Part 21 (1/2)

He wiped his eyes, looked at me as if I'd never known him at all

”A bunch of times” The last just a few months earlier Pop hadn't washed his hands of hiht and woke up to find the house e at that door in his head, and now he hurried into Pop's writing room, took down from his shelf the 38 snub-nose and 380 semiautomatic, loaded both, then climbed the front stairs to the kitchen and walked out onto the sun up under his chin, the other to the side of his head He was going to count to three and pull both triggers at once One, two- One, two- Sitting two steps below my brother, I could feel the ends of the barrels up under ainst h my brother's passionate, inquisitive brain, and he told us of screa them into the trees The door to the kitchen had been open, and the whole roo cordite and scorched brass He becauns back on the closet shelf, then he found bacon in the fridge, put six slices on a skillet on the stove and turned up the heat till the air filled with pig smoke

I squeezed irlfriend to the phone on the wall I called information I called Christof in the canyons north of Boulder

IT'D BEEN less than twenty-four hours, and Jeb and I were greeting hiht and had a slight liotten about The circles beneath his eyes seeed, and when I introduced him to my brother, Christof took his hand in both of his, looked down into his face and eyes the sa all that needed to be seen and noas the tiht While I drove north up the highway, they talked, Christof turned sideways in the passenger seat, Jeb in the shadows in the back Christof was askingto the answers But already Christof's voice became deeper, more serious, and I could hear him work his way into the darkness h ere at the Haverhill line, and I was driving over the Merrihts Up ahead was the exit for River Street and the Howard Johnson's where so o for breakfast after last call Christof had said earlier he needed to eat, so I slowed for the rauished

Down to the right a culvert was overgroeeds and beyond it was a new car lot, its sign lighted over what years ago had been a drive-in theater, one of those our ht Mystery Ride It's where I'd first seen Billy Jack, Billy Jack, athe van s as he punched and kicked and broke bones athe van s as he punched and kicked and broke bones

I pulled into Howard Johnson's and parked in front of its s Most of the tables and booths were e to a cook in white I cut off the engine Christof was turned co my brother's In less than forty minutes he seemed to have taken Jeb back twenty years In the rearview mirror I could see his contorted face, and it was as if I were spying on someone's birth or death

I left the car and walked into the bright fluorescence of Howard Johnson's The air sarette slanced over at me She had short bleached hair and bad skin I'd seen her around for years but didn't know her She walked up to rabbed so theIt was hard not to think of Sa ceraain and again I sat in the booth but did not look outside In the car, Christof was coaxing my brother to name all that had hurt him, a darkness he'd sed till itfor the into the faces of boys and men for years

CHRISTOF STAYED with Jeb a few days Then my friend was back in the canyons two thousand miles west, and already hter, his eyes were brighter, and a gray veil seemed to have lifted from him Twenty-five years later, he's still free of it

I never told ht with Jeb and the 22 Colt I never told hiuns, either When trouble came, our father just was not the man we'd ever turned to; trouble was simply trouble, and who on this earth had ever escaped it anyway?

16

IT WAS AN early y, her voice tentative The night before Pop had been driving back frohway to help sootten run over

”What?”

”Your father got run over by a car He's at Mass General”

My blood seemed to thin out in my veins The air itself was easy to see Later I'd learn that Pop had driven into Boston to meet a woman he kneorked with prostitutes He wanted to interview one for so This was in the Coe parlors and peep shows and base there, Pop had armed himself; under his white cotton sports jacket he wore his leather side holster and its 380 semiautomatic Four inches beneath that, he'd clipped to his belt the 38 snub-nose he'd bought Peggy, and into his right front pocket he'd dropped a ser

He met his friend, strolled the dim neon streets of the Combat Zone, talked to a couple of prostitutes on the corner, then walked his friend back to her car and headed hoht and lighted stretch of highway a car was stopped in the fast lane Pop slowed down A youngThen he saw the motorcycle they'd hit, most of it under their car, and he pulled ahead of them and cut left onto the median strip between the northbound and southbound lanes He helped the young wo dark hair and was crying, her accent Spanish She told hier brother were frolish and they were passing a big truck, then saw aso fast Just now She'd hit it

It was after hway quiet, and Pop wanted some help before he squatted and looked under the car to see the crushed motorcyclist Later we found out there was none, that the driver of the bike was drunk and stuhway, that his wife had just left hione to a bar and drank and drank, then raced up the highway on his motorcycle where he wiped it out, then walked away, this boy and girl plowing into it

Nowthe brother out of the car He was lean and handsome It looked like he'd broken his nose Pop walked hi worass of the median, the wo to co about what he should do for theency call box he could see That's when he also saw a car co and he raised his ar that car was reaching for a new cassette tape, orpiece of debris in the road, we still don't know, but she swerved and drove straight for Pop and the brother and sister fro her away, an act which put hi and so she could only watch as the car shot into her brother and ht miles an hour, a speed we know because a state trooper was driving down the southbound lane at that exacton his siren and lights and driving across the grassy median where the boy lay dead on the hood of the wohway screa, ”It's not my fault! It's not my fault!”

Pop lay on her trunk His pants were around his knees In his left front pocket a quarter was bent in half The trooper was talking to him, words Pop barely heard because his deadher pal hih so because it was not yet his ti there, not feeling anything, telling the trooper about his guns He assured him that he was licensed to carry them, and he reached into his side holster and pulled out the seazine and handed it and the pistol to the trooper who rested the gun on the roof of the car and began to cover Pop with a light blanket, butfree the 38 snub-nose now He tried to unload it and the trooper gently took it fro him He'd already called an ambulance In the air were the cries of women, the sister of the dead boy and the woman who'd driven into them Two or three cars had stopped and pulled over and their drivers were cliate Pop said, ”There's one er”

The trooper told Pop to stay still He reached into un Pop wanted hi now, a black tidal wave of it sweeping through the village that once had been my father's body and his life in it We learned later that he'd broken thirty-four bones, that both his legs were crushed, his right one so badly it would undergo ten operations before being amputated just below the knee, his left so pulverized he would never use it again

When Peggy calledand told s were broken pretty badly I picturedon crutches, then the casts co with no cane Then being his old self again He was only fifty He was in good shape He'd be fine

But he wasn't He'd broken so many bones that his bloodstreas Those first days there was the fear he would drown or that the marroould drift to his brain and kill him as surely as a bullet The doctors told us to call his sisters down in Louisiana, to call a priest too

But overnight his lungs cleared One of his doctors said she'd never seen anything like it She shrugged and called it ain a cast and went to work trying to save his right After two h, it was no use The day before the amputation I was in his hospital room at Mass General The writer John Smolens was there He was an old friend of Pop's, one of the men he'd shared an apartht, and there seeray in his beard, his hair thinner, but that afternoon there was color in his face, and he was cheerful and laughed easily and looked like aterrible behind hi squirrels, how by Nove I looked down at his right foot It was bare, pink and healthy-looking, the toenails clipped, but his shi+n was pinned and wrapped, still an open wound since the summer, and I joked about all the times that foot had kicked me in the ass, which it never had, and I bent down and kissed his foot goodbye, Pop laughing, his buddy too But I was thinking of us running together,for ht across his s and sweaty face

17

I WAS RENTING A trailer on Plum Island It was a beach town three miles east of Newburyport where I worked as a bartender in an Irish pub, saving eachFive blocks east of the restaurant was Lime Street Sometimes I'd drive up it and look at the tiny house we four kids had shared with our mother in 1970 and '71 WAS RENTING A trailer on Plum Island It was a beach town three miles east of Newburyport where I worked as a bartender in an Irish pub, saving eachFive blocks east of the restaurant was Lime Street Sometimes I'd drive up it and look at the tiny house we four kids had shared with our mother in 1970 and '71

It was even smaller than I reht onto the narrow sidewalk and street, the tiny yard in back surrounded by a tall plank fence This one, though, was straight and plumb and had been treated for the weather, the house too, its old clapboards newly painted an eggplant purple, the tri was a shi+ny brassover t boxes screwed under the sills Across the street, instead of cars sitting on blocks getting worked on by Larry, there was a lohite fence and a green lawn and a toddler's swing set and sandbox A black Saab was parked in the paved driveway All the houses on the street looked bigger and brighter, and farther up, where the Jack Sully down, the condes and a jungle gy slide down onto fresh chips of cedar There was a basketball court too, its s their families into the South End for years-orthodontists and realtors, accountants and software engineers and college teachers The whole town had changed because of this: Market Square was no longer littered with abandoned cars and sprouting weeds; its brick s had been completely refurbished, every brick scrubbed and repointed, everyand slate roofboutiques, food and wine shops, a record store, jewelry store, and a bookstore Restaurants and pubs stood on every half block Hanging from each lamppost were potted flowers, and tourists would stop and have their picture taken beside one

The lu leisurely boats sailed up the river from ports off Maine, Boston, Hilton Head, and Florida, sleek white boats you could live on but docked here long enough for its owners to take a stroll through this town people actually wanted to come to

I knew this meant the poor people who'd lived here before had been forced out, that what happened to Newburyport was known as gentrification Part of me missed the tall weeds on Fair Street the drunks used to live in, a lot that was now the new Salvation Ar, but it was as if what had happened to Newburyport had happened to uys fro up in ainst it who only know one or tays how to get free, both of which can hurt other people or the up the pub, I'd sit on my trailer's stoop with a beer and watch the sun rise over the dune across the street, a blooe that would send et to work on the novel I was trying to write It was set in awith his single mother, his two sisters and brother There was no erous, and no grown-up seee In one scene, the boy dreams he and his fa down the long hill of Main Street to Basilere Bridge and the Merrimack River The boy's father is there in the truck bed with the girlfriend and he's drinking and laughing, and the boy's mother is back there too, his brother and sisters as well, but the truck's cab is e it, and no adult seems to notice or care as the truck barrels down the hill for the slow-, dirty river My character wakes up, pulls on his leather, then walks down into the avenues looking for a raphical as it could be I also thought I'd been writing long enough that I are of the creative dangers of basing fiction so closely on one's own life Wasn't the biggest danger that I'd confuse the facts with the truth? That I'd feel co into my novel just because it had happened happened? And if I are of this danger, wasn't that enough to guard against doing this?

But what I wasn't seeing was a more obvious problem, that I was too emotionally close to this story to write honestly about it; a part of ry at hiscare of hier was new, and it was a surprise to , I'd drive the ten miles to y was pregnant with their second child, and she needed help caring for Pop, as bedridden and in constant pain

Before the accident, they'd e, the rural part of Haverhill, where they'd built a s acres of open field and a ridge of trees Their paved driveas long and steep, and because their front door was four feet off the ground, Jeb and I had had to rip out the steps and build a winding forty-eight-foot ramp for Pop's wheelchair We did this two days before he cale which by law could be no higher or lower than one inch per foot This allowed a crippled person to wheel himself up or down it without help fro three-foot holes for the posts, and because we thought this ra concrete footings Friends came over and pitched in, Sam Dolan one of theht and set up a halogen laed treated two-by-tens into the posts and nailed in crosspieces and ripped sheets of plywood and tacked thee to the air; there was nothing we could do to save Pop from what had happened to him, but we could do this We were also still under the illusion that Pop would walk again one day, that his casted left leg was not nearly as da hoalk on the new prosthetic leg for his right

The first ti rooht leg of his sweatpants folded up under his stuht around his chest but noas loose, his upper arrown y, and his cheeks were gray, the whites of his eyes yellowed, but he was s h with stubble, and he ses

My five-year-old sister Cadence was talking to hi she'd done, did he like it? It was dusk and the TV was off and their golden retriever Luke lay on the floor in front of it Peggy was cooking in the small kitchen

Noas a month later, and Pop hadn't even left the house He lived in a haze of pain that never lifted andIf it wasn't positioned in just the right place on the pillows, he toldinto his nerve endings across bone Peggy was the one who took care of Pop, but when I was there I learned how to prop the leg at an angle that did not hurt hiht or left or up or down is all it would take to hborhood bully, the pain never quite went away And he told ht was so and foot had been, the actual air air there hurt Soh it, this liruntled ancestor there hurt Soh it, this liruntled ancestor

I laid a towel across his chest, took scissors and trimmed his beard I lathered his cheeks and throat and shaved him Sometimes I'd take over bedpan duty, a task Popout in a weakened Marine Corps voice, ”Get in there, boy, and ipe that ass!” that ass!”

But there were tiet help for this, and he would thank me more than once and I'd tell him not to worry about it What I did not tell his, an euilty about because how could there be any human rooy had their second child, his sixth It was long after h to be in the delivery room, but there was no space for his wheelchair where the husband and father usually sat at the head of the operating table so he watched fro father would I enty-seven years old Peggy enty-eight I held her hand and watched over a raised blue sheet as the surgeon made an incision in her belly and parted the flesh and in seconds there waslifted from her mother's wo too, saying, ”It's a girl, you guys It's a girl girl”