Vengeance
Authors: Eric Prochaska
© Eric Prochaska 2016
Eric Prochaska has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2016.
For Eddie
Drifting like an angel above your hometown, even for the first time, even in pitch blackness, you recognize it like a childhood classmate. Familiar, but now vacant of frivolous tales of youth. Not raising a glass to your return or striding forward to embrace you. All pleasantries forsaken for a somber mien.
The gravity of the matter. That he would reach out to you. Something that outweighed his pride and stubbornness.
“
Hello
?”
you
say
.
Nothing
should
be
foreboding
about
answering
a
phone
call
on
that
afternoon
.
Your
voice
plumbs
silence
made
more
ominous
by
the
knowledge
someone
is
listening
without
speaking
.
“
Ethan
…?”
he
finally
replies
.
Floating over those lights. Still in shock from the news. As if the world were spinning faster than you could keep up with. Your mind barely in the present, not able to foresee the people you were soon to face. The crimes you were about to commit. The lives you would gamble with, truth versus ruin. Sucked back into a life you had renounced. Caught in a whirlpool. It had taken eighteen years to achieve escape velocity. All undone by a phone call.
“
Yes
?”
you
say
,
straining
to
decipher
the
familiar
quality
of
the
mysterious
caller
.
Your
lungs
are
paralyzed
upon
recognizing
the
threadbare
voice
of
a
ghost
you
buried
five
years
gone
.
Your
heart
dives
as
you
realize
what
dire
event
could
necessitate
him
to
contact
you
.
Low enough to distinguish the lights of First Avenue, the artery that dissects quadrants, so obviously crooked from this vantage. You recognize the snaking darkness through the center of things. The river. Stitches across the serpentine blackout, the brigade of bridges. Backlit plumes rising from the industrial plants spaced along the river. Smaller streets, shopping centers, and neighborhoods emerge. Forested tracts of meandering drives. Between them and the river, a square mile of exposed grid, straight-shot streets and perpendicular intersections. The radius of a single flickering lamp, made more visible by the contrast of burnt out lights on either side. The old neighborhood.
A summons to return to the place you resist calling home. You heed because the wraith has evoked the one soul you care about in that damned place.
“
Ethan
…”
he
says
.
Too
feeble
and
gaunt
to
be
the
severe
personage
you
remember
.
“
What
is
it
?”
you
prompt
,
withholding
the
title
of
“
dad
.”
“
It’s
Aiden
,”
he
says
.
He stumbles over phrasing, this man who never shied from a harsh word, as he tells you that your brother was found dead, face down in the middle of a road. In the coldest stretch of winter. In the darkest hour of night.
The tires smear the tarmac, bounce, and light again before the plane brakes ferociously. The rough physics rattle you from your haze. Home. Cedar Rapids. Not the most likely host for the events you’re about to stumble into.
All the crime happens in Los Angeles. New York. Just watch the movies. No one in Omaha owes a bookie money. No one in Des Moines is trucking in drugs from Columbia via Texas. Indianapolis doesn’t have an underground of human trafficking. Pittsburgh has never seen a gang. There is no such thing as the mob. But if there is, it surely hasn’t franchised beyond New Jersey.
You wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking.
Don’t assume you’re safe in the Heartland. That thousand mile slow motion scroll of intermittent constellations you’ve glanced down upon. Each anonymous city a tight grouping of bullet holes through which the light from the center of the Earth can leak. Interstate trickles of luminous blood. In that anonymous dark, being followed into a blind alley is still terrifying. Chicago or Topeka, the wrong side of town is still the wrong side of town.
“
Ethan
…
he’s
gone
.”
Cold poured through the seam of the jet way. As if breaking a quarantine seal I’d placed over every memory when I escaped. The terminal was mostly deserted. A few people slumped in rows of molded plastic seats. A janitor vacuuming in the far corner.
As I crossed the parking lot to retrieve my rental car, I cinched my arms close to my body to preserve warmth. I had grown up unmindful to the presence of an airport in my hometown. Air travel was for middle-class families. Now, as a visitor, it seemed natural to fly in. Just as natural as it was that no one met me at the terminal. I passed the village of hotels and kept toward town. I had no destination, but I was too wound up to lock myself in a room. Soon, the exit signs were emblazoned with familiar names.
I traversed the main surface streets in long stretches, turning at the major intersections, as if securing a perimeter. The midnight streetlights swept the windshield rhythmically, a glowing mantra. The radio murmured a vaguely nostalgic station, a soundtrack to Nocturne Americana. Out on the avenues, I recognized most of the business names, but somehow the buildings seemed slightly misshapen or sized differently than I recalled. Here and there I thought a business had been further up the block or on a different block altogether.
It was my first semester in graduate school. Spring break. I had planned on using the time to catch up on reading and assignments. But I didn’t bother to bring any of it along. I wasn’t going to be able to concentrate on that sort of thing. My brother was dead. The only family I cared to claim that had been left to me in this world. My immigrant mother was long gone, and my grandmother had died while I was in high school. Her husband had died long before I was born, leaving my father as my sole blood relative. He and I had been vehemently dispassionate toward each other for years before I left Cedar Rapids.
I delved into the heart of a neighborhood and pulled over in front of a house we had lived in for a year when I was in junior high. The rigid stalks of uncut weeds protruded through the trace of snow huddled against the foundation. I got out, leaving the car idling, and left the door wide open. The dome light failed to warm the night air. I stepped up to the sidewalk, the persistent tone that reminded me to close the door musing ever more faintly. The house’s dimensions seemed to have contracted since I had lived there. The front walk was more uneven and cracked. The top of the chain link fence that wrapped the back yard was just as rippled where kids had hopped it. I could almost feel the dog-ear of wire poke my palm, my feet pound as I dropped on the other side.
But so few of my years had been spent in that house. Was I looking for a particular memory? Was it nostalgie de la boue that drew me to the place? No. I realized the house wasn’t my destination. It was a landmark on a path. I knew who I needed to visit to feel I had come home.
*
The graveyard gate was open. The moon had been full a few nights before, leaving a waning gibbous to light my way as I tread between headstones. Beyond the last rise of the cemetery, a smokestack from the processing plant below exhaled its ghastly corn starch mist over the town. Red marker lights blinked an eerie pulse. The industrial cacophony crashed like breakers at the base of the hill and dissipated into a hazy muttering mostly lost to the breeze. I navigated by a memory seven years old but found her grave without trouble. The ground did not warm as I sat before her headstone. The last time I had been there, the day before I left town, I had made so many promises. I had promised to be good, to not become what my father had become. I think that was always her greatest fear. I would make something of myself, I said. I told her I missed her. It was inconsolable how I missed her.
I caught her up on my life since I had been gone. A measure of how far I had come. And I spoke of Aiden. My brother. I wished I could have believed in some Elysian lore that she had welcomed him into the afterlife and they were beaming with joy at being reunited. Maybe it was my own unease at Aiden’s sudden death that interfered with that vision. But I couldn’t help but feel Aiden was adrift somewhere between my world and hers. Rudderless, unaware. I implored her to reach for him, to gather him to her, but I wasn’t sure he was close enough to her shore.
Headlights interrupted my prayers. The engine’s panting snaked through the cemetery. I wiped my eyes and took a few deep breaths as it approached. He turned the flashers on, but not the siren. Guess he didn’t want to wake the dead. The spotlight bleached my form so I stood up, hung my thumbs in my pockets, and nodded a greeting. I didn’t appreciate the disturbance, but I knew I had to play along.
The cop stepped out of his cruiser, staying behind his driver’s side fender. I couldn’t make out details through the glare, but his stance suggested he might have one hand on the grip of his holstered pistol.
“Good evening,” he said. His voice revealed how young he was.
“Hey,” I said back. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and I didn’t want to appear tense or suspicious. I had no desire to be shot in a graveyard by some anxious cop.
“Do you have some I.D. on you, sir?” he asked, still behind the car, still maybe grasping his pistol.
“In my back pocket,” I said. I reached for my wallet in exaggerated slow motion.
“Sir!” he barked. “I’m going to have to ask you to turn around slowly so I can make sure you don’t have any weapons back there.”
Of course. After all, if you ask someone for an I.D. and they reach for it, you should expect they are reaching for a weapon. I assumed the posture of a mugging victim with elbows out and hands up and turned around gently.
“All right. Sir? Go ahead and get your I.D.,” he said. I could hear the pea gravel crunching and knew he was rounding the front of his car, walking cautiously toward me. I pulled out my wallet and plucked my license from within. I put my arms back up, holding my wallet in one hand and the card between two fingers of the other.
Shadows of headstones outside the disk of spotlight wavered and dashed across the ground from the light of his flashlight. I could feel the heat of it on my cheek as he slipped the license out of my hand with a rehearsed “Thank you.” About ten seconds passed with only the sound of the idling cruiser and the slight quivering that comes from trying to stand perfectly still on a cold night. I heard his feet shift and maybe a sigh as he said, “Ah, man. Hey, you can turn around now.”
I turned, accepted my license from his outstretched hand, and left my arms down after tucking my wallet away. He clicked off his flashlight.
“You’re Aiden’s brother? Back for the funeral?”
“Yeah,” I said, squinting to recognize in his face how he knew this.
“Hang on. Let me kill that light.” He returned to his car and extinguished the spot and flashers. On his way back, he stopped in the glare of the headlights and jerked his head back once to signal for me to join him. “I was in the same class as your brother. In middle school. Johnson.”
He meant Lyndon B. Johnson Middle School. He remembered us well enough to know we didn’t last too long at any one school. “What’s your name?” I asked. I couldn’t make out the lettering on his badge in the harsh light.
“George Flynn,” he said. I let it settle. It sounded familiar. But maybe it was such a generic name I just thought I’d heard it before.
“Aiden and I wrestled at the same weight,” he said, seeing I couldn’t place him.
“I kind of remember.”
“Well, it was a long time ago. What? Over ten, eleven years, right?”
“Maybe twelve,” I calculated.
We maintained eye contact when we answered questions, looked away when searching for something else to say. We both must have felt it was odd to be standing there, talking to a stranger in that context. The death, the cemetery at night. Yet it seemed perfectly appropriate at the moment.