"What about the boy?"
"Don?"
"Don?"
"I didn't name him. It's Don. Don Charboneau. Well, this is the really fucked-up part."
"Oh, there's a fucked-up part?"
"Don's been in touch. Don is just back from Iraq. Can you believe that? He's only twenty-one. And now he's got titanium legs."
"What?"
"You heard me."
"Jesus."
"Usual roadside shit. And both of them."
"Man, that's bad. But there's that guy, that runner-"
"This kid's not there yet. Moves around like a drunk cross-country skier, according to Lee. It's pretty sad. I mean, I feel for him, I really do."
"He's your son."
"Right. He's my son. We think so."
"I thought you did tests."
"Science isn't everything."
"How did he find out about you?"
"We wondered what had happened to him, but he'd sort of dropped out of Nathalie's life for a time. I think she was mad at him for enlisting. Then she dies and he comes back. I guess he went through Nathalie's stuff, figured some things out. He started sending itemized bills for his expenses to Lee. Even showed up at his office once."
"Really?"
"Yeah, pretty aggro, right? Then he sends me a letter with a return address in Jackson Heights. Says he looks forward to the healing."
"Jackson Heights. That's near me."
"I know."
The car was turning onto my block.
"How did you know where I lived?" I said to Michael, the driver.
"What," said Michael, nodded at the navigation screen on his dashboard. "You think you're living off the grid? You have a listed phone number."
There was something in the tweaked amusement of his voice I recognized. It made me think of late nights over a CD jewel case, razor blades, long-winded denunciations of world banking cabals.
"Michael Florida," I said. We had always referred to him by his full name. I never knew how it started but the nature of the name and the nature of the man made it seem correct.
"Long time, brother."
Michael Florida's eyes shone in the rearview mirror. Even in the dark of the car I could make out his face now, the pocked cheeks, the pointy chin.
"How have you…" I said. "How did you-"
"Figured I was dead by now?"
"Or working in a halfway house in Arizona."
"Nice." Michael Florida laughed. "But it was Missouri."
The car slid up to my building. I looked up and saw the front room lit. The lamp near the sofa threw light on the ceiling cracks.
"We'll have to postpone the reunion," said Purdy.
"Seems like my life is one big reunion these days."
"I'm sure it seems that way," said Purdy. "Me, when I make a friend, I try to keep him."
"Point taken."
"Don't take it too hard, Milo. You're a good man."
"You think so?"
"I'm betting on it. Michael?"
Michael Florida twisted around and slid a large envelope between the bucket seats. Purdy handed it to me.
"I could have sent you an email and wired some money, but this is more fun, no? Fun's hard to find. You have to make your own. Look this material over."
"I will," I said.
"Goodnight, Milo."
"Goodnight, Purdy. Michael."
I ducked out of the car. The sofa lamp went dark.
Thirteen
The next morning I found a note from Maura in the kitchen. She'd written it in the margins of an unpaid cable bill, slipped it beneath a kiwi. I'd always loved Maura's handwriting, its swoops and swells, its queer collapses. She wrote like somebody half trapped by her bubbly grade school script, still trying to ungirl it:
Milo-Working late tonight. Please pick up Bernie at H. Salamander. He can have the other cupcake in the fridge, but only after he eats his dinner. He can have one show before his bath and two books after. Call if there's a problem. Please don't have a problem.
The absence of a sign-off did not seem strange. Once she might have written one of our pet names, along with a coded reference to some salacious act. But those names, like most of the acts, had vanished. Bernie had begun to suss them out anyway, and it could be rather unnerving to be addressed by your son as "Smoof" or "Turbs" or "Provost Cavelick," to hear the words wedged so unevenly in his mouth, the way they must have been in ours. That the pet names harkened back to lost years of sustained laughter and lovemaking made me somewhat grateful for Bernie's interventions. Besides, I knew who wrote the note.
I made some coffee and took the envelope Purdy had given me to the stoop. The envelope was thick, and the first thing that slid out was a packet of cash. I shoved it back in and tugged out some stapled papers, printouts of email exchanges between Purdy and Don Charboneau. Most were terse and cautious hellos, information about whereabouts, fund transfers, but a few let loose, went "aggro," to use Purdy's word, achieved a register that Purdy maybe even secretly admired. The longest, and latest:
From: [email protected]
Hi Dad. Just moved down to the city to be closer to you, my dad. I'm in Jackson Heights. Ever heard of it? Some good curry around here. Lots of dotheads, too, though Mom would have killed me if she heard me say that. Weren't so many dotheads in the service, but there were a few. Cool guys. For dotheads. Most of my unit was just niggers, black niggers and brown niggers and white niggers and Christ niggers. So, now that my mom is dead and my aunt is dead and even the only close friend I had in the Army is dead, and I have nobody in the world but you (and my girl, Sasha), I am really looking forward to us hooking up and doing father/son things, like going to baseball games, and movies, and you can teach me about sex and how to tie my shoelaces and wipe myself or maybe you can just send me more of that money. Yeah, do that. Don't they call it hush money? That's a funny phrase. Where's Lee, your Hebrew friend? Can you get him to send more hush money? Or maybe you can do it yourself. I know how much you want to see me. Come out and we'll eat some dothead food or there's also really good Salvadoran. I knew somebody from San Salvador in my unit. Another light-wheel mechanic. The close friend I mentioned before. Her name was Vasquez. Fucking Vasquez. Got an RPG right in the teeth. Can you picture that? Probably not. Yeah, so, that was what happened to Vasquez. She was right ahead of us and I saw her head explode off her neck, about three seconds before our Humvee blew. I bet you really care. There was a lot of brain and bone in the road, and pieces of a paperback book by Roque Dalton. Ever read Roque Dalton? I actually have. I'm the one who told Vasquez about him. See, I'm not quite the guy you'd think would be the guy who wrote most of this email. I'm kind of a mystery. That's what Sasha says. But then again, she's not always the sharpest card in the deck, if that's the saying for it. I'll take that money now. Love, your loving son, Don
Along with the money and the emails were directions to Don's apartment. My mission, so to speak, was described in a brief note from Purdy. He wanted me to deliver the money to Don, but more important, get some kind of read on him, figure out whether he seemed to have a master plan or was just, as Purdy put it, a "hurt, confused kid with no legs (probably the case)." The "deal," Purdy wrote, was this: Purdy would be ready at a certain point to get involved in the boy's life, be a better secret father, if Don wanted that, to help in ways beyond these relatively paltry payouts, but he needed a more reliable sense of the kid, if he could be trusted to not divulge Purdy's broken trust to trust freak Melinda. This was Purdy's ask. I was going to be his bastard son's minder, his mind reader. It couldn't be as bad as building decks, and given what Purdy had intimated at the candy store, the payout would be better than paltry. Already in my mind I was curating the opening show in the Milo Burke Gallery at the Mediocre University at New York City, where, in a maneuver without precedent, I had been promoted from part-time development officer to full-time chair of the painting department. It seemed right, if only a tad egotistical, that the first exhibit include a few of my more representative works.