Stay Away

by Ike Hamill

  He heard something knocking around in the kitchen as he rounded the newel post.

  Lily stayed put on the landing of the stairs.

  “Wen, if you need anything, I’ll be right here okay? Just call.”

  He nodded to her and walked towards the moving shadows that were spilling through the kitchen door.

  His brother was at the sink. Jessie turned when Wendell came in.

  “Did you see Dad?” Jessie asked. “He’s in the rec room—go say hi.”

  “You traded for me?” Wendell asked.

  Jessie smiled and nodded. “I traded a fish for you. He didn’t want to give you up, but I drove a hard bargain.”

  “And you traded for Dad too?”

  “A finger for Mom and Dad. One each. Nicky and Eric got the fingers. Did they tell you about that? They got them from a dead guy.”

  Jessie frowned comically and then smiled again.

  “Creepy, right?” Jessie asked.

  “Thank you for trading for me,” Wendell said. “But I came back on my own you know.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Wendell nodded. “I wasn’t done with my journey, but I came back to make sure that everything was still okay. Did you get the parts for your moped?”

  Jessie shook his head. “I mean, yeah, we did, but the moped got ripped off. Some guy stole it from where we hid it. Thanks for the parts though.”

  “Even Steven,” Wendell said.

  “I guess.”

  Wendell looked towards the doorway to the hall and then the laundry room. Beyond that was the rec room. He heard another thump from back there. That’s where his father was.

  “I’ll go see Dad.”

  Jessie nodded. “Mom should be back soon too.” When he said it, he glanced at the door. Jessie had seemed perfectly pleased when he mentioned their father. The look on his face had a shadow to it when he mentioned their mother. Jessie was a stranger. Wendell didn’t yet know if he was the help kind or hurt kind.

  Walking into the hall, he turned on the lights. At the door to the rec room, he reached through and turned on those lights as well. His father froze, standing with a bookcase shelf held over his head for a moment.

  “Oh, thanks, Wen. I didn’t think the lights were working,” his dad said. “I was just moving stuff around. Eric did a good job in here, but it’s not precisely what I had in mind. We’re going to have to do some rework to get it just right.”

  Wendell watched him put the shelf down. He approached Wendell the way he always did—with his shoulders and hips cocked a little to the side. Since he had been small, Wendell had always been intimidated by people, especially men, coming directly towards him with outstretched arms. His father had figured out a way to come close without making Wendell flinch.

  Wendell almost wanted to tell his dad that it wasn’t important anymore. That fearful, timid version of Wendell had died a while ago. Instead, Wendell accepted the quick hug and appraising look his father gave him.

  At the same time, Wendell was studying his father, looking for anything incongruous about him.

  “Where were you, Wen? You were gone for so long. We searched and searched. Everyone was looking for you. Where did you go?”

  “I was trying to fix the fish problem.”

  “There’s a fish problem?” Reynold asked.

  Wendell nodded.

  His dad smiled and chuckled. “Our Wen. You’re always out there trying to find a solution to something aren’t you?”

  Wendell shrugged.

  As far as he could tell his father was perfectly normal. Actually, maybe he was better than normal. He was Saturday-evening normal. On Fridays, his father was always still working on trying to forget the week. By Sunday, he was already talking about all the stuff that the following week would require. But on Saturday evening, his father was always relaxed and easy going. There was never anything to worry about on Saturday evening.

  “You were away too?” Wendell asked

  His father pulled back and let him go. Wendell appreciated that. He didn’t mind being hugged by his father, but he was always glad when the process was over.

  “Yeah, I guess. That’s what Jessie and your sister say. Truth be told, I don’t remember it.”

  His father’s hand rose to scratch the back of his head as he thought.

  “Mom too?”

  “I suppose. Jessie said she’ll be back any minute. That sounds about right. I don’t know where she is, but I know she’ll be excited to get back here and see you again. She was frantic when you were gone. She must have interviewed everyone in the state trying to find anyone with information about where you went.”

  “She didn’t interview me.”

  His father laughed at that. When Jessie made their father laugh, Jessie always beamed. Wendell didn’t like it so much. He was never quite sure what would come after the laugh.

  Wendell glanced around the room. Everything was different. Before he had left, the big room had basically been storage space for all the tools and projects going on. It had been an extended shop. The corners always had cobwebs and the floor always had a light coating of sawdust. Their mom had hated all the sawdust tracked around the house. When there was a project going on upstairs, she always made Eric take things up and down the back staircase so that he wouldn’t trail all kinds of dirt through the laundry room.

  Now, the room had been finished. There were bookshelves on one side and wainscoting up to the windows in the back. At the far end, the raised platform had been turned into a sitting area.

  His father saw him glancing around.

  “You want to help me get things set up?”

  “Sure,” Wendell said. He wasn’t certain what his father had in mind, but he had never really understood the renovations that had always gone on in the house. It always seemed perfectly fine the way it was, but his father had always been intent on changing everything. There was always a room to paint or windows to replace. Sure, the old windows were really drafty compared to the new ones, but the replacements always seemed to be happening in rooms they didn’t even use. What was the point of replacing a window in a room that nobody ever went in? It seemed to Wendell that it would be easier to just board them up.

  “Move these books over there and stack them up. See?”

  His father pointed to stacks that he had already made. They were his mother’s law books—the kind that sat on shelves collecting dust but were never opened. Wendell had tried to read one once. It was full of nonsense—big words that didn’t seem intended to convey any meaning.

  Wendell moved and picked up a single book. It wasn’t that heavy. He could have easily carried more than one, but his father wouldn’t expect him to carry more than one and that would give him more time. His sister had asked him to find out if their father was “really him.” Their father told a lot of stories—most of them over and over. There was one that Wendell knew better than the rest. It was the story that changed depending on what time of day that his father told it.

  “Dad?”

  His father set one of the bookcase shelves down on top of two stacks of books, making a bench.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you tell me what happened with Mr. Watanabe?”

  His father didn’t even glance up at him. “You don’t want to hear about that.”

  “Yeah, Dad. When I was up north I met a man named Whitten. Didn’t you say that’s what he changed his name to?”

  “Back to,” his father said. “But there are tons of people around here named Whitten, son. That doesn’t mean anything on…”

  “But he had slanted eyes. The Mr. Whitten I met had slanted eyes and he…”

  “Wendell,” his father said, shooting him a look to stop him mid-sentence.

  All Wendell had to do was keep quiet—his ploy had worked.

  # # #

  “When I was your age, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor,” his father said.

  His father was eleven at the time and Wendell was almost fourt
een. He didn’t want to interrupt and correct him. His father was leaning against another of the bookcase shelves and was drifting into his storytelling mode. At that point, his father seemed completely normal.

  “Your grandfather got terribly upset because my Uncle Lee was on the USS Utah, stationed in Pearl Harbor. We didn’t get news for weeks that Lee was okay. By then, your grandfather had joined up. He was old, but he had skills. He figured that with his knowhow about boats and engines, they would find a place for him, and he was right. What he didn’t figure on was the Navy’s incompetence. They should have placed your grandfather on one of those war machines that was moving into the Pacific Theater. Instead, they put him in Buffalo, New York. By September of forty-two, he was serving on the USS Sable, which was a training ship for Navy pilots. You might think that he would have been proud to serve a valuable role in the training of our brave pilots. Nope. To the contrary, your grandfather considered himself to be a glorified dishwasher, as he put it, ‘without all the glory that such a job implies.’”

  Wendell watched his father closely. The introduction to the story never really varied. It wasn’t about his father and it consisted of the details of another person’s life. The part that his father had actually witnessed was still to come.

  “When he came back, he was angry. I never really knew what your grandfather thought about other nationalities when I was growing up. Living in Maine, it just didn’t come up very often in the thirties. We all had a live-and-let-live attitude, I’d like to think. Of course that changed for a lot of folks after Pearl Harbor. It seemed like everyone had a friend or relative who was directly involved. Even if they really didn’t have a direct connection, people took deep offense. Of course, all the kids in school were pretty gung ho. We didn’t play Cowboys and Indians anymore, we all wanted to play GIs versus Krauts or Japs. My dad came home from the service and he was angry as hell from that point on. My mother used to have a tea set that her parents had given to her. Dad smashed that thing and said he would never have anything a Jap had touched in our house. I didn’t understand why he was so mad. To me, it was like a game, and I knew that he hadn’t so much as laid eyes on a real Japanese person in his life.”

  Wendell sat down on the makeshift bench that they had created from the stacks of books and the shelf. His father had turned completely inwards to the memory.

  “We had won the war, so I didn’t understand why Dad wasn’t more happy. Before, he had seemed like a normal, content man. After coming back from having won the war, he was mad all the time. I couldn’t make any sense of it, but you know how kids are. I just moved on and accepted the new reality. He wouldn’t even go see a Charlie Chan movie when they reran it at the Colonial. That guy was supposed to be Chinese. They were on our side.”

  After a deep breath, his father continued.

  “Anyway, none of that really mattered to me much until I was failing high school. I wasn’t going to graduate because I couldn’t pass math. That’s when Nathan Fisher told me to go see Mr. Watanabe. He lived in one of those little camps over behind the mill. Nobody could teach me enough math to graduate. I couldn’t even multiply or divide—it just didn’t make any damn sense to me. I was finally desperate enough to knock on his door. I almost left when I saw his face. I don’t know why I didn’t figure that a guy named Watanabe would be Japanese. Dad’s prejudice almost made me walk away. If I had, I never would have graduated.”

  Wendell leaned forward, studying his father’s face.

  “Before he taught me the methods, he showed me why the ideas made sense. He had a way of drawing things so that I could grasp them. It wasn’t about numbers, it was about regular old things that people did every day. You wake up, put on clothes, gather water, and make breakfast. There were numbers beneath all these things, whether we saw them or not. There were numbers in music. Math was a way that all these things could relate to one another and make sense within themselves. Mr. Watanabe opened up the whole world to me. He taught me so much that I went way beyond what I needed to know for school. I even studied after I had already passed my test. Eventually, I wanted to know why his mailbox said Whitten on it. I wanted to know why someone who was such a gifted teacher was cleaning up chicken poop.”

  When his father stopped talking, Wendell prompted him with a single word.

  “Camp.”

  “That’s right,” his father said. “Mr. Watanabe’s father had changed their name to Whitten, and encouraged his sons to serve in the military. But even after all that, they had been herded up and tucked away in camps in California during the war. Afterwards, Mr. Watanabe had moved to Maine to get a fresh start. Then, either because of pride or defiance, he had changed his name back to Watanabe. I guess it didn’t matter. He couldn’t change his skin, or hair, or eyes. People were going to judge him either way. People like my father. When he found out the reason why I had passed high school, I thought he was going to flip.”

  Reynold shook his head at the memory. This was where the story turned. There was the version that Reynold told when he was trying to make peace, and the version that came out when he had a few beers in him.

  Wendell listened as his father recalled the confrontation.

  He had a saying.

  “History is a set of lies that people agree on,” Reynold would say. That was usually followed up with, “And those lies depend on what we’re currently ashamed of.”

  That was how the story of Mr. Watanabe always came out. By the end, Wendell could always tell what his father was ashamed of that day.

  After his dad finished, they continued to stack books up and move the shelves to create benches.

  “Now,” his father said, “I think we need something for up front, you know?”

  He gestured towards the raised stage at the end of the room. Eric had turned it into a little sitting area, but Reynold and Wendell had moved the couches to the other side, to be parallel with the benches.

  “It should be a vertical feature to grab the eye and send it upwards. Maybe a podium or something,” Reynold said, tapping his chin with his finger. “Do we have something around here like that?”

  “Grandfather clock?” Wendell suggested.

  “No. That’s not exactly what I’m thinking. Put some thought into it. I’m going to go grab some candles. These lights are too bright. This room needs some more natural light.”

  When his father went through the door, headed to the pantry, Wendell slipped up the back stairs. He walked down the very edge up the upstairs hallway so his weight wouldn’t make the floor squeak. On the left, he passed by what used to be Eric’s room and then became his sister’s. Now that Lily was back, it looked like she had taken up the room again. It didn’t look right though. Everything was clean and tidy in there. His sister’s room had always been a pigsty.

  Wendell passed the room on his right that Eric had been fixing up. It was all done now. The windows were replaced, the closet door was new, and even the trim had been changed over. Wendell kept going and let himself through the door to the upstairs front hall. At the far end, he saw the backs of Eric and Nicky. They were waiting at the top of the stairs for him to come back.

  “Hey,” he whispered.

  They jumped, startled, and turned to see him. Nicky put her hand on her chest in surprise. With a wave, they called Lily back to the top of the stairs. Wendell looked through the doorway to his brother’s room. There was some laundry here and there, especially the shirts and pants draped over the back of his chair, but it was pretty clean as well. It seemed like the house had achieved some sort of order while Wendell was away.

  They all piled back into Wendell’s room and he shut the door behind them, pressing his back against it. His sister stared at him, unblinking, and waited for his assessment.

  “He didn’t say that he fought Grandpa,” Wendell said.

  ERIC

  WENDELL JUST STOOD THERE, not explaining what he meant.

  “What does that mean?” Lily asked.

  She l
ooked like she wanted to reach forward and grab Wendell. Eric understood the sentiment. When they needed Wendell the most, of course he would drop into one of his uncommunicative spells.

  “I asked Dad to tell me the story about Mr. Watanabe. He said that Grandpa went and confronted him, but he didn’t tell me that he fought Grandpa. It was like when I was a little kid,” Wendell said.

  “Jesus, Wendell, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Could you start making sense please?”

  Eric put up his hand, like he was back in class and Lily was the teacher. She rolled her eyes at her brother and then turned to Eric with a sigh.

  “Yes?”

  “I think I know what he means. Your father has two versions of that story—one he only tells when he’s really being honest.”

  “Or drinking,” Wendell said.

  Eric nodded.

  “In the more tame version, his father busted down the door at Mr. Watanabe’s house and accused him of trying to brainwash your dad. Mr. Watanabe was some kind of kung fu master, but he didn’t fight back. Your dad watched it all happen and hated his father for judging Mr. Watanabe on his appearance instead of who he was.”

  “How noble,” Lily said, frowning.

  “But after I had been here a while, your father told me the other version. In that one, he stood up to his dad. He doesn’t like to tell that one because it… I don’t know, it’s like he’s betraying his father for a stranger or something. It was his decision to put ethics above family.”

  Wendell jumped in, saying, “You have to be old enough and one of us to hear the real version. Even Mom gets the one where he doesn’t fight.”

  “Oh?” Eric asked. “I didn’t realize.”

  “I’ve only heard the one where he beats the snot out of Grandpa,” Lily said, but she turned her gaze up to the ceiling like there was another memory somewhere out there.

  “I’ve never heard either version,” Nicky said. “But I barely know your dad. What does this prove?”

  “That there’s something wrong with him,” Wendell said.

  Eric nodded.

  “Wen, I was asking you to, like, I don’t know, look at his body language or his eyes or whatever,” Lily said. “Did he seem like Dad? That’s what I’m asking.”