NOISE WAKENED ME in the morning—the shuffle of thick shoes past my window, the tumble of lumber, bellowing voices, laughter. The sun was up, hot and full of mischief as it tried to pierce the blinds.
I found an old flannel robe of my mother’s in the closet and walked out on the front porch. Zarlingo, Cavallaro and my father were hauling building materials to the Datsun out front and lifting them into the camper—planks, shovels, mortarboards, a wheelbarrow, tools. They sweated in the morning heat; the back of Papa’s khaki shirt was soaked down the spine, his face as red as a rose.
They paused at the truck to wipe their faces and sip beer from cans. The sky was a cloudless sheet of blue fire, tremulous, vast. It was a minute or so before they saw me.
“Ain’t you dressed yet?” my father said.
“No, I ain’t dressed yet.”
“Why don’t you get dressed like everybody else?”
“I just woke up. Do you mind?”
“You workin’ for me or not?”
“We’re not in the mountains yet.”
Zarlingo looked inside the camper.
“Oh shit. We’re outa beer.”
“Let’s go down to the Roma,” Papa said. “I like that tap beer better.” He squinted at me through the burning sunlight. “Put on some clothes. That’s your mother’s robe. Take it off. We leave in an hour. You be ready.”
They climbed into the cab, Zarlingo behind the wheel. I didn’t like the look of it. The air was shimmering with diabolic vibrations. As the camper moved off I yelled. Zarlingo braked to a stop and I walked to the car. Nick put his head out the window.
“What’s the matter now?”
I nodded at his two friends. “Are these two winos working for you too? If they are, I resign right now.”
“Resign?” he exploded. “You ain’t even started!”
“Well, are they, or are they not?”
Zarlingo put a placating hand on Papa’s knee to defuse him. “Let me talk to the lad, Nick.” He turned to me. “Look, sonny. We’re not working for your dad.”
I said, “Don’t call me sonny.”
“We’re just trying to give him a hand,” he went on. “Okay, buster? So why don’t you shut up and bug off?”
“Mannaggia!” my father howled, tumbling from the car and facing me nose to nose, splashing me with spit. “What are you tryin’ to do to me? These fellas are my friends. They’re doin’ me a favor, hauling all my stuff to the job free of charge, so what right you got to talk like that? Use your head. Show some respect.”
Injured and affronted, Zarlingo and Cavallaro looked straight ahead. I didn’t care how Papa defended them, they were mean, malevolent old bastards and it was impossible to be civil to them, but I said it anyway, merely to make peace.
“I’m sorry.”
They remained rigid and outraged. My father got back into the cab. “Let’s get outa here,” he said. Zarlingo shifted gears, and as the car moved off Papa stuck his head out the window.
“Get dressed, goddamnit. And take off that robe.”
I shuddered from it, those dreadful vibrations: there was something stupid and inexorable about the whole matter, a trap, a dark hole alive with rattlesnakes. Then and there I should have fled the scene, even in my mother’s old flannel robe I should have grabbed the first bus out of town.
Instead I showered and shaved and put on the ancient garments of my youth—corduroys, a sweatshirt, a pair of misshapen hobnail boots. How bizarre it was, the feeling inside those old clothes, a snake shedding his skin only to find an older skin beneath. I felt like an old man of sixteen.
They puzzled my mother. She didn’t care for them.
“You look too young,” she said.
“They feel crazy.”
I wanted to say they felt like the garments of someone who had died, the time of my young manhood, a time of stress and crisis, the family poverty in the midst of my father’s prosperity, the rage at him, the conviction that God did not rule the world after all, the hunger to lust and achieve, to jump the fences of home and town, to change myself into somebody else, to write, to fuck and write.
Eating breakfast I sensed a change of perspective growing out of the change of clothing—the same knives and forks of my youth, the same plates, the smooth worn handle of the same bread knife, the aging crucifix hanging above the stove—all things old and smooth and soft as the inside of my mother’s hand. She watched as I sipped coffee, her eyes troubled, uncertain of my identity.
“You don’t have to work for your father. Maybe you shouldn’t.”
“I know.”
“Do what’s right—for yourself.”
The morality of it was not the question. What mattered was that I had seen death glowing through the face of an old man clinging fiercely to life. No wonder he was stubborn, capricious, self-serving and touched with madness. But he was still my father. If I turned from him in his last cry for achievement it might bring a swifter death, and I did not want that shadow over the rest of my life. I had never actually refused to go to the mountains with him. I had simply allowed him and my mother to draw me into the plan. My father was entitled to this last paltry triumph, this little house of stone in the Sierras.