A Song for Carmine (3 page)

I hear Ma in the kitchen opening and closing old cabinet doors while Pa still catches his breath at the other end of the couch, his breaths short and weak; he tries to stretch them out. I can smell his oily skin, see him watching me out of his yellow eyes; we are in the wild again.

“How have things been, Pa?”

He shakes his head, sits up straight, tries to laugh before the cough grips him again.

“What’s so funny?” I ask. “Is it because I’m here or you’re there?” This time he doesn’t laugh, looks across the room at something I don’t see, and grabs his knees with his hands. His nails are overgrown, and the hair on his arms has turned gray.

“Here you go, Carmine.” Ma hands me a glass of bourbon. I take a sip, slide it onto the table beside me.

“It’s been a long time. I didn’t think I’d ever be sitting in this room again.” Ma sits in an armchair across from us and crosses her bony legs beneath her housecoat.

“It ain’t normal for kids to leave home and never to come back,” she says. She lights up a cigarette and stares at Pa for a long time, waiting for him to say something.

“Things have been going real good for me.” I make big hand gestures as I talk, paint a real colorful picture for them. “I’ve just been made partner at the advertising agency I’ve been working at, dating a nice girl; I’ve got loads of money. I don’t have long.” I take another drink of the liquor and wince as it goes down; it tastes like it’s been in the back of the cabinet for a long while.

“Your pa, he ain’t got long either.”

Pa starts to cough again, as though on cue, but manages to catch his breath before losing it.

“Ma, don’t make this harder than it needs to be, you hear?” He tries to smile at her, but it doesn’t come out right. Instead, a crooked frown appears on his face; one cheek lifting up, he almost winks.

After a minute, he pulls himself up to standing and leans on his cane. It’s the only thing holding his body in place. “I’m headed to bed, boy. You stayin’ or you goin’?”

Ma looks at Pa, then at me. Nothing much has changed, and she’s waiting for the first swing, I think. I stand up and put my hand on my wallet, looking up at the faded white ceiling before answering.

“I think I’ll crash. Is my old room open?”

CHAPTER 3

I awake in the
night to Pa screaming. I’ve never heard anything like it. It’s a screech. No, it’s more like a long, drawn-out hiss, like a siren, coming from his bones, crawling out of him. My brain doesn’t know what to do with such sounds. I turn over and try to focus on the sounds of the crickets outside my window, count the women I’ve been with, imagine the rising and falling of the stock market, the paper I’ll choose for my new resume.

In the morning, Ma is at the stove scrambling eggs. I smell the yolks harden and the whites sticking to the bottom of the pan, the salty butter melting.

“Does he always scream that way?” I stare at Ma’s back as she cooks and my head aches, and I try to think about why I’m here and what I want to do.

“He has for the last month or so.” Her voice is low, the way new mothers sound after being up with a newborn all night, tired, worn-out, but still resilient.

“The doctor tells us that the cancer is eatin’ him up inside.” She turns the pan over, dumps the eggs onto a paper plate, takes a long drag off her cigarette.

I don’t have any experience with any of this. Illness. Weakness. I’ve been on a twelve-year happy hour, and none of it makes any sense. I think about Diego’s aging face, Melanie’s long, silky legs, the time we had a potluck for some account clerk’s dying wife. This is the stuff from other people’s lives. This isn’t really life.

Outside the kitchen window, I can see the blue of a faraway mountain, remember its loneliness. I stand up to leave the room.

“Don’t you want to eat?” she asks, searching my face for something familiar and knowing I’ll shake my head and turn away. I barely recognize her. She’s been dead to me for years.

*     *     *

My first memory of life is a little like this. There’s an opening in a room full of shag carpet, some kind of hole in the floor. I fall through. Somehow her skinny arms catch me downstairs. I am safe. Other memories are harder to remember, seem scattered, disconnected. Bits of color. Flashes of light. A piece of a memory here, a feeling there. I am following her around, clinging to the backs of her legs, looking up her narrow back, calling her name. She feeds me pancakes in front of the television. She brushes the knots out of my hair; she puts me in a tub of cold water and washes my fever away. Pa brings the belt down on my back and she leaves the room. I see red. Follow her shadow. Hear her moans as she leans on the church pew and talks to Jesus. I try to put it all together and imagine a woman that I know.

*     *     *

A couple of hours later, I walk three blocks and find the familiar tavern easily. I walk there almost on autopilot, noting my surroundings and remembering it was the place that Pa walked to a few nights a week, to reach his disciples he told us, his belly shaking as he laughed. Neon signs blink in the windows, and I can smell the stench of air-conditioning and cigarettes as I approach the door.

I sit down at the bar. A silver Coors Light sign blinks in front of me; a layer of dust dulls the light. I remember seeing it as a child, walking up to the barstool, giving Pa a message from Ma, the sting of his hand pushing me away, my brain trying to process it.

“Hey. Take a look at my son. He’s a shrimp, ain’t he? God help him.” His friends laugh; he doesn’t turn around to look at me again. I hear the beer glass slide across the bar as I leave, hear Pa saying something about the son of Job and the trials and tribulations of his life. He spoke, and everyone turned to listen.

I tap my fingers on the bar and look around the room. The smoky air hangs, and the jukebox plays some country tune I’ve heard on the road somewhere. The faces look familiar: dark and weathered, but tender; there’s nothing more to them than what you see here. I can smell the sour of Jack Daniels in the air and my heart quickens.

I order a beer and a shot, slide my hand through my hair, and take my jacket off. I think I’ll stay awhile.

I think about my routine at home in Dallas, sitting at a bar so unlike this one. Glossy floors and high ceilings, leather chaises, the dark lights leaning in and out, the sound of money sliding across tables, deals being made, sex being bought and sold. My life was a prime-time show people live vicariously through.

The bartender looks slightly familiar to me, a tall good-looking guy I remember playing football at school. I’d go and watch the games from the sidelines, smoking weed under the bleachers or trying to sneak my hand up girls’ skirts. I laugh to myself when I think about how he’s still here and pushing glasses around behind a bar. Then again, how I’m still sneaking behind bleachers—only bigger ones—and chasing skirts. I still like it; it still makes sense.

“Hey, don’t I know you?” I down the shot and follow it with half a glass of beer. On the jukebox, Patsy Cline swoons about love and heartache. How does that woman still have a place here?

He looks at me closely for a minute and squints. He’s putting it all together. I remember his name is Adam, Adam Short.

“It’s Carmine, right?” He leans over the bar in my direction and looks at me, tries to find any memories stored, things we might have shared.

“Yes, Carmine St. Clair. I think we went to school together a long time ago.” I drink the last of my beer and tap the glass on the bar. He fills it up from the tap and dries his hand on a towel.

“You haven’t been around these parts in years, have you? Seems like I’d remember seeing you around. You’re big-city now, aren’t you?”

I smile. Lean back in my chair. Tell him about all the money I’ve made in Dallas and how I won’t be here for long, that I’m only stopping in to check on my folks on my way to the East Coast to make some more coins.

“You know how it is,” I tell him. “I can’t believe you’re still working at this bar. Didn’t your pop used to serve drinks to mine back in the day?” A jukebox switches songs, something by the Rolling Stones, and I hear the pinball machine clicking somewhere in the room.

“Yep, still here, like a lot of us. Your folks have been struggling the last few years, I hear.” He turns a sink on behind the bar and starts washing a glass.

“Ain’t been a whole lot happening in these parts for any of us, but after the church, your Pa couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble. But I’m sure you know about all of that.” He dries the glass and then dips another one into the sudsy water.

He keeps talking for a long time and tells me how Pa’s had some trouble with some folks around town, how Ma’s been in the food line at the charity, how some of the winters have been harsh.

“Sounds like they made it all right,” I say, tipping my empty glass toward him again. “Only Pa is sick now.” I look around the room behind me, but only see a few scattered faces, no one I recognize. “I’m just not sure what that has to do with me, you know?” I reach down the bar and grab a bowl of peanuts, toss a few in my mouth. They taste like the bar smells. It’s something to do.

“My pa passed away a few years ago, left me this bar. Sometimes I find myself waiting for him to come out of the cooler, a case of beer in his arms. It’s tough, man, tough, and now my mother can’t take care of herself, needs help with the simplest of things. It’s a strange position for a man to be in, a strange feeling to get used to. I still don’t know what I’m doing.” He drains the sink and folds the towel, his eyes turned in.

“Why is that?” I ask him. He looks at me strangely, as though he suddenly doesn’t recognize me, like I’ve just walked up to him, a new face in the crowd.

Just then a group of men come up to the bar and order drinks, a rowdy group; they fill in the voids and the room has become something else. I slide my coat on and walk out. When the cold mountain air hits me, I remember I’m not in Dallas anymore.

CHAPTER 4

For the first couple
of days, it all feels so mechanical. Little stick figures walking about, changes in scenes, background noise; it all seems so separate from anything I know about. Ma shuffling in and out of their bedroom, Pa’s moans, the
Price
Is
Right
on the TV, then later in the evening,
Wheel
of
Fortune
, the clink of his spoon hitting the bowl of oatmeal he eats before bed.

The sounds of his pain seem cyclical—they are the worst at night, die off in the mornings, but then come back in the afternoon around lunch. I pop a couple of muscle relaxers in the day and try to coast through it, my body jelly, my mind still in Dallas, in the clouds, still on top. I don’t know what I’m doing here but doing time, waiting for the next wave to catch.

At night when all the lights are off in the house, I sit out on the front porch. I can’t believe how quiet it is in these mountains, how silently everything grows and grows until green covers everything, but then nothing changes and things stay the same beneath it all, a picture book that repeats the same images, flipping one after the other.

Through conversations in the hallway, Ma tells me that Pa’s cancer started in his colon, swam and grew until it thrived in all of his lymph glands; now there are tumors in his lungs, one growing in his brain. He has blood clots in his legs and he probably won’t walk much longer.

“How long has this been going on?” I ask her as she folds laundry into piles on the kitchen table.

“Oh, you know, Carmine, your pa don’t like to go to the doctor much. Never has. I had a feeling something was up. He was eating like a horse, but dropping weight like… I don’t know. By the time I’d convinced him to see someone, it was just about too late to do anything.” She turns around and stirs something on the stove and then pulls out a chair.

“What are we talking here, Ma? A week, a couple of years? Isn’t there some kind of treatment? Money doesn’t matter; I’ll pay for it.”

She cuts me off. “No, Carmine, there isn’t. Money hasn’t got anything to do with this. You ain’t been around in years, and I don’t know how much you care for him, but I thought you should know. That’s why I called.”

“I’ve got some calls to make,” I tell her and stand up and leave the room. Down the hall, Pa’s old TV yells my old commercials to the room.

*     *     *

My father was meant for a life in the sun, running the family’s fishing business, his skin already so beaten and worn, he belonged on a boat, at the sea, salt in his mouth. He grew up in Texas, worked his father’s fishing business, shrimp, crabs, the Gulf’s seafood, until his father gambled and drank it all away, the boat, the connections, eventually his life.

I remember Grandpa well. He would come to family dinners, bottle in hand, already half-crocked by half-day. I thought he was funny, charismatic, gritty. I sat near him always, trying to get a whiff of his alcohol-heavy breath; it was as sweet as honey, endearing. It was love and tenderness, and as necessary as Christmas and the first day of school. Ceremonial, yet rotten and weak.

His clothes were always dirty and weathered, but he worked every day of his life. People grew accustomed to him being drunk. I began to think it was okay after all, though deep down I was ashamed of them all.

After Grandpa passed, Pa came to Eton to find a few distant relatives, found work, mostly odd jobs, roofing, carpentry, plumbing in the palm of the Appalachians, and life went on.

He met Ma on an old logging road when he was just twenty-two years old. The two of them were like magnets, he told me, so drawn to one another. He was doing some day labor with a wood company; she was there with her father, taking notes about wood grades and insect development, shielding her eyes from the sun and watching the men work.

“She was quiet as a mouse, boy. I worried if I clapped my hands too loudly, she’d fall apart.” He laughed and looked across the room to her, pretended to clap, waved his hands instead. “But she’s stronger than she looks.”

They were married a few months after they met. They lived in a series of run-down apartments before Pa earned enough to buy this house at an auction. I came along less than a year later, unplanned, but they said they were ready to try their hand at raising a family.

Pa grew up poor, spending whole days and sometimes nights floating in that fishing boat on the Texas coast, the sun leathering his face, his father telling him about the ways of the world and how you had to take advantage of the world before it took advantage of you. Ma came from more stability. My grandparents lived and worked the forest, but there wasn’t anything ever said and the liquor ran through the house like water. Sundays they all sat on the cold hard pews in Eton, miles apart, and prayed, but they could never say for just what.

Ma and Pa make it seem like their early years together were good—that there was love and enough to get by and when the money grew short they didn’t mind because they had each other. Sometimes they’d wait until it got real dark and they’d enter the fields of some of the orchards and steal apples and pull blueberries off the bushes in handfuls.

It lasted awhile. Neither of them had ever been happier, but they didn’t trust it. They knew life was waiting just around the corner to get them, to take it all away, so they made sure they were ready.

For a while, Pa talked about going back to Texas to rebuild the fishing business, to build some real roots, to leave Ma’s past behind her and start something new.

“But we knew there wasn’t nothing back there in Texas for us, but a boat with a hole in it and some old debts from Granddaddy. I figured that wasn’t no way to start anything new, not with the past hanging on so hard.”

They decided to stay in Eton, and Pa found Jesus soon after, became a preacher, joking that there had to be more money in saving souls than in fishing. The small Baptist church up the road from our house needed a leader and it was enough. The rest of the time he built furniture: cribs and rocking chairs, dressers, chests of hope, whatever some of the locals or tourists passing through wanted. He spent hours in his shed, shaping and twisting the softwood of Georgia into dreams, the glue and booze keeping him in a calm trance. Ma and I would sometimes watch him through the windows of his workshop behind our house and wonder who he really was, searching the clouds for the next storm, trying to stay away from each other.

“He wasn’t always like this, Carmine,” she used to tell me. “He used to be sweet; he treated me like a queen when we was first married. Then something just died inside of him. When you came along he was so happy, but then he started remembering all these bad things that happened to him when he was a boy, all those beatings, and how his Pa would leave him places, sometimes on the water, sometimes in the middle of a field, sometimes with family he barely knew. And then times was real tough here in Eton, and there was never enough money and never enough work, and I tried, Carmine. I wanted him to be good to us.”

*     *     *

Later that night, I sit at the dinner table with them, push around stew in a plastic bowl, listen to Pa clear his throat. It sounds exaggerated. His Bible rests near his bowl. When he opens it up and starts flipping through the pages, I think I’ll snap.

“Still pretending, huh, Pa?” I pick up my glass of water, tip it back, drink the whole thing, but stare at him the whole time.

I hear the thump of that Bible in my mind as though it was yesterday. His voice resonates: “The Sins of the fathers shall be visited upon seven generations of the sons.” He also liked Isaiah 14:21—“Prepare a place to slaughter his sons for the sins of their forefathers; they are not to rise to inherit the land and cover the earth with their cities.”

He stares back at me until his eyes begin to water and he looks away.

“I never was any good at pretending, boy.” He closes his Bible and slides it to the middle of the table. I take another tablespoon of pasty stew and then push the bowl away.

Ma’s shoulders tighten. She picks up our bowls and starts the old percolator again.

“Carmine, your pa is too sick for trouble. I mean it. He don’t need any trouble.” She sighs into her own chest and rinses the bowls in the sink.

If I heard it once, I heard it a thousand times. “That boy has got to learn to be a man, to relinquish his sins, and goddamn it, I’m gonna make sure of it.”

“I know he ain’t right,” I’d hear Ma whisper to someone, “but don’t a man have a right to teach his son any way he sees fit?” I heard her say it on the phone more than once.

“I didn’t come here to make trouble, Ma, but a man has got to be himself, doesn’t he? Isn’t that what you always said, Pa? Something about marching to the beat of your own drum or something?” I smile. Pull a cigarette out of Ma’s pack and light it up. It’s getting dark outside and I can see the fireflies fly past the window.

“Since when do you smoke?” he asks. Ma serves him a cup of coffee with milk, the way he likes it. His breathing is labored, and he stares at the cup as though it’s a chore to consider it.

I remember the time he caught me smoking and how I thought he’d let me get away with it because he didn’t say anything for days. It was something most of the kids did. My friends and I’d steal cigarettes from our mothers’ purses and smoke them out by those old tracks while we waited for the train to pass. One time Pa was driving by, slowed his car to a creep, and looked right at me.

But then it came up. I should have known he wouldn’t let me get away with it. He never let anything slide. Ma and Pa were fighting over money—there was never enough—when he brought it up. Furniture brought in a little, church contributions helped, but it wasn’t enough to get by. Some late nights we’d drive from dumpster to dumpster and collect things people threw away, fix and sell them. Pa felt so ashamed about this. What would people think if they saw the town’s preacher digging through their trash?

I remember the brightness of my bedroom light snapping on in the middle of the night when their voices had died down, and the pound of his steps moved closer; they seemed to shake the whole house. “Boy, get up out of that bed; do it now. It’s about time you and I had a talk about some of your choices, man-to-man, don’t you think?” He slapped me across my face, pulled me up straight beside him, held his hand over my mouth to get me to stop hyperventilating.

“Now stop it, stop it right now. You ain’t got nothing to cry about, boy. I just want to talk to you a minute.” I smelled the sour whiskey coming from his mouth as he talked late into the night, punctuating lectures with slaps, telling me about what it means to be a hardworking, God-fearing man.

I lean across the table and get close to him; he smells like old bones, rotten eggs, the bottom of those old dumpsters.

“I smoke when I want to, always did. You got something to say about that, old man?” I pull another cigarette from the pack and light it up. Think about blowing the smoke into his face, but don’t.

“Oh, you’re Mr. Big Shot now, are you?” He calmly lifts the mug up to his mouth and takes a drink; his hand shakes as he sets it back down on the table. “No kind of son leaves his folks and don’t come back. Stomp me if you want to. I can’t stop you. But it won’t change anything. I’m dying, you fool.”

I hear a fire truck pass a few blocks away and the song of an owl’s hoot.

“Who’s gonna save the preacher, Pa? Jesus?” I stub the cigarette out in the ashtray, half-smoked.

He looks at me for a long time and I try not to blink. The whites of his eyes have a yellow hue to them, delicate like a baby’s skin; his skin hangs and moves when he breathes hard. He starts to say something, but then a storm of phlegm takes him over.

I get up and walk out of the room. The sight of him so weak and helpless saddens and disgusts me.

*     *     *

“Hey, Diego, it’s Carmine. Listen, I want to be a part of the next big thing; whatever it is, I’m with you. I’m taking care of some personal business right now, but I can be back in Dallas within a day. Call me back.”

I flip the phone closed and scroll through my contacts; there’s no one else, there’d only been Icarus, Diego, one plan.

I keep my cell phone in my hand, carry it around the house with me, but it never rings, it never even rings. So many relationships and pursuits and sex and deals, and my phone never rings. Not even Melanie. I believe it must be temporary.

Throughout the day I pick up the phone and try to think of someone else to call, don’t know who it would be, put the phone down and stare out into the black of the street I grew up on, the square houses across the street, the broken streetlight with a shoe dangling from it, the old railroad tracks. How it all came to be.

In Dallas, everything was illusion and insulation. A penthouse in the sky filled with shiny substance: the leather sofa, the fine linens, the original art that hung on the wall in dark frames, Versace and Cuisinart and high-end electronic systems of every kind, stainless steel and black matte catching all angles of the light, Nintendo, Sony, a large-screen TV, more, trophies everywhere—there was never enough. I know I stood in line to buy these things or spent drunken nights on the phone with catalog reps, credit card in hand, filling every second with something. “Thank you for calling The Sharper Image, may I help you?” was music to my ears. Stuff fueled the fire within, filling me, encouraging me to gather and own more, allowing me to forget, keeping the guilt a few steps behind me.

There was always something new around, something shipped, tag just removed, unused and uncertain. In my closet there were rows of expensive suits hanging lifeless on cold hangers, underneath, fifty pairs of shoes. The furniture, the suede chaise, a decadent chocolate mohair sofa with luxe and rich pillows
,
cork-top coffee and side tables, pearl walls paired with Robert Hansen artwork, handmade mahogany bookcases custom-carved to hold my large collection of record albums, terrazzo floors throughout the penthouse, sumptuous cream Flokati and Peruvian rugs, large sash windows that overlooked the Dallas sky, and a plush ceiling finished in elegant, satin-brass recessed lights. I got amorous looking at all of that stuff—mine, all of it mine. I wanted to come on my things, mark my territory, paddle my chests with my fists. I was finally in control, over the top. I had rewritten history; Eton was fucking bad fiction.