“What foul ball,” she said.
“What’s his name, Epperson, Max Epperson, the guy you were cozying up with tonight.”
She said nothing.
“Come on,” he said. “Cat got your tongue?”
“I don’t remember seeing anyone but you tonight,” she said finally.
“Epperson. Not the guy with the mickey-mouse vest. The other one.”
She had framed her response carefully. “I guess neither of them made an impression on me.”
“Epperson made an impression on you all right.”
She had thought this over. “Listen to me,” she had said then. “No one was here.”
“Have it your way,” he said.
She had driven to an all-night drugstore to buy a thermometer. His temperature, when she managed to take it, was 102. By morning it was 103.2, and she took him to the emergency room at Jackson Memorial. It was not the nearest hospital but it was the one she knew, a director she and Wynn knew had been shooting there, Catherine had been on spring vacation and they had taken her to visit the location. Nothing straight bourbon won’t fix, her father said in the emergency room when the triage nurse asked what was wrong with him. By noon he had been admitted and she had signed the forms and heard the difference between Medicare A and B and when she got back upstairs to the room he had already tried to yank out the IV line and there was blood all over the sheets and he was crying.
“Get me out of here,” he said. “Goddamnit get me out of here.”
The IV nurse was on another floor and by the time she got back and got the line running again the nurse with the narcotics keys was on another floor and it was close to five before they got him sedated. By dawn his temperature had dropped below 101 but he was focused exclusively on Max Epperson. Epperson was welshing on his word. Epperson had floated a figure of three dollars per for 69s and now he was claiming the market had dropped to two per. Somebody had to talk reason to Epperson, Epperson could queer the whole deal, Epperson was off the reservation, didn’t know the first thing about the business he was in.
“I’m not sure I know what business Epperson is in,” she said.
“Christ, what business are they all in,” her father said.
They would need more blood work before they had a diagnosis, the resident said. The resident was wearing a pink polo shirt and kept his eyes fixed on the nurses’ station, as if to distance himself from the situation and from Elena. They would need a scan, an MRI, they would need something else she did not get the name of. They would of course order a psychiatric evaluation, although evidence of mental confusion would not in itself be a diagnostic criterion. Such mental confusion, if there was mental confusion, was incidental, a secondary complication. Whatever the diagnosis, it would not be uncommon to see a psychotic break with a fever this high in a patient this age.
“He’s not that old,” she said. This was pointlessly argumentive but she disliked the resident. “He’s seventy-four.”
“After retirement you have to expect a deficit.”
“He’s not retired either.” She could not seem to stop herself. “He’s quite active.”
The resident shrugged.
At noon a second resident arrived to do the psychiatric evaluation. He too was wearing a polo shirt, mint green, and he too avoided Elena’s eyes. She had fixed her gaze on the signs posted in the room and tried not to listen, I/O. INFECTIOUS SHARPS ONLY. “This is just a little game,” the psychiatric resident said. “Can you tell me the name of the current president of the United States.”
“Some game,” Dick McMahon said.
“Take your time,” the psychiatric resident said. “Don’t let me rush you.”
“Count on it.”
There was a silence.
“Daddy,” Elena said.
“I get the game,” Dick McMahon said. “I’m supposed to say Herbert Hoover, then he puts me away in the home.” His eyes narrowed. “All right. Wheel of Fortune. Herbert Hoover.” He paused, watching the psychiatric resident. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Harry S Truman. Dwight David Eisenhower. John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Lyndon Baines Johnson. Richard Milhous Nixon. Gerald whatever his name was, kept tripping over his feet. Jimmy something. The Christer. Then the one now. The one the old dummy’s not meant to remember. The other old dummy. Reagan.”
“Really excellent, Mr. McMahon,” the psychiatric resident said. “You deserve first prize.”
“First prize is, you leave.” Dick McMahon turned with difficulty away from the resident and closed his eyes. When he opened them again he focused on Elena. “Funny coincidence, that asshole bringing up presidents, which brings us back to Epperson.” His voice was exhausted, matter-of-fact. “Because Epperson was involved in Dallas, that deal. I ever tell you that?”
Elena looked at him. His gaze was trusting, his pale-blue eyes rimmed with red. It had not before occurred to her that he might have known who was involved in Dallas. Neither did it surprise her. She supposed if she thought about it that he might have known who was involved in a lot of things, but it was too late now, the processor was unreliable. An exploration of what Dick McMahon knew could now yield only corrupted files, crossed data, lost clusters in which the spectral Max Epperson would materialize not only at the Texas Book Depository but in a room at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis with Sirhan Sirhan and Santos Trafficante and Fidel and one of the Murchisons.
“What deal in Dallas is that, Mr. McMahon,” the psychiatric resident said.
“Just a cattle deal he did in Texas.” Elena guided the resident to the door. “He should sleep now. He’s too tired for this.”
“Don’t tell me he’s still here,” Dick McMahon said without opening his eyes.
“He just left.” Elena sat in the chair by the hospital bed and took her father’s hand. “It’s all right. Nobody’s here.”
Several times during the next few hours her father woke and asked what time it was, what day it was, each time with an edge of panic in his voice.
He had to be somewhere.
He had some things to do, some people to see.
Some people would be waiting for him to call.
These things he had to do could not wait.
These people he had to see had to be seen now.
Late in the day the sky went dark and she opened the window to feel the air beginning to move. It was only then, while the lightning forking on the horizon and the sound of thunder created a screen, a safe zone in which things could be said that would have no consequences, that Dick McMahon began to tell Elena who it was he had to see, what it was he had to do. Tropical storm due from the southeast and hard rain already falling. That he could not do it was obvious. That she should undertake to do it for him would have been less obvious.
12
It is hard now to call up the particular luridity of 1984. I read back over the clips and want only to give you the period verbatim, the fever of it, the counterfeit machismo of it, the extent to which it was about striking and maintaining a certain kind of sentimental pose. Many people appear to have walked around the dead center of this period with parrots on their shoulders, or monkeys. Many people appear to have chosen during this period to identify themselves as something other than what they were, as “cargo specialists” or as “aircraft brokers” or as “rose importers” or, with what came to seem baffling frequency, as “Danish journalists.” This was a period during which many people appear to have known that the way to fly undetected over the Gulf coastline of the United States was low and slow, five hundred to a thousand feet, an effortless fade into the helicopter traffic off the Gulf rigs. This was a period during which many people appear to have known that the way to fly undetected over foreign coastlines was with cash, to buy a window. This was a period during which a significant minority among the population at large appears to have understood how government funds earmarked for humanitarian aid might be diverted, even as the General Accounting Office monitored the accounts, to more pressing needs.