Keepers

by Gary A Braunbeck

  Right here. This moment.

  This touch, this promise, this breath.

  The last good night of my life.

  A few weeks after our excursion to the Keepers facility, my father went into work drunk off his ass (which no one ever knew), fell into his press, and was killed instantly. When she hung up the phone after getting the news, my mother sat down as if every bone in her body had dissolved. She pretty much stayed like that for the next two months, with the exception of the funeral and a trip to the doctor for sedatives.

  For my part, I wasn’t surprised. Dad’s drinking had gotten progressively worse over the last few years. It was only a matter of time before something terrible happened.

  Don’t misunderstand, I loved him quite a lot, and I cried for three days solid after his death, all too aware of the empty spaces in the house and my life and the world where he should have been but was no longer.

  Beth and Mabel were there every step of the way; from going with me to identify his body (what was left of it) at the morgue until I guided Mom’s hand to toss the dirt down on the coffin lid, they were there.

  I walked out of the cemetery completely emptied of feeling. This was not the world I had grown used to. Dad wasn’t here, so this was another planet, an alien landscape, something out of a book or fantasy film. In the real world Dad would be bitching about dinner being overdone or the rain-delayed ball game or how I wasn’t doing anything with my life. Sure, he got on my nerves and embarrassed me sometimes and I don’t know that I ever much liked him, but I did love him and now would never have the chance to make sure he understood the difference. I should have said something to him sooner, should have found him the morning after I overheard him talking to Mom and asked him to tell me about his Downtown Sundays as a child, and I should have listened, and I should have smiled, and I should have been able to recognize my duty within those austere and lonely offices to tell him that I understood, and that I loved him.

  The luncheon afterward was organized by a group of volunteers from St. Francis de Sales (the parish to which all my family belonged but whose church none of us had stepped into for over a decade until this day); the ladies had set up tables and refreshment stands in the new cafeteria of the grade school located right next door to the church. I was tired, I was sad, and I was hungry, but I couldn’t yet face the well-meaning friends and family members with their sincerely felt but empty-sounding platitudes, couldn’t look at the bowls of potato salad and platters of lunch meat and trays of homemade brownies, couldn’t stand the smell of the freshly brewed coffee, couldn’t sit beside Mom and watch her try to eat while an army of mourners passed by the table, each of them compelled as if by holy proclamation to put a hand on her shoulder and then mine as they made their way over to the baked beans or that great-looking apple cobbler that was disappearing way too fast.

  As we were driving back toward the church, Mabel mentioned in passing that she was out of cigarettes, and I grabbed the opportunity for a reprieve.

  “Drop me off on the square,” I said. “I’ll run into the Arcade News Stand and buy you some.”

  The Arcade—a small, enclosed group of shops and restaurants that has been part of Cedar Hill since before I was born—was perhaps a ten-minute walk from St. Francis. I could get Mabel’s smokes, then go over to Fifth and Main, cut up to Granville Street, and be at the church before the first pot of coffee was empty. Everybody wins: Mabel gets her smokes, Mom gets a few minutes without my moping at her shoulder, and I get fifteen or twenty minutes alone.

  No one argued with me about this, no one said my place was at the church, or that I was being selfish, or that it might seem thoughtless to other mourners in attendance. I loved all of them even more for this.

  I was dropped off across the street from the Old Soldiers and Sailors Building. I stood there staring at the structure for a moment after they drove away. It seemed to me now that, thanks to Whitey, I shared a little-known secret with this place; down there, somewhere, stood a wall with the names of some of Vaudeville’s Greatest written on it, and what was before to me just an old hulk of an abandoned theater now seemed so much grander. I wished I could have gone in and seen that wall. Maybe I’d come back and try sometime.

  I went to the Arcade and got Mabel’s smokes, but as I was getting ready to head on over to Fifth and Main I realized just where I was and what I had a chance to do.

  On Downtown Sunday my dad went to the movies (either the Midland or the Old Soldiers and Sailors Building, they were right across the street from one another); then he’d get some candy or comic books afterward (the Arcade News Stand had been in the same place for fifty years); and then the old men sitting on the steps of the building on the corner.

  Which meant the site of the old Farmer’s Building and Loan.

  Less than two blocks away.

  Without realizing it, I had already walked two-thirds of the same route my dad had covered every Downtown Sunday when he was a child.

  It wasn’t exactly like following in his footsteps, and it wasn’t as if he’d known I’d overheard him that night or would ever know now what I was about to do, but I’d just been given the chance to honor his memory by retracing his steps through one of his best memories.

  How could I not walk over there?

  It would be nice to say that I saw the square in a completely different light, much as I had the Old Soldiers and Sailors Building, but the truth was this area of Cedar Hill looked and felt just the same to me as it had any of the hundreds of times I’d walked these streets; tired-looking though dependable brick- and wood-fronted buildings, some with shingled roofs, some with aluminum, others—old war-horses who’d stood the test of time and the seasons and were damned proud of it so why change now—still sporting thick layers of tar paper over two-by-fours: the sturdy, inoffensive banality of a small Midwestern downtown. Nothing about its current state, nor the way it existed in my own childhood memories, made it special.

  What did make it special was knowing that, back there, just over that way, fifty or sixty years ago, the child who would grow up to become my dad had come along this exact path, walked past many of these same storefronts, and had probably used the same crosswalk I was approaching.

  Maybe this could serve as some small gesture of thanks.

  I passed the Hallmark store, the shoe store beside it, and was moving toward the crosswalk when a man in his thirties who’d been walking ahead of me suddenly veered to the right and kicked a small cat that had been pacing him for a few yards. The cat wasn’t being pushy or annoying, wasn’t running figure-eights between his feet as he tried to move along, it was just walking beside him, minding whatever passed for its own fuzzy business, when this jerk, for no apparent reason, decided to swing around and drop-kick it into a doorway.

  The cat reeled ass-over-teakettle, spitting out one of those uncanny, almost macabre screech-yowls of pain and fear that you can feel all the way in the back of your teeth, then hit the doorway with a solid whump! before spin-rolling back onto its stomach, legs splayed. It scrabbled its claws against the concrete but quickly found enough purchase to stand and shake some of the What-the-hell-was-that-about? from its stunned and wide-eyed face. It narrowed its eyes, licked a corner of its mouth, gave the tiniest of shudders, and then released a thin, dinky meep noise so full of confusion and physical hurt that I was ashamed to be a member of the human race in its presence. It looked up at me and blinked as if to ask: Did I offend? Please don’t hurt me. I’ll give you rubbies.

  I walked toward it, slowly, then knelt down and held out my hand. The cat gave my fingers a perfunctory sniff, then—in obvious pain—leaned forward to rub itself against my hand, the metal tag on its collar clicking against my watch band.

  “Bad day?” I whispered to it.

  Before the cat had a chance to answer I glanced up to see where Drop-Kick had disappeared to: he was turning down an alley between two buildings near the corner of the crosswalk. He’d never given the cat a second thought
, just kicked the shit out of it to break up the dreary routine of his day and then kept going without so much as a backward glance.

  It’s good to be exposed to such naked, unself-conscious displays of compassion; it enriches one.

  I never stopped to consider that something might go wrong (whatever part of my mind that governed rationality was still wandering around back at the cemetery); I just rose to my feet and followed him double-time into the alley.

  He sauntered along, then stopped for a moment, stretched his back, and knelt down to re-tie one of his shoelaces.

  That’s when I took him.

  I ran forward, pulled back my right leg at the last moment, did a half-pirouette, and threw everything I had into the kick; my foot connected solidly—wham-o!—with his ribs, knocking him back and down in a fast blur of flailing hands and other equally befuddled body parts. The side of his skull smacked against the alley floor and for a moment I thought he might have been knocked unconscious, but then he shook head, winced, and pressed both hands against his ribs, groaning.

  I glowered over him. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that hurts?”

  “Oh, man … ow!—what the fuck’re you … oh, man … .”

  I thought I heard the soft crackle of chipped bone scraping against chipped bone; I know that wasn’t the case, but for that moment imagining that I did hear his damaged ribs whimpering under his skin filled me with a gleeful, nasty sort of satisfaction every person should feel once during their life, if only to know they never want to experience it again.

  His face reddened under a fresh wave of pain, then he pulled in a deep breath and looked at me. “I’m gonna fuck you up, asshole.” And he began to stagger to his feet.

  The smart thing to do was run.

  So, naturally, I just stood there.

  He slipped, his back pressed against the wall, then he caught his balance and shoved forward with one of his hands; as he did this he looked quickly up and down the alley to make sure there weren’t going to be any witnesses to the plague of biblical proportions he was about to unleash on my face; left, right … and then a slow double-take: Huh? What the—?

  At both ends of the alley, sitting almost unnaturally still but with oh-so-attentive eyes, a group composed equally of dogs and cats of various sizes watched us with stark, unblinking interest. There must have been over a dozen animals in all.

  Drop-Kick had almost fully pushed himself away from the wall when I shot out a foot and kicked his leg from underneath his bulk, sending him crashing ass-first to the ground one more time.

  I stared at him, parted my hands before me—Well?—then turned and walked out toward the crosswalk.

  The animals at this end of the alley moved so I could pass, but none of them seemed in any hurry to leave.

  At the corner, the injured cat—now moving a bit more steadily—came up to me and rubbed its face against my leg. I smiled at it, thought about just picking it up and taking it home with me, then looked up when I heard the signal click over to “Walk.”

  I stopped with one foot off the curb.

  Across the street at the Farmer’s Building and Loan, an old hound dog sat on the top concrete step staring directly at me.

  I knew this wasn’t the same hound dog from my dad’s childhood, I did, really, but there was an odd moment between seeing it and allowing its presence to fully register when I thought, Maybe … ?

  I shook it off but didn’t move to cross the street.

  I looked down at the cat by my leg. It blinked at me, seemed to outwardly sigh, then turned its head in the dog’s direction.

  From the top of the steps, the dog looked from me to the cat, and for the next few moments I just kept moving my gaze between them; the dog, the cat, the dog, moron with his leg cocked up in the air.

  I pulled my foot back onto the curb just as the dog released a short, sharp bark. The cat, in response, moved its head up and down. They looked at each other once again, the dog licked its nose, and the cat blinked one eye.

  Winked, rather.

  The cat winked at the dog:

  This meeting is concluded and the board has decided that rubbies were, indeed, the proper course of action under these circumstances …

  The dog barked again, three times, much louder, and the cat released a long, high yowl, this one of the “Just-letting-you-know-I’m-here” variety.

  When I looked at the cat now, I noticed for the first time the small blue plastic tag attached to the back of its ear.

  In the back of my brain, something fumbled for a light switch and cleared its throat: Ah-hem. Hello. Over here. Anybody?

  Where did I know this from?

  Across the street, the hound dog lay down, its great floppy ears spreading out on either side of its head. I could not make out whether or not it also had a blue tag attached, but that thought fled with its tail between its legs as soon as I heard the guy back in the alley cry out.

  The animals had moved into the alley and surrounded him. He was still ass-down against the wall, and a couple of the larger dogs—one of them a seriously grim-looking German shepherd—loomed on either side of his head, their noses so close to his ears I wondered if he could hear anything besides their wet, heavy breathing. The rest of the animals pressed near his sides and legs; every few seconds one of them would reach up and gently swat him with a paw, seemingly just to watch him jump or hear him yelp.

  He saw me looking and said (not loudly, but with great panic nonetheless): “Hey, buddy … no hard feelings, okay? Could you”—He jumped as the German shepherd, with a low snarl, nuzzled his face for an instant—“gimme some help here? Call the cops or the fuckin’ pound or Wild Kingdom or someone?”

  Though there was nothing overtly threatening in the way the animals stood, there was no doubt in my mind that this guy was going to be in a lot of painful trouble if they decided they didn’t like him; at least half of them, as far as I could see, had a small blue plastic tag attached to the back of their ear.

  Hello? Anybody home? (Tap-tap) Is this thing on?

  The cat nudged my leg again, then growled. Not at me; at the animals in the alley.

  I remember this next very clearly: The animals, as one, turned their heads to look at the cat, the cat gestured with its head toward the hound dog across the street, and as soon as the animals’ attention was on the dog, it rose from the steps and crossed the street to take its place on my other side.

  It sat there for a moment, then yawned, shook itself, and licked my hand.

  The animals in the alley focused their full attention on me. If they’d had arms, those arms would have been parted before them, silently asking: Well?

  Life gives you many odd and marvelous gifts on a daily basis, if you take the effort to notice: the tinny, distant chords of music from an approaching ice-cream truck; the geometrically perfect formation held by a gaggle of geese as they fly overhead; being the first person in the morning to see the streetlights turn off; scanning through radio stations on a car radio and suddenly coming across a favorite, back-then song you haven’t heard or thought of in twenty years; the sound made by your teeth as they bite into a fresh apple; the scent of newly baked bread or pastries wafting from the door of a bakery; the way an attractive woman passing you on the street holds eye contact a few moments longer than is really needed … gifts. Common enough, but strange and wonderful when you catch them.

  And then there are rare moments when the odd, strange, and marvelous gifts decide to tag-team your ass: getting a phone call from a person you’ve only just thought of after many years, and finding that they’d only just now thought of you, as well, and figured what the hell; finding an old photograph that you had convinced yourself long ago you’d imagined as having existed; knowing exactly, precisely what someone is going to do or say several minutes before they do; or finding yourself in the middle of a downtown square one afternoon with a dozen animals silently asking if they should let this guy walk away unharmed or not, it’s your call.

&nbs
p; Gifts wonderful and strange and not to be questioned too much when they’re bestowed upon you.

  I almost laughed from the craziness of it, then simultaneously shook my head and waved my hands forward in a quick gesture of dismissal: He’s not worth it.

  I turned to go. The hound dog and cat where nowhere to be seen.

  When I looked back down the alley not three seconds later, Drop-Kick was completely alone. The animals had vanished as silently and as quickly and totally as they’d appeared.