Chapter 18

Alfonso was on the phone in a voice that stopped my breathing.

“I gotta…” he was saying. He was flying east and would I drive him to the airport? “There’s this long-term parking if I’m parking there long-term, man, but I don’t want to drive. I don’t think I can drive, man.”

“I’ll be right there.”

“I don’t know if there’s any use in going, but I’m going.”

“I’ll be there. Wait, I’m on my way.”

His son had lived in Trenton, New Jersey. His son was being buried in Trenton.

I was thinking of the nightmares fathers have, waking sick in the dark, far from their children. For Alfonso it came true with drugs and a drive-by shooting. He didn’t tell me if Alfie was one of the shooters, one of the dealers, or just a kid passing by on his way. “He was still in school,” he said. “He was gonna make it.”

I asked him if he was trying to fly east with his service pistol and if he didn’t want to leave it with me. He asked if I thought he was nuts, but he didn’t answer the question. Then he felt me reach across to poke at his hip as I drove and he chuckled as if we were playing our bachelor games again. He couldn’t get it on the plane. He couldn’t shoot his former wife. He couldn’t kill himself.

“Hey man, I might be crazy, but I’m not nuts.”

“Thanks for that reassurance.”

Then he was being silent about his son and I was being silent about mine. I drove through the morning traffic down 101 to the airport, the San Francisco commuters heading out to Silicon Valley and the peninsula commuters heading into the city, Alfonso heaving wide-mouthed yawns. He wasn’t bored or sleepy. His eyes were red-rimmed and heavy-lidded as he slumped against the door. Men sometimes yawn when they mean to do that thing they somehow forget how to do around the age of eleven, the skill of weeping, although rumor has it that they are learning again and floods are being released all over America.

Alfonso’s breath was bad, sour meat inside. I wondered if, to make sure, I should pat him down, body-search him for his pistol.

At the terminal I pulled up at the United entrance. If he carried a weapon, he might could talk his way on, a cop on duty. Okay, that was his business. Most likely he wouldn’t be carrying it on his person if he was thinking rationally. He might not be thinking rationally. I wasn’t my brother’s keeper.

He swung his bag out of the back seat. The grace of some fat men. Alfonso’s caramel voice running thick. He wasn’t meant for sadness, but I couldn’t tell him that now; sadness wasn’t God’s intention for Alfonso Jones. He was meant to be funny and easy in himself, hard on me, but people don’t always play their assigned roles. Even as a cop, he was no longer at Park Station. Life doesn’t make permanent assignments.

“Call me from Trenton,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, where will you be staying? I’ll call you.”

“Never mind. I’ll be back in three days.”

He hoisted his bag and straightened his back, stretching. The bottom button of his shirt was undone. “Just before this came up,” he said, “something else came up. Wanted to talk with you. I know Karim wants you to do some jobs for him.”

“I got to get some money. I got to get some variety in my life.”

“Don’t.”

“I might.”

“Don’t, you listen to me now.”

But Alfonso wasn’t Dan Kasdan’s keeper, either. On the way back to the city I switched on the radio, KSAN, and before I could turn it off I heard part of a golden oldie that said something like, Hello hello, I’ll be your lover tonight. Wisps of morning damp on the highway, wisps of asbestos and oil particulate and a touch of San Francisco morning freshness being undone by heavy morning traffic. Alfonso, my buddy.

Alfonso, my fellow father. Perhaps I shouldn’t put myself in the way of accident, just as Alfonso said. A philosophy to live by, if we were choosing to live. Having other people in mind sure does limit a person’s options.

Alfonso had his son, I had Priscilla and Jeff, maybe Karim thought he had me. No telling what makes a person fall for someone, willing to give his life for someone, a ruinous meteor elevatoring out of control down from the sky here at the edge of the Pacific or any ocean. With fiery edges crashing and sputtering out.

He used to have his son.