by Pete Dexter
The old man doesn’t seem to notice. "A simple favor," he says, and waits.
His father shrugs. "I’ll do what I can."
The old man brings the fingers of his two hands together and lets them touch. "I want to bring this guy over here," he says, looking at the fingers. "Let him tell you he’s sorry."
His father begins to shake his head; the old man holds up his hand. "I want you to see this guy, Charley, let him explain what happened."
His father stands completely still.
The old man closes his eyes. "I want to bring him over, you can see him for yourself."
"He don’t belong in this house," his father says.
Something in that makes the old man smile. "He’s helped us out a few times, Charley," he says.
His father doesn’t answer.
"And now he says to me, Constantine, I need a favor too. I got to talk to Charley, set this straight. He says Constantine, I can’t live next door to this crazy Irish bastard, he’s thinkin’ these things about me."
His father looks away from the old man, out the window and then at the men standing in back of him. He looks at Peter’s uncle.
"I ain’t having him in my house," he says.
The old man studies his fingers and nods, and when he speaks again the kindness has gone out of his tone. "Yeah, you are," he says. "He’s gonna come in here, say he’s sorry, and that’s the end of it."
He looks up at Peter’s father, his eyes angry and wet behind the glasses. "You heard what I said? That’s the end of it."
His father crosses his arms and stares at the old man.
"It ain’t just for him," the old man says. "Something like this, you got to put it away or it affects you." His finger makes a circular motion in the air near his ear. "The first thing you know, you’re loco."
His father begins to say something more, but the old man interrupts him. "You been grieving long enough," he says. "It ain’t doing nobody any good."
The old man nods at the man who is holding his coat, and that man walks out the front door and is back in half a minute with Victor Kopec.
Victor Kopec is wearing a dark, expensive suit, and he blows on his hands as he walks into the room and rubs them against his face. Peter wonders how long he has been waiting out there, for Constantine to tell his father that he wanted him to come in.
Victor Kopec looks around the room, smiles at the boy sitting at the top of the stairs. "My man," he says.
Peter pushes himself away from the railing, crablike, using the heels of his hands and feet, until he is out of the line of sight. He flattens his cheek against the wall, and listens to himself breathe.
"Mr. Flood," the man says.
There is a long silence, and then the sound of Constantine’s voice. "Charley," he says, "it can’t hurt nothing to look at the man when he’s talking to you."
Peter edges his face around the corner until he can see the living room again. His father is still standing in front of Constantine, and as the boy watches, he turns and puts a murderous, black look on Victor Kopec, daring him to speak.
Victor Kopec is not afraid, though; the old man makes him safe. "Mr. Flood, I want to thank you for allowing me to express my sympathy for what happened," he says.
Peter hears how easily the words come out of Victor Kopec’s mouth; he hears the insult.
His father takes a small step closer and Victor Kopec takes a small step back. There are some things that having Constantine in the living room does not change.
"I wanted to tell you what happened was I hit some ice in the street out there, and the car gets sideways where I can’t steer it, and the next thing you know I’m in the middle of this. And then the dog, the crazy bastard’s got these instincts . . ."
The man’s confidence grows as he speaks, as if he cannot see the way Peter’s father is looking at him.
"I shot him right there in the driveway," Victor Kopec says.
"I had him seven years, since I left K-9. I eat with him, watch television with him, sleep with him. So what I’m saying, I lost something here too .... "
His father stares at the cop until he runs out of words, and then, when the room is quiet again, he turns back to Constantine.
"Is that it?" he says.
Constantine looks from his father to Victor Kopec, perhaps measuring the distance between them. Victor Kopec shrugs, comfortable, as if the men in the room will be with him forever.
"Is that it?" his father says again.
The old man shakes his head. "That’s what I was gonna ask you," he says.
His father turns and considers Victor Kopec. Without another word, he reaches across the space between them and takes the policeman’s hand. Victor Kopec is startled at first, and then seems to relax.
"My sincere condolences," he says.
His father shakes the hand and nods.
"Now it’s over," the old man says.
His father looks into Victor Kopec’s eyes.
"Something happens, you got to either forgive somebody or kill them, it makes you loco the thing ain’t settled," the old man says.
The room is quiet again while the words themselves settle.
"Charley?" the old man says.
"Everything’s settled," he says, still looking at Victor Kopec. Constantine takes off his glasses and wipes the corners of his eyes, as if he has been crying. “That’s good," he says, the handkerchief still in his eye. "Victor helped us out a lot of times, and this way, we’re all friends and he ain’t dead, he can help us out some more."
Victor Kopec begins to nod, but in that same moment Peter sees him reconsider, as if he realizes something has changed between himself and the men in this room. That he has been threatened.
Victor Kopec smiles now, no longer sure of himself, no longer so comfortable.
"Constantine," he says, "my sincere appreciation for working this out between us."
The old man stirs in his chair and pushes himself slowly to his feet and smiles. "You’re neighbors," he says.
Then one of the men places the coat over his shoulders, centering it carefully, and another opens the door. On the way out, the old man suddenly stops and looks up the staircase, directly into Peter’s eyes.
He holds on to the banister, frozen. The old man lifts his hand, his thumb comes up, turning it into a gun, and pretends to fire a shot.
* * *
The men leave, the front door shuts, the house is suddenly quiet. Peter’s father stands at the door, a moment and then walks into the kitchen.
Peter himself sits on the stairs, thinking of the pistol the old man had made of his hand. Of his crooked fingers that could not point up the stairs.
He is thinking of the moment the old man pretended to shoot when a noise comes from the kitchen, almost a shot itself. He waits, and in the quiet that swallows the house afterwards, he suddenly moves, surprised to find himself moving, running down the stairs, crossing the living room, slowing now as he gets closer, and finally walking, a step at a time, into the kitchen.
He sees the blood first, it spots his father’s shirt and his pants and falls in heavy drops on the floor around his shoes. His father is leaning into the icebox with both hands, as if he were holding it up, and then Peter sees the spot between his hands where he has smashed it with his head. The smooth line of the door is dented, as if someone had dropped it off the truck.
His father turns to him, his eyes are black and his face is running with blood—the cut is in his hairline—and for one long moment Peter feels himself in the same place with him, feels himself in the center of the place, in the center of his father’s thoughts.
And then it passes.
The blood runs out of his father and the look in his eyes turns dull, and he is seeing something else.
"Go to bed," he says.
* * *
In the morning, an ambulance comes for his mother. It is not as surprising to hear the noise in the hallway, or—after he has climbed out of bed—to see the men carrying her down the s
tairs, as it is simply to confront her appearance. She is a ghost. Her face, framed in a pillow at the top of the stretcher, is as thin as the bones underneath it, and she is the color of bones too.
When did she become a ghost?
He stands in his pajamas and watches the men turn the corner at the landing with his mother between them, stepping carefully, the man in front going backwards, feeling for the step behind him with his feet.
His father is at the bottom of the stairs, waiting. There is dried blood in his hair and in his eyebrows, and his eyes are as dull as they had been in the kitchen.
His father opens the door for the men when they are off the stairs, and then follows them outside to the ambulance.
Peter walks down and stands in the doorway, the cold wind coming up his pajama legs. The men load his mother into the back. He steps into the yard.
The neighbors are at their windows now, one or two are standing on their porches in housecoats. They do not leave their homes, though. A dozen times he has seen these same neighbors gather in each others’ yards, sometimes in bathrobes, touching those who are crying on the shoulder, at the same time seeing for themselves if the person on the stretcher is dead. But no one comes to the driveway to touch his father now.
Doors close and the ambulance is sealed. Its lights go on but there is no siren. His father waits on the street until it is out of sight. Then he turns the other direction, staring at the house of Victor Kopec. He stares as if there were something to see, but Peter looks at the house too and there is no light, no sign of movement inside. Shades are drawn in every window.
His father walks back to the house, crossing the car tracks that still divide the yard in half, and stops for a moment when he sees Peter standing in the cold, wet grass in his bare feet and pajamas.
"Get inside," he says quietly.
Peter turns, without a word, and walks into the house. He feels his father close behind him, behind him and above, floating.
"Is she sick?" he says after his father has closed the door. His feet hurt and he is shaking in the sudden warmth of the room.
His father begins one direction, then changes his mind. He sits on the davenport and puts his elbows on his knees and bends forward to run his fingers through his hair. Tiny bits of dried blood sift onto the coffee table in front of him.
"What happened to your mother," he says, "she got scared of things that wasn’t there. First she wouldn’t go out by herself, then she wouldn’t go out with me with her, then she got scared to come downstairs in her own house . . ."
Peter thinks of the night the men came to the house, and of his mother in her room listening.
"Finally . . ." his father says, and then stops. He shrugs and nods in the direction of the front yard, and in that gesture is the whole world on the other side of the door, the one his father knows and the boy has glimpsed just once.
"It scared her so bad she’s afraid to even move her little finger," his father says. He looks up then and nods. "She’s afraid that she moves her little finger, it wakes up and remembers what happened to your sister. She thinks if she just keeps everything still it don’t hurt."
He stands up and walks to another chair, as if he is afraid of the opposite thing.
"Did she go to the hospital?"
"It ain’t the kind of hospital you can visit her," he says.
And then he moves again, this time to the window, and stares at the house next door.
* * *
He wakes up alone in the house.
He feels the emptiness of the place even before the sound—a soft thumping—moves from his dreams into the room, and he opens his eyes, afraid of anything that is not familiar.
He dresses himself, sneakers and pants and his jacket, and walks into the room where his mother slept. The bed is unmade, part of a sheet lies on the floor, a nightgown is tossed across a chair. The room still smells of her skin.
He picks up the nightgown and takes it to a hook on the open closet door. Then, without knowing why, he goes into the closet.
He does not belong in the closet, or even in the room, but he cannot bring himself to leave. He stands in the dark, the soft press of her dresses against his face and hands, and feels her absence.
He holds himself—and her—still, his eyes beginning to pick up shapes of things in the back and on the floor. He imagines his mother, afraid to move even a finger. He slows and then stops his breathing, noticing the stillness is more perfect when he is part of it. Moments pass, every other thing is still.
And then enclosed in stillness, a tiny, passing moment stalls inside him, and then takes a shape of its own, billowing like smoke, filling him almost as soon as he first notices it there, filling him until he is suddenly afraid there is no room left inside himself to breathe.
He backs out of the closet, taking as much air into his chest as it will hold, and the moment recedes to the place it had been before, and passes.
He hears the pounding again, somewhere outside.
He walks out of the room and down the stairs. The noise stops and he stops, suddenly afraid that another moment is caught in his chest. He waits, but it takes no shape. He opens the front door and steps out.
A cold mist has settled in, a kind that will last all day. He zips his jacket to his chin and puts his hands in the pockets and looks out across the street. The place on the curb where his father parks—no one else has parked there for as long as he can remember—is empty. The spot itself is dry, the outline of the car against the wet pavement.
Victor Kopec’s front door opens and he emerges carrying an ax. He walks to the middle of the yard, hurrying as if he were afraid of being caught at this. He picks up a sign lying in the grass and begins to tap it into the ground with the flat end of the ax.
Peter can’t see what the sign says from the steps, and walks toward the curb in front of his house until he can make out the words:
FOR SALE
BY APPOINTMENT ONLY
CALL CATHY AT DUNNE REALTY
Victor Kopec holds the sign with one hand and taps with the other. He taps a dozen times, and then he steps back and swings the ax with both hands. Not a full swing—he brings his hands to a spot in front of his eyes, and then pulls them straight down, as if he were ringing a bell—and an inch at a time, the stake disappears into the ground.
He stops and steps back, leaning on the ax, and considers what he’s done. The sign is off center, pitched forward and to the left. Victor Kopec drops the ax and lifts one of his black police shoes in the air and kicks it. The noise is still in the air when he kicks it again. The sign falls back and then forward, as if it’s been shot. The next kick turns it sideways, and then Victor Kopec picks the ax up off the ground and swings it from the side, the way Peter has seen Pancho Heurrera swing at baseballs at Connie Mack Stadium, and hits the sign square in the face.
Out of breath, Victor Kopec turns to see if anyone is watching. An afterthought. And that is when he notices Peter. He considers him a long minute. "How come you ain’t in school?" he says finally.
Peter does not answer.
"You better go on inside," Victor Kopec says, "or somebody’ll call the truant officer."
He doesn’t move. The man is angry and afraid at the same time. The words are not the ones he wants to say.
"You want to make something of yourself, you got to go to school," he says.
Then Victor Kopec turns to his sign, which is bent almost in half, and smashes it again. He walks back into his house and closes the door.
Peter wipes at the mist on his face with the sleeve of his jacket, but the sleeve is wet too, and feels colder than the air. He looks at the sign in the yard, wondering how long Victor Kopec will leave it like that. He thinks of his uncle, who once shot a cat on the steps of his house on Two Street and left it there for a week in a plastic bag, where the old woman next door who owned the animal would see it every time she came out.
He pictures his uncle’s face, the pockmarks deep in his cheeks,
and thinks of the thing he said to his father in the living room while the men were holding him.
"Charley, it was his fault, he’d be dead .... I’d done it myself .... "
He knows his uncle would kill Victor Kopec, but not for what happened in the yard. His uncle’s reasons are never the ones he gives.
His father gives no reasons at all. His are shaped out of sight by weights the boy only glimpses at work in the momentary changes that cross his face and disappear.
His sister could touch that face, put her fingers in the creases and over the eyes, and understand him in ways Peter never could.
A breeze blows across the park and rattles Victor Kopec’s broken sign, and Peter walks back into the house to wait for his father.
* * *
He is alone in the house all day. He sits on the floor in front of the television set, turning off the sound, and eats marshmallows. He hears Victor Kopec slam his car door outside, then start his engine. He hears him leave, hears him return. The phone rings, he does not answer it. He is not allowed to pick up the phone when he is alone; he doesn’t know the reason. He counts the rings—eight of them—and then the phone is quiet, and in the silence that is left behind, he hears the last ring hanging in the air.
He lies on the floor, his cheek resting against his hand, and watches soundless cartoons.
His uncle’s voice wakes him up, talking to his father outside. He opens his eyes, stiff and cold, not sure where he is.
"Lookadit this way," his uncle is saying, "you talked to him once, what does it hurt to talk to him again?"
He sits up. His hand has gone to sleep under the weight of his head and he holds it in his other hand, lifeless and white. He thinks of his sister’s hand, the mitten in the street. He hears the key in the door.
Peter pushes himself up off the floor; his dead hand doesn’t feel the wood underneath it. His father comes through first, holding a bag of groceries. His uncle is behind him, pressing close as he talks.
"I’m tellin’ you, the guy’s callin’ Constantine eleven times a day, sayin’ you’re gonna do him. He says he’s gonna sell his house and move to Fort Lauderdale .... "
