The Long Save

Sometimes I tell it this way: my father saved a man’s life once. He didn’t ask for anything in return. He simply saw the man was choking and ran inside to save him.
            Sometimes I tell it like this: the man ordered a steak and fries and ate his meal alone. My father watched him, noticing the pleasure in his eyes, until one of his bites turned to fear. My father barreled through the door and worked his hands beneath the man’s belly. The man looked back at him, out of breath but grateful.
            If I get to it, I tell this part, too: my father didn’t know if he should save him. He imagined how it would feel to hold the man as the life drained from his body. His hands beneath his stomach, his chest against his back; the last person to hold him, to fail him. As if touching him meant he bore some responsibility.
            I like to tell what happened after: how my father sat with the man for a moment, the two of them trying to breathe; how they were equally tired, shocked by what could have been. The man reached for my father’s hand and my father let him take it, the two of them sitting beside a broken plate and a balled-up piece of steak, shot against the corner.
            When my father tells the story, he starts the following day—when the man’s hair was neatly combed, and he wore his finest khakis.
            I tell my father, that isn’t how you start.
            But he looks at me and says: the other parts don’t matter.

The man wore his finest khakis. His hair was combed the way his mother had combed it and his father had combed it, whenever he came to visit. Always parted. Always on the left.
            But my father handed him a new outfit. And he said to the man, wear this.

Clothes don’t make a man until they do, my father says. Then they’re the only thing that matters.
            I ask him what kind of clothes make a man. And all he says is: Guess.

The man changed out of his khakis and his button-down white shirt and wore the clothes my father gave him. Then my father pulled the door shut, and the man glanced back at his room.
            My father led him down the hallway, his hand on the man’s back. He doesn’t tell it this way, but it was the same back he’d held the day before. The same belly he’d worked against to loosen the steak. The same hand he’d held right after.
            My father would never say those things.
            Instead, he says they walked.

The man walked down the hall, counting the number of steps before my father opened the door and led him into another room. Then the man stopped counting.
            Sixty-two, my father says.
            The man entered the next room, and my father shut the door.
            And all that went around his head was sixty-two, sixty-two, sixty-two.

A small but helpful fact: they had known each other for years. The man had told my father his dreams. To swim with sea turtles in the Galapagos. To find a tortoise Darwin’s hands had touched. To lay on his back beneath the white equatorial sun.
           He had asked my father once: What’s your dream?
            And my father told him, but I don’t know what his answer was.

Sometimes my father speaks in hypotheticals.
            He says, If a man were on the edge of a cliff and you were told to push him, would you do it?
            No, I say.
            What if you knew the man did bad things? And everyone around you knew it, too?
            What kind of things?
            The worst.
            I tell him, I don’t know.
            What if you had no choice? You either had to push him, or you had to jump.
            I know he wants me to answer quickly, so I do.
            Then I guess so.
            You guess what?
            I guess I’d probably push him.

The thing is, my father says. The man was a man, if he did bad things or not.
            And your hands were the ones to push him, even if you were just trying to live.
            So when I ask you, would you push a man off a cliff, what do you think you’d say?
            Yes.
            And so would everyone else.

My father says he did not shout, Dead man walking, even though it’s in the movies. He says some people shout those things, some don’t. It seems like an unnecessary thing to announce.
            And besides, he says, the man wasn’t dead yet anyway.
            Instead of wearing khakis and a button-down, the man wore a prison-issued uniform with DOC on the back. When they reached the door where my father handed him off, the man whispered something to him, but all my father heard was sixty-two, sixty-two, sixty-two.

Last meals aren’t available to everyone. Some states don’t allow them. In others, the warden sits down to eat with the man, and they talk about whatever they want.
            I try to imagine what that must be like. Two people eating together, one knowing his time is up.
            Another fact my father says is meaningless: it was the man’s first time eating steak. He’d only had three pieces before he choked.

And when he saw it lying there, still perfectly grilled on broken glass, he got back up and finished it.

I’ve never seen my father cry. But I heard it once, through my bedroom walls. It was about those letters on the man’s uniform: DOC. How he’d always thought they were a joke—Department of Corrections. Like they’d ever corrected anything.
            But when he nudged the man through the door and shut it behind him, he thought how close he’d come to being corrected. Not the man, but my father. That as they’d sat together, the two of them trying to breathe, he saw a world in which he did not have to push and he did not have to jump. And it was all right there in those letters. Staring at him the whole time, telling him to correct things. And all he did was what he’d always done and locked the door behind him.

When my father tells the story, he ends it, most times, like this: I never should have saved him.
            If you save someone, he asks, what do you think that tells them?
            He gives me time to answer, so I think about it hard.
            That you love them?
            Not always.
            That you care?
            Right, he says. And he looks at me with silver-blue eyes and adds: So what can you say I did, except tell him his very last lie?

I try to imagine how the man would tell it. In some ways, I think he did—when he whispered in my father’s ear. I think deep down, my father heard him. That those words still echo in some chamber of his mind. Maybe that’s what drives him mad. Like a song that keeps playing in your head, until all you desperately hope is to hear some other tune.

When my father shut the door, the man was taken to a gurney, where he was restrained around his stomach, his thighs, his wrists. Then the equipment was sterilized, and so was his arm. Rubbed with alcohol, wiped clean. A little patch of skin near the hand my father held, as if the needle might cause infection, as if God forbid, he might get sick. As if just before they pushed him, they handed him some shin guards, and said: Look at us. We’re human.

My father’s last act of the day was to collect what remained in the man’s room. There wasn’t much. A few books the man had read—On the Origin of Species, Slaughterhouse-Five, a paperback by Sylvia Plath. There was a notebook, but little in it. Drawings and caricatures and jokes that didn’t end. There were reading glasses and two ballpoint pens, a comb with some hair attached. And in the corner was a pair of khakis and a dress shirt, folded neatly, as if to be worn another day.
            My father put these things in a box for the man’s parents to take home with them. Then he wrote in the notebook, I’m sorry, and somebody came in to clean the room.

The year my father turns sixty-two, he retires from the prison. It takes me weeks to put it together. But then I do, and I say, it’s because of the steps.
            He looks at me with silver-blue eyes and says: Anyone can invent connections.
            But then he turns his uniform in, the same one he wore each day, a hunter green shirt with badges on the shoulders and black on everything else: his shoes, his belt, his hat. I look at him, and he’s different. A white undershirt and faded blue jeans and the last of his thinning hair, tucked neatly beneath a baseball cap. I wonder who this person is, this man with muscled arms and tan lines at the elbow. He is handsome and rugged, like a brother I didn’t know he had.
            He volunteers at a local shelter—for cats and dogs and rabbits. There’s even a cage with guinea pigs that hardly anyone visits. He spends time with all of them, especially a terrier mix no one seems to want. It is old and not good with other dogs. It’s missing a few teeth and its fur is kind of stringy and no one says Aww when they stand outside its cage. My father has never had a dog, even though he’s wanted one. His parents were always too busy, then he was too busy, too.
            When I visit him, we take the dog for long walks. His name is Bruiser now—because he looks like a Bruiser, and the shelter had called him Sweetheart, which my father would never say. At the end of our walk is an open field and beyond the field is a long line of evergreens. If no one’s around, my father bends down, unclips the leash from Bruiser’s collar. The dog tears across the field, despite his age. He runs with the exuberance of a puppy chasing a ball. My father stands back to watch him, a small smile on his face. And I say, in case he hasn’t thought it yet, how lucky Bruiser is to be here.