Bucky F*cking Dent Read Online Free Page B

ahead.
    The boy goes back to the closet and opens a big suitcase marked “Vacation” and puts on all the scuba equipment he can find—bathing suit, flippers, mask, snorkel. He walks in front of the TV. A frogman, a fish out of water. His father doesn’t blink. The Red Sox score. The man applauds and stares straight ahead. The mother stares at the boy, who stares at his father, who stares at the TV—their connected gazes would form a perfect triangle, if his father would look at either him or his mother. But he doesn’t, and the triangle remains imperfect and open, leaking and bleeding. A phone is ringing. The man yells for his wife to get it. She responds by breaking a dish. He finally looks at his son, still standing in front of him in full scuba gear, and says, “Answer the fucking phone, will ya?”
    Ted is awakened suddenly from this dream, his stoned sleep, disoriented. He realizes the strange sound that has jarred him is his phone ringing. He checks his watch. It’s three-ish in the morning. He fumbles for the receiver and croaks at it, “Boiler room,” because that always amuses him.
    A woman’s voice on the other line, palpable New York Puerto Rican aka Nuyorican accent (Ted was familiar with this particular patois from his patrons at work). “Is this Lord Fenway Fullilove?” Jesus, Ted thought. Only his father tortured him with that stupid middle name. He was named after a stadium. Ted had always wanted to, but never gotten around to, excising that ridiculous nomenclature from his life once and for all. He never used it, sometimes giving the initials LF when a middle name was demanded on an official form. And when pressed he would say the LF was Larry Francis or Left Field, never Lord Fenway.
    â€œThis is Ted Fullilove, yes. Who is this?”
    â€œMy name is Mariana Blades. I’m an RN here at Beth Israel…”
    Ted felt words rush out of him before he thought them; it was like the words were thinking him, speaking him.
    â€œMy father,” he said without a doubt and without really knowing what he meant.
    â€œYes,” said the nurse, “your father.”

 
    6.
    Ted hadn’t spoken to Marty in about five years. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever really spoken to him at all in his life, had actually had an honest conversation, but the last five years had been complete and defined radio silence between the two. He had tried to forget what the precipitating event was; he had a vague memory of giving his dad a manuscript to read and having been hurt by the reaction. He remembered his father had said something constructive like “You write like an old man; you went straight past writing about fucking to writing about napping after nonexistent fucking—are you a homo? When I was your age…” or something like that. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Ted had asked. “I’m trying to hurt you into poetry, nitwit,” Marty had proclaimed like the oracle of Park Slope. All that was almost unimportant, and Ted stopped himself from rehearsing the particulars of the last breakup. The relationship between father and son was so weighted, fraught, and broken that it needed barely an inciting incident—a forgotten please or thank-you, a sideways glance, to put them at each other’s throats. Their relationship was a desert in a drought: one little match was all it took to ignite hellfire.
    The nurse, Mariana, had not wanted to get into details on the phone, but Marty was at Beth Israel Hospital on First Avenue and Sixteenth Street in Manhattan. Ted had grown up in Brooklyn, but never went back there, and rarely ventured from the Bronx into Manhattan. Manhattan, with its if-you-can-make-it-there-you-can-make-it-anywhere bullshit ethos, was an affront to Ted’s pseudo-Communist leanings. Its ostentatious money was a constant and unpleasant reminder that he had, in fact, not made it there or