August and Then Some (12 page)

“Nothing's wrong with this job, but you seem like … Let's put it this way: if you keep working the way you do you're not long for it.”

“What way?”

“Oh, the way of someone who never takes a break and works double-time during one of the hottest days of summer on what looks like no sleep or a deep hangover or both.” He lets that
much sink in. “Couple guys in my family worked themselves to death. But that's not because they loved working so much. It's because they hated everything else. But fuck me, I could be totally wrong. Am I?”

I shrug.

We sit in the heat for a while. I drink my drink.

“You think Starbucks is hiring?” I say.

“Always.”

“You got a pen?” Brian reaches into his back pocket and hands me a pencil. “Piece of paper, too?”

“What for?”

“I'd rather not write my phone number on your hand, because we're not going steady yet. No offense.”

“None taken.” He looks through his wallet, pulls out a faded receipt that documented the purchase of something old and forgotten.

I write my number on it. “Here.”

He takes it back. Looks at me. I say, “In case I leave this job soon.”

He nods his head and puts the paper back in his wallet. “You know the one about the five frogs?”

“No.”

“Five frogs are sitting on a log—”

“Frogs or toads?”

“Either one.”

“Which?”

“It doesn't matter. Five of them are sitting on—”

“I'm just trying to get a visual.”

“Frogs then.”

“You sure?”

“They're green things with long tongues, OK? You're ruining my timing, now shut the fuck up.”

“Go head.”

“Five frogs or toads are sitting on a log and four decide to jump off. How many are left?”

“One?”

“Five.”

“How you figure?”

“Because there's a difference between deciding to jump and actually jumping.”

About a week after I punctured my hand in Ricky's office I was laying in my bed and heard my father's car door slam. I checked the clock on my night table: 1.30 a.m. on a Tuesday. Then I heard him trip; the palms of his hands slapped the slate of the front stairs and I heard him yell, “Son of a bitch.” My mother creaking down the stairs is what got me out of bed.

When I came downstairs Mom was standing in the kitchen holding her robe closed at her neck. “Please, Jake, go back to sleep.” Which is what she always said when my father came home in a drunken or even sober rage, or when they were having a screaming match in the middle of the night and I poked my head out from the staircase and tried to watch:
Go to sleep
,
Go up to your room
,
Get scarce
,
Leave so we can pretend you don't see this …
I always listened to her. Pretended to have gone back to sleep and stood with my face against my closed bedroom door recording their words and slaps on some permanent tape in my head. Yelling about bills and credit cards and drinking and dirty clothes and food and bullshit and something else entirely. Like an obedient little dog I'd listen until everything went quiet and my mother came up the stairs.
Then I'd jump under my blankets, knowing the next morning we'd all play dumb about what happened. But that night I'd had it with the good pet routine and when she told me to go to sleep again, I stayed.

He was drunk and pissed off—pissed off because he had to leave his job, pissed off because he couldn't walk straight anymore, pissed off at the side door for not staying still while he was trying to get the key in it—and if you've ever seen a raccoon on the side of the road just before they're about to get squashed by someone's tires, then you know what my mother looked like when he stumbled into the kitchen. She was too petrified to blink, hoping the two tons of drunken metal wasn't going to slam into her.

“Pissin piece of crap door. I raised that thing from a peephole, now it's making pretend it doesn't know my key no more.” He teetered around the room, unable to bend his left leg, and grabbed for the oven to keep from toppling over. “And the stairs, they're no better. I built that dumb stack of rocks. Jake, remember we cracked them up with sledgehammers and redid those bastards? You and me.” He made this long sweeping motion over his head like he was swinging a hammer. “Bang! Jake, you remember? Sure you do. I know what you remember.” He squinted his eyes at me. “And whudda the stairs do? Make advantage of the dark and try to trip me up. Schmuck bastard ingrates.” He got his balance on a chair and tried to look at our faces. “These are the jokes people. What's the matter with yous? Did somebody die?”

“Night's young,” I said.

Mom said, “Jake, don't.”

“Plan on killing someone, Jake?”

I didn't respond.

“Didn't think so. Hey, how come no one left a light on for me? Huh? What? I have a few drinks—which by the way there's nothing wrong with because I don't have to get up in the
morning now that I got nowhere to run to—and I'm not worthy to have a light left on for? What gives?” He looked my mother in her eyes. “Let's see what you got in there? Judgment. That's right. Look at you looking at the bad man. Am I a bad man?”

“She didn't say anything to you, Dad.”

“Hey. I raised you from a fucking peephole too, so don't wise off to me. I'll rip you off your hinges.”

I got the gist of the metaphor. I said, “I'm not wising—”

“Shut it.”

My mother looked at me like shutting it was the best thing to do. So I did. She said, “I'm going to go to sleep now,” and started to move.

“No, come here, let me look at you.” He hobbled over to her and put a hand on each side of her face.

Mom tried to squirm out of his grip. “Let me go to sleep.”

He stopped her. “Cut it out. I just wanna look at you.”

“Dad, let her go.”

“Shut up for a second, Jake. I just want to look at her. Look at me.”

Mom kept squirming.

“See that? She can't look at me.” He stumbled back, holding onto her face and the rest of her body followed.

“Stop it,” she said, and grabbed both his wrists.

“Look at me.”

“I want to sleep.”

“No one sleeps till you look at me.”

“Mom.”

“OK, I'm looking at you.” She tilted her head up to his eyes that were a foot higher than hers. “See, I'm looking.”

He looked back, smiled and said, “I am a bad man.” There was silence. “Right?” Mom shook her head. “Yes I am. Come on, say it. Say what I am. Tell me how bad I am.”

“I don't know what you are.”

“Yes you do.” Right then he slid his hands off her face like he was finished with the interrogation. She took one step back from him. He said, “Bad dog,” and shook his head.

He threw one short fast jab right in her breastbone below her throat. It made a thud like someone serving a deflated volleyball. Her ribs caved in around his fist like they were made of rubber. She fell back and tried to grab the kitchen table, but her nails just slid off it and she went right to the linoleum. I shoved Dad in his chest and he backpedaled into the counter, bounced off it, then came at me. This time I pushed him in his face. I accidentally squished my thumb in his eye socket and that's what stopped him. “Fuck it.” He put his hand over his eye and staggered out of the kitchen toward the basement stairs.

From the floor Mom held a forearm above her head and her eyelids blinked a mile a minute because she thought another hit was coming. I knelt down and grabbed her arm to lift her up, but she swatted my hands away. She stayed down, breathing heavy with one hand on her chest where she'd been hit. We both looked down and at the same time noticed her robe had come undone. She pulled it back together.

“Let me help you up.”

“Why didn't you go to sleep?” Like it was my fault.

She crawled on her hands and knees to the sink, then used the counter to pull herself up. She turned the cold water on, collected it in her palms and threw it on her face. She leaned on the edge of the sink with all her weight on her elbows and just hung there for a while, let the water drip off her chin and tried to catch her breath. She walked to the freezer, her posture like a weeping willow tree, and got out some ice, put it in a plastic bag and held it to her chest. When the cold hit her tender ribs she sucked air in fast through clenched teeth.

We heard my dad stumbling down the basement stairs moaning in a language that was slightly left of English.

“You OK, Ma?”

“How do I look, Jake?”

She looked bruised, old, underweight, and done.

Silence would be next. Three or more long days of it as she retreated into her bedroom, not even coming out for meals. My father would sleep on the couch and no one would talk to anyone. You couldn't do a thing about the quiet that followed violence. I left her there in the kitchen so she could get on with it, and crept downstairs, to do what, I wasn't sure.

He sat on his workbench. One dim, bare light bulb dangling on a cord over him, a bottle of scotch in one hand and a hammer in the other. I didn't know what I was dealing with—whether he knew what he was doing or saying or if he was in a black-out or what. And I had no idea why he was holding that hammer, so I laid back a little. “That bottle from your private stock?”

“I got em stashed all over the county.” He held it up and took a sip. “Go head, Jake, read me the riot act.” His words were all glued together.

“I don't know what that is.”

“The speech. The one you give to people when they messed you up. Starts off like, ‘I'm telling you this for your own good.' Or ‘You're a fuck up, here's why you're a fuck up, so from today until always you need to stop fucking up or I'm outta here.' I already know I fucked up, and I already know she's outta here. I'm not stupid on top of everything.”

“You're sloshed. You don't know what you're talking about.”

“You don't know shit about life. Your ass, your brains, and your dick are all pointing in different directions. She don't look at you like she does me. Judges me. Every day. And for what?”

“Why don't you tell me for what?”

“For nothing.”

“No, no. For something. She does it for something. Tell me what for.”

He held up his bottle. “For this. Because I turned out like my father. On a lone continent with his homemade wine. Terrifying, aren't I? You think I'm messed up, you should have seen him. Lucky you didn't. So if you gotta know, that's why she's leavin.” Then he pointed to his leg with the hammer. “And for this. She's runnin. I can feel it. It's easy to …” He coughed, took a huge sip. “It's easy to run from a guy who can't. And I'll fuckin kill the guy who comes near her when she does. I show you what.” He put down his hammer and pulled out a box.

“Inside this box, booby boy, is a magic rabbit.” He opened it and took it out. “Browning's best. A magic wand that's got a permit to let me legally kill the guy who goes near her when she leaves.” It was a small gun, whose handle got a little lost in his hand, but as he held it I could almost feel the weight of the metal that looked like a tarnished green under the bad light. “Fuck do I care though. Go ahead!” he yelled to the upstairs. “Leave!” He took another epic sip. “You know, the first time I saw your mother feeding you, you know … from herself, I thought, aah, there might be a God. Now …? Huh. Why do I always feel like I'm about to fall off a roof if there's a God? Ah, fuck this shit.” Then the tears came. He curled into himself like a burning spider. I understood that the car wreck of this guy's life started way before he found a wife and kids. And whatever caused the accident was still riding his back.

I said, “That is one sob fucking story.” It came out so easily. “You know what a sob story is, right? Starts out like, ‘Why does everything bad happen to me?' and ends with, ‘No one loves me.' The beginning is bullshit for sure. But I gotta give it to you—the ending might be true.”

He wiped his nose with his wrist. “What's true is you don't have no guts to come over here and say what you just said.”

I guess he was right, because I stayed put.

“OK, I'll put this back. See? Gun's away now. Back in its box. Now come over here.”

“I'm right here.”

“So say it.”

I paused.

“Say what?”

“Say who no one loves.”

I paused again.

“Come on. Who's the guy who no one loves.” He laughed at me. “That's what I thought. No guts.” He stepped over to me and poked me hard in my stomach. “Empty.”

“You,” I said. “No one loves you.”

“There we go, now you're showing some guts. Impressive. Fucked
up
. But impressive.” He picked up that hammer again and lifted it over his head like he was trying to break concrete and swung it down aiming for my head. My hands shot up and I caught the wooden part of it on my forearm and knocked it away. I managed to get a hand on each of his temples and yank him down to the floor. His knees and elbows slapped the concrete. I held onto his head and pushed his face into the floor with all my weight until he stopped struggling. “Ouch, you Mary dyke. You fuckin hurt me.”

He breathed in hard and let out a big “Ouch” on his exhalation. He did this over and over—deep breath in, let out an “Ouch”. Deep breath in, “Ouch.” Eventually the ouches turned into grunts and the grunts turned into sloppy exhalations. Finally, he was out cold.

I let go of his head and stood up.

“Hey.”

He didn't move so I said,
Hey
, louder. Nothing. I gave him a little kick in his back. His body didn't flinch or anything. All I saw lying there on the basement floor was a drunk who forgot to say when. And I had put him there. I had beaten him and successfully taken “father” out of the equation.

But why—here's the tricky part—why was there no satisfaction
in that? Why didn't that make up for him and Danielle in the bathroom on my twelfth birthday? And God knows how many other nights. And why did it take me this long to get him ass-flat on a cold floor? Instead of kicking him again I picked up the hammer. I tried to hit him hard, but it was more like a tap to the ribs. He didn't let out so much as a grunt.

I hit him in the same spot harder.

He wasn't moving for nothing.

Then I whispered, “You son of a bitch,” swung the hammer over my head and came down as hard as I could right above his knee on his already messed-up leg. It sounded like pounding meat.

And still … Goddamn it—still … Not even the next morning when we all woke up to him yelling for help from the basement floor. Not even when I saw him on the same floor, his pants wet with scotch and piss, cursing his goddamn leg, and saying he fell over because of it. Not even when we called an ambulance and the hospital said the ligaments were never going to heal for him to walk right. Not even when he came home with another brace and a cane. And not even when my mom refused to come out of her room and talk to him. Still—I felt no satisfaction.

After I hit his leg I hung the hammer back up in its place.

Walking upstairs I tried to step on the parts that don't creak. I passed the crack of light coming out from under my mother's bedroom door, went to my room, lay on my bed and played over and over the hollow thud his fist made on my mother's chest.

I thought he might have been right, maybe I didn't have too much guts. I mean, how could you hit an already annihilated guy in his most damaged part and feel like you did something ballsy?

A dim orange from the streetlights sliced through my aluminum blinds. All I could hear was air coming in and out of my nose. I tried for a long while to breathe the silence deep inside me but my breaths wouldn't go down.