Coronado - Dennis Lehane [36]
Dear Sirs,
Please find enclosed my check for $50.00. I look forward to receiving the information packet we discussed as well as the sample test. I have enclosed a SASE to help facilitate this process. I hope to see you someday at the airport!
Sincerely,
Jackson A. Willis
You let it drop to the floor, pick up another one:
To Whom It May Concern:
Two months ago, I sent a money order in the amount of fifty dollars to your company in order that I may receive an information packet and sample test so that I could take the US government test and become a security handler and fulfill my patriotic duty against them al Qadas. I have not received my information packet as yet and no one answers when I call your phone. Please send me that information packet so I can get that job.
Yours truly,
Edwin Voeguarde
12 Hinckley Street
Youngstown, OH 33415
You drop this one to the floor too, watch your father sit on the corner of the desk and open his fresh pile of envelopes with a penknife. He reads some, pauses only long enough with others to shake the checks free and drop the rest to the floor.
You let yourself out, go to the Chinese place and buy a cup of Coke, go into the hardware store and buy a knife with a quick-flick hinge in the hasp, buy a couple of tubes of Krazy Glue, go back into your father’s office.
“What’re you selling this time?” you say.
“Airport security jobs,” he says, still opening envelopes. “It’s a booming market. Everyone wants in. Stop them bad guys before they get on the plane, make the papers, serve your country, and maybe be lucky enough to get posted near one of them Starbucks kiosks. Hell.”
“How much you made?”
Your father shrugs even though you’re certain he knows the figure right down to the last penny.
“I’ve done all right. Hell else am I going to do, back in this shit town for three months, waiting on you? ’Bout time to shut this down, though.” He holds up a stack of about sixty checks. “Deposit these and cash out the account. First two months, though? I was getting a thousand, fifteen hundred checks a week. Thank the good Lord for being selective with the brain tissue, you know?”
“Why?” you say.
“Why what?”
“Why you been hanging around for three months?”
Your father looks up from the stack of checks, squints. “To prepare a proper welcome for you.”
“A bottle of whiskey and a hooker who gives shitty head? That took you three months?”
Your father squints a little more and you see a shaft of gray between the two of you, not quite what you’d call light and it sure isn’t the sun, just a shaft of air or atmosphere or something, swimming with motes, your father on the other side of it looking at you like he can’t quite believe you’re related.
After a minute or so, your father says, “Yeah.”
YOUR FATHER TOLD you once you’d been born in New Jersey. Another time he said New Mexico. Then Idaho. Drunk as a skunk a few months before you got shot, he said, “No, no. I’ll tell you the truth. You were born in Las Vegas. That’s in Nevada.”
You went on the Internet to look yourself up, never did find anything.
YOUR MOTHER DIED when you were seven. You’ve sat up occasionally and tried to picture her face. Some nights, you can’t see her at all. Some nights, you’ll get a quick glimpse of her eyes or her jawline, see her standing by the foot of her bed, rolling her stockings on, and suddenly she’ll appear whole cloth, whole human, and you can smell her.
Most times, though, it’s somewhere in between. You see a smile she gave you, and then she’ll vanish. See a spatula she held, dripping with pancake batter, her eyes burning for some reason, her mouth an O, and then her face is gone and all you can see is the wallpaper. And the spatula.
You asked your father once why there were no pictures of her. Why hadn’t he taken a picture of her? Just one lousy picture?
He said, “You think it’d bring her back? No, I mean, do you? Wow,” he said and rubbed his chin. “Wouldn’t that be cool.”
You said, “Forget it.”
“Maybe if we had a whole album of pictures?” your