certainly one very decent one between us and we’re also not big-time spenders as you loved to call it or said your dad did—” “My dad,” “—so no, but thanks,” “Well, if you ever do need anything on the money end, you’ll let me know, all right? or the boys for school, I mean it — it might sound silly, on my income, but I’ve lived cheap since I got out and put some away only for you,” and she says she’ll remember and thanks him again and kisses his cheek and he stays there looking at her as she gets in the elevator, turns around and blows a kiss at him and doors close and he thinks “What now? what do I do? where do I go? just don’t get drunk or too depressed — that’s it, call her early tomorrow from work, well, not too early, and maybe she and Saul and even Glen can stop by the place before they leave,” and goes home.

Calls the next morning, they’re out, “Damn,” he thinks, “waited too long,” leaves a message for her to call, no phone call back, calls again and they’ve checked out, “What the hell does that mean?” he thinks, calls her in Oregon a few days later and says seeing her and her family was one of the best things that ever happened to him and he’s been thinking about it and would love to come out to see them all for a week or so some summer, even less, not this one though since it’d be so soon after he’s just seen her and he knows they have other plans with Alaska and he’d like to give them plenty of leeway to prepare, emotionally you can even say, for his visit, not that he’s saying he’d be a hardship on them or burden he means or anything like that — he’s independent—“Fiercely so, as they say, though not fierce”—those days are long over if they ever began — and he’s the last person in the world to get in the way or upset things or busy- or nosybody around and no problem as to who’ll cook him breakfast or cook him anything if she wants and in fact she might even have to fight him as to who’ll cook for all of them during his stay, only kidding, and also only kidding about assuming there’ll even be a stay and she says what does he mean? she’d love having him but they don’t have that much room in their house, comfortable as the place is — each boy has his own bedroom and there’s no family room and now no playroom to convert, that room has become Glen’s home office and the basement his woodshop and the only other places are an unventilated attic and an airless crawl space, but maybe the two youngest boys can double up and he can stay in one of their bedrooms for a few days. “I don’t want to put anyone out — I can sleep on the porch if you have one and the weather’s not too damp or cold”—he doesn’t know Portland or really any part of the States west of the Shenandoah Ridge he thinks it was and it’s called which he visited with a friend and his friend’s folks more than fifty years ago, “We slept in pup tents, made bacon over a log fire,” but maybe it gets like that there summers — cold — unlike here, and she says they do have a porch in front but it’s not screened in and if it’s bug season, which all depends, at least on how bad the bugs are, on how much precipitation they had that spring and how chilly the summer’s been, they’ll feast on him, so porch-sleeping’s out because it’s either bugs or cold so you just can’t win, besides that their house is on a relatively heavily traveled street. Anyway, he says, they have something going here — started, in plans — and he’s looking forward to it already, if it works out that is, and if it doesn’t work out, no sweat, sweetheart, he’ll more than understand, and hangs up and thinks she doesn’t want to see him out there or Glen doesn’t or them both or it’s the kids and they’ve discussed it with their folks and don’t want any old something or another staying there for even a week and the parents or one of them went along with the kids, but it’s never going to happen, whatever the reasons he just knows he’s never going out there, that’s all. Hey, worse comes to worst and he wants to see her that bad, which he knows he will, he can fly out there without telling them, stay at a nearby hotel and call from there and say he’s here, always wanted to see the West Coast and for sure shouldn’t die without doing it sometime in his life and if they want to see him — no, he won’t be that tough — and he wants to see them too and had planned to but if they have something better to do — not “better”; “something more important”—not even that — just something already planned that can’t be put off like another Alaskan trip tomorrow or this time the South Pacific or Japan — he’ll understand and see Portland himself and then continue his trip south by bus for the rest of his two weeks to San Francisco and places like Mexico and L.A.

Late that fall — he calls his daughter about once a week and they talk a few minutes and then he usually asks to speak to one of the boys — a young man comes into the luncheonette, no more than eighteen — but things with Margo like “How are you?” “We’re all fine,” “How’s the weather?” “Could be worse,” “Hear from your mom?” “She’s always the same: couldn’t be better,” “How’s work? how’s school? what’s doing in Portland these days? I’ve been reading the weather map in the paper lately and it’s been saying you’re getting tons of rain,” sometimes sports talk with the boys which he has to read the paper or talk to some of his customers to know about, for a week a lot about their trip to Alaska: lot of driving around, didn’t seem too interesting to him for all those miles, bunch of seals, loose bear or two, some kind of antelope or moose, could have been a modern zoo like even one that’s in his city but didn’t say that — up to the counter looking around—“You know, I went to Julie’s grave a few days ago, try to do it every other week but then sometimes find myself going two or three straight days, lay some flowers, just stand there, listening to the wind whistling and things, everything looks great, same with your grandparents’: shipshape,” “That’s good; I’m so sorry I didn’t visit it while I was there, I used to with Mom pretty much before we moved away, it was all very sad, especially because it was so soon after she died”—something’s wrong, he almost knows what’s coming, he was robbed a few years ago on the street going home from work: “Give me your money,” “You got it, baby,” for there were two of them with sawed-off shotguns it seemed, little bit of overkill he later liked to joke, “What would you have done if there was just one?” he was asked, “Just what I did: handed it over with a smile, what do you think?”—the guy’s eyes: shifty, suspicious, jittery movements, sweaty-faced — never any mention anymore about his trip to Portland some summer so he supposes it’s off — he says “Yes sir,” no other customers, from where he’s standing nobody looking in at the place from the street, boss and his wife out buying meat and deli for the week, Jesus he sometimes wishes he had a handgun under the counter for when his life’s at stake, at least some mace—“Anything I can do for you? — you come in for chow or what?” and the man pulls out a gun he doesn’t know where from it’s out so fast, maybe from inside his coat sleeve — that’s what he should have told the detectives for a laugh: “Check all the theatrical agents in town, the thief was a magician, the gun was followed by rabbits and doves”—and says “This is a holdup, keep your fat mouth shut, no stupid moves, hands where I can see them and quick let’s have everything you got in your register and pockets and if you got a safe in back then open that or you’re going to be one big dead prick,” and he says “A holdup? a holdup? in this joint? get out of here,” and looks around for something to scare the guy with, something’s pumping in him where he swears he can tear off the whole twelve-stool counter with his hands and throw it at the kid, iron skillet’s way over there, hammer he uses to nail things up sometimes is at the end of the counter in a shoebox, knives are around but they’re short and he doesn’t know how to throw them and the big carving ones are in the sink, grabs a long spatula by the grill he’s beside and waves it and says “I told you to beat it or I’ll brain your fucking brains in, you fucking imbecile, for who the fuck you think you’re dealing with?” and when the man doesn’t move he swings it at him and the gun goes off, that’s all he remembers that happens: he hears, gun, sees, fire out of it, and maybe he doesn’t even remember that but just imagined it, and is treated on the floor by the emergency med people and taken to the hospital, no memory of anything in the restaurant or ambulance after he’s shot, just went black, no pain, none after that except for a few days later when a nurse is told by mistake by the floor resident who meant another patient that he’s to be taken off painkillers and boy for a while did he scream before they put him back on, someone came in he was told, guy with a stack of flyers for a new neighborhood runner’s shop, which he probably would have tossed out right after the guy left, no place for them — counter ends and top of cigarette machine crowded as they are — and nobody takes those things except to stick their chewed gum in and anyway who wants them flying to the floor every time the door opens with a little wind behind it or just customers walking past them fast? called out “Anyone here? I’d like to drop off something if you don’t mind,” put the flyers on the counter to leave there, saw him lying behind it on the floor, ran out to the street screaming “Someone’s been hurt, robbery must’ve been, help, people, someone’s been butchered or shot, man behind the wall, man behind the wall,” is what he kept saying, instead of “behind the counter” probably, and pointed to the restaurant but wouldn’t go in when some people from the street did, register emptied, pockets untouched, cheap watch gone, thief had to be kidding about the safe or else had no idea what a simple place it was, police said it could have been one of the persons who ran in to help or see him who took the money and watch or a few of them because usually when a robber shoots you that bad he gets out fast and doesn’t waste even a few extra seconds looking for dough and why would he take a cheap watch? “though could be it was a combo of both: thief and passersby,” his boss calls her and says what happened and that he wants her to know he’s not one who likes giving bad news but Nat told him to if anything like this happened to him, “for you know he was once robbed with some guns a few years ago and was concerned he might be again and not get off so lucky,” and she says “No, he never told me, though of course you must know what happened years ago with his youngest daughter, my sister, Julie,” and the boss says “Nat once mentioned, that’s about it, but not her name, though someone else told me he served time for something connected to it, like getting the guys who killed her but where he was completely in the right and like who wouldn’t have done the same thing if he could? so it never stopped me from keeping him on,” and she says “I’m sure he appreciated you for that, but really, he only spoke about my sister once in that regard in all the time he’s worked for you? — that’s surprising, since it seemed the thing uppermost and forever in his mind,” and the boss says “Twice, then, even three times, let’s call it four, but quickly, like where he’s reading a newspaper at work with a similar article in it where an innocent kid got killed between street drug dealers — crossfire, what’s in the papers so much today — and it comes back to him and he says something ‘You know, something like this happened to my kid,’ and he just touches on it but I can see by his face and so quickly into another subject or news story that he doesn’t want to go deeper so I don’t…but you know, he also told me to call you if other things ever happened to him which he seemed a little worried about, like getting a heart attack, not that he wasn’t strong as an old bull before he got shot, or just not answering his phone when he didn’t show up for work and it turned out, as he said it’s turned out for a couple of old bulls he knew, that he was dead in bed from a stroke the night before in one second flat — anyway, missus, he seems to be doing okay, as I told you from everything that’s been told me, probably be in the hospital a few weeks but no complications expected the nurse said who answered the phone in his Intensive Care where I called, so rest easy for now and first chance I’m allowed to see him — Intensive Care won’t let me because I’m not family, but he should be out of there soon — I’ll tell him I did what he asked me to and that’s spoken to you,” and she says “Please call me collect any hour of the day if you learn that his condition’s deteriorated or just phone me collect after you’ve seen him, when you have a free moment, and of course give him our love,” and she takes his home phone number and number of the I.C. unit her father’s in.

His good arm’s for the most part paralyzed from the shooting so he can’t go back to work, tries getting a cashier’s job in other restaurants but no work around or times are tough so some of their jobs they have to double up and excuses like that or else they just don’t want him, he thinks, because he doesn’t look healthy anymore and not good for customers’ appetites or something and his clothes are old and out of date and arm stiff like it is and with everything about him unkempt and with possibly more health and accident insurance for them because of his age and wounds from the shooting and maybe they think a possible medical relapse on the job or they know what he did to those killers years ago and feel he brought the new shooting on somehow and don’t want a hothead working for them and then if you’re going to hire a cashier or guy who hangs up coats or things like that, even someone who takes care of the men in the restrooms of the higher-class restaurants, better to have one who can chase not-too-threatening unwanteds out of the place or at least look like he can, finds it more economical than working to just retire, maybe for the time being, and take the small union pension he’ll get and accident insurance from getting shot at work, which isn’t half bad, and in a year full Social Security with the medical coverage the government gives, — care or — caid, calls her a lot but after five and on weekends because it can cost a great deal, it grieves him is the best he can put it that she still talks to him in the same formal way she has since a few years after he went into prison — it wasn’t like that before with her but she was just a girl then and of course things were much different: he lived with Lee, one family, Julie, had a good job and wasn’t a temporary maniac and in fact he was a pretty good father, around average, he thought, fairly relaxed and not at all the browbeating or faultfinding kind — asks to speak to her boys and Glen almost every time after he speaks to her but not much talk there too, Glen kind of quiet and, what’s the word? unforthcoming or something and reserved, the boys always acting shy or don’t know him enough so don’t see why they should have to get on the phone with him so much, which makes some sense and he’d probably feel the same if he was them, tells her how he’s really grown close to her family almost solely by phone, isn’t that funny? and that he’d still like to come see them if she isn’t going to be in his city anytime soon, but come to think of it he can’t afford the fare right now—“Though I still have the same money put away only for you or the boys’ schools, I want you to know, or even for you and Glen if you both lost your jobs or just one of you did and you were suddenly strapped for cash — not much, you understand, so don’t set your hopes when I die on buying a swimming pool with it or building an additional wing to your garage,” and she says “I don’t harbor macabre or calculating thoughts like that and surely not on what I’ll gain monetarily from someone’s death, not that you won’t live past a hundred, and besides, we’ve only one car and park it in the street — Glen gladly takes the bus to work — and we don’t as a rule go in much for building private pools in our area — only a few days get very hot, the community is kind of artistic or professorial with a flock of doctors mixed in and very ecological-minded, and there are already several fine public pools at minimal costs,” and he says “Only kidding, honey, only kidding, about the garage and pool and my death both,” and she says “I know but I felt I had to say something as to how and where we live so you wouldn’t in the future be put in the position of possibly prejudging or just misunderstanding us, and listen, Dad, if you do want to visit us that much, use your savings for us to fly out here and we’ll put you up comfortably for a week at least,” and he says “No, I got to leave something to you, it’s an absolute must in my mind after all I haven’t done — maybe I’ll win the lottery or a big part of one, but if I did that’d mean I’d have to play it and I always thought tossing away dough like that a tremendous waste and dumb escape — excuse me, I hope you or Glen don’t play them,” and she says “Please, and I don’t even know if we have those games here.”

They speak on the phone for two more years, occasionally a letter or postcard between them and always birthday cards and gifts at Christmas from him, a few times she says she thinks she’s coming east for a convention or with one or two of her boys to visit him and then perhaps take in New York City and Washington, D.C., but then writes or phones that her plans were canceled or fell through because of personal reasons she doesn’t want to go into when he asks what, “Well, I thought it might have been over me — a dispute between you two, for instance, though I wouldn’t know why, I’m really a harmless and mean-well guy — or something to do with stopping you, though there also I’m in the dark about, my lousy memory of last week’s things,” and she says no and for the last time about it that’s as far as she’ll go, okay? and he says sure, “I was only saying, nothing to it, so I’ll be speaking to you, honey, goodbye,” and about a month later she gets a call from an official in his city (there were a number of reasons they hadn’t spoken since their last conversation when she said her plans had fallen through and he thought it might have been over him: it was midsummer and they were away two weekends in a row at Glen’s mother’s beach house when he called, another night they were having dinner in a restaurant when he called and then he got tired and took a nap that ended up a six-hour sleep and when he awoke he felt it was too late to call even with the three-hour time difference, another time her son took the message that he’d called but forgot to give it to her, another time Glen took the message after a brief exchange with him, “So how’s it going?” “Everything’s fine,” “Tell her I called?” “You bet,” but got into an argument with her when she got home from work and after it was still so mad at her he didn’t want to tell her anything and next morning he’d planned to mention her father called but they talked mostly how sleep usually irons over any bad feelings still lingering from the previous day’s fight and then he forgot till three days later when he thought “Why bother, he’ll probably call today anyway?” she called him that day but he’d pulled the phone jack out of the wall because he had a stomach flu or it was something he ate but anyway was too weak to answer the phone and didn’t want to be woken up by or even hear its rings, the boys were in day camp and she yelled from the bedroom “You interested in paying me a visit?” “You bet,” and later the phone rang while they were making love and Glen reached for the receiver and she said “Leave it,” and he said “What if it’s important?” and she said “If it is, they’ll call back,” they got an answering machine that recorded his message but something malfunctioned that first day or maybe it was the way she’d assembled or connected it into the wall, but the entire day’s tape was erased and next day without them doing anything new to it except taking the plug out of the wall socket and putting it back in, it worked fine, she called and he wasn’t in, she thought she’d call him back in an hour or so but then a number of things happened — Glen called and they had a long talk, one of her sons was invited to sleep over at a friend’s house and she had to pack his things and give him an early supper because she knew he wouldn’t get fed much there except for sweets and drive him, she decided to make a potato salad now instead of tomorrow for a picnic, a bird feeder fell down and broke and it took some time fixing it and hanging it back up in a tree, the radio was playing a familiar Mozart piano sonata and she wanted to hear it to the end to get the number, she got interested in the last of a series of articles on welfare and the poor and then went through the newspaper pile for the papers of the two previous days for articles one and two — and she never got around to it, he called but their line was busy for hours and he gave up after almost twenty tries and went to bed thinking he’d call her at work next day just to hear her voice again and see how things are going with her and her family after almost a month or even earlier at home if he can remember to call, say, between eleven-ten and — fifteen his time but he died overnight) that he died in his sleep it appears, in no way is there any indication of foul play, and may have been dead three to four days—“Excuse me, but if all this is too much for you,” the official says, “though you are the person I really want to talk to, I can speak to your husband about it,” and she says “No, it’s okay, it’s been a while since I saw my father, more than a month since I even spoke to him, and we haven’t been close for many years and I don’t want anything decided about him without my immediate say, so please continue and if it does get too much for me I’ll let you know,” and the official says “As I was saying, and if I do get too blunt please excuse me, it’s not the job but my manner…three to four days he might have been there — the police had to break in his door as the neighbor he kept a spare set of keys with for emergencies like this one might have been, just as he had a spare set of hers for the same thing, was out of town all that time and because no one else in the building saw him for that long, or the smell — I never got straight which one, but that shouldn’t be an issue now — but that’s how he was eventually found”—and though he laid out sufficient money with instructions that his body be cremated and for a small ceremony at the cemetery for relatives and close friends where his ashes are to be buried unmarked next to his daughter Julie’s grave, does she want anything different done? — “His instructions, along with where his passport is and checking account and union membership number to help with the cost of the funeral and things like that were all in an envelope in his night table drawer but weren’t notarized, the instructions, or even properly witnessed, so you can have the final say,” and she says “Why would I want to countermand my father’s wishes?” and the official says “By the city’s health law we have to give you this opportunity, your being, so far as we know — his instructions say you are and we’ll look into it further — his only heir, so we even have to get you to sign a release for the cremation or regular interment or whichever kind you finally decided on,” and she says “That’s what I mean — what else could I possibly want that’s different than what he said?” and the official says “You might not want him cremated, for example, as it could be antithetical to your beliefs, religious or otherwise — considerations like that, which you might not have thought about yet because of the suddenness of the news,” and she says “No, that’s the way I also want to go — it’s easier for everybody,” and the official says “You’re saying cremation,” and she says yes and the official says “Okay, and that’s what your father wrote in his instructions too — he, quote, don’t want to cause anyone a fuss, unquote, but another thing is the ceremony — and I’m only trying to be helpful here, this isn’t part of my regular job — he wrote he didn’t want any professional religious person officiating — someone, quote, lay and unpaid, unquote, as he says, could easily do it and that way too, quote, my daughter’s spared the minister’s or rabbi’s or whatever officiator’s expense, unquote,” and she says “There too, it’s fine with me, whomever he chose — did he, in these instructions?” and the official says “He has written down here the funeral home taking care of the cremation and graveside service but no one named as speaker or what kind of service he wanted, secular or otherwise, so I assume that’s all up to you — maybe, if I can poke my nose in a bit further, this neighbor lady friend of his will know who his closest friends were—she, even — and who can speak and be understood and lead a service…but the place of burial might be something else for you to consider — the truth is, my dear, though your father kept up and paid for in perpetuity, it says in his instructions, the grave of your sister and several others alongside hers plus some empty burial plots, you might not even want his ashes buried there but flown home with you,” and she says “Now that you bring it up, it would be senseless for me to come east for only a ceremony with people I mostly don’t know and with not even a casket to look at and really nothing much else to see there except the gravestones of my dead sister and some grandparents I never knew, so perhaps I can have half the ashes buried next to her grave and the rest sent to me and buried unmarked in my husband’s family gravesite — it would only occupy a small part of the plot so I’m sure my husband’s family won’t mind, and that way I’ll be able to pay my respects to him whenever I want since I don’t see when I’ll be flying east again now that he’s not there, and he’d be, or his ashes would, half of them at least, buried next to or near me since I’m sure I’ll end up buried here too,” and the official says “I’m positive all that can be arranged through the funeral home doing the cremation, but one last thing, dear, with your permission: if you don’t intend on coming east soon then you better start figuring out what you want done with his apartment, or room, rather,” and she says “Can all his belongings, for a price, be junked, the ones that aren’t worth anything, and the rest given to charity or some Goodwill place that might take them?” and the official says “That’ll have to be arranged between you and his landlord but I don’t see why it couldn’t be done — as for his private papers, if he has any,” and she says “Oh I’m sure he has: letters from my mother dating back before they were married, photos of the family and when he was a kid and no doubt some personal objects of my sister Julie from day one,” and the official says “Those, then, plus some more practically important items to you like his bankbook and check book and birth certificate perhaps and deed to his cemetery plots and maybe even some tucked-away savings or stocks and bonds certificates or things of that ilk he might have accumulated over the years though we hope paid income tax on,” and she says “I doubt he had any of those — not only was he just making it, we’ll say, so too poor to buy them, but he frowned on that kind of income like playing the stock market, money made on paper and if it turns out to be real money when cashed in, then money made without doing hard labor for it — he was old-fashioned that way, of that, from the little I spoke to him about gambling and livelihood, I’m sure,” and the official says “Whatever, but once you sign and return the documents I send you, if you’re truly not coming here, then the padlock will be removed from his apartment and you’ll be able to designate a surrogate to go through it and send those things of a more practical financial nature to you the surrogate might find — as for the photos and your sister’s possessions and such your father might have had,” and she says “It’s not what she possessed but what he might have kept of hers — she died when she was five, you know, murdered by a maniac; we were in the same car at the time — a crazy spray highway shooting,” and the official says “I didn’t know and I’m very sorry, dear, extremely,” and she says “Oh yes, that’s what started all my father’s problems — marriage breakup, in essence giving me up, certain quirks and obsessions, losing his job and so on,” and the official says “I didn’t know that either, dear, I’m sorry — anyway, those things, the ones that are only of possible personal value to you, well, unless you come here and claim them or have them sent to you or keep up his lodgings till the landlord thinks, because no one’s living here, that he wants the place vacated so he can raise the rent, then I’m afraid they’ll be disposed of as garbage too.”

Everything’s worked out, papers are sent, signed and returned, half his ashes buried beside Julie’s grave but with no ceremony or guests since she didn’t see any reason for even a simple service at the cemetery, for the lady-friend neighbor didn’t know who else would come or how she’d get there if she was the only one, and what was left of his relatives in the area, Margo remembered him saying, he’d lost all contact with, they never especially liked him in the first place or not since he was a fairly quiet timid kid, and it’d be hypocritical to ask them to attend the ceremony if she wasn’t going to be there, other half of his ashes sent to her in a can and buried between two empty plots at her husband’s family gravesite after a brief service with only her sons and husband and his parents and the gravedigger there, her husband officiating and saying “He was a good person from everything I heard about him and the few hours I spent with him in a restaurant once and the many phone conversations we had, albeit succinct as a majority of them were — honest and sincere and hardworking and devoted to his daughters, the living Margo, the deceased Julie, surely no man could have loved his children more, and who because of that love perhaps, but anyhow what became a deep misfortune, a disturbing calamity if not tragedy, actually, which perhaps no words can do justice to or describe so why try?”—“Hear, hear,” his father says—“seemed to blow it all, to be colloquial but direct, but he came back from, let’s be forthright about it and conceal nothing at a location where nothing should be back door, incarceration — paid his debt to society, as the state would put it, and perhaps undeservedly paid that debt but that’s not for us, in our inconsiderable power or whatnot, to say, to live a respectable and meaningful life from everything we know of it, and should be forgiven”—“Amen,” his father says—“he is forgiven from our standpoint I’m sure, and if there is a higher being, which my parents and perhaps my sons believe there is, and who can say? then we plead that he be forgiven by It too, that’s all I can say today and I believe is enough, thank you all for coming, and I don’t mean to hog this, although I want you to know I was asked by the deceased’s sole survivor to conduct the ceremony, so if anyone else wants to speak about Nathan Frey, please feel free to,” and they all shake their heads, his sons look at one another with the expressions “He doesn’t mean us, does he?” his father says “What could we say that could add to your words, Glen don? — your eulogy was fine and to the point and summed it up wonderfully, and memorized or off the cuff, no less,” “Extemporaneous,” Glen says, “I thought it would all just come to me and that that’s the way it should,” “Well, good job, son,” the lady-friend neighbor says she’s too feeble to do any work (“Your dad probably never mentioned me or my condition and age but I’m an old shrunken diseased cow he looked after when he could, going out for groceries and pharmaceuticals and squiring me to various doctors and things”) so a second cousin of Margo’s who lives in a suburb not far from her father’s building agrees for a certain fee to search through his room and send her whatever she wants from it, “There’s a rocking chair here,” the cousin says on the phone, “very old and in good condition, do you want that? — it looks practically like an antique,” “He must have found it on the street; I know it’s no heirloom, his wasn’t that kind of family and everything of worth from the marriage my mom took, so no, keep it or give it away,” “There’s a fantastic espresso coffee machine, really expensive-looking and with one of those spouts for steamed milk, it could be boxed and UPS’d,” “We have one and I’m surprised he did — probably given to him by one of the restaurants he worked at where it was used once — but doesn’t sound like my dad the last twenty years: café au lait, espresso, twist of lemon on a demitasse spoon, no; keep it if it’s so nice, but without any reduction in what I agreed to give you, you understand,” “A stack of letters to your mother and another stack to you — copies, I saw, from a few of them; do you want them and the ones in a third stack that you sent him?” “I don’t see the point, as the letters to my mother I’d find uncomfortably amorous or vituperative if plain poisonous sometimes and the ones to me I probably still have the originals of someplace, stuck in whatever book I was reading at the time, habit I have — every so often when I go through a book I’ve read, one drops out but I can’t say I reread it,” “The letters to you seem to date back to when he was in prison and you were a young girl,” “That’s too much of the past, most of which if I haven’t remembered or have tried my darndest not to, I want to continue to forget, so thanks but no,” “Photos of him, I suppose, and who must be his parents the way they’re smiling and cuddling him so close, and one of him, since the face is the same as in the others or a near lookalike, on a donkey or dwarf horse I think commercial photographers used to lead around the streets to take pictures of kids on — how else could the animal have got there? for it’s taken in front of an apartment building and with old cars around, but probably new then,” “Sure, include it, all the photos, since it’d be wrong just throwing them away or giving them to some junk shop for people to go ho-ho over, and my own kids will get a kick out of them for the resemblances to them, if there are any, at that age and maybe to his father and his father’s dad and also for the cultural significance and interest — how city people lived then, these photographers without shops and street musicians he used to tell me, when he was a kid, whole rhythm bands of them going down block after block and horse-drawn carts of ice for the icebox and vegetables and fruits and I even think milk, though the last might have been when his father was a boy,” “Lots of pre-’54 coins — a tall jarful, a couple of the pennies are silver and some of the other coins go back to the teens and twenties, from just a quick look, so there might even be better, and I think I saw an Indian-head penny before it got lost amid the others, and I know there was a quarter with a lady with wings, for a second,” “Yes, send them all — he once said many years ago that since he was around coins in the restaurant all day he’d started up a collection for me to help send me through school, so if they’re of any value I’ll use them for my own kids — insure that box for a few hundred, please,” “Several bills have come in — phone, utilities, a window washer, and a letter from Honolulu just today,” “Send and I’ll take care of them, but the window washer’s a joke — just that he’d use one with the view he once said he had, other buildings like his, and what’s he have, two windows?” “Three, plus the tiny bathroom one but it’s smoked,” “The letter, who knows what it means? — maybe a customer who passed through and once he got there he got lonely — if I wrote him my father died he probably wouldn’t know who I was speaking of — return it to the addresser saying ‘addressee de ceased’…any books? no, I have all I want to read, or the stores and libraries do, unless one or two look extremely old — in fact, would it be too much to ask you to hold the books upside down one by one and flip through and shake them in that position? — I’ll pay you something extra if there are more than a few of them — for like me he might have kept a few treasures and mementos in them,” “A very expensive-looking silk tie, it says, hundred percent and never used for it’s still in its box tissue-wrapped and from one of our finest stores and of the rest of his clothes the only thing that still looks good is a leather belt almost brand-new, size 34,” “That’s my husband’s waistline but I doubt he’d want to wear my dad’s belt — as for the tie, since the one he wore last time I saw him was stained and old, it must have been given to him since by a friend — a lady perhaps? I don’t think so, he seemed to have become kind of chaste and at home sort of an ascetic recluse, so maybe from his boss as a Christmas gift or one of his steady customers who gives nothing during the year but something lavish like this as an annual gift, but it was a cheap luncheonette from the way he described it, so I don’t think so there either — or maybe he bought it for the next time we saw him, that’d make sense for I can see him splurging for us, but I don’t see my husband Glen or one of my boys walking around in any of his things — the kids would find it creepy, a dead man’s clothes, so do what you want with the tie, decorate a tree with it as long as we’re on the subject of Christmas, only kidding…oops, that’s something, the ‘only kidding,’ he’d say, so it’s funny why I picked it up and how come now for the first time?” “An address book with not many names,” “No, past life, and what would those names mean to me if I don’t already have them? so to be disposed of, but of his photos, you never said but were there any of Julie and me? — little girls, she had bangs from age one and was exceptionally pretty, like a girl model, and my hair was always combed back long, in a ponytail or braid and I was the taller but also the homelier of the two, brown hair to her bright blonde and glasses from age three to her none,” “Plenty, and you both were adorable, but I already assumed you wanted those so I was going to include them whether you said so or not,” “My mother, another beauty, any of her or the two of them as a couple, and with us, as a twosome or alone?” “A few, in all the possible family combinations,” “Just wondering, but who do you think Julie and I resembled at that time?” “Can’t tell for sure, at best parts of the two of you in them both and you also resembled each other despite the glasses and hair,” “There was one of my folks together I especially remember, in fact I’d take it out of the photograph drawer in their dresser and pore over it when there was still the four of us, probably because they looked so happy in it, which is what I wanted, because in truth, okay as their relationship was and seemingly solid, they used to argue a lot and I was often scared they’d break up — but his arm around her shoulder and both of them leaning forward, snapping their fingers to some popular musical number it seemed, something like a rumba but that one reached its heyday before their time, and standing beside the new car they’d just bought, in front of a summer bungalow they were renting,” “No, it’s not among the ones I found and I think I’ve searched all over and your father didn’t have much,” “He was in hiking shorts, striped polo shirt and sandals and looked lean and weightlifter strong and with a mess of hair and healthy tan, she, prematernity with me, in a skimpy two-piece bathing suit, really a gorgeous figure, long smooth legs, teeny tummy, midget waist and a large perfect top, her hair tumbling everywhere, and barefoot, and both with these smiles as if they were having and had just had — maybe even had just climbed or fallen out of bed, that kind of fun — the time of their lives,” “There are only three photos of them alone, unless the one you’re talking of is stuck to the back of another, and it’s not one of them,” “My mother says she doesn’t have it either, and why would she unless she wanted proof of what a great body she once had, but why would she? and even at her age now, a bit wrinkled in the legs and such but it’s still pretty good, so I wonder what happened to it — maybe in a rage after she left him — well, he was in prison by then but he might have brought it with him, she looked so great — he tore it up, or it could still be in his wallet cut down to wallet size or maybe he looked at it and handled it so much he used it up,” “It’s not in his wallet photo section either, which I’m sending you the whole thing as is, by the way, meaning even the little scrap papers and play or movie ticket stubs tucked away, unless this photo, again, stuck to the back of another photo in one of the photograph sleeves, but why’d you, if you don’t mind my asking…no, I can probably answer it myself,” “What?” “Your not looking at that dresser drawer photograph again once the family was no longer intact, if I got it right, was because your sister died, no? and you didn’t want to see—” “That’s right, I suppose — whatever a kid goes through at that age over the death of the person closest to you — to me — same thing my father went through in a different way, I guess — and the way she died too perhaps — bang-bang — I mean we slept in side-by-side beds once she was out of her crib and on vacations sometimes in the same bed for a week and had our birthday parties together though our birthdates were a month apart — my God, we used to play together eight hours a day straight some days, drawing and cutting out fifty or so paper figures and acting them all out in different voices till we were hoarse, starting from scratch whole puppet shows, meaning not only making the papier-mâché characters but the scenery and stage and thinking up the play — I wouldn’t — what’d I say, five? maybe it wasn’t even to you, but she died at six — but I wouldn’t — six years old, of course — I could barely stand sleeping in our old bedroom but it was the only other one we had — in fact I had to have not only her bed removed but mine too because they were twins and a new one put in for me — my dad wasn’t even aware of it he was so into his own world looking for the avengers — no, he was the avenger, they were…oh, they were this and that, how does it help? scumbags, rats — but I wouldn’t, what I started out saying, even look at the framed photograph my mother had of her by her bedside — Julie, at a beach in a bathing suit, bangs being blown back above her head, whopping smile, fingers entwined beneath her chin, her eyes, I forgot to mention, dark black to my green—‘Turn it around first,’ I used to say and frequently scream at my mother if she summoned me into her room for something or sent me there to get her necklace from the dresser, let’s say, and years later, long after she’d remarried and had another child and I not only had a different house and time zone to live in but another new bed and I was still doing this, she suddenly said ‘What’re you, crazy? — it’s just a picture, a beautiful picture, there for our pleasure, your dearest sister, my darling treasure, get over it already, at least that aspect,’ and I swear slapped the photo smack into or maybe just up to my face — must have been up to it or maybe even a foot or two away but facing me face to face, and I could look at it even less after that and maybe I couldn’t even look at that one today…but his kitchen supplies, utensils, you know, for he worked in restaurants and might have taken home some very sturdy professional ones, anything?” “Huh, how’s that?” “Carving knives, ladling spoons, chopping board, great pans and pots, kitchen stuff, any there at his place?” “Couple of butter knives and forks and spoons, one table and one tea, and a plastic spatula, bread knife, sieve — that what you call it?” “Colander, strainer?” “—with an unmeant hole in it so of not much use, and that’s about it — rolling pin, whatever for, for there are no baking or bread pans,” “Maybe to beat off muggers,” “I think he had a bat for that, kept under his bed — oh, a paring knife here, I see, and potato masher, and that’s really it, can opener, bottle opener, corkscrew, really junky stuff, not worth the price of shipping, cheap as UPS is, and same with the dishes, service for two or one and a couple of beer mugs I guess for everything from beer to water to coffee to tea, since there are no, if you can believe, cups or coffee mugs,” “Maybe the carving knife wrapped well so it doesn’t slice the shipping box — I have a feeling it’s a good one,” “Who said anything about a carving knife? — paring, butter and bread, plus the little one with tweezers and toothpick on his key ring,” “Prints, paintings, art photographs on the wall or anywhere?” “Only magazine stuff, meaning coming from them or possibly art catalogs, reproductions from paintings or pen-and-ink things in a museum or at an exhibition, looks like, but glossy colorful ones on good paper so looking quite real, fifty of them at least, taped or tacked to the walls all over the place,” “But you’re sure none are real?” “Picasso, Chagall, Hopper, Matisse, Orozco, Tintoretto, Signorelli, Parmesan Cheese or some Italian name like that of a little angel and his or her little girlfriend — most of the painters’ names even I recognize — your father had quite the collection, should go for several mil,” “Then thank you, Jane, I think we’ve covered it all — send what we’ve settled on UPS and any little last-moment thing you might think to add and also a note on how many hours you’ve put in, but you’ve saved me a hell of a lot of expenses and work besides taking a great load off my mind,” “And what’s that?” “Simply to know nothing was thrown out or given away or left for the landlord to scavenge that was worth anything, emotionally or monetarily or what,” “Oh.”

For weeks later she has dreams almost every other night concerning her father — in one he says “Save me, I’m drowning in dirt,” in another he greets her with a formal handshake while she has her arms out for a hug and kiss, asks her to cup her hands, she does and he spoons a pyramid of earth in each palm and says “One more time?” in another she gets a telegram saying “My dearest child, I am completely in pieces and unmotivatedly scatterbrained, is there no rhyme not to say a season why you’re also not distraught, my deepest regards to those authorities above who might be able to do something to redress this, your loving poppy, Nat,” in another he’s a boy of about six sitting on her lap and she’s supposed to be his mother she thinks in the dream “but how’s that? since he’s this and I’m his,” when he says “Mamma grammar, divided we’re lame, together we contaminated, do you know that hysterical smote? — who said it second? ah, I could never teach you nuttin’,” and dives off into a hole in the sofa and disappears, in another he appears in the distance riding a horse, shouts “Hi-ho, my Margo, hi-ho,” and rides closer waving a sword over his head, stops under her bedroom window still shouting hi-ho, her husband stirs in bed m the dream and says in his sleep “Largo, heed the drosses, need the worms, give them crosses, sieve the burns,” she says “Glendon, wake up, be up, we’ve got to start making some sense,” and to her father from bed “Daddy, hide away, now, bow,” and her father says from below, still seated on the horse but sword sheathed, “Dearest Julie, I mean my darling Margo, I’m so lonesome, separated, throw me a rope, I want to crawl up and join you,” same night in another dream he’s standing talking to her cordially, seems like an art opening at a gallery, then a cocktail party at her home, he seems to be a friend of a couple she invited and he clinks her glass with his and says “So how’s the weather up there?” “Am I that tall to you?” “I’m talking real weather, lady: shrouds, tornadoes, lightning storms,” “Excuse me but who brought you, the Kahns, the Kanes?” “I’m still asking weather, missus, weather,” “Weather? where? we’re both in the same spot and consanguineous, Father, indoors,” “Hardly, earthly, cementally, it’s as dark as a person can see, though I love you neverthebestly, I mean beastly,” then he suddenly becomes a rat, same size and color as one but with her father’s face, and leaps onto her chest and starts scratching at her eyes and she swats it off and runs out of the house, her husband in pajamas, when in her dream she thinks “That’s funny, he only sleeps nude,” yelling from their bedroom window “Come back, he’s scampering up the vines, I told you we should’ve cut them down, now he’s coming through the window, don’t leave me be a solitary speck with him, he still has all his teeth and the rat can bite,” in another her father’s a mosquito buzzing around her head and she says “Stay away, now stay away — okay, don’t say I didn’t warn you, for I can get murderously allergic to bugs, having attacks like you’ve never seen,” and slaps at it but keeps missing, then she doesn’t see or hear it and while she’s looking around and listening for it it lands on her arm, she watches it stick its proboscis in, “Wait till it’s drawing blood,” she thinks, “even if there is some pain it’ll be worth it,” counts to six, whispers “Time,” and slaps it hard and lifts her hand to see what she thinks will be its squished bloody carcass even if it is a male, but nothing’s there and she yells “Damn air pockets, damned if they’re there, damned if they’re not, but I still might have nipped its tip if not flattened it and it’s dead or dying on the floor and all I got to do is step on it,” when it starts buzzing around her head and she says “I can take it, you don’t bother me so don’t think you do, I can take much more than this so you’ll just have to do your sneaky biting and then buzz away on your own, for I’m not wasting another wave on you,” in another she’s sleeping alone and he pushes open her bedroom door with his head and crawls into the room and up to her ear and says into it “I miss you, I miss your sis most persistently not to mention you, what dries up isn’t a scream, what cries down isn’t a dream, I can come up with these long after you’re sufficiently sick of them and me, fried, dried, you got it, so make more meaning out of me, my sweet, release me, let me already Margo,” and she says in her dream half asleep “But it’s you, goddamnit, you, I did everything good I could, cried, dried, so all right, didn’t fly, but that’s over and done with so now let me sleep,” and her eyes close and in her dream-sleep she dreams of hovering butterflies and bees, a flower garden with a deer eating the sweet peas, and a few hundred feet behind it an old barn with several big holes in the roof and its doors off and a buggy in a cow stall showing through and nothing else around but pasture with the tall grass being jerked by the wind, and she thinks “Peaceful, I like it, even the peas, by God, even the sky, blue with downy clouds, and thank goodness, nothing of him,” in another she and a grown-up Julie enter an empty cottage she and her family rent for two weeks every summer, wonders where’s the ramshackle furniture that practically makes the place in addition to the missing woodstove and the picture postcards of artworks she’s tacked to the door frames and the owner till now hasn’t taken off, hears tapping under the floor and says “What’s that?” “What’s up?” Julie says, “I don’t hear or see anything,” “That tap-tap, tap-tap, it’s even louder now and could be a code of some sort, Morse, lost, from under the floorboards,” and Julie says “You’re seeing things again, hon, for what floor, who boards?” and she says “And pardon me, my nearest miss, but you’ve either lost all your sensory powers or I don’t know what, lower powers, infrapowers,” and says to the floor “Tell her in taps or words if there is someone down there for I don’t want to appear hard of feeling,” and he says “Yeah, it’s me, Daddy, to you both though you’re so much apart, hidden from you while I’m hiding from one of the Axis, and if they find me, the Nazis particularly, I’ll be pitched into an infinite dip like everyone else of my kind, first shot, stabbed or gassed or eaten by dogs or two of those or three,” “Maybe Julie can help you, sir, but I’ve got to inform you I’m not that sort of daughter and don’t see how I could ever be, in fact now that I know you’re there and wanted, if I don’t say anything I’ll be risking all our lives for yours — even mine, let me tell ya, which I have to admit is to me of much less significance, feeling deep down that being last on line and kind’s the only thing,” “Please, enough with heartfeltness and panoplied philosophies, pry open the fucking boards, help me out and to get away for I’m too goddamn weak to, and take me to my mother cunt where there are no such things as axioms and Nazis, then I’ll be free and never again need to ask you for anything for me,” “No can do,” and Julie says “Who you speaking to, hon, me?” and she says “Yup, you, nope, me, maybe, unclear, over, under,” in another she draws up a pail from a well and he’s cramped into it, chin pinned to his knees, rubbing his knuckles and looking asleep, pail’s seams stretched and buckling, in another he says to her in a barrens with no houses or other people around “The weather’s been so inclement out here, I can’t see any shooting stars this year, there are only another few days till the peak of the shower’s over, I wish I could go back to where I started from to see it better, would you buy me a ticket?”

Next morning she says to Glen “Again, another one of those deadly daddy dreams, what gives with them? last night there might have been two, maybe three — you know, I really can’t take it anymore, I mean I can probably take it so long as I don’t lose a lot of sleep over it, but I don’t want to take it anymore, goddamn guy won’t leave me alone and I think I know what it all means, not ‘goddamn,’ that’s just what was in my last dream or one I remember as last, the goddamn cursing, but you know what I mean, and it’s not, I swear — how do you like that? ‘swear,’ ‘cursing’—but it’s not that I believe in spirits or anything like that, and I’m aware that cementarians or something — that’s from another dream about graveyards, the made-up word I mean if it is made up — don’t stick much of the cremated person’s dust into those soup cans, maybe a tenth of it someone in the know once said, so for me perhaps one fifth for two cans, but I almost feel that his ashes are talking to me in their way, or his spirit’s doing the talking for his ashes, or it’s neither of those, which is probably the case, for things like that can’t be, can they? and it’s just my mind which I don’t think will be normally composed for months unless I get his ashes and dust and bone fragments and eyeballs, for christsake, and whatever back together again, two cans, I don’t plan to mix them and put them in one, that’d be too complicated and messy and probably smelly and not something I’d ask anyone to do and I certainly won’t, but one on top of the other or side by side but at least as close as two cans can be in the same burying place,” and he says “So you have to do something about it, what else can I say?” and she says “Good advertisement for plane travel and what I was thinking myself, you think you can handle the boys for up to two days?” and calls work and says she won’t be in today and possibly the next and drives to the cemetery, at the office there asks if she may dig the can up herself, she knows exactly where it is and she brought a garden trowel for the work, and the person in charge says they’d get into all sorts of difficulties with the gravediggers’ union if they let her do anything with the trowel but fluff up the earth a little around the privets or dig up some weeds and she says “Good, so a professional digger will have to do it, I don’t care what the charge so long as it’s done in the next hour though I hope you’ll be fair, this isn’t a casket I’m asking you to unearth but a small can which is maybe at the most, or was when we put it there, a foot and a half underground,” gravedigger’s taken off another job and can’s dug up and she takes it home in the shoebox she came with, wraps it in several layers of aluminum foil and plastic produce bags, phones her father’s cemetery and tells them what she’s coming for and they say it’s all right though of course there’ll have to be some costs, phones her travel agent, arranges for a friend to be home when the kids get there and calls Glen to say she’s leaving now, “I’ve been thinking,” he says and she says “My mind’s made up so don’t try to change it,” “It’s not that but can’t it wait till the weekend when I’ll be freer to take care of the kids and your leaving won’t be such a shock to them and you also might have had more time to think about it, because for all you know your bad dreams might end for good here tonight,” “I’ve already made all the arrangements, not that anything like that can’t be changed, but I don’t want to keep the can around the house for that long, it wouldn’t be right for the kids or good for me, I also don’t see myself bringing it back to the cemetery and asking them to rebury it, so I just want to get the whole thing done with and if all goes well I’ll be home tomorrow around midafternoon,” drives to the airport, flies east with the wrapped can in her carry-on bag, stays at a hotel near the airport, the can in the bathtub behind the drawn shower curtain while she sleeps, gets up early and doesn’t remember having any dreams about her father or Julie or graves or holes or anything alluding to them, breakfasts and cabs to the cemetery and tells one of the owners she doesn’t know where the other can’s buried except that it’s around her sister’s grave so if they don’t have any record of the exact location, which isn’t to say the can couldn’t have shifted underground, they’ll probably have to go get a gravedigger to search for it, something, she said, they probably would have done anyway what with the possible labor trouble with the gravediggers’ union, while two men poke around Julie’s grave with poles she thinks of her and closes her eyes and says very low “You know, I don’t pray, I mean, never, I’m telling you, maybe not since I was a little girl and was afraid of God and thought he’d kill me if I didn’t pray so I felt forced to, but I’m doing it now for you, my darling sister, so if you’re near and you hear me please know I love you and have always loved you more than I can say or can express in any kind of way and feel you got the rawest deal anyone could get in this world and I only hope it never hurt and that things where you are now are all right for you, and I’m sorry I haven’t been out to see you since I don’t know how many years ago, when I was still a teen, I think, the last time, but I live far away and it isn’t easy but that’s no excuse for all those years, and I miss you too, meaning I miss you much the way Dad always used to say he did, said it in words and letters to me and also in my dreams since he died how he missed me but especially you, Mom you must know how much she loves you for I know how often she visits you even though she lives a few hundred miles away, and of course you know what I’m doing today and if you don’t it’s that now all of his remains or what’s left of them and I’m hoping his spirit too if there is one will be beside you, and I also think so much of what it might have been for me if you had lived, this I’ve been thinking since a little after you were killed and have never really stopped thinking it since, been for us both, really, both, so, that’s enough, there could be more but I don’t think I can go on any further, I hope you heard if you’re there or the essence of the message got through to you or just got to you or just eventually does in some way, essence or the whole,” cries, someone pats her shoulder but she doesn’t see who, breaks down, walks off by herself to be alone, wishes she’d brought flowers for Julie and her father and grandparents whom she never knew, thinks she saw a flower stall about a half-mile down the road from the cemetery but too late for that and she picks some flowers bordering another burial place out of view of Julie’s grave, there are lots of them around this plot and they seem like fast-growing and abundant healthy flowers so she doesn’t think the grave owners would mind, goes back to her family’s gravesite, “Found it,” one of the grave diggers says while she’s arranging some flowers on her grandmother’s grave and he holds up a rusting can, same size and kind as the one she has in her handbag, she says “Think it’d be all right if I do the honors? — it’s what I came for,” “Your privilege, I guess, I’ve no objections, and hole’s not so wide or deep as for you to fall in,” she asks him to make the hole a bit wider, unwraps her can, switches around the cans behind her back till she doesn’t know which one is which, doesn’t look at them till she sees just their tops in the ground, buries them side by side and touching each other, pushes the dirt over them till the hole’s filled, tamps the earth around it till it’s flat and says “Okay, Dad, now rest in peace,” and goes back to the cemetery office and asks the receptionist there to call a cab to take her to the airport.