A Song for Carmine Read online

  The sounds of his pain seem cyclical—they are the worst at night, die off in the mornings, but then come back in the afternoon around lunch. I pop a couple of muscle relaxers in the day and try to coast through it, my body jelly, my mind still in Dallas, in the clouds, still on top. I don’t know what I’m doing here but doing time, waiting for the next wave to catch.

  At night when all the lights are off in the house, I sit out on the front porch. I can’t believe how quiet it is in these mountains, how silently everything grows and grows until green covers everything, but then nothing changes and things stay the same beneath it all, a picture book that repeats the same images, flipping one after the other.

  Through conversations in the hallway, Ma tells me that Pa’s cancer started in his colon, swam and grew until it thrived in all of his lymph glands; now there are tumors in his lungs, one growing in his brain. He has blood clots in his legs and he probably won’t walk much longer.

  “How long has this been going on?” I ask her as she folds laundry into piles on the kitchen table.

  “Oh, you know, Carmine, your pa don’t like to go to the doctor much. Never has. I had a feeling something was up. He was eating like a horse, but dropping weight like… I don’t know. By the time I’d convinced him to see someone, it was just about too late to do anything.” She turns around and stirs something on the stove and then pulls out a chair.

  “What are we talking here, Ma? A week, a couple of years? Isn’t there some kind of treatment? Money doesn’t matter; I’ll pay for it.”

  She cuts me off. “No, Carmine, there isn’t. Money hasn’t got anything to do with this. You ain’t been around in years, and I don’t know how much you care for him, but I thought you should know. That’s why I called.”

  “I’ve got some calls to make,” I tell her and stand up and leave the room. Down the hall, Pa’s old TV yells my old commercials to the room.

  * * *

  My father was meant for a life in the sun, running the family’s fishing business, his skin already so beaten and worn, he belonged on a boat, at the sea, salt in his mouth. He grew up in Texas, worked his father’s fishing business, shrimp, crabs, the Gulf’s seafood, until his father gambled and drank it all away, the boat, the connections, eventually his life.

  I remember Grandpa well. He would come to family dinners, bottle in hand, already half-crocked by half-day. I thought he was funny, charismatic, gritty. I sat near him always, trying to get a whiff of his alcohol-heavy breath; it was as sweet as honey, endearing. It was love and tenderness, and as necessary as Christmas and the first day of school. Ceremonial, yet rotten and weak.

  His clothes were always dirty and weathered, but he worked every day of his life. People grew accustomed to him being drunk. I began to think it was okay after all, though deep down I was ashamed of them all.

  After Grandpa passed, Pa came to Eton to find a few distant relatives, found work, mostly odd jobs, roofing, carpentry, plumbing in the palm of the Appalachians, and life went on.

  He met Ma on an old logging road when he was just twenty-two years old. The two of them were like magnets, he told me, so drawn to one another. He was doing some day labor with a wood company; she was there with her father, taking notes about wood grades and insect development, shielding her eyes from the sun and watching the men work.

  “She was quiet as a mouse, boy. I worried if I clapped my hands too loudly, she’d fall apart.” He laughed and looked across the room to her, pretended to clap, waved his hands instead. “But she’s stronger than she looks.”

  They were married a few months after they met. They lived in a series of run-down apartments before Pa earned enough to buy this house at an auction. I came along less than a year later, unplanned, but they said they were ready to try their hand at raising a family.

  Pa grew up poor, spending whole days and sometimes nights floating in that fishing boat on the Texas coast, the sun leathering his face, his father telling him about the ways of the world and how you had to take advantage of the world before it took advantage of you. Ma came from more stability. My grandparents lived and worked the forest, but there wasn’t anything ever said and the liquor ran through the house like water. Sundays they all sat on the cold hard pews in Eton, miles apart, and prayed, but they could never say for just what.

  Ma and Pa make it seem like their early years together were good—that there was love and enough to get by and when the money grew short they didn’t mind because they had each other. Sometimes they’d wait until it got real dark and they’d enter the fields of some of the orchards and steal apples and pull blueberries off the bushes in handfuls.

  It lasted awhile. Neither of them had ever been happier, but they didn’t trust it. They knew life was waiting just around the corner to get them, to take it all away, so they made sure they were ready.

  For a while, Pa talked about going back to Texas to rebuild the fishing business, to build some real roots, to leave Ma’s past behind her and start something new.

  “But we knew there wasn’t nothing back there in Texas for us, but a boat with a hole in it and some old debts from Granddaddy. I figured that wasn’t no way to start anything new, not with the past hanging on so hard.”

  They decided to stay in Eton, and Pa found Jesus soon after, became a preacher, joking that there had to be more money in saving souls than in fishing. The small Baptist church up the road from our house needed a leader and it was enough. The rest of the time he built furniture: cribs and rocking chairs, dressers, chests of hope, whatever some of the locals or tourists passing through wanted. He spent hours in his shed, shaping and twisting the softwood of Georgia into dreams, the glue and booze keeping him in a calm trance. Ma and I would sometimes watch him through the windows of his workshop behind our house and wonder who he really was, searching the clouds for the next storm, trying to stay away from each other.

  “He wasn’t always like this, Carmine,” she used to tell me. “He used to be sweet; he treated me like a queen when we was first married. Then something just died inside of him. When you came along he was so happy, but then he started remembering all these bad things that happened to him when he was a boy, all those beatings, and how his Pa would leave him places, sometimes on the water, sometimes in the middle of a field, sometimes with family he barely knew. And then times was real tough here in Eton, and there was never enough money and never enough work, and I tried, Carmine. I wanted him to be good to us.”

  * * *

  Later that night, I sit at the dinner table with them, push around stew in a plastic bowl, listen to Pa clear his throat. It sounds exaggerated. His Bible rests near his bowl. When he opens it up and starts flipping through the pages, I think I’ll snap.

  “Still pretending, huh, Pa?” I pick up my glass of water, tip it back, drink the whole thing, but stare at him the whole time.

  I hear the thump of that Bible in my mind as though it was yesterday. His voice resonates: “The Sins of the fathers shall be visited upon seven generations of the sons.” He also liked Isaiah 14:21—“Prepare a place to slaughter his sons for the sins of their forefathers; they are not to rise to inherit the land and cover the earth with their cities.”

  He stares back at me until his eyes begin to water and he looks away.

  “I never was any good at pretending, boy.” He closes his Bible and slides it to the middle of the table. I take another tablespoon of pasty stew and then push the bowl away.

  Ma’s shoulders tighten. She picks up our bowls and starts the old percolator again.

  “Carmine, your pa is too sick for trouble. I mean it. He don’t need any trouble.” She sighs into her own chest and rinses the bowls in the sink.

  If I heard it once, I heard it a thousand times. “That boy has got to learn to be a man, to relinquish his sins, and goddamn it, I’m gonna make sure of it.”

  “I know he ain’t right,” I’d hear Ma whisper to someone, “but don’t a man have a right to teach his son any way he sees fit?” I
heard her say it on the phone more than once.

  “I didn’t come here to make trouble, Ma, but a man has got to be himself, doesn’t he? Isn’t that what you always said, Pa? Something about marching to the beat of your own drum or something?” I smile. Pull a cigarette out of Ma’s pack and light it up. It’s getting dark outside and I can see the fireflies fly past the window.

  “Since when do you smoke?” he asks. Ma serves him a cup of coffee with milk, the way he likes it. His breathing is labored, and he stares at the cup as though it’s a chore to consider it.

  I remember the time he caught me smoking and how I thought he’d let me get away with it because he didn’t say anything for days. It was something most of the kids did. My friends and I’d steal cigarettes from our mothers’ purses and smoke them out by those old tracks while we waited for the train to pass. One time Pa was driving by, slowed his car to a creep, and looked right at me.

  But then it came up. I should have known he wouldn’t let me get away with it. He never let anything slide. Ma and Pa were fighting over money—there was never enough—when he brought it up. Furniture brought in a little, church contributions helped, but it wasn’t enough to get by. Some late nights we’d drive from dumpster to dumpster and collect things people threw away, fix and sell them. Pa felt so ashamed about this. What would people think if they saw the town’s preacher digging through their trash?

  I remember the brightness of my bedroom light snapping on in the middle of the night when their voices had died down, and the pound of his steps moved closer; they seemed to shake the whole house. “Boy, get up out of that bed; do it now. It’s about time you and I had a talk about some of your choices, man-to-man, don’t you think?” He slapped me across my face, pulled me up straight beside him, held his hand over my mouth to get me to stop hyperventilating.

  “Now stop it, stop it right now. You ain’t got nothing to cry about, boy. I just want to talk to you a minute.” I smelled the sour whiskey coming from his mouth as he talked late into the night, punctuating lectures with slaps, telling me about what it means to be a hardworking, God-fearing man.

  I lean across the table and get close to him; he smells like old bones, rotten eggs, the bottom of those old dumpsters.

  “I smoke when I want to, always did. You got something to say about that, old man?” I pull another cigarette from the pack and light it up. Think about blowing the smoke into his face, but don’t.

  “Oh, you’re Mr. Big Shot now, are you?” He calmly lifts the mug up to his mouth and takes a drink; his hand shakes as he sets it back down on the table. “No kind of son leaves his folks and don’t come back. Stomp me if you want to. I can’t stop you. But it won’t change anything. I’m dying, you fool.”

  I hear a fire truck pass a few blocks away and the song of an owl’s hoot.

  “Who’s gonna save the preacher, Pa? Jesus?” I stub the cigarette out in the ashtray, half-smoked.

  He looks at me for a long time and I try not to blink. The whites of his eyes have a yellow hue to them, delicate like a baby’s skin; his skin hangs and moves when he breathes hard. He starts to say something, but then a storm of phlegm takes him over.

  I get up and walk out of the room. The sight of him so weak and helpless saddens and disgusts me.

  * * *

  “Hey, Diego, it’s Carmine. Listen, I want to be a part of the next big thing; whatever it is, I’m with you. I’m taking care of some personal business right now, but I can be back in Dallas within a day. Call me back.”

  I flip the phone closed and scroll through my contacts; there’s no one else, there’d only been Icarus, Diego, one plan.

  I keep my cell phone in my hand, carry it around the house with me, but it never rings, it never even rings. So many relationships and pursuits and sex and deals, and my phone never rings. Not even Melanie. I believe it must be temporary.

  Throughout the day I pick up the phone and try to think of someone else to call, don’t know who it would be, put the phone down and stare out into the black of the street I grew up on, the square houses across the street, the broken streetlight with a shoe dangling from it, the old railroad tracks. How it all came to be.

  In Dallas, everything was illusion and insulation. A penthouse in the sky filled with shiny substance: the leather sofa, the fine linens, the original art that hung on the wall in dark frames, Versace and Cuisinart and high-end electronic systems of every kind, stainless steel and black matte catching all angles of the light, Nintendo, Sony, a large-screen TV, more, trophies everywhere—there was never enough. I know I stood in line to buy these things or spent drunken nights on the phone with catalog reps, credit card in hand, filling every second with something. “Thank you for calling The Sharper Image, may I help you?” was music to my ears. Stuff fueled the fire within, filling me, encouraging me to gather and own more, allowing me to forget, keeping the guilt a few steps behind me.

  There was always something new around, something shipped, tag just removed, unused and uncertain. In my closet there were rows of expensive suits hanging lifeless on cold hangers, underneath, fifty pairs of shoes. The furniture, the suede chaise, a decadent chocolate mohair sofa with luxe and rich pillows, cork-top coffee and side tables, pearl walls paired with Robert Hansen artwork, handmade mahogany bookcases custom-carved to hold my large collection of record albums, terrazzo floors throughout the penthouse, sumptuous cream Flokati and Peruvian rugs, large sash windows that overlooked the Dallas sky, and a plush ceiling finished in elegant, satin-brass recessed lights. I got amorous looking at all of that stuff—mine, all of it mine. I wanted to come on my things, mark my territory, paddle my chests with my fists. I was finally in control, over the top. I had rewritten history; Eton was fucking bad fiction.

  In the kitchen, shiny new appliance after appliance that would never be used lined the backs of my countertops with names like Frigidaire, Novell, Bosch. I never ate at home, never used the kitchen or the refrigerator, barely the bathroom or bedroom. I didn’t want to taint any of it. I wanted to keep it all somehow separate from me, clean and protected and beyond the reaches of human stains. I never actually lived in my own life.

  But it all meant nothing to me. Simultaneously, I prayed for fire and more things, arson and more money. I dreamed of partner status. Glory. Another wedge between me and my past. I got further and further from the back of Pa’s hand, the shiny metal of those railroad tracks, the orange Georgia soil.

  * * *

  “Carmine, you awake?” Ma’s voice is quieter than I remember. I see the shadow of her form peeking in my doorway.

  For days I’ve been avoiding both of them, coming out at night, waiting until I could tell them when I’d be leaving and what I’d be doing next.

  I’ve got a handful of ideas. A few Icarus contacts. Thoughts of heading out west or east and starting fresh. Maybe even cutting loose of it all and buying a fishing boat somewhere like Mexico. Taking care of a sick old man I never really liked ain’t in my plans.

  “Carmine, I know none of this is easy for you and we ain’t on the best of terms, but I need your help. I’m so tired, and your old man needs you.” She stands there for a few minutes and then I hear her feet sliding across the wood floor, then the squeak of her sitting down at the end of my bed.

  “I’m not the person I was, Ma. I’m not, and to me, Pa is the same old son of a bitch he always was. I got nothing for him. I came for you.”

  She clears her throat, and I can see the profile of her face when she turns toward the window. A small ray of light reaches in from the streetlight and casts her face in it. I notice how her shoulders bend in toward her chest, how she’s caving in, how the skin on her neck sags.

  “Carmine, you got to leave the past where it is.”

  “Why would I do that, Ma? If you leave the past alone, it’s bound to sneak up on you. You should know that.” I get up from the bed and go sit in the corner chair. I need distance to think.

  “Boy, if that were true, we’d all be
in bigger trouble than this. I’m tired. I’m going back to bed.” She stands up and looks at me for a long time before walking out of the room.

  She’s wrong and I know it. You’ve got to stay one step ahead in the game. Otherwise, you lose.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, I’M sitting at the tavern again, staring at the white blinking light of the Coors Light sign. I swallow a whole draft beer in two drinks and order another one. I scan the room for women. Tug on the belt loop of my jeans. Tap my foot.

  When I walked out the front door earlier, Ma was in the front yard watering the plants. She watched me, waited for me to speak. When I got to the gate and opened it, she turned off the water and called my name.

  “You didn’t come back here because you needed a place to stay; I know it ain’t like that. I need help getting your pa in and out of bed, in and out of the car for doctors’ appointments. I’ve been handling it alone for a long time, and that’s why we called, see? He ain’t got long, Carmine, he ain’t got long.”

  I stared at her for a long time, followed the short lines that darted out on both sides of her eyes, looked at the creases around her mouth, the gray that sliced through her golden hair. The sun felt hot on my face, and I squinted.

  “Listen, Ma, I don’t owe that man anything, or you for that matter.” I closed the gate behind me and walked quickly down the sidewalk without looking back. No one was going to tell me what I needed to do, what I needed to be, especially not her and not for him. Things were gonna happen, be what they’d be, regardless of what I did. That’s how it always was, how it’d always be.

  * * *

  I sip on the draft beer and remember the funeral services Pa used to preside over. Sometimes he had me come to the church to help set up chairs or hand out programs. I remember the dead faces peeking out of coffins, the gray skin with color painted on, the smell of the funeral flowers filling the room.