"What's the matter?" I ask.
"My arm hurts. And my neck. It's like clamped inside."
"Please let me in," the doe says, pushing through. But just as he does, Pop sharply groans and pitches forward with sheer dead weight, and it's only because of Jack's quick reflexes that he doesn't smack his face on the hard tile floor. He and the doc gently turn him onto his back, and the doc gets to work, 100
percent business (definitely a welcome change of pace), checking his vitals, trying to track the pain, with Pop wincing as fiercely as I've ever seen him, tiny tears pushing out of the corners of his eyes.
"What's wrong with him?" I ask, all of it in sum beginning to spook me. "Shouldn't we call an ambulance?"
Paul says, "It's already coming."
The doc tells Patterson to alert the hospital to ready a cardiac team.
"He's having a heart attack?" Jack says.
"Possibly," the doc answers. "But we won't know how bad it is, or even what it is, until we get him to the hospital." He asks Pop if he thinks he can swallow some aspirin, and Pop nods.
Patterson is sent to get some. When he returns with them, Pop takes two, crunching on them like children's tablets, and lies back. The doe now regards him more generally.
"Why is he in such a miserable condition?"
Patterson says, "This is the gentleman who left the premises."
"I see."
"Can't you do something for him?" I say.
"There's nothing else I can do. We simply have to wait for the ambulance."
But now Pop sort of yelps, and claws angrily at his neck, like there's something ditch-witching its way out of him. Jack holds him steady and then eases him back clown, and for a moment he seems to calm, but then all at once his whole body becomes sort of warped and rigid, like a sheet of plywood that's been soaked and then too quickly dried. He rests again, his eyes shut. And then it starts again.
"Steady him now," the doc says, he and Jack quelling the new tremor. "Steady him. Steady. He'll make it through."
Paul is nodding in assent, but in fact it looks to me like Pop's going, really going. Going now for good.
eleven
I REMEMBER, from the time I was old enough not to care so much, Pop liked to say to me, with a put-on twang, "You're okay, Jerome, but I'd like you a whole lot better as a nephew than a son."
And I'd say to him, "Likewise, Uncle Hank."
We'd have a chuckle about it, our little hick routine, and often we'd play along that way for a while, through whatever we happened to be doing, driving in the car or painting the fence, and talk about stuff that we normally wouldn't talk about, which was pretty much everything, though this was of course only when Bobby didn't happen to be with us. When the three of us did go out together I was happy to sit in the back and let them shoot the shit and razz each other and just focus on my books on flying aces of WWII. It's no great shock that after Bobby went to Vietnam we didn't play the game anymore, and not because I was getting too old. But it was sort of fun while it lasted. Maybe we'd be driving out east to buy shrubs for a job and Pop would ask me about my girl and whether I'd finally gotten my fingers stinky, to which I'd make like I was hoisting my rig and say, If my big one counts, and we'd stupidly yuck it up like that all the way to the nursery, yakking like nimrods about women in the street and the latest car models and the merits and demerits of certain brands of beer. It was all a dumb joke but it was easy and comfortable and it doesn't take an advanced degree in psychology to figure out what we were doing, or why, or that those times were probably in fact when we felt closest to one another, most like a father and son.
I recount this with less nostalgia than a kind of wonder that we played the game at all, though at that moment in the jostling ambulance with the sirens wop-wopping and the sturdy EMS gal barking in Brooklynese his sorry vitals ahead to the ER, when it was clear that this was Pop's last careen on our side of oblivion, I thought for sure that I heard him try to drawl some avuncular sobriquet to me through the misty oxygen mask, some snigger to of Jerry-boy to check out the lushly ample hindquarters of the lady paramedic. But it wasn't that, of course, rather the muffled gasp of a death throe, in equal parts pissed and terrified, punctuated by his grasping my hand so tightly that I had to squeeze back as hard as I could to make him relent, actually crackling the little bones in his hand. Pop then kind of wailed and the butch paramedic possessed of these huge caramel-brown eyes noticed us holding hands and said with a fatalism and tenderness that walloped me deep in the chest, "It's really all we got, huh?"
I guess I blurted a yeah, not thinking much about what she was referring to, and it's only now, a few weeks later, when things have settled down and I'm finally up here again in sleek Donnie, Theresa serving as my copilot, cruising at a smooth altitude above this familiar patch of planet, that I'm able to peel away to the fuller meanings.
I should note without further delay that Pop has not been lowered into the ground, or sifted into an urn, or shelved away in a granite wall cabinet, nor is he otherwise in any way closer to the netherworld than he was when rescued from the Ivy Acres ground cover, but ensconced in the lap of Jack and Eunice Battle luxury, bain en suite, satellite TV clicker and walkie-talkie in hand, so he can squawk down to Rosario and order up a Bloomin' Onion or other microwave treat whenever he feels a lonely hollow in his gut. He is convalescing in style after the combination heart attack and mild stroke (an extremely rare occurrence, we're told, both to experience and then survive, particularly with no extreme ill effects). Eunice I hear has been especially solicitous, turning down his bed herself while he receives his daily bath from the hired home nurse (female, un-tattooed), and then fans out the dozen or so journals and magazines she replenishes weekly for him on the west end of the king bed, pillows fluffed and propped, the forever-blab of Fox News on the big tube awaiting his scrubbed pink return. Jack, too, is being extra helpful, keeping Pop up at night with a special subscription to an adult channel, his favorite program being the Midnight Amateur Hour, in which we are introduced to the porn star aspirations of excruciatingly ordinary middle-class folks, one couple Pop swears featuring the head cook at Ivy Acres. Even I have been going over there every other day, bearing gifts of guilt-larded fruit like biscotti and Sambuca and twine-wrapped soppressata or other such items that might bolster his memory of another time in his life when things weren't any better or worse but when at least most of his family and friends were still alive. Maybe it should be no surprise that it takes a serious brush with death to really land oneself in Nir-vana, which in this case for Pop — and soon enough me, soon enough you — is a convening of family predicated not so much upon either obligation or love as on a final mutual veto of any further abandonment.
And if family is the "it" the ambulance gal was talking about, the all-purpose F-word for our times, really all we got, like anybody else I'm not sure whether that's an ultimately heartening or depressing proposition, though perhaps that's not the point. I will confess that at the very moment I thought Pop was a goner, kicking the bucket, croaking for good, I didn't much feel love for him, even as I had love; I felt intellectually sure, is what I'm saying, which is no excuse. What this might suggest about families in general or ours in particular or just sorry old me is that while prophets tell us we're innately bestowed with enough grace to convey righteousness and bliss to entire worlds (much less one person), we mostly don't, at all, just pure potential that we are, just pure possibility. And the people who most often witness and thus endure the chasm between our exalted possible and our dreary actual are the ones we in fact love, or should love.