86'd: A Novel - By Dan Fante Page 0,20

the personality of its excessive, troubled occupant. I felt him there behind me—leering—furious with me for encroaching on his privacy.

Across the room in one corner was his large drawing board, its surface a disorganized collage of unfinished automobile sketches and clipped newspaper articles. From the age of eight, even before he could type a letter for himself, our Mom had sent his designs off to automobile makers. The practice had become a lifelong obsession with only rare acknowledgments.

One entire wall of the room was filled with Nazi biographies and World War II literature. Cecil told me something about my brother that I had not known: In the last few years he’d taught himself to read and speak German.

Another wall was filled with photographs of the Reich elite: Erich von Manstein, Heinrich Himmler, Erwin Rommel, and Martin Bormann. It felt like I was exploring my brother’s decomposing asshole.

Cecil drained his glass then slid open a plastic closet door to show me Rick’s two favorite German trophies: Von Ribbentrop’s SS dinner jacket and his cap. They hung there in a thick, see-through plastic garment bag below the guy’s scary WWII photograph. His son’s uniforms were on either side. I was overcome by the need to get very very drunk.

We were about to leave the den when my guide stopped me at the door. “Wait. There’s one more thing I want to show you,” he half-whispered.

Cecil slid open the top drawer of a tall brown filing cabinet. “Here are the two things your brother loved more than anything.”

I was handed two typed and bound manuscripts. My father Jonathan Dante’s first-draft originals, yellowed by time. One was Ask the Wind and the other Brotherhood of the Vine.

It was like a punch in the face. Cecil had no way of knowing that our mother had guarded these manuscripts with her life and that she had never allowed them to leave the storage case in the basement of her home. Only a month before she’d given in and been persuaded to donate all Jonathan Dante’s original work to a local university. Somehow, in a crack in time, these two manuscripts had been pirated away by Rick Dante and then tucked neatly into his Nazi time capsule.

I’d had enough. I dropped them back into the file cabinet then slid the door closed. I looked at Cecil. “My brother was a real piece of work,” I said.

“You bet,” Cecil said. “Rick Dante was one of a kind. Let’s go get another drink.”

“Good idea,” I said back.

We drank the rest of that day and into the night, Cecil killing me with endless chatter about my brother and his strange obsessions.

In the morning I found myself asleep in my clothes on Rick’s living room couch, my brain half crazy. To fight off my hangover it was more of the same—three fingers of bourbon with my coffee. Then a half-pint from my suitcase.

Outside the church I was introduced to Rick’s secretary, a pretty rosy-faced forty-year-old who shook her head and filled me in. Rick’s doctor told him, she said, that if he kept on drinking and didn’t cut back he’d be gone in a year. Then, a couple of weeks after he’d returned to work from his near-death stomach surgery, she began discovering his empties under the daily newspaper in his trash can. Rick Dante lasted another six months.

I had a decent buzz going as I sat with Mom and Liz and Rick’s wife, Karin, and their daughter, Mindy, in the front row of Our Lady of the Bleeding Armpits. Mom and I hadn’t talked for months but for once she smiled and gave me a hug.

We were inches away from a body that—paint or no paint—had aged fifty years since I’d last seen it.

Then a Mexican priest who’d never set eyes on my brother delivered long measured doses of sweetened snot about Jesus and eternity and a good Christian life to the fifty distracted attendees. Excluded from his homily was any mention of weekends in jail or rehabs or an enraged, penniless wife and teenage kid, or the casual theft of his father’s most famous work.

Then, without warning, three feet away, the corpse in the box sat up and glared at me. Rick Dante was dressed in a black SS uniform and helmet. “What’s your problem?” the Nazi sneered.

“You, asshole,” I heard my voice report. “You’re my goddamn problem. You and your double-locked mausoleum where you boozed your life down the shitter.”

“Sieg heil!” the Gestapo corpse screeched back.

Liz was grabbing