All the Beautiful Sinners (9 page)

His mother was talking to him again. In her voice. It was 6:43am, the sun just cresting through the window over the kitchen sink, the world out there starred and striped, full of flags.

“You haven’t been up all night, have you?” she was saying, the ash of her cigarette long and impossible.

John13 looked up as if trying to organize her face into one he could recognize, know how to respond to: mother, post-toothbrush, pre-coffee. On holiday.

He smiled a smile he knew she knew, looked back to his receiver, waited for her shadow to fade back into the house, leaving only his, the outline of his headphones against the white utility wall crisp and necessary. He’d been up for thirty-six hours now, dialed-in, on-air. Not bad for a thirteen-year-old. He smiled. John13 wasn’t his real name, of course, just an anagram of his ham call sign: 3O1JN. But
John13
sounded better, fit better. He’d even looked it up in the Bible. It was about Judas—another
J
. The first verse was about Jesus knowing he had to leave this world now, go to his Father. But the end of 27 was his favorite: “Do quickly what you have to do.”

John13 lived and breathed above thirty megahertz, in the two-meter band. The Mosley CM-1 receiver had been a gift his father bought him so he could stay in touch with his friends in Big Springs, or Corpus Christi, or Peterson, whatever base
their
fathers were moving to now. None of them knew enough Morse to get their general class license, though. John13 hardly remembered their names anymore.

His mother made him keep his radio in the utility just off the garage, so she could monitor who he talked to while she cooked. She’d even read his ARRL
Radio
Amateur’s
Handbook
, to see what the fascination was, but then had given it back in defeat. John13 had held his headphones out to her that day, but knew she wouldn’t take them. Because of her hair, set every Monday at the parlor, and dyed once a month, away from the métis black she was ashamed of. It made John13 think of her underwear, whether she was still Indian there, and then he just had to make noises in his head, to not think anymore.

From the stove, she could monitor what he said, but not what he heard. Not who he talked to. And there was always Morse, and the various Pig Latins of Morse.

Back when John13 had just been technician class, dodging Vacation Bible School with the rest of the sixth graders, the thing to do was tune in the tower on base, cross his fingers for a drill. When they came, he could hear his father barking orders. It was a thrill to hear him like that—intense, as if each of their actions was important. It was nothing like when he got home, stepped out of uniform, turned back into a man.

That was when he was a child, John13. Before he put away those childish things.

Now he was general class, could go cross-country on HF.

Some nights he only got as far as Enid. GB4HK. It was the call sign of Jesse James. They talked in dots and dashes in the silence when the rest of the radio operators in Oklahoma were listening to Hurricane Donna, the Florida operators relaying messages up and down the coast, their voices urgent and frantic.

“How many you think?” Jesse James asked, in Morse.

Died
was the missing word. Two dashes, seven dots: -•• •• • -••.

Jesse James was always asking questions like that.

“666,” John13 typed back.

Last night, all the people from base furtive in the dark, trying to get their flags up first, be the most patriotic, Jesse James hadn’t come on until three in the morning. He’d had his repeater on.

“Where were you?” John13 asked.

“Out.”

“With a girl?”

Radio silence: yes. Jesse James was supposed to be nineteen, trolling the junior highs after three-thirty, when they let out, his pocket full of dime store wedding rings, because twelve-year-old girls always want their first time to be special. John13 had been taking notes for three weeks now. Jesse James was teaching him anatomy, and methods of approach, and what books at the library had what pictures. John13 kept those notebooks in Morse code, so his mother couldn’t read them. His father knew it, though—Morse. Sometimes John13 left his notebooks out on the kitchen table, daring his father to read them, to
know
him, but it never happened.

In the kitchen, his mother was explaining how he’d been up all night again. The static at two meters was hard to tease apart from her bacon, sizzling in the pan. John13 waited for his father’s response: “Want me to do something?”

“You got it for him.”

“I know.”

“Well.”

“Okay.”

Usually they never even got that far. John13 checked his leads again, and the legs of the table. Opened and closed his notebook. His mother was still talking.

“Maybe he’ll forget about it when school starts.”

“I shouldn’t have given it to him.”

And then he was there, right after his voice: Father.

“Brushed your teeth yet, Scout?” he asked, a hand dropping to John13’s hair.

Scout.

He could feel his mother staring at his back too, could remember one of the games he used to play: tracking his father on base all day, praying for a drill, please, and, if there was one, then waiting for him to get home, to ask him what he did that day.

“Work,” he would always answer. Just work.

“Nothing special?”

“You know, the usual. Why?”

“No reason. Just thought I heard something.”

It was like his father was hiding it from him, the drills. Like he was having another life that he couldn’t bring home. One that mattered.

His mother knew about the game somehow, too. Would apologize, offer John13 a second, secret coke. To make up for everything that wasn’t there.

In September he was going to meet the rest of the base kids.

It would be better then. His mother said so. It would be better.

John13 shook his head no, he hadn’t brushed his teeth yet, then pressed the leather headphones down tight, so they cupped his ears even harder. So he could
hear
.

Jesse James was gone by now, of course, at the garage he worked at between other jobs. Now it was just FD98I, out of Minneapolis. He was trying to loop around down through Atlanta, find something out about milk. John13 had missed the first of the conversation, didn’t know what “milk’ was supposed to mean. He dialed deeper, listening for that one voice he knew he was going to hear, inarticulate and uncontrolled, but so full of emotion.

Harry
Cary
, his father had said when they’d dialed it in on accident, as if the name itself were magic. Harry Cary. That was four years ago, that first crystal radio kit: a diode, a coil; a brass ball for tuning; some caps. John13 knew nothing about baseball then. Just
Harry
Cary
. The tone of voice his father reserved for it, for him, like it brought him back to him and
his
father, arcing a ball back and forth across some 1940s lawn, one of them too old for the war, one too young, everyone between their two ages dead or dying.

The crystal radio set was supposed to have made up for one of the dogs they’d had to leave behind, rather than pay to have transported.

John13 watched his father and grandfather in the tall, sepia-tone grass, and held his hand up for his father to throw him the ball, then ran away before he didn’t throw it to him again.

But if he could just hear that voice again, find it.

Sometimes John13 would pretend Harry Cary was his grandfather. That somebody in his family had been able to
feel
like that.

He fell through the hash marks, listening for him.

His parents were still talking in the kitchen.

He closed his eyes, held his hand around the shape of a ball for a shameful moment, then closed it.

#

July Fourth was the one night of the year his father would drink. The only military holiday he wouldn’t spend with the other officers. Because they couldn’t see him like this.

John13 had spent the whole day on the air. He was a ghost, no sleep for two days now.

“Who were you talking to?” his father asked.

They were walking out the door, carrying the big cooler between them.

“Nobody,” John13 said.

“That Jesse James again?”

John13 shook his head no, didn’t look up.

Their new dog Bert jumped up against the cooler, pulling John13’s side down. He was Bert number four now, reborn in another pound after his father shot number three in the backyard, to teach it a lesson. This Bert couldn’t come in the house.

“Back by ten?” John13’s mother called out, through the screen door.

“What time’s the show?” his father asked back.

“Dark,” she said. “What, quarter of?”

“Make it eleven,” John13’s father said. “We might be tipping a few back or something . . .”

He made eyes at John13 about it, drinking. John13 felt his face try to smile.

His father’s excuse for making him see the fireworks show was that he needed someone sober to drive the boat. It was supposed to be a thrill, to sit in back, the outboard’s throttle in your hand, the nose lifted up against the water. It wasn’t. Jesse James would know how to get out of it, if he were here. John13 didn’t, so he rode with his father to the lake, their fourteen-foot boat trailing behind.

They got there an hour early.

“Why?” John13 asked.

They didn’t have any rods or reels. The high-schoolers were skiing on the lake, holding the bar with one hand, their bodies bronze in the dying light.

“Why what?” John13’s father asked.

“Why are we here so early?”

“To get a good place, son.”

Son.

They did, out where it was deep. His father had an old pumpjack gauge. They dropped the metal tape down to seventy-five feet, reeled it back in.

“That should do it,” he said.

“
What
?” John13 said.

“You’ll watch your tone, soldier.”

Soldier. Son. Scout.

John13 looked out across the water. There was a white hot line of light between him and the sun. Like it was pointing at him.

“I want to apologize,” his father said, an hour later.

“I want a coke,” John13 said.

His father put the heel of his hand on the cooler, held it down.

He said it again: “I want to apologize.”

John13 looked up to him.

“Okay,” he said.

“You don’t even know what for.”

He had eight beers in him now.

“The Mosley,” John13 said, looking away. “I know.”

“You should be out—” his father said, so unable to form the words that he just held his hand out to the high-schoolers, their music, their
fun
.

“I know,” John13 said. “I will. September.”

His father shook his head no.

“You have the rest of the summer,” his father said. “To do whatever you want. Whatever a boy your age
should
be doing.”

John13 looked at him. There was a finality in his voice that hadn’t been there before. Like he was preparing for something, talking himself into it.

“We should get Mom,” John13 said, urgently, standing enough to rock the boat.

His father smiled, an early bottle rocket glinting off his beer can.

“She doesn’t know about this.”

John13 flinched when the bottle rocket exploded. His father’s face was slack now, a mask, strings tied from his cheeks to his mind, so he could imitate a smile.

John13 went cold all over.

There was nowhere to run out here. Nowhere to go.

His father looked up to the puff of sparks. “You didn’t even ask for any fireworks, James.”

James. His real middle name.

John13 shook his head inside his head:
no
.

“What are you doing?” he said, his voice cracking down the middle, so that he could feel it in the underside of the back of his jaw.

“You’ll thank me next year,” his father said.

“No.”

His father flipped the lid of the cooler back then.

It was the Mosley.

John13 felt himself breathing hard. Like it was from far away.

“
Dad
.”

His father’s eyes were wet, the beer in him rising.

“See,” his father said. “Look at yourself, son. It’s . . . I don’t know. Unholy. It’s just wires and—”

“No.”

John13 was crying now, down the back of his throat.

His father hooked his chin back towards the ramp, said something else about the high-schoolers. Maybe the same thing.

John13 didn’t look. It didn’t matter.

“
No
,” he said again.

Now his father’s voice was cracking, too. But he was laughing at the same time. “I mean, James,
shit
. I expected to have to tell you to quit or—or else go
blind
.” He smiled, cracked a new can open. “I guess this is the sixties, though, right? Maybe you’ll just go deaf.”

Across the lake, all the running lights were fading off for the show. It was like candles in a church, a strong wind blowing through the open doors, sweeping across the pews, up to the altar. The cooler.

“Dad—” John13 finally got out, standing now, reaching.

His father smiled, gave him the beer. It was a ritual; John13 could see his father trying to hold his shoulders, his head, just like his father had stood when
he’d
offered the beer.

“Drink,” he said. “You’ll feel better.”

John13 held the can, looking down at it.

“Please,” he said, or tried to.

“Take one,” his father was saying. “Your mother’ll never know. You’re almost a man now.”

John13 held the yellow can to his face, his lips, and let the beer crash into his mouth. After he swallowed, he pursed his lips and looked over to his father—
is
this
enough
?— then retched over the side.

His father smiled, patted him on the back, guided the can out of his hands.

“I know you hate me now,” he said.

John13 looked up at him through the bangs he was going to have to cut off for school. He shook his head no. His father was crying now, wrapping John13 up in his arms, pulling him close.