Dead Reckoning and Other Stories

by Dino Parenti

  But how he would smile at the son who would smile at said suits every night they’d arrive with their wives or weekend humps to dine and heap acclaim. How he would continue to beam at the easy success the son made of his own smothered aspirations of epicurean achievement, reducing him to a walking smolder—a fire that would come to singe through his every word and gesture, like afterimages from a photo flash, leaving black spots on the skin few would ever be aware of.

  And while there always lived chances to prevent all prospective truth and confession from withering on the vine, the son will forever hoard his own thwarted dreams of farming, or horticulture, or forestry—anything that could keep him outdoors and away from tight rooms teeming with people demanding some measure of instant satisfaction. And since a penchant for suppression can bristle in a genetic line, the father will withhold the ill-advised pyramid scheme that eventually cost thousands their life savings, until it all bubbles over for everyone to see. And while the son will internalize his lie, the father will craft a miracle from the aftermath of his: he will convince the world that his golden parachute and flipping on his partners is God’s way of granting him the opportunity to finally follow his own gastronomic ambitions, and so a restaurant is purchased with plundered severance.

  The son will come to marvel at the father’s Teflon quality—not just his avoidance of all legal ramifications, but of any public or private shame. In Japan, honor suicides, though rare, were still practiced enough to raise an eye. The son will first hear about them in the States from a jeweler in Boston in search of engagement rings for Melody, only to then experience seppuku firsthand in Osaka when one of his teachers will gut himself with his own fish knife after causing the death one of his customers with a tetrodotoxin overdose.

  As the officer gnaws to a pulp the insides of his cheeks at the prospect of facing an empty copy machine alone, the son watches the roads from the processing building. Pelican Bay prison: an island of asphalt between Lake Earl Drive and the 101, surrounded by pine forest, and he wonders from which artery his father’s midnight blue Audi will be approaching, and why there is no honor-equivalent for American bankers who gouge people of their life savings, and why he himself could never swell like a puffer fish whenever threatened or touched—spiky and green and lethal, like the atomic lizard himself. Deter through intimidation the will of impulse and its propagation.

  ***

  If memory served, the appetite at any high-end Tokyo eatery didn’t end for some at the prospect of nibbling some potentially deadly sashimi. That depending on the customer, their bank account, and their jones for peril, flesh was never enough.

  Though highly discouraged due to prodigious toxicity, the fugu egg sac and testes were considered the highest of delicacies in certain circles, but first needed to be separated and washed with extreme vigor.

  As a wealthy British diner once remarked to him after his third sake bomb: Never will you behold satisfaction so carnal and murderous than immediately after someone just ingested that which begets. To stifle in something its instinct and its means to evolve.

  ***

  The son kneads on his lap the large manila envelope containing all his effects, returned at last after twenty-four months of residing in a basement alongside the afterthoughts of a thousand other young throwaways his age. The dead pager and wallet and empty Zippo lighter confiscated before his incarceration. The engraved pocket watch, bought for him by Melody from the same chatterbox jeweler in Boston where he scored her engagement ring.

  He can feel them turn under his grip, their sound like muted grumbles of glaciers in motion—not dissimilar in pitch to that which will often rumble from his father’s throat, no matter if he is thrilled or upset.

  The same loud-and-clear snarl discharged the day he informed the old man of a decision he’d reached—one he hadn’t yet shared with Melody. Their exchange to live for only three lines, it was never to be repeated verbally, although its afterlife would continue to simmer in all interactions hence.

  “Dad, I won’t be having children.”

  The father staring. “Just like that?”

  The son shrugging. “I fail to see the point beyond chumming already bloody waters.”

  The decision not to sire, a resentment not nearly as large for the father as his boy’s total autonomy in making it—an audacity as alien to him as it will prove for Melody as well. Her face knotted in betrayal at the son’s carefully plucked words. The assiduous pros and cons dissected on a cutting board, and his eventual realization months later that one of her feet will have right then stepped permanently outside the door before he even finishes his pitch.

  All but disqualified as vessel for the line by the father, the girl will revert to his target for all of mankind’s laissez-faire self-centeredness. Greetings and sendoffs will soon prove chance to once more exercise all the glib incisiveness that had wrought his fortune in the first place. A fortune without a chain to immortalize it, as Melody will officially inform the son of her intention to move out for a time to reconsider her future with him.

  The son will fall ill for weeks after, ensconced on the leather couch in the cabin, clammy hides rubbing in the throes of heartache and fever, helpless since youth, gazing with rubbery focus at the stag antlers above the TV. And the father, one hand dabbing cold compresses on his boy’s forehead, the other clawing under the steaming comforter. The boy’s sources of denied duplication, alternately cuddled and smashed for their mockery.

  Even the father’s final act of defilement, arriving strident with resentment.

  As for Melody, she will adopt a like position of impersonality for her ultimate exodus, hooking her ring on the son’s keychain holder by the kitchen door and flying back home to Orlando for good three days after the son’s fever breaks, which will fall eight days before his twenty-fifth birthday and a month before he will leave for Japan.

  ***

  If memory served, the son first tasted fugu three years before starting his prison sentence, almost to the day.

  He and the arm-trophy he’d rented a week before his apprenticeship in Osaka was to start. Joy, or Juliet, or whatever bogus name she’d insisted he call her. A tiny but aggressive sprite. Twenty-five, looking sixteen, and thinking eighty-five. Smelled of apricot and lament. And while game to nibble on fried seahorses off bamboo skewers charred on rusty grill carts in smoky alleyways, she turned up her nose at the fugu served inside the restaurant with the Italian crystal stemware and the ceiling-high granite waterfall. Muttered in broken English and through a sour, perpetual recoil of the insanities of spending so much on a thing that could paralyze the nervous system and heart. And all the son could think about was how the sweet flesh put the tingle of limbs gone to sleep in his lips and tongue. The phantom itch of what-if.

  ***

  On the inside, after all cultural and survival aspects of prison life will have been gleaned, processed, and folded into routine, the son will proceed to live in a perpetual state of conjecture as to just how keen the father has become to the circumstances regarding his son’s imprisonment.

  Will he have learned, for instance, all the vital details from people at the trial, considering that he only managed to show up once, and then for only an hour?

  Will he have learned that his son’s offense was considered a wobbler—a crime that the prosecution could’ve chosen to charge as either a felony or a misdemeanor?

  Will he have learned that his lawyer was competent enough to have had the charges reduced to reckless endangerment because it couldn’t be decided legally if a puffer fish constituted a deadly weapon?

  Will he have researched that a victim of child sexual abuse has one year after turning twenty-six to file civil charges against their attacker in the state of California? Will he have then learned that in Nevada, it’s ten years? And will he have remembered that the cabin is less than four miles from the Nevada border?

  Will he have learned that the puffer fish egg sacs the son had separated into a Tupperware c
ontainer were accidentally mistaken for sea urchin by a dishwasher, and that she’d nibbled on them in the cooler on her break because she never could never have afforded to try them otherwise?

  Will he have learned that her coma only lasted four days, and that her left-side paralysis would remain, likely for all life, at an only ten-percent level of severity?

  Will he have learned that the on-record reason for his son’s sorting of the egg sacs was for careful and orderly disposal as opposed to any sort of hoarding or attempted foul play?

  Will he have then deduced that the son intended to spike either the father’s squid ink or the pasta water with the tetrodotoxin from said egg sacs?

  Somethings to chat about for the long ride home, if so inclined.

  ***

  If memory still served, it took the son a half-hour to finish that Gourmet article before turning to his father.

  Turned in time to catch him watching, with set jaw and toggling eyes, some of the bankers strut out the executive elevator. Men like those he once ordered and grilled before substituting seven-figure certainty for the lure of creative sovereignty.

  He would never divulge how they smiled his way in the cafeteria—with the dimpled, steamrolled smoothness afforded to obedient dogs whenever he plopped sweet potato scallops and lamb curry onto their trays, any more than he would ever voice aloud that his had been the generation that genius to his heart’s truest desire had skipped.

  But the son didn’t need to see their slotted eyes and soft simpers. Didn’t need to see the stains on his father’s apron from the madras lentil recipe he’d spent the years since quitting corporate perfecting, and which the ownership co-opted and named after the firm as condition of his rehire to the building after his restaurant failed within six months.

  The father’s gaze growled a lifetime of grievances and acrimony without twitching a muscle.

  ***

  The father will arrive with only twenty minutes to spare before visiting hours end.

  He and the son will shake hands and swap grins and issue look-well proclamations of the other before driving off.

  In the car, the father will gripe over the unearned swagger of younger executives, while the son will express his disdain over jailhouse movie night. How there was no Godzilla in the bunch, never mind that it was the sound of the projector’s hum that truly made him nauseous.

  After another hour of statutory catchup, the son will request they veer southeast to the cabin instead of the Bay Area. Why wait till Monday to start cleaning house? He will say. This way, they can both have a hand in sharing their past while shaping their future.

  To this the father will smile, his head weighted by nostalgia and other vaguer encumbrances that will cant it from one side to the other before settling into a nod that lasts a beat too long, and some hours later after gassing-and-snacking up at Mad River, they will swing east on 299 towards Redding instead of continuing south on the 101.

  At least twice on the mountain roads the son will note the father on the verge of some admission by the hitch in his voice and the fast pursing of lips, only for some opportune chortle or sigh to slip in and stroke it away. Something of concession or justification will swim under the bloat of his cheeks before resuming whatever humdrum observation had kept him safely tethered.

  His voice after so many years, still a resined glove brushing along the dead cello strings of the son’s ears.

  ***

  If memory will serve, puffer fish mating involves females laying eggs in the fine sediments in the center of ornate, proportional circles created by the males. Near-geometrically perfect radial ridges, almost like underwater crop circles. Like inverted impact craters. Employing the water’s current in unison with their fins to funnel the finer sediments to the center, these circles readily end up to fifteen times their size, crafted solely to attract females. The males have even been known to decorate these circles with fragments of shells—a kind of ornamentation that keeps marine biologists torn between whether the circle designs serve more an aesthetic function, or a practical one. Once a female gives her thumbs up, she lays her eggs in the soft center of the circles before taking off. The males then fertilize the eggs externally, and remain there for another six days, likely to guard the eggs, as instinct calls for.

  ***

  As they near the cabin, the son will continue to listen and respond accordingly to each of his father’s rambling non sequiturs. The knives will surely still lie where last left, under the couch cushions beneath the branching antlers. He is certain the father will broach those barred subjects he tried to molt in the car once more as age and guilt converge in their mad, inexorable pileup, and the son will find his moment to submit his own evidence that not all lines are meant to stretch to the infinite. That some need to be snipped. He will offer argument both for and against heeding tradition and instinct, and testimony towards the efficacy of Japanese humility, and in the end, render verdict: that either their mutual truths, or someone’s entrails will burn something into the rug that no solvent could ever cleanse. And he will, with all his strength, fight a disposition to root his gaze on antlers.

  DEAD RECKONING

  THE POLICEMAN STAGGERED on blood-soaked soles a dozen yards behind the priest.

  Except for his patrolman’s hat and badge—the latter having been lanced through his bare flesh above the heart—he slogged naked, leashed to an ancient nag that towed him across the desert at a sluggish gait for over three hours going.

  Atop the saddle, bowed by a sun at zenith, sat the priest. He’d shed his cassock some time earlier, tearing from it a three-foot swath he’d cinched around his head before tossing the rest. The wind snared the frock inches from the ground, where it billowed to life and scurried past the trailing policeman’s ear, startling him aware, if only for a moment.

  An hour into the journey, the policeman’s skin began to blister and molt. Scaly white fringes at his shoulders and neck fluttered in the hot respiration like used car-lot streamers. By the second hour his punctured heels and insteps had turned to forges pumping fire up his legs, the slag settling in his belly and driving in stakes.

  Without warning he would lob cackles to the sky, or whip sine-waves across his tether, only to watch them flat-line two-thirds the way to the mare’s scraggy rump. More delirium than defiance. The remnant itch of severed limbs and severed wills. Even as he awoke hours earlier under the gnarled shadow of Joshua trees, groggy and stripped on a gully dappled in devil’s claw, he knew the fight had left him for all time. And yet beneath the surrender there still stirred a rare, invigorating ecstasy akin to the sweet whiplash of young love.

  Akin to that delicious moment four months earlier when he’d let his first arrow fly into the heart of a pederast.

  1

  No sooner had he sat in the confessional that the man began talking. No obligatory bless-me-father-for-I-have-sinned. No fortifying inhales or pauses. Just straight into the core of his controlled, precise monologue.

  “Over the course of this past week, I’ve slaughtered three men.”

  The priest in the neighboring cubicle, long inured to the false-starts, filibustering, obscenities, and even out-and-out lies of most people, struggled to keep up, thrown by the confessor’s forthright quality. Few aspects of man’s baser nature had troubled him for some time. If anything, he sought out the common annoyances of everyday life and waded headlong into them as a reminder to never again fret irrelevancies. Traffic became the beautiful reprieve between chores in which to ponder silence. Jury duty, the opportunity for communal bonding and justice.

  Even the neighbor’s broken-down pit bull that barked at every floor creak and passing car no longer proved the vexing nuisance it used to be, becoming instead the evidence that animals were as prone to calling out to something greater than themselves as man was.

  It took a grim, cold narrative seeping through the screen to chill him to the marrow again, a sensation he last felt upon finding the dead infant left on the church
’s entryway last Christmas Eve. The baby boy, well clothed and swaddled in an antique quilt, showed no signs of obvious trauma. A medical examiner later proclaimed it a SID case, but it did little to ease the despair that overtook the priest for weeks thereafter.

  And now a stranger was ripping back those scabs with blunt teeth—as debilitating a feeling as it was absurdly welcomed. Like the twisting of a loose tooth set to rip.

  For his part he offered little during the man’s tale except for the intermittent, yes, my son, which he uttered solely from conditioning. The details of the sanguine odyssey overwhelmed him to the point of fatigue, and when the monologue ended an hour later, the priest struggled for appropriate words of consolation, even as the man slipped quietly from the booth.

  What the priest did next surprised him only in hindsight: he pulled aside the musty drapes and peered out. Never before had he felt compelled to do such a thing. It was usually enough just to imagine the face behind the admissions of infidelity, thievery, or covetousness. But the need to know burned on this day, as did the need to see, and what he glimpsed baffled him as it aroused the more dormant facets of his temperament.

  Just as the man strode out the front doors of the church—this man who had just confessed in a most eloquent and detailed manner to three murders—the priest caught the unmistakable lines of a police uniform.

  II

  The sun continued to anvil the lurching policeman.

  He kept his head down throughout, eyes bound to the Giacometti shadow pouring from his shredded feet. Occasionally he’d trace it to where it slithered under the horse ahead, conjugating with the animal’s own cast splashed long before itself and its hunkered pilot. A vagrant logic reminded him that splitting them was an impossibility, but he kept thinking of ways to rift the two lose. To suspend the laws of physics for his benefit.

  If he could’ve seen himself then, the smile dangling from his jaw might’ve smitten all that remained of his reason.