“And you don’t remember nothing else?” your father says. You’ve driven all over town, every street, every dirt road, every hollow there is to stumble across in Stuckley, West Virginia.
“Not till she dropped me off at the hospital.”
“Dumb fucking move if ever there was one.”
“I seem to remember I was puking blood by that point, talking all funny.”
“Oh, you remember that. Sure.”
“You’re telling me, in all this time, you never talked to Gwen?”
“Like I told you three years back, that girl got gone.”
You know Gwen. You love Gwen. This part of it is hard to take. There was Gwen in your car and Gwen in the cornstalks and Gwen in her mother’s bed in the hour just before noon, naked and soft with tremors, and you watched a drop of sweat appear from her hairline and slide down the side of her neck as she snored against your shoulder blade and the top of her foot was pressed under the arch of yours and you watched her sleep, and you were so awake.
“So it’s with her,” you say.
“No,” the old man says, a bit of anger creeping into his puppy-fur voice. “You called me. That night.”
“I did?”
“Shit, boy. You called me from the pay phone outside the hospital.”
“What’d I say?”
“You said, ‘I hid it. It’s safe. No one knows where but me.’”
“Wow,” you say. “I said all that? Then what’d I say?”
The old man shakes his head. “Cops were pulling up by then, calling you motherfucker, telling you to drop the phone. You hung up.”
The old man pulls up outside a low, redbrick building behind a tire dealership on Oak Street. He kills the engine and gets out of the car and you follow. The building is two stories. The businesses facing the street are a bail bondsman, a hardware store, a Chinese take-out place with greasy walls the color of an old dog’s teeth, a hair salon called Girlfriend Hooked Me Up that’s filled with black women. Around the back, past the whitewashed windows of what was once a dry cleaner, is a small black door with the words TRUE-LINE EFFICIENCY EXPERTS CORP. stenciled into the frosted glass.
The old man unlocks the door and leads you into a ten-by-ten room that smells of roast chicken and varnish. He pulls the string of a bare lightbulb and you look around at a floor strewn with envelopes and paper, the only piece of furniture a broken-down desk probably left behind by the previous tenant.
Your father crab-walks across the floor, picking up the envelopes that have come through the mail slot, kicking his way through the paper. You pick up one of the pieces of paper, read it:
Dear Sirs,
Please find enclosed my check for $50.00. I look forward to receiving the information packet we discussed as well as the sample test. I have enclosed a SASE to help facilitate this process. I hope to see you someday at the airport!
Sincerely,
You let it drop to the floor, pick up another one:
To Whom It May Concern:
Two months ago, I sent a money order in the amount of fifty dollars to your company in order that I may receive an information packet and sample test so that I could take the US government test and become a security handler and fulfill my patriotic duty against them al Qadas. I have not received my information packet as yet and no one answers when I call your phone. Please send me that information packet so I can get that job.
Yours truly,
Edwin Voeguarde
12 Hinckley Street
Youngstown, OH 33415
You drop this one to the floor too, watch your father sit on the corner of the desk and open his fresh pile of envelopes with a penknife. He reads some, pauses only long enough with others to shake the checks free and drop the rest to the floor.
You let yourself out, go to the Chinese place and buy a cup of Coke, go into the hardware store and buy a knife with a quick-flick hinge in the hasp, buy a couple of tubes of Krazy Glue, go back into your father’s office.
“What’re you selling this time?” you say.
“Airport security jobs,” he says, still opening envelopes. “It’s a booming market. Everyone wants in. Stop them bad guys before they get on the plane, make the papers, serve your country, and maybe be lucky enough to get posted near one of them Starbucks kiosks. Hell.”
“How much you made?”
Your father shrugs even though you’re certain he knows the figure right down to the last penny.
“I’ve done all right. Hell else am I going to do, back in this shit town for three months, waiting on you? ’Bout time to shut this down, though.” He holds up a stack of about sixty checks. “Deposit these and cash out the account. First two months, though? I was getting a thousand, fifteen hundred checks a week. Thank the good Lord for being selective with the brain tissue, you know?”
“Why?” you say.
“Why what?”
“Why you been hanging around for three months?”
Your father looks up from the stack of checks, squints. “To prepare a proper welcome for you.”
“A bottle of whiskey and a hooker who gives shitty head? That took you three months?”
Your father squints a little more and you see a shaft of gray between the two of you, not quite what you’d call light and it sure isn’t the sun, just a shaft of air or atmosphere or something, swimming with motes, your father on the other side of it looking at you like he can’t quite believe you’re related.
After a minute or so, your father says, “Yeah.”
Your father told you once you’d been born in New Jersey. Another time he said New Mexico. Then Idaho. Drunk as a skunk a few months before you got shot, he said, “No, no. I’ll tell you the truth. You were born in Las Vegas. That’s in Nevada.”
You went on the Internet to look yourself up, never did find anything.
Your mother died when you were seven. You’ve sat up occasionally and tried to picture her face. Some nights, you can’t see her at all. Some nights, you’ll get a quick glimpse of her eyes or her jawline, see her standing by the foot of her bed, rolling her stockings on, and suddenly she’ll appear whole cloth, whole human, and you can smell her.
Most times, though, it’s somewhere in between. You see a smile she gave you, and then she’ll vanish. See a spatula she held, dripping with pancake batter, her eyes burning for some reason, her mouth an O, and then her face is gone and all you can see is the wallpaper. And the spatula.
You asked your father once why there were no pictures of her. Why hadn’t he taken a picture of her? Just one lousy picture?
He said, “You think it’d bring her back? No, I mean, do you? Wow,” he said and rubbed his chin. “Wouldn’t that be cool.”
You said, “Forget it.”
“Maybe if we had a whole album of pictures?” your father said. “She’d like pop out from time to time, make us breakfast.”
Now that you’ve been in prison, there’s documentation on you, but even they’d had to make it up, take your name on as much faith as you. You have no Social Security number or birth certificate, no passport. You’ve never held a job.
Gwen said to you once, “You don’t have anyone to tell you who you are, so you don’t need anyone to tell you. You just are who you are. You’re beautiful.”
And with Gwen, that was usually enough. You didn’t need to be defined — by your father, your mother, by a place of birth, a name on a credit card, a driver’s license, the upper-left corner of a check. As long as her definition of you was something she could live with, then you could too.