A Parallel Life (16 page)

“Oh,” Cooper said.

“He's very bright. He teaches at the language school
in Monterey. It's sort of a spy school. Do you know the first thing they teach you to say in the language you're learning?”

“Well, probably not ‘peace.' ”

“No.” She laughed an abrupt laugh to signal she'd gotten the joke and studied Cooper with the same slide show of expressions on her face as yesterday when he'd mentioned “dog heaven.”

“They teach you to say, ‘Don't shoot. I know secrets.' ”

She left as briskly as she'd entered—circumspect, avoiding any contact other than a handshake—and she came back for a minute with the gun and placed it in its leather holster on the kitchen counter next to half a can of Alpo that he'd been diluting with broth. She usually kept the gun in the glove compartment, she told him, but she'd do without it. This was more important. She'd be back up in a week for some workshop in investing and she'd get it then. She was doing that now. Telling people what to do with their money. He could picture her, brisk and practical in one of those gray suits with a taupe blouse that all the women seemed to wear who worked in the financial district. MBA nuns, a friend had called them.

After Janet left, Cooper went back into the bedroom and was surprised to realize that he longed for a cigarette, though he'd quit smoking for good a month after his father's death. Tic-Tok had managed to sit up, listing a little to one side, but up. He slapped his tail on the floor when Cooper came in and looked more alert than he had for days. Maybe Janet's visit had done something for the dog, or, maybe, and this thought distressed Cooper, the dog was aware of the gun in the kitchen and was trying to let Cooper know that he wasn't ready to go yet. He
was making an awful effort to look as if he was just resting between runs, that he could still fetch a stick or leap for a Frisbee, a trick Cooper had delighted in teaching him. All of these canine efforts at good cheer made Cooper miserable.

Cooper remembered walking into his father's bedroom one time after a week of the man's steady decline to find his father sitting up, a cigarette in one hand, another burning in the ashtray. His father, usually calm, was fidgeting and edgy. He got Cooper to help him stand and walk to the window to look out at the view he saw every day. Then he made Cooper support him for a walk through the house, something he hadn't done for weeks.

In the living room, his father had turned around slowly and then asked Cooper where he was. Cooper told him that they were in the living room. It was the house they'd moved into when Cooper was six. The place was old, built in the last century in a then-popular style called dogtrot because of the breezeway running through the center onto which the rooms opened. When they moved in, Cooper's father had the breezeway enclosed to create a wide hall. The kitchen occupied a wing off the rear. Sometime shortly after the move, Cooper's mother died from a stroke, an unusual thing for such a young person, and Roseanna started coming in to take care of Cooper and his father.

Cooper's father had stood on the rag rug in the center of the room and pivoted on his wobbling knees and said, “Don't lie to me, boy. I'm in someone else's house.”

“No sir,” Cooper had said, puzzled because this was the first time his father had ever been confused. “This is
your house. It's the house Uncle Wade left you. This is where I grew up.”

“Don't lie to me, boy,” his father said, angry and shaking as he hung onto Cooper's arm. “I know where I am and where I'm not.” Then tears started to run from his father's eyes, large tears that fell onto the floor. His father didn't sob or make any crying sounds. He just let these large tears fall as Cooper turned him back to the hall and walked him to the bedroom. Once in bed with the familiar view again, the man seemed to relax a little. He stopped crying. As he leaned onto the pillows and Cooper brought up the covers, his father said, “You know, there's a lot I've never told you.”

“Yes sir,” Cooper said, “I expect there is.”

His father then lit another cigarette and studied the world beyond the window. He didn't get up to walk around again and he didn't question where he was. In fact, he hardly spoke. In three days he was dead.

Often, since that afternoon, Cooper had wondered why he hadn't asked his father what it was his father hadn't told him. He wondered why he had shied away from asking his father some question that would have prolonged that conversation. What had he been reluctant to hear then, that afternoon, with the smell of cigarette smoke and wood smoke in the air? What could his father have wanted to say?

His father could, perhaps, have told his son of another life he'd led, a life he'd never revealed. There were stories of such death-bed confessions. Cooper has tried to imagine his father leaning forward, regaining his color through the vivid palette of memory as he whispered of infidelities into his son's ear.

Cooper has also considered that his father might have
wanted to recount ways in which Cooper had managed to fall short of certain standards and failed to meet expectations. There had been an incident one autumn when Cooper was fourteen and he'd gone with two cousins on his first coon hunt. Cooper loved the dogs, the lanky black-and-tans, and he'd been almost feverish with excitement as they drove up into Mississippi. They arrived after dark at a clearing in a woods to find other pickup trucks already there and waiting, the men with their guns passing in and out of the beams of light, the dogs still on the trucks, quivering in their cages.

Cooper followed the men who followed the dogs, the high clear hound voices—all of them thrashing between trees, getting soaked up to their knees in creeks. Whenever they'd paused, the headlamps they wore drilled minerlike tunnels into the blackness and there was always someone to hand him a flask.

He was reeling with whiskey and fatigue when the dogs finally treed a raccoon. While their lights fastened the animal, huge with anger—its eyes already distant with foreknowledge—the men argued whether to kill it on the branch or shoot it down for the dogs to fight. Finally, one of his cousins won the chance to bring it down.

Everyone agreed the shot was perfect as the live raccoon tumbled to the dogs. In the shadows, Cooper vomited. All of the way home, in the heated air of the cab, he kept smelling the rubbed-away vomit on his clothes. “My nose tells me that old Cooper lost it back there,” his younger cousin said.

“Shut up,” the older cousin, the one who'd made the much-praised shot, answered. “You'll do better next time, Coop.” There had never been a next time. Cooper
had always been sure that someone must have told his father about this and yet his father never mentioned it, though Cooper waited for him to bring it up.

Then, too, it was also possible that his father might have decided to share some new and fearful insight, some apprehension, with Cooper. He might have wanted to say that he'd had a glimpse into the abyss and seen nothing but darkness, no remedy of light.

But as he stood beside his father staring down into the weave of the blanket, Cooper had no list of pending truths or revelations. He just felt a need not to hear what his father had to say.

Cooper ran his hand from Tic-Tok's head along his back to his tail and scratched the spot just at the base of the spine. The dog relaxed, lay down, and then closed his eyes. Cooper continued scratching and was pleased to see that Tic-Tok was enjoying this enough to slap his tail once on the floor.

When the dog was asleep, Cooper went to the kitchen to put on water for coffee. He was starting a new unit tomorrow with his beginning class. It was going to be a sculpture project and the students were supposed to bring things from their homes that were going to be thrown away. He planned to gather his own collection of refuse for a demonstration and for the kids who invariably forgot the assignment and arrived empty handed.

As soon as he entered the kitchen, there was the gun. He had never had a gun in his house before, and its solid metal presence on the white-and-yellow speckled Formica counter, beside the Alpo, in front of the glass canisters filled with sugar, flour, and coffee—just one more domestic object—gave Cooper a sense of vertigo.

He did not normally drink by himself, but he had a bottle of Jack Daniels in a cabinet. He reached over the gun, opened the cabinet, and took out the bottle and a glass, poured several ounces, and sat on a stool to consider things. His father had always stated his belief in the advisability of spending some quiet time with a glass of whiskey before taking any actions that might recast the universe in unpredictable ways.

The hillside behind Cooper's house rose sharply, its broken face covered with wide-leafed English ivy. He had neighbors above, below, and on either side—all people who he knew held sacrosanct the virtue of quiet. The sound of the gun would not pass unnoticed. With the whiskey making a warm spot beneath his lungs, he held the gun in his hand and felt its weight. It was a solid thing, an admirable example of form following function. He didn't allow himself to think about Janet holding it.

He had always been good at hitting targets—darts, archery, shooting—when he was younger. But that had been years ago. He took a beer bottle out of the trash and brought it to the edge of the property and placed it on a stump against the backdrop of ivy. Then he walked back, turned, took aim. The light was fading but the glint of glass in the setting sun was enough.

The sound was deafening and the kick unexpected. His arm flew up as if it belonged to a puppet. It took him a moment to recover. Then he went over to the stump. The bottle had disappeared. He saw a bit of the paper label off to the right.

Back in the house he expected the phone to be ringing. He listened for the sound of a siren. He looked out of the window in the front to see a flashing red light. Nothing.
There was no evidence that anyone had heard the shot.

Except in the bedroom. Tic-Tok had managed to crawl under the bed, leaving only a few inches of tail showing beyond the spread. “Oh, Jesus, I'm sorry, boy,” Cooper said and threw himself on the bed above the dog. He lay very still knowing the dog knew he was there, hoping to suck in, absorb like a sponge, the animal's fears.

A few moments later, Cooper noticed he still had the gun in his hand. He released it gently onto the night table and went to sleep. Sometime later he woke up with the knowledge that things were worse. He turned on the light and saw Tic-Tok, on his side, legs up, the right hind paw scratching at something invisible. It seemed an involuntary action, something done without Tic-Tok's approval, a spasm. Cooper rolled onto the floor and crawled next to the dog. “Tic-Tok, old boy,” he whispered into the dog's ear. The dog's eyes were open, but staring, unfocused. The dog's breathing was rusty, an act done against itself. “Ohhh, Tic-Tok . . . Tic-Tok. . . .” he said. “I'm here, boy. I'm here.”

He lay next to the dog for an hour. Nothing improved. The breathing sounded even more difficult. Cooper got up and sat on the bed and called the vet and got the answering service. He asked for the vet he usually saw and was told that he was out of town but that he was having his calls taken by someone else who, yes, would make a house visit.

Cooper poured another glass of whiskey and sat beside Tic-Tok. Neither he nor Janet had been in the room when his father had died. At first, Cooper felt terribly guilty that he hadn't been there holding his father's hand, but later it occurred to him that, perhaps, his father, always a private man, had wanted to do it alone.

The doorbell rang.

When Cooper opened the door he couldn't figure out why a young woman was ringing his bell at 11:30 at night. Then he understood that she was the vet, and the leather pouch over her shoulder was her doctor's bag.

“He's in the bedroom,” Cooper said and stood aside to let her pass.

She knelt beside the dog and Cooper knelt beside her. Her hair was wet and Cooper realized it was raining outside. That seemed like a good thing, but he couldn't think why. She was quiet and attentive to Tic-Tok, in a way Cooper liked.

“We should do it, you know,” she said. She had a simple authority in her voice. Cooper nodded.

“He isn't going to get any better.”

Cooper nodded again.

“Should I?”

He nodded.

“Do you want to be here with him?”

“Yes,” Cooper said, and didn't recognize his own voice, it seemed to have come from so far away.

“It's called Permasleep,” she said. “It's very quick and painless.”

“Good-bye, Tic-Tok,” Cooper said and put his hand on the ruff of fur that crept up under the collar. He squeezed the loose skin and held on.

His father had been lucid until the end. Both he and Janet had learned to give shots of Demerol, then morphine. The doctor had stopped in twice a day. They had all worked to honor his father's wish to die at home, to be able to spend his last days looking at his field, at the woods beyond, under the tin roof of his own house.
Cooper knew he had tried to do what his father had requested, but what still bothered him was what he had not allowed his father to say.

As he sat on the floor beside the twitching dog, the realization struck Cooper that his father had had no message to deliver that afternoon—that his father had no special intelligence to impart to his son, but had merely wanted to buy some time with talk, to extend his days among the living through the simple act of speech. It struck Cooper that he had failed to understand that his father might have wanted to say nothing more significant than to express an opinion on the right diet for dogs, or the stupidest thing to do in a duck blind, or to ramble on about something he'd never liked—collards, for instance—that he'd never have to eat again.

Cooper felt Tic-Tok slump forward. The dog was collapsing, but gently, easily, almost in slow motion.

“You made the right decision, you know,” she said. “You might have missed.” She was standing now watching him.