Fragile Beasts (3 page)

A few days after Dad’s comment about goals Mom took our little sister, Krystal, and moved to Arizona with some guy we’d never heard of before.

I don’t know if it had anything to do with goals. Maybe this guy had some and Mom liked them. Maybe Mom had some goals of her own, and we were all getting in her way.

I never turned in my form. I looked at it one more time and thought they should have included the question: How do you think you’ll cope with middle school if your mom leaves?

“Mr. B.,” I call out softly. “Where are you?”

I know exactly where he is on a night like tonight. He’s out killing something, and even though death is one of his favorite preoccupations, the death of a human means nothing to him.

There’s a knock on my door, and I close the window and sit down quickly on my bed.

“Kyle? You asleep?”

It’s Bill.

“No.”

“You want to come out to the kitchen for a minute? Your aunt Jen’s gonna leave.”

“Did all the other people leave?” I ask him.

“Yeah. It’s just us.”

I open the door a crack and see Bill standing in the hallway being careful not to look at me.

He’s a big guy, beefy not fat, with shaggy salt-and-pepper hair, a broad, flat face, and small brilliant green eyes set so deep inside the folds and wrinkles of their sockets that they usually go unnoticed but every once in a while they flash like two emeralds lost at the bottom of a craggy canyon of skin.

He’s leaning heavily on his cane. He had his leg broken in a mine cave-in six years ago. It was too smashed up to heal properly, and it still gives him problems. Some days he can’t walk on it at all. Most days he talks fondly about J&P Coal and how he wishes he could be back on his crew. Every day he drinks. He says it’s for medicinal purposes, but I think he does it to make the boredom go away as much as the pain.

He’s been our next-door neighbor for my entire life. Before tonight, I’ve
seen him cry exactly twice: once when Jerome Bettis fumbled in the final moments of the Steelers playoff game against the Colts a couple years ago and once from laughing so hard when my dad cut off the top part of his pinkie while trying to install his new chrome grill with the deer antlers on the front of his truck.

They put the amputated part of his finger in my dad’s beer cozy and took it to the ER, but it was impossible to reattach it, so Dad brought it home and set it on the front porch in a coffee mug and declared it to be a conversation piece.

People came from everywhere to see it. Dad would tell the story, then stick the nub of his pinkie up his nose. It looked like he was pushing a regular-sized pinkie much farther than it was supposed to go, and it never failed to gross out Klint’s friends and make girls shriek and giggle.

Klint never laughed about it. Not once. He and Dad had some ugly fights over that stupid pinkie. Klint told him there was nothing funny about making people think he had so little inside his head that he could stick an entire finger up inside it, but like all their fights, what he was really saying was please stop drinking.

I
KNEW SOMETHING
was terribly wrong when I saw Bill standing next to his pickup truck at the Hamiltons’. Even worse than the tears streaming down his face was the fact he had taken off his ball cap and was clutching it in both hands in front of his big belly.

Crying was one thing, but I’d never seen him take off his hat.

“It’s your dad,” he said.

We didn’t need to hear anything else. I looked at Klint and he looked at me, and I could see myself in his face. It’s the worst kind of fear, free-falling, no way to be saved, no way to turn back, like being pushed from an airplane.

We knew what the next words were going to be.

If Dad had broken his leg or been arrested or lost his job, Bill would have been smiling. Even if Dad had slipped into a coma, Bill would have made a joke about it.

Only one thing could have made him cry and take his hat off.

I was still staring at Klint as his lips started to tremble and his eyes turned glassy with tears.

This was Klint: a guy who could step up to a plate with a full count hanging over his head, two outs, a man on base, a tying run at stake, and smash a triple over the right fielder’s head with the same calm he would have hit a practice ball with my dad in the backyard; this was a guy who could play four tournament games in a row on a ninety-degree Saturday and never complain and never make an error in the field; this was a guy who had broken his nose, his left thumb, pulled a tendon in his foot, and had a stress fracture in his shoulder by the time he was fourteen and each injury just seemed to make him stronger.

And now he was going to cry.

I covered my ears and closed my eyes and backed away. I was more scared of seeing Klint fall apart than hearing the next words out of Bill’s mouth: “He was in an accident. In his truck.”

“No,” Klint said.

“I don’t know how to tell you.”

“No, no, no,” he repeated, shaking his head.

“I’m sorry, boys.”

“No!” he shouted. “No!”

That’s when he started to cry, and I ran away down the road toward our house.

B
ILL REACHES OUT
and puts a hand on my shoulder, but he still doesn’t look at me. He talks to the floor.

“You feeling any better?”

“No.”

“Course not. That was a stupid question. I just meant … did you get any sleep?”

“I’m okay,” I tell him, mostly to make him feel better.

It seems to work. He takes his hand off my shoulder, sighs, and starts limping into our living room.

It’s empty except for Klint, who’s sitting on Dad’s easy chair, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped together, staring into space, like he’s listening intently to some invisible person’s confession.

His eyes are raw and red from crying and there are gray shadows of exhaustion beneath them but otherwise he looks like himself. Relief sweeps
through me. I want to hug him. I want to feel his physical body and know that he’s real, but Klint doesn’t hug. Not even when he wins. He stopped hugging years ago. It wasn’t a big deal for me or Dad to abandon the practice. Our hugs had been nothing more than pats on the back after a game. Mom took it much harder, though, and continued wrapping Klint in her arms even after it was obvious he was never going to return her embrace.

He glances my way.

“You okay?” he asks me.

“I’m okay. You okay?”

“I’m okay.”

Aunt Jen is standing in a corner, smoking. She’s Mom’s sister. She’s our only family around here, and I suppose it was good of her to come so fast on a Saturday night, especially since she never liked Dad except for when she tried to date him back when he was dating Mom.

Dad’s only sibling is a half-brother who’s a lot older than him and lives all the way in California. He’s some kind of junior executive (even though he’s over fifty). He doesn’t drink, his kids all went to college, and, according to Dad, his wife thinks her shit doesn’t smell.

He and Dad never had much to do with each other as adults, not because of any profound dislike but more from mutual disappointment.

Dad’s parents are both dead. He was a late-in-life baby, and his mom was a late-in-life wife for his dad. My grandfather was dead before I was born, and Grandma Bev died a couple months before Mom left with Krystal.

Mom’s dad ran out on them when she was ten, and she’s never been able to talk about him without her eyes going eerily blank, like the only way she can force herself to talk about him is by making herself not think about him. Her mom died of some kind of female cancer the year I was born. Mom and Aunt Jen have never provided more details than that to any of us, but sometimes they used to get together and discuss Grandma’s condition for hours in intense hissy little whispers over a bottle of Tequila Rose and would always end up with their arms around each other crying before the alcohol fully kicked in, and then they’d remember all the jealousies and grudges they still held against each other, some going all the way back to grade school, and they’d start fighting.

Aunt Jen is pretty in a mean, skinny girl kind of way. There’s nothing wrong with her face except the lack of anything soft or inviting about it. She
reminds me of a viper I saw once at the Pittsburgh Zoo on a school field trip. It was covered in a geometric pattern of sleek, bright colors. I thought it was beautiful until it woke up and fixed its beady eyes on me, and I realized there was nothing in them except self-preservation and poison.

“So I guess I need to call your mom,” she says between puffs, “unless one of you boys would like to do it.”

Klint slowly turns his head and fixes her with the same calm blue stare that makes all the high school pitchers within a two-hundred-mile radius quake in their cleats. It’s the serenity behind the intensity that makes his gaze frightening. Everyone knows once he’s in the zone, nothing can deter him from his mission. He will hit the ball, and he will hit it far.

I wonder what he’s thinking about Aunt Jen, if she’s the ball in this situation.

I try to see her through his eyes. He wouldn’t equate her with a pretty, deadly snake. The sharp angles of her body and the coffee-stain color of her tan would probably make him think of a spider.

“There’s no reason to call her,” he says.

She stops smoking and matches his stare with one of her own, but her heart doesn’t seem to be in it. She stalks over to the coffee table and grinds her cigarette into the lid of an old Skoal tin that’s doubling as an ashtray.

“Of course there’s a reason to call her. She’s your mother. She’s the only parent you got now.”

“What are you saying?” Klint asks her. “Now that Dad’s dead, she’s gonna want us?”

“She’s always wanted you. She left because of your dad not because of you boys.”

“She left because she’s a slut.”

Aunt Jen whirls around on him, her snake eyes flashing.

“Don’t you talk about your mother that way, boy.”

“She’s right,” Bill pipes up from his corner of the couch. “You shouldn’t talk that way about your mom.”

Klint snorts disgustedly at Bill.

“I didn’t say you were wrong,” Bill defends himself. “You just shouldn’t say it out loud.”

“You would take Carl’s side,” Aunt Jen turns her wrath on Bill. “You always did.”

“He’s dead, Jen,” Bill cries out. “For Christ’s sake, the man’s dead. Could you leave him alone for one goddamned minute?”

His outburst shuts up Aunt Jen and seems to take all the life out of him. His head droops from his wide shoulders, and I think he might start crying again.

I don’t want to see it. I walk over to the front door. Someone’s propped it open. The room was probably stuffy with all the people coming and going and everybody smoking. I went to my room pretty fast, so I don’t know for sure what happened out here.

I wasn’t here when Coach Hill showed up. I feel sorry for Klint that he had to go through that. The only thing worse for Klint than finding out Dad was just killed in an accident would be having Coach Hill see him messed up.

I’m sure Coach came because he thought it was his duty. He needed to show that he’s a caring guy who realizes his players have lives and emotions that extend beyond the bleachers even if he doesn’t understand why.

Maybe he even thought Klint might need him, not to provide any emotional support but simply as a reminder that there were more important things in life than life and death. There was next season.

I only stayed in the living room long enough to see Shelby. I knew she would come right away, zipping along the road from Hamiltons’ in the new convertible her dad just bought for her.

She’s a year older than me, a sophomore, and already has her permit. She’s not supposed to drive without an adult, but she doesn’t care since her dad’s Cam Jack, the J in J&P Coal, and there isn’t a cop anywhere around here who’d give her a ticket.

She doesn’t live here or go to school here, but she willingly spends most of her summers and some of her weekends here with her aunt Candace, who’s supposed to be one of the meanest, ugliest, weirdest, richest old ladies to ever live. She calls our crappy little town “her country escape” and defends her aunt by claiming she’s misunderstood.

Shelby sees greatness in small things and beauty in wreckage, and that’s why I love her.

She only stayed a few minutes but cried hard the whole time and seemed more upset than I was.

I don’t think losing Dad has become real to me yet. It’s still too easy for
me to tell myself I’ll see him in the morning. We’ll make our regular Sunday brunch of eggs and sausage and bacon and ham steaks and Tater Tots and more eggs. I’m the cook, but Bill always brings the ham and sausage and Dad brews the coffee. Klint will eat everything I fry up along with a big bowl of Wheaties and a couple bananas, and Dad will make his joke about him being a friggin’ health nut because he ate a piece of fruit, but he’ll say it with a gleam of pride in his eyes. Afterward Dad and Bill will aid their digestion by driving to the beer distributor and then we’ll watch football for the rest of the day until I say I’ve got to go do my homework, even though I already did it and I really just want to be alone and draw for a while, and then Dad will make his joke about me being a friggin’ Rembrandt except there won’t be any gleam in his eyes this time.

I could still believe that it would all happen again except for Shelby. She saw everything like she was watching a movie. She knew the plot. She knew there would be no regular Sunday for me tomorrow; she knew there would be no regular Sunday for me ever again.

“Well, I’m gonna call your mom tonight,” Aunt Jen announces.

I can’t help feeling a little excited. Mom will have to come for the funeral. I haven’t seen her for over two years. She’s only come back for one visit since she left, and it was a disaster. I talk to her on the phone now and then, but it’s not the same as seeing her. She’s always distracted on the phone.

Maybe she’ll move back now. Maybe we can live with her again.

I cross the room to Aunt Jen. It’s the closest I’ve been to her all night, and the combined scent of her sugar cookie perfume and cigarette smoke makes me feel sick to my stomach.