Parabolis (7 page)

“Love? I’m not talking about love. I’m talking about marriage. Grandchildren.”

“There you go again.”

“I just want to know when,” Turkish directed over his shoulder. He turned back to a smiling Dale and gave him a wink. Then he poured himself another glass. “Speaking of love, anyone in your life?”

“No, nobody.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding a nice girl to settle down with in town.”

Dale shrugged.

“What about Darius?”

“He settles down with someone new every time he’s on leave.”

Turkish gave an approving smirk. Then they both burst into laughter.

“By the way, he sends his regards,” Dale added.

“Oh? He visited you?”

“In Pharundelle just before I got out. He tried to talk me out of it. He wanted me to join him at the Ancile.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, swirling the chocolate milk around in his glass. “I was just done.”

There was a pause.

“Well, probably for the best. You pay your respects to your parents yet?”

“I came straight here.”

“Right, well, you make sure you do that.”

“I will.”

“When was the last time you saw your father?”

“When I graduated.”

Turkish shook his head. Then he disappeared behind the counter and returned with an envelope.

“Here,” he said, removing some documents and sliding them across the table. “I had these prepared as soon as I received your wire.”

They were the deed to his father’s house along with a key and an application for a business license.

“Now, I’ve registered you with the Department of Commerce, but you’ll have to go in yourself to change the title of ownership on the breaker when you apply.”

“Thanks for taking care of that,” said Dale.

“If it were anyone else, I’d tell him that it’s not a good time for business. But you’re your father’s son. Your father knew how to thrive wherever he was with whatever he had. I’m sure you’ll do the same.” Turkish took a shallow sip of his port. Then he stared off into the distance. “You know, I never told you this, but I didn’t like him very much when your mother first introduced me.”

“Why’s that?”

“Same reason you don’t like the idea of boys sniffing around here. I wasn’t about to let my baby sister get swept up by just anybody. And especially not some poor kid from Albia.”

“What’s wrong with Albians?”

“They had a reputation back then for being passionate. And by passionate, I mean short tempered and impulsive. You know anything about that?” Turkish asked with a smirk.

“Little bit.”

“I still remember the first time I met him. I was a few years older than you are now, and he and your mother were, what? Seven years younger? They were just kids, the two of them. We had him over for dinner and I remember he was terribly nervous. You couldn’t tell by the look on his face, but he kept rubbing his palms against his trousers. He didn’t say much. Didn’t eat much, either. I asked him what he did. He looked me straight in the eyes and told me he shined shoes at the Central Station. That’s what he was doing at the time, he and your grandfather. Shining shoes. It paid for his schooling and school is where he met your mother. You know that. Anyway, I laughed at him when he told me what he did—a shoe shiner. I asked him how he expected to support your mother. I asked him if that’s the kind of life he thought my sister deserved. And I still remember the look on his face. He looked at me like he was about to jump the table. He said, ‘Your sister deserves to be happy. And I will do whatever it takes to make her happy.’ He wasn’t rubbing his trousers anymore. The following week, he dropped his classes and took up a second job as a hired hand at the shipping yard. Every morning, before shining shoes, your father broke his back working at the docks. He worked those two jobs for over three years. For peanuts. But he saved every bit of it and put it into that house—your house. Then he asked your mother to marry him. Your father understood the meaning of love. I didn’t laugh at him much after that.”

“When did he start the breaker?”

“When Darius was born. Your grandfather passed away around the same time and left him some money. He put all of it down on some abandoned docks and turned that thing into the ship-breaking yard. Who’s ever heard of a ship-breaking yard? But that’s what he did. Found himself a niche and started his own business. Your father was a clever man. And a damn hard worker.”

“Aye, he was a good man,” chimed Cora Tess, coming out from the kitchen.

Turkish tossed back the remaining port in his glass.

“A man of his word too,” he said. “He made your mother very happy. Gave her everything she deserved and more.”

“I wish I knew her,” said Dale.

“Your mother?” Turkish snorted. “Oh, there wasn’t a creature alive that didn’t love her. She was a beauty. She didn’t think about herself much. And saw the best in people. She could see way back then what your father could be when he was shining shoes at the station. It’s almost like he lived up to what she saw in him.”

Turkish sighed and poured himself another glass of port. Dale sat staring at the keys in his hand.

“Go on, now. You’ve made a long journey. Go home and get settled in. After you visit your mother and father, come by the house for supper. We’ll have a feast ready. And maybe even open that bottle of brandy.”

“What about the cake?” Dale asked.

“We’ll have it for dessert,” said Cora Tess. “Now off with you.”

Dale thanked them and wandered back into the streets, heading to his father’s house. The house he’d grown up in. He was relieved to see it unmolested by modernity. Just as he remembered it, the house sat nestled in a row of old shops and eateries along the boardwalk. As he approached the house, he paused to take in that familiar smell, the fishy, salted air of the bay.

The doorknob was loose. Inside, there was a musty odor of an abandoned home. Dale walked toward the kitchen and saw a thin layer of dust on the dining table. The wall clock was still ticking. He ran his fingers along the old cast iron furnace. Cold. Then he noticed the faded black and white photographs lined along the fireplace mantle. They were the same photos of Darius and Dale as young children. At the end were two recent graduation photos from the Academy. And then there were the two pulled in front of his mother. Dale studied each closely as he had just about every day growing up. The mother he had never known, frozen. In one she looked serious. In the other, in which she stood in his father’s embrace, his mother smiled almost in laughter. His father looked especially strange. He was smiling. Beaming. Suddenly, Dale realized he couldn’t remember the sound of his father’s laughter. He realized his father had never known a day of joy since his mother’s death—since Dale’s birth. A lump formed in his throat. He cleared his throat and went over to the kitchen cabinet where his father used to store his liquor. There was a half-emptied bottle of bourbon.

Thanks, Pops.

Dale sat at the dining table, lit a smoke and sipped from the bottle.

After he’d finished settling in, he hiked up to the cemetery by the abandoned lighthouse overlooking the bay. His father was buried beside his mother. The grave was marked with a simple stone block that read:
Mikhail Sunday, proud father, loving husband, faithful servant.

Ever since he received news about his father’s passing, Dale thought about this moment. He played through in his mind the things he would say: the apologies, the gratitude, the things he should’ve said to his living father. Standing there over his grave, Dale could not bring himself to say anything. He took a quick scan of the empty cemetery. Then he muttered under his breath, “I hope you see her now, Dad.”

As night fell, his coach arrived in Hoche—a quaint village just outside of the main city where the Shawls lived. From a distance, Dale’s uncle’s cottage looked like something out of a painting, softly glowing against the backdrop of lush rolling hills. Smoke rose weightlessly from the chimney into the cool autumn air. Dale took it all in, overwhelmed by the feeling of childhood—the feeling of holiday and home.

Dale could not reopen the breaker for a couple weeks. Upon his initial survey, it was apparent to him that he had to first figure out the business. He started with trying to understand the shop’s set up—what went where and why? His father’s idea of a filing system was stacks of paper on desks, and more stacks in boxes. But after two days of investigative work, Dale began to see that there was an organization to the chaos. A hidden system. Once he could see it, he began to understand what his father was doing. Those two weeks, Dale was in early; he left late. With the daylight, he made slight adjustments to the yard—placement of certain containers with specific types of scrap. Nights were spent in the office poring over the books, receipts, and records of business dealings. It gave him a sense of the business, a business built largely around salvaged scrap parts.

Organizing inventory and pushing papers at a desk was quite a departure from his former life. At first, being “your own boss” was a welcome change from the regimented life of a soldier. But once he got past the challenge of getting the shop operational, Dale grew quickly bored. It didn’t take long for him to realize that he lacked that certain penchant for business; namely, he lacked the love of money. Without proper motivation, Dale spent hours at a time swiveling in his father’s leather chair, wondering how his life had become an aimless routine of disassembling ships and selling their salvageable parts for scrap.

After closing shop one evening, Dale wandered along the docks. Under fading light, the still surface of the Amaranthian Sea beyond the bay looked like a sheet of glass. Along the harbor were anchored ships—an entire community of seafarers with their laundry hanging on cables across obsolete masts, smoke stacks rising from the galleys above deck. The scene brought to mind his childhood fantasies of setting sail toward an endless horizon into the unknown beyond, free and elsewhere. A life at sea that ended drearily in a stinking bay. He had grown so far from that boy for whom it was so normal to dream.

Dale walked beyond the boardwalk and into the streets of the waterfront. There, he stopped at the overpass, the one he and Sparrow crouched under after the fight with Marcus.

Then he made his way along the main streets of the Central District toward the Southside, toward Azuretown.

Although most of the residents of Azuretown were still Azuric, it was no longer uncommon to see hip, young urbanites patronizing businesses for an exotic experience. Where there were once herbal apothecaries and merchants selling live chickens, there were now trendy nightclubs and fusion restaurants. The unthinkable a decade ago—seeing a non-Azuric sitting among the locals, shoveling mouthfuls of noodles with a pair of chopsticks and drinking rice liquor around smoky food stalls—was so common now that it went unnoticed. Even the signs and menus had been changed to accommodate the outside world.

Dale barely recognized the place Sparrow had shared with his mother. Like the rest of the block, the yellow building had been renovated. It was no longer yellow, nor was it a housing complex for the underprivileged. It had been converted into some high-end bathhouse. Venturing further into the neighborhood, Dale came to an entire fenced-off block full of dirt mounds and broken slabs of mortar and brick. There was a construction site where the forge used to be. Azuric men covered in dirt and dried sweat shuffled out with their pickaxes slung over their shoulders.

“What’re you doing here, peach?” asked the foreman, “peach” being the pejorative for people of fair skinned ethnicities. Namely, the Grovish and the Silven.

“There used to be a forge here,” Dale said.

“There used to be a lot of things here.”

“What’re you building?”

“A glue factory, not that it’s any of your business. Now, move along. The suits don’t like outsiders snooping around. Especially on Rogue turf.”

“The Rogues? The Carousel Rogues?”

“Yeah, the Carousel Rogues. What’s the matter with you?”

“In Azuretown?”

The foreman chuckled.

“Listen, you better get going. Curious people are even less welcome.”

Dale turned and took a few steps. He stopped and walked back to the foreman. “You wouldn’t happen to know where the nearest brothel is, would you?”

“Ah. So that’s what this is about. Damn peaches, always looking for some exotic flesh to poke. The only brothel we’ve ever had in Azuretown was the Lotus House. And ever since the massacre, they shut it down. Now you have to go to Central’s Red Light District. They’ve got whatever you’re looking for over there, if you can afford it.” Then he leaned in with his shifty, narrow black eyes and a change in tone. “But if you’re interested, I can point you to some massage parlors, if you know what I mean. Easier on the wallet too.”

“Thanks,” said Dale. “But I’ll pass.”

“Suit yourself.”

Dale walked back toward the waterfront. Along the boardwalk, just a few blocks from his house, he noticed a soft glow coming from within the windows of an old shop, a shop he hadn’t noticed before. The sign with the image of a grinning pig read, “The Broken Cistern.” He poked his head in to discover a desolate tavern. He was greeted warmly by the barkeep.

“Welcome, friend. We’ve got seats if you’ve got a bottom.”

Dale approached the bar. There were three fishermen huddled around a table going on their sixth or seventh round. And another two men sat in the back commiserating over a bottle of whiskey. None took notice of him.

“What’ll it be?”

“Bourbon on the rocks,” Dale replied.

“You got it.”

The barkeep was a short round man with a red face, bulbous cheeks, and a twinkle in his eyes. His thin lips stretched into a permanent smile and his voice possessed a cheer in it that seemed inconsistent with the setting.

“You from around here?” he asked, sliding Dale his glass.

“Born and raised. Never seen this place before, though.”