I closed my eyes, repeated that I’d be fine.
He couldn’t help me today, he said—he had a doctor’s appointment—but he could give me a hand the next day. I told him the doctor who’d stitched me up hadn’t said anything about restricting myself.
“Probably figured you had the common sense to know that already,” he said.
“Look, Ray,” I told him, “I’ll feel better if I get something accomplished over there, okay? I been trying to get to work on that house all week. I told these people back when we signed the contract that the job’d be done by the end of the summer, and here it is Halloween.”
“Don’t remind me,” he said. “Goddamned foolish holiday.” Did I want to know what he was doing for Halloween? Turning the lights out and going to bed, that’s what. He’d be goddamned if he was going to keep getting up and opening the door all night, have the furnace kick on over and over. He’d stopped answering the door two, three years ago—the year some of the parents started holding out bags. Let ’em get their free handouts somewheres else. Whole country was going to hell in a handbasket as far as he was concerned. You could tell when even the parents went trick-or-treating.
In the middle of his rant, I remembered that the next day was his birthday. November the first. All Saints’ Day. . . . What a bummer that had been when we were kids: after the high of Halloween, the double downer of having to go to church—a holy day of obligation—and having to honor the one guy I hated most in the world.
Get over it, I told myself. Ancient history. “You got a birthday coming up, don’t you?” I said.
Did he? Guess he did, now that I mentioned it. Hadn’t even given it a thought.
“How old you going to be, anyway?” I asked.
“Thirty-nine,” he said. “Same as Jack Benny.”
“No, really. Sixty-seven, right?” No answer. “You celebrating? Taking some broad out dancing or something?” He scoffed at the idea. Ma was the one who’d always been big on birthdays—Thomas, too, before he got sick. After Ma died, Dessa had taken over all that crap—baking a cake, getting a present, a card. After Dessa left, none of us bothered.
“How much work you got left over at that house of horror, anyway?” Ray asked. “Because if you want, I can give you a hand mornings. Help you knock it off.”
I told him thanks anyway. He had enough to do. He should be slowing down a little, instead of taking on other people’s work.
“If I didn’t think I could swing it, I wouldn’t offer,” he snapped. “I’m still ticking like a Timex and don’t you forget it.” He turned the radio on. Turned it off again. If they went through with those layoffs down at the Boat, he said, he might be looking for work. Might be able to give me the whole goddamned day. He rolled down the window and spat again. His eye twitched. What drugstore did I want to get my prescription filled at?
I told him I didn’t care. Price-Aid, I guessed.
“Price-Aid? They’ll charge you an arm and a leg over there. You ought to go to Colburn’s. Bob Colburn’ll take good care of you.”
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s go to Colburn’s.” I closed my eyes. Took a couple of deep breaths. If he wanted to go to Colburn’s, what had he asked me for?
“Listen,” he said. “You know what your problem is? You take on too much.”
I told him I was all right.
Yeah? Well, if I was so “all right,” how come I’d cracked up my truck in the middle of the night? That didn’t sound too “all right” to him.
“Who said I cracked it up in the middle of the night?” I said.
“Your buddy did. Motor Mouth back there at the dealership. He took me aside just now. Says he’s worried about you, too. You’re trying to do too much—run a business all by yourself, run interference for him down there at the bughouse. And it’s not like you’re getting any help from that little chippy you’re living with, either. Not that I can see.”
I kept my mouth shut. What Joy and I had going was none of his business. And as for Thomas, who the fuck else was going to run interference for him down at Hatch? Was he suddenly volunteering for the job?
“I know you been bearing the brunt of it,” he said. “All that business with him down there. Carrying your own load and his load. My load, too, I guess.”
I waited, listened.
“Of course, it was different when your mother was alive. She used to look after him. . . . I don’t know. It wasn’t the same—raising him and raising you. Dead ringers for each other, and you two were like night and day. . . . Used to piss me off sometimes, if you want to know the truth: the way she always doted on him. . . . I don’t know. Him and me, we just never hit it off.”
No kidding, Ray. I was there, remember? When I opened my eyes, I saw his knuckles gripping the steering wheel.
“But Jesus Christ, what did he have to go and cut off his hand for? I don’t care how crazy he is. That’s what’s eating me up. . . . You two were lucky. You never had to go to war like I did. It changes you: being in a war. You come home, you don’t want to talk about it, but . . . it just changes you. That’s all. The things you see, the things you do, and then you come back into civilian life and . . . When I was stationed over in Italy? I seen a guy get blown apart right in front of me. Cut in half, right at the waist. . . . So every time I think of him going over there to the house and taking my knife off the wall. Taking his hand off voluntarily. . . . At the library, of all places. I know he’s crazy. I know he can’t help it. But Jesus . . .”
It disarmed me—Ray’s verbalizing his struggle over what Thomas had done. His out-of-the-blue acknowledgment that there was something vulnerable underneath that armored exterior of his. I looked out the window because I couldn’t look at him.
“Just let me give you a hand with that house, all right?” he said. “Because that’s what I can handle right now. . . . That’s what I can contribute.”
I cleared my throat. “Yeah, well, thanks,” I said. “We’ll see.”
We were both quiet for a while—a mile or more. “Hell of a thing, though, ain’t it?” Ray finally said. “Down at the Boat? You give ’em your whole goddamned life down at that shipyard and then they turn around and boot you out the door. Try and fuck with your pension on top of it.”
I told him they weren’t about to lay off an old goat like him—that the whole place would probably fall apart without him.
“Don’t kid yourself, sonny boy,” he said. “Us old goats is exactly who they’re sending to the slaughterhouse this time. Corporate bastards. They all got a chunk of ice where their heart should be.”
I shifted in my seat. “So what are you going to the doctor’s for?” I said.
“What? . . . Nothing much.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Little numbness in my feet, that’s all. Who are you—Dr. Kildare?”
Rounding the next curve, Ray saw her before I did—a woman jogger crossing the road. He swerved, slammed on the brakes. Tylox or not, the pain knifed up my neck.
Ray cranked down his window. “Good way to get yourself killed, there, Suzie Q!” he yelled. And “Suzie Q” raised her arm high in the air. Gave him the middle-finger salute.
Hey! I thought suddenly. It’s Nedra Frank!
But after we’d passed, I managed to crane my sore neck back and see that it wasn’t Nedra after all. Not even that close—face-wise or body-wise.
“Jesus Christ, look at that!” Ray said. “You see that? That’s something you never used to see a woman do—sticking her finger up like that. There’s that Gloria Steinberg for you. That’s her big contribution to society.”
I was too whipped to get into it with him. . . . And besides, I thought, massaging my neck, even if it had been Nedra jogging along just then—even if she did surface someday, if I was walking along and fell over the bitch—it didn’t mean that she had kept my grandfather’s manuscript. She’d been totally whacked-out that night—irrational and pissed as hell. She’d probably skidded home in the middle of th
at snowstorm, gotten into her place, and trashed the damn thing. Destroyed Domenico’s history, page by page. . . .
Ray poked me awake. We were in the parking lot at Colburn’s Pharmacy. Did I want him to get me one of those neck collar things while I was in there?
“What? . . . Uh, no.”
In the sideview mirror, I saw my brother’s face—the way it used to look when we’d wake him up from his nap. Ma and me. Thomas always slept longer than I did—woke up looking lost. Looking like he’d been traveling to some other dimension. . . . I suddenly remembered that dream I’d had the night before, just before I’d crashed the truck: Ma’s mother, floating under the ice, her eyes begging me for something. . . .
Colburn’s front window was decorated for Halloween. . . . Was tomorrow All Souls’ Day or All Saints’ Day? I could never remember which was which. Couldn’t remember the last time I’d even stepped inside a church, for that matter. . . . I don’t “do” religion, I heard myself tell Doc Patel. That’s the other Birdsey brother. . . . I was seriously thinking of quitting that whole thing with Patel, anyway: all that dredging up of past history. What purpose did it serve? What could you do about the past? Nothing, that’s what. . . . I saw Thomas and me as kids on Halloween. Every year, two hobos with pillowcases—our everyday coats and clothes instead of costumes, our faces smudged with coal dust. Ray tolerated Halloween back then, but he was goddamned if he was going to throw away good money on plastic Dracula capes, rubber monster hands. And we could stop whining about it, too. Home by eight-thirty sharp. Church tomorrow.
Halloween, and then All Saints’ Day? All Souls’ Day? Ray’s birthday . . .
“Ray’s birthday!” Thomas would nag, weeks ahead of time.
“I know, I know already. Shut up about it, will you?”
How pathetic was this? Forty years old and I could still list the birthday presents my brother had bought for Ray. Coping saw; handheld spotlight; that deluxe shoeshine kit, complete with wooden-handled brushes, polishing cloths, and tins of polish. Thomas would have Ray’s presents wrapped a week in advance—have those homemade “Best Dad in the World” cards colored in and hidden away in his bottom bureau drawer.
Not me. Each November the first, I’d rush around before church, grab a couple of the candy bars I’d hauled in the night before, wrap them up in Sunday funnies from the stack of old newspapers out back. Scrawl “happy birthday” on a piece of loose-leaf paper and Scotch-tape it to the package. Shove it at him. “Here.”
The funny thing—the sad thing, really—was that Ray never seemed to register the difference in our efforts. “Yeah, okay, thanks,” he’d tell us both—embarrassed, I think, to be on the receiving end of gifts. Then he, Ma, Thomas, and I would rush out to the car and ride off to early Mass. They bookended us in the pew, Ma on one end, Ray on the other, Thomas and me in the middle. We sat in the same positions every single time. . . . Grudgingly, guiltily, that morning, I knelt, stood, genuflected—sneaking Halloween candy from my coat pocket up into my mouth. Ate candy in church, right under my stepfather’s nose. Ray Birdsey, the religious convert, the heathen-turned-super-Catholic: each sugary bite I took mocked Ray and God, both. Risked their rage . . .
But it was Thomas, not me, who got caught. The year we were fifth graders—our last for trick-or-treating, by Ray’s decree. An hour before Mass that morning, my brother had given Ray a transistor radio. He’d come up with the idea the previous summer and walked Mrs. Pusateri’s cocker spaniel for months to save up. Ray’s eyes were closed, his face hidden in his steepled hands; Ma was clutching her rosary, praying into the cupped hand that shielded her cleft lip. I slipped my brother a roll of Necco wafers. I didn’t like Necco wafers; my generosity had cost me nothing. Sin with me, Thomas, my hand said. I placed the candy against his palm and squeezed. Be tempted. Eat candy in church like me.
It was the crunch that Ray heard. He looked up, over. That was always the trouble with Thomas: he had never mastered stealth—had never learned the art of hating Ray deeply enough to defy him successfully. Ray reached past me and confiscated the Necco wafers—held up the evidence for my mother to see. He began to stare at Thomas—would not look away. Held Thomas in his gaze from the homily all the way to the consecration. And by the time Father Frigault had turned bread into flesh, wine into the blood of Christ, my brother’s whole body trembled in dread of the penance he would pay after Mass.
Ray stood for Communion and waited at the end of the pew. My mother and I rose and walked past him. Thomas rose, too, then sat again—pushed back down by Ray’s relentless gaze.
“The body of Christ,” Father Frigault said, suspending a Communion wafer before my face as I knelt at the rail.
“Amen,” I answered, and stuck out my chocolaty tongue to receive the brittle, tasteless disk, in size and shape not unlike a Necco wafer. With my tongue, I stuck the Eucharist to the roof of my mouth, soaked it in my sweet saliva, swallowed it. I returned to the pew and knelt beside my brother, who was whimpering now as well as trembling.
Thomas’s atonement began in the parking lot, as he reached for the back door handle of our Mercury station wagon. Ray’s hand shot out; he clutched my brother’s wrist and began walloping him with his free hand. “Dominick,” Ma said, “get in the car.”
We got in, Ma in the front seat, me in the back. We waited rigidly, silently, while outside Thomas bawled apologies, wriggling like a fish on a hook. St. Anthony’s parishioners passed by, some of them staring, others looking away from something that was none of their business. The Birdseys: that poor, mousy woman with the funny lip, those illegitimate twins of hers, and the ex-Navy man who’d been good enough to stand in as their father. He had his hands full, that poor guy. Worked down at the Boat and helped keep up the church grounds on weekends. It couldn’t be easy with that wife of his, afraid of her own shadow, and those two young hellions. Whatever that one who was getting the dickens had done to make his father mad, it must have been pretty bad.
Ray was silent during the ride from St. Anthony’s to Hollyhock Avenue. We all were, except for Thomas, who shuddered involuntarily.
Ray finished punishing my brother in the privacy of our home. “You’re dirt is what you are! You’re garbage! Your name is mud!” Thomas wailed and squatted on the kitchen floor in the duck-and-cover position we’d learned at school. “A goddamned embarrassment to your mother and me! A greedy little pig!” For the grand finale, Ray reached for his brand-new transistor radio, wound back like a pitcher, and hurled it as hard as he could against the wall. Plastic cracked, batteries flew across the room. “There you go, piggy boy! That’s for you! How do you like them apples?”
That evening, Ma lit Ray’s birthday cake with a shaky hand. In a wobbly voice, she led us in reluctant rounds of “Happy Birthday” and “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” When Ray refused to blow out his candles, she leaned over and blew them out for him. Having married Ray Birdsey for better or worse, she was determined to believe in his jolly good fellowship, no matter what the evidence said. No matter what the feeling in our stomachs. “A small piece, please,” Thomas requested. “No ice cream, please.” Ray stood and left the room, his cake and ice cream untouched.
Thomas never squealed on me—never told Ray that it was I, not he, who had smuggled the candy into Mass. And I never confessed—never picked up the heavy end of what had really happened that morning. That was the irony of it, the bitter pill I’ve swallowed my whole life since: that I was the guilty one, the one who deserved Ray’s wrath. But it was always Thomas he kept in his rifle sight. It was always Thomas who Ray went after.
“Here,” I told my brother that night of our stepfather’s happy birthday tirade. “I don’t even want this crap. Take it.” And I’d flung Milky Ways, Skybars, and Butterfingers onto his bed.
Thomas shook his head. “I don’t want it, either.”
“Why not?”
He burst into tears. “Because I’m dirt. Because I’m nothing but a greedy little pig.”
&nbs
p; Ray would lie in wait for him. Nail him every chance he got. But still, every Father’s Day, every birthday and Christmas: “To the best dad in the whole wide world!”
Statute of limitations, I thought, sitting slumped in Ray’s Galaxy at Colburn’s Pharmacy, half zoned-out on Tylox. All that’s ancient history. Why dig up the past? Why go sit in that office every week and tell her your big tale of woe?
When we got to the Roods’ house, Ray told me he’d swing by and pick me up as soon as he got out of the doctor’s. “Maybe I’ll stop by the medical supply place first and get you one of those collars,” he said. “Just in case you want it later. Get you a leash while I’m at it, too. And a flea collar.”
I got out of the car. He warned me not to overdo it. He could help me tomorrow, he reminded me. If the Roods couldn’t wait one more day, then fuck ’em.
I’d been there half an hour or more—had managed to pull most of the downstairs shutters—when Ruth Rood came to the window. She waved. I waved back.
It was awkward working with one hand; it was a royal pain in the ass. Ray was right: my coming here to work today of all days had been a stupid idea. Blood was beginning to seep through the bandage—not much, just a little. I’d probably just busted a few of the stitches. My hand hurt. And how was I going to get these damn shutters back to my place, anyway? They weren’t going to fit in Ray’s Galaxy and I’d forgotten to ask him about borrowing Eddie’s truck. Maybe Leo could arrange a loaner at the dealership. Or maybe Labanara would let me borrow his truck. I couldn’t take any more painkiller until after that hearing at four o’clock. Once the stuff I’d already taken wore off, my hand and my neck were really going to let me know they were there.
Ruth Rood came out onto the porch in her bathrobe. She just stood there, her hands wringing a dish towel the same way Ma used to do when she was nervous. Ruth looked like she wanted to say something.
“How’s it going?” I said. I kept working, trying to loosen a rusted hinge screw.
“I didn’t hear you drive up,” she said.