Pale lights glimmer in the low hills that surround downtown. I’m staring out the window after my second set at the Biltmore while Marianne takes a bath. Among the earthbound constellations, I see a good life with Marianne—on the road, in New York, anywhere. Our years together are just starting to unfold. Ahead we have days of road-tested revelations, nights of learning to hear our secret melodies behind all the standards. It all looks pretty good to me.
Then the phone rings.
“Where the hell have you been?” Ray is drunk.
“Downstairs. Just played two sets. Good ones, in case you’re interested.”
“Not where were you tonight, I mean where have you been for the last week.”
“New York.”
“I tried there. You’re usually at the Elysée.”
“We stayed at the Waldorf.”
“Whoa. Going fancy on us, are you?”
“It was great.” I remember the slow days high above the city.
“That’s good. Because while you were having such a great time, everyone was going nuts looking for you. I e-mailed you. I called Malcolm’s club house. And I called all your usual hotels between Baltimore and Boston, you name it.”
“Have a sudden need to talk to your little brother?”
“Kind of.” He pauses. “Ross, Chief’s dead.”
I’m suddenly aware of the carpet beneath my feet, of the gravity that draws me to it. “He’s in the hospital, you mean. He’s sick.”
“No, he’s dead and buried. He died Monday. The funeral was yesterday. They couldn’t wait.”
I sit on the bed, lower my head to my knees. I can’t imagine Chief dead, can’t picture him as anything but my fearless, raven-haired father. He’s behind his desk at Moore’s Frozen Foods. He’s moving up the ladder, building a career, making life better for us. He’s shaking the hands of presidents.
“You there?”
The phone has drifted away from my ear and I bring it back. “Yes.”
“He’s dead, Ross. When I was a kid, I hoped for it. I really did. I wished he would just go die.” Ray’s voice cracks. “And when he took off for Washington, I really wanted him dead.”
“But I never really figured it all out. Never made him proud of me or found a way of dealing with him that didn’t make me mad. Now I can’t ever do that. I missed my chance.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Ten years ago, probably. Back when I could still travel.”
“Did you ever tell him what you were doing?”
“Sort of. I made it sound important and on the level. The kind of shit he’d be proud of.” Ray can barely speak. It sounds as though someone’s hands are tightening around his throat.
“When I saw him in the hospital, he was really proud of you, Ray.”
“You got to be kidding.” Ray sounds like he’s laughing and crying. “I don’t think what I’m doing is the kind of making money that Chief had in mind for me. Neither of us are exactly chips off the old block.”
Marianne walks in wearing a white bathrobe with the Biltmore logo on the front. She sees tears streaming down my face, then sits on the bed next to me. She puts her hand on my shoulder.
“Ray, I’m really sorry.”
“Call Vivian when you get a chance. She was all frantic when we couldn’t find you for the funeral. Secretary of Labor was there. Nice obit in the Times. They called him an American political success story, and I quote, rising from a watermelon farm to the upper echelons of Beltway power.”
“Chief hated growing up on a watermelon farm.”
“They didn’t say he liked it, bro.”
“Did they mention the grand jury investigations?”
“Yeah, they did. It’s all part of the package. They described him as a mixed figure. Like anyone in power politics. Anyway, I thought you read the papers every day.”
“Don’t bullshit me. You’re knee-deep in pussy. Cray told me all about it.”
“Thanks for that.”
“All I can say is two words—Chief and Eileen. Remember listening to them screaming at each other in the kitchen every night?”
“Of course. But Ray, that was a long, long time ago. And now they’re both dead.” Our original audience, the two people we wanted most to impress or shock, is gone. Now we have to figure out who’s in the house for our second act.
“Just don’t get all normal on me and start settling down, saving up for a house. Shit like that is scary. Really scary.”
“And really unlikely.”
“It’s simple, Ross. When someone as naïve as you falls in love, he’s going to get his fingers burned.”
“All I can say is I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“You probably didn’t think Chief was going to die, either. Or that Cray was going to get the shit kicked out of him,” Ray sputters. “Maybe it’s time for you to wake up and spend a little time in reality, Ross. Until then, I don’t want to fucking hear from you.”
The phone clicks off.
I toss the phone on the bed, stunned. My ears are ringing.
“Bad news from Washington, I assume,” Marianne says.
“Yes.” I bend forward, close my eyes. “My father’s dead.”
Marianne puts her arms around me, kisses the back of my neck. “I’m really sorry, Ross.”
I say nothing for a few minutes, travel back to when I saw Chief in his hospital room. I can’t remember what our final words were, though I’m sure our conversation was as inconclusive and one-sided as usual. “I wasn’t a very good son,” I say. “And I’m not a particularly good brother or uncle, while we’re at it.”
“That’s not true.”
“Trust me, it is.”
“You did what you did.” Marianne gets up to bring me a Scotch from the minibar. “You can’t change it now. It’s all in the past.”
The first sip from the tiny bottle tastes burnt and bitter. Powerful Chief, distraught Eileen, devious Ray. They’re just mythical characters from my childhood, like Miles, Monk, and Bird.
“I bet you remember plenty of stories about your father,” Marianne says. “You should tell me some.”
“That might take a while.” Revisiting the same family episodes over and over leaves them as smooth as old coins, shining brightly though the dates and details are worn away. Everyone carries a handful of familial change.
“We’ll stay up as late as you need to. You only get terrible news like this twice in your life.”
Marianne brings a blanket into the living room. We kiss, then we sit quietly on the couch, sadness washing over me every few minutes. I spend the rest of the night lost in the past, where so much of my family resides. Time shifts the chords from major to minor to diminished. They’re souls swirling above the flatlands, my grandfather, my mother, and now, inconceivably, my father—strong, driven, distant, dead.
In a way, Chief started me down the path to my nightwork. During the summer when I turned sixteen, he got tired of hearing me pound away on the piano and signed me up for a job as a sorter at Moore’s Frozen Foods. An internship, he called it, though it was more like an internment. I stood at the side of an enormous stainless steel ramp, wearing a white coat, cap, and plastic gloves, and watched as newly frozen peas bounced down the ramp. My job was to cull the undersized or oversized peas and toss them down a chute. These would be packaged and sold to schools and prisons and other places that didn’t care about the uniformity of their peas.
My first day, a training session identified all the rogue elements a sorter might encounter. Rocks, frozen bits of pea tendrils, Band-Aids, pieces of glove, nails, fingernails, mice—all were illustrated in an enormous poster, KNOW YOUR FOREIGN OBJECTS.
I stood at my station for four hours at a time, until my legs ached and my fingertips were half-frozen. I was the youngest of the sorters and vulnerable to pranks. Playboy centerfolds, cigarettes, and car keys all found their way down my ramp and I dutifully weeded them out.
Sometimes I’d look up to see Chief in the windowed meeting room above the manufacturing area. He might be sitting at the conference table, smoke rising from his Winston as he berated the middle managers. Or he might be standing at the window, watching me like the God of Frozen Foods.
After a few weeks, I developed new muscles in my shoulders and legs and they quit hurting. My hands were always fast on the keyboard, but now they had a new purpose—to work and make money. I found that the conveyor had a speed control that the plant set automatically to 5. I nudged mine up to 6 and the peas flew even faster. But I could still spot the misshapen ones and the debris, and weed it all out.
Next week, I was up to 8, my hands a blur over the ever-advancing green peas.
At 9, my eyes could never leave the conveyor, just pinball back and forth. My hands darted out like a cat’s paws. A cat on meth. Line workers on break gathered around me, shaking their heads, sure I couldn’t keep it up shift after shift. But I did. Above, Chief beamed, pointed me out to his colleagues. His boy was no work-place flyweight.
When I moved the setting to 10, pea sorting entered a whole new level, one that even Cray and his Japanese gamer friends would find interesting. I had to hunch over the bouncing peas, making multiple catches with one hand, lunging for the occasional rock. A crowd gathered every time I stepped up to the sorter. I was featured in Moore’s newsletter, The Flash—a nod to the flash-frozen process.
Then Moore’s fired me. Or “reallocated” me to the shipping room, tracking outgoing shipments with the help of an enormous beige computer. Chief explained that the other sorters complained, and my fast work was creating chaos in the packaging department. I had discovered that my fast hands could help me make a living, attract attention, and get me into trouble.