“What kind of question is that?” He stood and the entire log shook. “What do you want to know?”
“Is she a thief?”
He held his hands up before him like I’d just pressed a.32 into his ribs. “Hey, hey, come on now, right?”
“Come on what? Is it a stupid question because I should know the answer is yes or because it’s no?”
“You know your sister’s not a thief!”
“How the hell do I know that?”
“Because your father would never let her go down that road.”
Clouds began to cover the sun. The wind continued to rise. It whistled through the trees so loudly that JFK perked up and looked to see if someone was calling him. “How about if you save that kind of talk for John Citizen, Mal? What else would she know? What else has she been taught?”
“She’s a smart girl,” Mal said. “Straight A’s. She’s going to go to college.”
“How smart? Smart enough to keep out of a big score or smart and capable enough to want in?”
“Jesus Christ, she’s fifteen!”
“I know that,” I said. “I want to make sure she’s nowhere near the punk when he goes down.”
He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it as a sign of reassurance, but it just hurt like hell. “I think you and her need to have a real conversation,” he said. “As soon as possible. Today. But don’t brace her.”
“I won’t.”
Mal nodded but his mouth tightened. We were uncomfortably close to talking about things that the Rands did not talk about. It was almost enough for me to ask him what he was doing, what his own plans were. Did he ever intend on retiring from the bent life, getting off the grift, or were we all doomed to play the game until we wound up on death row or sitting around watching TV with holes in our heads? Did my father find a way out or was he just dying a different slow death, sitting on the porch drinking his beer, taking care of his family, and bored out of his fucking mind?
An almost undetectable expression of worry crossed Mal’s craggy face.
“Have you seen Grey yet?” he asked.
“No.” I waited, but that seemed to be the end; I put a h of it. Another storm was building. Living in the desert, I’d forgotten what it had been like to get rained on all the time. JFK crawled under the downed tree limb and poked his nose out from beneath Mal’s ankles and stared at me.
“Something the matter?” I asked.
Mal looked foggy, reached into his shirt pocket, and retrieved another stogie butt. He lit it, tucked it into the same corner of his mouth. “I don’t know.”
A vein on his forehead began to thicken and throb.
“What is it, Mal?”
My father had said he’d found his brothers on the back lawn, looking a little lost, almost like they were sleepwalking. Was this the beginning of an episode?
“Mal?”
I stepped to him and gripped his elbow, and he snapped away with a tiny fraction of the force he was capable of but I was still pushed aside. He shifted the stogie to the other side of his mouth. “Don’t grab me.”
“I’m sorry. You just looked a little out of it.”
“I’m worried.”
“About what?”
“I’m getting forgetful. I sleep like shit. I wake up with the sweats and I go sit outside and then I’m suddenly freezing. I lose my way around town. Places I’ve been to ten thousand times and now I’m getting lost. I read road signs out loud to help me remember. I think I might really be losing it like Old Shep.”
“Mal, people who are going nuts don’t think they’re going nuts.”
“That’s what they say, but who knows if it’s true?”
Good point, actually.
“It’s hard to explain the way I feel sometimes.”
“Try.”
He held his enormous hands out before him and plied the air, trying to grab hold of something that had no form. He tried again, clutching at nothing, knuckles cracking. He let out a laugh that made my heart sink, fearing for my own future.
“Intense dreams. Nightmares.”
A fierce shiver ran through me. Christ, don’t tell me I was already showing signs of premature senility. Is that what had happened to Collie? Did he feel himself going crazy and just decided to go with it?
“I’m still sharp with the cards,” Mal said, drawing a deck from his pocket. He did a one-handed quadruple cut and then walked the queen of spades across his knuckles. “I carry a deck with me just so I can see them, shuffle through them, and know that I’ve still got a tour-card draw. That I’m still good at something.”
“You been to the doctor?” I asked.
The cards disappeared. “Yeah.”
“What’s he say?”
“He’s got me on medication and a whole health program. Valerian and kava. I drink chamomile tea and have a lot of herbal shit to take. Ginkgo biloba and fish oil. I’m supposed to eat a lot of green leafy vegetables. Me, your father, Grey. All of us. A fucking ton of salad. And your poor mother is always coming up with different healthy dressings for us. Cooking boiled cabbage. Stinks up the whole house. But we eat it. Watching Old Shep, it’s a constant reminder, Chut we eat what we might be like one day.”
He was telling the truth but not all of it. I could sense his desperation. It was way back there in the hard timbre of his voice and in the way he held his shoulders. The rain came down and we let it fall on us as we stood face-to- face. My white streak of hair hung in my eyes so that I didn’t have to show him my own dread. JFK picked up on my mood and whined. He started back up the trail and we followed along almost reluctantly.
Now I understood what was really pulling Mal apart. Not simply the fear of what might be happening to him, but the idea that it might soon be time to take measures into his own hands. That’s what he’d been groping for. He was struggling against the consuming terror that if he didn’t time it just right he might actually become too senile to remember to do the job when the time came. We’d never let ourselves turn into Gramp. We’d fight rats for poisoned bait before we let that happen. I knew I would.
19
JFK hung his head out the passenger window and barked into the rain as I drove over to the high school. Mal was right-it was time Dale and I had a real conversation.
There was much more security now than when I’d attended class here. They’d gated the area up and there was a little booth with a semaphore arm blocking the road. I had to give my name and show ID and tell my reason for being there. I said my sister was feeling ill and I was picking her up to take her to the doctor. The security guard didn’t give a shit so long as he got to mark it all down on his clipboard.
I drove through and parked outside the main set of doors. I didn’t think I’d see Butch’s Chevy around. I hadn’t expected to. He was twenty-one and wouldn’t want to get nabbed on school property with a fifteen-year-old. I was still surprised he’d been introduced to my parents. It seemed like the kind of relationship Dale would want to keep on the sly, but I suspected that Butch had pushed the matter, wanting to show off to my father, the infamous Pinsch Rand.
Within a few minutes the storm ended and the sun broke through again. A caravan of buses pulled up to the curb in front of the school. They blocked my line of sight. JFK was curled up and napping. I got out of the car, lit a cigarette, and took up position near the flagpole. Taped to it was a flyer stating that following the last period, open auditions were being held for
The bell went off and the corridors crowded with students and teachers. A din of chatter, lockers banging shut, and running feet filled the place. I was heading upstream and kept getting pressed back by the current, but eventually I got to the auditorium.
