More Than Enough (19 page)

“What are we going to do?” Jenny asked.

“We are going to get on with our lives,” my mother said. “That's what we're going to do.” That was a funny thing for her to say since we had just then driven around the same block for the second time and were about to drive around it a third time.

“You're driving in circles,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, trying to stay calm.

“Why?” I asked.

“I'm not going to make this easy for him,” she said. “I'm not.” He was right behind us now, so close that we could see the cab driver's skinny face appear and disappear as light fell over the windshield. My father rolled down his window and stuck his face out into the air, though he didn't say anything. I wanted him to shout or do something. But he didn't. So I rolled my window down and stuck my head out and looked at him. We were still rounding the same block, driving slowly, and the wind shook his wet hair out and made his face look paler and thinner than it was. He looked as if he had already lost us. I didn't want him to believe that. I wanted him to fight. I wanted him to do whatever was necessary. I wanted him to take action and make things right, as he had done when Danny Olsen had hurt me.

“Hi, Steven!” he finally shouted.

“Hi!” I shouted back.

“I'm sorry I yelled at you back there. I'm sorry for that.”

I didn't want him to apologize. I didn't want him to sound weak and conciliatory. I was pretty sure that he wouldn't be able to take us back if he did that. “It doesn't matter!” I shouted.

Other than that, he didn't know what to say, and neither did I. We just looked at each other as my mother continued to drive around the same block of quiet, medium-size houses with two-car garages and dead yellow front yards and no sign of people anywhere. I wouldn't have lived in one of those houses for anything, despite the fact that they were twice or even three times the size of our duplex. “Get back in here, Steven,” my mother said.

“Tell her I need to talk to her! Tell her that!” he shouted.

I fell back into my seat. “He needs to talk to you.”

“I heard him,” she said. When I tried to stick my head out again, she grabbed me and held me in the car. “We're not going to play his game,” she said.

“I'm not going to go away!” he shouted. “I'm not. Never! Do you hear me, Mary? Do you?” His voice was broken and hoarse.

“He's going to fight,” I said. “He is.”

My mother glanced over at me. “So am I,” she said.

Jenny was looking out the back window at him. She waved and he waved back. “I love you, Jenny!” he shouted, the word
love
and my sister's name half disappearing in his tired voice.

“Stop that,” my mother said. “Stop waving at him.”

Jenny put her head down in the backseat. “I'm closing my eyes,” she said.

“Jesus,” my mother said, looking in her rearview mirror. My father had sat back inside his cab, which patiently stayed with us on each revolution around that quiet block.

“He's not going to go away,” I said.

“I guess he's not.” My mother seemed to have given up, and I thought we would pull over and talk to him again. Instead, she just gripped the steering wheel with both hands and turned onto P Street and headed higher up into the Avenues. The yellow cab followed. “We're going to just go anyway,” she said.

“Go where?” I asked.

“To meet Curtis.”

“With Dad? Dad's coming to meet him, too?”

“We'll see,” she said.

I turned around and looked at the cab, still following us, and wondered for a minute what might happen between my father and my mother's lover. I wondered if there would be a fight or a shouting match. I wondered how a meeting between two men in their circumstances would look. I was worried since my father was not a physically powerful man. The only person I had ever seen him threaten was the bum with the black leather shoes, who ended up intimidating him and chasing us away. I didn't want to think about that. So I sat down low in my seat and tried to forget everything, the way Jenny seemed able to do. The sun had just sunk below the mountains when we drove into the upper Avenues where the roads were especially wide and where the newer, really large houses had been built into the steep sides of the foothills and looked down on the city with their black glass facades. The roads up there were both numbered and named, unlike the lower Avenues, where you just got numbers and letters. Rich people like names, of course, and no doubt they got to choose what they called their streets. The road we drove on then was called Milky Way Boulevard, and the smaller roads off Milky Way Boulevard were all named after planets—Venus, Neptune, Jupiter, and so on—which was tacky as hell, though I wasn't thinking that then. Instead, the planet names made me think about flying, about being a pilot, which was not something I thought much about anymore because I was fifteen and had poor vision and knew that I wasn't going to be a pilot. All the same, I thought back to the time, years before while we were living in Tucson, when my father took me to what was called the Bone Yard, a vast resting ground for old U.S. Air Force jets and planes no longer airworthy. The planes had been dismantled and scavenged for parts or, as our air force guide kept saying, “cannibalized” for anything that could still be used. It was a sad and scary place—miles and miles of these aircraft, stripped of their fuselages, cockpits, wings, and wing flaps so that only their metal skeletons lay beneath the desert sun. My father and I watched teams of men in monkey suits slowly tearing apart planes. Some of them wore welding masks, sparks shooting from their tools that made a sound worse—longer and higher pitched—than a human scream. I had to hold my ears and, at times, close my eyes as my father and I watched two men with a huge wrench, which they could only lift and manipulate together, pry the propeller from an old prop plane, place it on a dolly, and wheel it away. That propeller was taller than either man, and they had to work carefully and slowly to lower it. It was like a very large, prehistoric bone, a dead thing. I must have been eight or nine, just a kid, and didn't like that place at all—the noise and something else that I couldn't have put into words. It had nothing to do with my simple dream of being a pilot. Nonetheless, my father kept patting me on the back. “Isn't this something?” he shouted over the racket. “Isn't it?” I couldn't tell him that it frightened me. Adults don't understand the things that bother kids; and I knew I couldn't tell him how much I wanted to leave, how glad I was when we got in the car and drove away from that odd place. And because the Bone Yard was not the nicest thought to resort to as I drove through the Avenues that day with my mother, I tried to think of something else. I began to picture myself in an oxygen mask and goggles in the cockpit of a fighter jet. I was very careful about it, trying to see all the details—the unimaginably complex panel of switches, levers, and dials in front of me over which, as a military pilot, I would have complete understanding and mastery, of course. I'd be doing twenty Gs very easily, holding something like a large joystick between my legs and blasting right over the mountains. The snowy bald peaks rushed by below me as I left the Salt Lake valley behind, hurtling west at Mach speed, nothing but mountains and an empty, endless stretch of land in front of me. I crossed the deserts of Nevada, the Mohave, and Death Valley and knew I'd reached California as soon as I saw the peaks of the Sierras, which would take seconds to put behind me, doing three times the speed of sound, even though that probably wasn't humanly possible. To make it possible, I was wearing a special flight suit that combated g forces so that I could keep the air in my lungs, so that my circulation kept going, so that my brain got the oxygen it needed. I kept flying west like that until I came to the ocean, the whole world simplified by water wherever I looked. The sun was in front of me, of course, a red giant on which, at my altitude, I could see on its surface the firestorms I'd read about, great scarlet waves of hydrogen and other burning gases whipping up winds thousands of degrees centigrade. I'd seem to be flying between the blue earth and the red sun, then, and I'd just keep flying like that, between fire and water, not ever turning back. My jet was armed to the teeth with computerized bombs and heat-seeking missiles, with every destructive device that war jets could carry. I just held my course, looking down at my instruments now and then as I followed the sun. It would have been good to stay in that thought for a while, but I couldn't because I'd reached the edge of the world and it was going nowhere. There was nothing but space and light and water. That wasn't a place I could stay. So I opened my eyes—only then realizing that I had even closed them—and looked over at my mother. “Please stop,” I said then. “Please just pull over to the side of the road and talk to him.” I had the feeling that when we reached Curtis Smith's house everything would be decided. Everything would be finished.

“Just let me do things, Steven. Please. I don't want you to get involved in this.”

“Sure,” I said. “I'll just pretend I'm not here. I'll do that, okay.”

“Stay out of it.”

“You've put me in it,” I said. “You're the one who's taking us to meet your lover.” But she wasn't talking to me anymore. She just sat straight and kept driving up that hill. I wondered when we'd reach the top of it. I wondered how high up above the city rich people lived. I wondered how rich Curtis Smith was. I wondered what my father would do against him. Then I had this thought that sometimes helps me, this simple thought.
Whatever
is the thought.
Whatever
. One simple word. I'd just say it in my mind and sometimes it'd loosen the whole world up.
Whatever
, I thought.
What-goddamn-motherfucking-ever
. That was my thought, and it might have worked had I not remembered that my father had said the same word right after he had had taken the fifty-dollar-bill from my mother, which he shouldn't have done. It was a cowardly thing to do and a cowardly thing to say. So that thought was no help to me at all, especially now that we turned onto Mars Drive—no kidding—and then into this horseshoe driveway in front of what must have been Curtis Smith's house. “This is it,” my mother said, parking behind two cars—a black Corvette and a red BMW—that sat quietly gleaming, wet from the rain and impossibly new looking. I felt ashamed of our Buick, the rough, bestial growl of its engine, the oily stink of it, and started to understand why my mother was happy to leave it to my father, started to see that her decision had nothing to do with what a “great find” my father had made when he bought the Buick. Jesus. We were all liars. My whole family was.

My father's cab stopped at the mouth of the driveway and, for a moment, I thought he might turn around and leave. Then, very slowly, the yellow car moved into the driveway. My father stepped out of it while it was still moving so that when he hit the ground he nearly fell and had to struggle to right himself.

“What's happening?” Jenny asked, her head popping above the lip of the backseat. Her eyes looked sleepy.

“We're here,” my mother said again.

Jenny turned, saw the house, and seemed to wake up immediately. “Oh,” she said.

Right away when I looked at that house, I could have only one thought, a thought I did not like at all. Curtis Smith had stolen our dream. That house should have been ours, mine, my sister's, my father's and mother's. All of us together should have had that house. It was made of a natural wood, stained the deep, blond color of butterscotch. Its three stories supported two large balconies furnished with chairs, tables, and yellow sun umbrellas. I couldn't begin to count the windows, dark-tinted like sunglass lenses and full of a black reflective light even in the bluish air of early evening. The front yard leapt upward some twenty yards, broken only by a row of small trees and oval garden plots, padded with wood chips, that would flower in the spring, and landed at the front step before a set of polished, red-oak double doors with heavy, brass handles and a small window protected by a rake of cast-iron bars in the middle of one door. I kept expecting those doors to open. I kept expecting Curtis Smith to come out. But the house was absolutely quiet. My father was looking up at it. He couldn't seem to take his eyes off it. “I understand,” he said. He walked slowly backwards, still looking at the house, taking more of it in. He stumbled into the wet dirt of a circular garden and came to a stop. “Financially secure!” he shouted. If anyone was home inside that monstrous and beautiful house, they could hear my father. I thought I could feel them looking down at us through one of the dark windows. I wondered what my father looked like seen from up there. I wondered how clumsy and weak and desperate he would appear.

“Please don't shout like that, Billy,” my mother said. We had both stepped out of the car. When Jenny got out, my mother looked back at her and said, “You get back in the car and wait for us. It won't be long.”

“Okay,” Jenny said.

But before she could sit back down, my father said, “I want her to stay out here. I want to say something to all of you. I want Jenny to hear.”

Jenny looked at my mother for permission. She nodded. “As long as you stop shouting,” she said. “No more shouting. If you shout, she goes back in.”

“You're different,” my father said. He was looking at her now with the same shocked expression he had had when looking at that house, as if she were just as unexpected, just as impossible to take in and understand. “You're cold, absolutely cold.”

“Do you agree not to shout?” she asked.

“Okay,” he said. Jenny walked over to my mother.

“All right,” my mother said, “what would you like to say to us?”

My father looked back up at the house. He didn't seem to know what to feel, and I knew then that he was stalling, that he had no plan, no way of remedying this situation, nothing to say, that he was hopeless, really, and was just trying to gain a few minutes. “It's a beautiful house,” he finally said. I don't know why he had to say that. He wasn't speaking with bitterness or sarcasm. He laughed and shoved his hands deep into his pockets and nodded his head at that enormous house. “I guess I come in last, don't I?” he asked.