Another Perfect Catastrophe (2 page)

“Well. So what of her?”

I shrug again, looking down at the euthanasia essay, trying to remember if I've read it or not. I decide I have and give it a C plus.
Much improved
, I write. “I guess what of her is that she's in another guy's bed right now. Not much ambiguity there, huh?”

He looks away, frowns at the wall. I toss him a small stack of essays. “Here you go, grade a few. Then you can say we did something together.”

He narrows his eyes at me. “What do you mean, Billy? I'm not trained in this.”

“Just pick up a pen. Come on, it's fun. Give it a B minus, then write, Try a little harder next time.'”

He frowns again, shakes his head. “I didn't raise you like this, to shirk your responsibilities.”

“Hey, maybe that's the next stage of grief—shirking.”

He lifts the papers and places them back on my stack. “Must be the first stage, then.”

“First? You've been dying half a decade now,” I say.

“Right,” he says and looks at me. “And that girl's been gone three months.”

Near two in the morning I hear him moving through the hallways, muttering to himself, opening the refrigerator, clicking the mouse on the computer. He started an online club called the Tommy Kesler Society and so far has tracked down and recruited seventeen Tommy Keslers, two of them women, one of them as far away as Madagascar. They have nothing in common and little to do beyond tracking down the next Tommy Kesler. Some of them plan to meet next year at a Western Sizzlin'.

Again I can't sleep and so lie in the dark looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars Laney stuck to the ceiling. In college she'd majored in astronomy, because, she said, it was the only area of study where a final exam could be canceled by clouds. On our ceiling she made the Big Dipper, Orion, Cassiopeia, all to scale, saying she didn't want to forget the knowledge she worked so hard to gain, no matter how useless it might be. I reach over to her empty side of the bed, the sheets smooth and cool. One of my old T-shirts is still stashed under the headboard where she kept it in case of a fire, so the firefighters wouldn't see her naked. I pull the shirt to my face and breathe it in, then turn over and pick up the phone. I punch in the numbers for the watercolorist's house, which I always imagine painted in faded pastels, the edges running over the lines that define it. It rings twice, then the watercolorist picks up. It has happened before and I never know what to say to him.

“Hello? Hello?” His voice is tinged with sleepiness and panic.

“Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” I say to him. My hands shake.

“Oh, God, it's him again,” he says, his words muffled, far off.

“Billy, damn it.” Laney's voice, and his behind her, their words tumbling together in the sheets of his bed. “This stops, right now, tonight,” she says, “Or from here on I only talk through the lawyer.” She hesitates. I can see her, pulling the sheet up over her breasts, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Billy, please.”

“I was missing you, wanted to see how things are.”

“It's two in the morning. Things are dark and quiet.” I hear him behind her saying
just hang up the phone
.

“Dad's here.” I can hear him, too, as I say it, shutting down the computer, walking through the hall. The screen door bangs shut behind him.

“Yeah? How's the cancer coming along?” In her voice I hear her half smiling; for a long time Dad's illness was a joke between us, one of those little tent pegs that stake down the corner of a marriage.

“Well, not much change, but he's working on it.”

She laughs a little, sighs.

“I'm gonna hang up now, Billy,” she says. I say, “Yeah” and then she does. I hold the phone against my ear until it begins its machine-gun fire of beeps.

I figure to find Dad on the porch and follow him out with a couple of bourbons, to take in the night noises of tree peepers and distant highway traffic, but he isn't there. I look out into the fan of light from the house, at the glimmer of cans and bottles I have strewn there. Nothing but his Vette, shiny with dew in the driveway.

“Dad?” My voice sounds like any voice at night, like an intrusion, a rip in the surface of the quiet.

I set the bourbons on the porch rail and walk out in my shorts and bare feet, down the road a ways, until I find him next to the rise of fill dirt that surrounds the new self-storage facility being built, over by the runoff pond. He is doing the newspaper trick, folding the edges up into a lantern shape and twisting them closed. When I was a kid, he'd let the lanterns go on the Little League field behind us, would do it on Fourth of July instead of buying me bottle rockets or firecrackers. He'd argue that they were
better
than fireworks, but something about them those close summer nights struck me as off. They made no noise as they burned, and we watched them without a word. The whole endeavor was too …
ceremonial
somehow. I didn't have the words to say so then—I remember only standing beside him (my mother back at the house) and watching, but casting my attention toward the gut-shaking boom of the professional fireworks show at the football field, or the neighborhood rattle of firecracker strings, straining for the sound of them instead of all that quiet. Now, as then, he twists the ends closed and sets fire to them with his Zippo lighter. As heat fills the hollow paper it lifts into the air, slowly spinning.

“Dad?” He jumps, turns toward me just as the lantern tilts away from him and out over the pond.

“Billy, holy bejesus, what are you doing here?” The lantern tips and lands in the pond, burns a few seconds, then sinks.

“I just talked to Laney. The watercolorist was giving her stage directions the whole time.”

He nods, opens and closes his lighter. “That's a shame. Shame you can't just let it alone, either.”

“Well. And you, what the hell are you doing out here?”

“Oh, just that old paper trick I used to do. You know the one.”

“Dad…that's not the question exactly. It's almost three o'clock in the morning.”

He shrugs, snaps the lighter closed. “Couldn't sleep.”

“So you walk into the woods to do some stunt from twenty-five years ago.” I shake my head, noticing how cold I am. “You know, you might have a stronger case for Alzheimer's than cancer.”

He laughs, pulls a cigar from his pocket, and busies himself unwrapping it. Even in the pale arc-lamp light from the construction site, I can see his face flushing.

“I just thought…we don't have a hell of a lot to reminisce over. I thought this might fit the bill. Every Independence Day, we did these, remember?”

“You're reminiscing by yourself?”

He chews his cigar. “I'm practicing.”

I laugh. “Dad, we don't have to reminisce. We can just visit and talk. That fits the bill fine.”

He looks suddenly old, standing there in his boxers and satin jacket. He has a stack of newspaper at his feet, two of them half-folded into lanterns.

“Well, listen,” I tell him. “You went to all the trouble. Go ahead and do another one.”

He shrugs. “Not like you're some little kid anymore,” he says. “It would just be silly.”

“We're out here at the self-storage site in our underwear, Dad. I think we're a little past silly.”

He shrugs again, twists up one of the papers, and lights it. We stand back to watch the pale orange shadows of flame like something alive inside the folds of paper, the tiny curls of smoke, and then the turning and slow lift as heat fills the lantern. It was always like a contest, to see if it could get airborne before it consumed itself. The night breeze catches this one and pushes it up and out across the pond, where it settles atop the Porta Potti, and something—chemical fumes, methane gas—draws the flame in a blunt
whoosh
that bursts down the roof vent and into the toilet area, the white fiberglass walls suddenly in X-ray, showing through veiny brown, like a giant paper bag luminary at Christmas. The explosion is small, relatively, and self-extinguishing—it kicks open the door, then is quiet, the vent pipe trailing smoke.

The remaining papers at our feet scatter with the breeze out into the pond. We look at each other, the only sound a dog barking, far off.

“Okay,” I say, “I guess I'm ready to sleep now.” I grin at him, my old man of a father.

He grins back. “Conquering the world, one tiny shit house at a time.”

By dawn, as on most any day of my growing up, Dad is off somewhere in the Vette, his cereal bowl and coffee cup left behind clean in the drainboard. I eat my cereal and punch the button to listen to Laney's voice. Instead I hear Dad's voice, overloud, the speaker crackling as he talks.

“HE, BILLY KESLER, ISN'T HERE AT HOME RIGHT NOW, SO THIS IS HIS MACHINE. YOU CAN LEAVE A MESSAGE FOR HIM IF YOU LIKE …” A few seconds of silence, then, “BILLY, I UPDATED THIS TAPE FOR YOU … HOPE YOU DON'T MIND. IF YOU DO, CHANGE IT BACK.” I rewind all the way to the start, trying to find Laney's voice, but it isn't there to be found.

I drive to the community college campus, where I share an office with a professor of heating and air-conditioning. I go to class, hand back a batch of papers two weeks late. I show a short movie of
The Lottery
and we talk about religion and I assign a paper I will collect sometime near the day I return the current ones. This one kid, Kenny Pecora, follows me back to my office, wanting to know what else he can do. He has been to the Writing Center every day, he tells me. This is his third C in a row, he could lose his scholarship. He blinks at me, his face pale and desperate. When he opens his mouth, his teeth are overly large and square, like Teddy Roosevelt in the old photographs, smiling behind his pince-nez.

“I'm not mad at you, Mr. Kesler,” he says. His hair is cut so short I can see his scalp beneath it. He is wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and for half a weird minute I am twenty years old again, a sophomore wearing the same shirt, standing in line for a midnight show of
The Song Remains the Same
. “I'm just really, really frustrated, you know?” he says, and I have a near impulse to say, “Let me tell you about frustration,” like I'm some cantankerous stereotype, a sour old man in a comic strip. But the truth is I'm a young man still, and most of what needs to be said to students never gets said. I never tell the ones I know won't make it. Never tell the A students they are wasting their time in a place like this, never say that half of teaching is being skilled at bullshit, that problems with comma splices and topic sentences will not destroy their lives. Right now I could tell Kenny Pecora that one day I will see his name in an old grade book when I'm cleaning out files and I will remember his Teddy Roosevelt teeth and think,
Oh, yeah…him
, and wonder for about six seconds what became of him, but not care too much because nothing much
will
come of him, good or bad. I could tell him that he may have a wife who thinks he's distant and takes off on him, and he may put his fist through the glass door of a toaster oven, or he may have a father who spends his retirement staging his own slow death, or he may frustrate a student with three Cs in a row because he has given up actually reading the papers. I could, but to what end? I used to be a good teacher and might be again, if I decided. Think of some high school jock, now old and fat and wearing out his ass on the couch, knowing he could, anytime he felt like it, get himself back into shape. Back into fighting weight. Hustle a mile or two around the block. Do a few bench presses. Get back into trim and the old corduroys. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after.

I tell Kenny Pecora to hang in there.

After class Dad swings by to pick me up in his Vette, and we head out to the Noah's Ark construction site. He lets me drive, and I have to slide the seat way back from where he had it, noticing as I do how much thinner he's become. For a second I consider the possibility that he really
does
have cancer, but even God doesn't possess that much irony. Only enough to let someone's wife move in with the instructor of the class she was taking because the marriage counselor advised her to find some interests that belong only to her. That she did.

The ark is at the end of Cherry Hill Road, a project the local Baptist church is paying for with raffles and bake sales and the usual guilt. At the edge of town is a big, hand-painted wooden sign: WE ARE REBUILDING NOAH'S ARK! This is true, in a way, though I have trouble picturing Noah and his sons with a crane and steel girders and warning signs from OSHA, which this place has in abundance. As we pull up, we see a pair of workers in hard hats, sitting on the top girder eating lunch, like those old photos of New York City. Several other men lean on the hood of a truck, looking at blueprints.

“There it is,” I say.

Dad half stands, so his head pops out of the open top of the car. “I'll be damned,” he says down to me. “You can just see what it'll be like finished. Imagine old Noah fitting two of every animal inside there.”

For a minute I give in to the story, trying to imagine it the way it was always shown in all those dentists' waiting room kids' Bible books. The ark is surprisingly compact, only about the size of a small office building, like it's meant not to hold animals but maybe just a dermatologist and an accountant or two. When its finished, the paper said, they will hold Sunday school classes inside, with enough room left in the hull for a volleyball court.

My father keeps looking, muttering to himself. “Took him a hundred and twenty years to do it, and his neighbors all scoffed. ‘Old Noah, the flake,' they'd say, ‘Noah the nutcase.' But the man had him a vision, yessir. That he did.”

I say nothing, wondering where all of this is coming from. The closest he has ever come to any kind of religion was forming the Tommy Kesler Society. All the time of my growing up, Sunday mornings for him meant three of his friends over for Bloody Marys and fishing shows on TV, while I slept in late hearing the mixed sounds of their hoots and whistles when the show's host landed a big one, and my mother beating eggs and frying bacon in the kitchen. When commercials came on, they would click over to the television preachers and spend those three minutes making fun of their haircuts and neckties and weeping, before fishing came on again.