NOT AN AMERICAN

by Stanley W Rogouski

  "Robert Chegoffgan," she said, taking the scarf. "He was my father, Robert Chegoffgan."

  "That's a nice scarf. I suppose he wants it back."

  "Not very likely. He's been dead for the last 10 years."

  "Oh my God. I'm sorry."

  "Relax. It was half my life ago."

  Cathy Chegoffgan stood up, wrapped the scarf around her neck, and threw it over her shoulder with such a stylish, practiced flourish that there was no question that it had indeed been a cherished possession.

  "It still must suck to lose a parent at that age."

  "Duh. You think?" she said, sitting back down on the bench. "But I don't really want to talk about it."

  "I'm sorry, but I just can't believe you gave me your dead father's scarf. You had no idea you'd ever see me again."

  John Avellanos looked at Cathy Chegoffgan, managing, with some difficulty, not to press the issue any further. He remembered how he had seen her the previous November, the pale guardian angel who had emerged from the snow to wipe the blood off his face with her dead father's scarf, then disappeared so quickly he had come to believe she had been a mirage. Now she was entirely real, an opinionated young woman with a self-cultivated rough edge, and an intelligent gleam in her luminous brown eyes. She picked up her empty coffee cup.

  "Look at this," she said, rattling the cup under his nose. "Someone thought we were street performers."

  She turned the cup over and emptied its content out onto the bench. There was a dollar bill, some change, a ten and a five, almost 20 dollars. She put the money back in the cup and pushed it over towards Avellanos. He pushed it back.

  "It's your cup."

  "It was your performance."

  "Actually it was our performance."

  She put the money in the top pocket of her flannel shirt, then stood up, and held out her hand.

  "Let's just say it's lunch money."

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Whole Foods at the train station food court?”

  “That yuppie fake vegan place?”

  “Do you want to eat or do you want to argue? They have nice big tables and they’re never crowded.”

  “Lead the way he says after some token resistance.”

  John Avellanos and Cathy Chegoffgan walked out of the fountain circle onto the main path that crosses Reagan Plaza. They passed a line of police officers guarding access to the great lawn in front of City Hall, then made a right turn into the forested section of the park towards Scahentoarrhonon Station. The drizzle had become a steady, light rain drifting through the thick canopy of American elm trees overhead. Cathy Chegoffgan took an umbrella out of her knapsack and held it above his head, stretching her arm out to compensate for the differences in their height.

  "Who wears a 1000 dollar suit but forgets to bring an umbrella?"

  "This? It's just something I got from Sears."

  "Don't bullshit me," she said, running her finger up and down his sleeve. Whoever made this knew what he was doing. This is not the kind of material you give to wage slaves in Bangladesh."

  Avellanos was about to respond when she stopped on Reagan Plaza East. He realized they were in front of Scahentoarrhonon Station. It was exactly 11 o'clock. As he looked up at the French Renaissance facade through the drizzle, she tapped her foot on the sidewalk, one, two, three, all the way up to eleven, the muffled sound of the bells drifting through the trees in Reagan Plaza down from the clock tower over City Hall. He stepped down off the curb onto the street.

  "Good morning sir," a police officer said to Avellanos as they waited for the light to turn. "Good morning ma'am," he added to Cathy Chegoffgan."

  "Fuck you pig," she whispered under her breath.

  Cathy Chegoffgan putt the umbrella back into her knapsack. They crossed the street, and they bounded up the stairs, pausing to look back at Reagan Plaza before they went inside. Avellanos, who had never before been inside the grand old building, was impressed, standing in place, wanting to admire the architecture, but Cathy Chegoffgan, who used to work at the newsstand near the Amtrak ticket office, grabbed him and pulled him downstairs. The main waiting area reminded her of abusive customers. In the food court, she became part of the great flow of traffic between New York and Chicago. Almost in spite of herself she had begun to like it, if only because she could pretend she had just bought a ticket for Seattle or Los Angeles, that her time in Poison Springs had merely been a brief stopover before she caught the next train west.

  "This is the only place in town I like," she said as they put their trays down on a big empty table. "Next week it's my 21st birthday. Then I'm free to leave this loser city and never come back."

  "Why didn't you just leave when you were 18?"

  "An 18-year-old girl alone in America? You're like prey."

  "I can't believe those people gave us 15 bucks for arguing about Shakespeare."

  "Catalinelli canceled outdoor concerts. Then he said he'd ticket street performers without a license. If you can play the guitar and dodge the cops, you can make some real money."

  "I thought people loved Catalinelli."

  "They used to like him when there were a lot of Mexicans here. Now that they're all gone, they want to forget they ever supported him. They think he's embarrassing. Ever since David Sherrod stabbed him in the back it's been all downhill. They don't want people to think they're ignorant rednecks. One little thing they can do to say 'fuck Michael Catalinelli' is to drop some money into some street performer's cup. It makes the town more interesting. And it's low risk, but if you think we got it under false pretenses, we can go back outside and give it back."

  Avellanos laughed.

  “But Felton is losing," he said, "has been since June."

  "It's only close because she's an elitist dumb fuck, no offense intended. Catalinelli is done for. Nobody admits voting for him anymore. Even my mother denies it."

  "What do you mean 'no offense intended?'"

  Cathy Chegoffgan pushed her tray aside, and pulled an 8 x 11 inch envelope out of her knapsack. As she eat her lunch with her right hand, she opened the envelope with her left. She put a stack of photographs down on the table in front of her, and handed Avellanos the portrait she had taken the previous day near the fountain circle. He took the photograph, careful not to get it stained with grease, and held it up to examine it in the light. It was surprisingly good, skillfully framed in order to compensate for the hard, afternoon light. With his arms stretched out over the top of the bench, he actually did look a bit like Jesus Christ. He looked up to see that she had taken another photo with her smart phone.

  "Do you ever take photos of this train station?" he said.

  "People who take photos of buildings are losers who don't know how to talk to people. That's not me. You have an interesting face. That's why I stopped to talk to you last year. I kept looking for you in the paper too, all through December. I thought maybe you froze to death, and I would see your interesting face somewhere on page 5 or 6."

  "That was quite a blizzard," he said, "but I went to high school in Vermont, so I've seen worse. So what do you mean no offense intended?"

  "That was the worst blizzard I ever saw in November," she said, continuing to eat with her right hand as she shuffled the stack of photographs with her left. "The TV stations said it was the storm of the millennium and we only have one or two of those every year, so you know it was bad."

  She stopped when she came to a photo of a woman in her late 30s, Elizabeth Felton standing with a short African American man in his early 30s, Michael Catalinelli's former press secretary, now tormentor David Sherrod. Cathy Chegoffgan had taken the picture at a press conference on the steps of City Hall, but she had still managed to get close enough so that their faces filled the entire 6 x 6 square of the print. She put it down next to the portrait of John Avellanos with long hair. There was a clear resemblance. When she turned over her smart phone, and showed him the photo of himself with short hair, it became an unmistakable resemblan
ce. He shrugged his shoulders as if to say "busted."

  "So you're saying you think we're related."

  "Nicholas Felton was a dog. He probably even fucked my mother? Who knows? He had the well-known reputation of humping everything that wasn't nailed down. Condoms break. Women don't take their birth control pills. Things happen. So last Spring, his daughter sends out a press release informing us the public that her long lost half brother had come home for his father's funeral and that he was living in East Poison Springs until he got back on his feet. It went nowhere, one little article in the Winterborn Daily Post, and then poof, it disappeared. People were like Nicholas Felton with an illegitimate son? No shit. Who cares? Tell us something we don't know."

  "So when did you think it was me."

  "Not last fall, not even yesterday. But when I saw you with your short hair in your 1000 dollar suit I began to put two and two together. It hit me just five minutes ago. Of course. You came to town the night of his father's funeral. You got lost. I almost let you die out in the snow. But I'm still confused. You're an educated guy. You can afford to dress like your father. Are you really working at WillyMart?"

  "Yes I am."

  "Are you a union organizer or something?"

  “No. I'm not. I'm really working there."

  "Why?"

  "You think Elizabeth Felton's money is my money? Do you think Nicholas Felton's money is my money?"

  "Not necessarily."

  "Do you think I came to town to collect on the will?"

  "No. I didn't say you came to town to collect on the will."

  "What if I did? What if Nicholas Felton fucked my mother then dumped her, exploited a poor, working-class Hispanic American, then forgot about her?"

  "He's a scumbag. But she should have sued him for child support."

  "What if she was too proud? And what if their son went into the army, served in Iraq, then came home, unable to deal with what he had done for his so-called country, that same country people like Michael Catalinelli says he doesn't even have a right to? What if he wandered around the United States for years? What if he couldn't hold a real job?"

  "OK. So working for WillyMart. That's not a bad thing then. I guess I'm the elitist snob."

  "What if finally, out of desperation, he came back to Poison Springs to see if he could connect with his biological father, to see if he could figure why he just couldn't live a normal life? But what if the summer he came back to Poison Springs his father was already dying of cancer? And what if the night I finally worked up the courage to go back to the house where my mother had grown up was the night they lowered Nicholas Felton into the cold, cold ground behind the First Presbyterian Church in East Poison Springs?"

  "It was cold that night."

  "It sure as hell was."

  "I'd also say it makes sense now why you're so obsessed with Shakespeare and probably Edgar Allen Poe and probably I don't know who," she said, taking a sip of carbonated, lemon flavored spring water. "That's one fucked up story you won't read about in the newspapers."

  "Unfortunately you probably will."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I had hoped my so-called sister was going to drop out of the race."

  "Why would you want her to do that? Catalinelli's a dirt bag."

  "He's a minor dirt bag. He's a petty little opportunist. Michael Catalinelli is nobody. He's exactly what Elizabeth called him, a miserable little demagogue. He's a miserable little demagogue in a miserable little pond not even worth noticing. Why would I care if he's the mayor of this crappy little city?"

  "Because he let a poor, mentally disturbed man get killed in jail?"

  "That was bad, but do you want to know what a real, genuinely dangerous man looks like. Google the name 'Oscar Avellanos.' Catalinelli's a cheap demagogue. Oscar Avellanos is a man who organizes death squads in the morning, then comes home at night and reads the Bible to his kids. If I ever wanted to play Lee Harvey Oswald, that's the man I would shoot, not Michael Catalinelli. Catalinelli's not worth shooting. He's not even worth voting against."

  "It says Oscar Avellanos is Mexican and it's all in Spanish," she said, looking at her smart phone. "I can't read this."

  "Look more when you get home. There's a student newspaper in Boston that puts out a bilingual edition."

  Cathy Chegoffgan continued to browse the web on her cell phone.

  "You'll find more there," Avellanos continued. "You know what the real point of Romeo and Juliet is, the unintentional real point? You know how the play opens with the servants, the Capulet and Montague slaves fighting one another over the rich man's feud? Identifying with your master's interests. That's what voting is all about."

  "That's why we have reality shows."

  "Right."

  "And that's why we have sports."

  "That's exactly right, but Elizabeth doesn't understand. She thinks this election really means something. She's wanted me to get involved in her campaign ever since I got to town. That's why she sent that press release. She wanted to make it public. That way Catalinelli couldn't use it against her."

  "That was smart."

  "It wasn't smart. She doesn't know who I really am. She doesn't know how much I could hurt her campaign if the whole truth about me came out. I won't only destroy her campaign. I'll destroy her career. I'll destroy her life, and I don't care if her father was a rat. She's a genuinely good person. She took me in when I had nowhere else in the world to go."

  "You should go to the VA. That's the usual kind of guilt you feel when get back from a war."

  "I was happy when she made that stupid remark last June. I thought it was over. I thought Catalinelli would win the election in a walk. She'd go back to her old job, and I've move on. But then fucking David Sherrod learns the hard way what it means to be black or brown in Poison Springs. He starts Occupy Poison Springs, or Occupy the Plaza, or Occupy whatever the fuck he's occupying. Suddenly, whatever people think of David Sherrod, they also think Catalinelli done for. He's lost control of his own right hand man."

  "That's what I said. He's done for. It's a good thing."

  "Elizabeth Felton is back in the race. You're a vet. You've lived a hard life. You come from the salt of the earth. You're exactly what I need to diffuse the charges that I'm a rich elitist Ivy League snob. She doesn't say it in so many words, but that's what she means. And it gets worse. It's only a matter of time before Catalinelli goes to the media and tell them I'm only refusing to get involved in my sister's campaign because I'm neutral, that I resent my father for being a rich, elitist snob just like his daughter. Once that happens, I won't be able to stay out of the election, even if I tried. If I leave town, then it looks like I'm running away."

  "Catalinelli might not. It will look like he's picking on an innocent Iraq War vet."

  "I hope. But my nerves are shot just thinking about it."

  "You need to meet more of your fellow vets. They all have stories like you."

  Avellanos laughed.

  "So you're saying I'm not as special as I think."

  "I'm saying I can take you to meet David Sherrod. I know him. I know that whole crowd. They're like my friends. They all have stories about going to Iraq. Maybe you won't feel so alone if you talk to some of them."

  John Avellanos picked up the stack of Cathy Chegoffgan's photographs, and started to examine the various images she had taken over the years. A look of relief passed over his face, as if he had initially regretted talking so freely about so much, but was pleasantly surprised by her reaction. She would understand when he told her the real truth. She smiled at how young and innocent he suddenly looked. If he had served in Iraq, he had to be at least in his late 20s, but he looked as if they could have gone to high school together no more than 22 or 23

  "I thought you didn't take photos of buildings," he said, holding up a photo of the old West Hill coal breaker.

  "My grandfather used to take me up there. So you like that photo?"

  "Yes."

 
; "I never thought it was a big deal. But lots of people like it so I guess you're onto something."

  "Like isn't the right word. I'm overwhelmed by it."

  "Thank you."

  Avellanos did like it, and he now realized why she used film, and not a digital camera. The photo of the West Hill coal breaker was beautiful and artistic, very obviously taken with a Hasselblad and not a camera phone or even a digital SLR, printed up with a real enlarger, and not an ink jet printer. In the distance below, you could see the sprawling wreck of Winterborn II. Further off, Route 1081 coursed through the suburban sprawl like a little industrial cousin to Mark Twain's Mississippi. There was a line of iron hopper carts on a set of rails leading inside. One of the loading belts had half collapsed across one of the iron supports, forming the shape of a cross, giving it the quality of a landscape from the High Middle Ages showing Jesus crucified on a mountaintop. But he seemed particularly interested in a pile of debris in the foreground, mostly beer cans and old newspapers. There was a knit hat, a yellow knit hat with green knit ducks threaded through the fabric. If Cathy Chegoffgan didn't think the photo was a big deal, it was mostly because she thought it had been ruined by the yellow hat. But for John Avellanos, it seemed to have some kind of deep, personal significance. She noticed a tear under one of his eyes. She picked up a napkin and brushed it off."

  "Thank you," he said. "I understand why you lug that old Hasselblad around now."

  "It's the only inheritance I'm probably going to get. My grandfather never used 120 in Vietnam," she said. "He used 35mm. But he always used 120 when he got home. Using 120 was his way of saying he was back. He wasn't going to get killed," she added, noticing how he continued to stare at the image of the green and yellow knit hat.

  "Did he take this photo?"

  "No. I did. But he taught me how to do it."

  "When did you take it? Please be specific. Was it before or after we met last November?"

  "Last summer."

  "So after?"

  "Yes. Definitely."

  "I need to tell you about myself, everything about myself.”