Jen kept pace with her host. Jerry had parked at the summit of a steep gravel and stone driveway and now they walked purposefully past the shrubs coated in flurries and strings of white lights along the front of Jerry’s house, all huge and white, with Romanesque white columns on either corner of a concrete slab porch. She watched him turn the key and kick the rug, stumbling into his front door, then smiling back at her sheepishly. “Here we are.”“I like your Christmas lights,” she observed. “Classy.”
“That’s my family, all right. Classy as hell.”
A dog, full of wild fur, leapt at her waist, tongue agog.
Jerry intervened. “Midas, get down, man. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine.” She knelt and scratched the pup’s head. Three more dogs rounded the corner, a whirl of tongues, fur, and paws. “Holy shit!”
“Yeah, my mom breeds Collies. Come on, guys, go lay down. Lay down. I tack it up to some kind of weird Lassie obsession she had as a child. I don’t really get it.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever met a breeder.”
“Well, tomorrow will be your lucky day. Do you want some water or anything?”
“No, I should probably just get some sleep.”
“Okay, the basement couch is probably the most comfortable. I’ll grab you some blankets.” He disappeared down a hallway, three dogs in tow, while Jen, with Midas following, wandered into the living area towards the framed family photos on a shelf next to the Christmas tree. She held a photo to the tree’s white lights. Jerry and a girl who had to be his sister, aged about ten and seven, wearing matching grins and pastel blue ensembles.
The next frame featured a woman of about forty, had to be Jerry’s mother, sitting in the grass with two big Collies flanking her and three Collie puppies, one in her hands and two at her feet. “Recognize anyone here, Midas?” She held the photo in his face for a second. He sniffed loudly and turned away.
Another photo looked fairly new: the sister sat next to the mother with a high school version of Jerry above them, completing the pyramid, in front of one of those standard gray backdrops, most likely the same standard gray backdrop at Sears department store that Jen and her father had posed in front of when she was twelve.
She remembered getting dressed to leave, buttoning up her dark green blouse (when she wore it to school, the kids called her ‘Camo’), while Kenny, her father, had pulled his thinning hair into a ponytail, sported the only collared shirt in his closet, and borrowed a thick paisley tie from Bill, a guy with an office job who lived down the street. Kenny had even let Jen trim his mustache as he knelt on the bathroom floor with a towel around his neck, and had grinned as his little girl circumspectly snipped away with a tiny scissor. “Dad, stop smiling. You’re screwing it up. Keep still.”
Kenny bought as many copies of that photo as he could afford. Pocket size, wallet size, 3x5’s, 4x6’s, 8x10’s. Something in that photo validated own insecurities with his parenting, somehow proving that he was capable of running a functioning family alone, and that he even if he personally was a loser, he wasn’t pulling his daughter down into the muck with him. That year was the only year Kenny ever sent Christmas cards, and he felt more satisfaction with every pocket size photo he slipped into each envelope. He kept a framed 8x10 on the mantel of the small fireplace in their rented mobile home, and he knew he was doing all right.
After Amelia, Jen’s mother, moved away to France when Jen was barely a year old, Kenny did his best to erase the mother of his child, to take all that love and pour it into his little girl. The name Jennifer was Amelia’s idea, so Kenny started calling his daughter by her middle name, Delilah, which he concluded to be the prettiest name in the Bible. Kenny, who was only nineteen at the time, did his best, getting relatives to watch her as he loaded and unloaded boxes forty hours a week. He knew that while he covered his nose with his Guns’n’Roses t-shirt while changing her wet yellowed diapers, his former band mates and high school buddies were pissing off the roofs of Pennsylvania state school frat houses into green quads full of crushed cans, draining their pipes after hours of guzzling Coors Lights.
When Delilah was three, the lead singer of his old metal band, God Save McQueen, came by and let Kenny borrow his copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Jesus wasn’t doing much to help Kenny’s situation, so he just stopped asking, and listening to Metallica just made him miss the glory days, so it wasn’t long before Kenny boxed up his collection of metal cassettes and swapped Messiahs: Christ for Kurt. When Jen thought of those years, the first years she could remember, she thought of playing with her stuffed Care Bears, rolling around on the living room’s burnt orange shag carpet, Nirvana blaring and Kenny in the recliner, nearly catatonic from whiskey, bobbing his head, eyes closed, mouthing the verses of “Lithium.”
When the whiskey reached just the right level, before he would put his little Delilah to bed and go to his room and think about Amelia abandoning him and punch his pillows, he and Jen would have their air instrument session. Kenny would be Dave Grohl and lean forward in his chair smacking the shit out of his air drum kit, crashing his air cymbals and cracking his air snare, while Jen held the neck of her air guitar with an outstretched left hand and strummed the air strings with her right. She had all the lyrics of Nevermind memorized, and she would throw back her head and yelp with toddler angst and look to her dad for approval. Half the time he was beaming at her and the rest he was so consumed in the drumming out of his regrets that he forgot she was there, but that was okay.
When Kurt died, there were no more after dinner jams. Kenny started going out a lot more in the evenings, and Jen, at age six, had to put herself to bed most nights. Kenny bought her a Care Bear night light and told her, “Delilah, even if I’m not here, if that light is on, you’re safe.” So when her daddy was out drinking with warehouse buddies and barfly gals in Middletown, Jen would switch on Share Bear with her glowing belly and stare at it in the darkness and whisper Kurt Cobain’s lyrics until she couldn’t keep her eyes open.
*
On one night in May, two days before Jen’s high school graduation, she walked in and found him sitting in his tan lather chair, his eyes red with hastily wiped tears, two dying ice cubes in a sweating highball glass. A lit cigarette in the tray next to him whispered a thin line into the air atop a mess of freshly dead butts. He looked at her blankly, then to the framed photo with the gray backdrop in his lap. “What’s wrong, Daddy?” He coughed, leaning forward and holding a fist to his mouth. “Your mother wants to come to your graduation.”
Jen had asked about her mother plenty of times in seventeen years, and Kenny would always give the same answer. “Your mother and I were young and we didn’t get along. She moved away, but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you,” a rehearsed response which sprouted new layers of encrusted bullshit every time she heard it. She sat down on the couch across from her father, who now tilted back the highball glass, scrounging for whiskey remnants and finding only melted cubes.
“I thought you two didn’t talk anymore.”
“Well, it’s your graduation. It’s a very important –“
“She just contacted you out of the blue after all this time?”
“It’s not that simple, Delilah.”
“Daddy, you know I hate that name. Call me Jen, please.”
“I talk to Amelia sometimes, and she’s sorry.”
“Are you sticking up for her? Why can’t you just tell me what happened? I’m almost eighteen!”
He stood, walked toward the mantel, and placed the photo back in its proper position. “You’re right.” He turned, thirty-five years old but feeling like a washed up old man, and glanced at the glass.
“Pour me one more and I’ll tell you.”
Emmanuel Gonzales and Felisha Jones stepped out of the car in front of a house that looked curiously similar to the thirty or so they had passed before it, each one large, two stories, colored a pastel blue or yellow, white or beige. Occasionally one made of brick or stone would pop up. Each had a porch of some sort, some holding unnecessarily ornate columns. There were walkways, like the one they were standing before, which traveled to the front door. Cars of the latest makes and models stood like trophies along curbs and in driveways. It was a sort of residential heaven that Manny and Fel were unfamiliar with. Even the sun seemed to shine brighter there.
The home of Louis Allen was faint yellow with a chocolate brown-shingled roof. A large white porch wrapped around the front of the house, holding one of those hanging wooden benches. The number of windows seemed unusually high; especially since each one was shrouded by deep burgundy curtains. Fel grabbed Manny by the arm and they both made their journey up with walkway.
Felisha knocked on the door then tugged on the collar of her blouse as she waited. Mr. Blik has made sure they both wore their “good” clothes so they would be more able to fir in in their new alien world. Manny had a sky blue button-down shirt, untucked, dress khakis and a clean pair of Timberlands. Fel wore a sweater vest over her blouse, dress pants and conservative heels.
The door crept open just enough to get caught on the chain lock inside. A sliver of the head of a woman, peeking out with a nervous green eye came into view. “Hi, can I help you?”
“Louis live here?” Fel asked firmly.
“Louis. Yes. Yes.” Her eyes narrowed. “What do you want with him?”
“We...” Felisha paused for a moment, “we was downtown with him last night...at a bar. He left his license and, um...” She signalled for Manny to show the woman the license, “we couldn't catch him before he left but...here it is.”
“Oh. Oh, good! Good.” She disappeared from view, closed the door, then after a few clicks the door swung open revealing the tiny blond middle-aged woman in her pale green dress. “He'll be so glad to know it wasn't stolen with the rest of his wallet.” Fel nodded, stoic. “Thank you both. Thank you. Have a wonderful day.”
Louis' mother tried to close the door, but Fel blocked it with her swiftly placed foot. The woman, upon realizing why her door had not shut, showed a flicker of fear in her round glistening eyes. “Can I, uh, help you?”
Fel smiled. “We was just wonderin' if Louis was here. We had such a good time last night n'-”
“He's out,” said the woman. The pleasantness she had previously faked, then meant, had faded away. “Lunch with friends.” She tried to close the door once again, by Fel's foot remained.
“Any idea when he'll be back?” Fel asked politely enough.
“No.” The woman's nervous smile had given way to a quivering frown. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to wash clothes, so...”
“I'm pregnant.” Fel's words caused Manny eyes to open wide and the woman's jaw to drop. “Last Thanksgiving, bot came down to my corner n' fucked me right in his car. Said he had protection n' I was too drunk to doubt 'im, ya know? Could weeks later I found out that motherfucker got me pregnant. Imagine my luck when I find that cracker last night to tell 'im the news? Boy runs off like it ain't even his responsibility. Lucky fo' me I find his license. Fucker.”
The look of terror on the woman who was undoubtedly Louis' mother left her frozen. “I...I...no.” But she, like most, was quick to exchange fear for defensiveness. “My Louis would never do that! Now get off my porch before I call the police!”
“Listen, bitch!” Felisha's voice grew sharp. “Either you let me in or I'm gonna drive around this shit-hole neighborhood tellin' all yo' tennis club friends that yo' boy fucked a black chick. A fuckin' prostitute!”
Louis mother froze again. She thought to herself. Looked at Fel. Then Manny. Then Fel again. “Pregnant,” she whispered in case any of her neighbors were closer than they had been when Fel said it the first time. “Are you sure?”
“Sure as shit,” Fel spat.
The mother lowered her head. “Hm.” She took a step into her house. “Come in then.”
*****
The Harrisburg City Police Station...
“I'm sorry officer,” panted Angela Gonzalez, “sorry I came so late. I couldn't leave until now.” She had run from the bus stop to the station six blocks away. Beads of sweat rolled down her round face. “My son! Emmanuel! Where is he?!”
Officer Randall, a young man in his late twenties, stroked his chin and narrowed his eyes, making a sound that seemed to say, “Don't push this” to the woman at his desk. “Ma'am,” he said, “his bail was posted.”
“By who?!” she jumped to her feet, tired as she was, unaware of anyone who would do such a thing for him.
The officer swallowed. “A man by the name of Ronald Blik.”
“Blik!” she repeated excitedly. “Where can I find this man?!”
Randall swallowed again. “Mrs. Gonzalez, Ron Blik isn't the kind of man that you can just go up and ring on his doorbell, ya know?”
“But...my son!” She was in tears by this point. It had been so long since she had seen his face; since the day he left home because of her. “How...can I find my son?!”
“Mr. Blik is...a dangerous man.”
“I have to find my son!”
“We'll do what we can, ma'am," said Officer Randall, an automated response that meant that she realized to mean he would do nothing at all.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment