Chapter Twenty-Four
—
Here’s the story Felix Salt wished he could have told about the second half of his life:
The story he could tell, by the end, was different.
One day, he thought: Tom and I aren’t close anymore.
It made his heart sink because it sounded—and felt—irreversible, even while he refused to see it that way.
Before their contact tapered off to its current nothingness, when they still spoke over the phone, it was as if Tom had sound-engineered any trace of affection out of his voice.
The lie had done them in, Felix knew. Not the sex.
Tom didn’t care who slept around; he cared about the lie, what it cost him.
His sense of himself, for one thing. His control over his sense of himself.
After being abandoned by his mother and getting no good explanation for why, after doing whatever he’d had to do, inside, to get through that, get over it (did a person ever get over such a thing?)—he’d lost Skip twice, in a way.
And Felix had still gotten it all wrong.
Margaret’s legacy had been the impossible predicament of when to tell Tom.
That, and a son who no longer felt like he could trust anyone in his family.
—
Summer. The cabin at the edge of the woods was like a little haunted house when they arrived late at night—all cobwebs and shadows, a bat or bird flapping across the tops of their heads when Bishop got the door open.
But in the morning, the cabin was bright and rustic and charming, filled with sunlight that projected the imperfections of the beveled windows onto the floor like floaters.
They were sixty-five miles northwest of Bonhomie, on the border of the Goll Woods State Nature Preserve, a hundred yards from the Tiffin River.
The cabin belonged to a co-worker of Bishop’s, someone named Wally Babik.
Felix rose from the iron-frame bed, found his shorts, and got his first clear look at the interior.
Planked walls and slanted ceiling. A small wooden table set for two with tin plates, tin cups, flatware.
A rusted umbrella stand by the door, holding fishing poles.
He walked out onto the porch. The sun was still low but had burned off last night’s chill, and when the leaves stirred overhead, he felt a breeze licking his skin and for just a moment was back on Espiritu Santo, emerging from the Quonset hut behind Augie, the two of them bound for Champagne Beach.
To the beach, Salt! Get the lead out! Barefoot, he stepped off the cabin porch and over to the edge of the clearing to pee.
Augie had gotten a kick out of dropping their ranks and titles on the island, when it was just them.
He’d gotten a kick out of being able to tease Felix.
You call that a backstroke? Three decades later, Felix was approaching his sixty-fourth birthday, and Augie’s voice was still clear as a bell.
He walked back to the porch, to the small bench between the ladder-back rockers where he’d left his cigarettes.
What if they’d both survived? Would they have tried to cross paths, stateside?
Even stayed together? He liked to think so—even while knowing both his situation and the world wouldn’t have allowed for it.
He and Bishop weren’t “together” like that, but they’d been friends for over twenty years, and more than that—discreetly—for the past decade.
They’d never looked at each other for very long in public.
They’d never let Bishop’s car sit in Felix’s driveway or in front of his house overnight.
What they had wasn’t a romance and maybe wasn’t even as much of one as they could have gotten away with, but it worked for them.
They were, Felix thought, like a plant that could only get as big as its pot, no shaping or pruning allowed. Still, a healthy plant.
Fishing wasn’t the point of this little getaway, Bishop had said when Felix told him he didn’t really like to fish, but here Bishop came up the path from the river, a pole in one hand and a bucket in the other.
Grinning. He’d caught lunch, he said. An ugly, whiskered catfish.
Felix grimaced at the thing but pulled his shoes on to collect wood for the fire pit.
After lunch, a walk in the woods, a swim in the river, a turn on the creaky bed, and another swim, the two of them sat on the little porch, in the rockers, and watched as the sun sank behind the tree line and the sky went from deep blue to purple.
Blackbirds zipped back and forth in front of the cabin and were gradually replaced by bats.
Felix pointed to the Dog Star, just visible. He thanked Bishop for suggesting the weekend, said the cabin was terrific.
“I think so too,” Bishop said, rocking slowly. “I told Wally he’s a fool to give it up.”
“He’s selling it?”
“Sold it,” Bishop said, smiling. “About two minutes ago, best I can figure. Feel like making this a regular thing?”
This meaning more trips to the cabin. This meaning more days like the one they were having, which was probably the best they’d ever shared, because it was the most time they’d spent together alone.
This being, maybe, as close as they would come to suggesting that, whatever they were, they might want a bigger pot.
“I’d like that,” Felix said.
—
The body, however, makes its own plans.
Three months after that trip, Felix started noticing his breathing had become more labored.
He discovered that it was hard—and then physically impossible—for him to take a full breath, or hold a breath in for more than a few seconds.
His morning cough, which had evolved into his first half of the day cough, was now just his cough.
He slowed down. He started feeling weaker.
Noticed a slight wheeze in his voice that he couldn’t control.
The doctor at the VA hospital in Mansfield asked him how long he’d been a smoker.
“Just since the war,” Felix said. He did the math in his head.
Thirty-three years of smoking, on average, thirty cigarettes a day meant three hundred and sixty-one thousand cigarettes had passed through his lungs, give or take a few hundred.
He couldn’t imagine anything stupider. The doctor arranged for tests, and the X-rays told them everything they needed to know.
Though it was far too late to make a difference, he quit.
He’d never even tried before, and it wasn’t nearly as hard as he thought it would be.
Dum-Dums did the trick. He kept them on him at all times.
Kept them in the car, in his robe pocket, in a bowl on his nightstand.
When he wanted a cigarette, he had a lollipop.
And it turned out he didn’t want thirty lollipops a day.
He wanted four or five lollipops. Then two or three.
Then he never wanted to see a lollipop again and didn’t smoke anymore.
He was thankful for that, at least, because, for what it was worth—and to him it was worth something—he wanted to die an ex-smoker.
If only I’d wanted to live that way, he thought.
—
Bishop, glassy-eyed, his face graver than Felix had ever seen it (he’d actually never seen it grave at all), asked him if he wanted to talk about it.
Felix said he wasn’t in pain. But the other thing, Bishop said.
The rest of it. Meaning, Felix supposed, what this meant for them.
Trying to be funny, Felix said that was a dead-end topic.
He said he wanted to get past the sadness, if such a thing were possible.
He wanted to stay in the happy part while there was still time—and still a happy part.
That proved challenging. He put off reaching out to Tom, knowing he wouldn’t get him but would have to leave a message with his answering service—and even then, anything short of life-or-death wasn’t going to get a reply. He wasn’t ready to leave a life-or-death message.
Bishop urged him to call.
Bishop offered to call for him.
Bishop got the number out of Felix’s address book and threatened to call if Felix didn’t.
So they bickered about that, which was the last thing either of them wanted to do, but eventually it got Felix to dial Tom’s number and leave a message.
A week later, he called again and left another message. Please call home ASAP.
A week after that, he said to the young woman at the service, “Something serious is going on, and I need you to call me.” In a moment that felt surreal, the young woman said the words back to him, “just to confirm.”
When another week went by, Felix began to think that if it took a message as simple and blunt as I’m dying to even get a response out of Tom, then maybe it was better to just let him stay out there, where he wanted to be.
“Don’t let this go a year,” Bishop cautioned.
Felix coughed, and thought wryly, I probably won’t.
Bishop had enough on his plate, between his job and his father.
Felix didn’t want him having to tend to a second person.
He didn’t want to be anyone’s task, much less a burden.
He’d asked the doctor what the prognosis would be for someone who only had advanced emphysema, and the doctor had said three to four years, so that’s what Felix had told Bishop.
Emphysema: three to four. But the black dots Felix hadn’t mentioned changed everything, according to the doctor.
The combination of those and the damaged and swollen air sacs in Felix’s lungs was going to make things progress very quickly.
They’d gone on to discuss treatment, but other than oxygen and pain management, Felix didn’t see the point, and the doctor hadn’t countered that. One year was the prognosis.
“Could it be shorter?” Felix said, just so he knew.
“Hard to say,” the doctor said, moving his pen around the X-ray. “Could be longer too. But when you see more than one black dot, the horse is out of the barn.”
There were many, many black dots.
—