The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering

 

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For my family

 

1.

My father always had either too much gentleness or too much fight. But after he started cracking eggs at Airplane Food, Pop entered a kindly spell that looked to be permanent. Umma said he had gone too decent to ever switch back to bad again. He did not hit or holler nor break any man's two legs for telling him he couldn't pitch a tent on private property. He did not seem capable of murdering someone who cheated him out of a drink.

I couldn't have been more pleased with his change of temperament, but my twin brother thought Pop now cared too much. He'd gone soft, said Faron, and could not earn a boy's respect behaving as he did.

On the rare occasion when they found an embro inside one of those eggs, the rest of the crackers at Airplane Food would not hesitate to dump it in the scramble vat with the rest. But not Pop. He told Umma it hurt his chest to look upon those pitiful creatures, to hold one in his latex-gloved hands till its visible blue heart expired. They were about to become something, he said, and to fling them into the vat was a wretched insult to chicken life.

The customer had more gastromical complaints. The sort that flies on airplanes has nothing better to gripe about than pinfeathers in their breakfast platters. To discourage the crackers from dumping embros in the scramble, management made a game of it. Whoever collected the most by the end of a working week could take home a liter of Haven Dark rum. Pop wanted so badly to win this contest, because he'd done time in the Cuba Pens chopping sugarcane for the Bosom rum concern. If he could get a liter free of charge, it would feel like a restitution.

Contest or no, Pop remained vigilant. He watched what went in the vat, and what came out the bottom. Never once did he expectorate in the vicinity of the scramble. He kept a consistent stir with the big plexiglas paddle. And Pop made himself well worth the management's dollar. Careful as he was, he could crack a gross in fifteen minutes, which put him squarely in the top five.

Winning that game of embros was what did Pop in, and it set in miserable motion the whole starry trajectory of the Van Zandt family.

*   *   *

It was Meet Your Future Day at Airplane Food, a Friday. Offspring of employs had the privilege of laboring alongside their parents, seeing how the world worked. We shared Pop's cracking station, on a gangway about ten feet above the vat. I followed his example; not a speck of shell landed in the scramble. If Faron dropped an egg on the floor, he did not hesitate to kick it in whole.

We were both of us bully proud of our father. He had won the embro tally that week. He showed us the bucket of baby chicks that had been used to verify the count, and he displayed his jug of Haven Dark atop an egg crate for all the other crackers to envy.

Two hours till quitting time and we were looking forward to a night of rum and song on our bunks in the Airplane Food dormitory. I made Pop promise he'd bust out the Roland AX. I wasn't supposed to know that Umma had been saving a Canaday goose for roasting, but I did.

Then along comes a fellow across the gangway to Pop's crack station. I Murder was his name, though I am sure the irony was lost on him at the end. He was not too large and none too nice. The little thug pushed his chest against big Pop's gut and started into the bully talk.

“I will have it,” said I Murder, by which he meant the rum. He spoke in a Caribeen brogue.

Now this man was exactly what his name declared: homicidal. If he hadn't been born and raised in the Cuba Pens, he would have landed there anyway. Both his parents had been Water Bombers, people of conviction, self-educated and violent. His grandparents were worse. Commies of the old breed. Folks like them were the reason Consolidated War & Jail partnered up with Dutch Bosom to turn the whole island of Cuba into a jailhouse and distillery. Easier to lock down the reds and runners where they lived.

I Murder was a boy when his mama died. After his pa stopped participating in life, he was raised by turnkeys, including an old lady whose job it was to shoot bats. Her name was Cruz and she was just as good a shot with human targets.

By the time Pop got hired at Airplane Food, I Murder ran his own private Gunt from the factory break room, a fiefdom of eggs of which he was the baby chief, unquestioned and plenty rich. He took home a tub of leftover scrambles each night to sell in the Colatown favelers. People said he owned a car. If it was Pop's rum he wanted, it was rum he would get.

Unfortunately I Murder's status meant nothing to Pop. And here is where we get to my father's condition. He could be so decent and kind that you'd be forgiven for thinking Pop could be pushed around. He offered to everyone a soft smile, a bashful hello, a musical greeting card if it was your birthday. But a point would come, dictated by the moon or hormones or your own bad luck, when he would switch. And then the very large man I came from, the man with scarred hands and red braids down his strong back, would make you pay whatever price it was he thought you owed. And near everybody was in arrears.

Faron saw it before I did: the light go dim in Pop's eye. He heard the troubling moan escape his big wax lips. My brother knew I was the kind of fairy-boy that gets crushed between powerful men, so he did his best to protect me. He hurried me down the steps to a lower landing, at eye level with the vat. I could barely breathe for Faron's weight on top of me and the odor of bulk-made breakfast. Up through the steel grid of catwalks we watched the two men prepare to fight.

Faron told me later that he felt sorry for that Cuban runt, though I doubt his sincerity. I remember the grin on my brother's face, the pride that lit up his eyes. His Pop was back. His father: the bad one.

I took Pop's old wallet from my back pocket and gave it a good chew. This was a habit of mine when circumstances spun beyond my control, which was most always. My brother's weight was on me so hard, the steel grid cut a design on my calf. But this was no time to complain. It would have been a good time to warn I Murder, though, and I wish I had been bold enough to do so. Pop was fixing to end that man's life if he didn't back away from the crack station and apologize.

“That rum,” said I Murder, “is mine.”

The muscles of our old man's face went slack like a sail. He would not be told what was or wasn't his. Pop put down his unbroken eggs—he cracked them in pairs. He returned them so gently to the foam cradle, as if he had laid them himself.

“I won that jug fair,” he said. I bit the wallet somewhat harder, feeling for the consolation of old toothmarks. Pop showed him the bucket: “Sixteen embros. Mr. Destin counted.”

I know that Pop did not want to switch at that moment. After all, this was Meet Your Future Day. His boys were watching, learning by example, and he'd sworn to Umma that he would never give them reason to send him back to the Pens again. But when those malicious juices welled up in his tubes, it was like indigestion of a moral order.

Years later, when I shot fink in my arm behind a Caroline sand dune or nodded off in the throne room of Castle Kintek, I understood what Pop meant when he said trying to be good was like standing in heavy surf. The waves pour in and chew the sand around your feet till you're balanced on two hard points. Then comes the big breaker, and no man, even one as strong as Pop, can stand his ground.

I Murder did not care about Pop's victory in the embro contest. He cared nothing for the rum. He only despised fairness and would do what he could to corrupt it. The Cuban reached for the jug like it had always been his. That was the last justice the little bully ever tried to reverse.

Ten feet below them a four-hundred-gallon vat gasped and gagged—white, yellow, it burped yolk into the propane-sweetened air. The opening was wide as a water tower. A ring of gas jets underneath made an awful hiss. At intervals a valve on the bottom spurted cooked egg onto cardboard platters. Triangles of toast shuffled down a second conveyor belt. Each tray got two, sprayed with oleo, before it passed through the heat-sealer and landed on a palette to be shipped to the world's airports.

Pop touched the soft patch of his own throat, like he was a Jesus Lover blessing himself, but he was in fact rehearsing. Then he found I Murder's neck and lifted the man off the gangway. Pop said it again: that rum was nobody's except his.

The little man carried a blade, as a character like that often does. I watched from below as he slipped it into Pop's ribs like he was opening the mail. To so immense a body, that shiv meant nothing, but the shock of it made Pop's switch complete. He swung out over the vat still holding the smaller man, so that I Murder's flipper-flops clapped right by my head. I remember worrying: what if he drops a shoe in the scramble? I Murder clawed at Pop's eyes, but he didn't have the reach. Pop held him stiff-armed, steady as a crane and about as caring when it drops a load of bricks.

The dagger stuck in Pop's rib cage after I Murder fell away. When he hit the scramble, hot egg splashed across my face. It slopped over the sides of the vat and blue flame followed it up, filling the air with sulfur. We could see too clearly a man trying to swim in boiling paste. He tested one stroke then another but didn't swim well or for long. Already his flesh was puffing up. The blisters popped and peeled away with each turn of the paddle. Fresh blisters took their place.

Pop didn't see the two guards cross the gangway. He shut his eyes and rocked from heel to heel hugging that bucket of embros like it was a baby. A voice on the floor shouted
switch it off, switch it off
. The propane jets went quiet. Somebody propped a ladder against the side of the vat. I bit a hole clear through Pop's wallet.

The man's organs were roasting inside him now. A fork would have slipped easily into his thigh. Gore jetted from his neck to thicken in the heat. Rusty knobs, blood sausage. Some faces you will recall your whole life. I have seen a few of them, silent begging at the end. I Murder's mouth made a line. It parted as if to speak. His lips drew back. I believe the muscles were contracting as they cooked. His teeth were silver.