Aloft (39 page)

I'm annoyed by his sneaky tactic of cutting out any culpabil-ity in this mess, keeping it all in the passive, and then backing up the conversation, which is of course what I myself would do with a customer whose job we'd maybe messed up. But despite recognizing this I don't call Patterson on it, mostly because I understand that Pop's run is not Patterson's fault exactly (if at all), and that he's had to drag his flabby ass out of the lounger and tape the rest of whatever jackass-glorifying TV show he wasn't closely watching. I even almost feel sorry for him because his is just the dicey situation our litigious scapegoating civilization tends to put you in, when you've been installed at the big controls just long enough to absorb the most serious trouble, while bearing no real power at all.

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Still, some chump's got to
represent,
and be punching bag for the rest, and so I say, to get the discussion snapped back on terms of my liking, "Look, Patterson. You had better start doing more than some good informing, or you're going to have a major action on your hands. My attorney's Richard Coniglio, senior partner at Whitehead Bates, who has constant wood for this kind of thing."

This seems to freeze up Patterson, like he's actually heard of the firm, for he breaks into a wide why-me smile and clears his throat and kind of hitches himself up, balls to gut, like some pitcher down 3-0 in the count.

"There's room for calm here," Patterson says, collecting himself. "Our experience leads us to believe that your father is likely fine, if what he's done is just wander off."

"Your
experience?
How often does this happen?"

"Almost monthly, Mr. Battle. Ivy Acres is not a holding facility, a prison. Sometimes people forget that fact. We consider our community members to be adults, and as adults they're free to move about, come and go on the shopping shuttle, take outings with friends and relatives, really do as they please. We're talking, of course, about our members housed in the main part of the facility, and not those in Transitions, who aren't as independent or mobile."

"I thought you had a pass system."

"We do. But it's only so we know where members are and how long they'll be out. When people don't come back we wait twenty-four hours and almost always they were at a niece's house and stayed over after dinner, or they just lost track of the time and missed the last shuttle and checked into a hotel. It has been very rare during the time I've been here that there have been
issues."

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"I think you should tell us about those," Paul says. "Just so we're aware."

"That's privileged information, I'm afraid."

"Well, everyone tells me I'm a privileged guy," I say, without the scantest levity or irony.

This doesn't intimidate Patterson, certainly, but I can tell he is beginning to plot out the best course for himself, trying to cal-culate whether he ought to toe the company line and say nothing more or maybe turn a little state's evidence right here and now, see if he can't ride the fine middle course and slip through this thing without any serious damage. I'm wondering, too, whether this might be one of those moments that I as an American of obvious Southern Italian descent might take advantage of (given the cultural bigotry/celebration concerning certain of our neighborhood associations), and suggest to Patterson that he'd do well to tell us whatever we want to know, lest the firm of Whack, Rig & Pinch arrange a special late-night deposition for him, dockside or alleyside or maybe right in the garage of his Cold Spring Harbor colonial, when he's just about to roll out the garbage container to the street. I really shouldn't, in deference to Pop, who can't stand any such talk, despite and perhaps because of the well-known fact that the Battaglia brothers got their start paving and walling the properties of certain connected guys at their second-home mansions in Brookville and Lake Success, but I warn Patterson he'd better start plain "wising up," and "stop being such a punk." Patterson now clears his throat again and says, "Unfortunately the two people involved clearly intended to leave the campus. They took specific measures."

"Like what?"

Patterson ahems. "One of them ground up three bottles of sleeping pills and mixed them into a milkshake at a diner, A L O F T

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where he was found dead in the men's room. The other was a woman who took our shuttle to the mall and shopped for most of the day. But instead of returning on the bus she somehow made her way up to the roof and jumped off the top of Saks."

"Christ . .."

"Besides those instances, Mr. Battle, we've had only success.

Now, you wanted to know what we're doing about finding your father. The police have been notified, of course, and we've also hired two private investigators, who are out searching for Mr.

Battle right now The lead investigator called me as I drove in, and so far they can confirm a sighting of an older man of his description."

"Where?"

"At the Walt Whitman Mall. In fact this very morning. A security guard apparently escorted him out, as he wasn't appropriately dressed."

"Escorted him out where?"

"Just out. I asked this, too, but the guard didn't note where the man went."

"Did he say what
the man
was wearing?"

"I believe it was trousers and a pajama top."

"Fucking great. That was Pop."

Paul says, "At least he was fine as of this morning, which means he got through last night on his own."

"It's a whole other night tonight," I say, thinking how good •

it is that Jack is driving up and down the Nassau-Suffolk border scouring every park and playground and strip mall for his grandfather. As I've noted, the thing about Jack is that he has never been in the least lazy in his life; I can't remember an instance when I asked him to clean the gutters or shovel the driveway or set the dinner table and had him groan or shuffle his feet 516

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or do anything but get on the job, the same as if I'd suggested that we throw a football around, or maybe go to Shea Stadium, which we did only once, when a customer of mine gave me a couple of playoff tickets in 1973 (Jack was thrilled because he got Rusty Staub's autograph). Jack's trouble has been of course that he tends to respond not wisely but too well, like a cricket that jumps whenever you touch him; it doesn't matter that he might be perched on the edge of some chasm. This is not my way of intimating once again that I think Jack isn't the bright-est bulb on the tree, because even if that were true it doesn't matter in the least. Let's face it, for most of us in this more-than-okay postbellum Western life, smarts really don't count for a tenth as much as placement and birth, the particular tra-jectory of one's parturition, and if there's a genuine flaw to Jack's character it's no secret he gets too focused and purposeful for anybody's good, and especially his own, for it would never occur to him to lift the hatch and just bail out before the groundrush stops everything dead.

"Maybe Jack will find him," Paul says, as usual reading my mind. "I'll call and let him know about Pop being sighted at the mall."

He doesn't know Jack's cell number (nor do I), so he takes my phone outside the building to speed-dial him while I reacquire Patterson, who appears a bit sodden all of a sudden, like he's just come off a chartered fishing boat on a chilly, mist-spritzed day, like he'd pretty much give anything to get back home and pull on his flannel pajamas and crawl into bed. And though in fact I have zero interest in suing anybody ever, and can't think of what else to have him do save piss away his time keeping me company while I fret about Pop in my backslidingly diffuse and scattered manner, I say, anyway, "You're going to make this ALOE. T

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come out right, Patterson, or I swear once my attorney gets busy you'll be lucky to run the nut-and-candy cart at Roosevelt Field."

To this Patterson is mum, his lower lip pressed up tight against his half-exposed top teeth, so that he looks like a big bald, worried rodent, and I'm ready for whatever sweet load of sunshine he's going to try to blow up my ass, thank you very much. But presently Paul appears in the doorway, and then Jack, bearing what looks like a pile of dirty laundry in his arms, laundry with sneakered feet. I realize he is carrying Pop, wrapped up in a soiled—and very smelly—bedsheet.

"Pop . . ."

"He's not dead," Jack pronounces, evidently responding to my expression.

Pop moans with trenchant exasperation, as he always does.

He's alive.

"He's pretty out of it," Jack says, laying him down on the bed. The top of the sheet flops down, revealing Pop's face, which is sunburned and badly peeling. "He told me he didn't sleep for two days."

"Where did you find him? At a mall? A park? Not at
Starbucks . . ."

"Right outside here," Jack says. "I was parking the truck and I saw something move in the pachysandra by the duck pond."

"What the hell do you mean?" I turn to give Patterson a look, but he's already gone, yodeling something from the hallway about finding the house doctor.

"He was back over there, where that other section of the home is."

"Transitions,"
I say, picturing him grimly looking in at Bea from the window.

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"He's probably very dehydrated," Paul says. "And in shock."

Jack says, "I pinched his skin, and it's pretty bad. I asked him and he said he had been drinking water. But I didn't see any bottles. Maybe from the sprinklers. Or the duck pond."

"Oh Jesus," I say. "Is Patterson getting a doctor?"

"I'll go find him," Paul offers. He runs out, leaving the three of us in the room, posed like in one of those neo-Classical deathbed paintings, the acolytes deferentially arrayed at the great man's torso, his mouth twisted in the last mortal coils of agony, his eyes cast upward to the Maker .

"Can you two give a guy a little room here?" Pop hoarsely blurts out, hacking up some very gluey spit. Jack cups his chin with a tissue and Pop spews it out. "And instead of trading all your medical theories, how about a goddamn glass of water?"

While Jack fetches one from the bathroom, I try to take the dirty sheet from him, but he won't let me.

"Come on, Pop, it's filthy. And so are you."

"I like it this way."

"You smell like cat piss. And other things."

"I don't care. It makes me feel alive."

Jack gives him two glasses, and he bolts both down, which is probably not ideal, and hands them back to him for more.

"What the hell did you do these past two days?"

"I walked by day," he says, intoning not a little prophet-like.

In fact he seems too tranquil, and steady, for what he's obviously weathered.

"I guess you didn't get very far, with your legs bothering you."

"Just to the gate," he says. "I was just going to take a short walk at first. But then some kid drove by and asked if I needed a ride, and I told him I did. He dropped me off out in East-hampton."

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"You went out that far?"

"That's where the kid was going."

"Didn't he wonder why you were wearing a pajama top?"

"Hey, he was wearing a shirt with cuts all over it, like it got run over by a combine. Plus he wasn't too swift."

Jack brings the glasses back full and hands them to Pop. "So what did you do out there?"

He bolts them down, again. "Like I said, I walked. I walked on the beach, all the way out to Montauk Point."

"That's got to be fifteen or twenty miles at least. You really walked all the way?"

"Well, I almost got there. I could see it, that's for sure."

I ask, "Did you have any money? What did you eat?"

"Of course I didn't have money. I was just going out for a little walk, remember? Plus I'm kept a pauper, so I have no freedom. And if you want to know, I panhandled."

"You begged?" Jack says, crinkling his forehead, like his mother sometimes did.

"It's not below me," Pop replies, glancing at yours truly.

"Nothing's below me."

I say, "So you begged on the beach in the Hamptons."

"Yeah," he says. "Most people wouldn't part with any dough, but they were decently generous with the food, which I ate but didn't like. Sushi, some other rolled thing they called a 'wrap.'

This is what people bring to the beach. And how come everything has to have smoked salmon in it? Nobody appreciates an honest ham sandwich anymore."

Jack asks, "Did you sleep on the beach?"

"Oh yeah. It was real nice, sleeping outside. It wasn't too cold either. In the morning some cops gave me a ride to town. After I got together enough for a doughnut and coffee, I hitched a
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ride back from a guy in a Jaguar. I think he thought I was some nutso billionaire like Howard Hughes. When I got back here I didn't want to go inside right away, so I lifted a sheet from the laundry service truck and camped out."

"You could have told somebody, you know."

"What, that I was going to sack out with the ducks? The jerks here would have called you, and you would have called some shrink, and all of you would have gotten together and sent me to a place where they have metal grating on the windows."

"I wouldn't have," Jack says, most =helpfully. "Next time, you can come stay with us. I'll set you up on the deck with a pup tent."

"I need the open air."

"Fine, then, anyway you want it. Better yet, you can come stay with us now if you like."

"Oh yeah? You mean it?"

"Why not? You have a month-to-month lease, right?"

"Ask Mr. Power-of-Attorney. Hold on, I gotta use the head."

We help Pop out of bed, but he bats away our buttressing and goes into the bathroom.

"Of course it's month-to-month," I say to Jack. "But shouldn't you talk about this with Eunice?"

"What makes you so sure I haven't?"

"I know you."

"You think you do."

"Well, have you?"