The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [47]
He insisted on pleading nolo contendere and would not say another word on the matter to anyone. His public defender, with scant knowledge of my father’s criminal record and in plain malpractice, had not warned him, or had not even known, that mandatory sentencing, which had recently been introduced in Minnesota, would gravely affect Recidivist Dad unless he pleaded guilty and made a deal. He would do neither, nor trouble himself to plead not guilty and take his chances. According to the draconian tables of the law, the judge had no leeway. It was 1987. My father came out of prison for the last time in 2009.
But that sentence was still days in the future. Now I could get drunk with my best friend, and we could go try to score and forget about the whole business.
I was unwilling to talk much about what had happened. I wanted to be free of him entirely, just be a happy young man with money and a buzz and an erection. I also suspected I had done something wrong and, like a child, didn’t want to talk about it, because talking about it might make it real.
Dana, however, was eager to talk about it, out of guilt for putting The Wizard of Oz ahead of her father, out of dread that she had trusted me to represent sage advice. “He said that? That his goal was to outlive Constantine? What were his exact words?”
I couldn’t remember and didn’t care to try. I was straining hard for jollity, and Dana was being a sweet, needling drag, extracting detail after detail from me. We had to shout to make ourselves heard over the music. “Look: he wants to stay in prison. I think he’s more comfortable there now. He can’t get into any more trouble, and he doesn’t know how to live on the outside anymore. You see,” I added knowingly, having seen a movie or TV show once, “you develop an inferiority complex in there. They do it on purpose. They inculcate in prisoners the idea that they can’t make it outside.”
She nodded at my great expertise, and we drank. To be more accurate, I drank and told her to drink. “Look: he’s done with us,” I insisted, mixing up subject and object. “He’s washed his hands of us. I’m sorry, but there it is.”
We were in some sort of lounge, and I was feeling nervous about how Dana was looking at me. “Drinks are on me, you know,” I said again.
“Thanks.”
“Okay, no, I guess he said, ‘I can outlive him,’ and I said ‘Constantine?’ and he didn’t say anything else, just started to insult me. A lot.”
“Oh.” She nodded, looked around the room. “Look at her.”
“Oh my. Whose team?”
“I can’t tell.” She sipped her drink and turned back to me. “Do you think he might have meant that he could outlive Sil? For Mom?”
“That hadn’t occurred to me. It’s a sweet idea. But, ah—” Of course she was right. It was instantly clear, and I suddenly felt ill, for missing this, for fear that I had done something wrong by not noticing, and in amazement at how little of my father’s interior life I could map. “I don’t know,” I said.
Dana wasn’t drinking enough, so I started bullying her into keeping up. A mean drunk, in short, mad at my father, suspecting my sister of having already figured out the depth of my crime while I still had only the dim sense of having done something wrong. She put up with my dumb jokes, my pushiness, and she didn’t call me on it.
Later, I saw her looking at that girl shouldered up in a clump of other women on a red curved sofa. She was a striking Asian beauty, I think, long straight black hair and a white T-shirt. Any more detail than that would make a mockery of my efforts to be honest here. But I watched Dana measure her up, and so I insisted in my mood and my cups, “Straight. Boys only. Plain as day. She yearns for a rising son.”
“I don’t think so.” Dana smiled, like a boy mathematician challenging his elders for the first time, and I should have known better. But she reeled me in. “Of course, you’re a very handsome man.” I should have stopped her right there and punched her, but this was that night, and the moron bowed to his twin sister and said,