* * *
After two post-op days in a back brace at the hospital, Clyde underwent a month of five-times-weekly spinal rehab during which his doctors forbade him to drive, encouraged him to sit as infrequently as possible, and instructed him to neither stand nor sit in the same position for longer than twenty minutes at a time. Otherwise, things worked out as he’d predicted. His settlement covered all his medical bills, paid him the equivalent of nine years’ salary in one lump sum (tax free), and the plant agreed to contribute to his pension fund the amount that both they and he would have, had he continued to work through age sixty-five. They kept him on their health insurance plan, too.
The rehab doctors praised his compliance, and by the end of the month he’d been weened off all painkillers, and was as fully recovered as anyone they’d ever worked with, they said. As long as he practiced what they called “common back sense”—e.g. didn’t water-ski, downhill-ski, join a rowing crew, or take a job as a bouncer or long-haul trucker or roughneck—he’d live a life unmarred by the symptoms of impeller’s twist.
* * *
—
The afternoon he returned from his final visit to the rehab clinic—he’d driven there himself—Clyde reminded me that he’d be flying to Austria the following week, to visit St. Wolfgang, the village from which his paternal grandfather’s family had emigrated. He asked me, for what must have been the fifteenth time, if I was sure that I didn’t want to accompany him. We were in the backyard. The previous evening, the record-breakingly treacherous winter had turned upside down, and it was seventy degrees out. I was wearing a T-shirt and sitting on a lawn chair, next to the graves in which I’d buried Triple-J’s cure and Blank. I had a hip flask of Scotch—MacGuffin Gold, I think; maybe Glenfibbly Special Cask—and, in lieu of answering my father’s question, I offered him a sip.
“Too early for me,” he said, “but thanks. Now, what do you say? Business-class ticket. I’m buying. Last chance.”
“I can’t,” I told Clyde. “I have to stay here and work. I’ve told you at least—”
“Work, my ass. I haven’t seen you work so little in years.”
“Well I have to get back to the bricks,” I said. “And I don’t want to go to Austria. Who goes to Austria?”
“Get back to the bricks—that’s not what that means. That doesn’t mean anything. What you wanted to say was get back on the horse.”
“You sure about that?”
“What you really wanted to say, though,” he said, “was hit the bricks, which means hit the road, which is what I’m proposing. And you know what? I don’t really want to go to Austria, either, Billy, but it’s where we’re from, the original Magnets, so it’s important we see it.”
“That’s not why you think it’s important,” I said, and it wasn’t. Clyde’s father had died when Clyde was nineteen, and he had, on his deathbed, told Clyde that he had always wanted to see the village where his own father (i.e. my great-grandfather Magnet) had come from, but hadn’t ever had the time or the money, and he’d asked Clyde to “see it for [him] one day,” and Clyde had said he would. He’d recalled that conversation for me back in November, right after we’d gotten the call from police letting us know that his mother had died—at that time, it seemed a strange thing to recall, but I guess it really isn’t, the death of one parent bringing to mind the death of the other, more likable parent, etc.—and, once the big settlement check had come in, mid-January, the first thing he did was fill out an application for a rush-job passport and book his trip to St. Wolfgang.
“What in the hell is that supposed to mean?” he said. “That’s not why I think it’s important.”
“You agreed to do something for your father,” I said, “so that’s why you’re doing it. Good. Good for you. But don’t drag me into it. I didn’t agree to do that thing, and you didn’t agree that I would do that thing. I never met your dad, let alone his dad. I never even heard the words St. Wolfgang til a couple of months ago. I don’t care about where our ancestors came from. I don’t understand why other people care about where their ancestors came from. I wasn’t raised to care about that kind of stuff—origins—and it was you who raised me. I think you probably care even less than I do, truth be told, so enough with the false sentimentality already.”
“I’m not being false. I just want to take you on a trip to Austria,” he said.
“And I don’t want to go with you.”
“What’s happened to you, Belt? You sound so cold. Angry.”
“Oh, right, sure. Belt. You called me Belt. You called me by my name. I’m melting. Little boy blue and the man in the moon. Come on. Enough big ropes. We’re not having a moment here, and I’m not going to Austria. You’re going to Austria, maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t, you’ll probably get bored one day and write me a postcard, and then you’ll come home and tell me all about the weird food you ate.”
“I never wrote a postcard.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“I never received one.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“Is that sad?” he said.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“I don’t think they’re known for having weird food. It’s coffee they’re known for. And mountains. And Mozart.”
“And opera,” I said. “And delicate pastries.”
“That so?”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “All of that stuff. Everything you’ve always lived for, plus Hitler.”
He clapped me on the shoulder. “I’ve noticed you get a little prickly when you drink,” he said. Then he went to his room and took a long nap.
I stayed outside, drinking, thinking. Not about drinking. Not about Austria. About this book. I hadn’t written a salvageable word of it since before Clyde’s injury, and I’d thought that drinking and thinking beside Blank’s grave—I hadn’t been to the grave since the winter’s first freeze, before Thanksgiving—might somehow help me hit back on the brickhorse. That’s why I’d been sitting out there to begin with. I was getting desperate. Not as desperate as I would, but desperate enough. This was the second, and the worse, of two dry spells.
* * *
—
The original dry spell had not been so bad. The first couple weeks succeeding Blank’s death, I hadn’t even bothered trying to write; then the next couple weeks, I’d tried and failed, but figured all it was was that, while mourning, I’d “lost touch” with the book. Turned out I was right. After a few days spent reading through what I’d already written, I started working at nearly as furious a pace as I had back in September and October: I wrote 150 pages in under four weeks, right up through the scene described in “Compound” where the trio of boys makes fun of my bike.