by Brad Felver
It was dark by the time everyone left. Mark stumbled into the back room and fell asleep on the couch there. Cassidey slipped out when I wasn’t looking, which made me wonder if all her flirting was just about getting a good letter out of me, and suddenly I felt more stupid than dirty. My mother was trying to clean up, and I told her to stop, that we could get it in the morning. I fell asleep on the couch trying to think about my father but mostly thinking about Cassidey.
I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of something scraping out by my father’s grave. My brother was right about the way sound carries around here. Christ, I thought, coyotes. They’re all over these parts, buzzards on land. I dressed quickly and grabbed the twelve-gauge and eased out the back door. I walked through the tracks we had all made, and I held the shotgun at a half-aim and shined a flashlight at the grave, ready to see the reflection from those yellow eyes dart away, but what I saw was my mother. She was half in the hole and seemed to be struggling to get out.
“What the hell are you doing out here, mom?”
“Come help me,” she said.
I walked over and dropped the shotgun in the snow and climbed down into the hole with her. I had to straddle the casket in a way that didn’t feel particularly dignified for my father or for me. “Mom. Jesus, what’s going on?”
“I thought I could do it on my own.”
“Do what?”
“Just help me,” she said. “Stop with all the questions.”
“Mom.”
“Look,” she said, and I could tell she was more embarrassed than frustrated. “You’re smart. We sent you to college. So do the math. I’m old. This will be me soon. I don’t even know how you managed to pay for this casket. How did you get this one?”
“Mom,” I said, “why are you doing this now? We’ll figure it out. We always do.”
“I’m figuring it out right now. We’re not paying for two caskets.”
“Jesus,” I said, though I’m not even sure the words came out. “Has it come to this?”
“Come to what?” she asked, and I realized that it had always been like this.
I stared down at my father for a minute. She had managed to pull him halfway out of the casket, but he just hung there on the edge, his back twisted awkwardly like a hose curled the wrong direction. Together we pulled him out and then hauled the casket inside the barn and set it up on the ply where my father’s body had been, and that’s where it would sit for a couple years until my mother died. Then we went back out to fill my father’s grave in, and I told my mother to go inside, that I would take care of it.
“Look,” she said, “we all still loved him.”
“I know it that, Mom.” I started shoveling dirt on top of my father, trying futilely to avoid his face.
She arched her back and looked up at the sky. It was overcast, no stars, brutal Ohio cold, but she looked up for a long time, probably just to avoid eye contact. “I’m so glad you came back to us after college,” she said. “Your father was convinced we’d never see you again, but I told him you knew where you belonged.” She didn’t wait for a response. She walked back to the house, and in the morning we both pretended nothing had happened.
For the next half hour I tossed dirt into my father’s grave. It almost felt good, just the two of us at the end. It made me think of the time he took me walleye fishing up in Michigan, which was a story I should have worked into his obituary. I was eleven and had never been out of Ohio. We drove up on a Saturday evening and slept in the truck bed. It was a warm, clear night, and I was on a real vacation with my father. In the morning, we stopped at a small station. “I forgot to dig for night crawlers,” he said. “What will we do?” I said, worried we would have to go home, and he said, “I’ll figure something out.” He went inside the station for a long time. Then he came out, muttering to himself, and dug his hands into the seat cracks and the glove compartment of the truck. When he didn’t find what he was looking for, he pulled his Case knife out of his pocket and looked at it longingly, and for a minute I worried he was going to do something crazy. It had been his father’s knife, and one day I hoped it would be my knife, but that would never happen. He stomped back into the station, and a few minutes later, he came out with a small tub of night crawlers. Had he robbed them? I wondered until we reached the shoreline, but the water of Lake Erie was so green and beautiful, so immense, that I soon stopped thinking about it.
We sat at the edge of a long concrete pier, and we fished together. The sun was nice, and the breeze was nice, and I had the whole day with my father. I caught four fish, two bluegills, a walleye, and a perch. We cleaned the walleye and the perch and tossed back the bluegills. My father didn’t catch anything at all, which was a point of pride for me. He was fishing a naked hook, of course, but I didn’t know that then, just like I didn’t know he’d traded away his knife. By the time we ran out of a bait, it was getting dark, and we needed to drive home. I’d been trolling the bottom with a treble hook for the last hour or so, and I realized I’d gotten hung up. We switched poles so my father could try to get mine free. He yanked and twisted, pulled on the line, but it wouldn’t come free.
I reeled his line in and saw that his hook was cleaned.
“Guess they got me again,” he said.
“Sorry, dad,” I said. “I guess we’ll just have to cut mine.”
He reached into his pocket for his knife and realized it wasn’t there. Then he just yanked at my line as hard as he could, which ripped the leader clean off. He tousled my hair and we threw the poles in the truck bed and drove home, where I bragged to my mother and brother about how I’d caught fish but my father hadn’t. I was eleven years old. I had no idea that my father was the world’s quietest hero.
I finished filling in the grave and tamped down the loose soil and squatted next to him. There was no headstone, not for my father, not for anyone else, but I knew who was where.
How to Throw a Punch
There’s a guy who works down the line from you, Mick Sligo, and he’s convinced you stole the king of spades from his deck of cards. He plays euchre during breaks, and he needs that king of spades. He pokes you in the chest, hard, says you need to give it back pronto. He’s a brutish sort of guy, tattooed forearms, shaved head, mound of beer gut. He wears cut-off shirts and always manages to sweat through them until they look translucent with grease. He drives a Chevy with six wheels and tells loud jokes about Polacks.
You did not steal Mick Sligo’s king of spades, but that hardly seems to matter. You try to reason with him. What would you do with a single king of spades? It’s an odd thing to steal, no? Mick Sligo doesn’t care. His blood is up, and he’s chosen you. Find it by the end of the shift, he says. He does not say or else, does not explain what he will do to you when you do not find it.
You realize that for first time in your life, you’ll need to throw a punch. Mick Sligo cannot be reasoned with. He’s a hulking barbarian, and you can hardly blame him for choosing combat over diplomacy. You think of your wife and three-year-old daughter at home, asleep. You moved to second shift when she was born so you could see them during the day. But you ended up on the same team as Mick Sligo. Your wife won’t approve of violence, but she’ll help ice you down when you get home, hopefully your knuckles, but probably your jaw.
You need to know that this probably won’t end well. You shouldn’t punch guys who have lots of tattoos. You shouldn’t punch guys who are more than a head taller than you or a foot wider than you. You shouldn’t punch guys who seem too eager. You shouldn’t punch guys with fighter nicknames: Snake, T-Rex, Bomber, Ninja, Mick Sligo.
If you have any say, it’s better to punch guys who wear things like this: bow ties, braces, top hats, eye patches, prosthetic arms. Punch guys who have lots of facial piercings. Punch guys who’ve just eaten a big burrito. Punch guys with chronic diarrhea.
But in your case, the fight seems inevitable. You’ll have to punch Mick Sligo. You should know that you’ll look ridiculou
s throwing a punch at first. Everyone does. You’ll swing too hard, end up falling on your can. You’ll tweak your wrist. You’ll miss by two feet. Think of the time when you were sixteen at the turnabout dance, and Marla Wolters let you take her bra off one-handed; it will be that awkward.
So you need to practice before the fight. Head to the bathroom during every line stop. Go into the handicapped stall. Start by spreading your legs to shoulder width. Then scissor them so they’re catty-cornered, left in front of right. This distributes your weight the right way to keep you from falling on your can. Practice bouncing your weight from your back leg to your front leg. That’s where your power comes from. You see lots of those schmucks with muscles growing all over their arms and necks like tumors, jerks who swing with only their shoulders. These guys are idiots. Never took a physics class. Real power comes from your hips and your legs. It’s technique, all of it. Practice swinging like this: Two jabs and an uppercut. Two jabs and an overhand right. Two jabs and anything. Those jabs set everything else up. They don’t need to connect; they just need to change his posture. And when they do, you flatten him.
You want your knuckles to connect, not the hairy part of your fingers. That’s a good way to dislocate a finger. Keep your wrists locked tight. Don’t bend them at all or they’ll crumple. Punch into the meat of your hand for practice. Your knuckles should go deep into it. It should start to bruise. Do this over and over. Let Mick Sligo see you do this. Do not make eye contact with him all night. Do not look at him when his back is to you. He could turn around at any moment. Focus on what you must do, which is punch Mick Sligo hard enough that he’s convinced you did not steal his king of spades.
When the moment comes, do not partake in pre-fight antics. Do not tell Mick Sligo, “Bitch, I’m gonna to drop you like a B-52.” Do not bump chests. Do not say mama jokes. Walk directly up to Mick Sligo, scissor your legs, torque your hips, and pop him in the temple.
This is the most important rule of throwing a punch: always get the first punch in. Street fighting is not pugilism; it’s a race. Most people have never been hit in the head. It rattles your damn bones. The earth tilts on its axis and goes fuzzy. You feel incapable of basic thought. Scientists did a study and found that even twenty minutes after head trauma, subjects could not do basic long division or identify secondary colors (fuchsia, magenta, puce). You must do this to Mick Sligo. Even if he recovers, you got that one punch in, and that’s something. Make him forget puce.
At the end of the shift, Mick Sligo will look down the line at you. His cut-off will be translucent, his chest hair underneath clinging to it like tiny, fibrous worms. You will feel his eyes on you for several moments before you decide to look up and meet them. When you do, they will look mean and hungry, as if you are the porterhouse that he is rearing to eat. But you will stare straight back. Perhaps you will even nod at him. Perhaps you are feeling particularly roguish, and you wink. Perhaps you hope to be remembered for a dash of bravado, which is a perfectly natural wish.
Regardless, you will eventually turn away, grab your cooler, and head toward the exit. You will feel a commotion behind you, a growing crowd of interest. You will feel Mick Sligo back there also. It is a long walk, back upstairs, across the bridge that spans the line, past the air-conditioned sales offices. You will stop to clock out, and you will feel the crowd growing, growing closer to you. You will fumble with your ID and be forced to rescan it twice. You will taste something sharp and metallic, and this will be the adrenaline. Your torso will grow cold with fear.
“Hey!”
You’ll hear it behind you, not far. The unmistakable yell of Mick Sligo seeking his king of spades. But you will not turn around. You will move forward, past the security desk, through the foyer, and out into the parking lot. The night air will splash your face like cold water, and you will breathe it deeply as if surfacing. The crowd of men, twenty or so, instinctively circles around you.
And then the hand on your shoulder, twisting you around. You know it’s the meaty paw of Mick Sligo. You know what you must do. As he spins you around, you twist into position, left in front of right, scissored, and by the time you’re face to face with the lumbering Neanderthal, you’re already into your swing. The world slows for that first punch. You must enjoy this because everything seems to speed up from there. But for now, it blurs, and you are swinging, torquing your hips into him, and your middle knuckle connects square with Mick Sligo’s temple. He drops into a heap. Just instantly drops. There is no pause, no wail of pain, no wobbles like a Jenga tower. You punch, he drops. He does not move. He lies there like an oversized trash bag full of yard waste.
For a moment, all will go quiet. The crowd will stare at Mick Sligo, wondering if he will get up and take his revenge on you. It was not supposed to happen this way, even you know this, and the onlookers seem confused. But Mick Sligo does not get up.
You’ll probably want to stand over him at this point, spread your legs, and puff your chest like a marauding Spartan. You’ve certainly earned the right. But you should also know that such an action is perhaps the start of something else entirely. This is the last thing you need to know about throwing a punch: it’s addictive. Once you learn how to do it, you want to do it often. The desire to throw a punch will soon overtake its rare necessity. You feel it already, don’t you? You’ll feel it from now on, during every conversation, like a pistol burning to be loosed from its holster.
Unicorn Stew
Bev and me, we’re cooking up some unicorn stew in a trash can and punching each other. We have a sign and everything, silver spray paint on plywood, so any other craphead kids know what we’re doing. Do Not Disturb! it says, Making Unicorn Stew. It’s boiling hot outside, and we don’t want to deal with their interruptions and stupid questions, like, “Did you know that my dad killed a bigger unicorn than you did?” or “Did you use a regular gun or a plasma laser to kill the unicorn?” or “You should have made unicorn ice cream,” which isn’t even a question at all.
The stew has other things in it besides unicorns. Like potatoes, because without potatoes it’d be soup, not stew. Also Fruit Roll-Ups and tartar sauce because it does need some seasoning. Bev steals all of it from the store, and we have to tell her dad that right away, so he knows we didn’t spend any of his money. He’s already pretty sore about me staying with them while my dad is out driving his truck. He glares at me during dinner, and all I can do is stare at his big brown mustache and think about how tough it makes him look. He says I eat too much, but I always make sure to eat a little less than Bev does. “We don’t have money for you little piss-heads to be wasting it on your dumb piss-head games,” he’ll say about our unicorn stew. But then Bev will promise him that we didn’t pay for anything. We boosted it all from the packie. The problem is that Bev’s dad doesn’t usually believe people, so he might still get rough. He might still thwack our knees with the little flashlight he carries on his belt.
We drop in the ingredients, and then we punch each other. “Potato incoming!” I shout and then sock her in the shoulder. Lemon-Lime Kool-Aid incoming! she shouts and hits me in the thigh. Pepperoni log!—punch. Creamed corn!—punch. We go on like this for a long time until the trash can is pretty full. We keep adding water from the garden hose. It’s so hot out we’re both sweating like crazy people. It’s that wet sort of heat, the kind that makes it hard to breathe. I want to peel my sweaty shirt off, but I don’t because Bev has to keep hers on, Bev being a girl.
The reason we punch each other is to make bruises. Bev gets them from her dad, who doesn’t like cigarette smoke or C-minuses for spelling “besiege” wrong. He mostly leaves me alone, but I get my bruises from seventh-graders, soccer players with shaggy bowl cuts, who wait for me in the little hallway by the cafeteria and don’t think I should have red hair or pigeon-toes unless I want to be a major league faggot. Bev and me are only in the fifth grade, and we can’t do much about it. So we make new bruises on each other, and they mix in with the old ones, and then we don
’t know where any of them came from. Bev’s a head taller than I am, like most of the girls in our grade, and she hits hard, but I don’t admit this or complain about her sharp knuckle punches because I’m the one getting the better bruises, after all.
Bev’s mom is sitting in her broken car, on the street, smoking and listening to the Sox game. I think she’s watching over us too. It has to be about a million degrees inside that car, but there she is. Bev’s dad won’t have smoke in the house since he says he wants to quit, and what Bev’s dad says goes. He works across the river at the Necco Wafer factory and always smells extra sweet, like he maybe has a bunch of cotton candy in his pockets. Sometimes he’ll bring home a sack of little heart-shaped candies, the ones rich kids put in Valentine’s Day cards. But he has the crummy, messed up ones with mistakes in the lettering where the machine marked them all wrong or off-center or something. I guess they can’t sell those, so he steals some and brings them home. Most say dumb crap. Don’t even look like real words. Some are kind of close—Luove yo, Cute tie, So Buel! You have to use your imagination. My favorite was one that was probably supposed to say Love Bird but ended up all mashed and crooked, so it looked kind of like Lve Tird. Bev likes the one we found last year. We think it was supposed to be two different hearts that said Be Good and Lover Boy, but they got blended somehow and so it sort of looks like God Lover!
Mostly, though, we just eat the little candies up until our stomachs are all bloated, like we drank way too much root beer. Then we shoot the rest at each other with slingshots and call each other love turd and God-lover. Little heart bullets, and boy, do they leave marks.
So Bev’s mom sits in the car and smokes and listens to the Sox game, even though it’s hot enough to make your face melt off. And the Sox are almost definitely losing again. We can hear that grumbly radio voice echo every time the other team knocks a hit. Sometimes she looks over at us and shakes her head, probably thinking that we should be making broccoli casserole instead of unicorn stew.