A Brilliant Death (3 page)

“Why?”

“Because he’s a horse’s ass, and he has questions that I can’t answer.”

“Two good reasons,” Duke said.

The day after the accident, Frank told Snookie and Urb to tell me that he wanted to talk.

“About what?” I had asked.

“What else? The fight,” Urb said. “He cornered us at the Coffee Pot. He said he wanted to know what you and Travis were fighting about before the crash.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I said I didn’t know,” Urb said.

“Me, too,” Snookie added. “I didn’t want Big Frank breathing down my neck.”

They both had lied. They had been there and knew perfectly well what we had been fighting about.

“I’ve already explained it to the police and my parents, and I don’t want to talk to Big Frank.”

“I figured you didn’t, but I wasn’t going to tell him that,” Snookie said. “That guy scares the ba-jeesus outa me.”

I didn’t like Big Frank Baron. Never had. He had been a miserable father to Travis, who everyone around Brilliant had referred to as “the orphan” because Frank paid him so little attention. Travis had practically raised himself, and his dad was never there for any of the important events in his life. He was not there when Travis won the conference cross country title, or the district wrestling championship, or the Jefferson County Oration Competition, which he won for a critical analysis of John Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
. I don’t think Big Frank ever made a single parent-teacher conference. He could not be bothered, and I despised him for the years of abuse—a lifetime, as it turned out—he had heaped on Travis. And, frankly, like most other people in town, I was terrified of him, too. You really didn’t want to piss off Big Frank Baron.

As I took my seat, I could feel his eyes on me, but I avoided his glare. I looked at the service bulletin and pretended to mutter to Snookie—anything to avoid looking up.

As the organist finished the last strains of
Amazing Grace
, I saw Big Frank turn around in his seat. I took a breath and looked toward the front of the church as Reverend Horvath stood before the congregation and in his booming voice said, “Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am. Psalms. Thirty-nine: four.” He smiled faintly. “Let us pray.”

The lower sanctuary and the balcony were full. Nearly all of the Brilliant High School class of 1971 was in attendance. Even Margaret Simcox, who had fought with Travis nearly every day for twelve years of school, sat amid our classmates, sobbing. Travis, I thought, would love this. I half expected to look up in the balcony and see him taking it all in, gleeful, his brows arched, that lopsided grin consuming his face.

Reverend Horvath spoke of how only God could make sense of such a tragic death. I wasn’t paying much attention. Nothing Reverend Horvath had to say was going to make me feel any better about losing my friend. Ever since the accident, people kept approaching me like I had lost a member of my family. And, in a way, I had. They offered their condolences, but ultimately they wanted to know if I thought our fight had caused Travis to commit suicide. No, I told them. It had been an accident. That’s all. The fight had consisted of Travis popping me once in the nose and the two of us falling into a heap in Mrs. Robinson’s peonies. Actually, he also gave me a head butt when we hit the ground, but that was all. I didn’t even hit him back. In the six days since then, it had grown to a battle of Biblical proportions. I was tired of the questions and tired of the waiting. I just wanted it all to be over. The organ music was a drone in my ears, and Reverend Horvath’s words had no penetration. After the final prayer, several adults went up to offer condolences to Big Frank, and Duke and I slipped out.

But once he had me in his sights, Big Frank was not about to let me go. He hurried past those lined up to speak to him and went out the side door, slogging through water in the parking lot that was over his shoes, his belly jiggling out of his dress shirt, and then running down Campbell Avenue after me. We were almost to Third Street when Duke said, “You’ve got company.” I turned to see Big Frank lumbering down the road, and I stood at the corner of Campbell and Third, waiting.

He was sucking for air by the time he got to me. “You been duckin’ me, boy,” Big Frank said between breaths. “We need to talk.”

CHAPTER THREE

I can’t remember a time when Travis wasn’t around. In my mind’s eye, he was always there, a permanently ingrained part of my youth, with a smudged face, a mop of shaggy auburn hair, and a dirty, oversized T-shirt falling off one shoulder and hanging around his knees. He had a glint in his eye that teamed with a lopsided grin as though they were partners in mischief. Travis was a little guy—“puny” or “scrawny” as my dad called him, though my mother preferred “sickly.” Mom was forever shoving food at Travis, trying to fatten him up.

“Travis, would you like a sandwich?” she would ask.

“No, thanks,” he would respond.

“Sure you do. You know, you wouldn’t have that runny nose all the time if you’d put on a little weight,” she would say, pressing a fried bologna and cheese sandwich into his hand. Travis always resisted the offer, claiming he wasn’t hungry, but he would wolf down the food like he hadn’t eaten in days, which, given his home situation, was entirely possible.

My dad watched in amazement as Travis ate lunch one day and said, “That boy eats like he just got out of a concentration camp.”

There were times when I don’t think Travis left our house for a week. He had the run of the neighborhood, but he seemed to like our house best. To Travis, my family was a caricature from a Norman Rockwell painting. “You guys are like normal people,” he often said. “You eat meals at the table and talk to each other without screaming.”

Travis was less than a year old when his mother drowned in the boating accident that was the scandal of the century in Brilliant. Big Frank was out on the road in his tractor-trailer, delivering a load of sheet metal in Arkansas, and, according to the most popular version of what occurred that night, she apparently seized the opportunity to take her lover out on Big Frank’s cabin cruiser for a late-night rendezvous. The couple became so impassioned that they forgot to anchor their boat, and it drifted into the path of a coal barge. The horn and spotlights of the towboat pushing a flotilla of eighteen barges apparently forewarned them of the impending disaster, and a naked Amanda Baron and her equally naked partner were seen jumping overboard just before the barge made kindling of Big Frank’s boat,
Lady Luck
. Common logic stated that both were killed in the accident, but since neither body was ever found a popular theory among romanticists was that the couple was able to swim to shore and disappear. There had been wild speculation around Brilliant ever since as to the identity of the mystery man, and the rumors ranged from the improbable—Big Frank’s brother and the mayor—to the impossible—Clark Gable and Dean Martin. Gable had grown up in nearby Hopedale, and Martin, the former Dino Crocetti, was from the south side of Steubenville, but how they became linked to the case was as much a mystery as Amanda Baron’s disappearance. For years after the accident there were reports of Amanda Baron sightings in Chicago, Columbus, Nashville, Myrtle Beach, Richmond, and Las Vegas, where she was purportedly working as a showgirl named Iris Jubilee. Residents of Brilliant argued over whether she was dead or alive, and she became a local folk legend, a kind of Amelia Earhart of Brilliant, Ohio. A day after the memorial service for Amanda Baron, Big Frank dropped Travis off at his parents’ house, promising to pick him up “later.” “Later” turned out to be nine years. Grandma and Grandpa Baron lived just down the alley from us, where they shared an old frame house with their two youngest sons, Crazy Nick, an established lunatic who once killed the neighbor’s cat because “it kept looking at me funny,” and Tony and his roughneck wife, Trisha, who once sucker-punched the principal and carried the distinction of being the only girl ever expelled from Brilliant High School. Travis’s Uncle Tony was found shot to death in an alley in Pittsburgh in 1959. This fueled speculation in Brilliant that it had been Tony on the boat with Amanda, and Big Frank had him rubbed out for his indiscretion. In reality, Tony had been subsidizing his income as a mechanic at McKinstry’s Sunoco by running numbers for Staten’s Tobacco & News in Steubenville, which was a front for the Antonelli crime family’s gambling operations in the Upper Ohio Valley. Apparently, this wasn’t quite lucrative enough for Tony, who developed a plan to skim the bets and help himself to a share of the profits. This ill-conceived plan was discovered almost immediately, much to the chagrin of his Sicilian superiors, including the head of the family, Salvatore “Il Tigre” Antonelli. Tony was found with a single .22-caliber bullet wound behind the left ear. From the stories I heard about Antonelli and his normal punishment for those disloyal to him, Tony got off easy.

Travis’s Aunt Trisha remarried and had her new husband and stepdaughter move into the house with Travis, Crazy Nick, and her now-former in-laws. This arrangement lasted about a year, until the newlyweds were sent to prison for their part in an insurance scam that involved stealing cars and selling them to chop shops to be cut down for parts. This coincided with the collapse of their marriage. They divorced about the time they were shipped off to prison, leaving Grandma Baron to raise her former daughter-in-law’s former stepdaughter. Trisha moved to Arizona after getting out of prison and was killed in a motorcycle accident a few years later. According to the sketchy reports that got back to Brilliant, she was on the back of her boyfriend’s Harley when a pickup truck pulled out in front of them at an intersection and she was launched from the bike and into the grill of an oncoming semi.

Grandma Baron died when Travis was nine. She had a stroke while eating a sardine sandwich. Her sister found her slumped over the kitchen table, an orange tabby straddling her forearm and eating the fish from between the slices of bread she still held in her hand. Finally, Travis went back to live with his dad, who by that time was in the process of divorcing wife number two and was passionately involved with the woman who was to be the third Mrs. Frank Baron. From that point on, Travis raised himself. He was the neighborhood waif. The mothers of all his playmates took turns looking out for Travis, making sure he had the essentials—food, school clothes, a winter coat, and shoes without holes in the soles. Since Big Frank had little time for Travis, he became community property, not unlike Primo, the three-legged mutt who lived in our neighborhood and who everyone took turns feeding. If he wasn’t planning a marriage, or the subsequent break-up thereof, Big Frank was either on the road with his semi or tinkering with his 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, a jet black, two-door sports coupe with red leather interior and a 283-cubic-inch V-8 engine, a Ramjet fuel injection system, and a Turbo 350 transmission, a Holley, four-barrel carburetor, dual exhaust, and chrome that was polished to blinding intensity. Big Frank loved that car more than anything on earth, including his own son and any of his various wives—current or ex. The home Travis shared with his father was a dump—a small frame house in the floodplain that was badly in need of paint and repairs. But the cement-block garage behind the house was spotless. Each door was triple-locked and bars covered the windows. Frank had given the Chevy the nickname “The King” because he believed it to be a vehicle without equal, and he referred to the garage as the palace. He never went to the garage to take the Chevy out for a spin. Rather, he went to the palace to take the King out for a spin.

This gave Travis even more of a reason to hate the car. He hated that car the way a scorned wife hates her husband’s mistress. Travis didn’t even like Big Frank, but he was still envious of the attention his dad gave the Chevy. On many occasions, Travis said, “I’d love to see him total that car,” as though removing the Chevy would somehow cure the dysfunctional relationship he had with his father.

Travis craved attention from his father and hoped for just a sliver of the adulation that was heaped upon the car. When he couldn’t win Big Frank’s acceptance or approval, he would act out just to get the attention. The attention usually consisted of an ugly encounter with the back of one of Big Frank’s massive hands. It was all in futility. Travis was never going to get the attention he craved because Big Frank simply couldn’t be bothered.

CHAPTER FOUR

Travis and I loved to go down to the Ohio River to bowhunt for carp.

Just south of the power plant, near the warm-water discharge pipes, the carp swarmed like insects, thousands of them. Carp are the cockroaches of the river. They can live on pollution, mud, and feces, which is a fact, because in the 1960s there wasn’t much else in the Ohio River. It was an open sewer. The carp flopped around by the pipes, sucking down the warm water and growing to the size of tunas, and we made sport of shooting them with our bows and arrows. Travis equipped the arrows with hunting tips and drilled tiny holes in the shaft, through which we threaded fourteen-pound test line. After sticking a carp, we would pull it to shore, which wasn’t always that easy since they were big, hardy rascals and usually quite unhappy about having been run through with an arrow. We called it sport fishing, although it really wasn’t much of a sport because there were so many of them that it was virtually impossible to miss. In twenty minutes we would have a stringer of carp that we could barely carry.

Now, I would never think of eating a carp out of that river. Never! However, Turkeyman Melman, who lived up on the hill a few hundred yards past the water tower, would give us five dollars for a stringer of them, and he didn’t particularly mind the arrow holes. Turkeyman had a fifty-five-gallon drum that he had converted into a smoker in which he cooked the carp. He was one of Brilliant’s most colorful characters. He was a muttering, squatty little man in constant need of a shave and a bath, and he sported perhaps three brown teeth in his head and an enormous tongue that he was always waggling outside his lips, like an eel poking his head out of his hole inspecting the seascape. His given name was Harold, but he was known only as Turkeyman, or Turk, which was short for Turkey Buzzard, a scavenger in nature as Turk Melman was a scavenger at the township dump.