Authors: Bill Loehfelm
Fresh Kills (4 page)
He dragged me into the house by the arm and threw me at my mother’s feet in the kitchen. He demanded she do something with me and stalked off upstairs. My mother sat me at the kitchen table and held a bag of ice to my face. I winced at the coldness and swallowed a mouthful of blood, but I didn’t cry. My mother hurriedly explained to me that the beating had been an accident. She was sure my father and I were both sorry. I knew she was afraid of him when he came back to the kitchen. She put the ice in my hands and rushed me outside to clean up the mess I had made.
I walked out onto the porch and hurled the bag of ice into the street. It was then that I saw Purvis across the street. He stood there, watching me with his mouth hanging open, clutching a soccer ball against his stomach. He looked terrified. I knew he had seen everything my father had done. I wanted to explain it to him. I wanted to punch him. I lifted my hand to wave and call him over so I could do one or the other; I wouldn’t know which until he was in front of me. But he just turned and ran back to his house, leaving the ball bouncing in the gutter. I felt a flicker of pride that I’d scared him, and then humiliated that he’d seen me getting punished.
Confused, and shaking with shame and anger, I walked over to the driveway to do my job. It was the first time I saw my own blood on the ground. Just a few little black spots scattered among the dinosaur parts. My mouth and jaw throbbing, I collected the plastic shards of the models and threw them down the curbside drain. All that remained was the blood. I didn’t know how I’d get that off the concrete. I couldn’t go back into the house. I thought about getting rags and bleach from the garage, but I was afraid to go anywhere near my father’s stuff. So I knelt down and rubbed at the stains with the hem of my T-shirt. I was still at it when my mother called me in for dinner.
Later that night, from my room, I heard my father yelling at Julia. The rush of footsteps up the stairs told me Mom had scooped her up and spirited my sister up to her room next to mine. I went over to ask Julia what had happened. Dad had gotten angry with her for dragging a chair up to the fridge. She’d been trying to reach the freezer. To get me more ice. I told her not to worry about it and picked up a Dr. Seuss book off her floor. Julia sat cross-legged on the floor and I stood up on her bed. “I am the Lorax,” I began, holding the book open but reciting from memory, “I speak for the trees.”
I GOT TO STAY HOME
from school the next day, until the swelling went down. At recess the day I went back, Purvis asked what I’d done to make my father so mad. I pushed him so hard he banged his head when he fell. A teacher came running over, and I told her, before she even asked what happened, that it was an accident.
from school the next day, until the swelling went down. At recess the day I went back, Purvis asked what I’d done to make my father so mad. I pushed him so hard he banged his head when he fell. A teacher came running over, and I told her, before she even asked what happened, that it was an accident.
Purvis never asked any more questions, but he always looked at me funny when I missed school, whether it was because of my father or not. He made me nervous. Purvis was well-known at school as an excellent rat. We resented him for it, but silently respected his skill. None of us could ever catch him telling a teacher on us. I feared he’d bring his excellent ratting ways back to the block and tell my folks when I got in trouble in class. I knew I’d never catch him at it. Every now and then, as a precaution, I warned him to keep his mouth shut. In response, he would drag his pinched finger and thumb across his closed lips and nod knowingly at me, like we shared the location of buried treasure. I didn’t know what made me more angry, that he knew secrets about me, or how much he enjoyed ownership of the knowledge.
Purvis and I continued hanging around together as we got older. He was always the one making the effort, waiting for me after school, showing up on the front porch every Saturday morning. I don’t know if I ever really liked him, but it got me out of the house and away from my father. Secretly, I feared betraying Purvis because of what he knew. I towed Julia around the neighborhood with us when I could detach her from my mother’s side.
My father and I had more accidents, though he learned after the first call from school to stay away from my face. I wouldn’t talk to a soul about what was happening. I don’t remember if it ever even occurred to me. I doubt it did. I was no Purvis. I was no rat.
After a while, I at least learned to run. I ran to my room, to the bathroom, anywhere I could put a door between us, and never to my mother. My father had a long reach but wasn’t much for chasing me. In my early teens, things changed. My father went for quality instead of quantity. For a big man, my father was surprisingly quick. Closed fists replaced open-handed smacks. I was growing up, and it was time, I guess he decided, to treat me like a man. I turned dark, became a brooder, steeling myself against him. I trained myself not to flinch when he raised his voice, not to make a sound when the punch landed. I appeared like a spirit for dinner every night, then vanished to my room for the evening.
Using a stolen switchblade, I carved through the covers of my textbooks, into the desk my mother bought me when I started high school. I sliced thin red lines in my shoulders, drawing stares at swim practice. I answered their stares and the coach’s questions with crazy rants about Celtic warriors and tribal markings. I got suspended for telling the guidance counselor to mind his fucking business. I never talked to my parents about anything. I just haunted the house, my high school, my small slices of the island, pissed off at the world.
“This has to be your genes, Susan,” my father said one evening as I cleared the dinner table, eager to escape upstairs to write bad poetry, to read, or just to stew in my own inarticulate venom. “We got us one of them faggoty artist types. He sure as hell didn’t get it from me.”
“Please don’t use that word in reference to our son,” my mother said. To his last day, I’m sure my father thought she was referring to the word “artist.”
I WAS IN THE SHOWER
when my sister arrived from the airport. Julia pounded on the door and yelled at me to hurry up. I yelled back that I was already hurrying. I’d slept through the first inning of the Mets game. Already, they were down by two to the hated Atlanta Braves. I hate the fuckin’ Braves almost as much as I hate my father.
when my sister arrived from the airport. Julia pounded on the door and yelled at me to hurry up. I yelled back that I was already hurrying. I’d slept through the first inning of the Mets game. Already, they were down by two to the hated Atlanta Braves. I hate the fuckin’ Braves almost as much as I hate my father.
I glanced at the TV as I passed it, saw things hadn’t improved, and found my sister sitting at the kitchen table, photographs spread out in front of her. I bent into the fridge for a beer, tossing the cap into the sink, an odd habit I’d developed I don’t know when, and sat in the fake leather nook that wrapped around the kitchen table.
“’Sup, sis.”
Julia swept her hair out of her face and sighed. “I didn’t think you still had a key.”
“I don’t,” I said. “Broke in through the dining room window.”
“Glad to see you’re staying sharp,” she said. She covered her eyes with her hands and rested her elbows on the table. “Can you believe this shit? Someone murdered our father. It’s unbelievable. Who would do this? What for?”
“Forget that for now.” I leaned across the table and touched her elbow. “How’re you doing?”
Julia didn’t answer. Her face was blank, unreadable when she took her hands away. Her eyes fell back on the photos.
“Whatcha got there?” I asked.
Julia moved some of the snapshots around, apparently at random. She was looking at them but seeing something else entirely. What that was, I had no idea.
“Just some stuff, some pictures I had at my place,” she said.
“Of us?”
“Of all of us,” she said, still staring.
She shoved a few photos across the table to me. They were square, four-by-four or something, with fat white borders, curling at the edges. I picked one up, then another, then another. My sister and I standing in front of a vintage car in a museum somewhere. My sister and I running across a beach. My sister and my father on a carousel. My father seated behind her on a toy horse. He’s wearing a loud shirt and wraparound sunglasses. He looks seasick. Julia’s wearing a bright yellow dress and a brighter smile. I looked at my grown-up sister. Her eyes were wet.
“What museum is that?” she asked. “What beach?”
I tossed the photos on the table. “I don’t know.”
“Where is that carousel?” she asked. “Coney Island? Jones Beach? I don’t remember any of these.” She swept her hands over the pictures. “These people, they could be anyone. I don’t remember this family.”
“Jesus, Julia, how old are these pictures? We were little kids. Of course you don’t remember.” I picked up the one with the car. “When was this? ’Eighty-four? I was seven, you were, what? Three? Of course you don’t remember.”
“Do you remember?” She shoved the carousel picture at me. I was ten in that picture. Old enough to remember, if I tried.
I concentrated. We’d been to Coney Island. I thought so anyway, I thought someone told me about it once, but I couldn’t recall anything specific. “I remember that ugly shirt the old man’s wearing.”
“Do you?” she asked. “From that day? Or from looking at these pictures with Mom? Or from her cleaning out the closet? Or do you just think you remember it?”
She pushed another photo at me. Mom and I are holding hands, running toward the camera through a field of short dead grass. We’re both laughing. I’m going on four years old. Autumn, judging by my mother’s sweater and the yellow grass. Just me and my mother. She is thin and young. Red-cheeked. Beautiful.
“Tell me about that one,” Julia said. I couldn’t. I didn’t remember a thing about it. That moment, wherever it was, may as well have never happened.
I pushed up from the table. “Julia, I don’t know. What’s the difference? So we don’t remember. Big deal. I don’t remember my first day of school. I don’t remember the first book I read. I don’t even remember the first day of high school. I barely remember the day I met Molly.” Julia looked up at me, confusion in her face. I threw the picture on the table. “These are just . . . this is just the highlight reel, the wish list. It wasn’t like this and you know it. It wasn’t toy horses and beaches and sunny fields.” I took a big hit of beer. “There’s plenty I do remember, like bruises and broken furniture. I don’t need any pictures to remember what he was like.”
“It wasn’t all misery, either.” She wiped her eyes. “You know why I’m crying?”
“Not for the old man, I hope.” I flicked my cigarette ashes on the kitchen floor.
“Don’t you let him cause you one more single moment of sadness.”
“Are you going to answer my question?”
I blew out a plume of smoke. There were a million reasons for her to be crying. Because whatever misguided hope she’d held of making him a decent father died on that sidewalk. Because all that remained of her family now was me and some grainy, yellowing photos. Because she grew up watching her old man beat her mother and her big brother. Would it have been easier on her, I wondered, if he had hit her, too? I drained more beer from the bottle.
“Fucked if I know,” I said.
“I’m crying for me,” she said. “I don’t miss him. I never realized it until now, but I haven’t missed him for years. I don’t know who he is, this man in this awful shirt. I feel like I never knew him. Isn’t that sad? My father, the man our mother loved for most of her life, was shot dead in the street and all I feel is numb.” She reached out and grabbed my hands, squeezing hard. “What kind of daughter does that make me?”
“You were a better daughter than he ever deserved,” I said. “And you know it. You tried as hard as you could. You wrote, you called. You tried.”
“I did those things because I was supposed to, because that’s what daughters do,” she said. “Because Mom would’ve wanted me to. It wasn’t because I missed him.”
“It’s not your fault he never answered,” I said. “It was more than I ever did.”
“What kind of sister am I, John? Tell me the truth.”
“You’re a fine sister,” I said. “The best a man could hope for. You’re too hard on yourself, and too forgiving of the old man, like always. When will you learn not to care anymore?”
“You care,” she said.
“The hell I do.”
“Sure you do, Junior,” she said. “If I still know you at all, you’re feeling a whole world of things, maybe none of them good, but at least you feel something. I don’t. I can’t. I can’t feel anything. It doesn’t matter to me that Dad is dead, that neither of us will ever see him again.”
“Then why are you even here?” I asked. “I’m only here because of you. Why didn’t you stay in Boston and go on with your life? You should’ve saved us both the trouble.”
“Because Mom would be heartbroken if we didn’t do the right thing.”
“Mom is dead. Besides, she was heartbroken for most of her life. It’s too late for either of us to make it up to her now. What the hell’s the difference?”
“Mom’s not dead in here,” Julia answered, tapping a small fist above her heart.
She started crying again. Quietly. One deep breath and a steady stream of tears. I lifted her from her chair into an embrace.
“It’s just us now, Junior,” she said. “Don’t be a complete bastard. Not to me.” Against my shoulder, I felt her eyelashes beat back tears. “Stay here, in our house, with me. Until this is done.” She looked up at me. “Don’t leave me here alone.”
I sat with her and held her hand until she stopped crying, but we didn’t look at any more pictures. I started to tell her what Waters knew about our father’s death, but she stopped me. Purvis had already told her. I wanted to know more about her conversations with Purvis, but I bit my tongue. He was a touchy subject for her, too. I just got up from the table and went back into the den.
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