His neighbors from Lincoln Street stand near his father’s grave. Mr. Brody, the retired math teacher who lived next door, pushes his walker across grass. He pats him on his shoulder. Phil Cossink, the pharmacist, with his added-on sunroom and attic turned into a playroom for his three children has come with his sons. They’re college students now and wear suits. His wife reminds him that she brought him Christmas dinner in a blizzard when he was alone.
A developer places an arm on his shoulder. The stranger has a ruddy face and he’s breathless. His father’s property up to 5 Hawk Creek was sold at auction. The developer plans to build 40 Cape Cod houses with swimming pools on 30-acre parcels.
“I respect natural environments.” He is hearty, almost festive. “I’m not considering blading.”
That means he’s going to chop the forest down. Thomas turns his back and walks away.
Sheriff Jim Murphy, in his black dress uniform and white gloves, stands at his side, their shoulders brushing. Thomas notices Jimbo is wearing his purple heart. He hasn’t seen it before. The velvet is vibrant and George Washington is depicted in the center in gold. No clergy preside. There are no eulogies.
The sky is the brilliant untarnished blue of intelligence, prophecy and magic. It’s the sky of an earlier time when brutality was confined and sporadic. The cobalt sky is naked, not a blue humans know, but the blue of tapestries, epics, and cities still bearing their ancient names. Syracuse, Ithaca, Corinth and Thebes.
Then he chances to look directly at a woman wearing a black hat with a long veil and a black dress past her ankles. She looks like Central Casting sent her for the role of a Greek widow. She slowly approaches and introduces herself.
Samantha Markowitz is from Erie. She has fair skin with freckles that blend in together, turning her cheeks a moist peach. She embraces him and trembles in spasms. Her 12-year-old red-haired twins sob. Then Lillian Johnson is weeping in his arms. She doesn’t have a horse farm. She lives in a brick house half an hour north of Harrisburg. She’s a nurse. Her sons, Joshua and Justin, are red-haired dermatologists in Philadelphia. They’re at least 6’3. They shake hands. His father’s other sons have excellent eye contact and their business cards are linen and embossed.
Samantha and Lillian are sturdy, handsome women, 40ish he guesses, and fleshy. Their voices are soft and their words sparse. Of course, Captain wouldn’t want women who dazzle. The spotlight must remain fixed on him, the narcissist.
“You all squared away?” the sheriff asks.
“Nobody’s all squared away,” Thomas remarks in his father’s tone.
“I hear you,” the sheriff replies.
“See much of him?” Thomas asks.
“Captain got more social when you went to college,” the sheriff says. “That euthanasia crisis dragged on. He knew the clinic was doomed. He expected malpractice suits and he wasn’t ready for the tournament circuit. Made his depression worse.”
Thomas remembers. His father had flown to California to discuss it in person. He shared a house with two other students and his father had ignored them.
“This euthanasia craze gives me pause,” Captain said. “It’s a plank of the PETA doctrine. They’re symbiotic. Point is, the fundamental principles are unsound.”
Tom asked how and why. He enjoyed his father that spring California day. Outside, layers of magenta Bougainvillea embossed the bamboo backyard fence. Four hummingbirds drank sugar water. He poured Captain coffee. His father’s hair hung in a braid halfway down his back. It resembled copperheads and milk snakes he found near 5 Hawk Creek at Cistern of the Sage.
His father wore a new hat, a black Stetson, blue jeans, his size 16 Doc Martin work boots, and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. He’d bought one of their cd’s.
“Which one?” Tom was curious.
“The one with Dylan covers,” Captain replied.
Then Captain explained that euthanasia was a terrible death. His father was restless and distracted and his eyes seemed cluttered. He paced, chainsmoked, and stared at the floor as he talked.
“You can’t fool some critter you’ve had for fifteen years. They recognize the carrier and the sight of it induces pure terror. In the clinic, they’re assaulted by the stench of critters in pain. They smell death.”
Captain said it could take him three days to give them a lethal shot. By then, the critters are sick with shock. Their owners don’t realize they’re consigning their pets to three days of abject suffering. In winter, maybe longer.
“What do you suggest?” Tom asked. He realized that if the clinic closed, his father would have an awkward transition.
“It’s a town of 3,400 with 8,870 registered weapons. They love that critter for fifteen years, sleep with it in winter, feed it from their plate. It’s their responsibility to end it,” Captain said. “Take the critter out back and put a bullet in his brain. Wait for a pretty day, sun shining. Let him see some robins. In a microsecond, it’s lights out.”
“You don’t have an ethical problem,” Tom ventured. “And who knows? Maybe you’re right. You’re senior faculty, Captain.”
Later his roommate asked, “What’s your father do? Is he a roadie?”
“He’s a vet,” Tom answered, a bit off-balance.
“Gulf War?” his roommate inquired.
“No. He’s a veterinarian,” Tom replied, his tone crisp. “And a professional poker player.”
“So he’s a professional liar,” his other roommate offered.
Tom smiled, uneasy, and rode his bike to the library. He hadn’t thought of his father that way before. A professional liar.
The Con weekly, Galileo, devoted a three-page article to his father. They included Captain’s allegations of conspiracy, and undue and misguided influence from PETA in Pittsburgh. His account of the plague of kittens and puppies criminally deserted by students was vivid. What did they imagine happened to critters dumped out of cars? Some magical intervention? Maybe Jesus would feed them? It was animal abuse and punishable by imprisonment and fines.
“I’m not an innkeeper,” Captain stated. “And I’m not an executioner.” The Galileo quoted him and put his statement in bold.
“That was his finest moment,” Sheriff Murphy says. “It had a kind of grandeur.”
Thomas agrees.
“Captain had a restless nature. He was cursed. Born bipolar,” the sheriff says. “He was lonely. He’d stay here for days.”
Thomas is surprised. “What did you guys do?”
“Smoke pot, watch TV, drink some and talk. He tried to teach me Texas Hold ’Em. I didn’t have the math for it. Plus, Captain was plain out lucky. You have to go the river, he’d tell me. It’s a game of blood. Every hand is seppuku. Captain had the statistics cold, and cards just came to him. Only two outs and he gets one. Flushes, full houses, trips. It was uncanny. But he was obsessed with law suits.”
Thomas remembered the quiet sustained furor in Wood’s Hole. His father closed the clinic a year later. By then he was playing professionally. He was on the circuit with men barely twenty-one, and constantly moving across the county, often by himself. Captain called him from airports. He’d come in second at the Commerce Club in L.A. and was going to Palo Alto next. Then Vegas, Atlanta, Houston and Miami. He’d take off a few days before going up the coast to Atlantic City and Foxwood Casino in Connecticut.
“I talked to Lily and Sam,” Sheriff Murphy says. “Good stock and hardworking. Agreeable. And he sure put his mark on those kids.”
“Accommodating,” Thomas decides. “Easy come, easy go.”