"Pop. ."
"He's not dead," Jack pronounces, evidently responding to my expression.
Pop moans with trenchant exasperation, as he always does.
He's alive.
"He's pretty out of it," Jack says, laying him down on the bed. The top of the sheet flops down, revealing Pop's face, which is sunburned and badly peeling. "He told me he didn't sleep for two days."
"Where did you find him? At a mall? A park? Not at Starbucks. ."
"Right outside here," Jack says. "I was parking the truck and I saw something move in the pachysandra by the duck pond."
"What the hell do you mean?" I turn to give Patterson a look, but he's already gone, yodeling something from the hallway about finding the house doctor.
"He was back over there, where that other section of the home is."
"Transitions," I say, picturing him grimly looking in at Bea from the window.
"He's probably very dehydrated," Paul says. "And in shock."
Jack says, "I pinched his skin, and it's pretty bad. I asked him and he said he had been drinking water. But I didn't see any bottles. Maybe from the sprinklers. Or the duck pond."
"Oh Jesus," I say. "Is Patterson getting a doctor?"
"I'll go find him," Paul offers. He runs out, leaving the three of us in the room, posed like in one of those neo-Classical deathbed paintings, the acolytes deferentially arrayed at the great man's torso, his mouth twisted in the last mortal coils of agony, his eyes cast upward to the Maker.
"Can you two give a guy a little room here?" Pop hoarsely blurts out, hacking up some very gluey spit. Jack cups his chin with a tissue and Pop spews it out. "And instead of trading all your medical theories, how about a goddamn glass of water?"
While Jack fetches one from the bathroom, I try to take the dirty sheet from him, but he won't let me.
"Come on, Pop, it's filthy. And so are you."
"I like it this way."
"You smell like cat piss. And other things."
"I don't care. It makes me feel alive."
Jack gives him two glasses, and he bolts both down, which is probably not ideal, and hands them back to him for more.
"What the hell did you do these past two days?"
"I walked by day," he says, intoning not a little prophet-like.
In fact he seems too tranquil, and steady, for what he's obviously weathered.
"I guess you didn't get very far, with your legs bothering you."
"Just to the gate," he says. "I was just going to take a short walk at first. But then some kid drove by and asked if I needed a ride, and I told him I did. He dropped me off out in East-hampton."
"You went out that far?"
"That's where the kid was going."
"Didn't he wonder why you were wearing a pajama top?"
"Hey, he was wearing a shirt with cuts all over it, like it got run over by a combine. Plus he wasn't too swift."
Jack brings the glasses back full and hands them to Pop. "So what did you do out there?"
He bolts them down, again. "Like I said, I walked. I walked on the beach, all the way out to Montauk Point."
"That's got to be fifteen or twenty miles at least. You really walked all the way?"
"Well, I almost got there. I could see it, that's for sure."
I ask, "Did you have any money? What did you eat?"
"Of course I didn't have money. I was just going out for a little walk, remember? Plus I'm kept a pauper, so I have no freedom. And if you want to know, I panhandled."
"You begged?" Jack says, crinkling his forehead, like his mother sometimes did.
"It's not below me," Pop replies, glancing at yours truly.
"Nothing's below me."
I say, "So you begged on the beach in the Hamptons."
"Yeah," he says. "Most people wouldn't part with any dough, but they were decently generous with the food, which I ate but didn't like. Sushi, some other rolled thing they called a 'wrap.'
This is what people bring to the beach. And how come everything has to have smoked salmon in it? Nobody appreciates an honest ham sandwich anymore."
Jack asks, "Did you sleep on the beach?"
"Oh yeah. It was real nice, sleeping outside. It wasn't too cold either. In the morning some cops gave me a ride to town. After I got together enough for a doughnut and coffee, I hitched a ride back from a guy in a Jaguar. I think he thought I was some nutso billionaire like Howard Hughes. When I got back here I didn't want to go inside right away, so I lifted a sheet from the laundry service truck and camped out."
"You could have told somebody, you know."
"What, that I was going to sack out with the ducks? The jerks here would have called you, and you would have called some shrink, and all of you would have gotten together and sent me to a place where they have metal grating on the windows."
"I wouldn't have," Jack says, most =helpfully. "Next time, you can come stay with us. I'll set you up on the deck with a pup tent."
"I need the open air."
"Fine, then, anyway you want it. Better yet, you can come stay with us now if you like."
"Oh yeah? You mean it?"
"Why not? You have a month-to-month lease, right?"
"Ask Mr. Power-of-Attorney. Hold on, I gotta use the head."
We help Pop out of bed, but he bats away our buttressing and goes into the bathroom.
"Of course it's month-to-month," I say to Jack. "But shouldn't you talk about this with Eunice?"
"What makes you so sure I haven't?"
"I know you."
"You think you do."
"Well, have you?"
Jack says firmly, "She'll be fine with it."
"But you ought to make sure, don't you think, before getting him all excited? Besides, I don't know if it would be the best thing for him."
Pop calls out, "I'll take the guest room with the big TV, okay, Jack?"
"Sure thing, Pop."
"Are you hearing me, Jack?"
He stares right in my eyes. "The best thing for Pop, or for you?"
"For me? For him to stay at your house? Christ. I don't know what that means. I really don't. And I'm thinking about you, kid, especially you. You've got a wife, and kids, and a big house to run, and a business to. ."
". You know, the one with the big tube TV. ."
"Sure, Pop, sure," he says, and then to me, "To what?"
"What?"
"To what. A business to what?"
"You know what."
"Tell me, Dad."
"Forget it."
"Come on, let's hear it."
"I said forget it."
Jack gives me a look — or actually, he doesn't, which is a look in itself — and for a scant moment I feel myself tensing my neck and jaw for what I'm intuiting will be a straight overhand right, popped clean and quick, and I actually shut my eyes for a breath. Of course nothing comes, nothing at all, and when life flips back it's just Jack gazing straight at me, his mouth slightly open in his way, with that resigned enervation, like he's waiting for a train that always runs late.
"Well, don't worry about it," he says. "It's going to be okay."
"I won't," I say. This sounds as empty as it is untrue, but like most men we accept the minor noise of it and try to move on.
But presently we don't have to, as Paul and Patterson and a light-brown-skinned guy with his head wrapped in a bright purple cloth — presumably the doe enter the room in a rush, though they're momentarily frozen by the sight of the empty bed; Jack points to the bathroom, where we converge, Tack first.
He knocks, calling for Pop, and then opens the door. Pop is sitting hunched on the edge of the tub, grasping his arm.