Carl Hiaasen – Basket Case

“Speaking of which, you wanna go?”

“Right.” Janet, with a sarcastic sniff.

In the living room, the computer clicks to life and beeps out a greeting.

“Shit,” she mutters. “My lonely lumberjack.”

“The Bahamas. You and me,” I say. “We’ll talk to the cops who investigated Jimmy’s drowning.”

“You serious?”

Behind her, the PC keeps beeping entreatingly.

“Jack, I can’t afford a trip to the islands.”

“Neither can I,” I say lightly, “but young Race Maggad easily can.”

“Who’s that? “Janet asks.

“Please go with me. It won’t cost you a dime. The newspaper will pay for everything.” I’m not trying to sound important so much as convince myself that I can pull this off. For obvious reasons, the obituary beat doesn’t come with an expense account.

“How about it?” I ask Janet Thrush.

“Damn, you are serious.”

After the fifth beep, she rises to attend to her caller.

“Please,” I say. “If I go alone, they’ll just blow me off. They’ve never even heard of my newspaper in Nassau. But you’re his sister, they’ve got to talk to you.”

“Doesn’t mean they gotta tell the truth.”

“Sometimes you can learn more from a lie. Think about it, and call me later.”

“Might be late. After Larry I’ve got Doctor Dennis logging on from Ann Arbor and then there’s Postal Paul from Salt Lake. My very first Mormon.”

“I’ll be up,” I say.

As I’m backing the car out of the driveway, the camera lights flare on in Janet Thrush’s living room. The drapes are lined so there’s nothing to see but a hot white glow around the margins of the windows. From inside the house, though, I hear the beat of some jazzy music, accompaniment to the dance of the modern meter maid.

My mother knows when my father died but she won’t tell.

“What does it matter? Gone is gone,” my mother says.

I’d like to know when my father died in order to avoid dying at the same age, which is my deepest fear. My mother disapproves of this obsession and therefore refuses to provide useful clues about Jack Tagger Sr., who stomped out the door when I was only three and never returned.

“How did he die?” I’ve asked her many times.

“Not of a heredity disease, I can assure you,” she usually says. “So stop this ridiculous fretting.”

My mother kept only one photograph in which my father appears. He is tall and sandy-haired and bare-chested and, to my eye, radiantly healthy. In the picture he has a tanned arm slung around my mother’s shoulders. They are squinting into the afternoon sunlight—this was on a beach in Clearwater, where my parents lived at the time. I am in the photograph, too, sleeping soundly in a stroller to my father’s right.

Once I asked my mother what my father did for a living, and she replied, “Not much. That was the problem.” In the photo I would guess his age to be between twenty-five and thirty years old. That means if he were alive today he’d be at least sixty-eight and possibly as old as seventy-three. But he’s not alive—on this point my mother wouldn’t lie.

After Jack Sr. skipped out, our lives moved briskly along. My mother worked long hours as a legal secretary but she always made time for me, and a social life. Although she seriously dated several men, she didn’t remarry until after I’d finished high school. I went off to college, fell into the newspaper business and never thought much about my father until many years later, when I got demoted to the obituary beat at the Union-Register. It was then I started worrying unhealthily about mortality; my own, in particular. So I phoned my mother in Naples (where she and my stepfather retired for the golfing opportunities) and asked if my father was still alive.

“No,” she said evenly.

“When did he die?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Just curious,” I told her.

“I’m not sure when it was exactly, Jack.”

“Mom, please. Think.”

“It’s not important. Gone is gone.”

“How did it happen? Was it something congenital?”

“For heaven’s sake, don’t you think I’d tell you if it was,” my mother said. “Now let’s drop the subject, please. It happened a long time ago.”

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