Jerry Battle, it must appear, can let the mortar pit and crumble. He can stand by and watch the gutters overflow, the water pooling against the foundation. He can gaze yet a thousandth time upon the buckles becoming waves in the asphalt yard, only to pick up the phone and speed-dial ahead for his three-soft-taco lunch. And though all of this (semi-) metaphorical illus-tration is pretty much the bare fact of it, and frankly how I had always wanted it to be, duly punched out for the very last time, no matter what, I can't now loll around and let Jack sink lower in the icy water, and not because I give a hoot about Battle Brothers. I don't. I never did. Pop always knew that, but he didn't mind, because through luck and happenstance and my sagely ever-passive hand, business tended to get done. So it squarely depresses me now to think that Jack might have thought I did care, which has to be my fault entirely, and perhaps explains the lengths he's gone to trying to make the business worth more than it ever possibly could be worth. No doubt that I should have derided his interest when he was in college and asked to work summers for us; I should have mocked it as dummy's work, an idiot's errands, said anything that might have plumbed his core anxiety about himself, which he has always harbored, instead of letting him join and then eventually become foreman of one of the landscaping crews, and then hang out after they rolled back in at the end of the day and drink beer with the mechanics, when he was the boss's son but a regular guy and so maybe too readily accepted and admired.
And while I know Jack was never headed for a fancy law associate's position like Richie's Ivy League minions, or was an intellectual sort like his sister, I'm damn sure that he could have made a perfectly fine sales rep for one of those big pharmaceu-tical companies, or a valued young executive in some corporate human resources department, taken full advantage of his athlete's natural poise and fealty to the team for the cause of gen-teel and estimable profit. That would have been good by me, for sure, though I must acknowledge, too, that I never pushed Jack away from Battle Brothers too assiduously, namely because—
surprise, surprise — I actually didn't mind the idea of his taking over someday, if that somehow meant Pop would get and stay off my back about The Future, thereby committing the sin of tendering one generation's dreams for the illusory expectations of another, which is no doubt a practice wretched, and shameful, if time-honored.
I ' M N O O D L I N G all this about at the moment, or trying not to and failing, sitting here on Pop's made-up bed in his room at Ivy Acres. I'm waiting for the head administrator to drive back in from his home in Cold Spring Harbor after normal business hours and explain to me how an eighty-five-year-old man with limited mobility walks off a twenty-acre campus without a trace and then isn't missed for an entire night and day. He's going to do so because I've threatened his assistant that otherwise he'll be speaking exclusively to a jodhpur-clad partner of Whitehead Bates in the morning, and the duly confused/impressed assistant immediately slipped off to a secure phone and called his boss.
Jack, meanwhile, has gotten it into his head that he's going to drive around the county checking the bus depots and diners and the dozen or so local Starbucks shops because Pop had their coffee once and thought it was a revelation and might now make some kind of crazy coot pilgrimage there, as if he were going to hire on as a barista before he kicked off, which after I considered for a second didn't seem that far-fetched a notion.
Paul has accompanied me to Ivy Acres for moral support, but after an hour of waiting here in Pop's room he's all but talked out on the incompetence of institutional structures and systems and turned on the television instead, switching with the jump button at the commercials between the Discovery Channel (Wild Predators) and HGTV (Before and After renovations).
The combination, as you might expect, proves remarkably soothing to yours truly, as all I need to forget everything else is a good meaty nature channel show where the ants and the termites are about to wage total arthropodan war.
"I only like the Before," Paul says. "At least the old place had some wool to it. Some shagginess. Now everything looks as if it's been bikini-waxed."
"Most people like that."
"I guess. What bugs me even more is how they had no qualms about destroying everything, even the good stuff, like that great fireplace."
"That was a beauty."
"Sure it was. You know better than anybody that you can't buy that old brick anymore. And the newel posts of the stair-case. Did you see how that guy took his sledgehammer to those?
He found that pleasurable."
"He was loving it."
"No kidding," Paul says, getting excited, maybe even agitated. "There's no respect anymore. People want what they want and they want it now Nothing comes before them, literally or in time. Everyone is Client Zero."
"Numero Uno," I say.
"Chairman Me."
"A Solo Flyer."
"Exactly," Paul says. "They think they can go anywhere and do anything, as if none of their actions has any bearing except on themselves, like they're in their own mini-biosphere, all needs self-providing, everything self-contained, setting it up like God would do himself. It doesn't matter that there are people on the outside tapping at the glass, saying, 'Hey, hey, I'm here. Look out here.'"
This stops me for a second, as he's striking closer to home than I'd prefer. Then I realize why Paul isn't quite acting like himself, which I assumed had to do with Pop being missing and all of us feeling anxious and moody. He's talking not about me but about his wife, Theresa, who, if you think about it, has done a pretty spiffy job of shutting out any chance of real inquiry, any real debate, who hasn't let by more than a few loose atoms of dissent, the only surprise here being that you'd think her seriously empathic prose-poet husband would have been asked to help steer from the beginning.
Theresa was feeling a bit tired, and so despite her wanting to come along I'd somewhat forcefully suggested she remain back at the house, just in case Pop managed to make his way there. In fact I scolded her, finally getting sick of her merely humoring my opinions. This I feel bad about, as she's looking washed-out of late, as though the blood isn't being fully pumped to all parts of her body. Her coloring is all wrong, her face appearing as if it were lighted from within by an old fluorescent tube, an unsteady flicker in her usually bright eyes. And I should really say A L O F T