“Where could he be, after all, Dan-o? It’s a small place, a safe place. Couldn’t hurt yourself if you tried, and I’ve tried lots.”
“A small place? Jarrod, there must be hundreds of acres here.”
“Really?”
It is a tall, tall order, with the grounds being so vast, so densely wooded for much of it. And I don’t even feel safe calling out his name, because I am paranoid that somebody who is the wrong somebody is going to hear us.
“Ollllldd duuuude!” Jarrod calls out.
I punch him hard on the arm.
“Shut up,” I tell him in an angry whisper, though even I think whispering is more than paranoid.
“Mwaaa, waa, waa,” I hear, garbled and possibly not even words to begin with, but certainly human. The sound seems to come from a long way off.
“There,” Jarrod says with some pride. “I found him for you. Calm down and let’s go celebrate.”
“What are you talking about? We’re going to get him.”
“All the way down there? On foot?”
“Grrr.”
“Come on, we’ll go get the tractor-mower. I have to cut the grass down on the playing fields this morning anyway.”
“You are so lazy,” I say. “Which way exactly? I am going down right now and you can meet me there.”
“Well, for me it’s up that paved road and then right on the next one, but as the crow flies, probably straight through these bits here. I’ll race ya.”
I am already cross-country running through the trees before I can answer his dumb challenge. I’m dumb enough myself, trying to call out to my grandfather as I run full tilt, but trying to whisper-yell so as not to be heard by anyone else.
He answers, though. Well, no, he doesn’t. He is there all right, probably a couple of hundred feet away at this point, and he is vocalizing, but it isn’t to me, and it isn’t in any English I recognize.
“Da,” I pant as I emerge into the clearing. If it were a football field, I’d be at my own goal line and he’d be at about the opposing thirty-yard line. I defy my unfit body and break into another sprint. He sees me.
And breaks away in the other direction.
“Da,” I call out again and again, but he barely looks back at me as he plunges into the far woods.
Eventually, I catch the old guy, and he is panting, but not as hard as I am. I turn him around and we breathe heavily into each other’s face. I am sweating a lot, but the cool forest air is peeling off the heat quickly.
It must be cooling him even quicker, because he is standing in his bare feet and pajamas. He has deep scratches on his hands and feet, bleeding like he’s been crawling through bramble hedges.
“What are you doing, Old Boy?” I ask, and I feel myself choke up just slightly as I ask it.
I step forward, to hug him, to warm us both, to stop him from answering.
And he punches me dead in the mouth.
I can hear Jarrod’s tractor-mower thing coming down the hill as I run after my grandfather once more. I can already feel my right eyetooth wiggling in its socket and a little bit of fat lip and blood.
“Jeez,” I say, catching him, wrapping him up, and, dammit, hugging him.
“Kill me, then,” he says. “It’s about time you caught me. You boys were always two steps behind. Kill me. Fair enough.”
“It’s not them, Da,” I say, holding him tight, breathing close enough into his ear to bite it off. “It’s me. It’s Daniel.”
He does not respond for a full minute. Then, “I was just going for cigarettes.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I say. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“It’s cold,” he says.
“Would you like a lift, sir?”
“I would, yes. I would like that. You are a good boy,” he says.
“Well, I try to be,” I say, releasing him from my grip and steering him back toward the field and to Jarrod. I hold on to his shoulders as if he is manually operated.
When we step back onto the smooth grass and Jarrod steps up to meet us, the old guy acts once more on impulse.
He punches unsuspecting Jarrod straight in the face.
Jarrod actually goes down. But he is laughing as he gets back to his feet. “Wow, that hurt a lot. Spankings from a granddad like you would put kids in the hospital.”
We hop on the mower once Da starts recognizing Jarrod’s distinctive manner.
“Did you ever kill anybody?” Jarrod says, steering the machine back up toward the dorms.
“Only once,” Da says, staring at the surroundings as if it were all just built and planted since he passed through earlier this morning.
“Tell it, man. Tell it, come on.”
Da hugs himself through the chill.
“No, I won’t,” he says. And the chill in his voice is so noticeable that even Jarrod recognizes not to ask again unless he wants to be number two.
“Did you take your medications this morning like you were supposed to?” I ask the shivering, shriveled Old Boy as he slips back into bed.
“I don’t take medications. Medications are for gimps, simps, and wimps.”
“Oh, another saying from your work?” I ask, snarky.
“I don’t have work. I am retired.”
“Where are your meds, Da?” I snap, tearing apart his modest allotment of underwear and toiletries packed nicely in his drawer like a new boarding-school schoolboy.
“I don’t have any,” he growls.
As he should, growl. Of course he doesn’t have his medication. I packed our stuff.
I blew it.
While Da sleeps and Jarrod mows, I pace. I sweat and fret and try and come up with a solution to this because we cannot go back home for the medicine because that will be the end of the road, and we cannot call the doctor to order more because that would give us away as well, and we sure as hell can’t go any further at all with no medication.
“My feelings exactly,” Jarrod says, walking in with grass clippings covering his legs.
“I guess I was thinking out loud,” I say.
“I guess you were thinking out loud, out there,” he says, pointing out the window. “I could hear you outside. I could practically hear you while I still had my headphones on.”
I’ll have to watch that.
“What’s the matter anyway? You got him back. You didn’t lose him again, did you?”
“No, I didn’t lose him again. But I did something just as stupid. I forgot to bring his medicines. Without those…” I shake my head, pace some more, grab two fistfuls of my own hair.
“You are a sight, cousin.”
Jarrod watches me as if I am in a pet-shop window. His amusement grows.
“What?” I say.
“I might know somebody.”
I freeze. “What do you mean by that?”
“My guy. In the next town. He claims he can get exactly anything I want.”
“Don’t screw with me here, Jarrod. I am very much on edge.”
“I can see that. I’m sure we can hook up something for your problem as well.”
“Yeah, one medical emergency at a time,” I say. “But thanks, I’ll let you know.”
We wait it out while Da sleeps off his moderately big adventure. By the time he comes into the kitchen, he looks a bit more rested, settled, and at least is dressed in regular outside attire.
“Where can I get a cigarette?” he asks.
“I know just the place,” Jarrod says.
We are off once again in the Subaru, and this time I don’t have to drive. There is a slight indication my cousin is starting to get the hang of low-level responsibility and commitment to a task.
“This is great timing,” he says. “I was fresh out of my own medication and had to make this run today myself.”
Close enough.
“Are we getting medication?” Da says from the back. “For me, too?”
He sounds so weak and lost to me, I want to cover my ears. I want to promise him anything. I want to make him better with my own stupid hands. I turn, see him wringing his own hands feverishly. “Would you like some, Old Boy?”
“I think maybe I need some. I don’t feel well.”
“We’ll take care of you, Da. Just sit back and watch the scenery.”
He does, and the scenery does basically the same granite-trees-granite-trees-flying-by trick for the whole forty-minute ride.
“Are we there yet?” asks a convincingly bored-out-of-his-skull voice. It belongs to Jarrod.
“You are the driver,” I point out. “You tell us.”
“Just about there,” he says as we finally turn off the highway and onto the lead-in road to the town. Five minutes later we are pulling into one of those classic northern New England towns that never wind up on postcards. There is a small steel-colored river running past a couple of hulking and empty factories that must have made shoes or shoelaces or shoehorns or something that somebody else makes even better now. The river has a couple of bridges over it, but neither is covered like in the calendars. They should cover them. They should cover everything else while they are at it.
“Oh yeah,” I say, admiring the ambience.
“You want meds or don’t ya? Don’t be so snooty.”
“Oh yeah,” Da says, recognizing something else. “Bet this town arms more militias in a year than I ever did. And I spent a lot of time in Angola.”
Like in slow motion, Jarrod and I turn to Da, who is poker-faced.
A horn wails at us. I spin and yank the wheel, pulling us out of oncoming traffic. The other driver is wailing even louder.
“Lucky you didn’t kill us,” I shout at Jarrod, shoving his head sideways.
“Even luckier that guy didn’t,” Da says, staring out the back at the other driver, still menacing us with a finger.
We pass several vehicles as we negotiate the main drag, and they all look like they were monster trucks in their playing days. Then we turn off the road, off that road, and then off that one. We park at a modest-looking little shop that appears like it doesn’t want to bother anyone. VENUS EXOTICS, it says in red lettering on a cream-painted window.
“Is this what I think it is?” I ask as Jarrod leads us in.
“Not if you think it’s a bakery,” he says.
“Whoa,” I say as we head straight down the middle of three aisles. The woman behind the counter, dressed in a schoolgirl uniform, waves us through to the back. If that is her uniform, she’s kept it nice for about forty years.
Da keeps muttering behind me as we walk toward the door that says MANAGER. I pull him in front of me and guide him. “Whoa,” he says. “Wow.”
“Jarrod,” the man says when we walk into the office.
They shake hands. Da and I get introduced.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” Da says.
“Thank you,” the man, Matt, says.
“I have never seen so many giant rubber penises in one place in my life,” Da marvels.
“Please,” Matt says, “you’re making me blush.”
We have only just met, but I am guessing that is purely impossible to do.
“Anyway…,” I say, catching Jarrod’s eye.
“Yeah, Matt,” Jarrod says. “About business.”
“Right, right, I’ve got your order. I take it your friends are here for something as well. What can we do?”
This is where it gets complicated.
I can just about recall the main couple of medications Da takes daily to almost hold it together. Matt is something of an expert, but he is not 100 percent certain.
“Do you sell cigarettes?” Da asks politely. His hands are starting to tremble from a number of different deprivations.
“Sorry, sir, I do not.”
Something my grandfather always pounded into me, and I always believed it anyway, but now that I am seeing his hard side I am believing it fantastically: Manners beget manners. Don’t start a ruck when you can just say please and get the same result. I suppose it works with a sex-shop black marketeer as well as it does with anybody else.
“Here,” Matt says, sliding a nearly full pack of Camels across his desk.
“You’re a good man,” Da says, smiling pleasantly.
“Keep that to yourself,” Matt says, smiling likewise.
“Entebeyar,” Dad says.
“Huh?” Matt says.
I must break in. “Listen, we have a time thing here. You might not be one hundred percent sure about the medication, but it sounds like the stuff to me. And we are one hundred percent desperate, so we are going to go with your sense on this.”
“How old are you?” Matt says.
“Eighteen,” I say.
“Hmmm.” He nods approvingly. “You’re quite the young commando here, aren’t you? Taking charge and running the show.”
“No, really I’m not. It’s just, circumstances require.”
“Circumstances require!” Da says, jumping up in the air a bit and clapping his hands loud as gunshots. It’s like I have won some kind of talent show or something. “That’s the thing, my boy, the thing, and the thing itself. When circumstances require, what are you capable of?”
He has the whole room staring.
“The man is proud of his grandson,” Jarrod says to Matt.
“So he is, so he is. Wanna buy a Glock, kid?”
“Jeez, no,” I say, physically recoiling.
“Right, another day,” Matt says.
“Hey, if you can’t locate the right stuff,” Jarrod says, “maybe we can just find something off the shelves here to help him out.”
“Jarrod,” I snap. “That is my grandfather.”
“I don’t mind,” Da says.
“Listen, gents, come back in a couple hours, I’ll have you all sorted out,” Matt says.
“Um,” I say, taking charge a little less authoritatively than my new rep might suggest. I lean a bit closer. “About payment… we’re a bit light right now, trying to avoid cash machines…”
He looks right past me. He looks hard and soft at Da as Da tries to coolly not look at the wares on offer everywhere we turn.
Matt shakes his head slightly. “I know that look. I know all about it. Call it a gift, from my uncle.”
I am about to open my mouth to thank him, find it already hanging wide open, start to speak, but stop. Matt pulls out a small lunch bag tightly wrapped in tape, whips it punishingly hard into Jarrod’s midsection. “Besides, this guy right here is three of my best customers.”
We walk down the tired, gray main drag, killing time and being anonymous.
“Wanna bone up?” Jarrod says, because that’s what Jarrod says, and he is walking around with a rock band’s monthly supply.
“The answer is yes,” Da says. Hunching over a bit, smoking on his cigarette as if he is trying to get things out that are just not in there.
“The answer is no,” I say. I put my arm around Da, and he feels a lot less substantial than the guy who loosened my tooth. “Why don’t we just get something to eat?”
“One small smoke, I swear,” Jarrod says, “then eat. I’m buying, even.”
This is an attractive offer. I took a few hundred dollars out of the ATM before we fled, but that wouldn’t last long without a lot of help. I am about to say okay when Da pushes me over the edge.
“Please?” he says.
No matter what his stories. No matter what his tall tales, and I have no idea which ones are redwoods and which have some reality. No matter, no matter, I know the old guy did not go through his life as a chimney like Jarrod.
He just wants to feel better. Any kind of better. Before his mind started the tricks, he was frequently in this kind of stoop-over or that kind of organ discomfort. The blinking lights in his attic sometimes made the physical pains skitter into the shadows. But now, when the meds are not balanced just so, they all seem to come slithering out of the corners.
“Fine. A little. Jarrod, a little by standards other than yours.”
“Promise,” he says.
We wander around the gritty town that we don’t know and that doesn’t appear to want to know us. But this being this kind of town, there has to be an overgrown baseball field around someplace for just this sort of thing.
It takes mere minutes for us to find it, and we are sitting on the bench along the third base line. Where there used to be four slats for baseball butts, there are two, but that is plenty for us. Jarrod does the assembly work, Da smokes another cigarette and stares out over the playing field and the smoke and the overgrowth and time, the way smoking always seems to allow an older person to do. Almost seems worth the smoking for, losing some years at the end of your life, in order to have all that screen time with your younger self.
“You ever play?” Da asks out loud.
“Sure,” I say quickly. “You know-”
He slaps my thigh, hard. “I know you did,” he says calmly. “I remember every pitch you threw, every one you hit, every one you missed. I will forget my feet before I’ll forget any of that. I was asking him.”
“Me? Ya, I did,” says Jarrod.
“Very good,” Da says, looking over the short chain-link fence curving around the outfield.
“Except, you didn’t,” I correct.
“Hey, if he can make up stuff, so can I?” Jarrod says, risking a broken nose or something.
No such thing. Da just sits, still staring. He takes on that creased, crunched expression folks get when they are asked a question they know they should know, they know they do know, only they don’t know it right now. He looks frustrated and confused and reluctant, but he takes the joint when it is passed. Then he smokes and extends it to me, and I am so close to asking him if he indeed knows which of his stories is true and which is otherwise, I can actually feel that W forming on my lips.
“No, I can’t,” I say, and he withdraws.
Jarrod takes the smoke back. I start walking, and point at him as menacingly as I am able.
“I will be right back,” I say. “Do not go anywhere. And do not lose him.”
“How could I even do that? He’s, like, full size.”
I run up to the corner, where we passed one of those discount stores. Probably was a five-and-dime once, a Wool- worth’s, a dollar store, a whatever-the-name-says, but always cheap as cheap and always the kind of place you could get a Wiffle bat and ball but most likely not authentic Wiffle brand.
That’s not exactly what I am looking for, anyway. I find what I want, a sponge ball, orange, and an enormous fat bat, plastic but three times the strength of and about twelve times the barrel width of a Wiffle bat.
I buy four of those balls. Because I am feeling very jacked right now and some balls are going to go downtown.
Next thing, I am standing at home plate. I look out at the fence. How did it get so close? How did the whole field get so small? I feel like I could touch the left field foul pole with the tip of the bat. I played Little League and Babe Ruth League and hit a fair few long balls before I stopped respecting baseball enough to work hard and compete with the guys who did.
Da hated that. Hated it so much, the notion of being good enough at something but not giving it the proper respect. “Suck with dignity,” he said at the one game of mine he ever booed me and walked off from, “but don’t suck with apathy.”
Even when I was good, though, the fence always seemed so far away, such a tall order, not within my reach. Now I’m embarrassed that I ever felt that way.
Suddenly there is Da, on the mound. He has one orange ball in his right hand, one in his left, and two at his feet.
“You,” he says, long past the possibility of committing Jarrod’s name to memory, “out there and shag flies.”
“They are too small for me,” Jarrod says, giggling from the bench.
“Get out there and play some outfield,” Da shouts, and Jarrod jumps.
My cousin camps in center field, and Da waves him over to left. Farther. Farther.
“Come on,” Jarrod whines, “I’m going to have to run a long way if he hits it over there.”
“He won’t. He can’t. He was too lazy to learn to use the whole field. He could only pull and everyone knew it and that’s why he sucked.”
I laugh out loud. Jarrod laughs out loud. The pitcher himself turns in my direction and stares me down.
“Bring it, old man,” I say.
For someone of his age and limitations, Da’s windup and delivery are sweet, as they always were. He rears back, lifts the left knee up about ten inches, extends the left elbow straight at me, comes straight over the top with his right hand, and lets go of the ball at the optimal release point. Straight it comes.
It whistles in fast, and pap, smacks me right in the ear.
“Hey,” I shout, pointing the fat red bat in his direction. “You did that deliberately.”
“Of course I did. Get back in the box.”
I get back in the box, ready to swing. He winds up, unloads one straight and meaty in the middle of the strike zone. I am so excited, by the moment and the ball and the fence, that I swing so hard I pull a chest muscle; I feel it instantly.
I make contact, though, and the ball leaves the infield.
Dribbling harmlessly along the ground, then slowed by the tall grass, right to where Jarrod is waiting for it. He doesn’t even have to move.
The pitcher laughs. The left fielder laughs.
“Bring it, old man,” I say, because it has been a long time since I taunted a pitcher, so I am short on material.
He brings it.
“Ow.” I drop the bat. “Da, that really stings. If you do that again…”
He starts walking toward me, bouncing on the balls of his feet. I may have found the cure for old age here. “Yeah? You’ll what?”
He backs me down. “Nothing. Just pitch.”
“I will. But if you whine one more time, next thing I hit you with is a rock.”
I dig in silently. He winds up with the third ball.
And smacks me in the ear again. If there was a game of ear hitting, he would be world senior champion. But we are not playing that game. We are playing a very different game.
I shut my face. He winds up with the fourth ball. He slings it.
He jams me on the hands and I hit another dribbler to Jarrod.
“Damn,” I say, digging in once more. The old man is laughing, pleased at still topping me, pleased I am no longer moaning. He winds up and throws.
I cream the ball. I murder it, and it does not go to any stupid damn left field, either. I have mashed the ball high in the air and as straight to dead center as possible, and Jarrod is making a lame attempt to get out there, but that is pointless, people, because I have gotten all of that one.
I am running the bases, shocked at how thrilled I am over this. Over the fence. I hit one out. I look as I round first toward second, to see the ball land.
It’s only about a foot beyond the fence. Jarrod is actually in position, and he reaches up, and if the ball hadn’t bounced right off his forehead, he would have caught it. I hit that with everything I had.
I am elated and defeated, all in one go.
I still do my homerun trot because at least I can taunt Da, which I do, pointing a big finger his way and hooting at him as I hit third.
But he’s not watching. He’s not listening. He’s not here.
Still looking up at some spot where the ball may or may not have crossed the sky several seconds ago, Da steps sideways off the mound, stands there looking up awkwardly, hands held out for balance. Then he looks at me, awkwardly, lost, and falls sideways, landing on his hip.
“Da,” I say, running straight across the diamond. I get to him, pick him up, and he winces.
“Are you okay?” I ask. “I am so sorry, this was a stupid idea. I am sorry. Are you all right?”
He stares at me. He stares and stares and stares.
It is a sandwich shop, about ten booths and a ten-foot counter. Smells like coffee. Smells like tomato soup. Smells like just enough Lysol to be reassuring.
Soup and sandwich times three.
“He will be fine,” I say to Jarrod, who looks uncharacteristically worried.
“He doesn’t look good, Danny.”
“He’ll be fine, once he gets his stuff.”
“That’s what we all say.”
“Food, for strength, then some medication, get his equilibrium back, then a good rest and he will be his old self.”
“His old, old, old self,” Jarrod quips.
I reach right across the table and grab his shirt, pulling him to me to make the booth seem a lot smaller. A teenage girl pushes a stroller across in front of us and stares as if we can’t see her. As if we are in a jackass aquarium or something. Don’t tap the glass, girlie.
I look at my balled fist, Jarrod’s balled shirt, the uncomfortable defenseless look on his face.
“How many times do you suppose this table has seen this scene?” I ask with what I hope is an apologetic smile.
Jarrod shrugs. “Probably, like, a lot?”
“What is even in this for you, man?” I ask him, still clinging to him.
“I don’t know,” he says.
I laugh. “You’re a good man,” I say right up close to his face.
“The bar on the opposite corner is that kind of place,” says the cook with the Marty Van Buren sideburns. It sounds like a joke but he appears unamused. He delivers the soups and sandwiches himself, separating the goings-on by plunking down food. The waitress is having her own food at the counter.
He walks away. I look to Da beside me and he looks rather drained of color.
“Eat,” I tell him, picking up half of his tuna sandwich, which is now bleeding watery mayo onto him. He takes the sandwich listlessly, dunks a corner into his tomato soup so that both sandwich and soup mingle into a look that could kill your appetite. He bites, crunches into too much celery.
I am very happy I got ham and cheese.
“What is your plan, Danny Boy?” Jarrod asks.
“My plan?” I ask. “What kind of plan could I have? I was going off to study philosophy in a few weeks, that was my plan. And even that was no kind of plan at all.”
Jarrod nods.
“It has to be getting worse by the day, man,” I say. “Worse for me and him both. There will be a lot to answer for, even criminal stuff, who knows. All I can say is, he’s in trouble down there, and I am not bringing him back into that, no way. I can’t.”
Jarrod nods.
I look over to Da to see that he’s getting along okay. Half the sandwich is gone, even the crust, and he is working at the soup. The management must have split a small bag of potato chips among the three of us because there are about five chips per plate and a slice of pickle, but nobody’s eating all that anyway. Da smiles a bit, winces, smiles, dunks his sandwich. I take this as progress.
Jarrod has eaten everything. Now he’s collecting pickles and chips that don’t belong to him, but hey.
“I’ll take him,” Jarrod says.
“What?”
“I’ll take him. He can live with me. At least for a while. He can share my boiler room, and as long as he does his quiet-old-guy thing more than his nutty-old-guy thing, we could probably get away with it.”
Stress is about to cause me to blow, to grab him again and emphasize how stupid and reckless the plan is.
Until I picture it.
“What?” he says, smiling broadly but uncertainly. “What? What’s so funny? Dan…”
I love this laugh. It feels so good it just perpetuates itself. Then Jarrod catches it; then, Da. It is joy.
The waitress comes over with our bill, hands it to the old guy, and says cheerfully, “Thank goodness for stoners, or we’d never move this food.”
We walk back into Venus Exotics, leaving Da in the car. He is in no running mood, a sore hip and a lit cigarette keeping him reliably planted in the backseat.
True to his word, Matt hands over a bag with a few pill bottles inside, just like the pharmacist does.
“I even gave you a little note with instructions inside, just like the pharmacist does,” he says with no small pride. “You take care of that ol’ boy. Sorry to say, kid, but I know that look. Good things don’t usually follow that look.”
It stings.
“So then, Matty, why don’t you give us one of your other products, that give an old boy a look that good things definitely do follow?”
I did not say that.
Matt quickly reaches out and bops Jarrod on the side of the head with something like a baseball bat that isn’t one. “There, that’ll give you a look.” He’s laughing; now he’s serious.
“Here’s to wash it down,” he says and grabs me a large can of something called POW energy drink off a shelf.
“Thanks,” I say warily. “But is this going to make him feel anything more than we want him to?”
“Only a little extra consciousness, I’m afraid.”
I shake his very warm, strong hand. I wait till I am out the door before giving it a precautionary wipe on my shirt.
We tear away in the Subaru after a successful excursion, feeling a little like maybe we can do this.
“All the best people are rascals,” Da says as he takes this pill and this pill and this pill with a swig of POW and we all cross our fingers.