A Brilliant Death (6 page)

“Oh, I spent a couple of hours this afternoon being Rex Tate’s personal punching bag.”

“Looks like he had a good day.”

I turned my head, slowly and painfully, toward Travis and nodded. “I think he rather enjoyed it, yes.”

“I’ve got some good news,” Travis said, taking a seat on the porch deck, resting his back against one of the wooden supports. “I’ve come up with a plan.”

“A plan?” I sipped my juice and frowned. “A plan for what?”

Travis’s mouth dropped. “My plan, you know, my plan for . . .” Travis twice arched his brows.

It had been several months since our carp shoot and a month since our trip to the cemetery, and I had temporarily forgotten about his latest project, which he had named Operation Amanda. “Sorry, Trav. I forgot. Your plan, what is it?”

Travis leaned forward and motioned for me to do the same, which took no small effort as I was bruised from my shoulders to my kidneys. He whispered, “I remember a long time ago, Big Frank sent me up to the attic to get something. He’s gotten so fat he can’t get up there anymore. Anyway, I remember that Frank’s got all these old boxes full of junk up there. I’ll bet there’s something in there that would tell me about her.”

“That’s it? That’s your big plan? Sneak up to your own attic?”

“It’s not as simple as it sounds,” Travis said, annoyed at my response. “The only way to get up there is through an access panel in the closet ceiling in Frank’s bedroom, and the attic isn’t finished. It’s just a bunch of rafters with a couple of boards across them to stand on, and it’s like walking in a cave, darker than hell. I’m going to need some help.”

“Uh-huh, and you want me to climb up there with you?”

“You said you would help.”

“Have you lost your marbles? I said I’d help, but I didn’t know that meant sneaking into Big Frank’s bedroom! You neglected to tell me that little fact.” My blustering made my stomach and chest ache.

“Well, at the time I didn’t know that, either. I just thought of this the other day. Come on, man, be a buddy. You said you were going to ask your mom about it for me, and I’ll bet you forgot that, too.”

“Ask his mother what?” my mom chimed in, having just stepped onto the porch after picking a basket of grapes from the arbor at the back of our house.

“Oh, ah, Travis wants to know if I can go camping with him Saturday night. Is that okay?”

My mother squinted and said, “You know, dear, your Adam’s apple jiggles something terrible when you lie.” She turned to Travis. “What was he supposed to ask me about, Travis?”

“I wanted him to ask you if you knew anything about how my mom died.”

There was a moment of awkward silence, and I could tell by the way her face had puckered up that she was wishing she had just answered the camping question. I smirked.

“Why, she drowned in the river, sweetheart.”

“I know that, Mrs. Malone, but how? She was out on a boat with her boyfriend? Do you know who he was?”

As the red flush consumed my mother’s neck, she looked away from Travis and started toward the back door. “I think that’s something that you’d better just talk to your father about,” she said, disappearing into the kitchen.

Travis looked at me and shrugged. “See what I mean? No one wants to talk about it. It’s like everyone in this town is trying to keep a big secret from me.”

The implication was obvious. “Trav, I don’t know anything. Honest. If I did, I’d tell you. And, against my better judgment, I’ll help you look through the attic. When do you want to do this bit of exploration?”

“I don’t know yet. Soon. The next time Big Frank’s out of town.”

I snorted a burst of laughter that sent daggers though my chest. “When Big Frank’s out of town? Padnah, that’s a given if you want my help.” I looked over to make sure my mom wasn’t listening through the screen door. “Just out of curiosity, what do you think Big Frank would do if he found out you were snooping around in his attic looking for information about your mom?”

Travis shrugged, a sign that he was well aware of the ramifications but preferred not to think about them, or at least discuss them with me. For all his bravado, I knew Travis was terrified of Big Frank. A year earlier, we were watching a war movie at his place when Big Frank was on a road trip. The soldier on the screen was making his way through a mine field, feeling his way through the sandy earth with his toes, trying to get to his injured buddy. It was a very tense scene, and when it was over Travis said, “That’s exactly what it’s like living here with Big Frank. You creep along, trying to be quiet, trying to be careful, trying to stay hidden because you never know when you’re going to trigger one of the mines. Remember when I asked for the money to go to the show and he backhanded me?”

“Vividly,” I said.

We were twelve and wanted to take the bus to Steubenville to see the movie
The Dirty Dozen
. I had permission and my three dollars. We needed only to secure three dollars for Travis. Permission was not a problem, as Big Frank wouldn’t have cared if Travis hopped on a rocket to the moon. As we stepped onto the back porch, I could see his massive outline through the gray mesh of the screen door. He was sitting at the table, his belly stretching the seams of a sleeveless undershirt, his forearms resting on the table’s white baked enamel surface. It was barely one p.m., but standing at attention before him was an amber phalanx of empty Pabst Blue Ribbon longnecks, the bottoms of which were full of soggy ashes and butts.

“Dad, can I have three dollars to go to the show?”

“Three bucks, huh?”

Big Frank turned in his chair and stood, wobbled, and grabbed hold of the table for balance. A smoldering cigarette dangled from the right side of his mouth. The eye above the smoke was closed and his face crinkled. “Three bucks, you want?”

Travis nodded. “Yes, please.”

Frank pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and opened it. It was empty. “See any money in there?” Frank asked.

“No, sir,” Travis responded.

Never in my short life had I seen anything as fast as the backhand that lashed out and raked Travis across the mouth. It was a cobra strike. His little head whipped back and blood and spittle flew from his mouth and splattered in a bright, upward spray of little dots on the side of the refrigerator. “You want money? Go fuckin’ earn it.” Big Frank then turned to me, his eyes dark, malignant. A minute earlier I had been an innocent twelve-year-old excited about going to the movies with my best buddy. In the instant that flesh struck flesh, I became a voyeur in the home of Big Frank Baron and the world in which Travis lived.

“Did your mommy give you money for the movies?” he snarled at me. I nodded. “That figures.” And he staggered down the hall.

Travis slipped off the edge of the porch, snapped a bunch a grapes from the vine, and sat down next to me on the swing. “It’s like that all the time. Not as bad, usually, but you never know when he’s going to explode. If I say the wrong thing, look at him wrong, anything, he goes off. Sometimes he just screams or whacks me up along the back of the head. Sometimes he busts me. You know why?”

I nodded. “Yeah, because he’s a mean prick.”

“Well, that, too. But you know what I think really gets him? I’m smarter than him, and he resents it. I’ll never let him wear me down. Never. I put my grade card on the table every time I get it—straight As. I know he looks at it, but do you think he’d ever say anything? Not a word. Not one word. He’ll sign it, but he has never once said, ‘Good job.’”

I continued to rock on the swing, pushing against the wooden deck, listening to the ache of the springs and watching the cars pass along Ohio Avenue. “So you don’t know when this little expedition is taking place?” I asked.

“I’ll let you know,” he got up, stretched. “Get ready for Operation Amanda—Phase One. But listen, buddy, you can’t tell anyone.”

I stood up, having decided to try to soak away some of the soreness in a hot tub. “Oh yeah, I’ve got this death wish, so I’m going to blab it all over Brilliant that I’m going over to Big Frank Baron’s house to sneak through his attic.”

The touchdown came in the waning minutes of the fourth quarter. Our fullback slid off tackle, bounced off their third-string outside linebacker, spun, and stumbled two yards into the end zone. The crowd on the Brilliant side of the field erupted.

The touchdown made the score 62–6 in favor of the Warren Consolidated Ramblers. The reason the Brilliant faithful were making such a fuss over a late-game touchdown against the Ramblers’ third-team defense was because it was our first score of the year. In the first three games, we had been summarily thrashed by a total score of 142–0. So despite the fact that we were about to go oh-and-four for the third straight season, there was considerable excitement over the fact that we had scored.

The positive aspect to this otherwise pitiable season was that Coach Haines had gotten so disgusted with the team, the upperclassmen specifically, that the freshmen were actually getting some playing time. We were no better at stopping the other teams or scoring than the upperclassmen, but we weren’t any worse, and we were young, so at least we had an excuse. The games were miserable and the practices worse, but I was secretly delighted over the fact that I would earn a varsity letter as a freshman.

Because we played Saturday afternoons, my aunts, uncles, and cousins would all come to the games. Afterward, we all met at our house for my mother’s Reuben sandwiches and potato salad. My cousins were stellar athletes, and I had never been their equal. Johnny was a running back for the Steubenville Big Red, and Duke was a quarterback for the Mingo Indians, both of which had respectable football programs.

We were sitting on the family room couch with paper plates piled high with food while the adults enjoyed their food and beer in the kitchen. “You guys need some work,” Duke said.

“I know,” I said.

“You guys suck,” Johnny said. “I don’t care how hard you work, you suck.”

Duke choked back a grin.

“You should try not to sugarcoat everything that comes out of your mouth, Johnny,” I said.

“I’m just sayin’, you guys are really bad.”

“I played in the game, Johnny,” I said. “I know how bad we are.”

He shrugged and stuffed half a sandwich in his mouth.

The beer flowed, and it was nearly one in the morning before everyone cleared out and I staggered upstairs to bed. The phone rang at eight o’clock Sunday morning. Mom, who had been up for three hours by this point, called up the stairs, “Mitchell, it’s Travis.” I went downstairs in my underwear and took the phone. “Yeah?”

“All systems are go for Operation Amanda. The Big Bad Wolf is leaving town at noon.”

It took several seconds for the message to penetrate my morning fog. “Where’s he going?”

“I didn’t ask to see his bill of lading, for cryin’ out loud. He said he was going on an overnight. Come on down about twelve-thirty.”

“Okay, but if . . .”

The phone went dead.

Travis lived two blocks away in a small, two-story house, squeezed hard between the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks and the Ohio River, and across the street from the Tip-Top Bread bakery. When the river flooded, it consumed the first floor of his house. When a freight train passed, the entire house shook. The aroma from the baking bread was the only redeeming quality of the patchwork neighborhood of old homes and house trailers. When I arrived, the tractor-trailer—a red Kenworth cab with Big Frank’s CB handle, The Big Bad Wolf, painted on the doors and a sinister cartoon wolf huffing and puffing and blowing a house of sticks onto the fenders—was gone from its gravel pad behind the house. Travis was waiting at the door and pushed it open when I hit the front steps. “Is he gone?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

“Yeah, left about a half-hour ago, thank you Jesus. He was in a swell mood all morning. Come on in.”

I stepped over a maze of dirty clothes and newspapers that were strewn across the living room. The only time the Baron house got cleaned, Travis said, was when Frank was on the prowl for a new girlfriend. The house had been neglected for years and was now more in need of a wrecking ball than a coat of paint. The fly ash from the power plant had stripped the paint down to the wood, giving the siding the weathered, gray look of a house that sits along the seashore and is pounded by salt and sand. The wooden pillars on the front porch had rotted at the base, and the roof sagged in the middle. It was one good snowfall from total collapse, and I hurried through the front door, just in case it decided not to wait on winter.

I followed Travis up the narrow staircase and down the short hall to Big Frank’s bedroom in the back of the house, where the lone window overlooked his precious garage. A stepladder had been placed in the opening of the closet door, and the plywood hatch at the top of the closet had been slid to one side. “You go up first,” Travis said. “I’ll give you a boost. Then you help me up.”

Simply thinking about climbing up into Big Frank’s attic was terrifying, but at the same time strangely exciting. It was a bit like trying to get our baseball out of old lady Tallerico’s yard while it was being patrolled by her formidable German shepherd, Minnie Fay. One kid would go to the far corner and distract the beast, while another—we took turns—hopped the fence and dashed for the ball. Then it was a dead run-like-your-hair-was-on-fire sprint to the fence, followed by an angry head full of teeth, slobber, and attitude. If Minnie Fay or Big Frank caught us where we should not be, the results were likely to be the same. From the stepladder, I jumped up and grabbed hold of the wooden rim around the hatch and pulled myself up to my elbows, then waited for Travis to put his shoulders under my dangling feet and boost me the rest of the way. Once I had my feet on the rafters, Travis handed up two flashlights, then raised his hands for me to take hold. Straddling the hatch, I squatted down and pulled Travis up through the opening. For extra leverage, he put a foot on the clothes bar and pushed off. It sagged and creaked but blessedly did not break.