Problems with People Read online

  He got through, eventually, but before anything else could happen, he remembered his medications, and that swallowing them demanded water. A bottle of water was $3.50, so, instead of spending such an outrageous sum, he went to a coffee shop—he thought, creatively—to ask for a free cup he could use at a drinking fountain. There was a line for coffee. He wanted to ignore it and just ask for a cup—play the geriatric card, maybe—but he didn’t feel comfortable as a line cutter. So he waited, uneasily, since he hadn’t found his gate yet. At last he got the cup from the hand of a girl who was surprisingly polite, efficient, and clearheaded. Then he looked for a drinking fountain, but when he found one, it turned out that his medications weren’t in his carry-on bag, no matter how many times he looked for them. “It’s just as well,” he thought. “Travel stuffs up my system enough without pills making things worse.”

  Cup in hand, he searched for his gate. “You see, no problem,” he thought, on finding it—he wasn’t a child, he didn’t have “dementia.” He felt in his jacket for his boarding passes—check. He looked at them, then at the gate number. He read the display board behind the check-in counter. In a while, it dawned on him that this wasn’t the right gate—that this was the gate he should be at in St. Louis, in order to board for his connecting flight to Atlanta, where the plan was to meet his son. How could that be? He stood in another line, in order to explain himself to the girl at the check-in desk, who, though preoccupied with something on her computer screen, took his boarding passes and corroborated his conclusion: indeed, he’d come to the wrong gate and, even worse, was in the wrong terminal. He would have to go back the way he’d come and follow the signs to a tram.

  He hurried off. This was why you came early—this was exactly why you came early—this was why you drove efficiently and didn’t waste time. This was why you didn’t muddy the waters with two boarding passes. Why didn’t other people get basic principles? What would he do if he missed his plane? He found the tram but, on board, the announcements for stops were in multiple languages. English came first, but then a lengthy progression of gobbledygook intervened, such that, by the time all was said and done, no one could have reasonably remembered what the English was about. At any rate, the tram stopped, the doors opened, and since no one got out, neither did he. Which was a mistake, because the only stop after that was at baggage claim.

  Now he’d really muffed it. He knew that. He wasn’t going to kid himself—he’d muffed it, as his wife had predicted. He was going to have to go through Security again, start over at step one, show his ID, and take off his shoes—his shoes, which he’d neglected to double-knot after his last bout with Security, so that one was untied. “Oh well,” he thought. “Why tie it now, when I’ll only have to take it off again in a few minutes?”

  He went into action, following signs to Security, but then, seeing a kiosk marked “Traveler’s Aid,” got sidetracked. It seemed to him that what he needed at this point was a dispensation; he believed that if he could get someone to understand, they would whisk him past the checkpoints and assorted aggravations that stood between him and his gate. The someone at the kiosk—his potential savior, his miracle worker—turned out to be an Asian woman who wore the same expression his wife wore when he explained similar things to her—when he explained how a sequence of events hadn’t gone right through no fault of his own. It was a face that said he was half a man. It was an expression that hit him in his octogenarian kishkes. “You’re not going to bypass Security,” she said. “If I were you, I’d get a move on.”

  He got a move on. There were twenty-seven minutes left. A lot of travelers might not panic about having twenty-seven minutes to make a plane, but at his age, he was more aware than they were of things that could go wrong. Further calamities might be waiting for him down the road. Sometimes bad luck was inevitable and things came together in exactly the wrong way—not very often, but it happened. Maybe this was one of those times. Maybe the best move was to give up now and, from a pay phone, call his wife for a ride home. But, no, he didn’t want to do that.

  At Security, he skipped the line and tried to explain that he was about to miss his flight, but when he started in on the narrative he’d mapped out, the guard he was appealing to—a caramel-colored giant in a very clean uniform—pointed to the end of the line. “I’m eighty,” he pleaded. “Please. Have compassion.”

  “Compassion,” said the guard, flatly, in a rich baritone. “Back of the line, sir.” He pointed, then examined another traveler’s ID.

  “Please—isn’t there a special arrangement for someone late? I’m very, very late for my plane.”

  But the guard didn’t answer. Instead, he motioned the next traveler forward, took the next picture ID and boarding pass, looked up, glared, said, “I’m counting to ten,” and, while examining documents again, began counting.

  “Come on, now,” he said. “Have some understanding. Do you think I look like Osama bin Laden? Do you think I’m going to blow up my own plane? Let’s be reasonable for a moment here. I’m asking you to be a reasonable human being. I have a plane to make that I don’t want to miss. I’m traveling to St. Louis, and in St. Louis, after waiting for fifty-five minutes in the airport, I’m changing planes for Atlanta so I can see my beloved son, who I haven’t seen in six and a half years, six years and five months—a long time. Do you have a son, sir? My son—does that make sense to you? I’m asking you to be decent about this, good and decent in your heart.”

  “Ten,” said the guard. “And now, since I’m good and decent in my heart, I’m going to give you one more chance to go to the back of the line, sir. Federal rules.”

  Such mishegas. People were either too young or too dumb to understand what was obvious. Everything now was run by idiots. “Please,” he yelled. “This is terrible!” He stepped up with his boarding pass and picture ID and shoved them in front of the guard.

  But then another guard was at his elbow. In fact, he was taking his elbow, not roughly—but nevertheless. A man about the age he’d been when his youngest son was born. “Come with me, sir,” he said. “Come on, come with me, let’s go.”

  “If you could just get me through Security,” he replied, “that would be the right thing to do.”

  But he could feel that this new guard didn’t mean to guide him toward the metal detector and X-ray machine. No, this new guard, already, was taking him in the opposite direction, and now he understood: he’d missed his flight.

  His son the lawyer looked neither distressed nor surprised on taking delivery of his father. He rolled the suitcase again, negotiated the concourse, skybridge, and escalators, spoke soothing words about the situation, and then, after leaving the airport, drove in the slow lane with jazz music on softly and—breaking the law—made two cell-phone calls, one to report on their progress to his mother, the other to leave a message to the same effect for his brother in Atlanta. His primary comment on things was “It’s really too bad,” offered a half-dozen times.

  The traffic was horrendous. “This isn’t how it used to be,” he thought, “in my day.” He saw his building, or what used to be his building, as they inched through downtown, where he had another thought—that he wanted to be going downtown every day again; that retirement was a nightmare. “I miss working,” he confided to his son, who replied that for him, work had never been fun. This made him think of something. “In 1951,” he said, “they told your grandmother she had cancer. It was here.” He indicated his intestines. “Terrible cancer. She was so-so for eighteen months, but then downhill. They couldn’t do anything for her. Nuts. I was twenty at the time.”

  “Yes,” said his son.

  “Twenty and five months. I’d already met your mother. There were two things going on for me right then. Number one, your mother. I didn’t date before that. Sometimes at the Sammy house, one date, but never a second. I was terrible with girls. Then—your mother. Number two, at university, I wasn’t sure what to do. In high school, I’d really enjoyed writing for the schoo
l newspaper, but it was a toss-up for me, journalist or lawyer. My mother was very wise about this. She was the key person, really, in our family. My father was out of it compared to her—he was easygoing, everybody loved him, but my mother ran things. She was orderly, my mother, she ran a tight ship. She was absolutely perfect in every regard and a wonderful lady, widely respected. To me, every year I live past forty-nine, which is how old she was when she died—that’s a bonus I don’t deserve. I try to remember that, but I don’t always succeed. I’m not perfect.”

  “She probably wasn’t perfect, either, Dad. Not really.”

  They were plodding along in the slow lane behind a truck. They couldn’t see a thing, but his son didn’t seem to mind.

  He just kept driving, with ample braking room, and his jazz music softly playing.

  “No—not perfect. But she gave me good advice. On her deathbed. She didn’t have long to live. In fact, we reset our wedding date for April 21 because my mother wanted to see me married—I knew that, so we moved up the date.”

  “Yes, I know. That was good of you.”

  He touched his son’s arm. Here was the punch line, and he didn’t want his son to miss it. He said, “She told me, ‘The way I see it, if you want to be a journalist, you can always be a journalist, but if you want to be a lawyer, you need to go to law school. You have to have that sheepskin on your wall.’ And that was right. That was very wise. That had an impact on my entire life. The way my mother handled that was perfect.”

  His son got off at 65th when he should have gotten off at 73rd and taken a quick right before the tunnel. Why didn’t he know that? After all these years? The way to go? The right way to get home? Still, one way or another, he was heading home, and it was a relief, in a way, that this was so. Because the whole thing had really been one big hassle. Easier, more sensible, to stay home, where he belonged. Besides, his system wasn’t right away from home—not that it was right when he was at home, either. Always plugged up, stuck, that was him, here or there, at home or elsewhere. Well, there were pros and cons to every choice, ups and downs, pluses and minuses—a plus was that his wife would be happy with how things turned out, vindicated by his airport confusion, and glad to have him back in her fold, where, as she put it to their kids sometimes, she could “keep an eye on him.” Fine, if that gave her satisfaction, but, on the minus side, he’d missed his son, the world traveler and independent journalist. Maybe from now on he’d see him just in dreams, and hear his voice exclusively on the telephone, at long intervals—obscured, disembodied. Would he even know him if he saw him again? Would he recognize his son for who he was?

  Photograph

  Hutchinson’s son died in October. He and the captain of the gillnetter Fearless went down in sixty-five-knot winds near a place called Cape Fox. The captain survived, but Paul was lost. The news came to Hutchinson and his wife in the form of a phone call followed by a fax from the Coast Guard station in Ketchikan, Alaska.

  The day the news arrived, Hutchinson had gone duck hunting and shot his limit by eleven-thirty. While his wife was speaking to the Coast Guard petty officer, Hutchinson was on the road between Vantage and Ellensburg and feeling keenly the pleasure of his existence—three greenheads and a mallard hen in the cooler behind him, his dog asleep with her head on her paws, a thermos of coffee wedged against the dashboard, the heat and the radio on. While he rolled through Rye Pass and into the Ellensburg Valley, his wife read the fax five times. Later, she looked at photo albums, starting with Paul as a baby. She found a lot of photos from hunting expeditions, including one of Paul holding a duck by the neck and smiling, stiffly, for the camera.

  While his wife grieved over photos, Hutchinson ate a midday breakfast at the Sportman’s Café in Cle Elum. There were maybe a dozen other males present—smoking, drinking, staring at a screen—and Hutchinson found that the atmosphere of the place undercut the joie de vivre that had been growing in him all morning. He’d taken a booth and, with the sports section propped against a napkin dispenser, eaten two eggs, hash browns, sausage, and sourdough toast spread with jam. Now, six weeks later, it was the last decent meal he could remember eating. He remembered that after it he’d driven through Snoqualmie Pass feeling certain it was a good thing to arrive home early. He would have ample time to get things put away. He would draw, pluck, and roast two of his ducks.

  His wife met him at the door with the news, and Hutchinson, not believing it for a moment, hurried into the house to read the death notice from the Coast Guard.

  They were eating dinner. There was no such thing as dinner. Hutchinson and his wife had both stopped cooking. She lived on slices of cheese.

  “You can say that,” said Hutchinson. “You can accuse me of that. But I don’t have to think it’s fair.”

  He leaned against the stove. In one hand he held a spoon, in the other a soup pot. His wife was at the table with a box of corn flakes in front of her. She wasn’t eating, either.

  “I’m guilty,” said Hutchinson. “Of course I’m guilty. But I blame you, too, Laura. We blame each other.”

  She didn’t look at him. She was very much this sort of woman, and he had always known that. She could be cold—she went cold when she got angry. “What you say is true,” he said. “But you babied him.”

  “Twist and turn,” she replied, and left the kitchen.

  He stayed by the stove, insisting to himself that it was equally her fault for—for what exactly? Could he really say that babying a kid just made him press all the harder? He could say that. And hadn’t he warned her? When he heard her coming back down the hall, he turned toward the burners. “I think I want you to leave,” she said. “I can’t stand the sight of you anymore.”

  The next week, he gave her to understand over the telephone that he was entitled to see his daughter, who was home for the weekend. Laura told him to come on Saturday. She said that the captain of the Fearless had called. He, too, would come on Saturday—Saturday night, for dinner.

  The captain of the Fearless was standing in the living room with a bourbon and water when Hutchinson showed up. “I’m Bob Pomeroy,” he said. “Your son was a great guy.”

  He didn’t look like a fisherman. Wire-rimmed glasses sat cock-eyed on his nose. He blinked often. His lips were cracked.

  They sat in the dining room. Hutchinson’s daughter had changed her hairstyle: a pageboy, tinted red. She wore a smock and knickers. Her glasses hung from a chain around her neck. When Bob Pomeroy asked her politely about college, she said she’d recently changed her major from art with a focus on photomedia to art with a focus on visual communication design. Hutchinson hadn’t known about that.

  When the food was on the table, Bob Pomeroy shook his head and pressed his glasses against his nose with a dry, fissured forefinger. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think I can eat.”

  He leaned toward Hutchinson across the table. “I’m in knots,” he said. “I better just lay it all out here. I have to tell you what happened,” he said. “I feel I owe you that.”

  The food grew cold. No one touched anything. Bob Pomeroy pushed his plate away, slid a map from the inner pocket of his jacket, unfolded it, and turned it in Hutchinson’s direction. “Some background,” he said, “and context.”

  The Fearless was a salmon boat, he explained, geared to gillnet or to troll, depending. For the last two seasons he’d fished with his girlfriend. This year they’d run the Inside Passage in mid-April, trolled from the Pedro Grounds to Cape Chirikof through mid-June, then worked the net through the height of the Alaskan summer. Basically, all of that was a bust—three months of headaches. They went through a lot of foul, nasty weather, doubling and even tripling up a lot of lines that chafed through in a week’s time. A good net sank, and they passed too many hours tied up to floats, waiting for better conditions. Then, in mid-July, Bob’s girlfriend left him. She got off the boat at Port Chilkoot, south of Haines, and refused to come back on board. The result was that Bob had to find a new deckhand, which h
e did by running up to Skagway. In a tourist saloon, he turned up Paul, who was nineteen and a half and weighed 210 pounds—precisely at that juncture in his earthly existence when he was capable of pushing his body hardest. He seemed eager. He and a friend had driven north from Bellingham in a truck with a mounted camper. The friend had flown home, but Paul was still there, about to start work in a cannery.

  The Fearless left Skagway with Paul on board, fuel tanks topped off, and quarters stocked. It was a bright, even joyous, brimming July day as they maneuvered past Sullivan Island. While his boat made the run down Lynn Canal, Bob tuned the radar and depth sounder, and because the sun was out on a fair afternoon, and the green water lay sleek and glassy, and because his new deckhand seemed stalwart and reliable, he felt—for the first time since May, really—good about things. In this state of mind, he went outside, made his way forward, and peered up toward the pilothouse window, where Paul—he would not forget this—stood tall at the wheel. Paul nodded at him gravely, as if he’d been piloting the Fearless for years, then fixed his gaze once again to the southeast and the promise of the Chatham Strait fishing grounds.