Mr. Was (4 page)

It was one of those questions I knew not to answer.

That afternoon, Dad showed up in his beat-up Cadillac with a suitcase full of Mom's and my clothes and a case of beer in a cooler. Or anyway, what was left of a case of beer. He'd managed to drink a lot of it on the drive up from Skokie.

He was in a good mood, but he didn't smile and tell stories and laugh the way he usually did when he was drunk and happy. He was holding it all inside, like he did when he had good news but wasn't ready to tell
it. He asked Mom a few questions about the house, and about the funeral arrangements. She answered his questions in a kind of dull, tired voice. I had the feeling she had been glad he'd decided to come up for the funeral, but now that he was here she wished he'd stayed in Skokie. She kept calling him “Ron, honey,” the way she did when he was in a bad mood and she was trying not to set him off.

My father was one of those kind of guys whose face shows everything he's thinking. His mouth was wide and loose when he was happy, or he could tighten it down into a little knot when he was angry. He had thick brown hair like mine, pale brown eyes, and a short, wide nose that sat on top of his bushy mustache. He wasn't a big man—maybe five feet seven inches— but his arms and legs were hard, hairy, and powerful. Sometimes I thought he looked like a gorilla, only not quite as hairy.

My mom was just the opposite—tall, slim, and soft. She had blond hair with just a hint of red when the sun hit it, and deep blue eyes like the sky. I had her eyes, but I had my dad's flat nose.

I told him about how Skoro had tried to strangle me. He laughed. I didn't think it was funny, but I laughed, too, like it hadn't bothered me to almost get killed.

Dad seemed excited about the house. At one point I found him in the dining room, staring up at the chandelier. He grinned at me.

“You know, I bet that old chandelier is worth a few thousand bucks all by itself.”

“Really?” It looked sort of ugly to me, but what did I know about chandeliers?

“Old Skoro had a pile of money,” he said. “And he never gave us a dime. Well, I guess it was worth the wait.”

“So we're going to be rich now?”

He punched my shoulder. “You got it, champ.”

Later that afternoon, Mom and Dad drove into Red Wing to meet with the lawyer. I spent about half an hour looking for the TV set before I figured out that there wasn't one. I looked in all the rooms on the first two floors, but the closest thing I could find was the computer in Skoro's study, a PC that must've been ten years old. I turned it on. The monitor buzzed and crackled, then slowly brightened to a dull gray color. A row of five question marks appeared at the center of the screen. Either it was asking me for a disk, or for some sort of code word. I couldn't find any disks, so I tried hitting a few keys at random, but the question marks remained unchanged. After a few minutes I gave up and switched it off.

Skoro had a lot of books in the study, but most of them were pretty boring. Lots of stuff about stocks and bonds and that sort of thing, and a whole shelf full of books about World War II. There were a bunch of old
Reader's Digests,
and some medical journals, and an album of photographs. I flipped through that. The pictures were black and white. I didn't see anybody I knew. I finally found a book
called
An Illustrated History of the American Automobile.
I flipped through the pages, mostly looking at the photos and illustrations. The book was from the 1950s, which meant that the newest, most modern car in it had been built something like thirty years before I was born. I'd never seen most of them, except on old TV movies. After a while I went upstairs to try to get the door to the third floor open.

The lock was the old-fashioned kind with the keyhole shaped like the keyholes in cartoons. My mother hadn't found the key to open up the door to the third floor, so I untwisted a clothes hanger and tried to pick the lock. I'd picked locks before, just for fun, and sometimes it worked. You just have to keep poking around in there. I pushed the end of the coat hanger into the hole and worked it around until I heard something click. Turning the knob, I gave it a pull, but the door still wouldn't budge. I twisted the coat hanger this way and that, working the knob with my other hand, and was about to give it up when I felt something give way. I pulled, and the door swung slowly open, revealing a dusty staircase.

Just then I heard the front door open.

Normally, Mom has a nice voice, deep and clear. But she also has this piercing whine she uses when she's unhappy about something. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but the tone of voice told me that things had not gone well with Skoro's lawyer. I heard my father's deeper voice saying, “It's a load of crap is what it is. How could you not know? He was your
father, wasn't he? How could you be so stupid?”

I heard more whining, and decided to go downstairs. Sometimes they would stop fighting when they saw me. Other times I might as well have been invisible. I closed the door, and heard the click of the lock engaging.

By the time I got downstairs they were in the kitchen, my mother sitting in a chair twisting her gloves in her hands, my father cracking open a beer.

“Well, champ,” he said. “Your grandfather's screwed us again. He left every last dime to some dump called the Memory Institute.”

“That little place in town? I tried to go there but they were closed.”

“We still have his house,” my mother said, putting on her fake brave smile.

“I'd rather have the two million,” Dad said. He took a pull off his beer and left the room. I helped my mom unload the bag of groceries they'd brought back, then watched her make dinner. Pork chops, Dad's favorite, with rice and lima beans, which he hated. Mom would do that sort of thing, and I never understood it. It was as if she played with his anger, like she wanted things to be bad. Everybody thinks their parents are screwed up, but mine should've won some kind of prize.

“We don't have to
live
here, do we?” I asked.

Mom shook her head. “I don't know what we're going to do, Jack.”

I found Dad sitting on the living room sofa staring at the wall.

“How's it going, champ?” he said.

I shrugged. “We don't have to
live
here, do we?”

“What, you got a problem with this place?” He laughed, real sarcastic-like.

“It creeps me out,” I said. “You know what they call it?”

“What? What's who call what?”

“This place.” I swept an arm around the room, taking in all the old-fashioned, beat-up furniture, the heavy, dark brocade wallpaper, the dusty, boring paintings. “The people in town, they all call it Boggs's End.”

Dad shook his head disgustedly. “Boggs's End. Wouldn't you know. Not much of a selling point, is it?”

Dinner was quiet. Mom ate with her head bowed, and Dad's jaw kept twitching. He left a pile of lima beans on the table beside his plate. When he had finished eating he took a couple beers with him into Skoro's study. A few minutes later he yelled for me. I found him sitting in front of the computer staring at that row of yellow question marks.

“You know about computers,” he said. “How do you work this thing?”

“It's a PC,” I said. “I only know Macintosh.”

“Well, see what you can do. Kids are supposed to be able to figure this stuff out.”

I sat down in front of the computer. “It wants a code word, I think. Five letters or numbers.”

“Try his name,” Dad said, leaning in over my
shoulder. “Type in S-K-O-R-O.“

I tried that, then hit the enter key. The disk drive buzzed, the screen flickered, and a line of type appeared on the screen:

OUND COMES AROUND WHATGOES AROUND COMESAROUNDWHATG

At first I couldn't read it, then the words snapped into focus.
What goes around comes around.

“What's that?” my father demanded.

As if in answer, the disk drive squawked and the screen went dark. A curl of smoke rose from the vents on the side of the computer.

“What happened?” my father asked.

“I don't know. I didn't do anything.”

“You must have done something! Start it up again.”

I tried flicking the on/off switch, but the machine was dead.

My father snorted and said, “Now you've done it, champ.”

“I did what you told me.”

“Get out of here. Leave me alone.”

After that, the only sound in the house was the clinking and scraping sounds of my mother cleaning the kitchen. When she had finished, she sat at the kitchen table with a pen and a book of crossword puzzles.

I tried to read an old newspaper by the light of the chandelier, but I couldn't concentrate. The problem, I realized, was the quiet. There was no traffic or airplane
noise, no sound of neighbors' voices, and most of all there was no TV. There wasn't even a radio. This, more than anything, creeped me out. How had old Skoro lived without a TV or radio? I tried to imagine him there, an old man alone, sitting in his living room in the silence. The thought raised the hairs on my arms.

It took a long time to fall asleep that night. The mattress was squishy, the sheets were scratchy, the air in the room tasted cold and stale and dry. I kept hearing strange creaks and pops from the ancient radiators. I hoped that I wouldn't do any more sleepwalking.

As near as I could tell, I didn't.

I didn't get a chance to explore the upstairs the next morning.

“We have to get going as soon as we're done with breakfast,” my mom said. “The service is at ten o'clock.” She was dressed in a dark blue dress with all her makeup on.

Dad wasn't talking. He looked pale, with a few extra lines on his face. I think he'd sat up drinking beer for most of the night. He hadn't shaved, and his hair was sticking out funny on top. Mom acted casual, like it was no big deal, but she had that tight-eyed look that told me she was holding on to herself. Like if she spilled a drop of coffee on her dress she would start bawling.

I wasn't happy about going to a funeral, but I knew better than to make a fuss. I kind of knew what to expect because my dad's great-aunt Beatrice had died
the summer before. Her funeral had been in a big, echoey cathedral that smelled like old wood, candles, and perfume. Most of the two or three dozen people at Aunt Beatrice's funeral had been old ladies. I had asked Mom about that, and she told me that there were always a lot of old ladies at funerals. When I asked her why, she said it was because the men died first.

Later, I found out that that wasn't always true.

Anyways, the part I really hated about that funeral was when I had to look at Aunt Beatrice dead. She'd been sort of ugly when she was alive, and being dead didn't improve her. Her face looked like wax, with some kind of pink stuff rubbed into her cheeks. Her mouth, which I remembered as being a wrinkly, lipless frown, had been turned into a red lipsticked smile. For weeks after her funeral every time I saw an old lady I imagined what she would look like in a coffin, red-lipped and smiling.

Grandpa Skoro's funeral was nothing like that. Instead of being in a big church, it was held at the funeral home in Lake City. The undertaker, a pale old man with a mushy-looking face, took us down the hall to a little chapel. Mom was walking funny, like she had a board strapped to her back, and Dad, who was feeling better after a few cups of coffee, wore the same dreamy, faraway look that he gets when he mows the lawn. The chapel had several rows of hard wooden chairs, some of them occupied. We had to sit in the front row, so I couldn't get a good look at the other people in the chapel without turning around.
There were only ten or twelve of them. Mom later told me that Grandpa hadn't had a lot of friends, and those he did have were mostly dead. Dad said something about it looked to him like they were all dead.

The coffin, a huge wooden thing with all kinds of brass hinges and stuff, sat on top of a platform with big vases full of flowers on each side. The top was closed. He had requested a closed coffin funeral and, even though he was dead, he got what he wanted.

The service only lasted about twenty minutes. A tall, thin-faced man with shoulders as wide as a doorway stood up and introduced himself as the Reverend such-and-such. He talked for a while, but I didn't hear much he was saying because some guy behind me kept whispering to himself. At first, I thought he was praying, but after a while I started to hear the words. It sounded like he was saying, “. . . around comes around what goes around comes around what goes . . .” over and over, like a chant. I could feel his breath on my neck. It smelled of licorice and dust. I finally couldn't stand it anymore, so I turned around to look at him.

There was no one sitting behind me. The pew was empty.

But I could still hear the words, echoing in my brain: . . .
comes around what goes around comes around what goes around comes around what goes
. . .

• • •

Later, at the cemetery, we stood in a little group in the cold snow, everybody wearing long dark coats
except me. I had on my red nylon parka with the Chicago Bears logo on the back. I don't know who all the other people were. They all looked old and cold and the same. The mushy-faced undertaker mumbled a final prayer.

We watched them lower Skoro's coffin into a hole in the frozen ground. I asked Dad how they could dig a hole when the ground was hard as rock and he said, “They use coals to warm the ground, then they dig with a backhoe.”

The wind blew across the snow and cut up under our clothes. When we finally left, I was shivering. My mom's face was red, and my dad had his chin tucked so far down in his collar that all you could see were his blinking eyes and the white bridge of his nose.

D
ad came into the kitchen holding his notebook under one arm. He threw it on the counter, grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator, sat down at the table, helped himself to a salami-and-Swiss sandwich, picked up the squeeze bottle of mustard. Dad liked lots of mustard on everything.