Townie_ A Memoir Part 21

He wiped his eyes, looked at me as if I'd never known him at all.

"A bunch of times." The last just a few months earlier. Pop hadn't washed his hands of him yet, and Jeb had stayed the night and woke up to find the house empty. For weeks he'd been standing at that door in his head, and now he hurried into Pop's writing room, took down from his shelf the .38 snub-nose and .380 semiautomatic, loaded both, then climbed the front stairs to the kitchen and walked out onto the small side deck. He pressed one gun up under his chin, the other to the side of his head. He was going to count to three and pull both triggers at once. One, two- One, two- Sitting two steps below my brother, I could feel the ends of the barrels up under my jaw and against my temple. I held my breath, saw the scalding lead rip through my brother's pa.s.sionate, inquisitive brain, and he told us of screaming, of pulling both guns away and emptying them into the trees. The door to the kitchen had been open, and the whole room had smelled of smoking cordite and scorched bra.s.s. He became afraid Pop would smell it when he got home. Jeb put the guns back on the closet shelf, then he found bacon in the fridge, put six slices on a skillet on the stove and turned up the heat till the air filled with pig smoke.

I squeezed my brother's knee. I stood and stepped past him and his girlfriend to the phone on the wall. I called information. I called Christof in the canyons north of Boulder.

IT'D BEEN less than twenty-four hours, and Jeb and I were greeting him at the airport in Boston. Christof had gained some weight and had a slight limp I'd forgotten about. The circles beneath his eyes seemed darker too, his mustache thick as ever. We hugged, and when I introduced him to my brother, Christof took his hand in both of his, looked down into his face and eyes the same way he always had with the inmates, as if he was seeing all that needed to be seen and now was the time for Jeb to see it, too.

It was near midnight. While I drove north up the highway, they talked, Christof turned sideways in the pa.s.senger seat, Jeb in the shadows in the back. Christof was asking my brother questions, and I felt like a voyeur listening to the answers. But already Christof's voice became deeper, more serious, and I could hear him work his way into the darkness my brother lived in.

Soon enough we were at the Haverhill line, and I was driving over the Merrimack River, the guardrail zipping by in our headlights. Up ahead was the exit for River Street and the Howard Johnson's where so many late nights Sam and Theresa and I would go for breakfast after last call. Christof had said earlier he needed to eat, so I slowed for the ramp, Jeb talking now, his voice small and high and anguished.

Down to the right a culvert was overgrown with weeds and beyond it was a new car lot, its sign lighted over what years ago had been a drive-in theater, one of those our mother would take the four of us to on a Friday night Mystery Ride. It's where I'd first seen Billy Jack, Billy Jack, a misty rain spotting the van windows as he punched and kicked and broke bones. a misty rain spotting the van windows as he punched and kicked and broke bones.

I pulled into Howard Johnson's and parked in front of its windows. Most of the tables and booths were empty, a waitress leaning against the counter and talking to a cook in white. I cut off the engine. Christof was turned completely in his seat, one hand holding my brother's. In less than forty minutes he seemed to have taken Jeb back twenty years. In the rearview mirror I could see his contorted face, and it was as if I were spying on someone's birth or death.

I left the car and walked into the bright fluorescence of Howard Johnson's. The air smelled like hot grease and cigarette smoke and disinfectant, and the waitress glanced over at me. She had short bleached hair and bad skin. I'd seen her around for years but didn't know her. She walked up to me, and I told her there would be three of us. She grabbed some menus and I followed her to one of the empty booths along the window. It was hard not to think of Sambo's then, of smas.h.i.+ng ceramic cups into human faces, of kicking a boy in the head again and again. I sat in the booth but did not look outside. In the car, Christof was coaxing my brother to name all that had hurt him, a darkness he'd swallowed till it made him want to die. Sitting there waiting for them, I knew it was the same darkness I'd been pus.h.i.+ng into the faces of boys and men for years.

CHRISTOF STAYED with Jeb a few days. Then my friend was back in the canyons two thousand miles west, and already my brother looked different. He walked straighter, his eyes were brighter, and a gray veil seemed to have lifted from him. Twenty-five years later, he's still free of it.

I never told my father about that night with Jeb and the .22 Colt. I never told him about that afternoon with the other guns, either. When trouble came, our father just was not the man we'd ever turned to; trouble was simply trouble, and who on this earth had ever escaped it anyway?

16.

IT WAS AN early morning in July, the phone was ringing, and it was Peggy, her voice tentative. The night before Pop had been driving back from Boston. He'd stopped on the highway to help someone who'd been in an accident, and he'd gotten run over.

"What?"

"Your father got run over by a car. He's at Ma.s.s General."

My blood seemed to thin out in my veins. The air itself was easy to see. Later I'd learn that Pop had driven into Boston to meet a woman he knew who worked with prost.i.tutes. He wanted to interview one for something he was writing. This was in the Combat Zone, a dusty cl.u.s.ter of ma.s.sage parlors and peep shows and bas.e.m.e.nt barrooms near the theater district. Before going there, Pop had armed himself; under his white cotton sports jacket he wore his leather side holster and its .380 semiautomatic. Four inches beneath that, he'd clipped to his belt the .38 snub-nose he'd bought Peggy, and into his right front pocket he'd dropped a small, single-shot derringer.

He met his friend, strolled the dim neon streets of the Combat Zone, talked to a couple of prost.i.tutes on the corner, then walked his friend back to her car and headed home. It was a dry night, the stars out, and on a straight and lighted stretch of highway a car was stopped in the fast lane. Pop slowed down. A young man and woman sat in the front seat, their faces bleeding. Then he saw the motorcycle they'd hit, most of it under their car, and he pulled ahead of them and cut left onto the median strip between the northbound and southbound lanes. He helped the young woman out of the car first. She had long dark hair and was crying, her accent Spanish. She told him how she and her younger brother were from Puerto Rico, that he spoke no English and they were pa.s.sing a big truck, then saw a motorcycle lying in the pa.s.sing lane and she'd hit it going so fast. Just now. She'd hit it.

It was after midnight, the highway quiet, and Pop wanted some help before he squatted and looked under the car to see the crushed motorcyclist. Later we found out there was none, that the driver of the bike was drunk and stumbling through the woods off the highway, that his wife had just left him and he'd gone to a bar and drank and drank, then raced up the highway on his motorcycle where he wiped it out, then walked away, this boy and girl plowing into it.

Now my father was helping the brother out of the car. He was lean and handsome. It looked like he'd broken his nose. Pop walked him around to where the young woman was. He stood there, one foot on the gra.s.s of the median, the woman between Pop and her brother, and Pop was trying to comfort them somehow, thinking about what he should do for them before going for help. A hundred yards north was an emergency call box he could see. That's when he also saw a car coming and he raised his arms to wave it down.

Maybe the woman driving that car was reaching for a new ca.s.sette tape, or maybe there was a glittering piece of debris in the road, we still don't know, but she swerved and drove straight for Pop and the brother and sister from Puerto Rico, Pop grabbing the woman's arm and pulling her away, an act which put him where she'd been standing and so she could only watch as the car shot into her brother and my father at fifty-eight miles an hour, a speed we know because a state trooper was driving down the southbound lane at that exact moment, a moment he clocked before switching on his siren and lights and driving across the gra.s.sy median where the boy lay dead on the hood of the woman's car and she was out and running across the highway screaming, "It's not my fault! It's not my fault!"

Pop lay on her trunk. His pants were around his knees. In his left front pocket a quarter was bent in half. The trooper was talking to him, words Pop barely heard because his dead mother was there, too. She was at his side, running her palm along his forehead and hair, telling him it wasn't his time, that he was going to go through something very difficult, but he had to stay strong because it was not yet his time.

Then she was gone, and Pop was lying there, not feeling anything, telling the trooper about his guns. He a.s.sured him that he was licensed to carry them, and he reached into his side holster and pulled out the semiautomatic. He ejected the magazine and handed it and the pistol to the trooper who rested the gun on the roof of the car and began to cover Pop with a light blanket, but my father was pulling free the .38 snub-nose now. He tried to unload it and the trooper gently took it from him, thanking him. He'd already called an ambulance. In the air were the cries of women, the sister of the dead boy and the woman who'd driven into them. Two or three cars had stopped and pulled over and their drivers were climbing out to investigate. Pop said, "There's one more in my pocket. I can't reach it. It's a derringer."

The trooper told Pop to stay still. He reached into my father's pants pocket for the third gun. Pop wanted him to pull his pants up, but the pain was beginning now, a black tidal wave of it sweeping through the village that once had been my father's body and his life in it. We learned later that he'd broken thirty-four bones, that both his legs were crushed, his right one so badly it would undergo ten operations before being amputated just below the knee, his left so pulverized he would never use it again.

When Peggy called me early the next morning and told me what had happened, she said his legs were broken pretty badly. I pictured my father in two casts, lying in bed a few weeks, then walking on crutches, then the casts coming off and having to walk with a cane. Then walking with no cane. Then being his old self again. He was only fifty. He was in good shape. He'd be fine.

But he wasn't. He'd broken so many bones that his bloodstream had filled with marrow and entered his lungs. Those first days there was the fear he would drown or that the marrow would drift to his brain and kill him as surely as a bullet. The doctors told us to call his sisters down in Louisiana, to call a priest too.

But overnight his lungs cleared. One of his doctors said she'd never seen anything like it. She shrugged and called it a miracle.

They put his shattered left leg in a cast and went to work trying to save his right. After two months of operations, though, it was no use. The day before the amputation I was in his hospital room at Ma.s.s General. The writer John Smolens was there. He was an old friend of Pop's, one of the men he'd shared an apartment with after the divorce. Pop had lost weight, and there seemed to be more gray in his beard, his hair thinner, but that afternoon there was color in his face, and he was cheerful and laughed easily and looked like a man who was just about to leave something terrible behind him.

It was early September. He was talking about hunting squirrels, how by November he'd be doing that with his new leg. I looked down at his right foot. It was bare, pink and healthy-looking, the toenails clipped, but his s.h.i.+n was pinned and wrapped, still an open wound since the summer, and I joked about all the times that foot had kicked me in the a.s.s, which it never had, and I bent down and kissed his foot goodbye, Pop laughing, his buddy too. But I was thinking of us running together, my father waiting for me at the top of the hill, the mottled light across his smiling and sweaty face.

17.

I WAS RENTING A trailer on Plum Island. It was a beach town three miles east of Newburyport where I worked as a bartender in an Irish pub, saving each morning, the strongest time of the day, for writing. Five blocks east of the restaurant was Lime Street. Sometimes I'd drive up it and look at the tiny house we four kids had shared with our mother in 1970 and '71. WAS RENTING A trailer on Plum Island. It was a beach town three miles east of Newburyport where I worked as a bartender in an Irish pub, saving each morning, the strongest time of the day, for writing. Five blocks east of the restaurant was Lime Street. Sometimes I'd drive up it and look at the tiny house we four kids had shared with our mother in 1970 and '71.

It was even smaller than I remembered it, but the front door still opened right onto the narrow sidewalk and street, the tiny yard in back surrounded by a tall plank fence. This one, though, was straight and plumb and had been treated for the weather, the house too, its old clapboards newly painted an eggplant purple, the trim sage. Fastened to the door casing was a s.h.i.+ny bra.s.s mailbox, red flowers spilling over two window boxes screwed under the sills. Across the street, instead of cars sitting on blocks getting worked on by Larry, there was a low white fence and a green lawn and a toddler's swing set and sandbox. A black Saab was parked in the paved driveway. All the houses on the street looked bigger and brighter, and farther up, where the Jackman School had been and where I'd seen Cody Perkins beat Big Sully down, the condemned brick building was gone and now there were swings and a jungle gym and a long slide down onto fresh chips of cedar. There was a basketball court too, its smooth surface used by men who'd been moving their families into the South End for years-orthodontists and realtors, accountants and software engineers and college teachers. The whole town had changed because of this: Market Square was no longer littered with abandoned cars and sprouting weeds; its brick mill buildings had been completely refurbished, every brick scrubbed and repointed, every window and slate roof made new, and on the street level were clothing boutiques, food and wine shops, a record store, jewelry store, and a bookstore. Restaurants and pubs stood on every half block. Hanging from each lamppost were potted flowers, and tourists would stop and have their picture taken beside one.

The lumberyard was gone, so was the Hog Penny Head Shop. Big leisurely boats sailed up the river from ports off Maine, Boston, Hilton Head, and Florida, sleek white boats you could live on but docked here long enough for its owners to take a stroll through this town people actually wanted to come to.

I knew this meant the poor people who'd lived here before had been forced out, that what happened to Newburyport was known as gentrification. Part of me missed the tall weeds on Fair Street the drunks used to live in, a lot that was now the new Salvation Army building, but it was as if what had happened to Newburyport had happened to me too. Instead of fighting guys from those old streets, they kept showing up in my dream world on the page, men up against it who only know one or two ways how to get free, both of which can hurt other people or themselves.

Some early mornings, after locking up the pub, I'd sit on my trailer's stoop with a beer and watch the sun rise over the dune across the street, a blooming lip of orange that would send me to bed. I'd sleep, then make coffee, then get to work on the novel I was trying to write. It was set in a milltown, and the main character was a boy living with his single mother, his two sisters and brother. There was no money and the neighborhood was run-down and dangerous, and no grown-up seemed to ever be around or in charge. In one scene, the boy dreams he and his family are in the bed of a pickup truck that's hurtling down the long hill of Main Street to Basilere Bridge and the Merrimack River. The boy's father is there in the truck bed with them. He has a dark trimmed beard and his arm is around his young girlfriend and he's drinking and laughing, and the boy's mother is back there too, his brother and sisters as well, but the truck's cab is empty, no one driving it, and no adult seems to notice or care as the truck barrels down the hill for the slow-moving, dirty river. My character wakes up, pulls on his leather, then walks down into the avenues looking for a morning high.

I knew this was as autobiographical as it could be. I also thought I'd been writing long enough that I was aware of the creative dangers of basing fiction so closely on one's own life. Wasn't the biggest danger that I'd confuse the facts with the truth? That I'd feel compelled to put everything into my novel just because it had happened happened? And if I was aware of this danger, wasn't that enough to guard against doing this?

But what I wasn't seeing was a more obvious problem, that I was too emotionally close to this story to write honestly about it; a part of me felt sorry for that boy I'd been, and I was angry at his mother and father for not doing a better job of taking care of him and his brother and sisters. This anger was new, and it was a surprise to me.

After writing, I'd drive the ten miles to my father's house to try to do whatever had to be done. Peggy was pregnant with their second child, and she needed help caring for Pop, who was bedridden and in constant pain.

Before the accident, they'd moved to East Rocksvillage, the rural part of Haverhill, where they'd built a small house into the side of a hill overlooking acres of open field and a ridge of trees. Their paved driveway was long and steep, and because their front door was four feet off the ground, Jeb and I had had to rip out the steps and build a winding forty-eight-foot ramp for Pop's wheelchair. We did this two days before he came home from the hospital. Jeb and I lay out the ramp's angle which by law could be no higher or lower than one inch per foot. This allowed a crippled person to wheel himself up or down it without help from anyone else. We went to work digging three-foot holes for the posts, and because we thought this ramp was temporary, we skipped mixing and pouring concrete footings. Friends came over and pitched in, Sam Dolan one of them. When the sun went down, we turned on the porch light and set up a halogen lamp and aimed headlights and kept working. We lagged treated two-by-tens into the posts and nailed in crosspieces and ripped sheets of plywood and tacked them down. There was a hopeful, nearly festive charge to the air; there was nothing we could do to save Pop from what had happened to him, but we could do this. We were also still under the illusion that Pop would walk again one day, that his casted left leg was not nearly as damaged as it was, and that his main challenge would be learning how to walk on the new prosthetic leg for his right.

The first time I saw him home from the hospital he was lying on his living room couch, his casted leg propped on three pillows, the right leg of his sweatpants folded up under his stump. He wore a Red Sox T-s.h.i.+rt that used to be tight around his chest but now was loose, his upper arms thinner than I'd ever seen on a grown man. His beard, always trimmed, was long and s.h.a.ggy, and his cheeks were gray, the whites of his eyes yellowed, but he was smiling up at me, raising his atrophied arms to hug me as I leaned down and kissed his cheek. It was rough with stubble, and he smelled like oily skin and damp hair and cotton bandages.

My five-year-old sister Cadence was talking to him, asking him about a drawing she'd done, did he like it? It was dusk and the TV was off and their golden retriever Luke lay on the floor in front of it. Peggy was cooking in the small kitchen.

Now it was a month later, and Pop hadn't even left the house. He lived in a haze of pain that never lifted and most of it came from his left leg. If it wasn't positioned in just the right place on the pillows, he told me it was as if sharp knives were slas.h.i.+ng into his nerve endings across bone. Peggy was the one who took care of Pop, but when I was there I learned how to prop the leg at an angle that did not hurt him as much as another. Sometimes half an inch to the right or left or up or down is all it would take to make it far worse or far better, but like a neighborhood bully, the pain never quite went away. And he told me the phantom pain of his right was sometimes worse, that where his lower leg and foot had been, the actual air air there hurt. Sometimes I'd see him reach down and pa.s.s his hand through it, this limb he no longer owned but haunted him like some disgruntled ancestor. there hurt. Sometimes I'd see him reach down and pa.s.s his hand through it, this limb he no longer owned but haunted him like some disgruntled ancestor.

I laid a towel across his chest, took scissors and trimmed his beard. I lathered his cheeks and throat and shaved him. Sometimes I'd take over bedpan duty, a task Pop made easier by rolling onto his side and calling out in a weakened Marine Corps voice, "Get in there, boy, and wipe wipe that a.s.s!" that a.s.s!"

But there were times he clearly hated having to get help for this, and he would thank me more than once and I'd tell him not to worry about it. What I did not tell him was that I felt joy doing these things, an emotion I then felt guilty about because how could there be any human room here for joy at all?

In January my father and Peggy had their second child, his sixth. It was long after midnight at a hospital in Boston, and Pop was well enough to be in the delivery room, but there was no s.p.a.ce for his wheelchair where the husband and father usually sat at the head of the operating table so he watched from the foot, and he and Peggy asked me to sit where the young father would. I was twenty-seven years old. Peggy was twenty-eight. I held her hand and watched over a raised blue sheet as the surgeon made an incision in her belly and parted the flesh and in seconds there was my crying infant sister being lifted from her mother's womb, the umbilical cord purple and wet, and I was crying too, saying, "It's a girl, you guys. It's a girl girl."

Later, while Peggy was in recovery and my fourth sister, Madeleine, was being cleaned up and examined, Pop and I sat in a dark hallway sharing an illegal cigarette. It was just before dawn. The sky outside the windows was black, and down the street a traffic light turned green for no one. I didn't smoke, so I drew on the Marlboro as shallowly as I would a cigar. I'd been up all night with my father and his wife, and I should've been tired but I wasn't; I kept seeing my baby sister being pulled from her mother's womb, this completely formed, healthy human being two other human beings had made. I rarely thought of G.o.d or angels or anything otherworldly or good that may be among us, but in that hospital hallway with my father, I was feeling that something other than just us and our daily stumbling and striving may be here after all.

Pop looked beleaguered. In the delivery room he had smiled and there'd been tears in his eyes, but now he looked fatigued and gripped by a fresh pain he could barely tolerate. His torso was still weak with atrophy and both elbows rested heavily on his chair's armrests. He'd be starting physical therapy soon, and it was time to get him ready for that, time to build his upper-body strength back to where it was just so he could work the crutches, and later, a cane.

MONDAYS, WEDNESDAYS, and Fridays I'd drive to Haverhill and set up his old weight bench in the living room. This was the same bench his second wife, Lorraine, had dumped in our front yard on Columbia Park, and while Cadence played or read or drew, and Peggy breast-fed baby Madeleine or lay her down for a nap or went off to do errands, I'd help transfer Pop from his wheelchair to the weight bench, an act which required him to have the strong triceps and pectoral muscles he no longer had. He'd be pale and sweating before he even lay down on the bench, something he could only do with help. His left leg was no longer in a cast but it did not bend, and his right was a stump so he wasn't able to plant two feet on the floor on either side of the bench. This made this exercise far more difficult for him to do, but once he was in place and ready, we began anyway and with just the bar.

Before his accident and in the early years married to Peggy, Pop had worked himself up to a 200-pound bench press, but now this 20-pound bar had clearly taxed him by the eighth or tenth rep, and he set it back in its forks and looked up at me standing there behind them, looked up at his son's upside-down face. "I'm f.u.c.king weak weak."

"But muscle has memory, Pop."

I told him what I'd read in one of my muscle magazines years earlier, that once you've built muscles and then neglect them, each cell remembers what it once was, and so the lifter starting over is miles ahead of the one beginning for the first time.

"Muscle memory," Pop said the words slowly and to himself, the way he'd always done whenever he heard a line or phrase or human situation that intrigued him. Usually it would end up in a published story of his months or years later. One night he'd called me down in Austin just to shoot the s.h.i.+t. "Hey, it's your father who art in Haverhill." We talked awhile, then I told him about the gym where I was working out, about a b.u.mper sticker on the locker of one of the powerlifters there: I don't know how I feel till I hold that steel I don't know how I feel till I hold that steel.

"Wait," he said. "Tell me that again."

And I knew he'd just reached for the pen he always carried and was writing those words down. A few years later they became the opening line for his novella "The Pretty Girl."

But this time, as he lay crippled on the bench, ready to do his next set of presses, he seemed to be taking it in for his use only, words he would need, not to help build a character, but to build himself.

EIGHT WEEKS later his upper body was back to what it had been before the accident. We'd learned it was easier for him to bench-press only if his torso couldn't slide to the left or right, so we'd hook his leather weight belt under the bench and around his waist, cinching it in tight, and he stayed that way till his bench presses were done. For his shoulders he did overhead dumbbell work from his wheelchair. For his back I installed a chinning bar in his kitchen doorway that he could reach but could be taken down afterward. For his upper arms Pop did seated dumbbell curls and overhead triceps extensions, and with each pa.s.sing week he got stronger and stronger.

One afternoon Pop told me that the day before his accident he'd gone out and bought a compa.s.s because he'd wanted to walk wherever he went, to get his exercise that way and learn more about where he lived.

"Can you believe that, man?" He was between sets and he glanced over at me and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his arm. "I had plans to walk. walk."

And now he wanted to do something for his heart and lungs, too. But what can a man without legs do? There was swimming, but his entire life he'd been afraid of water. There were those racing wheelchairs you could take out on a track somewhere, but Pop and the rest of us still held out hope that he'd walk again one day and the thought of buying another wheelchair was a dark one.

Then I remembered shadowboxing. I told him how it could wind even the fittest boxers, how you could probably do it in a sitting position, and I pulled up a chair beside him and showed him how to throw a few punches. I felt like I was lying to him, though, because these punches were not themselves without pivoting feet and legs and hips to power them. But Pop liked the movement, needed the movement, and he remembered boot camp in the Marine Corps, how much harder the running became when you had to count cadence too, when you had to sing "the D.I.'s f.u.c.king song." So Pop began singing. After his weight workouts, he'd put on some Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald or Peggy Lee, and he'd shadowbox in his chair and sing from his diaphragm, Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars..., Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars..., his left leg sticking out straight from his chair, his right gone, his eyes closed as he hit notes and punched the air. his left leg sticking out straight from his chair, his right gone, his eyes closed as he hit notes and punched the air.

I'd drive down the hill feeling more joy than sadness. I had never grown anything before, never planted a seed and watered it till something blossomed that had been waiting there all along. At least I thought I hadn't. But I had. It was me I had built up. And I imagined that helping Pop get his strength back gave the kind of sustained creative satisfaction a gardener must feel, or a coach, or a father.

18.

IT WAS THREE years later, and because of what I'd just done, a big man offered me his place in line, another squeezed my shoulder and said, "That's the way to do it," and the woman who took my boarding pa.s.s glanced at me quickly, her eyes pa.s.sing over me as if she were trying to memorize something. My heart had finally slowed back down. My legs felt unsteady. I needed water.

It was a big plane, and I took my seat in the center row. Beside me sat a young woman in a Boston College T-s.h.i.+rt. She had long blonde hair, a thin gold bracelet clinging to her tanned wrist, and she was reading Cultural Literacy, Cultural Literacy, which I'd just read. She glanced at me. I asked her if she liked the book, told her I thought it was pretty good, my voice still high and reedy from where the adrenaline had put it. She said she'd just started it, and she smiled and stared at my bare arm. She went back to her book. which I'd just read. She glanced at me. I asked her if she liked the book, told her I thought it was pretty good, my voice still high and reedy from where the adrenaline had put it. She said she'd just started it, and she smiled and stared at my bare arm. She went back to her book.

I reached for both ends of my seat belt. I clicked them together and now saw what she had seen. They were the same size as the fine droplets of paint that come off a roller when working on a ceiling, that winter day Jeb and I painted that closed room, our accidental high, the drinking and driving and more drinking, Devin Wallace knocking my head against the concrete again and again. Covering the backs of both my hands and forearms were hundreds of dots of blood. It was as if I were exposing some shameful part of myself, and I stood and stepped sideways past other pa.s.sengers and rushed up the aisle and locked myself in the bathroom.

I pulled the faucet lever. The water was warm and I tried to make it hotter than that, as hot as it could possibly get. I began to wash off the man's blood. When it swirled down the drain I looked into the mirror so close to my face. At first I didn't see me, only what I'd done, the men's boom box breaking into pieces, the big one rising up from the floor and swinging at me, a wild hook I'd ducked.

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving in Miami International Airport, its wide corridors filled with people walking in all directions, every seat in the waiting areas taken, whole families sitting together. Some were tanned or sunburned and heading back north or east. Others were already brown and sat on the floor sharing sandwiches and salads from one of the food stands. Spanish hung in the air, and Southern accents, New York and New England, too. Every few minutes, neutral voices shot out of an invisible sound system calling out departing flights. It was late afternoon, and on the other side of the tinted windows the tarmac and flas.h.i.+ng planes were still too bright to look out at.

In Key West I'd bought myself a bolo tie, its center a small TV screen that kept scrolling black-and-white geometric shapes. I didn't watch TV anymore, hadn't for years, but I liked the digital patterns that seemed to rise up inside that screen like some positive and innovative future I was part of. I'd just sold my first book, a collection of short stories I'd been working on since Colorado. I'd gotten paid four thousand dollars for it, and now I could afford to go visit my mother where she and Bruce lived in Miami. She'd gone back to school and was studying for her master's in social work. She and Bruce lived in a carpeted two-story condo in a gated compound of palm trees and aloe vera, live oaks and Spanish moss.

There'd been a plan for all four of us grown kids to go down for the weekend, but only Nicole and I were able to get there, Nicole from California where she, too, was earning a master's in social work, and me from Boston. Bruce's drinking years were behind him now, and he was visiting his seven kids and ex-wife up north, his grandkids too. It was the Friday after Thanksgiving and outside my mother's condominium the Florida sun shone on the live oaks and sable palms of her gated apartment complex, a lime green lizard skittering across the concrete patio. Nicole and Mom and I were sitting around the air-conditioned living room talking about getting out and doing something.

Mom wore shorts and a blouse. She looked tanned and pretty and younger than her forty-nine years. Nicole's red hair was cut short, and she'd spent the morning studying, her focus still on what she'd been reading though this talk of doing something seemed to jolt her into the present, and she said she'd never been to Key West.

"Let's go there. We'll stay in some cheap motel."

"Oh, I can't afford that, honey." Mom's tone was sweetly matter-of-fact, like she was stating the time of day or what she planned to cook for supper. Not being able to afford things was a condition she and we had always known, and I thought of her Mystery Rides when we were kids, her ability to take nothing and make something fun out of it.

I thought, too, of the book money I still had in the bank, enough to stay in a good hotel and eat well and drink well, which we did for the next two nights in Key West. We found a resort on a beach, swam in its pool, ate all our meals outside in the salt air under thatched umbrellas, and we walked from shop to shop under the sun with other tourists, something we'd never been before.

Mom and Nicole seemed to soak in this idleness as a much-needed break from their graduate work, and I couldn't remember ever being this happy before. There was the light-shouldered feeling that a kind of darkness was behind us for good, that we'd gotten through it and that from here on out things would be better. But there was this, too: I was finally taking care of my family the way I'd felt called to from the beginning, since I was a boy and Pop had left the five of us in that cottage in the woods.

And how sweet to be able to give my mother a Mystery Ride, to sit with her and Nicole at a linen-covered table overlooking the sea, the sun going down like some gloriously kept promise, to tell her to order whatever she wanted, to eat and drink her fill, how she looked at me once and shook her head, her eyes s.h.i.+ning.

On Sunday we drove straight from Key West to the airport in Miami. The sun was brighter than ever, and I sat in the backseat squinting out at marine supply stores and beach shacks and stretches of blue-green salt water. A cormorant swooped off a rotting post and disappeared into a thick stand of mangroves, and my face and arms were sunburned. With my new bolo tie and its digital screen, I felt like some aristocratic bohemian.

I was inside the airport only twenty minutes when I saw a woman crying near one of the shops. She was thirty-five or forty years old. She had curly black hair, and she was short and round, and three young women were comforting her. They wore the same waitressing uniform of a restaurant along the airport's corridor, a cotton dress the color of peaches, a white ap.r.o.n cinched in at their hips, these pretty Cubana girls asking the woman if she was all right. Did she call the police? Are those men still down there?

I stopped walking. People pa.s.sed me by. A businessman's briefcase b.u.mped the backpack over my shoulder, and he turned and apologized, a man in a blue b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rt and yellow tie, his cologne lingering in the air. The woman was saying, "No, they're still there, and I'm afraid to walk to my gate gate."

I was stepping toward the women. I said, "What happened? Do you need some help?" All four of them looked me over, a sunburned tourist in jeans and a short-sleeve s.h.i.+rt and electronic bolo tie, a leather book bag over his shoulder. The woman sniffled and told me her story. She'd just hurried here from another gate, and she'd been pulling her suitcase on wheels behind her. Two men were sitting on the floor against the wall, and one of them called out to her, "Hey, lady, quit dragging your a.s.s." He pointed to her suitcase and the two men laughed, and the woman stopped and told them off.

"What'd you say to them?"

"I said they had no business talking to me like that and then one of them stood up and bent my arm behind my back and kicked kicked me-" Her voice broke. She put her hand over her mouth and looked down at the crowded gates and shook her head. me-" Her voice broke. She put her hand over her mouth and looked down at the crowded gates and shook her head.

Two of the other women had drifted back to work. One remained, her hand on the woman's shoulder. "Wait for security. They should be here soon."

But they weren't here, and I was saying to the woman, "Let's go. I'll walk you to your gate."

She thanked me, her accent New York City. She sniffled once more and grabbed the handle of her suitcase and pulled it as I walked beside her. Up ahead of us were hundreds of people heading home after sharing Thanksgiving with their families, and most of them seemed to be families, mothers and fathers and grandmothers, little kids dozing in their laps or sitting two to a chair sharing a book or a bag of chips. Most of the kids were in a T-s.h.i.+rt and shorts like their parents, others were dressed up. In the center of the terminal was a decorative dividing wall ten or twelve feet high and built out of gla.s.s block. Across from it four young black girls in pink dresses laughed and played some invisible game between two rows of people sitting and waiting.