“You gotta have a church,” Jacob said.
“Why?” Michael asked. The MacLeod house, him with the musical aspirations and the Orange Crush hair. Michael was certain that if Jacob had told him what he was thinking, he would have said, There’s no way you can go with Lori Ballinger, give it up. He would have saved him from whatever it was he had felt when she said, No, I can’t. “Why do you have to have a church?” More belligerent than he’d intended.
Behind them, they could hear Clare calling, jokingly, “Oh, boys.” She was hanging out the window of the car. The car was slowing down, passing them. “Yoo-hoo,” she said, waving her headband toward them. In the front seat, their mother and father were laughing.
They both waved back. The car swung into the driveway ahead of them.
“People need a place to go,” Jacob said.
“Why?” Michael asked again. “What for?” And when Jacob shrugged, but smiling this time, as if he knew they both knew the answer, Michael said, once more, “It’s bullshit.”
John keane lay in bed and held a running argument with the pain. It was a terse, dismissive argument, the kind he might have with some idiot shop clerk or dishonest mechanic, the kind of hopeless, useless, beneath-your-dignity argument that you know you should walk away from but don’t. Can’t. Raising your eyebrows at any bystander or eavesdropper as if to say, Can you believe this idiot? Can you believe I’m bothering to talk to him?
The boys, before they left for their summer jobs-Jacob was cutting lawns again this summer, Michael caddying by day and pumping gas at night-had knocked together a number of two-by-fours and, following his instructions, had rigged it with a pulley and a rope. They had then wrapped the rope around one of his old, paint-spattered army boots, across the instep and up through the laces, and weighed the other end with a dictionary and half a dozen volumes of their grocery-store encyclopedia. Following his instructions (they were good kids, both of them), they had slipped the boot over his right sock, adjusting the whole contraption until his leg was pulled taut, nearly suspended over the damp mattress, and the pain that had woken him two nights ago, all unbidden and unaccountable, met its match with this new pain-a disciplined, intentional pain-intended to be the cure.
Michael had hesitated at the bedroom door. This was at about eight-fifteen this morning, Mary downstairs getting the rest of them out of the house. If anyone was going to say this two-bit attempt at traction was an eccentric, half-assed scheme, it would be Michael the wise guy. But Michael merely waved his arm-a long, thin arm, softened, nearly blurred by the fair hair that covered it-and said, “Take care.”
He had lifted his own arm, the mold from which the other had been formed, and said, “Sure I will.”
He had a bottle of aspirin by the bedside, a cold cup of tea, a tube of Ben-Gay, even, his wife’s idea, a tumbler of scotch, but he resisted resorting to any of them just yet. Yesterday, the boys had moved the portable TV into his room, close enough so he could reach the dial and the antenna (another jerry-rigged affair with rabbit ears and a coat hanger and aluminum foil), but he resisted that as well. The house was empty now-the boys at their jobs and his wife and the two girls off to a matinee in the city-and silent but for the whir of the fan on the dresser, which by now had become a part of the silence as well. This was the beginning of his second day of sick leave, the first two he had taken in more than twenty years, and he didn’t like the vertigo he felt at this sudden suspension of his routine any better today than he had yesterday. (He raised his chin at the army boot, at the pale blue pant leg of his pajamas: I don’t like it.)
It wasn’t that he was a company man, he was happy enough to use up his three weeks of vacation time every year-one week to work around the house in the spring, two in summer to take the kids to the shore. He was just mostly healthy, and found a couple of aspirin or a cold tablet taken in the morning far preferable to the silence and boredom of a sickroom. And he didn’t like doctors. Mary Keane rolled her eyes every time she heard him say it. She understood that what he didn’t like about doctors had less to do with what he called their arrogance and more to do with the diplomas on the wall, the golf-course tans-the disadvantage, the particular kind of humiliation a man with four children making fifteen thousand a year endured while sitting with his bare legs dangling, those missing toes, in his boxer shorts and T-shirt before a diplomaed man in a good suit who had been to Columbia University or Cornell. Once a year, he went downtown for his company physical and every year he got a clean bill of health-as had (he was quick to point out) his brother Frank two weeks before he died, which told you something about doctors.
He was convinced anyway that lingering illness and curable, or incurable, disease was not likely to get him. His end, when it came, he was certain, would be swift and unavoidable. The black coach. The sudden fall. Like Frank’s.
He shifted uncomfortably on the bed, palms pressed to the mattress to ease the pressure on his tailbone. He moved his foot inside the boot. This morning, when he had shown the boys the sketch he had drawn during the sleepless night, Michael had muttered, “It looks like a guillotine. Or the rack.” He had raised an eyebrow and flicked an imaginary cigarette and said in a squinting, lip-curling German accent, “Foolish man, ve have other vays to make you talk.” But Jacob, who if he had been another kind of oldest child might have had the courage to dissuade his father, to point out that they were not setting a broken limb, that this was not the Wild West and it was high time a doctor be consulted, said simply, “Dad thinks it will help,” and then led Michael to the basement where there was still a small, leftover pile of two-by-fours tucked away in the furnace room.
It might have been more fitting for them to have rebelled, and he suspected that were he a younger man, a younger father, they would have. But the solemnity with which the two of them had come, one after the other, into his bedroom yesterday morning revealed something. Here he was out sick for the first time in more than twenty years and here they were standing over him, dumbstruck and wary, their fear of his dying sprung into their faces as if from the very moment their mother had awakened them with the news that sometime during the night, something had gone wrong with Daddy’s leg. He suspected that they followed his instructions for the weights and the pulley and the contraption that was to support it not so much to humor him in his pain but to coax themselves into believing that he was still in charge, that they were still under his care.
And then the sound of them pounding the wood reached him from the basement, and it was all he could do to cast aside as utter nonsense his own morbid thoughts regarding coffins and crucifixes. It was only a bum leg, after all. Sprung on him in the middle of the night.
He stirred again against the mattress, tilted his head back against the mahogany headboard. He tried to gauge the movement of the sunlight across the white ceiling. There were the blue shadows cast by the valances of his wife’s curtains, the reflection of light in the mirror above her dresser, in the glass of the children’s school photographs, in the blank face of the TV. The pain stretched its own legs for a few seconds, reached up over his thigh and across his back and into his chest and arms. In response, he moved the toe of the boot, then bent his knee to lift the weight of the books that pulled against it, matching pain for pain, the unbidden with the intentional, in some vague theory that the one would defeat the other, that the one was preferable to the other. When he reached for the aspirin on the bed stand, he saw that his hand was trembling and he whispered a quick “Son of a bitch.” It was an ongoing and unwinnable argument with an idiot.