Paul sniffs. “In the next century we’re all going to be enslaved by the insects that survive this century’s pesticides. With this I acknowledge being in a band of maladapted creatures whose time is coming to a close. I hope the new leaders will treat me as a friend.” He again sniffs, then worries his nose with his dirty fingers.
“Is that a lyric from some rock song?” I’m getting us back into the traffic flow, heading toward the center of town again. We have made a circle.
“It’s just common knowledge,” Paul says, rubbing his knee with his wart.
Almost immediately I see a sign I missed when Paul and I were arguing: a tall, rail-thin, buckskin-and-high-moccasined pioneer man in profile, holding a flintlock rifle, standing on a lakeshore with triangular pine trees in the background. DEERSLAYER INN STRAIGHT AHEAD. A blessed promise.
“Don’t you have a better view of human progress than that?” I push right out across Main among the late-Saturday traffic and trolley vans shunting tourists hither and yon. Lake Otsego is unexpectedly straight out ahead — lush, Norwegian-looking headlands miles away on its far shore, lumping north into the hazy Adirondacks.
“Too many things are bothering me all the time. It gets to be old.”
“You know,” I say, ignoring him, “those guys who founded this whole place thought if they didn’t shake loose of old dependencies they’d be vulnerable to the world’s innate wildness—“
“By place do you mean Cooperstown?”
“No. I don’t. I meant something else.”
“So who was Cooperstown named after?” he says, facing toward the sparkling lake as if it were space he was considering flying off into.
“James Fenimore Cooper,” I say. “He was a famous American novelist who wrote books about Indians playing baseball.” Paul flashes me a look of halfway pleasant uncertainty. He knows I’m tired of him and may be making fun of him again. Though I can also see in his features — as I have other times, and as the dappled light passes over them — the adult face he’ll most likely end up with: large, grave, ironic, possibly gullible, possibly gentle, but not likely so happy. Not my face, but a way mine could’ve been with fewer coping skills. “Do you think you’re a failure?” I say, slowing across from the Deerslayer, ready to turn up the drive through two rows of tall spruces beyond which is the longed-for inn, its Victorian porches shaded deep in the late day, the big chairs I’ve daydreamed about occupied by a few contented travelers, but with room for more.
“At what?” Paul says. “I haven’t had enough time to fail yet, I’m still learning how.” I wait for traffic to clear. Lake Otsego is beside us now, flat and breezeless through an afternoon haze.
“I mean at being a kid. An ass-o-lescent. Whatever it is you think you are now.” My blinker is blinking, my palms gripping the wheel.
“Sure, Frank,” Paul says arrogantly, possibly not even knowing what he’s agreeing to.
“Well, you’re not,” I say. “So you’re just going to have to figure out something else to think about yourself, because you’re not. I love you. And don’t call me Frank, goddamn it. I don’t want my son to call me Frank. It makes me feel like your fucking stepfather. Why don’t you tell me a joke. I could use a joke. You’re good at that.”
And then a sudden stellar quiet settles on us two, waiting to turn, as if a rough barrier had been reached, tried, failed at but then briskly gotten over before we knew it or how. I for some reason sense that Paul might cry, or at least nearly cry — an event I haven’t witnessed in a long time and that he has officially ceased yet might try again just this once for old times’ sake.
But in fact it’s my own eyes that go hot and steamy, though I couldn’t tell you why (other than my age).
“Can you hold your breath for fifty-five seconds straight?” Paul says as I swing up across the highway.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Do it,” Paul says, looking straight at me, deadpan. “Just stop the car.” He is opaque and gloating with something hilarious.
And so, in the shady drive to the Deerslayer, I do. I hit the brakes. “All right, I’m holding it,” I say. “This better be really funny. I’m ready for a drink.”
He clamps his mouth shut and closes his eyes, and I close mine, and we wait together in the a/c wind and engine murmur and thermostat click while I count, one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand …
When I closed my eyes the dashboard digital read 5:14, and when I open them it reads 5:15. Paul has his open, though he seems to be counting silently like a zealot speaking some private beseechments to God.
“Okay. Fifty-five. What’s the punch line? I’m in a hurry.” My foot is easing off the brake. “‘I didn’t know shit could hold its breath so long?’ Is it that good?”
“Fifty-five is how long the first jolt lasts in the electric chair. I read that in a magazine. Did you think it seemed like a long time or a short time?” He blinks at me, curious.
“It seemed pretty long to me,” I say unhappily. “And that wasn’t very funny.”
“Me too,” he says, fingering his bunged-up ear rim and inspecting his finger for blood. “It’s supposed to knock you out, though.”
“That’d be a lot better,” I say. Parents, of course, think about dying day and night — especially when they see their children one weekend a month. It’s not so surprising their children would follow suit.
“You just lose everything when you lose your sense of humor,” Paul says in a mock-official voice.
And I’m back in gear then, tires skidding on pine needles and up into the cool and (I hope) blissful removes of the Deerslayer. A bell is gonging. I see an old belfry stand in the side yard being clappered by a smiling young woman in a white tunic and chef’s hat, waving to us as we arrive, just like in some travelogue of happy summer days in Cooperstown. I wheel in feeling as if we were late and everybody had been distracted by our absence, only now we’ve arrived and everything can start.
9
The Deerslayer is as perfect as I’d hoped — a wide, rambling, spavined late Victorian with yellow scalloped mansards, spindle-lathed porch railings, creaky stairs leading to long, shadowy, disinfectant-smelling hallways, little twin pig-iron bedsteads, a table fan, and a bath at the end of the hall.
Downstairs there’s a long, slumberous living room with ancient-smelling slipcovered couches, a scabbed-up old Kimball spinet, a “take one, leave one” library, with dinner served in the shadowy dining room between 5:30 and 7:00 (“No late diners please!”). There is, however and unfortunately, no bar, no complimentary cocktails, no canapés, no TV. (I have embellished it some, but who could blame me?) And yet it still seems to me a perfect place where a man can sleep with a teenage boy in his room and arouse no suspicions.
Drinkless, then, I stretch out on the too-soft mattress while Paul goes “exploring.” I relax my jaw sinews, twist my back a little, unlimber my toes in the table-fan breeze and wait to let sleep steal upon me like a bushman out of the twilight. To this end I again braid together new nonsense components, which seep into my mind like anesthesia. We better dust off our Sally Caldwell … I’m sorry I drove your erection you putz … Phogg Allen, the long face … eat your face … You musta been a beautiful Doctor Zhivago, you stranger in the Susquehanna … And I’m gone off into tunneling darkness before I can even welcome it.
And then, sooner than I wanted, I’m emerged — lushly, my head spinning in darkness, alone, my son nowhere near me.
For a time I lie still, as a cool lake breeze circulates thickly around the spruce and elms and into the room through the soft fan whir. Somewhere nearby a bug zapper toasts one after another of the big north-woods Sabre-jet mosquitoes, and above me on the ceiling a smoke detector beams its little red-eye signal out of the dark.