The Porcupine of Truth Read online

  San Francisco! Now we’re getting somewhere. “Okay,” I say, waiting for the next thing. The big thing that’s going to tell us what to do, where to go next. San Francisco, I guess. But that’s a pretty big place.

  “So he got help for his problem,” Lois says.

  I nod again. That’s cool. I’m glad my grandfather got help. But then she doesn’t say anything else. “So that’s it?”

  Lois looks meek. She shrugs her shoulders. “I thought you’d want the book. I thought you’d want to know that he joined the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s life-changing, you know.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “I’m glad. It’s just, I need to find him. I feel like you know something and you’re not telling me, and … I mean, it’s still a dead end. You really won’t tell me about his struggles?”

  “That’s not for me to tell.”

  I sigh, thinking about the stupid Bible quote. Maybe it’s true that gossip is bad, but I’m not asking for gossip. I’m asking for information about an actual family member so I can find him and save my dad’s life. But Lois doesn’t seem like the kind of old lady who’s going to change her mind. “You sure you don’t know anything else that could help me find him?”

  “I’ve found many answers in the book,” she says slowly, and I have no idea what the hell that means, but to her it means something, I guess, because she stands up.

  “Bless you both,” she says. “God can, and God will. If you let him.” And then she toddles off.

  We sit there, watching her leave, and the only thing she’s told us that’s new is that my grandfather went to San Francisco. But did he stay there? What happened after he stopped writing her? Without any more information, that’s just about nothing.

  “Done. Over,” I say. “We’re heading back to Billings.”

  Aisha leans back on the bench. “Looks that way.”

  I thumb through the book absentmindedly. Two pages after my grandfather’s inscription, on the bottom of the copyright page, is more writing. The writing is circled in a different color of ink.

  “Huh,” I say, pointing it out to Aisha.

  She looks. “Keep coming back. Turk B.”

  “She circled it. That’s a new circle.”

  Aisha grabs the book and studies the circle. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s new.”

  “I guess she thinks it’s not gossip to just circle something?” Lois is out of sight now, and I have no idea where she went.

  “That’s so weird. Religious people can be so weird,” Aisha says.

  “What do you suppose the ‘Keep coming back’ part means?”

  “I have no clue. Looks like someone gave the book to him before he sent it to Lois.”

  “There’s a number,” I say. “No area code.”

  Aisha pulls out her phone. “You said he went to San Francisco, right?”

  “Yep.”

  She Googles it. “The San Francisco area code is four-one-five,” she says. “Give it a try. I mean, it’s from nineteen eighty-something, but —”

  “This Turk B. guy could still have a landline. He’s an old person,” I say. My heart is in my throat. I take out my phone and punch in the number. The ring sounds old, which gives me hope. It just rings and rings. I stay on for a full minute, wishing someone would answer.

  Finally I hang up. “No dice,” I say to Aisha.

  She says, “Wait. Say the number again.”

  I repeat it.

  “And his name?”

  “Turk B. Funny last name.”

  “I think they just use initials in AA,” Aisha says as she types in the number. She stares at her screen and then she stands, all her attention on her phone. “Got something.”

  “What?” I stand too.

  “Turk Braverman. Thirty-six Prosper Street, San Francisco, California, nine-four-one-one-four. Reverse lookup.”

  “Turk Braverman,” I repeat. “Okay.”

  But then we just stand there, because the number is from thirty-plus years ago. It could easily be an old number. An old address. I mean, I looked up my mom once on whitepages.com, and she was still listed as living in the apartment she grew up in near Columbia University. The guy may not have known my grandfather that well, and he is probably ancient by now. He could be dead, for all I know.

  “Google him,” I say, and Aisha does so. The only thing that comes up is an ad for criminal background checks, and that’s for Turk B., not Turk Braverman. Google asks if we mean Tzuriel Braverman, which we definitely don’t.

  We map the address. It’s right in the center of San Francisco, near Market Street, which I think is probably a famous street since even I’ve heard of it. Aisha tries to pull up the satellite image on her phone. The webpage spins and spins.

  “Maybe Turk Braverman will be, like, standing out in front of his house waving,” I say, and Aisha laughs.

  “And underneath it’ll say, ‘Hi, Carson and Aisha, you found me!’ ”

  Finally the picture comes up. It’s a block of thin row houses that look like they come from a hundred years ago, with intricate awnings and rickety staircases. There’s an orange one, a light-blue one, and a lime-green one. But what are the odds some guy who wrote “keep coming back” to my grandfather thirty-plus years ago still knows him? And is it worth a long-ass drive just to find out? Would Aisha even go for that?

  I look at her, and it’s like she can read my mind. She maps the route. It’s 737 miles, almost eleven hours away, according to Google Maps.

  I wince. “Too far?”

  “Too far for what?” she asks.

  “You wouldn’t be up for —”

  “Hell I wouldn’t!”

  “You mean —”

  “Carson,” she says. “You think I’d rather go back to Billings than drive to San Francisco? Gay mecca of the world?”

  She grins. She wants to go. A slow grin crosses my face too.

  “Are we going to San Francisco?” she asks.

  “We can keep calling the number on the way,” I say, and she nods.

  It occurs to me that we have about a hundred dollars left to our name. I try to figure out if that’s enough money for gas to get there. Gas is like $3.50 a gallon.

  “How many miles to a gallon of gas does the Neon get?” I ask Aisha.

  “About thirty.”

  So $3.50 buys thirty miles. Which means seventy dollars buys six hundred miles, and ninety dollars buys seven hundred and fifty miles. Yes. We have barely enough money to get to San Francisco if we don’t eat, which sounds like a bad idea to me. But so does going home, when we have this one shot at finding my granddad.

  So I swallow my fear, say nothing about the cash flow situation, and shout, “San Francisco, baby!”

  WE STOP AT the West Salt Lake City Flying J, a gas station, because a sign along the highway alerts us that there will not be another gas station for more than a hundred miles.

  “How is that even possible?” I ask. “What if you live in between the two?”

  “Might be that no one does live there,” Aisha says, and I realize, of course, that I still have an East Coast perspective. Out here, the empty spaces can be as big as Rhode Island. Bigger.

  After we gas up and I use the restroom, I find Aisha standing by the soft-serve ice cream station. She points to the sign. Fifty cents a cone.

  “On me,” I say, figuring we can afford a buck for ice cream. “This way, you can never say I was a cheap bastard.”

  Aisha isn’t listening, though. She seems to be scanning the cavernous convenience store, and she looks — angry? Sometimes it’s hard to tell with her.

  I pay for the ice cream and gas, and we are down to sixty-five dollars. I’m not sure why I’m not more worried about it. I’m just not.

  We drive off, and on our right is the Great Salt Lake. It’s as big as an ocean, and the shore is crusty white. I don’t know much about salt lakes, or what makes one lake saltier than others, but it is cool to look at.

  Aisha’s quiet, so I say, “Wh
atcha thinkin’ ’bout?”

  She tightens her lips. “Forget about it.”

  A pang in my stomach. What happened? Did I do something again? “No, tell me.”

  She glances over at me, and I see in her eyes that she’s not mad. She’s sad. “Do you know the last time I saw a person who wasn’t white-skinned?”

  I laugh, because that wasn’t what I expected her to say. But then I think back. Wyoming? No, definitely not. Here in Utah? I scan my brain. No. Not that I can remember.

  “Jesus,” I say.

  “I don’t think about that stuff a lot, but I was looking around the gas station and it was white folks for days, and then I realized — story of my life. Not that there’s anything wrong with white folks. It’s just, sometimes it’s nice to not feel like the only one.”

  I think about what that would be like. To be on this trip and not see another white person for three states. I can’t imagine. Not that I somehow, like, identify with all white people and not with black people, but there’s something to be said for … likeness?

  “Wow,” I say.

  “I mean, Billings. What was my dad thinking? Why did he even take us out of Lincoln? Not like that was so great either. I mean, why couldn’t we live anywhere where there were other people like me? Why can’t I ever be around my people?” She taps the dashboard for emphasis.

  “Aisha,” I say, reaching over for her hand. “I’m your people.”

  She looks over at me and smiles. She takes my hand. “Yes. And no.”

  Her hand feels warm, familiar. It hadn’t really occurred to me that our skin colors make us so different. I mean, I don’t really think like that. But maybe I should?

  “That has to be really hard,” I say.

  “Sometimes it is,” she says. “Sometimes not.”

  We watch the world spin by as we speed west. My phone rings, and I see it’s my dad. I feel my body tighten. For several days now, I haven’t had to think about him. Should I pick up? I decide not to.

  “Who was that?” Aisha asks.

  “My dad,” I say.

  She nods but doesn’t say anything. I’m glad. I don’t want to talk about it.

  My phone rings again. It’s him again.

  “Shit,” I say. The man is dying. I should answer it.

  I take a deep breath and pick up.

  “Hello,” I say, monotone.

  “You left me,” a weak voice says.

  I hear the alcohol in his voice. “You’re drunk,” I say, very clearly, my blood sizzling in my veins. I feel it in my feet, my knees, my skull. “You’re drunk, aren’t you?”

  “A little.”

  “I won’t talk to you when you’re drunk. And by the way, I didn’t leave you. Mom did. I was three. I didn’t do anything to you. You were a drunk. You did it to me.”

  He is quiet for a moment. I listen closely, and I can hear the sound of sniffling.

  “I mean now,” he says, sounding like a lost boy. “You left me now.”

  I’m not used to this. My dad drunk dialing me, my dad sounding this vulnerable. The sizzle in my bloodstream simmers down a little, like someone threw water onto a hot frying pan.

  “I didn’t leave you,” I say, softer. “I’m coming back. Soon. There’s something I need to do. Something I need to find out, okay? I’ll be back. I promise.”

  He sniffles. “People don’t come back.”

  The line between me and my father feels like a thin wisp of hair being pulled tight. I don’t want it to break. He’s dying, and as much as I hate him sometimes, I cannot allow it to break. “I’ll be back,” I say, in a heavy accent like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and my dad laughs, so I laugh. But then I listen more closely and he isn’t laughing.

  He’s sobbing. For the second time in my life, and the second time in a week, I hear my dad weep. He sounds like a wounded animal.

  I bite down on my lip, hard. Harder. I keep pressing until it breaks and I taste the salt flow of my own blood seep into my mouth. I run my tongue over the open cut, over and over.

  “I screwed it all up,” he says through his tears. “I screwed up.”

  “You didn’t,” I say, but I can’t finish the sentence.

  Deep sobs seep through the phone. “I’m sorry,” he says. “My boy. My boy. I’m sorry. My boy.”

  I lose it. I lose my shit. The tears don’t just dribble out of my eyes, they cascade. They soak my cheeks. I am suddenly three in his arms on the couch watching cartoons, and I am six and sitting alone on the radiator in my New York bedroom, and I am twelve and standing in right field alone, and I am fourteen and wanting to tell someone, anyone, about my first wet dream. I am fifteen and wondering how to shave and my grandfather teaches me and it’s not the same. My dad. Who has always been missing. My dad, like a hole in my heart.

  “Dad,” I whisper. “Daddy.”

  Aisha pulls over, turns off the ignition, and leaps out of the car like there’s a bomb about to go off. I am alone in a Dodge Neon, on the side of the road in western Utah, and my dad and I are having The Conversation. The one I’ve wanted my whole entire life. The one I’ve dreaded my whole entire life.

  “I ruined it all. Is it too late now?”

  “No,” I say. “Never.”

  “I want to do better,” he says. “I want to be a dad. Will you let me try?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “I don’t have that long, but I want to try. Will you please get back here so I can try?”

  “I will, I promise,” I say. I wipe my eyes and in the silence I picture him doing the same. In my mind, I see the line between us becoming thicker, fuller, just by a little bit, but still, it’s changed.

  “So where are you?” he asks after a while.

  I tell him the truth.

  “Western Utah?” he asks. “What the hell’s in western Utah?”

  “Absolutely nothing. Heading west. Don’t tell Mom. She is going to kill me.”

  “She said you were visiting friends in Wyoming,” he says, and that surprises me. “What are you doing out there?”

  “Long story.” Knowing the way he feels about his dad, I don’t want to upset him further right now. “I promise I’ll tell you everything when I get back.”

  “Okay. Don’t wait too long, all right?”

  As my mother might say, I hear what he’s saying, even if he’s not saying it. “I won’t.”

  “Promise? I’m not doing too good, you know. Not guiltin’ you. Just true.”

  “I promise. You promise to hold on?”

  “I promise,” he says. “I will.”

  “Mom driving you crazy?”

  This makes him laugh. “I’m an asshole,” he says. “Your mother is a saint.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “Your mom’s the love of my life, Carson. Always was, always will be.”

  I so want to ask again, Why? If she was the love of your life, why didn’t you stop drinking and come with us all those years ago and avoid this? I don’t get it. But I don’t want to hurt him and he’s tender right now and we’re talking, so I don’t say anything like that.

  “Wow,” I say. “Do you think she feels that way too?”

  “I aim to find out,” he says.

  “You have to stop drinking.”

  “I know. I am. I will.”

  I close my eyes and imagine my family as a puzzle. There’s always been a missing piece in the center, and now the piece is loosely in place, not quite clicked in yet, but it’s flickering. And I know that I can’t just assume my mom feels the same way as he does and she’ll take him back or that he’ll ever really stop drinking, plus there’s the dying thing, so it’s very, very complicated. But just knowing that the piece is there soothes me like a warm, heavy blanket. It feels like the midafternoon heat from the sun through the windshield.

  “If you want to call me tomorrow, or you want me to call you, that would be okay,” I say.

  “Good,” he says. “I will.”

  I smile. Warm blank
et. “I gotta let Aisha back in the car. She’s probably frying.”

  “Sure,” he says.

  “And will you maybe not drink before you call?”

  “I’ll try, Carson,” he says. “Every second is hard. You get that?”

  “Kind of. Not really,” I say. “But I’ll try.”

  “I love you, my boy,” he says, and the words are hard to squeeze out of my mouth in return. I love him and I hate him and I have so much hope now and it’s totally futile and if we get close, unless he miraculously recovers, we’re doing it just in time for me to miss him the rest of my life.

  “Love you too, Dad,” I spit out, meaning it and not meaning it. Because it’s what you say.

  I hang up and look out the window. Aisha is on the side of the road, ahead of me and to the right, plugging away on her phone, texting God knows who. I knock on the window.

  She doesn’t hear.

  I knock again.

  She waves me off. She is intently typing away, and since she let me have my time, I give her all the time she needs. I close my eyes and recline in the passenger seat, allowing the hot sun to bake me, to be my warm blanket.

  I wake up when she opens the door and settles into the driver’s seat. She turns the ignition on and blasts the A/C. The car is really hot, but I was deeply asleep and it was a good sleep, hot or not. I felt at peace in a way that I have never felt before. The hole, the homeless feeling in my heart: Its throb is missing.

  She turns toward me. “So you want to hear what I wrote my dad?”

  I had a feeling. I nod.

  She smiles, a scared, grief-stricken smile that trembles at the corners. She reads: “Dad, I know you raised me to be your baby girl. You raised me good and you raised me right, and you raised me never to raise my voice to you, which is the right thing for a father to teach a child. But I am afraid if I don’t raise my voice this one time, I’m gonna lose my daddy, and my daddy is gonna lose his baby girl. So here goes.”

  The next part she says really loud, her voice filling every inch of the Neon.

  “YOU’VE KNOWN WHO I WAS FOR A LONG TIME, DAD. I DIDN’T JUST GROW UP AND ONE DAY DECIDE I WAS GONNA BE A DYKE. I WAS LIKE THIS WHEN I WAS LITTLE, AND YOU KNOW THAT. YOU KNOW IT.

  “I’M YOUR BABY GIRL AISHA, AND I CAN’T BE ANYBODY OTHER THAN YOUR BABY GIRL AISHA. YOUR BABY GIRL AISHA LIKES OTHER GIRLS, ALWAYS HAS, ALWAYS WILL. YOU REALLY THINK I’M THE DEVIL, DADDY? THIS IS HOW I WAS BORN, AND IT’S OKAY, DADDY. IT IS. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT, AND IF IT IS YOUR FAULT, I THANK YOU BECAUSE I LIKE ME. MAYBE NOT IN BILLINGS, BUT THERE’S OTHER PEOPLE LIKE ME IN THE WORLD, AND I’M GONNA FIND THEM, I KNOW IT. I WILL FIND OTHER PEOPLE WHO LOOK ME IN THE EYE AND KNOW ME.