The Next(22)

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?"