Jill tells him of her plans: she believes she will leave On-Line within the next few months. A better offer has come her way from the physics department of Murray State College. The university’s personnel director seems to have taken a romantic interest in her.
“Do you like him,” Adams asks. “I don’t know.” She traces a line on Adams’ thigh. “Maybe.”
“Then I think you should go out with him.”
“I might,” she says. She sips her Amaretto. A sweetened kiss.
He must renew his passport, contact the utilities, visit his parents, make arrangements for a replacement with the band. (Zig has written a song about him called Sanitized Terminal Man, “about this real straight dude who likes to get down at night.”) He’d forgotten what it meant to say good-bye.
Rosa puts him in touch with his paternal grandfather, who if living would’ve been a hundred and thirty-two years old.
“What’s it like being dead,” Adams asks.
“It’s like not being able to read.” The voice is cold. “Imagine a grown man with no education trying to figure out his income tax or a newspaper headline or the warning label on a can of pesticide. That’s death.”
Adams says, “What can’t you do?”
“It’s not so bad, not so bad. We have our share of erotic moments, though don’t ask me how. I think, somehow, we’re more purely erotic without our bodies, as if the soul or energy that animated our arms and legs were not spirit or chemical reaction or electricity, but desire. But I don’t know. You’d have to ask one of the others. Some of these guys seem to know what’s going on here. I don’t. You know what I miss? Eyes. I never realized how important eyes are.”
Rosa opens her eyes and his grandfather is gone. Adams gazes out the door. Tombstones, lighted houses. Children making food with the mud beneath a tree.
His mother airs a bedroom for him. She is stooped and dark. A searing headache. “Hand me my pills,” she says, folding a wet cloth on her forehead.
“How’s Dad?”
“You’ll see the old coot tomorrow. I invited him over for supper.”
“Good. Can I get you anything else?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Good night, son.”
Adams sets his glass of water on a nightstand by the bed. The moon is full. He is reminded of a night long ago. In the afternoon his mother had taken him shopping. On the way home he saw in the window of an antique store a set of toy musketeers hand-carved by a London cobbler in 1836: a toothpick army dressed in red tunics, black caps, and white belts, with brown ammunition bags on their backs. Some stood, aiming rifles. Others knelt. Still others manned tiny wooden cannons. Adams’ mother let him stand in front of the window while she ran to the jewelry store down the block.
Adams pressed his fingers to the glass, pretending to thump the wounded soldiers. Then he noticed, next to the little brigade, a display of nautical equipment: a brass telescope, a pocket watch made of gold, a silver gyroscope, and an old-fashioned rod wound tight with string. Lying open next to the rod was a captain’s log bound in leather. The ink had faded to the color of a sparrow’s wing. Adams couldn’t read the words but he made out the date, 1798, in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Next to the log, another wonder: the captain’s survey kit. Inside, encased in blue velvet folds, a wooden straight-backed compass, a ruling pin, and a divider. The instruments gleamed, their edges precise. Adams knelt closer to the glass.
Just then the shopkeeper appeared. He wore a gray suit and a tie as red as the wooden soldier’s coats. He placed his right hand on a gold-leaf globe the size of a small freezer on the floor next to him, and his left hand on a Louis Quatorze chair. He scowled at Adams — he’d smudged the window. Adams turned and ran. He received a scolding from his mother, who’d searched for him for half an hour, but it didn’t matter. That night, curling up in his sheets, he felt himself wrapped in velvet, the moon gleaming between the folds.
His father heats bread and thick potatoes. His face above the boiling water’s light stands out, stung by the hot Nebraska air. Without words he tells Adams, “You descend from a man without foresight and are handicapped by the need to go on.”
The bales behind his house are cut and carelessly stacked. Throughout the morning, combines graze on the fields; they are willful, with solid arms. Adams thinks, “This is my father’s home, a scraped rock. People cry in the middle of the day and I don’t know what to do with them.”
Last night dust poured through the air vents like salt. A jug of fresh water waited to dry on the kitchen table. Adams cleaned the things he’d kept and went to see the river fish stirring up mud.
Okra, creamed corn, cauliflower, fried chicken, and rice. Tumblers of iced tea. Adams’ father is quiet. His mother chatters about her church friends, passes biscuits and salad, asks about his upcoming trip.
After supper, Adams’ father says to him, “Let’s go for a spin.”
They get in his pickup, an old black Ford, and drive to the miniature golf course. A Monday night, it’s closed. Adams’ father unlocks the gate and they stroll the carpeted greens. Windmills, castles, and moats flank the fairways under sodium vapor lights. As they walk, Adams’ father knocks a blue ball ahead of them with a putter.
On all sides of the course, cornstalks scrape one another. Diesels moan on the highway.
“So you let your wife get away from you?” Adams’ father says.
“Looks that way.”
“Man ought not to let his wife get away from him.”
“Not if it’s not for the best,” Adams says. “What’s that mean?” The old man sends the ball past a Plexiglas squirrel.
“What about you two,” Adams asks. “That’s a different situation.” “How?”
“We’da killed each other.”
A large metal buffalo blocks their path. They step around it.
“How you gonna get her back?”
“I’m not,” Adams answers. “She filed for divorce. I agreed to it.”
“Hell, boy.” Adams’ father swipes at a weed growing through a crack in the carpet. “That’s bad business.”
Adams watches the weed sail over the head of a mermaid curled alluringly on the edge of the thirteenth green.
“It ain’t an easy path, Lord knows, but a man ought to be able to hang on to his women.”
The blue ball swings around the mermaid’s fin and into the cup.
“You’re right,” Adams says.
He phones Kenny, then Otto.
“You’re going to freeze your ass off, boy.”
“Probably. Listen, do me a favor and check on Pam and the kids while I’m gone, all right? Just give them a call.”
“If Pammy’ll talk to me. She’s a good girl, but she listens to her father.”
“Make her talk to you. Don’t let her treat you that way.”
“Pammy does what she wants. You know that by now. But I’ll try.” “Thanks, Otto.”
“Keep a hot potato in your pants. You’ll need it.”
On the computer Adams simulates world climate, concentrating specifically on the northern hemisphere. He types in a climate model developed by North, Short, and Mengel of the Goddard Space Flight Center, calls a world map to the screen, and averages temperatures for the month of July over a period of a hundred and fifteen thousand years. A hundred and fifty thousand years ago glaciation covered North America and most of Eurasia. If the temperature at high northern latitudes remains below zero degrees Celsius in the summer months, ice builds slowly over decades. Presently, July temperatures fall below freezing only in Greenland and Antarctica.
Otto is right about his ass.