He walks out of the room and down the stairs. The
noise stops and he stops, suddenly afraid that another moment is
caught in his chest. He waits, but it takes no shape. He opens the
front door and steps out.
A cold mist has settled in, a kind that will last all
day. He zips his jacket to his chin and puts his hands in the pockets
and looks out across the street. The place on the curb where his
father parks—no one else has parked there for as long as he can
remember—is empty. The spot itself is dry, the outline of the car
against the wet pavement.
Victor Kopec’s front door opens and he emerges
carrying an ax. He walks to the middle of the yard, hurrying as if he
were afraid of being caught at this. He picks up a sign lying in the
grass and begins to tap it into the ground with the flat end of the
ax.
Peter can’t see what the sign says from the steps,
and walks toward the curb in front of his house until he can make out
the words:
FOR SALE
BY
APPOINTMENT ONLY
CALL CATHY AT DUNNE REALTY
Victor Kopec holds the sign with one hand and taps
with the other. He taps a dozen times, and then he steps back and
swings the ax with both hands. Not a full swing—he brings his hands
to a spot in front of his eyes, and then pulls them straight down, as
if he were ringing a bell—and an inch at a time, the stake
disappears into the ground.
He stops and steps back, leaning on the ax, and
considers what he’s done. The sign is off center, pitched forward
and to the left. Victor Kopec drops the ax and lifts one of his black
police shoes in the air and kicks it. The noise is still in the air
when he kicks it again. The sign falls back and then forward, as if
it’s been shot. The next kick turns it sideways, and then
Victor Kopec picks the ax up off the ground and swings it from the
side, the way Peter has seen Pancho Heurrera swing at baseballs at
Connie Mack Stadium, and hits the sign square in the face.
Out of breath, Victor Kopec turns to see if anyone is
watching. An afterthought. And that is when he notices Peter. He
considers him a long minute. "How come you ain’t in school?"
he says finally.
Peter does not answer.
"You better go on inside," Victor Kopec
says, "or somebody’ll call the truant officer."
He doesn’t move. The man is angry and afraid at the
same time. The words are not the ones he wants to say.
"You want to make something of yourself, you got
to go to school," he says.
Then Victor Kopec turns to his sign, which is bent
almost in half, and smashes it again. He walks back into his house
and closes the door.
Peter wipes at the mist on his face with the sleeve
of his jacket, but the sleeve is wet too, and feels colder than the
air. He looks at the sign in the yard, wondering how long Victor
Kopec will leave it like that. He thinks of his uncle, who once shot
a cat on the steps of his house on Two Street and left it there for a
week in a plastic bag, where the old woman next door who owned the
animal would see it every time she came out.
He pictures his uncle’s face, the pockmarks deep in
his cheeks, and thinks of the thing he said to his father in the
living room while the men were holding him.
"Charley, it was his fault, he’d be dead ....
I’d done it myself .... "
He knows his uncle would kill Victor Kopec, but not
for what happened in the yard. His uncle’s reasons are never the
ones he gives.
His father gives no reasons at all. His are shaped
out of sight by weights the boy only glimpses at work in the
momentary changes that cross his face and disappear.
His sister could touch that face, put her fingers in
the creases and over the eyes, and understand him in ways Peter never
could.
A breeze blows across the
park and rattles Victor Kopec’s broken sign, and Peter walks back
into the house to wait for his father.
* * *
H
e is alone in the house
all day. He sits on the floor in front of the television set, turning
off the sound, and eats marshmallows. He hears Victor Kopec slam his
car door outside, then start his engine. He hears him leave, hears
him return. The phone rings, he does not answer it. He is not allowed
to pick up the phone when he is alone; he doesn’t know the reason.
He counts the rings—eight of them—and then the phone is quiet,
and in the silence that is left behind, he hears the last ring
hanging in the air.
He lies on the floor, his cheek resting against his
hand, and watches soundless cartoons.
His uncle’s voice wakes him up, talking to his
father outside. He opens his eyes, stiff and cold, not sure where he
is.
"Lookadit this way," his uncle is saying,
"you talked to him once, what does it hurt to talk to him
again?"
He sits up. His hand has gone to sleep under the
weight of his head and he holds it in his other hand, lifeless
and white. He thinks of his sister’s hand, the mitten in the
street. He hears the key in the door.
Peter pushes himself up off the floor; his dead hand
doesn’t feel the wood underneath it. His father comes through
first, holding a bag of groceries. His uncle is behind him, pressing
close as he talks.
"I’m tellin’ you, the guy’s callin’
Constantine eleven times a day, sayin’ you’re gonna do him. He
says he’s gonna sell his house and move to Fort Lauderdale .... "
His uncle notices him then, standing in the room
whose only light is the television set. "Hey, Petey," he
says, "how you doin?"
Peter nods, shaking life back into his hand.
"Just like you," his uncle says to his
father, "he don’t say nothin’ . . . Hey, what’s wrong with
your hand?"
"Nothing," the boy says.
His father walks past him and puts the groceries on
the dining room table.
"How come you’re shakin’ it, then?" his
uncle says.
"Went to sleep," he says. He looks around
himself at the darkened room, surprised that the day has passed
without him.
His father turns on the lights in the kitchen and
dining room, opens the icebox door and comes back with two beers. He
gives one to Peter’s uncle.
"I’ll fix us something to eat later," he
says, "but leave me and your uncle talk a minute first."
He nods and goes up the dark staircase to his room.
"You ain’t listenin’ to me," his uncle
says after the boy closes the door. He hears them as clearly as if
they had come up the stairs with him.
"I heard you," his father says.
"Then say something back."
It is quiet a long moment, and then his uncle is
talking again.
"What Constantine said, he don’t mind that the
guy’s frightened. He likes him a little nervous, it makes him
easier to work with. But he don’t want him nervous enough he moves
to Fort Lauderdale."
"He ain’t going to Fort Lauderdale," his
father says.
"It’s what he told Constantine."
It is quiet again, a long time. "Wait a minute,"
his uncle says. "We been through that, right? You told
Constantine you ain’t gonna hurt him .... "
Again it is quiet.
"You’re fuckin’ crazy, Charley," his
uncle says. "I sincerely mean that."
His father says something back, speaking too quietly
for Peter to make out the words.
"Constantine ain’t going to put up with it,"
his uncle says. "He’s told the guy it’s forgiven."
"It ain’t up to him," his father says.
"And who decides that? You?"
Peter hears a different tone in his uncle’s voice
then, a conciliatory sound, as if he has won the argument and is
trying to show his father that he has lost.
"Constantine forgave him," he says.
Not long after that, Peter hears his uncle leaving
the house. The front door opens and closes.
Peter finds his father sitting at the kitchen table
holding a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer in his hand, tearing a
path through the label with his thumb. He works from the top down,
and when his thumb breaks through at the bottom the two sides of the
label open like the doors on a barn.
His father rolls the paper under his thumbnail into a
ball until it is perfectly round. "Your Uncle Phil," he
says, smiling, and shakes his head. He looks at him then, without the
smile. "You hear what he said?"
Peter nods.
"Always makin’ things big .... "
Peter sits down at the table and almost at the same
time his father gets up. He goes to the refrigerator and finds a
fresh beer and then, before he closes the door, he looks at him and
says, "You want a beer?"
Something depends on the answer.
"Yeah," Peter says, "I’ll drink a
beer with you." The way his father says it.
A smile—the shade of a smile—crosses his father’s
face, and then is gone. He reaches into the icebox with the hand
holding the beer, and when it comes out, it is holding two. He sets
them on the table and then hands Peter the bottle opener.
"The first thing about drinking beer," he
says, sitting down, "don’t ever take the cap off with your
teeth."
Peter stares at his father, wondering what is
happening. "It don’t matter if all your friends use their
teeth, in the end they’re gonna break one off, wait and see."
He looks at him and waits. Peter picks up a bottle and the bottle
opener and pries off the top.
"It’s the same thing as hittin’ walls,"
his father says. He takes the open beer out of his hand, brings it to
his lips and tastes it.
Peter reaches for the second bottle and stands up to
get better leverage on the bottle opener.
"There’s always going to be some guys hit
walls," his father says. "They go to somebody’s wedding,
drink the wine, say the wrong thing and the first thing you know
they’re punching holes in the reception hall." He looks at
Peter again, the smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. "Your
Uncle Phil was a great wall puncher."
Peter nods, picturing it.
"The thing about that," his father says,
"besides it’s stupid, is that you can’t always tell where
the studs are, especially you drank enough champagne to want to punch
walls in the first place. And it’s one thing to put your fist
through drywall, it’s something else when you hit the studs .... "
His father falls silent a moment, and Peter is afraid
the moment is over. That his father has said as much as he can.
His father shakes his head. "More people broke
their hands at weddings than fights," he says. And then he
touches the side of his bottle to Peter’s and drinks again.
Peter lifts his own beer off the table and carefully
brings the cool, wet circle at the top against his lips. The smell is
different this close, and then he lifts the bottle and the beer is
bitter and alive in his mouth. His eyes water and he swallows,
feeling his father watching.
"There’s no excuse, hurting yourself on
purpose," his father says. "The Italians know that, the
Irish don’t. It’s why they run things."
And then he seems to go away for a little while,
perhaps thinking of Peter’s sister.
Peter brings the bottle to his mouth again, taking
more of the neck into his mouth than he means to, and then taking
more of the beer. He coughs, and his eyes water again.
His father seems lost.
He takes the bottle out of his mouth, and feels beer
on his chin. He wipes at it, and coughs again. His father comes back,
looking surprised to find him there.
"You like it?" he says.
Peter thinks a moment, not wanting to lose him.
"No," he says.
"Then don’t drink
it."
* * *
O
n Easter Sunday, the city
holds its egg hunt in the park.
Two months have passed now since the accident; the
only evidence of it left outside the house is a bare spot in the
front lawn where Victor Kopec’s convertible tore the tree out of
the ground and the For Sale sign that sits off center and bent in the
yard next door.
Inside, the damage is everywhere.
The days bleed into nights, and into each other,
becoming weeks; nothing starts or ends. A coma. In the morning, light
comes through the drawn shades and turns the walls a quiet orange,
and at night the lighting seems always to come from other rooms.
There is a slowness to everything inside the house, a heaviness that
Peter notices most when he steps outside, and is no longer heavy and
slow himself.
The hunt for Easter eggs begins late in the
afternoon, after the Broad Street parade. Peter’s father is
somewhere with his uncle, doing their work for the unions. His car is
gone, but even with the hundreds of people who have brought their
children to the park, no one has taken the space where he parks.
He sits on his knees on the davenport, his chin
resting on the back cushion. The children are gathered at the far end
of the park, standing behind a ribbon that is held on one side by the
mayor and on the other by someone in a rabbit suit.