The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering

by Jeffrey Rotter

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  For my family

  1.

  My father always had either too much gentleness or too much fight. But after he started cracking eggs at Airplane Food, Pop entered a kindly spell that looked to be permanent. Umma said he had gone too decent to ever switch back to bad again. He did not hit or holler nor break any man’s two legs for telling him he couldn’t pitch a tent on private property. He did not seem capable of murdering someone who cheated him out of a drink.

  I couldn’t have been more pleased with his change of temperament, but my twin brother thought Pop now cared too much. He’d gone soft, said Faron, and could not earn a boy’s respect behaving as he did.

  On the rare occasion when they found an embro inside one of those eggs, the rest of the crackers at Airplane Food would not hesitate to dump it in the scramble vat with the rest. But not Pop. He told Umma it hurt his chest to look upon those pitiful creatures, to hold one in his latex-gloved hands till its visible blue heart expired. They were about to become something, he said, and to fling them into the vat was a wretched insult to chicken life.

  The customer had more gastromical complaints. The sort that flies on airplanes has nothing better to gripe about than pinfeathers in their breakfast platters. To discourage the crackers from dumping embros in the scramble, management made a game of it. Whoever collected the most by the end of a working week could take home a liter of Haven Dark rum. Pop wanted so badly to win this contest, because he’d done time in the Cuba Pens chopping sugarcane for the Bosom rum concern. If he could get a liter free of charge, it would feel like a restitution.

  Contest or no, Pop remained vigilant. He watched what went in the vat, and what came out the bottom. Never once did he expectorate in the vicinity of the scramble. He kept a consistent stir with the big plexiglas paddle. And Pop made himself well worth the management’s dollar. Careful as he was, he could crack a gross in fifteen minutes, which put him squarely in the top five.

  Winning that game of embros was what did Pop in, and it set in miserable motion the whole starry trajectory of the Van Zandt family.

  * * *

  It was Meet Your Future Day at Airplane Food, a Friday. Offspring of employs had the privilege of laboring alongside their parents, seeing how the world worked. We shared Pop’s cracking station, on a gangway about ten feet above the vat. I followed his example; not a speck of shell landed in the scramble. If Faron dropped an egg on the floor, he did not hesitate to kick it in whole.

  We were both of us bully proud of our father. He had won the embro tally that week. He showed us the bucket of baby chicks that had been used to verify the count, and he displayed his jug of Haven Dark atop an egg crate for all the other crackers to envy.

  Two hours till quitting time and we were looking forward to a night of rum and song on our bunks in the Airplane Food dormitory. I made Pop promise he’d bust out the Roland AX. I wasn’t supposed to know that Umma had been saving a Canaday goose for roasting, but I did.

  Then along comes a fellow across the gangway to Pop’s crack station. I Murder was his name, though I am sure the irony was lost on him at the end. He was not too large and none too nice. The little thug pushed his chest against big Pop’s gut and started into the bully talk.

  “I will have it,” said I Murder, by which he meant the rum. He spoke in a Caribeen brogue.

  Now this man was exactly what his name declared: homicidal. If he hadn’t been born and raised in the Cuba Pens, he would have landed there anyway. Both his parents had been Water Bombers, people of conviction, self-educated and violent. His grandparents were worse. Commies of the old breed. Folks like them were the reason Consolidated War & Jail partnered up with Dutch Bosom to turn the whole island of Cuba into a jailhouse and distillery. Easier to lock down the reds and runners where they lived.

  I Murder was a boy when his mama died. After his pa stopped participating in life, he was raised by turnkeys, including an old lady whose job it was to shoot bats. Her name was Cruz and she was just as good a shot with human targets.

  By the time Pop got hired at Airplane Food, I Murder ran his own private Gunt from the factory break room, a fiefdom of eggs of which he was the baby chief, unquestioned and plenty rich. He took home a tub of leftover scrambles each night to sell in the Colatown favelers. People said he owned a car. If it was Pop’s rum he wanted, it was rum he would get.

  Unfortunately I Murder’s status meant nothing to Pop. And here is where we get to my father’s condition. He could be so decent and kind that you’d be forgiven for thinking Pop could be pushed around. He offered to everyone a soft smile, a bashful hello, a musical greeting card if it was your birthday. But a point would come, dictated by the moon or hormones or your own bad luck, when he would switch. And then the very large man I came from, the man with scarred hands and red braids down his strong back, would make you pay whatever price it was he thought you owed. And near everybody was in arrears.

  Faron saw it before I did: the light go dim in Pop’s eye. He heard the troubling moan escape his big wax lips. My brother knew I was the kind of fairy-boy that gets crushed between powerful men, so he did his best to protect me. He hurried me down the steps to a lower landing, at eye level with the vat. I could barely breathe for Faron’s weight on top of me and the odor of bulk-made breakfast. Up through the steel grid of catwalks we watched the two men prepare to fight.

  Faron told me later that he felt sorry for that Cuban runt, though I doubt his sincerity. I remember the grin on my brother’s face, the pride that lit up his eyes. His Pop was back. His father: the bad one.

  I took Pop’s old wallet from my back pocket and gave it a good chew. This was a habit of mine when circumstances spun beyond my control, which was most always. My brother’s weight was on me so hard, the steel grid cut a design on my calf. But this was no time to complain. It would have been a good time to warn I Murder, though, and I wish I had been bold enough to do so. Pop was fixing to end that man’s life if he didn’t back away from the crack station and apologize.

  “That rum,” said I Murder, “is mine.”

  The muscles of our old man’s face went slack like a sail. He would not be told what was or wasn’t his. Pop put down his unbroken eggs—he cracked them in pairs. He returned them so gently to the foam cradle, as if he had laid them himself.

  “I won that jug fair,” he said. I bit the wallet somewhat harder, feeling for the consolation of old toothmarks. Pop showed him the bucket: “Sixteen embros. Mr. Destin counted.”

  I know that Pop did not want to switch at that moment. After all, this was Meet Your Future Day. His boys were watching, learning by example, and he’d sworn to Umma that he would never give them reason to send him back to the Pens again. But when those malicious juices welled up in his tubes, it was like indigestion of a moral order.

  Years later, when I shot f
ink in my arm behind a Caroline sand dune or nodded off in the throne room of Castle Kintek, I understood what Pop meant when he said trying to be good was like standing in heavy surf. The waves pour in and chew the sand around your feet till you’re balanced on two hard points. Then comes the big breaker, and no man, even one as strong as Pop, can stand his ground.

  I Murder did not care about Pop’s victory in the embro contest. He cared nothing for the rum. He only despised fairness and would do what he could to corrupt it. The Cuban reached for the jug like it had always been his. That was the last justice the little bully ever tried to reverse.

  Ten feet below them a four-hundred-gallon vat gasped and gagged—white, yellow, it burped yolk into the propane-sweetened air. The opening was wide as a water tower. A ring of gas jets underneath made an awful hiss. At intervals a valve on the bottom spurted cooked egg onto cardboard platters. Triangles of toast shuffled down a second conveyor belt. Each tray got two, sprayed with oleo, before it passed through the heat-sealer and landed on a palette to be shipped to the world’s airports.

  Pop touched the soft patch of his own throat, like he was a Jesus Lover blessing himself, but he was in fact rehearsing. Then he found I Murder’s neck and lifted the man off the gangway. Pop said it again: that rum was nobody’s except his.

  The little man carried a blade, as a character like that often does. I watched from below as he slipped it into Pop’s ribs like he was opening the mail. To so immense a body, that shiv meant nothing, but the shock of it made Pop’s switch complete. He swung out over the vat still holding the smaller man, so that I Murder’s flipper-flops clapped right by my head. I remember worrying: what if he drops a shoe in the scramble? I Murder clawed at Pop’s eyes, but he didn’t have the reach. Pop held him stiff-armed, steady as a crane and about as caring when it drops a load of bricks.

  The dagger stuck in Pop’s rib cage after I Murder fell away. When he hit the scramble, hot egg splashed across my face. It slopped over the sides of the vat and blue flame followed it up, filling the air with sulfur. We could see too clearly a man trying to swim in boiling paste. He tested one stroke then another but didn’t swim well or for long. Already his flesh was puffing up. The blisters popped and peeled away with each turn of the paddle. Fresh blisters took their place.

  Pop didn’t see the two guards cross the gangway. He shut his eyes and rocked from heel to heel hugging that bucket of embros like it was a baby. A voice on the floor shouted switch it off, switch it off. The propane jets went quiet. Somebody propped a ladder against the side of the vat. I bit a hole clear through Pop’s wallet.

  The man’s organs were roasting inside him now. A fork would have slipped easily into his thigh. Gore jetted from his neck to thicken in the heat. Rusty knobs, blood sausage. Some faces you will recall your whole life. I have seen a few of them, silent begging at the end. I Murder’s mouth made a line. It parted as if to speak. His lips drew back. I believe the muscles were contracting as they cooked. His teeth were silver.

  Pop’s boots thundered overhead as they dragged him down the steps. I heard him keen like a dray horse. He was a beast bred for strength and compliance who now strained at the bridle. I looked back to see a woman haul I Murder’s body out with a hook. He was the ham in the omelet, precisely that significant and exactly that dead.

  The gas ring was relit. The valve resumed its pattern, opening and closing like a heart. It could release a thousand servings of egg every hour. Somewhere, early the next morning, a jet would skim under the Night Glass, beneath our fading stars. A passenger would gaze out the window without admiring the view. Stars are flaws in the globe of the sky. He would know this to be true and would only pity the night for its imperfections. “Yes,” he would say, in answer to the flight attendant, “the eggs are just fine, thanks. But I could use another sugar for my tea.”

  In all the confusion nobody took notice of me and Faron. My brother grabbed the rum and back to the dorms we walked all alone. It was understood that he would break the news to Umma. Understood because I could not stop shaking to speak. Pop would spend the night in a holding cell down in Georgietown. Next morning they would chain his legs to the rail of a gunboat and float him back to the Cuba Pens. So began our sorrow.

  * * *

  Now, ten years on, I am left with the solitude. This evening First Light came to the Paranal Observatory. The only remaining telescope on Earth opened her single mirrored eye, and after three blind centuries she found the stars unmoved by human history.

  At last the old light from distant galaxies drips down the eight-meter barrel, scarcely enough to feed the glow of a computer screen and illuminate the salvaged legal pad on which I write this story, this explanation and apology, to you, dear daughter.

  One day, Little Sylvia, when you are older, you will resent me for what I have taken from you. When you were a baby I carried you by train and by bus, away from the broken world up north so that you might hide here on a mountaintop in the Chilly desert—far from anywhere but close to the stars. Little Sylvia, when you are old enough, I hope you will read this and I hope you will understand why your father did what he did.

  As you sweat and breathe in a sleepsack on the couch behind me, I write this down so that you will know: I gave you solitude, sweet daughter, so that you will never be lonely.

  No one should be as lonely as Umma was after they took Pop away.

  2.

  For killing I Murder, Pop received a long stretch in the Cuba Pens, but only if he behaved himself. If he promised to be quiet and polite, he could labor in the sugarcane fields till malaria, heat, tube poisoning, or some better thug laid him out.

  Though he had been taken far away from us, my mother believed in the propagating nature of love. Love as a particle and a wave. She was descended from Jesus Lovers and carried with her many of their magical ideas. Love, she said, bridged distances the human eye could not, which sounds like nonsense until you need it to be true. But even love had its limits, so she moved us as close to the Cuba Pens as was legally possible.

  The Gables is a township up the Dixie Hiway from Old Miamy. To the north is Hiya City, a geriatric stronghold. Directly south are the Miamy Ruins, which were a big tourist draw and a Bosom Industries asset. The Gables was the farthest south a free person could live, the bottom of the unincarcerated world, and approximately three hundred miles north of Pop’s prison cell.

  The night we moved into Residential Tower C, Umma stood by the south-facing window while me and Faron unpacked our duffel bags. She remained there till it went dark, head cocked like she was listening. After a while her body went rigid. Those drumstick shoulders hitched up in their puff sleeves, and she made a noise I had never heard her make before. I believe my mother was moaning, and not from grief. Faron asked did she need a glass of water. I asked did she need a tissue. Umma told us be quiet; she was feeling him.

  Pop’s love was not a vibration or a breeze or a glow, she said. It was like ordnance. With a blast radius as wide as the Caribeen. From his cell down in the Cuba Pens, she could feel him go thud, thud, thud. Umma called that love, but I know now that Pop was punching the walls of his cell.

  The Gables was a step up from sharecropper tents and factory dorms. I hear it’s all faveler now, but in my boyhood the tower blocks were respectable living. Our junior-plus one-bedroom was on the top floor. Us boys thought it was a penthouse. Galvanized steel door, en suite kitchen, sit-down toilet right across the hall. The carpets were soft and beige, beige walls and beige window treatments—the décor blended so seamlessly with the Floriday summer sky that our home seemed to expand out into the greater world. Our bunks were hinged to the living room wall. I called top on account of my claustrophobia, but I usually woke up on the couch beside Umma.

  The only drawback to tower living was the eleven flights we had to climb up and down each day. If you had pocket change you could afford the elevator. The steps cost you more anyway. The Stairdwellers shook you down hard, and if your pockets were empty the
y made sure teeth fell out instead. I wouldn’t risk it without Faron. He was my muscle.

  Umma was my warmth. I would like to say love, but mostly she saved that for Pop. She was a wiry woman but hot, like the coils of an electric stove. In those days after our father went to Cuba, Umma did not embrace us; she coiled around us until our skin began to burn.

  She meant to make a better life for me and Faron so she enrolled at the Old Miamy School for Drugs and Doctors. She’d always been crack at sewing up Faron’s playground wounds. She could read decent well, and the clinics were so hard up for physicians they would take anyone. I believe there was also a measure of pity in their decision to accept her, though no serious person would admit to such an outmoded sentiment. Umma chose obeegy, making babies.

  When she did her rounds at the babying clinic, Umma wore a calico dress some nurse had left behind in the lockers. It was a few sizes too large, and the gathered front pockets were always weighed down with stray objects she’d collected throughout the day. This was her idea of housekeeping. When she went to sleep I would go through them looking for my books, pencils, or underpants.

  One night, when we’d been living in the Gables about four or five months, I dug through her pockets in search of Pop’s wallet. Instead, I found a canvas bundle the size of a grande burrito. The inside was carefully stitched with little flaps that contained what appeared to be medical supplies—syringes, needles, brown tinctures in plastic bags. A small square of paper fell out and I picked it up. In a cautious, cramped hand—not my mother’s—someone had written:

  YOU DONT HAVE TO.

  I have always been good at waiting. I was born to keep vigil. Umma’s shifts at the clinic ran till midnight six days a week. When the red digits of the oven clock showed twelve I would climb onto my bunk and survey the elevated stretch of Dixie Hiway. It ran so close to our tenement that you could leap across from a stairwell window on the third floor. And it was so empty, I had no trouble picking out my mother’s frail shadow as she walked the hiway home. Good Samaritans made bonfires of cottonwood and scrub pine to scare away coyotes and light the way. If you stayed clear of the median you were safe enough, but still I worried.