The Ruinous Sweep

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “Have you got a card, too?” she said.

  It was a calculated gesture of pique. Bee wasn’t quite sure what had made her do it. Bell, meanwhile, fished in his pocket and came over with his card.

  “Thank you, Staff Sergeant,” said Bee. She never once looked at Stills, but the inspector’s glare was leaving scorch marks on her cheek.

  Bell stepped back as Bee pocketed the two cards.

  The inspector leaned in very close to Bee’s ear, as if to share an intimate secret. “We will be in touch,” she said.

  There must have been a cool wind coming out of somewhere because dropping down behind the garbage pile, Donovan began to feel something like warm. He had heard once that when you had hypothermia, the last thing that happened before you froze to death was that you began to feel good and toasty. He was too exhausted and beat up to feel anything like euphoria, but he’d take this feeling right now over shuddering any day, whatever the consequences. He leaned back against a forty-gallon barrel. It must have been full because it didn’t shift with his weight, only sloshed a bit. Rainwater, he guessed. He closed his eyes, took in a long, slow breath, and let it out, felt almost at peace. Glad to be off his feet. At least he wasn’t running anymore and he could take stock, try to make sense of those fleeting glimpses brought on by seeing Al at the card table — glimpses of what must have happened back at his apartment. They began to coalesce into images. Like Polaroid photographs, the glimpses gaining more color and detail the longer he held them steady in his mind’s eye, until bit by bit he was able to string together something of the story.

  He had been at his father’s place, out in Britannia. He still visited him, wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t court mandated anymore. Maybe he had thought he could change his father. He wouldn’t be the first misguided son with a messiah complex. The thing was, his father was changing him. It had taken Bee to recognize it, to see what the visits did to him.

  “I’m not saying stop seeing him,” she’d said. “But you need some help, Turn. You need to talk to someone.”

  It was his temper.

  “You’re not afraid of me, are you?” he’d said.

  “Not at all,” she’d said. “I’m afraid for you.”

  So he’d made up his mind. He’d make the break. He didn’t need a therapist to tell him the old man was bad news. “I’ll do it,” he’d said. “This week. You wait. Dad and I will have The Talk.” The look in her eyes was not encouraging. “You don’t think I’m up to it?”

  “Weren’t you the one who said nobody dumps your father and gets away with it?”

  “It’s an ego thing,” he told her. “He turns it around so he’s the one doing the dumping. Either way — dumper or dumpee — I’m out from under. Finito. Hasta la vista.” He had dusted his hands as if, after all these years, it was all going to be as easy as a lob to first for the final out. Bee wasn’t so sure. He should have listened to her.

  Because he and Al didn’t really talk anymore.

  Funny YouTube videos, action movies, draft choices, and player deals: a truly rich relationship. For instance, Donovan never brought up the twelve-step program that always stalled for his father at step number two: recognizing a higher power that could restore sanity. The highest power Al McGeary recognized was Al McGeary.

  “See someone, Turn,” said Bee on the phone during her work break. He had been at the park. Spring training. That’s when he saw his cell battery was low. “Gotta run,” he said.

  He played in an adult baseball league, tier one, the youngest player on his team. Their season didn’t start till May, but a few of the guys had gotten together under the lights out at Britannia Park, smacking balls around, digging the winter out of their bones. He was going to talk to his father when he got back.

  “Sounds ominous,” his father had said that morning.

  “Just be here.”

  “Where else would I be?” said Al.

  “I mean be here and sober.”

  “Now it really sounds ominous.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Got it.”

  “Sober.”

  “As a proverbial judge.”

  So Donovan had gone straight to his father’s from practice, walked in sometime around eight, and heard the laughter: a party.

  Shit.

  He leaned his forehead against the hall closet door. Turned out it was just one other person, but that was one person too many, Dad’s friend Rolly. Dad and Rolly were three sheets to the wind. Which meant six sheets to the wind between the two of them. That was a lot of sheets.

  But “sheets to the wind” was too fresh an image to describe the kind of inebriation these two could get themselves into. Donovan had once found a book with 2,231 synonyms for being drunk. There were some good ones: “Sir Richard has taken off his considering cap” was maybe his favorite. “He’s kissed black Betty” was another. Donovan was pretty sure he’d seen 2,231 examples of his father soused. Anyway, when he got to the door of 304, Al was good and glazed, glazed and segued, half-canned, round the corner, and in uncharted waters. In a word, gone.

  And it wasn’t as if Donovan cared anymore. Not really. If he’d been able to think about it rationally, he might even have seen how eloquent his father was being. You want a father-son talk? Here’s what I think about that.

  He should have just left.

  What had he been thinking?

  Al made some off-color joke and Rolly laughed like someone in the last stages of emphysema.

  Donovan’s heart banged against his ribs dangerously.

  Get out of here. Split! Don’t even stop to collect your shit.

  He’d go to Bridgehead and wait for Bee to get off work. No. Not an option. Anyone else could chat up the baristas, just not boyfriends.

  Peals of laughter from the front room.

  Go to Bridgehead anyway. To hell with the rules! Buy a maple macchiato, get yourself a cream mustache and go all Clark Gable on her . . .

  “Breaking news, Rolly. The lad is leaving me.”

  Donovan’s attention was dragged back to the moment.

  “What’s that?”

  “Donny T. He’s throwing me over. Clearing out.”

  “Non.”

  “Ah, oui, Monsieur Pouillard. At least that’s what I think he’s got up his sleeve. Assuming he can find the balls to do it.”

  “I had not known things were so bad.”

  “Bah! Things are what they are. He’s high-strung, like his mother. For all his brawn, he’s really a mama’s boy.” Al stopped, sucked on the neck of his bottle — Donovan could hear him, hear the glugging, the sigh of contentment, the burp. “You can bet she’s behind it, Rolly. The whole thing reeks of one of Mama Trisha’s stratagems. Consolidating her moral victory.”

  Don’t wait to hear where this is going. You think he didn’t hear you come in?

  “Here’s to Trisha the Virtuous,” slurred Dad. There was the tink of bottle necks, more glugging, and then he said, “Yep, this is definitely one of the old girl’s cunning stunts.”

  Rolly’s death rattle of a laugh followed. “Cunning stunts, eh?” he said.

  “You betcha,” said Al. “That’s my ex for you, such a stunning —”

  “Shut up!”

  Donovan wasn’t sure how he’d gotten there, but there he was, all six foot two of him, standing over his father in his easy chair.

  “Hey, it’s Downtown Donny T. You whack another one out of the park, sonny boy?”

  “Shut it, Al. Just shut the fuck up.”

  “I was asking how your practice —”

  “I heard what you were saying.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Rolly, backing up into the dining area.

  “Not sure what you’re getting at, Donovan.”

  “What you called Mom.”

  His father raised his arm as if it weighed a ton. He waved his hand in the air. “Didn’t call her anything.”

  “You were just about to.”

  “Oh, that. Hey, an old
joke. A little play on words. Get over yourself.”

  And the bat came down.

  Smashing the bowl of popcorn on the table beside the La-Z-Boy.

  “What the —”

  And the bat came down on the beer bottles.

  “Jesus!”

  And the bat came down on his father’s crystal whiskey glass so hard that a piece of it pinged off the TV screen across the room.

  His father’s hands grabbed the arms of his chair and he leaned toward his son, his face a ferocious red — a junkyard dog at the end of its chain. And then, just as suddenly, his muscles went slack and a lazy smile creased his face. “Oh golly. Did I forget about our little talk?” He smacked himself in the forehead and then threw himself back in his chair, laughing his drunken head off.

  Donovan stood there. He’d finished last season batting .315. He was stronger now — had hot hands, and right this minute they were hotter than anything.

  Al leaned forward, all condescension and brass. “What’s on your mind, son,” he said, and the look on his face was calculated, a come-on, a dare.

  “Apologize,” said Donovan, his voice shaky but not his resolve.

  “You’re the one breaking things, as Rolly is my witness.”

  “Apologize,” said Donovan. He took his eyes off his father just long enough to glare at Rolly. Rolly was smart enough to keep his mouth shut.

  Donovan stepped closer to his father, leaned in close. “Stamp your foot twice, Al, if you get what I’m saying.”

  Thunk!

  Donovan awoke to the sound of a door closing, startling him back into the land of the living — or this facsimile of it. A moon had appeared from somewhere, a good-size moon, remarkably similar to the one he regularly took for granted in that other land he occupied up until . . . was it only a few hours ago?

  He sat listening. Would he even hear footsteps on the spring-wet grass, the soggy blanket of dead leaves? He turned, careful not to make a racket, and on his knees peeked through a chink in the trash-pile wall. No one.

  He turned back, wrapped his arms tight around his chest. He had drifted off. He was shivering, but it was only partially from the cold. His heart was beating so hard he was afraid it might bust right out of him. He turned again toward the farmhouse, afraid someone might hear his heart and come looking for him. Do him in. Undo him. That’s why he was here, wasn’t it? This was the Country of Payback. He threw himself hard against the cold steel drum. Water sloshed out and trickled, freezing, down his neck. He struggled to catch his breath. Struggled to calm himself down. He sat there feeling the cold water seep into the elastic band of his underwear. He closed his eyes and willed himself back to his father’s apartment in the city, made himself watch what happened next.

  His father hurled himself up out of his chair and Donovan sprang back, but he needn’t have. The old man teetered there, as if standing on the bow of a ship in a storm. Then his eyes rolled back into his head until there was nothing but bloodshot white and he went down like a sack of flour.

  His chin caught the edge of the coffee table, hurling his head back. And there he lay on the carpet amid the unseasonal snowfall and shards of broken crockery and glass, his arms flung outward but the rest of his body all cramped up between his chair and the heavy coffee table.

  “Dad?”

  The bat dropped from Donovan’s hand and he dug his cell phone out of his pocket. “Shit!” Low battery. He turned to Rolly, who was staring at his friend with his tongue between his teeth, as if there were something wrong with the picture but he’d be damned if he could figure out what.

  “Rolly! We’ve got to phone 911.”

  Rolly tore his attention away from Al to refocus as best he could on Donovan. When he finally had him in his sights, he glared. “Tabernac,” he said. “Look what you done.”

  Then Al groaned and they both turned their gaze on him. His hand lifted feebly from the floor and gesticulated, then fell back again.

  “Your phone, Rolly,” said Donovan. Rolly patted his pockets, shook his head. “Then where’s Al’s? He’s having a heart attack, for Christ’s sake.”

  Rolly held up his hand like the world’s saddest traffic cop. “It’s not his ticker,” he said.

  “But he —”

  “His ticker’s fine!” shouted Rolly. Shouting made him lose his balance, and he reached out a hand for the dining room table to steady himself. The empty bottles sitting there jiggled. “He just stood up too fast. I see it before.”

  Donovan stared at his father, who was still breathing. He wanted to believe Rolly, but he didn’t think Rolly had worked in the ER anytime recently.

  “I’ll go phone,” said Donovan.

  “Yeah, you go,” said Rolly, flinging his arm out in the general direction of the door. “You done enough damage ’round here.” Donovan stared at the man. He was finally moving, shuffling like he was eighty instead of forty-something, shuffling around the couch toward Al. He glanced at Donovan and shook his head. “You got some nerve, kid, talking at your old man like that.”

  Donovan stepped backward. Felt dizzy, stopped. Looked again at his father. Blood trickled down Al’s unshaven chin onto his T-shirt. But then his eyes flickered open, took in his son, looked him up and down. Donovan watched a grin worm its way onto his father’s face.

  “Vamoose!” said Rolly.

  But Donovan only stared. And then he went to his father, knelt beside him, and whispered in his ear. The words weren’t for Rolly to hear, just his dad. “You got that, Dad?” he said. His father nodded slowly.

  “Fiche le camp!” Rolly shouted.

  And Donovan got to his feet, shaking.

  “Back to mama,” said Al, waving. “That’s a good boy.”

  “I’ll handle this,” said Rolly, who had taken Donovan’s place at his father’s side. He wrapped his arm under Al’s shoulder to lift his limp torso into a seated position.

  And Donovan left, slammed the door behind him, good and hard so that it echoed down the hall. He ran — couldn’t get out of there quickly enough.

  He heard a door open, the next-door neighbor no doubt; the one who called the cops whenever the noise level got too high in 304. Donovan didn’t turn to look. He crashed through the door to the stairwell. The elevators took forever and he just wanted out.

  Thunk!

  Another door. On his knees again, Donovan peered through his spy hole. A woman, silhouetted by the yard light, walked from the big shed toward the house. She stopped before she reached the porch and turned to look in his direction, as if she had heard something. He cringed — curled in on himself. She couldn’t possibly see him, could she? When he dared to look again, she was still staring his way, and the yard light gave her whole body an aura, like a full-on halo.

  Then she turned toward the house, climbed the steps to the porch, and entered. The screen door opened, the kitchen door opened. The screen door shut, the kitchen door shut. And Donovan was alone again.

  He took a deep breath and resumed his seat, his back against the oil drum. Then he gasped, went cold all over. Not five yards away stood a man. He had his back to Donovan, staring out toward the forest, his arms limp at his sides, a long moon-shadow off to his left. Donovan sat perfectly still. Had the man heard his intake of breath? It didn’t look like it. Had he walked right past the trash heap without seeing Donovan there, another piece of wrecked machinery?

  Donovan’s hand moved carefully to his right, where the broken handle of a spade stood like a rotten tooth. He wrapped his fist around it, lifted it slowly, quietly. He turned his attention to the weapon, enough to see that the spade was still attached, rusted and chipped but heavy enough. Then the shovel dislodged something that clanked, and when Donovan looked up, the man had turned to face him. He walked toward Donovan, shuffling drunkenly. He was wearing saggy sweatpants and a short-sleeved T-shirt, and Donovan knew who he was even without being able to see much of his face. In the light of the right bracket of the moon, he recognized that stumbling gait, the
body left to go to seed.

  “Dad,” he said, but the man did not answer. Then, as he grew nearer and nearer, Donovan gasped again and drew his knees in tight to his chest. His father stopped two paces away and stared down at the boy in the trash heap.

  “Here, let me help you out,” said the man. He shoved his hand into his pocket and pulled out a lighter. He lit it and held the flame up to his face, the better to see the damage there. This was not Murphy, the cardplayer. This was not the man he had left in apartment 304 back in the city. He was battered beyond recognition, his nose a bloodied stump, an eye caved in, livid bruises. His father lifted his hand to his mouth and cupped it there. Then his lips parted and three teeth tumbled out into his waiting palm. He closed his fist on the teeth and then threw them aside.

  “This is your work,” he said.

  “No!” said Donovan.

  “Sure it is. Was your bat did it.”

  “No. I never —”

  “It’s what you wanted.”

  “I ran. Ran away.”

  “But you came back.”

  “No!”

  “Yes!”

  “Not to do that.”

  “Then what? To apologize.”

  “Yeah . . . Yes.”

  Al laughed, shook his head. The action made his body falter. It looked for a moment as if he might fall, and Donovan drew himself in tighter. Then his father clicked his lighter shut, shoved it into his pocket, leaned forward, his hands on his knees. “You can’t take back what you said, you know. What you whispered to me, all private and personal — just for my ears. You can’t ever take that back.”

  “No,” said Donovan. He shook his head. “But I didn’t do that to you.” He pointed at his father’s face, his arm shaking.

  “Sure you did.” Though his words were garbled, there was humor in his voice and a moon glint in his one remaining eye. “There were even witnesses. Remember?”