William Lashner - Past Due

“Consider it for me,” I said.

Bullfinch clutched the black box in his long fingers, leaned forward, lowered his voice. “I’ve never seen one, you understand.”

“Go ahead.”

“Saint Gaudens’s original design called for something very unusual. He made a proof set, struck with nine blows from the minting press each. Nine, when normally there is only one. The result was spectacular, more sculpture than coin. Only twenty-four were struck, given to influential senators, to the president, a few notables. Twenty-four. They are very rare. Some of them are held by organizations never to be sold. Others have disappeared, a few disappeared in Philadelphia, the locations and purview completely unknown.”

“How much?”

“Mr. Carl, why the interest?”

“How much?” I said.

“Again, condition is of paramount importance. But recently, those that have reached the market have sold for in excess of one million dollars.”

“In excess?”

“Well in excess.”

“Well, well, well,” I said. “So four would be worth?”

“Now you’re being silly.”

“Yes, you’re right. I am.”

“You wouldn’t, Mr. Carl, happen to know the whereabouts of such a coin?”

“Thank you for your help, Mr. Bullfinch.”

“We could be of great assistance if you do.”

“I’m sure you could.”

“Would you like a card?”

“No, thank you,” I said, as I unlocked his door. “If need be, I know where to find you.”

“Good day, Mr. Carl.”

“It is,” I said, “isn’t it?”

“This is the big day, Victor,” said Dr. Mayonnaise, with an unseemly excitement in her voice.

“Yes, it is,” I said.

“He’s been waiting for you.”

“I’m sure he has.”

“Did you ever think this day would come? Did you?”

“No,” I said. “Truthfully, I did not.”

“The paperwork’s been signed and everything is settled so you’re free to take him home whenever you’re ready.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Just great.”

“He’ll need some care for a while. He’s still weak, but he’ll get stronger day by day.”

“That’s my father, like something out of Godspell . I want to thank you, Karen, thank you for everything. You were right about the medicine, you were right about Dr. Goetze. You’re a hell of a doctor.”

“I appreciate that, Victor. I really do. Not everything works out so well. We’re going to miss him here.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. Your father tells the most wonderful stories.”

“Stories? What about?”

“About you. That time, at school, when you mistakenly put your underwear on the outside of your pants?”

“Oh, that one. The funny thing is that I was in high school at the time.”

“Take care of him, Victor,” she said.

“I’ll try.”

She was right, Dr. Mayonnaise, my father was waiting for me, sitting in a wheelchair, in his street clothes, a small suitcase on his lap. The surgery had gone off without a hitch, his recovery was labeled remarkable by the staff, his breathing was growing stronger every day as he worked out his newly efficient lungs by blowing a ball in a tube for exercise. The ball and the tube were going home with him so he could continue his rehabilitation.

“Where you been?” he said when he saw me.

“Running an errand,” I said.

“They’re making me sit in this wheelchair. I don’t need no stinking wheelchair.”

“They’re afraid if you fall and break a hip on the way out you’ll sue.”

“And I would too, the bastards.”

“I could sure use the work. How do you feel?”

“I hurt,” he said. “I hurt all over.”

“That’s better than the alternative. I’ve been to the house and readied it for you, made it nice and cozy.”

“It’s never been nice and cozy.”

“Until now.”

Slowly I pushed him out the door of his room and down the hall. All the nurses stopped us and said good-bye, told him jokes. It was like there was a stranger in the chair, the way they were going on, someone who had charmed them all, had become like a favorite old uncle. How was that possible? At the last, Dr. Mayonnaise leaned over, gave him a little hug, said her words of encouragement.

“She’s a nice girl,” he said as we waited for the elevator.

“Yes, she is.”

“You know, that cat thing. They got pills for that.”

“So I’ve heard, but how do they get them to open their little mouths.”

“You’re going to have to grow up sometime,” he said.

“Yes, I’m afraid I am.”

In the privacy of the elevator I couldn’t help from asking. “Dad, you know that box you were talking about. The one you buried. Do you have any idea where it is?”

“Why?”

“I’m just asking.”

“Let me tell you something. There’s nothing in there worth a damn thing. Nothing in there but blood and despair.”

“Okay.”

“It ruined enough lives.”

“Okay. We’ll talk about it later.”

“No, we won’t.”

“Maybe now’s not the time. But there is a map?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, you didn’t. So, Dad. The girl in the pleated skirt. You never told me. What happened to her?”

“She left me,” he said. “What did you think? What else was going to happen? She left me.”

The elevator doors opened, I wheeled my father to the entrance. An orderly in blue scrubs was waiting for us at the door.

“I’ll take the wheelchair for you, Mr. Carl,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said as I took the small suitcase off my father’s lap. “All right, Dad, are you ready?”

“No.” But even as he said it he took hold of my arm and pulled himself to standing. Slowly, together, we walked outside. It was bright outside and warm. My father put a hand up to his eyes and turned his face to the sun.

Later that night I was sitting alone, in my apartment, with a picture of the Grand Canyon in my hand. The picture was on one side of a postcard, the other side had a simple message: “Wish yous was here with us. Thanks.” No signature, no name, but I knew who had sent it. Derek Manley. He had picked up his boy and was driving cross-country, seeing the sights, trying to figure out his next move. It would probably be witness protection all over again, but this time starting over with his son. Good for him. But something about the postcard was troubling me. It wasn’t Derek I was thinking of, it was myself.

I stared at the great mysterious landscape carved by the Colorado River and tried to put it all together. It was as if everything that had happened to me since Joey Parma had called the morning of his murder had been leading me toward one thing, yet I couldn’t figure out what it was. There was something in the confluence, something in the gaps, something I was missing.

I suppose it is a common flaw, to believe yourself to be an acute observer of humanity and yet be totally blind to the circumstances of your own small life. Or maybe I am the only one totally clueless. Because it took me a long time, far longer than it should have. I had been thinking I had unshackled myself from my past when everything I had learned, everything that had happened, had proven with utter clarity that I had not. You don’t free yourself from the past by ignoring it and hoping it goes away, because it won’t, ever, it can’t. The only way to free yourself is to reach out to your past, try to understand it, fight to embrace it no matter what the barriers.

I opened a beer and thought it through. It was there, somewhere, in Joey Parma’s failed life, in Tommy Greeley’s pathetic search to regain what he believed he had lost, in my father’s story, in the justice’s relationship with his wife, in the buried box of coins, in Kimberly Blue’s revelation, in the Zen proddings of Cooper Prod, in Derek Manley’s cross-country jaunt with his son, in the twenty bottles of gin lined up in Mrs. Greeley’s china hutch. Twenty bottles of gin. “She left me,” my father had said, his voice flat, devoid of rancor or pain. As if the telling of the story had pierced something in him, deflated something angry and ugly and he was left to say, simply, that she left him. She left him. He had said it before, I had heard it before, but never so calmly, never before without the pain. My dad, showing me the way, would wonders never cease? There is a statute of limitations in the law, maybe there ought to be one in the heart.