The Broken Places

by Susan Perabo

  His mother didn’t seem to be bothered by this, or — it seemed to Paul — even notice it. They ate their dinners alone, as they so often had before when Sonny was at the station, and never once did she offer any explanation or excuse for his absence, never once said “Where the hell is your father?” On the rare occasions Sonny was with them, they would talk about the same things they’d always talked about, focus all conversation on Paul: Paul and school, Paul and football, Paul and his friends. At those times everything seemed perfectly normal, and Paul would stifle the part of himself that worried over his father’s whereabouts, chastise himself for acting like a baby. Why should he expect his father to hang around with him all afternoon, just because he wasn’t working?

  One Saturday morning in mid-November, desperate for a father-son game of horse or twenty-one, Paul gave in to his weakness and headed into town to look for his father. His first stop was the firehouse; it had taken him a while to think of it, but once he did he was sure he’d discovered his father’s secret. Leave of absence or no, his father probably couldn’t stand to be away from the familiar sounds and smells of Casey Station #1. He’d probably been sitting around there at every free moment, playing cards, drinking coffee, shooting the shit with the guys.

  Inside he found Ben and Black Phil; they were testing the SCBA masks, inspecting for nicks and cracks in the plastic shields and tears in the rubber.

  “Young Tucker . . .” Ben breathed through his thick mask, doing his best Darth Vader impersonation as Paul approached. “Young Tucker, give in to the dark side.”

  “Hey there,” Phil said. He glanced curiously around the station, peered around the corner of the engine. “You here with your dad?”

  “Nah,” Paul said. “Just lookin’ for him. You guys seen him today?”

  Ben pulled the mask from his head, began rehooking it to its airpack. “He don’t work here anymore,” he said. “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “I thought he might be hanging out,” Paul said.

  “Nope,” Ben said. He lit a cigarette. “Last time I saw him was on TV.”

  Paul waited for the joke to follow. When it didn’t, he toed at the floor with his sneaker, tried to think of something to say. The station felt strange, empty, without his father in it.

  “Try the diner,” Phil said. “Saw him headin’ in there a couple times last week.”

  “The St. Charles?” Paul asked. He’d never actually been in the place, knew it only from the overpowering aroma of frying ham that emanated from it every time he walked by. It wasn’t a place for families, for teenagers, even for the firemen. For as long as Paul could remember it had been a hangout for old men; just a block up from the nursing home, its customer base consisted almost entirely of those residents who were still semimobile.

  He walked across the street, pushed open the door to the diner. It was a small, smoky, well-lit place. The mismatched tables were empty but for sugar jars and napkin dispensers. Only three customers sat at the counter, his father between two old men who wore nearly identical brown cardigan sweaters. The waitress, an elderly woman with arms skinny and bent as twigs, leaned lazily against the soda machine.

  “. . . didn’t know there was dark like that,” his father was saying. “It was different than smoke. In smoke sometimes you get snatches of light. But this was like —”

  “France,” said the man sitting to his left. He ground out a cigarette in a plastic ashtray. Paul noticed his hands: they shook and had a grayish hue to them, like spoiled meat. “Darkest dark I ever saw. France from a foxhole. No stars in France, not in those days. They don’t tell you that now. They don’t want you to know how dark it was.”

  “Like you could die and not know the difference,” Sonny said.

  “Exactly that,” the gray-handed man said, tilting another cigarette from his pack.

  They lapsed into silence. Sonny took a sip from his coffee mug. A plate piled with ham sat before him, untouched. In fact, Paul noticed, all three men had plates stacked with fatty ham, and all three stacks looked equally ignored. Was this really how his father had been spending his days? Sitting around with a bunch of mumbly old geezers? Where exactly was the fun in that? Paul backed slowly toward the door, bent on a quiet escape, when the waitress looked up.

  “Hi, hon,” she said.

  Three stools swiveled around, giving off a horrible chorus of squawks.

  “Hey,” Sonny said. He smiled. “Whatcha doing here?”

  “Just looking for you,” Paul said with a shrug. “I thought you might want to play ball.”

  Sonny nodded to the men on either side of him. “This is Gus,” he said of the gray-handed man. “And this is Earl. This is my son, Paul.”

  The two men scrutinized him. Earl wore thick glasses and had a Band-Aid on his earlobe. Gus had a bent, flattened nose. They didn’t smile or say anything about how good-looking he was, not like the old people at church or his friends’ grandparents. They just looked at him impassively, as if his presence were an interruption they would tolerate but not encourage.

  “So . . . you wanna play?” Paul asked uneasily.

  “Maybe later,” Sonny said. He picked up his fork. “Still working on my breakfast here.”

  “Okay,” Paul said. “See ya.” He waited a moment more, waited to see if his father would ask him to join them. Then he turned to the door, heard the stools squeak back to the counter.

  “Boy looks like his granddaddy,” Earl said.

  “You think?” Sonny asked.

  “Spittin’ image of Sam in high school,” Gus added. “I recall one summer we all . . .”

  “Cheers,” Sonny said. He raised his plastic tumbler of Coke and Paul followed suit. They were at Bonanza, squeezed into a vinyl booth. The restaurant was warm and noisy, and practically every kid in the place had a bright orange cheese mustache thanks to the nachos at the food bar. It was family night — kids under twelve paid their weight in pennies — and Paul was pleased that for the first time he would not have to step on the clown-faced scale at the checkout so his mother could fork over her handful of loose change.

  “What are we toasting?” Laura asked.

  Sonny shrugged. “Just seems like a long time since the three of us went out to dinner.”

  “All right,” she said, raising her glass of tea. “I can toast to that.”

  Sonny struggled to cut into his thick steak. His hands were almost entirely healed, but the fingernails on the index and middle finger of his left hand, after appearing normal for nearly a month, had suddenly turned black halfway to the quick. He held them off to an angle as he anchored the steak with his fork.

  “They gonna fall off?” Paul asked, nodding to the nails.

  Sonny glanced down. “Probably. Must’ve smashed ’em pretty good, I guess.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Not how I got every bruise, no.”

  Paul hesitated. He wasn’t quite sure what questions were off-limits. But his father had talked to those men about it, the men at the diner. So surely he wouldn’t mind talking about it with his own son.

  “Was it gross?” he asked.

  Sonny chewed. “Smashing my fingers?”

  “No, the whole thing.” He shook some salt on his baked potato. “The . . . the foot and everything?”

  “Paul,” Laura said. “I don’t think he wants to talk about it.”

  “It’s okay,” Sonny said. “I don’t mind.”

  Laura scooted out of the booth. “I’m getting a refill on my soup,” she said, though her bowl was three-quarters full. “Anybody else want anything?”

  “Check out the desserts,” Sonny said. When she was out of earshot he turned back to Paul. “It wasn’t really gross. I couldn’t see anything, you know, no blood or . . . or anything, really.”

  “So how’d you know where to cut?”

  “I just had to feel it out. Put this hand” — he gripped the edge of the table with his left hand — “on his shin, a little up from where I wante
d the blade to fall. I didn’t figure one hand would cut the other, you know? Then I just went on faith. So it was more surreal than gross. You know what that means, surreal?”

  “Like taking drugs?”

  Sonny nodded, forked a piece of steak. “Right. Like drinking a cup of NyQuil and then waking up a couple hours later and having to find your way to the bathroom.”

  “Did he scream?”

  “Did who scream?”

  Paul rolled his eyes. Who did he think? The Elephant Man? “Ian. You know. When you did it.”

  “Oh.” Sonny hesitated. “Yeah. Well, a little. I had to hold on to him real hard, keep him still. His adrenaline was pumping. I mean, mine too. But he was squirming all over the place.”

  “Did he cry?”

  Now Sonny set down his fork, regarded Paul curiously. “Why?”

  Paul shrugged. He’d gone too far; he could see it in his father’s gaze. “I don’t know. Just wondering.” Truth was, he liked to think of Ian Finch crying. Sometimes, when he was a little bit intimidated by somebody, he’d imagine them finding out their dog had just been run over by a car. He’d found that picturing somebody bawling a mess of snot and tears was a way better confidence boost than thinking about them wearing only their underwear, which is what they’d been taught to do in speech class.

  But it was more than that. What he really wanted was to know something nobody but his father knew, an intimate detail he could have all for himself. Ian and his father shared something he had no place in; if he could get the real story — the grisly one, the scary one, the one his father wouldn’t tell the reporters — then maybe a little piece of it belonged to him.

  “He cried a little bit,” Sonny said. “At the end. He was hurt bad, you know, and he knew it. He’d had all day to think about it, how bad it was. He was pretty shook up by the time I got to him.”

  Paul tried to imagine Ian — the lazy smirk, the hard eyes — shook up. “How’d you get him to stop being scared?”

  Sonny shrugged. “Mostly I just talked to him. Told him stories. Told him about growing up in the station, told him about you.”

  “You told him about me?” Paul asked. This was somewhat alarming. What if he’d told Ian something embarrassing? Something Ian could use against him?

  Laura sat down with a new bowl of soup. “There’s banana pudding up there,” she said.

  Sonny perked up. “Yellow or brown?”

  She considered. “I’d say grayish gold.”

  “That’s a hell of an endorsement, sweetie.”

  “Did he really pee his pants?” Paul asked. “That’s what somebody at school said.” In truth, pee was only half the story; word among the seventh graders was that down in the Neidermeyer basement Ian Finch had not only peed but also shit his pants. But Paul knew he’d get nailed if he said this in front of his mom, especially while she was eating.

  “Are you still —” Laura began.

  “How would somebody know that?” Sonny asked Paul. “You know better than to believe —”

  “That’s why I asked,” Paul said. “ ’Cause people are saying lots of things. I just wanted to get it straight. I won’t tell anybody.”

  Laura put down her spoon. “Could we maybe not talk about this?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” Sonny said, waving his hand. “You’re right. Lousy dinner conversation. What do you want to talk about?”

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Anything. Something. Something . . . else.”

  He smiled gently. “You have a good day today?”

  “Not especially,” she said. “The new basketball coach stormed into my classroom after school and accused me of grading one of his players unfairly. He apparently thinks I have it out for athletes.”

  “What player?” Paul asked.

  She blew into her soup. “Brady Fischer.”

  “Wow,” Paul said. “He’s the best player on the team. He can dunk.”

  “That’s nice,” Laura said. “Unfortunately his talents do not extend to mathematics.”

  Sonny took a slug of his Coke. “Want me to talk to him?”

  “Why would you talk to Brady Fischer? Do you know him?”

  “No, I mean the coach,” Sonny said. “I could have a little chat with the guy. You know, tell him to lay off you.”

  She set down her spoon. “Why would I want you to do that? You don’t have anything to do with it.”

  He shrugged. “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I didn’t ask you to fix it. You asked me how my day was and I was answering you. Maybe you could say, gosh, that’s not very nice.”

  “Gosh,” Sonny said. “That’s not very nice.”

  The waitress approached with drink refills. She hovered around for a moment, looked nervously back toward the kitchen, then cleared her throat. “You’re Sonny Tucker, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, Lord,” Laura said. “Here we go.”

  The waitress ripped a page from her order tablet. “Would you sign this for me?”

  “He’ll be signing a credit card receipt later,” Laura said.

  The waitress smiled brightly, missing the joke entirely. “Oh, I don’t think so. I think this dinner’s on the house. For all of you.”

  “That’s real nice,” Sonny said. He took her slip of paper, scrawled his name.

  “Well, we’ve officially arrived,” Laura said, after the waitress had scurried away with an armful of plates and bowls and Sonny’s autograph clenched between her teeth. “A free meal at Bonanza. Now if only there were a good restaurant in town . . . then we’d really get some mileage out of you.”

  Winter arrived the last day of November. No snow fell, but a brittle chill sank into the valley and the town turned silent, ghostly, eerily desolate. It happened every year. When it snowed, there were things to be done: driveways to clear, hills to sled. But the cold, just the bitter, unyielding cold, drove people inside their homes and inside they stayed until something snapped. This was Paul’s favorite time of the year. He’d bundle up and take long walks through the hushed streets of downtown, pretending he was the only survivor of war or plague, that he had only his own wits and courage as means of survival. He liked playing sports in this weather too, liked the feeling of being hot in the cold, of working up a sweat until even in a sweater he was burning up. He’d inherited this from his father, and often on the coldest days of the year the two of them would play basketball in the driveway until their fingers turned numb. But this Saturday morning, again, his father wasn’t at home. Who could say where he was? Maybe having breakfast at the St. Charles Diner, comparing darknesses with the old men who’d spent their youth with Captain Sam.

  Paul had been outside shooting for about a half hour — using the garage door to feed himself passes in his father’s absence — when he caught sight of Ian Finch gimping down the street toward their house. The street was deserted, motionless, and it was a surprise to see movement of any kind, much less movement in the dark, slouched form of Ian Finch. Paul stopped mid-shot, gripped the ball, blackened from the tarred driveway, tight in his hands, and watched Ian’s gradual approach. He wasn’t limping, not exactly. His left leg was just a bit slower on the step than his right, as if he had a pebble in his shoe or a blister on his heel. He wore a tattered black trench coat and a black wool hat that was pulled down to his eyebrows. When he reached the house, Ian stopped at the foot of the driveway and took a cigarette from his coat pocket. His hands were bare and bright pink.

  “Hey,” Paul said.

  Ian shielded his silver Zippo against the wind and lit his cigarette. “Sonny around?”

  “Nope,” Paul said. He spat on the driveway. Who did Ian think he was anyway, coming to their house, even their neighborhood? It was one thing for him to hang out with his father somewhere else, another town, but this was their territory. Right now one of their neighbors was probably calling the police, reporting a criminal (the telltale trench coat and black wool cap) creeping down the l
ane.

  “Where’s he at?”

  Paul twirled the ball in his hands. “Wha’dya want?”

  “Little cold for shooting baskets, ain’t it?” Ian asked, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

  “I guess it depends on the person.”

  Ian smirked. “Never too cold for super jocks, huh?”

  Paul dribbled the ball once and then rocketed his fiercest chest pass straight at Ian’s throat. Ian caught it clean but nearly lost his balance, had to plant his good foot behind him to keep from tumbling backwards.

  “Take a shot,” Paul said, although — at the end of the driveway — Ian was thirty feet from the basket.

  Ian took a drag, then flipped his cigarette into the street. “What do I look like? Michael Fucking Jordan?”

  Paul fumbled for something cutting to say, but — in the heat of the moment — relied on the old standby. “You chicken?”

  It didn’t work, not by a stretch. Instead of looking offended Ian appeared only mildly amused. He smiled crookedly and rolled the ball lazily back to Paul. “You’re a piece of work, jocko,” he said. “Anyways, I thought you were a football player. Don’t you know basketball’s a nigger game these days?”

  Paul swept up the ball and pivoted back to the basket, lofted an air ball five feet shy of the rim. He was shaking, although he wasn’t cold. Nigger. Jesus Christ, there were words you just didn’t say. You could say shit and fuck and even the occasional cocksucker, but you didn’t say nigger, not even to your friends, not even as a joke. He wished his father were there in the driveway to hear this — surely he would have sent Ian sprawling to the pavement, dummy foot and all.

  “Use your wrists,” Ian said.