Souvenir (10 page)

Brick was back behind the bar, counting out the change in the cash register, not wanting to be in the middle. He avoided both of them, trying to get things ready while there was time before the first of the day shifts got out and business picked up.

“For your future, Chris. So you can make something of yourself. Do something more than make ball bearings at New Departure for the next forty years. No offense, Brick.” Clay glanced at Brick, who had done his forty with a two- year break when his Guard unit got called up for Korea.

“Forty years?” Chris said, stopping and holding the broom handle up with one hand. “I’m not going to do the same thing for forty years, what’re you crazy?”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” Clay said, advancing and raising his hand. Chris flinched and Clay tried to calm down, not make a fool of himself, or hurt Chris before he got things under control. He felt his hand hanging in the air and brought it down in an arc, grabbing the broom away from him, thankful there was something to latch onto. They both stood looking at each other, Chris surprised, his eyes wide open, ready to step back but not wanting to, not wanting to give ground. Clay, strangling the broom handle with one hand, trying to stop his forward movement, wishing his son was ten, or eight maybe, not fifteen and talking like such a punk, asking for trouble.

“I’ll sweep up. You clean out the grease trap.”

Chris swiveled on his heel, giving his father a clear berth as he walked to the kitchen. He stopped at the bar. “Sorry, Brick, I didn’t mean you.”

“Don’t worry, kid, I know what you meant. No offense taken, either of you.” Brick closed the register and kept his head down, setting up beer glasses, giving them a final rub with a clean cloth to get the water marks off.

Two customers came in, locals from the neighborhood. Clay watched as they ordered beers. Brick served them, money changed hands, and two little slips of paper went into a cigar box under the counter. Couple of five dollar bets, big spenders. Nice and low key, like Clay liked it. Nobody made a fuss about it or made a big show of putting down their numbers. It went on when off-duty cops were in, but it was done so casually that it was part of the scenery, like the picture of the old Silver City Brewery on South Colony Street, hung up over the bar. The place was long shut down, but it was famous around town since Legs Diamond owned it during Prohibition, and had kept producing bootleg beer along with the soda pop that was supposedly keeping the brewery in business. This was a lot like Prohibition. Nobody wanted to embarrass their buddies on the force by breaking the law right out in the open, but everybody knew what was going on. What people didn’t know was how much of it was going on. Even with the share he gave Brick and Cheryl out of his cut, Clay ended up with a fistful of cash every week, plus, it brought customers into the bar. The number slips he collected on his rounds filling cigarette machines were all his. He didn’t have to divvy up that cut with anyone.

Clay looked away from the customers, leaving them to their small beers and big dreams of hitting the numbers as he swept the floor, keeping his eyes down, piling up dirt from corners, under the booths, along the bar. He swept everything up he could, then turning the dustpan at a right angle to the thin line of dust left on the floor, swept it up again. He repeated the process one more time. Any job worth doing was worth doing right, that’s what he’d learned growing up. That was when jobs were hard to come by, and you were damn glad to get any work. Now there were plenty of jobs, but not enough good hard workers to fill them. How was that kid ever going to make it? All he wanted was a car when he turned sixteen, something with big fins and lots of chrome. Chris couldn’t see beyond the next hood ornament, while Clay worried what would happen once he got what he wanted. What would it be then? Drag races, drinking, an arrest, maybe an accident, maybe worse.

The door opened and Clay went to put the broom away. Business, about to pick up, demanded his attention. Chris’ job was to get the place cleaned up for the after work crowd, then do whatever chores were needed. It was only for two hours, but Clay had talked Addy into letting Chris have the job. He’d get to spend time with his son, Chris would earn his spending money, and they’d know he wasn’t out getting in trouble with his pal Tony. A year older than Chris, Tony already had been in juvenile detention for a fistfight last summer that sparked a near riot at the A&W drive in. That convinced Addy, and she agreed, as long as Clay promised to keep Chris clear of any of his arrangements with Tri-State Brands.

Clay leaned the broom against the wall, chuckling to himself. Yeah, I’m worried about Chris turning into a juvenile delinquent, but maybe I should be worried about my own problems with the law. He picked up Chris’ jacket, thrown in a wet heap on a folding chair. He hung it on the back of the chair, shaking his head at the carelessness of his son. Seeing a bulge in the pocket, Clay reached in, pulling out a half-empty pack of Winstons.

“Damn!” he said, picking the folding chair up and slamming it on the floor. He stared at the chair for a minute, seething, and then walked into the kitchen, gripping the red and white pack in his hand.

Chris had an apron on, and was scraping out the open grease trap, filling a metal can with the fatty yellow and brown sludge. It smelled like bad meat and burnt rancid butter, which wasn’t far off. The smell rose up into Clay’s nostrils and he felt like gagging. He took a deep breath but it was worse, more of the same awful odor crawling into his mouth and lungs. Clay was thrown off stride for a second, surprised at Chris already hard at work on the trap. He half expected to find him goofing off.

Chris’ face wore a look of disgust as he grimaced at the sight of another hunk of aged grease dumped into the can. He looked at his father, not noticing the pack of cigarettes he held.

“Yeah?”

Clay fought to keep his stomach in control. The smell overpowered him, tried to open him up and spill him out. He felt his eyes water and his skin go clammy. He wanted to turn and run, but he had come in here for a reason. He had something to say. He was confused. What was happening? The cigarettes, he was going to tell Chris—what? That he was doing a good job, doing what he was told? Or was he?

“Dad?” Caution edged into Chris’ voice. “What’s wrong?”

“I…I told you…”

The putrid smell rose up again, like a wave rolling over him. He didn’t understand what was happening, why everything was so off kilter, why he couldn’t make sense of anything.

“Dad?”

Then he knew. Knew what the smell was. Knew the difference between this smell, here and now in this kitchen, with his son kneeling on the floor, and that other smell, the one switching on the memory like pulling a light cord, filling the room with blinding white brightness.

Bright light like the white phosphorus shells that rained down over them in that little village, the one they took right after Hartman got killed. WP. Willie Peter. The Germans must have wanted to burn them out, or maybe that’s all they had left. Incendiary shells exploding into white-hot flame. Clay saw them bursting all around, in the street, on walls, houses, vehicles, setting everything on fire. Not the bright yellow and cherry red of regular fire, but a furious stark white incandescence. He had crawled under a tank out in the main square. One shell fell through the roof of a small thatched stone house opposite the tank. It exploded inside the house, and the screams told him a full squad had taken refuge inside. The screams didn’t last long, but the fire did, burning everything away except the stone. Clay stayed under the tank all night, and in the morning when he dared to look inside the stone house, nothing was left but the stone floor and walls. Inside were burned bones, blackened metal and a thick, gooey layer of grease. The stone house had been well built, and acted like a cauldron as the phosphorus burned itself out, igniting flesh and fat, the commonest of common graves, eight men melted into a single substance. He had gagged then, the stench worse than anything he had ever smelled, ever imagined, ever wanted to think about. He felt it coming back, but determined to stay here, to deliver the message to his son, not to be drawn back into ancient history. Clenching his teeth, to keep the odor from reaching farther down his throat, he brought up his hand.

“I told you, you’re too young to smoke.”

“You sell ’em, why do you care who smokes ’em?”

Chris turned away, working the compacted grease loose inside the trap. Clay watched him, angry at the comment and unable to argue with the logic. Chris scraped a corner of the trap and lifted out the oldest, bottom-most layer of grease, soft and gray, dripping thickly off the large metal spatula. He ladled it into the can, tapping the spatula on the edge to get it all off. The liquid squish of the grease falling into the bucket released a cloying, dense odor that seeped into your skin, eyes, mouth and nostrils. Chris drew up his tee shirt, holding the thin cotton fabric to the ridge of his nose.

The Graves Registration unit had used shovels, and it had made that same sound as they dumped it into a big steel drum. Clay turned, walked out of the room, out the back entrance, and fell to his knees, as he had that day in the village, and vomited. The odor of the grease ran through his body, forcing everything out, doubling him up on the gravel next to the garbage cans. He felt the acidic bile at the back of his throat, the smell of the grease twisting through him, leaving him gasping for air as he sat up and cleaned his lips with his handkerchief.

There wasn’t a day that went by that Clay didn’t think about the war. There was always some fragment of memory, a thought that brought him back, once in a while it was even something funny. But this hadn’t happened in years. Right after the war, it was every night, in his dreams. He’d scared Addy half to death, digging a foxhole in the bed with his hands, screaming as the nightmare shells burst all around him. Some nights, when he could feel it coming, feel the memories pressing against the inside of his skull, ready to burst out, he’d sleep in the big chair in the living room, feet up on the hassock, and he’d feel safe. Alone. Unable to frighten anyone, unable to do sleeping harm.

When Chris came along, the nightmares seemed to fade away. He had a family. A tavern to run. Money to earn. Ashtrays to clean. Cigarette machines to fill. Numbers slips to pack in a bag. There was an order to everything, and it calmed him. If the ashtrays got dirty, it meant he’d be cleaning them tomorrow. When people bought cigarettes, he’d be there tomorrow with a new supply. Sometimes he felt giddy with the joy of an endless string of known tomorrows.

The pack of Winstons was still in his hand. He got up, spat, and lifted the lid of the garbage can to throw away the soiled handkerchief and the cigarettes. As he was about to drop them, he noticed the tax stamp. Virginia. One of his own.

Addy was there at five, like always. Pulled over alongside the bright yellow paint on the curb, the no parking zone by the corner perfect for her. A spot always waiting when she came to pick up Chris, and one that required her to stay in the car, motor running. A tentative, apologetic honk on the horn to announce herself, and she’d sit patiently, waiting for her son.

“Mom’s here,” Chris announced as he came out of the back room, throwing on his jacket. Clay was coming up from the basement with a case of Narragansett Ale. Chris didn’t meet his eyes. He could’ve been talking to Brick, one of the customers, or the walls. Clay set the case down on the floor and followed Chris outside. They hadn’t spoken a word since Clay had fled the kitchen. Chris had finished cleaning up, left the grill sparkling, emptied the trash, smiled at the customers he knew. This left Clay without resentment, but wide open to the shame and embarrassment he felt as he ran away from his own kid, felled by a random twenty year old memory. He couldn’t leave it like that, but he had no idea what to do, no concept of what he could possibly say to explain himself. He followed his son out the door, suffering with the small contentment of sharing the same space, breathing the same air, even if the connection went no farther than that.

Chris opened the car door and got in. Clay leaned on the open door, keeping the connection open, three of them now together, the front seat of the Nash Rambler and the open door encompassing them, clarifying their relationship, defining Chris. Their boy, who they fed, clothed, employed, transported. Addy and Clay smiled across the gulf of their son, fidgeting in the front seat, his hand on the door handle.

“My God,” said Addy, “what is that smell?” Her nose wrinkled as Chris leaned forward to turn on the radio and tune into his favorite station. The Beatles sang Twist and Shout through the static and Chris lowered the volume, hoping that would keep his mother from turning it off.

“Me. I had to clean out the grease trap,” Chris said. His eyes stayed on the radio.

“Well, those clothes will have to go in the wash, young man, and you scrub yourself when we get home. You smell like a greasy spoon.”

“What’s for dinner?” Clay asked, not caring about food, but wanting to talk about something else, anything else.

“Meat loaf. Clay, you look pale as a ghost. Are you all right?”

Clay rubbed his face with his hand, trying to bring some life back into it. He was surprised it still showed, not happy that his face betrayed him so readily. Chris glanced up at him, then back to the radio. C'mon c'mon, c'mon, baby, now, come on and work it on out—

“Yeah, fine. Tired and hungry is all. Chris did a great job today.”

“Well, good,” Addy said. She moved her eyes from Clay to Chris, then back again, trying to signal Clay to tell Chris, not her. Clay understood what she meant, but what the hell was he supposed to do, repeat himself?