All the Old Haunts (2 page)

She waves him off, disgusted. “I’d rather go back to talking about your mother.”

“To hell with her,” Caesar snaps, backing away toward the door, backing away from Sonja’s look. “She can just go to hell. She can just go to hell and, like, be in hell, is what.”

Sonja shakes her head, Caesar slips out the door. He stands there outside, like a damn nutcase, framed in the glass door, looking in at Sonja as she stares back at him.

They had talked about this. Like she told him, they
had
talked about this.

She motions him back inside. He shakes his head petulantly. She nods her head, waves him in. As if he has no power, as if he’s attached to a string that’s tied to her beckoning hand, he comes back. But he holds the door open.

“I don’t want you coming over tonight.”

He hangs there in the doorway a few seconds. His face grows red, his eyes hooded.

“I knew it,” Caesar growls. “I knew you was just gonna dump me all the time anyways. I just gave you a reason. You should just
thank
me, ’cause I just gave you a reason, but I always
knew
you was gonna dump me, leave me flat. But fine, you know. Fine, Sonja. I wasn’t never gonna trust you anyway. So you can just go to hell, too.”

She doesn’t answer back. A pair of girls, teenagers, stand silently, nervously behind Caesar, waiting to get into the clinic. Caesar sees Sonja looking behind him, past him.

“Fine,” he says, and rushes off.

Sometimes Victor Sobocop stood around nights at the Children’s Museum, making sure nobody came in and made off with the giant telephone or the ant farm, sometimes he stood around days in the library branch making sure nobody wrote
suck a duck
inside their copy of
Make Way for Ducklings.

Caesar enjoyed dropping by when he could to check out his father at work. Sometimes he would make jokes later to Sonja about how corny and serious the old man looked and sometimes, like when Victor had to stand in front of the primate pavilion at the zoo and the apes threw shit and melon rinds at him, Caesar couldn’t even manage to get off the grounds before bursting into hysterical laughter.

One of those, Caesar figures when he hunts down his father on the job to tell him he’s no longer in school. It will be easier in a public place, in his uniform, where he has a job to do and can’t go nuts. It will be easier still, because with the old man looking like a toy soldier and patrons walking up and either not noticing Victor del Negro’s existence as a man at all, or disrespecting him and ignoring him when he tells them don’t smoke or please pick up that candy wrapper, then, Caesar can walk away feeling better. Better than the old man no matter how sober he is, no matter how righteous he is, no matter how religious and unnaturally
good
he is when he tells his son how stupid he is for throwing away his education and his life. An eighth-grade graduate in a flattop blue cap and a shiny badge, Victor is a rabid supporter of education. It’s easy to admire what you never done, is what Caesar thinks, and to admire what you don’t have. But that don’t make it great and it don’t make it worth nothin’.

When he comes up on his father—from behind like he does whenever possible so he can look him over good for a while without him knowing—Caesar finds him standing like a statue. He’s in the first-floor lobby of an office building where an accounting firm takes up half the building and lawyers take up most of the rest. There’s a directory on the wall that looks like a war memorial, the gold-lettered names spelled out over black onyx. The pillars that run down the middle of the corridor to the elevators are massive swirls of pink and green marble. Every word spoken here bounces around off of glass walls, mirrored ceilings, tiled floors, until that one word has come back to you five or ten times. And whispering only makes it worse because you can still hear every word and you realize you’re hissing as well.

Victor allows himself a small tight smile at the arrival of his son. People stream in constantly through the revolving door, yet the place still seems somehow empty and somehow silent.

It has to be done quickly, Caesar knows now.

He walks directly up to Victor, stops a couple feet in front of him. He takes him in, like usual, head to toe. The hat, pulled exactly to the brow, the face, weathered, creased, shaved to the bone and scrubbed to a sheen. He wears just a splash of cologne, something nice. Victor pays a lot for good cologne, buys and uses it in the smallest possible quantities, because what he can afford to use in quantity is trashy and will not do. His shirt is starched and tucked into his pants without a ripple, as if they are all one stretch of cotton/poly blend. The tie is straight as a plumb line, the socks slightly exposed to show he has found almost the exact color to match the uniform even if the company would not provide them. The gummy shoes are smarting from the thrice-weekly polishing.

Dignity, Caesar sees here. There are no laughs in the old man today, and there are no laughs at him. He holds his head in such a way, his neck tilted back, like a sulky horse. Caesar has to do this quickly.

“Did you hear what I said, Dad? I quit. This morning. You know that, right? You get it?”

Caesar is worried at the lack of response. His father, when drunk, with the old foghorn on him, was huge and explosive in his reactions to everything. He left you shaken, or he left you exhilarated, but he never left you guessing.

“You’re not gonna say nothin’, Dad? You’re not gonna tell me what you think? You’re not gonna tell me to pack my bags and be gone before you get home?”

Caesar is by now almost begging for a reaction, to free him. He would pay in blood to hear the foghorn, but he’d be satisfied with soft-spoken disapproval. It’s not coming. Not as he’d expected anyway. Like the queen’s guards in their big hairy hats, Victor holds his ground. He stands tall, looks straight, beyond his son.

And then his eyes fill with tears. That is Victor’s response. He continues to look straight ahead.

Caesar never, ever. He never saw this. He had played and played it in his head … and it never came out like this.

He hurries out, hits the revolving door like a tackling dummy, keeps on running. Probably, he has made the people in suits stare at his father even more now. Sorry. He’s sorry about that, too.

“Damn,” Caesar screams at himself as he runs, hard, through downtown traffic without looking. “Damn, Caesar, goddammit, damn you.” Cars scream to a stop, horns yowl at him. Caesar still refuses to even look. “Damn you, Caesar,” he screams and smashes himself in the side of the head with a closed fist. “Damn you.” He does it again, harder.

Caesar ain’t never punched nobody but Caesar.

It’s a misperception that Caesar hates his mother. But if he did. If he did hate his mother, it wouldn’t be because she left. That would be ragtime, it’d be cheap and easy. No, if Caesar did hate his mother, like people think, it would be more for stuff like this, if he did hate her:

Caesar has these memories of his mother, and they are all based in scent, sound, and touch. Not in sight, the way he figures other people recall their past. The one that comes back most, and it comes back nearly every day, three times before he leaves the house in the morning, is the smell of his mother getting him up and out for fifth grade one morning. Victor was asleep in the next room, lying on his back, Caesar knew, from the rumble of his snoring right through the frame of the house. Drunk Victor always slept on his back, always snored like a pig.

That sound didn’t disturb young Caesar even a little bit, so familiar was it, like the garbage trucks on Wednesday morning. But when his mother came in and woke him with the small words close to his ear, he snapped to, felt her overwarm breath on his cheek, and reached his hands up to read her face before even opening his eyes. Caesar knew the contour of his mother’s face as if he were a blind boy.

He watched her then as she pulled things from his top drawer, his second drawer, his closet, and laid them out on the foot of the bed, as if he couldn’t pick out his own clothes. He watched her stagger, then raise a hand to her temple as she tried to straighten up too quickly, and he hopped up to help.

She took Caesar’s small but mighty hand, smiled, then asked him not to help. It was then he saw, the bad eyes squinted, the broken blood vessels on the cheeks, the whole-body tremble that made her look like she was freezing even as her hand practically melted his with sweaty heat.

He dressed, and met his mother in the kitchen where she had toast and juice ready for him, and where he chewed and she watched the whole time happily, except for the few moments when she nodded there at the table. When the two of them had wrestled together something of a lunch, and found a suitable bag to carry it in, when Caesar had his small jacket on with only faint oil blotches on the collar, his mother held him at arm’s reach, checked him out, then licked her hand and started patting, wiping, beating down his wild cowlick.

He did his best not to wince, but the smell of her, of her breath, of her hand on him, it was as if she’d taken a week-old slab of raw chicken skin out of the bucket and was smoothing out his hair with it.

But she got it smooth. And as he went out she stood there looking at him like he was magnificent, like she had the 3-D, 4-D, 5-D virtual reality glasses that let her see Caesar like nobody else could or ever would see him. And he ran back to the door to give her a second hug no matter what she smelled like, and she stayed right there in that door frame until he was completely gone from her sight, smiling at him and waving every time he checked back over his shoulder even though her eyes could barely open and it was clear she needed badly to get back to bed, to lie with the pig and snore with him.

So, wouldn’t anybody hate her, stuff like that? Caesar would, if he did hate her, hate her for just that kind of thing.

The boy hardly remembers the journey. Walking to the church, entering the church. But he is sitting in the church. He certainly doesn’t remember making any part of the journey with his father. But there he is.

Victor stands, Caesar squirms. Victor laughs a generous laugh, and the sound of it fills the cavernous building, shooting out there, rattling around.

“You’re being blasphemous, old man,” Caesar says, scolding.

Victor slides into the pew next to him. “You’re right,” he says, and in one sleek motion sweeps the guard cap backward off his Brylcreemed head. He crosses himself, and scoots up close enough that their shoulders are touching solidly.

Caesar is relieved. They stare together up into the ceiling a hundred feet above them.

They look at the ceiling the way some people look at the night sky. Only they count saints and apostles, lambs and angels, the way other people might count stars and constellations.

Caesar doesn’t take it all too seriously, or literally, anyway, but he can enjoy it just the same, grooving on the detail of big old St. Mark with the tidal-wave beard or the flaking gold leaf of serene Mary’s halo. There is sparse lighting, set back into strategic spots up there so even with the main lights off there is a gentle wash over the scene, a truly celestial something going on.

And it’s quiet, and it’s large, and it’s all theirs when it’s not really supposed to be. The church is open and welcoming for the masses, but there are just the two of them. Caesar has to admit he gets an extra prickle out of that.

It’s a lot more, though, for Victor. He’s one of those seekers. Always looking for something, expecting something, trying to force something that may very well not be there. If they are looking up there together at the same thing, into the cone, the apex of this pretty ornate, pretty ancient, pretty pretty pretty building, one of them, Caesar, can be satisfied that it all means something to somebody. Even if it ain’t nothing to him but people’s hopeless spirit dreaming.

Caesar sneaks a glance in his father’s direction. Victor’s lips are moving, with some effort, over the Serenity Prayer most likely.

“Don’t forget to ask for the wisdom to know the difference,” Caesar says.

The father doesn’t bother telling the son that he’s got it wrong again, that he’s confused again. He simply stands, walks away from Caesar and toward the towering mahogany statue.

“Why don’t you strike me down … what’s your word? …
Smite
me. Leave my idiot son alone. You gotta ruin somebody, take me. Smite
me.”

They both listen as the words settle back down like snow, like the particles of dying paint constantly sifting from the ceiling.

“Wasting your time,” Caesar says. “Why you waste your time so much? You’re alone. We’re alone. Nobody’s listenin’.”

Victor stands here, no, shaking his head, no, disbelieving, no.

“No,” he says, and he gives his little crucifix, at the end of his rosary beads, a kiss.

“Yes,” Caesar repeats calmly.

Victor merely, resolutely, shakes his head.

Caesar wants to laugh at him. Can’t. He wants to boldly disagree. Can’t. Caesar has respect. Anger and respect.

“Listen,” Caesar says in lieu of trying, “I got a great thought. We know this place better than anybody. Let’s, you and me, go get us some wine. Some sweet sacramental wine. Huh? What you think? Have a drink with me? Nobody’ll know. Nobody’ll care.” There are many things Victor could do now. Caesar is well aware. Caesar is, in fact, counting on it. He doesn’t know precisely what he’s counting on, other than Victor. He’s counting on
Victor.

Victor takes a deep, deep breath. He looks skyward once more. Lips move.

He stands his ground. It is, after all, very much his ground.

“Son,” he says, “Maybe you are right. I think you are not, but just maybe it’s true, and I am alone. But you’re wrong, too.
You
are no way, not ever, alone. Understand? My boy ain’t never gonna be alone.

“You got
me.
No matter how stupid you wanna be. You got me.”

Caesar stands. Waits. He tries to fix his hard-man face, but it’s too obvious he’s fighting off a smile.

“So, thank you,” Victor finally answers, to the wine invitation. “But when you get home … whenever you get home, I’ll be there.”