Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

  Every day he wore his fears just like he wore those Dickies of his.

  But the people in those movies, they didn’t go in on wearing that particular suit. Like I said: they weren’t afraid of anything. I’m pretty sure that’s what my old man wanted. That’s why he loved those movies. That’s why he passed them on to me.

  Thanks to my father, by the time I was nine I’d all but memorized Fred MacMurray’s voice-overs from Double Indemnity. Hands down, that one was the old man’s favorite. “A perfect story,” he’d say. “True as can be, even if it ain’t real.”

  And when we weren’t watching grayscale racketeers, my old man told me stories. Even though he wasn’t particularly good at telling them, he made it clear that a good story was the only way to tell the truth. He didn’t go in on those long-toothed yarns about one-eyed giants with clunky names and boozehound gods that couldn’t keep it in their pants. No. My old man told me about real people. People with Social Security numbers. He told me stories about my great-grandfather, a man so strong that one time he punched a mule and knocked it cold. Then there was the story of my great-grandmother, a woman so tall that people came from three counties over just to try and look up her dress. He told me hunting stories about the ones he got and the ones that got away. He told me stories about men down at the sawmill who lost their favorite body parts to the saw blade but who still came back to work and acted as if nothing had happened.

  He seemed to feel there was a heavy lesson in that.

  My old man told me once that he wanted me to grow up to be a writer. “Stories are the best things,” he said.

  “Writing chooses us,” I once told a fan at a book signing. “All we can do is heed the call.”

  But if I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that the old man led me to this world. By watching movies, by talking about forerunners I would never know, by showing up in my life day after day, right up until he had used up all of his days.

  He was a swell Joe, my old man. Safe to say, I loved him.

  He died slow. But that was a good thing. And by that, I mean that there was enough time to bear up to it.

  Picture that living room with me and my father. The wood-burning heater. The old television. The black-and-white movie swirling on it. Picture a large rotary phone sitting within reach. The phone rings—a loud, old bell sound, the kind of phone that rings so loud you could hear it from the backyard. My father answers.

  On the other end of the line a doctor says: “You’ve got cancer, buddy.”

  The old man, without missing a beat, says back to the doctor: “Happens to the best of ’em.” Then he hangs up the receiver and we finish watching the movie.

  His last moments came and went a year later under slanted sunlight that came in through the windows of a hospice center and cast hard shadows over the day. The cancer had already won. By now, it was just doing victory laps, so they kept him run up on morphine, which meant he slept more than he did anything else. Practicing up for the future. I guess.

  I was ten years old then. My mother and I camped out at the edges of his hospital bed. She kept telling me that everything was going to be okay. I told her I believed her.

  Together, she and I did what we could to keep a cycle of those old movies of his dancing on a loop on the TV on the far wall. The hospice people said that even though he was sleeping, he could still hear what was going on. My mother believed that story. I didn’t, but I went along. Maybe for her sake. Or maybe just in case.

  The plan neither of us said out loud was that we hoped to have him drift off on a soundtrack he’d known all through his life. Dames telling brutes: “Get your mitts offa me!”

  Hardheads barking back: “No dice, toots.”

  It was a good play, but at the very end it came up short. A swing and a miss. Nobody’s fault, really. Just how things go sometimes.

  Here’s how it fell apart:

  The old lady had just stepped out to find food. Can’t remember how long it had been since either of us had eaten, but it was long enough for my stomach to turn on itself. So there I was, decade-old me, dressed in jeans and my best t-shirt and my only pair of sneakers. Credits had just finished rolling on The Maltese Falcon and while I was swapping out one movie for the next on the TV, the news broke in like it always does. The story of the hour, running on every single channel—the only show in town, you might say—was about some dark-skinned man gunned down by a cop in his own front yard. There was a lot of the usual side-picking: excessive force versus resisting arrest. The details were still up in the air, but the one thing that showed through in the muck was the fact that, no matter how you cut it, the man had died in front of his wife and son. They’d watched the whole thing from the comfort of their very own front porch, awash in the flickering glow of blue lights and a deafening crescendo of eight gunshots.

  The dead man on TV was barely past thirty, but hell if he wasn’t the spitting image of my old man. It was downright uncanny. Just as skinny. Just as dark. Even had on a pair of dark blue Dickies, if you can believe it. And the icing on the cake? In one of the photos of the dead man’s life that flashes up on the screen, it’s a family shot. Him, his wife, and a little troublemaker that wasn’t too far down the handsome scale from yours truly. Aged ten years, just like me. I mean, the kid was damn near my doppelganger. The only difference was his skin: impossibly dark, impossibly beautiful.

  That’s when it started.

  The picture of the dead guy, it sent a bolt through me. The longer I watched the news story, the more I saw my father stretched out in the morning grass, a tarp draped over his body and bullet holes in his back yawning at the sky—same color blue as those walls I told you about. Before long, it wasn’t some stranger on the TV but it was my old man, one hundred percent. Even as I turned and looked at him there in the bed, dying by centimeters, he was there on the screen, already dead. Somehow, he was dying and dead all at the same time.

  Schrödinger’s father.

  I got tight in the chest and sweaty in the palms. “It’s not real,” I told my young self. I said a prayer to God and Batman at the same time. After all, if there was anybody who knew what it was to lose their parents and lose their mind both, it was the Caped Crusader. But that didn’t do any good. My eyes still saw my old man on the TV, dead as a target at the shooting range. So I slammed them shut. I knew it had to be my overactive imagination yanking my crank, so I focused on doing what I could to curb the insanity, curb the fear.

  The Fear. That’s the thing that was really dangerous. It had a fist in my stomach and wasn’t about to let go. My whole body felt like it wasn’t mine anymore. Like maybe it had never been mine. Like it might suddenly be taken away from me at any moment and there was nothing I could do about it. What’s worse, there was nothing I would ever be able to do about it.

  That’s what the Fear really came down to. That’s what all of the other fears were derived from for people of a certain skin color living in a certain place. But it wasn’t just a fear, it was a truth. A truth proven time and time again for generations. A truth passed down through both myth and mandate, from lip-to-lip to legislation. Certain bodies don’t belong to their inhabitants. Never have, never will again. A persistent, inescapable, and horrific truth known by millions of unsettled bodies. The Fear.

  It had always been there, but I could see it now. Could really recognize it. And once that happens, once you see it, you can’t look away. Can’t ever quiet it. Can’t ever forget that you don’t belong to yourself anymore, but to the hands, fists, cuffs, and bullets of a stranger.

  You can never come back from that knowledge. Not ever. At least, not without a mild, prolonged psychotic break. Not without going more than a little mad. And we don’t know anybody like that, do we?

  “No . . .” a ghostly voice whispered. It was my father, of course. The first time in thirty hours and he chose now, of all times, to wake up. His eyes—milky,
red, and wide as saucers—stared in terror at the TV. It was a shattering type of fright that I saw in him just then. Greater than any of the fear I’d seen him wear throughout his whole life. Like the TV had finally, here at the end, held good on some gruesome promise made before he was even born. But it wasn’t just terror, it was something else. Like he knew the face on the screen hanging before us both.

  “. . . God . . . no . . .” he rasped, lungs sounding like rusted bellows.

  He tried to raise his hand, but all he got was a half-showing of weak, ebon fingers stretching in the direction of the face on the television. His whole body trembled from the effort, but still he tried, like he was reaching out to grab the dead man and pull him back into this world. His brow, doing what his dying body couldn’t, rose up, mournful and aghast. It was an expression like nothing I’d ever seen before. Sadness and regret. Horror and recognition. It was like finally, here at the end, he saw not just a truth but the Truth.

  He cried then. Small, shining tears slid over the dark, quivering earth of his woeful face and, still, he reached for whoever it was he saw on the television and his dry, dark lips contorted, building a word. The silent, breathless cave of his mouth looked the way it looked whenever he called my name.

  For maybe the first time in my life, I knew my father’s fear. I knew what haunted him. What stalked him. What hung over his whole goddamn life. I knew it because I felt it now too. I don’t know if he passed it on or if I just, finally, saw what he had been seeing for his whole life. Either way, his fear was mine now.

  Sometimes, I think that’s what really killed him.

  Cancer just took the credit.

  His fingers fell limp. His brow relaxed and he just melted back down into the bed. His eyelids came down—one last sunset. Then the lights switched off and the clockwork stopped spinning. My name went unsaid.

  * * *

  —

  Anyhow, Kellie and I are driving along on this beautiful spring day and we’re smiling and talking to one another, because that’s what people do. “God,” I say, “can you believe this weather? It’s just absolutely beautiful!” One of the federal requirements for a first date is that you talk about the weather at least once.

  “I know,” Kellie says. “It’s just terrific.” Then: “Are we still on for the museum tonight? I hear that Rembrandt exhibit is supposed to be amazing.”

  “Definitely still on,” I say, as chipper as you please.

  Then, as we’re driving along on this spring day and making our way through the quaint downtown of a smallish city you may or may not have visited, she spots someone standing on the corner. I see her see this gentleman. He’s average height. Clean-cut. Wearing a half-decent suit. Not the kind you buy on 5th Avenue, but maybe the one you’d find at a really good Dillard’s in a really good area if your luck is really good. The guy is staring down at his phone, texting.

  “Hey, can you do me a quick favor?” Kellie asks.

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  “Pull over for me? I’m going to step out here for a second. Meet me down there at the corner, okay?”

  It’s an odd request. But who among us hasn’t made the odd request in his or her lifetime? So I pull over and let her out in the middle of the block. The cars behind me in traffic don’t honk their horns because this isn’t the type of town where people do that type of thing. This is a good place filled with good people who know that they’ll get wherever they’re going when the time is right. It’s a philosophical city.

  She steps out and shuts the door.

  “Just be ready for me down at the corner,” she says.

  “Definitely,” I say, confused but willing to play along.

  I cruise slowly along the street and I watch Kellie as she moves through the crowd. She’s like some jungle cat stalking its prey. She slips between people, almost unseen. And all the while, she doesn’t take her eyes off of the guy on the far end of the block.

  He’s still staring down at his cell phone. Lost in his own little world.

  Kellie begins to move a little faster. Not quite running, but not a leisurely stroll either. If she were a horse, I would say that she was cantering very nicely. Well, the canter soon becomes a slow jog. Then a full jog. And then, like some flower blossoming, the jog becomes a full-on sprint.

  It all happens so fast I can hardly keep up with it. She’s sprinting along the block, barreling her way through the crowd, slipping and dodging people as if they were linebackers. And the poor bastard on the corner—who still hasn’t taken his eyes off of his phone—still has no clue what’s coming.

  Just as she reaches this guy Kellie leaps into the most perfectly executed flying punch I’ve ever seen. It’s a thing of beauty. The moment freeze frames. She’s got her fist squarely on this guy’s jaw. He’s bowled over. One shoe is flying. The poor cell phone is airborne.

  And all of it hangs there in suspended animation for just a moment as my brain tries to process what it’s seeing.

  And then, just as suddenly as the moment began, it’s over.

  Time resumes. The poor schmuck on the corner tumbles to the ground. Kellie, having never broken her stride or rhythm, is dashing toward the car. She looks back over her shoulder and I hear her shout: “I warned you, Vince! I fucking warned you!”

  Then she dives into the car shouting, “Go! Go!”

  I pull out with my little car’s tires squealing.

  “So,” Kellie says half a block later. “What time are you picking me up tonight?”

  And I know what you’re thinking. But, in my defense, would you have told her no just then? To this day, I get paranoid when I look down at my phone for too long. Who knows when the flying punch will toll for me?

  Soot awoke to blue lights flashing around the walls of his bedroom. They danced in and out of existence like fairies. He heard his mother’s voice screaming his father’s name. There was horror in her wails—the sound of things falling apart, the sound of dreams breaking. Soot scrambled out of bed and raced to his mother. She heard his footfalls on the old hardwood floor and, without taking her eyes off of whatever it was she was watching outside, shouted, “Go back to bed! Please!”

  She wiped her face and stepped out of the front door onto the first step of the stairs. She moved slowly, like walking along the edge of the world. She carried her hands before her, both of them aimed at the sky.

  “Please don’t do this,” she spoke to the blue lights shimmering in the front yard.

  Soot wanted to follow her, but he didn’t have the courage to disobey her. So he climbed up on the old couch and squinted out of the window with his heart beating in his ears.

  Outside, caught in the blue and white lights, Soot saw two shadows. One tall and lean, one square and hard. One stood with his hands in the air, the other with one hand on his hip. He knew from the lankiness of the shadows which one was his father.

  “Mama?” Soot called, but his mother did not hear him. She was out on the stairs with her hands in the air, calling her husband’s name.

  “William?” she called.

  Then the world exploded.

  His father’s shadow fell to the ground.

  Soot ran out onto the porch and grabbed his mother by the waist. She was screaming, screaming with her fists clenched and her body a taut cable of pain.

  In the glare of the headlights, with the blue flashes blinding him, Soot saw his father turn to him. He saw the man’s eyes—full of pleading and fear—and the only thing Soot wanted was to disappear. And, somehow, he felt himself growing light. He felt as though he were moving, but the world only stood still.

  Unseen, he felt warm and calm, safe and unafraid.

  It’s the end of the evening in San Francisco. Seems like folks had a good time. I’ve been a good distraction for everyone. A good way to make them ignore the river of youth still flowing past outside the booksto
re. But every tide must recede eventually. And soon, the Black bodies and voices—even my own—are gone and all that is left are my readers. All of them basking in the performance I have just given.

  I managed to talk about Hell of a Book for over an hour and not remember any of it. It’s like I wasn’t even here. And I’m thankful for it. But out in the crowd, people are sobbing. Women wipe the corners of their eyes and grown men turn away, maybe even wiping a few tears of their own.

  Whatever Hell of a Book is about, it must be something powerful.

  I wish I knew what it was.

  “Hell of a show,” the woman with the platinum blonde hair says when it’s finally her turn to step forward and get her book signed. Her voice is full of confidence and energy, like Richard Simmons has come and taken over her life and made her a better person and now she’s ready to share that with the rest of the world. But all I can think about is the fact that she’s the last thing I have to do in San Francisco. Once I’m past her, the night is mine.

  “Thanks,” I say. “It was a barrel of kicks for me too. Hope you had a few laughs.”

  “I guess so,” she says, her face tightening into a query.

  “Something the matter?” I ask.

  “How long can you keep it up?”

  “What do you mean?” I say, narrowly resisting the urge to respond with “That’s what she said.”

  “All of this,” the woman says, making a gesture with her hand to indicate my novel, the bookstore, the people, my whole entire existence from the day I was born until this very second. “How long can you keep it up?”