VII – When Bruce was Found (Though He Never Got to Drink the Ginger Ale)

A Story for Anxious Times

Chapter 7

It was a funny story. Not Naked Gun funny, because it was this guy’s life that had basically fallen apart, but Randy told a good story, and since he didn’t mind being the butt of the joke more things were jokes in his stories.

But at the end of it Jesse Henderson still had a very good chance of losing his job, an even better chance of losing Janie, and no car keys. And somehow floating behind all of that was the sense that he actually did need to bite the awkward bullet and go down to St. Andrew’s and see his dad. And he actually thought “dad,” which was weird because he almost never used the word. Jesse said “my father” when talking about Bruce, the cinder block man who’d raised him. But it’s human nature to be unaware of the most fundamental changes happening inside us, so it didn’t register to Jesse that he thought “dad.” Instead, he just rubbed his forehead with his right hand, closed his eyes, and breathed out the words, “I want to go see my dad but I don’t have a way to get down there.”

“Car break down?” Randy asked.

And Jesse, still frustrated at his uncharacteristic act of forgetfulness despite any foundation shifting going on under his scaffolding, frowned and said, “No, I forgot my keys and I can’t go back to my office and get them.”

Randy looked confused.

“Just trust me,” Jesse said, waving him off. And Randy did.

“Well,” he said, that thick baritone voice still working its subtle magic on the normally placid and impenetrable Jesse, “like I said, church service is canceled tonight. So I don’t have plans. And I feel like I already know the guy, so-“ and here for just a second Randy reverted to his old car salesman ways. Old habits are hard to break. His “closing” trick had been to shrug, turn his mouth into a “why not give it a try” casual frown, and give his dark Sicilian eyes a playful twinkle. But it was a hard to break habit for a reason: it was so stinking successful. And while it may not have been his most honorable tool, it was being used for a noble purpose now.

And like all stories, this one has joints. If the bone swings one way, catastrophe, or failure, or sadness. If the bone swings the other, hope.

Jesse didn’t exactly smile, he was still too much his confused, scared, controlling self to be pleasant about the prospect of riding shotgun with a strange (though admittedly pleasant and compelling) man he’d just met to visit the fourth last person in the world he wanted to talk to. (If you’re curious, numbers one through three were, in order, his manager Dave, his wife Janie, and Sherry at the office who was, believe it or not, still watching American Idol. In one of the great poetic injustices of life, while Jesse’s dismissal papers were being drawn up, Sherry would work at the company for another fifteen years, retiring somewhat contentedly to watch reruns and saying each January, to her husband’s perpetual disbelief, that this would be the year she would take up her supposed lifelong dream of making birdhouses.) But Jesse didn’t say no, either. And after six seconds of silence that would have been awkward had the questioner been anybody less generous of heart than Randy, Randy held up his keys and grinning, asked, “Ever ridden in a pickup truck?”

The answer, I’m sure you could have guessed, was no. At least not that he could remember. And if he had, it certainly hadn’t been a fifteen-year-old F-150 with hand crank windows and a shockingly red interior. Violently red. Desperate as he was, Jesse was still a combination of revolted and irritated as he sat down on the plush passenger seat and noticed two empty sweet tea bottles lying on the floor. Just lying there. Like there weren’t such things as garbage cans. Or recycling bins, if someone was watching.

I have no data to back this up, but I have a hunch that if we get to have testimony time in Heaven, the number that begin with “Well, we were in an old F-150” will be surprising to a good many people. There is something hopeful, something dripping with redemption, in cranking down the window of an old pickup truck on a sunny day, and so while Jesse would never be able to trace his salvation all the way back to the source, especially considering it flowed from a mountain spring called “eternity,” I think there is some legitimacy to putting some sense of a beginning to that moment right there in Randy’s old pickup truck. Bought, like so many good things in this tattered world of ours, from a little old man who worked for a living. It cost Randy exactly five dollars (which the old man used to buy fishing bait at a gas station down the road) plus a two hundred dollar donation to the old man’s older Baptist Church’s benevolence fund. When the old man had given Cindy the treasurer the stack of twenties, she’d said, “Rick Murdoch, did you sell something else? You’re not going to have a blame thing to your name if you don’t get up and quit it.” To which he’d said, “Hush,” and walked his creaking bones up to his seat in the back and readied himself to join in singing, “Nothing but the Blood.”

Randy sat down in the driver’s seat, casually rested his left wrist on the steering wheel, and looked over at Jesse with a prankster smile on his face. He had ridiculously plain black sunglasses on now, and somehow they underscored his playfulness. “You like country?” he asked. A full two seconds passed. Two seconds each pregnant with twins.

“Just kidding,” he said, and started the truck.

Jesse suddenly wished he’d gotten his anxiety meds out of the drawer beneath his car keys.

They pulled into the hospital quickly, much too quickly for Jesse, because Randy had a sense of humor. He’d been driving a little herky-jerky the whole way just to loosen Jesse up a bit. It hadn’t worked, mainly because Jesse was too nervous about seeing a father he had trouble conversing with on a normal day, and this was no normal day. He was scarcely two hours removed from wondering about how he could kill himself. But despite the failure, the world needs more men like Randy, and Jesse appreciated the good faith effort from the man he’d just met and had already become something special to him. The effort itself had at least taken his mind off of Janie for a moment.

He’d considered about twenty different ways the hospital visit itself would go. The biggest variable was sitting right next to him, all 220 muscular pounds of him. Did Randy want to go inside with him? Normally Jesse was not the direct type, but again the strangeness of the day presented itself.

“Do you want to go in with me?”

And there was something indescribably lovely about the simplicity of Randy’s answer. “Yeah,” he said, looking at the building itself and then over to the left at the parking garage. You get one swing at this earthly life, and for all the harm that the Randy now dead and buried had done, and it was great, this Randy behind the wheel of the F-150 was working some good magic. Nobody knows when walking into a hospital will be a part of someone’s eternity changing and when it’s just walking into a hospital. But being willing to walk in sure gives you better odds than not.

Randy pulled the truck into the last spot available on the first level of the parking garage, which was the top since it went downward along the side of the hill the hospital itself crested. They both stepped out into the afternoon sunlight, Randy doing the classic old man groan as he did so, Jesse doing his own classic check for his wallet, cell phone, and keys before remembering that his keys were forever trapped at his desk and hating himself again for it. Hating himself for eleven things, actually, but too nervous to carefully distinguish them.

They were an odd pair. Randy walking with that playful, confident stride Jesse had first noticed when they’d met, smiling warmly underneath his cheap black sunglasses with the warm breeze just barely rustling his short, slightly curly Sicilian black hair. Next to him was Jesse, pale in the bright sunlight and despite the suit looking more like he was a patient of the hospital than a visitor to it. But something about the flat note Jesse brought to the tune was touching. No one with a brain in his head and ten seconds to spare to watch them walk up to the hospital front doors could have missed that Randy was a crutch for his tense, distressed partner in the black suit. It was in the way he obviously slowed his steps to match Jesse’s apprehensive pace, the fact that he clearly wanted his smile to be contagious. When they passed through the revolving doors and into the cool hospital lobby, Randy looked left and right, while Jesse stared straight ahead into the hallway across the lobby that led to the elevators. He softly bit the inside of his right lip. “What am I doing here? I don’t know this guy,” he thought. Then, after a second of mental silence with some self-pitying irony, “I don’t know either of these guys.” He looked up, wondering why this hospital always seemed so dimly lit, especially considering they were #1 in spinal surgery in the region, as that Metro bus with the apparently homicidal driver had duly informed him this morning. Did spinal surgery not pay as much as he’d thought? He would have guessed #1 could have afforded better lighting. And his rock quarry of a father up there would have thought it could have afforded better television stations and some beef on the menu more often. But why was Randy walking over there?

The “there” was the small gift shop to the right in the lobby. Randy was intently striding over to it, and then turned around and said, “Do you mind if I get him something? Even just a pop?” Jesse shook his head. He was stunned, but Randy turned back and walked into the gift shop, looked left and right, then made his way to the back right corner. Jesse, totally warped by what was happening, followed him inside. He had never thought about coming into this little refugee from a shopping mall and buying something for his father. And what he was asking himself was a good question: Why? But the answer his mind gravitated to wasn’t a good one: Because of the sort of father he was. The thrum inside Jesse’s heart right then was that it was hard to show sentiment to a man who shows no sentiment. But for all the truth in that isolated thought, that wasn’t Jesse’s deepest problem, any more than Randy’s deepest problem that day in Jerry’s car on his own trip to the hospital had been his wife’s coldness. And Jesse was also willfully blind to the fact that his wife Janie could have had a few things to say about the damage a lack of warmth can do.

But the thunderheads in his mind scattered a little when he stepped into the tiny gift shop, thankfully much better lit than the rest of the hospital. He smiled a real smile, wounded and scared as he was. Something about the voluntary goofiness of this big, joyful man, looking through the little Coke cooler with his dollar sunglasses perched atop his short, uncombed hair. He forgot about himself for a minute, and just smiled.

“Does your dad like Coke?” Randy asked, turning and looking up at Jesse from his crouching position. And something in that question stung just a little. Stung enough to make Jesse’s smile go away. Randy noticed, but he just waited patiently.

Why the little heartburn stab? It’s a simple question. And this is a simple gesture. Why have you never come in here? Why really? No garbage about your dad being a hard man to know, to enjoy, to love even, why haven’t you walked your two feet in here and bought him a pop? Why hasn’t it even occurred to you?

Or has it?

Jesse stopped the thoughts cold before the pain got more intense. Before the broken bone was set.

“Ginger ale,” he said, sleepy eyes and a cracking voice.

Brandon opened the front door to his house on the northwest side of Cincinnati and did his traditional tired exhale. He wasn’t actually tired, but we all have rituals, and it’s the unconsidered ones that are the hardest to cease.

But Brandon wasn’t going to amble over to the couch and wistfully wonder about what to do. He had a charted course. And if Rachel was in the kitchen, then that’s where he needed to be.

She was, but she was just leaning over the sink, looking out the window at the sunlit flowers in their neighbor’s yard. He could see her eyes because of the angle. She was silently crying. But she hadn’t noticed him and so she continued to stare. And he kept watching.

He remembered the day they were married, three years ago. Summer day, Devou Park, which overlooks the city from the Kentucky side of the Ohio River. She’d smiled all day, all night, the big and bright smile that stood out under her red hair and sparkling eyes. Lovely through and through. She’d been under a gazebo for a picture with her sister and the other bride’s maids, laughing sweetly, when he’d had the thought that he didn’t deserve her. He’d said it before, like most men who loved a woman, but she was laughing and looking at the camera when he’d been blown over by the truth of it. Here was this real woman, made by the living and loving God, honest and beautiful and faithful and ready to love the Lord for as long as He gave her on this earth. Complete in the way that only real people made by a real God can be, with a favorite color (green) and a worst fear and a scent and a particular ring to her laugh, and she had been given to him. That’s what the pastor had said, just now in front of the families and the friends and the fathers and the Father. How could he do this? She was so wonderful, and he wanted to give her so many precious things, but he was a Bible college student and a sinful man. There she stood, sparkling in the sunlight of the clear day in her white dress and producing in him the brightest sparks of love and the bitterest sorrow that he wasn’t a better man, and he just wanted to make good on every promise he’d just made. That would be the smallest gesture of what he felt.

Now she was crying in silence. Wounded in a way he didn’t understand. He stepped into the kitchen, and under him the floors creaked and she quickly turned to look at him. She smiled and wiped her eyes, which made him love her more and break his heart even further. But then she couldn’t disguise it, and seeing him and being seen by him made it worse, and made it better, and she broke. Her head fell, and then she sat down in a chair at the kitchen table, and she sobbed from the bottom of herself.

He walked over to her shaking form, knelt down, put his head next to hers. He could feel on his forehead that the table was already wet. He put his right arm on her lap, sought out her hand, either hand, and found one. He closed his own around it, and he kissed the back of her head. She cried louder, and he breathed in big, hoping he was doing the right thing. Hoping he was helping her.

He opened his mouth, and he prayed for their son, the little baby inside her. With everything he had, he asked their Father to bless and save and protect their son.

They cried together.

The elevator ride was the tensest part. Which is pretty much a universal feature of the human story. The elevator ride is always the tensest part. Setting sitcom episodes to the contrary aside, I’m not sure we could have created a more foreboding way to get to a place. Maybe a hearse. But in that case at least one occupant doesn’t have to endure the journey.

The moment Jesse was dreading was when the elevator doors opened. It let off right next to the floor’s main nurses’ station, and if that talkative nurse was here he would rather the cable just break now. Reason the first was that she always told him how good it was for his father to have visitors and for all patients to have visitors and how much she just loved his father and about four other flavors of syrup. Reason the second was that she would of course ask who Randy was, and how Randy was doing, and say how great it was that Randy was here, and then call in a Code Blue for someone to come clean up the human spill that used to be Jesse. He was already dazed and terrified of tomorrow enough to pass out. Who knew if he still had a job, or would have a job in a month? Who knew how much longer until Janie left? And the constant concern, the background music of his daily anxiety: Was Jeremiah actually getting any better? What was better? And was it wrong for him to want that?

Please don’t be there. Please don’t be working today.

Doors open.

Of course she is.

“Hey, Jesse!”

Oh man, even that southern accent was dripping like high fructose corn syrup all over his nerves. He barely frowned and had enough sense to try to look from her straight down to his father’s room, as though there were some urgent matter down there on the door that required his immediate attention.

“Listen, I can’t stop to chat, but I’m glad you’re here.” She lightly touched his hand, and while his central nervous system and the bundle of fears it ran alongside wanted him to jump a the touch, he stood stock still and waited for her to be gone. She smiled at Randy and walked away, behind them down the other side of the hall.

“I can’t stop to chat.” Man. That really shook his functional atheism. He felt the urge to thank someone, but instead just looked at Randy to his left, nodded down the hall toward his father’s room, and started walking.

If Jesse had known his termination papers were being drawn up after a conference call with the incoming management team, he would have turned around. But God has tender mercies, and so he had no idea, and pushed in on the vertical metal handle and looked at the only man he’d really ever wanted to impress lying on the bed, looking pale and weak and with all the fight siphoned out of him. Like one of those old battleships brought to port after her wars are over, resting at some memorial site for middle school kids to yawn at, guns silent and stories all past.

The last time Jesse had seen his father he’d obviously been in pain, though saying nothing of it. His forehead had been wet with sweat, his eyes distant and he’d said even less than normal. But he hadn’t looked this bad. The infection wasn’t getting better, clearly.

“Hi,” he said numbly, his dad slowly turning his white-haired head over to Jesse’s direction. Jesse cringed. He couldn’t catch himself in time to stop. His father’s eyes looked like death. The right one was bloodshot, and both were dim and only half-opened. And though until the end he wouldn’t admit it to himself, Jesse knew then.

“This is Randy,” he said, voice trembling but nothing in his eyes or his mouth but the barest mannerly form of human feeling. And Randy, who already loved Jesse, bailed him out.

With a warm but quiet smile he said, “Jesse and I were just having coffee, and when he told me about you still being here I just wanted to visit and bring you a ginger ale.” No mention of how they’d only met that day. And the offer of a ginger ale. And guided by Providence that did the trick: Bruce Henderson, retiring battleship, hull scuffed and engines in disrepair, smiled back and lifted up his right hand a few inches and gestured for Randy and Jesse to come over and have a seat. The same Providence allowed the Reds game to be on the hospital TV.

“Last night’s game?” Randy asked as he put ginger ale on the table next to Bruce. He didn’t ask if he could open it for him.

Bruce nodded and croaked out a, “Yeah.” Then he looked over at Jesse. “’D’you see that Chatty Kathy nurse?” Jesse smiled, nodded, said nothing.

“Well,” Bruce uttered, hoarsely seeing Adam Dunn launch a 395-foot home run to score the first run of the game.

“I won’t tell you what happens next,” Randy said.

“Kearns strikes out,” said Bruce, with a frown.

Randy was genuinely surprised. “Read the paper up here in the room?”

“No,” Bruce answered, and grimaced as he felt a sudden hot stab in his left hip. “Just not a dummy.”

Which is how it started.

The longest conversation Jesse had ever had with his father in three plus decades was something like seventy-five minutes long. And that had been full-strength father. But here in this hospital bed, sick as he was, Bruce Henderson talked baseball and car repairs and college football and a dozen other interests with Randy and his oldest son for nearly three hours. And he smiled.

Jesse forgot about work, about the scene he’d caused and the company being bought, and drank every sound of every word his father spoke. He’d never seen him like this. He even asked Jesse questions, about if he remembered their first van or that time the basement flooded or what the name of his younger brother’s little league coach had been.

Randy was laughing. So was Jesse. Bruce was trying not to because of the pain, but his stomach shook and he smiled wider than Jesse could ever remember seeing. The story had been about Randy’s own younger brother’s being cut from the middle school football team and responding by putting dead fish in each of the head coach’s hubcaps, which after two months of his failing to discover caused him to leave his car in the back corner of the school’s parking lot and drive his wife’s minivan to work every day for the rest of the school year. Purple minivan with a “Proud MOM” bumper sticker on the back, no less.

“Families,” Randy said, wiped a tear from the corner of his right eye, and laughed a short burst again.

Bruce was quiet all of a sudden. He pulled his left cheek in, looking like he was preparing to spit out a sunflower seed. Then he looked over at Jesse, and said, “Yeah.”

Time halted for Jesse. He had no idea what his father was thinking, but it was something. And after weighing whatever it was for a second, he said, gravel in his mouth, “How’s Puck?” Puck was Bruce’s nickname for Jeremiah. It went back to baby days, when Bruce had laughed at his round little grandson, said he looked like a hockey puck, and had rubbed noses with him. The laugh, the touch, those had been new spots on the map of his father that Jesse had long held in his heart. Good spots. Places he’d wished had been discovered earlier. And when Jesse had slowly, too slowly, told his friends and family about the autism diagnosis, only his father had had the reaction he did. No sympathetic sad face, no hug, no awkward question about what was next or veiled attempt to find out what kind of life Jesse and Janie and their boy could expect. Their boy. No, none of that. This mysterious man, this man he barely knew, all muscle and sadness and loyalty down to the roots, he’d looked away from Jesse, reached down to the living room floor, picked his three-year-old grandson up and smiled at him and kissed his head and made tiger noises. And Jesse had decided then that even if he could never know his father, he could love him. Because that was what he’d wanted done for the boy who had his heart. His little boy.

“He’s good.” He tried to say “Dad,” but he stopped short. Why? The same reason you and I do foolish things.

“Jesse,” and the look took on an added layer. He was tired. He was sorry and burdened and tired. Jesse wanted to reach out and touch his hand, reach over Randy’s chair, closer to his father, and feel his rough, tree trunk hands, and smile. He just sat there, though. Didn’t want it enough.

“When I get out of here, there’s something I gotta’ tell you.” He never looked away. His eyes were locked with his son’s, and Jesse hated himself for it, but that’s what made him start to cry. But his father’s expression didn’t change. Not at that, not at anything.

“I gotta’ explain something to you. I can’t do it here, I need to show you something back at the house. But it’s important. Real important. And I’m sorry I kept it from you.”

Sorry. It was like ice struck his chest. He did not think he had ever heard that word from his father.

“Forgive me, Jesse. Let me cook you supper when I’m home. And I’ll tell you all of this thing. It’s terrible, really, but you need to know.” Here he coughed, no tension for a man who had spoken his piece for the first time in decades, but stretched terribly thin. And then he looked at Randy, and Randy asked him if he could pray for him. Bruce dredged up a wry, sad smile. “Prayers don’t go up for a man like me. My boy could tell you that,” and he looked at his crying oldest son and hated himself.

“Jesus died to answer prayers for men like you.” Stone in Randy’s voice. He was speaking his peace, now. And nothing would stop him. And you’d have to have no eyes and no ears to miss that it was love that was making him do it. Strange as it is to some, in that moment Randy would have died to save either of the two men in that room with him, both of whom he’d met that afternoon. We become like what we worship.

Bruce just stared. Nothing to say, and needing to hear more. Wanting to hear more.

“You and I were born like that, Bruce. And that’s exactly why He came. You and I were born needing forgiven, deserving all of it, deserving all the death we could get. He came to take it, for everyone who will trust Him. That Cross is where He took it.” Randy nodded up at the cross on the wall, next to the television that was now showing a re-run of a Cleveland Cavaliers game. Dusty. Older than anything in the room, probably. It seemed unreal to Jesse. But then he saw the Cavs game on next to it and wasn’t so sure.

Bruce closed his eyes. He nodded. It felt like a quarter century’s worth of rubble was being cleared out in the ten seconds of silence that followed.

“He’s God, Bruce. And He took on a body and bones so He could pay what we owe, you and I.”

Jesse had no idea what to do, what to say. He felt a faint sense of wanting to protect his father from whatever this was, but he had never been more certain of anything than he was right now that his father wanted whatever this was.

“All He asks is that we trust Him alone. Then our punishment is put on Him, and His goodness is counted ours. And we’re forgiven, clean. With the One who matters most.”

And the old man whom Jesse didn’t know very well, whom no one knew very well, muttered the ancient name, the one precious to so many dead and so many not dead yet, the one cussed at and trampled on and treasured and will someday be the siren song drawing knees to the earth and eyes to the sky. “Jesus,” he said. Bruce Henderson, all 230 pounds of him, all granite and muscle and silent despair, was found, by the One who seeks out the lost and wicked souls, draws them and blesses them and carries them home.

“Would it be okay if I read you something, Bruce?” Randy asked. True question, so that everything hinged on the answer. And Jesse’s father, still with his eyes closed, nodded his head twice.

Randy pulled a small book out of his back pocket and slowly and with great gladness began to read something Jesse had never heard to his tired old father, praying in his mind that every word ring true for the old man as he did.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

And Bruce listened until he fell asleep, somewhere around chapter 11.

The sun was setting when they walked back to the pickup truck. Randy was smiling, happy down deep in a way you only understand if you’ve brought someone to Jesus. He kept saying things like, “Man,” and “Praise the Lord,” and would shake his head and whistle.

“I don’t know what that was,” Jesse finally said, sounding more annoyed than he really was. “but I need to know whatever it is he didn’t tell me.” He stopped walking, ran his hands through his hair, and then turned to look back at the hospital. “He’s never talked like that. Not once in my whole life, Randy. I need to know what this thing he’s hidden from us is.”

Randy walked back up to him, joining him where he’d stopped in the middle of the little street between the hospital and parking garage. “He’ll tell you, Jesse. I believe he meant it.”

And Randy was right about the second thing, but wrong about the first. Bruce never fully regained consciousness, dying at about 3 AM later that night.

Which is a loss, because he would have wanted to tell Jesse himself. Wouldn’t have wanted him to find out the way he did.

But we are not authors. We are characters.

And so Jesse uncovered it how he did, out in the crumbling white building in the sad, green hills of West Virginia.

The moment he made the most important decision of his life.