Dead Reckoning and Other Stories

by Dino Parenti

  ***

  Haven’t mentioned yet the huge, upturned mole cricket kicking at the frothy shoals of the discharge where I’d considered plunging my hands just a moment before.

  It’s a gargantuan son-of-a-bitch—at least three inches long—and ugly in ways that almost cycle back to beauty. Each kick at the air to twist itself towards dry asphalt is instantly undone by the current catching on the back of its spade-shaped head.

  This grotesque little metronome fascinates me though, and I can’t decide whether to turn it over with the tip of my boot, or pulverize it with the heel. It has such a short life as it is, and something that transient should be more valuable to those with vastly greater longevities, and who’ve yet to accomplish a goddamn thing with it.

  The term for that star pattern continues to elude me, the reminder bouncing back in the swirling black water from Lee’s sign in a million sultry eye flutters.

  ***

  Wasn’t till I was out again following a stretch, struggling with the baby-steps of deferred fatherhood, that Jenna confessed that the boy might not be mine.

  The day of his third birthday party, as I helped him fix a church we cobbled out of Legos he’d accidentally elbowed the steeple from, she kept corner-eyeing us with the contained agitation of someone braving a water moccasin swimming figure-eights between her calves.

  Only after the boy started clapping and shouting tower, tower! at our finished masterpiece did I realize I was echoing the same look her way—so much so that I didn’t even see it when the boy karate-chopped the top off the steeple again, only deliberately this time. Thought of his hands undoing all our work then, so like his mother’s in their angularity and reediness—the antithesis of my sausage-like mittens—and recalled reading someplace that handed-down physical traits didn’t always show externally. That the vast majority of the area of the human body was internal, and that though your offspring’s face may not resemble yours, their hearts, or their spleens, or a particular curvature of femur or ear canal may be a perfect, indistinguishable copy.

  When the spire tumbled by my feet, it was only the tin cans of mine and Jenna’s eyes whirring static across a concave of make-believe twine that kept me from reaching back to grab him by the arm, shirt, throat—whatever my hands could wrap a fist around. That was the moment when I started to worry that the boy may possess some of my non-physical traits to a tee.

  Later that night, as we cleaned up streamers and paper-plates smeared with green G.I. Joe frosting, Jenna paused mid-sweep to stare out the window for a while at a migration of dandelion spores the moon lit up like pearls.

  “Had a lapse a couple of months before you went away,” she said, nibbling the inside of her bottom lip bloody. “But I didn’t say anything ‘cause Dale has your cheek bones and your strut pretty damn close. I just loathe the thought of . . . secrets between people trying to care for one another.”

  Can’t say I was surprised by her overstep. We were never fully invested in cohabitation terms. Still, I simmered over the possibility that not an hour earlier I’d helped some other man’s issue blow out his candles. I’d only been out a month.

  That night in bed, when I asked who her lapse had been with, she shook her head and said that there was no point in knowing that. I reached up to finger the moon between her breasts, tempted to ask if he too had poured his pained contortions into its mercury half-face, but my wiser demons shouted down the schemers. Still, it shocked me how easily I’d yielded to her. Suppose most men feel deserved of wealth and power, but rarely of love, and maybe the effort of reconciling this was enough to smother all other priorities.

  Ultimately we agreed to continue raising the boy as if he was fully ours, but in the places where my deeper, more ancestral goliaths lurked, this would always trouble me.

  ***

  Nudging the mole cricket with the tip of my boot, it kicks in mad attempts to latch one of its hind legs to my foot while the other anchors itself into the lip where the swale meets the asphalt. All the while the flotsam wakes across the Triceratops-like plating of its neck, threatening to draw it in for good.

  My hands feel like a new pair is fighting to birth out of the first, and I wonder how meeting new people will be for me after this. When I shake hands I naturally look at said hands—watch for that breach of tendon through the skin that tells me how sincere, nervous, or self-assured they may or may not be. I never look at the eyes. The espoused windows to the soul. Maybe it’s a prison reflex. Direct eye-contact is an open invitation to scrap. Or maybe it’s a flaw of mine—seeing eyes as mirrors instead of windows. Or maybe I’ve just seen the true shade of too many souls to think differently.

  ***

  Didn’t meet Lee for years, and when I did, it was purely by happenstance.

  The boy was four, and we were at the A&P for toiletries and such. I’d just been let out a few weeks prior after a six-month bit for punching through the storefront of the local union delegate who was on the take and screwing us on overtime wages. Prick would off himself a month later, and from all accounts, the funeral had been a rollicking good time.

  Was picking out a toothbrush and stealing glances at the boy’s evolving features when I heard his name called—a voice that pulled us to the end of the aisle where Lee stood, a roll of paper towels jammed under the crook of an arm cabled in sinew. The rest of him was just as chiseled and impressively solid, culminating in a series of welted scars that crisscrossed his bald head in dried-riverbed fingers.

  His smile was a steel wedge hammered into the heart of a severed tree trunk.

  The boy considered his grandfather through guarded eyes, and for a while this is how they stood, mirroring the other’s cant, Lee smiling a mash of pride and inquiry before finally advancing towards us.

  When he got to where he was parallel with the boy, he paused to run a rough-hewn hand atop his head.

  “Hello, Dale,” he said. “Be sure to tell your mama I said hello, and that I hope she’s well.”

  He kept dripping his hammerhead’s smile, and the boy kept staring mutely back, even as Lee pulled something from his shirt pocket and placed it into the boy’s palm.

  An orange starfish, about the size of a poker chip.

  When Lee volleyed his grey eyes with mine, I glimpsed for just an instant the ruin of Jenna’s course, preserved for some cagy posterity within the cosmic whirl of his pupils where Heartbreak Ridge and Inchon still raged for him, likely for all time.

  Without a doubt, he surely figured my own experiences in Quang Tri and Xuan Loc were walks in the park by comparison.

  What he said next he muttered through a smirk, and only its obscurity kept my fists wedded to my thighs. He acknowledged my restraint though, the confirmation made evident in his languid head-to-toe sizing up of me before ambling off to the register.

  “Ah, the surrogate . . . ”

  ***

  Jenna’s final meal before leaving for the institution was a soufflé.

  Normally I’d make them for her every Thursday because she didn’t work on Fridays and could sleep in—the one day she didn’t have to worry about feeling bloated while on her feet for ten hours a shift at the hospice helping the dying forget the unavoidable for at least a few moments a day. But this had been a Monday, and one of the old-timer’s tortoises had died, and because he had no family, all of his love got poured into his terrarium.

  The old man being too broken to even look into the tank, Jenna assumed the task of burying it for him. Because that’s what she did. It’s what she’d done it for all the boy’s hamsters and goldfish. Even done it for all the flowers in the house.

  When I’d suggested keeping the shell as a paper-weight because it evoked the prehistoric, her eyes flashed solar-bright.

  “Nothing dead will be hoarded,” she said. “It gets buried and stays that way.”

  Funny thing with Jenna was, that while disagreement was always loud and clear, our proclamations of love were roundabout affairs. Best we ever managed was to ech
o that we were each the finest thing that ever happened to the other, though damn if I recall which of us said it first. Often I’d wonder if our words really mattered. We did better without them. Her watching me make soufflés was a greater assurance than any vow stitched by man.

  The boy would usually be asleep by then, so it would just be the two of us in the kitchen without filter. The sight of me undertaking something delicate that also carried such a high rate of failure was the only thing besides the boy that put the sun in the woman’s eyes. She even snapped a few clandestine Polaroids of me before I chased her out of the kitchen and into the bedroom where more than just her pictures developed. At my peaks, I would slur phrases of affirming loyalty into her ear, and she’d whisper her hopes for a little girl in turn—someone to change the world in some future tomorrow—and in those moments it was easy to forget that something called aphasia or hypomania flourished behind those sapphire eyes.

  The greenhorn baker in her found my striving for betterment inspiring, and this jump-started her into trying her hand at making cookies. She even bought a cookie-cutter set of astronomical shapes, and on weekends would bake two-dozen moons, comets, rockets, and UFOs for me and the boy to enjoy throughout the week. That there was never a star in the bunch roused no suspicion, as I had assumed someone had pinched the pattern from the box in the store.

  The one time she tried to tackle a soufflé, she mangled it. I came home that day to find her pouting in the kitchen, the cloven skulls of about a dozen cracked eggshells strewn about the counter.

  “How the hell do you make these without going mad?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I guess it’s like lovin’. If the directions are halfway decent, the rest is intuitive.”

  “Then I’ll just watch you be intuitive from now on,” she said, before heading for the shower.

  Fine by me. Didn’t mind one bit engaging in what pretty much amounted in my book to a paint-by-numbers affair so long as she kept gazing at me with those sober blues as if I were father, son, and husband, all rolled into the same husk.

  The Wednesday before they came to take her away, I cracked an egg to start a new soufflé, but nothing spilled out. When I split the shell further, it revealed a partly developed embryo. It had a way to go yet, but already there were tiny, budding feet, feathers, and a beak. The nascent slit of an eye.

  Jenna was stuck at work, but the boy had been up late and was perched up at the island counter watching me cook. We stared at the tiny fetus cupped in my hand, and gradually a cold, complex inquiry started migrating from his leaden eyes into my dark browns. His regard—so mature in its layering—unnerved me to the point that I didn’t even remember stuffing the chick down the drain and flipping on the disposal. The jet-plane roar of it sure augured at my ears though. Could feel the crunch in my teeth, and without warning my gorge began scuttling up my throat before managing to beat it back down.

  “Was it ever going to grow up?” the boy asked, only this time with a jump in pitch instead of his usually relaxed scientist’s manner, and I realized then that his unsettling look was an expression of bracing not unlike to an approaching punch. Only it wasn’t a fist he seemed to dread, but the vagaries and misdirection of words.

  Took me a moment before I could gather myself enough to respond.

  “With enough warmth and time, more than likely.”

  By the time Jenna came home, the blades were cutting at nothing but air. When she asked what it had been, I replied that the water wouldn’t drain. She eyed me long and from all kinds of corners, as if to verify whether or not I was the ghost from a long past she just recognized before reaching up to dab at the flowering scar above her left eye.

  In averting my gaze from her mark, it fell upon the boy’s, who promptly offered a single abdicating nod, spindly fingers braided at his navel.

  When the turtle’s shell turned up a week later as we tilled the soil in the flower beds, he extended the same silent reassurance at me, but by then she had already gone away.

  ***

  Another cold-green shoot of meteorite scribes the ink above my head before decaying.

  They’ve been zipping by at a good clip for the last ten minutes—about one every thirty-seconds—and I think of tracers zipping against tree lines.

  The voices oohing and ahing through the trees at the spectacle sound more primate than human.

  A coughing fit hits me, and from the well of my throat rumbles up the detritus from my earlier engagement. I lean over the cricket and hack out a thick dollop of bloody mucous, but it misses wide, catching the corner edge of the curb where it eventually slithers into the soapy cataract.

  The stars from Lee’s sign struggle to twinkle through the roil—that obscenely bright sign that keeps my shadow manacled to my leg like a dead chain-gang partner I’m sentenced to drag around for eternity.

  From the pictures Jenna had shown me in books, I knew that Lee’s star pattern was trying to mimic the shape of the constellation Leo. Stars hundreds of light years away and apart from each other, that when strung together by crude human hands took the shape of a warped coat hanger. Jenna would obsess on those expanses, and often whispered about them in bed to me when I couldn’t sleep.

  “Many of those stars are really faraway suns that are long dead. All those boiling cauldrons of elements, and the only thing left of them is their light. Their ancient death rattle. Distance can falsely impart proximity. From far enough out, Sequoias standing a football field apart will appear to belong to the same grove of saplings . . . ”

  ***

  Took the boy to watch the meteors fall. The Leonids. Jenna was coming home in a week, and she asked over the phone if I would take him so he wouldn’t miss it.

  It was unseasonably hot for November, and the cicada droned their elegy for the summer until it enveloped me so thoroughly that after a while they merged into the perpetual seashell echo squatting between my ears. A few dozen people had gathered at the upper holler by Highway 64, some sitting on blankets, some getting their bake on in the beds of trucks. I even ran into our neighbors from down the street, this rangy, lapsed Pentecostal-preacher with an atoll of healed snake-bites spiraling up his right forearm, and his blind wife, neither of whose names I could never manage to hold onto. She smiled at my approach, no doubt recognizing my bull-in-a-china-shop airs while he did his best to play amiable despite chronically pursed lips that reeked of so much surplus self-righteousness belched into the ether.

  The boy and I staked out a spot in the middle of a wooden bridge near the same area where I’d met his mother eight years and four stints earlier. Across the way, opposite the highway, rippled the piss-amber lights of Lee’s bar, and it took the boy asking me what was wrong for me to realize my nostrils had been flaring.

  The celestial show soon commenced with a pair of yellow-green filaments stippling overhead from the north, skipping across the atmosphere like the brightest scaled coins. Our legs stirred the air over the dark pond, and as if pardoned from gravity, we’d often look down to watch the falling refuse of a shedding comet in the glassine water, the illusion dampened now and again by guppies dimpling the surface for mosquitos.

  “Better than through an attic telescope, huh?” I said.

  My hand cupped his shoulder, and when he shrugged to my comment the shudder of his nerves was the physical embodiment of the wistful looks his mother would sometimes cast helter-skelter into the horizon.

  “Mama wouldn’t let me up there,” he said, his voice a meek, matter-of-fact trill. “I could see the telescope from the car every time, big and white, up high in the attic window when we would visit. But Mama said I wasn’t ever to go up there, especially with Grandpa. She said it was a dangerous place. The floors were soft, and we could fall through.”

  Meteorites soon began tearing up the sky in an astral firefight. As the crowd whooped and cheered ever louder with each streak, I felt myself plunging into a muddle that soon spun as a singularity in the pit of my stomach. The harder I pond
ered the disintegration above, the less I could shed the notion that this was the same overture that played out in the lime-sized brains of sauropods plodding across the equatorial bracken of a fragmenting super-continent, moments before the sky exploded and atomized their hides.

  Each time I looked towards the bar, I sensed the boy’s attention drifting off along the same humming tether, and the pangs in my stomach would worsen.

  Finally I grabbed him by the hand and wove us through the crowd until we found our neighbors. He was describing into her ear the spectacle above, and she nodded more from courtesy than gratitude, as if she’d witnessed the tears of stars a thousand times before in a different lifetime.

  When I told the boy to stay with them, he protested. He laid that nonplussed look on me again—that lie-anticipating gaze. Because he knew. At least he sensed something of my intentions in his gut, for his deferential nod was a pair of hands grabbing my collar, reminding me that I was a parent, and the rush of that pride was only matched by the fear that closed in on it from all sides.

  After kissing the top of his head, I told him for the first time eye-to-eye that I loved him before setting off across the field towards the beacon.

  Inside, and Lee’s place was a scattering of solitary regulars eye-fucking invisible partners.

  Into this hot, damp stuffiness I stepped, guzzling back a mouthful of sloppy-second smoke and dirty-dishwater stink that made me feel oddly more honed. Sea shells had been embedded into the surface of the concrete floor, stamped to mimic rock, while starfish of all colors and sizes abscessed from the stony face of the bar.

  Behind it idled Lee, bearing already trained at the door, palms on the counter, deltoids high by his ears where a fresh cigarette was nestled like a pen.

  Thought of all the other babies he’d fathered—half-sibling’s Jenna was content never meeting—and wondered if one or more of the ladies present had carried his spill. Their glares in turn poked back their own sharp conjectures at me, their orbs and bar lights pinging off the bottles behind Lee in a grandstand of quasars.