Parnell nodded.
“Same thing,” Richard said. “I took the cyanide and put it in a capsule.”
“Christ. I don’t know about it.”
“You’re scared, too, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I am.”
Richard sipped his whiskey-and-soda. With his regimental striped tie he might have been sitting in a country club. “May I ask you something?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Sure.”
“Then if you believe in God, you must believe in goodness, correct?”
Parnell frowned. “I’m not much of an intellectual, Richard.”
“But if you believe in God, you must believe in goodness, right?”
“Right.”
“Do you think what’s happening to my father is good?”
“Of course I don’t.”
“Then you must also believe that God isn’t doing this to him — right?”
“Right.”
Richard held up the capsule. Stared at it. “All I want you to do is give me a ride to the hospital. Then just wait in the car down in the parking lot.”
“I won’t do it.”
Richard signaled for another round.
“I won’t goddamn do it,” Parnell said.
By the time they left the restaurant Richard was too drunk to drive. Parnell got behind the wheel of the new Audi. “Why don’t you tell me where you live? I’ll take you home and take a cab from there.”
“I want to go to the hospital.”
“No way, Richard.”
Richard slammed his fist against the dashboard. “You fucking owe him that, man!” he screamed.
Parnell was shocked, and a bit impressed, with Richard’s violent side. If nothing else, he saw how much Richard loved his old man.
“Richard, listen.”
Richard sat in a heap against the opposite door. His tears were dry ones, choking ones. “Don’t give me any of your speeches.” He wiped snot from his nose on his sleeve. “My dad always told me what a tough guy Parnell was.” He turned to Parnell, anger in him again. “Well, I’m not tough, Parnell, and so I need to borrow some of your toughness so I can get that man out of his pain and grant him his one last fucking wish. DO YOU GODDAMN UNDERSTAND ME?”
He smashed his fist on the dashboard again.
Parnell turned on the ignition and drove them away.
When they reached the hospital, Parnell found a parking spot and pulled in. The mercury vapor lights made him feel as though he were on Mars. Bugs smashed against the windshield.
“I’ll wait here for you,” Parnell said.
Richard looked over at him. “You won’t call the cops?”
“No.”
“And you won’t come up and try to stop me?”
“No.”
Richard studied Parnell’s face. ‘Why did you change your mind?”
“Because I’m like him.”
“Like my father?”
“Yeah. A coward. I wouldn’t want the pain, either. I’d be just as afraid.”
All Richard said, and this he barely whispered, was “Thanks.”
While he sat there Parnell listened to country western music and then a serious political call-in show and then a call-in show where a lady talked about Venusians who wanted to pork her and then some salsa music and then a religious minister who sounded like Foghorn Leghorn in the old Warner Brothers cartoons.
By then Richard came back.
He got in the car and slammed the door shut and said, completely sober now, “Let’s go.”
Parnell got out of there.
They went ten long blocks before Parnell said, “You didn’t do it, did you?”
Richard got hysterical. “You sonofabitch! You sonofabitch!”
Parnell had to pull the car over to the curb. He hit Richard once, a fast clean right hand, not enough to make him unconscious but enough to calm him down.
“You didn’t do it, did you?”
“He’s my father, Parnell. I don’t know what to do. I love him so much I don’t want to see him suffer. But I love him so much I don’t want to see him die, either.”
Parnell let the kid sob. He thought of his old friend Bud Garrett and what a good goddamn fun buddy he’d been and then he started crying, too.
When Parnell came down Richard was behind the steering wheel.
Parnell got in the car and looked around the empty parking lot and said, “Drive.”
“Any place especially?”
“Out along the East River road. Your old man and I used to fish off that little bridge there.”
Richard drove them. From inside his sportcoat Parnell took the pint of Jim Beam.
When they got to the bridge Parnell said, “Give me five minutes alone and then you can come over, OK?”
Richard was starting to sob again.
Parnell got out of the car and went over to the bridge. In the hot night you could hear the hydroelectric dam half a mile downstream and smell the fish and feel the mosquitoes feasting their way through the evening.
He thought of what Bud Garrett had said, “Put it in some whiskey for me, will you?”
So Parnell had obliged.
He stood now on the bridge looking up at the yellow circle of moon thinking about dead people, his wife and many of his WWII friends, the rookie cop who’d died of a sudden tumor, his wife with her rosary-wrapped hands. Hell, there was probably even a chance that nurse from Enid, Oklahoma, was dead.
“What do you think’s on the other side?” Bud Garrett had asked just half an hour ago. He’d almost sounded excited. As if he were a farm kid about to ship out with the Merchant Marines.
“I don’t know,” Parnell had said.
“It scare you, Parnell?”
“Yeah,” Parnell had said. “Yeah it does.”
Then Bud Garrett had laughed. “Don’t tell the kid that. I always told him that nothin’ scared you.”
Richard came up the bridge after a time. At first he stood maybe a hundred feet away from Parnell. He leaned his elbows on the concrete and looked out at the water and the moon. Parnell watched him, knowing it was all Richard, or anybody, could do.
Look out at the water and the moon and think about dead people and how you yourself would soon enough be dead.
Richard turned to Parnell then and said, his tears gone completely now, sounding for the first time like Parnell’s sort of man, “You know, Parnell, my father was right. You’re a brave sonofabitch. You really are.”
Parnell knew it was important for Richard to believe that — that there were actually people in the world who didn’t fear things the way most people did — so Parnell didn’t answer him at all.
He just took his pint out and had himself a swig and looked some more at the moon and the water.
Prisoners
For Gail Cross
I am in my sister’s small room with its posters of Madonna and Tiffany. Sis is fourteen. Already tall, already pretty. Dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt. Boys call and come over constantly. She wants nothing to do with boys.
Her back is to me. She will not turn around. I sit on the edge of her bed, touching my hand to her shoulder. She smells warm, of sleep. I say, “Sis listen to me.”
She says nothing. She almost always says nothing.
“He wants to see you Sis.”
Nothing.
“When he called last weekend — you were all he talked about. He even started crying when you wouldn’t come to the phone Sis. He really did.”
Nothing.
“Please, Sis. Please put on some good clothes and get ready ‘cause we’ve got to leave in ten minutes. We’ve got to get there on time and you know it.” I lean over so I can see her face.
She tucks her face into her pillow.
She doesn’t want me to see that she is crying.