America America (37 page)

“I think you might be right.”

“And he was the one arranged everything after, too.”

“Possibly.”

“The autopsy.”

“I don’t know, ma’am. I really don’t.”

“You know, George has never cried for her. He doesn’t want me saying that for whatever reason of his.” She shook her head sadly. “Men, I guess. But I know it’s true. Refuses to shed a single tear until someone does justice. Does justice for JoEll, Mr. Sifter. My husband has vowed to be the last one standing. Tell you the truth, that doesn’t mean a thing to me. But it means a lot to him, for whatever reason. Only more torture for George, in my opinion. But it matters, all right. I wish he
could
cry about it. Might help him some.”

“I can imagine how he feels.”

“Can you?”

Now she looked closely at me. And it was as though a lifetime of manners just slid right off her. She regarded me up and down. Her eyes at last stopping and looking straight into mine with no acknowledgment at all of what she might be seeing there. As deep and distrusting a look of scrutiny as I’ve ever been given in my life.

Finally, she turned. Spoke the rest of her piece quietly, looking over the fence into the courtyard of the lunch place next door. “Been a Democrat all my life,” she said. “George, too. But what did he want with my daughter?” She touched her hat. “Married, too. A big shot. Could have had anything he wanted. Movie star. Model. And he wanted JoEll. I ask you why, that’s all. What would a vile man like that want with my sweet JoEll?”

D
AD’S BEEN A PHYSICALLY ASTUTE MAN
all his life, and of course it’s no different now that he spends his days the way he does. He practiced three different trades on the crews of Liam Metarey and could well have practiced a fourth. Not only was he a plumber and a stand-in electrician and a skilled layer of concrete—not so easy a job, nor quickly learned—but he was also a half-decent carpenter, from his own knockabout days as a teenager. In those times, in this lumber mill country, when you wanted to build a shed or a piece of furniture, you first cut down your own tree. He knew how to rough-size the timber with a two-handled saw, to smooth it with a set of heavy jointer planes, and to spike it all together in a pattern of framing that you still see in some of the older houses around here but that went out of use with the arrival of plywood. All this is to say that I can understand, if not actually approve of, the way he is behaving at his current quarters.

For example: one recent morning when the floor aide, Mrs. Milton, went to open his window and found it stuck from the humidity, Dad jumped from his bed—on which he’d been reading an anthology of high school poetry—and set to work helping her. Clara and I had come to escort him on our twice-monthly visit to Mom’s grave, which he always resists—I sometimes wonder if he’s embarrassed by the plainness of the headstone—and when the window stuck, he seemed to see his opening. He hurried to Mrs. Milton’s side and took hold of the sash.

Fine enough, and what you might expect from a man of his generation. But this window wasn’t the double-paned, smooth-sliding, molded-vinyl device you see in most nursing homes but an old double-hung with a wooden screen and storm. Walnut Orchards, unlike most other places with such names, actually did start out as an orchard—not just of walnuts, but of cherries and pears, too—and the wing where my father sleeps used to be the cannery. It’s a green-roofed, white-clapboard building half the length of a football field, with Dutch rafters and a row of those old-fashioned windows, trimmed in black. The length and number and low set of the panes give it the look of a particularly long, luxurious, and beautiful horse barn. But such windows, when stuck, are nearly impossible to open.

Nor for my father, however, even at eighty-one. He tested it a few times, then proceeded to hit the sash, first with the open palm of his good hand, then with his shoe, then with the poetry anthology, and finally with a paperback of Norman Mailer’s
The Time of Our Time
, which caused the frame to emit a cracking sound but not quite to move. At last he resorted to the metal leveling plate that until he took out the eight-in-one tool from the pocket of his pajama pants—I was as surprised as anyone—had been screwed to the foot post of his bed.

He used it to pry off the stops on either side of the casing, and at this point the window fell gracefully backwards into his hands. But we were now in direct communication with the outside air, and this somehow caused Mrs. Milton to give up on her kind demeanor and go straight to the alarm cord, which at Walnut Orchards activates a revolving light outside the room door, like the one on an old police cruiser. A bell goes off, too, in the office, some distance away. I think she might have thought he was trying to escape.

The alarm bells are presumably intended for medical emergencies, and I made a note to ask the manager how much could be expected of the nose-ringed young man who arrived a few minutes later, wearing red Converse high-tops and a shirt that said
QUESTION AUTHORITY
? By that time, Dad had removed the rest of the trim and was retrieving a broken sash cord from inside the frame. The orderly merely sat down indolently in a side chair, next to where Clara was standing, to watch him. Dad pulled on the broken sash cord, and up came the rusted old iron weight at its end, like an eel out of a slough. It was a hot day and within a few moments the heat from the open window had overpowered the room’s air-conditioning, but Dad was like an old lizard waiting to be warmed. He began to whistle “Whiskey in the Jar” as he retied the knot.

“That’s a strangle snare, honey,” I said to Clara, matter-of-factly. It seemed we had all accepted his task at this point, and we could all also see that he was doing a perfect job.

He stopped whistling. “No, it’s not,” he answered irritably. “It’s just a simple noose, for Chrissake.” Then he added, “Boy, my knuckles are stiff.”

“It is
not
,” I said. I turned to Clara. “It’s a strangle snare.” It was. A simple noose uses a single loop. Dad taught me all this.

“Cor,” Clara said.

I should add that lately his memory has begun to worry me. Even more than usual. Not that he’s forgetting things—everybody around here seems to do that—but that now it appears impossible to correct him with the truth. There seems to be a tiny homunculus of pent-up annoyance running free in his brain now, which is not at all how he used to be when I was young. Until the stroke, in fact, I doubt a single day of his eight vigorous decades had been marked by anything but hard work, personal reserve, and courtesy.

“Lord,” he said, after a few more minutes of fiddling with the knot and the weight, “a
strangle snare
?”

“You taking the medicine Dr. Jadoon gave you for your fingers?”

“Lord,” he said, louder. “A
strangle snare
?”

I had no choice: “I told you, Pop,” I said, “a simple noose only uses one loop.”

“Cor—”

“God damn you to hell.”

“Cool,” the orderly said.

“Dad,” I said. “How do you plan to get the trim stops back in?”

“Fuck,” Dad answered, and reached behind him, as though the hammer might be there on the floor.

The slackness was gone now from the orderly’s features, and he was leaning forward in the chair like an honors student. I realized he was imagining his own situation, wondering if the current standoff with his own father—judging from the nose ring and the shirt—was destined, as mine appeared to be, to last out a lifetime.

But I’m not going to record any more. All I’ll tell you is that the rest of what Dad said was heated. After a few minutes I tried to disengage, a trick that, thankfully, has become easier as I’ve grown older, but Dad spit out another diatribe. This one was aimed at the quality of modern lumber, the thinned-down hardware available at big-box retailers, and the greed of the facilities executives at Walnut Orchards. When the orderly chuckled here and there at his asides, my father took him quickly as an ally, and I was left to stand there until Dad finally tired—first of his own conversation and a few minutes later of the window, which he finally set back down against the wall.

By now it was almost too late to make the trip to the cemetery, but I didn’t say anything. It was unsettling to see him like this, but I knew that if I set the window back in the frame and tried to move him along I might never hear the end of it. I’d also planned to tell him some news that Clara and I had heard, but I realized now that this, too, would have to wait. It was news about Aberdeen West.

T
HAT
S
UNDAY,
The New York Times
ran its famous article—the one that would eventually win G. V. Trawbridge his second Pulitzer Prize. It came out on page one, above the fold. I saw the paper at the breakfast table in the guest house, brought in by Liam Metarey himself and placed next to Henry Bonwiller’s black coffee and toast. By then, there was such a feeling of stunned reversal at the estate that I simply walked up and read the opening of it over the Senator’s shoulder. After a moment, he stood, moved to the window, and began tossing a marble egg in his hand. He was looking out at the land. At the far end of the horse pastures, Gil McKinstrey was driving a tractor over the berm, and as Henry Bonwiller watched the machine disappear behind the hill I had the feeling he was watching his ambitions vanish, too. Nobody looked at me. Nobody spoke.

B
UFFALO
, N.Y., April 23—Allegations have come to light in recent weeks about the death of JoEllen Charney, an Islington, New York, legal secretary who is believed to have been involved at the time of her death in an extra-marital affair with front-running Democratic presidential candidate Senator Henry Bonwiller of New York. Miss Charney, who disappeared in December, was found dead shortly before the Iowa Presidential caucuses, encased in ice in an apple orchard that shares a border with the campaign offices of Senator Bonwiller.

A New York State Police investigation earlier this year resulted in no indictments, but sources have confirmed that the case has been re-opened by the Buffalo office of the F.B.I., and that Senator Bonwiller is a person of interest in the new investigation. An indictment, if one is coming, would be expected by summer.

Later that morning, the Senator left. I was in the driveway when the campaign jet rose steeply over the house and banked to the south. The boom of that plane always startled me, no matter how many times I heard it, and in its aftermath each time the particular silence of that place seemed to begin all over again, as though the land were cleansing itself. First the sound of the birds returned—it was impossible to know if they’d stopped chirping or if my ears had only stopped hearing them; then came the distant putter of the tractor; then the
clap-clap-clap
of a hammer and the rising triplet of Churchill’s following yap. Last, always, came the mumble of the wind, high in the sycamores, the shivering of those giant leaves that to me is still most emblematic of that land and those days. I stood under the bur oak, wondering what was coming.

Later that day, I was questioned again. I must have been the first one they approached, because the agent came in just a few moments after I’d parked his black Mercury Marquis in the garage. I was filling a bucket with soap to wash it when he appeared at the door. He held out a panel fold. “FBI,” he said. “Got to ask a couple of things.”

“Yes, sir.”

I dipped the sponge and lathered the hood.

“Just a couple things, Corey.”

I was young enough to be surprised that he knew my name.

“Yes, sir.”

“How about puttin’ that down?”

“I’m sorry, sir.” I set the sponge back in the bucket. A half-dozen sawhorses were stacked next to where he was leaning against the wall by the door, and I pulled one out and took a seat across from him. He was a big man, and a laundry soap smell came from his dark blue suit. He adjusted his pants, which seemed uncomfortable, and took out a small pad from his breast pocket. “The Senator, Senator Bonwiller,” he said. “Now, you say he was a good driver?”

“Was he a good driver?”