The dog walks back into the other yard and lies down,
watching the man, its chin flat against the ground between its paws.
The man stands up with Peter’s sister in his arms
and hurries to the front door, pounding on it with the flat of his
hand, looking back over his shoulder at him once as he waits for an
answer.
Peter’s mother comes to the door holding the top of
her robe together with one hand. She sees the man first, then what is
in his arms. Slowly, her hand comes off the robe and goes to her
mouth. Her robe falls open and Peter sees her breasts.
The man takes Peter’s sister inside, leaving the
front door open. Peter stands up, his legs shaking, and moves halfway
up the steps.
The man puts his sister on the davenport and opens
her parka. His mother is crying now, he hears her but can’t see her
from the steps. The man picks up the telephone on the glass coffee
table in front of the davenport and dials a number.
"Tommy," he says, "I need an ambulance
right now . . . my place . . . yes, goddamnit, an ambulance, there’s
a fuckin’ kid ain’t breathing .... "
He hangs up and then, perhaps hearing the words
himself, he looks for a long minute out the door, right into Peter’s
eyes. The man puts the phone against his ear again and dials another
number. His fingers are shaking.
Peter’s mother comes back into his line of sight.
She stops at the davenport, looking down at the motionless child, and
then touches her, straightening one of the legs.
She looks at her own hand and it is bloody.
The man holds his forehead while he waits for someone
to answer the phone, trying to hold himself still. He looks again at
Peter, then turns away to speak.
"Sally," he says, sounding relieved, "it
looks like I got a problem here at Charley Flood’s."
Charley Flood is the boy’s father, although the boy
has never heard this man use his first name before.
"There was an accident in front of his house,
his little girl . . .yeah . . . I don’t know. The car slid and
there she was .... "
The boy looks back into the yard where the car is
still sitting with its door open.
"No," the man says, "it’s worst than
that."
There is a long pause while the man listens. "I
appreciate that," the man says finally. "If you could come
over and wait for him, make sure he don’t do nothing premeditated .
. ."
The man nods into the telephone. He stops for a
moment and looks behind him at the davenport.
"Look," he says, "he ain’t going to
like this at all."
Peter looks at the davenport too, and thinks of his
father, who is unhappy for reasons he glimpses in the silences at the
dinner table, when they are all forced to sit together in one place.
Before dinner and after, he lives in this house without seeing Peter,
or his mother. He only notices the little girl.
Except sometimes in the park. In the park, he is
changed, and turns to Peter sometimes, inviting him to share her.
Ain’t she something?
And in this way, Peter knows, the little girl is the
connection between them.
He wishes suddenly that he were lying there with her,
that he had been hit by the car too. He understands that the blood on
his cheek is not enough to save him, that he hasn’t been hurt badly
enough to be forgiven.
The man hangs up the telephone, and then turns back
to Peter, walking toward him as if he were angry. He stands still,
aware of the trembling in his legs. The man comes through the door
and down the steps, hurrying, as if something outside could still be
saved. He reaches into his coat as he passes, and then his hand drops
behind his back as he walks away, hiding the gun.
The man crosses the yard to the dog. Peter sees the
animal’s bead come up, the tongue falls out of its mouth.
There is only one sound from the dog, so close behind
the shot that it’s hard to separate one from the other. And then
there is another shot, and another, and another.
9
The man shoots the dog until there are no more
bullets in his gun. The air smells of gunpowder, the shots echo back
from the houses on the other side of the park.
Between the shots, he hears his mother crying in the
house. He stands on the steps, watching himself from another place,
lost in this moment that collects and shapes the small pieces of his
life.
Lost in the surprise of
who he is.
* * *
L
ate at night, Peter hears
his father in the driveway. He knows the sound of the car, the sounds
of all the cars that belong on this street.
He is sitting at the top of the stairs, his face
pressed into the banister railings. There are other men in the house
now, men who work with his father and have been here before. They
have been coming and going all day. His uncle is sitting at the
dining room table with his mother, his arm all the way around her
back, his thin fingers, patched with hair, cup her far shoulder and
pull her into him.
Comforting is unnatural to his uncle, but something
holds him in this awkward place. He has seen his father held in this
same way at funerals; he has seen him disappear into words and
manners that were not his.
He thinks of the thread that held the dog next door.
His father opens the door, takes a step into the
living room and stops. No one in the room speaks, no one is willing
to meet his eyes.
His mother covers her face.
"What is it?" he says.
The room is quiet, and then the one named Sally
pushes himself off the davenport and touches his father’s arm.
"Come sit down," he says.
His father stays where he is, looking around the room
now, as if finding the secret in this place can change it. "Charley,"
the man says, and tugs at his sleeve, a child’s gesture. Peter’s
father follows him to the dining room table, where they both sit
down.
The man puts a small glass in front of him and
fills it until it spills over the lip.
"Drink this, and then we talk," he says.
His father drinks what is in the glass, taking it all
at once, and then returns the glass to the same spot, fitting it into
the half circle it left on the table when he picked it up.
His mother is crying into her hands; she cannot lift
her eyes to look across the table, and he understands that,
understands the weight.
"It’s the baby," the man says softly.
From the staircase, he watches his father. Nothing
seems to change. He stays exactly where he is, staring across the
table. His pulse is in his temple, one of his hands is still wrapped
around the small glass.
"She got hit with a car," the man says.
Hearing this, his mother begins crying out loud. His
father does not move. "It wasn’t nobody’s fault," the
man says. "The guy hits some ice and he slid . . ."
A tear appears suddenly in the corner of his father’s
eye and runs the length of his face, dropping straight and fast, like
sweat on a glass.
"What guy?" he says.
One of the men in the living room walks to the dining
room table and stands quietly beside the one who is talking.
"Victor Kopec," says the one named Sally.
The boy’s father moves then, turning slowly to look
at the man who has said the name.
The man nods. "He slid into the yard . . ."
He rubs the back of his neck, looking for the words to say the rest.
"He hit her clean, Charley. She didn’t feel a thing.
Afterwards, his dog, you know, they get excited, but it didn’t make
no difference by then. You can ask the doctors. It wasn’t the dog,
it was the car."
His father stands up and the man steps in front of
him and shakes his head no.
"Ask
your brother if what I’m saying ain’t true."
His father tries to step around the man, but the man
moves in front, stopping him. His uncle’s arm moves in a slow arc
over Peter’s mother; he pulls a cigarette from his shirt pocket.
His face is pale in the kitchen light, and the pockmarks deepen at
the movement, throwing a shadow across his face.
"Charley," he says, "it was his fault,
he’d be dead. I’ve got a kid, I’d done it myself .... "
Peter’s father doesn’t seem to hear him. He puts
his hands on the shoulders of the man in front of him, almost gently,
and moves him out of the way. The other man——the one who walked
in from the living room——grabs him from behind, hugging him
around the waist.
The man holds him, then they are all holding him.
Peter’s uncle has the feet. His father turns left and right,
kicking, and his strength moves the huddle of men back and forth
across the room.
And all the time, the man named Sally is talking.
"You can’t kill him, Charley," he says. "Constantine
don’t want him hurt."
A chair turns over, a lamp falls from a table. The
boy hears his father hissing through his teeth as he fights. All the
other noises in the room are soft. The boy pictures a neighbor
walking past the house on the sidewalk, pausing for a moment to look
at the lighted windows, and then walking on.
"Listen to me, Charley," the man says.
His father stops struggling and hangs for a moment in
the center of the red-faced men holding him, hangs as if he were in
his hammock in the back yard.
"Listen to me," the man says. "Listen
to what I’m telling you. She didn’t feel a thing."
And in that moment, hanging helpless, his father
turns his head, as if to remove himself from the one who is talking,
and in doing that his eyes move to the corner of the room, and are
somehow drawn to the staircase where Peter is sitting with his face
pressed into the banister.
"I want your word," the man says. "I
can tell Constantine they ain’t nothing to worry about here now."
Behind the men, Peter’s mother is crying.
"Later you want to do something, you can talk to
Constantine yourself, right?"
His father doesn’t answer and his eyes stay
fastened to the staircase.
"All right?" the man says. "Lookit,
you got things to take care of right here anyway . . . Charley?"
His father rolls his head then, slowly, and looks at
the man who is talking, and in a movement so small Peter is not sure
he sees it, his father nods. His uncle drops his father’s feet and
the ones holding his waist and arms set him upright and then step
back, wary.
The men flex their arms and necks, some of them out
of breath. His father’s shirt is ripped along two lines that follow
the muscles in his back.
The one named Sally waits a moment and then kisses
his father on the cheek and walks out the door. The other men follow
him, each of them making some gesture. His uncle is last out of the
house.
"I would of killed him myself, Charley," he
says.
Peter’s father does not
answer. He waits until the uncle is gone, then closes the door. He
walks up the staircase slowly and pauses for a moment in front of
Peter, studying him as if he cannot remember who he is. Then,
absently, he reaches out, touches his hair, and walks past him toward
the end of the hall.
He stops
before he gets to the end, though, and stares into the pale light of
her room, as if memorizing what is inside—a place full of stuffed
animals—and then he closes the door.
* * *
C
ertain things come to him
without his knowing how. He sees the fragile looks between his mother
and father, and understands that in those gestures there is a certain
panic.
It is as if they were tied head to foot with ropes,
unable to move an inch, struggling one moment, giving in the next.
And they cannot touch each other at all.
And they cannot touch him.
That is what he wants now, to be touched.
The things he knows settle on him with a certainty
that precludes mistakes or misunderstanding; he knows them as well as
the room where he sleeps or his own face in the mirror.
He walks into the living room and finds his father
sitting in a chair by the window, staring across the front yard, and
knows that there is nothing he can say that his father will hear.
His father sees him, then looks back out the window,
silent.
He was silent before the accident, too, but it was a
natural part of the rooms of the house then; now it is unnatural, and
the rooms are unnatural too.
His mother comes downstairs only to cook and to eat.
He sits down on the floor next to his father, wanting him to touch
his hair again. He thinks of the night the men held him while the one
named Sally talked. He wishes he had thrown himself into them, dived
on them from the top of the stairs. He judges the distance now,
imagining his path through the living room air and the stillness in
his chest as he falls, the spot he would land.
He imagines himself broken and still on the floor,
and something in that stirs him. He wonders if they would lay him on
the davenport too.