It’s scary when that happens. Scary enough to make me want to cry, mourning my beautiful little girl. The one who was so strong for me when she was ill. The one who looked up from her hospital bed—she was so sick that night, so sick!—and said, Don’t worry, Mommy, I’m not going to die. I checked with God and he said not to worry, I’ll be fine.
And she was. From that day on Kelly got better. Little by little, day by day, every test showed she was going into remission. Eventually, on that marvelous ninth birthday, that wonderful wonderful birthday, all the blood work, all the scans showed her cancer-free. I thanked God, I thanked the doctors and the nurses, but mostly I thanked Kelly, because she’s the one who never gave up, who never let the disease take over.
Anyhow, so that’s my state of mind. We live in the house in Valley Stream I inherited from my mom, the one she bought after she and my dad divorced. A divorce I always figured was partly my fault. All the stress I caused for them when I was Kelly’s age. Guilt, guilt, guilt. The mortgage happened when Mom needed money for a hospice. I told her—promised her—I wouldn’t put a mortgage on the house, that was her gift to me and Kelly, but what can you do?
My dad, a New York state trooper, he used to have a saying when he was about to deal with something important: I’m loaded for bear. Well, I thought I was loaded for bear, or at least loaded for Kelly. But when she finally did come home what did her mother do?
Mom burst into tears.
Because Kelly is smiling that impish smile, the one she first learned moments after being born. That smile I hadn’t seen for a while, not directed at me. A smile that breaks my heart because I miss it so.
“Mom? Why are you crying? Did something happen?”
I’m shaking my head. Can’t get the words out so I point to my lips, and then to her.
“You want to talk,” Kelly says. “Sure, yeah. You saw me on the bike. It was really dumb, me not wearing a helmet. I know that and I’m sorry. Seth was wearing his helmet, did you notice? He gave me a hard time, said it was so retarded, not wearing protection for your brainpan. Isn’t it weird he’d say ‘brainpan’? But that’s Seth. And the tattoo, Mom?”
Kelly swings around, lifts her little midi-blouse.
“It’s a fake. Body art. Got it at this place in Long Beach, on the boardwalk.”
I wipe my eyes, blow my nose, very nearly speechless. “Oh, Kelly.”
My daughter plunks herself on the stool next to me. With her amazing eyes and her amazing smile, she looks five going on twenty. “You’ve got to get over this worry thing, Mom. I’m okay. Really. The helmet? Won’t happen again.”
“People get killed on motorcycles,” I respond, my voice husky.
“Yeah, they do. They get killed by lightning, too. And by worrying themselves to death.”
“Who’s Seth?”
Kelly looks at her fingernails. “You’re going to ground me, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then I better go to my room,” she says, and flounces away, as if it’s fun to be grounded. As if being grounded was her idea.
She stops on the stairway, looking back at me in the kitchen.
“Don’t worry, okay?” she says. “There’s just totally no reason to worry about me.”
But there is. Big-time. And, as it turns out, for a much bigger reason than I ever imagined.
3. Man Of Steel
The thing about a turkey buzzard is that it looks really ugly perched on a branch or hopping around next to roadkill. Looks less like a bird, more like feathered hyena with hunched shoulders and a hooked nose. But let the ungainly critter soar and it becomes unspeakably beautiful, rising on big and glorious wings. What an amazing transformation, from a hideous bag of cackling bones to an elegant dark angel, circling in the noonday sun.
Ricky Lang envies the buzzard. He’s sprawled on the trunk lid of his BMW 760i, the twelve-cylinder sedan, staring up into the blinding blue sky. What he wants, what he really and truly wants at this very moment is to be that buzzard. Riding the updraft without effort, just the slightest wind-ripple of white feathers marking the edge of his great black wings. White feathers like daubs of ceremonial paint. Not as valuable or potent as eagle feathers, he’ll grant you that, but Ricky prefers the buzzard to the eagle because buzzards love to fly for the sake of flying.
Oh, baby, how they love to soar on the blurry heat rising from the vast casino parking lot. They soar over the malls and highways, anywhere there’s an updraft. Of course buzzards keep their eyes peeled for food, for something newly dead, that’s what they do, how they survive. But it isn’t just hunger that motivates the birds. Ricky has seen scores of turkey buzzards far out into the Florida Bay, circling miles from shore. Soaring like that, over water, a buzzard takes its chances. If it has to rest in the water it will be unable to launch itself back into the air. Feathers soaked, it will drown. Yet still it soars in dangerous places.
There’s only one explanation for such behavior. The big ugly bird soars in dangerous places because doing so makes it beautiful.
When the heat on the trunk lid finally becomes unbearable, Ricky Lang heaves himself upright. Five feet ten inches of hard muscle, small, fierce brown eyes flecked with gold, and the rolling, pigeon-toed gait of a sailor. Not that he’s ever been to sea, not really. Airboats don’t count—an airboat is more like skidding a slick car around a soft, watery track. Got the slightly bowed legs from his dad. That and hands like ten-pound hammers. First time Ricky ever saw the movie Superman he had to talk back to the screen because white-bread Clark Kent wasn’t the Man of Steel, no way. Tito Lang was the Man of Steel, everybody knew that! Fists like steel, head like steel, nobody messed with Tito, back in the day.
Ricky, five years old, assumed Superman was stealing from his father. Thirty years later, the Tito of today—that doesn’t bear thinking about, it makes his head hurt. More like the Man of Mush than the Man of Steel. Brain gone soft, pickled with swamp whiskey, and his trembling hands formed into weak arthritic claws that can’t manage his own zipper.
Thinking about his dad, Ricky clenches his fists so hard that his ragged fingernails draw blood. Feels good, the pain, keeps him focused. Unlike his father, Ricky doesn’t drink swamp whiskey, or any form of alcohol. He gets drunk on other things, on liquors that form in his own brain.
Fear of the dead, rage at the living. That’s what keeps his heart beating. Lately he’s learned to sip at the rage, make it last. For instance today he’s been enjoying a prolonged confrontation with casino security. Started at, what, eight in the morning, and it’s nearly one o’clock in the afternoon, so he’s had it going for five hours, on and off. A marvel of sustain. He loves the push and pull of it, the way he makes the security guards all jumpy and sweaty. Their eyes bugging when they see him approaching the main entrance. Hurried yaps into their handheld radios, looking for guidance, calling in the reinforcements. They’re afraid of him and that makes it sweet, because he can savor their fear and use it to organize his own thoughts.
Being in charge of his own thoughts is very important to Ricky. That when he says jump, his thoughts say how high? Because his thoughts have been all over the place lately, bouncing around in his skull like speeding pinballs. Each bounce inside his head resonates all the way to the balls of his feet, and makes him feel like he can leap buildings in a single bound.
As Ricky approaches the entrance, shrugging his big shoulders like a linebacker, a size-large dude in a lime-green blazer hurries out to intercept him.
“Am I a bird or a plane?” he asks before the guard can speak. “You decide.”
The guard glances nervously at a charter bus unloading senior citizens. All those soft, Q-tip heads bobbing slightly as they head for the bingo halls and the slot machines.