Bennis stretched her legs, crossed her feet at the ankles, and said, “The thing is, no matter how much I love my mother, a week at home with Daddy would just about kill me. That old son of a—never mind. If you could come with me—”
“I can’t. I’ve got the Andrekowicz thing.”
Bennis made a face. She didn’t want to hear about the Andrekowicz thing. Bodies in pieces all over the South Side. “Well, there you are. I don’t want to see my father, and no matter what Myra says, he doesn’t want to see me. He only talks to Bobby and Anne Marie because he has to. He wrote the rest of us off years ago.”
“That’s a hell of a thing to say about an old man in a wheelchair.”
“The old man in the wheelchair is going to last another twenty years,” Bennis said. “A lot longer than Mother. And he deserves it less.”
“Which is supposed to mean what?”
“Which is supposed to mean I think I’ll go call my brother Chris. Myra must have called him. Maybe he got more out of her than I did.”
“I like your brother Chris,” Michael said. “Only don’t tell him I always think his poems are jokes. He gets weird about it.”
Bennis hauled herself out of her chair and headed back toward the bedroom and the phone.
3
When the light went off on his console for the third time in fifteen minutes, Chris Hannaford told his listeners (all 226 of them) not to forget to boycott grapes, started a Grateful Dead record, took off his sweatband, and dropped the sweatband over his light. A little later, he would read some of his poetry, and that would be nice, but what he wasn’t going to do any more was answer the phone. Oh, no. First he’d been stuck with his sister Myra, which was a little like accidentally ingesting a triple dose of Benzedrine. Then—
He felt his stomach start to cramp and leaned over, counting until it went away. He was losing his nerve. He was coming apart. And that second phone call hadn’t helped.
They were going to kill him.
The Dead record was winding to an end. He got another from the stack and flipped it on without introduction. The masses never minded getting their music straight. Mostly he wouldn’t oblige them, of course. Just because the idiots wanted to pretend that literature began with Paul McCartney and ended with Bruce Springsteen didn’t mean he had to agree with them. He’d won four dozen awards for his poetry, been published in everything from The Atlantic to The New Kionossa Review, and was (if he had to say it himself) the driving force in the survival of poetry in post-Reagan America. Actually, someone else had said it for him, in The Yale Review. A friend who still lived in New Haven had sent him the article. He’d been embarrassed as hell at first, but after he’d thought about it he’d realized it was nothing but the truth. Who else was there?
His stomach cramped up again, and he forgot all about it.
They were going to kill him. They had practically said so when they called. How in the name of God had he got himself involved with these people? What was he—aside from the driving force, etc.—but an ex-preppie Yale boy with a little family money and even fewer brains? He must have been tripping.
Except that he didn’t trip. He didn’t do much of anything but smoke marijuana, write poetry, show up for work—and gamble. When he put it like that, it made him want to laugh. Gambling was what got people in trouble in thirties detective novels. Getting in hock to mob-connected bookies was a hard-boiled private-eye cliché. That kind of thing didn’t happen to people in real life. It didn’t exist in real life.
(We don’t hear from you in four days, we’re gonna take your thumb.)
He nipped the second record for a third, still not able to talk. The spasms were so bad, he had to put his head between his knees to keep from vomiting. That comic-opera voice on the phone, for God’s sake. The thought of his thumb (right or left?) lying on the pavement in Santa Clara in a mess of blood and pulp. Four days.
He felt the sweat break out on his forehead and knew he was going to be better. The sweat always hit him just before and after these attacks. He sat up, waited for the record to finish, and said,
“That was the Dead times three, ladies and gentlemen. ‘Truckin,’ ‘Sugar Magnolia,’ and ‘Uncle John’s Band.’ Give me a minute here, we’re going to have a Chris Hannaford special. An uninterrupted album. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
He chose it because it was sitting right there on top of his stack. He spun it onto the turntable, nipped off his mike, and sat back, a tall, cadaverous, long-limbed man with the trademark Hannaford hair and a face that had seen too many bars, too many late nights and too much trouble. Now that the attack was over, he could think.