by Chris Lynch
“Jee-zuzz,” I yelped as I bumped my chest right into Ray’s big chin. He was coming up the stairs just as blindly as I was going down them.
“Jee-zuzz, yourself,” he said, looking up, sighing heavily, slapping my chest. “What’re you doin’ here, at this hour?”
“Goin’ for a run,” I said. “What’re you doin’ here is a better question.”
“I’m going to work,” he said, snappish.
“This early?” I snapped back.
“Yes, Keir. Sometimes I go to work early. You wouldn’t necessarily know that, because why would you need to know that? This is still sleep time for you. Go back to sleep.”
He brushed past then, in a gruff way that felt completely strange and foreign to me. I almost asked, Who are you all of a sudden? Then I saw that he was scurrying toward the side of the house, where the trash barrels are. He had a lump of something bunched under each arm.
“Hey,” I called, then ran to catch him when he didn’t immediately respond.
“Hey, what?” he called back without looking. He started jamming the lumps into one of the barrels.
“Hey, this,” I said, lunging into the trash before he could even fully pull himself out.
I retrieved the junk from all the other stinking junk, then stood in front of my old man with one of the things in each hand. I examined them intensely as Ray looked everywhere else.
In one hand I held an array of flowers, carnations, pink roses, one white lily, done in the shape of a heart and held together with a spine of something like a coat hanger. It was very much like a miniature version of a funeral arrangement. And at the center of the heart was a postcard sort of thing that read, NEVER TO BE FORGOTTEN.
In the other hand I held up a teddy bear, wrapped in cellophane and holding a single red rose along with another card. This one read,
DEAREST KILLER,
DO NOT
EVER
R.I.P.
Ray lunged and slapped both “tributes” out of my hands and straight back into the trash barrel.
“Don’t even waste a minute on that,” he said forcefully. “There are jackasses everywhere. They got nothing better to do with their sad selves, and the only thing to do is ignore them.”
I was still staring at my hands as if the things were still in my grip. Then I looked into the bin, at them, and to see what else was beneath them.
“This is why you were up so early,” I said.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “That is a pathetic reason to get up early. I get up early because I get up early.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Well, I do now. That’s what I’m like now, one of them early risers. And it feels great. That shows how much you know about me. The new me. So.” That was always his last word when he wanted to conclude, when he wanted to have the last word even if he hadn’t earned it. So.
I had gotten all the logic I could get out of staring at my hands, then staring into the trash barrel, then staring at my hands again. And it was a sad tiny teardrop of logic, at best.
So I turned to my father instead.
“So,” I echoed his so inconclusive so. “How long have you been doing this?”
“Three, four minutes at the most,” he said. “No trouble. Hardly worth talking about.”
I smiled, nodded, pointed at him the way a quarterback does to his wide receiver when they’ve just connected on a long bomb touchdown pass.
“I mean,” I said, “how long? How many days? How many mornings, when I was in there all comfy, curled up and cowering from the nasty, scary world, were you out here cleaning up the nasty, scary world in case I might see it?”
He couldn’t avoid my gaze now so, cornered, he checked his watch. Corniest delaying tactic of them all, so of course the watch check was Ray’s move.
“I really am going to be late, Keir,” he said. He was probably correct, and he sincerely meant it, but it meant nothing all the same. We both knew he had to answer, even if it meant he didn’t punch in till lunchtime.
“They’re just punks, Keir, little nobodies. Just jealous of you. They’ve always been jealous of you. It don’t mean nothin’. At all.”
This did not put me at any kind of ease, no matter what his intention was.
“How long, Ray? How many days have you had to do this?”
“This fence. You know this fence, stupid iron bars. There’s always crap winding up caught in this fence, every day. I been cleaning the crap out of this fence every damn morning since you could even remember. Remember?”
I didn’t want to remember. “I don’t want to remember. Ray. How many days, since I’ve been home, have you had to clean up after this shit?”
He had by now gotten as tired as I had, of fighting dogged, relentless, inevitable fact.
“All of them, Son. Since the morning after you came here from . . . you know, the dorm. Every day brings more.”
We locked stares on each other for as long as we could hold it, maybe forty seconds. I remained frozen, so he broke the spell because he was the man here, with the job and the responsibility and the sense of time that comes with it. He lurched across the couple feet of space between us and grabbed me up tight in his awkward, primitive beastly hug. He hung on just a bit longer than usual and leaned his head flat against mine while stroking my hair flat. Just the way a trainer does when he’s telling a beaten fighter, It just ain’t your night, kid.
Then he let go, unclamped himself from me, and walked toward his car and his work and away from me and the trash barrels and all that stuff inside them.
• • •
I went for my run. And when I returned, approaching the front steps, everything suddenly looked filthy and disheveled. Like an abandoned house. I dropped right there and started picking up leaves and candy wrappers with my bare hands, and about a dozen of those cellophane rectangles that fall away when someone opens a pack of cigarettes. I thought nobody smoked anymore. Why do people have to be thoughtless pigs?
I got a broom and went over all the steps, twice, before picking every bit of litter up out of the modest patch of a front yard we had behind that sturdy iron fence. When I thought I had it under control, I stood on the top step looking down over it, and feeling all whooshy with pride. Then I looked up, and beyond our place to all the places surrounding us, and all the places surrounding them.
It could have been just one punk. Or two. Maybe it was an organized thing, or something more spontaneous and copycat, leaving stupid shit at my door to scare me or threaten me or whatever it is that ignorant vigilante types think they’re accomplishing with this hero bullshit.
I didn’t even do anything. One or ten or five thousand of them, I didn’t care, they got their facts wrong.
But it didn’t matter. Didn’t matter how many were at it. Didn’t matter that I didn’t even do anything. This house was marked, as long as I was in it. This life was marked.
I went inside and hit the weights hard for another hour. I paced, and paced around the old house I loved so much. I felt the emptiness of it right now and it gave me the twitches. I felt utterly alone, and at the same time, surrounded.
I burst out the front door again, down those clean stairs, and onto the streets for another run. A long, long run as far out as I dared with my lack of conditioning, and then back again, just about.
The stairs looked dirty again. Could have been I was a little sensitive to it, could have been I missed a spot or two, or it could have been just the filthy filth of people, gathering all over our property. There’s always crap winding up here, like Ray said.
I cleaned and swept again, the way good people do with their places, like they should do, to show the world a decent face. Then I went in the house and lifted some more, but I couldn’t last in there for very long this time. I scuttled back out the front door, breathed in a couple of anxious lungfuls like a guy coming to the surface after a dive too deep. Then I sat on my clean, proud steps to rest, and to just be there.
I couldn’t have Ray blocking for me all the time. He shouldn’t have had to. Cleaning up my messes, before I could see them? No, we couldn’t have that.
• • •
“You been right here all this time?” he said, startling me. My head was hanging, my elbows on my knees, as I must have dozed right there on the steps.
“What?” I said, snapping slowly out of it.
“You’re right where I left you this morning, knucklehead,” he said with a laugh. “Were we playing a game of freeze tag I wasn’t aware of there, Tin Man?”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said, taking a weak swing at the air in front of his big-target face. “I’ve been everywhere today. This is just where I happened to wind up. Sitting, waiting for you to come home from work.”
I knew it as soon as I said it, but I had not thought about it one second before that. His big gooey features told me all I needed to know anyway. Looked like he was going to burst out in both giggles and tears at the same time. “Remember?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, trying not to fall all the way into this one or I might not be able to climb back out. “Every day, practically, when I was little.”
“Every day,” he said.
“Waiting right here,” I said.
“Right exactly there,” he said. “Same step, even. Third from the top.”
I looked down at the step under me, then back to him. “Even I didn’t realize that,” I said.
“Ha,” he said, tromping up and past with a small smack to the back of my head for good measure. “Why wouldja need to? That’s what you got me for.”
This was starting to hurt. I had to shift it.
“No, what I got you for is to feed me. You going to make my dinner, old man?”
“Maybe. If I feel appreciated, ya rotten punk.”
“You want me healthy, don’tcha, Coach?”
“Of course I do,” he said, continuing on through the door and toward the stove beyond so that I might be cared for properly. As I ever was.
“Good,” I said, “then get to it. I can’t be waiting for my dinner, because that’s not part of the program.”
He stopped, and I could feel him reverse enough to hover in the doorway looking down at me. I continued to stare out into the world and not at him.
“Ah, that program of yours,” he said with a mix of pride and reluctant farewell. “It sure seems to be picking up steam very quickly.”
“I guess it is,” I said, holding back anything more. There was more, and I was only just now beginning to grasp it all myself. In his Ray way, he seemed to be working on it right along with me. Then he shut the door and left me to it.
Mary was right, and damn her for it. I was a big fat wrong-magnet here in this house. And I’d be a big fat wrong-magnet at Norfolk. The Plan wasn’t going to work. The Plan, after all the planning, was dying right in front of me.
I couldn’t burden anybody with any more of this shit of mine.
And I couldn’t allow anybody to handle any more of this shit of mine for me.
I had to go away, and not just three hours away, where my sisters, many classmates, teammates, and much, much else would be there with me. Like it or not. And where weekend trips home would be so easy, so expected, so necessary.
commitment
I can’t say it wasn’t my fault, because it mostly was.
Backing it up, it went more or less like this. I committed to Norfolk, where my sisters, Fran and Mary, were. We were so great, such a team. They were the kind of sisters a guy would choose a college for even if it sucked, which Norfolk spectacularly did not. The fact was, I had been missing them monstrously since they left home. Especially Fran, who kind of mothered me when I needed a mother but was never uncool about it. I missed Mary, too, though Mary was always the tougher nut, the one who gave it to me bare-knuckles if she thought I was out of line. Wouldn’t have thought you could miss the knuckles, but that’s what I did.
And a full-ride scholarship, essentially because of my abilities as both a placekicker—I was a lock inside of forty yards—and a defensive back—I crippled a receiver one time, but mostly I was decent reliable coverage in a zone setup. But as a kicker—especially of field goals and point-afters—I was lights-out, automatic on point-afters. They assured me I was valued as a kicker, and that my ability to fill in at DB in a crisis was just a massive bonus. Which would provide me just enough excitement—and, once in a while, glory—to live the football life while avoiding most of the life-threatening business that the game is kind of renowned for. Sweet. It was my dream arrangement, Norfolk.
But then things went wrong. Life didn’t do things the way it was supposed to. As an above-average graduating senior football player and all-around contributor to team and school and home and community and world, I had a right to expect a smooth ride on my way out of high school. Things went all wrong, and in the span of a little more than a couple of harrowing, upheavaling weeks, I did a turnaround. I turned completely away from everything I had known I wanted out of the next stage of the life thing—familiar friends, family, football, far but not too far from father, impossible good fortune for a guy like me. That was my idea of having it all, and I was this close to having it.
Then, all wrong. A situation got out of control and there was poison in my life that just would not flush out no matter what. And I started thinking how everything needed to be 180 degrees from what I’d wanted before, because now I wanted out, and away from anything familiar. Because everything that was familiar to me before was turning, rapidly, elsewise. The town that was so mine, so recently, was now a foreign place, a place I feared showing myself, to such a degree I knew my original choice was no choice at all. Coach, at Norfolk, said he understood. Said it was late for changes of heart. Said he understood the complications over which I had no control. It was almost as if he wasn’t surprised. It was almost as if he wasn’t terribly upset. Best for everybody, he said, and so he released me from my signed letter of intent to him and his fine program and the fine community that supported it unreservedly.
Shame. I could have used such a community.
But the silver lining appeared much farther west, with big skies, smaller expectations, and not one familiar face between me and home two thousand miles behind me. Carnegie, a very successful NAIA school, sent me a hopeful long-shot offer back when the NCAAs—mostly Division II and III schools with the odd limping Division I sniffing around—were paying me all the attention. I vaguely remembered the offer, but we had no contact after that.
As I sifted through all the paperwork from all the interested programs, Carnegie’s location and size and campus and moderate approach to athletics leaped up at me out of the pile of more feisty competitors. Much the same way and for the same reasons, I’m sure, it must have shrunk away and buried itself the first time around. Back when I was a spotless and bloodless kicking machine, splitting the uprights cleanly nearly every time. When the choices were still all mine to make.
It was a step down in prestige, going to Carnegie. And they weren’t even offering the full ride that Norfolk was.
But they were taking my call, which lately didn’t feel like a guarantee, putting them immediately at the front of the line. If there even was a line now. So when they got over the surprise of my sudden dramatic rethink and offered me a half scholarship and a full new existence, we had a phone call handshake deal.
Bliss. Troubles could trouble somebody else now.
But it wasn’t as easy as that, of course. Even a desperate broken simpleton like me knew better than that.
When I got off my sneaky whispering phone call to my new coach, I got instant butterflies at the thought of telling Ray. He had just spent every minute of a whole lot of his days nursing me, to the point where I was probably physically better than I was before the beating.
Physically better.
It was a hard time, diabolically hard, nasty weeks of me and Ray against the world, only I wasn’t any good for shit. So it was Ray and Ray ag
ainst the world, in defense of me, and he was magnificent. We were never closer, he was never truer blue and steadfast, and I had the conviction that if I decided to hibernate in that house under his Papa bear eye, I would be safe and without care for the rest of my days. I hadn’t thought I could find any more love for my old man, but lying there like a pulpy lump day after day, I’d be damned if it didn’t find me.
And when I finally gathered myself enough to make the first cautious foray out of hiding, out of my room, it was to locate him. Just to tell him . . . whatever. The stuff somebody should say to somebody once in a while. I found him, utterly wiped and recharging in his Barcalounger. His mouth was wide open and his left arm dangled over the arm of the chair toward the floor. The pins and needles would not be long in coming to that hand, prickling him awake and back on duty.
I was very happy to back away now and give him what peace he could get. There would be time to say the stuff.
• • •
When I had dinner on the table for my father as soon as he walked in, he looked at me sideways.
“Are you having a relapse, Keir? Post-traumatic brain disorder or something?”
I suppose the balance of caretaking and caregiving between us had never been anything close to equal, but this level of shock was not necessary.
“It was my turn, that’s all. You gonna eat my food or do stand-up comedy while I dine alone?”
He scrambled down into his chair as if he was terrified it all might vanish before he had a chance. A few moments later, we were sizing each other up across a sloppy mash-up of scrambled eggs with cheese, corned beef hash, and french toast. We both adored breakfast food for supper, and it occurred to me that it had been a sad long age since we’d had it.
“Nice,” Ray said after we ate in near silence through most of the meal. It wasn’t that kind of tense horrible silence, and not all that unusual for us, since we always agreed on respecting good food while it was still hot. There was always going to be time for the words once the food was honored and devoured, and anyway, we exchanged grunts of companionship that filled the gap.
