Chapter Eleven #2
“Hi.” He cleared his throat and coughed some distance from the receiver.
“Felix. Felix! Where are you?”
He was in a military hospital in Manila. His ship had been torpedoed—had they notified her? They’d told him they had.
“I got a telegram, but nothing else. Are you—” She almost said, Are you alive? “Are you alright?”
“I nearly drowned,” he said, then told her of his breaks: shoulder, collarbone, a couple of ribs, and a humerus they’d had to re-break to get it set right, that re-break being near the top of a long list of things he never wanted to experience again.
“My God. Are you…healing? You sound awful.” He sounded like someone was standing on his throat.
“They say I’m healing. I swallowed a lot of seawater. Oil too. We got a little fried by the sun waiting to get pulled out of the ship’s debris. It was a real mess.”
“Thank God, thank God, though, Felix. Did anyone die? From the ship?”
If it weren’t for the static, she would have thought the line had gone dead. “Quite a few,” he finally said.
She tried to grasp this, tried to picture it. “Oh, Felix.” She couldn’t stop saying his name.
“I know,” he growled through his damaged throat. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. How long have you been there?”
“A week, I guess. Apparently, I didn’t have much to say when I first got here, so that didn’t help with the processing.”
“Are they keeping you there?”
They were moving him to San Francisco, he said. They wanted him to see a couple of specialists. The kind they didn’t have where he was now. He coughed again. They’d told him they’d only be keeping him for about a week, if all went well. As soon as the doctors cleared him, he’d be a civilian again.
This time, he was the one who wondered if the line had gone dead. “Margaret, are you still there?”
“I am,” she said as the room took on texture around her. “I’m here.”
“I’m coming home.”
—
Two weeks had passed, and other than that brief, curt phone call when she’d told him not to come over, Cal had had no contact with Margaret Salt.
He didn’t understand why she hadn’t at least dialed the store or stopped by.
After leaving that note (which he wished he hadn’t), he drove up and down Roswell Lane a few times looking for an indication that something had happened—a wreath or a star, even a For Sale sign in the yard.
But there was none of that. Had her husband returned?
Wouldn’t she have told him? He went from feeling worried about her to feeling dismissed, and from feeling dismissed to feeling a little used.
He actually didn’t mind feeling a little used, because when had anyone ever seen fit to use him?
Sexually, no less. But it was jarring the way the whole thing had come to a sudden halt, and it made waking up in the guest room of his own house feel that much more pathetic.
There were mornings when he had to remind himself that his sleeping down the hall from his wife had nothing to do with his having slept with Margaret Salt.
Had it just been a whim for her, then? He was as relieved as he was disappointed that it was over (if it was).
And he was grateful to have gotten away with it (if he had).
He couldn’t un-sleep with Margaret, un-oust LaGrange, but he could throw himself back into those parts of his life that would have him.
Guilt was the sound a tree made when it fell in the forest, and he plugged his ears.
He did a full inventory of the store, re-mulched all the flower beds around the house.
He took Skip to a petting zoo at one of the local farms (Becky declined to join them).
He bought groceries and drove them out to the house on Compton Road, and there he found his father on the living room floor. Barely responsive. Again.
—
Everett’s breath was steaming the floorboards, but the rest of him had let go.
He’d thrown up. Soiled himself. His skin looked so gray when Cal got him into a sitting position, he might have been bleeding out from some invisible wound.
Two empty whiskey bottles sat on the coffee table.
A third lay on the couch. Buster, his dark-brown fur speckled with white, hovered nearby, worried and vigilant.
Cal got his father cleaned up. As he worked, Everett came to his senses a little, mumbled that Cal should stop it, and Cal said, “Yeah, yeah.” He told Cal to leave him the hell alone for once, and Cal snapped, “Why don’t I do that, Dad?
Why don’t I just leave you alone out here so you die on the floor? Is that what you want?”
Then, sorry he’d said it, he brought Everett and the dog home with him to Taft Street.
Becky had never seen Everett in this state before, though she’d often heard about it from Cal.
It broke her heart for so many reasons, not the least of which was that she still didn’t know this old man very well, and she was beginning to wonder if anyone besides Cal did—or ever would.
Together, they got Everett out of his clothes (the cleanest ones Cal had been able to change him into) and dressed him in a pair of Cal’s pajamas.
They didn’t want him to have to contend with stairs so they set him up on the living room couch.
There, he promptly passed out, and they went on with their lives around him, hoping he wouldn’t need to urinate or worse.
“Sorry,” Cal whispered to Becky. She shook her head and made a face that somehow exactly conveyed that this was a situation apart from their situation—the one that had them living like strangers who just happened to be married and raising a child together.
Her understanding was a relief, but he was so upset and irked by his father’s behavior—and his timing—that his jaw hurt from clenching.
Everett slept for most of the next day.
In the evening, when he tried some toast Becky offered, he barely made it to the downstairs bathroom before retching. Cal turned on the news to mask the sound. They learned that Italy had declared war on Japan.
The next morning, Everett showed signs of improvement. He was at breakfast, Cal’s extra bathrobe knotted around him and his hair wetted and combed. Buster, who’d hovered next to the couch for two days, circled the table and curled up under his chair.
As he moved about the house, Everett seemed reluctant to touch anything.
Becky watched him pick up a copy of The Saturday Evening Post and look through it carefully, without creasing any of the pages, then gently set it back in the magazine rack beside the couch, his hands trembling.
She asked if she could get him something to read, and if so what he’d like.
“Westerns,” he said, as if that should’ve been obvious.
She went to the library in the afternoon and came back with The Ox-Bow Incident. Everett read the first third of the book that evening, then paged through the rest, not very interested. He didn’t understand why anyone writing a western wouldn’t write it like Zane Grey.
He wanted to go home. He missed being able to wander through the canyons of his own possessions.
Plus, he found it humiliating to have to walk around his son’s fancy house in his son’s fancy clothes.
Just one more day, they told him. They wanted to make sure he was eating and keeping everything down before they brought him back.
On the third day of his stay, he knocked on the pocket doors to the parlor—just as Becky was making contact with Mrs. Isaacson’s great-great-grandfather—to ask if there was any more coffee.
“Can’s empty,” he said, wagging it in the doorway.
Becky had to apologize to Mrs. Isaacson and holler for Cal.
Cal suggested he and Everett and Skip go into town for a while. Buy some coffee. Walk Buster.
—
In Paulson’s, Everett was amazed that so many things, aisle after aisle, were just sitting there waiting to be bought by anyone who walked through the door with a little money and enough ration points.
“War bonds!” a boy called out to them as Cal was untying Buster’s leash from a post in front of the store. The boy held up the bonds and rattled a cigar box. “War bonds!”
“Murder!” Everett yelled at him. “Murder!”
The boy ran off.
“Take your dog, would you, Pop?” Cal handed Everett the leash, shifted the grocery bag to his other arm, and pushed the stroller forward.
They rounded Jessup Circle and made their way up Sutton Street.
“Isn’t that your store?” Everett asked, spotting Hanover Hardware.
“Maybe one day,” Cal said. “For now, I just work there.”
“Why aren’t you there now?”
“Because it’s Saturday. I don’t work on Saturdays.”
“I need a saw.”
“For what?”
“For me, okay? I need a saw.”
They crossed the street as a man with a paper sack under his arm was leaving the store; the man tipped his hat and held the door open for them as they entered.
Roman was standing behind the counter, massaging his forehead. When he saw Cal and Everett, he muttered hello, but when he spotted Skip, his whole face brightened and he came out to greet him.
“Howza Dutch Clark?” he said as Skip squirmed out of the stroller and ran over to him. Roman scooped the boy up in his arms.
“I could use an awl,” Everett said, eyeing the shelves.
Roman said, “Awl bet you could.”
“And a saw.”
“What for?”
“For me.”
Outside of Everett’s periphery, Roman caught Cal’s eye and teetered his free hand, miming a drink. Cal shook his head no. “I mean,” Roman said, “what kind of performance do you want from it? Different saws do different things.”
“Short blade,” Everett said, yanking Buster’s leash a little, to keep the dog still. “No waffle. I want to build a doghouse.”
Still holding Skip in one arm, Roman led Everett over to a pegboard and showed him several different handsaws. When Everett asked how much they cost, Roman told him he was family, whatever saw he wanted was on the house. That went for the awl too.
Everett took his time. He leaned in, squinted at one of the handles. He asked Roman if the screws were split nut brass.