It was not Death that stood before me but only Vernon Dickey, my father-in-law.
"Was I asleep?" he said.
"What are you doing out here?"
"Didn't want to wake you folks."
"Did we know you were coming?"
"I didn't know it myself till yesterday afternoon. Drove straight through. Fourteen hours."
"Babette will be happy to see you."
"I just bet."
We went inside. I put the coffee pot on the stove. Vernon sat at the table in his battered denim jacket, playing with the lid of an old Zippo. He had the look of a ladies' man in the crash-dive of his career. His silvery hair had a wan tinge to it, a yellowish discolor, and he combed it back in a ducktail. He wore about four days' stubble. His chronic cough had taken on a jagged edge, an element of irresponsibility. Babette worried less about his condition than about the fact that he took such sardonic pleasure in his own hackings and spasms, as if there were something fatefully attractive in this terrible noise. He still wore a garrison belt with a longhorn buckle.
"So what the hell. Here I am. Big deal."
"What are you doing these days?"
"Shingling here, rustproofing there. I moonlight, except there's nothing I'm moonlighting from. Moonlight is all that's out there."
I noticed his hands. Scarred, busted, notched, permanently seamed with grease and mud. He glanced around the room, trying to spot something that needed replacing or repair. Such flaws were mainly an occasion for discourse. It put Vernon at an advantage to talk about gaskets and washers, about grouting, caulking, spackling. There were times when he seemed to attack me with terms like ratchet drill and whipsaw. He saw my shaki-ness in such matters as a sign of some deeper incompetence or stupidity. These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn't fix a dripping faucet-fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn't sure I disagreed.
"I was saying to Babette the other day. 'If there's one thing your father doesn't resemble, it's a widower.'"
"What did she say to that?"
"She thinks you're a danger to yourself. 'He'll fall asleep smoking. He'll die in a burning bed with a missing woman at his side.
An official missing person. Some poor lost unidentified multi-divorced woman.'"
Vernon coughed in appreciation of the insight. A series of pulmonary gasps. I could hear the stringy mucus whipping back and forth in his chest. I poured his coffee and waited.
"Just so you know where I'm at, Jack, there's a woman that wants to marry my ass. She goes to church in a mobile home. Don't tell Babette."
"That's the last thing I'd do."
"She'd get real exercised. Start in with the discount calls."
"She thinks you've gotten too lawless for marriage."
"The thing about marriage today is you don't have to go outside the home to get those little extras. You can get whatever you want in the recesses of the American home. These are the times we live in, for better or worse. Wives will do things. They want to do things. You don't have to drop little looks. It used to be the only thing available in the American home was the basic natural act. Now you get the options too. The action is thick, let me tell you. It's an amazing comment on our times that the more options you get in the home, the more prostitutes you see in the streets. How do you figure it, Jack? You're the professor. What does it mean?"
"I don't know."
"Wives wear edible panties. They know the words, the usages. Meanwhile the prostitutes are standing in the streets in all kinds of weather, day and night. Who are they waiting for? Tourists? Businessmen? Men who've been turned into stalkers of flesh? It's like the lid's blown off. Didn't I read somewhere the Japanese go to Singapore? Whole planeloads of males. A remarkable people."
"Are you seriously thinking of getting married?"
"I'd have to be crazy to marry a woman that worships in a mobile home."
There was an astuteness about Vernon, a deadpan quality of alert and searching intelligence, a shrewdness waiting for a shapely occasion. This made Babette nervous. She'd seen him sidle up to women in public places to ask some delving question in his blank-faced canny way. She refused to go into restaurants with him, fearing his offhand remarks to waitresses, intimate remarks, technically accomplished asides and observations, delivered in the late-night voice of some radio ancient. He'd given her some jittery moments, periods of anger and embarrassment, in a number of leatherette booths.
She came in now, wearing her sweatsuit, ready for an early morning dash up the stadium steps. When she saw her father at the table, her body seemed to lose its motive force. She stood there bent at the knees. Nothing remained but her ability to gape. She appeared to be doing an imitation of a gaping person. She was the picture of gapingness, the bright ideal, no less confused and alarmed than I had been when I saw him sitting in the yard, deathly still. I watched her face fill to the brim with numb wonder.
"Did we know you were coming?" she said. "Why didn't you call? You never call."
"Here I am. Big deal. Toot the horn."
She remained bent at the knees, trying to absorb his raw presence, the wiry body and drawn look. What an epic force he must have seemed to her, taking shape in her kitchen this way, a parent, a father with all the grist of years on him, the whole dense history of associations and connections, come to remind her who she was, to remove her disguise, grab hold of her maundering life for a time, without warning.
"I could have had things ready. You look awful. Where will you sleep?"
"Where did I sleep last time?"
They both looked at me, trying to remember.
As we fixed and ate breakfast, as the kids came down and warily approached Vernon for kisses and hair-mussings, as the hours passed and Babette became accustomed to the sight of the ambling figure in patched jeans, I began to notice the pleasure she took in hovering nearby, doing little things for him, being there to listen. A delight contained in routine gestures and automatic rhythms. At times she had to remind Vernon which foods were his favorites, how he liked them cooked and seasoned, which jokes he told best, which figures from the past were the plain fools, which the comic heroes. Gleanings from another life poured out of her. The cadences of her speech changed, took on a rural tang. The words changed, the references. This was a girl who'd helped her father sand and finish old oak, heave radiators up from the floorboards. His carpenter years, his fling with motorcycles, his biceps tattoo.
"You're getting string-beany, daddy. Finish those potatoes. There's more on the stove."
And Vernon would say to me, "Her mother made the worst french fries you could ever hope to eat. Like french fries in a state park." And then he'd turn to her and say, "Jack knows the problem I have with state parks. They don't move the heart."
We moved Heinrich down to the sofa and gave Vernon his room. It was unnerving to find him in the kitchen at seven in the morning, at six, at whatever grayish hour Babette or I went down to make coffee. He gave the impression he was intent on outfoxing us, working on our guilt, showing us that no matter how little sleep we got, he got less.
"Tell you what, Jack. You get old, you find out you're ready for something but you don't know what it is. You're always getting prepared. You're combing your hair, standing by the window looking out. I feel like there's some little fussy person whisking around me all the time. That's why I jumped in the car and drove headlong all this way."