Me, Dead Dad, and Alcatraz Read online

  Until Alex whirled around, smiling broadly at me, and poked me—harpooned me—right in the belly with an abnormally long and sharp index finger.

  “Ow,” I said.

  But he was the one who looked stunned. “I practically lost my whole arm in there, Elvin. That tummy of yours didn’t offer any resistance at all. Here, tighten up this time.”

  “Ow,” I said.

  “Whoa. Nephew, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but you could use a little work. I think maybe I showed up just in time.”

  It was my great fortune to have Frank recover his composure and his sense of humor at this point.

  “Well, I don’t know about just in time. I think maybe three or four years ago would have been just in time.”

  “Thanks, pal, you can be quiet now.”

  “Not to worry, not to worry,” Alex assured me. “We can fix you.”

  Fix me. “Fix me?” Fix me. I was not to worry, because we could fix me. Sounded pretty worrying to me, actually.

  “Sure. We can work on you, have you as dashing and strapping as your movie star friend here.”

  And this is how stupid and weak and pathetic people can be. Well, me anyway. I did a double take. Dashing and strapping. I gave it thought. Serious thought. I let this seem important and good.

  I thought about the possibility that I could look like Frankie. That had never been suggested by anyone out loud before. Be like Frankie. That, well, that would be something. That, I had to admit, would be a dream come true. A dream of many years’ standing come true. Frankie, frankly, was the most handsome, and therefore luckiest and most successful and most self-confident, guy in the world. Nobody would not want to be Frankie, because God gave Frankie everything.

  Oh right. Almost forgot. God.

  God given.

  Alex wasn’t really here to tell me I was like Frankie. He was here to tell me I was like him. It was in the blood.

  “I don’t know, El,” Frankie said. He was at the mirror in my bedroom. He was staring at himself. I was staring at himself. He started brushing his hair, which was not unusual. He had great hair. Auburn, longish, curly but not big curly, soft. It had a shine, and would catch any little bits of light, like the crystal drops off a chandelier, and flash them back in your face wherever you were to remind you, hey, I’m Frankie’s hair. It was no wonder he was brushing it all the time. I would brush it all the time if it were my hair. I think I’d brush it anyway, if he’d let me.

  “What don’t you know, Frank?”

  “About your uncle. I mean, he’s probably cool and everything, but I don’t know about that hair. You can tell lots about a guy by his hair, and that’s very suspicious hair he has there.”

  “Well, of course.” Well, of course. Look at Frankie’s hair. “Look at your hair. Everybody’s hair looks like crap next to your hair.” Except Alex’s hair really was in a whole different category. It was thin, sort of, though there were no bald spots. It didn’t move. It was wiry, but it wasn’t curly. It was like water, in that it didn’t seem to be parted anywhere or brushed in one way or another, not forward or back, not side parted and not middle. It was all texture. Stucco? Holly bush? And the color was something not found in nature. If you crossed, say, olive with peach, you’d be in the ballpark.

  “Ya, but I’m not comparing his hair to my hair. That would be unfair. I’m comparing...”

  He went on talking, and brushing, and looking at himself. But I was distracted. All of a sudden my ability to hear went haywire as my other senses became overloaded and mish-mushed. It was a combined assault of things that shouldn’t really be having anything to do with each other.

  I was smelling stuff. Food stuff, coming up the stairs from the kitchen, where my uncle was apparently making good on his claim to be a megachef. Spices and meats and sauces and starches, in mixtures foreign to me, were pulling at me like two fingers hooked into my nostrils and yanking me toward the kitchen.

  And at the same time, I was staring, at Frankie. Staring, I mean staring-staring. I watched his hair as he brushed it over and over and over again. It got softer with every stroke. It got shinier with every stroke, and...

  Lamb. There was definitely some lamb going on down there. And something pork related, and something saffron...

  He switched hands and started brushing the left side of his head with the left hand, in order to get the same symmetrical strokage happening all over, and thereby achieve that almost unnatural unity of hair. Genius hair, it was.

  It was sweet now, the aroma. No. Spicy. Oh, both together. Pungent. Rich. Very glutinous rice was being mixed with something fruity. I am not too proud to admit I was salivating. My mouth was filling like a bathtub.

  He was shaking his head now. Making the curls jump. Jump, you curls. They jumped. They settled down again. One landed out of place. Frankie raised a hand and brought it across his brow to adjust the one wayward, glowing, lock of—

  “What are you doing?” he asked, startlingly enough to make me turn away and scuttle for the door like a thief.

  “Where are you going, Elvin?”

  “I was not staring at your hair.”

  I walked right into Mikie.

  “Yes, you were,” Mike said. “I didn’t see it, but you were. You’re always staring at his hair.”

  “That’s not true,” Frankie said, coming surprisingly to my defense. “Sometimes he stares at my eyes,” he added, less surprisingly.

  “Hey, shut up,” I said.

  “Calm down,” Frank said. “I don’t mind. At least it shows you have good taste. It just gets a little spooky when it goes on too long.”

  “Shut up. It doesn’t go on too long.”

  “What are you so upset about?” Mike asked. “It couldn’t be Frankie’s hair; that looks like it always does. What’s wrong?”

  Finally.

  I opened my mouth to state my case. My case failed to emerge.

  I didn’t know what I was upset about.

  “It’s his uncle’s hair,” Frank said. “He’s afraid, now that he’s met his uncle, that he’s going to turn out like his uncle because his uncle is practically like his dad.”

  “I never said that—”

  Mikie interrupted. “The hair is a maternal issue, isn’t it? Doesn’t it come from the mother’s side of the family?”

  If this in fact was not my problem, why did I react like this...?

  “Really? Is that true? God, you’re the best. You usually know what you’re talking about, Mike, so it must be true that I won’t get hair like Alex, right? If it’s maternal issues you’re talking about, I’m your man, right? No bigger mama’s boy than me.”

  “Well,” Frank said, addressing his reflection as if the two of them were the only two beings in the room and this was a serious academic discussion about an issue of global importance, “I know hair. And I know people say that about the hair coming from the mother’s side, but I don’t buy it. How many guys have you seen whose heads look exactly like their old man’s head? Look at that guy Chuckie, on the basketball team, and his father the coach. Slapheads, the pair of them.”

  “Ah, you could be right there, Franko. Now that you mention it—”

  “Shut up,” I snapped. This was bothering me so much, especially after it was only minutes ago that I had been drifting away on a cloud of juicy meats and spices and the hypnotic rhythm of Frank brushing, brushing....

  “Hey, don’t yell at me,” Mike said. “You’re the guy who’s so obsessed by everybody’s hair. Anyway, I met your uncle on my way in. Seems nice enough. But instead of the hair, I would think there would be a lot more pressing stuff to worry about. Why’s he here? Where’s he been? And what was the big hoo-ha you couldn’t tell me about on the phone?”

  “He stole all Elvin’s money,” Frank said.

  Then the three of us migrated together toward my bed and sat there, side by side by side.

  “Did he steal from you, El?”

  “Well, not right out of my pocket, n
o.”

  “Out of his trust fund.”

  “You had a trust fund?”

  “Can you believe it, Mikie? All this time we’ve been hanging around with a Rockefeller baby and we didn’t even know—”

  “Would you let me tell this?”

  “Sorry.”

  “My father left some money. For me and my mother. But he put Alex in charge of it.”

  “Why did he do that?”

  “Because Alex is a money guy. Or at least he was, before they took away his money-guy license or whatever it is they do when you don’t do it very honorably. He did people’s taxes, and managed their finances, and made, you know, investments for them. That was his job.”

  “His other job was horse races and casinos.”

  “Franko...”

  “Sorry.”

  “So what’s the real story then?”

  I didn’t get a chance to make it sound less awful.

  “That was the real story,” Alex said from the doorway. We all whipped our heads in that direction to find Alex there, leaning and smiling and frowning at once. “My brother was dying, and he asked me to take care of money matters for his son and his wife. Then he went and died. My sister-in-law, the widow Bishop, trusted me to do a good job. I stole her money and lost every bit of it. And I stole her little boy’s money, that boy right there, and I lost every bit of that.”

  I turned away from Alex, because I didn’t like this whatsoever, and couldn’t take it. Now I could see the side of Mike’s head in the mirror as he looked at Alex, and I could see Frank face on, since he had already gone back to looking at himself. They were both riveted.

  “And so now I am here,” Alex said, “seeking redemption. From the only people who can offer it to me. Come on downstairs. Supper is ready.”

  There was almost a whoosh sound, as Alex left a big empty in his wake.

  Mike continued staring after him for several seconds.

  “Whoa,” said Mikie.

  “I hope I don’t have too many more relatives I don’t know about,” I said.

  Frankie stood up. “We better get down there. God knows what he’ll do if we’re late for supper.”

  “Holy smokes,” I said as I led the small procession to the dining room table. I said holy smokes for the traditional shock expression that it was, but also for the fact that the whole room seemed to be smoking. Not that it was filled with smoke itself, but like the room was smoked, barbecue, hickory smoked. I wanted to eat the walls.

  Ma was already seated, and Alex marched into the room and pointed at individual chairs with his ladle, indicating where the rest of us were to sit.

  “There, there, and there,” he said before disappearing back into the kitchen.

  “What are we having?” I asked Ma as I took my seat next to her. I was at one end of the table, with her on my right, the guys to my left, and Alex’s empty place staring straight at me from the opposite end seat.

  “I don’t know,” Ma said. “He wouldn’t let me help, or even see. I know the ingredients, but not what he did with them, exactly. I do know he used the microwave a lot, and the broiler and the stove top. The place was as steamy as a bathhouse, only you wanted to eat the vapors with a spoon. Since he wouldn’t let me do anything, I just sat here absorbing it. I’ve been sitting right here in this seat for the last hour, closing my eyes and lapping it up.”

  She was describing an exact dream I had had over and over.

  “You told,” Alex said as he walked through the door again with two bowls in his hands.

  “I didn’t tell anything,” she said.

  “I hope you didn’t spoil it.” He plunked the bowls in front of Ma and Frankie, then came back with two more, plunked one down in front of Mikie’s place, and then his own. Everybody was served but me, even the guy who wasn’t here yet.

  Then he came in with mine, setting down a heaving, hissing bowl of the most intense soup I had ever sat in front of.

  “Dig in, everyone,” Alex said. “It’s a little thrown together, I’m afraid, a little rushed. But it’s based on callaloo soup, something I found during my time living in Jamaica. I hope you like it.”

  “You lived in Jamaica?” Ma asked.

  Alex just nodded, then scooped a big load of soup into his mouth, watching to see that everyone did likewise.

  And it was incredible. The soup seemed to have a thousand flavors going at once. There was some crab in there, some haddock, big chunks of chicken and little ones of bacon. I recognized my old pal garlic there, and his buddy onion. And then it all became murky. I couldn’t tell what more was going on because I couldn’t slow down enough to work it out, but much more was going on.

  The crowd was unanimous about the soup. Everybody slurped and made those moaning, semiword sounds as they thanked and praised the chef without insulting him by slowing down.

  Until I did. There were big glasses of water in front of each of us, and a pitcher in the middle of the table, and good thing, too, because as I passed the halfway mark of my bowl, there was a cumulative effect coming on. It was getting hot.

  Quite hot.

  I put down my soup spoon and took up my glass. Drank half the water down, cooling the heat. I put down my glass, surveyed the crowd to find everyone eating comfortably, then picked up my own spoon again.

  Then put it down again.

  I finished my glass of water, poured another, then drank half of that.

  “Are you all right, Elvin?” Ma asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Kind of hot. Fine, though.”

  Alex laughed, like we were sharing a joke. “Oh ya, me and your dad, we always liked the hottest stuff. Especially your dad. I’d be on the floor crying from some chilies he found in Mexico on vacation, while he’d be chewing on them like they were gum and laughing like crazy. It was something, I wanna tell ya. I thought maybe you had the taste like the old man so, ya, yours and my soup’s maybe a little feistier than the rest. I could take it back, though, Elvin, because I am very sorry if it’s not what—”

  “No,” I said, the last sips of water already evaporating with the heat. “No way, don’t you touch my soup. I love feisty. I can’t get enough feisty.”

  “Really?” Ma said.

  “Really?” Mikie said.

  “What’s the big deal?” Frank asked, yet again surprising me by coming to my aid. “The guy’ll eat anything.” And still, I don’t know why I kept being surprised.

  Regardless, I was going to finish my soup. It wasn’t that spicy anyway, the way really obvious foods burn your tongue right away. This was smoother, subtler, more sophisticated cuisine here, and I loved it. I could see why my dad would have loved it.

  “Pass the water please.”

  “Tell us about Jamaica, Alex?” Frank asked.

  “Jamaica,” Alex said as he stood, after he’d tipped up his bowl and emptied the contents into his wide mouth, “is hot. Great food. Great spices, great music. It is true that the hotter the climate, the hotter the food, and the closer I have ever come to the equator, the more singed I got.” He went around collecting bowls. “As you will see in a minute, when you taste my jeweled rice from Iran, to go alongside my own concoction, Vietnamese chili-roast chicken-lamb burgers.”

  “Oh my God,” I burped. I actually burped the words. I achieved something else with that sentence: I expressed two 100 percent contradictory feelings at once and completely meant them both. Oh my God, that sounded like fantastic food, and I was already opening extra salivary glands to handle the rush, and Oh my God, more spice when my own saliva was already beginning to burn me.

  I was also last finishing my starter, and told Alex to take the other bowls while I finished.

  “You sure?” he asked quietly, a look of concern on his face. “You don’t need to finish, Elvin. I won’t be insulted. You already ate most of it.”

  “I’m sure,” I said gently, whisps of flame escaping through my nostrils.

  He left and came back with plates stacked expertly on
each arm like a pro waiter. He served all around to more gasps of appreciation.

  As he circled around to my end of the table, I gasped as well, though it was a different sort of thing.

  But I finished. In Alex’s own style—and probably my dead dad’s—I tipped up the bowl and emptied the hissing remains down my gullet with a flourish. As I handed over my bowl, I made a loud ahhh sound that could have been interpreted a number of ways.

  “Well done,” Alex said with a big, beaming smile. “I guess you liked it. You might be your father’s boy after all.”

  These are the moments. These are the moments that cause me trouble. I believe I have a fully functional if sometimes hi-de-hee kind of a mind, but really the times when I have caused myself the most problems have been the times when I let some small emotional stimulus enter the situation and cause my heart and my mouth to huddle together on a plan and leave my mind completely out of it.

  “Oh, the soup was excellent,” I said. “But to tell the truth, I usually like my food spicy.”

  I smiled up at my uncle as broadly as he smiled down at me. I don’t know what he thought, with my forehead and upper lip sweating away before him, but I wanted to slap all my teeth out.

  “Weh-hell,” Alex said, shaking his head, “this train’s a-comin’ atcha, boy,” and he rushed excitedly toward the kitchen, but not before poking me in the stomach with his finger.

  “I don’t know exactly what redemption is,” Frankie said as he pushed himself back from the table and patted his stomach, which still looked sickeningly flat to me, “but I vote for you to get it, just for the food.”

  Alex rumbled out a hearty laugh, but looked down at his plate and picked at his pie with his fork.

  “You don’t get a vote, Frank,” said Mikie. “But ya, Alex, your food is really great, man.”

  “Thank you,” he said, still not looking up.

  I took a sip of my tea. Chai tea. Even that was spicy. It went over my tongue like it was trying to claw its way back up as I swallowed. My shirt was soaked in sweat. My underwear was soaked in sweat. My socks were soaked in sweat. I was kind of sweaty. I had been to the bathroom three times already as my body processed about seventy-eight spices and seeds and colors it didn’t recognize. I ate a large meal and lost weight.