Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,49

focus, to stand up, in one elusive gesture, for what was right. He had done some other research back in Cambridge, MapQuesting the old man’s house in Chatham, figuring out the routes. There wasn’t much he could do right now, but somehow he hadn’t planned on all this gaping silence, stretching into the darkness like an endless night. Typical, he heard a voice say, and for a moment he startled, unsure if it was real. Never prepared, never paying attention, and now he could recognize the intonations, the slight slurring of the consonants, the disdain just barely held at bay. Fuck, he thought, as the ghosts descended on the living room, and he could see—really see—his father’s form take shape by the window, in the wing chair he had favored that summer, sipping gin and tonic, dressed in khakis and Izod, trying to look like he belonged. You never were much good on the details, the voice went on, a voice like smoke, coming from nowhere and everywhere, flickering like bad reception but relentless as it had ever been.

It had been a trainwreck, that summer. Of course it had. The rental had been too expensive, and his parents had fought about it every day. His father had seen it as a way to something, but to his mother this had been an empty faith. His father drank too much, and was too loud, too familiar; you could see the others wince as he closed in. And so, he had turned his frustrations first on his wife and then on his son, a scrawny kid then, the human fly, his father called him when he saw him scaling the exterior of the house. What are you doing? he would yell. Why can’t you be normal for once in your life? Everything had come to a head one afternoon, when his father had returned to the house to drag him to some useless function and found him hiding in the closet of his room upstairs, curled into a hopeless ball.

It had been years since he’d thought about this, but being in the house brought the memory back in a rush. He could see himself in the corner of the closet, listening as his father’s footsteps neared but lacking the will to move. He could see the closet door pull open, feel the violence of it, and see his father’s face, flushed with anger, eyes darting as if afraid he would get caught. Goddamn closet case, the old man had slobbered, staring down at him. Then he had slammed the door and rushed heavily from the house.

Years later, when his father was dying, he’d mentioned the memory to see what he would say. He didn’t know why—to settle the score perhaps, or maybe he just wanted some vindication, an acknowledgment of how it had been.

That never happened, his father had whispered. I don’t know what you’re talking about. But ghosts didn’t lie. Or did they? One way or another, he was going to find out.

In the morning, he awoke from uneasy dreams on the living room couch. His back was stiff and his head hurt as if he’d been drinking. For a moment, he couldn’t place himself, the angles unfamiliar, light bleeding through the windows in a pale yellow wash. Slowly, awareness crept in: the house, the vision, the jetty, the intercession of all those ghosts.

He sat up, rubbed his eyes. The room was empty, as far as he could see. In the thin November blankness, there was nothing, no whisper of the past. That was good because today he was going to need to be present, he was going to need to pay attention, no matter what his father might have thought.

He pissed for a long time in the downstairs toilet, but the water was turned off so he couldn’t flush. No matter, he thought. He wasn’t going to be here that long. In the kitchen, he found a box of Cheerios and ate a handful even though they were stale. That summer, he had spent every morning in this kitchen, staring down the endless emptiness of the days that loomed ahead of him like open questions, his only goal to stay out of his father’s way. Funny how he hadn’t remembered that until he got here, funny how it all seemed to fade away.

At some point, he was going to have to eat something more substantial than stale Cheerios, but he put that in the category of later and returned to