“I know. I know. Go on and get out of here, Chip. Do your job.” He swallowed. Something clicked in his throat. “And do it well.”
CHAPTER SEVEN First Night. Now You Know Jack. A Simple Woodcutter. Therapy. My Father’s Visit. Lynparza. Mr. Bowditch Makes a Promise.
1
I asked Mr. Bowditch if it was okay to sit in his chair and he said of course. I offered him half of my sandwich and was kind of relieved when he said no—Jersey Mike’s subs are the best.
“I might try a cup of soup after pill o’clock. Chicken noodle. We’ll see.”
I asked if he wanted to watch the news. He shook his head. “Put it on if you want, but I rarely bother. The names change but the bullshit never does.”
“I’m amazed it works. Don’t the tubes blow out?”
“Of course. Just as the C-cells in a flashlight wear out. Or the nine-volt in a transistor radio.” I didn’t know what a transistor radio was but didn’t say so. “Then you put in new ones.”
“Where do you get the tubes?”
“I buy from a company called RetroFit in New Jersey, but they become more expensive each year as the supply diminishes.”
“Well, you can afford them, I guess.”
He sighed. “The gold, you mean. You’re curious, of course you are, anyone would be. Have you told anyone? Your father? Perhaps a trusted teacher at school?”
“I can keep secrets. I told you that.”
“All right, no need to sound pissy. I had to ask. And we’ll talk about it. But not tonight. Tonight I don’t feel capable of talking about anything.”
“It can wait. But about the TV tubes… how do you get them, if you don’t have any Internet?”
He rolled his eyes. “Did you think that mailbox is out there just for decoration? Something to hang holly on at Christmas, perhaps?”
He was talking about snail-mail. It came as a revelation to me that people still used it to do business. I thought about asking him why he didn’t just buy a new TV set, but I thought I knew the answer. He liked old things.
As the hands on the living room clock crawled toward six, I realized I wanted to give him the pills almost as much as he wanted to take them. Finally the time came. I went upstairs, got two, and gave them to him with a glass of water. He almost snatched them out of my hand. The room was cool, but his forehead was beaded with sweat.
“I’ll give Radar her chow,” I said.
“Then take her out in the backyard. She’s quick about doing the necessary but stay outside for a bit. Hand me that urinal, Charlie. I don’t want you to see me using this goddam thing, and at my age it takes awhile to get going.”
2
By the time I came back and emptied the urinal, the pills were doing their work. He asked for the chicken soup—Jewish penicillin, he called it. He drank the broth and ate the noodles with a spoon. When I came back from rinsing the mug, he’d gone to sleep. It didn’t surprise me. He’d put in a hell of a day. I went upstairs to his room, found his copy of The Bride Wore Black, and was deep into it when he woke up at eight o’clock.
“Why don’t you turn on the TV and see if you can find that singing show?” he asked. “Radar and I like to watch that sometimes.”
I turned on the television, flipped through the few available channels, and found The Voice, barely visible through a blizzard of snow. I adjusted the rabbit ears until the picture was as clear as it was going to get, and we watched a number of contestants do their thing. Most of them were pretty damn good. I turned to Mr. Bowditch to tell him I liked the country guy, and he was fast asleep.
3
I left the bell beside him on his little table and went upstairs. I looked back once and saw Radar sitting at the foot. When she saw me looking down, she turned and went back to Mr. Bowditch, where she spent that night and every night. He slept on that roll-out couch even after he was able to use the stairs again, because by then they were hard for her.
My room was okay, although the single standing lamp cast spooky shadows on the ceiling and the house creaked in its joints, as I’d pretty much known it would. I guessed that when the wind blew, it would be a regular symphony. I plugged in my Nighthawk and went to the Net. I was thinking about carrying that weight of gold on my back, and how it made me remember my mother reading me an old story from a Little Golden Book. I told myself I was just passing the time, but now I wonder. I think sometimes we know where we’re going even when we think we don’t.
I found at least seven different versions of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” reading them on my phone by the light of that single lamp. I reminded myself to bring my laptop the next day, but for tonight the phone would have to do. I knew the story, of course; like Goldilocks and Red Riding Hood, it’s part of the cultural river that carries kids downstream. I think I saw the animated cartoon version at some point after Mom read me the story, but can’t remember for sure. The original story, courtesy of Wikipedia, was a lot more bloodthirsty than the one I remembered. For one thing, Jack is living with just his mother because the giant has killed his father during one of the giant’s many rampages.