The Complete Collection. William Wharton

such a tight grip his knuckles are white. I try unlocking them.

      ‘Come on, Dad. Let go of the pipe.’

      He won’t. He won’t look at me either; he only bears down and grits his teeth. I try undoing his hand, opening one finger at a time, the way you do with a baby when it grabs your beard. Then, suddenly, he lets go and latches on to another pipe. This pipe’s the hot-water line; his hand must be burning but he holds on tight with manic fury. Billy’s pulling at his other hand.

      ‘Come on, Gramps; let go! Come on, let go now.’

      I’m almost ready to give up, call for help, when we finally pry him loose. We turn him around. As soon as he’s turned away he seems to forget the pipes. We try working him through the doorway but he goes into his usual hang-up, checking molding, running his hand up and down as if it’s some new thing he’s never seen before. This is a man who built his own house from the ground up and has done carpentry work since childhood. These days, it’s almost impossible to move him past any doorjamb; but we manage.

      We slide him to the bed, sit him down, take off his robe and slippers, then help him lie back. As usual, he’s afraid to put his head down. I cradle his head in my hand and lower him slowly onto the pillow. He’s deeply tense. He stares at the ceiling and his mouth starts moving, chattering, his lips opening and closing over his teeth, up and down with a quivering, uncontrolled movement.

      Strangely, Dad still has all his teeth. Here he is, a seventy-three-year-old man and he has all his perfectly beautiful teeth, somewhat yellowed, long in the gum but not a filling. I’m already missing six, and Billy beside me has several teeth missing, three root canals, filled with gold and porcelain-covered. If anyone ever X-rayed Dad’s head and Billy’s, not seeing anything else, they’d think Dad was the young man.

      He continues staring at the ceiling. I stroke his head, try to calm him. He holds my hand and squeezes it hard. He gives me a good squeeze as if he knows, and then squeezes again. I like to think of those squeezes as the last real message Dad gave me.

      We go outside. I’m barely making it. For some stupid reason, I don’t want Billy to see me crying.

      When we come out the door, who’s standing there leaning against a tree but Mom. She’s pale and breathing hard. We run over to her. She’s got that damned lunch box in her hand. We’d forgotten it.

      She puts one of her digoxin pills under her tongue. She’s in a bad state, gray-white. She gasps out her story of how she’s worked her way up the street, stopping and popping pills so she can fight her way to us.

      I can’t hold myself back.

      ‘Mother, it couldn’t be that important. It’s insane for you to run up here with a box of pills. You’ll kill yourself for nothing.’

      But she had to come. She knew we were only up the street, here with Dad, and she wasn’t. She couldn’t stay away.

      We help her into the car and drive home. I put her to bed, make her take a ten-milligram Valium. We go through the entire goodbye scene again.

      I signal Billy to get in the car. I tell Mother, firmly as I can, I must go. I say goodbye, kiss her, turn around and leave. Joan has finally found somebody to come twice a week, and she herself will come twice more; still, I feel guilty into my very soul.

      Our plan is to head straight toward Vegas, packing as much desert as possible behind us during the night. Summers, it’s damned hot out there even in an air-conditioned car.

      We begin having trouble before we get near the desert. We’re twenty miles from San Bernardino when the voltage indicator starts flashing. The only thing is to turn back; we might make it to L.A. but that’s about all.

      We pull into a garage I know on Pico Boulevard. The voltage regulator is shot, has to be replaced, a minimum hundred bucks, parts and labor. Damn!

      I call AAA CON and tell them what’s happened. They tell me to call the owner, collect. I do that. After considerable shuffling around I get an OK. This means money out of pocket but we’ll get it back when we deliver. The garage says the car will be ready by morning. I get a few extra days’ travel time from Scarlietti, too.

      We can’t go back to Mother’s. I don’t think I could sleep again in that back room, too many bad memories, bad nights. Marty, my daughter, lives near the garage so Billy and I hoof it over there.

      Marty gives me two aspirins and puts me down in their bedroom. I can hear them, Marty, her husband Gary and Billy in the front room watching TV, a rerun of Mission Impossible.

      I have a tremendous yen to cry. Twice I go into the bathroom, sit on the toilet, but the way Dad couldn’t piss, I can’t cry. I spread-eagle on the bed and it catches up with me; I’m gone.

      Marty and Gary sleep on the floor and Billy sleeps on the couch. I have the only bed in the house all to myself. We sure have nice kids.

      We’re all up at seven for breakfast. Both Gary and Marty need to be at work by eight.

      When I call, the car’s ready; but the bill’s twenty-five dollars over estimate. We walk down and pick it up.

      We cruise out Wilshire Boulevard. I bid a silent farewell to L.A.: all its artificiality, the sugar-coated hardness. I can’t say I’m sorry to go; it’s been a rough stay. I know I’ll miss Joan but I’ve learned to live with that.

      We drive into the sun, due east. Then out through San Bernardino and up over the pass.

      Coming down the other side, heading toward Vegas, maybe a hundred twenty miles outside L.A., an enormous dog dashes in front of our car. I jam the brakes but they don’t grab straight and we almost flip. Lucky there isn’t much traffic because we rear-spin and I hit the dog anyway. He thumps front left and bounces off right. I pull up on the shoulder and we run back.

      The dog’s spinning around; his hindquarters are smashed. He should be dead but he’s twisting and howling. It’s hard to look or listen; he’s snapping and we can’t get near. It takes almost five awful minutes for him to slow down and die. There’s no collar or identification so we drag him off to the side of the road, into the bushes. It’s some kind of German shepherd, big as a wolf. We take out the tire iron and use it as a shovel to dig a shallow grave in the sand. We cover it with dry grasses and pieces of brushwood.

      There’s not a mark on the front of our car. It’s incredible the difference between machines and animals. We must’ve hit him with either the tire or the bumper. Back in the car, we don’t talk much for the next hundred miles.

      Then, about forty miles this side of Vegas, there’s some kind of motor-cross race up on the hills beside the road. Billy’s excited by this so we stop. I stay in the car. To me, it looks baked, barren, violent, but this is terrific for Billy. Everything that’s attractive to him – the unfinished, random quality, the rough-and-ready atmosphere, the noise, the smells – only reminds me of things I don’t want to remember. At Billy’s age I had too much of it, enough to last more than a lifetime. Comfort gets bigger as I grow older, comfort and the illusion of predictability.

      After ten minutes, Bill’s back, eyes flashing in vicarious thrill; he’s seen some new four-stroke he’s never seen before.

      An hour later, we roll into Vegas. The town’s just had a flash flood. Caesar’s Palace is thick packed clay up to the terraces. The parking lots are caking mudflats. It makes even more obvious how Vegas, plumb smack in the middle of a desert, is an insult to nature.

      It’s weird seeing this counterfeit world inundated with thick, caking, beige mud, cracking in the sun like a Christmas tree in a trash can, tinsel still sparkling.

      We park close as possible and hurry in from under the heat. It’s well past noon. Lead-heavy sun is forcing itself hard into the tops of our heads. It must be a hundred or more in the shade.

      We walk into a sudden shock of cold. We tromp mud onto pus-yellow and blood-red carpets, on into the dimness. There’s the whir and tinkle of slot machines. There’s a refrigerated-air smell