The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [46]
Annie sat down in the chair that Clark carried over to her. “‘Juncture,’ meaning he’s definitely dying?”
“What’s definite? But when a man’s about to slip off a mortal coil, Annie—I feel I can call you Annie, because he talks about you all the time—a man goes to the core. So, if you want my advice, if it’s a password of Jack’s, it will have something to do with you, he is so proud of your accomplishments—”
The remark took her aback. Never before had she considered that, despite their long separation, her father might talk about her, and apparently with pride. She was surprised that he would even know of any accomplishments of hers. Sam must have told him. “Have you heard of my aunt Sam?”
The man said yes, “absolutely, of course. His sister Sam sends him news about your goings on. Impressive, number one in your class. In the end, Annie, you cannot take it or leave it with familia. This is what—you agree?—gives us our humanity.”
Although reluctantly moved to hear that her father had boasted about her, and although already planning to fly to St. Louis, she took a caustic tone. Even if he were dying, she asked, why should she deliver a plane to St. Louis to a man who’d thrown her away when she was seven years old?
Rook coughed as he mumbled, pardon him, but if he had been blessed with Annie’s brains, and if his padre were dying—which he wasn’t alive to die, because he had already died, young and much too fast, of this bastard cancer. And his father’s father, Simon Rook, had died even younger, in fact a horrible death off the coast of Cuba, thanks to the lying cabrones in the CIA.
Annie jumped to her feet, pacing. Sam rescued the plate as she flung out her arm. “Twenty years ago my ‘padre’ unloaded me on his sister and waltzed off into the ozone! So you’ll excuse me if I don’t get worked up over Jack Peregrine’s ‘dying’ wish. So fuck you!” Her outburst surprised her.
Rook’s rejoinder was also unexpected. He shouted loudly: “Excuse me, that is absolutely, definitely a lie! You have insulted me!”
But then she heard a pounding noise, grunts, and shrieks and realized he wasn’t talking to her anymore but to someone in his vicinity. Where had he said he was? South Beach? A store?
Finally he blurted out in a choked way that a vicious old lady was trying to wrestle out of his hand his mobile phone, claiming it was hers.
Annie heard more thumps and shouts. Then Rook was yelling, “I believe we still have a tiny ember in Florida of what once upon a time we called Liberty. Do not accuse me of committing a crime! Why would I steal your cheap cell phone? It’s pink!”
Annie could hear a woman’s voice shouting something about how this man had stolen her purse out of her shopping cart and that he was a foreigner who thought he could get away with robbing her because she was old, whereas people like him had no right even to be in Florida.
Rook shouted back, “Pardon me, my great-grandfather Isaiah Rook was a rabbi in Miami! My mother’s brother was up to his waist in the Everglades for Alpha 66 and my grandfather Simon Rook was personally recruited for a little something called Operation 40 by names you’d toss your cookies at if you heard them! That is what the fuck I’m doing in Florida!”
“What’s going on? What’s wrong with Jack?” whispered Sam, tugging at Annie’s sleeve.
Annie shouted into the phone. “Listen to me, Rook!”
The Cuban was panting. “Good-bye! The same to you!…Not you, Annie. That old lady, she’s gone, gracias a Dios! I apologize…Ah, let me take slow breaths. As the Great Buddha said, ‘El camino no está en el cielo. El camino está en el corazón.’”
Annie ignored a sarcastic impulse to inquire into Buddha’s ability to speak Spanish and instead asked Rook to tell her exactly what was wrong with her father’s health.
Rook caught his breath loudly, like a balloon losing air, slowly calming himself. “He’s dying.”
“Dying from what?”
“Slings and arrows. Life. Pretty much.”
“Was it an accident?”
He coughed. “Accident? Annie, I’ll tell you my personal theory. When you’re born, in my opinion,