Headstone City

TWELVE

On the night Ma died, the boy with the sick brain told him how much he loved Dane's mother, how wonderful she was, how beautiful she was there in the bed, her skin yellow, the machines forcing air into her lungs. Heaving her against the pillows like a careless lover.

The kid had sutures all across his head, bone showing through on one side. Jagged raw red scars crosshatching his frontal lobe. Pieces of his skull had been removed and replaced with plastic and steel. He walked like he had five angry people inside grappling for control. Dane followed him around the room where his mom was dying and he was walking the same way.

Dane was seventeen and didn't know his mother well at all. She'd been ill for years and had spent most of her time in the back room, waiting to die. Their conversations consisted of lists and catalogues of delirium.

What did you do today? Today I went to math class, gym, went down to the pier with Maria, stole another car, and played stickball in Venucci's parking lot. What did you do today? Today I dreamed an angel with golden wings as shiny as coins sat with me on the end of the bed. In its hand was a burning sword. I watched the television for a while, but it wasn't on. I bled in the toilet. Go out and play.

He came home from a weekend in Atlantic City, where he'd stayed with Vinny in one of the Don's hotels, and found her on the bathroom floor. Eyes shadowed and skin turning a delicate shade of blue. Dad in his grave only a few months, Grandma at bingo. Dane drove her over to the hospital, stunned by how quickly they set her up in ICU.

They allowed him to stay with her while the symphony of mechanical discord spiked his skull. Red lights snapped on and glowed like eyes of furious judgment. You could go crazy in this room waiting for your mother to die.

He learned more about his mom from the ill kid, who spoke as if he'd known her all his life. He'd spent much of his youth in the hospital, where they tore at his skull and pulled out pieces and jammed transistors in. Other people lived between his ears. He understood how to read the medical charts. What each machine's purpose was. The kid had strange eyes, one staring straight ahead, the other never quite settled, always jumping.

The room flashed with wild hands. The kid kept reaching over and running fingers over Dane's scalp. His own jagged stitch marks hadn't completely healed yet. The wounds were still a bright pink, his hair coming in choppy and discolored in those areas. The boy with the sick brain giggled and did a little rumba around the room, excited to see somebody else with a fucked-up head.

Dane kept rubbing his mother's hand with his thumb. He couldn't stop, the rhythm of his motion timed to the beeping machines. He looked down at the floor, searching for the pool of blackness that shuddered beneath his feet. Sometimes he had a shadow, and sometimes his shadow had him.

The kid spoke with a beautiful voice, in English and other languages. Occasionally hissing his words, with a deep meaning and an awful emotion. He told Dane that Ma had spent so much time crying that she couldn't stop, not even now, in her coma. Her sleep would never be pure. She'd always struggle, restless and weeping, for the remainder of her hours in the hospital bed, and afterward into purgatory.

Thumb moving back and forth on your mother's yellow, bloated flesh. The machines speaking in ancient rhymes you can almost comprehend.

The boy touched your scars, matching them against his own. You're glad that he keeps talking.

“Was wünschen Sie von mir?”

“I don't want anything from you. What the hell do you want from me? Why are you even here?”

“É bonita. Eu quero-a. Você não merece uma mulher tão maravilhosa. É minha. Mãe. Mãe.”

“She's not your mother. She's mine.”

“Mère. Mère.”

“She's my ma, damn it.”

“Mia madre. La mia madre!”

“No matter how many times you say it, she's not yours, she's my mom.”

Thinking about how easy it would be to snap the boy's neck, Dane waited for somebody to come save him. His grandmother, with her red fingers. Uncle Philly, who would be off shift in a half hour. The nurses out in the hall gossiped loudly about possible pay cuts and breast enhancement.

A doctor who looked maybe twenty-five peeked his head into the room and flashed a brilliant smile at Dane, showing off his caps. His hair had some kind of wet- look mousse in it, sculpted into small curved thorns rearing in every direction.

In Jersey, when Dane and Vinny were laid up in the emergency room, there had been a doctor with the same kind of haircut who'd wandered around smirking. Did the hospitals hire these guys just to roam the halls like maître d's?

Dane wanted to pace. He stood and tried to move, but it was like he was fused to the spot. It took him a minute to realize he couldn't stop rubbing his mother's hand, not even if he wanted to. He had to keep this contact, no matter how long he had to stay here.

A voice came from under the bed.

Dane couldn't understand it. He lifted the hanging sheets and saw the kid crouched under there, arguing with the floor, pausing between incomprehensible sentences as if the floor was talking back. Maybe it was. Dane tried to listen, but the cruel grating of his mother's respirator kept dragging his attention back to her frail chest.

The kid's head was coming farther apart, sutures and staples pulling away. He crawled out from beneath the bed and stared at Ma's body, then turned away, beaming, needy but appearing innocent.

Dane knew what the boy wanted.

The rage and grief grew inside him until he was grunting and groaning in his seat like a pig. He tightened his free hand around the arm of the chair. He wanted to smash the kid with one of the machines and scatter the shards of his skull across the wall.

“Go on, damn you,” Dane whispered. “Do it, if you have to.”

The boy with the twisted head crept into bed with Dane's mother.

He held her tightly and began to weep, whining and mewling. In time his sobs became a single word, repeated over and over but never growing any louder. “Mama, mama.” His tears rolled off her bony chest each time the machines drove her to take in another breath. “Mama.” He cried for almost an hour until finally, exhausted, he slept.

Dane sat there watching as her body functions grew even slower, and though it felt as if they would never stop, eventually they did. It really hadn't taken that long, he realized, checking his watch. His hand was free to move again.

The respirator still forced her lungs to heave, although Dane knew she was dead. The boy with the sick brain grinned in his sleep. His eyelids fluttered as he dreamed. The flaps of his head barely held together, the meat of his mind throbbing, flesh trying to pull open.

For an instant, Dane saw a black, indistinct shape in there waiting to be born into existence. Perhaps it was the boy's soul. Or Mom's. Or his own.

Scar tissue could be more alive than the rest of your skin. Itching, dead, but full of answers. Cut it open and it reproduces. Not alive, but giving birth.

He left before he was certain. There were some questions that should never be answered.

That leering doctor met him in the doorway again and bared his teeth. Dane looked at him and said, “I ought to kill you, you crazy grinning fuck.” The guy still didn't drop his smile, but he vanished quickly down the hall.

As Dane drove home from the hospital, it felt as if the neighborhood were slowly growing aware of the death of his mother. As if the streets were learning of it mile by mile, as he made his way to the house.

Dane stared down and saw his hands were scuffed and bleeding, the knees of his pants dirty. He must've fallen a couple of times in the hospital parking lot, but he couldn't remember. His scars were singing.

Grandma Lucia's house, which for years had suffered the presence of the dying woman, now expressed relief. The place looked like it was waiting for loud Italian music, parties. The wide hardwood floors where his parents had danced Christmas mornings when he was a child appeared freshly polished.

The photos on the shelves above the TV shifted at the edge of his vision. Those faces darkening with intent. The names he couldn't pronounce had a power over him, already inside his veins. The face of his mother, once out in front, now hid behind other angry women. Blurred and growing more clouded even as he watched.

Dane went to his room, and when he looked up, his dead father was walking across the floor. He sat on the bed.

There were times you wanted to talk to ghosts and times you didn't. Dane wasn't sure what he wanted now. He waited for his dad to speak. Maybe the death of Dane's mother had somehow called the man up, brought him home.

A cold knot of tension throbbed in Dane's belly. Part anxiety but mostly expectation, thinking that perhaps it was finally time to learn the lessons of his father. Answers might be revealed, if his old man could be handled properly. His father might set him on a course he could understand.

A dying breeze clawed at the window over the desk. Leaves clung to the battered screen and skittered across the broken bricks outside. Odd to feel himself tugged in this fashion, knowing his father was buried even while the man sat on the mattress behind him.

You could survive almost any injury so long as you left one version of yourself behind and allowed a different one to continue.

Dane started a slow turning he would never completely finish.

His father had been dead for a little less than six months. Dane had found him down the block, parked in front of the Gothic gates at the mouth of the cemetery with his brains blown out, the gun still in his hand.

The papers gave ambiguous hints about corruption, making it seem like he had to go on the take to cover rising health-care costs for his terminally ill wife. Once he'd been caught, he'd killed himself out of shame. It sounded believable and almost romantic. Tragic without any of the usual saccharine.

The man's photo was on the news every night, not looking tough at all. Sort of soft actually, smiling a bit self-consciously.

Anywhere else in the country it might've been true, but not in Brooklyn. This was the town that had perfected the Bounce. Five cops bringing in sixty keys of heroin, a squad room of police officers surrounding the evidence, and somehow it disappears in front of everybody's eyes. Nobody worried about exposure in Brooklyn. Graft went with the territory. Phil Guerra had once been caught with an underage hooker, the two of them trading a crack pipe, and all the brass did was throw him into rehab for three months and make him go to Sex Addicts Anonymous.

Brooklyn cops never ate their pistols over something like possible corruption. It would be like a bus driver drowning himself because he didn't like making left turns.

As Dane shifted in his seat he saw his old man still seated in the center of the bed, waiting for something no one with a heartbeat could name. Dane couldn't see the gunshot wound in the man's temple from this angle, but it would be there. It had to be. It was as sharp in his imagination as if he'd been shot in the head himself.

“Is she there yet?” Dane asked. “Where are you? Is that purgatory? Is there anything I can do to help?”

For some reason, it felt as if it would take time for his mother and father to find each other. Both of them so gloomy and always staring at walls.

Dad didn't answer.

“Who did it to you?”

An enduring silence broken only by the breeze skirting past outside, the soft scrabbling clatter of pigeons on the roof.

Angling his chin, Dane was unable to meet the man's eyes, which were passionate and alive. His father appeared to be searching for something to say. He opened his mouth and closed it again. He held his hands up in a helpless gesture, like a baby trying to reach for an object beyond his grasp.

His father gave a sickly grin and lay back on the bed. It had been the bed he'd slept in as a boy.

“At least try to talk, Dad. Make an effort. Can't you even do that?”

The window frame vibrated in the staccato breeze. It felt like a ploy to get Dane to turn away from his father for an instant, giving the dead enough time to slip away unseen. He wouldn't fall for it. He touched the back of his head and his scars writhed, the metal plates hot to the touch. When he pulled his hand away his fingers were covered with blood.

He stared at his father lying there, the man looking up at the ceiling as if remembering what it had once been like to be alive in this room, not so different from Dane himself.

Sweat dripped through his hair and soaked into his shirt collar. Surrounded by death and connected to the dead, but not quite there yet. Feeling the weight of murder in the dirt and concrete of the neighborhood. Embarrassed by his own excitement, at this moment, of being alive.

“Find Mom, if you can. And next time, try harder to talk to me.”

Dane allowed himself to look away, and when he glanced back, Dad was gone.

There were important words waiting for him. Solutions that his father was unable or unwilling to give to him. Maybe only for the time being or maybe forever.

Dane was certain he would find his father's murderer eventually, in the angry years laid out before him like the rutted paths that threaded through Headstone City. There was time.

Grandma Lucia walked in, her pocketbook chiming, a plastic container full of pennies rattling, and said, “Madonna mia, what the hell's that smell? You buy a bad salami? Something die in here?”