Joe's Black T-Shirt

by Joe Schwartz

  The rage that poured from his Father was a volcanic fount. His face became red, enraged by the obvious insolence. “Son-of-a-whore! Son-of-a-bitch!”

  Father’s words struck out and felt cold against his cheeks. It was as if he had stepped into an unexpected winter storm. His face burned with shame.

  “After what you have done, you’re in no position to play games,” Father said.

  Above a whisper, he answered him in a voice he hadn’t used since he lived under the man’s roof. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good,” Father said. His rage seemed to have left him as quickly and suddenly as it had found him. He was still mad, but the meds were doing their job. Unable to differentiate pain from outrage, the crystalline water dripped faster into him, releasing its magic formula. “Now, let’s start over. Where is…the…girl?”

  “What girl?” Mike asked. He asked again shaking Father by his softened bicep, “What girl, Dad?”

  His spirit dwelled somewhere else again, far away, waiting.

  Mike, now wide-awake, sat with great attention toward Father. The man never discussed his work with him, even after law school. Now he was walking down a nightmare version of memory lane holding his father’s hand and praying to God for the strength to continue.

  ***

  His mother came into the room promptly at six. She took pride in being on time and likened tardiness to sin itself. Mike hadn’t been less than fifteen minutes early for an appointment, meeting, or casual party since puberty.

  “Right on time,” Mike said rising to salute Mother with a ritual kiss upon her cheek.

  Her focus was immediately drawn toward Father. The machines that surrounded his bedside clicked and beeped with their electronic efficiencies. Mother studied them for the smallest changes. Whether good or bad she wanted to know. Every moment at this point was precious.

  “Did he talk to you last night?” she asked as she sat in the chair.

  The question surprised Mike. “He did, a little.”

  “He talked to me yesterday,” she said. “He thought we were getting married. I think he is remembering all the good things.”

  Mike didn’t know about that. Mother had been with Father every day for the last thirty-five years. It was no surprise to him there could be a surplus of good memories for her. How couldn’t there be? He, on the other hand, had not been making much time for Father since college. Over the last five years, he saw him purposefully two days a year: Fourth of July and Christmas. Beyond that, they talked mildly on the phone. Outside the subject of law, they didn’t have much to discuss.

  “Will you stay for breakfast?” Mother asked.

  Her question brought him back to the present. “Yeah, sure, Mom,” he said.

  As the day nurse came on, talking with Mother while simultaneously administering to all of Father’s needs, he had a thought.

  After breakfast he would forego sleep a bit longer. An old friend, an under-grad in pre-law until his senior year, was now a newspaper editor. Maybe he could help him figure out this puzzle.

  ***

  Daniel worked for The Riverfront Times, a weekly rag supported mainly by advertisements for strip clubs and bars that were handed out free to the public. Occasionally it broke a real news story. In the world of journalism, it was a by-line for Daniel, something that would look good on his resume in retrospect. In reality, it was nothing more than a regular paycheck.

  Mike had hoped to catch him at the office. After leaving three voice-mail messages, he was almost asleep when Daniel returned his call. Shaking off the cobwebs, they agreed to meet for a late lunch downtown.

  After the waitress with a purposefully exposed cleavage left them alone to eat their toasted ravioli and pizza, they were able to talk.

  “Sorry about your dad,” Daniel said through a mouthful deep fried pasta.

  “Shit happens,” Mike said. He took a slice from the pizza, but had lost his appetite. “I need you to help me with something, if you can.”

  “Yeah, man. Anything.”

  “I’m not sure if this is legit.”

  “Where I work, that’s our specialty.”

  “I want to know if you can find out about a case my Dad would have worked. It’s probably nothing and I doubt you will find anything.”

  “So what,” Daniel said as he let out a smelly belch. “I spend most of my day going over copy written by amateurs that wouldn’t be taken seriously by a comic book publisher. I’ll run your dad through all the databases. You would be surprised. We all leave digital footprints. Things you wouldn’t have thought anybody could know are somewhere. It’s a matter of looking in the right place.”

  “Thanks, Dan,” Mike said.

  “Your dad was a great sheriff. I’m sure I’ll find a ton of stuff.”

  Mike almost corrected his friend then stopped himself. His use of the past tense in reference to his father was not that far from wrong.

  ***

  Mike was barely able to get four hours of sleep before his shift. After a quick shower, he threw on jeans and a t-shirt despite the cool northerner coming in. The light jacket that had seemed overkill a couple days before now couldn’t keep him warm.

  Quickly walking into the hospital room, worried he was late, he felt little relief in arriving ten minutes early.

  “Sorry”, Mike said trying to apologize. “I overslept.”

  Uncle Henry was once again kicked back with his boots on the bed. He was reading one of the books Mike had brought with him last night. A paperback Mike had grabbed without much thought from the ‘Oprah’ section about two brothers who sell knives door-to-door for a living. Hell, if she liked it, there was fifty-fifty shot he might as well.

  Dog-earing the page to mark his place, Uncle Henry looked his nephew over.

  “It’s dang near winter, fella. Where’s your coat?”

  “How’s Dad doing?”

  “No change.”

  Mike wanted to know more.

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Oh, sure,” Uncle Henry said falsely, “he said if you see that know-it-all boy of mine, tell him to get a coat from my closet.”

  “Funny,” Mike said, “you should take that act on the road.”

  “Believe I will,” Uncle Henry said. While he put on his coat, he kept hold of the book, shoving it through the sleeve. The pages curled into a thick half-circle. Its cover was now misshapen and creased. Mike almost laughed aloud thinking about how distraught the librarian would be at seeing this.

  “Mind if I hang on to this?” Uncle Henry asked waving the book.

  “Might as well.”

  After he gave his uncle a playful bear-hug goodnight, he took over in the chair. Five minutes into his shift, Mike fell asleep.

  ***

  Mike awoke with a start. He didn’t realize how tired he truly had been. Mad at himself for it, he reconciled his thoughts of inadequacy by vowing to not allow it happen again.

  Father was awake, staring at him. His mouth clamped tight, almost in a grimace, his jaw moved left-to-right as he ground his teeth.

  “Dad,” Mike said blinking and rubbing his sleep-swelled eyes, “It was an accident. It won’t happen again. I promise.”

  Father’s jaw unlocked with a viciousness.

  “You’ll burn in hell for this, you lousy son-of-a-bitch. I don’t give a good goddamn who your family knows up there in Jeff City or how much money they have.”

  Tonight, Mike promised himself, he would not play games. He wanted answers. If Father was trying to send him a message, it was his duty to decipher the code.

  “What is it? Who do you think I am?”

  “Don’t act stupid. Maybe most folks around here don’t give a rat’s ass about some little colored girl, but I do. I already called the sheriff and told him what I know you’ve done. He said he’d be here soon enough. Until then, I’m not to let you out of my sight.” The exertion of speaking tired him more than a ten-mile run. Father carefully chose his next words. “I hope the sherif
f let’s me cut your balls off.”

  Exhausted, his eyes fluttered closed.

  Mike hadn’t liked what father had said, but was glad he was consistent. Any doubts he had as to his father’s sanity were disqualified. He was of sound mind if only it was in a distant memory.

  ***

  Mother brought Mike a coat, one of Father’s many and insisted he put it on before leaving the hospital room. It was a full size to big, accustomed to wider shoulders and a larger tummy. The furry lamb’s wool lining dyed dark blue was warm and soft. Two silver rings, where a badge would have been clipped over the left breast, were vacant. He felt like a child playing dress-up.

  After breakfast with Mother, he came home. Daniel’s voice echoed from the answering machine as he came through the door. He rushed to pick-up the cordless extension, tripped, and fell in a slide across the linoleum kitchen floor. Embarrassed, he used the counter’s ledge to get back to his feet.

  With regret, Mike pressed the machine’s play button. Where his mother loathed tardiness, he hated voice mail, forced to listen to people as they pretended to talk to the person they had called. It seemed counterintuitive. Likewise, he shunned cell phones. How the world’s problems were going to somehow be solved while driving seventy miles per-hour was a mystery to him.

  “Hey, Mike it’s Dan. You there, buddy?” Daniel asked igniting another pet peeve of Mike’s. It was like writing a letter with the opening sentence asking if you were reading this. Some things were apparent. “Guess not. Look, dude I’ve been checking sources against what you told me, but haven’t found anything that sits on all four legs. I’m on my way now to meet a buddy. He’s got stuff going back before the bible. I’ve got a hell of a busy day ahead of me. Call me on my cellie if you want, but that’s pretty much it for now. I will be in the office all day tomorrow fact-checking. Let’s have a couple of brew-hahas for old time sake, say about six at Fred’s place tomorrow night? Anyway, call me, dude. Let me know what’s up.”

  The machine’s feminine-like robot voice announced ‘end of message.’ Mike stood, thinking things over. Maybe he was chasing shadows in the dark. Daniel said he had nothing. Possibly there was nothing to find after all. Sometimes clients got like this. Regardless what you did for them, you cannot make the facts change. If Daniel found nothing by tomorrow night, he resigned himself to accept that this thing with his father was nothing more than a drug-induced fiction.

  ***

  Mike got a good days rest. When he awoke, Mother had readied a meal fit for a king. Fresh garden-picked salad with homemade Italian dressing, handmade sourdough rolls, deep-fried steak cutlets, home cut fries, and green beans with squares thick as scrabble tiles of maple-cured bacon. It was far from a calorie conscious meal, but it was certainly food for the soul. The comfort of each bite more pleasing than the last.

  After supper, he had a cigarette. The smoke helped digest the rich foods and made room for desert. Homemade Brown Betty buried under vanilla ice cream.

  “Your father used to smoke. Did you know that?”

  “No,” Mike said honestly surprised. He never knew of Father having any vices outside of working too much.

  “Before you were born, him and his brothers would get together every Sunday. They were all married by then too. We wives would come together in the kitchen frying up chicken and drinking schnapps. The men would be out in the field, shooting targets off the fence line, in between drinks of mason-jar liquor. By the time supper was ready, the whole gang of us were in one hell of a great mood. It would be well after midnight before we would get to bed.”

  Mike listened serenely to the story. He never thought much about his parents as people. The idea that they were young once was intriguing.

  “As soon as I found out I was pregnant with you, I took the pledge. Your father, the consummate gentleman, jumped on the wagon right along with me. Nine months later, you were the center of the universe to us. It wasn’t until your first birthday either of us realized we hadn’t had a drop in nearly two years. I guess we lost our taste for it. Daddy, though, loved those cigarettes. He got the habit in the service. When we met up, everybody smoked except for me, but it never bothered me one way or another. It was when you were five he quit. Seems you wanted to be like him so bad that you took to picking his butts out of the ashtray, pretending to smoke. That broke his heart.”

  It made Mike think as he crushed out his cigarette. He had the habit and couldn’t conceive life without them. The idea that he had been unwittingly imitating his father made him smile. It was weird, especially at a time like this he thought, the things children found in common with their parents.

  “He must’ve gained forty pounds quitting, but he did it. I thought his new pot-belly was sexy.”

  Mike laughed out loud more from embarrassment than humor.

  “Jesus, Mike,” Mother said as her jovial mood turned sullen, “I am going to miss that man so much.”

  He leapt from around the table and he held his weeping mother’s head against his chest. Doing his best to comfort her, he couldn’t keep back his own tears.

  “Me, too,” he whispered resting his cheek on top his mother’s head.

  ***

  Father was resting comfortably as the new nurse came in tonight. She was much taller and thinner than the other one, but they had identical smiles. Lips pressed together, raised slightly at the corners, and completely anonymous regarding emotion. It was a smile that said nothing, yet somehow reassured family members.

  His uncle seemed more tired tonight. His usual lively banter had taken a more somber appeal, like jokes without punch lines. Father had experienced a couple of serious tachycardia incidents on his shift. The closeness of his brother’s waning mortality touched a deeply impacted nerve in the man.

  So far tonight on Mike’s shift, all was quiet. The steady rhythm of breathing, the regular measurement of heartbeats accented by the chirps of the ever-watchful equipment was almost lulling. It was business as usual and he could have not been more grateful.

  At a quarter of five, Father came awake with a yawn. A rested man, seemingly invigorated by a good night’s sleep, but groggy absent his ritual coffee. Using a Post-It note to bookmark his place, Mike smiled, glad to see the man he remembered.

  “Morning, Dad,” Mike said. “How do you feel?”

  “How do I feel,” he said reiterating the question as philosophy. “I feel sick to my stomach.”

  “I’ll ring the nurse. It’s probably the new medicine.”

  “You got an answer for everything, don’t ya?”

  The statement made Mike cringe.

  “You were never anywhere near the Mopkin’s place. From eight p.m. until the following morning, you and Minnie Porter were snug as two bugs in a rug. All evening watching TV with her folks, then spending the night over there due to the storm. Quite the airtight alibi if I do say so myself.”

  Would this goddamn one-man play never stop, Mike thought.

  “Maybe the sheriff is more than willing to swallow that ol’ horseshit story, but I’m not. I don’t need a new Cadillac nor do I owe a heap of back taxes on my land. I wouldn’t give a shit if my family had to live out on the streets if it meant having to take your dirty money.

  The truth be told, I can’t prove nothing, but if it takes me my whole life, I swear I’ll show folks. I don’t know how, but I will. No matter who you get to cheat, lie or steal for you, I won’t rest until the whole world knows that Rodney David MacArthur II is nothing but a child-murdering rapist not fit to walk the streets. I hope when folks know, they pull you from limb-to-limb and beat you with the bloody stumps. That they drag your Daddy from that big house he bought by selling whores and blackmailing the men who used them and let him watch you die like a dog in the street. Let him see it all and then burn that goddamn mansion of his to the ground with him in it.”

  Stunned, Mike could not speak or so much as swallow to quench his dry throat.

  “I suggest you pack your bags. Leave town bef
ore sunset tonight. If you don’t, my brothers and I are going to find you. When we do, we’ll skin you alive and feed you to the sows. That’s a promise, not a threat.” His eyes fluttered as the exhaustion grabbed hold of Father once more. In a voice suddenly present and desperate, he weakly reached for Mike’s hand, asking, “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Dad,” Mike said as the life in his father’s eyes retreated from his body again.

  It was a secret code after all. Written in a language from one lawman to another. All his life, his father made light of his work. Speeders, drunks, and the Saturday night fights were his only claims to jurisprudence. He should have known better. All men, should they live long enough, have regrets. Should they liver even longer, they might have a chance to absolve the past by preparing for the future.

  ***

  At 9:04 a.m., with Uncle Henry, Mother, and Mike gathered at his bedside, Father gently found his eternal rest. They had loved him the greatest that another person could and he in return shared the same with each of them, every moment of everyday.

  ***

  Father Gabriel gave his father’s eulogy and conducted a service fit more for a president than a humble county sheriff. No man could have hoped for more.

  At the wake, amongst the dozens of law enforcement officials, Father Gabriel found Mike. He had left the receiving line, his right hand numb from condolences. The priest placed a hand on Mike’s knee as he sat in the folding chair next to him.

  “I’ve made a decision Father Gabe,” Mike said.

  “Times such as these do that to a man.”