Death at Dawn

by Arthur Day

  “I have no problem with that,” I told her. “My father was a marine gunnery sergeant, an ordinance expert. My mother raised me and did legal and medical typing on the side to earn extra money.” I shrugged. “We moved a lot, sometimes every year or so. When I was seven or eight my parents divorced so I was basically raised by my mother. Dad was just a figure that showed up once in a while and took me out for ice cream or something like that. I never really knew him.”

  No I never really knew the man and as I got older I did not want to know him. He would stop by whenever he was stationed in the area and I did my best to be somewhere else. He had left Mom and me and had burned that bridge and burned it good and if, later in life, he regretted his decision, it was way too late as far as I was concerned. He was a stocky, bandy-legged little man all arms and chest and mean when he was drunk. One of the times that stuck in my memory was a night when he and Mom were shouting at each other. I peeked through the bedroom door into the tiny kitchen in time to see him punch her hard enough to knock her to the floor. I ran in and tried to protect her and he promptly beat me until I lay on the floor beside her. I turned my head and saw one of her eyes staring at me. The other was already swelling shut. “Stay down,” she hissed. I did as she asked and a minute later my father staggered out towards the NCO club. It was Mom and me and her death killed part of me and still haunts the rest.

  As a child I hated beans and never changed my mind. It is so like that, don’t you think? Childhood impressions and habits stay with us throughout our lives like a cloak that, once worn, is never discarded but picks up spots and stains over time and can change color slightly with the owner’s mood. Beans were long and green and slimy and stared up at me from the plate as if daring me to stick them with a fork or they were short and overcooked and came out of cans and tasted like that goop that my younger brother sucked up with apparent relish. My mother would throw all kinds of crap into the blender, turn it on, and feed brother Bobby the result and he would chuckle and gurgle with delight and lean forward to get the next mouthful.

  “We haven’t got money to waste on stuff that comes out of a factory and probably doesn’t do anyone any good except it’s convenient.” She said when I was old enough to realize that there were alternatives. She was a buxom woman was my mom. Built like a tree trunk from shoulders to legs and with breasts that my schoolmates used to whisper and laugh about on the morning after those rare times when she came to talk with my teachers. I hated these times. Every other mom I saw was slim and leggy as if they had been cloned. They walked around tapping their phones and asking other parents what they thought of this teacher or that one and whining about the latest Facebook scandal or YouTube shocker. I mean really. What should they expect from a technology that is with you from when you sit and pee in the morning until you tell your husband to go pound sand at night? They bemoan the crumbling of our civilization due to social media while they do their part to further its influence. And there was Mom, stumping down the corridor in her usual clothing, a black dress with a high neckline. She would smile at students as she passed them like she was throwing dollar bills in their direction. Even at the age of twelve I knew that she was the opposite of glamorous and I simultaneously loved and hated her for her presence. She never seemed to look to the right or left but always straight ahead and slightly above your head as if she saw someone or something there that no one else could see.

  She took me to the library so that I could use a computer when it was required but there was never going to be one in our house. The phone in our living room must have dated from the sixties and was one of those finger-tip bruising dial phones that she used as little as possible and that we were allowed to use rarely if at all. Her father had been a doctor and she had learned that the new invention called the telephone was strictly for when his patients needed to call him. When I got older, talking with her on the phone was an exercise in frustration for I would be going on about something and suddenly she would hang up as if she had been on an egg-timer. Not that she could ever have been accused of being overly talkative. I think when my father left a lot of my mother left with him. She would look at me with a frown and a look of sadness behind her eyes as if she wanted to talk about him but it was simply too painful so she would simply look at me and then just mutter something in her gray, gravel voice. She never kept any pictures of him or of the pair of them together, not even the iconic wedding picture.

  We lived in a small white house in an area of small houses just north of Hartford in South Windsor. It was a doll house in need of fresh paint. Two bedrooms upstairs with dormers for windows. A living room and a kitchen dining area on the ground floor. Those rooms had probably been separate when the house was built but someone had taken out the wall the separated them so that now you could look through the window and see the kitchen and even a little glimpse of the back yard through the kitchen window. My mother had put curtains in the windows and kept them pulled most of the time so that the house was in perpetual shade resembling a picture of the living room of Dr. Jekyll that I had in a book. Even with the lamps on, I would imagine men of immense power and evil lurking in the shadows and the corners waiting for the right person to pass by and then WHAM they would strike and I would be carried out the window and into the woods beyond for horrible satanic rites by moonlight. I was quite the imaginative child and not all for the good either. Our furniture was old but comfortable. There was a couch that sagged in the middle and had been slip-covered at least twice, a nice armchair with a salmon slip cover and, across the hall, an old dining room table with lots of room for expansion. Fully set up it might have seated eight or ten. I had never seen it at its full length. It was a family piece, she told me. Table for the ages or maybe table of the ages. In our attic were several pictures of 19th century relatives all wrapped in brown paper and twine. Probably from her parents for I don’t think my father had any ancestors deserving of a portrait. I had unwrapped one once and then carefully wrapped it up again. When we ate our meals at the table I had fun imagining the man in the picture dressed in the funeral colored clothes of his time with a white stock around his neck and the hint of a smile tugging at his lips sitting at the table carving up a pheasant for his family. Another piece my dear? How did you manage with the weather today? It was simply awful. I do hope you did not get wet getting in and out of the carriage. The children of course do not care for that is simply part of childhood. How do you like the claret? A good vintage I think. My mother would notice that I was somewhere else and rap sharply on the table to bring me back to reality or at least one version of it. I would sit quietly or answer her as the case might be but always the dignified gentleman would sit solemnly across the table from me smiling ever so slightly.

  For my reality was the world of books. I read everything from the daily newspaper (including the ads) to Faulkner, although the poetry of his world lost me until I got older. By the time I was ten I had read Kidnapped, Robinson Crusoe, Little Women, The Black Arrow and many more. While I gained a vocabulary that raised the eyebrows of my mother and my teachers, I also became increasingly a part of different worlds and cultures and acted them out to the merriment of my school mates who called me Squeak the Geek because of my high-pitched voice. In those worlds I could be the strong hero instead of the skinny, shy, bespectacled little boy that I was.

  “Get your nose out of that book. There’re chores that need doing. Take the garbage can out to the curb and then clean up the mud room. It’s disgusting in there.”

  “Mom I just did that.”

  “Hah. You call that clean. A person could catch a dozen different diseases in there. This time use a mop and soap with the water in place of wishful thinking.” She would turn away like some great ocean liner turning north out of New York’s harbor full of dignity and purpose, sure of her mission and her place on the board of life. There could be no further discussion or argument with such a person and the few times I’d tried had ended badly for me so
it was into the mud room again for a quick redo muttering vague threats of unmentionable savagery.

  Such things are common to kids growing up and I mention it only to try to describe the full being that was my mother as all parents have good moods and bad ones and a few that should be avoided at all costs. She could also be very kind and attentive. There were many nights when she would work with me when I was stuck on my school work. I was not the sharpest tool in the shed and got stuck often, particularly in math, a subject that left me with a headache and problem pages where I had pushed my pencil right through the paper in my frustration. I had a quick temper and it did not take much to get me stomping around and yelling and muttering like some Muslim cleric. Although she too had to have been tired after a day of work she would sit there beside me at the dining room table and try her best to guide me through to an answer. How she did it I don’t know. Remembering those days can be embarrassing. I was a real asshole but somehow the two of us got on together. Mutter and Jeff. Until she was murdered.

  I was on leave from the marines when it happened. My mother had come down to New York to meet me since I had been posted to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. It was a day of torrential rain. Sheets of it blew down the avenues making a mockery of the umbrella manufacturers. People sought shelter where they could, but some still hunched down and walked, grey figures lost in the wet and the gloom. Taxi’s swished by throwing up sheets of water, their headlights like giant bugs bouncing up and down as the always rough streets bounced them around. It was the type of weather that penetrated deep into the soul making people feel small and inadequate, settling into the deep lines of their faces as they struggled up towards the intersection of West 57th and Broadway. Sodden pieces of trash floated in the gutters. Even the rain seemed gray and dirty.

  We met in the bar of the Holiday Inn on West 57th Street because my mother refused to pay five hundred dollars a night for fancier digs. She was the type of person who packed her own toilet paper for she thought hotel toilet paper was not fit for an orangutan. A bed’s a bed she announced when we agreed to meet. All the others charge extra for wearing nice uniforms and being snotty to everyone. The lobby was crowded. In an array of colors and textures like John Daly’s pants there were Japanese tourists with cameras and smiles in spite of the weather, budget tours of New York where buses would pull up and disgorge their loads of tired, grumpy, unshaven humanity complete with kids running wild through the passage way to the elevators and babies squalling fitfully in the arms of women who looked as if they would rather be anywhere else, businessmen on a budget, and people like my mother although she was, to my mind, one of a kind and could not be compared to anyone else but was one of those folks who either could not or would not pay a thousand a night for a bed with a view of Fifth Avenue or Central Park.

  I sat at the lobby bar next to a middle-aged man with a large gut and hairy ears and a day’s growth of salt-and-pepper beard who seemed engrossed by the ball game showing on the TV behind the bar. He had the air of a man who’d spent most of his life waiting for someone or something and ate and drank simply to remind himself that he was still alive and kicking. His tie was partially loosened, and his jacket had dark stains on the side next to me that might have been food held too long in the pocket of the jacket. He looked rumpled and bored, ready for the next boat out but not sure he was at the right pier. He might have been a buyer in the Garment District or a manager in an insurance agency or secret agent traveling incognito but ready to kill at a moment’s notice. Yeah. Right.

  I had just come off maneuvers so I was a little tired myself. One platoon had managed to get itself lost and in the wrong place and I had spent most of my time running around trying to straighten them out. The platoon sergeant was young and recently promoted and the lieutenant was even greener. I took a sip of my Bud Light and looked at the barmaid who was definitely worth looking at. She was in her late twenties or early thirties with long black hair that curled around her shoulders, big green eyes and a smile to soften asphalt in January. Probably half the men at the bar were there because of her and the other half considered her a nice bonus on a miserable day. She knew her business because she trolled up and down the bar making more drinks, pouring drafts and making wisecracks with the guys. Even the lone woman at the bar smiled at something the barmaid said. She was a definite profit center for the hotel. Juanita was the name on her id badge pinned to her chest. Juanita Chiquita and I and probably every man at the bar with the exception of the one sitting next to me wanted to be with Juanita Chiquita in one of the rooms upstairs. She knew it too and was ready and able to cash in on that.

  “Sorry I made you wait.” I smelled the faint scent of roses almost before I heard her voice as my mother came up behind me. She was definitely dressed for Carnival with a dark blue shirt under her black jacket. She would have done an undertaker proud. “It took longer to get here and get changed than I had allowed for.”

  “Not a problem, Mom. I only just got here myself,” I lied. The person who first said that one should never lie had probably never made it out of bed. I got up and offered her my seat.

  “It’s too crowded here. Let’s go somewhere quiet and have some supper.” She declined to sit and put her arm through mine instead.

  “Not exactly weather for walking around and looking for a place,” I said looking down at the top of her head.

  “Seriously?” she shot back with a wicked grin and then softened her tone. “It’s a mess all right but I saw a place right across the street. Looked clean and not crowded.” She held up her other arm and showed me the raincoat nestled in its crook and then smiled up at me as if to say ‘you lost that one, Michael so man up and let’s go’.

  I shrugged into my overcoat and we forged our way through the crowd towards the front door. Outside the doorman put his whistle to his mouth to get us a cab, my Mom just grinned and waved him off as she shrugged into her rain gear. The crowds that normally would jam the sidewalks in that part of town had thinned considerably. The huddled masses had become the huddled messes, bowed and silent. The clouds had come down between the buildings and the air was misty with rain and smog making it hard to see more than twenty yards in front of us. Not that there was anything to see except more rain, raincoats and sidewalk. Fifty-Seventh Street was not much of a tourist attraction that day.

  We got to the intersection behind a throng of people waiting for the light to cross. Mom looked sideways at me and squeezed my hand. I returned the feeling and looked across at the traffic on Broadway. Then the light changed, and the crowd started across. By this time there were people standing around us and in back of us as well, so we went along with the crowd.

  There was no instant when “time stood still” that you read in some drug store novels. I heard a scream, a bang and then there was the car careening through the intersection towards us and only feet away. I did not have time to do anything but try to push my mother out of the way, but the car’s course was erratic, and it brushed past me and hit my mother and two other pedestrians before charging down the street and back-ending another car further down the street and coming to a smoking stop.

  “So there you have it,” I murmured into the complete silence in the room. Sometime during my recitation Pam had muted the TV and now only silent people moved about the screen making faces at each other with evident jocularity.

  “My God,” Pam whispered. “What an awful way to die and you almost joined her”. She clicked the remote and all the people making faces at each other died a digital death. We stared at each other across two feet of space. Her face was white under the light of the lamp behind her chair, her lips a pencil line, her eyes huge with the sudden intrusion of violent death in her life, death that had no rhyme or reason, a shrug of God’s shoulders, not even a pinpoint on the map of human suffering but still personal for all that.

  I had never described that time to anyone else. It had always seemed that my mouth was full of peanut
butter and my mind on another planet. Sitting there with Pam I found that I did not feel much of anything. Perhaps relief at finding someone to talk with or maybe it was just time to talk it out regardless of the audience. I had been relatively young then and still remembered the horror that filled my mind at the sight of my mother and others lying on the pavement like rag dolls after a kids’ party. Closed my eyes and felt momentarily too tired to move, too tired to do anything but descend into darkness and there to participate in a dance of the damned but it lasted only a second and there was Pam looking concerned.

  “You okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Sure?”

  “Yep.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to take you back to an awful moment.”

  I felt tears in my eyes and savagely knuckled my face. I felt embarrassed as if I had stood in the middle of Times Square and dropped my pants. I had shown Pam a still raw part of my emotional being and did not know if I had been right or not and even if she empathized and all was well I still felt that I should not have said as much or in such detail. It was as if I had ratted out someone whom I loved or at least whose memory I loved. “How ‘bout your family?”

  Pam waved her hands in the air as if to dismiss the whole subject. “My family is very boring. Dad worked at a bank and mom stayed home and raised us kids.”

  “Boring is good, though, right?”

  “I suppose. We lived in a nice house. Pink on top of a hill in New Jersey. I didn’t give it much thought growing up but as I became an adult I realized that we had more than most people. Plenty to eat. Nice clothes to wear to school and church, a good education and we didn’t need to take out government loans for college. On school vacations we’d go down to the Caribbean and have fun swimming and water skiing and stuff. I sorta took a lot for granted and maybe that’s bad as far as most people are concerned but I couldn’t help being born to a rich family or simply assuming that everybody was like me when I was a little kid.” Pam finished with a determined look on her face as if to warn me away from picking on her because of her family. She had undoubtedly listen to people tell her how lucky she was throughout her life. “I work hard and give back what I can,” she finished. “Want another beer?”