Moods are elevated as we make the last turn into the college. Right stuff or not, the medication seems to be combining well enough in my grandfather to have produced a goodwill and camaraderie that fills the car up nicely. We are all pretty much tired of driving for now, though, and everybody’s looking forward to doing some nothing.
But that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.
Jarrod quick-pumps the brakes before we get into the parking lot itself.
“Damn,” he says. “There shouldn’t be anybody here.”
“What?” Da and I say.
I go a little bit frantic, and my newfound control and strength go floating like so much smoke straight out the passenger window.
Da remains slouched way back in the car, out of sight, as we sit and ponder.
“I got nobody else visiting, I swear,” Jarrod says. “And that isn’t any car connected to the college I know of. Nobody has been on campus for weeks, nobody is scheduled for another two, they always let me know in advance anyway, and if this is a student, lost and confused, it’s way early for that.”
Da’s voice has dropped an octave.
“You didn’t use that phone, like I told you not to, did you, Young Man?”
I am absolutely certain he hears my Adam’s apple go ga-lulk right now.
“No,” I say, clipped. “You took it, anyway, remember? So, see-”
“Did you call anyone, Daniel?”
Oh no. There are no lies of omission with Da.
“Yes, but I used a landline-”
“Who did you call?”
“Lucy,” I say, flattened. “I called her cell from a pay phone.”
“Drive,” he tells Jarrod.
The driver tears away with surprising speed, and focus.
“Go easy,” Da says. “Stealth is more important than speed. Stealth is more important than everything. They can’t catch you if they don’t chase you, so don’t make them chase you.”
I sit, hands folded, in the shotgun seat, and I believe if my grandfather had a shotgun back there, I would not be in any seat at all. I remain silent for as long as-
“That kind of screwup can be lethal,” Da says to me coldly. “It may be yet.”
“I am sorry, Da. I am so sorry. I wasn’t-”
He punches the back of my headrest. I think it is not violence. I think I am beginning to learn the difference between what is and isn’t violence. I think that was just “shut up.”
“Driver,” Da says.
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you got one of those godforsaken cell phones?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
There is a barely nonviolent silence.
“Could you please loan your phone to my foolish grandson? His is back at the college. As long as they already know we are with you, one quick call won’t hurt. GPS can’t help them much if we are already right around the corner from them.”
I take the phone, turn to Da.
“Phone your sister, please. Get what you can.”
I do what I am told, as I will continue to do for as long as I know him.
“Lucy?”
“Dan? Now whose phone are you using?”
I try to focus through a separate conversation here in the car.
“We will need a place to stay quiet for a while,” Da says.
“I know a guy,” Jarrod says. “But I kind of figure you’re the kind of guy who would know a guy.”
“I am the kind of guy who would know a guy, but all those kind of guys I know are the kind of guys we don’t want to know now.”
“Um, what?”
“Do you know a place?”
“I do.”
“Very good. For the time being, though, drive the opposite way to there.”
“Why?” he asks.
I punch him in the arm and he complies.
“This is Jarrod’s phone,” I say.
“Please, Dan, just come home, all right? They are not going to do anything to you. But Granddad has done stuff that you don’t even know. They just want to protect him and everybody else and just get him secure…”
The phone is one of those annoying ones that sound like a little radio broadcasting to everyone in the vicinity.
“Secure!” Da nearly vomits the word. “They want to make me secure. Isn’t that just kindness itself.”
“I think he can hear you,” I tell her. “And he’s not wildly in favor of your plan.”
“Too bad. You have to stop this before it gets all serious.”
“Did you rat us out?” I ask as Da gives my headrest a hurry-up punch.
“Why would I even have to do that? They were in my room so soon they practically hung up the phone for me. Please, Dan.”
“How are Mom and Dad?”
“Livid!” Lucy shouts.
“Perfect,” Da says with contempt.
“Tell them I miss them too.”
“You are going to screw up everything,” she says. “College and everything.”
Because Lucy is crying as she says that last bit, I think I feel something. Something small but sharp and electric zings through my chest.
My sister, my pal, cares whether I have a future, and I care that she cares.
What a chump. Pair of chumps, really.
“It’ll be okay, Luce. I can’t just-”
“He’s dangerous!” she shouts.
A highway crosswind or something suddenly blows Jarrod’s attention in our direction. “Hiya, Luce.”
Da reaches forward and grabs the phone from me.
“I think this is good enough,” he says.
He rolls down his window and, with Lucy’s little voice screaming DanDanDanDanDan like a tiny passing train, he takes his pick of the endless parade of pickup trucks passing us in the next lane, draws back that hellacious, accurate old right arm, and fires away.
The phone zips on a line and clatters around the bed of an old Dodge. And takes its GPS signal with it.
“I repeat,” Da says, “technology is for chumps.”
“I found that phone in a couch,” Jarrod says. “It was perfect.”
“Um, Da?” I venture with trepidation.
“Yes, Young Man.”
“Won’t they trace Jarrod’s car?”
He punches my headrest again. Not becoming my favorite mode of communication. I miss my phone.
“Glad you are catching on, my boy. I guess we are going to have to locate ourselves another car after Jarrod gets off the next exit to head us north.”
“I don’t think so,” Jarrod says.
I stiffen.
“Excuse me?” Da says calmly.
“It’s not my car, so it’s not registered to me. A student left it at the end of spring semester. Left it for the summer to go help stabilize things during the election in Haiti.”
“‘Stabilize,’” Da says, laughing. “I love that old chestnut.”
“Thanks,” Jarrod says, like he’s achieved something.
“Where would we be without ya, J?” I say.
“It doesn’t even bear thinking about,” he says, turning off and heading us north.
“This is your guy?” I say when we pull down the narrow lane.
“Yup,” Jarrod says.
“This is the same guy as the other guy.”
“He’s about the only guy I know. There is one other, but he’s not gonna want to know me anymore when he finds out I stole his car.”
“But why are we here, man?”
The combination of activities has conspired to leave my grandfather snoring in the backseat. I am jealous but there is no resting for me at the moment.
Jarrod points to an array of windows in a row above Matt’s shop. “He rents out rooms. Nobody will find you here. Then you can make a plan for what to do next. He’s good at plans, actually. He’ll help.”
I look up at the windows. There are little lacy curtains in each one, and a plastic flower in a milk glass. You can see the dust from the street. I have not the slightest doubt that Matt does all his decorating out of that dollar store where I got the baseball stuff.
It hits me now. Like hunger, like cramps, like the full burst in your belly when you drink an icy Coke after having nothing in your stomach during a whole scorching summer day.
I love baseball.
“Let’s go talk to him,” I say.
“Back for more already?” Matt says, laughing. He is closing up shop, no assistant helping him. “You guys are voracious.”
“Got any rooms free, Matt?” Jarrod says.
“A couple. What’s up, something wrong with The Shining?”
“We just need to move on now,” I say, cutting Jarrod off before he can be more helpful.
Matt looks back and forth from one of us to the other and back again with a sly, knowing lip curl. “I get a lot of that here. No problem. Where’s my pal?”
“He’s in the car.”
“He okay with stairs?”
“Why wouldn’t I be okay with stairs?” Da says, walking in, bleary but with us. He is limping noticeably.
“No reason, pal,” Matt says, though he is probably counting about five reasons in his head.
We follow him through the front door, then he lets us all in the entrance next door. We tromp up the dark and curved stairway that is no struggle even for Da because the stairs are uncommonly short. It’s almost like floating up to the next level.
“Most people here are singles, ha-ha,” he tells us quite unnecessarily, “but I do have one double room. You want three singles?”
“We’ll take a double,” I say quickly, not wanting even a hint of another ramble by Da to happen. I shudder at the thought of his taking off here like he did in the relative safety of the woodsy campus.
“One double, one single, then.”
“Oh, just the double,” Jarrod says. “I’m gonna drive back to my place.”
Da snaps right to attention. I gasp. “Jarrod, oh, no, you can’t.”
“Right,” Da says, “you can’t.”
“I have to be there,” Jarrod says. “I have to. There are things to do. Those guys will sure be gone when I get there, then we can just go back like it all never-”
“No-no,” Da says with finality. “Oh no, no, no. That cannot happen. You are a good boy, and have been wonderful to us, but you are going to have to be wonderful to us for at least a little while more.”
Jarrod, in his endearing way, takes this as an invitation. As appreciation.
“Oh, really, nice and all, but thanks. I honestly do need to, you know, physically be back there at night. It’s my job and everything so it’s the least-”
“Really, no,” Da says. In his special-serious voice.
“Jeez, even I got a chill off that one,” Matt says with a laugh. “The elder statesman can get quite the snarl on when he wants to, huh?”
Jarrod sees less of the humor. He looks like he wants to cry.
“Easy, Da,” I say, putting a hand on his hand.
He turns on me, eyes reddish. He pushes me away and approaches Jarrod to make his point a little clearer. Jarrod might just piss himself, and if the place didn’t already smell like this when we got here, I might have guessed he’d already commenced.
Before Da can snort in his face, I grab him.
Really hard, really meaning it, I grab my grandfather’s arm and yank him forcefully in my direction.
He is shocked as his piercing eyes rush up to mine.
“Oh no,” he says to me. “Oh, no, no, no.” He turns away again.
I yank him even harder. “Oh no yourself, Da. No, and no, and no. You leave him alone now.”
He bites his lower lip and wrinkles his nose in a most threatening snarly dog fashion.
I stare, scared witless, but keeping that to myself.
He holds ground.
I hold ground.
Then I make my move.
I bring both hands up to my face, filling almost all the space between us.
“Shush,” I say calmly, all eight fingers waving in the water between us. “Octo-shush.”
I walk past him, frozen there, because waiting for his response would be weak. Showing I cared what he thought now would be weak.
Jeez, I wonder what he’s thinking.
“Listen, Jarrod,” I say, “you have to understand how it complicates things to have you go back. We will work something out, don’t worry.”
Two heavy hands thump on my shoulder, and I see Jarrod’s eyes go B-movie horror wide.
“That’s my boy,” Da says in my ear. He kisses my cheek. “We’re knocking that ridiculous fear thing right out of you. Now once we throttle that foolish compassion malarkey, you’ll be the complete package. And I can go in peace.”
It feels like what international peace talks must feel like, or trade negotiations, or big business deals. Jarrod, Matt, Da, and I sit around the folding card table that is the centerpiece of my room. The place is not bad at all, if you thought to consider what one of these dodgy hideaways might be like. There is a picture of Mount Kilimanjaro on one wall, the pyramids of Egypt on the opposite one. They look like they came free with the Sunday paper, but they are framed, from the dollar shop, making the investment modest but thoughtful. The window opposite the dark, planky gumwood door has the dusty plastic rose I saw from the street. There is a lot of little-engine-that-could about that rose and the spirit of the place.
There is no clock and no calendar, and no wonder. Please check all weapons and any sense of time passing at the front desk, to be collected on checkout.
There is so much smoke in the air, it has replaced my need for solid food for a couple of days. Matt’s on cigar while the other two are at the Camels.
“So, you are going to study philosophy,” Matt says.
“I am,” I say, sideways, waiting for the punch line. There is always a punch line to philosophy.
“I studied philosophy,” Matt says both proudly and whimsically.
I try to guess if that was actually the punch line and not actually true. I decide it is the punch line either way.
“Boston University. Time of my life. I was headed for magna cum laude, too. Till I got arrested and thrown out for training my ferret, Colin, to contaminate selected biomed labs. Damn, those were fun times.”
Da exhales.
“So you were a terrorist?”
Uh-oh.
“Da…?”
Matt waves me down. It’s cool.
“Sir, you flatter me,” Matt says. “I was a prankster. I was a rapscallion.” He waves his cigar in a theatrical way. “But I was pretty good at it. And Colin was excellent. He was really the brains of the operation.”
“It is all diversion,” Da says. “Terrorism. Nobody knows what’s really happening. Everything you see? In the news? That’s what they want you to see. Killing and blowing up stuff? Who cares? We don’t care. We wanted you to think the great threats were coming down out of the sky or rumbling right at you in a truck. Who cares? People die, a hundred, a thousand. Means absolutely nothing. Chumps, you are all chumps. Know what we have done? We have taken all you little babies, we have turned on the TV, turned it on loud and made it all fast and splashy and crashy, and plopped you damn babies on the floor to just sit there stupid and watch it, all day long. Idiots. Babies. You keep falling for it, so they keep broadcasting it. Watch the show, babies, watch the show.”
Matt looks altogether impressed.
“I love this guy,” Matt says. “I really do.”
“He’s very lovable,” Jarrod says, hiding his skinny self behind his cigarette.
For his part, Da is showing a rapidly decelerating interest in being lovable.
“You were a terrorist?” he challenges Matt.
“Ah, actually you are the one who said that…”
No matter. “You don’t even know who a terrorist is or what the terror is about. You all like explosions and blood and noise. It all works because you are all morons. Morons blow up other morons for the fear and amusement of yet other morons, while the adults go about the real business of ordering and reordering the world.”
“Reordering,” Matt says, and he is saying his bit about as pleasantly as you could say this stuff. “You mean killing as many people as possible who do not agree with your ideology.”
“Ha,” Da says, as if Matt has dropped right into his carefully constructed tiger trap. “Just shows you. You don’t get the new world at all. With the diabolical twenty-four-hour news cycles and all that hounding us all the time, might as well make it work for you. Only a dope kills ’em all. Killing, my friend, is yesterday’s news. Killing is old-fashioned. Maiming is where it’s at.”
Matt is on the brink of being defeated, but clinging on.
“But, man, how could you do all that, for your own purposes, when hundreds, thousands, of folks, people just like yourself, suffer horribly for it?”
Da has been pushed back on his heels now. He looks back and forth between me and Matt, bypassing Jarrod entirely. He smiles suspiciously.
“Is this some kind of famous philosophy quiz-type thing?” he asks.
“Ah, well, Da, it just sounds like a question to me.”
“It is,” Matt says. “It’s just a question.”
“Oh.” Da nods, happy, friendly, like a guy who’s just been given the directions to the party and is damn grateful for them. “In that case, the answer is: Why would I give a rat’s eyelash about a hundred, or a thousand, of me?”
There is a smoky silence descending that threatens to spoil all this great fun, until Jarrod decides it is actually a trick question, “I know this one, the answer is: You are your own brother. Right?”
Da stares him melted. “You know what I did to my brother when the filth-”
“Da,” I say, “come on, you’re being a drag. Smoke a bone with Jarrod and tell one of your funny stories, like about the country you overthrew using nothing but fire ants.”
He whips a look at me, as if now we have gone into dangerous reality. Then he turns back to Matt for the payoff.
“Okay, you want to know where your real terrorism is?”
“Ah, well, sure, that would be good to know.”
I have never seen Da more serious. I have never seen anyone more serious.
“It’s in your food,” he stage-whispers. “I know, because I put it there.”
Jarrod responds to all this levity by frantically breaking out his accessories for mood enhancement. His hands shake, but he is making a heroic job of getting something smokable assembled.
Matt looks, seriously, at Da, at me. He is undoubtedly a man who has seen, if not everything, certainly a telling cross section of everything. He could be harder than he is, I think. And he could be more cynical, for sure.
But he listens. He nods. He goes on about his business.
“You are one hot potato, sir,” Matt says, shaking Da’s hand.
Da takes it in the spirit offered, shakes it. “It’s not the potatoes,” he says, like offering a great and true tip to a select friend at the racetrack. “But beyond next year you’ll want to be careful of pretty much everything else. And, oh, do buy American.”
“You sound like my doctor now,” Matt says, patting a modest belly. “Except for that little American thing at the end there.”
“Source carefully, is what I’m telling you. Watch your eat and drink. You’ll never see it coming. And it’s already too late to try, ’cause it’s in the chain.”
Well, then. Where does a party or a business meeting or whatever go from there? Snacks?
“We don’t have any clothes with us or anything,” Jarrod says. “What are we supposed to do? What if I just went there, maybe grabbed a few things, hurried right back…”
“That site is toxic,” Da says. “Can’t go back. It’s dead. Forget about it.”
“Ever?” Jarrod asks.
“We’ll see,” Da says casually, like running everyone else’s world is just second nature.
“He will need his life back at some point, Da,” I point out.
“We’ll see,” he repeats, and I accept, silently reassuring Jarrod with an old-style, single-finger shush gesture.
I secretly upped Da’s dose, and between one thing and another he is sleeping so soundly the snoring is volcanic music. Sitting at my chair, I stare out the open window, listening to him and the outside world clash. It doesn’t go long without a horn beeping here, even in the night. It is usually joined by a responding beep, then things go quiet for a while more again. I listen to people talking as they walk to and from the pub, the movies, the restaurant, the park. Twos and fours are it, and a chunk of me now is wishing to be among them. I am looking forward to going to school. Going to a whole different world, away from my town and my family… and this new craziness, which has been unusual and exciting but is fast approaching do-without-it time. I don’t have a great many friends back home, truth be told, so I don’t know how much I’ll be back once I make the leap. My folks sent me to a weird boarding school as a weekly boarder, the most unwieldy of all the configurations, I think. You don’t live there full-time, so just when things get social and fizzy, you are going home for the weekend or holidays. Then you get to what’s supposed to be home, and you are trying to hang with the folks who have been living the real part of life, five days out of the seven, without you. You are trying to hang.
Until you are not trying. Which was okay. I’m not complaining. Not a lot, anyway. At least I don’t think it’s a lot.
And the only one who ever came and visited me, was him.
I stand from the window and walk to his bedside. I stare down at the snoring stillness of him, and I shake my head.
The only one. This Chock Full o’Nuts I see before me.
Couldn’t even plan for it, either, because he would just appear. Take me to dinner usually, or just drive around. He taught me how to drive so early, I had to relearn when it was time to go for my license. Had to take a handful of professional lessons because of all the bad little habits I developed, you know, like casually experienced drivers do.
Despite his own hall-of-fame smoking credentials, the one time he caught me trying it-one of his surprise appearances at my dorm window, of course-he took me outside and gave me bubbling and searing cigarette burns in the center of each palm. Looked just like stigmata for two weeks. Kids called me Jesus Smoking Christ all that time.
I liked it. The attention. All of it.
And it was almost like I didn’t even have him, because pretty much nobody ever believed me that he had been there. The only one who at least sometimes believed was Lucy.
“I believe you. He’s psychotic,” she said when I showed off my stigmata.
I sit on the side of the bed now, the snoring very comforting to me. Certain things, I realize lately, calm and settle me. Snoring means sleeping, good. Electric cars are a problem for me because they are so silent. That could kill you, right? Because a car is supposed to make noise to warn you of its lethality. That kind of incongruence in the physical world has begun to put me right off. Silence is deadly. Sound is life.
“Stealth, is all,” Da says and I leap off the bed as if it were a catapult.
I stand with my back to the window, staring at him, staring, staring at him. But he has not changed. The slow up and down of his rib cage, the three coarse breaths, and then the chopping snore.
Did he even say it? Is he testing me further, playing with my mind? Can he hear inside my head, the old mystical-madness thing that attaches to altered minds?
I sort of wish I could have done my first year of philosophy before this small adventure. Next summer would have been a lot more convenient. Then maybe at least I’d have known a thing or two.
“Hey,” comes a hoarse whisper, wafting up to my window from the street.
I turn to find Jarrod down there, alone.
“Come on down,” he says.
“Get to bed,” I say.
“Why?” he says.
I go to give him an answer, realize I haven’t really got one, and head down into the night.
“I have an idea,” he says as we sit on the curb watching absolutely nothing go by.
“Don’t. Don’t do that, Jarrod. Don’t have an idea.”
“Hear it, hear it. The old man is dead to the world, right?”
“Hmm. Not quite yet but, anyway…”
“We make a rapid run. Back-”
“Stop it, will you? No.”
“Listen. We are back in an hour and a half, collect our stuff all up, nobody’s the wiser. Perfect plan. If you come with me, you don’t have to worry that I’ll screw everything up. We’ll have Matt bolt the door from the outside-he has to do that sometimes-so even if he wakes up, your Da is safe and sound.”
When he finally stops talking, I breathe in the refreshing silence.
Then, “Leave it, Jarrod. My stuff is gone. Your stuff is gone.”
“Why would they take my stuff? My stuff is still there. Probably yours, too. You can get the rest of Da’s things, the clothes. You can get the phone and everything. It’s perfect. It’s perfect.”
The desperation is as clear as the greasy sweat on Jarrod’s face.
“It’s all gone, Jarrod. All of it. Forget it. They took everything, for sure.”
“Not everything. I’m a good hider. A good hider.”
He is speaking both faster and slower than usual. The words themselves burst out quick, with wrong-long air spaces between them. It’s like a verbal version of the game we played as kids, 1-2-3-red-light.
“What is it, Jarrod?”
“What is what? I want to go home, remember? That’s it. I just told you.”
“What is it you have to go back for, that can’t wait?”
“My stuff. And it’s where I live now. And I got work in the morning. You know how you just don’t feel right when you’re not in your place?”
“I am getting to know that feeling pretty well, yeah.”
“Right. Then. Let’s go.”
He is actually leaning his upper body in the direction of his car.
“Will I guess what it is?”
He stops leaning and looks at the ground. “No, why don’t you not do that.”
“You already have a load of stuff from Matt, so I know it isn’t that. So it’s… other stuff?”
“Stop it, huh, Danny, please? Can’t you just leave me be? I feel worse enough already.”
“Ah cripes, Jarrod. You know, it’s these kinds of reasons why you are what is known as a ne’er-do-well.”
“Are you trying to insult me? With ne’er-do-well? Cousin, I’d ne’er do any-damn thing at all if I could get away with it.”
This is very much like punching water.
“So… dammit… just get something from Matt.”
“Not possible,” he says, putting two hands up in front of him, as if I was coming to kick his ass. Which I should do. “Not possible there, man, so let’s just forget I said anything. Okay. Just let that one go.”
“I think that’s a good idea. Because I can assure you, whatever you left behind is with somebody else now. And you don’t want to go inquiring about it.”
An old, old scratchy voice comes down at me from over my shoulder.
I look up and back, to my window.
“Jeez, Old Boy, who are you, Rasputin? What does it take to pin you down, even for one night?”
“Who is that?” He is pointing at Jarrod, and he isn’t pleased.
“Just sharing a smoke. I’ll be right up.”
“You’d better be. I don’t like the look of him.”
He pulls his head back inside.
“I don’t like the look of me, either,” Jarrod says, dejected.
“See, it never would have worked anyway. Do this: Light up, smoke your brains out, and crash. Sleep in here in the capital of nowhere, in the state of oblivion, wake up all new, and we’ll figure out a move. Okay?” I give him a heavy and honest hug around the shoulders.
He doesn’t answer with words, but he does spark up a sapling. He inhales joylessly.
“That’s the spirit,” I say, and head upstairs.