The Man in the Phone Booth

Mark McBride

“You know who I am.” 

A statement I first said in March after she thought I was the butcher from Heartly’s Meat Market. Sometimes she thinks I’m Clive her husband (my stepdad, thirteen years deceased) or a nurse’s aide named Manny to whom she complains of clogged bowels. Today, I’m in luck.  

“I reckon you’re my son.” 

The upper half of her bed is elevated to keep the fluids around her heart at bay.  

“And what’s my name?”

“Daffy Duck.”

“My name’s David, Ma. You know that.”

“Don’t matter none to me.” She files a fingernail against the bedspread, a repetitive motion she’s taken to lately. “Your daddy wanted to name you Porky.” I was born ten pounds, two ounces and as pink as a pig. “You remember the story I told you, how he died?”

He’d stopped to help the driver of a stranded car on the Mathews Toll Bridge and was struck dead by a passing motorist. This happened in Florida when I was three years old. The only memory I have of him is a trip to the park: green grass, squirrels, a vague sense of wonder. 

“Of course I remember.” 

“Well, it didn’t happen.” She runs her tongue through her mouth. “He’s not dead.” 

It’s crazy, but for a second I want to believe her. I still see the man who I thought was my father standing inside a gas station phone booth off I-80. I was seven, maybe eight. I recognized him because he was the same man in the pictures I’d found in the cigar box at the top of her closet. My sighting happened after she’d married Clive and moved cross-country to Sacramento, which made me wonder how my father—real or ghost—would have found me.

“He died forty-five years ago,” I say. “You know that.” 

“Nope,” she says, a gurgle in her throat. “Visited last week.” She rattles off a round of coughs that fills the air with the grassy stench of decomposition, then deposits a plug of dark mucous into a tissue that seldom leaves her hand. “Do I have to spell it out for you?” 

“Okay, okay. I get it. How’d he look?” 

She snorts, swallows. “Same as he always does.” 

Her chest rises and falls. The coughing has exhausted her.

“Well, I’m glad you had a nice visit.” 

She doesn’t say anything, and soon her eyelids begin to drop.

I place my hand on her arm. “Ma?”

“Still a daydreamer,” she whispers, eyelids sealed.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I tell her, but there is no tomorrow.  

~~~~~

The call comes around midnight, and afterward I sit in the dark unsure how to feel. The way she called me Daffy Duck, the strange talk of my father, the word daydreamer. A word I’d never heard her use, yet a word I’d known since elementary school when my teachers called me out for not paying attention. Ramona liked to use the word, too, though at first she saw it more as a gift, a necessary component of my creativty. I was an English major who could cook eggs Benedict, write love poems, and build a chifforobe from scratch. And Ramona loved me for it. Then Davy was born—sparkling boy, miracle of life—and the romance went belly up. I’d started writing short fiction by then, which did not sit well with Ramona. Instead of making up stories about your pretend family, maybe you could take Davy to the park. And as Davy grew, so did Ramona’s resentment. I’m sure the husband in your story is a wonderful father. Anything Davy wanted, cared for, or entertained, Ramona championed while she relegated me to in-house villain. I bet the wife in your story is loving and slim and happily domesticated. The Embattled Years. That’s what I called them. Still, we soldiered through. I soldiered through. My hope was that when Davy left for college, Ramona and I might have a second chance as empty nesters, but that turned out to be another kind of fiction. I was out of the house by the end of Davy’s freshman year and divorced by the time he was earning sophomore credits. Then something beyond even my imagination happened: Ramona and I started talking again—on the phone at first, then, surprisingly, on Zoom. It was a way of being in the same room with one another without being in the same room with one another. I would chat with live images of Ramona at the kitchen table, watching television, sitting on the patio, and when the two of us would get going, laughing and cutting up, I’d see her through the narrow perspective of the tiny camera and wish I was still there, back in the old house, safely tucked into my room with my laptop and books.  

So naturally I Zoom Ramona the next morning. She’s ironing until I tell her about Mother, and her face comes in close. “Dave, I am so sorry.” She says it with such genuine sadness, I have to force myself not to turn away. She asks if I’ve called Davy, and I tell her not yet. She asks about funeral arrangements, and I tell her Mother will be cremated.

“She’s not going to be buried with Clive?”

“She didn’t want to be.”  

“That’s weird.”

“No. What’s weird is what she told me about my father.” 

“Clive?”

“No. My real dad. She said he was still alive and that he’d visited her last week. And listen to this: she told me he was, and I quote, ‘Still a daydreamer.’” The image of Ramona’s face freezes. A broken connection? “What you used to call me.” Her lips are cinched. Confused, annoyed? “Do you remember the short story I was writing about my dad before we split?” 

“Why would I remember that?” 

“I pulled it out just last week. And then she mentions him. Isn’t that weird?” Silence. “There’s got to be a message in there somewhere,” I say.

“The message is you have too much time on your hands.”

“Maybe. Still. It’s interesting, isn’t it? My long-lost father, a daydreamer, alive and well.”

“Please,” Ramona says. “I’m sorry about your mother but your father is not alive and well.” 

“He is in my story,” I say. 

~~~~~

This is the start of the story I found—“The Man in the Phone Booth”:

An ‘84 Cadillac Eldorado pulls into a gas station off I-80. Your mother is driving. You’re in the passenger seat. Joe, the owner of the station, steps out of the garage and wipes his hands with a rag. You like Joe. He tells silly jokes and smells of gasoline, and the final digit of his middle finger is missing, which fascinates you.

“Fill ‘er up?” asks Joe.

“To the top,” Mother says.

“Hello in there, little man.” Joe offers his smile; you answer with a giggle and wave.

Your mother asks Joe about her sticky windshield wipers, and as he explains the mechanics of friction and rubber fatigue, you examine the end of your middle finger, trying to imagine the bone and knuckle hidden beneath the skin. When you look up, you lock eyes with me. 

I am the man in the phone booth.

You know instantly who I am and make no effort to conceal your recognition. You do as any seven-year-old boy would: gawk in stunned amazement. Your mother and Joe are still talking, but you don’t hear a word. Your full attention is on my face, the high cheekbones, the deep-set eyes. You’ve studied these features before in the photographs you found in the cigar box at the top of your mother’s closet.  

When Joe finishes, your mother pays him and starts the engine. 

Why are the pictures hidden in a box? Why does she act as if they don’t exist? 

“See you later, little man,” says Joe, but you don’t dare say a word. 

~~~~~

To help put my mother’s death in perspective, I go to church, which for me is ingesting five grams of psilocybin mushrooms and meditating on the west bank of the American River. It’s a once-a-month ritual I began after the divorce to help curtail depressive episodes. Today, in light of my mother’s death, I double the dosage. The purpose, I tell myself, is to connect to the world around me: the oaks and cottonwoods, the green tangles of grapevine, the glittering windrows of dredge tailings pushed against the far bank. The land and water speak of prospectors and pioneers, Spanish explorers and Maidu Headmen, and nothing, it seems, escapes my perception, not the cry of the hawk above or the men working the perimeter of Folsom below.  

My stepfather Clive was a guard there for twenty-five years, and when I was a boy, I sometimes imagined my real father wasn’t dead but behind bars, with Clive there to make sure he never got out. I used to imagine sneaking in through the iron gates to see my father. It was just a boy’s dream, a fabrication. Still, the prison holds a special meaning to me. Its post-Civil War architecture, so dark and heavy, a blend of myth and reality. The knowledge that men are inside separated from the people they love offers clues to my position in the universe.

Today, some of those men are weeding the rocky bank: six in horizontally striped uniforms, two guards stationed above, and one prisoner below, in faded grays, separate from the rest. Though only his back is visible to me, I somehow experience the world through him—the clank of steel doors, the finality of locks tumbling into place—and not until the man turns and looks across the river to the high bluff where I am sitting, do I realize he is old and that his face is filled with a familiarity I cannot deny.  

~~~~~

“So let me get this straight,” Ramona says, her forehead and cheeks aglow with skin cream. The view of her is from her laptop’s camera, which is in the bed where I used to sleep. “You thought he looked like your father? What were you doing by the prison anyway?”

“I was on one of my meditation walks.” 

“You’re still doing that? I thought Dr. Nelson—”

“I’ve researched it. Okay? It’s common knowledge that entheogenic—”

“There’s nothing common about tripping on mushrooms and hallucinating your dead father alive.”

“It’s not tripping. It’s—”

“Come on, Dave. You’re forty-eight years old.”

“What the hell, Ramona? I thought you’d understand.”  

She shakes her head, and somewhere in the pixilated movement of her cream-pasted face is the poltergeist of our failed marriage.   

“I talked to Davy today,” she says. “You haven’t called him yet.”

“I will.”

“He loved Nana, and he’s hurt you haven’t reached out to him.”

“I find that hard to believe. The last time I saw him, he was ready to punch me.”

“That’s because you brought a date to lunch with him. On his birthday.”

“I thought he’d like to see that I was doing all right for myself.”

“This isn’t about you, Dave. Don’t you remember how much he loved your mother’s garden, how he used to help her with it?”

“What? When he was ten?”

“For God’s sake, he mulched it last spring.”

“Well I didn’t know that.”

“That’s because you don’t talk to him. Call him. He’s your son.”

~~~~~

Instead of calling Davy, I call Beth Mertz, the birthday date. I met her a few months ago in the fiction section of Barnes and Noble. She said she was a librarian who didn’t read library books because they were dirty. Something about the way she said dirty snagged my attention, and a week later we had vigorous sex on my couch, which was both thrilling and strange: her overactive tongue, the sharpness of her hips, the way she sobbed afterwards.  

“Oh, Dave,” she says now on the phone. “What can I do?” 

That weekend Beth gives me the escape I need: an early dinner in Sausalito. “I know a special place,” she says, and it is. Waterfront. Deck heaters. Sea bass and roasted asparagus. She listens with surprising tenderness as I speak of my mother’s death—how it was expected but still a shock, impossible, really, but evidently completely possible. After dinner, Beth tells me she’s planned a surprise: sunset off the Golden Gate Bridge. When I say heights aren’t really my thing, she insists. “Trust me, Dave. You need this.” She pulls up to the 101, but instead of heading south to the bridge, she goes straight onto Conzelman Road, and it’s then I realize her intention.  

“You want to walk it?” 

All I wanted was a distraction from my mother’s death, from the divorce, from my life, a literary tryst, but deep down I knew something was off with this woman. The crying, the lizard-tongue kissing. As we step onto the bridge’s span, I am surprised at how busy the walkway is, like a park in the sky. Joggers, bicyclist, families. I spot a suicide warning sign and ease closer to the roadway. “Come on, Silly,” Beth prods. I tell her again I’m no fan of heights, and she tells me to put my big boy pants on. “You’re fine, Dave. Just stick with me.” None of the people we pass look in our direction. Same with the people in cars. It’s as though we’re invisible, alone in our own foreign universe. Then, somewhere near the center of the span, Beth stops and swings her right arm out. “This,” she says. “This is what I wanted you to see.” 

When I look toward the ocean, the wind whips my hair. I’m cold and jittery, but the view is extraordinary. The setting sun hidden behind a strand of cirrus clouds, a smudge of pearl-gray above the dark Pacific.    

“When you told me about your mom,” Beth says, “this was the first thing I thought of.”

“Why?” 

“Because I came here when my husband died.”  

“You were married?”

“For thirteen years.”

She steps onto the bottom bar of the railing, her hands on the top bar, and stares into the abyss. 

“Please don’t do that,” I say.

She turns, and I see her eyes have flooded, and suddenly I understand the teary conclusions to our love making. “Come here, Dave,” she says, her voice thick with conviction. 

“I don’t think so.” 

“Come and stand with me.”

“No. I’m okay here.”

She reaches an arm toward me. “I’ll hold you.” 

“Really. I’m fine.”

“Please, Dave.” A line of mascara loosened beneath her right eye distorts her face.

And then I hear myself say, “My dad died on a bridge.”

“No one’s going to die, Dave. I just want to share this with you. Okay? Can’t you do that for me?” 

I want to, I really do, but there’s not a muscle in my body that will give an inch. I can’t even answer her. Instead, I watch her face begin its slow descent. It happens in stages, starting with the eyebrows and ending with the mouth, that flat hopeless dash that sends my heart plummeting. This is a look I’ve seen before, one far worse than mere disappointment or heartbreak. It’s the same look Ramona gave me the night she told me she wanted a divorce. 

“I think I’m going to be sick,” I tell Beth Mertz and head for the safety of solid ground.

~~~~

“Davy called me today,” Ramona says. She’s in front of the stove, apron on, stirring a pot of her homemade lentil soup. “He’s convinced you never loved him.”

“Right. I don’t love him. Please. I’ve just been a little busy.”

“That’s not an excuse.”

“Well it’s true. It’s not easy repeating over and over again to total strangers that your mother’s dead.”

“You have to take it step by step.”  

“I hate step by step. You know that. I operate better outside the lines, or, better yet, with no lines at all.”

“That may be true, but your son needs you now. He needs closure.”

“Closure?” I say, inexplicably stung. 

“He needs to see Nana’s really gone.”

“What does he want? Video evidence.”

“You never understood him.” 

“Oh, and I’m the only one? Did you know he once blamed me for not forcing him to be more social? Like it was up to me to teach him how to have friends. I don’t even have friends.”

“It’s always been hard for him. You know that.”

“He said the least I could have done was send him to boarding school so he would’ve been forced to be around people his own age. Can you believe that? Boarding school. Really? He told me, and this is word for word, ‘I bet Hitler would have sent his son to boarding school.’ He actually said that to me.”

“He’s hurt!”

“Well I’m hurt too. He’ll just have to learn to deal with it. That’s what I’m doing.”  

“That’s what you call this?”

~~~~~

At the SunTrust Bank—of all the names!—the bank associate leads me into a vaulted room. I knew Mother had a safety-deposit box, but I had no idea what was in it. The associate pulls the drawer and hands me another box made of reinforced cardboard. “You can place the contents in here,” he says. I’m quick about it. A small bundle of papers, a weighted coffee tin, photographs of dead relatives, and a stuffed envelope. I open the envelop and pull out a half-inch stack of hundred-dollar bills. There are things I’ve wanted that this money will buy—a Martin guitar, a vacation to Mallorca—and for an instant I feel reborn, as if my life from this point forward will be different. Then I see a child’s crayon drawing. A yellow sun above a blue-and-green earth. The earth has a set of eyes and a smiley face. Beneath it, in red, are the words, You are my world mommy.  

I was just a kid, yet I recall the argument my mother had with Clive. She’d slammed out the front door, leaving me alone, in tears. Clive was nice. I remember that. He was a dispassionate man, not what you would call loving, but in times of crisis he could be calm, and he set me up with a piece of paper and crayons, and when I was through with my drawing, he said, “Nice job, kiddo.” I pretended to be comforted by his words, but I wasn’t, and even now, standing in a vault designed to protect what is precious and irreplaceable, the memory of his words cuts me all the more.  

In the bank parking lot, I call Davy.

I have no excuse to offer him. The truth is, Ramona’s right. I’ve never understood him. He was not the kind of kid who played tag or soccer or had friends knocking at the door. He was the one people wondered about, and I wondered about him too. I remember when he was five and had lost one of his baby teeth, I asked him what he thought the Tooth Fairy would bring, and he said, “Isn’t that breaking and entering?” As far as I could tell, there was little magic in his world, which sometimes made me question how he could be my child. On the phone, I try my best to make it up to him. I tell him I’ve been messed up lately and that I’m sorry I haven’t reached out. My words are followed by a prolonged silence.

“Are you still there?”

“I don’t like you very much right now,” he says, more fact than slight. 

“I get it.” And I do. 

“Why’d you call?” 

“I had Nana cremated.”

“I know that already.”

“It’s what she wanted.”

“Of course it is. It’s better for the environment.” 

“Really?”

“Everybody knows that,” he says, an edge of superiority in his words.  

“I want to do something for her,” I say. “And I was hoping you’d help.” 

I wait for a response, but I don’t hear anything except the traffic around me. I’ve lost him, again, the connection gone, but then his voice comes, low and distant. 

“What?” I say. “I didn’t hear you.”

“What do you want to do for her?” he asks.

~~~~~

The wood box that holds Mother’s ashes sits on Davy’s lap. In the floorboard by his feet is the coffee tin from her safety deposit box. When I first opened it, I was unsure what it was. The gray remains weren’t exactly powder, more a gritty sand, but when I rubbed the grains between my fingers, I recalled the one memory: squirrels on green grass.

On the bank of the American River, I tell Davy I used to imagine my father was alive in Folsom Prison. I explain that I rationalized my mother had lied about his death because he’d done something so horrific that she didn’t want me to live with the stigma. So she invented the story: a hero killed in the act of helping a stranger.

“I’ve never told anyone,” I say, “but the truth is, I would have rather had my father alive and in prison convicted of murder than dead.”  

Davy studies the box in his hands. “That’s really messed up,” he says, annoyed.

“Yeah.” I take a breath. “Are you ready?”

Together, we take off our shoes and feel the cool edges of the sharp rocks beneath our feet. Upstream a couple launches a canoe. From somewhere inside Folsom, a whistle sounds. 

“Hello there,” I say, when my toes touch the cold water. 

Davy ignores me.

We take our time, acclimating to the temperature, each step coming with its own rocky torment. Knee deep, thigh deep. On the bank above, a father and his young son walk by kicking rocks of their own.  

When the water is at our waists, Davy stops. “This is good,” he says, and he’s right. Any further could lead to trouble. There’s little wind, and I imagine the remains will go down like sugar in coffee.

Davy pries the lid off the wooden box, and I tell him to wait.

“Let’s do it together.” I remove the top from the coffee tin. “Do you want to say anything?” 

“Why would I want to say anything?”

“I just— Never mind. Okay.”

I nod and we slowly tip the containers and watch the grainy remains spill into the water, the milled bones sinking straightway while the ashes cloud the surface, my father’s darker than my mother’s, until the current, stronger than I thought, blends them together in a way that makes them indistinguishable from one another. Unable to help myself, I place my hand into the floating matter before it dissipates, and instantly a watery press stings my eyes. I hate to cry, and I hate crying in front of other people even more, let alone my son. So I turn away, just one step, but suddenly there’s no bottom and I’m plunging into the icy river, about to go under, when Davy hooks my arm and pulls me back to level footing. 

“You okay?” he asks.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I say, catching my breath, keenly aware that I’m freezing and embarrassed but also thankful the river water has masked my tears. The coffee tin, I notice, floats on the surface like a toy boat.

“I dropped the box,” Davy says, the lid still in his hand. “It’s got to be here somewhere.”

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “It’s just a box.” 

He lowers into the water, hands fanning out, his attention on the small steps his feet make as he feels along the bottom. His hair is wet on the side, but the rest of his face is dry, determined. He has my blue eyes, Ramona’s wide mouth. He’s twenty-three years old, six-foot-one, a graduate student in the College of Economics with a specialization in systems engineering, and no matter what I say, he won’t stop looking for the wooden box until he finds it. On a tree branch, a cormorant mockingly suns its wings, but I know better than to seek the warmth of the shore. I ease back into the cold water, my feet at the edge of the hole that nearly brought me down, and search for what I cannot see.