So he kept on doing as he had been, but uneasily. Nearly always he signed himself on for the morning shift so that he was free to watch television with Alec in the afternoon. In the summer, during the afternoons, the local station ran pretty decent old movies, Abbott and Costello comedies, Errol Flynn swashbucklers, dusters. And on Saturdays there were the baseball games which both he and the old man loved.
Despite his grandfather’s rash of new oddities Daniel still found him easier to deal with than his mother. He hated to think what she would have to say about Alec if she could see him now, sitting in the house in a bulky knit Siwash sweater with two pairs of heavy wool socks on his feet while the mercury stood in the thermometer at 85°F. It was little wonder that his head didn’t work one hundred per cent, he was probably suffering from heat stroke, boiled brains. Whenever Daniel gave him the gears about overdressing, the old man grew sulky and grouchy. “Laugh now you little bastard,” he warned, “your turn’ll come to feel the cold.”
Although he got hostile any time Daniel teased him, it was the only way Daniel had of snapping him out of his moods. If he was sunk up to his ass in his thoughts he didn’t trouble to answer simple questions. He had to be ragged or needled into saying something. Daniel not only found the old man’s withdrawals into blankness upsetting, he also regarded them as insulting. What business had he switching off his own personal control switch to the outside world, shutting Daniel out and falling into a trance? Most often it happened when he watched television. It annoyed and aggravated Daniel to no end because when the old man came out of his reveries he demanded explanations as to how the runner came to be advanced to third base, or how Miss Kitty came to be tied to a chair in her own saloon and where the hell was Matt Dillon anyway?
Daniel would have liked to tell him to take a flying fuck at the moon if he couldn’t bother to watch the television himself. But he didn’t. He just sourly let things take their course, the old man staring glassy-eyed off into space, one hand laid like a brick on the crown of his fedora as if he feared a windstorm might erupt in his living room and tear it from his head, the barely discernible twitching of his lips signalling some hunt of the mind the way shivers and tremors in a sleeping dog’s limbs betray pursuit in a dream.
The famous hat. There was a time when his grandfather had merely forgotten to remove it indoors, now it was clear that he refused to. Daniel thinks that only a crowbar could get between the two of them and effect a separation. He remembers the day late in July he let himself into the house and discovered his grandfather dripping onto sheets of newspaper spread on the floor in front of the kitchen sink. A froth of soap suds bubbled on the mat of his thick, grizzled chest hairs and there were smears of white lather caking his flanks and thighs. He was scrubbing himself with a scrap of washcloth so hard that his private parts were flapping energetically up and down and making the occasional sideways squiggle left and right. He was absolutely naked if you didn’t count the straw hat stuck to his head. Daniel was struck dumb in the beginning. It was embarrassing to be looking at an old person, a senior citizen, without his clothes on, and it got even more unnerving when his grandfather tried to engage him in a conversation as he skidded a soap-slippery washcloth over his belly. Daniel couldn’t stop his eyes from veering back and forth between the hat and the bobbling parts, between all that limber action down below and the rock solid steadiness of the hat riding up top. With every passing second his embarrassment grew more and more acute, finally transforming itself into hysteria and nervous giggles which sent him scrambling for the living room. There he hunkered in the easy-chair, gasping out choked answers to the questions his grandfather flung at him from the kitchen, biting down hard on his knuckles to control himself during pauses in the conversation. Soon, however, the old man was roaring that he couldn’t hear him, what was he doing in there, come out and make himself understood. It was like trying to listen to a boy with a mouthful of marbles.
Somehow Daniel pulled himself together and returned to the kitchen. What he now saw didn’t strike him as funny any longer, just a sorry sight, vaguely disgusting, the white body bloated and sagging underneath a ridiculous hat. Before he could censor himself, Daniel heard himself saying, “Jesus, Alec, if you want to wash all over, whyn’t you do it like normal people and take a bath?”
And Alec said stonily, “Because I’m so goddamn old and so goddamn stiff and so goddamn fat I can hardly jack myself up out of a tub anymore. That’s why.”
Although there were sometimes awkward moments such as that, by and large the two of them got along well enough in the touchy, complaining, grudging fashion usually associated with long-married couples. Lacking any other companions their peculiar partnership had become the centre of their lives. Alec had summarily ordered his old friends, Huff and colleagues, to keep clear of his property following the uproar at Christmas and they had sulkily done so, even when they learned Vera had moved out. Also, Alec’s relations with Mr. Stutz were not quite as they once had been. The old man held himself very cool and aloof in Stutz’s presence for fear that a heated word might betray how hurt he had been by his friend and employee going behind his back to lend money to his daughter. Now all Alec’s natural mischievousness, his desire to get sober Stutz’s goat, were suppressed in case his teasing might be interpreted as bitterness or injured pride. He bit his tongue and didn’t say, “What’s this Stutz? You set on a promotion? Interested in moving from general manager to son-in-law? Interested in buying into the business?” No, following the opening of The Bluebird the two men treated each other with business-like rectitude. Nor did Mr. Stutz receive any more late-night phone calls from his employer.
Daniel was similarly isolated. Kids might say hello to him on the street but they never bothered to stop and talk. Dancing lessons had not saved him from loneliness; no girl had looked at him and imagined Montgomery Clift. On the other hand, he knew that whatever qualities he owned were not ones to endear him to the boys. He was hopeless at sports, no joker, and too proud to play Tonto to anybody’s Lone Ranger.
So that summer Daniel and Alec had their routines and each other. An hour each afternoon was spent pottering in the crazy garden which had sprouted chaotically, rows sown half with one vegetable, half with another, rows sown twice with different vegetables, a thicket of dill bristling in the potato patch because the old man had accidentally spilled a packet of seed there in the spring. Alec wouldn’t let Daniel pull it up. He said it never hurt to be reminded of your mistakes. Daniel didn’t argue. The garden was his grandfather’s business. He directed the boy in weeding, thinning, and hilling, while reserving watering rights for himself. He was never happier than when he plodded about the garden in black, high-topped rubber boots, a hose snaking after him as he sprayed the sweet peas entwined in the chicken-wire fence, doused the bald green heads of the cabbages, shook a shower over the potatoes, or sprinkled the marigolds.
Growth that summer was abundant, lush. There was really no reason to water at all except that it gave the old man pleasure. Rain was plentiful, unlike the previous year when it had been necessary to haul tanks of water from the farm. Spectacular storms often broke late on hot afternoons, black and purple thunderheads swelling on the horizon like bruises, lightning breaking open the sky in jagged, bluish-yellow cracks that spilled down a blur of wild rain and wind. Then stillness, the garden awash in water, the rain barrels foaming and swirling under the drain spouts.