filled with paraquat, and then- and then Jay is on the ground, vomiting, nose bleeding, lips foaming, and if there is a benevolent God or a being or a higher power, then the wind would shift right then.
It doesn't.
When he is found the next morning by one of the farmworkers, a middle-aged black man named Herschel, Jay is lying in the dirt, barely alive. The wind has shifted, but only later. A boy of nineteen, in his prime, lying at the edge of a potato field. His fingernails have turned black.
You could think about that a long time, and I have, ever since Jay told me.
'When I woke up in the hospital, like three days later, they had an airway down me-' He lay back on his bed. I noticed that he was playing with the dial on the oxygen machine. He breathed through his nose, easily now. The oxygenation meter said ninety-six percent. 'I asked about my mother. They told me she was gone. Drove off. She probably had no idea I was in the hospital. She and my father had a terrible fight that night. I think she was angry that he wouldn't let me use the truck. He probably hit her. He really might have. She had this little old shit car, a Toyota, and took off. Didn't pack. Just fucking took off. Later my father admitted he'd hit her.'
'Where did she go?'
'I don't know. I always figured she went to live with her father, he was some oil guy in Texas.'
'She never told you where she'd gone?'
Before answering my question, Jay did a strange thing. He reached into his drawer and pulled out what looked like a cigar. It was a cigar. He bit off the end.
'You going to smoke that?'
'I wish.'
'You wish?'
'I love the taste of cigars. I light one maybe once a month. One puff and that's it.'
I remembered the night I'd met Jay. 'Is that the one Allison got for you in the Havana Room?'
'The very same, man. I saved it for a special occasion.'
'Which is what?'
'I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone. Hey, open the windows, would you?'
There were two, one facing the street, one over the stairs. I lifted them up and the cold night rushed in. Meanwhile Rainey went to the kitchen, ran the water, and returned with a glass nearly full. 'Open the door, too.'
I did. He pulled out an inhaler and gave himself several more shots, and when he pulled it away, the medicinal mist of the stuff floated from his mouth.
'Okay.' He pulled the glass of water close, then lit the cigar. He blew air through it, making the tip glow, looked up at me, nodded, then puffed once, held the smoke in his mouth until his eyes widened, then released the smoke upward. It dissipated in the air from the windows and door so quickly I barely smelled anything.
'That's good.' He dropped the cigar into the water, making a short hiss, then closed his eyes and seemed to redream the smell of the cigar. His face reddened. He coughed violently and shot himself with the inhaler again. 'All right… I'm all right. There. Fucking stupid, fucking suicidal.' He coughed deeply but laughed. 'One half puff and I'm a'- he coughed-'a mess.' He sucked hard on the oxygen. 'Stupid, but I love it. Lung tissue reacts so quickly. That was it. My indulgence, Bill. Once a fucking month for Christ's sake, one half puff.' He put away the lighter in his drawer, coughed again, hard, and spat a brown glob into the trash.
I got up to close the windows and door. 'So, you were telling me-?'
'Right. My mother drove off that night and I never saw her again, man.' He stopped, his eyes considering the enormity of this, the implausible strangeness of it. 'I asked my father a million times where she'd gone, and he was so fucked up by everything, sometimes he said she must have a boyfriend, sometimes he didn't know, sometimes he said she must've gone back to Texas. He said he called information down there, in Houston. He took a trip one time and I figured he went looking for her. That he knew and didn't tell me. Maybe he'd seen her with another man. But I wasn't sure. He wasn't well. When he was dying, he made me promise to tell her that he was sorry, that he had always loved her, that he- shit, he was a mess, he was weeping, he was fucked up. It's bad to see your father like that. His life came to nothing, he was a drunk and a fuckup and he never got over how one day he had a beautiful wife and son who was, you know, maybe going to play in the majors, maybe- only maybe, and then the next he has no wife and a son who can't even blow out a match.'
We sat there. I didn't have anything useful to say. I think it's possible to hate one's father yet also grieve for him, and this might have described how Jay felt. But I didn't give voice to the thought; instead I watched the compression device on the oxygen chamber rise and fall, while outside the room's tiny windows the Brooklyn night spun past.
But in time Jay began to remember again, and now he simply talked into the room toward the ceiling, his voice not confessionalfor a confession requires not only wrongdoing but also a listener willing to make a moral judgment- but duller than that, as if giving testimony in a long and intricate case, the points of which he had mastered and yet which he knew was probably of slim interest to anyone else. There is only a little relief in simply letting such a collection of facts unspool from oneself, but we all of us were once chimps chattering in the trees, desperate to be heard and understood, to find a language particular to the self, and in this Jay was no different.
Within two months of his accident, he said, he'd regained the strength to get to England. His chances of playing professional baseball were now zero. The Yankees called after he hadn't reported, then received further details through his college coach. They sent a kind but brief letter wishing him well with his recuperation. Meanwhile he was spitting up buckets of phlegm every day, learning to use a nebulizer correctly. He could swing a bat weakly and he could throw off speed, but that was it. The shock was enormous, staggering. As was the fact that his mother had not yet come home. The only possible compensation would be to find Eliza Carmody. He'd written her, received one letter back. He did not tell her of the accident. He tried to call her, with no luck. So that fall he bought a ticket using the remains of his signing bonus money. He arrived at Paddington Station, rail thin, hair long, with almost no money, willing to live anywhere in London. He moved between neighborhoods and acquaintances, some benign, some not, the expectable grab bag of out-of-work models, would-be novelists, cannabis lay-abouts, abused seekers of truth, and piano-playing carpenters. That he did not understand the striations of English society meant that he was unencumbered by certain anxieties. And anyway, when you were an American in London, those things did not matter so much. The Brits liked the fact that you didn't understand, it was refreshing to them, or so they said. He found the London girls exciting and he wished he had more money with which to chase them. He found Eliza, he said. A house in Chelsea, on Tite Street. Ivy and black shutters. The parents were never home. Jay and Eliza were left alone. Her father was trying to rearrange the funding for the tunnel between London and Paris, the Chunnel. He was a little fat man with sausage fingers and almost no understanding of twenty-year-old girls. Jay saw him once at the end of the driveway and feared the man instantly.
Eliza didn't seem happy to see him. She didn't seem anything, really. Discouraged, or tired, actually. She played tennis with a friend on the soft clay court behind her house while he watched. But she wasn't well and in the middle of a point she went to the bushes and vomited matter-of-factly. He was in love with Eliza, and when she told him that she was pregnant he felt shock and a small sudden pride. Are you sure? he asked. Of course, yes, of course I am, she said. Mine? My baby? Yes absolutely, who do you bloody think I am? she said. They kept it secret for several weeks, but her mother, herself a former tall beauty, began to ask questions, and so with Jay present, Eliza told her mother. Instantly the parents were furious. They had plans for their daughter, plans that did not include a penniless, good-looking American who hung over park benches winded after a short walk.
There followed quite a fight, with Eliza defiant of her parents' disapproval yet noncommittal toward Jay himself. She was, after all, from a wealthy family, and had no intention of marrying someone with no money. None whatsoever, end of discussion, no romantic illusions ever suffered for a moment in this house, Mr. Raintree, or what ever your name is! Finally Eliza's mother burst into tears and fled up the stairs, leaving her father to glare coldly upward at Jay. He understood that he was an intruder, and said he'd come for Eliza the next day; when he did, pressing the buzzer on the big green door early in the morning, she was gone. I'm sorry, her mother said, lips pinched in resolution. I shan't discuss it. He called the house almost one hundred times over the next two days and there was no answer, and then a male voice answered and said if he called again they'd have him arrested and deported. They knew where his apartment was, they would make it difficult for him, maybe they would have a go at him- just so that he remembered what's what- Mr. Carmody's bank had security people. Finally, Jay stood outside
