Dodo, Chapter Eleven, The Knife

I’ll never forget the look of terror in the man’s eyes. He reached for his companion, pulling her from my path, wrapping his arms about her neck and waist like a parent would a child.
     His frozen stare followed me as I passed.
     Confused, nervous, I didn’t dare look back.
     Feeling the night wind opening my jacket, I strode across the downtown street, trying to fathom the unusual attention I’d aroused stepping from the bus. It was only when the wind died and I felt the handle of the large kitchen knife against my ribs, that I realized what had happened.
     “Idiot!” I thought, instantly feeling like some wretched pariah.
     There was the long blade, sticking from the shallow inside pocket, reflecting the glow of the street lamp above me.
     To the frightened couple I might well have been a murderer, a rapist, or a serial killer. I scolded myself again, hurrying from the small crowd gathered about the transit station.
     Why had I ever let Helmut force the stupid knife on me in the first place?
     Pittsburgh wasn’t Mayberry, but it wasn’t some vicious den of villainy either. I had no right walking about armed like some third world bandit.
     Stopping over a drain, I decided I had to lose the knife, and the nausea that was suddenly swirling about me. All I had to do was drop it through the grate, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Fear was crouching in the cavern of my ear, whispering, warning me. It had Helmut’s voice.
     “It’s after ten, idiot – you know the kind of shit that goes down after ten on a Friday night? They’ll fuck with a skinny kid like you – rob you, beat the shit out of you and then fuck you in your ass, stupid – just like that.”
     I must have rolled my eyes, for he grabbed me by my collar and yanked me towards him, thrusting his imposing chin at my throat.
     “I ain’t kidding, dick-face! You know what happened to Iceman and Lisa.”
     Bettina was standing in front of the refrigerator, holding a slice of pizza to a paper plate. She nodded her agreement. “You can’t be too careful, Tot,” she said, sounding unsettlingly like mother.
     Iceman and Lisa had been mugged just the week before, near Wilkinsburg. The mugger had a screwdriver, which he stuck into Iceman’s gut, holding him at bay against a window as he ordered Lisa to empty her purse onto the sidewalk. When Iceman had tried to grab the end of the screwdriver the mugger had raked it across his face, breaking his glasses and leaving a healthy gash above his left eye. He was then kicked repeatedly, until he collapsed to the ground, covering himself, terrified of what might happen to Lisa.
     Lisa was Iceman’s “platonic girlfriend”, as he liked to put it. Barely half his size, she had a button nose and perpetually pink cheeks. She reminded me of the silent film actress Mary Pickford. Like Bettina, I’d had a crush on her since the day I’d first set eyes on her, a horrible, relentless crush, the sort that made just seeing her almost unbearable. That she ended up married to an abusive jerk, dancing at a topless bar to pay their rent, simply made it worse. I think the only thing that saved me from doing something desperate and stupid was meeting F and falling in love.
     “Here, take this – and don’t come home without it,” Helmut ordered, taking the ten-inch blade from the kitchen drawer and dropping it into the inner pocket of my black sport coat, a well-worn thrift store treasure. I bit my lip, relenting to his bullying barrage, the way I always did.

It was mid-January.
     Pittsburgh was a mausoleum in the heart of winter, a jackstraw blueprint of colorless, bitterly cold, mostly empty streets, depressing stretches of old commerce and unforgiving industry, staid structures that seemed to press against the slate-colored sky, slipping into dusk’s lowering shroud.
     I made my way down Liberty Avenue, a tawdry procession of peep shows, florists, and watch repair shops that cut through the triangular thatch of downtown streets, a bleak arm reaching from the east, ending before it could disappear into the Monongahela River.
     I was on my way to a rendezvous with my father.
     It was a clandestine meeting, an act that defied reason, one which, only a week before, would have been all but unthinkable. That I was coming, unwittingly armed like an apprentice butcher, made it only more surreal.
     Father had left mother for the first time, some two weeks earlier. It was not a surprise. It had been in the making for a long while, ever since I’d graduated from high school. His moods had become increasingly more erratic, his temper more severe, his willingness to forgive forever diminishing. Mother could do little right in his eyes. Her every attempt to confront his drinking was met with outrage and indignation. “I do with my time what I choose, Mrs. Vogel,” he’d sneer, his head in the ice box, looking for the beer Helmut and I had been told to throw into the river beyond the railroad tracks. It was a routine we performed every Saturday morning, while father slept off the previous night’s tavern occupancy. He’d return from these drunks, a brown bag of bottles under his arm, stumbling through the front room of the small house in Ohio he’d brought us to when his job at the snack food factory in Binghamton was suddenly terminated. I never told mother that Helmut kept the beer for himself, drinking two or three under the highway overpass as I stood watch, having been instructed to whistle twice if I saw a police car, once if I saw father. The rest was stashed behind the wooden hutch at the rear of the brickyard down the road, the same place I’d once tried to keep a baby raccoon I’d found orphaned beside the highway. Helmut brought girls there, forced them to drink, and felt inside their underwear. I knew because he told me.
     I recognized that agreeing to meet with father was a towering betrayal to mother, and to Helmut. I realized it was a mistake, but I couldn’t stand him up.
     I now know it was fear that ruled my mind. I made myself feel better by convincing myself it was a sacrifice I had to make, a grand, unselfish gesture, a way to reach out and help father, somehow, someway. That he had chosen to contact me gave me a false sense of belonging, a notion of purpose in the adult world. It fed my weaknesses and he knew this all too well. He was an intelligent man, a ruthlessly orthodox commander of the seemingly crazed forces that drove him onward. Even drunk and lost to his overwhelming moods, he was a man to reckon with, which is why this particular meeting was so memorable, so illuminating, so ultimately terrifying.
     Father always had strange friends. Almost exclusively male, it was a club groomed to appear like the heavies in old Hollywood movies, with deep-set eyes, collapsing brows, and chins poised like waiting fists. Many had nicknames, as colorful as their appearances, tags like Tiddly Winks, Ratchet, and, my favorite, Pokerface, who I had little trouble imagining was a long lost member of Dick Tracy’s rogue’s gallery. An emotionless slab of a man, he had unblinking dots for eyes, and a countenance that could scrape paint from metal.
     I’d encountered a slightly different variation of this motley passel of middle-aged toss-offs in each place we’d lived. From the old country, to Binghamton, to Ohio, it was the same cluster of grey, dour faces, their beers cradled to the bar, drawing on discount cigarettes, backs bent, resignation and regret painted on every last downward turn of mouth. I expected more of the same when I reached the oppressively shuttered, brown facade of The Shanty Inn, the designated location of our familial tryst.
     The Shanty Inn was a windowless fortress of plywood and false bricking, decorated with faded shamrocks, the wood beneath peppered with cuts and tears, exposing past frontage from bygone businesses, glimpses of old tinplate advertising.
     “Flavored with the Juice of the Pressed Mint Leaves”, I read to myself, attempting to decipher one of these, an old ad for Wrigley’s Spearmint gum that featured a character with a head like the moon sitting on a triangle.
     “Hey! Get in here! What’re you doing – loitering out there?” a gruff and familiar voice suddenly called out. “Trying to make me look bad, are you?”
     Just like that.
     There was no hello, no greeting, nothing, just an order.
     It had been more than five months since we’d last seen each other.
     It was, in essence, an exchange that well described our entire relationship.
     Walking awkwardly to where he father peeking from behind a brown door that was decorated with one of those cardboard Christmas tree air fresheners, I offered him a shy grin, catching the dark, steely eyes that looked threateningly from the shade of his rumpled, plaid hunting cap.
     “Get your keister inside! You know what kind hangs about streets like this?” he said, reaching up to swipe me across the back of the head as he closed the door behind us. “Lowlifes – and derelicts – and queers – that’s what!” The stink of stale wine and beer was all about him.

The Shanty Inn was as miserably drab inside as it was out.
     Squinting at the mist that clung to the exposed bulb hanging above the drafty doorway, searching the dim room beyond, I made out a narrow bar to the right, its half dozen stools occupied by a collection of heavy coats, all sprouting red hands that nursed glasses and bottles, dying cigarettes propped between their fleshy fingers, listing like markers on a country road. To the left the room stretched out to include three or four compact booths and a pool table, upon which sat a box of toilet paper and an unmarked glass jug of something bright blue. “Window cleaner,” I thought, noting the irony.
     “Second booth. Go sit down,” Father instructed, never once looking directly at me.
     I did as I was told, sliding into the tight arrangement, the red cushioned back of the high seat rising inches above my head. I fell into a slouch, preparing myself for the bitter pugilist, the man whose fury had ushered me into this world. How well I knew his unmade face, its bruised-looking eyes, its pink and paunchy flanks of unshaven skin, its weak, dimpled chin. My father was not a pretty picture, then or ever. What mother had ever found attractive in him was long gone before I arrived.
     “What are you – an idiot? Take off that damned coat!” he declared, staggering my way, two bottles of Old German shaking in an unreliable grip. It was his regular drink, not so much for its name, more for the fact that it was the very cheapest beer in the Tri-State area, cheaper even than his first love, Budweiser. “You’re insulting your host! You think Henry don’t know who you are?” he barked, bumping into the table, making me flinch.
     I looked across the way, seeing an unnervingly thin man leaning behind the bar, looking in our direction with a benign alertness. His bald head, shining under the dim yellow light that dangled above a parade of evil-looking whiskey bottles, was surrounded by a crest of dirty grey hair that crawled down his temples in wiry clusters, meeting his cheeks, two paper moons that disappeared into the hollows of his skull.
     “Hurry up with it! I ain’t got all day!” father growled, falling with the beers onto the table, his breath assaulting me.
     I struggled to free myself from my jacket, feeling the knife pressing into my side. I’d completely forgotten it was still there. I was looking for a place to stash it when the old chewing gum ad had caught my attention.
     Father, seemingly not having noticed my concern, pushed a bottle my way, and, without a word, dropped heavily into the booth, coughing as he settled himself under the rickety table, like an impatient hermit crab pulling on its shell.
     I carefully removed myself from my jacket, keeping the blade hidden, all the while watching father. His shirt sleeves rolled above his elbows, his thick, hairy arms resting on the table, he was steadying his beer, his head tilting slightly, the bent peak of his cap covering all but his thin, cracked lips that formed an upside down horseshoe, an indicator of his mood. It meant I could expect just about anything.
     Why he’d come to Pittsburgh, why he wanted to see me, I just couldn’t figure out. That he’d called Helmut’s number and asked for me wasn’t like him. He normally would have simply tracked us down. He’d have confronted us, on the stoop outside Helmut’s building, berating Helmut, shaking his head my way in disgust, before forcing a dollar bill into Helmut’s pocket. He’d then have left, without a word. But this was totally unlike him.
     When I picked up the phone in Helmut and Bettina’s apartment, he seemed to be still making up his mind what he wanted. I think getting me alone was what put the idea of the clandestine rendezvous in his head. He made me swear, cross my heart and hope to die, that I wouldn’t let Helmut know a thing about it. I’d kept my word, telling Helmut I was going to a party with Willy Blanefield III, something I knew would keep him from investigating, his hating Willy with a passion.
     My jacket now hanging on the curled hook at the front of the sequestered booth, I wrapped my fingers about the cold bottle sitting before me and took a long, deep breath, expecting father’s eyes to shoot towards the jacket any second, the knife suddenly exposed, his mad fury unhinged.
     Though my throat was quickly going dry, I was afraid to lift the bottle to my lips, afraid he’d see the nervous way I was working my hands.
     “How’s your brother?”
     I blinked, finding my voice, my eyes on the label of the bottle. “He’s OK.”
     There was a snorting sound. Father lifted his bottle to his mouth. “Tell him his mother wants him to come home. She needs a driver to help with her shopping.” What was he talking about? She’d never ask Helmut to do that, not after she knew he’d found a steady job, and a girlfriend. “You doing good at your painting school?” he then asked, bringing down his bottle with a thud, almost toppling it. I blanched, scanning the table furtively, noticing the blackened burn hole in the middle, about which some creative customer had scrawled a thicket of pubic hair, along with a pair of skinny legs in high heels, spread wide in carnal invitation.
     Father was referring to the commercial art school I’d supposedly enlisted in a few weeks earlier. Mother had been excited to hear I was thinking of my “higher education” when I first told her. What I hadn’t mentioned was that I never even made it to the register’s office before bailing on the idea. I was a student of nothing but my own random attention to life, but I wouldn’t let mother know this. I’d kept up the art school ruse, which father had obviously heard about. It meant he was at least talking to mother. I didn’t know if I should feel good about that or not, his attentions so often leading to dangerous circumstances.
     “It’s going OK,” I lied, risking a sip of my beer, coughing hard.
     Father suddenly grinned, presenting his uneven teeth. “You get to paint those nudes with the big cans?” he asked, using one of the adopted phrases he thought made him sound American.
     “Um – sometimes,” I breathed, glancing at the crude bit of table graffiti. “It depends on the class.”
     He laughed. It was a strangely light and womanly laugh. A sound I wasn’t used to. “The class of the dame! Ain’t that right, Totty? You better not be painting no sluts or prostitutes at your academy. You keep away from that kind, you hear me? They’ll give you no joy.” It came out almost tender. I half expected him to reach out and pat the back of my hand. “You see your brother’s girl?” he then asked, taking another swig of his beer.
     I nodded, keeping my eyes from his.
     “She good looking?”
     I nodded again, quickly.
     He laughed, slamming his bottle down. “That’s a Vogel! Vogel men always get the pretty dames. Ain’t that right, Totty? Keep away from those dirty ones, you hear me?”
     “I will – I promise,” I croaked, my voice breaking.
     Father laughed more. “Keep out of that dirty pussy, Totty. I want my boys with clean American girls.”
     I blushed. It was impossible not to.
     “What’s your brother do with his girl?”
     I shrugged. “I don’t know, normal stuff I guess. They hang out and stuff.” I was downplaying the whole affair, wisely keeping our new life from him.
     He regarded me for a long moment, fingering the neck of his bottle, picking at the label with his thumb. “You got a girl?” he finally asked.
     Terrified at what he might think if I told him the truth, I nodded that I did.
     “Lisa,” I lied. “Her name’s Lisa. I met her at school.”
     He didn’t say anything. He just smiled softly, watching me. It made me think of the time I came home from a birthday party with swollen lips and red marks all over my neck. He’d carried me to the kitchen sink by the back of my trousers, pushing me under the faucet, rubbing at my skin with the lye soap mother used for cleaning the floors. I couldn’t have been more than five. The boys and girls at the party had retreated to the back garden of the house where it was being held. Lacking a chaperon, we’d taken it upon ourselves to start a spirited game of Postman Knocks, my then-round face quickly becoming a favorite target for the cake-sweetened lips of the giggling girls in their pastel dresses.
     “You treat this Lisa well, boy – you understand?”
     I nodded, feeling my cheeks warm, hating the lie I’d put myself in.
     “It wouldn’t be any kind of a world without the women in it, Totty. You remember that. A man has to know he’s gotta worship his woman, but that don’t mean he’s going to stoop to her – you understand me?”
     I nodded, wondering if he knew what he was saying.
     “Blessed are we, to have them with us on our journey,” he muttered, his gaze going faraway, taking another pull on his beer. “Blessed are we.”
     I closed my eyes, seeing him cutting a great hole in mother’s favorite skirt with his penknife, to spite her when she’d received a compliment one Saturday afternoon from a strange man on the high street in Wurms.
     “There’s an angel waiting for every man, Totty. A blessed woman to look after him and give him sons. You find yourself one with strong hips – and a healthy face. You’ll do the Vogels proud, you will.”
     I breathed into my bottle, beginning to relax a little, realizing that he only wanted someone to talk to, a son to help him pretend he was a real father.
     Rationalizing it that way, I knew I could act my way through the meeting. I just had to avoid his eyes. They cut too deeply, no matter how thick my camouflage.
     “A man without a woman is just hamburger,” he sighed, turning his gaze towards the bar, shaking his head slowly. “See Henry the Fly there? He’s a dead man, Totty, a dead man in an empty bed. He carries himself about like a chore. No joy there, no warm pussy in the night.”
     I glanced at the gaunt, sickly-looking bartender, seeing him busy wiping at an empty mug, his hangdog eyes searching an unseen space, his face lost in the rising snakes of smoke coming from the row of hunched backs at the bar. I couldn’t have seen what father saw. I was barely nineteen, far too young to feel the dread of the barren eventuality such a picture painted, not the way father had intended.
     “You treat her like an angel,” he reiterated, referring to my fabricated girlfriend, with a sincerity I’d rarely witnessed. Thinking of mother, the constant anguish he caused her, made me want to leap across the table and squeeze the breath from him. My hate towards him was equal to my love for mother. It was a balance that worked to perpetuate the situation, though I didn’t realize it then. Home was a raging storm of confrontations, absurd accusations, insane demands, silent appeasements, and uneasy truces. In the thick of it, none of us could see the sad, resounding truth, that we were all essential parts of a madness we were unwittingly nurturing, even as it was destroying us, day by day.
     Just then, the front door of the bar opened, emitting a noisy conversation, already well under way. Two women in high heels and long winter coats stomped towards the bar, shiny leather handbags swinging on their crooked arms. They brought with them the smell of diesel exhaust and sickly perfume.
     “…damn police again! The motherfuckers think takin’ the seats away is goin’ to stop me workin’ they got anuther thing to be thinkin’ about!” declared the tallest of the two, her hair like the blown mane of some ebony lion. “A girl can take a break and have a cup of coffee, ain’t no crime! They think I’m takin’ johns in a donut shop? Crazy, I tell ya! Crazy. They don’t know nuthin’.”
     The other just nodded her head. Both ignored the roosting drinkers. The taller snapped her fingers in the air, catching Henry the Fly’s attention. He lifted his dour face, his eyes offering a mute “What’ll it be?”
     “Scotch, no ice. A White Russian for my bitch here,” the taller woman curtly requested, digging in her handbag. As she did, the smaller turned to survey the booths and caught sight of father, his face buried in his bottle. I saw her eyes widen as she tugged on the other’s sleeve. They both turned to look, the taller instantly shooting icy daggers into the top of father’s cap. “Hey! You! I know you!” she called out, in a voice like a fire alarm. “You owes me twenty bucks!”
     I shut my eyes, preying they weren’t about to cause any trouble, hoping against hope it was a case of mistaken identity. I heard the hard shoes clicking our way, caught the pungent wafts of perfume advancing upon my nostrils.
     “You! Mutha! You cut out on me at the Edison!” the voice wailed. “Give me my twenty bucks!”
     I squeezed at my bottle, keeping my eyes closed tight, hardly breathing.
     “Get away from here,” I heard father reply, his voice suddenly heavy with the slur of inebriation.
     “Twenty bucks, mutha! I sucked your nasty old prick for twenty bucks. Give it me – now!”
     I heard father sliding his bottle on the tabletop. Murmurs came from the bar.
     “Put that thing away and get out of here,” father repeated, his voice going dark. Right then I knew then she had the right man.
     I opened my eyes to see the brassy woman holding a small knife to father’s neck. He was gripping his bottle, tensing his fingers, not looking at her. He gave his warning one more time. She flared her nostrils, her ashen, painted face twisting with rage, her heavily-lined eyes burning right through him. She was about his age. Her circus makeup only made this more obvious.
     “Go away,” father growled, lifting his bottle ever so slightly. I was concentrating so hard on the blade of her knife, willing it to move from his throat, that I began to feel dizzy. I started seeing stars, flashes of white that moved about me like tiny insects. I could only watch as the woman pressed the point of the knife into the flesh above his collar. He tried to bring the bottle up, but she was quicker, knocking it from his hand with surprising ease. It shattered on the concrete floor and father seemed to disappear before me, wilting like some neglected flower to the surface of the table. He didn’t move as she rifled through the pockets of his overcoat, which lay on the seat beside him. She quickly found his wallet and withdrew two greasy-looking bills. Searching the rest of the wallet she threw it at the wall, spitting in the air angrily.
     “That’s all you got? Six bucks?” she screamed, the knife now brandished over the table, crinkling the dirty bills in her other hand. He didn’t answer. She gritted her teeth, hissing. I could see her friend, standing halfway between the bar and our booth, holding two drinks, her face as still as stone. Henry the Fly was busy cleaning another glass. The pigeons at the bar sat watching silently, their heads crooked about, cigarettes burning in their hands.
     “Yes. That’s all,” father finally said, his voice small, sad, like it was when he came down from one of his surges.
     The woman turned to me for the first time, looking at me as if I were a stain on a rug. “He got any money?” she said, sliding her knife through the air, now pointing it my way. I saw the thick vein on father’s neck move, his empty hands gripped the air.
     “Leave him, he’s just a boy, he’s got nothing for you.”
     I stared at the knife, thinking of my own, the much larger weapon hanging just above me, wishing I had the guts to go for it, to beat her down and chase her from the bar, to see the look on father’s face when I did. But it wasn’t going to happen. I knew that. It made me realize that Helmut had only given me the knife to make fun of me. He knew I’d never actually use it.
     I began to feel sick, nausea rising, tickling my throat.
     “Now you owes me fourteen bucks!” the hooker reminded father, stuffing his money into her coat pocket, still holding the little knife before her as she began to back away. Doing so, she almost bumped into her friend. They exchanged funny looks and the shorter began to giggle. The knife was put way and the drinks were strolled to the far booth, where shadows laid shadows upon one another.
     No one said a word for a long moment. An uneasy silence had all but sucked the air from the musty room. I’d placed my open hands on the seat cushion on either side of me. My stomach and head felt connected, like two ends of a Q-tip, each pulling at the other, one needing to explode. I blinked hard, wishing away the stars that continued to gather before my eyes. I knew what was happening, but not why. I’d felt the same way many times before, as if I were about to vomit my insides. It’d been that way, even when I was a child. It was a sensation that came with stress, a warning sign that left me as the danger removed itself. I sat there, concentrating, determined not to let father see me that way, to hide myself from him, as I had so successfully done with he and mother, all my life.
     Henry the Fly suddenly coughed.
     Someone at the bar waved his hand before his nose.
     A joke was made about Henry’s stale farts. I heard giggles coming from the far booth. The stars were gone. My head and stomach no longer felt tethered. I breathed easier. Looking over at father I could only feel pity for him, the way I did whenever he collapsed in mother’s arms, when the uncontrollable tears flowed down his leathery cheeks, when he begged for forgiveness, a forgiveness that always came. His head was still hung low, his hands on his lap, a pool of spilled beer before him. I wanted desperately to say something, to offer some kind of encouragement, but nothing was there. It all seemed so completely hopeless, so useless.
     Why had I come from this man, I wondered. Why had he made me, if only to use me to hate himself all the more? Was his pain so great, so much a part of him that he needed to share it through the generations?
     Right then, for the very first time, trapped there in that womb-like little booth, I realized how much Grandfather Amwolf and father were alike, and how much Helmut was like the both of them. I suddenly saw my own future, laid out before me, a tunnel of darkness and despair. 
     In that defeated moment, I lost my grip on the golden deception of childhood, on the unconditional, trusting hope of a promised happy ending.
     A few minutes later, the two hookers made their way noisily from the bar, not even looking our way. I watched them disappear back into the rumbling of the night, the door groaning shut behind them. Father still hadn’t spoken, hadn't moved. I reached up to my jacket and took out the kitchen knife Helmut had given me and carefully slid it across the table. Father lifted his head at its approach, his eyes going round, his mouth moving silently. He gave me the briefest of glances, before taking hold of the knife. Touching the sharp blade with his finger, he made a low sound in his throat and proceeded to conceal it in the folds of his overcoat. Then, without a word, he staggered to his feet and exited the bar, leaving me sitting where I was, wondering what I had just done.
     I must have sat there for a good ten minutes, lost in thought, before I noticed Henry the Fly, hovering above me, wiping at the spilled beer with a damp rag. He looked at the half-drunken bottle before me. “Get you another?” he asked, grinning.
     “No, I’ve had enough, thanks,” I awkwardly replied, getting up, pulling on my jacket. I made my way to the door, wondering what I might find waiting for me on the other side, no longer terrified of the inevitable.
     A moment later, I stood on the broken sidewalk, watching the frozen blackness of Liberty Avenue through the mist of my own breath, wondering where father had gone. Then I saw him. He was coming out of a dimly-lit pawn shop across the way. I could see him counting money in his hands, slipping it into his wallet and staggering away, his own breath like a specter fleeing his soul.
     It would be almost another two years before I’d see him again.

Dodo, Chapter Ten, The Swallowing Depths

“No, idiot, I whip the rock right at his coffin – it makes the biggest thump in the world – everyone is totally quiet and I just stand there – I can see myself grinning in the shiny blade of the shovel,” explained Helmut, seated on the icy cold pavement of Sixth Street, busy unlacing his sneakers.
     “I thought you were going to say he woke up and beat the shit out of you.”
     “Here – hold these.”
     “What are you doing? It’s freezing.”
     We were standing in the middle of a bridge, where Sixth Street crossed the unforgiving murk of the slow-moving Allegheny River, one of three tributaries that formed the triangular cut of land upon which Pittsburgh had been built. It was early November. We’d just scored a bottle of Night Train at the most reliable of all the late-night package stores that would still serve Helmut. I never quite knew just what he had done to have himself blacklisted from so many of the sad bottle temples, the dimly-lit businesses that attracted men who either stared at their shoes or the backs of their own eyes, but I knew it was something bad, probably something violent. I was yet to understand the true shape of Helmut’s increasingly regular transgressions.
     The wind cutting across the bridge was fiercely cold. My winter coat, a full-length canopy of bulletproof tweed, a hand me down from Uncle Alder, was all that kept me from catching pneumonia. Even so, the freezing air found its way inside my upturned collar, running its icy fingers under my thin T-shirt.
     “What are you doing?” I repeated, holding his shoes obediently, his socks bunched inside them. I watched him sit up on the yellow metal siding of the bridge. It was about four feet high, tall enough to stop you from just walking off, but hardly high enough to stop you from climbing over, something you’d only do if you planned on jumping. The Spartan span’s architecture offered nothing but empty space beyond the ill-considered wall, all the way down to the depressing slough of dirty water. “Tell me what you’re doing, Helmut!” I insisted angrily, seeing him swing his leg over the other side of the wall, his body quickly following. Soon only his hands were visible, clinging to the rounded edge. They seemed to linger there for an eternity. I stood there, not breathing, terror squeezing at my heart, trying to understand why my brother’s unfolding suicide seemed so strangely inevitable.

It took me back to our first house in America. It was a drab, split-level, brick row house in Binghamton, New York, one of twenty-odd such homes that ran alongside a creek, a dirty ribbon of polluted water that was as unpredictable as father’s moods. At a moment’s notice, under heavy rain, the soft, slow current would become a raging torrent, the creek rising up over its banks and onto the road before the houses, flooding each and every basement, sparing no one.
     The second winter we’d been there, the creek began to swell from melting snow, pumping its frigid, churning contents under the ill-fitting door of our basement, which faced the street, at the foot of a short set of descending concrete steps, a good two feet below the road. The muddy water quickly covered the basement floor, rising about the washer and dryer, the plastic baskets of musty clothes waiting to be laundered, the toilet and cavity drain where we showered. Within minutes it had reached more than half the way up the wooden stairs that lead to the kitchen, swallowing father’s boxes of National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, and Consumer Reports, three American publications he’d so unexplainably taken to.
     We never could quite figure out what he found so compelling about them. For years I’d believed it their intricate maps and diagrams, his math-oriented mind having found in them a language that was universal. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties that mother casually explained one afternoon that he’d had been using the magazines to learn to read English, something he swore he’d never bring himself to do, no matter how necessary it was, in order to make a go of it in the new world.
     His insistence on it was always a secret joke between Helmut and I, adding to our clandestine code, the language we’d fashioned together over the years, the only manner in which we felt safe discussing father, even when he wasn’t around. “Grandmother,” we’d whisper to each other, if someone in the early days inquired how his English was coming along, meaning “dad’s mum”.
     So it was hard to understand, at the time, why he almost drowned trying to save those out-of-date magazines.
     I clearly remember being upstairs, in the small corner room Helmut and I shared, with its slanted ceiling formed by the roof of the attic-free house. My mattress lay wedged in the sharp angle, buttressed to where the ceiling met the floorboards. Directly over my pillow I’d taped a large poster of The Incredible Hulk, bright green on yellow. I was studying the intricate, brick-like lettering of the cartoon logo when I heard mother screaming. She was at the front door, making sure the water hadn’t reached the porch. Father was hollering from the basement stairs, informing her that the “river was in the house again!”
     Battling each other for position on the steep staircase leading downstairs to the front room, Helmut and I catapulted from our mattresses, dragging sheets and blankets with us. When we reached the kitchen, mother was rushing back and forth from the basement door to far end of the kitchen, heaving stacks of dripping magazines into the sink. We reached the stairs just in time to see father, in his undershirt and drawers, slipping headfirst from where he’d been awkwardly perched. To this very day I can still see his hands, white at the knuckles, glistening, holding onto the top metal shelf, the rest of him lost beneath the angry, swirling brown water.

“Helmut?”
     The hands were still there.
     I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t moved, why I hadn’t heard him smack into the river below. A conversation ran through my head, one I’d once overheard, between two policeman, about how a suicide jumper who hits water often forces his stomach right through his rectum.
     “Check this out, douchebag!”
     The hands suddenly disappeared, the top of Helmut’s knit cap appearing behind the wall. Completely confused, I stepped forward, enough to see him, standing on one of the spindly light fixtures that marked the bridge for the benefit of passing barges. Speechless, I just watched him out there, hanging above oblivion, one bare foot on either side of the twin metal brackets that ended about seven feet beyond the wall, secured to the bridge by two metal cables. His back now to me, he proceeded to make his way further along, stepping ever so slowly, as if he were on ice. As he approached the end of the fixture, the blinking light caught him in its blood-red glow, illuminating his jeans and ski jacket. Watching the light moving, rising up and down, made me swoon, the veins at my temples draining. I was certain I was having another of my attacks, the episodes that the doctor at the clinic hadn’t been able to diagnose, even though F was all but convinced I was epileptic. Mother hadn’t been any help when I phoned her to talk about it. She evaded my questions, instead going on about her painful corns, and the weather, her neighbor’s dogs, anything to change the subject. She was always a terrible one to pin down on the telephone.
     Still hardly breathing, I dropped Helmut’s shoes, my hands numb, almost as if they weren’t there. The wind howled at my ears.
     “Check me OUT, Totty!” Helmut suddenly laughed, turning about at the very end of the fixture. “I’m Like Travolta in Saturday Night Fever!”
     He began to bend at his knees, making the whole fixture drop inches. Bouncing up and down in the eerie scarlet light, he waved his arms, the ties of his jacket hood dancing about his flushed and drunken face like seaweed in a broiling sea.
     Somehow I found my breath again. “It wasn’t Travolta – it was the other guy!” I hollered, squeezing my hands together, beginning to back away from the wall, not wanting to see his white toes curled about the edge of the metal holdings, knowing they were all that separated him from falling a good fifty feet, into the merciless current.
     “Phuck YOU, Pizzburgh, you fancy town! You’re for pussies!” he yelled, slurring his words, his eyes rolling back in his head. “I am Ubaman! Ubaman! Gain my supapowah wif Nigh’ Twain! Woo-HOO! Woo-HOO!”
     I couldn’t take any more. I turned and began to make my way towards downtown, leaving his socks and shoes and the half-empty bottle of bitter wine on the sidewalk, swearing at him, crying that he was going to die and I didn’t care, I was leaving.
     “Uba! Ubaman!” he cackled, clearly oblivious to where I was. “Phuck You, Pizzburgh! Phuck YOU, Unided Stades ov ‘merica! Phuck YOU, eveyone – I am Ubaman! Ubaman distroy!”
     I kept going, half-hoping he would fall, realizing that I’d never have to put up with his shit again. At the same time I was terrified, terrified he might leave me all alone in the strange, compact metropolis, rife with its exotic enclaves, its crowded hillside neighborhoods, the old houses, those moribund upright caskets of working class refuge, brick edifices of a whole world of represented peoples; Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Greek, Irish, Czechs, a generational tidal wave of immigrants who’d shifted themselves to this graven marker of a bygone industrial era. Moving on quickly, I closed my eyes, my hands deep in the pockets of my uncle’s coat, imagining that Helmut’s dream was true, that father really was dead, that Helmut had been chosen to shovel the first earth upon the coffin, that he’d spotted the large stone in the soil and that he’d laughed hysterically, hurling it at the brass memorial plate over where father’s shrunken head lay.
     “Everyone is totally quiet and I just stand there, seeing myself grinning in the shiny blade of the shovel.”
     I also saw him plummeting from the bridge, down into his own watery grave, where father’s hands appeared, darting the surface like furtive fish. I imagined the two men embracing, father’s grayish arms wrapping about Helmut’s neck, clawing at his insulated jacket, which billows out about him like the body of a sea ray.

“One more box! You get me one – more – box!” father gasps, pushing Helmut’s head under. “You’re not coming up until you do!”
     There was Helmut, barely a teenager, stripped to his underwear, shivering at the top of the basement steps, begging not to have to go down into the cold, dirty water, father pointing the way.
     I turn, seeing mother, her eyes closed tight, clutching at the front of her dressing gown, softly praying to herself, pressed against the kitchen counter, leaning into the sink.
     “But I helped get you out! I don’t wanna go in anymore! It’s cold!” Helmut cried, before father put his foot into the door, slamming it shut, Helmut’s whimpers disappearing.
     I was staring right at him, as he turned, squatting, his hands going to his knees as he approached me, his hair plastered to his face, his vest soaked and soiled, translucent against his arms and chest, the veins on the backs of his hands blue and angry under the matted black hairs. “You best be watching this, Totty Vogel, you best be paying attention. We family are a team – understand? The one who swims best does the swimming in this house!”
     “I whip the rock right onto his coffin –”
     I feel mother’s hands taking me, pulling me towards her, drawing me into the dry and warm dressing gown.
     “It makes the biggest thump in the world –”
     Father exhales deeply, straightening his back, lifting his hands to his face, running them through his hair, cloudy water splashing at his feet.
     “Everyone is totally quiet and I just stand there –”
     Neither mother nor I speak. We dare not even move.
     It is the wait we both know well, the wait we have endured so many times before, in countries old and new.
     It is that moment of absolute unknowing, that delicate, breathless balance on the edge of limbo, the breath that draws in from nowhere, as the man who has used us in order to make us peels off his drenched shirt, revealing the flattened tendrils of black hair across his chest, the obscene bulge of his belly, the fearful white scars disappearing into the waistband of his underwear, the body that can destroy, that knows no mercy, that suddenly doubles over in a burst of tears, that drops on its wet knees to the linoleum, that begins to sob like an old woman, that begs, that whimpers for forgiveness as mother takes it into her arms, leaving me pressed to the sink, the very fabric of my existence stretched so tightly before me that I can see the future, the blinking towers of light the beckon, even as I hear Helmut’s hurried footsteps behind me, the sloshing of the cheap wine, the cursing on his lips, the fury born of father’s drenched limbs.

Dodo, Chapter Nine, Father's Saharan Exit

I was transfixed, standing in the corner of the tiny motel room, watching the beetle amble its way across the bed, its body the color of blood and bruises. It moved with uncharacteristic sloth, over the indentations made upon the mustard bedcover, marks left by my father, who had lain there only moments before, his arms and legs all akimbo, like some dropped ventriloquist’s dummy.
     Outside the room’s sole window, glowing a diffused orange behind the thin, matching mustard curtains, was the rotating light of a police cruiser, making a regular, lazy rhythm, one that seemed to acknowledge the beetle’s languid, sated pace. It was like a metronome, whispering “it’s over now, he’s gone, it’s over now, he’s gone, it’s over now, he’s gone”.
     I noticed there was a paper bag sitting on the bed stand. I recognized the coffee shop logo. Inside, I found one uneaten, powdered donut. Wondering if it had been father’s or if one of the many attending policemen and paramedics had left it, I took it and hurried to the far side of the bed, trapping the beetle inside the sugary hole. “There’s your dessert,” I announced, turning to see a pair of father’s pants hanging over a straight-backed chair occupying the tiny causeway between the bed and the dark, paneled interior wall of the musty room. The pockets had been turned inside out. Again, I didn’t know if father had done this, perhaps looking for a match, or if the young detective with the crew cut had been searching them, for what I couldn’t guess. “He’s been dead since about five Monday evening,” the detective had explained, seconds after I’d first arrived, gesturing about the room, as if to say “And there you have it – not much is it?”
     No, it wasn’t much, but it was everything father had and that still meant something. After so many years of worry, and fear, and resentment, father had finally left mother for good, having retreated from our lives, becoming just a painful memory. I’d not really ever expected to come across him again, dead or alive.
     I’ve always heard that having a parent die is the first real introduction to your own mortality, but it didn’t feel that way, not the way it did, just fifteen days later, when I stood at mother’s bedside, feeling her hand tighten one last time about mine and then go soft, the life disappearing from it with a shudder, a wash of energy that I took to be her final goodbye. I was suddenly besieged with a series of random memories. It was like being ushered into an unwelcome surprise party.

     “Mind yourself on that road, Totty, it’s not safe.”
     “Don’t let your brother see I gave you that dollar, Totty, it’s yours – you earned it.”
     “This is the old key, Totty. You be a good boy and make sure your father watches you hang it on the hook. We don’t want him knowing where I’ve put the new key.”
     “I’m going to pray for you, whether you want me to or not, Totty Vogel – pray that you don’t end up like the other men in my life.”

     Father’s passing was very different. It was more about recognizing the life I still had ahead of me. It was as if the old man had finally stepped aside so that I could see my future, even if that future might be nothing more than an echo of his own sordid existence.
     They never did give me a clear cause of death, other than the county coroner’s somewhat awkward, hopelessly vague “Died in response to a variety of failings in major organs,” an epitaph more suited to an accountant or mailman, some colorless drone who had performed with the regularity of a clock, not the wild wind of emotion and unpredictability that was my father, that was Georg Stefan Vogel.

“The inside of your foot touches the ball, Totty, the inside.”
     Uncle Alder looked ridiculous, his pale, boney legs protruding from his ill-fitting cotton shorts, his thick socks bunched about his large, dirt-brown gardening boots. Having removed his trousers, on a mocking dare from father, he was still wearing his Sunday shirt and vest, a pipe stuffed in one pocket, a handkerchief sticking from the other. He was sucking a mint, the way he often did, holding it to one side as he spoke. Father was slumped against the front gate, ostensibly guarding Alder’s trousers, busy wetting the tip of a cigar in his mouth. It could have been Grandfather standing there, I thought, as Uncle Alder raised his right foot, pointing to his instep, like I didn’t know exactly where such a thing was.
     “You’re wasting good time with that one,” grumbled father, sighing as he lit his cigar. “His brother’s the footer in the family.”
     Alder grinned my way. “Teach them young, Georg, and the teaching will stick,” he replied, winking at me, as he lobbed the scuffed football across the lawn. It hit the grass inches in front of my foot. I reached out, intent on connecting as instructed, but my toe struck first, sending the tightly-inflated ball shooting sideways, right into father’s rose bush, creating a flurry of showering pink petals. Alder laughed nervously, hurrying over to fetch the wayward ball, one eye on the gate, and father, who hadn’t missed a thing.
     “There’s a reason you do these things on a Sunday, boy,” father intoned, pushing away from the gate, his cigar held between his teeth. “Nothing more wicked than a devil on a Sunday, is there?”
     I hadn’t moved from where I’d met the ball, my hands deep in the pockets of my wool shorts, studying the ground at my feet. I knew father was striding my way for the horrible smell of his cigar preceded him. I barely had time to steady myself before I felt his hand strike the back of my neck, sending me forward into the grass, my jaw cracking as I hit the turf with my chin. I lay there, my arms over my head, my knees curled up defensively, a position I had learned well in my five years.
     “Watch the little worm, Alder, make sure he doesn’t wriggle himself down into the dirt and out under the front gate,” declared father, his voice moving off towards the house. “I’ll be back.”
     I dared open an eye, peering between my fingers, seeing Uncle Alder still standing by the be-headed roses, holding the ball with both hands, wearing an awkward expression. He didn’t say a word to me.
     A moment later father returned, exiting the house with something cradled under his arm. I closed my eye as he neared, pushing my face deeper into the grass, feeling the back of my neck starting to sting from where I’d been hit. “Get up on your feet, little worm,” he said. “You’ve got work to do.”
     I did as I was told, following the dark-toned man to where a carpet of pink and blush petals lay scattered about the roots of the rose bush. Uncle Alder stood aside as we approached, still wearing that uncomfortable look on his face, a mix of embarrassment and fear, leaving him with a queer half-smile, and wide-open eyes. 

     I now could see that father had mother’s sewing basket. “You’re going to sew my roses back together,” he explained, setting the basket on the ground, opening the lid, pointing to mother’s needle case. “I expect them to look just like they did before – do you understand, boy?” I nodded, holding back the tears that strained to flow. “Your Uncle and I are going for a drink – your mother won’t be back from her church duties until one. That gives you almost two hours – plenty of time.” I swallowed, kneeling before the basket, afraid to look up, not knowing how on Earth I’d do what he’d told me to, but knowing I must, somehow, do it, all the same. I heard Uncle Alder begin to protest, but his mutters were quickly drowned out by father’s commanding voice. “The right-minded know all too well what happens to idle hands,” he growled. “Get your trousers on, Alder, I’m not drinking with a half-naked dolt!”

The young detective looked at his notes, then at the bed, then back to his notes. He turned to me, a quizzical frown on his face. “Did you put the donut there?” he asked, trying to sound stern.
     I nodded slowly. I was still standing in the corner of the room, my arms now folded behind me, resting against the stucco wall, inches from the door.
     “This is still an official investigation scene, sir,” he stated, scratching at his notes, making adjustments. “I need to ask you not to touch anything else, or move anything, until the initial investigation is complete.”
     “You think he was murdered?” I replied, offering a quick grin.
     “We’ll telephone you with our findings, sir, along with the coroner’s report.”
     “Of course you will,” I breathed, wondering if he was going to move the donut.
     He walked towards me, stuffing his little notebook into his shirt pocket, the one decorated with the badge. He stopped inches from me, looking up, momentarily meeting my eyes. “I’m sorry about your father, sir – I can’t imagine what I’d feel if it was my dad, I mean, it’s got to be hard, I know.”
     “They’re all different,” I said evenly, as he made a quick movement, heading on through the open door, out into the parking lot, where the ambulance holding father’s body still stood. There were two paramedics drinking coffee, leaning against it. I saw one of them cover his mouth to laugh. The other had just stood on one foot, imitating, I was quite sure, the peculiar positioning of father’s arms and legs, the way he’d been discovered on the bed. It didn’t take a genius to know what they thought was so funny, the infamous symbol father’s body strangely mimicked was the first thing I’d noted when I’d stepped into the room. It was perfect fodder, a story that would be spread from county agency to agency by the end of the day. Once a German, always a German, I thought, turning back to the bed, my jaw set, trying to recall how many times I’d walked through a room of silent stares, wishing to God I’d been born an Italian, or even a Englishman.
     “Mr. Vogel?”
     I turned to see a pleasant-looking, middle-aged, female paramedic, a clipboard held in her arms. She smiled warmly. It seemed genuine.
     “Yes?”
     “Can I ask you a few quick questions about your father?”
     I sighed, rubbing at my brow. It was still before ten. The call to come out to the Sahara Motel had awoken me from a troubled sleep.
     “It won’t take very long, I promise,” she smiled, her large eyes full of sympathy.
     I nodded. “OK.”
     She looked to the bed, grinning. “I’d usually say have a chair or sit on the edge of the bed.”
     “Official investigation scene,” I replied, smiling.
     “Right,” she agreed, making a funny face, glancing at the donut. “Was that there with the body?”
     It was my turn to grin. “No. I put it there just a moment ago. I had a reason. Go ahead and have a peep,” I suggested, motioning towards the bed.
     She gave me another odd face and walked over to look. Her eyebrows shot up when she leaned across the bed. “Is that what I think it is?” she said, her voice rising with her surprise.
     “Carrion beetle,” I stated. “Body’s been here almost four days, right?”
     She looked doubtfully from the bed to me, and back again. She shook her head slowly. “Still, that’s pretty f’d-up – shouldn’t have been able to get in here, you’d think. What a dump – it needs reporting.”
     “Never imagined my father would die in the Sahara,” I grinned, appreciating her candor and friendly tone.
     She smiled quickly and then her face went serious. “Your father, George Stefan Vogel, he was a German immigrant?” she asked, putting her pen to the clipboard pad.
     “We all are – well – we all were,” I replied, sliding my hands into my front pockets.
     “Georg is survived by?” she asked, writing as she went.
     “Just mother and I now,” I offered, wishing Helmut could have been there to witness the morning’s events.
     “Your father was seventy four. Did he have any ailments or chronic conditions that you might have been aware of?”
     “No,” I replied, wanting to avoid the complicated truth. “But he was a regular smoker, a pretty decent drinker too.”
     She nodded knowingly, writing quickly. “Any major accidents – head trauma?” I must have given her a suspicious look for she smiled. “These are really just basic, routine questions, Mr.Vogel, I promise you.”
     “No, not that I know of,” I offered, quickly realizing the error. “Oh, well, he did knock himself out once, a long time ago, tossed from his car – an accident,” I explained, wondering, for the first time in my life, just what role that icy road had played in father's troubles. An image of mother, bent at the kitchen table, polishing that tiny mint spoon, flashed before my eyes. The paramedic wrote feverishly, biting her lip.
     “This was in Germany I take?”
     “West Germany,” I corrected.
     “A long time ago,” she grinned.
     “Yes,” I said, sighing. “A very long time ago.”

Black Weather, Scroll Nine

Black Weather, Scroll Eight

Dodo, Chapter Eight, The Wild West

I opened my eyes and saw the purple shape floating on the surface of the filled tub, just between my knees. It reminded me of a rose petal, drifting across some quiet pond.
     Mother had opened the door moments before, without knocking, the way she always did. Quickly averting her eyes from the sight of me, submerged up to my chest in the grayish water, she’d backed her way towards the bath, holding out a small carton. “Epsom salts, Totty,” she’d whispered, as if lowering her voice was somehow making her entrance more discreet. “Sprinkle some in the water, it’s good for aching muscles.” She’d then hurried out, closing the door ever so gently.
     I lay there, my arms circling the back of the tub, watching the bruised nail that had separated itself from my big toe, seeing how it cast a c-shaped shadow upon my stomach. I was alarmed, but not surprised. I had, after all, run almost ten miles, along a grueling course of hilly, unforgiving country road. My legs no longer felt like my own. It was as if I were Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, awoken to find myself attached to another’s limbs.

“How many miles can you run?” I’d asked Helmut, earlier that morning, my foot perched on a kitchen chair, working the laces of my high-top sneakers.
     “Twenty, twenty five – a marathon I guess,” he’d replied, sounding as confident as ever.
     “You’ve really run that far?”
     “Almost, maybe – doesn’t matter, I can do it,” he shrugged, avoiding my stare. He was standing before me, adjusting the red, white, and blue wristbands he’d bought the day before at Barker’s, the discount store located less than a mile from our house, a cavernous emporium of discarded merchandise where we’d recently begun buying sealed boxes of original-label 45s, ten for two dollars, sweetening our ears with the likes of James Brown and Wilson Pickett. It was early summer, 1972, the family had only been living in America for a few months.
     Helmut, desperate to blend into his new home, was clearly willing to meet any challenge. He seemed to believe that by besting the Americans he would gain their acceptance, like some nomadic warrior, stumbling into a strange camp, wrestling their strongest brave into surrender. This, in fact, is how he essentially saw the world, and himself.
     “I hope I can do the whole thing,” I breathed, satisfied that my sneakers were adequately tight. I was referring to the twenty-kilometer running race we’d entered the evening before, riding our bikes to the local fire hall to register our names and pay our six-dollar entry fees. Sponsored by The Pioneer Steakhouse, a popular local gathering place, the fee had entitled us to bright red T-shirts emblazoned with the restaurant’s logo; a prime rib, crossed by two muskets and topped with a coonskin cap. We’d both proudly worn them to breakfast, earning quietly critical looks from father.
     Following my older brother into his latest reckless venture, as desirous of fitting in as he, I soon found myself on the starting line, having made my way through the tight throng of two hundred or so runners who had gathered on the narrow road before the drab concrete building that housed the Hudson County Volunteer Fire Department.
     “Don’t let any of these guys muscle you off the pavement, Totty – you hear me?” instructed Helmut, giving me one of his serious looks, before cracking a toothy grin. “Watch the heels in front of you too – trip in this bunch of turkeys and the red shirts are going down like freakin’ dominoes!” He loved his new mastery of current American slang. I watched as a bald man pointed a gun to the white sky and fired a single, muffled shot and we were off, a parade of moving advertisements for The Pioneer Steakhouse, all ages and disciplines, from the seasoned county champion to an eleven year-old West German immigrant named Tot Vogel. “Take it easy until we start thinning out!” I heard Helmut call out, as I was quickly swallowed by the mass of early morning runners. “You hear me, retardo?” I was quite happy when, coming to the first of many winding turns, I was cut off, forced almost to a complete stop, losing sight of Helmut in the crowd ahead of me.
     Hudson County, Ohio, consisted of a few hundred thousand acres of rolling, tree-choked hills and smelly farmland. The nearest town was a good four miles from where our small house sat, at the foot of a steep ridge, only yards from a busy railway line, rocking cars full of coal and ore passing so regularly the pictures mother had hanging in the front room made half-circle marks on the wall as they swung on their nails. The Fifth Annual Pioneer 20K Steakhouse Run wound through this rough-hewn territory, making a mockery of any pre-planning on the part of novices like Helmut and I. Less than two miles into the race I was stooped over a low stone wall, coughing my lungs out. I didn’t know it then but it was allergies, the swaying grasses, ripe with seed, giving rise to a throat of mucous. Sitting on the uneven stretch of moss-lined boulders, which reminded me of home, I watched at dozens of runners pass me by, before my lungs allowed me to continue. Biting my lip, I rejoined the mostly-older procession, trying to ignore the burning nausea building in the pit of my stomach.
     The morning sun was soon bleeding across the sky, replacing the thin clouds with dramatic patches of blue that appeared sporadically, directly overhead, as the gulag of amateur athletes padded through arches of blowing, green leaves, the road at their feet tattooed with the shadows of listing trees. I had given up looking for any sign of Helmut long ago. He was obviously far ahead. The hot sun was soon making me wish I’d bought wristbands too, salty sweat running the bridge of my nose, pooling about my upper lip. My knees were beginning to ache, my shins all but numb, my feet throbbing inside my flat, pinching sneakers. I didn’t know it then, but my white socks were already pink with blood.

“What do you want with running in a race?” father had questioned us, sitting at the breakfast table, shielding his head with the paper. We rarely saw his pained-looking face before lunchtime.
     “It’ll be a kick,” replied Helmut, scooping boiled egg from its shell, spreading it across his toast, like butter. “I’m going to win.”
     I could almost see father’s sneer through the newspaper.
     “Twenty kilometers is a long way, Totty,” cautioned mother, reaching out to touch my arm. “You shouldn’t go. Why don’t you just watch your brother?”
     “Let them kill themselves,” father snorted, turning noisily through his paper.
     “I don’t want you leading your brother into such foolishness,” exhorted mother, now squeezing at my arm. Though talking to Helmut, I knew she was really appealing to me, digging for the weakness she knew was there.
     “Mother,” I moaned, twitching at her touch, afraid to catch Helmut’s eye, more afraid of the rustling newspaper across the table.
     “They go together – or no one goes,” father stated, his tombstone face suddenly appearing over the morning headline. I could feel mother’s hand soften its hold, slowly pulling away. “A joint funeral is cheaper,” he laughed, enjoying his own joke, his eyes all shiny inside their reddened lids. He’d managed to remain sober for the first three months at his new job in the new country. I think he considered it some sort of a gift to the rest of us, one he was now eagerly taking back, night after night, bottle after bottle, filling the garbage can by the shed with green glass, as mother lay in bed, pressing the cover to her ear, preying into a tear-stained pillow, already knowing that the alternative was worse.

Looking about me, I realized how much younger I was than the vast majority of the runners. This shouldn’t have been a revelation, for Helmut had lied to the lady at the registration table, telling her I was thirteen, the cut-off age for the race clearly posted as twelve. Being tall for my age had helped.
     It was becoming increasingly more difficult to keep my arms bent, pumping them at my sides in accordance with my stride, as Helmut had shown me. I now dropped them every few steps, letting my fingers hang loose, giving momentary comfort to my aching shoulders. My hearing was going all funny, like it did when I was upset or confused, making everything sound flat and muffled. It could have been the allergies, or the humidity, but it was more likely my nerves, the condition that was then only a larva, buried deep underground, just beginning to sense its own existence. I caught the dim cacophony of running shoes hitting the road and the constant flapping of the paper number Helmut had roughly pinned to my right shoulder, catching my skin, leaving a thin trial of blood along my forearm. “This is so they can shoot you with their camera at the finish line,” he’d explained, making me stand still. “Means they’ll have your face on record, retardo, so don’t go robbing any banks or assassinating any elected officials – they share their files with the FBI, you know.” I winced, recalling a film we watched in school back in Worms, J. Edgar Hoover gesturing at the press with his cigar, pointing towards a shape lying under a blood-stained tarp, dumped squarely in the middle of a squalid-looking Chicago street, like some dog’s accident.
     America was an endless source of fascination. Any worries mother had of us not being able to adjust were unfounded. We’d both taken to the cultural displacement with a determined gusto, an enthusiasm that belied our nervous trepidation. It had always seemed somehow mystical, less than real, a country one read about in books, perhaps saw in movies, but not a place young German boys ever imagined they’d visit, let alone live in. Being barely eleven when we stepped onto the dark tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport, I was full of miscomprehensions about my new home, myths that Helmut’s teasing and father’s silence had done little to remedy. Mother was the only one I could ask questions of, but her knowledge was hardly more accurate than mine. “Rock Hudson has a home on both coasts,” I remember her explaining during the flight, dabbing at my cheek with her napkin as a pretty blonde stewardess retrieved our dinner trays. “And the Empire State Building is so tall, airplanes have to fly around it!”
     The idea of this had instantly caught my imagination.
     “Will we fly around it, mother?” I’d asked, glimpsing past the stoic profiles of my brother and father, seeing the endless blue sky that peeked through the little window.
     “I’m sure we will, dear, I’m sure we will,” she’d replied, returning to her glossy magazine.
     “Huh – we’ll probably fly right into it,” breathed Helmut, his eyes closed.
     “No we won’t!” I cried, causing father to stir, making Helmut flinch nervously.
     “Hush, boys, you’ll wake your father,” whispered mother, busy absorbing all she could about Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, those glamorous, iconic metropolises, the sparkling jewels in every immigrant’s eyes, places we’d hardly ever see, at least not as a family.

I was now walking more than running, the pain in my feet making it hard to do even that. I’d not noticed the change at first, my every stagger, every limp shuffle, a welcome distraction, bringing me a moment’s respite from the stinging coils that seemed to be tightening about my toes.
     “Like some water?”
     I looked up, seeing a teenage girl standing beside the road, just ahead of me. Her long, straight hair was almost white in the brilliant sun. She smiled, holding out a small paper cup as I hobbled towards her. I managed a grin and took it, drinking so fast I splashed half the cool water down my neck. I meant to say “thank you” but instead a weak “danken” came from my throat. I saw the girls’ eyes widen with surprise. Digging my chin to my chest, I gritted my teeth and forced myself on, into a trot, my pride the only thing keeping my going.
     It’s impossible to explain the immigrant experience to those who have never immigrated, other than to suggest one imagine being transported to a world that looks much like Earth, but which is otherwise entirely different, its every movement, every sound, wholly unpredictable. Of course, it was much easier for Helmut and I than it was for mother and father, we had mastered English in school and regularly digested as much of the American mythos as we could. Like most Western European children, my head was dizzy with imagery of the romanticized “Wild West”; cowboys twirling ropes, shooting each other in lonely standoffs, red-faced Indians looming behind every rocky crag, squinty-eyed sheriffs passing through swinging saloon doors, tumbleweeds rolling lazily by; it was all waiting for us, just beyond the horizon, seemingly as tangible as Heaven’s promised harp and wings. The day I learned that the Americans had acquired the automobile, along with other modern conveniences like the telephone and television, was a day of much confusion and consternation. I asked mother how this could be, how the Wild West could have airports and electric toasters and Beatle boots. She pulled me to her and kissed the top of my head. “Your cowboys and Indians lived a long time ago, Totty, they aren’t there anymore – just like the knights and the Vikings of Europe.” That evening I’d retreated to my side of the tiny bedroom I shared with Helmut, spreading my collection of plastic and metal “army men” across my bed, an assortment that included rifle-shooting cowboys, arrow-aiming Indians, shield-toting knights, Cossacks, barbarians, and German infantrymen, along with the prerequisite British paratrooper, gouged with a penknife to indicate the wounds of combat. Though confused, suffering a curious sadness, I was soon giggling to myself, imagining my fierce Indian brave sitting on a toilet, the gunfighter in the sombrero loading his dishwasher. It was a joy that suddenly vanished, the instant I heard a violent pounding on the back door and mother telling Helmut to hurry off to his bedroom.
     Mother and father continued using the old language in the home, right up until father’s death. Only then did mother begin talking to us in English. Helmut and I had used it around her from the very start, the day we’d first raced up those narrow stairs to the dusty, empty room that would be our haven for so many years to come. Around father we reverted to the old way, not daring to offend or upset him, for we never knew which way the wind was blowing.
     It was a strange thing, being so openly referred to as a “German”, for I’d never thought of myself as such before. In America, my identity preceded me, from the classroom to the street corner. I was called nastier things, of course, like “Hitler-Boy” and “Nazi-Fuck”, but these came mostly from the bitter-faced grandson of one proud WWII vet or the other, men forever stuck in the past, still clutching invisible rifles, much like the little men in my cigar box.
     At first, it seemed I could do little to please anyone. Those who wanted me to be American were disappointed with my accent, my awkward politeness, my somewhat aloof, cool nature, those who were looking for an exotic foreigner were frustrated with my limited knowledge of my own country, with the fact that I looked very much like they did. I was, after all, just a boy. I might as well have come from France or England. I had not packed the cultural history of my people in my suitcase, I had, in fact, determinedly left all that I could behind, keeping what I chose in my memories of Grandfather Amwolf, Grandfather Meyer, Uncle Alder, and the grey, damp stones and nettles that lined our garden wall.

I don’t know exactly how long I had been out on the road when I heard the car engine approaching. Amazingly, I was very nearly still managing a run when the horn sounded. Almost stumbling over myself, I turned to see a familiar station wagon, leading a trail of dust. Apart from a farmer on his tractor, it was the first vehicle I’d encountered all morning. It suddenly dawned on me that the race was all over, that I was the very last person still out on the course. I tilted my head to the sky. The sun had already passed its highest point. I gasped, searing pain racing from my toes to my hips.
     “Hey, retardo!” came Helmut’s voice, sharp and critical, as the station wagon pulled beside me. “What are doing?”
     I saw father’s shape at the wheel. He was smoking. It was strange thing to see, for he never smoked around the house, more a response to his own upbringing than any sort of consolation for mother.
     Helmut was leering out of the passenger side, an unlit cigarette between his red lips. I saw a pack of “cowboy cigarettes” on the dashboard. This is what father and Helmut called Marlboros. It was their favorite brand. Father often enlisted Helmut to hide the contraband from mother, often in the ceiling of the garden shed, the secret stash usually consisting of a carton of Marlboros and a twelve-pack of Budweiser, always cans, never bottles. The shed was commonly referred to as The King and Cowboy, as if it were a public house, even in front of mother. “Marlboro and Budweiser, two things America does like no one else,” I can recall Helmut once claiming, parroting father, as we chugged sweet, cold soda, waiting for mother outside the local supermarket.
     “Dad’s really pissed,” Helmut whispered, now leaning out of the car, cupping his hand over his mouth in confidence. The engine suddenly cut off. “Seriously,” he added, with uncharacteristic solemnity.
     I came to a stop, standing very still, staring at the ground, my lower body insensitive, my head spinning, feeling the heat of the car’s engine rising over me. I was sure, after all I had endured, that I was going to pass out, right there, in front of Helmut and father.
     “You’re goin’ to get it,” whispered Helmut, the tease back in his voice, just like that.
     I heard father’s door open and his hard shoes on the road. The car was parked half on it, half on the broken shoulder. I counted the footsteps, hearing them soften as they reached the dirt. My eyes were now closed, a heavy feeling coming over me, as if I were about to swoon. I wondered what I would do when father hit me. A great terror blossoming, I bunched my hands at my sides, preparing myself for the worst.
     “You beat your brother by almost two miles.”
     I held my breath, going dizzy.
     “Never knew you had it in you, Totty. Doubt you did either,” father added, putting a hand on my shoulder. I winced, pulling away from him, before I even realized it, almost tripping. He steadied me and drew me back towards him. I heard a low chuckle coming from within the car. “What should we do to celebrate? Hmm?”
     My eyes stinging with sweat, I turned, blinking, catching the big grin on father’s face. I couldn’t believe it. Still terrified, I grinned back, wiping at my eyes, realizing I couldn’t feel my feet at all. “Celebrate?” I heard Helmut whine, his voice all but disappearing into the car.
     “You made yourself a real man today, Totty Vogel –yes, you sure did,” father announced, giving me a solid slap on my back, making the sour feeling in my stomach take a dangerous climb. “Give me that pack, Helmut!”
     I glanced over at the car, seeing Helmut, wearing a queer look on his face, one as much wounded as fearful. He handed the Marlboros to father.
     “Here you go, boy, you’ve earned this,” said father, holding a cigarette before my lips, waiting for me to mouth it. I hesitated, not knowing if I could even manage. “Go on, boy, take your prize,” he added, touching the filtered tip to my lips. I took it, terrified of dropping it. “Raise your head, cowboy, you get the champion’s smoke today,” he insisted, with an odd chuckle, something I couldn’t ever remember him doing, not in my honor. He lit the cigarette. I just held it there in my mouth, my arms at my sides, inhaling and inhaling, until it seemed my ears were about to emit great plumes of smoke. Then, all at once, I was pitching forward, my trophy lost on a gushing cascade of all that Helmut had forced me to eat for breakfast.
     “Gross!” came my trainer’s voice, from within the car.
     I was instantly on my hands and knees, losing my guts with dramatic fashion.
     “Look at your mess!” declared father, his mirth a fleeting thing. “I should make you walk home. Clean yourself, boy, and get in the back seat, your mother is worried sick about you. Why would you run on like that, after your brother had stopped? Do you enjoy making your poor mother worry herself over you? Hmm?” I was sure my vomiting was the only thing that had stopped him from striking me. I could hear the violence rising in his voice, a tone I knew all too well.
     Staggering to my wrecked feet, wiping at my new shirt, I climbed into the car, unable to restrain the tears, my eyes flooding with the realization that America wasn’t going to be any different, after all. It wasn’t going to change father, not like I’d been secretly hoping, ever since I’d raced through those sliding doors at JFK, breathing in the first taste of my new home, listening for the gunslinger’s discharge, the war cry of the Indian, never considering that I’d brought the wild west with me.