Marzoli placed the pillow back against the window, blocking the view of the old man's apartment yet again. I could feel he knew I'd intentionally blocked the view with the pillow. I had to turn my eyes away from him.
"You're turning white again," Marzoli interrupted the silence. "You're dehydrated from freezing your ass off out there."
No, I wasn't feeling that. I hadn't realized I was breathing in Marzoli's scent again. Once again, I started to hyperventilate. Once again …
Bits of the old man's brain smeared down the wall and plopped onto the floor.
"Sit," commanded Marzoli.
He put his large guns around my back and lowered me onto the couch. He covered me with the blanket again …
Close your eyes, Paul …
Marzoli's mass hovered above me after my spine sank into the cushion of the couch, propping himself with a thick arm on the back of the couch. I felt him inspecting me as I tried to regain control of my breathing and my thoughts. No doubt he was thinking that this freak in need of a straightjacket must be goddamn fascinating. His scent oozed into my skull as he lingered.
Marzoli finally backed away, padding to the kitchen.
I heard him filling a glass of water …
He returned from the closet back down the hall towards us, cocking a second rifle. Grandfather had a Winchester 223 bolt action rifle in each hand. Paul looked at me with his mouth open and eyes as round as pies. I was handed one and Paul the other. They were heavy, cold, and solidly built of black steel and shiny dark brown wood.
Grandfather disappeared down the hall again, opened the closet door, and returned holding four framed glass photos he placed on the kitchen counter for Paul and me to see.
One was a photo of my father as an adult. It was taken when he was younger, around thirty-five perhaps. He was old enough to have a beer gut, but young enough to suck it in and hide it beneath an ill-fitting sports coat. He looked tired and angry in the photo, but he condescended to smile for the photographer.
Another photo was of our mother. She had longer hair then. I couldn't call her beautiful. Her dress and hair and makeup were sloppy and hastily thrown together. She seemed unhappy in the photo, like Dad, but a little more successful in hiding those feelings. Her cheeks were fat, and her arms were puffy. She was wearing a dark blue dress with white sunflowers on it, and she looked rather uncomfortable. Judging by the oak tree behind them, both photos seemed to have been taken at the same event in the same exact spot. A wedding? A funeral? They were obviously taken by a professional photographer hired to formally record whatever event Mom and Dad had been invited to.
What occurred to me now but didn't then was the very odd notion that a married couple would attend this event together and not appear in one formal photo together. Instead, it seemed, they elected to appear in two separate photos. Could they not stand the sight of each other even back then? Had they just had a significant spat en route to the event? Was the undercurrent of hate so strong that recording their togetherness was too repugnant a notion at that moment?
I then took a closer look at the other two photos placed to the left of the other two. One photo was of a boy, and the other was a girl, both around our age. At first we did not recognize who they were, and then we realized they were Mom and Dad as children. We'd never seen them as anything but adults. Our house had no remnants of the past. No attic full of boxes of photos. No small box full of eight millimeter family films. No albums to link us to a continuum of previous lives. And yet out of nowhere, Grandfather presented two photos of very happy, lively, fresh, innocent children. They seemed authentically joyful. Optimistic. Playful. Energetic. Happy.
The girl was wearing a bright yellow play dress, covering her mouth while giggling. The boy grinned with gleeful wickedness in bright blue Osh-Kosh overalls holding a dark green frog near his tongue, pretending he was about to lick it. Quite possibly he did.
Looking at the background, we could tell they were both playing near the pond behind Grandfather's trailer. It occurred to me right then that Mom and Dad had grown up with each other. All I had known is that they went to the high school prom together. I knew the theme of the prom was the solar system because Mom had been on the planning committee. That Mom was furious with Dad and the other football players because they decided to turn the papier-mâché sun into a real ball of fire with a flask of bourbon and a lighter. But that was all I knew about their childhood. It never occurred to me that Mom and Dad had, in fact, played together as infants, taking summer trips together to Grandfather's trailer by the rectangularish man-made pond.
Mom and Dad had entered this trailer and slept on this couch and listened to this record player played by this same stern man. Just like Paul and me.
At that instant, Paul and I were too full of wonder at the sight of Mom and Dad as children … too shell-shocked by inexplicably being handed double-barrelled shotguns … too fearful of our arrival at this rigidly reserved older man's trailer to arrive at the question I would ask myself often through the next year. What happened to turn those children into the resentful, sludgy, angry, alcoholic, older creatures six inches to the right?
That older man who propped those photos on the counter before us had the answer to that question. He held the secrets of a million details in his eyes. His son's first rash of poison oak. His son's first loose tooth. His son's first bicycle. First day at school. First razor blade. First date. First car.
But Grandfather's eyes had also seen his son's first unhappiness, beginning a chain of heartbreak that led to the photo of the miserable man barely accommodating a smile for a camera at a formal party. His eyes must have also seen the first time Dad put a glass of whiskey to his mouth. The first time Dad stumbled home piss-ass drunk. The thirtieth time Dad crawled up the porch stairs slobbering inebriated obscenities and kicking the screen door in.
Until that moment, Paul and I had never reflected on life, let alone damaged lives. We played hotrods on an old, moldy, stained carpet without ever imagining that the carpet had once been bright and new. And yet, there in front of us, were six inches that divided two drastically contrasting sets of photos of our Mom and Dad. No doubt Grandfather felt we should be cognizant of the difference. He wanted us to consider the six-inch separation. To register what the sum of those inches would truly total in the end.
Were those six inches composed of millimeters of unhappiness, or was there one single moment that spanned that six-inch journey in one tragic jump? Perhaps Mom and Dad had each been hit one split second without any gradation, like the severing of a spine. Mobile all your life, and then paraplegic a second later. Wham, slice, done. Could such a sudden slicing happen to my brother and me as well?
Paul and I had no idea as we stared at those photos that the answer would come by the end of that summer. We had no idea that the shotguns, the closed curtains, and the photos were all part of Grandfather's master manipulation and would cause a permanent change for the rest of our lives. We had no idea that the moment we stepped through that trailer's screen door, we were beelining toward our own six-inch leap.
"What about your grandfather?" Marzoli asked.
I felt the click of the glass on my teeth again as Marzoli forced me to drink a tumbler of water.
"What d'ya mean?" I mumbled.
"You muttered Grandfather as you slept."
"Nothing. It's nothing."
I opened my eyes to see if I'd succeeded in curtailing any further questions. Marzoli power-drilled into my brain with that observant, compassionate, concerned look that forced me to turn away, shriveling in my own dishonesty. I'd not succeeded in curtailing any questions, only delaying them.
"As you wish," he said.
I realized in that instant with those three words, two separate circles had merged: an ever-surfacing past I had believed to be completely buried, and an ever-invasive present personified by this Puerto-Rican Sicilian whose firm ass sank into the cushion of the couch next to my thigh. I realized I would never separate these worlds again. That the bees buzzing in that motherfucker's hive would never settle down until he explored the three lapses from reality he'd witnessed in me.
I'd have to force him to let me off the hook by substituting a subject of more pressing interest.
"If Ruben wasn't murdered, where is he?"
He crossed his arms, and the corners of his lips went up in amusement.
Yes, Marzoli was completely aware of my tactic to derail his inquiry, but his tidal intellect had already surged towards a line of response.
"Yesterday, remember when I told you to keep an eye out, but I did not tell you what to look for? Do you know why I was that vague?"