Reamde

rushed across their screens, making a funny and sad contrast with the dozen or so family photographs, developed and printed through the medieval complexities of chemical photography, laboriously framed, and hung on the walls of the room.

The word “Jake” caught his ear, and he turned to see some older cousins looking at a framed photo of Jake and his brood, about a year out of date. The photo was disorientingly normal-looking, as if Jake could comfortably flout every other convention of modern American life but would never dream of failing to have such a picture taken of him and Elizabeth and the three boys. Shot, perhaps, by some other member of their rustic church who had a knack for such things, and framed in a birchbark contraption that one of the boys had made himself. They looked pretty normal, and signs of the true Jake were only detectable in some of the minutiae such as his Confederate infantryman’s beard.

A woman asked why Jake and his family never came to the re-u.

Richard had learned the hard way that when the topic of Jake came up, he needed to get out in front of it fast and do everything he could to portray his kid brother as a reasonable guy, or else someone else would denounce him as a nut job and it would lead to awkwardness. “Since 9/11, Jake doesn’t believe in flying because you have to show ID,” Richard said. “He thinks it’s unconstitutional.”

“Does he ever drive back here?” asked a male in-law, cautiously interested, verging on amused.

“He doesn’t believe in having a driver’s license either.”

“But he has to drive, right?” asked the woman who’d started it. “Someone told me he was a carpenter.”

“In the part of Idaho where he’s moving around, he can get away without having a driver’s license,” Richard said. “He has an understanding with the sheriff that doesn’t translate so well to other parts of the country.”

He didn’t even bother telling people about Jake’s refusal to put license plates on his truck.

Richard made a quick raid on the outskirts of the kitchen, grabbing a ­couple of cookies and giving the women something to talk about. Then he headed for what had, in his boyhood, been the back porch and what had latterly been converted into a ground-level nursing-facility-slash-man-cave for his father.

Dad, legal name Nicholas Forthrast, known to the re-u as Grandpa, currently aged ninety-nine, was enthroned on a recliner in a room whose most conspicuous feature, to most of those who walked into it, was the bearskin rug. Richard could practically smell the aforementioned hormones boiling off it. During the porch conversion project of 2002, that rug was the first thing that Alice had moved out here. As symbol of ancient Forthrast manly virtues, it competed with Dad’s Congressional Medal of Honor, framed and hung on the wall not far from the recliner. An oxygen tank of impressive size stood in the corner, competing for floor space and electrical outlets with a dialysis machine. A very old console television, mounted in a walnut cabinet, served as inert plinth for a fifty-four-inch plasma display now showing a professional football game with the sound turned down. Flying copilot in a somewhat less prepossessing recliner to Dad’s right hand was John, six years older than Richard, and the family’s acting patriarch. Some cousins were sitting cross-legged on the bearskin or the underlying carpet, rapt on the game. One of the Cardenas sisters (he thought it was most likely Rosie) was bustling around behind the recliners, jotting down numbers on a clipboard, folding linens—showing clear signs, in other words, that she was about to hand Dad off to John so that she could head off to her own family’s Thanksgiving observances.

Since Dad had acquired all these accessory parts—the external kidney, the external lung—he had become a rather complicated piece of machinery, like a high-end TIG welder, that could not be operated by just anyone. John, who had come back from Vietnam with bilateral below-the-knee amputations, was more than comfortable with prosthetic technology; he had read all the manuals and understood the functions of most of the knobs, so he could take over responsibility for the machines at times like this. If Richard were left alone with him in the house, however, Dad would be dead in twelve hours. Richard had to contribute in ways less easily described. He loitered with hands in pockets, pretending to watch the football game, until Rosie made a positive move for the exit. He followed her out the door a moment later and caught up with her on the wheelchair ramp that led down to Dad’s Dr. Seuss–like wheelchair-lift-equipped van. “I’ll walk you to your car,” he announced, and she grinned sweetly at his euphemistic ways. “Turkey this afternoon?” he asked.

“Turkey and football,” she said. “Our kind of football.”

“How’s Carmelita?”

“Well, thank you. Her son—tall! Basketball player.”

“No football?”

She smiled. “A little. He head the ball very well.” She pulled her key chain out of her purse, and Richard got a quick whiff of all the fragrant things she kept in there. He lunged out ahead of her and opened the driver’s-side door of her Subaru. “Thank you.”

“Thank you very much, Rosie,” he said, unzipping the breast pocket of his parka. As she was settling into the driver’s seat, smoothing her skirt under her bottom, he pulled out a manila envelope containing a half-inch-thick stack of hundred-dollar bills and slipped it into the little compartment in the side of the door. Then he closed the door gently. She rolled the window down. “That is the same as last year, plus ten percent,” he explained. “Is it still suitable? Still good for you and Carmelita?”

“It is fine, thank you very much!” she said.

“Thank you,” he insisted. “You are a blessing to our family, and we value you very much. You have my number if there is ever a problem.”

“Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Same to you and all the Cardenases.”

She waved, put the Subaru in gear, and pulled away.

Richard patted his jacket again, checking the other packet. He would find some way to slip it to John later; it would pay for a lot of oxygen.

The handoff had undoubtedly been awkward and weird. Much less stressful, for a man of his temperament, was to FedEx the C-notes, as was his practice in years when he did not attend the re-u. But, as he ascended the wheelchair ramp, the Furious Muses remained silent and so he reckoned he had not handled it too badly.

The gravamen of the F.M.s’ complaints was Richard’s failure to be “emotionally available.” The phrase had left him dumb with disbelief the first time a woman had gone upside his head with it. He guessed that many of his emotions were not really fit to be shared with anyone, much less someone, such as a girlfriend, he was supposed to be nice to, and associated “emotional availability” with unguarded moments such as the one that had led to his getting the nickname Dodge. But several of his ex- girlfriends-to-be had insisted that they wanted it, and, in a Greek mythic sort of revenge, they had continued to be emotionally available to him long past their dates of expiration. And yet he reckoned he’d actually been emotionally available to Rosie Cardenas. Maybe even to the point of making her uncomfortable.

Back to the ex-porch. The place had become more crowded as the football game approached the end of the fourth quarter, and the sound had been turned back on. Richard sidled through the crowd and found a place where he could lean against the wall, which was more difficult than it used to be, since people kept hanging new stuff on it. John, apparently, had been spending enough time here that he’d taken the liberty of decorating it with some of his own Vietnam memorabilia.

In the middle of a big empty space, though, a World War II vintage M1 Garand rifle was mounted on a display bracket with a brass plaque. John knew better than to crowd this shrine with his ’Nam souvenirs.

As a boy, Richard had assumed that this rifle was The One, but later Bud Torgeson—the longest lived of Dad’s comrades-in-arms—had chuckled at the very idea. Bud had patiently explained that holding an empty M1 rifle by its barrel and swinging it like a club hard enough to stave in excellent Krupp steel helmets was way out of spec for that particular equipment and generally led to its being rendered unusable. After The One had been duly inspected by whoever was in charge of handing out medals, it had been scrapped. This M1 on the wall, along with the plaque, had been purchased surplus, cleaned up, and given to Dad by the enlisted men who had served under him and, according to the story, been saved from death or a long stint in a prison camp by said crazy spasm of Berserker-style head bashing.

Without being unduly bitter about it, Richard had always wondered why the offspring of Nicholas who had settled down and lived exemplary, stable, churchgoing lives in the upper Midwest were viewed as carrying on the man’s heritage and living according to his example, given that the single most celebrated episode in the man’s life had been beating a bunch of storm troopers to death with an improvised bludgeon.