“Your ole man isn’t very good at it either. If it makes you feel any better. He’d like to be. Maybe you can tell me what you liked about it that made you quit thinking you’re thinking.”
“You’re not that old.” Paul looks at me peevishly.
“Forty-four.”
“Umm,” he says — a thought possibly too fretsome to speak. “You could still improve.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Your mother doesn’t think so.” This doesn’t qualify as a current event.
“Do you know the best airline?”
“No, let’s hear it.”
“Northwest,” Paul says seriously. “Because it flies to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.” And suddenly he’s trying to suppress a big guffaw. For some reason this is funny.
“Maybe I’ll take you out there sometime on a camping trip.” I watch basketballs fill the interior air like bubbles.
“Do they have a hall of fame in Minnesota?”
“Probably not.”
“Okay, good,” he says. “We can go anytime, then.”
On our way out we make a fast foray through the gift boutique. Paul, at my instruction, picks out tiny gold basketball earrings for his sister and a plastic basketball paperweight for his mother — gifts he feels uncertain they’ll like, though I tell him they will. We discuss a rabbit’s foot with a basketball attached as an olive branch gesture for Charley, but Paul goes balky after staring at it a minute. “He has everything he wants,” he says grudgingly, without adding “including your wife and your kids.” So that after buying two tee-shirts for ourselves, we pass back out into the parking lot with Charley ungifted, which suits both of us perfectly.
On the asphalt it is full, hot Massachusetts afternoon. New cars have arrived. The river has gone ranker and more hazy. We’ve spent forty-five minutes in this hall of fame, which pleases me since we got our fill, exchanged words of hope, encountered specific subjects of immediate interest and concern (Paul thinking he’s thinking) and seem to have emerged a unit. A better start than I expected.
The big, jumpsuited Oklahoman is sprawled out with his tiny daughter under one of the linden saplings by the river’s retaining wall. They are enjoying their lunch from tinfoil packets spread on the ground, and drinking out of an Igloo cooler, using paper cups. He has his Keds and socks off and his pants rolled up like a farmer. Little Kristy is as pristine as an Easter present and talking to him in a confidential, animated way, wiggling one of his toes with her two hands while he stares at the sky. I’m tempted to wander over and offer a word of parting, talk to them twice because I’ve talked to them once, act as a better welcome committee for the Northeast Corridor, dream up some insider dope “I just thought about” and am glad to find him still here to share — something in the realty line. As always, I’m moved by the displacement woes of other Americans.
Only there’s nothing I know that he doesn’t (such is the nature of realty lore), and I decide against it and just stand at my car door and watch them respectfully — their backs to me, their modest picnic offering this big, panoramic, foreign-seeming river as comfort and company, all their hopes focused on a new settlement. Some people do nicely on their own and by the truest reckoning set themselves down where they’ll be happiest.
“Care to guess how hungry I am?” Paul says over the hot car roof, waiting for me to unlock his side. He is squinting in the sun, looking unsavory as a little perpetrator.
“Let’s see,” I say. “You were supposed to get us something from the fucking vending machines.” I say “fucking” just to amuse him. The freeway pounds along behind us — cars, vans, U-Hauls, buses — America on a move-in Saturday afternoon.
“I guess I just facked up,” he says to challenge me back. “But I could eat the asshole out of a dead Whopper.” An insolent leer further disfigures his pudgy kid’s features.
“Soup’d be better on an empty brain,” I say, and pop his door lock.
“Okay, doc-taaah! Doc-tah, doc-tah, doc-tah,” he says, snapping open his door and ducking in. I hear him bark in the car. “Bark, bark, bark, bark.” I don’t know what this is to signify: happiness (like a real dog)? Happiness’s defeat at the hands of uncertainty? Fear and hope, I seem to remember from someplace, are alike underneath.
From the linden tree shade, Kristy hears something in the afternoon breeze — a dog barking somewhere, my son in our car. She turns and looks toward me, puzzled. I wave at her, a fugitive wave her bumpkin father doesn’t see. Then I duck my own head into the hot-as-an-oven car with my son and we are on our way to Cooperstown.
At one o’clock, we pull in for a pit stop, and I send Paul for a sack of Whalers and Diet Pepsis while I wash dead grackle off my hand in the men’s. And then we’re off spinning again down the pike, past the Appalachian Trail and through the lowly Berkshires, where not long ago Paul was a camper at Camp Unhappy, though he makes no mention of it now, so screwed down is he into his own woolly concerns — thinking he’s thinking, silently barking, his penis possibly tingling.
After a half hour of breathing Paul’s sour-meat odor, I make a suggestion that he take off his Happiness Is Being Single shirt and put on his new one for a change of scenery and as an emblematic suiting-up for the trip. And to my surprise he agrees, skinning the old fouled one off right in the seat, unabashedly exposing his untanned, unhairy and surprisingly jiggly torso. (Possibly he’ll be a big fatty, unlike Ann or me; though it doesn’t make any difference if he will simply live past fifteen.)
The new shirt is Xtra large, long and white, with nothing but a big super-real orange basketball on its front and the words The Rockunderneath in red block letters. It smells new and starched and chemically clean and, I’m hoping, will mask Paul’s unwashed, gunky aroma until we check into the Deerslayer Inn, he can take a forced bath and I can throw his old one away on the sly.
For a while after our Whalers, Paul again grows moodily silent, then heavy-eyed, then slips off to a snooze while green boilerplate Massachusetts countryside scrolls past on both sides. I turn on the radio for a holiday weather and traffic check and conceivably to learn the facts of last night’s murder, which, for all the time and driving that’s elapsed, occurred only eighty miles south, still well within the central New England area, the small radar sweep of grief, loss, outrage. But nothing comes in on AM or FM, only the ordinary news of holiday fatality: six for Connecticut, six for Mass., two for Vermont, ten for NY; plus five drownings, three boating per se, two falls from high places, one choking, one “fireworks related.” No knifings. Evidently last night’s death was not charged to the holiday.
I “seek” around then, happy to have Paul out of action and for my mind to find its own comfort leveclass="underline" a medical call-in from Pittsfield offers “painless erection help;” a Christian money-matters holiday radiothon from Schaghticoke is interpreting the The Creator’s views on Chapter 13 filings (He thinks some are okay). Another station profiles lifers in Attica selling Girl Scout cookies “in the population.” “We do think we shouldn’t be totally prevented from adding to the larger good”—laughter from other cons—“but we don’t go around knocking on each other’s cells wearing little green outfits either.” Though a falsetto voice adds, “Not this afternoon anyway.”
I turn it off as we get into the static zone at the New York border. And with my son beside me, his scissored and gouged head against his cool window glass, his mind in some swarming, memory-plagued darkness which causes his fingers to dance and his cheek to twitch like a puppy’s in a dream of escape, my own mind bends with unexpected admiration toward meisterbuilder O’Dell’s big blue house on the knoll; and to what a great, if impersonal, true-to-your-dreams home it is — a place any modern family of whatever configuration or marital riggery ought to feel lamebrained not to make a reasonably good go of life in. A type of “go” I could never quite catch the trick of, even in the most halcyon days, when we all were a tidy family in our own substantial house in Haddam. I somehow could never create a sufficiently thick warp and woof, never manufacture enough domestic assumables that we could get on to assuming them. I was always gone too much with my sportswriting work; never felt owning was enough different from renting (except that you couldn’t leave). In my mind a sense of contingency and the possibility of imminent change in status underlay everything, though we stayed for more than a decade, and I stayed longer. It always seemed to me enough just to know that someone loved you and would go on loving you forever (as I tried to convince Ann again today, and she rejected again), and that the mise-en-scène for love was only that and not a character in the play itself.