The Language of Men (10 page)

"Perfect," the man said, accepting his order with a toothless grin.

He gave the male customers funny nicknames:
Rocko, Charlie, Butch, Guy, Chief, Boss.
The female customers he called
Toots, Hun,
and sometimes,
Miss.
But as the day went on, the nicknames dwindled, until it was three o'clock, a half-hour before quittin' time, and my father called everyone the same way: "Next!"

Earlier that week in school, an overzealous guest speaker had come to our class to teach us about fingerprints. I believed the man to be a private investigator or secret agent, but most likely he was a criminal justice major from one of the community colleges. He distributed ink pads and pieces of paper which had a box for each one of our prints. Fighting the urge to smear each other's faces or leave a permanent high-five on a friend's back, we listened to the man identify the loops and whorls and arches, explaining that each one of us has a unique print unlike any other person in the entire world. He told us about desperate criminals slicing off their fingertips in hopes of eluding the law.

"But," he said, holding up an inky finger, "they always grow back."

"How long does it take?" one kid asked. We all nodded, anticipating an expert's response.

The man paused. "Not as long as you'd think."

I wanted to ask more questions, but, as usual, I kept quiet, my face burning for answers. How many times can you slice your fingers before you alter your prints? What if this guy was wrong? What if my father's whorls have become loops, arches into whorls, or if now there's nothing at all, no unique markings, the skin as smooth and common as sausage casing?

We punched out. My father slung the black garbage bag over his shoulder, and I followed him out to the parking lot. On the ride home, I dozed off my head knocking against the passenger window. We pulled into the driveway. My father grabbed the raccoon and walked into the house, through the kitchen, into the basement, through the laundry room, beyond his rack of Army jackets with our last name sewn above the pockets. I followed him around his workbench strewn with scalpels, hypodermic needles, and glass eyeballs. As he opened a long, casket-like freezer, I watched him drop the raccoon beside a frozen zoo of squirrels, big-mouthed bass, rabbits, and a hawk.

Mornings sounded painful. Stretching, groaning, shuffling, showering, shot of caffeine, sigh after sigh after sigh—all in preparation for leaving the place you loved, the place you felt comfortable, and venturing out into a dreadful world. I watched television shows where the mothers and fathers sat around a marble island of pancakes and eggs and bacon and fresh-squeezed orange juice, chatting about their plans for the day. None of them swore beneath their breath or paced the house searching for a missing shoe. While I knew these shows were fake, there were parts that felt very real: a science teacher who acted just like mine or a kid who said the same things I did. I second-guessed myself: Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps all of it could be true.

A lot was required to break my parents' routine. When it was temporarily broken for a long weekend or a trip to visit relatives, the first day was spent leaving the routine, the last day was devoted to reentering the routine, and much of the time in between was spent in limbo, neither one sure what to do or how to act. So my mother scrubbed Simple Green on her sister's stove while everyone slept and my father took long walks to 7-Eleven, returning with a 12 oz. coffee cup clutched in his hand.

Our home was an integral component of my parents' routine. They seemed unable to operate at full capacity without first loading themselves inside our home, as if the floors of our house were circuit boards, their morning rituals a computer's processes. While they seemed to need their routines in order to function, I never noticed them deriving any pleasure from these essential habits. Perhaps in my mind I lump together their preparation for work with the work itself, envisioning my mother pacing and sighing through the dermatologist's office or my father breathing Winston after Winston as his fingers work a ham across the slicer. But it's hard not to. I cannot remember my parents ever saying anything positive about their jobs. Work sucks. Work is life.

I once asked my father what he wanted to be when he was younger. He looked at me.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I mean, was there anything you wanted to do?"

He paused. Chewed the inside of his cheek a few times, then raised his eyebrows.

"Not that I can think of."

I believed his animals were alive. The way he handled a freshly-killed raccoon or squirrel was different from how he moved a hunk of ham or roast beef across the deli slicer at Waldbaum's. When he'd work the slicer, the meat was sterile, no hint of life. My father would move his right arm back and forth in a quick, isolated motion, while his left hand supported his body weight against the slicer.

In his workshop in the basement, his technique for handling dead meat was different. He'd flick on his magnifying lamp and hunch over the animal. With a scalpel pressed between his fingertips, he'd gently slice through the fur, then the membrane, careful not to puncture the animal's veins or organs because if he did, the hidden interior fluids, the blood and the bile, would spill out and ruin the exterior.

When I asked my father how he became a taxidermist, he paused for a moment. He squinted, like he does when he's stumped by a piece of music or movie trivia. "Well, I was hoping to take the boiler repair class, but it was all filled up." My father's days off were sacred, so for him to spend his free time doing something and not get paid, there had to be a good reason, but I didn't know what that was.

A rabbit perched on our mantel; a pair of mallards hung from the wood paneling in the living room, a squirrel held an acorn on the shelf above my bed. The squirrel often rode shotgun as I raced my plastic go-cart down the driveway. What could be better than a wild animal sitting patiently beside me, gazing up as if to ask: "Where to next, brotha?" There's a picture of me in sunglasses on our back deck, sitting in my go-cart, wheels angled, raising the squirrel above my head like a trophy.

"It was pretty creepy," my older brother, Don, said. "I'd catch you in the backyard trying to feed Dad's squirrel a piece of your peanut butter and jelly sandwich."

I didn't think it was creepy. Why would it be? My room was already filled with fuzzy dinosaurs and turtles dressed as ninjas. Is a squirrel holding an acorn any creepier than me inserting a cassette tape into the back of a bear wearing suspenders and singing Teddy Ruxpin songs? And if I wanted Teddy's friend—a worm—to sing along, I simply plugged an AV cable into Teddy's spine and the worm wiggled to life.

I LAY in the grass, my sneakers against the red barn door, onion weeds and dandelions tickling my neck. Above, the black branches of the dead oak stretched like thin fingers, cracking the flawless blue sky. The cars on Route 25
whooshed
by the house and followed the s-curve past the animals and the silo. My mother and my father were somewhere, laughing. A silhouette of a man stood over me, blocking out the sun, the oak, even the sounds.

"What are you doing?" the silhouette asked.

"Nothing."

"Well, time to do something."

Grandpa picked me up and carried me to the animals. Not rough, but not gentle, he held me like a sack of chicken feed. I bounced in his arms as he climbed the slight hill, his bad breath whistling through his teeth. He set me down and opened the gate to the chicken coop. I liked the goats and the pigs, the cows and the sheep, the slow harmless animals. The chickens frightened me. There were so many of them and they'd get excited when he came in and they'd squawk and run and try to fly. He scooped out chicken feed using an old Clorox bottle sliced in half. The loyal, hungry chickens followed him, pecking the pellets out of the mud and crying for more.

"Ant, come here!"

I walked out into the mud. He gave me the scoop. I held it upside down and he grabbed my hand with both of his and corrected me. The Grandpa I now see in my mind has no face. All I see is tan, swollen biceps, veins bulging like blue hoses, and callused hands. I used to watch his hands: the black tractor grease buried beneath his remaining fingernails and in the creases of his knuckles and palms; stubby fingers wrapped around a ratchet or a hammer; stumpy thumb holding a tape measure in place. My father had the same hands.

When we drove out to Grandpa's farm, my father bent his wrist over the wheel of his Chevy, the rough tips of his fingers dancing to the oldies station like wooden wind chimes. His thumb was busted and split, never healed. It got tired of repairing itself and chose to stay ripped and raw, awaiting the next blow from a hammer. Their hands were like history books, scars of Braille. Some people hope to inherit money or land; I wanted hands like my father's.

I dug the scoop into the bucket and before I could throw it, the feed dribbled into a pile around my feet. The chickens swarmed me, running around my legs, lifting off the ground and flapping beside my ears, pecking, squawking, screaming. Grandpa walked over slowly and scolded the chickens. The chickens reluctantly broke up like a pack of bullies, and I swore they were giving me dirty looks. The chickens liked my grandfather. They followed him everywhere, even when he didn't have any food. He treated them well and, in return, they offered him their eggs. I didn't understand why they didn't like me.

My brother told me about the time my grandfather took him out to the chicken coop. He sat Don on the fence, told him to stay there. Grandpa chased all the chickens into a small wire pen. There were so many chickens and the pen was so small that they climbed all over each other, flapping their wings and pecking up through the holes in the wire. He let one out, choked it silent. He pressed its body against the fence where my brother sat and bent its neck around the wooden post. He slid the axe out of his back pocket, held the chicken's body with his boot.

"Hold his head. Like this."

Don held the chicken's head, pulling the neck tight around the wooden post. The axe cut through the chicken and thumped into the wood. The chicken's body took off into the mud, running in circles, then zigzagging before it slumped on its side. Don held the head in his finger tips, blood dripping on the dirt. The beak was shut and its right eye blinked once, drowsily, and then remained open. Grandpa took the head and tossed it over the fence, into the tall weeds.

Don told me what chicken eggs really were. They weren't gifts to Grandpa, thanking him for his food and care. Grandpa was stealing their babies and eating them. I had watched my grandfather pick the shells off hardboiled eggs, peel the whites from the yellow yoke ("the baby," Don said), and put the pieces in his mouth. There used to be a little dog that hung around the farm, but somebody drove by one day and stole him. I wondered if really Grandpa had stolen the dog and eaten him. I wondered if I had any other brothers and sisters that Grandpa had stolen before I could remember them. Had he cooked them in a pot and then eaten them on the back porch, too? Maybe afterwards, he had smoked his pipe and rocked slowly in his chair beside a bucket of tiny bones.

"Everybody was afraid of him," my mother told me, "but not you. You could always get to him."

Soon after our trip to the farm, my cousin Matthew died in a car crash. He was nineteen. It didn't make any sense. How could a soldier die here? There was no war, no tanks rolling down our street or helicopters hovering over our pool. And soldiers only die from bullets, not on dark highways leading back to their bases.

On the morning of Matthew's funeral, my father bleached his white Reeboks. That was a habit of his. First he removed the laces and let them soak in a bowl of hot water. Then he moved them into a bowl of bleach. After that, he placed the sneakers in the sink, their tongues pulled back. He placed his hand inside the sneaker, wearing it like a glove. Then he dipped the orange scrub brush first into the water, then into the bleach and began rubbing it along the sides of the sneaker in quick scratchy strokes. He stood barefoot at the sink in jeans and a white tank top, a Winston hanging limply between his lips. From my seat on the counter, I saw the black soapy water run off his sneakers and swirl in the drain. The bleach and smoke stung my nose as he exhaled and dipped the brush in the water again. When he was finished scrubbing, he wiped them with a rag and placed them on a paper towel next to the sink. The laces soaking, he stared out at the backyard.

He only bought white sneakers. When they became too worn for daily use, he bought a new pair and put the old ones under the couch, wearing them only on weekends for yard work or painting. He'd come home from work on Saturday, switch sneakers and head out into the backyard to rake leaves. Eventually, the new sneakers became the old ones, and the old ones got thrown out.

"You don't have to come if you don't want to," he said, resting his Winston on the edge of the sink.

I nodded, relieved. I didn't want to see Matt's body. I thought about the movie
Stand by Me
and wondered why all those stupid kids would risk so much just to stare at a dead person. I had been sitting on the back deck when my father came home from work and told me. The expression on his face, the tone of his voice, made me feel like I had done something wrong. I had started to cry. "That's not how it was when Dad told me," Don said, years later. "I grew up with Matt. I was a lot closer to him than you were. Dad just walked up to me when I came home from school and said, 'Hey, listen, Matt died.' Like he was telling me dinner would be late."

I wonder if this is really how my father told him. Maybe my father thought that Don was old enough to handle a blunt sentence better than I could. Maybe by then Matt's death was starting to affect my father more than it had before and he wasn't paying much attention to his tone and just wanted to spit out the news. Maybe after he told my brother, he saw something change in Don's eyes, like a tiny fluorescent light flickering, and my father couldn't think of anything else to say.