Father's Day (16 page)

“Not everyone.”

“God damn it, Lou. Can’t you let the dead rest in peace? What are you trying to prove? I asked you to find Carol Ann. That’s all!”

“It’s not that simple.”

He pulled a crushed cigarette pack out of his pocket. The last cigarette came out crumpled and bent. He moistened two fingers and tried to straighten it out. He ripped off a match and struck it firmly against the striker. The sulfur fizzled and flickered but the night breeze blew it out before the flame caught. He tried it again, cupping his hands and holding the match and cigarette together in one motion. A small spark ignited the tip and he drew on it frantically.

Sarah’s arms were crossed over her chest against the cold. Her gaze went past him to the street, and to the sky beyond it, the face of the moon peering at them from behind a coven of roiling clouds.

“Why do you hate me, Lou?”

“I don’t hate you. I’m disappointed, that’s all. Maybe in myself as much as you.”

“You know I tried to call you, not long after Sam died. I saw you at the funeral and thought that we might have had something once, figured we might be able to give it another try.”

“We never had anything, Sarah.”

“We could have. Even before Sam and I were married. There was something that always passed between us. You can’t say you didn’t feel it.”

“That’s a long time ago.”

“Not so long. After Sam died and you got divorced, I thought that maybe you’d call, try to get ahold of me. I waited. Believe it or not, I did. I looked you up but you weren’t in the book. I went so far as to call the department, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. I felt like we would be together, eventually.
Carol Ann and Maggie could have been friends, maybe even sisters.”

She stepped closer to him, touched the back of his head, felt the short, freshly cut hair, the stubble on his cheek. Carol Ann Blackwell’s handwritten note was burning a hole in his pocket. He wanted to pull it out and throw it at her. She rested her head on his shoulder. It felt heavy, as if her whole body needed to rest, as if she was waiting for Lou to support her, take her into his arms, and make her forget.

“You know I only married Sam because I couldn’t have you. It’s not that I didn’t love him. I did. Please believe that I did. But I wanted you and I thought you wanted me, but you suddenly turned cold. You wouldn’t even look at me.”

“I was a lot different back then.”

“I don’t think so.”

He felt her lips brush against his ear, felt her hand slide up inside the front of his jacket. He felt a warmth rise in his face and backed away.

“Go back inside, Sarah. It’s too cold out here.”

He pounded down the steps, almost running toward his car. He listened to the sound of his shoes on the pavement. There was no other sound. He wasn’t very far from the neighborhood in South Philly where he was born, where his mother lived with her parents after she became pregnant. There wasn’t much about that time he remembered and not much his mother was willing to talk about. He’d never known his biological father and now it didn’t matter. There was only Louis Klein, the name and the man.

The man he’d come to know as his father had been a man in uniform, a man who lived by a code, hidden from him behind a mask of authority. And that man’s son learned what it meant to be a man through his example, though neither realized it at the time. Lou had buried all the burning questions inside himself.
He’d learned on his own that some questions didn’t require an answer. He’d learned to have faith in his own actions and wondered when he’d lost that. He still sympathized with the weak, worshipped heroes, built his body, and he’d struck out plenty of times.

Lou had often asked himself why he did it, why he stayed a cop, why he didn’t go out and get a real job, take up a trade or sell cars. He thought about opening a restaurant once. Being a cop kept him out all night, kept him sleep-deprived, and separate from the world of dreams. He’d killed time with Jim Beam in the morning and turkey clubs in the afternoon. He’d always come up with the same answer, the same now as it was then. He was doing it for his little girl, only nobody else thought so. The truth of the matter was, he could have done anything, been anyone, and it wouldn’t have mattered, to her or anyone else.

He slowed his pace, took a few last drags off the cigarette, and threw it into the street. A row of tall hedges provided a barrier to the biting wind. He rustled two coins together in his pocket as he walked. They felt like quarters but were probably nickels. He pulled his empty hands out of his pockets and looked down at them. They were thick, hairy old hands, not surgeon’s hands, not carpenter’s hands, and not hands that looked like they’d done much work. They were just cold, empty hands that had let a lifetime slip through them.

He took a slow
ride home, drove like a normal person. It was after midnight and traffic was light. He sat at a traffic signal, waiting for the light to change. It seemed as if his was the only car on the road. The car idled with a low rumble, still had a lot of power for its age, he thought. His daughter had teased him about keeping it, told him the next time it broke down to just leave it on the side of the road, call a cab, let the police tow it, that it wasn’t worth fixing. Heshy had told him the same thing, that the only place to get spare parts for it was the junkyard, that it was out of style, like his clothes, like his haircut, like his taste in music. That fifties rock-and-roll, that doo-wop shit was dead, he’d say. What did he know?

Lou remembered a time just before his divorce, their veterinarian, some young guy just starting out, had said the same thing to Lou’s wife about a dog she’d adopted just after they were married. It was a scraggly, cocker-spaniel mutt, sort of a substitute first child. She figured, if they could raise a dog, they
could probably handle a kid. Maybe she just needed something warm and fuzzy to cuddle up with that didn’t look like him.

Fifteen years later, their only daughter was running away from home. Lou’s wife had someone on the side and her beloved pooch was stumbling around blind, relieving itself on the living room carpet and walking in endless circles on a pair of crippled hind legs. She refused to put that thing to sleep no matter how much it suffered.

Finally, Lou took it to the vet himself, had it put down and cremated. He brought her the ashes in a blue and white pewter urn that cost him sixty dollars. She threw it at his head. He ducked and it smashed a picture hanging on the wall in the dining room, a picture of Maggie at her kindergarten graduation, flashing her baby teeth and holding a diploma that was just a blank piece of paper with a blue ribbon around it. She blamed him for ruining her life, for making her miserable, holding her back. She tried to convince Maggie of the same. She called him every name in the book, while he picked broken pieces of glass out of the carpet. He’d hang on to the car a little while longer.

The house was dark. He dragged himself up the front steps and struggled to fit his key into the lock. His hands were stiff in the cold trying to find the right key. He heard something behind him, something a long way off, like a dead leaf falling from a tree or the crunch of a footstep on a broken branch. He dropped his keys and bent to pick them up. That’s when he heard the shot, a sharp crack in the night and the echo going down the street. He stayed down, pulled his gun, and rolled onto his stomach, but there was nothing for him to shoot at. The stillness had returned to the night as if nothing had happened, as if he’d imagined the whole thing, as if he were some shell-shocked, paranoid ex-cop pointing his gun at the sky. Then he heard a car start at the end of the block and peel away.

He grabbed the rail and pulled himself back to his feet, put
the gun back into the holster on his belt. He wiped a bit of saliva from his chin with the back of his hand, stooped down stiffly to retrieve his keys, blowing air out through his nose like a locomotive winding down. The halogen flashlight on his key-ring showed a small hole in the doorframe.

He went inside, turned on a lamp in the living room, and leaned over the counter in the kitchen with the bottle of Jim Beam. There was a certain magic, he thought, about drinking whiskey straight out of the bottle, especially late at night, after having cheated the angel of death one more time. He knew Maggie was a light sleeper, as he was, and was surprised she hadn’t come plodding down the steps. He put the bottle to his lips, raised it over his head, and closed his eyes. He’d expected the burn but it never came, not in his mouth, not in his throat or in his stomach. There was only a soft warmth that ran through his nose and rose behind his eyes.

He grabbed a steak knife out of the drawer and went back outside. He snapped on the porch light and found the bullet hole in the wood. He dug at it with the knife. The bullet was in deep. He pushed in the point of the blade and twisted. The knife’s edge furrowed a small grooved hole in the soft wood. He began to chip away at it, prying out small fragments until the flattened shard was visible. He peeled up a broken splinter of wood and felt its sharp point against his thumb. He dug deeper until he pulled out the small, mangled piece of metal. He held it up to the light as if he was examining a diamond. He couldn’t tell the caliber. The bullet was too fragmented to tell for sure.

He reached into his jacket pocket for the cigarette pack and gently peeled off the cellophane wrapper. He dropped the bullet into it, rolled it up and dropped it back into his pocket. He thought about having a cigarette on the porch but decided against it.

He sat at the kitchen table with the bottle of Jim Beam and
turned the pages of the afternoon paper. He only glanced at headlines, totally skipped the sports section. He’d long ago lost his enthusiasm for ball games. He gave more attention to the obituaries and the court house notes. He checked to see who died, who got divorced or arrested, anyone he knew. Death and divorce seemed to interest him the most. The paper never used the word
suicide
. The terms they preferred were “died suddenly at home.” The smoke from the cigarette seeped from his mouth and engulfed his face in a glowing haze. A bullet in the brain was quite sudden.

He checked the ages of the deceased, if they died of sickness or accident. There were numerous pictures of very old men, their ages listed in the brief biography under their name, under a smiling face and a full row of false teeth. There was the picture of an infant, died two weeks after a premature birth. A memorial fund was set up and the short paragraph below it solicited donations. There was no one he knew, no high-school sweethearts, no childhood friends, no pillars of the community. They had nothing in common, except they all ended up in the same place, page six.

In the last column was a long list of bench warrants. He scanned it for familiar names. He paged through the classified section, looked at the job advertisements and the odd items for sale. People would sell just about anything, from their mom’s mink coat to an old engagement ring. Most of it was just plain junk. The first ten employment ads were for truck drivers and the others were assorted minimum-wage factory work. Cops usually didn’t change jobs any more often than criminals did. It wasn’t worth it.

Lou put a pillow behind his head and leaned back on the couch. He felt his eyes closing and didn’t fight it. His feet were still flat on the floor. His head was back. His mouth was open and dry. He felt like he was floating in water and that any minute
the water would disappear and he’d fall into an empty pool. Looking down and not seeing the bottom but knowing it was there, hard concrete under all that blackness. The sensation wasn’t really physical. It was his mind falling free of his body until he sailed away into a deep sleep.

When he awoke, his mouth felt like he’d inhaled a bag of cement. He sat up, took a few short shallow breaths, and made his way to the kitchen sink where he slurped water directly from the faucet. The night had flown by. The television was still on and so was the lamp on the end table. The light of early morning came through the window, rays from an orange sun siphoning through the closed blinds, flooding the room with an eerie redness. It was the type of light he’d seen emanating from a fireplace, the wooden logs burning hot and red until there was nothing left but white ash.

He started the coffee maker and looked out the kitchen window while he waited for it to brew. A cobblestone alley ran behind his house. It was a single lane, flanked on both sides by dark and dilapidated garages. He’d played there as a boy and in a hundred alleys similar, climbing up between the garages and jumping from roof to roof. He’d pried open a few garage doors in his day as well, taken a few bikes, a few cans of beer out of some ancient refrigerator. An accidental push on a garage door hardly constituted burglary.

Most of the garage doors that faced the alley were of the original wood, warped and faded, hanging clumsily from rusty brackets. The garage behind his mother’s house was no different. He’d never bothered using it. He’d only looked inside once, when he first moved back into the house. He might decide to use it for storage but he wouldn’t be parking his car back there.

The floor had been covered with dirt. There had been junk everywhere, bicycles that hadn’t been ridden in years and boxes of moth-eaten clothes. Cans of paint stood stacked on a wooden
shelf against one wall and an old rusted washing machine sat against the other. The windows had been boarded shut, the air inside heavy and stagnant. Against the back wall, garment bags hung from a metal rail wired to the beams overhead. They looked like body bags hanging like corpses from a noose.

The first suicide he’d ever responded to was in one of those garages. A fifty-two-year-old man had gone missing. His wife reported it about three days earlier. The guy had never even been away overnight, never. Their garage door was broken, stuck open, the lights broken as well. Their neighbor’s five-year-old son was shooting baskets in the driveway and the ball had rolled into the garage. He’d discovered the man hanging from the rafters in the back, an electrical cord tied around his neck.