Ted put his head down on his father’s chest, so he did not see when Marty’s eyes began to flutter open. Marty croaked through days and weeks of dryness, “Did you say two tickets?”
67.
The doctors were astounded at Marty’s recovery. Astounded and oddly chagrined. They showed about as much emotion as doctors are allowed to show when something better than they expected happens through absolutely no agency of their own. Which is to say they showed very little joy and a lot of skepticism, like Marty’s resurrection was some sort of elaborate magic trick orchestrated by Ted, who just looked askance at them and said nothing about the ticket cure. The doctors didn’t want to let him go, but Marty scoffed at their dire warnings. This was his story, he told them, not theirs. Marty and Ted waited for a quiet moment and then simply walked out without checking out. It wasn’t prison. Opening the door to exit the hospital felt to Ted like rolling away the stone. He actually felt like he was in a story, his father’s story. This was a miracle of some kind, of that Ted was certain. Marty said goodbye to Mariana on his own as Ted waited outside in the car. Marty felt okay, actually, not bad at all, considering, and he had a date with destiny. He and Boston both.
They were going to drive up to Boston in the balky Corolla, so Ted had packed them each a little suitcase and was in the kitchen cutting a big roll of bologna and making sandwiches for the road.
“Dad, you ready? I don’t wanna rush, don’t wanna tire you out, I wanna take our time, get a motel.” Ted handed Marty a sandwich. Marty zipped his suitcase. Ted went to pick the suitcase up. “Jesus, what did you put in here? It weighs a ton.”
“Don’t know how long we’ll be gone, could be on the road for a while. We got the playoff, then the divisional series, then the pennant, then the World Series. Hold on, I got to call Maria.” He went off to dial his new old love. As they talked, Marty’s laughter filled the house, as did his piss-poor Spanglish. Ted just smiled and shook his head. When they opened the door to leave, they saw two shopping bags of food and a note that read, “For your trip, from M.” From Mariana. Marty peered in at the food. “Wonderful. Wonderful,” he said.
“I’m fine with bologna,” Ted said.
“Take her food, you idiot. Don’t you know what it means when a woman makes you food?”
“I bet she cooks for a lot of people.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m just saying that I bet she cooks for a lot of people.”
“What does that have to do with cooking for you? Stop being such a pussy.”
Ted picked up the bags of food.
“I was fine with bologna,” he said.
68.
They made it to the Bruckner Expressway in no time. And in a couple of hours, they were well out of the city and right in the middle of a beautiful autumn New England day. As Ted drove, Marty dived into Mariana’s food, grunting and making almost sexual pleasure noises at the taste, washing it all down with strong café con leche. Ted said, “Hand me a bologna sandwich.”
“What? Don’t be an idiot. Have some of this.”
“I said I’m fine with bologna, okay?”
Marty handed him a bologna sandwich that had all the grace and allure and taste of a brick. Ted took a bite and acted like it was good.
“Are you aware that your bologna has a first name? It’s O-S-C-A-R.”
“Shut up.” Ted tried to massage the bare bread and lunchmeat down his gullet; it was like swallowing a dry thumb.
“Second name is Mayer. M-A-Y-E-R. Your bologna’s a Jew.”
“Oh my God.”
“That wasn’t mine. That was J. Walter Thompson. They were good. There’s plenty to go around,” Marty said.
“Plenty what?”
“Plenty everything, grasshopper.”
He wagged his chin at Marty’s food. “How’s the plátanos?”
“Like eating the ass of an angel.”
“You are disgusting.”
“Life is disgusting, Ted. ‘Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement; for nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.’ Who said that?”
“Yeats.”
“Yeats!”
“Another wild old wicked man.”
“Didn’t he fuck the daughter of the woman he loved who dumped him for some dick politician?”
“I suppose you could put it that way. Maud Gonne.”
“Who cares? Who cares if Yeats was into strange? Who cares if Whitman was a homo? Or Frost an asshole to his wife? Why do we know these things? I don’t want to know such things anymore. Did the W. B. in Yeats stand for Warner Brothers?”
“It did not.”
“Well, excuse me, I’m an autodidact, Ted. Unlike book-learned, sissy you.”
“I know, you always said that. I just thought it meant you knew a lot about cars.”
“Hahaha. How’s the bologna?”
“Fuck you.”
They drove farther north like that. In perfect loving antagonism. It occurred to Ted that maybe Marty was like all the red and gold leaves he saw burning on the trees. In nature, it seems, things reached their most vibrant and beautiful right at the point of death, flaming out with all they had-why not natural man? His father was red, green, yellow, and gold, like a beautiful bird falling from the sky. Paradoxical undressing again. Ted coughed, and Marty’s mood darkened. “You got a cold?” he asked.
“Just a scratch.”
“Wear a scarf.”
“It’s like eighty degrees.”
“Driving in the car makes a wind chill factor.”
“Of seventy. Brrrr.”
“Hey, let’s get off the highway.”
“Backroads? Blue roads?”
“We got time, why not?”
Ted aimed the Corolla for an exit.
“This is your world.”
69.
It was slower and prettier going off the beaten path. They were deeper in New England. Ted had the Dead blasting as he slogged his way through a second Saharan bologna sandwich. He kept eyeing the food Mariana had delivered. The frijoles’ siren song. Finally, he could restrain himself no longer. He reached over and grabbed a handful of something and jammed it in his mouth, and then mouthful after mouthful, like a man coming out of water, gasping for air. Marty approved:
“Eat, drink, and be merry.”
“How ’bout two outta three? Where do we go up here?”
“Fuck if I know.”
“What do you mean? This is your neck of the woods.”
“No, it’s not. Not my neck.”
“You grew up outside of Boston.”
“No, I didn’t. Let me have more coffee.”
“We can’t be stopping to pee every five minutes.” But Marty grabbed the thermos anyway.
“Said in the journal you were from just outside Boston, and as a young man you used to travel all around New England on your Triumph motorcycle.”
“Motorcycles scare me.”
“You don’t ride?”
“God, no.”
“But you’re from Boston?”
“Nope. Never even been there.”
“What? Then why… why are you a Sox guy?”
“I lived in New York and I like rubbing people the wrong way.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“Why? It kept people from talking to me about anything meaningful and pissed them off at the same time. Win-win.”
“Were you born in 1918?”
“What an insult.”
Ted coughed.
“Will you put on a fucking scarf?”
“What’s with you and the scarf already? Don’t change the subject. How much of the journal is real and how much is fiction?”
“It’s faction. And that’s a fact, Jack. But it’s fiction. That’s a fict, Dick. It’s like Razzles. No one knows. History is a big fuckin’ mystery.”