“We were at Jerry’s house,” Matt lied, and I nodded to it without hesitation. “I’m goin’ home now, Dad.”
This seemed to derail Uncle Dennis, and he just nodded and squinted at his son for a moment. He wet his lips again and I noticed that his face was wet with perspiration, and now I could see that the gray suit was a mass of wrinkles. Our eyes met and I tried on a smile without much behind it. Dennis turned his attention to his son.
“C’mere.”
Matt took a step forward, his head bowed slightly. For a second Dennis stared at him and I could hear the man’s moist breathing, and then he snorted again. He looked at me and said, “You c’mere, too.”
I moved to within a step of Matt and watched as Dennis went foraging into his pockets. His gaze moved to a passing cab on Clybourn and he tried to sing something, then pulled out a handful of keys and change and bills. Coins fell to the sidewalk and a dollar bill seemed ready to fly to freedom, and I saw that Matt had relaxed.
Uncle Dennis’s liquor-stiffened fingers fought with the money and then he was holding out his fist filled with change. He told us to hold out our hands and then poured the coins into our palms, going from hand to hand till it was all gone. As he distributed his pockets full of change, some of it went bouncing out into the street.
“You dropped…” Matt started to say but his father stopped him.
“I don’t care, never mind. Just money, all it is, is money. I got money, I don’t crawl around for a quarter.” He dropped the last of it into Matt’s open hand. “Put it away. Go buy some candy tomorrow, or—I dunno, whatever you want. Now get outta here, the botha you.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Matt said, and I echoed him, putting the money into my pocket.
My uncle stepped aside for us and we marched in lock-step up Clybourn till we were close to Matt’s house. When I looked back, I could no longer see Uncle Dennis.
“He’s gone,” I said.
“He’s goin’ to the tavern. He always does,” Matt said. I saw that he still held the coins in his tight fist, and now he looked at the money as though deciding what to do with it.
“Is he gonna be mad when he comes home?”
Matt looked back the way we had come. “He is sometimes, and then they fight.”
“Maybe you’ll be asleep,” I said.
“You can’t sleep through it,” he said in a dead voice. “I gotta go.” He didn’t look at me. Then he turned and crossed Clybourn toward the projects, and I went home to face Grandma.
***
We were in the tiny corner playground, where we’d been digging a matched pair of tunnels in the sandbox. We carefully soaked the sand with water from a drinking fountain, then went to work on our excavations. Matt dug too far into the sand, where the water hadn’t reached, and his tunnel wasn’t holding. He made a little exasperated gasp, then moved around to get a better angle, swinging his legs around in my direction. His foot caved in part of my tunnel and I pushed his leg away.
At exactly that moment, the ceiling of his tunnel collapsed. He muttered a curse, wheeled around on his knees, and threw a handful of sand in my face. It went into my hair and I got some in my mouth and my eyes. I swore at him and scooped some in his face, and then he was on me. We fell backward into the sand with him on top, then rolled around. I think he was punching me and I slapped at him. I couldn’t flip him off me, but I pulled his hair and gouged at his face and his ear, and as we rolled closer to the wooden side of the sandbox I tried desperately to push his head into the wood, it seemed the most urgent thing in my world to smack him against it. Then we pulled free from one another and I tossed a great double handful of sand in his face. He threw a blind punch that caught me in the mouth, and then we sat back on our haunches and sobbed.
A man came over and told us we shouldn’t fight, and Matt yelled at him to go scratch, then got to his feet and stalked out of the park. I watched him go, the back of his yellow shirt caked with wet sand. If I live ten centuries I will always see him that way, head down and crying and filthy. The man was telling me to wash the blood and sand off my face but I watched my cousin and felt as though I’d committed terrible sins.
I ran across him about a week later. I was roaming around Lincoln Park with Rusty, who had hit upon the notion of catching fish in the lagoon with a net. I’d never seen anyone catch anything in the park with a net and so was half-convinced it was illegal, but if there had been nothing challenging about it Rusty wouldn’t have been interested. We were circling the water, looking for the best spot to catch fish, and Rusty had just spotted what he insisted was a crayfish in the shallow part of the water near the pond’s concrete border. I peered into the water at the creature, impressed by its oddness. It was ugly and brown, and could have been a crayfish or alien life from a distant galaxy, since I had no idea what a crayfish looked like, and as I admired this crustacean question mark I heard a familiar voice saying my name.
I turned and saw Matt on a bench, alone. Rusty said hello and asked if he wanted to fish. Matt just shook his head and looked at me. There was no reproach in his eyes, just a kind of sullen challenge, and when I moved closer to the bench, he just looked out at the water. I joined him on his bench.
“What are you doing here by yourself?”
“What’s it look like?” He looked at the water and I studied his face. He sounded as though his nose was stuffed up, and there was a redness around his eyes, so that I believed he’d been crying.
“What’re you lookin’ at, stupid?”
“Nothin’.” I looked away for a moment and wondered if after all my cousin no longer liked me. I tried to seem interested in the rowboats out on the water but was drawn again to his face, to marks I knew I hadn’t made.
“I said what’re you lookin’ at?”
“I was just lookin’ at your face.”
One cheek was scratched—that was probably me—but he wore a dark red welt on the other, and one on his arm.
I pointed to his cheek. “Did you fall?”
He turned and frowned. “What? No, I didn’t fall. And it sure ain’t from you.”
“You got in trouble?”
He nodded and watched Rusty fiddling with the net.
I tried to fill the cold silence with talk, unconnected chatter, mindless observations, I wanted to know that things would be as they were. He made his short responses in a flat voice and finally stopped answering altogether. I looked at him and he was staring out at the stark little islands less than twenty yards away, and I could read his thought.
“We should hide out there one night,” I said, not believing for a second that we’d ever get away with it.
“I’d like to live there,” he said.
“You couldn’t live there,” I pointed out. “There’s nothing to eat.”
“I wish I could. I’d stay there forever.”
“There’s other islands that you could live on.”
“I know. There’s real big ones out in the ocean. I want to live on one of them someday, someplace far, so nobody can find me.”
“You’d be afraid.”
“No, I wouldn’t. I’m not afraid of anything anymore,” he said, and the way he said it, calmly and with no hint of a child’s cockiness, told me it was probably true.
Brain Fever
They were all fond of talking about my grandfather losing his mind, but it was clear to me that the person in that house closest to madness was Tom. I knew that his state was attributable entirely to love but understood little about it.
For several weeks after Big Ed’s barbecue my uncle was as cheerful and funny as I’d ever seen him. One day he came in with Uncle Mike, laughing and joking with Grandma and raising the noise level in the house. She feigned irritation with him, pretended to take his temperature, and I watched in delight, for her joy at her son’s happiness was plain. When he started coming my way Uncle Mi
ke yelled for me to take cover.
“He’s lost his mind, Dan.” To Grandma he muttered something and I heard only the word “girl.” A slight shadow seemed to cross my grandmother’s face but it was gone as soon as it had come, and then she shrugged.
His newfound romance meant he was frequently not around to spend time with me, and there were other times when his preoccupation with Helen cut him off from me, so that I was sour with jealousy over this new girl, but I benefited in other ways. If he was seeing her that night, he frequently took me out in the afternoon, just to fill the time till he could get shaved and dressed and douse himself in a cloud of talcum powder and Vitalis, and at these times he was chatty and attentive and full of energy. And, try as I might to maintain my hostility toward her, on those occasions when I saw Helen she went to great pains to talk to me, as if my good opinion of her were as important as anyone else’s.
It seemed to me that Tom saw her constantly—“He’s out with her all the time,” I heard Aunt Anne say—but apparently he couldn’t or didn’t see her enough to suit him. When he couldn’t, he was quietly sullen, and his anger hung about him like smoke. One Saturday night he sat with his parents watching the fights and saying nothing. For a time his parents attempted to draw him into conversation, but he answered their questions with a brief comment or a nod, and they soon fell into a stiff silence, shoulder to shoulder on the long couch. More than once I looked up and saw that he wasn’t even looking at the TV set. I saw Grandma shoot a surreptitious glance his way, and there was fear or worry in her eyes.
The next day he spent almost an hour on the phone. I spied on him from the dining room and noted how he never actually used her name, which seemed to make it even more obvious that it was Helen. He chain-smoked and filled the kitchen with smoke and spoke in a hard low voice. At some point in the conversation he became upset, and I could almost hear her attempting to placate him.
He held the phone to his ear in silence, his attitude expectant, and eventually the angry tightness left his shoulders, she’d said the right thing. When he spoke again he was in a more casual tone, and he was pressing her for a date, rebutting whatever excuses she made about other obligations, and soon he was laughing.
“See? You know what you really want, right? You want to go out with me.”
She seemed to buy this, and the conversation took on more relaxed tones. Eventually I heard him tell her he’d pick her up the following night. When he got off the phone he was smiling. I went back to playing on the far side of the dining room, and when he came in from the kitchen he made a point of getting down on his haunches.
“So when you get through with all this important stuff here, what’re you gonna do next?” I told him I had nothing to do: Matt wasn’t around, Rusty had gone to a picnic with his mother, and Jamie had chicken pox.
“In the summer? Chicken pox? Aw, the poor kid. Well, why don’t you and I go somewhere,” he said, and I told him it would take no time at all to kill all the soldiers in my fort. We spent the afternoon at the movies, watching Tyrone Power first in Yank in the RAF, and next as an unlikely but successful Bengal lancer.
In days to come I saw to me that this most mysterious of all adult states brought its share of trouble. From Tom’s reactions I was not convinced that it was the most salubrious thing for him. The relationship itself was hard for me to follow or fathom, for it seemed at times to speed on like a runaway train and at others to come jarringly to a halt. I had witnessed Uncle Mike’s slow and stolid courtship of Lorraine and heard about other people’s involvements, but nothing I’d seen prepared me for the suddenness of these changes.
Tom and Helen fought, apparently on their dates and on the phone as well, and more than once he caught me in mid-step as I entered the kitchen when he was on the phone. He waved me out without so much as a glance in my direction, and I backed out without murmur, for the look on his face told me that room was a hard place to be.
I wanted someone to sit down with me and explain exactly the way of things but knew better than to ask. One morning I caught Aunt Anne alone in the living room. She was paging through a magazine with a bored look, and she smiled when I came in.
We made some small talk and then I went fishing.
“I hope I never have girlfriends when I grow up.”
She gave me an amused look and said, “Well, I hope you do. Unless you decide to become a priest, which would make Grandma go dancing down Clybourn.”
I was momentarily distracted, for the image of my grandmother doing a sort of rhumba through the neighborhood was rich with promise. Then I returned to reality.
“I think people who have girlfriends and boyfriends fight a lot, I think they’re mad at each other all the time.”
She started to answer, then paused, her eyes resting for a second on some distant object, and when she spoke I knew she was speaking to us both.
“Well, that’s true sometimes but not always.”
“Uncle Mike and Aunt Lorraine used to fight a lot.”
“But that was just because your uncle…Aunt Lorraine really wanted to get married—besides,” she broke off, “they don’t fight at all now.”
“How about Uncle Tom and Helen?”
She looked away. “Yeah, they fight a lot. Sometimes it’s not good if both of the people are hot-tempered, because then you’re liable to fight over everything. And both of them are.”
I went for the home run.
“Are they gonna get married?”
“Well, we’ll have to wait and see,” she said, and I understood exactly what she thought.
Gradually I was able to piece together what few crumbs they fed me, what I overheard and saw, what I could infer, and I thought I had at least the history of this strange thing, if no understanding of it.
As near as I could make out, my uncle had met Helen just before he’d gone off to Korea but they’d had no time to get anything started. While he was overseas, she’d begun seeing Philly Clark in what was to become an on-again, off-again relationship. Tom had come back from Korea and for a time played the field. But a comment I heard him make to Aunt Anne told me he’d just been biding his time.
“That’s the one I been waiting for since I got back, Annie,” he said.
Tom had seen Helen a few times on the street or at social gatherings, and at around the time of the Paris-Shanahan wedding, when Helen and Philly had been in the midst of one of their frequent fights, he’d made his move. For a time all had gone well. Then something had happened to alter the picture, to complicate life, and Tom and Helen battled their way through a steamy July and into August. And though no one ever explained it to me, no one so much as mentioned his name to me, I understood that Philly Clark was the cause. Helen was seeing both of them.
An incident occurred at about this time, a small thing that for some reason stuck in my mind. We were standing in front of the hot dog stand on Clybourn and Oakley, a half dozen of us fighting oppressive heat on an overcast afternoon. My friend Jamie got into a shoving match with a boy named Alvin and soon they were grappling on the sidewalk in matching headlocks. They rolled onto a patch of bare dirt and the rest of us crowded around, eager for the diversion but nervous at the violence. Suddenly I was aware of hands on me, large hands that threw me effortlessly to one side, and a large figure moved past me toward the combatants.
“Come on, break it up, let ’im go,” the voice said, and I saw that it was Philly Clark.
“Let ’em fight,” another guy behind me said, and a third voice agreed with him.
“Fight’s over,” Philly Clark said in a tone that was as much intended for his companions as for us, and he pulled Jamie off the other boy.
Alvin kicked at Jamie and Jamie tried to kick him back, but by now Philly Clark was swinging him through the air.
“Here, you take Dempsey and I’ll get Tunney,” he said, and deposited Jamie in the arms of one
of the other men.
A moment later two angry boys, sniffling and sweating and now covered with sidewalk grit, stood a couple feet from one another and Philly Clark stood between them like a giant referee.
“What’re you fightin’ for?” he asked but didn’t wait for the answer. “This is stupid. You guys got your whole life to fight. Wait’ll you grow up, you’ll get to fight all you want. They might even put you in a uniform and let you have a gun. Now shake hands.”
No child ever shook at the first invitation, and these two had made each other miserable enough that a truce wasn’t very appealing yet.
“I said shake,” Philly said.
“You should let ’em fight,” one of the others said.
“Yeah, you wanna see a fight?” Philly asked him but I could tell there would be no more fights on this corner today.
Eventually Jamie and Alvin shook, grudging and sullen, and then Philly Clark made them do it over because “your heart ain’t in it. Besides, you look like a couple of dimwits.” And then he had them laughing.
He looked at them and then at the rest of us and I saw his hand go into his pocket. Then he noticed me. He frowned slightly and pointed his chin at me.
“You’re the Flynn kid. Tom Flynn’s nephew, right?”
I decided my actual lineage was too complicated to discuss so I agreed that I was a Flynn.
He looked at me and then put both hands in his pockets. He stared for a moment up Clybourn Avenue and then made a little shrug.
“You guys go get a pop or something, all you guys.” He took out a handful of change, more than a dollar and held it out. He was looking at me.
“Here, you, Flynn. You take care of it. I’m holding you responsible. Everybody gets some, okay?”
I nodded and said thanks.
“And no more fights, right?” Now we all nodded, willing to swear off violence forever if it meant a steady income.
In the Castle of the Flynns Page 28