In the Castle of the Flynns

by Michael Raleigh

  My uncle sighed and said, “Your ma’s looking for you, Matt. Everybody in your family, everybody in my family, they’re all looking for you. Come on home with us.”

  He shook his head and said, “I’m not goin’ back there. I’m not,” and I heard his voice start to break. “I’m not gonna live there anymore,” he said, and began crying.

  “Take it easy, take it easy,” my uncle said. He watched Matt for a moment, blew his breath out in a long sigh and said, “Okay,” and I could see him thinking on his feet. “Tonight, you stay at our house, or with one of your aunts—maybe Ellen.”

  Matt considered this for a moment, shivering, and then said, “I want to stay with Danny.”

  “Danny? Danny’s gonna be livin’ in the street,” he said, and Matt actually laughed. His face was wet, his nose running, he looked as though he’d been beaten up, but he was laughing. I looked at Tom and saw him studying me, giving me an odd look.

  “Let’s go home,” Tom said.

  “Okay,” Matt said, and we got up together. Tom took off his light jacket and put it around Matt but said nothing to me.

  At the edge of the pond my uncle stopped and looked out at the water. “I was afraid I’d have to go looking for you out there.”

  “Matt was out there,” I said, hoping to force him to acknowledge my existence.

  “On those islands?” He looked at Matt in wonder. “There’s nothing there but old beer bottles, they’re just a couple of nasty, muddy little lumps of ground.”

  “How…” I began.

  He gave a short laugh. “How do I know? I been on ’em. A long time ago. We used to come down to the park at night and take the rowboats out.”

  “They let you?”

  “Nah. But they didn’t lock ’em up. They locked up the oars, so we came down with boards and pieces of wood, a dozen of us.”

  “You didn’t get into trouble?”

  “Yeah, I did, I caught hell. You know George Bauer, the old cop?”

  “Sure.” George Bauer was a retired policeman who frequently visited our Cub Scout Pack to give instruction on first aid. We loved his visits, for his stories were chilling, his anecdotes dripped blood. My favorite involved a Chinese man—“A Chinaman,” Officer Bauer would say—who bit his tongue off in a boating accident.

  “I rowed my boat to the shore,” Tom said, “because one of the guys had to get home, and Bauer was waiting for us. The other guys made it into the bushes but he grabbed me and wanted me to tell him the names of everybody out on the water. I wouldn’t tell him, I mean my brother Mike was one of ’em.” He looked at me, “and your dad. So he beat the crap out of me, then I got away and ran home, all the way home from Lincoln Park to the old house on Sedgwick. Anyhow, there’s nothing nice on those islands.”

  “They’re all mud, they’re not like you think they’re gonna be,” Matt said. After a long moment, he added, “Everything’s like that.”

  “Nah. Not everything. Let’s go, guys.”

  We walked back to the car in silence, and my uncle let Matt get in first, then gave me a long look.

  “Now we all know what we’ve been afraid of for a long time: that you’re dumb as a doorknob. You coulda got yourself killed down here—the botha you.” To me he added, “You’ll be lucky if your grandmother ever talks to you again,” but I saw the trace of a tired smile forming as he walked around the front of his Buick.

  Indeed, my grandmother greeted me with a look that could have shriveled my vital organs, and for a long time after they sent me to bed I could hear her rumbling to herself about what I’d done, catching only a phrase here and there, most of them ending with “for the love of God.” She called me “the little amadan” and “that little wild crazy thing,” and once I heard her ascribe my lack of common sense to Grandpa and his entire long line all the way back to their tribal days, “When the lot of you were madmen and pagans living in the trees,” but by breakfast she was speaking to me.

  Matt spent the night at our house, and in the morning Aunt Mary Jane came for him while we were sitting on opposite sides of an improbable stack of Grandma’s pancakes. At first Matt fought her, saying he didn’t want to go back, but she calmed him down and told him things were all right now. She said his father was sorry. Eventually he calmed down, and when breakfast was over they left.

  Uncle Mike was over, talking quietly in the living room with Tom, and they stopped talking when I went to the living room window to watch Matt go home. Uncle Dennis was outside. He was pale, with dark circles under his eyes and a pleading look in them, and when his son came down the stairs, Dennis moved to meet him. He said something to Matt, and Matt nodded, still looking down, and then Uncle Dennis hugged him and I thought he was crying.

  I waited till they were pulling away in Dennis’s red Dodge and then looked at Uncle Tom.

  “Will things be better in Matt’s house now?”

  Uncle Mike opened his mouth but Tom headed him off.

  “Sure, they will,” he said. “They’ll be okay now.”

  The Announcement

  About a week later, Tom and Philly Clark chanced to meet in a tavern on Barry. Several drinks and a few well-chosen words later, they nearly traded punches. I listened to Aunt Anne and my grandmother discussing the encounter. I heard what they said and added what they’d probably left out and drew my own sanguine conclusions. I took this first angry encounter as a portent of what was to come: a long campaign, at the end of which my uncle would have won his girl back.

  Three days later Aunt Anne, her face pale, stunned me with her announcement that Helen was going to marry Philly Clark.

  “They’re not really engaged yet, you know. There’s no ring. She doesn’t have a ring,” my aunt said in a hollow voice. She seemed to take consolation from this business of the ring but I didn’t understand what a ring could have to do with anything. I felt the breath leave me, my disbelief made me giddy. I thought with hatred of the tall, cocksure Philly Clark, handsome and as lucky in his life as anyone I knew of. It occurred to me that Philly couldn’t marry the dark Helen if he were dead, and I even considered praying for a virus of some sort to take him; I was certain that measles would do it, for Grandma had told me measles was dangerous for grown men. A sudden rush of guilt swept over me and I found myself apologizing to God for praying that Philly would die. Instead I found myself praying that perhaps he’d change his mind about Helen, find another girl, perhaps, or even become a priest, but I couldn’t muster much confidence in Philly’s vocation to holy orders.

  For days afterward I went out of my way to show Tom extra kindnesses till I believe I was driving him crazy. He said little to anyone, his presence ghostlike in the house. Gradually he fell into his normal routines but something was gone from his face and I waited anxiously for it to return. At night in bed I prayed for him to be all right again and had no idea what it would take. If he hadn’t been my favorite I might have been irritated with him, for it seemed to me an overly dramatic reaction to the loss of a girlfriend.

  Labor Day

  Sometimes a name, a few bars of an old song, a faint scent on the wind, can call up moments and people long gone. Mention Labor Day and I will forever see my Uncle Tom on a pitching mound in the forest preserve, covered in sweat and smiling a murderous smile. Every eye is on him, and something close to quiet has come upon the spectators, a hundred or more of them. Philly Clark is forty feet away, a bat in his hand and my uncle’s imminent death on his mind, it is a moment they’ve ached for, and the two of them are frozen forever in that pose. In memory’s eye, my uncle goes into his windup and Philly Clark waves the bat, and at the prime moment when the ball leaves Tom’s hand, a boyish look of perfect happiness comes over his face, and Philly’s eyes widen. A half mile in the distance, a slender wisp of smoke rises from the trees, unremarked by anyone, growing thicker, taller, just moments from calling all attention to itself.

/>   Part of a child’s world dies on Labor Day. I have seen more than fifty of them, Labor Days, learned to appreciate their dark significance: the last pretense at summer, a boy’s final moments of freedom. A child spends three months carving a fictive world for himself, and on Labor Day it collapses with the setting sun. But the Labor Day that sealed the summer of 1955, that Labor Day I will always remember and measure the others by—unfairly, for they will all suffer in the comparison.

  Several times each summer our parish gathered in the sunshine in a forest preserve now completely engulfed by the city proper. Over the years I have come to understand the darker reputation our forest preserves hold, as places where underage romantics convene to playact at love, where young drinkers come to carouse and bay at the moon; hoboes and homeless have camped in these woods, and they have seen crime, with more than one body being discovered in the underbrush by picnickers. But to us in that simpler time, the forest preserves were a place for fun. That year there had been no neighborhood or parish picnics for us in the forest preserves, and so I was almost giddy to learn that there was to be a Labor Day picnic. My grandmother and Aunt Anne put together a lunch that would have fed us for a week, my uncles dredged up a heavy red fossil of a cooler and filled it with beer and bottles of soda, and we jammed ourselves into Tom’s car. Both sides of my family would be there, as would most of the neighborhood, and that meant I’d see Matt as well as Rusty, and my imagination was taxed by the day’s possibilities for mischief.

  Perhaps it was just that anticipation of unsupervised criminality, or denial that my summer was coming to an end, but any semblance of my patience had flown: I thought the car ride out would kill me, that my own chest would explode with the tension. The adults were no help: my grandmother seemed unusually giggly, Tom and Anne sang with Fats Domino on the radio, my grandfather gazed out the window and smiled at it all. He didn’t seem to be coughing as much.

  After a week of cloudy skies, the sun rose hot and high and unchallenged, and it could have been the Fourth of July. We found our perfect place beneath a pair of small trees, the selfsame trees we always sat under, and as we set out our blankets and baskets and coolers, people came by to greet us, particularly my uncle. I saw quickly that mine were not the only giddy adults at the picnic, and I have no doubt that I was seeing not only the silliness of the end of the summer but the effects of liquor in the morning sun.

  I noticed an edge to many of them, too, especially the young men. There would be a baseball game that afternoon, there was always a baseball game, and this one had now taken on a special meaning, as it would match two neighborhood teams with more than baseball between them: Philly Clark’s team would play my uncle’s team. The excitement hung in the air like a cloud of bright contagion.

  The Dorseys were camped not far from us, a noisy sprawl of blankets and boxes of food and cases of beer, and when I came calling for Matt they yelled out my name as though I was a celebrity. My Aunt Mollie called out that she heard I was living in Lincoln Park now with the squirrels, and they all laughed.

  Matt was glad to see me, but guarded, and I sensed that he was unhappy about something. As we talked, Aunt Mary Jane laid out sandwiches and a plastic bowl of potato salad, and Matt’s eyes wandered over to the baseball diamond, where Uncle Dennis was hitting fly balls to a couple of other men. Matt watched his father for a while and then said, “Let’s go someplace.”

  We found Johnny Butcher, one of Matt’s friends, and my classmate Jamie Orsini, and busied ourselves climbing trees and playing games until Rusty showed up. We greeted him from aloft, each of us in a different section of tree, and he waved to me. He was beaming, and there was a bright glint in his eye that bespoke the possibility of high adventure and wanton destruction. In a matter of seconds we clambered down and Rusty had us clustered around him, a tight circle of young disciples. He was carrying a khaki pouch with a stencil that said u.s. army, and when he sat down on the grass and displayed this cache of treasures, he secured our attention as well as our loyalty. Inside, he had a magnifying glass, stick matches, a pocket knife, a small hatchet, a folding spade, a vial filled with a gray substance that proved to be homemade gunpowder, fireworks great and small, a number of plastic containers and what appeared to be a lifetime supply of Lifesavers in half a dozen flavors. Rusty passed some of the candy around, then sat down cross-legged and held up each item like Balthazar at the manger, explaining what he thought it might do for our entertainment. He proposed an expedition into the dark heart of the woods where, he said, a dead body had been found no less than a year ago.

  “Why should we do that?” I asked.

  He gave me a puzzled look and said, “We might find another one.”

  This made eminent sense. Failing to find corpses, Rusty said we could conduct a series of sylvan experiments designed to teach us the power of modern man’s ingenuity and bring terror to the forest creatures.

  I learned many things in the woods that day, not the least of which was our own infinite capacity for destruction. In the course of the next four or five hours under Rusty’s single-minded leadership, we dug holes, chased birds, hacked at trees, set fire to a dead rabbit, constructed wooden edifices of dubious intent, tossed lit firecrackers into the hollow trunks of trees. We attempted to use the magnifying glass to set a colony of red ants ablaze, succeeding instead in sending the irritated insects swarming up the legs of Matt and Johnny. We dug deep holes and covered them with twigs and brush to trap unsuspecting forest beasts, and I have no doubt that two or three years later a hiker or forest ranger sprained an ankle in one of our traps. Oblivious to the laws protecting such things, we cut down a dozen saplings and constructed a lean-to as a headquarters, protecting our little shack with a thin circle of gunpowder from Rusty’s vial, to be lit in case of intruders. From this camp, we went into the brush, using Rusty’s plastic containers to store for later use the spiders, crickets, earthworms, and other feral creatures who blundered our way. In the end, the candy gave out, the heat in our lean-to grew oppressive, the mosquitoes counter attacked, and thirst got the better of us. Johnny Butcher suggested that we set fire to some of the trees, but Rusty silenced him with a look of boundless contempt.

  “Start a forest fire? You wanna break the law?”

  In the end, we returned to civilization, filthy and sweating, lumpy with mosquito bites and aburst with secrets, each of us going to his family’s blanket to eat. As we parted, Rusty whispered to me that in the afternoon he would find something to blow up.

  “Blow up?” I echoed.

  “Sure, but I don’t wanna cause no trouble.”

  Back in the bosom of my family’s blanket, I gulped down soda but had to be force-fed lunch, then sat restrained by my grandmother so that my food could “settle,” as she put it. Grudgingly I sat on the blanket and listened to the Birely’s Orange gurgling around the bologna sandwich inside me; a few feet away my grandfather and Uncle Mike dozed in the sun. Uncle Tom was already out on the dusty baseball diamond, fielding grounders and chattering to his friends. From my forced place of rest, I scanned the rest of the picnic: most of those close to us were either family or people from just up the street. In the distance I saw others, people who lived a little farther away, some of them from the opposite side of Riverview, or “across the river,” as my grandmother liked to say. And at the very limits of my vision, on a long blue blanket, I could see the girl named Helen, once again startling in her red bathing suit. Beside her was Philly Clark. He appeared to be talking to someone else, and I wondered if Helen knew yet that my uncle was there.

  I studied them for some time, puzzling over their appearance together. From all that I’d heard, it seemed to me that their romance, mistake that it had obviously been, was now at an end, and I wondered that they didn’t realize it. Then I saw Philly turn slowly, his eyes scanning the crowd as he spoke to his friend, his gaze coming to rest eventually on my uncle out on the diamond. I fancied that I saw malice
in his eyes. At least Philly knew it was over.

  There would have been a crowd to watch a baseball game anyway, the last ballgame of the long summer, the last day for these adults to stand in the sun and sip at their beer and forget about the factories and shops and warehouses that provided them with both employment and servitude. And of course they would have been gathered to watch this particular game, a continuation that it was of many other games between these two teams. Their sports rivalry had come to match the one in their everyday lives, but it was the baseball games that seemed to distill whatever poison they shared between them. So these little baseball wars were a special feature of the parish picnics.

  But it was obvious to me that this crowd had gathered to watch something else, that word had spread of the “problem” between my uncle and Philly Clark.

  I remember little of the game itself: I can say that, like most of its fellows, it was low-scoring and close. They were good teams, well-matched. Unlike other sandlot teams I was to see over the years, Philly’s team and Tom’s both boasted real pitchers as well as several men who had starred in American Legion ball, and each could field a squad that could actually catch the ball.

  I once saw Uncle Tom’s team beat a team of big muscle-bound strangers by a score of 22 to 3, but on this hot Labor Day they led Philly’s team 3 to 2. It was the top of the seventh inning when the issues festering in them all finally surfaced. It had been a quiet game, with almost none of the loose-lipped bravado and taunting that marked most of these games. Players known for their mouths were strangely silent, and they displayed their tension toward the umpire rather than each other. The strange quiet grew till it engulfed the spectators as well, and finally it touched the play on both sides. In the sixth, Philly’s men made several uncharacteristic errors to let in the tying and lead runs, and in the seventh, Joe Burke, Tom’s usually competent pitcher, gave up a single with one out and then seemed no longer able to find the plate. His teammates barked abuse at the umpire, an unfortunate older man accustomed to umpiring softball games, but their hostility did not help Burke. He walked the number two hitter in Philly Clark’s lineup, then gave up an infield hit to the third batter, loading the bases and bringing up Philly Clark, the best hitter on their team and probably on either.