Horsefeathers the cat purred in ecstasy as Jesse's fingernails found the right spot behind his ears. I stopped short of the screen door with the tray of drinks in my hands and stood silently a few moments, for the pleasure of watching my son unobserved, out there on the sun deck.
I got all too few chances. I'd had that deck built partly in hopes of getting him to come out to B.C. and spend some time sitting out there on it with me. Son on sun deck. Bright sun deck produces bright son. An effective magical pun.
Gee, I found myself thinking, too bad I don't have a magic wife deck, too. That'd get him for sure.
I swept that all away, and used all those precious seconds to study my only child, hungrily, as if trying to map him so well that I'd be able to recreate him with available atoms some day, like a transporter beam. Almost thirty years younger than me . . . three inches taller, three inches broader, and twenty pounds heavier, not boney like me . . . fit and strong, not a semi-invalid like me . . . buzzcut and cleanshaven, straight-looking even to a normal contemporary, let alone to his "old-school" hippie dad . . . beyond doubt the most expensively and tastefully dressed young man on Heron Island, and possibly in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia as well. I found myself looking for any feature or other visible characteristic we shared—or for that matter, any trait of his mother's that manifested in him—and came up empty. I wanted to understand him, who he was, so well that one day I might risk telling him who I was and some of the things I had done. And I had high hopes that today might be the day we at least began that process, reopened the lines of communication, made a start. He was thirty, I was nearly sixty; if not now, when? God knew it had been long enough coming.
The heart-stopping beauty of the place where I live was surely on my side. I'd managed to rid myself of more than one stubborn grudge sitting out there on that sunporch; raw nature is nothing but object lessons, really. Try explaining to a crow that you have reason to feel sour, or making a passing dragonfly see that it's all about you. Tell a hundred-foot-tall pine how far behind schedule you are. Even a City Mouse like Jesse had to be feeling it, or at least starting to by now: peace. Give it a chance, I thought.
I smiled, slid the screen door open, and stepped out onto my magic sun deck with the tray of refreshments.
"Christ, Dad, how can you stand it out here?" my son asked. Horsefeathers jumped down off his lap and went off to find his friend Fraidy, the half-mad feral cat who grudgingly permits me to feed her.
I glanced around. "Too many bugs? Let's go in."
"Not out here. I mean out here—in the middle of nowhere on a tiny island at the ass end of the universe. A week here and I'd go out of my mind."
I sighed, and set the tray down on the table. "What would be so bad about that? Two weeks, and you might go back into it again." I went back and slid the screen door closed again. "And find it improved by your absence."
"What if you have one of your lung collapses out here? A bad one?"
I shrugged. "If I do, I'm an hour or two from a good hospital. And since I live in a civilized country instead of America, my medical care is covered."
He gave me The Look, said, "Dada," and shook his head. It was the way he said it that made my heart suddenly heavy in my chest.
Jesse first started calling me that in precocious early adolescence, a pun on his very first word intended to indicate that he found me surreal. Fair enough: many do. It had started out a friendly enough insult, became contemptuous briefly during the worst of late adolescence, then reverted to a mere family joke again for nearly a decade . . . but ever since his mother was diagnosed it had been an epithet, the kind intended to be fighting words. This was the first glimpse of the blade concealed in the scabbard. He had been scrupulously polite since his arrival—but now, after less than half an hour in my home, my son just had to confirm that he still hated me and everything I stood for, hated the place I stood itself.
I told myself not to panic. He was all I had left of his mother; he could not be lost to me for good. She would not like it, so I must not permit it. Failure was not an option. A probability, maybe, but not an option.
I took a seat across the round table from him, passed him the beer he'd asked for, and used the ritual of constructing myself an Irish coffee to get some thinking done.
All right, then. If you must make the deal, and you can't make the deal, the problem has to be that you have failed to correctly see through the other party's eyes.
So I tried as hard as I could to look through Jesse's eyes. First at our surroundings, which to me were so surpassingly, transcendently idyllic.
I lived in a shithole, in Nowheresville.
Oh, there was indoor plumbing. It was a real house, nowhere near as rustic and primitive as some of the hippie shacks in which I'd spent my own early adulthood, over on the far side of the continent—Jesse had heard about those, even if he didn't remember them, and had seen photos. This place had electricity, lights, hot water, central heat, cable TV, highspeed internet access . . . well, it had all those things as long as it had the first one, anyway. And the power seldom went out more than once a month or so, unless it did, or for more than a day or so, unless it was longer. Even then the place stayed warm and tight in winter for as long as the firewood held out: it was a real, professionally built and properly maintained house, not something thrown together by hippies out of scrap lumber like the shack in which he had been conceived and nursed.
But to a New York public relations man, the distinction must be barely noticeable. It was a cheap little prefab cottage surrounded by completely unimproved wilderness in an out-of-the way corner of a relatively undeveloped island forty horrendously inconvenient minutes by ferry from the mainland and another hour's drive from anything worth doing or going to. The deck on which we sat was solid, honestly made and recently painted—but it was cheap, simple carpentry done with inexpensive materials. Even though I'd swept it thoroughly that morning, it was already lightly covered with crap that had blown down from the thirty-meter-tall trees all around, and I could already see at least a dozen new spiderwebs established at various right angles. Around deck and house were no garden, no flowers, no hedges or plantings, just raw nature, northern rainforest variety. Bugs, big and small. Other unknown small fauna. Paved road was a couple of hundred meters of deeply rutted driveway away, invisible through the trees. And all it led to was an island so small and undeveloped it had no bank branch, no taxi, no gas station, no hospital, no hotel, a single block with sidewalks and streetlights, one pub, and three restaurants. He did not yet know that one of the restaurants was excellent and another superb.
And of course since it was in Canada the island must be a frozen wasteland in winter, just like Nova Scotia. I had told him about B.C. weather, repeatedly, but I could tell he didn't believe me. In any case, it was in Canada—where they let queers get married and the money was worth doodly and the government took most of it in taxes and the socialized medicine system didn't work and everyone smoked pot and civil war was imminent and nobody could play football for shit and Arab terrorists crossed over into America all the time.
Only the first of those is actually true, but try telling an American. A straight one, anyway.
All this in the time it took to pour hot water out of my mug, dip the wet rim in the sugar bowl, turn it rightside up again, pour Tanzanian coffee into it, and add the Jameson's.
So much for the surroundings.
Next, I turned my son's merciless eye on me.
Old fart, just for a start. I had been calling myself a middle-aged fart for years now, but who was I kidding? I was eight years past the middle of my life even if I was going to get a century like my grandfather had, which I doubted.
Stir the sugar in; smell the coffee and whiskey getting acquainted. See your reflection recoalesce in the surface.
Worse than an old fart: a loser. Long scraggly hippie hair I had washed but probably forgotten to brush. Beard and mustache I could tell I had forgotten to trim. Dressed in drip dry mail order plaid shirt and unpressed jeans, generic socks, and superbly comfortable but undeniably ratty slippers, all of these finely coated with the hairs of my one and a half cats. My watch was the cheapest Timex sold. I wore old-fashioned eyeglasses with clip-on shades against the summer sunlight, instead of the self-polarizing contact lenses he had. The stud in his left earlobe was worth more than everything I was wearing, and his shoes cost more than my monthly mortgage payment. I could not have loitered in his neighborhood for more than a few minutes before being asked to state my business. Not even on a dark night: one of my pockets held marijuana so transcendently pungent that even I was aware of it, and to him I must have reeked.
And what has he got to compare to all this? I asked myself as I added an extra dollop of whipped cream to my Irish coffee. A luxury apartment with parking, maid service and a view of Central Park, a job that brings in a hundred thousand U.S. a year, the respect of the powerful and privileged, a never-ending supply of beautiful intelligent women, the cultural, commercial and culinary attractions of New York . . . hell, who wouldn't dump all that in a hot minute to move here?
Well, it's good to drink your Irish coffee in big gulps, before it has time to cool off.
"Do you remember when we moved from Halifax to Toronto?" I asked him.
"Sure. I was nearly seven."
"What did you think of the place? Can you still remember?"
He shrugged. "I hated it, and I see where you're going. I came to like it, yes. Eventually I found compensations for its immediately obvious drawbacks. I guess if I had to live here long enough, I'd find the compensations here, too. Thank God I don't."
"New York has no drawbacks."
He shook his head. "None I've ever noticed."
The caffeine and ethanol were playing tug of war with my brain, stimulant versus depressant. Isometric intoxication. "Stepping over the bodies on the sidewalk doesn't bother you?"
"There aren't any on my block."
"And you don't mind what it costs to live on that block."
He smiled. "I can afford it."
Only because you work for Mordor, I thought, but I couldn't say it, because if I did we were done now. I finished my Irish coffee instead.
Okay. Time to . . . what was the military euphemism? . . . to retire to a previously prepared position. It sounds so much nicer than "retreat."
"You certainly can. I respect that. I hope you know how proud of you I am, Jess. How's your work these days?"
"Intense but incredibly well paid."
I forced a smile. "I was thinking more along the lines of information I didn't have already."
"What would that be, exactly? You're a journalist."
I sighed. "I've told you before, I'm not. I'm a columnist."
"That's just a journalist who's allowed to make it up."
Exasperating young man. Exasperatingly smart: he was essentially correct. "I know who you work for. I know in general what you do there. I'm not asking for classified information, I'm not soliciting a leak or planning an exposé."
"Just making small talk."
"I'm trying to express an interest in your life. I'll ask about your sex life if you prefer. But you're always telling me you're all about the work. So fine: tell me whatever you can about that. Broad outlines. What's a typical day like?"
He didn't answer right away. And when he did, his voice was less antagonistic. "Actually, Pop, it probably isn't all that much different from a typical day of yours, in essence. I go to an office very near my home . . . I read a lot of news . . . I surf the net . . . I talk to people by phone, e-mail or webcam . . . I stare into space for a long time . . . and after a while, I start to type. You do it for the Globe and Mail, I do it for Burston-Marseller, that's all."
There's a damned big difference, I thought, between a national newspaper and a planetary public relations empire. But it was the friendliest thing he'd said since his arrival. Never criticize an olive branch. "It must be nice to get paid twenty times as much for it."
"Yes," he agreed, "but then you have to work twenty times as hard to keep it out of the hands of the tax man. Or else accept the blame for what they'll do with it. Hard, these days."
He was definitely trying to meet me halfway. The first encouraging sign since he'd arrived. "Actually, here in C—excuse me a second." I held up a hand for silence, and listened hard, frowning.
A car had just pulled into my driveway. And I recognized it by the sound—even though I had not heard it in a couple of years.
What the hell was she doing here? Now?
How come you can never seem to not-find a cop when you don't need one?
Detective Constable Nika Mandiç was an officer of the Vancouver Police Department whom I had not seen since we'd concealed the body of a homicide victim on my property together two years earlier. It had been the right thing to do, but neither of us much cared to remember it. And as far as I knew, we had nothing else to talk about.
Sure enough, her scabby old '89 Honda Accord came into view through the trees. I'd owned one exactly as horrible when I met her; you remember the sound.
"Who's that?" Jesse asked.
I got up, and gestured for him to keep his own seat. "Someone I used to work with. I haven't seen her in years. Wait here a second, will you, while I find out what she wants."
As far as I know, Nika's alert when she sleeps, not that I'll ever find out. She saw me coming, saw instantly that I'd left a guest behind me on the sundeck, and coasted by without slowing, parking much farther down the rutted drive than she needed to. It let us meet well out of the guest's earshot, which suited me just fine. She was out of the car by the time I reached it.
As always, she looked like a teenage boy's fantasy of a Lesbian, butch but incredibly beautiful. Like every Lesbian I've ever seen on television or in the movies, now I think about it, and few I've ever known I happened to know she was not gay, but I'd never seen her with anyone and had great difficulty imagining the hairy-knuckled, flashlight-dicked alpha male who'd have the confidence to take a crack at her. She looked, as always, fit enough to beat up a kangaroo. And agitated enough.
"Who's that?" she greeted me.
"Nice to see you again too, Nika. Those are the same words my son just used."
She frowned, moved closer and lowered her voice. "What did you answer?"
"I told him you were D.C. Nika Mandiç, a Vancouver police officer with whom I had once criminally conspired to trap, murder and bury a wealthy citizen we could not have convicted of anything, against whom we did not have enough evidence to get a search warrant for his home, purely because a hermit we know, who'd never met or seen him, assured us the guy was a once-in-a-generation monster, getting ready to rape and butcher an entire family as a work of art. I talk fast. Don't worry, though, your secret's safe: I didn't have time to tell him you used to drive the Jailer-Trailer . . . excuse me, the Community Services Mobile Unit."
"If I applaud, will you give me a straight answer?"
"Sure," I agreed. I never said a true one. "I told him I was getting you high. So he'd give us some room." I took the joint from my shirt pocket, lit it, and offered it to her.
She smiled hugely for Jesse's benefit, said "God damn it, Russell," through her clenched teeth, took the doobie and pretended to toke. Then she crossed her eyes staring at it. "Jesus, what is this shit?"
I took it back. "Kootenay Thunderfuck, they call it."
She lost the imaginary toke she'd been holding, and glared at me.
"That's what they call it. Now give me a straight answer: what are you doing here?"
She leaned in to take the joint back, and locked eyes with me. "Tell me the truth. Have you said anything? To anybody? Have you hinted?"
Those eyes were incredible. I wasn't sure if I could have lied to her. Happily I had no need to. "Of course not."
She wouldn't let go of my eyes. "Have you made any attempt whatsoever to learn more about . . . him? Or to look for possible associates? Any attempt at all? Online, in the library?"
"Everything I've learned about Campbell since we last saw him, you told me. Well before that, I knew way more than I wanted to know about him or ever will. I've been trying real hard to forget I ever heard of him."
Still not done. Any moment her pupils would begin to spiral. "Have you had any further communication at all with . . . with Smelly? Or tried to research him in any way?"
"No, and no. Why?"
She let my eyes go, looked down at once and pretended to examine the joint. "I think we may be in trouble. Really serious trouble. If we are, I put us there. I'm sorry."
"How really serious?"
"I think I put my favorite cousin in serious danger. Maybe worse. If I did, I'm probably next. And then you and Smelly. Take this damn thing back, I'm getting high just holding it."
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. So I put the joint in it.
"Can I have a hit of that?" my son asked from a few meters behind me.
Talk about mixed emotions!
One of my greatest regrets, in a life by no means undersupplied with them, is that despite diligent effort I never succeeded in turning my own father on. He had not been unwilling in theory; he was not afraid of the drug and admitted to me more than once that he was quite intrigued by my descriptions of its effects.
Unfortunately, the first time I ever discussed the matter with him was the day after he and my mother had driven several hundred miles at night in the middle of a snowstorm to bail me out on a felony charge of conspiracy to distribute the stuff, collect my belongings from the dorm I no longer lived in, and drive me back home to Long Island. Dad knew the charge was just barely a felony, a Class E, and furthermore a total utter crock, but you can see how it undermined my arguments for asking him to get high with me. As you know—
—but maybe you don't. If you're under thirty, there's probably no way you can imagine just how paranoid 1968 was. Trust me, then: it seemed reasonable in those times to believe that for the next year or so, our home would be under constant surveillance, visual and electronic, by government forces—and that I would probably be tailed when I left it, for months to come. Even I was smart enough to understand that it would be suicidally stupid to bring so much as a roach into my parents' home before the trial.
So although I am ashamed to confess I called my father a coward at the time, I knew perfectly well then and I admitted to him later that his answer to my request was eminently reasonable, under the circumstances, and better than most arrested college students could have expected. His answer was, "The day they legalize it, you and I will get blasted together."
I called him a coward then because I was one. Because I needed someone to be angry at, and I was afraid to be angry at either the cops or those who had delivered me to them. Being arrested and arraigned and kicked out of school are all humiliating; having to leave behind the person who doesn't mind you calling her your old lady is heartbreaking; having prison over your head when you're a skinny weakling with long hair is terrifying; I badly wanted one of those I'd disappointed most to agree with me that pot was worth all that trouble, to understand that I had not put him and Mom through all this for frivolous reasons, to empathize. One joint, and he would grok in fullness. I did not so much ask it as demand it.
But his point was inarguable. Bad enough to have maybe gotten his phone tapped; getting him (and Mom!) busted too was unthinkable. I yearned to turn him on—but wanting to turn people on was exactly what had gotten me busted in the first place. And anyway—here again I must ask you to believe this made perfect sense in 1968—anyway it could hardly be more than a few more years before grass was going to be legal, so what was the hurry?
A year later a genie waved his hands and the felony charge went away, poof!, so thoroughly away that I can legally answer "No" to the question "Have you ever been arrested for a felony?" It ended up being like getting a Heidelberg scar—unpleasant for a while at first, but not really dangerous, and then you get bragging rights for life. But even after the shadow was past, I remained reluctant to bring risk to my parents, even though I was starting to lose faith in the imminent legalization of pot by then.
Except for Apollo 11, 1968-9 was not a great period for hope.
Dr. King is shot by the FBI. Hersh breaks the story of the My Lai Massacre. Nixon bombs Cambodia. Ho Chi Minh dies; so do Ike and Allen Dulles, and Yuri Gagarin. Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne drive off a bridge together and only one makes it to shore. Judge Hoffman tries the Chicago Seven, has Bobby Seale gagged and manacled in his chair. The Weathermen start setting off bombs, sometimes intentionally.
Québecois separatists kidnap Commissioner Cross, so Premier Trudeau invokes the War Measures Act authorizing the government to do anything it likes; 450 bystanders are arrested; Cross is soon found dead in a car trunk. Gay men riot in a Greenwich Village dive called the Stonewall Inn, and the planet tilts on its axis. The Godfather spends sixty-seven weeks on the Times list, and sells twenty-one million copies. Woodstock happens . . . but then so does Altamont. The first 10,000 heroin addicts are converted to methadone addicts, to protect them from drugs. The Manson Family do their thing.
Mind you, during the same period a booming U.S. economy employs a record number of workers, unemployment falls to its lowest level in 15 years, the prime interest rate is 7 percent, the dollar is strong in world money markets, and Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average rises above 1,000 for the first time in history. But none of us hippies gave a damn about any of that—or much of anything. We already sensed somehow that the Beatles had broken up. John and Paul were both married, and the wives couldn't stand each other: it was only a matter of time. The dream was over.
By next May Paul had confirmed the news, and the Let It Be film publicly autopsied the corpse.
Things got steadily shittier for quite a spell, then. It became gradually clear that the Apollo Program was over, and that there was nothing of any consequence after it. A race had been won, and space flight was over, before anything was done with it. It would take more than thirty-five years before men would again have the sense and guts to venture more than a cheesey couple of hundred miles from the ground. The Vietnam War finally ended . . . in shame and disgrace, and as clumsily as we could manage. As for politics, let's not even discuss the Nixon Era. It was he who gutted NASA, at the moment of its greatest triumph, for being a Democrat's idea.
Hell, look at music. The Great Folk Scare finally blew over, rock and roll anarchy was finally tamed and lamed, and the industry proudly brought us disco instead. Who wouldn't have been depressed?
Maybe it's no wonder people moved away from smoking Happy Weed . . . or for that matter, tripping on acid, mescaline and peyote . . . and started to honk harsh powders that sometimes contained a few molecules of cocaine up their bleeding noses, or set their faces on fire freebasing, or spike speed, or even smack. When you cut your hair, shave, put on a suit, and get a job with a dental plan, you may discover that's what you need, just to get over. Joy would get in the way, cost you your edge. We only had fifteen years to convert ourselves from people who cheered for Captain America in Easy Rider to people who would cheer for Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, and coke and speed and skag helped.
I will never inject a drug for pleasure; I snorted cocaine six times in my life and never cared for it; I never stopped smoking pot myself, or enjoying it. But I stopped trying to talk my father into getting stoned with me. I came to think of it less as a sacrament and more as an analgesic, an anodyne.
Until the day Dad called with a funny little story, I wish I could quote it exactly for you, about the cosmic particle that had left a far-distant star eons ago, and traveled countless light-years for innumerable centuries before passing through his pancreas and the rest of his planet without even noticing, one unfortunate side effect being that he was going to be dead of pancreatic cancer in an absolute maximum of three months. Then pot became more of a sacrament to me again.
One I failed to share with him, try as I might.
I was then living over a thousand miles away, newly married. Jesse was six months old, and not a healthy baby. His mom was basically still recovering from a thirty-hour labor followed by Caesarian section, serious infection, and several long bouts of mastitis. I was trying to get my journalism career started, and had already used those excuses too many times to my obligatory crusty editor. I managed to carve out four days, arranged temporary support and backup for wife and child, and flew home.
Where I found it all but impossible to get two consecutive minutes alone with Dad in his hospital room. It is possible to get high in a hospital room without getting caught, if you know what you're doing; I had learned the knack on the second job I ever had, porter in a hospital, at eighteen, and used it in two subsequent long hospital stays of my own. But even when I finally came up with an errand that got Mom out of the room for a few moments, and worked up the nerve to propose the idea to Dad, he turned it down. I pressed him. "I can sneak back in after Visiting Hours, I know how hospitals work, Pop. It would really mean a lot to me."
He did hesitate. But then he shook his head. "Not at the end of my life," he said. "It would only confuse me, and I need my attention for dying now. I want to get it over with. Thanks, Son; too bad we didn't get to it sooner."
I didn't even get to respond; Mom came back that quickly.
So when my own son turned eighteen, I'd asked him to get high with me. He turned me down flat, then, and the next half dozen times I proposed it—with something eerily close to the same thinly veiled contempt I had given my own father when he offered to get drunk with me on my own eighteenth birthday. And for the same reason: he said he'd grown up seeing me use that drug, and wanted no part of it.
Of course, I had come to find use for alcohol later on—and I did, I'm happy to say, get pie-faced with Pop one glorious night—and I did in later years smell unmistakable evidence that my son was at least a social pot smoker. But I had never gotten him to share a joint or a pipe with me. "Can I have a hit of that?" were words I'd wanted to hear him say for a long time—and for him to say them now, here, was the best possible sign for my hopes of a reconciliation between us.
Add in as a bonus the fact that if Jesse became part of the circle, Nika would have to stop pretending and actually take a few tokes—and I found that I wanted very much to get her stoned, to find out what her robocop brain was like when it was wrecked. It would actually help calm her down, which it was clear she needed right now.
But damn it all to hell and back again, I did not want her getting stoned anywhere within a kilometer of my son. She was a neophyte, and among the most common effects on the beginner are a tendency to babble and a conviction that absolutely everything in the world is hilarious. I could easily picture Nika, in an explosive burst of laughter and smoke, telling Jesse how little he knew about his father, recounting for him the altogether side-splitting story of my old college roomie, Smelly the telepath, and how old Smelly had led her and me to conceal a body down by the stream that ran through my property, one ugly morning a few years before. Nobody who's been smoking dope for more than a couple of weeks actually behaves like that, except in folklore, but new users sometimes do.
So:
"A hit of what?" I asked, and made the joint disappear. "Have I introduced Detective Constable Nika Mandiç?"
It was ridiculous. The scent of Kootenay Thunderfuck cannot possibly be mistaken for anything else, and noses were probably opening appreciatively as much as half a kilometer downwind by now. Vagrant wisps of heavy smoke still stood in the air between Nika and me. I croaked it more than said it, and exhaled hugely afterwards.
But he had heard me say Nika was a cop, and he could see she was mortally embarrassed. He decided to let it go.
Let the drug go, anyway. "A hit of the conversation, of course," he said after a barely perceptible pause. "Hi, I'm his son Jesse, and you're Nika. So you're in law enforcement."
"Hello, Jesse. That's right, I'm a VPD officer."
"Well, I for one feel safer already," he said, and showed her how good his dental work was, all the way to the back teeth.
My God, he was hitting on her.
Even she could tell. She dimpled and said, "Thank you, Jesse. And what do you do that's dangerous?"
Holy shit, she was hitting back!
I stood there and gaped. All I kept thinking was, I really wish I could keep smoking that joint.
And I'm not even sure I can satisfactorily explain why I was so dismayed. My son and my collaborator in felony were of about the same age, both healthy and single. The pairing even made a certain sense, from some perspectives: they both had a stick up their ass, for one thing. So why did I keep trying to think of reasons why they'd make a bad pair? It wasn't all that hard—she arrested people for not telling her the truth, he lied for a living—she lived on a cop's salary, he was on the lower rungs of rich, with a good grip and strong arms—she was a Canadian, he was an American—but what the hell did I care? They were both adults, barely.
Okay, it's stupid. I'm closing in on sixty years old, and I get enough reminders of that every day to keep me popping acetaminophen. And other pills. But in my head, I'm still my son's age. In my silly secret heart, I had always thought of Nika as a possibility untried, always felt that if things had gone another way . . . well, they might have gone another way.
Right. I was still the star of my own movie, sure, maybe even the main character . . . but I was no longer the romantic lead, that was clear. The male ingenue had taken the set. My choices now were to become kindly old dad and give benevolent wise advice to the young couple, or fuck off.
When I thought about it, by all the standard criteria that matter to normal people, my son was a better man than I was. I happened to know his penis was bigger. So was his IQ. So was his bank balance. And she was a normal person. For a cop, anyway.
Five minutes later, on the sundeck, drinking the Irish coffee I had intended as my second cup, Nika remembered that she had a matter of life and death urgency to discuss with me in extreme privacy.
By then things had become even more uncomfortable for me, and if you're wondering how that could be, just think about it. That's right—they had started talking politics. Do I need to say he turned out to be a big fan of our current sissyphobe prime minister, Stephen Harper? Or that she was an ardent and annoyingly well-informed supporter of Resident Bush? Or that my teeth nearly met through my tongue within the first five minutes, from biting back brilliant rejoinders? Is there anything more frustrating than an argument you could win with your head in a bag . . . that you can't let yourself win? Probably, and it's frustrating that I can't think of it just now.
"No one's ever going to give up Osama, no matter how high a reward is offered, or what kind of torture is used," he was saying, and I was not saying Of course not you silly shit, the dude's been deader than Dubya's dick for years now, and then he went on, "If they want to find him, it'll take dumb luck or a mind reader."
Her eyeballs seemed to swap sockets and back again. "Oh. Um . . . Jesse, can I ask you to give me a few minutes in private with your dad? I just remembered the reason I drove out here, and I'm afraid it mustn't wait. We won't be long."
We walked to her car together, stopped short of it—and found that he had followed us. It startled me. His manners were better than that.
"I just wanted to say—" he began, and stopped.
"Jesse," Nika said, "you're a serious man. You've obviously done some government work. You're not cleared to hear . . . are you listening to me?"
He wasn't. He was looking past her, at something on or near ground-level. In a moment he caught up with what she'd said, and spoke to both of us. "You have some idea of the kind of resources and influence I can summon. Are you sure you don't want me to sit in on this discussion?"
Burston-Marseller was at that time the undisputed biggest and best public relations firm in the world. There probably wasn't a lot they couldn't fix if they wanted. I almost thought about it. "Thanks, Jess," I said. "But I'd rather not involve you."
"He's right, Jesse," Nika said softly.
"I think it's a little late for that," he said just as softly. "Whatever's going on, I'm already involved."
We exchanged a glance. "How do you figure that?" she asked him.
"I know that's not standard equipment on a Honda," he said, pointing. "I happen to know what it is. As a matter of fact, I think I could quote the suggested list price."
We spun to look where he was pointing. It took both of us seconds to see it, seconds more to grasp what we were seeing. At first I saw . . . dirt. My rutted driveway. Mud. Random puddles.
Then I saw a reflection in one. Something small and shiny, under Nika's rear bumper. Moving slowly. Size and color of a nail-clipper. Seconds after I focused on it, it stopped moving. I tried to blink away floaters, failed as usual, and stooped for a closer look. Nika, far more effortlessly, went down on one knee and peered directly up at the thing, clinging to the underside of the bumper. It was motionless now.
It looked to me like a tiny toy robot lizard, with a horn sticking up out of its snout—just the right size to go in a box of Cracker Jacks. (Do they still sell them? How? Do kids with game boxes and video iPods want little plastic toys?)
I turned to Nika and the blood had drained from her face.
"I don't happen to know what it is," I said. "Do you?"
"I've heard about them," she said slowly, getting to her feet. "Seen a sketch that turns out to be accurate. It's a GPS snitch. It is the tracking device of the gods. Almost literally." She turned to look at Jesse. "I have no idea what it lists for. I think it may be a federal felony to recognize it. In America, anyway; I doubt our government has any, so it may not be proscribed here yet. Not that it matters."
"Not that it matters," my son agreed. "I think I've been involved since you drove up this driveway. That thing picks up audio extremely well."
I straightened up, almost. "Jesus Christ in a trenchcoat!"
"Russell, I'm sorry. He's right. I'm very sorry."
"You think?" I bellowed. "You don't know the meaning of the fucking word."
"As a matter of fact, I do," she said, just loud enough to be heard. "Don't you tell me I don't."
"Dad, how could she have known that was there? Now why don't you tell me what you're sorry I'm involved in, so I can decide whether I agree?"
I turned to Nika. "We have to tell him."
"We do now," she agreed sourly.
I propped an elbow on a fist, covered my face with a hand. "You sorry enough to take a crack at it?" I muttered.
She sighed. "We might as well sit back down."
We resumed our seats on the deck. But before we could say anything, Jesse held up his hand for silence. He took from his shirt pocket the hot new superphone he had been so quietly proud to show off when he'd first arrived; it wasn't even supposed to be on sale for another few days yet, and then only in America. He poked at the screen for a moment, and set it down on the table.
It began to play back—at plausible conversational volume—everything he and I had said on that deck since his arrival, with pauses longer than a few seconds edited out.
I wondered why he had recorded our conversation. I wanted to believe it indicated that mending our fences was as important to him as it was to me. Or did he just keep the phone doing that all the time, a kind of audio diary, and dump it to hard disk each night? I was too busy to ask.
Its volume was impressive for so small a device, making both me and Nika start at first. He made an adjustment with a forefinger, and the speed of playback dropped just perceptibly, not enough to distort our voices. Then he pointed the same finger in the air and made a circular motion to indicate that the recording was on a loop, and would repeat. Nika and I exchanged a glance, then both nodded that we got it. All three of us rose as silently as we could—me least of all, damn it—and I zipped the screen door open in its track as quietly as I could, and we all slipped into the house, pulling the solid wooden door closed behind us.
"You really think that thing picks up audio?" she asked as soon as it shut.
He shrugged. "It wouldn't add much to the cost."
She looked around, seeing the room for the first time since the night a man had died in it while she watched and thanked her lucky stars, and I knew from her body language it was all coming back for her. Jesse let her pick her seat first. She chose the near end of the couch, beside the end table where a reading lamp stood, and I took the daddy chair on the other end that I knew she was avoiding. He pulled the old rocking chair at an angle to face both of us across the coffee table, and waited while she finished her drink. So did I. I found I was curious to hear how she would say it.
"A long time ago, back when he was in college, your father had a roommate nobody else on the whole campus was willing to share a room with, for two semesters."
"Excessive tolerance has been one of his flaws as long as I've known him. What was this dude's offense?"
"He didn't bathe. Ever."
I could hear him inhale. "My God, I think I remember my mother mentioning that goofball, once. Stinky, they all called him, right?"
I put my hands down and took a deep breath. "Smelly," I said. "We called him Smelly."