Big Jack Is Dead (20 page)

He groaned and rolled over onto his stomach, grinding his erection into the mattress. Even at thirteen, he still sometimes peed in the bed, which confused and mortified him, but this morning his sheets were dry. Closing his eyes, he let waves of pleasure wash over him as he pressed himself down into the bed, humping slowly a few times. He considered slipping into the bathroom to masturbate before breakfast, but his father called out again.

“Boys, come see!” Big Jack cackled and said something inaudible. When only silence returned from their bedrooms, he yelled, “Goddamn it. Get up, you little fuckers!”

Jack rolled out of bed and landed on his bare feet. Brodie bumped the wall in the next bedroom as he jolted awake.

Jack's room was very neat, almost empty. He crossed the floor and opened a drawer, pulling out a pair of sweatpants and tugging them on. Struggling with the drawstring, he hoped the sweats would hide his erection. When he came into the living room, he was still unsteady from sleep.

“Hurry the fuck up,” his father said.

Mincy entered just ahead of Jack, wearing a silky robe that revealed much of her cleavage and only covered the rest of her body down to the mid-thigh. Her ass was several times larger than Jack's head and each of her thick legs was deeply dimpled. She moved up next to Big Jack, looping an arm around his waist and cupping the blade of his hip bone through his jeans, which he'd donned upon leaping from bed. She stood roughly the height of her husband and craned her neck to see out into the yard.

Big Jack pointed out through the front window. “Look at that shit. It worked!”

“Oh my god,” Mincy said.

Big Jack looked at her sharply, surprised by her reaction. Staring at her briefly, his mouth drooped and his eyes showed concern, but the expression changed to pride as he realized that she was impressed.

Jack walked over next to them, slipping between the recliner and an end table, moving up against the window. Mincy's flesh shifted beneath the robe, causing him to shudder with lust.

Out in the yard, the Chinaberry tree was completely encased in ice.

Staring out the window, his father spoke with reverence. “Looks like goddamn Disneyland, don't it?”

Big Jack's handiwork dominated the front yard. The area was so radically changed that Jack's breath caught in his throat. Ice encrusted the Chinaberry tree to its full height, extending out along all its branches. The spray from the water hoses had cascaded down around it for ten feet in all directions, freezing drop upon drop through the night until the tree itself was lost. It resembled a raging fountain, frozen in mid-torrent. All around the yard, the grass was stiff and ghostly.

While there was no snow, the entire block was frosted over, the weather leeching much of the color from the world. Everything was gray or white and the sky overhead was a monochrome void. Just over the houses across the street, the first pale sunlight was evident. Everything was more still than usual.

Brodie trundled up behind them and stood quiet. Eyes wide, he was stunned with excitement.

“That's just so pretty,” Mincy said in disbelief. She turned and tilted her head, pecking Big Jack on the cheek. “We've just never had anything so pretty.”

They all stood at the window. Jack could feel the cold reaching his skin through the glass, but the view was mesmerizing.

“Let's go outside and look at it up close,” Big Jack said. When he snapped his head toward his sons they both jumped from the sudden motion. “Don't fucking touch it,” he said. The vein on his forehead puffed up in an instant and looked like it was going to pop. After holding them in his gaze, he made his way into the kitchen to refill his coffee cup. The others moved through the house to put on warmer clothes.

At the coat rack by the front door, Jack slid into his puffer jacket, zipping it up over his bare chest. His erection had melted away, forgotten at the sight of the ice tree. He ran back to his room for some sneakers and put them on without socks. Jack and his father made it outside first while Mincy was helping Brodie get dressed in his room.

Among the houses on the block, their yard was now utterly unique.

The early rays of the sun hit parts of the tree and the ice gleamed at the far tips of the branches. Dawn cast a faint, skeletal shadow against the side of the house. From the yard, the thing standing before them loomed even larger and more grandiose, with pockets and crevices all through the branches and flowing arms of ice. As the air gusted up, it whistled or moaned through the tree. Jack could barely make out a hummingbird feeder frozen a couple of feet deep within the folds of ice.

“Ain't this somethin'?” Big Jack asked. His eyes bulged in wonder. “It's bigger'n Henry's whole tool shed.”

Jack gazed up at the tree, awed. “It's really great, Dad.”

After a few minutes, Mincy and Brodie joined them on the sidewalk next to the crunchy grass. Brodie nearly slipped once, teetering toward the curb, but Big Jack deftly reached out and righted him by the top of his head.

They all stared at the tree, occasionally changing positions to get a different vantage point, walking carefully along the icy sidewalk.

“What do we do with it?” Brodie asked.

Big Jack looked incredulous, bordering on dismayed. “What the fuck you mean, boy? We look at it. That's all.”

Brodie looked down at the white grass. “Oh.”

“Mmm,” Mincy said. “You know what we should do to celebrate this?”

Big Jack smiled at her. “Yeah, what's that?”

“We should go down to the Pancake Palace for breakfast,” she said. There was a wide grin on her face. Big Jack opened his mouth to say something, but Mincy cut him off, leaving him agape. “Now, baby…you did real good and we should celebrate. I'm proud of you.” She threw her meaty arms around his neck and pressed her body against him.

Before anyone else could speak, she shooed the boys into the house. They got dressed and Big Jack drove them to breakfast.

 
Chapter 18
 

1999

Mincy handled everything before I flew home for the funeral, renting a storage space and coordinating with Big Jack's landlord. The man was extremely upset that one of his tenants had killed himself on the property, and insisted that everything be moved out as soon as the police investigation was complete. There was a new tenant waiting. The bank impounded Big Jack's truck to cover his streak of hot checks, so the storage unit contained all that was left in the world of my father.

It was located in a strip mall next to Doyle's Patty Kitchen, a burger place. Crossing the parking lot, all I could smell was the grease trap behind the buildings.

Inside the storage facility, the lobby was all white…counters, walls, floor and ceiling. Two sets of automatic glass doors kept the air chilled and the entire place hummed, every surface vibrating slightly to the touch. Beyond the lobby, a network of hallways led to identical doors, where a number was inscribed on each door in black lettering. The place reminded me of the stylized hotel in Hamburg, a high-tech mausoleum as envisioned by Bauhaus. The orderliness was somehow at odds with the hamburger place and drive through liquor store nearby.

Taking the key from the man behind the desk, I walked down one of the long white aisles lined with modular storage units. Earlier, I'd changed out of my suit and back to my jeans.

At door #66, I checked the number against the key ring. Everything on all sides was white. The place continued to hum so pervasively that even the air trembled. I turned the key and pulled the door aside. Several fluorescent lights came on automatically, running the length of the space. It was four feet wide and six feet deep. The ceiling was just high enough so that I didn't have to duck.

The ruddy odor of blood hit me as I stepped inside, followed by the stench of soiled laundry. I squinted my eyes, reeling. Several plastic bags sat against the back wall of the room. Everything from the rental house had been stuffed into trash bags. I wondered who collected his things and why they chose trash bags.

There was something stunning about the bags. This was the cumulative results of Dad's life, aside from a landscape of emotional scar tissue. Somewhere there were records of his various worldly transactions; hot checks, bankruptcies, occasional run-ins with the law, a high school transcript and his employment history. But here in this small cell were the only things he left behind. It seemed pathetic that it could all be contained in six or eight trash bags.

I walked over and sank down to the floor, holding my breath against the smell. The tiles of the floor hummed beneath me, the soulless fluorescent lights flickered above. Teasing apart the loose knot, I began going through the first of the black bags. Mostly they contained my father's unwashed clothes. Greasy jeans, scorched welding shirts, socks and underwear…the basis for ninety percent of his wardrobe. There were candy bar wrappers everywhere, scattered throughout the clothing like random bits of newspaper in a bird's nest. Too-sweet chocolate wafted over me as I scooped them up by the handfuls and wadded them tight. I started a waste pile just outside the door.

Sifting through the clothing, touching the last things my father had worn, made me wish I could talk to him, or just sit with him while he drank coffee and smoked. Those were the calmest, sanest moments I could remember.

Alternately, my lip curled in disgust when I grabbed something crusty and stiff. I wanted to scream at him for putting me through this shit, the shock of his self-destruction. As if growing up with him wasn't enough, there was the funeral, and now the touch of his grimy belongings and the smell of his spilled blood.

But he was gone. His death robbed me of the chance to tear into him, leaving me with impossible nostalgia and impossible fury all in the same intake of breath.

Carefully, I rifled each item of clothing. When handling a pair of jeans, no matter how tattered, I turned all the pockets inside out. I tore shirts to pieces, opening flaps and stripping the pockets down. At one point, I found myself looking for hidden compartments sewn into the fabric, shredding a camouflage puffer vest in my hands, methodically taking it apart at the seams. It felt crazy, but I finished ripping it up anyway.  The clothes went into the garbage pile with the food wrappers.

There were a dozen magazines and a few paperbacks, dedicated to porn or hunting. The only hard bound book was new, a manual on raising and training bird dogs. I flipped through all of them, page by page. The naked women made me shudder with discomfort, imaging Dad staring at them in a lusty daze. On the bottom of the stack, there was an envelope stuffed with receipts and small scraps of paper that I read before crumpling and discarding. The garbage pile grew.

Twisting the cap off his thermos, I looked inside, sniffing and reeling at the rank odor of coffee that had spoiled a week ago. As I unscrewed the lid, I fantasized about a rolled note sliding out into my lap…some letter that would provide me with clues about the devils that drove him, or some final sentiment.

After looking over every bit of my father's belongings, my hands were filthy with unnameable grime, part industrial, part animal. My senses were saturated, the odors so dulled that I barely noticed them. Gathering the trash pile, I stuffed it all into a few empty bags and carried them to a dumpster in the corner of the parking lot.

When I returned to the storage room, I took stock of what remained, pushing or tossing everything into the center of the floor…some of my father's tools, a heavily-shielded welding mask, a photo album, and his wallet. Everything else was gone, ready to be broken down by incineration or rot, including the man himself.

The toolbox was mostly full of odd screwdrivers and wrenches. A layer of screws and washers lined the bottom like coins in a sunken chest. The tools were mismatched, coming from four or five different tool sets. I suspected that my father's primary tools, the ones he used at work, had been stolen by someone along the way between the rental house and the storage unit. Likewise, his guns were nowhere to be seen. A pawnshop somewhere in the county probably owned them now. Aside from the tools, the battered toolbox contained two tape measures, an old pencil, a few oily rags, and a roll of pipefitter's tape. I lifted and inspected each item before replacing it.

My father's welding mask looked up at me from the floor, the black glass inscrutable. I ran my fingers over the cool surface of the visor, remembering a moment from twenty-five years earlier. It came to me vividly...I must have been around five, accompanying my mother on a rare trip into the plant where my father worked. In her sister's battered car, Ramona drove us off the highway and up to the chain link checkpoint. Holding a paper cup in one hand, an ancient man came out of the small shack, badly bowlegged. He approached the window to check my mother's identification card, working his lower jaw as he studied it. He spat tobacco juice into the cup and allowed us to pass.

I was fascinated with the high fence, with the curling barbed wire running along the uppermost edge, and the dense skyline of smokestacks, towers and industrial structures beyond the entry gate. At the same time, the place was foreboding, dead and inorganic, an environment hostile to life. The air stank and burned my nose.

We finally located my father's shop and parked. Ramona led me by the hand to where my father was welding. Standing back twenty feet, she chatted and laughed with another man as we waited.

I pointed to Dad and said something, but no one heard me. He was kneeling next to a framework of pipe that looked like the hollow, black bones of some monster. There were massive leather gloves protecting his hands and his welding mask fully encased the top of his head, his face and throat. A billed cap, turned around, was visible on the back of his head, the bill guarding the nape of his neck from sparks and slag. The welding machine was deafening. My father's shadow was cast starkly behind him on the scorched concrete. His back was soaked with sweat.

My mother leaned close to the man looming over her, straining to catch his words. She glanced down at me after a minute and realized that I was staring at the white-hot point of light at the end of Big Jack's welding rod.