I jerked the thumb again. “You know your way out.”
Edwina was at the head of the stairs, her face righteous again. It seems to run in the family, even with those who married in. Only Pops and I were short of it.
“Your father is very ill. I forbid you—”
“Save it for Rod; it might work on him.”
In the room I could see the old man’s arm hanging limply over the edge of the bed, with smoke from the cigarette between his fingers running up to the ceiling in a thin unwavering blue line. The upper arm, which once had measured an honest 18 and had swung his small tight fist against the side of my head a score of times, could not even hold a cigarette up in the air. It gave me the same wrench as finding a good foxhound that’s gotten mixed up with a bobcat.
The old girl came out of her chair by the foot of the bed, her face blanched. I put my arms around her. “Hi, Ma,” I said. She was rigid inside my embrace, but I knew she wouldn’t pull away. Not there in Pop’s room.
He had turned his head at my voice. The light glinted from his silky white hair. His eyes, translucent with imminent death, were the pure, pale blue of birch shadows on fresh snow.
“Chris,” he said in a weak voice. “Son of a biscuit, boy... I’m glad to see you.”
“You ought to be, you lazy devil,” I said heartily. I pulled off my suit jacket and hung it over the back of the chair, and tugged off my tie. “Getting so lazy that you let the foxhounds go!”
“That’s enough, Chris.” She tried to put steel into it.
“I’ll just sit here a little, Ma,” I said easily. Pops wouldn’t have long, I knew, and any time I got with him would have to do me. She stood in the doorway, a dark indecisive shape; then she turned and went silently out, probably to phone Rod at the bank.
For the next couple of hours I did most of the talking; Pops just lay there with his eyes shut, like he was asleep. But then he started in, going way back, to the trapline he and I had run when I’d been a kid; to the big white-tail buck that followed him through the woods one rutting season until Pops whacked it on the nose with a tree branch. It was only after his law practice had ripened into a judgeship that we began to draw apart; I guess that in my twenties I was too wild, too much what he’d been himself 30 years before. Only I kept going in that direction.
About seven o’clock my brother Rod called from the doorway. I went out, shutting the door behind me. Rod was taller than me, broad and big-boned, with an athlete’s frame — but with mush where his guts should have been. He had close-set pale eyes and not quite enough chin, and hadn’t gone out for football in high school.
“My wife reported the vicious things you said to her.” It was his best give-the-teller-hell voice. “We’ve talked this over with Mother and we want you out of here tonight. We want—”
“You want? Until he kicks off it’s still the old man’s house, isn’t it’”
He swung at me then — being Rod, it was a right-hand lead — and I blocked it with an open palm. Then I back-handed him, hard, twice across the face each way, jerking his head from side to side with the slaps, and crowding him up against the wall. I could have fouled his groin to bend him over, then driven locked hands down on the back of his neck as I jerked a knee into his face; and I wanted to. The need to get away before they came after me was gnawing at my gut like a weasel in a trap gnawing off his own paw to get loose. But I merely stepped away from him.
“You... you murderous animal!” He had both hands up to his cheeks like a woman might have done. Then his eyes widened theatrically, as the realization struck him. I wondered why it had taken so long. “You’ve broken out!” he gasped. “Escaped! A fugitive from... from justice!”
“Yeah. And I’m staying that way. I know you, kid, all of you. The last thing any of you want is for the cops to take me here.” I tried to put his tones into my voice. “Oh! The scandal!”
“But they’ll be after you—”
“They think I’m dead,” I said flatly. “I went off an icy road in a stolen car in downstate Illinois, and it rolled and burned with me inside.”
His voice was hushed, almost horror-stricken. “You mean — that there is a body in the car?”
“Right.”
I knew what he was thinking, but I didn’t bother to tell him the truth — that the old farmer who was driving me to Springfield, because he thought my doubled-up fist in the overcoat pocket was a gun, hit a patch of ice and took the car right off the lonely country road. He was impaled on the steering post, so I took his shoes and put one of mine on his foot. The other I left, with my fingerprints on it, lying near enough so they’d find it but not so near that it’d bum along with the car. Rod wouldn’t have believed the truth anyway. If they caught me, who would?
I said, “Bring up a bottle of bourbon and a carton of cigarettes. And make sure Eddy and Ma keep their mouths shut if anyone asks about me.” I opened the door so Pops could hear. “Well, thanks, Rod. It is nice to be home again.”
Solitary in the pen makes you able to stay awake easily or snatch sleep easily, whichever is necessary. I stayed awake for the last 37 hours that Pops had, leaving the chair by his bed only to go to the bathroom and to listen at the head of the stairs whenever I heard the phone or the doorbell ring. Each time I thought: this is it. But my luck held. If they’d just take long enough so I could stay until Pops went; the second that happened, I told myself, I’d be on my way.
Rod and Edwina and Ma were there at the end, with Doctor hovering in the background to make sure he got paid. Pops finally moved a pallid arm and Ma sat down quickly on the edge of the bed — a small, erect, rather indomitable woman with a face made for wearing a lorgnette. She wasn’t crying yet; instead, she looked purely luminous in a way.
“Hold my hand, Eileen.” Pops paused for the terrible strength to speak again. “Hold my hand. Then I won’t be frightened.”
She took his hand and he almost smiled, and shut his eyes. We waited, listening to his breathing get slower and slower and then just stop, like a grandfather clock running down. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. I looked around at them, so soft, so unused to death, and I felt like a marten in a brooding house. Then Ma began to sob.
It was a blustery day with snow flurries. I parked the jeep in front of the funeral chapel and went up the slippery walk with wind plucking at my coat, telling myself for the hundredth time just how nuts I was to stay for the service. By now they had to know that the dead farmer wasn’t me; by now some smart prison censor had to remember Ma’s letter about Pops being sick. He was two days dead, and I should have been in Mexico by this time. But it didn’t seem complete yet, somehow. Or maybe I was kidding myself, maybe it was just the old need to put down authority that always ruins guys like me.
From a distance it looked like Pops, but up close you could see the cosmetics and that his collar was three sizes too big. I felt his hand: it was a statue’s hand, unfamiliar except for the thick, slightly down-curved fingernails.
Rod came up behind me and said, in a voice meant only for me, “After today I want you to leave us alone. I want you out of my house.”
“Shame on you, brother,” I grinned. “Before the will is even read, too.”
We followed the hearse through snowy streets at the proper funeral pace, lights burning. Pallbearers wheeled the heavy casket out smoothly on oiled tracks, then set it on belts over the open grave. Snow whipped and swirled from a gray sky, melting on the metal and forming rivulets down the sides.