"Not aloud. No."
Another illustrious milestone in the career of Jack Tagger Jr. Finally I get back on the front page, and I didn't even write the damn story.
Soon I'll be getting that phone call from Charles Chickle offering the cushy trustee gig, yet even the prospect of being paid to torment Race Maggad III fails to cheer me. What happened to Evan sucks; I hate seeing any reporter get shafted.
Emma tries to help by reminding me that the kid cobbled the old man's obit from my notes, clips and interviews. "It was mostly a rewrite job," she says. "The bulk of the work was yours."
"Nice try." I reach for the phone. "Has our Evan got a listed number?"
He answers on the third ring, which is encouraging. I've known interns who would have already hung themselves in despair.
"Hi, Jack," he says quietly.
I launch a virulently indignant diatribe against shifty spineless editors, which Evan spoils by informing me that he is not the aggrieved party. He didn't write the MacArthur Polk obituary, either.
"I choked, man," he confesses. "Abkazion bailed me out. He grabbed all your notes, sat down at the city desk and banged the whole story out with, like, twenty minutes to deadline."
"I see."
Evan can't stop apologizing, and he's wearing on my nerves like a whining Chihuahua. "Once you told me the obit was for the front page," he says, "my brain locked up big-time. I'm really sorry, Jack."
"Don't be. It was wrong for me to dump it on you like that."
"What do you think Emma's gonna do?"
"To you? Nothing," I say. "I'm the one who's in trouble."
"Really?" the kid says anxiously.
"Oh, she's an animal sometimes. It's scary."
Emma peers curiously over the top of the newspaper. "Who's an animal?"
"See you Monday," I say to Evan, and hang up smiling.
We're back in bed when the telephone rings. Emma's head is resting on my chest and I'm not moving, period.
The answer machine picks up. The call is from Carla Candilla, her voice hushed and urgent.
"Derek really did it! 'Ode to a Brown-Eyed Goddess'Jack, it was so fucking lame."
She's calling on her cellular from Anne's wedding, which I'd come tantalizingly close to forgetting.
"It took him half an hour to read," Carla says, "meantime I had to pee like a racehorse. I wrote down a couple lines 'cause I knew you could use a laugh."
Emma stirs against me. "Jack, who's that on the phone?"
"The daughter of an old friend. She's the one who loaned me the gun." The gun now resting somewhere in Lake Okeechobee, where I tossed it.
"Dig this," Carla is saying on the machine. " 'My heart melts anew each time your brown eyes light on me. Passion sings in my breast like the soaring sparrow's harmony.' "
"Ouch," says Emma.
"And that's a best-selling writer," I feel duty-bound to report. But at least he wrote her a poem, which is more than I ever did.
"Can you believe itbirds in his breast!" When Carla's giggle fades, her tone turns more serious. "Anyhow, Mom looks awesome and the champagne is killer, so I guess I'll survive. The real reason I called, I want to make sure you got home okay from your big adventure last night, whatever it was. And I hope your friend's okay, too. Someday I'll get you drunk and make you tell me about it. Oh, one more thing: Happy Birthday, Blackjack."
Oh Jesus, that's right.
Emma raises her head. "Today's your birthday? Why didn't you say something?"
"Slipped my mind." Incredible but true.
Emma snaps her fingers. "How old again?"
"Forty-seven."
So long, Mr. Presley. Hello, Mr. Kerouac. I suppose this will never end, until I do.
Emma springs out of bed. "Get up, you old fart. We're going shopping."
That was the most time I'd spent in a mall in ten years. Emma was buoyant and sassy; she likes birthdays. She bought me the new Neil Young CD, two pairs of stonewashed jeans and a bottle of cologne that she says is "the bomb." Then she wanted to treat me to a movie, and she wouldn't take no for an answer. It was an action remake of the TV series Petticoat Junction,starring Drew Barrymore, Charlize Theron and Catherine Zeta-Jones, three beautiful sisters who live at a rural railroad depot. In the old television show, the girls had weekly comic encounters with cranky relatives and colorful characters who came and went on the train. In the movie version, however, all three sisters are working undercover for the Mossad. For me, the plot never quite came together.
A small FedEx box is sitting by the door when Emma and I return to the apartment. My mother's birthday present: a first edition of Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage.Where she found it I can't imagine, but what a beauty! I've got a shelf devoted to books my mother has given me on birthdays. Tucked into the pages of the Zane Grey novel is a card, and also a long brown envelope. For some reason I open the envelope first.
Inside is a photocopy of my father's obituary.
Ever since my mother revealed that she'd seen it, I've been imagining what the article said. Not everybody's death gets written up by a newspaper, so it was intriguing to think that, after ditching Mom and me, Jack Tagger Sr. had done something in life to merit notice of his passing. Perhaps he'd become a beloved saxophone teacher, a crusading social worker or a feisty small-town politician. Maybe he'd invented something new and amazing, some nifty gizmo now taken for granted by the entire human race, including his estranged namesakethe electric nose-hair trimmer, for example, or Styrofoam peanuts.
I've also pondered the unappealing prospect that my father earned an obituary not because of anything good he'd done, but because of some newsworthy fuckup, scandal or felony. Bruno Hauptmann got quite a boisterous send-off in the media, though I doubt his family made a scrapbook of the clippings. I myself have written obits of local scoundrels that elicited sighs of relief if not cheers from our readers. Communities usually are pleased to be rid of bad eggs, and I've been bracing for the possibility that my father was one.
Yet it turns out he was neither a miscreant nor a pillar of the establishment. He was merely a character, small and harmless to the planet.
His obituary is from the Key West Citizen,and is dated March 12, 1973. That explains why it didn't turn up in a computerized library searchmany newspapers didn't switch to electronic filing until the late seventies or early eighties. My telephone chase was fruitless because my mother never lived in Key West, so I'd had no reason to call the paper there.
The headline says:
Local Performer Dies in Tree Mishap
Emma, watching me from the opposite armchair, says, "What's the matter?"
It's the oddest sensation to read about my own father's death yet to hold no living memory of the man. I feel slightly guilty for not feeling sad, though truly I didn't know him. One lousy snapshot was all I had to go on.
"Read it to me, Jack."
"That's very funny."
"I mean it. Fair is fair," she says.
What the hell. I clear my throat and begin:
A popular Key West street entertainer died early Monday morning in an accident near Mallory Square.
Jack Tagger, known locally as "Juggling Jack," was killed when he fell out of a tree, police said. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Tagger had been out walking with friends when he spotted a raccoon perched in the top of an old avocado tree on Whitehead Street. According to witnesses, he shouted, "I saw her first!" and began scrambling up the trunk.
A limb broke under Tagger's weight, and he plummeted headlong about thirty feet to the pavement.
The accident occurred at 2:30 a.m. Police said there is a possibility alcohol was involved.
Emma thinks I'm making this up.
The bad news is, my old man was a drunken goofball. The good news is, apparently I've got show business in my veins. I continue reading:
Tagger was a familiar figure during the nightly sunset celebration along the Old Town waterfront. He boasted that he could juggle anything and, to the delight of tourists, he tried. He tossed wine bottles, flaming tiki torches, conch shells, cactus plants and even live animals.