In the Castle of the Flynns

by Michael Raleigh

  “Rusty? Rusty, are you alive?”

  A few feet from the outhouse I saw something green and realized it was his knapsack. I began to breathe faster, I am certain I was about to cry. “Oh, Rusty,” I said, “you killed yourself.”

  Something moved in the brush beyond the clearing. It moved toward me. It was dark and alien, the creature I’d always known would come for me in the end, and even as I backed away it fixed its terrible eyes on me and croaked in its evil, flesh-eating voice. I stepped back and the thing croaked again, and this time it called my name.

  It said, “Hi, Dan. Didja hear it?”

  I don’t believe I said anything for awhile, and my apparition was forced to repeat itself.

  “Didja hear it go? Huh?”

  I could not answer at first but giggled, a great rush of joy washed over me that he had not blown himself into individual molecules to be scattered by the late summer wind throughout the woods.

  Then I told him I’d thought he was dead.

  He shook his head. “Nah.”

  “You’re all…” In truth his face was nearly unrecognizable through its mask of dirt, smoke, ash, and what had to be the wet leavings of the demolished outhouse, lashing out in its final moment at its tormenter.

  “Yeah, I’m kinda dirty.” He examined himself and shrugged.

  I looked closer and saw blood on his face and arms. “You got hurt.” He frowned and we examined his wounds together.

  “Aw, man, slivers. I hate slivers.”

  Slivers they were, half a dozen of them in his hands, forearms, cheek, even his forehead. I helped him pull them out, these tiny missiles from a beaten adversary, and he looked at the little wounds.

  “I’ll tell my ma I fell into a thornbush.”

  I scanned his face quickly, became aware of his awful odor and faltered over how to tell him of his next problem.

  “You got…you-know-what on you.”

  “I’ll tell my ma I fell into dog shit.”

  “On your face?”

  “I’ll wash some of it off. There’s that little stream we saw.”

  He glanced over at the smoking outhouse and wet his lips. I remember thinking it took courage to wet his lips—I wouldn’t have touched my tongue to any part of that face.

  “Didja hear it where you were?”

  “Sure, they all did. But there’s cops, a lot of cops, they might come looking for you.”

  “A lotta cops?”

  “There was a big fight, you missed it. My uncle and that Philly Clark.”

  “Really? Did your uncle pound him?”

  “Yeah, but the cops came ’cause everybody else got into the fight, there was a hundred of ’em in the fight.”

  He looked down at the ground and pulled at his lip. “I missed a fight, huh?” He sighed and looked back at the outhouse, then smiled at me through the layer of crap on his face and gestured toward his masterwork.

  “It’s pretty neat, huh?”

  “It’s great. It was real loud.”

  He nodded and stared wide-eyed one last time at the outhouse.

  He sighed. “It’s the greatest thing I ever did.”

  “I know.”

  I accompanied Rusty down to the little stream where he washed some but not very much of the offal from his face, and put water on a few of his cuts. I wondered aloud whether one could drink from the stream and Rusty quickly shook his head.

  “It’s poisonous,” he said with a knowing look.

  “Oh,” I said.

  ***

  When we finally emerged from the woods we were greeted by my Aunt Mollie, who had been dispatched by Grandma Flynn to look for us.

  “Your grandmother thinks you fell into a river or something. What happened to your friend?”

  We exchanged a quick look. “He fell into a thornbush. And some dog poo.”

  “Aw, you poor kid.”

  “No, I’m fine,” Rusty said, and went to find his mother.

  We passed Uncle Martin, who appeared to be haranguing a group of older men with a theory.

  “A torpedo?” I heard one of them say.

  “I served on a tin can in the first war, and I’m telling you there’s nothing that sounds like a torpedo.”

  Mollie chuckled and shook her head, then took me back to the blanket where my grandmother and Aunt Anne appeared to be forcing Uncle Tom and Uncle Mike to eat sandwiches. The two men looked up at us, embarrassment showing through their bruises.

  “How you been, Mollie?” Tom asked, looking mortified.

  I looked up and saw Mollie bite her lip. She was frowning but it seemed she was holding back laughter. “I’m fine, Tom. Are you…all right?”

  “Oh, sure.” He looked to me for a diversion. “So where you been, kiddo?” Tom asked, and I heard him trying to sound normal.

  Mollie nodded and took her leave of the Flynns. She bent over and whispered in my ear: “Please don’t grow up to be crazy.”

  Then she walked away, a thin confident girl in a sundress who made a striking contrast to my bruised, abashed uncle.

  He looked her way for a moment, then at me. “So you been playin’—nah, you went to see what that was in the trees, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  A little smile appeared on Tom’s face. I thought it looked odd against his injuries. “So? What was it?”

  “Uh, it was this explosion.”

  “Yeah, we know that, we heard it. What exploded?”

  “Um, you know, an outhouse?”

  “Oh, for the Love of God, an outhouse!” Grandma exclaimed.

  Tom looked at Mike, then back at me with raised eyebrows.

  “They don’t explode, usually. How did this one explode? No, you don’t wanna snitch on your friend. It was that Rusty, right?” I looked from him to Uncle Mike and saw them both fight to keep the moment serious.

  I nodded.

  “He blew up an outhouse? No kidding?”

  “Yeah. It was wonderful.”

  My grandmother began muttering about the world going all to hell with children running wild in the streets and blowing things up. Uncle Tom looked at me with his battered-pug’s face and started to tell me that someday Rusty was going to kill himself, and he couldn’t finish. He began laughing, his body rocking with it, and tears came into his eyes. Uncle Mike was laughing now, and my aunt and Grandma tried to keep a straight face and I heard her say, “A pair of little idiots,” and then they were all laughing at me. For a moment I watched them, slightly embarrassed at being the object of their humor. Then I saw how good it was to hear them all laughing for the first time in many weeks, and I joined them.

  It was dusk when we left the park, and no one said much in the car. The air was rich with the smells of charcoal sizzling through the grease drippings, and through it I thought I could still make out the pungent scent of Rusty’s masterpiece. I reflected on all I’d seen and done that day and blurted out that it had been a really fine picnic, and they all started to laugh again, and this time I had no idea why.

  Aftershocks

  School resumed and this year Matt and I were to be in the same room, a change we both greeted with undisguised joy. At first it proved to be the cause of no small degree of trouble, both for the teacher and then for the two of us. Her name was Miss Bobek, and I was to learn much from her: she was, first of all, a handsome young woman, with large blue eyes and dark hair, and this taught me that a pretty woman could still make herself quite unpleasant if she devoted the proper time and energy to this end. I was also to learn that a pair of wild, industrious third graders were, in the long run, no match for an adult who possessed both a dour disposition and the patience to use it well.

  For that first few weeks of the year we were the little madmen of the third grade and took pride in the small victories we earned over M
iss Bobek. As time passed, however, she wore us down like a body puncher, greeting each new assault on the decorum of her classroom with a counterattack of her own. She swatted each of us more than once, sent us to see Sister Phillip-the-Principal, stood us like unrepentant bookends in opposite corners of the room, sent notes to our families implying a family disposition toward criminality and handed out punishments that would have daunted the martyrs.

  I caved in first and, uncharacteristically, Matt followed soon after, though his classroom demeanor was punctuated by sudden, ferocious temper tantrums, and moments when he wept as though he would never stop. At such moments Miss Bobek blinked in stunned surprise, sat back and gave the class instructions to proceed with some assignment or other, then took Matt out to the hall to calm him down. I thus learned that she was neither coldhearted nor mean-spirited, just a humorless young woman with an iron resolve that no one would take over her room. After these outbursts my cousin would apply himself, red-eyed, to his work, and I would watch him and worry. I wondered if a small boy could go crazy.

  ***

  If Matt’s unhappiness was plain to all, mine remained hidden. As night began to fall earlier and the air grew colder, it seemed that there was much to worry about. Changes had taken place around me that I could do nothing about, and I was convinced that more trouble would come. I no longer imagined that any of these things were my fault, perhaps because they were clearly real troubles, not shadowy creations of my imagination. Three people in my life had been visited by trouble, my grandfather, my cousin, my uncle: I thought about these dark changes late at night and prayed to God to take them away, to make them better.

  My uncle made a great show of spending more time with me: we continued to go to the movies often, sometimes twice a week: he seemed to lose himself in the glow of the screen. He enjoyed having me along but was quieter now. Left to his own designs on the way home, he would have listened to the radio, but I wouldn’t let him. I hit him with volley upon volley of questions, many of them sincere and based on things in the films that had shot completely over my head—I never understood, for example, the delicate relationship between Gary Cooper and his two women in High Noon—but for the most part I was prodding him out of his silence, for it wasn’t his nature and it made me a little fearful.

  He went out more at night but was not necessarily enjoying himself. For one thing, he was spending more time at the tavern, and my grandmother explained that it was because of a lack of help.

  “You can’t trust anybody these days. They’ll rob you blind.”

  I had no idea who “they” were but understood that my uncle had a problem. The bar’s earlier troubles had intensified and my uncle now had serious trouble with two of his four partners: one was drinking excessively and costing them business and another was deep in debt and “borrowing” from the till so often that the bar made no money on some days.

  One night I caught a snatch of conversation between Tom and my grandfather. Tom was telling him that Dennis had come by the saloon, and Tom “had to give him a sawbuck.”

  I came into the room and they both fell silent.

  On a Friday night soon after, I was drawing one of my dinosaur masterpieces when I heard about my Uncle Dennis. Aunt Anne had come rushing in from work and told Grandma and Grandpa.

  “Dennis is gone,” she said. She remembered me, looked my way, then dropped her voice. “They think he left town.”

  I wrestled with this and gave up, though the words were simple enough: my Uncle Dennis was gone, someone had seen or spoken to Mary Jane, and Dennis was gone, long gone. I stopped drawing and looked from one of them to another for a reaction that would make sense of it for me. My grandmother shook her head and looked away, and Grandpa muttered something about Dennis. Aunt Anne looked at me and gave me a rueful look.

  “You didn’t know, did you, honey?”

  “No. Where did he go?”

  She opened her mouth and shut it again, and I wondered what could be so difficult about this. I was also puzzled about what it all meant: surely he wasn’t dead or they’d be acting differently, so what did it mean that he was “gone”?

  She came into the room and knelt down; she smelled of perfume and spearmint gum and I could smell the big grocery store on her, the smells of the A&P and the National and the Kroger.

  “Sometimes when people aren’t happy, they do strange things, they act funny.”

  “What did Uncle Dennis do?”

  “He left home. He’s gone from his home, he’s been gone…a few days, and they don’t know if he’s coming back.”

  I thought fast, they were all stupid. “Maybe he’s hurt somewhere.”

  “No, somebody would have called Aunt Mary Jane.”

  I remembered a movie I’d see once with my uncle. “Maybe he got hit in the head, and he can’t remember anything.”

  “No, honey, it’s…not like that. He took his money and some of his stuff, and he…he just left. He owed money to a lot of people, and some of them are bad people, so I think he was afraid.”

  “He’s sick, that one,” Grandma said.

  “Ma, come on.”

  “Well, he is.”

  They moved into the kitchen to finish their discussion and make phone calls to the Dorsey side, and left me to ponder this revelation, that an adult could leave his family, apparently without warning. I felt pressure in my chest, a rising wave of panic. It was some time before I could think clearly. I sought to dress this news in more logical terms: I imagined that my uncle Dennis was dead, his body in an alley somewhere, but I soon realized that he was not dead or we’d surely have heard that. I don’t know how long it took me to realize the true significance of this, what this meant for Matt: that he’d lost his father. A image struck me, dark and sudden, of a small boy sitting alone in a room waiting for his father, and I left the room so they would not see me if I cried.

  I didn’t see Matt in school for most of the next week: I was told he was at Grandma Dorsey’s, that he was “a little under the weather”—as perplexing an expression as my family ever came up with. At night, I found myself wondering about him, imagining all sorts of cataclysmic life changes for him, now that he had no father: he would never have a Christmas again, they’d have to take him out of school, he’d have no home.

  When he returned to school I saw how the other children watched him, noted how Miss Bobek tried in her impassive fashion to cut him some slack. Matt never spoke of the turmoil in his life, but he was quiet in that tight-lipped way that I’d come to know. I treated him gingerly, shared things with him, tried with mixed success to make him laugh, backed off when he grew angry. But even his anger was muted, something in him seemed to have burned itself out, and I wondered if he would ever be himself again.

  I told myself that now he would no longer be subject to his father’s rages, that no one would hit him anymore, but I knew what Matt would have said, given a choice between this new life and the one that had gone forever.

  At about this same time my Uncle Mike announced to the family what he and Tom had heard: that Philly Clark and the girl called Helen had set a date, they were to marry in March. I understood that somehow this made the girl’s choice final, and I could see the effects in my uncle’s face. He said little, smiled little, spent more time at the bar.

  One night, desperate for some response, some reassurance that he was all right, I crept into the bathroom as he was combing his hair. There was a thinness to his face, as though he’d just gotten over an illness. Then he looked my way and I asked him if the bar was making lots of money.

  He gazed at me for a moment and then made a little snort of laughter. “You’re a good kid. No, the bar’s not making lots of money. The bar is…the bar’s going down like the old Arizona. It’s a bust. And…I’m a bust. I gotta get out of it before I lose my shirt.”

  That night, I was unable to shake the picture of my uncle sta
nding on street corners begging for money, or walking up Clybourn Avenue looking for work, as I’d seen men do. I thought of my uncle’s world of troubles and my cousin’s harsh life, and felt a small boy’s rage that I could do nothing to protect either of them. There seemed to be no end of trouble for people I cared about. I started to cry, and fell asleep amid dreams of doing great violence to faceless menacing adults.

  I watched my uncle carefully now, noted how all his energy seemed to have drained from him. One morning I told my grandmother I thought he was getting sick. She said, “He’s got a lot on his mind, the poor boy,” and she didn’t look at me.

  I watched the adults of that house walk on eggshells when Tom was around and thought I’d die if somebody didn’t talk to me about it. But my grandfather couldn’t be drawn out on the subject, my grandmother answered me with platitudes I didn’t even understand, and Aunt Anne told me, “You’re too young to understand this stuff now.”

  On a Saturday in the middle of the night I woke to my dark room and listened to the wind sweeping Clybourn Avenue. I thought of my uncle and it was no trouble at all to see him now as Uncle Dennis. There seemed to be no limit to what an adult could do in the throes of unhappiness, it was clear to me that he might die, and the pain was suffocating.

  I sat up in bed, panting and listening to the pounding in my heart, and I wanted to scream.

  I crept out of my room and padded through the hall till I was outside his bedroom. For what seemed a long while I stared at his door, trying to hear over the pounding of my own heart and listening for some hint that he was in there breathing. He suddenly seemed vulnerable to me, in need of protection. Strange things make sense in the middle of the night, and I settled onto the floor outside his bedroom to act at least as his sentry, if not as his guardian, Cerberus in flannel pajamas.

  Sometime later he emerged to use the bathroom and tripped over me where I had fallen asleep.