Raising Jake

by Charlie Carillo

  Then he turns to us, claps the muck off his hands, and says, “Get the fuck out of here, and I mean this minute. And do not come back.”

  Obedient as schoolboys, the three of us pile into the car. We all understand that we must remain silent until we start rolling. My father starts the car and puts it in gear.

  “Christ, we’re ridin’ heavy,” he whispers as we begin to roll. “Sit as still as you can. One bump and the whole carriage’ll collapse.”

  We roll along until Orvieto and his hat are a speck in the rearview mirror. Then the road curves and he’s out of sight, and the three of us begin to whoop and holler and laugh as if we’ve just pulled off the Brinks job.

  “Masterful, my son!” my father exclaims. “What you did back there was masterful, although I wasn’t thrilled about being called crazy.”

  “Was that a bunch of bullshit, about the Japs sinking your ship?”

  “Total bullshit.”

  “Thought so. Good touch, though.”

  “I thank you.”

  Jake puts his head back and howls, then pats my knee. “Unbelievable, Dad,” he says in a voice choked with pride. “That was just amazing.”

  I roll down my window to breathe in the salty, briny air. “I did what I had to do,” I say. “That’s all. Christ, but I need a drink.”

  “We all do,” my father says. “But let’s get this red-hot cargo home first!”

  Jake puts his arm around my neck for a quick hug, my father beeps the horn for no damn reason, the cobblestone cargo reeks like a sewer, and in the midst of the madness I suddenly realize that this, right now, is far and away the happiest moment of my life. And if anybody had told me yesterday that I’d be having my happiest moment tomorrow, I’d have told that person he was completely insane.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  When we get to the house my father pulls the car right into his little garage and closes the door after it.

  “Gonna leave it in here for a few days. Just in case that mountie has a change of heart and decides to come lookin’ for me.”

  “Should I unload the stones?” Jake asks.

  “No, Jake, my boy, you’ve done enough. I won’t need the car for a few days, anyway. Let’s go inside.”

  We follow my father. I can’t wait to be out of the garage. It’s tiny and dark and creepy. Lined up along one wall are all those cans of canary-yellow paint. The garage connects straight to a little laundry room with a sink and the very same old Maytag washer-dryer setup my mother used.

  I realize for the first time that after my mother died, my father had to take care of all of the household tasks. How did he do it? Nobody taught him, and he wasn’t the type of person to ask for help. While the two of us lived together my clothes were washed and folded (but never ironed), groceries found their way into the house, and meals appeared on the table—not great meals, a lot of fried meats and plenty of sandwiches, but meals nonetheless. We didn’t starve. We were clean. Life went on.

  I should have admired him for that, but I never did. Only now does it amaze me that a man who’d never before performed any domestic chores somehow managed to do all of them. He didn’t crumple up and die, didn’t let despair destroy him. He just put his head down and did what he had to do.

  “Strip to your shorts,” my father says to Jake and me. “I’ll do a wash. You guys can’t go back to town like that, they’ll throw you off the bus.”

  We do as he says, handing over our muck-spattered shirts and pants. He strips down as well, and while the three of us are washing up at the sink Jake sees his tattoo.

  “Whoa! Awesome, Danny!”

  My father flexes his arm to make it wiggle.

  “You’re a lot of help, Dad.”

  “Aw, relax, the boy’s not gonna run out and get one.” He pats the tattoo. “Jake, I woke up with this in the Philippines, and I still don’t know how it happened. That’s pretty much the way it is with tattoos, not to mention women.”

  Jake laughs as my father loads the washing machine and pours in a tiny amount of liquid detergent. He was always telling my mother she used too much soap.

  “By the way, we’ve got seventy-one cobblestones,” Jake informs us. “We had seventy-two, until that cop threw one down the hill.”

  “A pathetic show of strength,” my father says. “He was trying to get his balls back. I’d say he didn’t succeed.”

  “So at ten bucks apiece,” Jake says, “that’s more than seven hundred dollars’ worth.”

  Danny grins at him. “Not bad for an hour’s work, eh?”

  “Not bad at all.”

  Jake never, ever talks about money. It’s always been an abstract thing to him, and suddenly it’s come into focus, thanks to my father.

  “Well,” I can’t help saying, “I’m guessing that the fine for what we did, had I not opened that cop’s eyes, would probably have been around five hundred bucks. And they would have confiscated the stones. That would have made for a net loss of twelve hundred dollars. Keep that in mind while you’re calculating things, guys.”

  My father gets the washing machine going and turns to me, the two of us in our skivvies. The hair on his chest is white and his abdomen is as flat as a pearl diver’s. I’m sucking in my gut, but there’s no way to hide all those years I’ve spent behind a desk.

  “For God’s sake, Sammy,” my father says, “can’t you for once just enjoy what happened, instead of worryin’ about what might have happened?”

  “Yeah, Dad,” Jake adds. “Enjoy the moment.”

  I’m shocked that my son would say such a thing, that the two of them would gang up on me. “I thought I was enjoying it.”

  “Yeah,” my father says, “you were enjoyin’ it, all right, for about eleven seconds. Then you had to go and think about it. Stop thinkin’ about it, already. Think you can do that?”

  “I’ll give it a shot.”

  He reaches into a laundry basket, pulls out some clean T-shirts and tosses them to Jake and me. “Your clothes’ll be clean in a little while. What say we order a couple o’ pizzas, and sit around the kitchen table tellin’ lies?”

  “I’d love that,” Jake says.

  “Okay by me.”

  “Fine, then,” my father says. He pats my belly. “Now put on that T-shirt already, so you can let your gut go slack.”

  He leads the way from the laundry room to the kitchen, through a narrow corridor where I used to roll my toy trains back and forth on the yellow linoleum strip. It’s the same old linoleum with a darker, deeper path worn down the middle, but the walls of the corridor are different.

  Once bare, they are now covered with pictures—framed photographs of my mother, my father, and me. It’s odd, because there were no photos of any of us on display while my mother was alive. Since her death and my departure, my father has created this shrine.

  “Holy shit!” Jake exclaims.

  “Welcome to the Sullivan family photo gallery,” my father says with mock severity.

  There’s a baby picture of me asleep in a crib, and a picture of me on a swing, being pushed by my father. I’m maybe two years old, skinny and sullen, in a too-big blue-and-white striped T-shirt and ridiculously baggy short pants. My bangs have been cut in a straight line just above my eyebrows, like Moe of the Three Stooges. I’m clinging to the chains as if I expect to be launched into space while behind me my frowning, black-haired father prepares to give me a push.

  Jake roars with laughter at my haircut.

  “The ol’ soup-bowl-on-the head trick,” my father explains. “Saved a fortune in barbershop fees with that one.”

  “You made me look like an idiot, Dad!”

  “Small price to pay. Look at this one, Jake. This is the one that got the whole thing rolling, so to speak.”

  It’s a wedding day photo—my father in a tuxedo, my mother in a white dress, standing on the steps of some church on a cloudy day. Neither of them is smiling.

  “Your grandmother, the former Mary DiFrancesco,” my father
says gently.

  Jake studies the picture as if he’s waited all his life to see it. “She had intense eyes, Danny.”

  “Yes, Jake, everything about her was intense. Guess that’s why she’s no longer with us.”

  I’m beginning to understand why we never hung pictures in our house when I was a kid. They’re all too depressing. Sad, suspicious faces in every shot.

  Except one.

  “Whoa!” Jake exclaims. “Is that my grandmother?”

  My father nods. “Rockaway Beach, 1951. Before we were married. Before she started piling on the pounds.”

  I never would have recognized her. My mother is a slim young thing in a red one-piece bathing suit, standing on the sand with one knee playfully jutted against the other. Her glossy black hair hangs to her shoulders, hair that is much like my son’s, as Fran pointed out earlier today.

  She’s got a pair of sunglasses in her hand, which she’s obviously taken off for the sake of the picture, and she’s beaming at the camera with a smile that’s every bit as bright as the sun she’s squinting against. My father stands behind her, lean and moody and dangerous, arms crossed against his chest.

  “Yeah, I remember that day,” my father says. “It was a Friday. Know how I remember? Because we ate hot dogs for lunch, and Mary realized what day it was, and made me rush her home and get her to a priest.”

  “Why?” Jake asks.

  “Because in those days, Catholics were forbidden to eat meat on Fridays. It was a mortal sin. If you ate meat on a Friday and you died without confessing that sin, you went straight to hell.”

  Jake snorts in disbelief. “Come on, Danny!”

  “I’m tellin’ ya, kid, that was the rule.”

  “She believed that?”

  “She did indeed, Jake, with all her considerable heart and soul.”

  “But that’s insane!”

  “Insanity is a major part of the Catholic faith, my boy. They changed the rule years later, but on that day it was a race to save her soul. We ran off in our beach clothes and didn’t stop until we reached the door to the rectory. She banged and banged on the door until at last a sleepy priest finally appeared.

  “Imagine that—you open the door, and here’s this half-hysterical girl in a bathing suit, begging forgiveness for having accidentally eaten a frankfurter. The priest himself couldn’t believe it! He made the sign of the cross, told her not to worry about it, and slammed the door without saying good-bye. He was plenty pissed off, I can tell you. Who knows? He was probably pleasurin’ an altar boy when Mary came knocking.”

  Jake laughs out loud, and so do I. My father shakes his head. “Poor Mary. They had her but good, those rascals. She never even thought it odd when the church changed the no-meat-on-Friday rule, and she didn’t think it funny when I suggested that it happened because the fish merchants of the world had failed to meet the pope’s asking price for a renewal of the meat ban.”

  “You know, Dad,” I say, “you would have made a great newspaperman.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  The last frame in the gallery catches Jake’s eye. It’s a small one, and it encloses not a photograph but a tarnished medal of some kind, with a faded blue-and-red-striped ribbon.

  “What’s this, Danny?”

  “That’s the eighth-grade English medal, which your father won,” my father replies matter-of-factly. He puts his hand on my shoulder and gives it a squeeze. My soul is tingling. I cannot believe he has done this.

  “He’s always been good with words, your old man, as I came to know by his gift for back talk. Come on, then, let me call Napoli’s and order a coupla pies.”

  I’m stunned. “Old man Napoli is still in business?”

  “Nah, he died a long time ago. The family sold out to some greaseball from the other side, and the new owner kept the old name.”

  My father phones in the order and then we sit around the table, guzzling beer while we rehash the drama of the cobblestone caper. My father’s spirits are all but soaring.

  “Tell me, Jake,” he says, “what in the hell were you and that half-assed mountie discussing before your father and I arrived on the scene?”

  “The weather, mostly.”

  My father cackles. “Beautiful!”

  “He kept asking me what I was doing there, and I kept telling him, ‘Waiting for my partners.’”

  “You didn’t!”

  “What else could I say?”

  “Didn’t he want to know about the stones?”

  “Yeah. I told him they weren’t my property, so I could not comment upon them.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” my father says to me, “I’m afraid we may have the very first lawyer in the Sullivan family!”

  I can’t help laughing along with my father. Jake isn’t laughing, though. His mood has suddenly shifted, as if he’s the only one in the room who’s just heard bad news. He drains his beer bottle, sets it down, folds his hands on the table, and leans toward my father.

  “Danny,” Jake says, “you have to help us. My father thinks he killed your wife.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The room falls so silent I can hear the hum of the sixty-watt bulb that hangs over the kitchen table. My father looks as if he’s not sure he’s heard what he thinks he just heard. He turns to me. “What’s the boy talking about?”

  I can’t say anything. I can’t even move. This is Jake’s movie, and I don’t have any lines.

  “What I’m talking about is something that happened on the day she died, right before she went to church,” Jake says. “My father refused to go with her that day. He told her he didn’t believe in God. He said it was all bullshit.”

  My father looks at me. “You told her that?”

  Blood seeps back into my brain, enabling me to nod.

  “Did you mean it?”

  Can I speak? I can try. “At the time, yeah,” I manage to say.

  “Ho-ly shit.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  I start to say more but my tongue slumps down in my mouth, like that of a fighter who can’t answer the bell. Jake puts a hand on my shoulder. Then, calmly, almost clinically, Jake relates the rest of the story, the way a court reporter would read back the testimony of a witness. When he gets to the climax, he puts no great emphasis on the words “I wish you were dead.” He just says them.

  Then he clears his throat. He’s through being a reporter. He is my son again.

  “Danny, my father thinks he’s a murderer. He’s been carrying this around for a long time. Please help him.”

  My father’s hands are covering his face. I figure he must be crying behind those fingers, but when he takes his hands away he’s pale but dry-eyed.

  He looks at me. A sad smile tickles his lips, a bittersweet smile for both the lost years behind us and the found years ahead.

  “You poor kid,” he breathes. “Carryin’ that around all this time. Now listen, you hear? You listen to me.”

  He reaches over to clasp his hand on top of mine, the callused flesh of his palm rough against the soft skin on the back of my hand.

  “You didn’t kill your mother. I didn’t kill her, either, by the way. She killed herself, and not just because she ate too much.”

  “Dad—”

  “Listen to me, listen to me. Your mother didn’t know how to get mad. When things bothered her, she put on a show like nothin’ was wrong. She never yelled, she never let it out. Which would have been fine, if she really was calm, but she wasn’t. It all boiled around inside her. She was a difficult, stubborn, opinionated person, and before you say ‘Look who’s talkin’,’ think about this—didn’t you find it unusual that your mother had no friends?”

  I’m stunned to hear him say that. “Sure she did! She had loads of friends!”

  “Name one.”

  I open my mouth, close it, think about it, and realize he’s right.

  “She had admirers,” my father says. “That’s an entirely different thing. You can ad
mire a person without liking her, can’t you?”

  He doesn’t expect me to answer this question. Anyway, my silence is an answer.

  My father leans back, gulps some beer. “How can you have a friend if you can’t tolerate an opinion other than your own?” he asks. “The answer is, you can’t. So what the hell can you do? Where can you turn?”

  I clear my throat and say, “The church.”

  “Bingo! Sorry. Terrible pun, but you understand what I’m sayin’. The Catholic church lays it all out for you. No need to argue about anything, or question anything. They tell you what God wants you to do, and you do it. A perfect world for a woman like your mother.”

  “But not you.”

  “No, not me. Not by a long shot. See, your mother helped everybody who needed help. She liked the weak. But I’m pretty strong, as you might have noticed. She had a hell of a lot of trouble with anyone who was as strong as she was, and believe me, she was strong.”

  “Not that strong, Dad. I told her I wished that she was dead, and an hour later she was.”

  My father shrugs. “So?”

  “Are you saying that was a coincidence?”

  “Are you saying it wasn’t?”

  “How could something like that be a coincidence?”

  My father makes erasing motions with his hands in midair, as if to clean a blackboard cluttered with gibberish. “Wait. Stop. Let me get this straight. You believe that you had the power to will your mother’s death, is that right?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a power.”

  “Oh, that’s good. Because you see, Sammy, human beings do not have such powers. Maybe God has that power, if there’s a God, but let me ask you this—if there’s a God, and if he’s good, why would he strike down one of his top soldiers here on earth just because her masturbation-happy son wanted it to happen?”

  I’m weeping now, quietly and steadily. “I don’t know.”