Кейт Браверман - A Good Day for Seppuku

“I’m an innkeeper for strays?” His father is infuriated. “Not in this life.”

His father calls Sheriff Murphy. Jimbo drives his patrol car to the clinic. His father demands Jimbo arrest the delegation from Pittsburgh. The sheriff glances at the women in pastel suits and high-heeled shoes. They aren’t whores or white trash passing bad checks and selling dope. They aren’t hippies bad-mouthing America and whining about Salvador. They look like high school principals and doctors’ wives and smell like Reagan and golf.

‘What for?” the sheriff wonders.

“Trespass, conspiracy to intimidate, harassment, and monumental stupidity,” his father informs him.

“Hold on, Red,” the sheriff cautions.

“Call me Red again, I’ll knock your lights out,” Dr. Joshua Sutter threatens. He makes a fist.

His father has extraordinary hands, long and wide, and his fingers are monumental, graceful, sculpted and purposeful. The bones are clearly articulated like mountain ridges on old globes.

“Kids in the hollows eat paint chips and bark. Vets sleep in bushes beside highways.” He waves his big-as-branches arms up and down, and in a diagonal implying lightning. Then he spreads his arms apart suggesting the wingspan of an eagle or a flying dinosaur.

“Can’t do much about that,” Jimbo decides.

“We’re mass killing peasants in Central America. And they have bleeding hearts for kittens? You kidding me, Jimbo? These folks,” his father pauses and glances at the Pittsburgh delegation, “have the St. Vitus of the 80s. It’s highly contagious.”

“Can’t help you there, either,” Jimbo says.

Tommy waits a week. They eat frozen dinners, canned soup with crackers, and have Papa Paulo’s pizza delivered. His mother used a battered Betty Crocker cookbook. Wednesday’s meatless lasagna passes, Thursday’s fried chicken with wild rice, and Friday’s tuna casserole. His father reads a book about differential equations and makes notations in the margins. Periodically, he briefly glances up and says something about the sheriff.

“Jimbo’s a coward and fool. He got his purple heart for shooting himself,” his father reveals. “Dropped his .45 on his foot and it discharged. What a dick.”

Tommy stays in his room. He doesn’t have a single arrowhead or fossil trapped in amber. Amber is how history punctuates itself, assuring that some specimens don’t disappear. It’s like an exclamation point.

“Dad,” he begins.

“Don’t call me Dad.” His father closes a text book and looks directly at him. “Dad is for whiners. It diminishes and offends me. I’m not just your dad. I have other aspects. Other facets.”

“What should I call you?” he wonders.

“Call me Captain like everyone else,” his father instructs him.

“Where do you think Mom is?” Tommy asks.

“No idea,” Captain says. “At least a million women disappear every year. Could be more. Police find their cars on back roads. The FBI discovers their suitcases at airports and bus depots. Women vanish like smoke. Poof.”

His father draws out the word, poooofff, and waves his magician’s arms toward the ceiling. It’s a gesture meant to imply the infinite universe with its inexplicable laws and paradoxes — its force fields, dark matter, black holes, sudden blindness, spontaneous combustion and vanished mothers.

On Sundays when his father is gone tending to sheep and cows, Tommy walks to Madison Street where three churches in a row occupy the whole block. Covenant Baptist, then Central United Methodist and All Saints Lutheran. He makes himself inconspicuous and watches women pass in their special church clothing. They wear big floppy hats, their good shoes are polished, and they have their dead grandmothers’ rhinestone pins on their coat.

When they are close, almost brushing him, he breathes in their skin. This is what fascinates him, not the singing or sun beating itself against stained glass, but the powdery floral dust rising from the necks and hair of discreetly perfumed women. It’s this muted citrus and tea rose he wants to breathe, internalize and own. This is what he must analyze and possess. It has nothing to do with religion.

On his 14th birthday, Captain presents him with a color TV. Sheriff Murphy carries the over-sized 40-gallon aquarium from the display window of Peter’s Prize Pets. He has a bucket of water with guppies, neons, red barbs, butterfly rams and angel fish. There’s a bag of coral and gray pebbles and a small wooden box with a ship to sit on top of the gravel bottom. The ship runs on batteries and sends out distress signals in what might be Morse Code. Jimbo produces two birthday hats, candles and a cake from Brenda’s Bakery. Jimbo impales candles in the icing and Captain and the sheriff sing Happy Birthday. They’re out of tune. Tommy blows out the candles and doesn’t make a wish.

Later, Captain helps him set up the aquarium. They rarely have a project together and Tommy is disoriented by the thrill.

“What’s your major?” Captain asks. “Austerity and solitude?”

“Biochemistry,” Tommy answers.

“Sit alone in a lab with tubes in racks and shakers? Count how many molecules can disco on a pin?” Captain returns with a glass of scotch. “Don’t make the mistake I did. I hate my job.”

His father loathes being a veterinarian. Animals bore him. They’re too predictable and the stakes are too low. Sheep or cats, horses or dogs, mice or mammoths. Captain often threatens to quit. After all, he has other facets.

“Go to medical school, Thomas. Nothing serious like surgery. Dermatology is the best bet. It’s an overlay.”

Tommy doesn’t go into the forest in winter. Trees thin to sticks embedded in deep snowdrifts. Hills resemble the aftermath of an atomic blast. Their nudity is obscene. It’s a sacrilege. His birthday gift TV only receives two channels. The news from Scranton or Philadelphia, and preacher shows. The fish die one by one. His sunken ship no longer sends out distress calls in a smart sequence of three quick red beams every fifteen minutes. The batteries are dead.

Tommy suspects distress calls fail to lead to search and rescue. There’s the matter of encryption and current conditions. His ship is in the Mariana Trench and nobody is listening.

When he was in second grade, he realized his parents didn’t actually speak to one another. They only appeared to inhabit the same house on Lincoln Street. But they broadcast on separate frequencies in encrypted codes that changed every day. That’s when he recognized the futility of distress calls. There’re actually posthumous messages. By the time you say May Day May Day it’s too late.

Six months later, his grandfather, Horace Bowen, telephones. The Captain and Horace aren’t on speaking terms.

“Well, son,” Horace begins. There’s a pause, as if his grandfather is taking a deep breath. “Seems your mother got a touch of malaria in Africa. She called me for money. They flew her to Germany. She’s OK now.”

So she didn’t go to New Mexico after all, Tommy is startled to realize. She joined the Peace Corps instead and they sent her to Arusha in Tanzania. She was teaching girls to use sewing machines in a village called Mosquito Creek. They were making aprons with Mt. Kilimanjaro stenciled on the front. They’d sold 231 at the airport when she became infected.

His grandfather, Horace Bowen, has a northern accent with rolling a’s that are languid but defined, like smooth sandstone boulders slowly sliding down a hill. He lives in an Amish village in Manitoba, Canada. That’s where his parents are from. They grew up on adjoining farms. His mother won the Governor General’s Gold Crescent and was going to Berkeley, California. But she had somehow detoured and married Captain instead. She was sixteen.