Another Broken Wizard Read online

  “We just drove around for a while. What’s up with the cops?” I asked.

  “How should I know?” Russ said, too quickly, and looked back down at his hand of cards as if they demanded intense concentration.

  “Were they here before?”

  “Yeah, they came by, looking for Joe. Marissa wouldn’t let them in. Were they still out there?” Russ said, trying to sound disinterested.

  I said yeah and noted that the party wasn’t going to die anytime soon. I started to wave everyone good night. Joe finally came in from the cold. He went straight for the kitchen counter and downed two fingers of bourbon.

  “Even when those motherfuckers don’t have anything to say, they take forever to say it,” Joe said, coming up for air after he’d grimaced down the drink.

  “What’s going on?” Russ asked.

  “Just cops following up on what happened to Smitty. God, that one cop was a prick.”

  “Who was it?” Russ asked.”

  “Johnson, Johansson, something like that.”

  “I’ve met him before. He’s not that bad. What did he have to say?” Russ asked.

  “Just the usual shit. Just to ‘leave it to the cops before anyone else gets hurt.’ Blah blah blah.”

  “Maybe he has a point,” Russ said, studying his hand.

  “Jim, can I talk to you for a minute?” Joe said.

  Joe closed the door to his room behind me, crossed the room quickly and pulled the shade, even though his room only looked out onto the building next door. I leaned back on Joe’s mattress. He checked two drawers in his gray-metal desk, leaning over them so I couldn’t exactly see what it was that he counted in each, twice.

  A massive Bob Marley poster hung behind him. Bob was staring off with a joint the size of his thumb having just left his lips, smiling with the promise of stoned freedom. That was one more trap they had waiting for you when you hit fifteen or sixteen. I thought of the misery of those years, of Joe telling me that he wanted his friends to smoke his ashes when he was dead.

  Joe stopped counting and raised is head suddenly. He went over to the old wood door, locked it, then went back to the drawer and started counting again. Content, he shut the drawers and pulled a chair around.

  “What did your old football buddy want to know?” Joe asked.

  Joe alternately thought it admirable and stupid that I’d played high school football.

  “Just what we were up to. I told him we were driving around looking for Sully, that he and his friends had put Smitty in the hospital and that it started over a dumb, pointless fight.”

  “Why did you do that, Jim?”

  “He asked. And we hadn’t done anything illegal.”

  “But now, if I do do something to Sully, or even if something just happens to him, I’ll be the first one they look for.”

  “I didn’t think of that. But hey, that’s just one more reason to leave it alone, get out of town like you were saying. I’ll even give you your three hundred back if it will help.”

  “Getting out was the old plan. Now I have to stick around to settle this.”

  “Jesus Christ! Settle what? Sully got beaten down, then Smitty got beaten down—sounds even to me. I mean just drop it, just get out.”

  “Like I’m afraid? I don’t think so. This is where I’m from. I’m not leaving.”

  “Not like you’re afraid, like you don’t want to look over your shoulder at Denny’s. Like your life and your freedom is worth more than teaching a lesson to some jackass.”

  “Like you? Like your life?”

  “Listen, I’m just trying to help here. But I’m going to take off. I’m beat.”

  “You’re leaving? I thought we were going to get fucked up together,” Joe said.

  “Maybe this weekend. It’s three in the morning, I already sobered up and I have to be at the hospital tomorrow.”

  On Route 9, tired and unsatisfied, I checked my phone and saw that Serena had called, but I’d missed it. The whole road back to the Fountainhead was just one big, nondescript obstacle, devoid of reward, devoid of life, devoid devoid devoid.

  27.

  After a bad night’s sleep, I spent a minute trying to remind myself where I was, and a minute to convince myself I was somewhere else. My room was a drywall box, with a table for Dad’s laptop, a few half-unpacked cardboard boxes and a disorganized bookshelf next to my inflatable bed. I showered and pulled on some fairly clean business casual clothes for the hospital. Come Monday, I’d call my contacts again, follow up on resumes … Out in the frigid apartment parking lot, I caught myself talking out loud, laying out my plans. I remembered that Dad used to do that when he was getting into his suit in the morning.

  The hospital was quiet and I went to Dad’s room without saying hello to anyone. I was glad to hear the door whoosh shut and close out the scraps of small talk and shoe squeaks in the hall. I looked at Dad, breathing and beeping. My book told the story of how the Revolutionary War passed mostly around Worcester. I put it down and opened my book about King Philip’s War.

  From Sturbridge Village to the Freedom Trail, there was always too much history in Massachusetts, always some fresh bit of dusty dullness for school field trips. But I’d never even heard of King Philip’s War. Philip was the son of Massasoit, the chief who’d helped the Pilgrims survive those first few winters. I read for hours about the unlikely past of the places I’d grown up—the Praying Indian towns of Natick and Grafton, the razed settlements at Marlborough and Deerfield.

  The book on King Philip’s War spent a lot of time on two Indians who’d converted to Christianity and learned to read and write. They played both sides of the fence in the war, and had even acted as Philip’s translators at different points. Philip had the first one, John Sassamon, killed after he warned the Colonists about his war plans. The second one was named James Printer because he worked as a printer in Cambridge. After the war was done and Philip was dead, the Colonial authorities required that Printer bring them the heads of two Indians before they’d let him off the hook and give him back his job in Cambridge. The book wondered at the wavering condition of the two men, belonging to their respective tribes by birth and race, but also to the world of the settlers by their efforts to learn to read and write.

  Dad remained still. I closed the book. I thought of Joe and then I thought of Farragut Ward.

  A nurse came and went. On the news channel, the TV told me that Christmas retail sales had disappointed. And a girl was kidnapped in Montana.

  The cafeteria was a crappy refuge from Dad’s ominous presence. Chicken sandwich and a soda on a tray, I found my table by the window. New Year’s Day was quiet throughout the hospital. Half the cafeteria’s heat-lamped shelves sat empty and more than half the tables were free. Whiskeynose was still in his booth, though, button-covered reflective vest over his heavy coat, handing out change to exiting cars and watching his portable TV. It did me some dark kind of good to see him working the holiday. Vindictive and hungover, I watched, hoping that the cold would grow colder, his boredom deeper, his sense of a wasted life more keen. I picked at my dry chicken sandwich.

  “Hey,” Olive said.

  I didn’t see her walk right up to me. She had put her black hair up in little pigtails, and her sweater and torn t-shirt showed the edges of a red bra fringing her pale cleavage.

  “Oh, hey, Olive. What’s going on?”

  She sat down across from me, smiled perfunctorily, then took a deep breath and commenced.

  “Well, my dad’s not going to die, but that won’t stop my mom from acting like he will. And we took one car here so I can’t get away from her except to get some shitty food. And it looks especially shitty today. Other than that, not much, things are peachy.”

  “Happy New Year,” I said, thinking of kissing Olive.

  “Are you going to be here for a while?”

  I looked down at the chicken sandwich that I was ready to abandon. I paused.

  “Yeah. Just let me get some more cof
fee.”

  “I’ll get it for you. How do you take it?”

  I watched her narrow ass shift left and right under its plaid skirt as she walked to the empty cafeteria line. She came back with an order of fries and two coffees. She sat down and drowned the fries in ketchup.

  “So he pulled through okay. That’s good,” I said.

  “Looks like yours did too.”

  “Yeah, how’d you know?”

  “The ICU is a small town. How’s he doing?”

  “The doctor says he’s okay, but he’s still out of it, with the tube and everything. It’s going to be a long recovery, even if they don’t have to go back in for more surgery. We’ll find that out Monday, I think.”

  “This might suck less if it wasn’t the holidays. There’s like, nothing to do to distract you from all of it. My father’s opening his eyes every six hours and pulling at the tube they put down his throat and my mother’s crying, saying rosaries or yelling at us. I actually asked for more hours where I work. And I work at a freaking Ruby Tuesday’s. My mom would kill me if she knew.”

  “Tell me about it. There’s nothing on TV, and no one’s at work. It’s dead and probably will be for another week. It’s like time hardly moves,” I said, excited to share this misery.

  “And it’s not like either of our fathers are even dying.”

  “Exactly. It’s just like dress rehearsal for it.”

  “And that’s almost worse. I know. I’m sorry. It sucks for me to say that. I’m sorry. That’s not true,” she looked down at the wood grain pattern on the table’s plastic surface. The dripping french fry in her painted and chewed fingernails hung in transit between the cardboard tray and her purple lips for a moment.

  “Don’t worry. I know what you mean.”

  “Right? It’s not even like anything will change after this. Someone dies—you get sympathy, you get to act out. Something ends, some other things change.”

  “But with this, everything goes back to normal, except a little worse,” I said.

  “Exactly. Jim, you’re not the yuppie you look like.”

  “Nor are you the freak you make yourself out to be, Olive.”

  She blushed. She took another french fry. I took a gulp of the burnt coffee. We agreed without discussion to go back to the ICU separately. My hangover had turned giddy at having found some respite from the loneliness of the hospital.

  Gerry was in Dad’s room when I got there. He had taken the comfortable chair by the bed and put his flowers and his coat on the smaller, less comfortable extra chair.

  “Jim, I was wondering if I’d get to meet you,” Gerry said, offering me his hand, covered with hair and heavy with a broad watch and a pair of rings.

  Gerry wasn’t too different from how he sounded on the phone. He was short and hairy. It looked like he’d had his hair cut and styled on the way to the hospital. His dark eyes and quick smile looked sincere enough. He wore a green golf shirt with a logo on the breast that said it was expensive. Despite the accusation buried in his hello, I was glad to see him. It beat being alone in that room. Gerry seemed at ease there, which I didn’t think anyone could be.

  “Yeah. I was just getting some lunch and I got caught up, I had to make a few phone calls,” I lied.

  “How’s he doing?” Gerry said, looking down at Dad with a little frown.

  “They say he’s stable and that he’s recovering by the book. But I wish he’d say so himself. I thought the breathing tube would be out by now. But they’re saying it’ll be there until Saturday or Sunday.”

  “I can imagine this is tough. Were you here last night?”

  “No. He’s pretty out of it. So there’s nothing I can do here. I saw some friends out in Worcester.”

  Gerry asked about my night with the eagerness older men have for hearing the exploits of younger men. And I gave him a sanitized version, and there was a lot to sanitize. From there, we did our recaps—where Gerry had worked with Dad, what Dad had said about me—small talk, daily concerns. I could feel the muscles in my shoulders knotting up again. Gerry stayed another hour and we picked the bones of the Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, stocks, politicians, cities and suburbs, career, home, golf and occasional drunkenness that comprised the horizon of Gerry’s life, as it was supposed to do for me. After he left, I hung around for another few hours, watching what the news network itself would call ‘filler.’ I thought about the long weekend ahead and I thought of Olive. I called Serena once I’d found Route 9.

  “Hey you,” I said, trying to be fun.

  “Hey,” she said, flatly.

  Someone cut me off on the road and I got distracted. It made the flatness of her hello sound even flatter and made me forget to keep the banter afloat, to joke through the gloom imposed by the day in the hospital.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, just hungover. Listen, I’m just hanging out with Hannah and Aria right now. Can I call you back?” she said, sounding more distracted than me.

  “Sure. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Back at the Fountainhead, I divided my clothes into piles of clean, dirty and maybe. I stacked some of Dad’s half-unpacked boxes in the corner. I couldn’t seem to speed through the TV’s hundreds of channels fast enough, so I went to the Fountainhead’s health club and climbed onto the elliptical machine. I needed the exercise, even if just for my back. Twenty-nine and a chronic back problem. Mortality is too weak a word. I commenced fake running over imaginary distances under the fluorescent lights for a long time.

  But after that, a shower and a frozen pizza, I was still racing through the channels. In the TV’s glare, I imagined the bars in all the chain restaurants in the Metro-West suburbs at nine-thirty on a Friday night, the single women leaning forward from their stools, pushing their breasts forward and their asses back, hoisting fruity drinks in elaborate glasses, picking at popcorn and tortilla chips in the restaurant’s engineered gaiety. I imagined the local bars, tucked into the town centers of Westborough, Marlborough, Framingham, with patrons who’d known each other their whole lives. I thought of taking a few Tylenol PMs from Dad’s bathroom and calling it a night.

  I really would like to say I called Serena first. I would like to say I was drunk or profoundly anguished. I would like to say I had a damn good reason when I called Olive. I would like to say we commiserated until our frustration, anxiety and grief forced us together. I would like to say she made the first move. I would like to say I didn’t know what I was doing. I would like to say I didn’t know what would happen. I would like to say it was necessary. But I can’t.

  Olive was dressed the same as she was in the hospital that afternoon, and that decided it. Our first kiss occurred at the opening of the heavy apartment door. There was no trepidation or hesitation. Her small breast with its red knot of nipple heaved warm under my hand. From the knock on the door, through the threshold of the apartment, out of our clothes, onto the couch, into her to the last bucking spasm, the whole thing had the quality of a rubber band snapping, forceful and inevitable. The first time was like that, anyway.

  It was around two when she left. I flipped through the channels slowly and fell asleep on the couch to a Robert Redford movie about skiing.

  28.

  Friday, January 2

  Regret and shame from the night before did pursue me down Route 9 to the hospital. But there was something about it I couldn’t leave alone. It was the spot of life that I needed more than I regretted.

  The inside of Dad’s car smelled like years of spilled Diet Coke. I cranked up the heat and cracked the window. Led Zeppelin was screaming on the radio, like they always did on car radios in Massachusetts. I passed the interchange with I-495, where Raytheon used to make the Patriot Missiles that lit up the skies of the first Gulf War.

  I had spent a long morning sending in resumes and writing e-mails, and I felt appropriately helpless. I planned again how I would explain myself, ambitious and enterprising but reasonable and obedient, in an interview.
I hoped that would be enough, because, for all my white-collar credentials, my own survival is largely a mystery to me. I’d made research reports—not shoes or missiles or loaves of bread. I’d traded the reports for money my employer made by deeply arcane means. I could trace it all back to the creation of paper currency and banking in the 12th century, I guess.

  But how would I trace this—being unemployed and trapped by in a place I hated? Now some smartass could say well, you’re trapped by your bourgeois morality. But I say that bourgeois morality is the only thing that ever paid my bills or afforded me the quiet hours I count as freedom. It all made me sick with an unanswerable uneasiness.

  I passed the Sheraton done up like a huge Medieval castle. Nondescript concrete and glass office buildings perched on the shoulders of farther hills. After Natick, the towns started to take on that intentional New England shine, like they were trying out for PBS. Not even the snow banks, blackened by road salt and exhaust fumes could diminish the upscale feeling of things there.

  Parking outside the hospital, I took some breaths and walked to the hospital without my coat. I walked slowly, deliberately looking away from whiskeynose’s booth as I did. Dad was still intubated and dormant in his glass cubicle. The lines on the screens looked a little perkier, but what do I know?

  I kept reading about King Philip’s War. During the war, the Colonists emptied out the Praying Indian towns and sent them off to Deer Island, in Boston Harbor. Half of the Praying Indians died when the Colonists got too busy to send regular supplies over to Deer Island. A hell of a way to treat your friends. I thought of the senior vice president asking me if I was loyal. I wondered what loyalty had ever gotten anyone.

  After a few hours, Dad’s oncologist came in carrying a leather folder overstuffed with paper. He was a little old Jewish guy with white hair and eyes that seemed too big and too alert for his face. He introduced himself and then stared down at the pages in his folder, then at the clipboard on the end of Dad’s bed. He checked and re-checked some things, his eyes blinking with careful curiosity.