Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [57]
Finney was closer to his father now than he’d ever been, but he didn’t want to put any more rocks on the wagon his father was pulling. His brother was supportive on the surface but continued to throw darts at him in small ways. His mother did not willingly take on problems, and rarely expressed an opinion that wasn’t on lease from her husband. In the last five months he’d grown distant from all of his other friends.
There was no one else.
The doorbell rang, and as he scuffed his feet across the carpet, his loose wool socks becoming snug as condoms, he glimpsed himself in the mirror—unshaven, disheveled, eyes bloodshot.
His father was on the dock, nonchalantly puffing away on a cigarette.
Gil Finney was small, wiry, his face weathered from forty years of inhaling unfiltered cigarettes and Dumpster fires. Six months of cancer and a lifetime of quarreling with strangers about right-hand turn lanes and parking spots had given him a drawn look, as if he were made out of wire. He’d been showing up unbidden lately, a routine Finney had become rather fond of.
“Hey, John. Everything skookem?”
“Yeah, fine. Come in.”
“I know you guys worked yesterday, but I thought you might want to shoot the breeze. I been up since five.”
“Me, too. How’re you doing?”
“Not so bad. God, last week I thought I was dying.” He laughed and then coughed. Then laughed again. For reasons unfathomable to Finney, his father, who’d never seen much humor in life, now found hilarious almost everything having to do with death, particularly his own. For months he’d been unnerving people with jokes about coffins and cemeteries and had even threatened to play a gag on his pallbearers, who would all be chiefs, by having his casket weighted with six hundred pounds of lead. “Make their fat asses do some real work,” he said, laughing until the phlegm rattled in his lungs with a wet, evil sound.
Using two fingers and a thumb, Gil Finney expertly flicked his cigarette stub onto the surface of the lake, where it sizzled for a fraction of a second and went out. A gull swooped down and swallowed it.
Sixty-two years of age, his father had lately become overly solicitous of the welfare of others, something Tony had once, after a couple of beers, theorized was a stunt to get people to think about him. Finney preferred to believe his father’s illness had actually transformed him into a better human being, just as Leary Way had in many ways transformed Finney into a lesser human being. Or so he reasoned.
Finney and his father had endured many years when they were barely speaking, and one where they didn’t speak at all, but time and circumstance had pretty much crayoned over the bad memories. These days Finney was glad for the visits and found, despite his own egocentrism, his father was often in his thoughts.
Gil Finney wore faded khaki slacks, deck shoes, and an old SFD windbreaker zipped to the neck. His wife, Finney’s mother, had bought him a goose-down, Eddie Bauer ski jacket, but he preferred the worn and the familiar.
After stepping jauntily through the front door, Gil Finney sank onto the leather sofa, picked up the remote control, and, with the speed of a startled cat running across a piano keyboard, began flipping through channels. “What do you hear about making lieutenant, young man?”
Finney had hoped somebody else would be there to face the heartache in his father’s eyes when he found out, but apparently, his old man’s connections to the department notwithstanding, nobody had had the temerity to spill it. Now that they were in the same room together, he realized he couldn’t do it either. At least not now. “All we can do is wait.”
“Whatcha doin’ now? Looks like you’re lazing around the house like a three-dollar chippy.”
“I would never ask for more