Silent Joe

Chapter Twenty-One

I cooked three expensive TV dinners and waited for the phone to ring. Maybe Alex hadn’t liked what he’d seen. Maybe he’d changed his mind. Maybe he’d just take his sweet time, like he’d done all along. Eighteen days he’d had her. I thought about how much can happen so quickly, and of the lifetimes you can live in eighteen long summer days.

At eight-thirty I got a call.

“Hello, Joe, this is Thor.”

“How did you get the number?”

“Private investigator.”

I said nothing. As quickly as I’d forgotten him — tried to forget him — he was back. I felt my scar grow hot and my fingers grow cold and weak. I heard the hollow thunk of liquid falling back down to the bottom of a bottle.

“Look,” he said. “There’s some stuff we should talk about.”

“I forgave you.”

“Not that. This is other stuff. About what happened.”

“I’ll listen.”

“I... uh... well, you know how the police are. They can get you to say things that aren’t true. And maybe, if the lies help you out, too, then you just tell them.”

“What’s the lie, Thor? Get there fast.”

“You aren’t my son, Joe. I thought you were, for almost a year. I named you and fed you the bottle and changed your diapers, spent a lot of my money on you. I treated you like you were part of me. But you weren’t.”

I felt like I was in an elevator plunging — a fast, claustrophobic plummet into darkness. I heard a human voice roaring in the descent. Mine, but not mine.

I heard him drink again, burp. When he spoke again I could barely hear the words because I was falling so fast.

“There,” he said. “I said it. I thought you should know. I’m done.”

He hung up. I pressed star 69 but his line wouldn’t accept it.

Speed. All the windows open and the Mustang’s 351 revving high as I shot down the freeway into Santa Ana.

You aren’t my son, Joe.

I got off and sanely rode Edinger into Santa Ana, heading for the Amtrak station. My heart slowed. I tried to get myself to the quiet spot. I could see the tree and the eagle and the hills beyond, but I just couldn’t will myself up into the branches.

When I got to the station I parked and looked around for lodging. Nothing. In a five-block drive I found an Econo Lodge and a rundown place called the Paloma. Neither nervous desk clerk had seen anyone matching Thor’s description. I drove an ever-widening maze outward from the station.

Fernandez Motel, Superior Hotel, Fourth Street Apartments — weekly/monthly, even the YMCA. Nothing.

So I widened the circle: Oak Tree Motel, Saddleback Inn, La Siesta.

The desk clerk at the Rancho Lodge was a young Indian woman whose eyes widened when I walked in. Then she turned her gaze away from my face and looked at the chain-mounted pen on the counter. I described Thor Svendson.

“Twelve,” she said to the pen. “Perhaps you can use the phone behind you.”

“I’ll just knock. Thank you.”

Room twelve was the last one on the ground floor, right of the lobby. Moths buzzed the lights of the walkway. A loud TV in room nine. I stood outside the turquoise-colored door and knocked.

Silence. No movement. No sounds. I knocked again.

“Who’s there?”

“Joe.”

“Second.”

I heard the chain slide out, the door lock being turned. Then the door opened and Thor stood before me. His face was pale and his eyes were blue and he had the same unsmiling smile he always had. White beard, white hair. Baggy jeans, a smudged T-shirt that was taut against his belly. Bare, white feet.

“How’d you find me?”

“I drove. I’m coming in.”

He stepped aside and I walked into the faintly lit room. The TV was on with no sound. It smelled like cigarettes and booze and french fries. Just a room with a kitchenette in one corner. The bathroom door was closed. Thor slumped into a chair in the corner, across from the TV. There was a half-gone bottle of supermarket-brand vodka on the nightstand, and a carton of orange juice.

“I was gonna tell you when I saw you the first time,” he said. “But that forgiveness thing was important. Didn’t want to overdose you.”

“How do you know I’m not yours?”

“First I suspected. Then I checked the calendar. Then I beat her up. She admitted it.”

“Whose am I?”

“She wasn’t sure. A woman like that can’t know. When I was in jail, waiting for trial, she offered me money not to say any of that. To just let everybody believe you were mine and I did it because I was crazy. I took the money. I was gonna do some time, so I figured I might as well get paid for it. I ended up not testifying at all, never took the stand. But letting people think it was my own kid I poured the acid on, it made me stand out. I noticed it real early, like as soon as they booked me. It kept me in protective block, which is a good thing. It got me some interviews. Fuck, I was famous. So I made up the angle about doing it because I heard the Lord telling me to do it. My own son. Like Abraham. He had a white beard like mine in this picture I saw.”

I looked into his merry, childlike eyes. “Why did you?”

He looked at me. A bit of surprise on his face. “To hurt her! I was drunk and high and pissed off. It wasn’t anything personal against you. I want you to know that. It was just to hurt something of hers. To get back at her for what she did to me. I’m not saying it was the right thing to do, and I’m not saying it wasn’t. But there are some things, Joe, a man can’t forgive.”

We let those words hang in the air. And hang some more. Thor looked down, took another drag on the bottle, another sip of the juice.

“And you expect me to forgive you?”

He looked up. Blue innocence. An attempted smile. Santa Claus beard. “You already did. Remember? Now we can move on. Forget about it. Start over. Hey, have a drink. This isn’t bad vodka, for Food King.”

“Where is she?”

“Charlotte? I haven’t seen her in twenty-three years. Haven’t talked, nothin’. Except for the money. She’d always send it on time. I bet she cleaned up, changed her name and married a banker.”

“How much? When?”

He looked past me then, like he was remembering. If you just took a picture of him and showed it to someone, they’d think he was jolly. Except for the big dark bags under his eyes, and the pale, sweaty skin.

“Thousand a month for twenty-three years. I’ve made two hundred seventy-six grand. She gave me five grand to sign on. Like a bonus. It’s all spent.”

“But you’ve never talked to her, not even on the phone?”

“Once or twice she called, maybe. Didn’t say nothin’. There wasn’t ever a return address on the money, so don’t bother asking.”

“How did she know where to send it?”

“Always to my P.O. box in Seattle.”

“Where is the last place you know she lived?”

“Where it all happened — in Lake Elsinore, out in Riverside County. Years ago a guy in prison told me she’d gone to L.A. Don’t know how true it was.”

“What was the postmark on the envelopes?”

“San Diego.”

“The whole time? Twenty-three years?”

“Yeah. So?”

“You have one of the envelopes the money came in?”

“I just kept the bills.”

Thor picked up the bottle and took a long drink. Then one from the orange juice carton.

“Drink, Joe?”

“When did you get the last payment?”

“Three weeks ago. It always comes on the first.”

“What kind of bills?”

“Ten hundreds. Used ones. Not new ones.”

“What did you do with it?”

“Rent. Vodka. A girlfriend or two, over the years. Gotta live, you know.”

I looked at him, at the room, at the bottle and the mute TV and the terrible look of innocence in his eyes.

“Yes. You have to live.”

“I thought maybe you were going to say I didn’t, then kill me like you said you’d do.”

“Things change.”

“How they do.”

He seemed to be considering something. He drank and set the bottle down with a clunk. “You want to see her?”

“That’s correct.”

“I guess if you were going to kill me, you’d just take that gun out from behind your coat and blast away.”

“I’d break your neck.”

He looked away, the half smile still in place, his white hair awry, his blue eyes so open and clear and empty.

I stepped forward and took his head in both my hands. It might have looked like one man steadying the face of another, to look into his eyes, maybe, to tell him something heartfelt. But I was positioning my hands for a head twist, getting the balance and weight right, estimating the potential of his resistance. A head twist is deadly because the guy doesn’t know which direction you’re going to go, or when. Thor seemed to understand all this. I got my face up close to his. I could smell the fumes of vodka, the sour tang of orange juice.

“Has this been the truth?” I asked him.

“Oh, everything. I got no reason to lie.”

“I’m glad I’m not yours. I’d rather be human.”

“See?” he whispered. “I’m not so bad.”

Back home I sat in the darkness and wondered. There was just enough moonlight to make pale stripes through the blinds. I’d been made fatherless twice in two weeks, and my emotions couldn’t catch up with the facts. The emotions were there, all right — I could sense them just below the surface. But the surface was frozen numb and in need of a good baptism. And all I had was a bathtub.

June called and I told her I couldn’t talk because I was expecting a very important call. I tried to be polite but maybe I could have said it better. She wasn’t happy when she hung up and my heart felt much heavier than it should have. I wondered if love was always irrational, or only in my own retarded history.

I felt cut loose. Adrift. I had needed Thor more than I’d known. He was my Lucifer, and always my blame for the darkness inside me. I’d needed Will, too — my light. Now, with both of them gone in his own way, I felt like the past life I’d lived had become false. It’s a terrible emptiness to see your own history dissolve. To feel the foundations that you labored so hard to construct slipping, sliding, turning to liquid.

With my heart thumping fast, I called June back and explained what I could explain. Thor and Charlotte. Drunk and high. To hurt Charlotte. Nothing personal. A thousand a month for twenty-plus years to keep the world thinking that I was his son. Postmark: San Diego.

A lot of time passed before June spoke.

“You’re new now,” she said very quietly. “You’re free. And by the way, I love you. I knew it the minute our interview was over.”

“I love you, too. I knew it the minute you jumped into the bay with me.”

An hour later the phone rang. My cell, not the house line.

“Get the money. Keep this phone ready. If one tiny thing doesn’t smell right from a thousand miles out, I’ll kill her. If I get a whiff of the FBI I’ll kill her. If I don’t like your tone of voice I’ll kill her.”

“Don’t kill her. Get rich instead.”

He hung up.

I punched off, set the cell phone back on the table and called his father on the hard line.