Grayson's Knife

by Russell H Aborn

  It’s a bright, unseasonably warm March morning and all stages of life pass by on the street below. Mothers push strollers carrying big headed toddlers; preteen boys ride Stingray bikes, tossing footballs back and forth and hollering at each other, on their way to play tackle in the sand on Wollaston Beach; old cars with teenaged drivers roll by, windows down, volume up, sharing the thump with one and all, like it or not. Sixteen-year-old Rosalind from the house next to Joe’s backs her father’s Chevy out of the driveway an inch at a time. When she finally straightens it out on the street, her father is on the passenger side. His posture and the visible side of his face would lead you to believe someone has a gun to the back of his head.

  “Rosalind got her learner’s permit?”

  “Yes, she only had to take the written a couple of times, God love her.”

  Joe McCarthy has solved his hose problem and is now out in the front yard rinsing his storm windows. He’s also turning and aiming the hose on the louder teen drivers, hitting their cars with a stream of cold water as they race by. One Camaro screeches to a stop, then backs up to McCarthy’s front yard. The driver slams the transmission into park, and he and the passenger throw open their doors. Grayson jumps up, opens the window, ready to tell the guys in the car to back off when he sees Vinny Santoro, a thirty-year old neighbor and father of three girls under ten, trot over to McCarthy.

  Up in the bedroom, Ma says, “Oh, oh.”

  “Those guys better get back in their car,” Grayson says. “Vinny’ll slap them silly.”

  Down on the street, Vinny holds his hands up in the ‘stop’ position.

  “Hey fellas,” he says. “That was an accident. He didn’t mean anything.”

  The young guys hurl curses from the car toward Joe McCarthy, deriding him for his advanced age, lack of hair, and baggy pants as McCarthy looks at them innocently and sprays the cellar windows at the base of his granite block foundation. The boys continue to issue invective, until, at some point, it violates Vinny’s sense of what is proportionate. Vinny takes the hose from the old guy and points it at the driver and walks toward the car, shooting water at the driver and into the front seat of the Camaro.

  “But now, this, this is definitely not an accident,” Vinny says, advancing. “Keep going, you frigging clowns.”

  The doors close and the car speeds off. Joe McCarthy raises his right fist and shakes it mightily at the departing villains, a flamboyant gesture he’d probably seen in a silent movie when he was a young man.

  “God help us,” Ma says. “That McCarthy is a crazy old bastard.”

  Grayson laughs, and Ma, though not exactly sure what is funny, laughs too, for the simple pleasure of it, delighted to have half an excuse to do so.

  Grayson looks at the clock radio on her nightstand. “Soul Train is starting, Ma.”

  “Oh, good.”

  He rolls her wheelchair in to the girl’s room, which is now furnished and arranged to allow easy access. The room where Emma, Jen and Susan had slept, fought, made up and helped each other with home permanents, was now an upstairs den with a TV, one recliner chair and a pullout sofa, should someone want to sleep over. Next to it was his old bedroom, which he’d shared with Paul and Hugh, and is now occupied by his father. Grayson had helped The Old Man dismantle the marriage bed and moved it into the room still called the boy’s room when his wife required the hospital bed that raised and lowered in sections. Now his father’s double bed, one side pressed against the wall, occupies the space where the boy’s bunk bed had been.

  Grayson pulls out the knob on the TV, and the new set sprang to life. He turns his head to look at her.

  “I can’t believe you got The Old Man to splurge on a color set,” he says.

  “I told him it was high time he spent some money on me.” She was looking at the screen, as if she couldn’t quite see it clearly. “What’s this?”

  One of the networks has interrupted their regular Saturday morning lineup of cartoons and kid shows to broadcast a shot of veteran newsman Harry Reasoner holding up a sheet of paper and talking. Harry is elbowed out of the way by a live shot of a rolling staircase being pushed up to a military airplane. Harry is saying something about “Travis Air Force Base in California” and the “Last of the POWs come home.”

  Grayson reaches to turn the channel but is stopped.

  “No,” she says. “Leave it.”

  They watch while the stairs are adjusted under the open airplane door. Soon, an Air Force pilot hobbles down the stairway. A knot of people wait on the tarmac but waiting proves too much for an adolescent girl. She bursts away from the crowd and runs toward the pilot with outstretched arms, a look of joy on her face that could be seen from the dark side of the moon. The girl is followed across the blacktop by her teen-aged brother, a younger sister, and a pre-teen boy. The mother is the last to arrive and is crying as she winds up on the outside of the group hug.

  Ma says, “Your father told me some of these men were handed Dear John letters when they got on the plane to come home. Heartbreaking.”

  “Every last man there got a Dear John letter,” Grayson says, “from everyone back here.”

  “I thought it would never end,” Ma says. “It was longer than your father’s war.”

  Grayson nods.

  “All the boys who will never come home,” she says.

  She didn’t mention Paul; she didn’t have to.

  “Ma, you ready for Soul Train? It’s started.”

  Grayson gets up and snaps one dial over to the UHF frequency and then slides another dial to Channel 38.

  Soul Train host Don Cornelius is trying to coax a few words out of a couple of wildly dressed young guys who appear to be in shock, maybe because they are talking to Soul Train host Don Cornelius. One of the young men throws worried glances at the camera as if concerned the camera might actually be a rocket launcher.

  Grayson stretches out on the couch with his hands folded on his stomach and during commercial breaks tells her he had recently visited two of his three sisters, he is putting together a softball team, might grow a mustache, and wishes he could buy a puppy, all of which is just fine. What he says doesn’t matter, what she needs is the comfort of his voice.

  Grayson sits up straight and pays attention when Don Cornelius introduces, “The Mighty Al Green.”

  Don Cornelius disappears, replaced by the performers on the stage, and the kids in front of it, seen from up high and far away. The band kicks in with a flourish of horns and the kids begin to move. As the music revs up, the picture on the screen switches to a shot from the left-hand side of the stage, where in the corner of the screen, a black woman stands behind two giant conga drums, smacking the tops with cupped hands, steadily. She has a big kerchief draped over her head, worn like a woman at Mass in the 1950’s. Though it doesn’t cover her facial features, the kerchief obscures them somehow. She is wearing a black suede track suit with a silver chain running down the length of her leg. She set the beat but soon only Al Green is on the screen.

  Al Green is wearing a vest and bright yellow pants, and he has one arm in a sling, and carries long-stemmed roses in his injured hand. He sings “Here I Am,” easily, and sounds as good, or maybe better than, his recording of it.

  “I have trouble understanding his words,” Ma says. “But I feel his passion.”

  “Oh, yeah. The band is great, too. I wish they’d show the woman on the conga drums again. She looks like she was chiseled out of stone, like a mysterious goddess, or something. I don’t know.”

  “Mysterious? Do you mean pretty?” Ma says.

  “Yes, but not just that. I don’t know how to say it. I wish they’d show her again so I can figure it out.”

  But there are mostly shots of Al Green. At times he dances in a conscious but not self-conscious way. Grayson looks carefully at close ups of Al’s eyes and face for signs of booze or dope, but there are none he can see. Seated at the drum kit behind Al Green is an intense, skinny, cock-eyed black guy with a
short haircut and a thin face. His eyes are, at all times, locked on Al Green, and the drummer beat the skins in the same pattern, again and again and again, as he stares, one eye is filled with love, and the other eye murder.

  But Al Green dances like he knew he could never die, not really, and there are moments when Al Green is being moved, almost ecstatically, but then he would come back to himself and resume what Grayson could only think of as an unselfconscious performance. It is electrifying to see someone dance like this because Grayson couldn’t even imagine letting go like that, whether drunk, sober, alone, and never mind in company.

  “Wow,” Grayson says.

  “He is really good,” Ma says.

  The kids dancing in the front of the stage look like they were on the edge of letting go, too. There are far more kids with eyes closed, and they are moving more idiosyncratically than Grayson has ever seen. It is difficult not to be spirited away by Al Green, the music, the beat and what Grayson can only think of as the drama of what is happening on the screen.

  “Here I am, baby, Lord, have mercy, come and take me,” Al begs. He begs one more time, and then he demands. “Come and take me!”

  “Oh,” Ma says.

  As the band plays Al Green dances, whoops and capers back and forth. He begins to hand out roses to the kids in front of the low stage. Occasionally Al Green closes his eyes and becomes the beat, but only for a moment, as if to go longer has too great a cost. Neither Grayson nor his mother speak.

  “Good God,” Al Green sings, “Do you love me, love me, love me. Good God! Do ya love me!” He dances back and forth across the stage. A few shouts, then he slows down the band with his raised hand.

  “You may not know what I mean this evening,” Al Green says, in preacher speak. “But everybody aboard the soul train, just git aboard the soul train this evening, you don’t need no money, you don’t need no ticket.”

  “He sounds like he’s praying,” Ma says.

  Grayson shakes his head. “Who knows?”

  Then he sees that is what his mother believes. “Yeah, I think he is.”

  The camera pans the stage and Grayson sees the conga player. She is there and has the beat going, but she looks unaffected by it all, as cool as New Year’s Eve in Iceland.

  The horns wail, the man on the drums kept up a steady unchanging beat and from the corner of the stage Al Green waves and steps off. The Soul Train logo comes on and a limp whistle sounds.

  “Yow,” Grayson says.

  “My, oh my,” his mother says. “What a great number. I thought I was going to get up and dance.”

  “He is dynamite. I have that record, but Al Green doing it live is wild.”

  “Speaking of praying,” Ma says. “I’ve been praying that you’ll agree to do a few things for me.”

  “Of course, I will. What is it?”

  “I guess it’s really one thing, with three parts.”

  “It sounds complicated,” Grayson says. “Do I need a pen?”

  “Stop now, I’m serious.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I want you to go to AA, make up with Catherine, and stop blaming yourself for what happened to Hugh. It was an accident.”

  “I’m trying, Ma. Mostly.”

  “Meaning?” Ma says. “You have to do all three to get any one of them fixed permanently. One or two out of three won’t work.”

  “Football meant everything to him,” Grayson says. “And I took it away from him.”

  “You’re his brother, you wouldn’t hurt him on purpose,” Ma says. “Did you mean to do it?”

  “I know. You’ve said that,” Grayson says. “I try not to think about it. Not anymore.”

  “He doesn’t blame you,” she says.

  How was it that his mother did not know her sons? How is it that a woman can give life to a boy, bear that boy, feed him from her flesh, keep him within the sound of her voice until he’s grown, and yet not know him? Or did only she truly know her sons, and know them better than they knew each other and themselves?

  “You said you’d do it,” Ma says. “Will you promise?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Promise.”

  “Promise,” he says.

  “I see your face,” she says. “I mean before I die.”

  “Ma. Stop that.” He stood up.

  “Sit down. I am going to die, and it’s all right. I can’t say I’m ‘ready,’ but I know I will be when the time comes. But I want to see you do these things first.”

  “Good. Wait until I do.” He rubs the palms of his hands together. “That’s a nice loophole for both of us.”

  “Be careful you don’t hang yourself in that loophole,” Ma says. She’d always had a sharp tongue when pushed, and still did. “Do I have to get mad at you?”

  “No, Ma. I’m sorry. I’ll take care of it. Be a little patient.”

  They adjourn to their metaphorical corners and watch Soul Train for a while longer, but The Mighty Al Green wore her out and she falls asleep in the chair. In daylight she could drop off quickly and easily; she’d sleep on and off now until late evening. Most nights she’d lie awake in the dark, listening to Larry Glick on the radio.

  Grayson hears the steps squeak and a few seconds later his father comes into the room. The Old Man sits in an armchair and they talk quietly about Yaz and the Red Sox. If Grayson wants to avoid the AA jive he has to stay on his toes. When the conversation begins to slow, Grayson moves rapidly to other topics, safe topics, like politics, war and religion. The Old Man can spot the smallest opening and race through it, turning an innocent remark about the weather into a tale of winos in winter. Many are the trolls pulled from under a bridge and into a meeting by a hazy memory of free doughnuts, but not all who are called by the pastry are chosen by the higher power to live clean, dry lives, and those that are give thanks to the program, the program, the program.

  His mother is snoring softly in her chair.

  “She’s been asking me if I think you’re going to come around soon,” his father says.

  “Yeah, I’ll stop by again, soon.” Grayson looks at the clock radio and gets up. “I got to run. I’ll be back in the next few days, okay?”

  “Yeah,” his foiled father says, a note of resignation in his voice. “Okay.”

  As he is leaving the room, his mother says, “Michael?”

  “Yeah, Ma?” He goes over and kisses her good-bye.

  “I had a dream that Al Green was praying for you.”

  “Well, God knows I can use it,” he says.

  He kisses her again and then flies down the stairs, light footed now, loving both his parents with a crazy love; he was happy as hell to be leaving, even as he already missed them. No longer the giant figures of his childhood, they’d gotten smaller as he’d gotten bigger and seeing them is like visiting his old grammar school and stooping to use the water fountain he once had to drink from on tiptoes. Watching them age faster and faster each year is painful, although he loves them all the more. He wants to save them from old age, sickness and death, and if he can’t, he can’t sit there and watch. He isn’t man enough. He feels terrible about not spending more time with them, and knows one day he’ll feel much worse, but, right now, this is about all of the love he can stand.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Just before 6PM Saturday evening, Grayson wheels the GTO into the parking lot at The Harvest Restaurant. The early evening sky is dimly lit, but even in mid-March there is a shade of deep blue high in the western end of the sky as the planet rolled on toward the longest day. He did a quick spin in the lot, looking for Catherine’s old LeMans. She works every Saturday night.

  The waitresses who came in before noon went home at six, run ragged during the ‘Feed the kids for a dollar,” special that ran from 3PM until 5:30 PM. Catherine had worked that shift but there was no money in it, so she preferred nights. The kid’s meal cost a dollar and for that they got a hot dog, a carton of milk and unlimited amounts of macaroni & cheese and rolls. Par
ents in their twenties and thirties came with their kids, most of who were under ten. Most of the families who ate at The Harvest were just now getting to where they could afford to splurge once a month or so for dinner out. This allowed them to dine out and not have to pay a baby sitter. The kids were often dressed up, and they struggled to behave, but a sibling skirmish would inevitably break out at one table, and swiftly spread across the restaurant. Catherine said once the peace has been broken, the disorder spread table to table unbelievably fast and seemed as well coordinated as a prison riot. Happily, no one ever got shanked, but many bread rolls were fired across a table. She found the kid’s fine dining experience to be great fun, but the tips were meager in comparison to the effort.

  In the early evening, she waited on old couples who liked to avoid the family scuffles. She said they, meaning the old folks, were sweet and most of them wore their hats all through dinner. They ordered Manhattans, left them unfinished, took almost the whole meal home in a doggie bag, and proudly dispensed tips. Shambling out, the old men would often alert her that they left cash laying there on the table, cash that some klepto might grab, if she didn’t get to it quick.

  He knows one thing for certain: The baby she carries is his. She’d dumped him January first, and based on his crude calculations, if she is finding out now that she was pregnant, she has to have gotten pregnant in late January, specifically January 23rd. She had come to him on the night of his mother’s stroke, and took him to bed, and besides, there was no way the Braintree dentist was going to…advance so far in just a few weeks.

  As Grayson circles again in the parking lot, he sees another one of the waitresses, trotting toward the kitchen door.

  “Suzanne,” Grayson calls.

  Suzanne Darwin was a great looking Braintree girl who had married a guy Grayson knew from around the bars in North Quincy. Suzanne was a lot better woman than Ape deserved, but Grayson thought you could say that about most women and their men.