I. Justice
The universe can be such a cruel place, Ian thought as he looked out the window at a near-blinding blanket of cloud tops. If there were any justice at all, he thought, one of the engine pods from this very jet would fall off the wing and crash right down on the old man's house.
But such justice was not to be, and Ian knew it. Because the universe is cruel, and full of immutable truths. The sun sets and rises; the world keeps on turning; and the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree.
That last one was the one Ian was afraid of.
II. The Bad Time. The Big Time. The Big Day
Landing always gave Ian a strange sensation, like he could see himself still in the air and firmly on the ground at the same time. As the jet touched down this time, though, it wasn't himself he saw, but his father.
Ian saw him through the lens of the past as a composite montage of experiences and snapshots, rather than a single defining portrait of a man: an unpleasant smell, like socks and mildew, faint but persistent and pervasive: a smell that had haunted his childhood. Bathing in cold water because the old man kept the house in such disarray that he could not find the electric bill to pay it. He saw his brother's flag-draped casket; having left home to escape their father's erratic, irascible hoarding and purging, Denny had lied about his age, gotten drafted into the army, and died of malaria in Viet Nam. He never even saw the enemy. The look of shame and confusion on his father's face when Ian confronted him about paying off an enormous gambling debt with the boys' trust fund money. Superimposed on all of these memories was the strange look of eager curiosity on his father's face, peering out of the filthy solarium window--out of one tiny space not completely obscured by stacks of old newspapers, unopened mail, and forgotten Blue Bonnet margarine tubs--as Ian left for the last time back in '79.
Ian worked his way through the University of Tennessee and graduated in 1985 with a BS in Business
Administration. He had laughed out loud when he watched Pretty Woman for the first time and heard Richard Gere's character confess to having paid ten thousand dollars to admit he "was very angry with his father." Ian had actually had an identical experience. He had tried hard to forget about his father, to forgive him. Love him. Whatever. But the old man never made it possible, it seemed. Every time Ian wrote off dear old dad, Ian would get a letter from him about some new gambling scheme; every time he almost forgave, a creditor would call Ian to collect on behalf of one of those schemes. Whenever Ian paused to metaphorically look over his shoulder, there was his father's expectant, excited face, blurred through dirty glass, framed by a lifetime of junk.
That was one vision he had of his father, the vision of the past; but like the queer doubling sensation he felt when the runway came up to talk business with the wheels, he saw, at the same time, what he had been told he would see with this homecoming.
There had been a message on his machine in the office in Chicago: his father wanted to talk to him about something big. While a message like this was nothing new in Ian's life, he was rather curious as to how the old man had tracked down his office number--or any of his phone numbers--here in Chicago. But curiosity was not enough to lure Ian into sheltering his father through another bankruptcy. Two days later, a man named Gilbert Wright left another message for Ian. Mr. Wright was a private detective, he said, licensed to work in all states east of the Mississippi, and had assisted Ian's father in tracking down his elusive son. Wright left his license number and telephone extension for Ian to research and reply, and added that Ian's father had paid him to corroborate some rather big news.
