The Envoy: A Christmas Serial. Part Ten

There was a long, awkward silence, during which I once more had an opportunity to regret –and more keenly than ever—that I’d ever agreed to this undertaking. It wasn’t my place, and it wasn’t any of my business; my father had always made that plenty clear the whole time I was growing up. I’d never even heard him say anything even remotely substantive about either of his parents.

I was accustomed to my father’s impatience, but the edge in his voice disturbed me. I’d never heard him sound so angry and hateful.

“Look, David, I never told you about my father because he wasn’t anyone I wanted you to know,” he finally said. “It’s that simple, and that’s the truth. But you should understand that he humiliated my mother and ruined her life. I never even really knew the man, but I did know that much about him. I saw that with my own eyes. I dealt with him the only way I could at the time. Your mother didn’t know any more than you do.”

“None of that sounds simple at all,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” my father said. “I never should have let you get mixed up in this in the first place, and I don’t understand why the hell they called you, of all people.”

“Your dad had my number,” I said. “He apparently kept track of us. And I guess there’s really nobody else.”

“I always just assumed there’d be literally nobody else by this point,” he said, “and that we’d all be long out of the picture, which is exactly where I tried to put us, and keep us. I never in a million years thought Santo would still be hanging around. Listen, do you want me to just call a lawyer to deal with all this?”

“I don’t think you need to call a lawyer,” I said. “At least not yet. Stuff around town should be open again in the next couple days. Let me dig around a bit more and see what turns up.”

“Well, listen, David, I don’t want you doing too much digging around,” my father said. “Don’t mess around. If it looks like it’s just too much for you to deal with, leave a message for me at the office and I’ll get somebody else down there to straighten it all out.”

“I’ll do as much as I can,” I said. “I’m assuming there might be some issues with the property or estate, and my guess is that might take some time to sort out. I’m not even sure what the protocol is. I mean, should I start cleaning out his apartment before I check with someone in town to see where everything stands legally?”

“Go down to the courthouse in the morning and ask them who you need to talk to,” he said. “Tell them you’re representing the family and want to settle the estate as quickly as possible. I’d imagine you can find out something about property and tax status from the county clerk or city attorney, and they might even know whether or not a will exists, or if they have one on file. They should at least be able to help you figure some of that stuff out. That’s a damn small town, which means that things can either be a whole lot easier or much more complicated, depending on how much they want to be sticklers about this business. I’m guessing that if, in fact, there’s no will, then there isn’t anyone else who can make any sort of legitimate claim on any of the old man’s property or possessions.”

“Supposing I manage to get any of this information,” I said. “What the hell am I supposed to do with it?”

“Well, as I said before, I’m not interested in any of the man’s goddamn money,” my father said. “We’ll sell the stuff or give it away. If he really does own that building –and I still find that highly unlikely—we’ll just unload that as well and give the money to some charity in my mother’s name. I don’t imagine it’s worth a whole hell of a lot. Nothing in that town is.”

“This all sounds like a tall order,” I said. “I don’t exactly have a lot of experience in this sort of thing.”

“Don’t sweat it,” my father said. “I can get somebody to bail you out at any time. But listen, though, David, for the time being I’m going to have something drawn up and notarized that will authorize you to act in the family’s interests. I’ll try to get it faxed to the city hall there tomorrow, and you can tell them to expect it.”

I assured him that I would make every attempt to straighten things out, and whatever I couldn’t understand or get a handle on I would try to get somebody else to deal with.

“Just remember, David,” my father said. “That’s a very small town. Everybody knows everybody else’s business. That’s why I never could stand the damn place. People are going to be wondering what you’re up to. By this time tomorrow the whole damn place will know you’re there, and they’re going to be curious. You don’t have to worry about any of that, but you need to recognize that it can work to your advantage. Ask around. Somebody will have the answers to whatever questions you might have.”

“So there’s absolutely nothing you can tell me about your father that might help me out here?” I asked.

“I haven’t spoken to the man in more than thirty years,” he said. “I have absolutely no idea what he did or didn’t have. Start with a bank account. There can’t be more than two or three banks in town. Go in and ask. If any of these people need some kind of authorization, you should be able to get it done with a death certificate and the papers I’m going to have one of our lawyers draw up and fax down there. You should also find out if he had a car. Look around his place and see if you can find a title or insurance papers. Have you found his wallet yet?”

“They gave it to me at the hospital,” I said.

“Go through it,” my father said. “You can probably find out some stuff from that. Remember those old Hardy Boys mysteries you used to love so much when you were a kid? Well, buddy, here’s your chance to do a little detective work of your own.”

“You realize how weird this all is, don’t you, dad?” I asked.

“You didn’t even know him,” he said.

“That’s exactly the point,” I said. “That’s precisely what makes it so weird.”

“Well, look, David, don’t let it be weird,” he said. “Weird is not a distinction I waste much time thinking about. Just try to think of it as a job, a project. You’re doing me a huge favor, and I promise to make it up to you.”

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“Sure,” he said.

“If you were home when your father died would you have come down here to deal with this?”

He was silent for a few seconds. “That’s a damn good question,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure the answer is no. In fact, if I had talked to you before you drove down there I would have told you not to bother. I’m sure that sounds terrible to you, but I really can’t imagine ever setting foot in that town again. I put that place behind me a long time ago, and for plenty of good reasons. I hadn’t so much as spoken to my father since I moved away. I’m sorry as hell that you ever got dragged into this. And I’ll say it again: if you decide at any time that you just want to get the hell out of there, let me know and we’ll figure out something else.”

We talked for a few more minutes about other things –his Christmas had been nearly as solitary as mine—and then we said goodbye.

After I hung up the phone I had a hard time getting back to sleep and sat up for quite some time channel surfing and drinking beer. I felt more confused and overwhelmed than ever. For whatever reasons, I was also beginning to feel more than a small measure of pity for my grandfather. I tried to imagine myself in his position. Regardless of whatever had happened between him and my father, or him and my grandmother, no matter how badly fouled those relationships had been, it struck me as pathetic that an old man could die with so little fuss or grieving. What little I’d so far seen in his apartment painted a picture –if an admittedly dim picture—of a man who had kept his angry, estranged son in his thoughts. If my father had seen his boyhood photograph there on the dressing stand, or his drawing of Thomas Edison on the refrigerator, would that have turned something over in his heart?

That didn’t seem likely, unfortunately. He’d lived too long with all his old private grievances, and he wasn’t about to let them go now. My father seemed determined to continue his cold war until every last trace of my grandfather’s life had been dispersed, buried, and erased. This was one salvage operation he wanted no part of. If he just kept his distance it would be as easy and painless as he wanted to imagine it could be.

I eventually fell asleep that night, but I was jolted awake by the racket of a garbage truck in the parking lot. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I dressed and decided to walk back down to my grandfather’s place to start digging around in earnest.

A couple of inches of light snow had fallen during the night, and in the stillness and quiet of the early morning the town looked almost idyllic under the fresh coating of snow. I found a little café open downtown and went in and had my first real meal since I’d left Chicago. I ordered a big breakfast of eggs, sausage, hash browns, and toast, and sat there alone in a booth near the window for a long time, drinking coffee and reading through the local paper. The Gazette came out three days a week, and wasn’t much more than a dozen pages long. The local news was a mundane mix of school board meetings, high school sports, and police reports that were mostly a mix of the quaint and the absurd. Someone had reported a raccoon behaving suspiciously. A lawn ornament had been stolen from a yard near the high school. There was a false fire alarm at a local nursing home. With the exception of a few incidents of disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, and driving under the influence, my father’s old hometown seemed to be a pretty quiet and well-behaved place.

I checked out the classified ads, hoping to get some idea of the real estate market in town. The homes that were offered were mostly listed in the $58-70,000 range, but there were quite a few that were much cheaper than that. I didn’t see much in the way of commercial properties for sale. There was a small beauty parlor that was selling for $90,000, and a parcel of land on the edge of town that was now an abandoned automobile lot was available for more than $100,000.

There were a lot of pets for sale, available for adoption, and lost or found. I counted more than thirty vehicles for sale, ranging from automobiles to motor homes to motorcycles. Someone was trying to sell a wedding dress, and someone else was looking to unload a collection of beer cans.

My grandfather’s obituary had not yet made an appearance, but then I noticed that the paper had last been published on Christmas Eve.

There was no one else in the café at that hour –it was, it turned out, not yet six-thirty—with the exception of a couple old farmers who were talking quietly in a corner booth. The waitress was very attentive, and eventually struck up a conversation with me. She appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties, and was attractive in a way that managed to be both wholesome and exotic; she was tall, fair-skinned and fine-featured, wore no apparent makeup, and had her black haircut in a short and choppy –almost boyish—style. She looked like someone I might encounter working in a restaurant or bar in Chicago.

As she refilled my coffee cup for the third time she asked me what I was doing in town. I questioned how she knew I wasn’t from there, and she just laughed. “Because I know who’s from this place,” she said. “We don’t get very many strangers in here.”

I gave her a brief and rather sketchy explanation for my visit. When she asked who my grandfather was, I said, “That’s a good question.” But when I told her his name she said, “Oh, sure, Charlie. I heard about that. I was sorry to hear it.”

I asked her if she knew him and she said, “Oh, sure, since I was a kid. He was in here all the time, and I saw him around, of course. He was sort of a local character. My grandparents went way back with Charlie, but I mostly knew him through Santo, who tended bar at Mernie’s.”

I admitted that I didn’t really know either of them, or hadn’t.

“This is sort of an errand more than anything else,” I said. “My father’s out of the country.”

“Is he coming back?” she asked.

“For this?” I said. “No, not likely. There was a lot of baggage I’ve never understand between the two of them, apparently going way back.”

“Aren’t there any other family members?” she asked. “Didn’t your dad have any brothers or sisters?”

“No,” I said. “It was just him, just the two of them left, I guess, and they’d been completely out of touch for years.”

“Sadness,” she said with a little shrug. Later, when she gave me my bill, she wished me luck.

“Can I ask you something?” I said before I left.

“Sure,” she said. “Whatever you want.”

“Who’s Santo?” I asked.

She gave me a look like she was trying to figure me out, and raised her eyebrows.

“Who?” She said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“That’s sort of a big question, isn’t it?” she asked.

She paused for a moment and fiddled with a pencil she had stuck behind one of her ears.

“He’s a quiet little guy who took good care of your grandfather,” she said. “He really did. He looked out for him.” She shrugged. “He’s a hard worker, too. Walks everywhere. Sometimes you’ll see him hustling along way out in the country. I think he picks up cans, but mostly I think he just likes to walk.”

When it became clear that was all she was going to have to say on the subject I thanked her and ducked back out onto the sidewalk.

The Envoy: A Christmas Serial. Part Nine

Everything that was happening right then and there, everything that had been happening all that day, felt so strange and so wrong to me. This, after all, was my father’s life, and these were my father’s secrets. Maybe it was my business, and maybe it wasn’t, but I’m sure my father had his reasons for keeping things to himself all those years. Those reasons –whatever they might have been—and my father’s obvious reluctance to involve my mother, my sister, and me in his history had always been implicitly respected in my family. This was as true of his job and his travels as it was of his past.

When I was younger, whenever I’d ask my mother about the mystery of my father’s past, she’d always say something like, “I think there are some things you just don’t want to know.” In time I came to accept, and even believe, this. I suppose on some important, protective level I still believe in the flawed, essential truth of my mother’s words.

That night, sitting there in that empty bar with Santo, I wasn’t sure how much further into the mess of my father’s past I wanted to dig. Even on strictly practical terms it was obvious that it was a big and increasingly daunting mess.

I don’t think I’m necessarily shy, but I’m also not assertive, and I’m certainly not confrontational. I like to believe that I’ve always been the diplomat in my family, and my mind was trying desperately to construct some kind of game plan that would allow me to wrap up this situation as swiftly and painlessly as possible. Obviously my father hadn’t properly thought things out –he hadn’t mentioned Santo, for instance, and clearly he was unaware of the issues of property. I’d never heard a word about the miniature golf course in my life.

I had absolutely no idea, of course, what might have been going through my father’s head halfway across the world, but I imagined him going about his business as usual and spending a few unhappy moments at the end of the day mulling over what I was up to and then shoving it once more to the back of his mind. He’d sounded inconvenienced, more than anything else, when I’d talked to him on the phone, and I knew that my father hated little more than being inconvenienced.

I suddenly had the terrifying vision of being stuck in that weird little town for months, wading through my grandfather’s possessions and the complicated paperwork of his estate, and doing this same awkward and confusing shadow dance with Santo.

I was feeling inconvenienced. I didn’t have much in the way of a social life back in Chicago, and I had no real financial worries or concerns about my work situation, but I missed my mostly comfortable routine of sitting around my apartment reading and listening to music. I missed my daily walk around my bustling neighborhood, missed the deli and Chinese takeout place up the street, missed scrounging through my favorite thrift and used record stores. Since I’d first arrived in that town in Iowa it had felt like one of the deadest places I’d ever visited, and I was anxious to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.

Eventually that night we sat there in silence for what seemed like a long time. Santo had his eyes closed and his chin on his chest. I also felt like I could fall asleep right there at the bar. I realized that I was famished and light-headed from the beer; other than a bagel, a banana, and a carton of chocolate milk that morning in my motel room, I hadn’t eaten anything all day.

At the moment I desperately wanted to get back to my room and into bed.

I sat there for a few moments longer, listening to Santo’s increasingly labored breathing.

“Hey, Santo,” I said, and he didn’t stir. I spoke his name again, louder, and still got no response. I could see his chest rising and falling, and marveled that he didn’t fall off the barstool. I pulled myself up from the bar and made up my mind to leave quietly. I knew full well that I hadn’t seen the last of Santo, and my unexplained departure seemed entirely consistent with his own mysterious character.

I fished a ten-dollar bill out of my pocket and left it next to my empty beer cans on the bar.

When I stepped outside onto the sidewalk, a light snow was still falling; the fog off the river was moving again in the streets. Up and down the blocks of downtown the streetlight Christmas decorations were suspended and dimly glowing in the fog. I swear I could hear church bells ringing; it literally seemed for a moment like ringing bells surrounded the little town. They were ringing in the distance, on all sides, in every direction.

It was a beautiful night, appropriately surreal and disorienting after the day I’d been through, the days. Just as earlier in the day, there was nothing moving anywhere. I didn’t have any idea what time it was, but as I walked back across town to my motel it seemed like there wasn’t anyone still awake or living in the town. All the houses I walked past looked to be completely dark; they could have been abandoned for all I could tell. Perhaps, I thought, all the residents of the town were gone for the holidays.

When I got back to my motel it almost looked like the place had been shuttered in my absence. The sign and lights out front had been extinguished and it appeared that I was now the only remaining guest.

There was, of course, no clock in my room, and I have never owned a watch, so I turned on the television and scrolled up and down the long list of cable channels until I found one of those forlorn stations where they flash community announcements, local news, weather forecasts, and the time. It was almost ten o’clock.

The Community Senior Citizen Center planned a bus trip to the mall in Dubuque the next morning, with a scheduled lunch stop at Mr. Steak. Please remember to bring AARP cards for special discounts. Snow was expected for much of the evening, with possible accumulation of two to four inches. Please drive safely. See Dale Halvorson at State Farm for all your insurance needs. Happy Holidays.

I took my little Coleman cooler and walked down to the ‘Snack Center’ to fill it with ice. There was a six-pack of beer and a carton of orange juice bobbing in the remains of the previous night’s ice.

Back in the room I drank a lukewarm beer and fell into a sound sleep.

Some time later the ringing of the telephone on the bed stand awakened me. I was severely disoriented for what seemed like several moments, during which I thrashed around in confusion in the bed. All of the lights in the room were still on, as was the television (still tuned to the mute community channel with its pastel pink background). I was fully clothed and lying on top of the bedspread. The phone must have rung for at least twenty seconds before I managed to rouse myself sufficiently to answer it.

The voice on the other end of the line sounded distant and unfamiliar. It took me a moment to understand what the voice was saying and to recognize it as belonging to my father. Once again, it was clear that we had a bad connection. He sounded like he was talking to me through an airshaft in an old apartment building.

“Jesus, you startled me,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” my father said. “Did I wake you?”

I told him that it was two-thirty in the morning and that I had, in fact, been sound asleep. “I’ve had a long, strange day,” I said. “You have no idea.”

“What’s going on there?” he asked. “Are you getting things straightened out?”

I told my father that I was beginning to fear that I was in a bit over my head on this one. I said that I didn’t have anything resembling a game plan, and that it all seemed very complicated to me.

“What’s complicated about it?” my father asked. “Sign whatever papers they need you to sign, clear out his apartment –or pay someone else to clear it out for you; find out if he had any other loose ends in town –a bank account, maybe, insurance, possibly a car. Just close everything down and get the hell out of there.”

I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was already impatient with me, and really didn’t want to hear much more about it.

“He didn’t have an apartment,” I said, interrupting him just as he was beginning another sentence. “Or, rather, he owned the building.”

“What building?” my father asked.

“The building he lived in,” I said. “I guess it’s the same building he’s lived in for a long time.”

“That place above the tavern downtown?” he said.

“That’s right,” I said. “I guess he now owns the entire building, including the bar, and apparently he’s owned it for quite awhile.”

“Where the hell did that bastard get the money to buy a fucking building?” my father said. “Jesus, the man never had two nickels to rub together in his life. Every year he’d have another shit job and some big, crazy new dream that would piss away whatever money he did have.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I saw the golf course.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” my father said. “He wasn’t still running that thing, was he?”

“No,” I said. “But it’s still up there on the roof. I sort of stumbled onto it when I was nosing around.”

I could hear my father’s exasperation in the silence on the other end of the line, or at least I could definitely sense it.

“God almighty,” he said. “I’d love to know how much of my mother’s money he wasted on that ridiculous bullshit. Before that he’d build a big, cheesy Christmas village up there every year. It was always one huge, goddamned waste of everybody else’s time and energy after another.”

There was a long moment of awkward silence.

“You haven’t had anybody crawl out of the woodwork down there, have you?” he eventually asked. I could tell that he was smoking, a habit that I knew he still resorted to when he was agitated. I sensed what he was fishing for, and I was for some reason reluctant to give it to him, yet what could I do?

“There’s this guy Santo,” I said. “The manager of the bar. He seems to know quite a bit about what’s what, and was supposedly with your father when he died.”

I heard my father exhale loudly, and sigh. “Oh, that’s rich,” he said. “That’s just great. That character’s still hanging around? Shit, what are the chances? The old man never stuck with a single thing in his entire life.” He changed the subject abruptly. “Did a will happen to turn up?” he asked.

I explained that I really hadn’t yet had much of a chance to hunker down and start sorting things out. “It's Christmas," I said. “Or it was, anyway. Everything here’s been pretty much shut down the last couple days, and I haven’t talked with anyone other than Santo and the woman at the hospital.”

“Well,” he said. “You’re going to have to talk to some people, I’m afraid.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “Look, though, dad, I didn’t know what I was getting into here. I don’t know what I thought, but I’m feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment.”

“Don’t be overwhelmed,” my father said. I recognized the clipped edge in his voice; he was obviously impatient. “Just take it one thing at a time. Make a list. Try to organize this deal into small, manageable projects. If you want or need to hire people to help you out I can wire you some more money. And if there are problems with some of the legal or financial stuff, I’ll have one of our secretaries or accountants make some calls, or you can find a lawyer down there.”

“Right now I still don’t have any idea about any of that,” I said. “I should start to figure out some things in the next couple days.”

“The big thing is to find out what he owns, and whether he owns any of it outright,” my father said. “The potential nightmare here would be if he still owed a ton of money on that fucking building. I’d be willing to bet everything I have that he didn’t leave a will, and if that’s the case you need to make it clear to the relevant officials that we’re going to make a claim on those properties.”

“Why bother?” I asked. “What do you care about what happens to the stuff he owned?”

“This isn’t about the money, believe me,” he said. “But that fucker Santo has been leeching off my old man for years, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to give him a free shot at anything my father left behind. The cocksucker.”

I was somewhat stunned by this turn in the conversation. My father had always sworn freely in my presence, but I’d never in my life heard him use the word ‘fuck’ or any of its variants, let alone 'cocksucker.' He sounded more agitated than I had heard him in years.

“Has he tipped his hand at all?” my father asked.

“Who?”

“Santo,” he said. “Who else is there?”

“There’s nobody else,” I said. “Santo’s asked some questions, but I don’t know if I’d go so far as to accuse him of tipping his hand. He’s been a pretty taciturn guy so far, but he did ask about a will tonight. He’s also asked about you.”

“If he asks about me again, tell him we’ve been in regular contact,” he said. “Tell him you’re consulting with a lawyer. Don’t tell that bastard anything else. I swear, buddy, do not give Santo a thing.”

“I’m not so sure he wants anything,” I said. “He certainly hasn’t given me any indication that he does.”

“Don’t be so sure,” my father said. “You just said he asked about the will. Mark my words, he’ll try to take anything that’s not nailed down, if he hasn’t already.”

“Jesus,” I said. “What the hell was it with you guys?”

“I never had anything to do with him in my life,” my father said. “Even when I was a kid I’d walk across the street to avoid him. The bastard hardly spoke English.”

“I wasn’t talking about Santo,” I said. “I was talking about your dad. And, for what it’s worth, Santo now speaks perfect English.”

The Envoy: A Christmas Serial. Part Eight

Santo often appeared to be oblivious to my presence. All along I had sensed a certain reserve or impatience in his attitude towards me, almost as if I was somehow imposing and he couldn’t wait for me to leave. I was also aware, however, that this may have been a product of my own social anxieties and long ingrained unwillingness to be an imposition. I left him alone at the window and went back into the kitchen and waited. When he finally reappeared he got himself a glass of water and sat down opposite me with his head down and his eyes closed.

“How long did my grandfather live here?” I asked, mainly to break the awkward silence that had settled between us. I honestly don’t think I cared how long he had lived in the apartment, or where he might have lived before. I had lost all interest in the prosaic parts of the back-story.

Santo lifted his head slowly and gazed at me across the table. “A long time,” he said. “He saved for years and years, and I guess he made some good investments. He eventually bought the entire building, including the bar downstairs, where I first started working as a night janitor. An old man owned the place before Charlie, and he always let him do whatever he wanted up on the roof. Charlie had moved here for good when the marriage broke up, but he’d kept this apartment for as long as I’d known him.”

“How long has that been?” I asked.

“A long, long time,” Santo said. “I pretty much learned to speak English from Charlie, and I’ve worked in the bar for almost 40 years.”

“You still work in the bar?” I asked.

“I manage the bar,” Santo said. “There’s not much to it anymore, but, yes.”

“I assume you have beer in that bar,” I said. "I could use one right about now." Santo nodded, carefully placed his package back beneath the little artificial tree, and gestured for me to follow him. Once again he took the lead, and as we paused outside the apartment door it was Santo who fished a key ring from his jacket pocket and locked the door. I followed him down the steps and out onto the sidewalk in front of the bar.

“This is a good little place,” he said as he rapidly inserted keys in various locks and opened the door. “It’s a good thing we’re the only real bar in town –there’s the serviceman’s club out on the highway, but they only keep weekend hours these days. Some of those people wouldn’t set foot in this place, but we’ve done all right just the same. We had a few rough years there where some folks gave us a hard time. I remember Charlie out there scrubbing spray paint off the front of the building in broad daylight.”

Santo threw a switch just inside the door and the rows of hooded bar lights made just the slightest dent in the darkness. He moved behind the bar and flipped another switch for the back-bar lights. I felt like I was in an aquarium.

“What would you like to drink?” he asked me.

“A beer,” I said. “Whatever’s cold will be fine.”

Santo put a can of Budweiser on the bar, filled a glass with some ice, and mixed himself some kind of drink. He took a seat on a high stool facing me, and fixed me with his deadpan stare, boring into me with those dark eyes.

“You like running this place?” I asked him.

“I like it just fine,” he said, and stirred his drink with his finger. “I’ve had to put up with plenty. It can be a sad business but I've been doing it for so long now that I don't really know anything else.” He shrugged again and we sat quietly for a moment, nursing our drinks.

“Everybody has to do something with their life,” Santo said. “This beats real work. I came to this town as a migrant worker.” He gave me that thin, uncertain smile again, and ducked his head into his drink, as if from embarrassment at having perhaps revealed too much. There was another long moment of silence, broken eventually by an eruption from the pinball machine back in the shadows. I looked at the beer clock behind the bar. It was almost seven o’clock.

Santo extended his glass and tapped my beer can on the bar. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “Here’s to your grandfather. He was a good man.”

He turned away from me, and I saw him shake his head –it was more like a violent jerk, actually, quick and hard, to the right and then to the left. I watched him in the back-bar mirror as he repeated this gesture again. He moved away from me down the bar, fished another beer from the ice bin, and placed it in front of me.

“I’ve lost a lot of people,” he said.

What could I possibly reply to something like that? I merely nodded and took a sip from my beer.

“Did you know my father?” I asked.

“Sure,” Santo said. “When he was a boy. He didn’t like me so much, right from the beginning. I understood. A lot of mistakes were made. It’s too bad, and I’ve always been sorry. I know Charlie was also sorry. It ate at him. Charlie would go down to the library to look for him.”

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“To search for him,” Santo said. “On the computers. To try to find out where he was and what he was up to. He found articles about your father here and there in newspapers and magazines, and it made Charlie happy to know what had become of him. He was pleased to think that he’d done all right for himself.”

“I guess so,” I said. “I guess he has. I’m still not sure I could tell you what exactly he does for a living, but he’s always managed to stay busy, and I think he’s made a lot of money. He still travels all the time for his job.”

Santo sat back down on his high stool and stared into his drink. “How do you get on with your father?” he asked after a moment.

I shrugged. “Fine,” I said. “He was in the army for a long time before he started his business, so he’s pretty much been coming and going for most of my life. When he has been around he’s always been busy and distracted. I think he’s a pretty restless guy, but we’ve always been good pals.”

“Did he ever talk about Charlie?” he asked.

I hesitated for a moment, contemplating a lie. “Never,” I finally said. “Or virtually never. It was obviously a sore subject and something he didn’t really want to talk about. It was pretty clear that something had happened between them. I guess I sort of learned from a very early age that it was something that was to be avoided.”

Santo shook his head sadly and we both sat there for a long stretch of silence.

“Did you find a will?” Santo eventually asked.

The question startled me in that the thought of a will had never occurred to me, and my father apparently hadn’t thought to raise the issue either.

“No,” I told Santo. “I mean, I haven’t really looked very hard. I haven’t really looked at all, in fact. Do you happen to know if my grandfather had a lawyer? Or something like a safety deposit box?”

“Leonard Sheldon handled Charlie’s divorce,” Santo said. “And he did some other things for him from time to time, but he’s been dead for years, and so far as I know there’s nothing left of his practice. Otherwise I don’t think Charlie had any use for either lawyers or banks. He didn’t really like either.”

He paused and seemed to think for a moment. I almost had the sense that he was hesitating. “I don’t really know,” he said. “I suppose you could check around, but I think he kept pretty much everything either in the apartment or in the bar safe downstairs.”

I was beginning to have some serious doubts, or at least questions, regarding Santo. I wasn’t sure, frankly, how much might be at stake for him in the settling of my grandfather’s affairs. How was I supposed to be sure how much he really knew or whether he was being entirely upfront with me? Since he obviously had full access to the building and my grandfather’s apartment, what would have stopped him from already turning the place upside down? He’d had several days head start on me, after all, and there clearly wasn’t anybody else in town that had any interest in my grandfather’s affairs.

The truth, of course, was that I didn’t have the slightest idea who the hell Santo was, and even less of an idea as to whether I could really trust him, or how much. At any given moment you could read his behavior and mannerisms as either shy and almost sweet or as suspicious. I’d never been a terribly good judge of people, and didn’t particularly trust my instincts, precisely because, in fact, I’d always been sort of cluelessly trusting to a fault. This was another trait of mine that had continually driven my father mad over the years. I really had no idea what kind of boss my father was, but I had to imagine that he was tough, unconventional, and driven by a much sharper set of instincts than my own.

My father had always been naturally suspicious, or at least wary of the motivations of seemingly everyone he came in contact with outside of our immediate family. He was one of these guys who would scrutinize every restaurant check and do his own math in the margins with a ballpoint pen, a habit that was a source of constant embarrassment to my mother, even if he did succeed in consistently demonstrating the erratic accuracy of many waiters and waitresses.

As far as Santo was concerned, it was by this point clear enough to me that he had been a significant figure in my grandfather’s life, certainly far more significant than I had ever been (which wasn’t, of course, saying much), or even my father, for that matter, at least so far as a presence goes.

From what I’d been able to tell so far, Santo was the only person in the entire town who was grieving my grandfather’s death in any way. He was certainly the only one who had thus far expressed anything in the way of sympathy to me, even if I hadn’t exactly gone out of my way to broadcast my presence or court sympathy.

“Did my grandfather have any other friends or family that you know of?” I asked Santo there at the bar. It almost appeared to me that Santo rolled his eyes at this question.

“Of course he had friends,” he said. “But he was never a man to get very close to people. I guess he learned to be a pretty cautious guy. Many of our older friends –Charlie’s friends, really—have either long since died or moved away. As far as family goes, there was a sister he was in touch with, a schoolteacher over in Wisconsin somewhere, and she’d come to visit once or twice a year after her retirement, but she died a few years ago. Otherwise, so far as I know, there is your father and your family.”

“There’s not much there, I’m afraid,” I said. “My mother and father are divorced, and my one sister lives in France. Neither my mother nor my sister ever met my grandfather, and my dad never once that I know of spoke of any other family.”

“Well,” Santo said, again with some obvious hesitation. “There’s not much here anymore. There never really was much here. This is a small town. The regular customers in the bar, of course, all knew him.”

I finished my beer and Santo fetched another one from behind the bar and set it in front of me. He also mixed himself another drink and climbed up on his stool once again, holding his glass in his lap with both hands and closing his eyes.

"Do you feel like there should be some sort of memorial service?” I asked.

“No, no funeral, nothing like that,” Santo said. “That wasn’t Charlie. He wouldn’t like the attention or expense. I would, though, like to put a notice in the newspaper, out of respect.”

“Oh, of course, that would be fine,” I said. “Do you want me to try to put something together? I mean, I have no idea…I honestly have no idea how these things are supposed to be handled.”

Santo took a sip from his drink and then stared across the bar at me. He held his stare long enough that I looked back down at my beer and traced something in the melted ice trails on the scarred surface of the bar.

“I thought I’d see your father,” Santo said, and there was now something different in his voice. I sensed a growing impatience, even a trace of hostility. “I thought he would come.”

“We discussed that,” I said, and he shook his head and cut me off before I could go on.

“We haven’t discussed anything,” he said.

“My father’s out of the country,” I said. “He’s been gone for months. He’s in the middle of some big project in Saudi Arabia and couldn’t come back right now.”

“Or wouldn’t,” Santo said, taking another step away from his earlier discretion or restraint.

“Wouldn’t is perhaps fair, or maybe even accurate,” I said, and took another pull on my beer. “I can’t pretend that I know about that. I know nothing about what happened between them, I told you that. My father never talked about it. I don’t think he ever even discussed that business with my mother. All I know is that someone from the hospital here in town called me, and I did come. My father asked me to take care of things, which I can already see is going to be a lot harder and more complicated than I ever would have figured. I don’t have any experience with this sort of thing.”

“I gave your number to the people at the hospital,” Santo said. “I hope you don’t mind. Charlie used to call your family’s house from time to time. He’d hang up, of course. It bothered him, though, when the number was disconnected.”

“The house was sold when my mother moved to Arizona,” I said. “I’m curious, I guess, how you got my phone number in Chicago.”

“Charlie’s sister tracked you down, I think,” he said. “Charlie asked her to. She went to Chicago from time to time, and had heard from someone that you were living there. She’d known some of your father’s old friends from town, and got little bits of information from them occasionally. She said she found your number in the phone book.”

Santo shook the ice in the bottom of his glass and glanced at the clock at the far end of the bar.

“I already wrote something for the paper,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind. I tried to keep it very simple, which was how Charlie would have wanted it. I’m just concerned that there are still people out there who knew him, or remembered him from a long time ago, you understand. People may not even know that Charlie has passed on, and he did a lot of things in this town.”

“I understand completely,” I said. “Of course.”

Santo reached into the pocket of his jacket and removed a piece of paper that had been folded into quarters. He unfolded the paper and handed it across the bar to me.

“You want me to read this now?” I asked.

Santo nodded, and then shrugged. “Or you can read it later, if you’d like,” he said. “But I’d like to get it down to the newspaper tomorrow, and I wanted to be certain it was okay with you. Or perhaps you’d like to add something.”

I set the sheet of paper on the bar. It didn’t look to be much more than a hundred words, composed on an old typewriter and typed over with corrections. Other sentences had been scrawled out with a pencil. In some places there were particular variations of a sentence that had been typed over or crossed out several times.

I gave the thing a quick read. It was awkwardly phrased and corny, but I couldn’t see any reason some editor at the local paper couldn’t straighten it out in a few minutes.

“Charles Martin Stensrud passed away last week at the local hospital in town,” it read. "Mr. Stensrud was born in Dortmann, near here, on April 9, 1926. In his long life he worked for the dairy in Mable, and owned a number of businesses in town, including a barbershop and the first car wash. Many of our citizens will have pleasant memories of the Rinky Dink golf course which Mr. Stensrud built and ran for many years. He is survived by a son, Charles Stensrud, Jr., as well as a grandson and granddaughter. He will be missed by many who knew him, including his dear friend, Santo Javier, the manager of Mernie’s Tavern.”

“That looks just fine,” I said, and handed the piece of paper back to Santo.

“Do you wish to have your name in the story?” Santo asked.

“No,” I said. “No, that’s not necessary. I don’t know a soul in town.”

“I hope you would tell me if that’s not the case,” he said, and as I assured him that I was pleased with the obituary as it was written I could see his lips moving intently as he read through the words one more time.

“It’s a very hard thing to write,” he said.

“I can well imagine,” I said. “I’m glad you thought of it. It wouldn’t even have occurred to me.”

“I’m sure you must have been shocked when you received the call,” Santo said.

“Yes, I was,” I lied. “It was certainly a surprise. And when I finally talked with my father he didn't give me any indication that he knew about any of this. I don't think he was even aware that my grandfather owned any property in town. He said something about him renting an apartment downtown.”

“He did,” Santo said. “For many years. The same one he was living in when he died. When he finally left your grandmother he had decided that he wanted to open a barbershop and cut hair. He moved into that apartment and created some space for a barbershop in the back of the bar downstairs. He’d been taking classes at a little barber school in Dubuque off and on for years. He had a tough go of it with the barbershop. It wasn’t a good time for it. A lot of people in town held Charlie responsible for your grandmother’s death.”

“What happened to her?” I asked.

“She died in a car accident,” Santo said. “Although some people continued to insist for years that she’d killed herself, and perhaps your father believed that as well.”

The Envoy: A Christmas Serial. Part Seven

It seemed like virtually everything on that roof was bleached the color of the sky that afternoon. I don’t know exactly what the putting surfaces were made of, but I imagined they had once been green, and they were now faded to the flat gray of automobile primer, as were most of the hazards sprawled across the rooftop. Here and there, though, there were remnants of lingering color that seemed impossibly bright in the midst of all that gray. There was a large tin rocket ship in the middle of the first hole, and it still sported a tattered flag emblazoned with an almost illegible number. Most of the color had been washed away, but there were a few remaining patches of stubborn red paint. The rocket had a spiraling ramp that disappeared into the interior, apparently wound its way to the top, and emerged near the cone onto another, exterior, ramp that zigzagged back down and emptied onto the fairway. There was a hand painted sign at the start of the hole, still readable: “Send the ball up in the rocket, Bring it back down in the pocket!” The other holes also had signs, all of them featuring, I’m sure, similar doggerel, although many of them were now illegible.

Another hole featured a fat blue whale, but the only part of the sign I could make out read, “Jonah was lost in the belly of a whale….” I sat down on a bench along one wall and tried, to no avail, to reconstruct the rest of the sign. I couldn’t come up with anything satisfying.

My perspective, I’m sure, was warped by my general state of exhaustion and confusion, but I really couldn’t make sense of what I was looking at. That strange little rooftop golf course was swamped here and there with large puddles of slush and melting snow. I could see the bank sign downtown that flashed the time and temperature, and it was forty-three degrees. The snow that remained was steadily melting away, and I was aware of the sound of water pouring down to the street from the drains on each side of the roof. There was a loud and persistent drumming caused by one of the drains emptying onto the metal lid of a dumpster in an alley below.

I noticed that the roof seemed to have an unusual, almost imperceptible slant on each side –almost like a book open on a table—so that all the water ran down into gullies and was washed from the roof on both sides. It was a curious design, and I supposed it was deliberately pitched like that to keep the roof from leaking and the course from being perpetually flooded.

I was engaged in the contemplation of this bit of apparent ingenuity when I became aware of movement on the roof.

I turned to find Santo standing awkwardly at the top of the stairs. He looked twenty years older than he’d looked the night before in the darkness outside my motel room. His hair, which I remembered as very black, appeared almost wholly silver in the pallid morning light. When I looked over at him I saw him raise his eyebrows and bounce nervously on his toes.

“Merry Christmas,” he said. “I’m sorry if I startled you.”

I wasn’t, actually, particularly startled, although I suppose in retrospect I probably should have been.

I don’t know why, because I virtually never initiate such a thing, but I got up, walked across the roof to Santo, and extended my arm for a handshake. He shook my hand firmly, locked into my eyes with his own, and gave me that hard, jerking nod of his head that I’d already seen several times the night before.

“What’s going on?” I asked, to which Santo gave me one of the oddest, or at least most unexpected, answers I’ve ever received to a question.

“Nothing of consequence,” he said.

I was so startled by this strange turn of phrase that I offered no reply, or none that I can remember. I was, though, suddenly quite cold. I was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, and had neglected to pack gloves or a stocking cap. I had no idea how long I might have been up on that roof.

“Did the motel fellow find you with the holiday basket okay?” Santo asked.

“That was from you?” I said. “Yes. That was very nice. Thank you.”

Santo nodded once more, and seemed to be trying to erase his reflection from a puddle with the toe of his boot.

“Look, Santo,” I said. “I could really use some help here. I’m not sure what the hell I’ve stumbled into. I came down here knowing absolutely nothing about my grandfather, and I guess, to be honest with you, I don’t know how best to proceed. I mean, what the hell is all this?” I waved an arm out over the miniature golf course, and noticed Santo’s eyes follow my hand all the way out to the river. He stood there silently, staring out over the town.

I honestly couldn’t get over how old he looked. I supposed now that it was possible he was at least as old as my grandfather had been, or at least close. It was almost as if I couldn’t be entirely sure this was the same man I’d spoken with outside my motel room the night before. My first impressions of him had been of an almost stocky, even brawny, character, and now he struck me as slightly feeble, and somehow bowed.

He leaned toward me and fixed me with that intent stare of his. His eyes were so dark, and it felt like he was looking not just into you, but all the way through you to whatever was behind or beyond you. I noticed for the first time the presence of a hearing aid in his left ear. He looked away from me again and took in the relatively well-kept ruins of the miniature golf course.

“Even after we closed up, Charlie and I used to spend time every year sprucing things up. I think Charlie always thought he’d eventually try to make another go of it. I haven’t been up here in a at least a couple years,” he said. “I’m surprised, I guess. It’s holding up surprisingly well.”

“What does this have to do with my grandfather?” I asked.

“He built it,” Santo said. “Everything was falling apart and going to hell for him, but he built this. He always said he had it in his head for a long time.”

“Where was my father?” I asked. “Was this when he was still around?”

“He was around for most of it,” Santo said. “He didn’t want anything to do with Charlie by then, of course. Things turned against Charlie when his wife moved out, but he knew what he was up against. He always understood. He never held it against your father, right to the end.”

“But what was it?” I asked. “What happened between them?”

Santo nodded, then shrugged. “You have to understand that your father was just a youngster then, a teenager,” he said. “I suppose he was just sticking up for his mother. That’s what Charlie always thought. I’m sure your father was hurt by everything that happened. This is a small town. Charlie understood.”

He paused and spent a moment studying the golf course. “He worked so hard on this thing,” he said. “Almost two years, every chance he got, he was up here working.”

“When was this?” I asked.

Santo shrugged again. “A long time ago,” he said. “Your father was still a boy. It would be on the papers somewhere downstairs.” He walked across the roof and removed a bird’s nest from a windmill, dismantled it with his hands, and flung the remains over the edge.

“You’re probably cold by now,” he said. “Let’s go back downstairs so you can warm up. There’s nothing up here anymore.”

He didn’t wait around for my approval of this idea, but simply turned and headed back down the steps, and I followed him. He paused at the desk in the office and absent-mindedly shuffled through the piles of mail on the top layer.

 “I couldn’t get Charlie to come up here for the last several years,” he said. “It made him kind of bitter, I guess. And Charlie wasn’t naturally a bitter man.”

I pointed to the calendar on the wall. “What’s the significance of 1958?” I asked.

Santo stared at the calendar for a moment and finally shrugged. “Somebody probably gave it to Charlie,” he said. “I guess that was around the time he opened the putt-putt. He worked like crazy all summer and opened in September, the end of the season. He had poor timing. He always did. It probably didn’t occur to him to get a new calendar. Time doesn’t mean a whole lot in a place like this. You usually know what day it is.”

“The mail’s all from 1982,” I said. “The mailbox was still full.”

Santo raised his head and stared at the ceiling. “I suppose that was about the time he gave up,” he said. “The town was slowly dying. The last season we opened the roof nobody came for over a month, not one person. We couldn’t even get the church groups to come down anymore. We used to get a lot of those. They’d come from the towns all around here. And the high school kids. Things just changed.”

While Santo was talking he was swiping at the dust on the desk with an envelope. “It lasted a good long time, but it was never quite was Charlie hoped,” he said. “And one day he just didn’t go up to the roof. He locked up the office and that was that. Right up until that point he’d go up there every spring with the hose and the paint, and come summer he’d be up on the roof every day, whether anybody showed up or not. He was the greatest putter I ever saw.” He paused, sat down at the desk, and started rifling through some files in a drawer. This activity seemed to have no apparent purpose. My impression was that Santo was just looking for something to do with his hands.

“It makes me unhappy,” he said, without looking up. “All of it. Charlie made a lot of mistakes, but he always had a good heart. He got along with everybody. He loved children. Charlie was a good father, or at least he tried to be. He would have been a good father, if things had been different. I really believe that. He never stopped wondering what your father was up to.”

“Why didn’t he keep in touch?” I asked.

“He tried,” Santo said. “But it was terrible, the times, this little town. Your grandmother was a difficult woman, and she was protective of Charles. She made things harder than they had to be.”

My father’s name was the same as my grandfather’s, but I had rarely heard anyone call him either Charles or Charlie, and he would snap whenever my mother would refer to him as Charles, usually when she was trying to get his goat. Until Santo had called my father Charlie in the parking lot of the motel on my first night in town I’d never heard anyone else use that name in connection with him. My father had always gone by his middle name, William, or Bill.

I was happy to let Santo talk. He had an oddly relaxing voice, very flat, and lilting, with a clipped trace of an accent I couldn’t identify. At the same time I suddenly realized there was nothing further I wanted to know. I couldn’t think of a single question I wanted to ask at the moment.

Santo eventually got up and I followed him from the office. He paused in the hallway and locked the door with a key of his own, and then turned around and entered my grandfather’s apartment. He led the way down the hall into the kitchen and pulled up a chair at the table.

“Did you always get your oranges?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “At least when I was growing up. I looked forward to it every year. It was wonderful. There was always such a mystery to it.”

Santo pulled the box out from under the Christmas tree and slid it across the table to me. “It wasn’t so wonderful,” he said. “He just wanted you –and your father, I suppose—to know that he thought of you. We were never sure whether your father would pass the oranges along to you or not.”

I gestured to the other, wrapped box under the tree. “There’s one for you there, as well,” I said.

I was surprised when Santo reached immediately for the package and began to carefully untie the bow. He looked at me, shrugged and almost smiled. “It’s Christmas, after all,” he said.

I watched him unwrap the package. He was one of those people who worked very deliberately so as to save the wrapping paper. He carefully wound the red ribbon and folded the shiny green paper neatly into a square and laid it on the table. He was left with a plain white box in his lap, and when he removed the top he tilted the package away from his body so that I couldn’t see what was inside. I watched his face, though, as he pulled his head back in a gesture of mild or feigned surprise; I couldn’t really tell. He actually did smile then, showing his teeth, and let out a tiny laugh as he removed a video version of “Shane” and a satin robe with his name in cheap iron-on letters across the back –“SANTO”—like a prize fighter’s. He held it up to me and beamed.

Santo stood up and held the robe up in front of his body, measuring it from his chin, and then removed his winter coat and tried on the robe over his clothes. He struck a boxer’s pose in the middle of the kitchen and threw a couple of awkward jabs.

“God knows where he found it in this town," he said. "He didn’t like to leave.” He walked to the end of the kitchen and opened the broom closet door, where there was a long mirror. I watched as Santo studied himself in the mirror and ran his hands up and down the front of the robe. “I used to do a little bit of boxing in my younger days, back in Mexico,” he said. “I fought at the fairgrounds over in Anton a few times as well. This was a long time ago, of course. Charlie always thought it was funny.”

“Were you any good?” I asked.

“I did all right,” Santo said.

I watched as he removed the robe and intently folded it exactly the way it had been; he then tucked it back into the white tissue paper and replaced it in the box. I thought for a moment he was going to unfold the wrapping paper and wrap the package all over again. 

Santo carefully placed the box back under the tree, excused himself, and left the kitchen. He was gone for an inordinate length of time, and when I went to investigate I found him in the front room, standing at the window. It looked like he had his face pressed right up against the glass. Beyond the high windows darkness was settling on the town and I could see snow falling through the beams of the streetlights. I watched as Santo slowly raised his right arm, took a step back, and very deliberately drew a cross on the glass with his index finger .