by Yocum, Robin
“Dad, can I have three dollars to go to the show?”
“Three bucks, huh?”
Big Frank turned in his chair and stood, wobbled, and grabbed hold of the table for balance. A smoldering cigarette dangled from the right side of his mouth. The eye above the smoke was closed and his face crinkled. “Three bucks, you want?”
Travis nodded. “Yes, please.”
Frank pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and opened it. It was empty. “See any money in there?” Frank asked.
“No, sir,” Travis responded.
Never in my short life had I seen anything as fast as the backhand that lashed out and raked Travis across the mouth. It was a cobra strike. His little head whipped back and blood and spittle flew from his mouth and splattered in a bright, upward spray of little dots on the side of the refrigerator. “You want money? Go fuckin’ earn it.” Big Frank then turned to me, his eyes dark, malignant. A minute earlier I had been an innocent twelve-year-old excited about going to the movies with my best buddy. In the instant that flesh struck flesh, I became a voyeur in the home of Big Frank Baron and the world in which Travis lived.
“Did your mommy give you money for the movies?” he snarled at me. I nodded. “That figures.” And he staggered down the hall.
Travis slipped off the edge of the porch, snapped a bunch a grapes from the vine, and sat down next to me on the swing. “It’s like that all the time. Not as bad, usually, but you never know when he’s going to explode. If I say the wrong thing, look at him wrong, anything, he goes off. Sometimes he just screams or whacks me up along the back of the head. Sometimes he busts me. You know why?”
I nodded. “Yeah, because he’s a mean prick.”
“Well, that, too. But you know what I think really gets him? I’m smarter than him, and he resents it. I’ll never let him wear me down. Never. I put my grade card on the table every time I get it—straight As. I know he looks at it, but do you think he’d ever say anything? Not a word. Not one word. He’ll sign it, but he has never once said, ‘Good job.’”
I continued to rock on the swing, pushing against the wooden deck, listening to the ache of the springs and watching the cars pass along Ohio Avenue. “So you don’t know when this little expedition is taking place?” I asked.
“I’ll let you know,” he got up, stretched. “Get ready for Operation Amanda—Phase One. But listen, buddy, you can’t tell anyone.”
I stood up, having decided to try to soak away some of the soreness in a hot tub. “Oh yeah, I’ve got this death wish, so I’m going to blab it all over Brilliant that I’m going over to Big Frank Baron’s house to sneak through his attic.”
The touchdown came in the waning minutes of the fourth quarter. Our fullback slid off tackle, bounced off their third-string outside linebacker, spun, and stumbled two yards into the end zone. The crowd on the Brilliant side of the field erupted.
The touchdown made the score 62–6 in favor of the Warren Consolidated Ramblers. The reason the Brilliant faithful were making such a fuss over a late-game touchdown against the Ramblers’ third-team defense was because it was our first score of the year. In the first three games, we had been summarily thrashed by a total score of 142–0. So despite the fact that we were about to go oh-and-four for the third straight season, there was considerable excitement over the fact that we had scored.
The positive aspect to this otherwise pitiable season was that Coach Haines had gotten so disgusted with the team, the upperclassmen specifically, that the freshmen were actually getting some playing time. We were no better at stopping the other teams or scoring than the upperclassmen, but we weren’t any worse, and we were young, so at least we had an excuse. The games were miserable and the practices worse, but I was secretly delighted over the fact that I would earn a varsity letter as a freshman.
Because we played Saturday afternoons, my aunts, uncles, and cousins would all come to the games. Afterward, we all met at our house for my mother’s Reuben sandwiches and potato salad. My cousins were stellar athletes, and I had never been their equal. Johnny was a running back for the Steubenville Big Red, and Duke was a quarterback for the Mingo Indians, both of which had respectable football programs.
We were sitting on the family room couch with paper plates piled high with food while the adults enjoyed their food and beer in the kitchen. “You guys need some work,” Duke said.
“I know,” I said.
“You guys suck,” Johnny said. “I don’t care how hard you work, you suck.”
Duke choked back a grin.
“You should try not to sugarcoat everything that comes out of your mouth, Johnny,” I said.
“I’m just sayin’, you guys are really bad.”
“I played in the game, Johnny,” I said. “I know how bad we are.”
He shrugged and stuffed half a sandwich in his mouth.
The beer flowed, and it was nearly one in the morning before everyone cleared out and I staggered upstairs to bed. The phone rang at eight o’clock Sunday morning. Mom, who had been up for three hours by this point, called up the stairs, “Mitchell, it’s Travis.” I went downstairs in my underwear and took the phone. “Yeah?”
“All systems are go for Operation Amanda. The Big Bad Wolf is leaving town at noon.”
It took several seconds for the message to penetrate my morning fog. “Where’s he going?”
“I didn’t ask to see his bill of lading, for cryin’ out loud. He said he was going on an overnight. Come on down about twelve-thirty.”
“Okay, but if . . .”
The phone went dead.
Travis lived two blocks away in a small, two-story house, squeezed hard between the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks and the Ohio River, and across the street from the Tip-Top Bread bakery. When the river flooded, it consumed the first floor of his house. When a freight train passed, the entire house shook. The aroma from the baking bread was the only redeeming quality of the patchwork neighborhood of old homes and house trailers. When I arrived, the tractor-trailer—a red Kenworth cab with Big Frank’s CB handle, The Big Bad Wolf, painted on the doors and a sinister cartoon wolf huffing and puffing and blowing a house of sticks onto the fenders—was gone from its gravel pad behind the house. Travis was waiting at the door and pushed it open when I hit the front steps. “Is he gone?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
“Yeah, left about a half-hour ago, thank you Jesus. He was in a swell mood all morning. Come on in.”
I stepped over a maze of dirty clothes and newspapers that were strewn across the living room. The only time the Baron house got cleaned, Travis said, was when Frank was on the prowl for a new girlfriend. The house had been neglected for years and was now more in need of a wrecking ball than a coat of paint. The fly ash from the power plant had stripped the paint down to the wood, giving the siding the weathered, gray look of a house that sits along the seashore and is pounded by salt and sand. The wooden pillars on the front porch had rotted at the base, and the roof sagged in the middle. It was one good snowfall from total collapse, and I hurried through the front door, just in case it decided not to wait on winter.
I followed Travis up the narrow staircase and down the short hall to Big Frank’s bedroom in the back of the house, where the lone window overlooked his precious garage. A stepladder had been placed in the opening of the closet door, and the plywood hatch at the top of the closet had been slid to one side. “You go up first,” Travis said. “I’ll give you a boost. Then you help me up.”
Simply thinking about climbing up into Big Frank’s attic was terrifying, but at the same time strangely exciting. It was a bit like trying to get our baseball out of old lady Tallerico’s yard while it was being patrolled by her formidable German shepherd, Minnie Fay. One kid would go to the far corner and distract the beast, while another—we took turns—hopped the fence and dashed for the ball. Then it was a dead run-like-your-hair-was-on-fire sprint to the fence, followed by an angry head full of teeth, slobber, and attitude. If Minnie Fay o
r Big Frank caught us where we should not be, the results were likely to be the same. From the stepladder, I jumped up and grabbed hold of the wooden rim around the hatch and pulled myself up to my elbows, then waited for Travis to put his shoulders under my dangling feet and boost me the rest of the way. Once I had my feet on the rafters, Travis handed up two flashlights, then raised his hands for me to take hold. Straddling the hatch, I squatted down and pulled Travis up through the opening. For extra leverage, he put a foot on the clothes bar and pushed off. It sagged and creaked but blessedly did not break.
The beam of my light scanned the attic. It had a low peak, with several one-by-eight planks lying haphazardly across the rafters to walk on. It smelled musty, and faintly of dust and old newspapers. Cardboard boxes of junk lay scattered around. One box, which had split at the corner, was full of hard-core porno magazines that had spilled into the insulation. I shined my light over the magazines. “Big Frank has quite an extensive library,” I said.
“Yeah, he’s a connoisseur of fine literature,” Travis countered, balancing himself on the rafters and making his way to the furthest stack of boxes. Travis began sorting through the boxes, which mostly contained the accumulated junk of three failed marriages. One entire box was dedicated to legal documents from Big Frank’s previous divorces. There were several boxes of Christmas ornaments, old clothes, and the miscellaneous junk that you would find in any attic. Just a few minutes into the venture, sweat was rolling down my cheeks. We picked through the heaps of boxes and dust, none of which contained a single item relating to Travis’s mother. We had scavenged nearly the entire attic when he moved a box containing old car magazines and revealed a large clothing box jammed between two rafters and resting atop the insulation. It had a plastic handle, was big enough to hold a woman’s coat, and had come from the Hub Department Store in Steubenville. It was yellowed with age and creased in the middle where a piece of twine was cinched tight. Travis dug his hand deep into the insulation and, as though he suspected the box contained the treasure he was seeking, gently lifted it out of its resting place. He worked the knotted twine down the sides of the box, allowing it to breathe for the first time in many years.
Travis pulled the lid from the box and for several moments shined his light on its contents. Lying in the box was a red leather book, the gold embossed word Diary barely recognizable across the top. There was a stack of yellowed envelopes bound by a brittle rubber band, three high school yearbooks, two thick scrapbooks, a white letter sweater with three maroon stripes on one sleeve and a maroon, chenille “N” over one pocket, a variety of other papers and treasures of youth, and a cigar-box-sized wooden chest with tarnished brass fittings. Travis lifted the diary from the box and opened it to the middle. The pages were yellowed at the corners and full of a light blue, blotchy script that had been put down with a fountain pen. Photographs and newspaper clippings were scattered throughout the diary like so many bookmarks. “This was my mom’s,” Travis said. “This was her diary.” He flipped back to the front page. There was a black line under the words Property Of, on which was written in the same blue ink script, Amanda Virdon. He began reading silently, and I felt like a voyeur, as though I was looking into the window of a very private part of his life. When he picked up the envelopes, the rubber band crumbled into the box. He thumbed through the bundle like a young boy with a new pack of baseball cards. He opened one and gently unfolded the two pages inside, cradling it with the care usually reserved for ancient scrolls. “They’re all from her father,” Travis said.
“How do you know?”
“This one’s from him and all the others have the same return address.” He read aloud: “I hope you have truly found happiness. Even a good marriage is sometimes difficult to make work. There will be tough times, but you are my flesh and blood, and strong. You can make it work. I wish you much happiness, my darling daughter.”
He slid the letters back into the box. “Kinda personal. I think I’ll read this stuff later,” he said, pulling the wooden chest from the box. There was a tiny bar on a brass chain holding the front clasp together. The box was full of trinkets and mementos from Amanda Virdon’s adolescence—a class ring, a locket, several medals on faded strands of ribbon, a fountain pen, a graduation tassel, and several wallet-sized, black-and-white photos. There were three identical head-and-shoulder photos of a dark-haired woman in a white graduation gown, her head tilted up slightly and to the side. Soft brown curls dangled against her naked shoulders.
“That’s my mom,” he said, barely audible. In the faint light I could see tears welling in both eyes. “I never even knew what she looked like ’til just now.” He held the flashlight’s beam on the photo for several minutes, drinking in the image that was, in part, a large piece of the mystery. “She was pretty, wasn’t she?”
“Are you kidding me? She was beautiful.”
He shook his head. “Makes you wonder what the hell she was thinking when she married Big Frank.”
“My dad always says that there’s no accounting for taste.”
Travis reached back into the box and pulled out another photo—a curled, black-and-white Polaroid of the same woman standing on the beach, resting her head on the shoulder of a young man with thick black hair, a wide smile, and washboard abdominal muscles that looked like they were chiseled out of stone. “Look at this.” Travis said, passing me the photo.
“She was a beauty, Trav. She should have married that guy.”
Travis smiled as he took back the photo. “She did.”
I reclaimed the photo for a closer examination. The Big Frank Baron I knew rarely smiled. He was balding and had a belly so large that the slightest physical activity caused him to suck for air and gurgle deep in his throat. “That’s Big Frank?”
Travis nodded.
“Holy smoke. What the hell happened to him?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere along the line he decided that fat and insufferable was preferable to trim and happy.”
For several more moments, he squatted on the rafters, the image of his mother disappearing with the fading beam of his light. I was happy for Travis. He had found the first clue in his quest. The letters and the diary would, I hoped, supply some of the answers he sought.
I only wished he could have enjoyed the moment longer; unfortunately, the silence was broken by the unmistakable grind of the downshifting of Big Frank’s Kenworth as he pulled it onto the gravel at the back of the property. For a moment we stared at each other, frozen, praying the grind was a figment of our collective imaginations. Then, our collective imaginations heard the air brakes release. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. It’s Big Frank,” Travis yelped, walking a rafter like a tightrope to the opening. “He’ll kill me if he catches us up here.”
“You said he was going out of town,” I yelled in a whisper.
“Well, that’s what he said. I don’t know why he’s back. Quick, help me down.”
I snagged Travis’s wrists and helped lower him through the opening. I started to follow. “No. Christ, I’m not supposed to have anyone in the house. Stay up there ’til he leaves. He probably just forgot something and will be gone in a minute.”
There was no time to argue. I slid the plywood cover over the hatch and listened as Travis shoved the stepladder under the bed and slammed the closet door. With the last of the dwindling light from my flashlight, I maneuvered away from the hatch and stood straddling two rafters. When my light faded, I was left in darkness, with only slivers of faint light filtering through the vent at the rear of the house. The front door slammed and I strained to hear the conversation between Big Frank and Travis. Unfortunately, the conversation was becoming clearer by the second. The steps groaned as Big Frank started upstairs. His shipment hadn’t been ready and wouldn’t be ready until later in the afternoon.
It is astounding how still and quiet one can be when one thinks that the slightest move might result in immediate death. I could hear them talking and walking into the bedroom, following each crea
k of the floorboards, when I clearly heard Big Frank say, “I’m going to sack out for a while, so don’t be makin’ a bunch of goddamn noise.”
It had been a good life, I suppose, for someone who had yet to see his fifteenth birthday. Besides never having had sex or gotten drunk, I don’t know that I missed all that much, although sex is obviously a big thing to die without, I would think. It was, however, too late to remedy that, as I figured my death was imminent. After all, I was straddling the rafters over the bed of a napping Frank Baron. Big, mean, paranoid, hateful, sleep-with-a-.45-caliber-semiautomatic-pistol-on-his-nightstand Frank Baron.
I did the only thing I could do in such a situation, which was nothing. I straddled the rafters and looked straight ahead, concentrating on breathing through my nose and staring at the ventilation grate on the far wall. I remembered reading about prisoners of war who helped save their sanity and pass the time by building houses, brick-by-brick, in their minds. I tried that, but it failed. I didn’t know how to build a house, and I couldn’t get past the first few bricks before the mental image of rotund Frank Baron snoring in his boxer shorts crept back into my mind. If sheer fear wasn’t bad enough, I was suddenly suffering from sensory overload. Parts of my body that had never itched in my life were screaming to be scratched. My bladder, I was sure, was close to rupture. And I wanted to sneeze, fart, cough, and belch. I was fighting the release of a bodily function cacophony that would literally shake the rafters. Scattered at my feet were Big Frank’s porn magazines. I stared at them and became semi-erect, creating additional angst.
Adding to this misery was the fact that it was a hot day for early October, and the sun was heating the attic to a broil. Every pore in my face was leaking, causing little droplets of sweat to boil up on my skin until they began a maddening roll down my face, dropping in succession from my nose and chin, or rolling down my neck in a ticklish torture. Soon my shirt was soaked and flush against my chest. My jeans had a ring of sweat several inches past my waist. What sweat didn’t drip off eventually ran down my legs and into my tennis shoes, which I was sure would squish if I ever got the chance to walk again.