All the Old Haunts Page 2

  And then his eyes fill with tears. That is Victor’s response. He continues to look straight ahead.

  Caesar never, ever. He never saw this. He had played and played it in his head … and it never came out like this.

  He hurries out, hits the revolving door like a tackling dummy, keeps on running. Probably, he has made the people in suits stare at his father even more now. Sorry. He’s sorry about that, too.

  “Damn,” Caesar screams at himself as he runs, hard, through downtown traffic without looking. “Damn, Caesar, goddammit, damn you.” Cars scream to a stop, horns yowl at him. Caesar still refuses to even look. “Damn you, Caesar,” he screams and smashes himself in the side of the head with a closed fist. “Damn you.” He does it again, harder.

  Caesar ain’t never punched nobody but Caesar.

  It’s a misperception that Caesar hates his mother. But if he did. If he did hate his mother, it wouldn’t be because she left. That would be ragtime, it’d be cheap and easy. No, if Caesar did hate his mother, like people think, it would be more for stuff like this, if he did hate her:

  Caesar has these memories of his mother, and they are all based in scent, sound, and touch. Not in sight, the way he figures other people recall their past. The one that comes back most, and it comes back nearly every day, three times before he leaves the house in the morning, is the smell of his mother getting him up and out for fifth grade one morning. Victor was asleep in the next room, lying on his back, Caesar knew, from the rumble of his snoring right through the frame of the house. Drunk Victor always slept on his back, always snored like a pig.

  That sound didn’t disturb young Caesar even a little bit, so familiar was it, like the garbage trucks on Wednesday morning. But when his mother came in and woke him with the small words close to his ear, he snapped to, felt her overwarm breath on his cheek, and reached his hands up to read her face before even opening his eyes. Caesar knew the contour of his mother’s face as if he were a blind boy.

  He watched her then as she pulled things from his top drawer, his second drawer, his closet, and laid them out on the foot of the bed, as if he couldn’t pick out his own clothes. He watched her stagger, then raise a hand to her temple as she tried to straighten up too quickly, and he hopped up to help.

  She took Caesar’s small but mighty hand, smiled, then asked him not to help. It was then he saw, the bad eyes squinted, the broken blood vessels on the cheeks, the whole-body tremble that made her look like she was freezing even as her hand practically melted his with sweaty heat.

  He dressed, and met his mother in the kitchen where she had toast and juice ready for him, and where he chewed and she watched the whole time happily, except for the few moments when she nodded there at the table. When the two of them had wrestled together something of a lunch, and found a suitable bag to carry it in, when Caesar had his small jacket on with only faint oil blotches on the collar, his mother held him at arm’s reach, checked him out, then licked her hand and started patting, wiping, beating down his wild cowlick.

  He did his best not to wince, but the smell of her, of her breath, of her hand on him, it was as if she’d taken a week-old slab of raw chicken skin out of the bucket and was smoothing out his hair with it.

  But she got it smooth. And as he went out she stood there looking at him like he was magnificent, like she had the 3-D, 4-D, 5-D virtual reality glasses that let her see Caesar like nobody else could or ever would see him. And he ran back to the door to give her a second hug no matter what she smelled like, and she stayed right there in that door frame until he was completely gone from her sight, smiling at him and waving every time he checked back over his shoulder even though her eyes could barely open and it was clear she needed badly to get back to bed, to lie with the pig and snore with him.

  So, wouldn’t anybody hate her, stuff like that? Caesar would, if he did hate her, hate her for just that kind of thing.

  The boy hardly remembers the journey. Walking to the church, entering the church. But he is sitting in the church. He certainly doesn’t remember making any part of the journey with his father. But there he is.

  Victor stands, Caesar squirms. Victor laughs a generous laugh, and the sound of it fills the cavernous building, shooting out there, rattling around.

  “You’re being blasphemous, old man,” Caesar says, scolding.

  Victor slides into the pew next to him. “You’re right,” he says, and in one sleek motion sweeps the guard cap backward off his Brylcreemed head. He crosses himself, and scoots up close enough that their shoulders are touching solidly.

  Caesar is relieved. They stare together up into the ceiling a hundred feet above them.

  They look at the ceiling the way some people look at the night sky. Only they count saints and apostles, lambs and angels, the way other people might count stars and constellations.

  Caesar doesn’t take it all too seriously, or literally, anyway, but he can enjoy it just the same, grooving on the detail of big old St. Mark with the tidal-wave beard or the flaking gold leaf of serene Mary’s halo. There is sparse lighting, set back into strategic spots up there so even with the main lights off there is a gentle wash over the scene, a truly celestial something going on.

  And it’s quiet, and it’s large, and it’s all theirs when it’s not really supposed to be. The church is open and welcoming for the masses, but there are just the two of them. Caesar has to admit he gets an extra prickle out of that.

  It’s a lot more, though, for Victor. He’s one of those seekers. Always looking for something, expecting something, trying to force something that may very well not be there. If they are looking up there together at the same thing, into the cone, the apex of this pretty ornate, pretty ancient, pretty pretty pretty building, one of them, Caesar, can be satisfied that it all means something to somebody. Even if it ain’t nothing to him but people’s hopeless spirit dreaming.

  Caesar sneaks a glance in his father’s direction. Victor’s lips are moving, with some effort, over the Serenity Prayer most likely.

  “Don’t forget to ask for the wisdom to know the difference,” Caesar says.

  The father doesn’t bother telling the son that he’s got it wrong again, that he’s confused again. He simply stands, walks away from Caesar and toward the towering mahogany statue.

  “Why don’t you strike me down … what’s your word? … Smite me. Leave my idiot son alone. You gotta ruin somebody, take me. Smite me.”

  They both listen as the words settle back down like snow, like the particles of dying paint constantly sifting from the ceiling.

  “Wasting your time,” Caesar says. “Why you waste your time so much? You’re alone. We’re alone. Nobody’s listenin’.”

  Victor stands here, no, shaking his head, no, disbelieving, no.

  “No,” he says, and he gives his little crucifix, at the end of his rosary beads, a kiss.

  “Yes,” Caesar repeats calmly.

  Victor merely, resolutely, shakes his head.

  Caesar wants to laugh at him. Can’t. He wants to boldly disagree. Can’t. Caesar has respect. Anger and respect.

  “Listen,” Caesar says in lieu of trying, “I got a great thought. We know this place better than anybody. Let’s, you and me, go get us some wine. Some sweet sacramental wine. Huh? What you think? Have a drink with me? Nobody’ll know. Nobody’ll care.” There are many things Victor could do now. Caesar is well aware. Caesar is, in fact, counting on it. He doesn’t know precisely what he’s counting on, other than Victor. He’s counting on Victor.

  Victor takes a deep, deep breath. He looks skyward once more. Lips move.

  He stands his ground. It is, after all, very much his ground.

  “Son,” he says, “Maybe you are right. I think you are not, but just maybe it’s true, and I am alone. But you’re wrong, too. You are no way, not ever, alone. Understand? My boy ain’t never gonna be alone.

  “You got me. No matter how stupid you wanna be. You got me.”

  Caesar stan
ds. Waits. He tries to fix his hard-man face, but it’s too obvious he’s fighting off a smile.

  “So, thank you,” Victor finally answers, to the wine invitation. “But when you get home … whenever you get home, I’ll be there.”

  Victor slowly, calmly, heads for the rear entrance, the main entrance, of the church.

  Caesar heads for the sacristy.

  He is halfway there, when he reaches the high bank of red-cupped devotional candles, picks up the foot-long stick match, and lights a light.

  He shakes his head, admiring, and laughing simultaneously.

  “Light one for me,” Victor says, from way far away.

  He blows out the match. “I already did.”

  “You gonna come light one for me?” Caesar asks.

  Victor has no trouble responding in the negative.

  “Nah. Save the candle for somebody who might not be going to hell.”

  That makes Caesar laugh, all the way to the sacristy. Where he stops at the door. Stops laughing. He waits, for a sign.

  “You comin’, or what?” the great voice calls from the far, far end of the church. “Boy?”

  The old voice. The boomer. The foghorn.

  Caesar answers it like a dog, like a little boy. Running running running toward the foghorn.

  CHLORINE

  THE INSTANT THE SCENT hits me, I nearly faint.

  He has always used about ten times the normal amount of chlorine. I think he wanted to burn us for daring to swim in his pool, blind us, or simply dissolve us entirely when he was finished with us.

  My head swirls with it, with the splashy sounds that go with the smells of the pool. I can see, in my head, the vapors rising off the surface of the water, white squiggly smoke lines of chemical hiss coming out of the water. In the pool house, the light-one-minute, dark-the-next pool house, dense with one white five-gallon bucket of the stuff stacked on top of another. The pool house, the tabletop within the pool house, the rafts deflated, one half inflated, the bug net, the tabletop, the incredible, incredible acrid smell of the chemicals, on top of the pool house table and underneath it. Wet bathing suits have a smell. Wet towels, piled and bunched, and stuffed, have a smell, and a taste.

  My parents don’t see me all woozy behind them. They are too zombied, marching to meet The Man.

  We find him out by the pool, of course. He’s the pool kind of grandfather. He never seemed to exist far beyond his pool, and now that he only barely exists at all, it makes sense that he only exists poolside.

  It took the third stroke to get us all here. Three strokes and you’re out, as the saying goes, but my grandad was never much for the quaint colloquial saying. He should be good and well out by now, and god help me I wish he were.

  But he’s not, he lingers, so we have to visit him, and wait on the fourth stroke, or the fifth. That would be sweet. He’d never do it though. The only reason he’s hanging on as it is is that he’s just too aware how much pleasure his death would bring. So he’s surely not going to do us all the favor of lapsing into the next world while we watch.

  I’m not greedy, though. As long as he goes, I’ll take it. As long as it brings him blinding pain and me sweet pleasure, then we’ll be exactly even, won’t we? We’ll shut our eyes together, one more time.

  “How are you feeling, Father?” Mother wants to know. That is, she asks. She doesn’t really want to know. And he’s not really her father. She’s just always called him that.

  He won’t be answering, either. The speech bit is gone.

  “He can hear perfectly well, now,” his nurse says. “Don’t let him fool you.”

  No, no, musn’t do that. Don’t let him fool you.

  There was a horse inflatable. That’s right, I remember. It was a seahorse. Fatty old seahorse. Couldn’t see your own lower half, with that fatty old seahorse on you.

  “So by all means, do talk to him all you like. I can tell the difference in him when he hears people talking to him, so he is listening, and that’s very positive.”

  Yes it is. It’s a positive thing. Grandad is all listen now, and no talk. And no nothing else.

  “How are you feeling, Father?”

  She’s at it again. That is Mom’s version of paralysis. If we were all granted advance amnesty, and could do whatever we really felt like for just one blissed-out cosmic moment, she’d beat us all to shoving the old gnarly bonebag into the pool. But she could never do that, because she is good. A very good girl. We are both good girls, bred to be good girls, from a long line of good, good girls. So we wouldn’t shove him into the pool. Grandad likes good girls who can’t shove him into the pool.

  So she asks simpleton questions that he can’t answer instead. Go, Mom.

  “Pop,” Dad yells at him, like they are finally playing the cops and robbers game he’s been waiting fifty years for. “Pop. Pop. How they treatin’ ya, Pop? They takin’ care of ya all right? Pop?”

  Pop. Pop pop pop. You’re dead.

  It is almost comical, the collective power of the assembled not-wanting-to-be-here-ness. It is, for a time, kind of fun.

  “Pop. Got a beer, Pop?” Dad says robustly. He heads for the screened-in porch, to the convenient little refrigerator that has never been without alcohol. Takes a lot of chemicals to keep a pool going. We like alcohol. “Hey,” he says, surprised.

  He does not ask if anyone else would like one. In fact, he does not return.

  “Father?” Mother says, like she’s speaking to him through a clairvoyant. “Father, it’s me, Jenny. Father, I just want you to know …”

  I switch off then. The last thing she wants him to know is what she wants him to know. It’s way more fun watching Dad watching us. It’s like a game of hide-and-seek, or kick the can. I can see him, but he won’t come out. Grinning like a sea monkey between sips of beer, he acts as if we cannot see him through the mesh of the screen. He pounds the one beer, and gets another.

  A tiny, tiny puff of August air, so small it’s got to be meant for me alone, brushes my cheek and my nose and my forehead. He is still controlling it, even if he can’t move, because whoever is caring for this unused pool is chlorinating it to his exact, excessive, evil specifications.

  It is like a drug. It is in my nostrils, hanging there, moving, up into my sinuses and my brain. It is as thorough as any of the other drugs, the ones I take because I want to, the ones I take because I have to, the ones I take because I don’t even know how they are getting into my system.

  There was a water polo set. Narrow hoops and netting floated on Styrofoam rings. The bug-net pole had an extender so long he could clean his neighbor’s pool with it.

  Cheese curls. The orange chemical powder, lodging into the wrinkled cracks of my over-soaked fingertips. The taste of chlorine and processed chemical cheddar mixed.

  Here’s a treat. We are in time for the evening meal.

  “Would you like to … ?” The nurse asks Mother, showing her the teaspoon and bowl of warm milkshake that is Grandad’s supper.

  “Oh,” Mother says as if she has been offered the ceremonial sword. Just plunge in between the fourth and fifth vertebrae … “No, oh, I mean, I’d probably just … I don’t think I could …”

  “Ha,” Dad calls, to the accompanying sound of a spritzing beer can. “Ah go on. He’ll love it.”

  Mother wisely ignores him, stammering apologies to the nurse. The nurse turns to me.

  I turn to the diving board.

  Grit. Like sandpaper on the belly. The sun so warm on days when even falling into the water seemed like an effort. Rolling over, seeing the damp cameo of me on the bleached whiteness of the springboard. Trying to count the tiny pebbly indentations in my flesh before falling back, blinded by impossible white sun.

  It was the best place, and the only place. The singular spot, off of Earth, above the water, sunning myself on the diving board like I was being suspended out over the ocean, suspended between sun and sea, just like that, just like perfect.

  It was the only
place for sunning. Nobody could ever sneak up on you there. Without sending a warning tremor through the board.

  I was always so much darker than the rest of them by the end of the summer. It was like I didn’t even belong to them.

  “Has Carl been to see you yet?” Mother asks Grandad.

  I suspect I am smiling, but I have to check anyway. I reach my hand up to touch with two fingers at my mouth. The corner of my lip is curled, up, where it is usually down. Mother is being very funny, asking him to speak, with a mouthful of cummy stuff sitting in his disabled mouth. This is very funny, though sadly Mother is unaware. Pity.

  “You are the only people who have been to visit,” the nurse says.

  My brother Carl probably hasn’t even seen Grandad since he moved away four years ago. He was eighteen. I was twelve. He could have stayed, if he cared. He didn’t.

  Grandad is not opening his mouth. The nurse tries to coax him, offering first words of common sense, telling him he will not get better unless he sticks to his prescribed program. This produces no results, so she switches to baby talk.

  “Come on then, who’s the big man now, going to eat all his lovely dinner….”

  I like this very much.

  “I think maybe we should be going, Father,” Mother says finally.

  “Yes we should,” Dad calls enthusiastically from the porch. He comes bustling through the screen door, like he’s got a very important and pleasant engagement. “Pop,” he says, “Pop, really, you’re doing great. We’ll be back again, maybe tomorrow.”

  Mother glares at him.

  “Maybe the day after,” Dad says. “We’ll play it by ear, huh?”

  “Oh,” the nurse says. “Oh, so soon? Such a short visit. He doesn’t receive many—”

  “Really,” Mother says, “I know, it’s awful, but we really must be someplace … like we said, we’ll be back. We’ll play it by ear….”

  The nurse pinches her lips tightly together, and nods. She goes back to trying to feed the old man who does not wish to be fed, by the pool nobody ever swims in.