by Dino Parenti
As our eyes antlered across the room, I felt my smile twist to ape his, and only then did I truly see the familial resemblance between him and the boy—so much greater than between me and Jenna.
My insides thawed and stabilized at last, I hooked my thumbs into my belt-loops and gave him the bottom of my chin. The whole way over I told myself I was only going to talk to him—to ask him to leave them be—but some conversations are best held without words.
Before coming around from behind the bar to meet me, the sprightly, eager warrior actually slipped the cigarette from his ear and into his mouth.
***
Asterism. The patterns that stars make as we see them from the Earth. It comes to me at long last, just as a lone police siren crowns through from no particular direction.
***
When we’d gotten home from the store and I mentioned to Jenna that we’d run into Lee at the store—that he’d given the boy a starfish—she dropped to her knees and mimed a gruesome, silent scream to the ceiling.
She’d been in the kitchen baking, and her sudden, silent avalanching of tears cut fresh canyons through the strata of flour on her smock, and the ensuing shrieks pierced through the walls.
“Not him! Not him! Not him!”
The final him transmuted into a low bestial moan, the expulsion forcing her body forward onto her forearms in a lampoon of prayer. Her moon pinged on the tile a moment before she ground her forehead pestle-to-mortar across the grout, her whimpering mounting steadily until her voice could no longer corral it, whereupon she began bashing her head repeatedly into the terra cotta tile.
My gravity regained, I pounced on her and rolled her off the floor into an embrace against the wall. Blood from her yawning head gash wept onto my shoulder. I struggled to grasp her wrists as they flailed for the boy, crying out, imploring him in a desperate breaking-voice whimper: “Never go in the attic, baby! Never go in the attic, baby! Never go . . . ”
When I sought out the boy I found him huddled on the seventh step of the stairs, staring through the balusters at the countertop where Jenna had been making sugar cookies. The dough, as always, had been cut into all manner of cosmic shapes, and for the first time I sensed the lurking reason for why the star pattern was never used.
***
Peering out from the police car, past Lee’s bar and the blanket covering his body on the gurney, all I can wonder is if the mole cricket will right itself or not.
Right up to when the cops hauled me off the curbside, I kept tapping my toe next to it, the decision fighting me to the very end. But there’d been enough cause-and-effect for one night. Enough reparation.
They did me the favor of lighting Lee’s appropriated cigarette at least, genuinely shaken by the sight of what remained of my hands—certainly in conjunction with what they’d seen of Lee’s face inside the bar. Because I kept punching, long after the regulars had skulked out, and long after I’d hit bone, and long after he stopped flailing and I’d stopped feeling anything at all, including my sated fury. Punching and punching until my peeled, open knuckles were grazing off slimy meat and splintering into the oyster shells cured into the concrete floor, and long after the crush of bone—a sound like loud, wet kisses I kept yearning for over and over.
Glancing up at the sky, my shattered, handcuffed hands thrumming hot, I behold the last falling star and make a wish. A hope really, that balance need not be just an aspiration, and that acceptance is the true endgame of it all. Read once where a scientist claimed that every life is an act of defiance against the laws of probability, and that love was its ultimate audacity. The way I see it, I’ve paid handsomely enough for the love I’ve taken in this world. For this I seek no absolution, nor offer apology.
***
Three years down, and a few yet to go.
All that is mine is perched on the sill of my little cell porthole and along the bolted sliver of poly allotted for books and postcards. Tokens the boy wrapped diligently beforehand in gunny and twine on all those hazy Sunday visits before his schooling ensued in Junes and Januaries. His plastic and rubber testaments to all the things he loves and reveres and hopes, and even those things he fears though he doesn’t know yet why, like the lonely soldiers, and the lonelier superheroes, and the ill-fated T-Rex’s and saber-tooth tigers that sometimes, when the sun runs ornery and wallops a hole in the clouds, visit as life-sized fossils poured through the tiny window upon my concrete world. Tributes to Plato’s allegory. But that penance is mine, and not the boy’s, and not his mother’s—that pretty redhead who took me in when I wouldn’t take myself, and who asked me one day if I would bring steaming and crying into the world this infant she knew haled not from my faulty matter. And yet I played the part because she looked at me like none other had or will again. Like I was some phoenix spun from the elements to someday bear once more upon my shoulders the boy that isn’t mine, but the man’s whose glow I smothered during a mutually necessary fulmination. Because the father can’t play the grandfather, any more than two bodies can fill the same space in time. Any more than metal pincers can replace flesh-and-bone hands. Because only one can claim the gravity that anchors Dale to this diorama, at least until it’s refashioned by the next runaway bug, global scuffle, or burning pebble from the skies.
VISITATION RIGHTS
ON THE WEEKENDS I was allowed to be with him after returning from the war, Daddy and I would shoot guns.
He’d pick me up from Mom’s early Saturday while she slept in, always waiting in his truck down the street so he could stare down the sun through the windshield cracks while gnashing a spicebush twig to smithereens. We’d slurp scalding coffee and chomp on biscuits he kept warm under his cleaner engine rags the color of chassis rust, then we’d drive for an hour to all the repo-houses near the levies where we’d bleed the day unloading buckshot and thirty-ought slugs into boarded-up domiciles. The reports fractured the derelict silence, flushing out grackles and terns in griping eddies, and while my ears screamed at our surge, the wail of shattering plywood and glass never failed to drive air into Daddy’s shoulders while seeping it from the veins that had come to grip his neck.
Daddy never spoke while there were still bullets to spend. We hardly said but a few words on Saturdays. That’s what Sundays were for. I guess he still smarted over losing the house, but at night when he whistled at the moon and pulled softly from a battered flask, I’d see the glint in his eyes splinter into a dozen twinkles, each absconding with another warm hue from the spectrum.
We’d end our Saturdays by shooting up the old Victorian by the place where the ladies danced wearing little more than what looked to me like party favors. Afterwards, our loads spent and the air rank with hot tin and cordite, Daddy would stare at the juke-joint the way our old collie, Toro, did through the window as the old man drove off for work. Sometimes he’d chuckle Mom’s name under his breath. Mostly, he’d just whistle The Yellow Rose of Texas while neon danced and skipped across islets of glass.
TWO BOYS IN A DINER
UNCLE HARRY BOUGHT it last summer. An overdue coronary while sunning his Townie hide in the middle of the worst Miami heatwave in memory. Two months later, I was swizzling bad coffee in the Adirondacks, staring at a slow-mo confetti of snow through a grimy diner window, wondering when the last time was I’d seen the white stuff fall so pure and plump.
Pop was flirting with the end himself someplace in New Jersey, but he wasn’t done course-correcting the fortunes of people he hated and loved, and in any case it was Uncle Harry who’d been weighing on my mind of late. He was Pop’s younger brother by six years, and though he would end up having three more brothers, Harry was always his favorite. It wasn’t even close, and it only convinced me further that whoever laid claim to the notion that there was no favoritism when it came to blood was either a straight-up liar, or a terminal peacenik, and the world already had too many of both.
I was mostly thinking of Uncle Harry ‘cause the old man who sat at the corner booth when Jimmy and
I first walked in was a dead ringer, down to the Karl Malden honker and Henry Fonda baby-blues. And like Uncle Harry, that coot’s mug lacked all lines. A chubby newborn’s face. As if no beef, worry, or humor ever made it to the surface, but instead white-watered unseen through his veins.
Uncle Harry’s one expression was a glare so cold it froze the piss in your bladder—the inverse of Pop whose puss was an aerial view of terraced rice-paddies. His was an open floodgate holding nothing back. Except for gratitude. Oh, Pop would bear-hug and hair-muss and kiss you like no one’s business—if he took to you—but lots of luck prying a thank-you or nice-job out of the man.
In that sense, he and Uncle Harry were mirrors of one another. Maybe there was something beautiful in that, but I wasn’t qualified to see it.
Anyway, Uncle Harry and his baby-butt face were gone, and so was his double because he’d vacated the joint early, and the first snow of the season started to fall twenty minutes ago, and that’s where we were: a handful of quiet monkeys gathered in a remote diner wide-eying nature’s wonder the way our harrier forefathers must’ve gawked at comets.
My kid brother, Jimmy, finally strolled out of the can after ten minutes. He said he needed to piss, but it was a ruse. The way a kid would claim he was only trying to cool you off during a swelter after you caught him fishing the tub of ice cream out of the icebox. Jimmy just wanted to change, which he did, looking all spit-shined and polished, even in a parka. He sported a white shirt on underneath—not the plaid number he wore when we walked in. He always carried an extra shirt in the car, and it was always white, and it was only so people would think he was bulletproof to spillage and sweat.
He strutted back to the counter in his best Jack Elam and waited by his stool, hands on hips, a quarter-inch of tomcat tongue poking past his lips.
Jimmy, always giving every new roomful the same showy once-over.
He even did so at Uncle Harry’s wake, putting the stutter in the priest’s paid, prepared lies regarding the deceased’s generous ways.
I wanted to keep staring at the snow—search out some ultimate pattern in its drift that correlated survival to vanity—but we didn’t have all day, so I said a terse, “What’s the word?” before gulping some more coffee.
Jimmy diddled at his chin cleft. I used to tease him that he could stash a gym-bag of swag in there, and the cops would be none-the-wiser.
“I say we take ‘em for all they’re worth,” he said.
Until that moment I always thought that stuff about blood forming psychic links across space—like with twins—was nonsense, but I swear I could’ve felt our father’s neck tendons go piano-wire taut right then.
I said, “Pop would pass his spleen, he heard you say that.”
What started as a sigh ended in a double-barreled nose blast from Jimmy.
“We’d be out in two minutes flat, Vic. How about it? For old time’s sake?”
How Jimmy loved his gems and jewels. He could truly make it in that trade if he ever tripped over some focus. I saluted him with my cup. “Take a load off for a bit, huh? Watch me finish my joe.”
He stopped poking at his chin-hole and asked how long I planned to be. I told him ten minutes. He asked if that was wise, and I told him the diners weren’t going anywhere—that they hadn’t even started their eggs yet, to which he fiddled some with his watch before drilling mother-superior eyes at me.
“I’m timing you,” he said.
“They got any maps here?”
“I haven’t asked.”
I glanced at my watch as if mattered. “We’ll need a map.”
His ass kneaded bacon farts out of the stool vinyl and soon his hands were crumpling invisible sheets of paper on the countertop.
Jimmy, for whom patience was only a virtue for surfers and old women at slot machines.
Thirty seconds into it, and he fired an off-the-cuff wolf-grin at the mousy old biddy a table over whose blue, saucer-big irises had locked on him with a deafening blend of surprise and disapproval. The locket perched on her thick knockers winked like a third eye eager to help cast judgment.
“That’s a nice piece of gold,” Jimmy muttered through a smile.
“Not what we came for.”
Jimmy lip-farted and called me a killjoy.
“They can’t take it to the grave with them, you know.”
Jimmy, always reminding people of something, even if it was nothing.
“Pop would beg to differ,” I said.
“Says you. And you got nine minutes.”
I wondered, did Jimmy know that at eighteen he’d only just begun to shed his juvenile skin? That the theory of manhood was a cakewalk compared to its practice? Fifteen years floated between us, and within that stretch Pop had spit out five others—all draft eligible except for baby Jimmy. A soldier-maker, my old man. And yet only Jimmy and I sparked, split, and ripened in the same womb, and maybe that was enough for me to suffer his random moments of stupidity without losing my cool. Why I made no fuss when he started spinning around on his stool, completing two-and-a-half orbits before tossing back his elbows on the counter to probe the room again.
I’d gotten the full gist of the place ten-seconds in: mountain roadside diner, writ large. A tiny upstate joint that whiffed of fry grease and Ben-Gay from the mostly long-in-the-tooth clientele, the bulk of which had arrived in the charter bus outside. An EST retreat down in Lake Placid, coupled with a seminar on reversing the aging process through meditation and diet, all for the low, low cost of one bible-thick book, plus a year’s supply of miracle vitamin tonic. The brainstorm of some thirty-something latent flower child who’d been to India and back without losing his nose to leprosy.
Jimmy started humming, and humming was his engine gauge tipping into the red and about to peg out. I watched his eyes toggle from face to face, assessing, calculating, fussing, and a moment later, he said, “Would it be too much to ask they appreciate at some point the virtues of self-offing?”
That was a new one.
“A bit extreme huh, Jimbo?” I asked.
“Really?” He frowned at the nearest diner who paid him no mind. “A man should know when his usefulness is at an end. That he’s become just another mooch in the world, ergo, he should do the noble thing and take one for the team, and so forth.”
Listening to Jimmy wax introspective tested the spring in my nerves, but to have called him on it was to deny him his fool’s paradise, and we all had a right to our own version of it.
“You’re proposing Seppuku,” I said. “As a kind of national mandate.”
“What? What’s that? Sounds Hawaiian . . . ”
“It’s Japanese. Loosely translated, it means honorable suicide.”
“Huh. Ain’t that something?”
“Used to be, a dishonored samurai, he would take his own sword and gut himself with it.”
Jimmy scowled at another unmoved diner at the end of the bar who seemed to hide behind the tray of clean root beer float glasses left on the space next to him.
“The Japanese do that?”
“No, Jimbo, not all of them. And not for a long time.”
“And you said I was being extreme.”
“To the Japanese, old age is something to honor. They don’t get bent out of shape about it the way we do here.”
“And this impresses you?”
“What we went to war for.”
He chewed on invisible taffy before batting the air back at me.
“Bull, you don’t know. Seven-and-half-minutes to go, genius. What do you got, bourbon in that cup?”
I wondered, did Jimmy know that we always spoke in similar, trivial bursts with Pop? That our entire conversational life was a long string of wind-swept isles in a sea of dumb silence?
Jimmy had spun himself back to forward, and we both poked some at our respective oatmeals while Don McLean griped on the juke about Jack Flash and dying days—until Jimmy decided to kibosh the peace by letting his spoon clang into his bowl.
&nb
sp; Jimmy, always the first to destroy a perfectly fine tranquility. Silence terrified him the way large crowds did others.
“Is Pop old to you?” he said. Practically whispered it, so I paid extra heed.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“I mean, does he seem . . . to be winding down?”
“Pop? Hell, Jimbo, Pop’s Pop, you know?”
“Yeah, I know. I mean, do you see him for the age he is? Or the way you always saw him growing up? Tough, you know? Indestructible?”
God, I loved the kid, but Jimmy’s non sequiturs were free-floating lodes of peanut butter I was always strip-mining from my upper palate. At such moments I would let my thoughts drift to mayflies and dragonflies—any creature I could think of with a short lifespan.
About a year for chameleons and octopi, if I remembered right.
A drone bee lived about a month, but what a productive month!
“Remember that first stroke,” he went on, “we drove to Syracuse to be with him? Saw him jacked into all those tubes and wires. I swear, he looked the smallest I’d ever . . . That’s the first time I realized how much bigger I was than him. Hell, I’d been bigger since I was fifteen, but . . . you know what I mean?”
I’d noticed that some of Jimmy’s oatmeal had catapulted onto my shirt cuff, and I got to flicking off the morsels as if they were a line of ants.
“Stop putting him in the ground, Jimbo. Wasn’t for the cancer, he’d look a hell of a lot healthier than these coffin-dodgers.”
“Except he ain’t that much younger than most of these coffin-dodgers.”
“Yeah, but you can’t quantify Pop in terms of elapsed time. Tough-ass bastard—ask his competition if they think he’s old.”
Jimmy glazed over all of a sudden, as if he’d just taken some jilted broad’s right hook to the chin.
“Five minutes down, five to go,” he said, jittering back to earth.
“Next gas station, we should stop and get a map.”
“Yeah, a map, sure. Hard to know where to go on a mountain. Up or down.”
