MAR. 9
1945: U.S. planes firebomb Japan, killing at least 120,000 in Tokyo alone.
Cal woke up again. His hands were tied behind his back. He struggled to a sitting position, squinted against the glaring sun. He was behind a barn out in the country somewhere. The backs of his shoulders scraped against a rough wood wall.
In front of him, down a slight incline, the ground had been dug out and shaped into some sort of miniature landscape of war-torn terrain. There were long, meandering trenches, fortified mounds, popsicle stick bunkers, tanks, machine guns, men of plastic, wood, cardboard, straw.
“Daddy! Daddy, look!” a small voice cried.
Cal twisted around seeking the source of the cry and saw the little boy from the side of the road. He had a gasoline can in his hands. “Put it … put it down!” His voice was hoarse and it hurt to raise it, but he was scared for the little boy. “You’lll hurt yourself! Put it down, now!”
“Will I, Daddy? Will I hurt myself? Say ‘son,’ Daddy. Or ‘honey.’ Or ‘sweetheart.’ Be my real daddy and say those things.”
“Put the can down, honey. Put it down.”
“Yes, Daddy.” He put the can down, but no sooner had it rested than one of the bigger boys ran up and picked it up again. Prancing wildly, he scattered its contents over the playing field.
“Stop it! Stop it, now!” Cal shouted. The little boy was crying now, the bigger boy shouting with glee. “Stop it, I said! Son!” The bigger boy stopped and looked at Cal, then burst into laughter. The other brother walked around from the side of the barn carrying a box of matches.
“Michael!” the youngest boy screamed. “You stop! Daddy said stop! He won’t let you play with matches!”
Michael looked at Cal, and, grinning, struck one of the matches. The youngest screamed, and Cal shouted as Michael set the playing field on fire.
Bunkers and machine gun nests went up in small, quick explosions. Tanks melted into bluish-green pools. Plastic and wood and cardboard soldiers tumbled and fled, but were consumed before much progress could be made.
And the two older children laughed gleefully, while the smallest, whose sleeve had caught fire, screamed.
“Help him! He’s on fire!” Cal had to yell it several times before Michael, and then the other, ran to help their little brother. They rolled him on the ground and threw dirt on him. By that time he’d stopped screaming.
Cal looked down at his feet. His shoes were on fire. Michael was coming toward him, a strange expression on his face. Cal could feel his socks burning. Then there was another intense pain in his head. And then there was nothing.
MAR. 10
1948: the body of Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk is found in the garden of Czernin Palace.
Cal woke up in the ruins of a greenhouse. Great holes permeated the hard plastic sheathing overhead. All around him were wooden flats filled with dead brown and gray vegetation. The air stank of damp and decay.
“Jimmie could have died,” a voice said behind him.
Cal twisted around to see who it was, and discovered that his mobility was quite limited. He seemed to be tied to a support post in the middle of the greenhouse. Michael came around and stood in front of him, looking defiant, with a surliness beyond his years.
“I tried to stop you. I yelled. How badly is he hurt?”
“His arm looks like a half-done hamburger,” Michael said. “It’s real interestin’. But he’ll be okay.”
“He needs a doctor. Any adults around?”
“Just you. You’re Daddy, remember? You’re supposed to be takin’ care of your kids.”
“Untie me and I will. He needs a doctor. You want him to be okay, don’t you? Let me go, okay? Let’s take care of him, please?”
“I let you go, and that’s the last we’ll see of you.”
“I’m not staying– I won’t lie to you. I have kids I have to get back to. I have kids … I owe a lot to. But I’m not going to abandon you kids. We’ll get Jimmie some help. We’ll get all you kids some help. I’ll make sure of it.”
“We don’t need any help. We just need you. Jimmie’s gonna be okay. He just needs his daddy. He just needs you.”
Michael left.
Cal sat like a corpse in this garden of childhood delights until the sun went down, waiting for his children, wondering what bedtime stories he might tell to give them what they needed.
MAR. 11
1888: the “Blizzard of ’88” strikes the northeastern United States, killing some 400 people.
Cal had a vague notion of pulling the blankets up over him, trying to keep warm, but the blankets kept falling apart on him, crumbling under his fingers, and as he desperately tried to maintain some sort of grip his fingers slipped deeper and deeper into his own flesh, which fell apart, crumbling in the bitter cold.
He opened his eyes and watched in fascination as the sky, bleached white, broke apart and fell in tiny pieces through the multitude of gaping holes in the greenhouse. The sky had already covered half the dead vegetation surrounding him, and he was thinking about what an improvement in appearance that was, the sky by nature being such a pure thing, when he looked down to see that the sky was covering his body as well. In fact, he was already nearly half-eaten by sky.
“Frank, come on! Dig his legs out!” Michael’s voice. Then a flurry of activity as Michael and his younger brother scrambled to get Cal out of the greenhouse, out of the snow.
“Jimmie? How’s your little brother?” Cal’s voice sounded strange to his own ears: thin, reedy.
“Oh, he’s fine, Daddy!” Frank said. “We’re takin’ care of ’em good. You can look at all the stuff we put on his burns– you’ll be proud of us, I bet!”
“Needs … a doctor.” Cal’s mind was filling with brilliant white sky.
“That’s daddies for you, always worrying about something. Then always tellin’ you what to do just because they’re worried. But don’t you worry, Daddy. You learned us well. Thanks to you we all know what to do now.”
“I didn’t … I didn’t …” Cal couldn’t find the rest of the words. He looked up into Michael’s face. The boy was grinning, grinning so brightly his eyes were burning. His eyes were two bright red buttons in the snowman’s face, his teeth long sharp icicles because the snowman had talked such nonsense his mouth had begun to melt. Cal was thinking about all the snowmen he had made with his children over the years, so that it was only natural that they should build the meanest, the baddest snowman of them all and send it after him for just retribution for all his fatherly sins, when he lost consciousness again.
MAR. 12
1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers the first of his fireside chats.
He woke up in roaring flames. He shouted, tried to pull himself back, and found he could not move.
“Daddeeee!” a small voice cried. Cal turned his head, sighed. He was lying in front of a fireplace, propped up on pillows (oily, dirty pillows, by their smell). The little boy, Jimmie, was lying beside him, covered by dirty sheets and bedspreads to the neck, moaning softly in his sleep. His face was snowblind white, his eyelids bluish.
“Jimmie? Jimmie, can you hear me?” Cal whispered.
Jimmie opened his eyes slightly, looked at him. “Daddy? Daddy, it hurts bad!”
“I know, Jimmie. I’ll do what I can. But you have to help me, you hear? You have to tell your brothers how much it hurts, and how you really need a doctor. You tell them that, okay?”
“ … okay …” Jimmie closed his eyes, appeared to fall back asleep again.
Cal pulled on the ropes binding his hands together. They cut like razors into his wrists. His skin was dirty, sweaty, and the sweat ran into the raw places on his wrists and began to burn. “Hey!” Cal shouted. “Hey boys! Get out here!”
He looked around at the room. Grit and grime layered the floor. There was trash and nibbled food everywhere. The air was a mixture of stale and sour. The only light was cast by the fire. A couple of lamps lay broke
n on the floor, shards of bulb surrounding them, still dangerously plugged in.
Giggling came from another part of the house. “Boys! You do as I say! I’m your father, aren’t I? You do as I say!”
But they would not come. And Cal had to watch as Jimmie’s breaths grew shallow.
“Listen to me, Jimmie. You like bedtime stories don’t you? Let me tell you one about my … my other children. The ones I so foolishly left behind. A daddy should never leave his children behind, right? Let me tell you what those children dream about, okay? And maybe you can dream some of the same dreams. And maybe that will bring us all just a little bit closer?”
Cal knew Jimmie was no longer capable of listening, but he told the story anyway.
MAR. 13
1964: 38 witnesses fail to respond as Kitty Genovese is stabbed to death in New York City.
The fireplace embers glowed like a dull, persistent pain.
He’d rubbed his wrists against his bonds all night long until the skin of his lower arms and hands was greasy with blood. Finally, in near-agony, he managed to slip out of the rope.
Dizzy with pain and exhaustion, he crawled over to Jimmie. The boy was still alive, breathing raggedly.
Cal pulled back the dirty sheets Jimmie’s brothers had wrapped him in and looked at the burn.
It looked bad. He couldn’t tell how bad since he didn’t know much about those things, but inflammation had spread up the boy’s arm and across his back and in the arm where it had started the tissue looked alternately dead and infected. He wanted to cry but Jimmie was half-awake and Cal didn’t want him reading the expression on his face. “I’ll get you to a doctor. I promise,” he said. It was all he could say, and even then he was sorry he had used the word “promise” because breaking the promises you make to small children is just about the worst thing possible. He knew– he’d broken so many of them already.
Cal wrapped Jimmie back up in the dirty sheets and picked him up. Staggering and feeling faint, he made his way to the door and pushed it open (unlocked– Michael must have thought Cal was no threat by now. Which made Cal wonder about what kind of parents these kids must have had. And where the hell were they, anyway? But then if something had happened to Linda while Cal was gone all this time– suddenly Cal knew what kind of parents these kids might have.).
Cal stepped out into the morning light with little Jimmie clutched tightly to his chest.
The backyard was an obstacle course of discarded furniture and appliances. The children had turned it into an odd sort of playground: dummies had been constructed out of rags and old clothes, and placed in various semi-obscene positions on and in the various pieces. Their scowling, mock-adult faces had been devised with crayon and brown paper bags stuffed with more rags. Most of the bags had tears where the adults’ rag-brains erupted.
One of the dummies was holding its own foot. Another had a knife buried in its face.
Cal carried Jimmie through the backyard and into the field beyond, where he fell several times with the boy. This made him panicky, especially when Jimmie started making a low musical sound like that of a wounded cat. Finally he made it through the field and up the embankment on the other side, to a paved road. There were cars coming from both directions. Cal started to cry he was so relieved.
But the first car– a station wagon with a family in it – passed him, swerving, honking angrily. Then a second. A third.
“Help! Stop! Please! I need help here! A doctor!”
Although one elderly woman slowed enough that he could approach her window and hold the boy out to her as if she were some ancient goddess he was making a sacrifice to, she too was soon hitting the gas, averting her eyes, intent on some invisible goal in the road ahead.
But there were more vehicles coming, so Cal continued to scream. He tried to pay attention to the sound of his screams, trying to find something in them that might keep these people from stopping and helping, but try as he might he could hear nothing in his own voice but sincere pain and desperation.
More cars passed, honked, some drivers sticking their heads out and cursing, calling him nuts. He wondered if Jimmie might be the key, so he threw off the sheets that covered the boy, yelling “Boy! The boy!” and holding Jimmie out toward the oncoming cars like an offering, Jimmie’s head flopping side to side and so impossibly loose on his small neck with his eyes half open and the whites shining in the early morning headlights and his mouth so slack Cal wondered if the boy had fallen back to sleep.
But the last car passed, and no one stopped.
Cal waited there in the middle of the road for a while, crying to himself, holding Jimmie too tightly, trying not to look at Jimmie’s face anymore. He waited and waited, and the morning grew brighter, but no more vehicles came into view. Finally Cal walked up and down the highway retrieving the dirty sheets, stooping while holding on to the too-loose Jimmie, his head and arms and legs flopping. And he wrapped his little boy up again and walked back across the field and through the playground of discarded furniture and mock-adults and into the ramshackle house where he laid Jimmie’s body down by the couch where Frank and Michael sat watching cartoons, eating cereal.
“Hi, Dad,” Michael said, looking up from his cereal bowl.
“Hi, Dad,” Frank said, and they both looked back at the TV where the roadrunner was doing terrible, terrible things to the coyote, mangling and breaking and tearing apart his body but the coyote always looked just as good as new in the very next scene.
Cal sat and watched cartoons with them and even ate a little cereal when Frank offered up his spoon and neither of them asked about Jimmie and of course Jimmie said not a word.
MAR. 14
1967: the body of President Kennedy is moved from a temporary grave to a permanent site at Arlington National Cemetery.
Cal found himself standing in dusty, yellow light, in front of a window thrown open, a warm breeze sweeping through. He could remember little of the night before, but he seemed okay now. He could not remember waking, standing, coming to this window, but he seemed okay now.
Outside the window was the side yard, and a part of the “playground” he had not seen before. Just below the window Michael and Frank were busy molding a small mound of dirt, putting miniature roads and fences in, erecting houses, a model of the Empire State Building. A teddy bear had been set out on the mound, an old-fashioned Jack-in-the-Box, a row of crayons inserted like lamp posts, plastic dinosaurs, part of a building block set put together into an abstract pattern.
“It’s all Jimmie’s stuff,” Michael said, looking up at the window. “Guess he didn’t have much.” He inserted a candle in the top of the mound and lit it. A chocolate birthday cake. “You don’t get much stuff when you’re little,” Michael said quietly to the mound.
Cal wanted to jump out of the window and grab the boy, shake some sense into him. His hands gripped the window frame until the rotten wood began to break up. He wanted to feel sad for Michael, but all he felt was rage. He remained where he was and asked, “So what happened to your parents?”
“They just left one day. We waited for them all night. Jimmie was pretty scared. He was too little to get left like that. They should’ve taken him. It made me mad.” He shook his head, looking little himself. “I think it must have had something to do with drugs. They were always doing something with drugs. Talked about it all the time, even in front of us. Grownups shouldn’t do stuff like that.”
“No. No,” Cal said. “Grownups do a lot of things they shouldn’t do. So you decided to get me to take their place?”
“It was Jimmie’s idea. At first, I mean. He wanted a mommie, a daddie, anything. Frank and me, I don’t know what we needed. I had my fill of daddies, I think. I didn’t want another one.”
“How long …”
Michael started laughing. “We must’ve been here two, three months by ourselves. Frank and me used to steal food. Phone would ring, but we didn’t answer. Don’t work no more. Sheriff came out here once, but
we hid good. Cops out here aren’t much anyway, I guess. They didn’t come back. Guess people mind their own business out here.”
Cal gazed at Jimmie’s last birthday cake. The candle sputtered, leaning in the soft ground. “You can’t leave him there, you know.”
Michael looked at him, irritated. “You think I don’t know that? I ain’t a kid, you know? I ain’t a kid.”
Cal nodded sadly. “I know.”
“Jimmie’s just restin’ here a little while. He woulda really liked this, you know? He didn’t like the soldiers much. He liked his own toys.”
Cal went back inside to clean up. He’d call the boys inside after a while to do the same. Let them play for now. But he wanted them to look at least presentable for the walk into town and the sheriff’s office. Appearances probably weren’t too important, considering. But he was a father, and that was the sort of thing fathers were supposed to do.
MAR. 15
“Buzzard Day” in Hinckley, Ohio.
After all the statements had been taken, Jimmie’s body dug up and an autopsy performed, the local sheriff offered to let Cal stay at his home as long as he liked. He declined, and asked for a ride instead. The sheriff let him come along on a trip to the far end of the county, and then some.
The sheriff, Cal soon discovered, was not a dense man.
“I figure their parents had a heavy habit, like the children said.” The sheriff seemed genuinely sad to be saying such things, not at all inured to the realities of his job. “There have been stories, no real confirmation, but I believe those kids. Parents, they think they’re protecting their kids not telling them about the things they’re doing to themselves. They think they can do all kinds of terrible things and it’s all okay as long as they don’t tell their kids anything about it. But their kids always know. Believe me, the kids always know, even if they can’t tell it to you in so many words.”
“So what do you think happened to their parents? Do you think they’re dead?”
“Might be. Hard to say. You see these mountains, these woods around here? People go up there all the time to get away from their problems, get away from their lives. I don’t go up there much– people are hard to track up there, and their so-called neighbors aren’t going to tell you jack. I suppose I could be convinced to go looking for those kids’ parents, but I’m reluctant. No telling what’s happened to them. People up in these mountains are up there to lose themselves, and they do. They die and nobody knows about it. You ask me, those kids are a lot better off without them.”
The Book of Days Page 24
