Dead Reckoning and Other Stories

by Dino Parenti

With a fresh dip of the sponge and some coaxing from my hands—hands I marveled were neither shaking or choking my thumbs inside tight fists—I was at last allowed access to the thickened webbing between her toes. It was an area I’d become the most intimate with over the later years, as her to mine. I knew the mole between her right middle toes, as she knew the windings of the thickets around my groin, as we each knew every rise and depression along the crooks of both our arms.

  In the end, as I pat-dried her feet, I understood all too well the tension in her eyes and the quiver of her cheeks. Recovery periods became the excuse to whip ourselves into another blinded race of rekindled love, only we’d never shoot the busted nag when it failed, but mounted it again with the hope it would gallop just a bit further down the track.

  “How long till you split like Max?”

  It came out of her at the tail end of a sigh, as if dismissing an annoying child. A similar delivery resulted in our first spat those many years back, yielding a swollen cheek for her and bruised ribs for me. She’d thrown first—with a cast-iron skillet—and I replied without hesitation, and we learned that day that not only had we stumbled across another vice, but that neither of us was going anywhere.

  “There’s more,” I said before taking back the washbasin and jogging to the door at the opposite end of the room. I grabbed the handle and fought to chokehold the smile trying to worm through. “Are you ready?”

  Despite her hands trying to twist off the armrests, she nodded.

  I pulled the door into myself and six wrinkled, squealing brindle-mix puppies bounded out at once, slipping on the linoleum and tripping over their own ears and each other.

  As soon as one spotted Annie, they all darted in unison straight for her, bunching at her ankles in a brown snowbank.

  Annie could only gawk at first, fingers laced tight against her chest. But the puppies worked their magic and gradually she loosened up, dabbing tentative hands on their heads before rubbing a belly or two, then picking one up onto her lap where it stretched to lick away the tears and giggles she wasn’t tough enough to douse.

  Seven years. The average age “experts” agreed for a child to have their first dog.

  Annie didn’t know dogs. Had rarely been around them.

  Leaving her to delight in private, I got busy setting up a foldaway table by the windows. Over it I draped a paper tablecloth of cornucopia and fall leaves, then began spreading out our meal: tuna sandwiches, macaroni salad, and Pringles.

  Twinkies for dessert. Her favorite.

  In the center I placed a mason jar of nasturtium I’d pinched that morning from the roundabout planter at the ER drop-off.

  Against it, I leaned a red envelope.

  Once done, I hung back to watch her some more. Watched the pups pry back old, creaky defenses I could never budge, revealing the bright, cocksure sponsor I’d fallen for at AA so many summers back. The bug gnawing her to the marrow was still years away then, a revelation she’d ultimately thumb her nose at with wicked zeal. She’d been a teacher with a family once-upon-a-time back east. Maine or Vermont, I can never remember. Told me early in our time through a bored aside that she’d faked her death to escape her old family, and I’m not sure to this day that I don’t believe her. Point being, nothing scared her. No sight of blood. No snarl or fist.

  Nothing, except for dying in a hospital, adrift in administrative coldness and the burn of ammonia.

  She wanted to go surrounded by green. By moss and trees.

  “Because they’re alive,” she would say. “And something with halos for hearts marking the course of centuries must surely have other ways of bearing witness.”

  Seven years. Depending on current CD4 count and viral load, the average time between HIV infection and full-blown AIDS.

  Annie beat that by half. Her ultimate gut-punch to me. We’d shared just about every damn needle, and I never caught so much as a cough.

  I lit a potpourri candle that recalled the burnt-marshmallow stench of crack. Charred smells just seemed to rule our anniversaries the way silence did funerals, and through dueling puppy tongues Annie arched her brow as if in rebuke for unleashing yet another fire-related pong into our lives. I’d only done it out of a want for normalcy. Because it’s what I remembered people with dining tables, and drape valences, and mortgages did. Because like Annie, I had a family once, too. A wife and boy. Because I assumed that in every person there resided a steady, tappable romanticism towards domesticity, never mind our own failed stabs at it.

  Seven years. The average stretch of a marriage before dissolution.

  We even tried the pregnancy thing once, until the night in the shelter nine weeks in when she woke me up to point out the snub jotted on the sheets in thick, clotted blood. In a sea of snoring cots and spicy wafts, we squinted at each other through the fog of our breaths, knowing without words or doctors that that had been our one chance. When she went to the bathroom to clean up, I rummaged through the trash and found an empty jar of baby food. After washing out the remnants, I returned to our cot and scooped up with my finger as much of our child as I could, and sealed it in the jar. I’ll never forget how warm it was. Warm like tears.

  Seven months. Earliest fetal viability outside the womb.

  My final objective on last night’s reconnoiter was to scour the shelter for Ketamine. It might smooth over our trip, though I hadn’t spiked anything in over six months—coincidentally, the last time I left her high-and-dry, then for nearly a month before crawling back a groveling, sopping heap of withdrawal and guilt.

  As it turned out, they’d secured all their ampules in the refrigerated safe with a combo lock I couldn’t pick, so I rooted through all the desks for a substitute until I happened upon a stash of powdered Special-K stuffed in the back of a drawer.

  Somebody on staff, fond of tripping afterhours.

  I could’ve then too, believe me. I wanted to. It would’ve been so easy. One hit, and I could’ve been on a Greyhound to TJ faster than my ex and my boy were on a plane to Houston after almost strangling her over money issues and one-too-many. Even now the urge burned hot as ever, and I wondered for how long Annie would sit there playing with those pups until she realized I’d hightailed it again to parts unknown. Would she still be surprised? Would I come back? And would she still be around if I did?

  A couple of days after our failure, as a way to keep something of our attempt at posterity close to our hearts, I had matching charms made. Since I didn’t know a jeweler, I went to Marbles. Marbles was one of my regular dealers for China white and blow, but his big thing was meth. Since Annie and I didn’t smoke, we didn’t touch the shit, but I knew that Marbles could crystalize anything. He had a way of turning out perfectly round doses that fit a pipe like a musket ball, thus his street name.

  Seven years. Average minimum sentence in most states for manufacturing and distributing crystal meth.

  Because I couldn’t afford his good stuff, he agreed to take my paltry wad of bills and recrystallize a bad batch he’d flubbed earlier during a large cook. Shit he said wouldn’t get a baby high. I watched him work, listening to him prattle on about denatured alcohol, and of bypassing the activated charcoal to preserve color.

  Because I wanted to use the blood from our failure. Trap it in a crystal.

  Through the pour hole of his custom molds, he inserted a small, threaded eyebolt after decanting the batch so once it hardened, it yielded a very practical and cheap bail to run a chain through.

  The end result indeed looked like a marble, the rust-red blood caught in a permanent, double-helix swirl within its heart.

  Presenting it to Annie as I put mine on was the only time she ever smiled for something I did with my hands.

  Checking that she was still engaged to my six little yelpers, I slipped through the door and into the adjoining room where the pups’ mother waited. The large bloodhound paced in agitated circles, teats full and pendulous, fattened no doubt by some vagrant boxer or pit bull based on her striped an
d tawny brood. As soon as I approached her she whipped her tail and licked stray slobber from her chops. Without thinking, I knelt before her and cupped her moist muzzle, and soon found my crown unwittingly planting against hers.

  “Think I can do it?” I asked. She tried to lick my words out of the air. “Like when they take your babies? Bounce back fast just so you can repeat the process? What’s the secret? How do you do this over and over without help?”

  The bitch just groaned ambivalence.

  The night following our failure, we buried Annie’s bloody jeans in McArthur Park before cobbling together enough gleaned scripture for a prayer. We settled on Max for a name. Something simple and unisex.

  An equal-opportunity ghostly bludgeon for fault.

  Ten days ago, before she nearly overdosed, when she informed me all-too-casually to only having three months left to live, I prompted her with equal indifference how long till she split like Max before slipping into an alley to cry myself sore. Afterwards, craving a dose of anything to the point of murder, and with only ten bucks in my pocket, I wandered through Skid Row until I spotted a known slinger working the corner of Crocker and 5th. What I had on me couldn’t buy a joint, which he didn’t have anyway, so I all but begged him to sell me a pipe, which he did just to get me off my knees and fumbling for his belt buckle on a busy street corner.

  Behind a nearby dumpster, I ripped off my necklace and rolled in the marble and put a flame to it. Being a novice, I dragged for all I was worth, my nose burning and eyes leaking ammonia until the ball bubbled and smoked. Despite coughing out my lungs, I kept dragging in the white smoke, frantic for communion, my mind working to coalesce shape to the boy or girl whose tiny essence was being channeled through a fifty-cent Bic lighter, until suddenly the crystal burst in a quick flame, shattering the bulb and almost blowing back shards into my eyes.

  Seven minutes. The average time to smoke a cigarette.

  Through the open door I could see my duffel by the washbasin where I’d stuffed the packet of Special-K. I can cut it later with the credit card my sister had lent me, and which I’d maxed out this morning on two bus tickets. Sausalito instead of TJ, first thing in the morning. They were in the red envelope, along with a card. A seventh birthday card, because it might make for a good eye roll from Annie.

  Inside it, a proposal to bury the baby food jar containing the rest of Max in a beautiful place, away from concrete and smoke. The way she always talked about between brawls and highs.

  And maybe we could take one of the brindle pups as well. Find a patch of soft peat between thousand-year-old-redwoods to call home. And maybe Annie will live another year, or two, and we won’t punch each other or stick ourselves to forget we’d punched each other. And maybe we’ll stop mourning who we wanted to be and rejoice in the steadiness of trees.

  And maybe I should’ve put all of that in the card, too.

  I left the mother hound and returned to the doorway to watch Annie playing with the puppies. My eyes kept drifting to where my duffel sat out of her view, and I thought on the power of dependency, and of dogs as unifying forces, and my old man in his letterman’s jacket, and of the unlikelihood of redwoods in Tijuana.

  Outside, the city continued to burn, new pillars of smoke replacing what firemen snuffed, rising in tight, black bars beyond the window.

  PUFFER FISH

  THE SON WILL go to the family cabin on Monday to retrieve his knives.

  He will, however, stay with his father for the weekend. The old man has warranted the time, seeing as he’ll be the one picking up his sole brood a few hours from now. No one else could spare the time. None of his friends. But it was asking a lot of someone to carve out half a day driving up to Pelican Bay and back to San Francisco, the stench of prison bleach and the tongue-tied silences left to linger in their Beamers.

  And what would they discuss with someone who’d just wrapped up a two-to-ten stretch at a supermax prison? Someone they’d never written to or taken the trouble to visit in the interim? That he’d only served the minimum would make casual conversation that much more difficult to reconcile, with two years being too short for any meaningful life change, yet not quite long enough for a charge reduced from the more serious criminal negligence.

  The techie brain, while impressive, can sometimes struggle with the tree structures branching closest to the animal soul.

  In the end, it’ll prove better for all involved that the father will be the one retrieving the son. They’ll have plenty to discuss and lots to share, if so inclined. The obvious and the not so cut-and-dried.

  ***

  If memory served, the son first read about puffer fish mere weeks after having breezed through culinary school.

  Fugu, they were called in Japan. And, as he was about to discover, supposedly the most dangerous meal in the world to prepare.

  He had agreed to meet his father for lunch, this at the acquisitions firm that had rehired the old man after a self-imposed hiatus. When the son arrived the father was perusing a copy of Gourmet, which he held up, tapping a finger on the headline through a flippant huff, Fugu: The Next Fad Coming to America?

  Yet another stab at persuasion the father would later deny. How reading about the additional years of training Japanese chefs endured in order to one day possibly land a shift in some trendy sushi joint might remind his adrift son of the youth still at his disposal. The potential yet for accretion and interest.

  The son read dutifully, pish-poshing and snorting at enough places to sell consensus, never mind his grudging, vestigial esteem for men who’d earned the right to almost kill their own patrons. To serve other humans a fish leaching toxins a thousand times more lethal than strychnine or cyanide. That he could end up doing essentially the same thing his father did to his own clients—albeit faster with knives than with hedge funds and derivatives—was an abdication to contend with down the line.

  ***

  It wouldn’t be just for the knives. The son will also return to the cabin on Monday to clean it out. To make it more hospitable for the times.

  The father’s suggestion: “Better to rent it out than letting it atrophy in the woods, along with all our memories.”

  The son will toss out the frayed rugs and the wall antlers and the couch with the deep divots and the ancient console TV that never got good reception, thus the film projector. Memories of those Godzilla super-sixteens the father reeled for the son on all those Christmas breaks at the winter cabin will return with a vengeance. The father’s snarky, first-act pontificating as he spoils from the opposite end of the leather couch all the magic of the atomic lizard—the deconstruction of the miniature work, and how the monster’s roar was nothing more mythic than leather gloves, smothered in pine-tar, rubbed against cello string.

  By act two, he will have slithered closer to whisper of the metaphors of atomic annihilation. How the Japanese conjured Godzilla as a cautionary tale against nuclear proliferation and, some argue, Western expansionism. To which the father will forever call hokum—that proliferation was as much philosophical as biological imperative, and neither could be denied.

  His voice damp in the son’s ears, sometimes like brook water, sometimes like bumblebee wings, cozy and dangerous. Fingers nudging into the arteries of his upper arm and neck. Further croons that someday, the son too may share a moment like this with his very own boy.

  By act three the conference calls will have rolled in, and soon the father will be droning numbers in the kitchen while the son will have slid himself down to the pile of olive shag beneath a ten-foot Christmas aspen drooped by Swarovski ornaments, and through his still-humming nerves and blunt gaze at the ten-point stag antlers above the couch, wonder if the father will ever drop linguini into the bubbling pot, or discuss return-on-investment margins until the water burns to steam.

  ***

  If memory served, the first time the son had witnessed fugu being prepared had been a religious blow to the gut. An experience as integral to the meal as was the eati
ng of it.

  Behind glass and with gloved hands, the visiting Japanese chef bloated the fish for the diners’ approval before hacking away the live fins and scooping out the eyes. Its means of motion and direction stripped, and with the fish deflated again, the chef ran his blade around the mouth’s circumference before a final cleave unhinged the head from the body. Out of the hole where its mouth and nose once tasted the ocean, its innards were squeezed through in a single, pulsing plop. The liver was instantly cut away and tossed. A cluster-bomb of tetrodotoxin the more adventurous diner ever demanded. Two stump-to-tail draws of tempered steel along the back and belly later, and the skin was peeled from its still torsioning body. A slimy hide, replete with poison that couldn’t be salvaged. Deboning was the final step, performed with equal care, as residual poison still lingered which could draw into pierced flesh. The bones and head were then dropped into a pot for stewing, while the flesh, filleted thin and still twitching in some cases, was lotus patterned on a plate with utmost precision, and finally served.

  ***

  Waiting for the officer with the washboard forehead to process his release papers, the son wonders if the father will remember the stink he put up at his decision in the end to move to Japan.

  To learn the art of fugu preparation from the real deal.

  Most assuredly not. Likely it’ll still dwell in the swirling basin of denial the son assumes the father is still widening with headlong glee.

  His scoffing at his son’s desire to attend culinary school instead of business school—if he had indeed scoffed—had surely been misconstrued from an attempt to challenge.

  His declaration that his boy’s odds of success were on par with winning the lottery—if he had indeed spoken those words—had surely been misinterpreted from the encouragement intended.

  Later, with the son freshly employed at a Michelin Star restaurant, and there was no abrupt shift in tone. No bragging up-and-down Montgomery Street to any executive who would listen of the chip-off-the-old block boy. That while yes, the business-genius gene had veered right instead of left, the engine was still a family-crafted machine through-and-through.