Raising Jake

by Charlie Carillo

  “You don’t? Well, luckily, I do. He would only strike her down to punish you for that nasty thing you said.”

  He spreads his hands. “Where was her punishment? She dies beautifully, perfectly, in God’s house! Think about that! No pain, no lingering, unlike most poor bastards who die a little bit at a time with their lousy ailments. No goin’ back and forth to hospitals year after year, with surgeons takin’ her away a piece at a time. No goin’ bald from chemo, no bullshit visits from relatives tellin’ her how good she looks while she’s wastin’ away…

  “Instead, she goes straight to heaven. She’s got a harp and wings and eternal happiness. Meanwhile, you drag yourself around for thirty years with this barrel o’ guilt strapped to your back. Now do you see why I never set foot in that lousy church? I just couldn’t stand all the dirty tricks they use to keep everybody in line! Guilt, on top of more guilt! What bullshit!”

  He turns to Jake. “Did you know that they believe in something called Original Sin? Ever heard of that one, Jake?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It means you’re born with a sin on your soul, a sin carried over from when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, and you can only wash it away through baptism, and babies who die before they’re baptized go to a place called ‘limbo.’ That’s neither heaven nor hell. I’m guessing it’s a lot like New Jersey. Have you ever heard of such lunacy?”

  Jake is laughing too hard to answer. My father turns back to me.

  “You’re the one who suffered, Sammy, not your mother,” he says. “I’ll say it again—if anyone got punished, it was you. Not her. You.”

  By the end of his speech, he’s almost whispering. Jake is transfixed by every word of it, and looks as if he wishes he’d been taking notes. I can barely hear myself as I ask, “Do you think God wanted to punish me, Dad?”

  He actually chuckles at the question. “I’m not sure I actually believe in God. I’m just layin’ it out for you in the only two ways you can look at it. Either God meant to punish you, which in my book makes him a pretty spiteful son of a bitch, or it was all just a coincidence.”

  He winks at me. “My money’s on coincidence, Sammy. And I think it’s time you started bettin’ that way, too. Your mother was fat. She was also, as Jake pointed out, intense. Fat, intense people tend to have fatal heart attacks. That’s the way it goes.”

  I draw the longest breath I’ve drawn in years. My lungs feel bigger. There actually seems to be more room in my body for air, for blood, for life.

  One of the wackiest stories I ever wrote for the New York Star was about a sixty-something woman from the Bronx who’d struggled with a weight problem all her life. No matter how seriously she dieted or exercised, she remained grossly overweight. Then at last it was discovered that she had a sixty-eight-pound benign tumor in her abdomen, which doctors estimated had been growing for more than thirty years. Thirty years! They removed the tumor, and she was fine.

  I got permission to interview her at her hospital bedside. She was sweet and forthcoming, and looking forward to a “normal” life for the first time in years.

  I even got a look at the tumor, a pink, floppy-looking thing that resembled a giant half-deflated beach ball. The photographer I was with took a few shots of it, then excused himself to go and vomit.

  The story didn’t make sense to me. Why did a doctor have to diagnose this gigantic growth? How could this woman have carried that thing around for so long without knowing or even suspecting it was there?

  She shrugged at the question. “Because I’ve always had it,” she said simply. I didn’t fully understand what she meant until now, right now, here in my father’s sanctified kitchen. He has just lifted this ten-ton growth from my soul, this thing I’ve always had, and I’m feeling almost giddy. I fight the urge to jump up and shadow-box. My father is grinning at me. He knows he’s gotten through. I take a swallow of beer, and it’s like a drink from the Fountain of Youth. I grab my son and take him in a bear hug.

  “Jake. Thank you for this road trip.”

  “You’re welcome, Dad.”

  “If you learn anything from my life, learn that it’s important to be careful in the things you say and do.”

  “I will, Dad.”

  “But not too careful,” my father chimes in.

  I release Jake from the bear hug. “Jesus, Dad, what are you telling your grandson?”

  “That wasn’t sexual advice,” my father says. “By all means wear a condom at all times, maybe two. I’m talkin’ in general here.” He gulps beer, puts his bare foot up on the table. “Did we or did we not have a bit of an adventure today?”

  “We sure did.”

  “Nothing a careful person would have experienced, though, was it?” He clinks his beer bottle against mine and Jake’s.

  “Here’s to Officer Orvieto,” he says. “I know I’ll sleep soundly tonight, knowing he’s on the job.”

  “Great cop,” Jake says. “A tribute to the men in brown.”

  My father laughs at that one, and I realize that Jake has downed three or four beers and is half in the bag.

  “Hey,” I tell him, “go easy. We’ve got to deal with your mother tomorrow.”

  “To Doris!” my father says. “The woman who gave me this splendid grandson!”

  “Yeah,” I say. “She gave him to you, all right. Come tomorrow, she may kill him.”

  “Aw, Dad,” Jake says, “you really do worry too much. Please stop worrying, ’cause—”

  “Because you’ve got a plan. I know. You’ve told me a million times, so please, don’t make me wait any longer. What the hell is this plan?”

  “You’ll hear all about it tomorrow.”

  “Jake—”

  “To-mor-row,” Jake insists, and the way he says the word sends my father into a beery rendition of “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow,” with my son joining him on the second chorus.

  But suddenly Jake stops singing. He stares at me, sensing from the look in my eyes that there is more to know about his father, one more story to be told. He also knows that this is the day to ask me whatever there is to ask.

  “Hey, Dad,” he begins, “why did you freak out when you saw that crucifix before?”

  I can’t say I’m surprised by the question. I told him I’d tell him about it later, and here we are, later.

  My father stops singing and goes pale. He puts his beer bottle down and says to Jake, very softly, “What crucifix?”

  “We stopped by his old high school and there’s this giant crucifix out in front. Dad could hardly look at it. I thought he was going to get sick.”

  My father turns to me, looking truly weary for the first time all day. “You might as well tell him,” he says. “This is a night for the truth. He might as well know what you and I know, Sammy.”

  I can feel myself trembling. “Dad,” I begin, “even you don’t know the whole story about the crucifix. I’m the only one alive who knows the whole story of the crucifix.”

  The truth of it hits me as I speak these words. My father’s eyes widen in shock. I guess I always thought I would take this story to the grave with me, but suddenly it’s time to share it.

  My father picks up his beer, takes a bracing swallow, puts a hand on Jake’s shoulder. They’re both looking at me with the eyes of children who are about to hear a ghost story, eager and reluctant at the same time.

  My father turns to Jake. “You sure you want to hear this story, kid?”

  Jake nods. “Yeah, I do. I might as well hear everything, after all these years of never hearing anything.”

  My father grins at Jake. “Smart,” he says, and then he turns to me. “Go ahead, Sammy.”

  “Dad. Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I want to know the whole story, whatever it is. Come on, man, we’re listening.”

  His voice is quaking. I’ve never heard my father’s voice quake before. He’s afraid. He should be.

  CHAPTER NIN
ETEEN

  My mother first read about it in the Tablet, the weekly newspaper for the Archdiocese of New York. It seems that a janitor in a small church in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was mopping up one morning when he happened to notice red stains on the floor beneath the life-sized crucifix at the altar. Looking up, he saw that the wooden Christ figure was bleeding from the nail holes in his feet.

  A miracle. And just like that, Scranton turned into Jerusalem as Catholics from all over the country flocked to view this miracle.

  Of course my mother wanted to go and see it. My father thought she was out of her mind. We took a two-week vacation to a Pocono Mountains resort each summer during the last week of July and the first week of August, and that was the extent of the Sullivan family travels. An old navy buddy of my father’s owned the place, so we got a discount on our cabin. My father fished, my mother struggled to cook our meals on a bottle-gas stove, and I formed fleeting friendships with the children of other vacationers around a large swimming pool with a cracked cement floor. Then we returned home to Flushing for the remaining fifty weeks of the year, and no other family trips were ever even discussed until the Bleeding Jesus hit the headlines.

  Our church was organizing an overnight trip to Scranton—a chartered bus there and back, plus one evening at a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge, buffet dinner and buffet breakfast included. My mother would leave on Friday morning and be back late Saturday afternoon. The cost was fifty dollars. She had the money, her own money.

  Now it was Thursday night. We were at the kitchen table, eating macaroni and cheese, and my mother wanted my father’s approval. He was dead set against it.

  “Mary. This is ridiculous.”

  “Not to me it isn’t, Danny.”

  “Why do you want to see this thing?”

  “It’s a miracle in our lifetime.”

  “It’s a scam that’s going to be found out, sooner or later.”

  “Oh, Danny. You have no faith at all, do you?”

  “Not in things that don’t deserve it. Somebody’s workin’ an angle here, I can just feel it.”

  My mother shook her head. “It’s so sad. If you can’t explain it, it has to be a fake.”

  “And if you believe it, it has to be real.”

  “You would have laughed at Lourdes, Danny.”

  “I’m laughing at Lourdes right now, Mary. Everybody who goes there in a wheelchair comes home in the wheelchair. Who gets healed?”

  “There’s such a thing as spiritual healing, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s where the priest says, ‘Don’t you feel better now?’ just as the collection plate comes around.”

  By this time my mother had her hands over her ears. When he was through talking she lowered her hands and said, “I’m going to Scranton and I’m taking Samuel.”

  “You’re what?!”

  “You heard me.”

  I was shocked. This was the first time I’d heard that I was going to Scranton.

  “Your supper for tomorrow night is in the freezer,” my mother continued. “Preheat the oven—”

  “Whoa, whoa! Why are you dragging the kid along?”

  “I think he should see this.”

  “Mary. Don’t turn your obsessions into his obsessions.”

  “Danny—”

  “Sammy,” my father said, leaning into my face, “do you want to go on this trip?”

  I was twelve years old, and I was in a terrible jam. The truth of it was that I wanted to attend a school dance that was being held on Friday night. I’d never been to a dance before, and all the kids in my class were going to be there, including Margaret Thompson, and I’d been lying awake nights thinking of ways to ask her to dance.

  She was the prettiest girl in my class, maybe the prettiest girl in the world. She had green-blue eyes and perky ears and blond hair that she wore in pigtails, and a giggly laugh that just about made me swoon. All the guys liked her, and I knew they’d all be asking her to dance.

  She barely knew I was alive. Once she asked if she could borrow my eraser, and when she returned it to me her fingers brushed the palm of my hand, and I damn near fainted.

  Would I pass out if I tried to dance with her? I didn’t know, but I was willing to try. At least I thought I was.

  Then came the Bleeding Jesus of Scranton, and suddenly my mother wanted me to go with her. The only good thing about that was that I’d miss school on Friday. The bad thing was that I’d miss the dance. The worst thing was that no matter what I wanted to do, I didn’t want to disappoint either of my parents, and that was an impossibility.

  My father had me locked in his gaze. “Don’t look at your mother. Look at me and tell me—do you want to go on this trip?”

  I swallowed, put my fork down. “Well, there’s this dance at the school tomorrow night.”

  “There you go!” my father said. “He wants to go to the dance, like any normal kid!”

  My mother looked at me. “Samuel. There’ll be plenty of dances.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” my father roared.

  “And I really don’t want to travel alone, Samuel.”

  “Alone!” My father snorted. “You’ll be with your own kind! A bus full of Holy Rollers, going to see a phony miracle!”

  She ignored the insult, didn’t even look at him. She was smiling at me in a way that was both motherly and seductive. “It’s up to you, Samuel,” she said softly. “You choose.”

  My head was pounding. I wanted to break a window, run outside, scream at the sky. My father was glowering at me. My mother looked at me as if she’d known what my answer would be all along.

  And she did, of course. I couldn’t let her go alone. I couldn’t disappoint my mother. I couldn’t do what I really wanted to do, any more than I could flap my arms and fly to the moon. “I’ll go with you, Mom.”

  My father threw down his fork and got up from the table. “A hundred bucks shot, instead of fifty,” he all but snarled on his way out the door.

  “It’s not your money, Danny!” my mother called after him, but I doubt he heard her. She was stroking my cheek the way she did whenever I was a very good boy.

  I was the only child on the whole damn bus. The passengers were mostly women and almost entirely elderly. Canes and crutches filled the overhead racks, and the reek of Ben-Gay arthritis cream was enough to make my eyes tear. Every seat on the bus was full, with the exception of two in the back, which were being used to transport folded-up wheelchairs.

  One old man named Harry Campbell wore jet-black sunglasses. He was stone blind. Why was he making the trip if he couldn’t even see the bleeding crucifix?

  “He has faith,” my mother explained. “He has the faith to believe in a miracle, even if he can’t see it.”

  He has fifty bucks, my father would have said. He has fifty bucks for the bus and the motel.

  I had to hide a smile, thinking of what my father would have had to say if he were along for the trip. It would have been a lot less spiritual but a lot more amusing.

  Maybe that’s why my mother wanted me to come with her so badly. I would be a teenager in less than a year—the sap was rising, the hormones were brewing. Maybe she sensed that her grip on my soul was loosening, and that a trip like this would strengthen it. Maybe, maybe, maybe….

  Our motel room had two narrow beds, a bureau, a window overlooking the highway we’d just come off, and a bathroom with a shower, but no tub. There were two glasses on the bathroom sink, wrapped in plastic pouches. There was a paper band around the toilet seat that was supposed to assure us that the thing was clean, that our asses would be the first to make contact with it since the gray-haired Irish maid we’d passed in the hallway had given it a swipe with a disinfectant-soaked cloth.

  My mother put our small overnight bag on the bureau, and then we stretched out on the beds for a little rest. Everybody from the bus would be gathering downstairs in about half an hour, and then we would all walk to the church to bear witness to the miracle.


  We lay there staring at the ceiling, a checkerboard of perforated white tiles. I wondered what we’d be having for dinner. I was thinking ahead, past the miracle. I had never been to a buffet. The thought of it was a lot more exciting to me than a bleeding Jesus.

  “Samuel?”

  “Yeah, Mom?”

  “I’m glad you’re here with me. Are you glad you’re here?”

  “I guess.”

  “We’re very lucky to be seeing what we’re about to see. People all over the world wish they could be here.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Samuel?”

  “What?”

  “I want to apologize for your father.”

  I didn’t like what she’d just said, or the way she said it. “Apologize for what?”

  “What I mean is…I’m sorry he’s not a better man.”

  I sat up on the bed, staring straight into her shining eyes. This was the sort of thing she never could have said in our house, or in that rickety cabin in the Poconos. She was telling me she was sorry she’d allowed Danny Sullivan to be the father of her child, instead of someone worthier of the role than the wisecracking, beer-swilling lout she’d permitted to impregnate her.

  It was a hell of a thing to hear, especially in a boxy little room like the one we were in, so close to the Pennsylvania Turnpike that the whine of traffic was as constant as a heartbeat.

  What could I say? I felt sorry for her and furious at her in equal measures. If she had that kind of scorn for my father, how could she feel about me, the fruit of his loins?

  No—no, I was wrong about that. She was looking at me with what appeared to be unqualified love. She obviously didn’t think of me as a part of him—and after this special road trip together, I’d be hers more than ever.

  “Samuel. Have I upset you?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I’m not criticizing your father. He’s a certain type of person, that’s all. He’s not much like me…or you.”

  I wasn’t going to respond to that. I was starting to think about the dance I’d be missing, and the way my father wanted me to go to the dance. It was enough that my mother had gotten her way and hauled me along on this crazy trip. It wasn’t necessary for her to tear him down. So I remained silent, staring at the perforated ceiling, wondering why there were holes in those tiles and why my parents couldn’t get along.