Denis Ever After

by Tony Abbott

  Matt snaps a picture on his phone. “Denis . . .”

  I swing around to him—“Yeah?”—but he’s talking to Dad.

  “. . . was on this side, wasn’t he? The front side of the monument?”

  Dad’s big shoulders shrink forward, like he can’t help it. Standing this way, he looks small. He’s struggling to understand something about the monument other than what it means to everyone else—a memorial to soldiers who fought here over a hundred and fifty years ago.

  “That’s right, the front . . .” He lifts his eyes to the words. “Georgia . . . a place I hate more than anywhere in the world.”

  Then, with a single move, Dad takes Matt’s hand in both of his. Matt wasn’t expecting this. I imagine Dad needs to touch someone real, someone he is close to, to be right here when he digs up the past, his past in Georgia, the hated place, which is what he’s about to do.

  “So, growing up, you still want to know?”

  Matt trembles, wondering how much he’ll have to coax Dad. “Yes. Please.”

  “Then I’ll tell you.” This is said in a whisper, as Dad scans the inscription on the monument and reads the name at the top. “Most of it was regular. Boring. Sad. Most of it.”

  The words scare Matt. “You were in Georgia when you were small? But not long, right?”

  “Till I was your age. Long enough.” Dad draws in a slow breath, turns his head to see if Matt’s listening, then breathes it out. “But it’s really about my father. You need to know about my father. . . .”

  21

  Valdosta

  With the sun hitting that block of stone, and moving under the sky and over the meadow and in their faces, Dad conjures his early life in ragged bits and pieces.

  “It was raining, and there was this school bus,” he begins, but he’s already off-track. He stops, looks off, and blinks a couple of times. “Wait, sorry. Valdosta. That’s where I lived. My father. You know, you and Denis weren’t the f-first.” He’s stammering, trying to put together a story he never tells. “I mean, twins run in families, right? Well, my father and his brother, my uncle. They were twins too.”

  Matt is surprised, but knows there’s more to come, so he reins it in. “You never talk about your uncle.”

  Dad snorts. “He died when he was a young man. I never met him. I only know the stories. They were so different, so unlike each other, my grandmother told me. I was worried when you two were on the way . . . but you weren’t anything like them, either of them. My uncle, Richard—Denis’s middle name—he was his own person, she told me, calm, beautiful. He loved people, loved talking. My father just hated him when they were growing up. I guess he knew my uncle was gay, even when he was young, and he tortured him for it. This was before me, you understand. My father grew up angry, drank a lot. Was a drunk, really. I don’t know what Vietnam did to him, but he was a hateful man, used to smack me around. This is your grandfather we’re talking about.”

  “Dad, I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, well. He did a lot worse to my mother. It was almost lucky when she died. I was ten. In a car wash, would you believe it? When her car came out, she was slumped over the wheel.”

  “Dad!”

  “She smoked a lot. After that, he really laid into me. Didn’t hold back. I hated him. He was this wiry creep, skinny but strong. A sergeant when he was in the army. He couldn’t keep a job. We fought. Once he slapped me to the floor because”—Dad laughs coldly here—“because I said that he was over thirty. It was an innocent remark, right? And I knew that only because my mother had said it, and I just repeated it. ‘Dad’s over thirty.’ He slapped me. I was seven. That’s how I grew up, being hit. Fighting. That was the real combat. That’s what Georgia is for me.”

  Matt’s face is streaming. Mine too. “Dad, what a junky way to live. But you got out. You’ve been a good dad to me. Us.”

  Dad screws up his face, remembering. “His mother, your great-grandmother, finally took me. I went to live with her in Pennsylvania.”

  Matt flicks his eyes at me. He remembers that GeeGee told me the same thing. “And you never went back? To Georgia, I mean. Except for the army?”

  Dad glances at Matt, as if he’s just realized he’s not alone. “That’s the point, Matt. I never wanted to go back, ever, after I moved in with my grandmother. Years later, your mother and I met, got married, moved to Buckwood. Then one day your mother calls me while I’m at work. She’s out of her mind, screaming. She was pregnant with you, and she said my father was at our house. My father, drunk, and he came . . . at her . . .”

  “Dad!”

  “She said I needed to go after him. The last freaking thing I wanted to do was to go to Valdosta, but I had to. Your mother screamed at me that he attacked her, or almost. I had to go. When duty calls, right?”

  Matt inhales a slow breath, trying to calm himself. “But did he? I mean, why—”

  “So I tear down there. All day, into the night, I’m driving to Georgia. I look for him everywhere and find him the next morning, at a bar. This is eight o’clock. He’s already skunked. I drag him out onto the sidewalk. It’s pouring. I accuse him of assaulting Mommy.”

  Dad is back there in his mind now, he sees the street, he is screaming on the sidewalk.

  “The rotten bum denies it. I’m sorry, Matt. I’m telling this like I remember it. He says he was just ‘checking on her.’ I punch his red drunk face, like I wanted to when I was little—”

  He breaks off. It is minutes like this. No sound but the crows gathering in the trees behind us, calling raggedly.

  Matt swallows. “Dad . . .”

  “The rain is pounding, and he’s taunting me, ‘You’re like your uncle! Pansy!’ And I really let him have it. He staggers back into the street. I’m ready to pound him again, when this bus, this morning school bus, comes around the corner. Maybe the bus is going too fast, but with the rain, it skids. I’m hit and thrown, but he steps right into it. The bus smacks him down and crushes his leg. Chops it right off . . .”

  “My God, Dad!” Matt puts his arm around Dad’s hunching shoulders, but our father is frozen in his story and doesn’t feel it.

  “I’m in the hospital in a coma. Eight weeks. When I wake up, my grandmother is there. My father died while I was in the coma.”

  Matt is shaking on his feet, picturing the vague features of Dad’s red-faced father, Mom back at the house, pregnant with us, the wet street, the bus, the leg.

  “But if your father attacked Mom, you had to, right?”

  “I don’t know if he did. I don’t know. The look in his eyes when I accused him was like I was wrong, I had it wrong. I hated that face, and I thought I knew he was lying, but it was too late. I kept hitting him. . . .”

  “How bad . . . You weren’t too badly hurt, really hurt, were you? You’re strong now.”

  Dad blinks once, looks Matt in the face. “Banged up. Four broken ribs, fractured femur, pretty serious concussion. Subdural hematoma. I’m fine now.” He blinks and seems to see the field for the first time in minutes. “After the hospital, I was . . . I was arrested. I went to jail because of the accident. They said I was partly responsible for it.”

  “Jail?” Matt is shocked at this, so am I. “Because your father died?”

  Dad flicks his eyes away. “Three months, then probation. It would have been longer, but lawyers proved the bus driver had suffered blackouts before. I got out with time served. My grandmother changed toward me. I think she blamed me. She buried his ashes in her plot up here. All that was before you and Denis were born.”

  When he says my name, Dad shrinks inside himself, and the battlefield is so quiet between the words. I hear the crows again and the putter of a small plane and trucks shifting gears far away.

  Soon it’s just the two of them again, standing at the crest of the field, Matt’s arm still on Dad’s shoulders as if he’s forgotten it’s there. My chest is heaving from what Dad is telling, and what Matt is hearing, and I feel like I’m not wanted here
. Like I’m eavesdropping.

  “Just leave him alone,” I whisper. “Let him forget.”

  But Matt keeps going. “The army was before that, right? Fort Benning?”

  Dad stretches, and Matt finally draws his arm away. “Yeah. My squad had some really good guys from Fort Benning. I was lucky to get out of Afghanistan alive. Four guys in my squad were in a transport when it was blown to pieces, jerked into the air like a toy. Two were killed right there, two maimed. I was far enough away, but it could have been me. Bad, huh? One holy mess after another. It all leads back to Georgia. I hate that place.”

  “Dad, I’m so sorry. . . .”

  Matt tries to reach out again, but Dad runs his hands over his chest, leans back on his feet, staggers, steadies himself by placing one hand flat on the stone, then traces his fingers into the words:

  WHEN COUNTRY CALLED, WE DIED.

  “I loved them, loved those guys, the way you do in battle. And I hated my father because of how he hurt people. My mother, my uncle when he was young. My father was that way his whole life. I’m happy he’s gone.”

  He pounds the stone with his fist, bloodying his knuckles, until Matt hugs him tight to make him stop. “Dad, I’m so glad you’re okay. I love you.”

  Dad rubs the blood from his fingers and breathes, as if for the first time in hours.

  “It was you. Mom and you and Denis. Knowing you were at home waiting for me, that carried me through all of it.”

  22

  The Gray Stone

  Dad stands there, not feeling me near him, probably not even sensing Matt, not really. The dead stone block crushes him. It’s the weight of how he grew up, of his father’s death, of what happened to his comrades, of me. Unable to take in light or give it off, he slowly lowers himself to his knees, first one, then the other, like he’s praying to the stone.

  Matt can’t see as I can how Dad is twisted and angry inside, but he knows. Sparks fly off our father like they flew from Matt that day at school, only a thousand times hotter. They’re spitting in the air and on the ground like furious fire from an arc welder. They’re the tangled confusion, anger, and shame burning his heart.

  “Matt, tell Dad he didn’t kill his father. It was his father’s own fault, or the bus driver’s, or the rain’s. Or God’s. But not his. Tell him, Matt. He needs it.”

  Matt is tongue-tied, but manages a few words. “Dad, none of it was your fault.”

  “Or Mom’s, either, for forcing him to go there. It happened because of everything. It was all combined.” I think of the innumerable threads. “I don’t know what it was. But say something!”

  “Dad, it wasn’t you.”

  On that battlefield, it sounds weak, pathetic, untrue, and Dad stays kneeling. He doesn’t move, as if he doesn’t hear. The rain, late last night in Buckwood, must have fallen in Gettysburg a few hours later, and though it’s sunny now, the ground is damp, and his knees soak into it. I sense him struggling for someone to tell him what on earth happened on that street in Valdosta and why I was killed and placed here and why, why, why, but there’s no one to tell him anything.

  He half turns his head to Matt. “In the car,” he whispers.

  “Please, Dad. Not yet?”

  “No, in the car. In my bag. There’s a folder. Bring it here. It’s time you saw it.”

  Matt turns. He drags himself back to the car, tugs the door open, and unzips Dad’s duffel, where he finds the file he’s not supposed to know about. He brings it back, holds it out.

  “Open it up. There are pictures. You can see them now.”

  At first I think Matt’s hands shake only to pretend he doesn’t know what’s in the folder, then I realize it’s because he does know. He’s studied those photos every night for two weeks. But now, at the very place where my body was found, the images cut him as he hasn’t been cut before, and it hurts too much to keep the secret.

  “I already saw the file, Dad,” he chokes. “I found it in your room. I copied it. That’s why I got in trouble at school. I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t have to confess. He could easily have held it back, but he can’t lie.

  Still kneeling, not ready to rise, Dad looks up at him and nods a couple of times. “I guess I didn’t hide it very well. Maybe I meant for you to find it. Don’t tell Mom you’ve seen it. She’s broken because of . . .” He sighs away the rest of what he might have said, but I hear it.

  Poor Denis, my Denis.

  He starts rocking.

  “Matt, ask him something. He needs to get out of where he is. He’s going to fall in. He’s thinking about death too much. Death is my thing. It’s not good for him.”

  Taking a step toward Dad, Matt puts his hand on his shoulder like a friend would do. I know he feels Dad’s pain shoot into him. Matt is so old at this moment.

  “You . . . you’ve come here a few times. . . .”

  Dad wipes his face with both hands. This seems to take forever, then he stands up. “Every year, at least once. I never find anything. Never.” He closes his eyes for a moment, then turns to the car. “Look, it was random. The killer left Denis here because he was afraid. Or he was low on gas. Or someone was coming. Or it was too dark to see. Or whatever. It’s a dead end, Matt.”

  It’s not a dead end, Matt thinks. It can’t be. Denis was put here for a reason. He doesn’t say this, but I hear him.

  “Maybe,” I say. “But this is enough for now. Let’s get out of here. Just go home.”

  There’s a lot of quiet after that, until a couple of cars drive up and people start milling around the spot, looking like they’re waiting for us to move away.

  One family has accents, so maybe they’re from Georgia too, coming to pay their respects, although one blond-haired boy has all the junk of war—a toy musket with a rubber bayonet, a rebel cap, an ammo belt, a flintlock pistol stuffed into his waist. He runs away down the field.

  “Was it here?” the wife asks her husband, and I hope to God they aren’t here to visit the spot where my body was found.

  But no. The husband sweeps his hands from the downward-sloping meadow to the trees. “This road marks the right flank of the Confederate line, the artillery position. My great-great whatever, the state senator, charged all the way to Little Round Top from here. Lost an eye and an arm in the Wheatfield. He was just a boy, then, in the 11th Georgia Infantry.”

  Dad smiles grimly at them and heads back to the car, not wanting any small talk. Matt follows for a step or two, then stops and whispers to me as softly as he can.

  “Look how far away the Honda was. It’s almost a mile from here.”

  “I think I know that.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t really see what a long way it was. He or they carried you all this way. Maybe there were two of them. That makes more sense. Two killers.”

  And a crack opens in my mind.

  I hear the ragged voices of two men talking loudly at each other. Men with accents like the tourist husband from Georgia. I don’t know where it was I heard them or when it was, but there are two voices. I press my memory, press it and squeeze it, and it hurts. But it comes.

  A gray evening. Lights were glowing, I can’t make out exactly where, and there was a sense that the weather was going to turn cold any minute. I was young and afraid of something. Maybe I was afraid of everything.

  But I was alive and hearing voices, and one of them spits out that word.

  I ain’t hungry. Keep your muck.

  The voice is rough and angry. Ain’t. I dig deeper, scratch into the corners in my head, and suddenly, I hear more—this time from the second voice.

  But here. It got all kind of cheese on it—

  Idiot. It ain’t even real cheese. You’ll throw it up on your first ride.

  These voices, two of them, come from far away, a noisy place, with jagged music, but over it all I hear that nauseating twang. I ain’t hungry. It ain’t even real cheese. Your first ride.

  “Come on, Matt,” Dad calls. “We should get home. M
ommy doesn’t like to be alone. Since Denis, she’s worried about strangers.”

  I try to remember whoever carefully positioned my arms, my legs, my head. It doesn’t fit with the harshness of Keep your muck. That comes from a different place. Here, I was set so gently, but I see no face in my mind, I hear no voice yet.

  Only the word cheese, foul as it is in this place of grim death, sparks something real in me, and I understand we need to make another stop before going home to Mom.

  We need to work back to the beginning, like GeeGee said.

  To the place I first went missing. A place where they have rides. A place where they play music. Where they serve fake cheese.

  Funland Amusement Park.

  23

  By the Roadside

  All told, we are on the battlefield only a little over an hour. While Dad drives on the highway back toward Buckwood, Matt reads the file and I prod from the back seat.

  “The way to do this is to follow it back. GeeGee said so. We need to stop at the Big Dipper.”

  I ping and flick until Matt finally squirms away. “All right!” he snaps, then adds another “All right,” like he’s talking to Dad.

  “Matt?”

  “I’m just thinking. The last thing before Gettysburg, the last thing we know about—that we know about right now”—which is a dig at me, because he still thinks I can know more but I just won’t—“is the roller coaster, right? The amusement park?”

  Dad is eyeing two police cars down the road. Their lights are flashing. Several cars are pulled to the side. One officer trains a radar gun at passing cars, while the other leans in a minivan’s window. Dad’s driving is fine, but he cuts his speed.

  “Right. Right. Beginning and end. Nothing in between.”

  I notice almost too late that one of the stopped vehicles is a gray pickup. We’re by it too quickly to see if it has a dent in the driver’s door like the one in Buckwood, but then, this is Pennsylvania, the land of dented pickups. I store it in the back of my mind.