Кейт Браверман - A Good Day for Seppuku

“We can get a private detective. He’ll find Mom and bring her home.” He’s absolutely certain Sheriff Murphy will go with him. They’ll track her down, leap out and grab her. Jimbo can put her in handcuffs and carry her back.

“You can’t pluck somebody from their destiny,” Horace tells him. It’s a chide. “You can’t walk on water or raise the dead. He can call himself Captain. He can say abracadabra. He can dance with a bear. But we each have our own destiny. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Tommy replies.

Captain is preoccupied and rarely speaks. It’s as if words have failed him. He doesn’t eat for days, then devours all the soup in the kitchen in one night. Tommy picks up twenty-three cans from the floor and the wrappers from two boxes of crackers. His father has taken to going to Brenda’s Bakery and buying a dozen donuts. Pink boxes of glazed, jelly and old fashioneds with white icing are stacked next to the soups and scattered on the floor of his study.

His father parks the Buick near the clinic, plays his Best of Dylan cassette, but can’t force himself to get out of the car. He explains that his legs feel like wood and won’t respond to his commands. He goes to a physician in Philadelphia and returns with a bag of medicines. Later he claims he’s allergic to them.

“It’s like dipping my head in a bucket of cement,” Captain says.

His father says he wants to take a shower, but there’s an abnormality with the water. Days aren’t washing off like they should. There’s a thickness to the water, a sense of stained inks, the skin of the drowned, and what’s leaked from gutters. It’s the run-off from ruined lives in apartments with storm clouds in them. Lovers shout insults in a patois implying punishment and exposure. Outside, trees shudder, seized with vertigo, and Cancan in the nervous breeze. Constellations vanish as they scream. Captain says he needs to investigate the pipes for corrosion and rust, or something worse.

His father goes to another doctor in Boston. Captain walks in circles in his study for hours, often all night. Tommy hears his pacing even when Captain is barefoot.

Captain has an entire shelf of medicine bottles. One morning he throws them against the wall, gathers the scattered pills and tosses them in the trash. He can’t fall asleep and he can’t wake up. Then he cuts clinic hours to afternoons only. Blue circles form under his eyes and he’s pale as a toad’s belly.

They don’t celebrate holidays. No one visits and they aren’t invited anywhere. It’s as if they’ve also vanished. Occasionally, they watch football on his father’s TV. They go trout fishing twice.

“I hate all God’s fucking critters,” Captain often says as he passes, humming “Tangled Up In Blue.”

Tommy is torpid and becalmed in his bedroom. Captain claims he won’t extricate himself from Lincoln Street. His father thinks he’ll just carry his bag of dead guppies and the stain of no merit badges into a future he’s already despoiled.

Captain makes it clear that medical school is mandatory. Or else he’ll end up an assistant professor in a make-shift lab with teenage assistants. They’ll break the minimal equipment and he’ll have no budget to replace it. Tommy’s going to put himself in prison with a 25-to-life sentence.

“Studying for the priesthood?” Captain asks, staring down at him. Tommy sits at his desk and feels miniaturized and incompetent.

He checks the mailbox every day. Tommy is convinced a communication from his mother is coming. Logic dictates an exchange of addresses and photographs, and Christmas and birthday cards. She will provide a detailed explanation. At the least his mother will send a postcard.

Tommy wonders if she considered what would happen to him on Lincoln Street in the barricaded late evenings when Captain anchors the Buick and returns from a twelve-day prowl. Captain makes the house shake when he walks in, stamping ice from his boots. His hat, sprinkled with snow, is barely attached to his kelp-red tangle of hair, and his father’s head almost brushes the ceiling. Captain doesn’t say hello. He may fast for days or devour all the soup in an hour. He claims his head is encased in bricks. Then he goes into his study. He closes and locks the door.

Tommy is certain his mother will come to his high school graduation. That’s why he cut his hair short and bought a three-piece suit he can’t afford. That’s why he’s valedictorian.

Tommy stands at the podium on stage and surveys the auditorium row by row, memorizing family groupings and searching for solitary women. His mother is thirty-three. It’s spring and she’ll wear a pastel suit with high heels dyed to match and pearls around her neck. She’ll have a short stylish haircut and a square hat like Jackie Kennedy. She’ll smell like Hyacinths and blueberries.

“Joining the Marines?” Captain comes up behind him. “You all dressed up for Mommy?”

Captain slaps the back of his new pin-striped suit as if he wants to leave his handprint on the fabric. His father wants to soil and brand him. There’s nothing friendly about it.

“She’s not coming, Thomas. She’s not sending birthday gifts or Christmas cards. No postcards, either. Just like I told you.” Captain smiles.

It’s ambivalent and unconvincing, Tommy decides. His father is afraid she might actually appear. Then he’d be accountable. His father’s face is the wrong postcard.

Captain is wearing his riverboat gambler’s hat, and his one sports jacket. He hasn’t taken it to the cleaners for years. It’s covered with cat and dog fur, and stained with sheep urine, cow pus and blood. Streaks of Betadine resemble skid marks from a collision that permanently scarred a highway. Yellow paint-like smears encrust his sleeves. It’s mucus that leaked from the eyes of sick cows. Hay protrudes from his pocket and sticks in the brim of his hat. Captain doesn’t own a tie. His father calls it a statement.

“I’m going to Cal,” he informs his father.

“You’re never getting off Lincoln Street,” Captain replies.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Jimbo offers. He’s wearing his dress uniform. It’s obsidian black and trimmed with gold. The buttons and braid on his cap are like lanterns. He’s polished his shoes and he’s wearing white gloves. They’re stark against his black uniform and seem pasted on and detached from his body.

“Where’s Cal at?” he asks.

“Across the bay from San Francisco,” Tom tells Jimbo.

“Sounds like he’s leaving town.” Jimbo glances at Captain. “Getting the 49ers, too.”

“We’ll see,” his father says.

During Tom’s senior year, his grandfather telephones on a warm late afternoon in spring. Redwoods in an accidental row form an uninterrupted dark green fence in front of his bungalow. Their bark smells like wharves and cinnamon. There’s no wind and the bay is a pale blue devoid of whitecaps. It’s asleep. The only motion is seagulls passing.

“She’s done it this time, son,” his grandfather begins. His tone is weary and distant. “Seems she’s been sleeping on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Been there a while, too. Living in derelict hotels and camping under a pier. They charged her with vagrancy, illegal use of public lands, and selling without a vendor’s license.”

“Selling what?” he wonders.

“Seems she had a stall on the boardwalk. She’d find shells and driftwood. Make necklaces and such.” Horace tells him, “I had to get a lawyer.”

Tom envisions his mother wearing an apron with Mt. Kilimanjaro stenciled on the front. She’s sewn on dozens of extra pockets. She’s in the tide line, collecting what’s fallen from cargo ships. She’s found paper umbrellas printed with pink peonies and cranes, and a piece of fuselage from a plane thought lost off Zanzibar. Once she found a swallow’s nest with six undamaged scarlet eggs .She won’t talk to cops. She’s taken a vow of silence and they wouldn’t believe her anyway.