And waited till the long, extended blink was finished. And then, very deliberately, threw one of his own like a willed fit. Thinking, I read yours, now you read mine.
Thinking, she was financed by bankers, by bankers, not usurers, not loan sharks who required exorbitant interest, bankers, these merely hardened bankers who, when she couldn’t pay back her loans (because Druff’s middle-sized, rather backwater city, with its good-enough symphony orchestra of the second rank, its undersubscribed newspaper and losing football and basketball franchises, and narrow, four-story, dressed-limestone City Hall — once a department store — old-fashioned and less imposing, finally, than a county courthouse — for where were its cannons, its respectful, generic, de rigueur statues of Civil War rebs or Yankees or doughboys or G.I.’s? — in a town square; the building still, despite its conversion, faintly mercantile, vaguely pro tem, giving off trace elements of officious red-tape vibes, as if it were the headquarters of some army of occupation, was a fairly conventional, fairly conservative middle-sized city, whose relatively timid consumers wouldn’t much care for, so didn’t much buy, the risky frills and back-of-the-truck furbelows of contraband rugs, and whose conventional, conservative loan officers in its great gray banks and S&Ls would have pretty much written off the Third World and have had nothing to do altogether with the out-and-out nutso fringe doings of a subterranean Fourth One, let alone any shady arrangements of a black market venture capitalism, who wouldn’t so much as consider, even out of politeness, handing over a loan application to be filled out by one of its representatives, never mind that they wouldn’t have bothered to read it if they had, and so Su’ad had miscalculated, had been taken in by what she perceived — poor, dusky, benighted, cause-ridden, wacko Shiite Muslim maiden lady that she was — to be the advertised, universally obtaining Satanic condition, although — fortunately for her short-range goals, however disastrous it turned out to have been for her longer ones — this particular middle-sized city had fringe arrangements of its own, even its own quiet, stylish, hardened-banker terrorists not so squeamish or choosy as their éminence grise banker cousins with their stuffy, institutional FDICs or as their snooty enough second cousins with their FSLIC ones, and who would extend her cash, Druff imagined, not for her signature on a contract, or even, he imagined, for her marker, but just — they must have insisted on this, worked it into the deal like the devastating fine print in some apparently innocuous clause — on the basis of her given word alone) then, though I can’t prove this either, struck her down in what wasn’t quite yet even her prime, because, well, just because, because downtown had become too tame, and what was a fellow to do, where was he supposed to go to if he wanted to go wilding?
Yeah, Mikey, Druff thought, go ahead. Read that!
Which, of course, Mikey didn’t, couldn’t. They had different agendas. Mikey and Dad were on two separate, totally different, entirely arrested beams. Mikey into his preoccupations with Health and a sort of immutability on command of anything that might once have pleased him. (He would have gone back to Lebanon with her, even if it meant they might have taken him hostage! The trouble with his son, Druff thought, was that he didn’t think things all the way through. He was going to go back to Lebanon with the woman he loved, willing to accept the risks, to take his chances on becoming a hostage. All right. So far so good. But had it once crossed his mind that they might not carry Blues hockey in the Middle East?) And Druff, Druff thought, never one to let himself off lightly if he could shoot himself in the foot with both barrels — with his own opposing preoccupations, with finding the action and recklessly throwing himself into harm’s way, not only forbidding the immutable but absolutely encouraging it, not only inviting a MacGuffin into his life but positively becoming one!
Well.
Druff’s eyes open again, he saw his son shake his head, mournful, woeful.
“Hey,” he said apologetically, “I’m sorry, Mike. I really am.”
“Did they give you a reason?”
“A reason?”
“For not letting us have the marathon?”
It was Druff’s last straw. He practically exploded. He could have awakened Rose Helen, upstairs sleeping, but he was past caring. “God damn it, Mikey, do you even know what I do for a living?” he demanded. “Do you? Well, do you?”
“You’re City Commissioner of Streets.”
“That’s right,” Druff said. “Now what do you suppose that entails?”
“You’re in charge of the streets.”
“Good,” Druff said. “Now where are the marathons run? Look at me. Don’t shut your eyes. Look at me! Where are they run?”
“In the streets.”
“Excellent. They’re run in the streets. Excellent. They’re run in the streets and I’m their commissioner. Why would I need a Scouffas, why would I need a McIlvoy? I’m City Commissioner of Streets, the streets are my jurisdiction. I could cross without looking both ways if I wanted. So if I wanted to put on a marathon why would I need the permission of people who don’t even live or pay taxes here?”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t. Wonderful!”
“Then you’ll do it?”
Druff stared at him.
“You’ll do it? You’ll put one on?”
And stared at him.
“You promise?”
“Sure,” said Druff, “honor bright. Cross my heart. Hope to kiss a pig.”
Then Mikey said something in a manner so completely neutral and uninflected that, at first, Druff, though he’d heard the words, had no notion, none at all, what they meant. “Oh Dad” was what he said. But for the separation of the two discrete syllables, it could almost have been some sound of the body — some incoherent, vaguely natural (though not nature proper: not the wind, not the water; not fire, not earth) noise of the emotions, of displacement, like the tuneless, interstitial creak of bones. He said it again. “Oh Dad.” Was it nerves? It was grief.
Then — to give himself time, Druff would have said “gradually,” but there was nothing gradual about it, nothing calibrated, nothing stepping-stoned, nothing scalar, nothing runged; there were no easy stages — he recalled its terms, and understood that whatever their agendas, they were on the same beam, all right. Even before Mikey asked him if he remembered Diosodidio Macospodagal. Why, the kid was a hostage. He was Druff’s hostage.
“The doctor?”
“Yes,” Michael said.
“You were a kid,” Druff said. “How do you remember his name?”
“I remember,” Michael said.
“Well,” Druff said, “it’s a funny name. The kind of name you never forget. Hey,” Druff said, “what’s this? What’s the matter with you? Do you want to wake your mother? Hey, Michael, come on. Stop it, Mikey. You’re a grown man. Stop it now.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”
“Of course you can help it. Take a deep breath. Go on, take a deep breath.”
“Fuck a deep breath.”
“Do you know how silly you sound?”
“Fuck a deep breath. Fuck a deep breath.”
“All right now. Cut it out. Will you cut it out, please?”
“Fuck cut it out. Piss on cut it out up the ass.”
“You’re making a scene.”
“Suck my scene’s dick.”