High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel (8 page)

The diners all along the boulevard.

The cars, so many goddamn cars, and the trees, the dirt squares surrounded by sidewalk, and the maples and towering oaks, four or five on every block, branches resting on saggy telephone wires.

The cars parked on streets, in the driveways. I counted the driveways until I stopped counting, and before long I recognized the store on the corner, “24/7 Milk Depot,” they’d kept the name. Where I used to get bagels, and once I had to ask a tall pretty lady for help, to reach up and get the sanitary napkins that Mom had asked for, up on the highest shelf.

“We are here,” he said. I paid and we stepped outside. He handed me my duffel and winked. Trunk slam. The tires squealed as he pulled way.

I was back in the world.

The burned-out shell of a Volkswagen Beetle sat across the street, parked in front a vacant lot. It had no doors. A small girl played with a Barbie, her little legs splayed behind her on the sidewalk. The house, my father’s house, our house, was looking really old. All of the houses were old, but ours seemed so very old. Which made me what, made my father what? The porch sagged, and leaned forward like it was easing into a recliner. The columns were slightly bowed, had arthritic elbows, and the house appeared to be in mid-exhalation. The chain-link fence was torn in places, rifts in the waffled steel. And the garage looked to have been unused for years. A large burn mark scarred the token front rectangle of browning grass. Weeds covered most of the front yards. I saw a mattress on a roof two doors down. A smell of fuel, gas, kerosene, something pungent was in the air. And the swoop of the Sikh temple’s swooping roof, around the corner, was exactly where it should have been, rising behind and above my father’s house. I am where I was made. I lugged my bag, opened the gate, and walked up the steps.

The porch sofa was gone and the windows were blocked by drapes. One window was broken and banded with silver duct tape, what looked like cardboard behind. I rang the bell, took a deep breath, and waited. I knocked, and rang again. Talk about déjà vu.

There was a rustling inside, a curtain moved slightly.

The door lock clicked.

Why not come home sooner?

The door moved barely away from the jamb, and a brass chain bridged the opening. Then it quickly shut.

“Dad?” I knocked again. “It’s me.”

“Who?”

“Josie.”

“Josie?” His voice was weak. “Josiah?”

He forgot I was coming?

“It’s me,” I said. “I promise.”

I heard the chain fall. He opened the door, and there he was, my father, barefoot and barely dressed, emaciated. Wearing nothing but a loincloth.

It was dark inside, and my nose quivered as I watched him shuffle up the hallway. A smell of wet rot and trash, a scuttling on the floor.

“Come in, come in,” he was saying, and waving me on to follow.

I couldn’t move in the hot stink of the foyer; it was a long hall, and it seemed even longer in the dark. The stairs leading upstairs on my left, the smooth wooden banister, and the living and dining rooms on my right. The bathroom was under the stairs. The hall ran between the stairs and the rooms on my right, like a dark alleyway leading on to the brownish glow of the kitchen, far away and half alive with dusk light. He stopped in that doorway, a pale golem shadow sipping from a glass of water.

My eyes were adjusting. I realized I was surrounded by plastic garbage bags. A month of trash, maybe more, in swollen stacks, piled on a broken chair, disemboweled and spilling on the stairs. My face flushed. I squinted.

“Not much food in those,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

He disappeared into the kitchen.

My forehead was warm, not sickly warm but something else. I slapped at my temple. I squeezed the thin bone between my eyes. A fly buzzing at my lips, I blew it away. Breathed in, buckled some, and gagged. I was horrified. By the house. And, frankly, I was scared for my father. A family death can decimate a home, and here he was all alone and living with it.

“Get in here so I can get a look at you!”

I walked past the stairs and saw, beneath them, the door to the bathroom was shut. A faint red light was leaking out from beneath like a darkroom.

“Get in here!”

His back was to me. His white hair in a greasy straggle fell in the groove between sharp shoulder blades. It looked like he was wearing a diaper. Cat turds were scattered on the floor like cigar butts. He stood there in the warm bath of brown light and stretched up on his toes, skinny arms punching out slowly. He turned and faced me, yawning.

“Let me get a good look at you,” he said.

Knots of soiled clothing and dinner plates caked with dry sauces on the kitchen table and counters. A few sofa cushions piled beside the fridge. Towers of torn, yellowing books, wet papers littered the floor and spilled from the pantry. A mustard-colored smear on the linoleum, and the rich bone-stink of food gone dry after too long in the air.

He said, “What?”

I was thinking.

“Close up your mouth,” he said.

Thinking what.

“How about we have us a toast? Come on, Junior. Say something.”

“A toast would be good, I guess.”

“There’s the spirit! I’ve been waiting!” A large white cat, with a gray belly swinging, rubbed its head against his shin. “I have cats now.”

He turned to the refrigerator and with both hands he gripped and pulled the door half open. His elbows poked at the skin, and I thought of groceries falling through wet paper bags. He handed me an open bottle of beer. “I got them all ready, took off the caps.”

I took the bottle.

On the refrigerator racks: a half-full bottle of red wine, no cork; a loaf of bread wrapped in plastic; half a stick of butter on a silver dish; and a clear pitcher of water. He let me close the door.

I followed him into the low-lit dining room to the same wooden table where we’d always had our Sunday family dinners. The table was mostly clear of clutter. And the bottle was cold in my hand, so cold it shocked in the dark warm sweat of the room. I wiped my forehead with my sleeve. He sat in a chair not so close to the table. They were heavy chairs. As a boy, I’d had trouble pulling them out from under the table so I could sit down for dinner. I pulled a chair closer to his. It hardly seemed the same room.

“I can explain,” he said. “But first.” He smiled, and there was a glimpse of younger Gill, a flash of resurrection in his eyes. I thought of how different it had been standing at Mom’s sickbed, a year before, a vacuum between Dad and me, like a scooped-out hole in the universe. “This is a momentous thing,” he said. “Never had a doubt, I knew you were coming.” His lips were ashen, corners webbed with spit-milk. Even right here, in his presence, the man was somewhere else. Sarah was right. Something was wrong.

“So how’s my little man doing?”

I wanted a smoke.

“To us!” he said. “Say something! Sit!” He raised his bottle chin high.

I sat, raised mine, and we brought the bottles together, but a lot slower than usual for a cheer. The bottles were collared with a limp silver foil and torn white paper, and they made no noise when they touched. No clink of glass, just a soft papery pat. The reality of the situation was settling on me. Something was very wrong. He had no idea. And I knew he would fight me if I said so.

“So,” I said. “You look pretty good.”

“
You
look good, taking care of yourself. How’s the beautiful wife?”

“Not my wife anymore. You know that.”

“Always your wife. Nonsense.”

The window behind my father, I broke it once with a Wiffle ball.

“And I’ve never felt better,” he said. “Despite—” He waved a hand. “Your mother, she used to clean.”

So, he was partly aware. I said, “The house could use some attention.”

“No one pays attention anymore.”

My heartbeat, my pulse, and the stink, I was semiacclimating. I dried the back of my neck with my sleeve. “And you’re feeling okay? How are you feeling?”

“Never better.” He patted my arm and slowly stood. The hand was cold.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?”

He left his bottle and shuffled to the opposite end of the table. He picked up a thin black notebook from a pile of back-to-school-sale spirals. Blue, red, yellow, green. He wrote something down with a pencil. “You always had a way, Junior, cutting right through the fat. Tell me now what’s new. Talk to me.”

I had no idea why he was calling me Junior.

He turned and yanked the pull chain of a small lamp on the other side of the table. The lamp cast a yellow cone over a thick open book. I saw his knotty spine. It zippered down from under his hair, and beneath the loincloth.

I said, “Are you eating? Please tell me you’re eating enough.”

“All I need.” He turned the pages slowly and scratched some notes in the spiral. “Right on down to the meat of things.”

Carefully, he set the book down, shuffled back, and pulled the chair farther from the table. I helped him some. He took hold of the back of the chair, and moved the chair slightly. Looked at it. Moved it again. Went back to the other side of the table and stood looking at his notebooks, shaking his head.

“Dad.”

He took the spirals in a stack and squared them off, against the table, into a neat pile. Set them back down. Nudged them so they were flush with the table edge. Looked at them. Looked at the chair. He picked them up again, squared them off again. I didn’t like seeing this sort of behavior. Compulsive.

“Dad,” I said again.

He came back and sat beside me, and then he started to stand up again. I set my hand on his knee, and broke his concentration. He stayed, took his beer and sipped.

I said, “You look thin.”

He looked at me, a sweet face really, which I didn’t expect. He tucked his hair behind his ears, and I saw his eyes were green. He said, “I’m fine. Fine.” A black cat jumped, landing on the far end of the table.

I took a long swig and thought of having a smoke, that maybe I could just step out back and have one, and wouldn’t it be nice to come back inside and, like in a cheaply plotted movie, find everything up until now was a dream. I’d find Dad doing just fine, in a clean house, of sound mind, doing the weekend crossword in a brand-new blue Barcalounger. Or better—I’d find him a young man again, Mom healthy and alive. I’d had this kind of fantasy before but always cut it short knowing it would mean never having met Sarah.

“Sarah’s worried,” I said.

“No reason to worry.” He gestured toward the hallway with his bottle. “Your mother was here, you missed her.”

I wanted this to be true. Who wouldn’t?

“She was here,” I said.

He pointed to the hall. “You missed her.”

What is it about a father’s face?

I’d never given so much as a single deliberate thought to my father’s eyes. I could talk of Sarah’s pink and mottled cheeks, of the single errant eyebrow stand that poked out from between her eyes. But a father’s face can be a frightening thing, a bridge between two voids. He was in me. I was in him. Where did that leave us? My mother’s eyes were like light on glass, and flickering. Always anxious, and waiting. I used to think she was waiting for the end, like Dad was, a new beginning, whatever you want to call it. But now I realized—it hit me just like that—it was Dad who made her anxious.

“Mom’s gone,” I said.

He put a hand on my face. A minty aftershave mixed with every other smell, and it helped. “You think I’m crazy,” he said. “And that’s okay. We just don’t know much, do we?”

I had questions. “Why are you calling me Junior?”

He was incredulous. “You’re my Junior.”

I looked at my lap. “What’s my name?” I studied what was left in the bottle.

“Clever boy.”

I tapped the bottle with a fingernail.

He touched my face. “I know who you are and who I am for the first time in my whole life.” He grabbed hold of the back of my chair and stood again. “Good enough for you, Josiah? Hmm?” He pressed a hand to my shoulder, and with his eyes he seemed to say, This is what shoulders are for. “Gill Laudermilk,” he said, “is a dead man and dying. I am a son of God, Yahweh’s Junior. See me in my glory!” He raised both arms, and they fell back to his sides, just as fast. “Let me show you something.”

I touched his side as he walked past, his naked skin. I squeezed lightly, partly to see if he was real, and he grimaced.

“I thought you were losing your balance.”

“Follow me,” he said.

His belly was hard, and starting to bloat.

“I gotta say you look really terrible.”

“Never better in my life.”

He led me to the living room where I used to watch TV with my mother. Where we ate ice cream from a shared wooden bowl. The carpet was the same dull gray, but now worn down and matted, balding in places. Outside light leaked in between creases, through rips in the cardboard covering the windows, but mostly the room was dark. An orange tabby beneath the glass coffee table, crouching, stared at me with silver eyes. A computer sat on the table. It was modern, thin-screened, and this was surprising, yes, but no more so than anything else. The sofa was covered by a white sheet, as if he were prepping to paint the walls. A pillow, a body-shaped impression. He’d been living in the living room and it stank of it.

“You can sleep here, or upstairs. I don’t go upstairs much. I have trouble sleeping up there.”

“So where?”

He pointed to the hallway, and waved his hand. “I know, I know, I know.”

“We need to sit, and start from the beginning.”

“You don’t know the half of it!” He sat and turned on a lamp beside the computer, a replica of the lamp in the dining room. “My lifeline, Junior. Isn’t she pretty?”

“You hate TV and you have this?” The sides of the computer were partly covered with yellow Post-it Notes.

“I still hate the TV! I keep two in the hall closet, never use them. But I hardly go out since your mother left.”

“You said she was here.”

“She’s always here. And without this”—he touched the screen—“no legs. I’m exhausted.”