Big Jack Is Dead (21 page)

She grabbed me with a jolt, covering my eyes. “No, no,” she said. There was panic in her voice, her nails dug into my arm. “Don't look at Daddy, baby…it'll burn out your eyes and you'll have sand in them tonight.”

Very clearly, I remembered lying in bed that night, screaming and crying as my mother held a wet washcloth over my burning eyes.

I dropped the mask with a
clunk
against the floor of the storage room. It folded when it landed, pivoting on the heavy headband. I ran my hands over my face and through my hair, muttering sounds that never quite formed curse words.

When I looked back to the pile, I opened the photo album. The plastic pages were yellow with age. The wax behind the photos had dried and some of them tilted or slipped out as I flipped through it. I held up a picture of my father and me at the hunting lease, posing with our deer. Ricky had taken it while drunk and the whole scene was canted to one side. Until now, I'd forgotten the moment of the photo altogether.

One of my hands rested on the neck of the doe I'd killed. Even removed so far in time, I squinted my eyes and pressed my lips together as I looked at the animal in the photo. My young face was devoid of emotion; the blank expression and the pose gave me the appearance of a mannequin from a hunting store display.

Next to me, my father angled the head of his buck so that it was twisted upright and staring forward. The eyes were flat and black, looking into the camera. Dad held the spiked antlers in each hand and there was an expression of wild enthusiasm on his face in contrast to mine. A chain of some sort hung from his neck, fallen from his t-shirt, and his mouth was open in a grin that evoked the memory of his chuckle. I stared at his face for a long minute before continuing through the album, looking at every photo before setting it aside.

Lastly, I picked up the Ziploc bag containing his wallet. I'd saved it until the end because of the blood. The job of clearing out the storage space was complete, except for this small object.

Reaching into the bag, I took the leather wallet between a thumb and forefinger. It was thick, stuffed with random scraps of paper, identification passes for parts of the plant and membership cards for the organizations to which he'd belonged. It had been in the back pocket of his jeans during the final seconds of his life. Blood had run down from the wound in his head, over the wallet, soaking it. Slowly, I opened the grisly thing, folding it out flat on the floor. Piece by piece, I went through all the ATM slips, scribbled phone numbers, laminated cards and other notes, deciphering all the meaningless words through the meaningful brown stains.

Down in the deepest fold, I found washed-out pictures of Brodie, Ramona, Mincy and me. Holding the curled paper in my hands, I looked over each photo and studied the faces. In most cases, blank expressions looked back at me across the years. Only in one of the pictures was anyone smiling with what appeared to be a genuine expression. It depicted Brodie standing next to a tire swing in the front yard. Wearing nothing but his underwear, he was about five. His hair was still light, as it had been when he was younger, and stood out in cowlicks. I ran my thumb gently over the smooth surface, touching the center of his chest. But his adult face came into my mind, his crazy, pin-point eyes and his slack expression, reminding me of the gulf between us. I shuffled the photos.
Where did my brother go?
 

I set the photos down and took everything else out of the wallet. Like a Tarot reader, I spread it out, staring at the pieces, trying to make sense of it all. The copper smell was stronger on the air now. Looking at the arrangement before me, I tried to accept that it had no meaning, no message. Collecting it all from the floor, I threw away the most trivial or bloodstained articles before putting everything else back together in the wallet, including the small photographs.

There was no note.

I closed doors to the storage unit and paid the bill up front. In the parking lot, I dropped my father's remaining possessions into the trunk of the Lexus and took one last look around, resenting this place for playing a role in my life. Then I drove to the house where my father had killed himself.

Chapter 19
 

1980

Several days after Big Jack created the ice tree, all but the last of the ice was gone, melted. The tree was ruined. Most of the branches had been snapped by the weight of the ice, the limbs parallel with the ground suffering the worst. Some of the branches reaching upward were still intact and the tree resembled a giant weed. The lawn was a mess, a muddy disaster of tracks and ruts. People from the neighborhood had stopped at all hours of the day to coo over the tree. A miniature mountain range of ice ringed the trunk, standing a foot in height. From the front porch, it looked like a dying ghost, reaching upward in its last gasp, struck down by three days of winter sun.

Jack walked along the sidewalk, returning from Jenny's house. Audible a block away, the garage at his house emitted a metallic screaming sound. When he reached his driveway, he stopped just behind his father's black pickup truck and looked out over the yard in disgust. He held his ears against the noise from the garage. The wreckage of the yard was profound. After he'd taken it in, he approached the garage to see what his father was doing, coming around and settling against the grill of the truck.

Big Jack was busy in his shop, hunched over the oily workbench. His brow was knitted as he studied the object in the vise before him. Under his guidance, a grinder moved in a blur and threw golden sparks up onto the wall behind the bench. The sound of metal being eaten away at high speed was shrill and deafening.

Holding Jack's flashlight, Brodie perched on the workbench. He crouched on one knee among his father's tools and pointed the light down onto the angled metal his father was grinding. Brodie gathered the long, beaded chain, attached to the end of the flashlight, cupping it in his palm to keep it out of the way. A set of pewter deer antlers hung from the chain, resting against the flashlight. He hovered over the vise with a stocking cap balanced on his head. His face very close to the grinder, he wore a protective plastic mask that his father had stolen from the plant.

Moving only his eyes, Big Jack glanced up as Jack approached, scowling when he saw that the boy was covering his ears. Jack lowered his hands.

The light bobbled and Big Jack snapped his attention back to Brodie, bellowing. “You want me to knock you through that wall? Huh?” He cut his eyes back and forth between his youngest son and the grinder. “Hold the goddamn light and don't make me tell you again.”

Mincy stood at the kitchen door, bracing it open with her hip. She held a pie pan, clutching it with checkered oven mitts. Steam rose up from the crust. Regarding the scene in the garage with dissatisfaction, she looked to all three of them in turn, irritated that no one had taken significant notice of the pie.

The sound of the grinder dominated everything.

She turned her attention to the younger boy, yelling to be heard over the grinder. “Brodie! Baby, fix your hat.”

He called back at her, “What?”

“Fix. Your hat.” She screamed this time, cutting through the noise. “It's about to fall off...and it just looks silly hanging down like that.”

The last words were drowned out, but the eight year old reached up with one hand to adjust the stocking cap. It stood up from his head ridiculously high and came to a wavy point. He tugged it down into place and the flashlight beam went off target as he did.

Without taking his eyes from the metal he was grinding, Big Jack roared at his son, “Goddammit, boy!”

Startled, Brodie dropped the flashlight into the grinder. The thing exploded, sending the chain, pewter antlers and pieces of the flashlight across the garage and into Jack's face like a cluster of cannon shot.

In an instant, he was thrown back against the truck. He registered three pale faces turn toward him in shock against the backdrop of the dim garage, howling apparitions. Thrashing like a shot animal, his mind went blank and his body flew into convulsions. Brilliant light flared from his left eye and he made no sound for a timeless second. He could not hear and he could not breathe. Only when he began to wail did he realize that he was lying on the concrete under the front of the truck.

They rushed toward him, around him, shrieking like birds fighting over a scrap.

Jack screamed and screamed, but the burning in his face only got worse.

Chapter 20
 

1999

At the curb, I killed the car and studied the block. Running along the river, it was shorter than most of the streets in Lowfield, oddly truncated. Eight houses sat in a line on the same side of the road. Some of them had sidewalks and some didn't, creating a gap-tooth grin along the front lawns. There were no houses on the opposite side of the street, only a levee, covered in wind-whipped salt grass and pieces of trash. The road terminated at the end of the block in a field of goat weed.

Next to a bus stop, I leaned against the car for a while, unprepared to go into Dad's house. A seagull floated by on an updraft, rising from behind the levee and eying me as it rode the air overhead. I remembered older kids at school bragging about throwing Alka-Seltzer to them during lunch, watching them swoop in to snatch the flat pills, only to fall to the concrete and bleed out minutes later.

I placed my fingertips against my eyelids, holding them closed, pushing against my eyes until I couldn't stand the pressure. “Please,” I said to no one.

There was a bench at the bus stop, sitting on a slab. Someone had hacked “H.B.W.” into the wood with a knife or screwdriver and in marker someone had written, “blows his brother” underneath. Off to one side, more graffiti offered a translation, “His Black Wings?” To which someone countered, “Hash, Bitches and Whiskey.” Behind the bus stop, a rusted barrel overflowed with garbage and the area reeked. Hunting for a clean spot, I sat down and slumped against the bench.

Masts and antennas were visible beyond the levee, where commercial boats were docked at a decaying marina. When I was growing up, one of my friends had lived a few blocks away and we explored the area often, avoiding drunken shrimpers as they staggered out of the marina bar. Their boats smelled of diesel smoke and dead fish. We often walked to the end of the rotting pier, once a train bridge, throwing bottles as far as we could across the river. The dark waters of the salty river were sheened with prismatic oil and floated with bits of Styrofoam. At the edge of the water, great chunks of rock and concrete sat just below the surface, broken bottles and torn aluminum cans nestled in their mossy crevices like bits of rot in bad teeth.  

When I was fifteen, the city attempted to turn the area into some sort of boardwalk. The idea was to hold an event once a month, a fried seafood party with bingo and live music. Along the river, they set up picnic tables and aluminum pavilions. Hoping to draw in people from all over the county, the City Council invited local businesses to set up booths. I went once, riding my bike down to the docks and walking around alone.

It was terrifying…fishermen and day laborers staggering around and yelling.
Hey, kid…you ever had any pussy?
The third time they held the event someone got stabbed to death and that was it. The whole thing was suspended, never revived.

Sitting on the bench, I wondered what my mother was doing. After the funeral had she just gone home to watch television? What had she felt, standing beside the grave? Remorse? Some final sense of freedom? For a moment I felt the desire to call her, to ask, but the notion fled as soon as I remembered what it was like to sit at a table with her, to carry on a conversation.
I visualized her spotted face, but it became Jenny's...older, with blackened teeth and patches of missing hair. She sat in her trailer, a simpering zombie.
Would this have happened if I'd stayed in Lowfield? Would I have hollowed her out just like my father did to my mother?

Leaning back, I looked up into the sky. My mouth tasted like poison. Turning my head, I spat and the saliva tumbled end over end through the air like a boneless acrobat. The wind blew a plastic bag down the street until it got caught under the car.

I made my way up the front walk of the house.

In the neighbor's yard, a rusted bicycle lay on its side, the chain loose and spilled out like entrails. A water-logged football sat next to the bike, the foam torn full of holes like craters. Several bags of trash had been piled around the front steps and one of the bags had been clawed open by a stray dog trying to get at a disposable diaper. I wondered with perverse amusement about what kind of relations my father might have had with the people living around him. A feud? An affair? Either seemed just as likely.

As I approached Dad's front door, a woman came out onto the porch of the neighboring house, calling out across the yard.

“He ain't there.” She was in her late twenties, with black hair and pale skin. Bruises ran along her arms and legs. “He killed hisself.” She tucked her bathrobe around her body, which might have been appealing a few years ago, but was now lumpy. Just as she spoke, a child peeked out from behind her, hanging onto the pillar of her thick left leg. He wore a diaper, nothing else. Insect bites covered his skin like a constellation of red stars. There was food matted in his baby-soft curls and his mouth was smeared with something that looked like jelly. Probably three years old, he looked across the yard at me with wide eyes.

“He killed hisself,” she said again. She was almost smiling, thriving on the words, the most drama-rich part of her week.
I heard her shrieking, falling back as I rushed her, as I forced her backward into her home and choked her to death on the floor while her doomed child watched.

“Sorry to hear that,” I said. “I'm just here to look at the house. I didn't know the man who lived here.”

“You movin' in?” She lifted a cigarette to her lips and took a drag. Her other arm lay folded across her waist, holding the robe closed.