Frank Zafiro - Beneath a Weeping Sky

His mother only occasionally objected to his absences, but since he’d turned ten he started making his own meals and taking care of himself in every way, which left her more time to drink her whore’s drink and watch her programs. About the only thing they did together on a regular basis was sit in the Laundromat once each week and watch the three loads of laundry as they were first washed, then dried. Every other interaction seemed to be in passing, sometimes punctuated with a sharp word or a stinging slap. He learned to absorb those without crying. Crying in front of his mother was almost as bad as crying in front of his father and there were far more opportunities for it.

So they settled into a routine of sorts, Jeffrey and his mother. She seemed to accept his bookishness because it freed her of dealing with him. He accepted that the cost of being her son remained the frequent slurred, angry words and hard smacks, but that they never lasted forever and he was eventually allowed to escape into a book.

Then his father came home and disrupted the truce. For those few days, Jeffrey tried to hide his reading habit while at the same time needing the escape all the more. The arguments between his parents grew fiercer and more frequent. The bruises and swollen lips appeared on his mother’s face more often. At the same time, it seemed like his father only ever slept on the couch. Sometimes he went out, staying away until late in the night. Every time he left, Jeffrey hoped he was going back to the best damn ship in the Navy (even if it was full of idiot officers) instead of coming home in the middle of the night, slamming doors and singing incoherently.

Once, he ordered Jeffrey out of bed in the middle of the night and into the living room. He stood at attention, blinking stupidly through his sleepy eyes, while his father criticized him and gave him advice on how to stop being such a sissy queer boy. He punctuated his points with heavy slaps to Jeffrey’s shoulders, along with admonitions to ‘stand up straight like a man.’

Jeffrey stood as tall and rigid as he could at three o’clock in the morning. He pretended he was an Army soldier and stared straight ahead, refusing to cry. He knew his father hated the Army even more than he hated and loved the Navy, so pretending to be a soldier gave him a strange sense of satisfaction and strength. It must have shown on his face because his father lit into him for having a “smart ass look on that mug of yours.” He followed that up with a series of hard slaps to Jeffrey’s head.

“You think you’re something? Huh?”

Slap.

“You aren’t shit, you little shit.”

Slap.

“You little whore’s son. You’ll never be shit.”

Slap.

“Don’t you fucking look at me like that.”

Tears sprang to Jeffrey’s eyes. He willed them not to fall.

The appearance of tears seemed to satisfy his father. He stopped slapping and laughed uproariously. “Oh, there it is. The little queer crybaby I know.” He waved him away with a flick of his hand. “Get out of my sight.”

Jeffrey retreated gratefully to his bedroom, but it was a long time before the burning in his belly allowed him to sleep.

On another occasion, he heard two voices come into the apartment late at night. One was unmistakably his father’s deep rumbling, but he didn’t recognize the other voice. It was definitely a woman’s voice, though. There were some whispers and laughter and the clink of glasses, followed by some other noises that he couldn’t exactly place. He heard the woman’s voice cry out as if she were in some kind of pain. That’s when he figured out that his father was putting her in her place. He was laying the whammo on her, just like he did to his mother.

After a while, the noises leveled off and he drifted back to sleep.

In the morning, he waited for the argument to begin, but it never came. Eventually, his hunger drove him out of his room. In the kitchen, his father drank coffee and read the newspaper. His mother sat in her chair and watched television. No one said anything.

Jeffrey made himself some toast. For now, he decided not to say anything, either. Instead, he ate his toast, then slipped into the living room. He stood next to the window and watched the sky for snow.

August 1982

His father missed his twelfth birthday, which was no surprise.

Slightly more surprising was that so did his mother, even though she was there. She tried to make up for her forgetfulness several days later. She took him to McDonald’s for a cheeseburger and then to the movies. Together, they sat in the darkened theater and watched E.T., the Extraterrestrial . She even bought him popcorn and a soda.

More importantly, she wasn’t being mean to him.

That part lasted the entire movie and until they made it out to the parking lot. In the car on the way back to the apartment, though, she noticed that he’d wiped his buttery fingers on his jeans. Her hand whipped out and caught him alongside his head, accompanied by harsh words about how he “never took care of his things” and how he “ruined everything he touched.”

He clenched his jaw and said, “Yes, Mother.”

At home, he tried to slip away to his room and lose himself in a book. But she caught him first. Reaching out with her thumb and forefinger, she gripped the tender skin under his chin and pinched. This was even worse than the slaps. If he tightened the muscles that ran under there, her finger pinch turned into a finger-nail gouge, followed up with a slap to the head.

“Don’t think you can just run and hide,” she carped at him. “That’s all you ever do, is read your stupid books. You don’t know how hard it is to be a single mother and to try to keep this house in order.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Oh, get out of my sight,” she told him. “You disgust me.”

He fled to his room. The book he was reading now concerned a boy who was thirteen and going through changes. The boy discovered things about girls that Jeffrey was just starting to be interested in. Beyond that, things were happening to that boy that were also happening to Jeffrey. The one that worried him the most until he read about it in this book was that sometimes he woke up in the night and realized he’d wet the bed. At first, he was horrified because of the difficulty he used to have with wetting the bed and wetting his pants. But this was different than pee. Instead, there was less of it and it was sticky. The boy in the book called them “wet dreams” and he always had them when he thought about his best friend’s sister. Jeffrey couldn’t always remember what he’d been dreaming about, but the times that he did remember were confusing to him. Sometimes, he knew he’d been dreaming about the sounds that the strange woman made in the living room when his father was laying the whammo on her. Other times, he knew he’d been dreaming about his mother, though he couldn’t remember what happened in the dream.

Eventually, he learned that he didn’t have to be asleep or dreaming to make those things happen. He could think about things, touch himself and after a while, there was a wonderful feeling, followed by that same wet, sticky stuff. He marveled at what a wonderful secret he’d discovered. He wondered if anyone else knew about it, but he instinctively knew to keep it private.

All of the changes in his body that made him think that maybe when his father came home again, he’d talk to him differently when he saw that he was becoming a man. He’d grow big and strong. Maybe he’d join the Army and even though that would make his father angry, he’d get over it when he saw how tough Jeffrey was. He’d show him. He’d lay the whammo on lots of different girls. He didn’t know how many it would take before his father would love him, but he knew that if he did it enough, eventually he would.