Authors: Bill Loehfelm
Fresh Kills (15 page)
“Relax,” I said. “He and I had a few things to clear up.” I drank my beer, watching birds in the yard through the kitchen window. “Nothing to worry about.”
She pointed at the phone. “There are messages for you.”
I was surprised. I didn’t know who had my parents’ number. I downed half my beer and pressed the button on the answering machine, leaning on the doorway as I listened.
“Holy shit, John, it’s Brian from the Cargo,” the first one began. “For fuck’s sake, you’ve worked for me for how long and I gotta read about your father in the paper? You can’t call a brother with news like that?” Shit, I thought. Work. I hadn’t given it a second thought. “You need anything, call or swing by the bar,” Brian went on. “Swing by anyway. We’re all keeping a thought for you. I got your shifts covered.” There was a pause. “Don’t let me find out about the arrangements in the paper, okay? Okay. Stop by.”
I probably wouldn’t. I liked the people I worked with well enough, I just didn’t want to be around any of them right now. It would just be awkward. They knew I hated my father. Why force them to act sorry about a guy they never even knew? But I’d call Brian, thank him for covering my ass. Tell him my sister needed me here.
The next message was from Molly.
“Hey, it’s me. We had a half-day and I was in the Cargo this afternoon for lunch.” A pause. “With Rachel, from school. So Brian was there and he asked me for this number.” She was whispering. I didn’t know why. David had to still be at work. “I hope it’s okay I gave it to him. He was kind of frantic.” There was a long pause. “I can’t believe I remembered it.” I looked at Julia. She was staring into her tea, pretending not to listen. Like she hadn’t heard it all already. “Anyway. I gotta go,” Molly said. “Maybe you could call me at school. Tomorrow, or whatever. I’m free most days from one to one-thirty. You know, if you needed to.” Another pause. “I mean, if you wanted to.”
I turned the machine off and raised a finger in Julia’s direction, not looking at her. “Not a word,” I said. “Not a word from you.”
“What’ve you been doing to that poor woman?” Julia asked. “You’ve got her stammering like she’s eighteen again. It’s adorable.”
“It’s not adorable. It’s guilt. She’s stammering because she’s calling the guy she’s cheating on her boyfriend with.”
Julia blew on her tea. “There’s one more message.”
When did I get so popular? I’d gotten more calls today, at my parents’ number, than I got in a week at my apartment. “Who?” I asked Julia. She just nodded at the phone. Probably Brian again. He could be a little intense. Most likely it was Jimmy McGrath.
I skipped the messages I’d already heard, went straight to the last one. Whoever called waited a long time to start talking. I finished my beer while I waited.
“John,” she said, “it’s Virginia. I saw what happened to your father in the paper. I know how you felt about him, but it’s still a terrible thing. I’m sorry.” Her voice sounded different, older. “I’m sure you don’t want to talk to me about that and there is . . . there is something else I’ve been meaning to call you about. I think, well, there’s something we need to talk about. Something I need to tell you. In person.” She told me her work number. It wasn’t the tattoo parlor. “Call me here, soon. I know you’ve got a lot happening, but time is an issue for me. We can get together. Thanks. I saw you at the Mall today with your sister. It was a cute picture. I mean that.”
The answering machine clicked off. Julia was silent, holding her breath. I grabbed another beer from the fridge.
“Nothing ever changes,” I said. “Nothing ever fucking changes.” The beer went down hard and I felt vaguely sick. “She did that shit to me all the time. We need to talk, but not now, not here. I’ve got something on my mind, but we’ll talk about it later. God, I hated that. I’d be sick to my stomach for hours, waiting.”
“Will you call her?”
“Hell, no,” I said. “I don’t give a shit what she has to say. I don’t owe her a thing.” I paced the kitchen, caught myself and stopped. I leaned back against the counter and studied my beer bottle. “This is so like her. God forbid something comes along that distracts me from missing her. She can’t have it both ways. She can’t walk out of my life and still want to be the most important thing in it.” I looked at Julia. “That’s what she wants, you know.”
“You really think that?” Julia asked. “When’s the last time you slept with her? Maybe she’s pregnant. Maybe something bad has happened to her. Wouldn’t you want to know that? She’d have wanted to know about Dad from you. I’d want Cindy to call me, if something like this happened to her.”
I sat at the table, scratched at the label on the beer bottle. I raised the bottle to take a drink, decided I didn’t really want it, and set the bottle back on the table.
My sister was probably right. Why, after six months, would Virginia start playing head games again? That kind of bullshit was what she’d gotten sick of, or so she said. I’d made her that way, she’d said. Manipulative. Made her do things she hated doing, made her into someone she didn’t like. It was the only way to get me to talk about anything meaningful, she’d said. Did she miss the challenge? It was possible. I must’ve given her something she needed, if she stuck around so long. Had I misread the thing with the flowers entirely? Was all the mystery an invitation to go looking for her? Was she telling me she wanted to be found?
If it was an opening, I didn’t know if I was up for it. One ex-girlfriend back in my head was enough. Still, she’d made me curious. She’d always gotten to me so easily. It was hard not to hate her for it.
“She’ll keep calling, if it’s something important,” Julia said. “Or she won’t, and you’ll never know what it was about. Why not get it over with? Besides, it might make you feel better, having an adult conversation with her.”
“Who said I was feeling bad about anything? And believe me, I’d have no problem never knowing. Hell, I’d probably prefer it.” I took a hit off my beer. It was warm. “But maybe you’re right. I don’t want her to keep calling. Maybe I should just get done with it.” I got up, poured the beer down the sink.
“Just meet her in public,” Julia said. “To avoid any, you know, potential pitfalls. Meet her for lunch. If she doesn’t eat, you know to head for the door.”
I stared at the empty beer bottle, wishing I hadn’t poured it out but not wanting to get another. I opened the cabinet, grabbed a coffee mug, then put it back. The morning coffee was long cold by now. I didn’t really want coffee anyway. I rubbed my eyes, hard, until I saw sparks. I didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted Virginia to not have called, wanted for her to not have left me, wanted to have never met her. I wanted to be home in bed, or even at work, a nice buzz on, making money, talking baseball, watching the door for Molly. I wanted my father not to be dead, to not be going through this. I wanted not to care about any of it. The pain in my chest came back.
“Junior,” I heard Julia say. “You all right?”
My hands were on my head, fists clenched in my hair. “Yeah. I’m fine.” I told my hands to let go, but they wouldn’t.
“Why don’t you go lie down for a while? Somewhere other than the couch. There’s still a bed in your old room.”
“Jimmy hasn’t called again, has he?” I asked.
“No,” Julia said. “Can you blame him?”
My hands finally relaxed. I wiped them down my face. My knuckles ached. I walked to the phone. Julia asked me who I was calling, but I didn’t answer. I plucked Waters’s card off the refrigerator. I got his voice mail.
“Waters, it’s Junior. Deputy Dog said you wanted to talk to me. I’ll be at the Golden Dove around seven. Meet me there, or not.”
“That was productive,” Julia said as I hung up.
“I’m not feeling very goddamn productive right now.”
“I’m taking a nap,” Julia said, rising from the table. “I recommend it.” She walked out of the kitchen and headed up the stairs.
I got another beer and headed out into the backyard. I dragged an old, rusty lawn chair into a spot of sun and settled into it, slouching. I pulled off my shirt and slid on my shades. The beer sat untouched at my side. I lit a cigarette.
There had to be a way to get through these next few days without losing my grip. Outside Joyce’s and the Mall and then in the kitchen, I’d come too close. That wasn’t the way it should be. Hadn’t I, in some way, won? My father was gone. My lifelong battle with him had ended the only way it could, with one of us dead.
I’d always figured that when he died I’d feel some satisfaction, or at least some relief. I thought I’d feel a thousand pounds lighter. I’d grow six inches taller, walk different, breathe different. All this space would open up in the world just from knowing he wasn’t in it anymore. It’d feel like letting go of that breath you hold when you pull open the closet door looking for monsters. Like when you wake from a nightmare and not only realize that it wasn’t true, but you can feel yourself forgetting it with every breath.
Sitting there in the yard, I didn’t feel any of that. All I felt was the same things I’d felt for twenty years when I thought of him, like there was something hard inside me, pushing up against my lungs. Like a fist clutched the muscles in my back. Like I was loading a weapon, waiting for my enemies.
But the enemies had passed me by and left me in the dust of their horses, their gun smoke in my nose and their bullets in my father. They’d left me standing with a jagged rock in my hand and no one to throw it at. With a body to bury and a family to console, a family of one.
Why wasn’t there any relief? Was it that the war had ended a couple of decades before I’d ever thought it would? That someone else had ended it for us? That my war had ended without me? Before I was ready? Ready for what?
For most of my life, even after I’d grown old enough to understand just how dishonest the imagination can be, I’d harbored secret fantasies of deathbed confessions in some indistinct future. I saw my father, laid low and wasted by some vindictive disease, crippled in a hospital bed, his handsome face yellowed and cracked with age, his powerful hands curled from atrophy. I stood at his bedside, younger than I could possibly be with him so old. I’d be taller and more broad-shouldered than I ever was in real life, my shadow falling over him. Him, spending his last breaths recounting his sins, fear settled deep behind watery eyes that pleaded for forgiveness. Me, denying him with my silence. Me, for once, pressing the fear deeper into him. Me, for once, taking the heart out of him. Him, turning away from me, dying. Me, walking away from him, finally alive.
But somehow, by dying the way he did, by surprise, he’d out-maneuvered me. As if I’d gone to that imaginary hospital bed and found it empty, curtains blowing in the open window, a rope of knotted sheets hanging to the ground. At the same time, he still wasn’t gone. By disappearing, he was suddenly everywhere. I felt as if he’d caught me hard by the arm and pulled me close to him. Just so he could smother me with his size, his strength again. So I wouldn’t forget who was faster, stronger. And there was nothing I could do to stop it. Here I was, under his roof again. Trapped here, surrounded by him, and fighting him off. Grinding my teeth until I could escape again. Not winning, not losing, just enduring.
I stood up, stuffed my hands in my back pockets. This was the last time, I told myself. No more. Never again. I leaned back, looked up at the sky, stared into the sun. You hear me, old man? This is the last fucking time. After this week, you get nothing more from me. I will never set foot in your house again. I will never say your name. Ever.
I closed my eyes tight and watched a flock of suns scatter across my eyelids. I waited for him to shout me down, to laugh at me. Nothing came. I wondered if he heard me. And if he’d heard, did he believe? Probably not. I struggled to believe it myself, that I could put myself beyond his reach. I looked down at my feet. I’d told him it was the last time a million times. Told myself that a million more. And I’d never been right.
SEVEN
DONNIE FONTANA STARED AT ME FOR A LONG TIME BEFORE HE stepped out his front door and pulled it closed behind him. Though a good fifteen years older, he’d been the closest thing to a friend my father’d had on the block. They’d worked across the street from each other in Manhattan, my father a contracts manager for a construction firm, Fontana an accountant for an insurance company. Two desk jockeys riding the same train nearly every morning for twenty years, until Fontana retired. As far as I knew, Fontana had never been inside our house, and my father had never been inside his. If their wives had ever met, I never heard about it.
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