Cyril in the Flesh

by Ramsey Hootman

  “And now?”

  She seems to consider, then shrugs. “I let it go. Mostly.”

  “Why,” he says. It’s not even a question. Perhaps he should say how.

  She stops, halfway across the lot, and glances up at his face. “I don’t have time,” she says, simply. “For holding grudges. That’s why.”

  “Inviting me back into your house—your life—” God, her kids’ lives—“is a little more involved than letting go of a grudge.”

  She snorts. “I dunno if you’ve noticed, Cyril, but a hundred fifty thousand Americans have died this year, and it’s only August. Before that, I lost my husband, and then my mom. Life is short. And it’s not perfect. You’re not perfect,” she adds, before he can make the correction. “Here. Lemme show you something.”

  They come to the back of the pickup, and she props one foot on the rear bumper, tugging the leather laces of her work boots until her foot slides out. The boot drops, and she uses a thumb to pull her sock down to her heel, revealing the smooth, firm skin of her ankle.

  The tattoo is a wobbly, lopsided heart enclosing a smiley face with stick arms and legs jutting out of its vaguely circular head. Underneath, in equally shaky script, the artist’s signature: Seth.

  “What, putting it on the fridge for a couple days wasn’t good enough? Jesus Christ, that’s hideous.”

  Robin of five years past would have scowled and told him to shut up—but then, that Robin hadn’t had the aplomb necessary to get a tattoo. This present Robin tugs her sock back up and straightens, studying his face as her toe feels its way back into the boot. She is, he realizes, filtering his words through the lens of Tav’s letters. The ones she now knows were his. “It’s cute,” she pronounces, finally. As if certain he would agree, given privacy and a pen. “And you know it.”

  As if she has the first fucking clue who he is. “Two years from now you’ll be covering it with band aids.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” She waves him toward the passenger side. “I mean, that’s kind of the point.”

  When he opens the door, she is climbing into the driver’s seat. He watches as she props her foot agains the center console to lace her boot. “You might have to unpack that a little,” he says, “because whoosh.” He grips the door frame and heaves himself into the passenger seat.

  “I,” she says, giving her laces one final tug, “have wanted a tattoo since I was eight. You know what I wanted?” She uses a finger to trace circles around the circumference of her arm, shoulder to wrist. “A big Asian-style dragon wrapped around, like this.” She laughs and sticks her keys into the ignition, pausing to slather her hands with sanitizer and pass him the bottle before starting the engine. “I thought that would be so cool. Oh,” she adds, as he sucks in his gut to fasten the belt, “I ordered some bigger clothes. Should be here Friday. Or Saturday, maybe. Mail’s been running behind.”

  “Nobody asked you to—”

  “You’re welcome.” She falls silent, briefly, as she looks over one shoulder to back out of the parking spot. “Anyway. Tattoo. Once I hit my teens and realized the whole dragon thing wasn’t my aesthetic, I decided I wanted something decorative, like a feather or a dandelion, but my mom always insisted tattoos weren’t Biblical, and my dad backed her up. In spite of the eagle-and-anchor monstrosity he had on his shoulder. In college... I can’t even remember. Some symbolic thing from a book I read in my lit course—”

  “Windmill,” he supplies. She had seen in the character of Don Quixote not a mirror of herself but an ally; an earnest—if slightly pompous—reminder that not all was what it seemed, at first glance.

  She levels a finger at him. “Yes! You know me better than I do, you creep. A windmill, symbolizing... Uh. Maybe you remember, because I don’t.” She laughs again, affectionately, at the earnest idealism of the girl she once was. “Then, once I realized woodworking had become my career, not just a hobby, I thought about getting a tattoo of my dad’s old block plane, right here along my forearm.” She glances at him. “Do you remem—”

  He nods. She had obsessed about it for months, and even contacted a couple of artists.

  “Course you do. But I never went through with it. I’m sure you can tell me why.”

  He rolls his eyes. “You were afraid you’d regret it.”

  “Exactly. Ten, twenty years from now. Who knows, you know, if I’d even be alive, but—oh no, what if there was something on my body I didn’t like? What if I committed to that, no turning back, and then realized it was a huge mistake?” She shakes her head. “The day of the funeral—Mom's funeral, I mean, God, I hate that I have to specify—Seth drew a picture to make me feel better.” She tosses a thumb over one shoulder, indicating the cramped extended cab. “Right back there, while we were driving from the church to the cemetery. I stuck it on the dash. Two days later I had to drive in to Santa Rosa to deal with her bank stuff. Passed a tattoo shop. Walked in and paid the first apprentice available to slap it on.”

  “You’re... not really making this sound less crazy. Just FYI.”

  They’re on the freeway now, heading back to Healdsburg, and she turns the blinker on, shifting left into the fast lane. There’s traffic, and she ends up sitting with her hands at ten and two, frowning at the tractor trailer in front of them.

  Her voice, when she speaks, is low. “When Tavis died, and then I found out that you—” She casts a quick glance his way. “Well. After all that, I spent a lot of time feeling like a failure. Feeling like an idiot for trusting him. And you. God. How could I ever—” She squeezes her eyes shut, just for a moment, and then strikes the steering wheel with the heel of her palm. “So stupid.”

  “None of that was your—”

  She holds her hand up. “I know. I know. You two assholes are the ones to blame. But that’s exactly what I’m saying—in the end, I don’t regret my choices. I don’t regret trusting Tavis. How can I? I don’t regret our kids, or my life. I tell Seth and Nora all the time that there’s no learning without failure. You gotta take risks. For yourself. For love. You’re not always gonna make the right decisions, and even when you do, the people you love will fail, too. Spectacularly. And... that’s okay. I mean, it’s not okay okay, but if you waste your one precious life trying to avoid regret, you’ll just end up regretting all the things you never did. I got the tattoo to remind me that risking disaster is what it means to be alive.” Traffic shifts, finally, and the truck rolls forward as she lifts her foot off the brake. “There’s no shame in a shitty tattoo.”

  “So, in the current scenario... I’m the shitty tattoo?”

  She laughs. “Maybe? I dunno, I’m the one who thought a windmill would be profound. I guess what I mean is that now, the tattoo is just... a part of me. It’s not good or bad, it’s just me.” She shrugs. “A whole lot of who I am, whether I like it or not—and I don’t—is thanks to you. And... I like myself, Cyril.” She shrugs. “Who knows? Maybe I can like you, too.”

  She sounds so fucking sincere. Jesus. He has to remind himself that this is the woman who neglected to mention the death of her own mother and showed up at his release acting like it was a surprise—not world-shaking elisions, no, but not things she could have omitted, before. Not without betraying herself with a guilty look, and then beating herself up for days afterward.

  Maybe it’s not a boyfriend. Maybe she’s not even lying, in the most technical sense. But she’s hiding something. Still. He can feel it.

  So he falls back on that which has served him best, or at least most often: anger. “Listen to yourself.” He uses his fingers to make air quotes as he mocks her voice. “Tolerating the asshole who fucked up my life might be marginally better than being on my own! Let’s give it a whirl!” Maybe she can learn to live with him—but she can’t seriously want him. “Nobody’s that desperate, Chica. Nobody.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” she allows. “Maybe this will be a huge disaster. It’s entirely possible I’ll regret ever speaking to you again. Probable, even, knowing you. But
I’ve had a lot of time to be honest with myself, and the truth is that it wasn’t Tavis I fell for. It was the guy who poured his heart out on every page he wrote. And I can’t—” She takes one hand off the wheel and rests it on the center console, palm up. Fingers open. An invitation. “I can’t move on until I give him a chance.”

  He looks at her hand but does not touch it. “He doesn’t exist. He never did.”

  “Not in the way I thought. But he’s part of you.”

  He shifts his bulk to look out the passenger window. “I’m thirty-seven years old, Chica. If this caterpillar was gonna turn into a butterfly, it would’ve happened by now.”

  She places her hand back on the wheel. “I’m not expecting miracles. But we got along all right after Nora was born, didn’t we? You were...” She hesitates, and when she speaks again her voice was soft. “Sweet.”

  He snorts. “That is the first time anyone has ever used that adjective to describe me.”

  “Fine. You're a big fat horrible nasty monster. But really, what does it cost me to give it a shot? I already know I can live without you.”

  After swinging by the plaza to pick up the kids, they go home and she tells him, playfully, to get his butt in the kitchen and start dinner, because what is he good for if not food, right? And suddenly it hits him that his culinary options are no longer limited to packets of ketchup and ramen seasoning. Robin has an entire shelf of cookbooks and a drawer full of spices, and just like that he is lost in a cacophony of aroma. Nora follows him back and forth across the plywood floor, begging for one snack after another. Robin leans in long enough to say, “Wait for dinner,” but he sneaks the kid a couple of chocolate chips from the bag in the pantry.

  Nora is less pleased with his creamed spinach and linguine. “I wanted cheese!”

  “The noodles are drenched in alfredo sauce, kiddo. Literally melted cheese.” The pasta is a little under-done and over-salted, but neither of these flaws ought to be game-changing for an unrepentant booger connoisseur.

  Robin sighs and grabs the Kraft parmesan from the fridge. Cyril makes a mental note to order a block to grate. He’s no master chef, but fresh ingredients are enough to fool most palates.

  Seth tells them about a television show he’s invented, entitled “Invincible Block and Normal Shield,” relating the plot of episode four in excruciating detail as Robin, catching Cyril’s eye across the table, bites her lips to check her laughter. Seth had been unusually fixated on geometry as a toddler—preferring objects with interesting shapes and textures to anything with a face—and it’s clear that he still views the world through a lens of complex mathematical relationships.

  “I’ve missed your cooking,” Robin says, savoring a bite with eyes closed.

  “Your standards have really taken a nosedive.”

  “I’m a single parent in the time of quarantine, Cyril. If we only have chicken dinosaurs twice a week, I call it a win.”

  Then it’s time to get the kids to bed, which is another exercise in chaos. Nora, informed that Seth will be having stories with Cyril, bursts into tears and proceeds to throw a tantrum. Not that she’s got any idea what she’s missing—it's only that her brother is apparently the recipient of a special treat, and she’s not. Robin heaves the child over one shoulder and carts her into the kids’ room, kicking and screaming.

  Seth dismisses the incident with a fatalistic shrug, as if to say, “Sisters—what can you do?” Then he flops down on the couch next to Cyril and looks up at him. Expectant.

  “Hey, kid.” He is keenly aware, since this morning’s walk to the plaza, that Seth is now more or less a complete person. Little kids are simple, like puppies: hungry and endlessly forgiving. Meaningful person-to-person communication? Yeah, this is where he fucks it up. “How’s it going?”

  “I dunno,” Seth says, running the words together so it sounds like iunno.

  Well. That’s enough small talk. Cyril rocks himself forward and up, with a grunt, and goes to the bookshelf by the entryway. “Let’s see. What should we read tonight?”

  Five years do not seem to have altered Robin’s reading habits significantly. She gravitates toward trade magazines and instructional handbooks—there's an actual Chilton’s manual for her pickup truck wedged in horizontally on an upper shelf, as if she’s referenced it recently. Her shelves are not entirely devoid of literature, however, and although most of it consists of true crime and nonfiction travel narratives, she has a few holdovers from her college lit courses. He walks his fingers over the spines, hesitating at Don Quixote.

  “I want dragons,” Seth informs him.

  “Dragons?” Cyril skips past Jane Eyre and Alice in Wonderland and tugs out a thick volume. “You ever read The Odyssey, kid? It’s got some good monsters.”

  Seth frowns at the cover, which is a uniform white with black lettering. “Not that kind of dragons.”

  “Oh,” Cyril realizes. “You mean Dungeons and Dragons?”

  Seth perks up, nodding.

  “Okay, well, it’s not really a book, per se. There’s manuals, I guess, but they’re not stories. It’s a game. Right?”

  Seth just blinks at him, bright-eyed and eager.

  Cyril sighs. “You got some paper?”

  Seth leaps to his feet and books it to the kitchen, where he yanks a drawer out so far the slides screech, and pulls out a yellow legal pad. Cyril takes a seat at the dining table and Seth drags a second chair around, jamming it right up against Cyril’s thigh. He sits on his knees, leaning over Cyril’s arm to see the page.

  “Kid. I can’t see with your head in the way.” Seth sinks back a couple of inches and watches Cyril sketch out a character sheet. He’s done it so many times he doesn’t have to think about which boxes go where—in his head, he’s already churning through potential storylines, shifting from one scenario to the other depending on the choices his players make, thinking about how Romero will inevitably Leeroy Jenkins the shit out of any battle scenario, so he’ll have to keep the guy occupied with a puzzle only his character can solve while the rest of his party puts their heads together to come up with an attack plan that won’t get them all killed—

  Seth giggles. “Who’s Braddeus the Bald?”

  And this asshole looks down at the paper in front of him and sees he’s already filled in half the stats for his dwarven cleric, except it’s not June in Taft and he’s not sitting on the edge of an aluminum bunk drenched in his own sweat trying to ignore the sound of Alder beating the shit out of that poor little bastard McCury on the other side of the room because it’s not happening, not anymore. Or, rather, it is still happening, only he’s not there. He’s here. With this boy who has his mother’s eyes in his father’s face.

  Seth waves a hand in front of him. “Are you okay? Should I get Mom?”

  “No, uh—” Cyril flips the pencil over to erase the name and stats of his prison comrade except it’s not a pencil, it’s a pen, and the force of the blunt end tears a hole in the paper. He drops the pen and rips the entire sheet off the legal pad, wads it up, and pitches it toward the garbage can in the kitchen. “I’m fine. I just, uh.” He clears his throat. “I used to play this with—with your dad.” Not technically a lie, but nonetheless a lie. “You’re a lot like him, and it just—brought back some memories.”

  “Oh,” Seth says, quietly, imbuing that single round word with a world of meaning. This child, who has lost both father and grandmother, understands the weight of grief. He sits back in his own chair, suddenly a decade older, and places an earnest hand on Cyril’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” he says, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Mom told me what you did.”

  That catches him off guard. “Really,” he says. And wants to add, did she tell you I wrote the letters that made her fall in love with your dad? Or did she tell you I was the one who got him killed? Yeah, probably not. But if not that, then what? “You might have to be a little more specific, kid. I’ve done... a lot of things.” Most of them to Robin.


  Seth whispers: “How you saved Shafik.”

  He exhales a dry laugh of relief. Of course—Robin had told him about the little Afghan kid who was, back then, about the same age that Seth is now. The one who followed Tavis around the base like a little shadow, and in return for his company received packages Robin filled with batteries and candy. Tavis had done a lot of things in the name of God and country that kept him up at night, but when Shafik had vanished, he couldn’t let it go. But he couldn’t do it alone. “Did your mom tell you I broke a bunch of laws to do it?”

  Seth nods. “That’s why you went to jail.”

  “Prison. But yeah, same difference.”

  “And why Daddy died.”

  This, right here, is how myths get started; how guys with guns blowing people’s brains out become exalted saints. Mommy looks at her kid and can’t bring herself to tell him Daddy’s job was killing people—or, in this case, mostly patching up the people who killed people—so she tells him the good part, the noble part. She simplifies. Because that part’s there, too, sure, but it’s complicated and all tangled together and it’s impossible to say, “Well, Daddy did something wrong,” without also answering, “What did he do?” Well, Daddy disobeyed the chain of command, because Shafik went missing, so it was okay that he broke the rules, sort of, but also it wasn’t okay because that was what he signed up for and he knew exactly what the consequences might be and—and at that point Mommy’s either lost her nine-year-old completely, or she’s convinced him that his father was a monster. So instead she tells him the abridged, bowdlerized version of the story, which is that Daddy sacrificed his life to save a little kid.

  And Cyril can hardly blame Robin because, looking into Seth’s earnest eyes, he can’t bring himself to tell him any different. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, kid, that’s what happened.”