10,000 Miles with My Dead Father's Ashes

by Devin Galaudet

  “But why didn’t you just talk to me before this letter?” I asked, my own voice cracking at the end.

  I do not remember what she said, but I remember how I answered. My response had been rehearsed before I walked over to her store. “I am so disappointed, but I understand. I promise to be out on the date in the letter. I know we will still be friends.”

  Ebba still couldn’t bring herself to look at me. This small gesture might have saved a lot of future aggravation on both sides.

  Nothing’s New was being evicted by the evil Swedish clog saleswoman. At twenty-two, I decided to act as my own attorney and purposefully made life difficult for all. I filed legal motions and read law books and shook my fist at the heavens vowing I would eat her for lunch. When I told Dad about it, I could hear his venom boil as he said, “Do not be nice under any circumstance. Just kill her.” For the moment I celebrated the anger with Dad before hanging my head from an overwhelming sense of failure—but I planned to fight.

  I hired my favorite of Dad’s cronies, because he represented the only crony I knew: Manny. He was still short and wide and lacked the sense of knowing right from wrong, which made most feel unsure about being alone with him. But he always had a loyalty to Dad and the lure of making a few bucks was enough to make him loyal to me too.

  The job was simple. I gave him a Darth Vader mask and a ten-gallon cowboy hat to wear to stop traffic along La Brea Boulevard to help me attract as much attention and make as much money as possible before closing the store. I picked up Manny most every morning and dragged him to every sale and flea market possible. Some mornings were improvised. “There, man. What do you think?” Manny said as he leaned out the window. I stared at the dresser and turned around to look at the back of the van, which was empty. “I think it could fit. But can you carry it without dropping it? It’s on a hill, too.” I said. Two houses away, a tall chest of drawers sat on the lawn. Parked behind it was a moving van. The house was quiet since we pulled up a couple of minutes ago. I said, “I am not sure this is a great idea.” I looked in the rearview mirror to see if a neighbor was watering the lawn or trimming the hedges. The block was quiet. “I am going to open the back and leave it open. I’ll walk up and take it. You roll up,” Manny said.

  He hopped out of the passenger’s side and ran around to the back of my van and open both sides. I watched him through the rearview mirror. He sniffed loudly, clearing the contents of his nose into his mouth, and then spat on the street before he took off for the dresser. I eased my foot off the brake and the van pulled forward slowly as Manny ran up the hill. At the dresser, he wrapped his arms around it and grunted it up. He was loud, and as he took a couple of steps down the hill, one of the dresser drawers began to slide out. Manny leaned back and jiggled the dresser, the drawer still out but not sliding out farther. I held my breath as Manny shuffled toward the van, which still rolled forward. I thought, I could slam the accelerator and split, but the dresser was almost at the back of the van. I heard one of the dresser feet scrape against the cement as Manny disappeared behind the side of the van. Manny came around the back of the van and heaved the dresser on its back with a crash. I looked up and around to see if there was anyone watching. Then Manny climbed in the back of the van and pulled the doors closed as I slowly pressed my foot on the accelerator pedal and drove away. My fear of buying disappeared and my dislike for the Wooden Shoe Emporium grew, because the store seemed less a chore.

  Manny took it upon himself to cause the Wooden Shoe Emporium as much difficulty as possible. He sat in front of her store and loudly sang spontaneous opera that reverberated through the Darth Vader mask until she closed her front door. Once closed, he posted homemade signs that read, “Closed” or “Moved to Sweden.”

  On warm days, Ebba would leave the back door open. I would give Manny a cane and let him “fish for shoes” between the wrought-iron bars guarding her storage room. I paid Manny three dollars for a matching pair of shoes. However, a single shoe, unaccompanied by its mate, was worth seven dollars. I paid him a little bit more to dispose of the shoes in a local sewer.

  Then I became a lawyer. I asked the court for more time. It pissed off the Wooden Shoe Emporium, for I had my store for another two months and delayed whatever plans Ebba had. The second trial was also continued to a third trial when the judge suggested I get a real lawyer, which I did. I found a lawyer I met at Tom Bergin’s, which made a lot of sense at the time. The results were not surprising. I lost my store. The judge had described the testimony of my father, Manny, and myself as “dubious, yet crafty and wholly unbelievable.”

  In the end, I kept the store a full six months longer than the date the Wooden Shoe Emporium had wanted me out on. It was a small victory. The entire time, I kept Manny as my right hand.

  ✴✴✴

  As planned, Dad had come into town from Vegas and picked me up the morning after the trial—ready, finally, to reveal his interesting news. Dad was shaky and not his usual self. He fidgeted and wrung his hands as he made small talk, and I braced myself for the inevitable bad news. We went to Tom Bergin’s, where I had become a regular in my own right, having earned my own green-and-white clover stapled to the ceiling.

  As we sat down, Dad ordered two straight whiskeys and looked at me and said, “What are you going to have?” I knew he was working on levity, but there was something, well, interesting that he had to say, and I wanted to hear it.

  He continued on about sports and the weather and other nonsense. I listening to his ramblings instead of the subject I had waited seven months to hear about. He avoided eye contact, preferring to gaze into the mirrored Jameson sign across from us. Whatever this thing was, it was more than just interesting. Dad’s hand trembled as he raised the whiskey to his lips.

  We went through a couple whiskeys each, his knee bouncing so violently the whole bar shook. I knew he was dying but gave it space. It would not have been a surprise. Dad was huge and gagged on four packs of cigarettes a day, which had prompted Mom to say at times, “What happened to the guy I married? He was the best-looking guy I had ever seen.”

  I knew how hard this was for Dad, but it had been months in coming. I could hear the chattering of regulars, but I don’t remember seeing anyone else but Dad. It was as if there were a dome around us that created blackness beyond its scope.

  He started, “You know how your mother and I got married?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, before her there was Helen.” Dad then began to weave a complicated story of his life with another woman I had never heard of before. He seemed shaken by an invisible force but continued through a stream of cigarette smoke and upended shot glasses. He rambled and referred to history, places and stories I had not heard of before. I sat in full attention, squinting and leaning on my arm.

  Dad and Helen were married shotgun style. The wedding photos show a youthful couple. The groom, Dad, sported a black eye and looked drunk. Helen was seven months pregnant and likely drunk, as well. First a baby came and then another, John and Nancy. Then Dad left Helen. He didn’t go into the specifics of why he left, or whether he had been given the boot by Helen. I eventually heard a number of conflicting stories by both sides of the family. From what I could piece together, Dad joined the army, and while he was away, Helen hooked up with Al, an abusive former-military sort that drove Nancy and John out of their home when they were teenagers. Years after, Nancy went searching for her real dad, conceivably a better dad than the one she had been given in Al. It took her three calls and thirty-five years to find him. The rest has been mired in history and vague memories. Either way, I now had a new brother and sister. When Dad finished talking he slunk in half, deflated and exhausted.

  I shrugged. Was that all? I thought. Was that the big deal? A life prior to me?

  On the plus side, I had been an only child and that was all about to change. Before I made the pronouncement of all being well, Dad’s unsteady hand p
roduced a photo of my brother, John. “He looks just like you,” Dad said, handing it to me.

  The shot was taken from fifty feet away in a light drizzle. He wore full subarctic attire: a bulky, hooded jacket pulled over his head, fingerless mittens, dark sunglasses, a scarf wrapped around his neck and mouth, and a full beard. John’s pink nose was exposed. Everything else that could have been an exciting discovery of brotherly resemblance was left to mystery. The photo was also out of focus.

  I took the photo in my hand and inspected it more closely before turning to look on the back to see if there was any more information, but it was totally blank.

  I fanned myself with my brother’s photo and said, “Are you sure you aren’t just dying?” To break the tension I smiled. I liked the idea of having a new family somewhere in the Midwest. However, this obscure photo seemed a little too ridiculous to buy all at once. It seemed like a red-flagged prop.

  “This one is a little vague. Do you have one of Nancy?”

  “I am not sure,” Dad said, pulling out a handful of photos. These would turn out to be school pictures of my new six nieces and nephews, but no picture of my sister.

  I remained both excited and skeptical. We talked Dad sat up straighter, and he looked more at ease. “See, I told you it was interesting,” Dad said. We parted on good terms, both drunk on a day of Jameson straight whiskey.

  New Year’s Day I found out for sure. The phone rang. It was still too early to wake up from all-night partying. Once the answering machine chimed on, an unfamiliar voice chirped, “Hey, Dev, it’s your brother, John…” The slurred timbre of John’s voice had to make him family.

  Two days later, Mom invited me over, claiming she needed to talk to me about something. It was fine, considering I had some “interesting” news for her as well and needed to do a load of clothes in her washer and dryer. I went over in the morning, under the threat of her breakfast.

  I grew up in a house where the “F word” was food. She had a knack for the experimental, a laissez-faire attitude that kept good recipes at bay.

  In the kitchen, an exposed cube of butter sat resting on the counter that every feral cat in the neighborhood had licked with their germ-infested little tongues. That day, Mom made me a runny mushroom omelet with melted cheese.

  “Thanks, Mom, you outdid yourself,” I said as she entered the dining room with some cold toast and the cube of butter.

  “I almost forgot your toast.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, and continued working on the omelet. “I’ll pass.”

  “So, you can’t stay long because I have art class. Do you remember when I told you about Susan? She was the tall lady wearing the wig. Remember, from the art show in the basement of the community center last year? You stopped by, under duress I might add, because you shouldn’t give your mother any pleasure in life by just coming without me having to call you six times. Well, Susan just did this painting of some building in Italy. At least, I think it was Italy. Well, it was awful.”

  While Mom talked, Strudel, Mom’s stray cat, hopped up on the table and began to clean itself two inches from the butter. Its tongue gathered bits of fur and debris into a small collection on its hind leg before it was distracted by Mom’s diatribe and began looking around the room.

  “Some people should just not paint. Speaking of that, have you seen my latest masterpiece?” Mom got up and returned holding a frame. On a three-foot-wide canvas were several splashes of muted colors, which I guessed to be a small house in a green jungle and an ominous, white-crested wave that happened by.

  “Wow, this one is really good,” I said, feigning interest. “So why am I here?”

  “I know you. You barely even looked. I painted this in five minutes. Now you are going to say something very sarcastic,” Mom said. “You should appreciate my art more, as I have one foot in the grave already.”

  “Okay, it is really very nice.”

  “Good. Thank you. Was that so difficult?” Mom said. “Did I tell you about my dead toe? Have you ever had a dead toe?” Before I answered, she said, “Did he tell you about the others?” It took a moment before I pieced together the change in direction of the conversation.

  “Oh, do you mean John and Nancy? Yes, he told me about them,” I said.

  “Good,” Mom said. “So, were you mad at him?”

  I thought about this for a second in spite of the fact I had no bad feelings about the whole thing. “No,” I said.

  “Good. So he told you about the others, too?”

  As it turned out, there was not just one other family but several, a gaggle of other potential siblings that Dad had created with women across the US and, as I later found out, possibly India.

  “Are you sure you’re not mad?” Mom asked. She walked out of the room with her painting before I could answer.

  “I don’t really know what I am right now. I guess I am not angry. It sounds like there’s a bunch of brothers and sisters running around. It’s a little intense, but I can take it,” I said. “Now, spill the beans. What do you know?”

  She took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “Don’t tell your father I told you this.” Then she sat down and started with the most recent. “Well, there was Phyllis Monroe.” Mom said this with a long pause between the first and last name in a way that was riddled with sarcasm. Then she worked backward, deeper into history, until she brought up Helen, John, and Nancy.

  In the beginning, Dad would not admit to anything beyond those who were actively looking for him, Nancy and John. However, there may have been as many as eight others.

  “So how do you feel about all this now?” She waited patiently with her arms crossed. I looked skyward and considered how I felt. This all had nothing to do with me, but there was something not right about it either.

  In the moment, I went with, “Good.”

  Mom then took another long, slow breath. “Okay, you never answered me about the toe. I think my toe is dead.” Mom got up and walked out the front door and motioned for me to follow her. “Since today is honesty day.” Mom began to shake. She took me to the garage. The garage was dirty and dank, with cobwebs hanging from the bare wood studs. Mom walked to a nonfunctioning refrigerator and pulled out an old box and set it on a table that was covered with paintbrushes.

  She carefully opened the box and sifted through its contents before she pulled out an old black-and-white photo. It was a picture of Mom in a wedding dress, with a wedding cake and a completely different guy.

  “Is that you and the guy who baked this cake?” I asked.

  “No, that’s John, my second husband,” she said.

  Mom and I talked while she shook through her confession. I tallied up all the weddings. Dad had a slim lead, seven to five.

  ✴✴✴

  The last time I saw Manny it was three o’clock in the morning and I was coming to from a deep sleep. The pounding on my front door with a garbled version of my name put a lump in my throat. I started to climb out of bed. I lived on the corner of Packard and Fairfax, a fairly dubious corner at the time. The multi-unit building that I lived in had been painted a dayglow orange, but at night it hid behind several shady trees that attracted mosquitoes, crack dealers, and the occasional hooker. I became accustomed to the fights next to my bedroom window and the loud warbled voices wanting to know the availability of this or that, but never did they bother to come round to the front door to hassle me.

  My girlfriend at the time, Chris, said, “What are you doing? Don’t answer it.” Oddly, had she not been there, I would have pulled the covers to my chin and waited until the pounding stopped. Instead, I felt I had something to prove by confronting what was on the other side of the door.

  I sidled to the door holding the hatchet my father had kept on his dresser for protection. A pair of brass knuckles with a folding knife on the end sat next to it. Together they symbolized the passing
of the torch of home protection from father to son, and I liked to pretend that I was a tough guy by owning illegal weaponry. My heart pulsed so hard I thought it would pop. When I got in front of the door, I heard Manny’s voice laboring. This was only a little comforting.

  “Devin, it’s me, Manny. Open up.” I looked through the eye in the door and saw Manny’s distorted face and blond Afro as he continued to pound.

  “Calm down,” I said. “Are you with anybody?”

  The pounding stopped. I could almost hear the gears sputtering in Manny’s head.

  “It’s me, Manny. Open the fucking door already. Uh, yeah.”

  While I considered Manny an ally of sorts, he was still a drug addict, thug, and all-around criminal. There really isn’t any honor among thieves, no matter what they say. I walked into the bedroom and told my girlfriend that it was okay, although I had my doubts. Then, I opened the door a crack.

  As usual, Manny was sweating, slack-jawed, glaze-eyed, and out of breath. He pulled on his nose and then made a honking noise that was a combination of nasal and guttural, which led him to wretch and cough up some phlegm that he spat on my welcome mat.

  “I have some really good news,” Manny said, and walked straight into my apartment. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and closed the door behind him after looking out the door to see if there was anyone else waiting.

  Once the door closed, I wondered why I had opened it in the first place. Manny was dangerous, and I really only liked him for the same reason I liked butterscotch and Barbra Streisand records: because Dad did.

  “Okay, so what’s up?” I waved him toward my tiny living room. I went into the kitchen, cracked open a beer, and brought Manny one too. Manny didn’t say a word until I sat down next to him on my torn sofa bed.

  Manny wiped his palms on his dirty jeans as he talked. “I need some money. Not a lot of money. But I have to have something done. A procedure. I need this thing done.” Then he looked up at me and waited. I understood his ploy. He wanted to see where I was at. He was sizing me up. How much money could he get from me? Did I want to know about this procedure? He waited to see if I was going to give something away that he could use to make this process easier or more profitable. He studied me for a moment before he wiped his hands on his jeans again.