The Last Bender, Chapter 13

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

 

 

            Bunuel may have been gone, but the giant hole he left behind was slow to close. Laraby would be pissed all right that he couldn’t be bought. I could hear it in my head. Standing up behind that desk turning purple. Asking, “Name me the cop who can’t be bought.”   What am I gonna say to that? The rules exist so you know what to do. But that was nothing. Bunuel nailed that one right. Cause if he had named a price Laraby would be pissed about that too. Laraby was always pissed about something. But now, Bunuel became part of the problem cause he’d stuck his nose in where Laraby didn’t want it. So I was supposed to stop him.

            I was a little mad, and a little bit shamed by the hardball. So I’m a not a detective, so what. And so what if in my old man’s day they talked less and got more done. Did he have to say it? I didn’t ask for it to be pounded into my head. Most days, I walk into a room full of lizard kings. Everyone so full of how smart they are, and they don’t give a damn. O.K. But throwing it at you is cheap.

            I went out to the car. The rust and ding paint and sun-whitened orange finish made it look like tangerine trash. In the trunk I kept a couple of  automatic T Dubs in a box of tools by the spare, under a greasy blanket with a skunk smell. I pulled it out, went inside and walked from room to room. To my old bedroom, where my grandfather, my sister, Mary, and I all slept. One night my grandfather climbed into my bed. I was half asleep. He held his big stinking old prick up against my ass cheeks. He smelled like dirty feet and whiskey. Around when he started to grunt I tried to come up with a plan for getting out of the bed. I don’t know how old I was but I was young enough to be paralyzed and old enough to know that I should get the fuck out of there. He started to poke at my asshole with his cock, trying to get it in. “Ow!” I screamed and shot rigid. The light in the hall popped on and I saw my father’s shadow loom into the doorway; he stood there a moment, shining a long handled flashlight onto the bed. The beam whited out my eyes. Mary screamed her head off. My grandfather crawled around the bed like someone had kicked him in the head. He started to sweat and the reek filled the room. My mother ran to the crib and took Mary up in her arms. She kissed her ears and rocked her back and forth, whispering o.k. three times.

            My father shined the flashlight into his father’s eyes and said, quietly, clearly, “You ain’t doin’ to him what you done to me.”   He dragged him into the backyard by the hair, howling and kicking. I wasn’t confused or afraid anymore, this was exciting. I was being avenged. My mother grabbed my shoulder to pull me in but I broke free and ran after them, into the kitchen. I climbed up the cabinet and watched through the lead paned window over the sink. The moon lit them very clearly: my grandfather behind his hands, wailing as my father beat him with the flashlight. He was not a violent man. He liked to be alone. He was patient. It mystified me how he knew how to beat a man until I went to war and realized he had been trained.

            The closet door was open. Strewn across the floor like fenders and glass after a wreck were all the things that accumulate in a house where four generations have lived. The tennis rackets and tent pegs and Lite Brites. The school workbooks, buckskin suits and liederhosen and chewed over diaper bags. A crochet book with one needle between the pages. Little bags of brightly colored sand. Flattened bowling shoes and boots with sprained ankles. Boxes and boxes of my father’s bills and pay stubs ordered, rubber banned and inventoried in twelve different colors of envelope.

            It was all carefully picked over.

            In my room, which was my parents’, they had ripped the mattress stuffing out; overturned the drawers and smashed the light bulbs. Unrolled every sock. Dumped the dirty laundry out. Cut open the lining of my down coat. Every suit was in a pile on the floor and every pair of shoes had been pried apart. My Oxnard button down shirts and pastel Lloyd’s Polos and BlackTese and Van Helsing tank tops all tangled in a heap.

            The kitchen had so little in it–I don’t cook except for sandwiches–but the drawers were pulled out and cabinets opened.

            Toilet paper trailed out of the bathroom. The trash was emptied on the tile floor. They had even unwadded snotty tissues and examined waxy ear swabs.

My thoughts were chaotic.  My gut chattered like cold teeth. I had to slow down and think. I went to the living room and sat down. The hurt of them touching and looking at everything we ever were, all unsavory, unshaved, spitting, loving, ranting, brooding four generations of us just blew up on me. I wasn’t going to sit there like a showgirl in sequins with cum on her face. I reached into the end of it and pulled out whatever I could find, which was two guns and some bullets. Anyone who got hungry for a piece of me now was going to eat one.