The Patron Saint of Ugly (26 page)

“Get a flashlight, for God’s sake,” Dad said. “I’m winning!”

Amid all that chaos, the dangerous blend of water and electricity, the world exploding and imploding, and that horrid image in my brain, my parents were concerned only about their stupid card game.

I ran to my room, stomach churning, and slid under the covers in my leaf-littered sweater and mud- and glass-crusted shoes. The burn of vomit still in my throat. I lay there, shivering, and not just from the frigid air that had suddenly whirled around Dagowop Hill.

Soon I heard footsteps out front. I knelt on my bed and looked out into the blackness as Nicky made his way up one slow step at a time, golden ringlets dripping from whatever had poured from the sky. The front door opened and then closed behind him, but my parents didn’t notice him any more than they had noticed me. He went into the bathroom across the hall from my room, and I lunged to my keyhole and squinted out. Miraculously the bathroom lights worked for him. He closed the door, punched in the lock, and yanked the shower curtain back. The faucet in the tub cranked on full blast, water rushing and gurgling, pipes moaning. Then the plunking sound as he eased himself in, and I imagined water swirling up to the rim. He stayed in there for half an hour, furiously scrubbing, occasionally sniffling, and I pictured his bony white knees gleaming in the box fort.

Finally my brother came out, and as he went to his room, I wondered if I should follow.
What did he do to you?
But his bedroom door closed on my opportunity. I tiptoed to the bathroom, where Nicky’s sepia-tinted bathwater glugged down the drain, as if the answer might appear in the ring of dirt circling the tub.

I felt bile rising and rushed to the toilet, but my nausea vanished at the sight of rusty water. I went to the sink, turned on both faucets—stained water splashed into the sink.

The front door opened. I ran to the hall and tried to plant myself there like a sturdy, four-trunked sentry. I leaned against the wall for strength, but when I heard Ray-Ray’s footsteps approach the hall entrance, I ducked back into my room and stood next to the doorway, peeking out with one eye. He loomed at the end of the hall, oblivious to me, his eyes aimed at Nicky’s door. Ray-Ray’s soaking torso swayed toward it, but then he turned slowly around and sat in one of Mom’s wingbacks, the fabric of his clothes rustling as he settled in, claiming ownership.

The following morning, a fresh layer of snow blanketed our hill, suffocating our Monopoly roofs, our streets, our lawns. Mr. Julietto had correctly predicted an early winter. The snow wasn’t blue-white but gray, like fireplace soot. I knew that beneath it, remnants of streetlight glass circled the base of every creosote pole up and down the hill. Just one day before I would have marveled at the powdery swells. But as I looked out my bedroom window I imagined Snakebite Woods were covered too, my four-trunk sycamore, my candy-wrapper-filled mound, and a box fort hoarding dark secrets beneath the ashy snow.

I sat in my room listening for Mother’s bed to creak, the little yawns and moans to slide from her mouth as they did each morning. Through the wall I heard her cough, the boards under the carpet whining as she walked to the bathroom. “Brr,” she said.

I opened my door and listened to the tinkling sound as Mom peed. The toilet flushed and the spigot turned on. “What the hell’s wrong with the water?” I heard her fumbling with the towel rack that often detached. “Stupid thing.” She came out and saw me standing in my doorway.

“Morning. Don’t drink the water.” She untangled my hair and assessed my leaf-speckled sweater. Grimy sneakers. “Did you sleep in your clothes?”

I didn’t answer, so Mom started walking toward the kitchen, toward loose poker change that I had no interest in. It would have been so much easier to spin around and hide under my covers, to pretend I hadn’t heard, hadn’t seen.

“Mom.”

She turned toward me, face weary from years of life in this fam-i-ly. “What is it?”

“I have to tell you something.” I looked at Nicky’s still-closed door, imagined him bundled mummy-like in his sheets. “In here.” I led her into my room, where I closed the door. Mom sat on my bed and dug sleep from her eyes. How I longed to dive into my closet.

“Garnet, I have a lot to do this morning, and now the water is screwed up.”

My heart thumped as I pushed out the few words I could muster. “Ray-Ray hurt Nicky.”

“What?”

I looked at my trembling hands and somehow found the language to describe what I had seen through the slats in the box fort.

Before I even finished, Mom burst into the hall, hands to her blanched face. I thought she was racing to her room to vomit up weird verse or dive into a hand mirror, but she ran to Nicky’s room. I followed, breathless, as she barged in and over to his bed. Nicky jerked up, hands rushing up to protect himself as he began listing venomous snakes.

“What did he do to you?” Mom said, voice too high.

Nicky’s eyes widened into that panicky look I had seen the night before.

Mom shook his shoulders, hard. “What the hell did Ray do to you?”

Nicky looked at me over Mom’s shoulder. He understood that somehow I knew too, and his expression collapsed from terror to red-faced shame. “Nothing!” His voice issued from some narrow place. He rolled toward the wall, probably hoping he could fall through the gap and be swallowed up for good. “Leave me alone!”

“What’s going on?” Dad stood in the doorway in his boxers and T-shirt. Black socks with a hole in the big toe.

Nicky buried his head deeper in the crevasse. Mom looked at Dad. “It’s Ray.”

“What?” Dad scratched his armpit.

I backed around him and moved into the hall as he entered. I couldn’t bear to watch Mom’s face as she searched for her own words to tell Dad what I had seen.

“Close the door,” Mom said to Dad, though she was looking at me. As if it weren’t already too late to protect me from this.

I sat on the hall floor as if I were waiting outside a confessional.

Until that moment, I had never heard my father truly angry. Over the years he had stuffed down his antipathy for his brother, his father, as if it were unthinkable to harbor ill feelings toward members of one’s own family. As if blood kin couldn’t wound one more deeply than anyone else on the planet. But that day, the groan started in the pit of his stomach and rumbled up to inflate his lungs before shooting through his throat in one long roar. I had never heard such screaming, such
goddamn, motherfucker, son of a bitch, bastard
, in all my days, and these were followed by Italian pejoratives:
testa di cazzo, bastardo, figlio di puttano, individuo spregevole!

The door to Nicky’s room flew open, the top hinge breaking, as Dad burst out, a maniacal glare in his eyes. He rushed toward the room where his clothes still lived but paused in the hall. I wondered if he was going to throw up too. He didn’t. He clenched his fist, cocked his arm, and punched a hole in the plaster wall as if it were tissue paper. “I’m gonna kill that son of a bitch! Where are my car keys?”

I expected Mom to come out and placate her enraged, hung-over husband. Instead, she dashed from Nicky’s room and rushed past me cowering on the floor. “I’ll find them,” she hollered on her way to the kitchen. “Put on some pants.”

Dad raced to his room to tug on a pair of trousers. He had one leg in and was about to ram in the second but he stopped, frozen, as if he’d just remembered something important. And then my dad started crying, real chest-heaving, gasping-for-breath sobs. Soon he shook it off.
“Picchiare selvaggiamente qualcuno!”
I understood that. He was going to beat the shit out of someone, though by then I wasn’t sure if it was Ray-Ray, Uncle Dom, or both.

I slumped against the door frame, stunned, looking at a hole in the wall and plaster chips on the floor, wondering what I had set in motion. It looked as if Dad really might kill Ray-Ray, and Uncle Dom too if he tried to intervene. And there was Mom coming at him with the keys in her hand. “I found them! I found them!” She could have been offering him a knife or a gun.
Kill them good, Angelo
.
Kill them good
.

Dad started to barge out the front door, red eyes pulsing, uncombed hair shooting out like tongues of fire.

“I’m going too,” Nicky said, which stopped all of our hearts.

“What?” Dad and Mom said.

Nicky stood in his bedroom doorway.

“No,” Mom said. “Dad will take care of this. You stay home with Garnet and me.”

Then my beautiful, delicately boned, fine-featured brother took a deep breath and said, “Dad, I have to go too.”

Dad looked at Nicky. “All right.”

“No!” Mom grabbed Dad’s arm as he passed, trying to stall him.

Dad drilled his eyes into hers. “Marina, Nicky wants to do this. He needs to do this.” I looked at my father, my brother, wondering where all this courage had sprung from.

It was definitive bravery, and Mom knew it too. By the way she stared at Dad, I could tell that he appeared a foot taller in her eyes. It was as if he’d disappeared after their courting days, had actually been gone, not merely sawing wood in the basement, but now she had found her husband again, a miracle in itself, and I immediately thought that if she could find him, maybe he could still find me.

Without breaking his gaze, he gently slid her hand from his arm and held it for one second, two. He offered a nod, which somehow bolstered my mother, and she backed away to let the two men in her life grab their coats from the closet and head outside.

Mom and I watched as they descended the ice-coated steps, Nicky nearly losing his footing.

“Careful!” Mom called.

They slammed the car doors and Dad backed out too fast, tailpipe sparking the ground. He peeled out, leaving two icy strips on the street, furious to get to Grover Estates.

I pictured Ray-Ray and Uncle Dom sleeping in their warm beds. They had no idea what was torpedoing toward them.

It sounded exactly as it should have. Metal and glass plunging into bricks and mortar. A screeching, crunching, grating roar. Alarmed residents yanked on their robes and galoshes to rush outside and down the hill, never mind the dirty water, the curlers and half-shaved faces, the teakettles keening on the stoves. They hurried outside, along with me and Mom, who squeezed my hand so hard it throbbed. We slipped and slid, because beneath the snow was a layer of ice. The natural spring that perpetually washed across No-Brakes Bend had frozen with a vengeance. It was a patch Dad could never easily navigate, but especially not while livid and speeding. We saw the tracks where our station wagon had skidded over the curb and then flown completely over the embankment and the row of hedges before plunging into the side of Mr. Dagostino’s garage.

Mom let go of my hand and ran toward the hissing smoke. I started to follow—“Mom, wait!”—but someone yanked me back by my waist. Annette Funicello, who looked even whiter than the snow, her eyes rounder than mine. “No, Garnet!” She tugged me back up the hill, though I tried to wrench free.

“Let me go!” I wailed, but she was stronger than I ever would have imagined, that adrenaline surge of mothers protecting their young. She pulled me all the way to her house as neighbors kept pouring down the hill, all those old nonnas kissing scapulars and holy medals as they rushed forward in their fur-lined boots, their children asking Annette, “What happened? What’s going on?” The questions went unanswered, but they would know soon enough.

Mary Ellen stood inside her front door. “Mom,” she whined when we came inside.

“Just a minute, honey.”

Though it was warm in her house, I started shivering, teeth chattering. Annette raced down the hall for a bedspread, which she wrapped completely around me before settling me on the couch in front of her picture window. She came at me with a brown medicine bottle and a spoon. I opened my mouth without protest and swallowed the burning liquid. I could still hear people outside crying and sobbing, a distant siren that grew louder and louder. I started to sit up to look out the window. “No,” Annette said, pressing me back down. She tugged the drape cord; the heavy curtains swished together, sealing out the light. They couldn’t seal out the noise, though. I tipped my ear toward the siren so that its cry could pour into my ear and twist around like a cyclone with the siren that was screaming inside of me, because I was the one who had removed the
portafortuna
and emptied it of its good-good magic.

Hours later I awoke to the sound effects of cartoons: slide whistles and
ka-bong
s and plucked violin strings. Tom chasing Jerry with an ax. Mary Ellen sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV in the living room. A cluster of shadowy figures stood just inside the front door: Annette and my mother and Sergeant Mickey from the Sweetwater police, who handed Dad’s wallet to Mom. She held it to her nose, inhaled, and I, too, smelled the musky scent of leather. I imagined holding the curved shape of it to my cheek, wondering where my father was that Mom was being entrusted with his billfold. I wanted to ask about Nicky, but for the moment all I could do was lie there, still swaddled in Annette’s bedspread, holding my breath.

Sergeant Mickey offered Mom the keys to the station wagon. At first she took a step back from the ring of dangling metal, but then she held out her hand, and when he rested the keys in her palm, her hand sank under the weight of them. He left Annette to minister to my mother, her outstretched hand still cupping Dad’s keys, which she had armed him with that morning. Her hand started trembling, the keys jangling, as if she were holding some dangerous thing in her palm: a wad of rusty razor blades, a blasting cap, a scorpion.

TAPE FOURTEEN

SS Edmund Fitzgerald

Archie:

I’m in the conservatory surrounded by the grand piano, a cello, and a honey-colored harp, though my preferred instrument, as you know, is the lowly saw. Specifically, a Sicilian import with a curlicue-etched handle stained with my father’s sweat. Its melancholy wail fits my mood, since I’ve been conjuring ghosts. Now there are even more ghosts, because the SS
Edmund Fitzgerald
sank last week on, you guessed it, November tenth. I asked Nonna how a cargo ship hauling so much mystically protective iron could go under, drowning twenty-nine men, whose bodies they haven’t recovered. She didn’t have an answer.