Deadlight Jack

by Mark Onspaugh

  George looked at him and shook his head. “You know, if you ever go senile, how will I tell?”

  “I guess I’ll start making sense,” Jimmy admitted.

  George laughed, but he seemed preoccupied. Jimmy reasoned that it was George’s missing grandson that was weighing on him.

  George pulled an in-flight magazine from the seat pouch in front of him and thumbed through it listlessly. Jimmy, knowing there would be no more conversation for now, closed his eyes and thought about what his uncle had said.

  Chapter 7

  ATCHAFALAYA SWAMP, LOUISIANA

  Donny was asleep, dreaming that his mothers were buying him a pizza as big as a coffee table.

  A sharp pain brought him awake; Professor Foxfire had rapped him on the head with his bony knuckles.

  “No sleeping, Master Watters! I want you to see everything. Besides, if you fall asleep, you might trail an arm over the side, where either a gator or one of my pale children might make a snack of it.”

  They were gliding over the water in a large and ancient flatboat. Professor Foxfire stood at the back, propelling them through the water with a long paddle that he moved in a strong and fluid waggling motion.

  “Stuff it,” Donny said under his breath. He had been seconds away from getting a mouthful of pepperoni and cheese.

  Professor Foxfire laughed. “Oh, so full of piss and vinegar! Why, if memory serves, hours ago you were crying like a baby; now you have the temerity to insult me. But, boys will be boys, right, Ethan?”

  Ethan said nothing, just cowered.

  Professor Foxfire grinned at Donny, and his eyes turned to those of a gator, and nictitating membranes glided wetly over them. “Soon you’ll weep, my brave boy, they all do. For now, enjoy the ride.”

  Donny looked, though he didn’t want to—it was part of why he had let sleep claim him.

  The flatboat transported him and his living compatriots deeper into the bayou.

  Three of Professor Foxfire’s balls of light led the boat, lighting the waterway enough for them to see gators slip into the water as well as the occasional cottonmouth.

  Some of the ghost children walked alongside the flatboat, their pale and slightly luminescent heads like dim luminaria. A set of twins dressed in finery from the Gilded Age rode astride the ghost gators, while a boy in a Boy Scout uniform rode the mutant mosasaur.

  Several of the ghost children brought up the rear, walking on the water, their eyes fixed on the living children. One of them was a boy in fairly modern clothes, and Trang told Donny that he was the brother of the girl they called “Gretel”—this was her Hansel and the way he stared at his formerly beloved sister made her weep silently and rock.

  They passed houses adjacent to the waterway and houseboats, some so old they were already partially submerged. Sometimes Donny would see someone withdraw behind a curtain or slam an open front door as they passed. Once they passed an old man rocking on his porch over the water, smoking a large pipe. He waved to them like it was some grand parade, then laughed. Donny had a feeling the old man knew exactly who was taking them on this ill-fated ride and why, and he hated the old man for doing nothing but laughing.

  Some of the older houses had water lapping at their front doors, like the waters of the Atchafalaya wanted to drag them down, make them part of some village on the river bottom for all those who had drowned or died in the jaws of gators or at the hands of men.

  They passed through waters choked with duckweed or giant water lilies, their flowers pale and ghostly in the moonlight. On the shore, nutria, like giant rats with black and pitiless eyes, watched them pass.

  And the noise! Donny had thought the crickets and frogs were loud in camp. Here it was a constant din of croaking, buzzing, chirring, hooting, and occasional screams or bellows from something far off but seeming to draw closer.

  And the place was an assault on his sense of smell, as clean smells like water, greenery, and flowers competed with mold and rot, mildew and decay.

  They floated past an old shack, completely submerged in the green waters, only the peak of its roof and an old tin smokestack above the waterline. Incredibly, lights could be seen below the surface, as if someone were home. Something watched them from the shadows, and it seemed to Donny it might have been more fish than man.

  The overhanging trees blocked out the moon, and they were navigating in complete darkness, save for the will-o’-the-wisps of Professor Foxfire.

  Each silent stroke of the paddle took Donny farther from his family and any hope of being rescued.

  Motherfucker, you won’t make me cry.

  It was the atom bomb of swears, one of the most forbidden, and therefore, the most powerful.

  Motherfucker.

  Motherfucker.

  Motherfucker.

  You won’t make me cry.

  Chapter 8

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  Thomas Kalmaku and his wife, Kate, were watching television when they thought they heard Molly talking upstairs.

  They looked at each other. It was ten o’clock, and she should have been asleep.

  Molly was eight now and already they had seen signs that she would not be an ordinary little girl. She was precocious, to be sure, but Thomas thought he saw more of his father in her than he wanted for his daughter, raised far from his hometown of Yanut.

  Thomas muted the TV and they listened. She was definitely having a one-way conversation. They walked silently up the stairs, pausing outside Molly’s room. They could see light in the crack under the door.

  “I think that is a good color on you,” Molly said, “don’t you?”

  They opened the door and found Molly sprawled on the floor, several pages of drawings and crayons scattered around her. She saw them, sat up, and smiled.

  “Hi, Mommy! Hi, Daddy!”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in bed, young lady?” Thomas asked.

  Molly fidgeted. “I have to help Grampa.”

  Thomas began to gather up the crayons. “Grampa is fine. George is looking after him, and he’s fine.”

  “You need your sleep, Molly,” Kate said, fluffing up her pillows and straightening her tangled sheet and blanket.

  “But Grampa,” Molly protested.

  “Is a tough old bird and he is fine,” Thomas said, giving only a cursory glance at the creature she had been drawing in vivid yellows, orange, and blue.

  He put the drawings on her little table and scooped her up. Kate kissed her bare toes and Molly giggled.

  “Oh, you weigh a ton!” Thomas said, grimacing melodramatically. “Did you eat a horse?”

  “No, Daddy,” she said, giggling.

  He put her into the bed, and he and Kate tucked her in.

  “Good night, Princess Ladybug,” Kate said, kissing her.

  “Good night, Mommy,” Molly said.

  “Good night, lovely,” Thomas said, kissing her as well.

  “G’night, Daddy,” Molly said, yawning. “Daddy,” she began.

  “He’s fine, I promise you,” Thomas said, and she nodded.

  They turned out the light and closed her door almost all the way. Molly lay in bed, listening for their footsteps on the stairs and the TV set.

  Molly shook her head, her expression the weighty seriousness of an eight-year-old. “No he isn’t.”

  She crawled out of bed as quietly as she could, tiptoeing to her drawing table.

  Molly picked up one of the drawings and looked at it. “Take care of my Grampa,” she said softly, and kissed the creature she had drawn.

  She went back to bed, and her sleep was undisturbed by troubling dreams.

  Chapter 9

  TRAVELING

  “You can buy a bathtub owned by Marie Antoinette,” said George suddenly, rousing Jimmy from a light doze. “Wait, it’s only a replica, so it will only cost you $250,000.”

  “Sounds like a bargain,” Jimmy said, stretching as much as the cramped quarters would allow.

  “Here’s a silver trai
n set that brings gravy to your guests,” George scoffed. “Why, that is just the thing for my house in the Hamptons, la di da.”

  Jimmy smiled, but he knew George was stalling. He could try to draw it out of him, but it was better to let George get to it in his own time.

  George ranted about two more gifts for the richest of the rich, the exorbitant price of a Manhattan penthouse and the cost of a luxury yacht once owned by Charlie Chaplin.

  Jimmy made appropriate sounds of amazement or derision, and waited.

  George finally put down the magazine and sighed. He looked at Jimmy, shook his head, and chuckled ruefully.

  “I was born in Albany, Georgia,” George said, “and my daddy got killed in World War II. After my grandfather died, it was just my mama and my brother, Louis, and me, plus a couple of old aunts. Mama died when I was seven—cancer. Louis and I were taken in by my daddy’s brother Nicholas and his wife, Mae.”

  George thought a moment, and a shadow crossed his face. Then, he smiled ruefully and said, “They were good people, but, of course, I was a handful.”

  “What were you, eight?” Jimmy asked.

  “ ’Bout that,” George said. “But I was willful and sass-mouthed. My uncle straightened me out. Made sure Louis and I said prayers for our mama every night.”

  Something in that statement bothered Jimmy, but he chalked it up to their different belief systems and kept quiet.

  “Uncle Nicholas had a soda fountain and candy store called Sweety’s Ice Cream Parlor. It was next to the movie theater, so he was pretty successful. He was so proud of us…” George laughed at the memory. “He had uniforms like his made for Louis and me. Starched white shirts with red pinstripes, red suspenders, black trousers, and red bow ties.”

  “You and Louis must have looked pretty sharp,” Jimmy agreed.

  “Fancier than anything you saw growing up on that iceberg,” George said.

  Jimmy just waited for him to continue.

  “I think he was hoping we’d take over the business,” George said. “But I ran off when I was fifteen. Must have broken his heart.”

  “Why did you run away?” Jimmy asked.

  George looked at him, startled. “I didn’t run away from anything. I wanted to seek my fortune, thought I knew more than anybody, even the people who cared for me.”

  George looked down at his hands and shook his head.

  Jimmy wanted to address an idea forming in his mind, but then George was off and running.

  “I wanted to go to New York and be a crooner,” George said. “I thought I’d be the next Nat ‘King’ Cole. But I’d get up onstage to audition and just freeze. I got jobs busing tables and serving, but I wanted to perform. But I was worse at playing piano and guitar than I was at singing.”

  “I’ve heard you sing,” Jimmy said. “You have a good voice.”

  George shook his head and muttered something.

  “What?” Jimmy asked.

  “Nothing, doesn’t matter now,” George said sharply. “Not really the point of the story, Leatherstocking.”

  “James Fenimore Cooper,” said Jimmy, nodding. “At least your racism is getting more literary.”

  “I try to keep improving myself,” George said sarcastically.

  “You were telling me a story?” Jimmy prompted.

  “Hold your horses, Hawkeye,” George said. “When you told that story about Raven stealing the sun it took days.”

  “Hawkeye’s from the same series, so no points,” Jimmy teased. “By the way, they’re both the same character and he was white, just raised by Indians.”

  “I don’t care if he was the color of a baboon’s ass,” George said, exasperated. “Anyway, I ran off to New York in 1956 and all I got was a broken heart. So, at seventeen, I decided to join the army like my daddy, win some glory, make my family proud.”

  Said family being Louis? Jimmy thought but held his tongue.

  “I happened to enlist between wars,” continued George. “Korea was over and it would be several years before troops were sent to Vietnam.”

  “I’d say you were fortunate,” Jimmy said.

  “You were never in the army, were you?” George asked.

  Jimmy shook his head. He and George were only months apart, and he had never considered enlisting.

  “Recruiter said I’d go to Germany,” said George. “I had told him my daddy died fighting the Germans in WWII. ‘This will give you a chance to see what a good job he did routing the Nazis,’ the recruiter said. I was excited, it was a real chance to connect with my daddy.”

  George blew out a gust of air in an exasperated laugh.

  “I never made it out of the good old US of A. I was stationed at Fort Drum in upstate New York, working the kitchen, which meant I peeled a ton of potatoes and washed a billion plates and whatnot.

  “When I asked my sergeant when I might be transferred to Germany, he said, ‘Watters, you dumb son of a bitch, the Germans hate niggers more than we do.’ ”

  Jimmy winced.

  “Oh, I heard that word a lot,” George said, “either in camp or in town. And always from Americans.”

  Jimmy didn’t know what to say. Growing up in Alaska, he had been fairly isolated from anyone who was not Tlingit.

  “Needless to say,” George went on, “this pretty much killed any ideas I had about a military career. But I didn’t go AWOL—out of respect for my daddy—just put my head down and did my two years. Just before I was discharged another recruiter showed up, trying to get me to re-up. I told him to get out of my kitchen before the medics had to remove his clipboard surgically.

  “After my hitch, I decided to move back to Georgia. I thought getting back to my roots might give me some peace,” George said, “but life is…complicated.”

  Chapter 10

  ALBANY, GEORGIA, 1960–2004

  “I was nineteen when I got back to Moultrie,” George went on. “I didn’t call the family—or anyone in town—I wanted to surprise them. Guess I had seen too many movies about boys returning home from the war to joyful homecomings full of home-cooked meals and pretty girls.

  “At first, it all seemed pretty much the same. Main Street was still neat as a pin and the theater was still there, but Sweety’s was gone. It was a shoe store or a five-and-dime, something like that.

  “I used a pay phone and called the old number, but it was disconnected. Now I got concerned. I had kept tabs on Louis while I was in New York but lost touch with him after I enlisted.

  “I went to our old house on Piney Avenue. New paint, new hedge—place looked nice. There was a young couple living there, them and their baby, and they told me Uncle Nicholas had had a stroke and died.”

  George looked at Jimmy, and Jimmy saw some of the shame George had been hiding. Jimmy felt badly for his friend but still felt a sense of unease.

  Something…hidden, Jimmy thought.

  “He died right around the time I reported to Fort Drum,” George said. “The man took us in, and I didn’t even know he was dead—because I off was playing soldier.”

  “What about your aunt?” Jimmy asked.

  “Gone off to live with some cousins they thought, but they didn’t know for sure just where.

  “I asked around town, but no one knew what had become of my aunt Mae or my brother Louis.”

  George paused, and a myriad of troubling memories played across his face.

  “But you found Louis eventually,” Jimmy said.

  Startled out of his reverie, George nodded. “Turns out they had sent my little brother off to the seminary. Louis said he never got any of my letters. Guess my uncle didn’t forward them.”

  “That wasn’t right,” Jimmy said, angry for George.

  “I was a sinner and a screwup,” George snapped. A woman across the aisle stared at him and he lowered his voice. “To my uncle, I was beyond saving, and he probably didn’t want me corrupting Louis.”

  Jimmy shook his head, unwilling to let George play the villain in this p
art of his life. “That wasn’t his call to make, George. Your God is supposed to judge you, not your uncle.”

  “That right, Powhatan? You thinking of changing teams?”

  Jimmy smiled. “Not likely, and I guess it’s not worth telling you Powhatan is the name of a nation, not an individual.”

  George made a sour face. “If you’re going to keep on interrupting me, this story is going to take until Judgment Day.”

  “Sorry,” Jimmy said, but he wasn’t. George was carrying a heavy burden, and Jimmy thought a lot of it might not rightly be his to carry.

  “So I went back to Albany to get my bearings. The town hadn’t changed much, either—little towns don’t, as a rule.

  “Of course, things were still bad for black folks, but I knew the lay of the land, as it were. In the army, I couldn’t get away from it, but in Albany I knew where I could live, shop, and work without too much bullshit.”

  The woman across the aisle gave him a disapproving look, and George noticed she had a little girl with her. George tipped his hat and said, “Beg pardon.” The woman gave him a curt nod that also served as a warning and went back to her magazine.

  George looked at Jimmy, whose expression held both interest and a trace of amusement.

  “Laugh it up, Seattle.”

  “I was wondering when you’d get to him,” Jimmy said.

  “So, I started looking for work. I would have tried the local soda shop—I had lots of experience—but they would only hire me as a dishwasher, out of sight. White folks didn’t want to look at a black man makin’ their sundaes, malteds, and what have you.

  “I got hungry after hittin’ the bricks all day and found a diner called ‘Fat Joe’s.’ Lord, I can still smell the smoke wafting my way, filled with the scent of burgers and onions. I don’t imagine you ever smelled that in your igloo, did you?”

  Jimmy was about to counter that his father had taken him for cheeseburgers in Yakutat, but he knew George was stalling, so he just looked at him.

  George sighed. “So, Fat Joe is behind the grill.” George laughed, and it was good to hear him do so. “Turns out he was skinnier than me. I sat at the counter, and this young woman asked me if I wanted coffee.”