Glimpses Read online

  “Yeah, I know it. Rundgren made a song out of it.”

  “So he did. It’s kind of like that, or like the way you came up with ‘Long and Winding Road.’ Change one little thing and you change the whole world.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I was eighteen years old. This was back in sixty-two, in Pine Bluff. It was my second day back from boot camp. I was scheduled to report to Navy OCS—you know, Officer Candidate School—in thirty days. I’d already passed the exams and everything. This old boy that I enlisted with called me up and we went out for a spin in his daddy’s new Nash Rambler. Some clown ran a stop sign and hit us. I mean, it wasn’t even our fault. This is pathetic, not tragic. Well, I hit the dashboard, which was of course not padded back in sixty-two. I wasn’t too bad hurt, but my teeth and lower jaw got kind of messed up. We didn’t have the money to send me to a real hospital, so I went to Millington Naval Hospital over in Memphis. After two days when the doc came around and offered passes I took one. So me and this other guy went and bought a fifth of Bacardi—nobody checked my ID or anything—and we went over to the Cotton Club. Of course that would have to be the night that the place got raided. Me and four other guys got busted for drinking under age. We spent the night in jail, and the next day the Navy chief comes around and everybody pays twenty-five bucks and gets out. Only I didn’t have twenty-five bucks. The chief wouldn’t give me an advance, and there wasn’t anybody I could borrow from, so I had to stay in jail.”

  “What about your family?”

  “I’ll tell you about my family sometime. Just take my word, I wasn’t about to call my father. Not to be asking favors of him, especially money favors. So the chief leaves me half a pack of Pall Malls and takes off. I come up for sentencing and the judge decides he’s going to make an example out of me. Thirty days on the penal farm.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Wait. As soon as I got there I knew I was in big-time trouble, but the sooner I got back to Millington the better. I knew I was just going to have to bite the bullet and write my dad. But the mail only went out once a week, and I just missed it. So it was nine days before I could get the money to pay the fine and get sprung out of there.”

  “What did your dad do, when he got the letter?”

  “Nothing. He just sent it, he sent me the money. It was only a matter of, by that time, twenty bucks or something. A lot of money to us in those days, but not anything that was going to break him. I don’t recall him ever even saying much about it, surprisingly.”

  “My family was pretty good when it was an absolute crisis. We just weren’t very good the rest of the time.”

  “Yeah. Same with my dad. I never could harbor much of a grudge against him, though. I feel like he’s always been abused by the job that he had, doing shift work for twenty-five years, where he had to be on day shift one week, swing shift the next, graveyard the next, and never had any kind of rhythm to his life.”

  “Jesus. That’s rough.”

  “Yeah, really. Well, you know, eighth-grade education.”

  “So what happened when you got the money?”

  “By that time the Navy charged me with ‘unauthorized leave,’ which was at least better than AWOL or desertion. They put me in restriction barracks from six in the evening to six in the morning, and the rest of the day I just hung around the geedunk, you know, the PX. I had to face a Captain’s Mast, where I got yelled at by the base admiral, then I had a summary court martial where I got busted down to E1 from E2 and had to do sixty days in restriction.

  “That was where I got upset, because I was supposed to report to OCS in about two weeks from then. And that was when they told me. No OCS until my record cleared, and my record wouldn’t clear for two fucking years. All because of twenty-five bucks, all because some yahoo ran a stop sign, all because I went for a ride in some guy’s father’s Nash.

  “Well, in two years my hitch was pretty much going to be over anyway. So I took the best job I could find, the easiest path to make rank. At the time that was Aviation Structural Mechanic—that’s as opposed to the guys that actually work on the engines. I was in Emergency Egress Equipment.”

  “Like ejection seats.”

  “Ejection seats, explosive canopies, drogue chutes. It was kind of a joke because every test I ever took, my mechanical aptitude was the worst. But there I was, in the Navy, working as a mechanic, Patuxent River, Maryland, the Pax River TPS. There’s only two Test Pilot Schools in the country, Pax River and Edwards Air Force Base out in California. Everything we did was planes. We didn’t believe the Navy really had any ships until one day we saw an experimental destroyer out in Chesapeake Bay. We all just stood around and stared at it. All that time in the Navy and it was our first ship.

  “I used to go into Washington, when I could afford it, and go to the clubs. This was sixty-three. The Beatles were in Newsweek or someplace and I saw their hair and thought, hey, that looks neat. But life around the base was all this chickenshit stuff, they would lay for me and drag me into the base barbershop and cut all my hair off.

  “Then one day these two bright red World War II vintage bombers arrive. They’re full of these hotshots from Cornell Aeronautical Labs, and they’re here to look at our jets. At the time we had the Phantom, which nobody else had. We hadn’t even sold it to the Marines.”

  Graham crushed his empty can and tossed it into a paper sack next to me. “Two points,” he said, and belched. I handed him another.

  “There’s three safety precautions,” he said, “on all emergency egress equipment. This is so some jet jockey doesn’t eject while he’s in the hangar and splatter his brains all over the ceiling. First you pop the circuit breaker so there’s no power to the explosives. Second you turn the detonator a half turn on all charges, so there’s no contact. Third, each button or handle has a hole or flange, and you twist a copper wire through it so it won’t move accidentally. You got all that?”

  “I got it.”

  “I was just back from this big Italian lunch. One of those Cornell hotshots pulled a jet into the TPS hangar. I don’t know what he did to fuck up all the safety precautions.”

  “The three,” I said, “safety precautions on all emergency egress equipment.” I was definitely starting to feel the beer.

  “You got it. I was standing there talking to a couple of guys, digesting that Italian lunch. I didn’t even hear the explosion.”

  He was quiet for a couple of seconds. “Graham?” I said.

  “Those jets have one big door on the lower side that blows off. That’s what hit me. Then this kind of laundry chute comes out and the crew is supposed to slide out. It hit the L1 and L2 vertebrae, you know, lumbar vertebrae. It crushed them together, and bone splinters went into my spine. That’s what did the job on me, taking those splinters out, all the nerve damage from that.

  “I woke up once in the ambulance. I knew I was on the road to Washington, ’cause we used to drive it so much. We were stopped for a red light. I remember seeing the red light reflected off the car next to me.”

  “Graham, look, I…”

  “Shoot, I can talk about it. It’s my life. I’ve been living with it twenty-five years. Anyway, as soon as I woke up after the operation there was this guy standing over me, they were expecting me to be nauseous. I mean, you’re not supposed to eat anything before surgery so that you don’t throw up under the anesthetic and asphyxiate yourself. And I’d had that big lunch and all. He was a hospital corpsman there at Bethesda, dressed completely in white, with a little emesis basin, one of those little kidney-shaped things that you brush your teeth with. And he says, ‘Do you feel sick?’ and I went eughhhhh and just barfed that bright orange Italian lunch all over his nice white uniform.”

  “Jesus, Graham, I’m trying to drink here.”

  He was ready for another beer. I passed one over and he said, “It’s just weird, that’s all. So many things had to happen just right. You know, a year after the accident, the Supreme Court decide
d you can’t try somebody in a military court for the results of something that happened in a civilian court. It’s double jeopardy.

  “We used to watch Jeopardy in the VA hospital. It was so boring we used to bet on who would win. Sheeeit. Is it getting drunk out here?”

  “It is,” I said. “Isn’t there a curfew or something? Maybe we should get out of here.”

  “In a minute. In a minute.”

  “Sure,” I said. “No hurry.”

  The L.A. lights blazed on below us.

  I lost two hours when I came back to Texas. It’s the price you pay for living on borrowed time. A hangover and all that dry airplane air didn’t help. It was after nine at night when we landed. Elizabeth hates to wait around airports and the house is only ten minutes away, so I waited to call until I got in.

  She sounded okay on the phone. When I go out of town it’s always a crap shoot. Will I get the silent treatment, or will she actually be glad to see me?

  Eventually I saw her white Honda, one of a hundred other small white Japanese cars, come around the wide curve in front of Mueller Airport. I got in and got a quick, dry kiss from Elizabeth.

  “You look like you haven’t been sleeping,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t…I was just worried, that’s all.”

  She shrugged. She shrugs a lot when something’s my fault.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t understand this thing you’re doing.” She dodged through the traffic and swung back toward Manor Road.

  “Well, maybe you could understand this.” I took Graham’s check out of my jacket pocket and held it in front of her.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s two thousand dollars. This guy Hudson is going to put the song out as a CD single, a bootleg.”

  “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Moderately. He’s the one taking the risk.”

  “Where did you tell him you got it from?”

  “I didn’t just tell him. I showed him.”

  She shook her head. “This is beyond me. Aren’t you happy with your shop? I thought that was what you wanted.”

  “I don’t know what I want anymore.” The words seemed suddenly ominous.

  “Where do I fit into this? Am I one more thing you don’t know if you want anymore?”

  “Of course not.” I didn’t sound convinced. “Of course I want you.”

  In the sudden silence the radio sounded too bright and artificial. I switched it off and waited for her to ask me about L.A., or the plane trip, or anything at all. She had both hands tight on the wheel, staring straight ahead, like if she tried hard enough she could make me disappear.

  Our friends have all told us we have the perfect marriage. Elizabeth puts up a good show of affection, and I always go along with it. I guess I don’t want to air our problems in public any more than she does. It’s true we never fight. Sometimes we start to, like in the car. Then she goes quiet, holds it in, and I have to admit I feel relieved. It’s one more crisis I don’t have to deal with.

  I waited until the next morning to call my mother. She didn’t seem to want to hear about L.A. either. She’s trying to decide if she should put her home phone number in the want ad for the funeral plot she no longer needs, since my father was cremated and she wants to be cremated too. She’s afraid it’s like a sign that says WIDOW.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I just get so…damned…mad at him. For leaving all this mess behind. I just don’t think I’ll ever get to the end of it. I think of all the time he used to spend in that lounge chair in front of the TV when he could have been helping me organize…”

  But then later she said, “I moved all of my things into the closet in your room. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Of course it is.” There wasn’t any point in telling her again that it isn’t my room, has never been my room, it’s just the guest room I stay in when I’m up there. I was already in college when they had the place built.

  “Next time you’re up here you can take all his clothes to the Salvation Army. I can’t go in that closet right now. It still smells like him.”

  There is only so much I can do for her. On those rare occasions when she actually does talk about her feelings, if I try to draw her out, she immediately changes the subject. The rest of the time it’s just reportage, endless physical detail. Worse yet, she’s gotten into the habit of calling me Jack, my father’s name, and calling him Ray. Sometimes she refers to me as her husband and him as her son. It makes me feel creepy and furious. I remind her every time, but she can’t seem to stop.

  Their house is on a slope above a creek that flows into White Rock Lake. There’s this fishpond in their back yard, a real monstrosity, ten feet long and six feet wide, four feet deep at the deep end, paved with flagstones around the edges. I helped my father build it, every Sunday while I was at DeVry. One of the engineers there had me tell him about an additive to mix with the concrete so it wouldn’t leak. My father decided it was too expensive, so the fishpond leaked for the rest of his life.

  The week I spent with my mother, after he died, I was knotted up inside the whole time. Maybe just to get me out of the house, maybe because she really couldn’t stand to look at it anymore, she sent me out there with a sledgehammer. I spent a couple hours at it every day, a couple hours where I didn’t have to offer up any consoling words, or worse yet have to listen to any, where there was nothing but the steady thump of the hammer and every once in a while the sound of something cracking and giving way.

  There is nothing I can say to her about my father. I know she misses him. I don’t have the heart to tell her I’m glad he’s dead. It’s a relief not to feel his lurking, disapproving presence anymore. At the same time there is this awful finality about it. I always hate it when people keep secrets from me. My father left me with questions I’ll never be able to answer, not as long as I live. Was he trying to kill himself? Did he forget where he was? Was he in some kind of awful pain? Was he angry? Then the really hard questions, that I can never say out loud: Did it have anything to do with that letter I wrote? Or did he even think of me, at all?

  I have a copy of the official police report written by a guy named Adkisson, who was my father’s dive partner. “When he was about 15' past me, he accelerated as if he was chasing something I could not see…he kept accelerating and was swimming down at approx. a 30 degree angle…I caught him at 93' (I didn’t know the depth at the time, I read this later on the surface.) I grabbed him by the leg, turned him around, gave him the up signal and asked if he was OK. He acknowledged the OK signal & we started up…I came to the surface and was going to call for the Zodiac. However the Zodiac was already coming. I turned around and saw him about 40 ft from me on the surface. As I swam toward him I saw his regulator hanging down, the camera electric cord entangled in his vest. The Zodiac reached him when I was 10 ft away. I helped them pull him in the boat. He was on the surface approx 1-2 min. We arrived & CPR was initiated immediately. I don’t know why he exhibited this conduct. This is the way it happened to the best of my memory.”

  At the end of that week in Dallas, my last night before I came home to Austin, before this whole business started with “The Long and Winding Road,” my mother had a memorial service there in the living room of the house. She called it “A Toast to Life.” I guess there were a dozen people there, sitting in a circle, what passed for my father’s closest friends. They all loved him, that was never the problem. It’s just that at one time or another I’d heard him say something cruel and dismissive about every one of them, like he had to prove that he didn’t need any friends, that none of them were quite good enough for him. Bill Wyndham, who used to be his department chairman, talked about how much his students loved him. A couple from the local anthropology club talked about how much time he’d spent working with them on typology. Joe Hastings, who ran the field school in New Mexico, remembered how my father always used to kid around about adoptin
g some good-looking eighteen-year-old female student. Donna from next door was the only one who seemed to be talking about the father that I knew, and even so she soft-pedaled it, went on about the warm heart under his gruff exterior. My mother talked about how he’d died doing exactly what he wanted to do, and how lucky that made him. At the end they all shook my hand and hugged me and told me how proud he’d always been of me.

  I wanted to say, “Prove it.” I wanted them to tell me why, if he cared so much, he never said it to me. I wanted to take Bill Wyndham by his expensive lapels and ask where my real father was, the one who thought Wyndham was nothing but a politician and bitched about having to go to his tight-assed parties. I wanted to throw Joe Hastings against a wall and tell him that my father didn’t need to adopt anybody. That he already had a son. That his bullshit macho posturing had always pissed me off as much as it insulted my mother, that I was sick of people bringing it up like it was supposed to be funny.

  Then I looked at my mother as she sat there with this radiant, sad smile on her face, her eyes full of tears, her champagne glass unnoticed in her hand, and I didn’t say anything at all.

  Saturday, a week after I got back from L.A., was Elizabeth’s birthday. Once, when I asked her why we hardly made love anymore, she told me that I wasn’t romantic enough. That I was too wrapped up in my work, that I didn’t make her feel special or attractive, that I needed to create a mood for her. There’s been no sex since my father died, almost a month ago, and I needed some physical contact.

  I took her to a movie in the afternoon and out to dinner that night. I even wore a tie. When we got home I had her come out in the back yard with me to look at the stars, which were in fact very beautiful. I tried to put my arms around her and she said, “It’s cold. Let’s go in.”

  She fell asleep lying next to me on the couch, watching It’s A Wonderful Life on TV. She started to move in her sleep. I looked over and saw her with one hand between her legs, pushing against it. She moaned and then sighed without waking up.