“Some of Chub’s friends.”
“Why did they do that?”
“It was a misunderstanding.”
“You need to stay away from him, Terry. You need to stay away from her.”
“I am. I will. Ma? This guy? John?”
I dropped heavily into a chair. She grabbed the empty glass from my hand, filled it, and brought it back out to John. His laughter filled the house. I knew he was brimming with schemes and scams and rip-offs that would bring doom on us. I glanced into the living room where Gramp was watching cartoons. He seemed to be grimacing as John’s chortle rang through the place.
My mother returned and said, “It’s disturbing, isn’t it, how much he looks like your brother?”
“I hadn’t noticed. What’s he doing here?”
“My brother Will phoned earlier this afternoon. My father had a stroke last month. He’s dying and wants to see me.”
“And you’re complaining about the fucking pharmacy?”
She took a breath and shut her eyes and found her resolve. “I’m sorry. It was a defense mechanism. I suppose I’m in denial. It’s a lot to take in. I haven’t heard from my family in over thirty years. I haven’t seen them since I got married. Talking to Will again … it brought back a lot of memories.”
I’d never met anyone from her side of the family. I knew absolutely nothing about them. After she and my father started becoming serious her parents asked what kind of a boy he was. She told the truth. They ordered her to stop seeing him immediately. She returned one last time to pack her belongings and found the pictures of herself turned to the wall. She never went home again.
“Was that him on the phone just now?”
“Yes.”
So, I had a grandmother too. “What was that like? After thirty-plus years?”
“It reminded me how much I missed him. And my parents. And how much I still resent them, for what happened.”
My mother was the strongest person I knew, but this family, a family she had married into at the loss of her own, had cost her a normal life. She spent her life in a house devised by crooks, built on fifty metric fuck tons of unfenceable loot stashed away in caches in the walls and ceiling and floors. She’d been braced by the cops a thousand times, had spent all her time holding the Rands together despite our best efforts to destroy ourselves. She’d seen Mal in the yard with his guts hanging, she’d listened to the TV as the crowds outside the prison cheered while my brother died. She watched over Gramp, feeding and cleaning him, engaging him on the off chance that he could still understand enough to deserve human conversation. I suddenly wanted her to leave us and save herself.
“What are you going to do?” I asked. “About your father?”
“I’m not sure yet. I have to think about it.”
I wanted another drink. She knew I wanted another drink and moved the tray away from me. I">“Is it?”tp said, “So if you talked with your brother, then why’s this one here? This nephew of yours.”
“He wanted to come.” She peered out the kitchen window at John and my old man freezing their asses off on the porch. My father stayed out there because it was his spot. It was usually the spot where the old dogs rested and kept watch. “I think he’s always wanted to come. He seems quite lonesome.”
Cousin John wasn’t lonesome. He wasn’t disaffected. He wasn’t eager for newfound blood attachments. The restrained joy I’d seen was all about money and action and some kind of score.
“So even though they threw you out of the house they’ve kept tabs on you all this time?” I asked.
“Considering the Rand family history, nobody had to exactly keep tabs. All they needed to do was watch the police blotter. Or the television.” She poured herself two fingers of scotch and drained half the glass. I had never seen my mother drink alcohol before.
She reached over and with two fingers plied my gray patch. We were both acutely aware that these white streaks were from her side of the family.
I didn’t even know her maiden name. I had always wondered why she hadn’t just covered and lied about my father’s occupation. I was a liar at heart. If you hit a wall you lied your way around it or over it or through it.
“What do you need me to do?” I asked.
“Right now? Just go out and talk with John.”
“Oh Christ, don’t ask me to do that.”
“Please, it’s not his fault that my parents disowned me,” she insisted. “He’s still family. And I think your father has reached his limit of social interaction. I’m going to give Gramp his medication and then I’ll be out too.”
“You don’t trust him either,” I said, noticing the swirl of suspicion in her eyes. “That’s why you didn’t let him in.”
I walked out the door. John was gnawing my father’s ears off, talking about movies. My old man hadn’t been to a movie theater since 1981, when he’d stolen the receipts for the Mayweather on Fourteenth Street and been chased two miles by a fleet-footed security guard. He stood there up against the porch railing like living stone. No one else would call him antsy, but I could see it. His bubbly dead son was blathering at him.
John turned to me. I got a good deep look at his face. The likeness was spooky as fuck. He didn’t bear my brother’s scars, those from his youth and the worse ones he’d gained in prison. John wore a soul patch, just a trace of peach fuzz. His eyes were all wrong. He was thinner, softer, and he smiled, apparently pleased to be here. Collie had never been pleased to be here.
“You don’t know what it was like for me, growing up in your shadow,” John said to me.
“You’re at least five years older than me,” I said. “How did you grow up in my shadow?”
He chuckled. There was no edge to it. “I was speaking metaphorically about the Rands. My father, he talked about your mother all the time.”
“You knew about us.”
“Sure, I knew about you,” he said, taking a sip of the Dewarem; margin-right: 0em; text-align:justify; margin-top: 1em; re couple of ’s and Coke. “Doesn’t everybody know about you? I mean, I’m not … whatever … street, you know. I’m about as far from that as you can get, I guess. I was coddled. My mom, she was a coddler, a doter. She was a pamperer. I’m pampered. I was her only kid. My mom, to her everything in the world was a mystery. It frightened her. She passed some of that to me. It’s just the way she was.” He chuckled again, edgeless, a little sadly. “She’s been gone almost three years now. Some kind of bone cancer. Took only a month.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Thanks. Thank you. A nervous woman, but I loved her for it, sort of. I gave her and my dad a rough time when I was in my teens. Spent most of my waking hours doing what I shouldn’t have been doing, driving them nuts, making her even more nervous. Granddad, he’s hard, he’s a hard man is what he is, and he’d give me stern looks, lots of stern appraisals, and stick his finger in my face, and give me orders on how to be a man, what to do to succeed, but it never took. I’d just go back out with my friends and fuck off, do whatever I wanted, had a little maryjane emporium going on the side, ran into some bad dudes, kinda bad dudes … well, pretty bad dudes. Had some more trouble. Occasionally heard the Rand name. Professionally, you know.”
My father wagged his chin in a noncommittal fashion. His beer was empty but he didn’t grab another one. He stared at John as if through a microscope, poring over every cell.
John didn’t notice. “I probably did all that just because I figured it was something I could get away with, the way you all got away with it. I thought I was sharp. I thought it was in my bones, I suppose. Sorta in my bones. In my blood. Maybe.” He shrugged. He had no Rand blood in him but somehow it was my father’s shrug. “Then I did some business with some folks who did some business with Big Dan Thompson. I never met him but I heard about him, he had that syndicate style you see in mob films. The mob films that make the mob seem hip. And then, you know, a few years back, that thing with Collie, it was everywhere, you were everywhere
, the name, I mean. Your name. I wanted to call, give condolences or whatever, but I wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do. So I kept my mouth shut. My dad, he never stopped talking about Aunt Ellie, she was on his mind a lot.”
He ran out sentence after sentence, sort of chuckling as he went, enjoying the gab. John kept his arms moving, his hands flashing, unable to stand still.
“So why didn’t he drop her a Christmas card from time to time?” I asked.
“Ah, he got caught up in the fallout too. It wasn’t his fault. He was just sixteen at the time. My grandfather, Perry, you’d have to know him. He’s … rigid. Demanding. Exacting. Not a bad man, just stern, puts his foot down and you know you’ll have to fight to the death to change his mind. And who wants to go that far?”
My father kept a cool gaze going. It had to be working on him, knowing that the man who had thrown my mother out of the house was calling her back home again.
“Right, Uncle Pinscher? You’ve got to remember him.”
“I remember him.”
“Hard, right? Hard hard man. Steel.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t bother hating him anymore, Uncle Pinscher, he’s dying. The strokes took it all out of him. He went from being who he always was to this paralyzed scarecrow with mostly empty eyes. He cries a lot, he’s scared like nobody I’ve ever seen scared before. I never liked him much but I feel sorry for him now. It’s why I’m here, really.”
My father’s face remained placid so I grimaced for him. Uncle Pinscher? My mother came out with another refill for John. My father didn’t get another beer. I hung on to my high as well as I could. She smiled and made a little small talk and John yipped and jabbered some more. She asked a few questions. He responded at length. Her face froze in place. She had thirty-five years of indignation under her belt. My mother had never turned her back on anyone in the family for a minute. I swallowed down a surge of hatred for her parents. I wanted to meet these people. Along with that came a vague anger toward my father for falling in love with her and stealing her away.
John snapped his chin up, put his hand on my elbow. His touch made me bristle. “So tell me about yourself, Terry.”
I didn’t feel like sharing. I looked at him and wondered when the ax would fall. When he’d make his move, when he’d show his true colors, the con man beneath. John waited for me to respond, sipping his drink, my father silent as stone, my mother shivering.
I said, “Sorry, John, I guess I just want to mourn quietly for Grandpa Merle.”
“Perry.”
“Right.”
“He’s not dead yet.”
“Right.”
“It’s okay, I understand. Must be rough, having me just drop in on all of you like this from out of the blue. My father said I shouldn’t come, but I wanted to. I’ve been meaning to for a long time, and this just gave me the right chance. I think. I think it was the right chance. What I hope was the right chance.” He finished his drink, drew me into one of those nervous, buoyant semihugs, and patted my back with his large strong hands. I couldn’t remember ever being hugged by my brother, but if he had, it probably would’ve made me feel something like this: uncomfortable, disturbed, pleasantly surprised. Against my will, my better judgment, against the tide of time, I hugged him back a little.
“I should be getting home now,” he said.
My mother embraced him. Her body language said she didn’t trust him any more than I did. My father stuck out his hand. John turned to me. I nodded. He didn’t really want to leave. He took a step and remembered JFK.
He said, “See you soon, boy.” JFK lumbered to his feet and sat having his broad flat head patted. John made it down the porch stairs before turning again and giving a brief wave. When he got to his car he did the same thing again. After he reversed out of the driveway, he waved again when he hit the street. Collie’s presence swelled beside me and pressed against mg, a kind of c
We Rands did a poor job of expressing ourselves. We supported one another, sometimes, but we did it in silence. My mother tried to ease the burden at the dinner table. She kept up a steadily lilting monologue. She told us stories out of her childhood that made her smile without feeling. She mentioned how she and her brother Will would go swimming in the Bay Shore marina when they were children, and how later the family rented a house out on Oak Beach every summer until she was twelve. No, thirteen. No, twelve. Maybe thirteen. She couldn’t remember. It had been a long time ago. Her tales illustrated almost nothing. I tried to smile through them but my lips felt like poorly molded clay. She was conflicted about her dying father and the memories kept beating at her like a squall whipping the coast.
My father put his hand on her elbow and whispered, “It’s okay, baby.” For him that was a tremendous show of affection.
The tension kept growing. Old Shep felt it too. As my mother continued her idle talk and she fed him, he looked up from his plate of stew and every so often turned his head left or right, watching each of us in turn. He looked frightened, like he was afraid of being hit.
Afterward Dale went to her room without a word even though I could see the shouting in the planes of her face, the screaming, the loss and anger. My parents watched television with Gramp, occasionally whispering to each other or laughing hollowly at the screen.
My bruised ribs were starting to hurt like hell again. I popped more Percs. The pain dulled. Some of the pain dulled. Some of the pain, the pain that I couldn’t put a name to, sharpened like shivs working at my kidneys. As the sun set I got into my sweats and went for a run with JFK down Old Autauk Highway and out around Shalebrook College and the lake. JFK planted himself at the shore near a bench where a couple of college girls sat. He moseyed up to them and stood Intimate Clinical Strength Antiperspirant and Deodorant Advanced Lady Solid Speed Stick, Light and Fresh pH-Balanced. h M for a brisk pat-down. I ran the mile and a quarter around the lake, my head growing lighter and lighter. The lamps around the park came up and illuminated the running trails. Each time I looked at the bench there was someone else sitting with JFK, scratching his ears.
John was going to try to hurt us. I had to put a stop to that.
It was stupid to keep running with possibly fractured ribs. My breath stuck in my throat like barbed wire. When I got around again the bench was empty. JFK buried the side of his face against my thigh.
We took it very slow on the way back home. I wondered if the crew was still watching. I didn’t mind. I had said what I had to say and the rest was up to Chub.
My phone rang.
Darla said, “How are you feeling?”
“A lot better, thanks.”
“You didn’t have to leave money, Terrier.”
“I wasn’t sure of the protocol.”
“I’m not certain I have a protocol. At least not yet. But if I did, you’re not someone I expected to follow it.”
“I owed you for helping me.”
“You didn’t owe me for that.”
“And I stole your bottle of Percocet.”
“You’re a thief. And you were in pain. I expected you to take it. And the money in my wallet. Instead, you left me cash.”
“I’m not that kind of a thief.”
“You’re the kind who would never steal something important from a friend. That’s good to know.” A Kia with a squealing fan belt sped by. “What’s that noise?”
“Traffic. And my dog panting. I’m out for a run.”
“With those ribs?” She let out a grunt of exasperation. “The fact that you’re even walking means you must be slamming down those pills. Are you trying to kill yourself?”
“I don’t think so.”
She let loose with a giggle, warmhearted and a little disparaging. “Well, I’m glad you didn’t answer with a definitive yes anyway. That would have ruined the evening completely. I thought you might like to come back over tonight.”
I imagined the silent strain still there at home, John’s presence remaining behind and conjuring th
e dead. Dale hiding in her room texting, burning up her laptop, practicing her French, talking on the phone with Tony, talking with ROG, whoever he was. My old man waiting to climb out of bed and take off into the dark. I should keep an eye out. I should follow him tonight.
As I walked along I thought of how Darla’s beauty worked its magic on me. I was still full of need and want, and it felt like I always would be no matter what she did to me. The loneliness was on me again, the mad boredom. I saw her stretched out across the mattress with her robe sliding open at the knee, exposing her leg, the taut muscular curve dimpled and shadowed, my pulse full of fire.
I found a bus bench and sat. JFK slumped at my feet, his ears standing up whenever a particularly noisy engine cruised by.
“I’d like to,” I told her. “Very much.”
“But you won’t.” this many times before to be Q
“I can’t. My father is disappearing nights and I should watch out for him.”
“If he isn’t telling you where he’s going then he has his reasons. Does he question you on where you’ve been?”
“No.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t corner him.”
“You’re right, I probably shouldn’t.”
“But you will.”
“Yeah, I probably will.”
“There are better things to do with your time, Terrier. I’m one of those things.”
“I know that.”
“I don’t think you do, but maybe you’ll learn.”
The air grew heavy with the smell of the ocean. That storm was still out there, waiting to roll in. “I thought you didn’t want me to fall in love with you.”
“I don’t.”
“I’m the type who falls hard and gets hurt.”
“I know,” she said with a sexy, throaty hum. “I’d very much like to avoid that.”
“Then maybe I shouldn’t come by tonight.”
“Because it’s the kind of night when you might fall in love?”
“Like you said. There’s always a chance.”
“It’s nice to think so, isn’t it?” she said and disconnected.
The Last Whisper in the Dark: A Novel Page 7