Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  Cait climbs down and puts a casual arm around my brother, walking him to the back of the vanbulance. Dad and I follow. She opens up the back and climbs up and turns, extending a hand. Ben looks at me and I nod. He reaches out with both hands, latching on to her wrist with both hands like it’s a rope, nearly pulling her back out, face first, onto the driveway. I have a flash of memory of Mae’s bird-like frame going down beneath the full weight of Ben’s exuberance into the living room coffee table. Dad and I simultaneously step forward, but Cait anchors her legs and hoists him up and in without trouble. It’s as if she’s done this before.

  “You look like hell, David,” says dad as Ben lies down on the cot. He closes his eyes to test its conduciveness to actual sleep. He asks for a pillow.

  “I’m fine. Stupid insomnia last night. I’m wiped is all.”

  He inclines his face, narrowing his eyes. “What happened to your head?”

  I touch the swollen escarpment of flesh that runs along my forehead like a tectonic fault line. Wincing, I remember instantly why I stopped touching it.

  “Damn. That still hurts. I collided with my kitchen cabinet.”

  “Your kitchen cabinet.”

  “Yeah. Stood up too fast. Damn.”

  “Maybe you should have someone…”

  “It’s fine. Just swollen.” Now I can’t stop touching it. “Damn that hurts.”

  “Mmm. Everything else… okay?”

  “Uh, yeah. Yep. I’m good.”

  “Mmm.”

  The lack of any further inquiry or follow up confirms for me the sort of complicated understanding that can only come from the crucible of adolescence. He knows there is more to the story and that I am lying. He understands that real answers are not his for the asking; will not give themselves up freely; will have to be hunted with cunning and trapped like wild, untrusting animals. This seeming abandonment of further inquiry tells me either that he knows more than he is letting on or that he wants me to believe he does. Either way, I am desperate to change the subject.

  “How are you doing?” I ask.

  “I’m fine.” It is a steely, unnerving calm. The thing he is not telling me is everywhere between us.

  “Retirement still treating you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “And mom?”

  “Mmm…your mom’s fine.”

  In the parlance of my family, the word fine is bursting with non-meaning. It does not convey any information about the subject of the sentence. Consciously or unconsciously, its import is entirely subliminal. The word fine means I’m choosing not to give you any real information. It means, I know what you want, but I’m withholding from you. To my mother, in most situations, the word is a signal that my father has removed himself from the conversation. As in:

  Hollis, are you listening?

  I’m fine, Susan. Whatever you want to do.

  But to me, in this context, the word fine can only mean one thing: he knows that insomnia is the least of my problems, if not complete and utter bullshit. He knows that I am, and that I have been, withholding from him. Two can play at that game, he says. I’m coming for the truth, he says. You’re a liar and you always have been, he says. Fine.

  Ben has opened every cabinet and has reclined on the fold-down cot twice. Cait escorts him to the driver’s seat where he puts his hands on the steering wheel and navigates an imaginary traffic jam between a multi-car pile-up and the emergency room. Cait leaves him and comes back to sit on the edge of the cot. She pulls the hair behind her ears and adjusts her cap, smiling.

  “He’s great,” she says.

  “He is,” I say. Dad nods.

  “Every moment is brand new for him, isn’t it? He just floats from one magic second to the next. He’s totally free. He’s as Zen as it ever gets.”

  My father looks at her, authentically for the first time, his eyes searching her. In two minutes she has managed to find the very center of my brother.

  “Yes,” he says quietly. “You’re exactly right about that. That’s Ben.”

  There is a heartbeat or two of darkness and silence that washes in and fills the space between us. Up front, Ben makes a sharp turn, barely avoiding disaster.

  “Finish your story, Mr. Johns.”

  “Hollis. I’m not Mr. Johns. I don’t do that.”

  “Okay. Finish your story, Hollis. What happened to Naughty Dillon?”

  My father leans a shoulder up against the back of the van. He slips his hands into his pockets, then looks surprised and extracts a coin and a folded receipt, which he opens and inspects causing him to nod in some silent recognition and then returns it to his pocket. He crosses his arms and adjusts his stance. He clears his throat and looks up at the stars as if trying to remember. He purses his lips, as if to restrain a grin. He is the method actor doing what he must to get back into the role. Forcing distance between moments so that he may have room to become someone else.

  “Well,” he says, and I can hear that the storyteller is back. “Naughty Dillon and the rest of us … Dillon and me and Stinky Daniels and Alice Monroe,” he counts them out on his fingers as though we have forgotten in the few intervening minutes since Ben’s appearance, “we all went to the police station. The trooper let the little ratty old truck full of junk go on its way … and he put Dillon in the back of the police cruiser … and he confiscated the alcohol we had in the back seat … and he packed all of that into the trunk of the cruiser … and then he came back and he told me that I had to drive Dillon’s car and that he wanted us to follow him to Cleveland. So that’s what I did. I slid over and took the wheel and I followed them into Cleveland. And when we got there, the trooper marched us all inside and sat us down in a room and one by one he called us into a separate little office and asked us about what we knew.”

  “Hey dad, I’m driving like a mo-fo!”

  “Keep your eyes on the road, Benny. So we’re all sitting there in the police station waiting for this trooper to tell us we can be on our way. And we waited about two hours and then we started to wonder what is going on and just how much paperwork there was to do on something like this. And just when we were about to ask what the problem was, we see Dillon’s dad walk in the front door. I forget his name. Bruce. Or Bill. Something like that. Don’t remember. Real big, imposing guy. Pushin’ a lot of air in front of him as my dad would’ve said. So he walks in the station, past the room we were sitting in, and he has a conversation with the trooper.

  “Now, Dillon’s father was on some police force at some point, Franklin County I think too, so maybe they knew each other, I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. They spoke the same language. These two great big guys, standing there like mountains, talkin’ about us. We can’t hear what he’s saying, but he talked and the trooper nodded and then the trooper talked and Dillon’s dad nodded. And after he was done talking with the trooper, Naughty’s dad walked into this room where we’re all sitting and he sat down in one of the chairs. We were all tired and a little scared and he sat there and looked at us looking back at him with our coats in our laps and Dillon tried to say something but his dad held up a hand, and then and he pointed directly at me. Great big beefy finger. Doesn’t say anything to Dillon. Just pointed at me and said tell me your name. And so I told him my name, and then he said, okay Hollis Johns, I want you to tell me where you and my son were headed tonight. And I looked over at Naughty Dillon and his eyes were about the size of these hubcaps and he looked like he was barely breathing. So I knew, sure as shootin’, that there was definitely a wrong answer to this question.”

  My father laughs. Shakes his head.

  “I just didn’t know what that wrong answer was. Naughty Dillon knew. I didn’t. But I also didn’t know what else I could do but honestly answer the question.”

  There is a screeching sound from the driver’s seat. Dad leans casually into the back of the vanbulance.

  “You doing okay up there Benny?”

  “Dad, its an emergency, okay?”

&nb
sp; “Okay Benny.”

  “I have to get there fast, okay?”

  “Okay Ben. Get there fast and quiet so you don’t wake people up.”

  “Fast and quiet and sneaky as a mo-fo.”

  Dad pulls the same coin and folded-up receipt out of his pocket that he looked at five minutes ago. He opens up the receipt and looks at it with a furrowed brow, then nodding his head again and replaces it in his pocket. We wait. He has us. He has me. Over three decades of these stories and it’s like the first time.

  “So I looked back at Dillon’s dad and I explained that we had been headed out to a party up near Shaker Heights. I think I probably didn’t call it a party. Probably more like a little get-together with some friends. Something like that. And Naughty Dillon’s dad kind of slid his eyes sideways over to his son and then they slid back to me. Not another muscle in this giant man moved. Just those eyes. And he said to me, so you weren’t headed to a football game then, were you Hollis? And I knew he had us. He had us cold. So I wasn’t about to lie to him. When you’ve done something wrong, lying about it only makes it worse.”

  He does not look at me when he says these words. He looks at Cait, and Cait looks at me. Maybe she knows what is going on and maybe she doesn’t. But I know that he is not talking to Cait. He is talking to me. I know that he is deliberately unraveling this yarn of his from around a warning which is all for me. Don’t lie to me, David, he is saying. Don’t you do this again. Don’t be the fuck-up son who lies.

  “So what’d you say?” Cait asks, maybe to break the silence.

  “Okay in there Benny-boy?” he says instead of answering. Ben makes a screeching sound. My father nods, purses his lips and stares down at his shoes. We wait.

  “Well, I looked over at Naughty Dillon, who was white as a piece of chalk, and I looked at Stinky Daniels and at Alice, and then I looked back at Dillon’s dad and I said, No sir. We were not going to a football game. And he said, Hollis, at this party you were going to, at this little get-together of yours, he probably said get-together rather than party because that’s probably what I told him. A get-together was one thing, but a party was something else entirely. So anyway, he says, at this little get together, can you tell me who was hosting? And I said, yes sir, a gal named Minnie Watson was hosting.

  “And when I said that – when I said Minnie Watson’s name – I could feel this kind of crumpling sensation happening over at Naughty Dillon’s side of the table; kind of like one of those paper cups under someone’s foot. I thought maybe he’d fainted. But I didn’t want to look over at Dillon because his dad, Bruce or Bill or whatever his name was, he was looking at me hard so I just kept looking back. And then he said, Thank you, Hollis, for your honest answers. Your daddy obviously raised you right. And then he pointed to me and to Stinky Daniels and to Alice Monroe and he told us that he drove a white Plymouth Fury and the he wanted us to head on out to the car and that he would give us all a ride home.”

  A car backs out of a driveway four houses down. Its lights sweep us as it slowly passes, the driver no doubt wondering whether the ambulance-like vehicle in my driveway means that there is some additional entertaining mayhem on my front lawn.

  My father extracts a hand from his pocket, giving a small insouciant wave, as if this is his neighborhood and the man in the passing car is an old friend who has not yet returned the wheelbarrow he borrowed last spring. The man in the car no doubt wonders if my father is a producer for Jerry Springer. My father crosses his arms and looks up into the sky. We wait.

  “So he looks at me and he looks at Stinky. He looks at Alice Monroe. And we all kind of looked at each other and we weren’t quite sure what to do, but when Dillon Knotty’s dad said to do something then by God you did it. And you didn’t spend too much time thinking about it. So we all stood up and grabbed our coats and headed on out of the room. I looked over at Dillon who stayed sitting at the table and he had gone from white as a piece of chalk to a kind of ashen gray color. Like spoiled meat. This boy was in big trouble and he knew it. All of us knew it, we just didn’t quite know what he’d done aside from lie to his dad about going to the football game.”

  “Who was Minnie Watson?” It’s Cait. A million miles away.

  “Well, none of us knew Minnie Watson from Eve. But Naughty Dillon knew her. Knew her…he was flat out in love with her is what he was. Never told any of us. We knew it was her party. Or friends of hers, I don’t remember. But we knew she was involved and that she was the one who had invited him and he had invited us. But that’s all we knew. It wasn’t until sometime later I actually met her.”

  “And she was black!” says Cait.

  Dad smiles. Winks. “Ms. Lewis, you may just be as perceptive as you are pretty.”

  Cait beams at me and I roll my eyes.

  “Minnie Watson was as black as a starry night in June. And she was one of the sweetest girls you could ever hope to meet. Great big smile. Beautiful brown eyes. What she was doing with Naughty Dillon I will never know. But Minnie was quite a catch and those two were in love for the full distance. And Dillon’s dad did not like that one bit.”

  “Racist,” I say, because, apparently, the obvious must be declared.

  “MmmHmm.” He nods. “Racist. Yes, racist. But there was a little more to it.”

  He stops. Pulls out the folded receipt from his pocket. Furrows his brow. Unfolds it. Remembers. Nods. Folds it again. Returns it. We wait.

  “So?” I say, trying not to sound impatient; trying not to sound like I am married to him. There is a nearly invisible twitch of his lips and I know that I have failed miserably.

  “Well, Dillon’s dad came out to the car and the three of us were in there waiting, just like he had instructed. I remember him opening the door and then reaching in under the driver’s seat and extracting a silver flask. It was big and kind of beat-up looking and dimpled all over. And he stood there and drank from the flask and looked back at the door to the station and took another drink and I thought that he was waiting for Dillon to come outside and get in the car. But then Dillon’s dad – Bruce or Bill or Dirk or Darrin or something like that – he screwed the top back onto the flask and he got in and closed the door and started the car and started to drive off. And the three of us in the back seat – no one was going to sit up front with him, so we were all there just crammed into the back seat – and so the three of us looked at each other and finally I spoke up and I said um, Mr. Knotty, what about Dillon? And Mr. Knotty looked at me in the mirror and said Dillon’s going to stay here for a couple of days. Dillon needs to learn a lesson. Lyin’ is the first step into Hell, Hollis. Don’t forget that.

  “And that was that. Took us all home. He tried to make conversation, but none of us were really talking. He dropped us all off at my house. He pulled up to the curb and we were all so ready to be out of that car that I think I had the door open before the thing stopped moving. He must have sensed that we were worried. He leaned out the window and said, Don’t you worry any about Dillon. He’s just forgotten who he is. He just needs reminding of who his people are. And we just sort of nodded and kept on moving. We had no idea what in the heck he was talking about. All we knew was that we had all left Dillon at a police station. He let him sit in jail for two days.”

  “That’s not legal,” objects Cait. She stands, moving from the cot to the bumper, dangling her legs. “That’s totally unconstitutional.”

  “Well, of course it was.”

  “All because he was in love with a black girl.”

  “A black girl who happened to be Minnie Watson.”

  “And… she… was…”

  I am channeling the impatience of my mother who, from wherever she is, can sense that her husband, my father, is at it again, siphoning time and attention from others in brilliant lazy spirals like a black hole siphons light.

  “Well, Minnie Watson was a girl about my age – our age – a high school student in East Cleveland. So I guess she was a couple of years younger than we were. Any
way, back in the early, mid-sixties there was a lot of turmoil in Cleveland over integrating the schools. And Minnie Watson…”

  He stops. Rubs his chin.

  “Well, let me go back a few years. When Minnie Watson was in elementary school, she attended Hazeldell Elementary in East Cleveland…”

  Stops. Kicks the toe of his shoe against the tire.

  “I guess I need to go further back than that. Let’s see. World War II…”

  “World War II?!” I blurt.

  “MmmHmm… After the Second World War, Cleveland saw a tremendous migration of blacks into the city. Not just a few, mind you. A lot. Like more than double over a decade or two. And almost all of that growth in the black population occurred in the eastern parts of the city. You could almost draw a line right down along the banks of the Cuyahoga River. As the black population grew, the white population began to shrink because the white folks started to resent the influx and they just started to get the hell out, a lot of them moving into the western parts of the city.

  “So as a result, Cleveland became a largely segregated city. Like a lot of cities back then I guess. East was the black side of town. West was the white side of town. Lots of mutual resentment and racial strife. Whites felt like the black folks were taking over. Black folks felt like the whites had the unfair advantage on just about everything. Jobs. Government services. Law enforcement. Schools. Especially schools. East was the least and west was the best. The black east-siders thought that schools on the west side of town, the white side of town, had all of the good facilities, all of the good teachers, all of the good programs. The east-side schools were run-down, under-funded and overcrowded while the west-side schools were newer and had lots of room. There was a lot of complaining by the black community that something be done about it. Remember, now, Brown versus Board of Education was officially the law of the land but Ohio, like a lot of states, was slow to implement its meaning. Brown was decided back in ‘52, so…”

  “‘54,” I say.