Ronald Malfi - Floating Staircase

Discomfited, I turned away.

My mind returned to that evening in the cemetery—the way he’d looked standing over his nephew’s grave. Now, despite all that had been revealed, I found that my impression of the man remained unchanged. Something about him was innately wrong.

“Glasgow.” Dentman’s baritone voice punctured me like an icy quill. “Travis Glasgow. Glasgow the writer.”

I swiveled around on the stool. “David,” I said, nodding. We could have been old acquaintances. And in a way, I guess we were.

“Come here,” he said. “Sit down. Have a beer with me.”

“I’m waiting for someone, thanks.”

“Be a sport, Hemingway.” His gaze was shackled to mine. I couldn’t turn away. Haunted, he was a shape without substance: a hollowed husk.

Also, he was grinning at me.

It took a fair amount of willpower to get off my stool and cross over to his table. It was the perilous trek around the ridge of a great mountain. A few lumberjacks shooting pool paused to watch me while on the jukebox someone was attesting to the fact that his gal was red hot.

As if by design, a single chair stood empty across from him at the opposite end of the table. Without a word, I pulled the chair out and dumped myself into it.

“That’s the spirit,” he said humorlessly.

“I’m buying this round.”

Dentman eyeballed me like I was a Thanksgiving turkey. “Your face healed up okay.”

“No worse than it was before.” When I realized I was rubbing my cheek, I quickly dropped my hand. “Anyway, I’ll consider it a going away present.”

“Shots,” Dentman said. “Bourbon.”

I motioned Tooey over to the table. He’d been watching me since I sat down. “Bring us a bottle of your nastiest, angriest bourbon.”

In under a minute, Tooey returned with two shot glasses and a dark carafe shrouded in dust. He unscrewed the cap, then set the bottle and the glasses on the table. “I brought glasses. Unless you two want to drink this shit out of an ashtray?”

“Thanks,” I said. “We’re good.”

When he walked away, he did so with the uneasy gait of someone who feared he might get shot in the back.

Dentman squeezed the bottle. I expected it to shatter. He filled both shot glasses, spilling much, then picked up his glass, scrutinized it. “Here’s to world peace.”

Together we downed the shots. It tasted like piss spiked with lighter fluid. I felt my insides tremble.

“I’m sorry for what happened,” I said once the sinister aftertaste had faded.

“Ain’t for you to be sorry about.”

“You didn’t let me finish,” I said. “I’m sorry for what happened to your family. But I still don’t trust you.”

“That’s good,” Dentman said, “because there’s still a part of me that wants to smack your face around to the back of your head.”

“Well, shit,” I said. “We should have toasted to friendship.”

To my astonishment, Dentman laughed. It was a low, drilling, lawn mower sound, much like the engine of his pickup, but it was a laugh just the same. After the laughter died, he said, “I suppose I owe you a bit of gratitude.”

“How’s that?”

He made a clicking sound at the back of his throat. “My sister, she needs me. She needs me to look after her. She isn’t well.”

I wondered if he had any idea I’d been watching his testimony through the two-way mirror.

“Our mother died when we were very young,” Dentman said. “Car accident. I guess I don’t remember her much.” Very sober, he looked straight at me—through me, I would have bet. “My father was a bad man.” Slowly, he shook his massive head, as if trying to shake the memories loose. “What was your father like?”

My father had been warm and understanding, given to periodic bouts of capriciousness and whimsy when the spirit struck. Before Kyle died, he had been a good father—so I suddenly hated myself for my inability to summon any memory of him other than the day when he beat me black and blue with his belt.

“Just a regular guy,” I said.

“Our father,” he said, and it was as if he were about to recite a prayer, “was crazy before he ever went crazy. This crazy man would tie his children to trees out in the yard when they were little. If you broke a dish, you would have to kneel on the pieces. You leave the stovetop dirty, you felt just what those hot burners could do. Hold your hand. Hold it. Keep it there until you learn your lesson.” He thrust his chin at me. “You ever learn your lesson when you were a kid?”

“No. Not like that.”

“He made me do things that no grown person—especially no father—should ever make a child do. He did worse things to Veronica. Things he couldn’t do to me.”

This summoned images so brutal and horrific in my head, I could feel a physical illness breaking out in my stomach and spilling like poison through the conduits of my veins. The horrible things Veronica suffered in that house . . .

“See,” Dentman went on, unflustered, “I left him once I was old enough. But then I came back for Veronica. I couldn’t let him . . . let him at her like that anymore. I had to go back. That room in the basement? The one hidden behind the wall? He built that room for her. She was terrified of it, but he’d lock her down there every night.”

“Jesus.”

“And sometimes he would be down there with her,” he added. “In the dark.”

“Stop,” I heard myself say distantly and ineffectually, like the yowl of a lost cat somewhere in the woods.

“One day I came back for her and we both left. Together. Fuck, she was a mess.” Dentman sounded instantly disgusted with the whole thing yet strangely rehearsed at the same time. “She hit some roadblocks and spent time in the hospital. Then, of course, she fell in with people who didn’t know how delicate she was. That’s how she got Elijah.” There was a curious combination of offhandedness and affection in his voice. It took me a moment to understand that maybe in a confused and intricate way he had loved the boy.

Dentman poured two more shots. He knocked his back before I even picked up my glass.

“When she heard he was sick, she said we needed to go back. She said it was her duty as a daughter to take care of him in his final days.” His eyes glittered like jewels. I watched him with more intensity than I had ever watched anything in my life. “Can you believe that? After all he’d done to her?”

“Why are you telling me this?”

He glanced at my shot glass. I had my fingers on it but hadn’t moved it from its spot on the table. “Drink it,” he told me.

“I don’t want it.”

“Drink it or I’ll push that shot glass through your forehead.”

It burned like acid going down my throat. I felt it trigger my gag reflex, and I thought I was going to vomit.

“Look at you,” Dentman growled, pleased with himself.

My eyes blurry with tears, I slammed the shot glass on the table.

“I hate you but I need to thank you, too.” He stared at his hands. Palms up, fingers only slightly curled, they looked like a pair of undiscovered sea creatures tossed on the deck of a ship. “I hate you because she’s going to go away for a little while. Doctors want to make sure she’s stable, that she’s okay. You stirred up a lot of emotion in her. You did some damage to my little sister.”

On a gale of laughter, the pub’s door swung open.

I cocked my head to see if Adam had arrived. I recognized the men who entered—they were two of Tooey’s regulars—but my brother was not among them. When I turned back around, Dentman had poured a couple more shots. “Jesus, I can’t . . .”

“Drink it. We’re doing this thing, aren’t we?”

“Doing what?”