Big Jack Is Dead

by Harvey Smith

  At the coat rack by the front door, Jack slid into his puffer jacket, zipping it up over his bare chest. His erection had melted away, forgotten at the sight of the ice tree. He ran back to his room for some sneakers and put them on without socks. Jack and his father made it outside first while Mincy was helping Brodie get dressed in his room.

  Among the houses on the block, their yard was now utterly unique.

  The early rays of the sun hit parts of the tree and the ice gleamed at the far tips of the branches. Dawn cast a faint, skeletal shadow against the side of the house. From the yard, the thing standing before them loomed even larger and more grandiose, with pockets and crevices all through the branches and flowing arms of ice. As the air gusted up, it whistled or moaned through the tree. Jack could barely make out a hummingbird feeder frozen a couple of feet deep within the folds of ice.

  “Ain't this somethin'?” Big Jack asked. His eyes bulged in wonder. “It's bigger'n Henry's whole tool shed.”

  Jack gazed up at the tree, awed. “It's really great, Dad.”

  After a few minutes, Mincy and Brodie joined them on the sidewalk next to the crunchy grass. Brodie nearly slipped once, teetering toward the curb, but Big Jack deftly reached out and righted him by the top of his head.

  They all stared at the tree, occasionally changing positions to get a different vantage point, walking carefully along the icy sidewalk.

  “What do we do with it?” Brodie asked.

  Big Jack looked incredulous, bordering on dismayed. “What the fuck you mean, boy? We look at it. That's all.”

  Brodie looked down at the white grass. “Oh.”

  “Mmm,” Mincy said. “You know what we should do to celebrate this?”

  Big Jack smiled at her. “Yeah, what's that?”

  “We should go down to the Pancake Palace for breakfast,” she said. There was a wide grin on her face. Big Jack opened his mouth to say something, but Mincy cut him off, leaving him agape. “Now, baby…you did real good and we should celebrate. I'm proud of you.” She threw her meaty arms around his neck and pressed her body against him.

  Before anyone else could speak, she shooed the boys into the house. They got dressed and Big Jack drove them to breakfast.

  Chapter 18

  1999

  Mincy handled everything before I flew home for the funeral, renting a storage space and coordinating with Big Jack's landlord. The man was extremely upset that one of his tenants had killed himself on the property, and insisted that everything be moved out as soon as the police investigation was complete. There was a new tenant waiting. The bank impounded Big Jack's truck to cover his streak of hot checks, so the storage unit contained all that was left in the world of my father.

  It was located in a strip mall next to Doyle's Patty Kitchen, a burger place. Crossing the parking lot, all I could smell was the grease trap behind the buildings.

  Inside the storage facility, the lobby was all white…counters, walls, floor and ceiling. Two sets of automatic glass doors kept the air chilled and the entire place hummed, every surface vibrating slightly to the touch. Beyond the lobby, a network of hallways led to identical doors, where a number was inscribed on each door in black lettering. The place reminded me of the stylized hotel in Hamburg, a high-tech mausoleum as envisioned by Bauhaus. The orderliness was somehow at odds with the hamburger place and drive through liquor store nearby.

  Taking the key from the man behind the desk, I walked down one of the long white aisles lined with modular storage units. Earlier, I'd changed out of my suit and back to my jeans.

  At door #66, I checked the number against the key ring. Everything on all sides was white. The place continued to hum so pervasively that even the air trembled. I turned the key and pulled the door aside. Several fluorescent lights came on automatically, running the length of the space. It was four feet wide and six feet deep. The ceiling was just high enough so that I didn't have to duck.

  The ruddy odor of blood hit me as I stepped inside, followed by the stench of soiled laundry. I squinted my eyes, reeling. Several plastic bags sat against the back wall of the room. Everything from the rental house had been stuffed into trash bags. I wondered who collected his things and why they chose trash bags.

  There was something stunning about the bags. This was the cumulative results of Dad's life, aside from a landscape of emotional scar tissue. Somewhere there were records of his various worldly transactions; hot checks, bankruptcies, occasional run-ins with the law, a high school transcript and his employment history. But here in this small cell were the only things he left behind. It seemed pathetic that it could all be contained in six or eight trash bags.

  I walked over and sank down to the floor, holding my breath against the smell. The tiles of the floor hummed beneath me, the soulless fluorescent lights flickered above. Teasing apart the loose knot, I began going through the first of the black bags. Mostly they contained my father's unwashed clothes. Greasy jeans, scorched welding shirts, socks and underwear…the basis for ninety percent of his wardrobe. There were candy bar wrappers everywhere, scattered throughout the clothing like random bits of newspaper in a bird's nest. Too-sweet chocolate wafted over me as I scooped them up by the handfuls and wadded them tight. I started a waste pile just outside the door.

  Sifting through the clothing, touching the last things my father had worn, made me wish I could talk to him, or just sit with him while he drank coffee and smoked. Those were the calmest, sanest moments I could remember.

  Alternately, my lip curled in disgust when I grabbed something crusty and stiff. I wanted to scream at him for putting me through this shit, the shock of his self-destruction. As if growing up with him wasn't enough, there was the funeral, and now the touch of his grimy belongings and the smell of his spilled blood.

  But he was gone. His death robbed me of the chance to tear into him, leaving me with impossible nostalgia and impossible fury all in the same intake of breath.

  Carefully, I rifled each item of clothing. When handling a pair of jeans, no matter how tattered, I turned all the pockets inside out. I tore shirts to pieces, opening flaps and stripping the pockets down. At one point, I found myself looking for hidden compartments sewn into the fabric, shredding a camouflage puffer vest in my hands, methodically taking it apart at the seams. It felt crazy, but I finished ripping it up anyway. The clothes went into the garbage pile with the food wrappers.

  There were a dozen magazines and a few paperbacks, dedicated to porn or hunting. The only hard bound book was new, a manual on raising and training bird dogs. I flipped through all of them, page by page. The naked women made me shudder with discomfort, imaging Dad staring at them in a lusty daze. On the bottom of the stack, there was an envelope stuffed with receipts and small scraps of paper that I read before crumpling and discarding. The garbage pile grew.

  Twisting the cap off his thermos, I looked inside, sniffing and reeling at the rank odor of coffee that had spoiled a week ago. As I unscrewed the lid, I fantasized about a rolled note sliding out into my lap…some letter that would provide me with clues about the devils that drove him, or some final sentiment.

  After looking over every bit of my father's belongings, my hands were filthy with unnameable grime, part industrial, part animal. My senses were saturated, the odors so dulled that I barely noticed them. Gathering the trash pile, I stuffed it all into a few empty bags and carried them to a dumpster in the corner of the parking lot.

  When I returned to the storage room, I took stock of what remained, pushing or tossing everything into the center of the floor…some of my father's tools, a heavily-shielded welding mask, a photo album, and his wallet. Everything else was gone, ready to be broken down by incineration or rot, including the man himself.

  The toolbox was mostly full of odd screwdrivers and wrenches. A layer of screws and washers lined the bottom like coins in a sunken chest. The tools were mismatched, coming from four or five different tool sets. I suspected that my father's primary tools, the o
nes he used at work, had been stolen by someone along the way between the rental house and the storage unit. Likewise, his guns were nowhere to be seen. A pawnshop somewhere in the county probably owned them now. Aside from the tools, the battered toolbox contained two tape measures, an old pencil, a few oily rags, and a roll of pipefitter's tape. I lifted and inspected each item before replacing it.

  My father's welding mask looked up at me from the floor, the black glass inscrutable. I ran my fingers over the cool surface of the visor, remembering a moment from twenty-five years earlier. It came to me vividly...I must have been around five, accompanying my mother on a rare trip into the plant where my father worked. In her sister's battered car, Ramona drove us off the highway and up to the chain link checkpoint. Holding a paper cup in one hand, an ancient man came out of the small shack, badly bowlegged. He approached the window to check my mother's identification card, working his lower jaw as he studied it. He spat tobacco juice into the cup and allowed us to pass.

  I was fascinated with the high fence, with the curling barbed wire running along the uppermost edge, and the dense skyline of smokestacks, towers and industrial structures beyond the entry gate. At the same time, the place was foreboding, dead and inorganic, an environment hostile to life. The air stank and burned my nose.

  We finally located my father's shop and parked. Ramona led me by the hand to where my father was welding. Standing back twenty feet, she chatted and laughed with another man as we waited.

  I pointed to Dad and said something, but no one heard me. He was kneeling next to a framework of pipe that looked like the hollow, black bones of some monster. There were massive leather gloves protecting his hands and his welding mask fully encased the top of his head, his face and throat. A billed cap, turned around, was visible on the back of his head, the bill guarding the nape of his neck from sparks and slag. The welding machine was deafening. My father's shadow was cast starkly behind him on the scorched concrete. His back was soaked with sweat.

  My mother leaned close to the man looming over her, straining to catch his words. She glanced down at me after a minute and realized that I was staring at the white-hot point of light at the end of Big Jack's welding rod.

  She grabbed me with a jolt, covering my eyes. “No, no,” she said. There was panic in her voice, her nails dug into my arm. “Don't look at Daddy, baby…it'll burn out your eyes and you'll have sand in them tonight.”

  Very clearly, I remembered lying in bed that night, screaming and crying as my mother held a wet washcloth over my burning eyes.

  I dropped the mask with a clunk against the floor of the storage room. It folded when it landed, pivoting on the heavy headband. I ran my hands over my face and through my hair, muttering sounds that never quite formed curse words.

  When I looked back to the pile, I opened the photo album. The plastic pages were yellow with age. The wax behind the photos had dried and some of them tilted or slipped out as I flipped through it. I held up a picture of my father and me at the hunting lease, posing with our deer. Ricky had taken it while drunk and the whole scene was canted to one side. Until now, I'd forgotten the moment of the photo altogether.

  One of my hands rested on the neck of the doe I'd killed. Even removed so far in time, I squinted my eyes and pressed my lips together as I looked at the animal in the photo. My young face was devoid of emotion; the blank expression and the pose gave me the appearance of a mannequin from a hunting store display.

  Next to me, my father angled the head of his buck so that it was twisted upright and staring forward. The eyes were flat and black, looking into the camera. Dad held the spiked antlers in each hand and there was an expression of wild enthusiasm on his face in contrast to mine. A chain of some sort hung from his neck, fallen from his t-shirt, and his mouth was open in a grin that evoked the memory of his chuckle. I stared at his face for a long minute before continuing through the album, looking at every photo before setting it aside.

  Lastly, I picked up the Ziploc bag containing his wallet. I'd saved it until the end because of the blood. The job of clearing out the storage space was complete, except for this small object.

  Reaching into the bag, I took the leather wallet between a thumb and forefinger. It was thick, stuffed with random scraps of paper, identification passes for parts of the plant and membership cards for the organizations to which he'd belonged. It had been in the back pocket of his jeans during the final seconds of his life. Blood had run down from the wound in his head, over the wallet, soaking it. Slowly, I opened the grisly thing, folding it out flat on the floor. Piece by piece, I went through all the ATM slips, scribbled phone numbers, laminated cards and other notes, deciphering all the meaningless words through the meaningful brown stains.

  Down in the deepest fold, I found washed-out pictures of Brodie, Ramona, Mincy and me. Holding the curled paper in my hands, I looked over each photo and studied the faces. In most cases, blank expressions looked back at me across the years. Only in one of the pictures was anyone smiling with what appeared to be a genuine expression. It depicted Brodie standing next to a tire swing in the front yard. Wearing nothing but his underwear, he was about five. His hair was still light, as it had been when he was younger, and stood out in cowlicks. I ran my thumb gently over the smooth surface, touching the center of his chest. But his adult face came into my mind, his crazy, pin-point eyes and his slack expression, reminding me of the gulf between us. I shuffled the photos. Where did my brother go?

  I set the photos down and took everything else out of the wallet. Like a Tarot reader, I spread it out, staring at the pieces, trying to make sense of it all. The copper smell was stronger on the air now. Looking at the arrangement before me, I tried to accept that it had no meaning, no message. Collecting it all from the floor, I threw away the most trivial or bloodstained articles before putting everything else back together in the wallet, including the small photographs.

  There was no note.

  I closed doors to the storage unit and paid the bill up front. In the parking lot, I dropped my father's remaining possessions into the trunk of the Lexus and took one last look around, resenting this place for playing a role in my life. Then I drove to the house where my father had killed himself.

  Chapter 19

  1980

  Several days after Big Jack created the ice tree, all but the last of the ice was gone, melted. The tree was ruined. Most of the branches had been snapped by the weight of the ice, the limbs parallel with the ground suffering the worst. Some of the branches reaching upward were still intact and the tree resembled a giant weed. The lawn was a mess, a muddy disaster of tracks and ruts. People from the neighborhood had stopped at all hours of the day to coo over the tree. A miniature mountain range of ice ringed the trunk, standing a foot in height. From the front porch, it looked like a dying ghost, reaching upward in its last gasp, struck down by three days of winter sun.

  Jack walked along the sidewalk, returning from Jenny's house. Audible a block away, the garage at his house emitted a metallic screaming sound. When he reached his driveway, he stopped just behind his father's black pickup truck and looked out over the yard in disgust. He held his ears against the noise from the garage. The wreckage of the yard was profound. After he'd taken it in, he approached the garage to see what his father was doing, coming around and settling against the grill of the truck.

  Big Jack was busy in his shop, hunched over the oily workbench. His brow was knitted as he studied the object in the vise before him. Under his guidance, a grinder moved in a blur and threw golden sparks up onto the wall behind the bench. The sound of metal being eaten away at high speed was shrill and deafening.

  Holding Jack's flashlight, Brodie perched on the workbench. He crouched on one knee among his father's tools and pointed the light down onto the angled metal his father was grinding. Brodie gathered the long, beaded chain, attached to the end of the flashlight, cupping it in his palm to keep it out of the way. A set of pewter deer antlers hung from the chain, re
sting against the flashlight. He hovered over the vise with a stocking cap balanced on his head. His face very close to the grinder, he wore a protective plastic mask that his father had stolen from the plant.

  Moving only his eyes, Big Jack glanced up as Jack approached, scowling when he saw that the boy was covering his ears. Jack lowered his hands.

  The light bobbled and Big Jack snapped his attention back to Brodie, bellowing. “You want me to knock you through that wall? Huh?” He cut his eyes back and forth between his youngest son and the grinder. “Hold the goddamn light and don't make me tell you again.”

  Mincy stood at the kitchen door, bracing it open with her hip. She held a pie pan, clutching it with checkered oven mitts. Steam rose up from the crust. Regarding the scene in the garage with dissatisfaction, she looked to all three of them in turn, irritated that no one had taken significant notice of the pie.

  The sound of the grinder dominated everything.

  She turned her attention to the younger boy, yelling to be heard over the grinder. “Brodie! Baby, fix your hat.”

  He called back at her, “What?”

  “Fix. Your hat.” She screamed this time, cutting through the noise. “It's about to fall off...and it just looks silly hanging down like that.”

  The last words were drowned out, but the eight year old reached up with one hand to adjust the stocking cap. It stood up from his head ridiculously high and came to a wavy point. He tugged it down into place and the flashlight beam went off target as he did.

  Without taking his eyes from the metal he was grinding, Big Jack roared at his son, “Goddammit, boy!”

  Startled, Brodie dropped the flashlight into the grinder. The thing exploded, sending the chain, pewter antlers and pieces of the flashlight across the garage and into Jack's face like a cluster of cannon shot.