Michael Collins - The Death of All Things Seen

Lee-Ann blew smoke out the side of her mouth. She nearly choked with laughter when Norman said it. She coughed and coughed some more, and then said, with her eyes still watering, ‘That’s what we’ll call him, Mr Price, “Little Lord Fauntleroy”.’

On second look, Lee-Ann was not the prize she had first appeared. Lines showed around her mouth. She stopped smiling as she met Norman’s eyes. She was aware he was appraising her. She pushed her hair off her forehead. Despite her embarrassment, she rallied and kept on talking for the sake of the kid. ‘I guess it’s big up there, huh, Mr Price? We never got round to getting up to Chicago yet.’

Norman kept looking at her in a quiet appeal that he thought nothing bad of her. He said, ‘Well, now you have no excuses. You’ve a place to stay when you come.’

Lee-Ann smiled. ‘That’s mighty generous,’ while Thomas tempered the offer, erasing the lie of the Sears Tower. ‘At your other place, if you might, Mr Price, at your apartment, and not your office at The Sears Tower. We are all sufferers of vertigo.’

Sherwood piped up, ‘What’s vertigo?’

Lee-Ann said, ‘It means we can’t take heights is all.’

A sense emerged that this third child might steer fortune elsewhere in the reach of his inquisitiveness.

*

Thomas Strait had trained as a phlebotomist in the army. He offered this information as a form of credentialing. There was a faint indigo tattoo of a snake around a woman on his thin arm, suggestive of a former life of corruption, drink and sin.

He worked now at the care facility where Kenneth’s mother lived, a ‘small time’ operation, but Medicare and Medicaid were a sure bet, and social security might see a person through a dignified end. He was suddenly more serious.

He had finished his education at a community college and was a certified Nurse’s Assistant. He had read every Reader’s Digest going back a decade, read every funny. He could remember names like you wouldn’t believe, names of relatives and cousins and family trees that meant something to the dying. He kept a roll of stamps in his locker, just for the occasion a letter might be sent, if the spirit took a patient, and he had very good penmanship, something that went back to his school days, and it was a wonder what you needed in life, when it was least expected.

While Thomas talked, Sherwood kept his eyes on Norman in the kindest way, smiling all the time. It was a blessing. Norman hoped only the best for the kid.

Lee-Ann, in deference to her father, waited. She was in the process of trawling for a husband. She mentioned it when the opportunity presented itself, the name of a schoolteacher whose house they passed by. Lee-Ann turned her head and looked toward the house. They were out a great distance in fields, heading where, Norman didn’t know, nor did he ask.

Mr Tobias Rash, the schoolteacher in question had lost his wife to breast cancer and had three girls of his own. Lee-Ann sang it in the theme of The Brady Bunch , how it might be, if she could swing it. She had three boys of her own. Life could convene and settle like that out here. It was an option and opportunity that might not be passed on.

Norman corrected Lee-Ann. ‘The man in The Brady Bunch had the three boys, right, not three girls?’

Lee-Ann responded, ‘And the father, whatever his name, he died of AIDS in real life, right?’ so it might have been an insult, when it wasn’t. It was just a fact.

Thomas Strait interjected and shook his head. ‘She knows every fact not worth knowing. If you can remember facts like that, and school is nothing but facts, then, ergo , it should be easy, right?’

The question was directed at Norman.

He said, ‘It’s a matter of aligning your desires with your talents, and then things come pretty easily.’

Lee-Ann held a mouth of smoke. Her eyes widened. ‘You a licensed school counselor, Mr Price? Cause that’s exactly how they all sound. What I always want to ask ’em, if they’re so smart, why are they still in high school?’

Thomas Strait smiled and was given to a natural paternal love. His gums showed. He said, ‘That’s deductive reasoning. That’s a genuine gift.’

There was love and concern in this man who couldn’t keep a set of teeth in his head.

Lee-Ann bent her wrist, her index and thumb opening and closing in a yap, her lips barely moving, ventriloquist-like, repeating what her father had just said. It got the kids to bust out laughing and Thomas Strait, despite himself, bust his gut, and suddenly Norman was trying to catch his breath, caught up in a fit of laughter he had not experienced in a long time.

*

Lee-Ann and the boys were eventually dropped off at a ramshackle house at the end of a dirt drive.

Sherwood came round to the front passenger side.

Norman lowered the window.

Sherwood asked politely, ‘Can you send me a picture of Mr Whiskers opening a can of food for show and tell?’

Norman was at a sudden loss.

Lee-Ann intervened. She crouched next to Sherwood and exhaled a secondhand smoke that was all but criminal. She said, ‘You know how many people would be after Mr Whiskers if his secret powers were revealed? He couldn’t ride that elevator no more. Somebody in China would steal him, and all day he would be made to open cans for the Chinese to figure it out.’

Lee-Ann met Norman’s eyes. ‘Isn’t that right, Mr Price?’

Sherwood was going to be called a liar in school if he didn’t bring a picture. He had told the class about Mr Whiskers, but he said with the firm resolution of a child, ‘I can keep a secret for Mr Whiskers. I don’t want the Chinese to get him.’

In that moment there was a cat and the greatest menace in the world, the Chinese.

*

Thomas Strait wanted to show Norman something. They left the car on the rise of a dirt road because of the warning lights and a problem with the oil. They started to walk. There had still been no reference to Kenneth. Norman now accepted that what passed would be determined by Thomas Strait.

Thomas was conversant in literature, specifically Steinbeck. He had sought answers in books, then discovered Steinbeck was more socialist than he liked. He was not reconciled that a man could be overly concerned with this life without forsaking the hereafter. This was his decided belief.

Norman listened quietly. Thomas Strait was an honest man hiding a secret — bottles of booze under his bed. Within him, all the incongruities and inconsistencies of life, damnation and salvation fought it out, and somehow kindness and understanding emerged. He was a man who could give advice because of his foibles, because of his shortcomings.

Thomas Strait had got his schooling because of time served in the military at a community college with just enough communists to make it interesting.

He smiled knowingly as he said it. Sherwood, his grandson, was named after Sherwood Anderson. Thomas had read Winesburg, Ohio . What he believed was that a deeper knowledge of all things was not such a liberating gift. It left you, more times than not, alone in the world. He put opinion out there as a matter of guiding principle. He was open to debate, to seeing around an issue.

Thomas Strait was simply establishing a level playing field in the eyes of Norman, without ever overtly announcing his intention. He had that nascent gift and worldly comport of a man who could befriend a stranger in the way so few could in a world gone cold and calculated.

His eyes flit between Norman and the emerging landscape.

He continued. ‘In European literature, they are always in fear of becoming invisible, I mean up here, in the head. Inchoate feelings, Mr Price, that’s how I described it in a paper. My professor, she just about shit herself when she read it. The professors, they couldn’t give advice. They were trapped, and I was tending toward something of substance. I wore a stethoscope around my neck like a religious cross. It was salvation in a way. I had short-term and long-term goals.’