Half World: A Novel (17 page)

3

Waking on the daybed. First smoke, first drink. Dickie picking something from his foil ball to get the synapses started. Jack already up and wandering the rooms or nowhere to be seen and Dickie stumbling into the bedroom to make sure he was still breathing, just sleeping it off in the lopsided bed, an empty Wild Turkey bottle on the pillow beside him.

Making instant coffee on the range in the kitchen. Some breakfast. Jack up now for sure, maybe standing in the corner by the table glowering at Dickie or out in the living room looking through the stacks of newspapers. Both men in their underpants, padding around in bare feet. The radio on, a news and weather station that also played a few swing numbers every hour, Artie Shaw, Lester Brown, even a few of the Benny Goodman small groups. Getting dressed, getting Jack dressed. Maybe a half hour killed right there. Getting some vegetable broth into Jack. Two coffee cups on the card table in the kitchen, one of broth, the other of Wild Turkey. Feeding the cats.

Late morning, Jack’s first nap of the day. A little housekeeping, maybe, peeling the rugs off the floors and dragging them into the vestibule to beat them into dusty submission. Scrubbing the bathroom. Gathering newspapers and mail and old soup cans, whiskey bottles, tossing it all into the Dumpster behind the building. Salvaging all sorts of forgotten detritus: Jack’s medals and citations from the Air Force, Dickie’s old driv
er’s license, a business card for a VA hospital with a handwritten appointment that Dickie couldn’t imagine Jack had kept.

More coffee. Back to the rapidly shrinking foil ball. Sidetracked by old newspapers, basketball scores, TV listings from his time underground, Dickie hunched over the newsprint like an amnesiac excavating lost history. Jack awake and ready for lunch. The twin coffee mugs. A trip to the bathroom and the ensuing cleanup. One of Jack’s outbursts, screaming obscenities at Dickie or whoever else he thought was in the room, jabbing his fists until Dickie finally grabbed him from behind and wrestled him down, holding Jack until he lay spent, limp, wheezing on the daybed.

Second nap of the day. Dickie down the stairs and out of the apartment, steering the Fairlane down to the supermarket, the liquor store, the bank if the Social Security check had arrived. Still feeling like a tourist in the aboveground world, but starting to get a few nods of acknowledgment from cashiers and clerks, despite the hair and beard. Becoming something of a regular. The time out of the apartment a breath of fresh air, literally, driving back slowly, windows down, taking slight detours to see the bridge from different angles, the river, the men standing in half circles down on the banks.

Back to the apartment and Jack up and raging or up and weeping. Trying to get a pill down Jack’s throat. Getting a few down his own to calm things a bit. Jack’s eyes lighting up when he sees Dickie’s shopping bags, the new bottles clinking in the brown paper. Here, boy. Sit. Drinks all around. A moment of lucidity where Jack comments on a news story from the radio, something in the paper from 1969. Maybe an actual discussion, just long enough to lull Dickie into letting his guard down until Jack is after his own throat or Dickie’s with a shaving razor. Dickie gathering all the sharp objects from the apartment and stashing them in the janitor’s closet on the other side of the staircase landing.

Vespers. The sky purple over the river. The radio station going one hundred percent big-band ballads, sending both Jack and Dickie into a teary melancholy. Dinner for himself, a take-out burger or a sandwich with some of the cats’ tuna, a couple of fruit pies. More broth for Jack. Another trip to
the bathroom, Jack crying at the mess he’s made, Dickie holding his father’s shoulders while Jack sobs with his pants pooled at his ankles. A few more drinks, another couple of pills. Nightfall. Streetlights below, pinpricks of orange light from the housing project. Dogs barking down by the river. Dickie’s thoughts of the men there, campfires and cigarette cherries in the dark. Dickie’s thoughts of Portland, an explosion in an office, a Sunday morning, the man who shouldn’t have been there. Jack standing in the living room, staring at the TV, a deodorant commercial, sculpting the fingers of his right hand into a mimed pistol, aiming at the screen, pulling the trigger.

Sleep, yes or no. Jack in the dark bedroom, talking or snoring. Dickie on the daybed, a last smoke, a last drink, the radio very low. Firecrackers from the street below, a chain of tiny detonations. A man at his desk, alone in a Portland office building. Dogs down by the river.

Time moves both ways.

*   *   *

It didn’t take long for Dickie to deplete his stash, until he was poking around in the folds of the aluminum foil looking in vain for a stray tablet. After a brief, foolhardy flirtation with the idea of going cold turkey, he decided to drive up to the address on the business card he’d found and visit Jack’s doctor.

The guy looked Dickie over, asked after Jack, took a few notes. Wrote a refill for Jack’s medication. Dickie almost chickened out, almost walked out the door without another word, but desperation trumped shame long enough for him to ask for another prescription, just something to calm his nerves a little, maybe something else to get him up in the morning. The doc looked at Dickie again, then back down at his pad, started writing.

“When did you get back?” the doc said.

Dickie, stunned for a second, wondering what this guy knew, if something had slipped through from Portland, and then, getting a grip, realizing that the doctor meant back from Vietnam. Maybe Jack had once said something about his son overseas. Maybe the guy could just tell, looking at Dickie. Maybe it was that obvious.

“I’m not exactly sure,” Dickie said.

The doc nodded, still scribbling. He tore off the sheet and handed it to Dickie without further eye contact. Sent his regards to Jack.

*   *   *

He returned to the apartment to find Jack playing Audrey’s old records in the living room, sobbing and yelling, breaking everything within reach that he hadn’t already broken. Dickie managed to get his father onto the daybed, one of the new sedatives down his throat.

When Jack was finally asleep, Dickie started cleaning. Broken bottles, broken plates, and then the records themselves, some in pieces, some simply flung into the far corners of the room. The cats still cowering behind the bookcases and the big oak hutch, furniture they probably figured Jack couldn’t overturn. They obviously didn’t know him as well as Dickie did.

In a corner of the living room was a box Dickie hadn’t seen before. He lifted the flaps and found it full of his mother’s 78s, some still in their original paper wrappers. He couldn’t believe Jack still had these. His father was the least sentimental man he’d ever known. Dickie hadn’t seen all of his mother’s recordings in one place since the first time his father had destroyed her records, when Jack stood in their driveway on the Oklahoma base and smashed them on the street, one at a time, while the neighbors looked on and Audrey stood watching from the living room window.

His parents had met during the war, the last war, or, well, actually, the one before the one before, the one that still seemed like a
real
war, with bond drives and homecoming parades and front-porch flags snapping in the breeze. Audrey had already made her most famous recordings in Paris. She had been a darling of the Resistance, her stripped-down renditions of classic torch numbers reinterpreted under the circumstances as songs of longing for many things in addition to love: country, courage, freedom. She made a few more recordings after she came to the States with Jack, but soon they were living on air bases in towns without main streets let alone recording studios, and after Sylvie and Dickie were born
she closed the book on her career, reserving her singing for lullabies and impromptu recitals for friends’ birthdays.

She hadn’t been forgotten, though. Every couple of years, some middle-aged guy with hair a little too long and a few days’ growth of beard showed up at their house, unannounced. A writer, a college professor, a collector. Audrey tried politely to send them away, but they hadn’t tracked her down to take no for an answer, so she’d invite them in, fix coffee, sit and answer questions, turn down offers to go to New York or Chicago and record something new. She always made sure whoever had come was long gone by the time Jack got home, making Dickie and Sylvie promise to keep the visits to themselves, their little secret.

At the time, Dickie couldn’t understand his mother’s importance to these men, what possessed them to track her down. He had fallen in with a group of air brats whose main interests included jazz and booze and raiding their parents’ medicine cabinets, not necessarily in that order. Their musical tastes were decidedly modern, Ornette and Miles and Coltrane, and Audrey’s records were anything but. To Dickie, they sounded like distant echoes of some lost time that he didn’t particularly understand or care much about.

He had one of his mother’s records with him when he started on MAELSTROM. A strange, fragile thing to take. He and Audrey weren’t even on speaking terms at the time, so he couldn’t really explain its inclusion in his duffel bag of bare necessities. It got as far as Ann Arbor, his first step into the student movement. He was living with Mary Margaret, a girl he’d met in an antiwar group, and during an argument one night she threw the record across their living room, shattering it against the far wall. Dickie hadn’t played the thing in years, but the loss nearly brought him to his knees. It took Mary Margaret a few minutes to understand the severity of what she had done. She didn’t ask him about the record, why it had stopped their argument cold. How mortal a sin she had committed. She retreated to the bedroom, leaving Dickie standing over his broken pieces of shellac.

He slid Jack’s discs back into their musty sleeves, slid the sleeves underneath the big oak hutch, fighting the urge to put one on the old Decca
player in the corner. He didn’t want to rile Jack again, and to be honest, he wasn’t sure he was ready to hear one himself. It would be a strange sound to him now. It seemed to Dickie that they were broken more often than they were played. The crack of the records fracturing was more familiar to him than the sound of his mother’s voice in the songs.

*   *   *

It didn’t take long to run out of pills again. He had another bout of cold-turkey optimism, but within a day he started to feel the clawing of withdrawal, his sinuses scratched and throbbing, his mouth dry, his body shimmering with a low-grade panic that threatened to bubble over into something more serious with each unmedicated hour.

He couldn’t bring himself to go back to the hospital and beg again, so he made his way down to the river, to the men in their camp. Four bucks for a little baggie of Seconal and Benzedrine. Same price it was in Vietnam.

*   *   *

Some kind of commotion from the rooms below woke him on the daybed, drool-chinned and discombobulated, more than a little hungover. It sounded like someone moving around down there, and after Dickie swallowed a few uppers and checked to make sure Jack was still breathing, he pulled on some clothes and went down to the street.

The door of the used bookstore was open, the lights were on. Dickie was so used to seeing the place dark and shut tight that it seemed almost like a dream. The place was crammed floor to ceiling with shelves of hardbacks and paperbacks, old movie magazines, a locked glass display case with what appeared to be leather-bound rare editions. A graybeard crouched in the back of the store, digging through boxes. He lifted his head when Dickie stepped inside, nodded, went back to his archaeology.

Dickie perused. Something to read wouldn’t be such a bad idea. He’d pretty much exhausted Jack’s cache of old newspapers, felt as if he’d finally caught up on his lost years, or at least those years’
Hi and Lois
strips
and Ann Landers columns. He wasn’t quite sure that his attention span could currently accommodate one of those copies of
Ulysses
or
Moby-Dick,
but there was a wooden crate of comic books on the floor by the old encyclopedias, two for a dime. The price and level of intellectual commitment seemed about right.

He left with a pair from a few years back, two issues of
Detective Comics
with a pretty compelling backup feature about J’onn J’onzz, the Manhunter from Mars, a big green alien guy who was brought to earth by a mad scientist and then got stuck here when the mad scientist gave up the ghost from the shock of bringing a big green alien guy to earth.

Dickie spent the next couple of nights with the comics, reading via flashlight or the streetlights out the living room window after Jack was down for the count. There was a compelling sadness that loomed over the proceedings, J’onn stranded on Earth, trying not to be found out, using his shape-shifting powers to impersonate human beings. J’onn haunted by memories of the planet he’d left behind, shifting back and forth between his human personas and his Martian look, unsure which was the right one even when nobody else was around. Dickie could identify.

He wanted to see how things turned out for J’onn, but every time he checked, the bookstore was closed again. He had to content himself with the comics he had, rereading until the covers came loose from their staples, until his thumbs were ink black, wearing holes in the colored newsprint.

*   *   *

He was down at the river once a week now, more often if he’d had a particularly tough stretch of days. Sometimes he’d take a hit from a passed bottle or a joint before leaving, but he didn’t say much, just sat and listened to whatever conversation he’d wandered into. Content just to be away from the apartment while Jack slept, out in the late-afternoon light with the vets, watching the water and the railroad bridge, the middle school kids walking the trestles high above on their way home, arms straight out at their sides, waving for balance.

*   *   *

If pressed, Dickie could come up with some pretty good stories about his time in Vietnam. It had come up occasionally with the student groups during MAELSTROM. Someone would ask, and Dickie would make a show of his reluctance to dredge up painful memories. Of course, this only created more interest, so when he knew he had their attention, he’d hold forth at great length—dramatic, detailed accounts of the mud and blood and horror, the living nightmare of war. His stories were the glue that sealed many a deal during those days, both proving these kids’ larger points about the war and giving Dickie a well-earned legitimacy in their eyes. Someone who’d been there, who’d seen it firsthand, and had made the choice to resist.