Mostly Seth is no trouble. The most annoying thing about having him around is the way he breathes! He takes in air in these big, sloppy gusts, always through his mouth, which is always hung open and halfway down to his chest. It makes him look like the village idiot, which he really is not, regardless of the problems he does have. Mr Marinville from across the street was over the other day with a banana cake he baked (he’s quite a sweetie for a guy who once wrote a book about a man having a love-affair with his own daughter… and called the book Delight, of all things), and he spent some time with Seth, who was taking a sandbox-break to watch Bonanza. Remember that one? TNT shows the reruns every weekday afternoon (they call “em the Afternoon Ponderosa Party, ain’t that cute), and Seth just loves em. “Wessurn, Wessurn,” he says, when they come on. Mr Marinville, who likes to be called Johnny, watched with us for quite a while, the three of us eating banana cake and drinking chocolate milk like old pals, and when I apologized for Seth’s wet breathing (mostly because it drives me nuts, of course), Marinville just laughed and said that Seth couldn’t help his adenoids. I’m not even sure what adenoids are, but I suppose we’ll have to have Seth’s looked at. Thank God for the Blue twins-Cross and Shield.
One thing keeps nagging me, and that’s why I’ve enclosed a Xerox of the postcard my brother sent me from Carson City shortly before he died. He says on it that they’ve had a breakthrough-an amazing breakthrough is what he says, actually-with Seth. Capital letters, lots of exclamation points. See for yourself. I was curious, natch, so I asked him about it the next time we talked on the phone. That must have been on July 27th or 28th, and it was the last time I spoke to him. His reaction was very peculiar, very unlike Bill. A long silence, then this weird artificial laugh: “Ha-ha-ha!” the way it gets written out but the way real laughter hardly ever sounds, except at boring cocktail parties. I never heard my brother laugh like that in his life. “Well, Aud,” he sez, “I might have overreacted a little on that one.”
He didn’t want to say any more on the subject, but when I pressed him he said that Seth seemed brighter, more with them, once they got far enough into Colorado to see the Rockies. “You know how he’s always loved Western movies and TV shows,” he said, and although I didn’t then, I sure do now. Nuts for cowboys and posses and cuttin” “em off at the pass is young Seth Garin. Bill said Seth probably knew he wasn’t in the real Old West because of all the cars and campers, but “the scenery still turned him on”. That’s how Bill put it.
I might have let it go at that if he hadn’t sounded so funny and vague, so really unlike himself. You know your own kin, don’t you? Or you think you do. And Bill was always outgoing and bubbly or indrawn and pouty. There wasn’t much middle ground. Except during that phone call, it seemed to be all middle ground. So I kept after him about it, which I wouldn’t have done ordinarily. I said that AN AMAZING BREAKTHROUGH sounded like one specific event. So he said that well, yes, something had happened not too far from Ely, which is one of the few good-sized towns north of Las Vegas. Just after they went by a road sign pointing the way to a burg called Desperation (charming names they have out there, I must say, makes you just wild to visit), Seth “kinda freaked out”. That’s how Bill put it. They were on Route 50, the non-turnpike route, and there was this huge ridge of earth on their left, south of the highway.
Bill thought it was sort of interesting, but no more. Seth, though-when he turned in that direction and saw it, he went nuts. Started waving his arms and gabbling in that private language of his. To me it always sounds like talk on a tape that someone is playing backward.
Bill and June and the two older kids went along with him the way they do-did-when he gets excited and starts verbalizing, which is rare but far from unheard-of. You know, kind of like Yeah, Seth, you bet, Seth, it sure is wild, Seth-and all the time they’re doing it, that embankment is slipping farther and farther behind them. Until finally Seth-get this-speaks up, not in gibberish but in English. He really talks, says: “Stop, Daddy, go back, Seth want to see mountain, Seth want to see Hoss and Little Joe.” Hoss and Little Joe, in case you don’t remember, are two of the main characters on Bonanza.
Bill said it was more real words than Seth had put together in his whole life, and some time spent around Seth has convinced me of how unusual it would be for him to say so much in clear language at one time. But… AMAZING BREAKTHROUGH? I don’t want to be mean or anything, but it was hardly the Gettysburg Address, was it? I couldn’t make it jibe then, and I can’t now. On his postcard, Bill sounds so pumped he’s just about blowing his stack; on the phone he sounded like a pod-person in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Plus one other thing. On the card he says “more later”, as if he can’t wait to spill the whole thing, but once I had him on the phone, I just about have to drag it out of him. Weird!
Bill said what happened made him think of an old joke about a couple who think their son is mute. Then one day, when the kid’s six or so, he speaks up at the dinner table. “Please, Mother, may I have another ear of corn?” he says. The parents fall all over him and ask why he’s never spoken up before. “I never had anything to say,” he tells them. Bill told me the joke (I’d heard it before, I think back around the time they burned Joan of Arc at the stake) and then gave out with the phony cocktail-party laugh again, ha-ha-ha. Like that closed the subject for good and all. Only I wasn’t ready for it to be closed.
“So did you ask him, Bill?” I asked.
“Ask him what?” he says.
“Why he never spoke before.”
“But he does talk.”
“Not like this, though. He doesn’t talk like this, which is why you sent me the excited postcard, right?” I was getting mad at him by then. I don’t know why, but I was. “So did you ask him why he hadn’t ever strung fifteen or twenty words of clear English together before?”
“Well, no,” he says. “I didn’t.”
“And did you go back? Did you take him to Desperation so he could look for the Ponderosa Ranch or whatever?”
“We really couldn’t do that, Aud,” he says after another of those long silences. It was like waiting for a chess computer to catch up with a tough move. I don’t like to be talking this way about my brother, who I loved and will miss for the rest of my life, but I want you to understand how really strange that last conversation was. The truth? It was hardly like talking to my brother at all. I wish I could explain why that was, but I can’t.
“What do you mean, you couldn’t?” I ask him.
“Couldn’t means couldn’t,” he says. I think he was a little pissed at me but I didn’t mind; he sounded a little more like himself, anyway. “I wanted to be sure of getting to Carson City before dark, which we wouldn’t have done if I’d turned around and backtracked to that little town he was so excited about. Everyone kept telling me how treacherous 50 can be after sundown, and I didn’t want to put my family into a dangerous situation.” Like he’d been crossing the Gobi Desert instead of central Nevada.
And that’s all there is. We talked a little more and then he said, Take it easy, babe,” the way he always did, and that’s the last I’ll ever hear from him… in this world, at least. Just take it easy, babe, and then he disappeared down the barrel of some travelling asshole’s gun. All of them did, except for Seth. The police haven’t even been able to identify the caliber of the guns they used yet, did I tell you that? Life is so unfinished compared to books and movies! Like a fucking salad.
Still, that last conversation nags me. More than anything I keep coming back to that stupid cocktail-party laugh. Bill-my Bill-never laughed like that in his life.
I wasn’t the only one that noticed he was a little off the beam, either. His friend Joe, the one they were out there visiting, said the whole family seemed off, except for Seth. I had a conversation with him at the undertaker’s, while Herb was signing the transferral forms. Joe said he kept wondering if they had a virus, or the “flu. “Except for the little one,” he said. “He had lots of zip, always out there in the sandbox with his toys.”