He still had the keys to the front door in one hand, along with his balled-up tie. “I knew you were drunk when I saw you with your socks on. Every fucking time, man. Socks, shorts, and shirt.”
The man who was a twenty-seven-year beat copper dropped the gun to the ground. The hose sucked up part of his lime-green sport jacket, the one he wore for St. Patrick’s Day parties.
“Fuck you swear me.” He thumped his chest like a cave man.
“Snap out of it,” his son said, pulling off dog hairs. “Shit, I don’t want to start counting your phenobarbs every night again.”
Sounding like his mother, the candy-ass. He tried to say, Go take one of your mother’s Valiums, that’s okay, but I can’t have one lousy beer. What came out of his mouth was something like a voice box dropped into a well of baby shit.
“Gwa ma can lib.”
Wobbled, weaved, kept himself in control.
It was okay for his son to take drugs because it hurt his arms and his head to write the stories, but it was wrong for him to drink in order to face his own job. Working the projects since ’86, thirty murders a month in his district alone. His wife hiding all the beer in the cabinet with the window cleaner, he had to go out and drink quickie shots that no one could enjoy when he went to buy his lottery tickets.
Let’s see Mr. Candy-ass live through a stroke.
“Dad. C’mon.” Minimalist as possible.
He pushed his son down again, the glare from the overhead light hurting his head.
He swatted the maggot-shaped bulb away.
Stumbled from the closet, tripped over his son and back to the real oblivion. No more Federal Street, no dreams or nightmares or sweaty pillows.
Nothing.
He had started to snap out of it, the scene swimming into focus, when the paramedics were standing over him in the dining room. Overhead candelabra-style lights on at three in the morning. Like a sunburst.
“Tom. Tom.” They said it over and over, litanizing his name. By the time they had bundled him against the late October cold and bumped the stretcher down the front steps, one solitary neighbor watching because it was something to see, the policeman were aware.
His eyes were scared and knowing.
Later that night, the policeman’s son sat in the waiting room of Mercy Hospital. His wadded-up tie was still in his possession, a lucky charm of sorts, stuffed into a pocket. Which one, exactly, he wasn’t even sure.
He watched “Zombies on Broadway” on the overhead Zenith television. WLS; Channel Seven’s Insomniac Theater. Couple of second string Abbot and Costello types bringing back one of Boris Karloff’s zuvembis to do a lounge act in Sheldon Leonard’s nightclub.
He was there alone, would be alone until the doctors came in with news good or bad. He had lied to his dad about mother coming home; she had left her husband, as promised, after his second alcoholic relapse in 1988. It had been springtime then. His mother lived on the northside now.
A full-time writer, the cop’s son had traveled around until his money ran low; his dad was more than willing to let him come back home. It was good to have somebody to clean up and cook.
The movie would play for about eight minutes, cut away to a trailer card of spotlights over a pale blue Chicago skyline. Then he would endure three minutes of ads for G-rated phone sex—“Hi! I’m bored! Call me now at 1-900-Hot-Love”—and bankruptcy lawyers.
Nobody ever seemed to proofread the trailers: once, at a friend’s place up north, he was watching “The Saint in New York.” The trailer card had eliminated the first word, making the movie sound like bastard Injun talk. Saint in New York. Ugh! He had pulled out his notepad then, adding apostrophes, and writing S’AINT IN NEW YORK, S’IN CHICAGO. Never wrote a story with that title yet, but maybe one day.
The movie came back on, always with the volume lower than that of the commercials. A family of blacks entered the room, an entire entourage. Sons, daughters, aunts. From what he could pick up, they were waiting to hear if their male relative had survived three bullets in a gang drive-by shooting.
Or ten bullets as an innocent bystander, the cops shooting him as he lay there on the corner of 42nd and Drexel, depending on one family member’s point of view.
The son waited for the neurologist to come tell him whatever he had to tell about his father.
He waited again, six months; another lapse of judgment, this one compounded by a pin stroke and dementia. Subtle signs of Parkinson’s Disease in a man not even sixty.
He didn’t make his pension because of the new mayoral administration’s campaign promises.
The writer and his ex-policeman father in Midland Nursing Home, Christmas Eve 1991. A woman in the room telling him, telling the writer, that she recognized his uniform. Taken aback momentarily, then realizing he was wearing a Bears jacket. Orange and blue. His father’s mouth gaped like a fish.
Wanting water.
The woman then told him that she was thirty-nine and her mother was forty-one. Another woman in the room kept up a chant in Polish, most likely swear words.
The writer’s father wore a Posey gait belt now, so that the attendants could lift the bloated body from wheelchair to bed.
He let his father look out the window, at suburban Fallon Ridge. An ozone horizon lit by used car lots and bars with Old Style signs swinging in the winter wind above their doorways, advertising carry-outs in bottles and cans.
His father saw himself reflected in the window.
Reflected in a bar window. Green and red Christmas lights, deck the halls. Division had transferred him to an easier district; the 8th, at 63rd and St. Louis. He was off-duty, at the bar down by the GTW tracks.
And his candy-ass son was tending bar.
“Here, pop. It’s on the house.” The writer, lighthearted. The woman whose mother was two years older than her again commented that she recognized the writer’s uniform. The other woman said dupa yash nothing head and blew an angry spit bubble.
The water cups at the nursing home were a cross between jigger glasses and urine specimen cups; ridged plastic and opaque. The writer steadied his father’s hand by wrapping the Posey belt around his wrist, like a slice of gauze. By pulling on the belt, his father’s hand was raised to his mouth.
“Okay, pop. Good job.”
His father thinking on how he had always expected his son to end up doing something like this, working at a gas station or tending bar like he was now.
Working at places where he could tell his stories.
Stories that only drunk people would believe to be true.
DAVID
by Sean Doolittle
I get the strangest things sent along with submissions and contracts, T.E.D. Klein sent me a photo of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in swimsuits. Sean Doolittle sent me a photo of a hand with “a really cool blister.” If I ever decide to resume my practice of psychiatry, I’ll know where to find patients.
Doolittle is another of the younger group of authors who are beginning to find their voice; not too long ago, their voices were beginning to crack. Speaking for himself, Doolittle says: “I’ll be 23 on July 20. Born in Lincoln, 1971. I’ve sold fiction to anthologies Northern Frights 2, Young Blood, magazines including Cavalier, Deathrealm (obviously), Palace Corbie, Cyber-Psycho’s AOD, and a couple handfuls of other small press publications. I co-edited the short-lived magazine Vicious Circle, and am currently in the Master’s Degree program in creative writing at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.” Part of the vicious circle, Sallee’s story just before this is reprinted from Vicious Circle.