The third incident was actually a series of incidents that had to do with snowmobiles and Jet Skis, both of which Tom loathed because they were so noisy and disturbed his peace. Almost since both vehicles had been invented, Tom had been trying to get them banned from the lake, as they had been from several others. But also almost since their invention, snowmobiles had become a working-class institution, and Jet Skis had been celebrated as “poor men’s yachts,” and since there was a blue-collar town at one end of the lake and a summer community consisting of trailers and shabby cabins at the other, Tom was derided and dismissed as an elitist. He made matters both better and worse when he saved a Jet Skier’s life.
It was a weekday summer morning about ten o’clock, and Tom was sitting on the dock in a lawn chair, reading. Around the bend came a Jet Skier going fast and much too close to the shore. Tom put down his book and yelled at him, to no avail. Then he watched the boy, who, it turned out, was fourteen, lose control and plow into the neighbor’s dock. Tom stood up, looked, and listened. A moment later he heard a gurgled “Help me.” Tom let himself down into the waist-deep water and slogged the hundred feet to the accident. The boy’s legs were trapped beneath the heavy machine, which had turned onto its side and become wedged beneath the dock. His arms were free, and he was flailing but sinking. Tom got behind the boy, put his hands under the boy’s arms and across his chest, and rested the boy’s back against his own legs and body so that he could keep his head above water. Then he began to call for help. It was almost an hour before the garbage collectors came by and heard his now weakening pleas. By then both Tom and the boy were shivering and exhausted. The local weekly put Tom’s photograph on the front page and called him a hero.
Unfortunately, they also interviewed him. To the question “What can be done to prevent accidents like this one from happening in the future?” Tom answered, “Keep hillbillies and half-wits off the lake, and ban Jet Skis altogether. I think that in order to operate a snowmobile or a Jet Ski on Frenchman’s Lake, you should have to meet one or both of these qualifications: first that you have an IQ of at least 75 and second that you have less than 75 percent body fat. That should pretty much eliminate the problem.” With that public statement, Tom’s status moved from eccentric to crank, and the affair became an official “incident.”
And incident number four, which Brooks came to call “the last straw,” had to do with his income taxes. It wasn’t that Tom didn’t do the tax return. He did. He filled out the forms neatly, completely, and accurately, all before April first, and he even wrote his check for two hundred forty-three dollars.{Then he put the stamped envelope aside and forgot about it. Christine found it on May 6 while sorting through a stack of mail. “Dad, didn’t you send your taxes in?” she said.
“’Course I did. Had ’em in by April first.”
“What’s this, then?” She held up the envelope.
The IRS fined him, and it was agreed that Christine would come by once a month to look over the bills and help him balance his checkbook and that next year they would hire a professional to do his taxes. It was humiliating. If it had happened twenty years earlier, it would have been a good joke, maybe even one he told on himself. “So I did ’em early, set ’em aside, and forgot to send ’em in. What a moron.” It was also the first time that Brooks mentioned the term “power of attorney,” causing Tom’s heart to sink into the deepest pit of his stomach and his mind to flood with fear and paranoia. Had it come to that? Was he that far gone?
“Just sign it over so Christine can help you keep track of things, Dad.”
“No way. Never.”
On the phone his lawyer, Jerry Santoro, had said, “Oh, hell, Tom, they can’t make you do it unless you’re a lot worse off than you are. Not to worry.”
“Well, I do worry.”
“Tom, look, you’re fit, you’re strong. I know men ten years younger …”
“That’s not what my children think.” He resisted adding “or doctor.”
“Children don’t think, Tom, you know that. You still out there on the lake sailing your boat?”
“Sometimes, but they want me to stop.”
“Don’t stop, Tom. Die at the tiller! That’s what I say!”
He felt a little guilty because he hadn’t sailed in almost two summers and really wasn’t even sure he could anymore. Or was he just buying into Brooks’s propaganda? He found himself thinking more than once about Wayne Rasmussen. He even said his name out loud once, and it sounded so odd and foreign on his lips that he thought perhaps he had never said it in all these years, not since the first time. He had been fifteen then. His father had gotten him his very first job working on a delivery van at Christmastime for Walter Flowers, the florist. Walter’s son Walter Junior was seventeen, and it was his job to drive the delivery van and call out the next address from a routing list on a clipboard that hung from the rearview mirror. It was Tom’s job to locate the next delivery, which he would then run up to the door of this house or that while the van idled in front. The only time Walter Junior got out of the van was when they had multiple deliveries at the hospital or the county home. Then he would walk ahead with the clipboard while Tom pulled a wagon full of flowers behind. Tom didn’t mind the hospital, but he dreaded the county home, which had been converted from a shabby old hotel called The Monroe and was full of people slumped in wheelchairs sitting at odd angles in dim corridors and the smells of stagnation, decrepitude, old flesh, dying flesh, dead flesh that no disinfectant could ever wash away or disguise. It was a smell with which for the rest of his life Tom’s association was immediate and absolute, like burnt hair, vomit, shit, and spoiled food.
“Wayne Rasmussen.” Walter Junior said his name as they went up in the elevator. “Room 412.”
Wayne Rasmussen was a man notable not so much for being old as for being ill. You could see the veins and very nearly the bones through his skin. He was sitting upright in a hospital chair, and all four limbs were tied down.
“Mr. Rasmussen? Got a little Christmas flower for you,” said Walter Junior.
“Nice,” said the old man as Tom put it down on the nightstand. “Nice. You wouldn’t happen to have a little Christmas cigarette for me, would you?”
“Well …” Walter Junior hesitated.
“Make an old man mighty happy. Only pleasure I got left. Hell, look at me, I’m nine-tenths dead already. Ain’t hardly nothing left of me. Won’t do no harm.”
“Sure,” said Walter Junior, tapping three smokes out of his pack.
“Now, just untie my right hand here.”
“Well …”
“Can’t smoke without my hand here.”
“Of course.”
“Walter …” said Tom.
“Shut up,” said Walter Junior. They left the old man smiling and inhaling deeply. They delivered the last of the flowers and went back down in the elevator. Out on the sidewalk a small crowd had gathered around a fallen body. Tom thought someone must have slipped on the ice, but the person was dressed in a hospital gown. His legs and feet were bare. Someone looked up, and then they all looked up at an open window.
“Must’a just sat there on the sill and tipped over backwards,” someone said.
Tom heard a siren. The man had hit a no-parking sign, and bits of him stuck to the pavement, the ground, and the sign. Back in the van, Tom sat in the drop seat on the passenger side. “That was Wayne Rasmussen,” he said.
“So what if it was? He was nine-tenths dead anyway. Didn’t you hear him?” Walter Junior was shivering so violently as he said this that Tom was afraid they would crash.
“You shouldn’t have … we shouldn’t have …”
“Don’t