Isat up late that night, sprawled on the veranda in a chaise longue, listening to the beat of the Pacific crashing the cliffs below. Now and then I blew some changes to the rumble of the surf, but the sax tasted dead in my mouth. The mouthpiece full of cold spit. Without Kate the music meant nothing anymore. I lay the horn aside and sipped Armagnac on the rocks. I was popping tranqs like M&Ms.
If it comes to it, I thought, like say a preexisting malignancy that’s already metastasized from the prostate to maybe a bone cancer, colon, lung, liver, testicular, or whatever—should I check out before things get really rough, too depressing and grim? I could end up like my old fishing buddy Jim Jury, who never knew (or let on that he knew) what caused the cancers that devoured him.
Cancer: the ugliest, most frightening word in the English language. In any language.
What is it in other tongues?
Krebs in German, le cancer in French, el cáncer in Spanish, close to that in Italian.
But in the gentle koine of East Africa it’s jamii moja ya nyota. Swahili. Almost musical. To die for . . . . Coming out of the tent at the crack of dawn, still cool before the sun cleared the acacias, and Wamatitu pussyfooting toward me from the mess tent with a tray of black, hot Kenya tea, smiling that broad, sweet Louis Armstrong grin of his, Salaama, Bwana—habari gani? Chai, Bwana? Beaded dew gleams like shards of diamond on the green canvas of the tent, and the air smells clean as cold canvas. Through the tops of the doum palms the snow-capped peaks of Kirinyaga float in the hard blue sky. A herd of Tommies is grazing out on the plain, their short white tails whirring like miniature helicopter rotors. The tails stop only when they die . . .
You’ll never go there again, Doc. Have a Halcyon instead.
I picked up the saxophone and tried to play around it. It didn’t help.
Checking out: Gunshot? Preferable: cheap, quick, painless, certain if you have a steady hand at the critical moment, and best of all no one else has to be involved. But it’s messy. I wouldn’t want the maid to see it later and feel obliged to clean up. Josefína would faint dead away before she even went for the mop and bucket. And what about the kids? Those images that yet fresh images beget . . .
Have another schnapps.
Drugs and poisons? Barbiturates, tranquilizers, rat poison, Drano, etc. An overdose, then? Of what? I’ve got whole drawers full of drugs in my office, freebies in a selection of delicious flavors from Roche, Pfizer, Schering, Glaxo Wellcome, and all the usual suspects. But which flavor works best, and what’s the optimum dosage to off oneself for sure? I could look it up. But there’s always an element of uncertainty.
The Rope? Who cuts you down? Hanged men shit their pants. The dead always tend to void their bowels, leaving a terrible stink behind. Apt enough, but messy.
A car crash at high speed, à la Death of a Salesman? Too melodramatic, and there’s always a chance of hurting someone else . . . in another vehicle, or maybe a pedestrian.
Disappear? Leave a farewell note? To whom? Jack Trevanian? It would be excessive, fucking romantic.
And after all, where would I disappear to? And what would I do when I got there?
I could drown myself. Swim out to sea like Norman Maine and never come back. Clichéd, and anyway I’m too good a swimmer. It would take me forever to sink. But then again, perhaps I might reach the Happy Isles, or anyway Hawaii . . .
Defenestration? I’m acrophobic. It would scare me to death.
Carbon monoxide in the garage with the Range Rover’s motor idling? Not foolproof enough, I could end up half dead with brain damage. Picture it: an old fart in diapers, grinning mindlessly, drooling, gurgling nonsense. Forget it.
I could update the Romans, open my veins in the hot tub. It’s said to be painless, the heat of the water assuaging the sting. Do it at night, under a full moon, you’ll have something to distract the eye from the carmine cloud you’re drowning in. They’d find me in the morning, a pale, leached-out hunk of flotsam adrift in a stale Red Sea . . .
But to hang on knowing that it’s pointless, nothing afterward, going through the indignities of a long, slow, mindless, drug-dulled and terribly expensive death . . . it doesn’t make much sense, except that it’s “proper.”
Think about it.
If it comes to suicide, I’d want some comfort along the way.
From whom? Kate’s gone . . .
So when was the last time you thought about heaven, Doc? You haven’t believed in it since you were ten. Now you’re pushing seventy. Sixty-eight anyway. It’s a nice idea all right if you can get in the right frame of mind.
I’m sure as hell getting there.
Have another schnapps.
Prosit Neujahr!
Who would you want to be there?
What would it be like?
Have another Xanax.
I’d certainly want my dogs, a dalmatian like Popsy, that coach dog my mother loved so much—yes, a coach dog, the kind that used to run along behind the fire engines when I was a kid, every firehouse had one; they were bred to run behind the coaches of the aristocracy, my mother’s notion of high tone. Then Gayelord, who hunted well for me all through med school and finally died of leukemia when I was away in the Navy. Then Spunky, the fox terrier Kate and I adopted that time when the Douche Boat was in Mare Island Naval Shipyard near Vallejo and the pooch hung around for handouts, someone must have abandoned him there, and we kept him for a while even after the Navy, even though Kate was allergic to dog dander, and then gave him to a shipmate who said he had an uncle with a big chicken farm in Utah; then our black Lab, Peter, who got chomped by that white-tip off Clarion on the Big Tuna Cruise; and then freaky Max (the German shorthair, a great gundog); and the big yellow Lab Simba, who took it as his droit du seigneur to scarf the first quail of the season but fetched perfectly on every bird that followed; and finally his successor, black Luke, the best gundog of them all, the best dog I ever had, another cancer victim, and why the fuck am I crying now?
Then Kate died.
Have another schnapps. Prosit Neujahr!
Have a Nembutal . . . no, take two!
I’d want Kate there in heaven of course, lean feisty smart hawkish—my blonde kestrel, no, my merlin—but not in her occasional combative mode.
Prosit Neujahr!
Another Percodan? Don’t mind if I do . . .
And the kids?
Sure, why not?
But only if they’re little still.
Pros’t . . .
Maybe my parents if they could be nice to each other for a change, and my grandparents, at least Frank Taggart and Rosa Pueringer Seidel. But you don’t have to have everyone in your own particular heaven, that’s the guilt-free beauty of it, those you leave out will have heavens of their own, and maybe some people can drop in from time to time, like my smartass cousin Maureen, and Captain Harold W. Becker USN, if he’d ever deign to spend time in the heaven of a mere doctor.
Ben would be there for sure. Even if he isn’t dead yet, by God I’ll have him in my heaven.
Here’s to you, Ben. Glück auf!
Bird would be there, and Diz, and Coltrane, Max Roach, Lionel Hampton on the vibes, Lady Day diddybopping along with them, all in fluffy white robes and haloes.
And what would heaven look like? What would be the geography of it?
Well, it’s my heaven, so I can make it anything I want . . . the best places I’ve ever known. Kenya in the early ’70s; Baja ditto; Wisconsin in the ’40s and ’50s; Alaska now and forever; maybe even California in the ’50s when we were first married, smog still a Bob Hope joke, and the earthquakes only spiced things up, but it would have to be a very big house to hold all those people, or a very big neighborhood, and the seasons would always have to be spring and early summer and September and October, and maybe a touch of winter. A kiss of snow . . .
There’d have to be a boat, of course, a ketch like Orm but lighter and quicker in stays, and Kate not prone to seasickness, and I’d have a wire snips with me when she got that fishhook through her thigh that I had to cut out, and I wouldn’t offend the boys by drinking too much and pushing them too hard to hold a true course and shoot straight and cast with a flyrod, and I wouldn’t argue against abortion when Eddie’s girlfriend was within earshot not knowing that she’d had one, because Kate had kept that information from me, and I’d never be sullen or “out of touch.”
Nor would my skin flake, nor would I ever erupt in blisters when I stayed out in the sun too long, nor would I ever piss more than twice or thrice a day, and never at all at night, and I’d still be six-one by 180, and my eyes would still be 20/10, and I could still clean-and-jerk two hundred pounds from a standstill, and I’d be able to hit every clay off the trap within ten yards, and every grouse that ever flew, and cast a streamer—a 4/0 Lefty’s Deceiver—the length of a football field, with pinpoint accuracy.
With only one backcast!
And the wahoo would take it every time . . .
But none of the fish I caught would ever go belly up after the release.
Hell, I could fish and hunt and eat anything and everything any time I wanted in my heaven, drink and never get drunk, and win the Nobel Prize for medicine every Thursday.
This is pure shit: the pitiful idea of heaven. It’s way too soppy-wish-fulfilling-sentimental. Pitiable is the word. My life was better than this implies.
Prosit Neujahr!
At sunup the next day I woke on the deck at Palos Verdes. It wasn’t heaven. It was cold as an Inuit’s igloo. The Pacific boomed good morning. Spray leaped halfway up the cliff, waves receded, regrouped, charged again. The whole house shuddered. The rhythms of the sea. I was reeling, still half in the bag. Salt water corrodes. The alto sax lay there on a chaise longue, beaded with dew. I fetched a towel from the locker and wiped it down, pulled the reed, licked it clean. Then I stood there naked with the dawn at my back, salt wind in my face, shivering, and wailed “Koko” the way the Bird blew it back in the ’40s, that gutsy guttural line erupting into dazzle, hearing Diz on the trumpet in my mind’s ear bopping behind me all around the chords. I needed someone to lay down the beat—Max Roach, maybe, Art Blakey? No, too showy, I wanted Ben there, tapping a smooth round riverbank rock like he did on the Firesteel, ticking out insect riffs on an empty tin can, rattling a hollow log beside the campfire . . .
Where was he when I needed him?
I laid down the sax. The empty fifth of brandy and a half full bottle of Xanax stood on the table beside the chaise. I tossed them over the cliff. And went in for some clothes and my Rolodex.
Ben called me now and then, every four or five years was his schedule, usually late at night Wisconsin time, sundown in California, slurred and mawkish—he’d taken up booze. Big time. When was the last time he phoned? I flipped through the Rolo. I usually scribble in the dates. There it was—two years ago. Before the shit hit the fan for me, but he’d already had a face full.
Ben’s retired now too, from what sounds like a rollercoaster ride of a career as a building contractor. More downs than ups. Then his wife left him. That was what he called about last time we spoke. Lorraine was gone, after forty-six years of marriage. They’d been sweet on each other since high school. Lorraine, he often said, had an overdeveloped civic conscience. She was the kind of woman who, if she happened to run a red light and wasn’t ticketed on the spot, would turn herself in to the nearest police station an hour later, checkbook and driver’s license in hand, demanding instant justice.
“Lorraine’s a goodnik,” he’d say. “Unlike me, the ultimate no-goodnik.”
Why did she leave him? Men of our generation don’t ask questions like that. If a friend doesn’t volunteer how he got a broken arm or leg, you don’t ask him how it happened. Nor do you ask a friend about his sex life, or what he paid for a new car, or gun, or pair of socks, or even what he’s dying of. If he wants to tell you, he will. It’s a simple question of honor between men.
Lorraine’s living near their kids on the East Coast now Ben told me, somewhere below Philadelphia, and none of them will speak with Ben when he calls. He’s all alone in a big, empty house of his own construction in a priggish, sleepy little hick town, Bonduel, with only his dog Jake, an aging yellow Lab, for company.
The Korean war scarred him for life, I think: that wicked winter fight during the Chosin Reservoir campaign, and later along the thirty-eighth parallel the “Diesels” and “Mercuries”—assault raids on the Chinese lines and ambushes in No Man’s Land—it all must have left him with suppurating wounds, a lifetime of bitter flashbacks. The fact that we didn’t win that war was worse. It turned him sour, surly, hair-triggered. He’d never admit it though. Ben’s no whiner. But his life has been wasted. Now with his wife gone he drinks too much and eyeballs the gun cabinet—mon semblable, mon frère! All that keeps his finger from the trigger, he tells me, is the continuing love and presence of his dog. He figures that after Jake dies is time enough. All that keeps my trigger finger still—so to speak—is the memory of the Firesteel.
I picked up the cell phone, punched in his number, and flicked it to speaker mode.
Brrrring . . . Brrrring . . . Brrr . . .
I set the sax to my mouth.
“Yeah?” His voice was thick, blurred, drowning in phlegm, though it’s already midmorning in Bonduel.
I wailed a line from “Salt Peanuts” . . .
A long pause, then:
“Well, you old son of a bitch! Long time, no hear. How the hell are you, Hairball?” He was suddenly awake.
“I have only one word for you, pal. Firesteel.”
Another silence, then:
“You know, I think about it too, more and more these days.”
“How is the old river?”
“I haven’t been up there in—Christ, must be ten or twelve years. And then only to fish the estuary. You know, that lower run by the Haystack? But it was still good, Harry. Damned good. Since they put those Pacific salmon in the Great Lakes, there’s plenty of action year round. Kings, silvers, steelhead, you name it.”
“What about the upper river where we took those big brookies?”
“I don’t know firsthand, but it shouldn’t be too fucked up yet. Most of the city folks want lake property, and the state’s kept the rivers up north pretty clean since the loggers cleared out.”
“How about the bird hunting?”
“Still good. Woodcock are falling off, thin on the ground these past few years, but that’s true everywhere. Habitat loss, I figure. Everything growing up to climax again. But this should be a peak year for ruffs, top of the cycle. And there’s Huns now up on the Firesteel. Not to mention ducks and geese.”
We were quiet for a moment. Then I said, “Kate’s dead.”
A long beat . . .
“Oh, shit, Harry. I . . . What can I say?”
“Look, let’s do that trip again. What do you think? I could fly into Green Bay tomorrow, we’ll buy ourselves a new canoe, Kevlar, light and strong, my treat. We’ll outfit the bastard, and hit the Firesteel all over again.”
“What did she die of?”
“Death,” I said. “A stroke. It was quick, thank God for that.”
“If it had to happen . . . ”
“It happens.”
I heard him cough, clear his throat.
“The Firesteel,” he said. “One more time . . . What did that Greek guy say? ‘You can’t step into the same river twice’?”
“Fuck him, Ben. He’s long dead. Don’t mean nothin’. Drive on.”
Ben laughed. “Why not?” he said. “It was a great trip, ‘the worst trip I’ve ever been on,’ I guess. We’ll name the canoe Sloop John B. We were young then, guy—Great Lakes Beach Boys, strong and ignorant, not a clue to what was lying just down the pike. And maybe we’ll finally catch that muskie.”
“Fuckin’ A.”
The rest of the conversation was details. I’d bring my sixteen-bore Purdey and a trout rod or two. Ben had a tent, sleeping bags, and plenty of camp gear. We’d worry about food later, after I got there.
“You bringing that saxophone of yours?” he asked. “Your ax, as you always called it?”
“Couldn’t die without it,” I said.
He laughed. Then he started coughing, another gobbet of gunk . . .
“Frog in my throat,” he said at last. “Too many cigars, I guess.” Then, “Hey, Hairball! I’ll carve me up some drumsticks, special for this jaunt! Shagbark hickory, there’s a tree in the backyard I’ve had my eye on. Jake’s been pissing on it for eleven years now so the wood’ll be cured to a fare-thee-well.”
Jake would come along, of course. A great last hunt for a great gundog, and perhaps a great trip for both of us as well. Maybe it could be a new beginning. Or a fitting finale.