Follow Me (41 page)

Are you still with me? It’s dark out. I’m back from basketball practice. I’ve been coach of our JV team for twenty years,
and we’ve never won a game. Ha. But we have fun. And I always make sure that my players understand why gyroscopic forces help
a body in motion maintain its original direction. I like to sneak in education when I can. I was thinking about something
earlier. Today I talked with my students about the 180th meridian of longitude, you know, the international date line. I explained
that if we cross the date line heading east, today changes to tomorrow, but if we head westbound, we go backward, back to
yesterday. One student asked if that means we have to do everything we did today all over again. I said no, the day is new,
even if we’ve already been through it. I didn’t say that I like to imagine what would happen if we really did get the chance
to avoid making the same mistake twice. Since I started talking to you, I feel like I’m heading westbound over the 180th meridian.
Just by putting down in words what I remember, I can almost convince myself that I can change what happened, you know, turn
left instead of right after the intersection, and save everyone a lot of trouble. If only I’d known then what I know now,
to borrow that cliché. Except in my case, there’s nothing I would have done differently. Well, almost nothing. But it will
be a while before I get to that part. I hope you don’t mind that I spend some time filling in my background. So yesterday
I’d begun telling you about the day my father died. That morning he’d been found washed up on the beach, and the sheriff’s
deputy arrived at our house to break the news to my mother, then asked her to come with him to identify the body while I waited
at home alone. I was telling you about that. I, um… hey, did you know that a walrus sleeps in the water in a vertical position,
with its head floating just above the surface? I always thought this was interesting. In the first dream I had about RB after
his death, I saw him floating offshore, his head bobbing above the surface. I jumped in and swam out to him. He was asleep
when I got there, and I had to shake him to rouse him, to wake him up. I wanted him to tell me what he was doing there. But
all he did was give a great big yawn and go back to sleep. He wouldn’t wake up, but I did, obviously, I woke up. We celebrated
my twelfth birthday the day after we buried him. It was June and me, along with the waitstaff at the Roslyn IHOP, who stopped
what they were doing and gathered around my table to sing. There were burning candles stuck in the bundled pigs in blankets.
I remember that they were the trick candles, you know, the kind that flare back up after you blow them out. Funny the things
we remember. And do you ever stop and wonder about things you’ve forgotten? Wonder and curiosity, yeah, they’re important.
I’ve forgotten whether I ever saw my mother cry. She must have been broken up by my father’s death, I’m sure, but what I remember
is coming out of my bedroom into the kitchen and watching June pounding on my father’s portable typewriter, his old Smith
Corona. I asked her if she was writing a book about RB, and she nodded without looking up, I remember. But it turned out that
she was writing letter after letter in an attempt to cash in on RB’s life insurance policy. The initial inquest, you see,
ruled that my father had drowned himself, so June didn’t have a legal right to the insurance money. But she demanded a review
of the inquest, and, and the original ruling was overturned, and my father’s death was ruled accidental. Even then, the life
insurance company kept stalling, yeah, it took three lousy years for them to pay out the claim, but when they did, wow, a
hefty fifty thousand dollars came to us as a single check in the mail one day. Geesh. My mother opened the envelope and held
the check up to the light and said here’s the book about RB, here’s the story of his life. I was fifteen years old by then,
and I just thought the whole thing was a joke. I have a clear memory of that moment, with my mother bending toward the lamp
like a plant toward light while I was sitting there, I happened to be watching an ice cube melt in my water glass. I remember
thinking there were two things that were impossibly strange, my mother and the ice cube. June was strange because she thought
my father’s whole life would fit on a small piece of paper, and the ice cube was strange because it didn’t raise the level
of the water as it melted. Um, so, well, anyway. I didn’t understand my mother. She’d kept herself busy since RB’s death.
Between her job at the IHOP and her wrangling with the life insurance company, she hadn’t had a spare moment to think about
anything else. She hadn’t taken the time to miss RB. She hadn’t noticed that I was growing up. And she didn’t realize that
she had exhausted herself. I was plenty angry with June, and for years I figured she was a money-grubber out to make good
on RB’s death. I’ve since come to understand that her fight with the life insurance company was not about the money. It was
her attempt to honor her husband. You see, she discovered that he had life insurance only after he died. He’d taken out the
policy and made the payments in secret during the last five years of his life. It was his plan, I guess, to provide for his
family, and in this sense June felt an obligation to get the insurance money. But when the check finally arrived, it didn’t
come with RB alive, of course. The check had been drawn because RB wasn’t alive. RB was dead, and the check announced the
eternity of this fact. In place of RB Boyle, we had fifty thousand dollars. That was the value of RB’s life — fifty thousand
dollars. Really, he’d earned the money in a wily scheme. With June’s help he’d played one last trick on the system by dying.
This was his big ha-ha, his revenge for the injustice dealt to him in life, and now that it had all played out, RB was gone
forever, and June’s work was done. Well, what do you think of this story so far? I’d promised to explain why I did what I
did to your mother, why I left her in the lurch. Given my stated purpose, all I’ve told you so far probably seems irrelevant.
But I think it’s important for you to know how I spent my early years, if only to help you understand the man who would go
on to fall in love with your mother. Does this make sense? Are you still with me? What happens when you tell a story that
no one hears? It’s like blowing air into a tire. You inflate the tube with gas, the molecules pelt against the walls of the
tube, the pressure inside the tube exceeds the pressure outside the tube, and yeah, the tire is inflated, ready to turn. Or
not to turn, if it’s never used. Those restless molecules just keep on with their crazy pelting dance. Listen to me, I’m rambling,
it’s late, and I have to grade papers and catch up on the news. Maybe I should remind you that you can turn me off whenever
you feel like it. You can decide whether to keep listening.

Dear Sally, I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you’re still listening. I feel
emboldened.
That’s a word I’ve never used before, not aloud, at least. But I’d convinced myself that you would only ever despise me.
You know, your grandmother liked to tell me about you, and before she passed away she told me that you want to write, she
said you’re trying to write a book. I wonder what it’s about. Huh, I passed a bookstore yesterday and saw in the window a
pile of copies of a book called
Drop Those Alfredo Pounds
. If you want to write a bestseller, write a diet book. Or how about a book called
The Germ Police
? I could help you with that. People are concerned about germs these days. This hasn’t always been the case, you know. Oliver
Wendell Holmes wrote an essay ascribing fever to an invisible something, and he was ridiculed. But that was the nineteenth
century. I like to look for any evidence that we’ve made progress. And then I see the latest statistics about endangered species,
and I despair. Well, we could write a book together, you and I, about how to fight germs. Or maybe we could write about building
a greenhouse. I don’t know, that’s always seemed to me a topic that would interest people. Either way, we’d make a bundle!
Okay, I’m kidding. Anyway, I was telling you about what happened after RB died. Mmm, well, I hung out with my friends Deano
Colletti and Tony Minastronti, we called him Minestrone, Stroni for short. We were a bad lot. While other boys our age were
conditioning themselves for the football season, we were smoking pot and getting drunk. Once when I was fifteen I spent a
night in the holding cell at the police station — this was shortly after June got the check from the life insurance company.
We’d stolen a case of beer out of a garage and set out walking down the street. I know, we weren’t the brightest bulbs. A
cop pulled up, just our luck. Deano and Tony were bailed out by their parents that night, but June didn’t come get me until
morning. She wanted me to spend the night in the holding cell in hopes of teaching me something about the consequences of
my actions. I didn’t learn much. My poor mother. Well, to move on, I turned seventeen in 1964. I hardly saw June. She’d quit
her job at IHOP after the insurance claim paid out. But she had to use a good chunk of the money to pay our debts. And anyway,
she couldn’t stand sitting around the house doing nothing, so she got a job as a waitress at the Red Lobster in Huntington.
She took every double shift they gave her. She was so busy she didn’t even know that I’d stopped going to classes. When the
school sent a letter home, I forged a letter back from June that explained I’d been diagnosed with mononucleosis and could
my teachers please send a list of homework assignments for the month, which they did, and which I didn’t bother to complete.
I don’t know why they let me graduate. For Christ’s sake, I graduated early, a semester early! And then in January of 1965
I took Pig and visited my brother, Phil, in Buffalo. June didn’t mind me going, or she didn’t let on if she minded. She gave
me a load of money to share with Phil. She said we should live it up. So that’s what we did. Phil already had gone through
the money June had sent him the year before. He’d bought a truck and a snowplow for himself and was trying to get his own
plowing and hauling business up and running. Plus he’d been getting ready to marry a girl and had put a down payment on a
house. That’s where he was living when Pig and I arrived in Buffalo, in a rotten little ranch house on Tonawanda Street. His
fiancée had broken off the engagement, and he’d sunk pretty low by the time I arrived. When it snowed he’d go out to plow,
but the rest of the time he sat in front of the TV. I sat with him the first month I was there. We drank beer and watched
TV, we ate pizza and wings and fed the leftovers to Pig, we got fat, we got depressed, we went through the money from June.
She wired us five hundred more, we went on drinking beer. In March there was a storm, we must have gotten three feet of snow
over a weekend, and Phil was too lazy to take the truck out, so I did it for him, I followed his map and plowed all day Sunday
and into the night, and at two in the morning I came back and Phil was gone, I mean really gone, along with his clothes and
his radio. He’d left the TV and the stereo behind for me. There was a note on the kitchen table explaining that an old girlfriend
had stopped by, not his ex-fiancée, another girl, she had a car and invited Phil to drive with her to California, and he said
sure, he was ready for adventure, and as soon as he’d settled I could come and join him. I remember Pig had eaten too much
of the leftover pizza and thrown up on the couch, so I had to clean that up, and then I went to bed. I was exhausted. I was
woken the next day by the phone ringing, it was June, even before I answered she was yelling in my ear that they’d found Phil,
they’d found Phil, but I didn’t understand, I, I, I didn’t think Phil was lost, I’d seen him the day before, Sunday morning,
sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee. Hmm. I think that was the only time I heard June raise her voice. What she meant
was that the police had found Phil’s body, along with the girl’s, in their car at a rest stop on 90, both of them shot up,
shot in the head from behind and in front, like they’d been surrounded and executed at close range. No one was ever charged
with the murders, but my guess is it was the girl’s boyfriend. It turned out she had a boyfriend, and what I still believe
is that she was running away from him, that’s why she came to Phil, so she’d have someone to run away with, but they only
got as far as the rest stop on 90 just east of Erie, Pennsylvania. That boyfriend, in case you’re wondering, he’s some bigwig,
works in the banking industry. Well, thanks to him, it was my turn to go to the morgue. While June headed to Erie in a bus,
I went to confirm that the male victim found in the Mustang along Interstate 90 was indeed my brother. You know, I remember
watching a TV show later that day, a documentary about, about of all things a juniper tree, a six-thousand-year-old juniper
tree that had been found growing on a ridge in the Sierras. Now whenever I think about my brother, I think about that tree.
This was ’66, I mean ’65. After we buried Phil, I stayed on in Buffalo while June went back to work in Huntington. I didn’t
get around to selling the house for a while. I enrolled as a part-time student at Buffalo State, and I supported myself with
my brother’s truck, hauling in the warm months, plowing in the winter. It would be a long time before I met your mother, nearly
nine years before I met her and fell in love. Those nine years, there’s not much to say about them. It took me nine years
to graduate from college, I graduated with a degree in biology, with honors, summa cum laude, if you can believe it. I had
an idea I might go to medical school, but no, it didn’t work out. I got a job driving for a moving company. I saw every state
in the Union, except Hawaii, Alaska, and, for some reason, Kansas. I never drove through Kansas, I don’t know why. So anyway,
the company ended up moving its headquarters an hour east, to the city you call home, and since that was my base I spent more
time there than in Buffalo, though I wasn’t happy about it, since I had friends in Buffalo, but that’s how it was, a few years
after the headquarters moved I decided to sell my brother’s house. There wasn’t much to take in after the mortgage was paid
off, but by then I’d graduated from college. I signed up for the long hauls and crisscrossed the country in my rig, and when
I wasn’t driving I was living in rented rooms and hanging out at Jeremiah’s on Monroe Avenue, you might know the place, that’s
where I met Larry, who knew Tom, who was the boyfriend of Phyllis, your mother’s friend. That’s where I met your mother, at
Jeremiah’s on Monroe. I remember, I remember there was a thunderstorm while we were driving down Monroe. By the time we got
to the bar the rain had stopped, but the trees were still dripping, and the gutters were running. I remember listening to
the sound of water running through the gutter as the door opened and out of the bar came Penelope Bliss. I’ll tell you about
falling in love with your mother, but now, it’s late, I’ve gone on, haven’t I? I’ll close here, but I promise to follow up,
you’ll hear more if you keep listening.