by Ed Gorman
Ma asks, "Any word on your parole?"
"My lawyer says two years away. Maybe three, 'cause it's a second offense and all." Dad sighs and takes Ma's hand. "I know it's hard for you to believe hon—I mean practically every guy in here says the same thing—but I didn't break into that store that night. I really didn't. I was just walking along the river."
"I do believe you hon," Ma says, "and so does Tom and so does Sis. Right kids?"
I nod. Sis has gone back to staring at the floor.
"'Cause I served time before for breaking and entering the cops just automatically assumed it was me," Dad says. He shakes his head. The sadness is back in his eyes. "I don't have no idea how my billfold got on the floor of that place." He sounds miserable and now he doesn't look jaunty or young. He looks old and gray.
He looks back at Sis. "You still gettin' straight A's hon?"
She looks up at him. But doesn't nod or anything.
"She sure is," Ma says. "Sister Rosemary says Ellen is the best student she's got. Imagine that."
Dad starts to reach out to Sis again but then takes his hand back.
Over in the red section this couple start arguing. The woman is crying and this little girl maybe six is holding real tight to her dad who looks like he's going to start crying, too. That bitch Mona has put on her mirror sunglasses again so you can't tell what she's thinking but you can see from the angle of her face that she's watching the three of them in the red section. Probably enjoying herself.
"Your lawyer sure it'll be two years?" Ma says.
"Or three."
"I sure do miss you hon," Ma says.
"I sure do miss you too hon."
"Don't know what I'd do without Tom to lean on." She makes a point of not mentioning Sis who she's obviously still mad at because Sis won't speak to Dad.
"He's sure a fine young man," Dad says. "Wish I woulda been that responsible when I was his age. Wouldn't be in here today if I'da been."
Sis gets up and leaves the room. Says nothing. Doesn't even look at anybody exactly. Just leaves. Mona directs her to the ladies room.
"I'm sorry she treats you this way hon," Ma says. "She thinks she's too good to come see her dad in prison."
"It's all right," Dad says looking sad again. He watches Sis leave the visiting room.
"I'm gonna have a good talk with her when we leave here hon," Ma says.
"Oh don't be too hard on her. Tough for a proud girl her age to come up here."
"Not too hard for Tom."
"Tom's different. Tom's mature. Tom's responsible. When Ellen gets Tom's age I'm sure she'll be mature and responsible too."
Half hour goes by before Sis comes back. Almost time to leave. She walks over and sits down.
"You give your dad a hug now," Ma says.
Sis looks at Dad. She stands up then and goes over and puts her arms out. Dad stands up grinning and takes her to him and hugs her tighter than I've ever seen him hug anybody. It's funny because right then and there he starts crying. Just holding Sis so tight. Crying.
"I love you hon," Dad says to her. "I love you hon and I'm sorry for all the mistakes I've made and I'll never make them again I promise you."
Ma starts crying, too.
Sis says nothing.
When Dad lets her go I look at her eyes. They're the same as they were before. She's staring right at him but she doesn't seem to see him somehow.
Mona picks up the microphone that blasts through the speakers hung from the ceiling. She doesn't need a speaker in a room this size but she obviously likes how loud it is and how it hurts your ears.
"Visiting hours are over. You've got fifteen seconds to say good-bye and then inmates have to start filing over to the door."
"I miss you so much hon," Ma says and throws her arms around Dad.
He hugs Ma but over his shoulder he's looking at Sis. She is standing up. She has her head down again. Dad looks so sad, so sad.
"I'd like to know just who the hell you think you are treatin' your own father that way," Ma says on the way back to town.
The rain and the fog are real bad now so I have to concentrate on my driving. On the opposite side of the road cars appear quickly in the fog and then vanish. It's almost unreal.
The wipers are slapping loud and everything smells damp—the rubber of the car and the vinyl seat covers and the ashtray from Ma's menthol cigarettes. Damp.
"You hear me young lady?" Ma says.
Sis is in the backseat again alone. Staring out the window. At the fog I guess.
"Come on Ma, she hugged him," I say.
"Yeah when I practically had to twist her arm to do it." Ma shakes her head. "Her own flesh and blood."
Sometimes I want to get really mad and let it out but I know it would just hurt Ma to remind her what Dad was doing to Ellen those years after he came out of prison the first time. I know for a fact he was doing it because I walked in on them one day; little eleven-year-old Ellen was there on the bed underneath my naked dad, staring off as he grunted and moved around inside her, staring off just the way she does now.
Staring off.
Ma knew about it all along of course but she wouldn't do anything about it. Wouldn't admit it probably not even to herself. In psychology, which I took last year at the junior college, that's called denial. I even brought it up a couple times but she just said I had a filthy mind and don't ever say nothing like that again.
Which is why I broke into that store that night and left Dad's billfold behind. Because I knew they'd arrest him and then he couldn't force Ellen into the bed anymore. Not that I blame Dad entirely. Prison makes you crazy no doubt about it and he was in there four years the first time. But even so I love Sis too much.
"Own flesh and blood," Ma says again lighting up one of her menthols and shaking her head.
I look into the rearview mirror at Sis's eyes. "Wish I could make you smile," I say to her. "Wish I could make you smile."
But she just stares out the window.
She hasn't smiled for a long time of course.
Not for a long time.
RENDER UNTO CAESAR
I never paid much attention to their arguments until the night he hit her.
The summer I was twenty-one I worked construction upstate. This was 1963. The money was good enough to float my final year and a half at college. If I didn't blow it the way some of the other kids working construction did, that is, on too many nights at the tavern, and too many weekends trying to impress city girls.
The crew was three weeks in Cedar Rapids and so I looked for an inexpensive sleeping room. The one I found was in a neighborhood my middle-class parents wouldn't have approved of but I wasn't going to be here long enough for them to know exactly where I was living.
The house was a faded frail Victorian. Upstairs lived an old man named Murchison. He'd worked forty, years on the Crandic as a brakeman and was retired now to sunny days out at Ellis Park watching the softball games, and nights on the front porch with his quarts of cheap Canadian Ace beer and the high sweet smell of his Prince Albert pipe tobacco and his memories of WWII. Oh, yes, and his cat, Caesar. You never saw Murch without that hefty gray cat of his, usually sleeping in his lap when Murch sat in his front porch rocking chair.
And Murch's fondness for cats didn't stop there. But I'lltell you about that later.
Downstairs lived the Brineys. Pete Briney was in his early twenties, handsome in a roughneck kind of way. He sold new Mercurys for a living. He came home in a different car nearly every night, just at dusk, just at the time you could smell the dinner his wife, Kelly, had set out for him.
According to Murch, who seemed to know everything about them, Kelly had just turned nineteen and had already suffered two miscarriages. She was pretty in a sweet, already tired way. She seemed to spend most of her time cleaning the apartment and taking out the garbage and walking up to Dlask's grocery, two blocks away. One day a plump young woman came over to visit but this led to an argument later that night.
Pete Briney did not want his wife to have friends. He seemed to feel that if Kelly had concentrated on her pregnancy, she would not have miscarried.
Briney did not look happy about me staying in the back room on the second floor. The usual tenants were retired men like Murch. I had a tan and was in good shape and while I wasn't handsome girls didn't find me repulsive, either. Murch laughed one day and said that Briney had come up and said, "How long is that guy going to be staying here, anyway?" Murch, who felt sorry for Kelly and liked Briney not at all, lied and said I'd probably be here a couple of years.
A few nights later Murch and I were on the front porch. All we had upstairs were two window fans that churned the ninety-three-degree air without cooling it at all. So, after walking up to Dlask's for a couple of quarts of Canadian Ace and two packs of Pall Malls, I sat down on the front porch and prepared myself to be dazzled by Murch's tales of WWII in the Pacific theater. (And Murch knew lots of good ones, at least a few of which I strongly suspected were true.)
Between stories we watched the street. Around nine, dusk dying, mothers called their children in. There's something about the sound of working-class mothers gathering their children—their voices weary, almost melancholy, at the end of another grinding day, the girls they used to be still alive somewhere in their voices, all that early hope and vitality vanishing like the faint echoes of tender music.
And there were the punks in their hot rods picking up the meaty young teenage girls who lived on the block. And the sad factory drunks weaving their way home late from the taverns to cold meals and broken-hearted children. And the furtive lonely single men getting off the huge glowing insect of the city bus, and going upstairs to sleeping rooms and hot plates and lonesome letters from girlfriends in far and distant cities.
And in the midst of all this came a brand-new red Mercury convertible, one far too resplendent for the neighborhood. And it was pulling up to the curb and—
The radio was booming "Surf City" with Jan and Dean—and before the car even stopped, Kelly jerked open her door and jumped out, nearly stumbling in the process.
Briney slammed on the brakes, killed the headlights and then bolted from the car.
Before he reached the curb, he was running.
"You whore!" he screamed.
He was too fast for her. He tackled her even before she reached the sidewalk.
Tackled her and turned her over. And started smashing his fists into her face, holding her down on the ground with his knees on her slender arms, and smashing and smashing and smashing her face—
By then I was off the porch. I was next to him in moments. Given that his victim was a woman, I wasted no time on fair play. I kicked him hard twice in the ribs and then I slammed two punches into the side of his head. She screamed and cried and tried rolling left to escape his punches, and then tried rolling right. I didn't seem to have fazed him. I slammed two more punches into the side of his head. I could feel these punches working. He pitched sideways, momentarily unconscious, off his wife.
He slumped over on the sidewalk next to Kelly. I got her up right away and held her and let her sob and twist and moan and jerk in my arms. All I could think of were those times when I'd seen my otherwise respectable accountant father beat up my mother, and how I'd cry and run between them terrified and try to stop him with my own small and useless fists. . . .
Murch saw to Briney. "Sonofabitch's alive, anyway," he said looking up at me from the sidewalk. "More than he deserves."
By that time, a small crowd stood on the sidewalk, gawkers in equal parts thrilled and sickened by what they'd just seen Briney do to Kelly. . . .
I got her upstairs to Murch's apartment and started taking care of her cuts and bruises. . . .
I mentioned that Murch's affection for cats wasn't limited to Caesar. I also mentioned that Murch was retired, which meant that he had plenty of time for his chosen calling.
The first Saturday I had off, a week before the incident with Pete and Kelly Briney, I sat on the front porch reading a John D. MacDonald paperback and drinking a Pepsi and smoking Pall Malls. I was glad for a respite from the baking, bone-cracking work of summer road construction.
Around three that afternoon, I saw Murch coming down the sidewalk carrying a shoebox. He walked toward the porch, nodded hello, then walked to the backyard. I wondered if something was wrong. He was a talker, Murch was, and to see him so quiet bothered me.
I put down my Pepsi and put down my book and followed him, a seventy-one-year-old man with a stooped back and liver-spotted hands and white hair that almost glowed in the sunlight and that ineluctable dignity that comes to people who've spent a life at hard honorable work others consider menial.
He went into the age-worn garage and came out with a garden spade. The wide backyard was burned stubby grass and a line of rusted silver garbage cans. The picket fence sagged with age and the walk was all busted and jagged. To the right of white flapping sheets drying on the clothesline was a small plot of earth that looked like a garden.
He set the shoebox down on the ground and went to work with the shovel. He was finished in three or four minutes. A nice fresh hole had been dug in the dark rich earth.
He bent down and took the lid from the shoebox. From inside he lifted something with great and reverent care. At first I couldn't see what it was. I moved closer. Lying across his palms was the dead body of a small calico cat. The blood on the scruffy white fur indicated that death had been violent, probably by car.
He knelt down and lowered the cat into the freshly dug earth. He remained kneeling and then closed his eyes and made the sign of the cross.
And then he scooped the earth in his hands and filled in the grave.
I walked over to him just as he was standing up.
"You're some guy, Murch," I said.
He looked startled. "Where the hell did you come from?"
"I was watching." I nodded to the ground. "The cat, I mean."
"They've been damn good friends to me—cats have—figure it's the least I can do for them."
I felt I'd intruded; embarrassed him. He picked up the spade and started over to the garage.
"Nobody gives a damn about cats," he said. "A lot of people even hate 'em. That's why I walk around every few days with my shoebox and if I see a dead one, I pick it up and bring it back here and bury it. They're nice little animals." He grinned. "Especially Caesar. He's the only good friend I've made since my wife died ten years ago."
Murch put the shovel in the garage. When he came back out, he said, "You in any kind of mood for a game of checkers?"
I grinned. "I hate to pick on old farts like you."
He grinned back. "We'll see who's the old fart here."
When I got home the night following the incident with Kelly and Briney, several people along the block stopped to ask me about the beating. They'd heard this and they'd heard that but since I lived in the house, they figured I could set them right. I couldn't, or at least I said I couldn't, because I didn't like the quiet glee in their eyes, and the subtle thrill in their voices.
Murch was on the porch. I went up and sat down and he put Caesar in my lap the way he usually did. I petted the big fellow till he purred so hard he sounded like a plane about to take off. Too bad most humans weren't as appreciative of kindness as good old Caesar.
When I spoke, I sort of whispered. I didn't want the Brineys to hear.
"You don't have to whisper, Todd," Murch said, sucking on his pipe. "They're both gone. Don't know where he is, and don't care. She left about three this afternoon. Carrying a suitcase."
"You really think she's leaving him?"
"Way he treats her, I hope so. Nobody should be treated like that, especially a nice young woman like her." He reached over and petted Caesar who was sleeping in my lap. Then he sat back and drew on his pipe again and said, "I told her to go. Told her what happens to women who let their men beat them. It keeps on getting worse and worse until—" He shook his head. "The missus and I kn
ew a woman whose husband beat her to death one night. Right in front of her two little girls."
"Briney isn't going to like it, you telling her to leave him."
"To hell with Briney. I'm not afraid of him." He smiled. "I've got Caesar here to protect me."
Briney didn't get home till late. By that time we were up off the porch and in our respective beds. Around nine a cool rain had started falling. I was getting some good sleep when I heard him down there.
The way he yelled and the way he smashed things, I knew he was drunk. He'd obviously discovered that his compliant little wife had left him. Then there was an abrupt and anxious silence. And then there was his crying. He wasn't any better at it than I was, didn't really know how, and so his tears came out in violent bursts that resembled throwing up. But even though I was tempted to feel sorry for him, he soon enough made me hate him again. Between bursts of tears he'd start calling his wife names, terrible names that should never have been put to a woman like Kelly.
I wasn't sure of the time when he finally gave it all up and went to bed. Late, with just the sounds of the trains rushing through the night in the hills, and the hoot of a barn owl lost somewhere in leafy midnight trees.
The next couple days I worked overtime. The road project had fallen behind. In the early weeks of the job there'd been an easy camaraderie on the work site. But that was gone for good now. The supervisors no longer took the time to joke, and looked you over skeptically every time you walked back to the wagon for a drink of water.
Kelly came back at dusk on Friday night. She stepped out of a brand-new blue Mercury sedan, Pete Briney at the wheel. She carried a lone suitcase. When she reached the porch steps and saw Murch and me, she looked away and walked quickly toward the door. Briney was right behind her. Obviously he'd told her not to speak to us.
That night, Murch and I spoke in whispers, both of us naturally wondering what had happened. Briney had gone over to her mother's, where Murch had suggested she go, and somehow convinced Kelly to come back.
