Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury

TWO OF A KIND Jacquelyn Mitchard

It does not happen so much, not anymore, but when it does, I grab Joanie.

I grab Joanie, my wife, like a little boy grabs his mama when he has a nightmare. And that’s not enough.

Even when my hand closes around her thigh, thick from all the years of babies and bending to scrub but warm and alive under her flannel pajama pants, I still let myself moan out loud. I hate to do it. A grown man. A grown man and a grandfather, at that. But I make the noise on purpose. I want Joanie to wake up, just so she can say something to me, say anything to me. It’s like the dream is a web that fell on me in the dark, so big you wonder what made it, gumming up your mouth and your nose so that even being awake and knowing you’re in your bed with your wife near the West Side of Chicago, with your daughter who got herself into trouble and the sweet little boy with corkscrew curls that come of it asleep down the hall, it still keeps rising and you want to claw your skin before it smothers you. The dream is stronger than real, like a spider’s web is stronger than wire—you know that? Silk is stronger than wire.

This is the dream.

I see my hand drop a hand of cards; then Jackie drops his cards, too. The knife snaps open in his hand, and it starts to fall but then rights itself like a creature, its twin blades a mouth that starts to snap like the blades are swimming, pulling theirself through the air toward me. They want me. That knife, it wants me. It has all my life. I see the blood burst from my palm before I feel the hot nip of the cut.

“Joanie!” I cry.

“Go to sleep, Jan,” she says, using the J sound, not the Y, like Irish do.

“Joanie, are we married?”

“Jan, these thousand years,” she tells me, half asleep. She takes my hand off her leg and lays it on her breast, not as if to start us making love but the way a mother would. There now, feel my heartbeat. Joanie’s hand is raw and red from the housecleaning, but dainty as a lady’s, shaped the way all them Finnian girls’ was, as if they was all linen and lace instead of shanty Irish. It’s shaped like the way her sister Nora’s small white hand was, when Nora and us was young and Joanie just a kid. Joanie’s hand holds tight to my finger. She can’t hold my hand, it’s so big-knuckled from all the years as a plumber, with the rod and the shovel.

“Where is Nora?” I ask my wife.

“Asleep in her cell,” Joanie answers with a sigh, because she’s used to this. We’ve been married, like she says, since she was just a teenager and I a man of twenty-three. “With the painting of the blessed Benedict I sent her at her birthday over her head, sleeping and never moving, as if she left her body, sleeping like dead, like she ever did, even as a child…”

“Are you sure?” I ask Joanie, because I’m awake now and I want her awake. “I had a dream. My leg hurts like hell. Is there a storm coming?” My white T-shirt is drying by then, freezing me. I need an excuse at this point. I start dragging the quilt up that I’ve kicked onto the floor.

It’s always the same.

“I know,” Joanie says. “It’s only a dream, Jan. Be still now and sleep. You’ll wake the baby.”

I don’t think Joanie ever wakes up, no more than she did to nurse the girls. She would just roll to her side then, and they would fall asleep between us—first Marie, for my mother, and then Katherine, just ten months apart, and after Katherine, a few years later, Eleanor, and then the little girl we called Jacqueline for… for Jackie, I suppose, as a gift to me, though we never said as much. When we thought that all that was done, and stopped bothering to take care with lovemaking, along comes our Polly. I was crowding fifty at that time, though Joanie’s six years younger. We were happy enough to have a child in the house again. We didn’t count on having three kids at home. But that’s how it went. Polly was just ten when Eleanor, a grown woman, came home alone and pregnant. Eleanor, named for Joanie’s sister Nora, wanted to call the baby boy Kwaze, after his father, who was a good enough fellow but foolish. His name is a good name in the African language. It means “Sunday.” We told Eleanor that we thought he’d grow up easier, her being the only parent, with an ordinary name. Eleanor gave him the name of Kevin instead, and our last name, Nickolai. We wished it hadn’t been our Eleanor, so good in school, a junior in college, hoping to be a doctor. Still, we were happy. Joanie is a happy woman, with a sunny heart. A heart with no shadows.

That’s why I never told her about it. Not in so many words. I never told her none of it, although it’s wrong, to the church, to everyone, for a man to keep a secret from his wife, a gentle and true wife that Joanie is. I do believe she does know. It’s like something she was born knowing. But she never asked me anything but had I been with Nora before her and me married—and I hadn’t done anything but kiss Nora. I didn’t have to lie. I never been with no one but Joanie, the truth of it is, though she don’t know that either, and she has no need to know that, as a wife. A man has his pride.

She never met Jackie. Not to speak to. She did meet him, but she was a little girl. She doesn’t remember the party we had before Jackie went to war.

But she’s seen him.

You see me, you’ve seen Jackie Nickolai. That’s how it always was. I look in the mirror even now, I see him sometimes. Though I got a gut and most of my hair went gray when I was still young. I still miss him, almost forty years and more later.

It never failed with us, Jackie and me.

One of us come up the street alone, maybe trudging through the snow from the bus, and Mrs. Kozyk or Mrs. Peasley or Mrs. Finnian would shake her dish towel at us and ask, “Hey, Pete, where’s Re-Peat?”

Mrs. Kozyk, and all the neighbors, they knew we weren’t brothers. But other people, even in school, didn’t. See, it figured, how we looked—long rusty black hair, green eyes, nervous piano hands—us always together, having the same last name. People naturally assumed, not just when we was kids but all the way up through high school, that we were brothers. Some of them thought, maybe twins. Always. Almost as long as there was.

“Two of a kind beats a pair!” Mrs. Kozyk would tease us. She didn’t understand half of what she was saying in English. She just overheard things her husband said when he played cards on the porch and said them. It wasn’t no surprise, given the peculiar way we was related.

We were cousins, Jackie and me. But how many times you ever hear of this way? Me, I only heard of it one other time, and then long after Jackie was gone, from a girl that my wife knew at the place she worked before she formed her own cleaning company and hired girls to come and go with her and our daughter Eleanor in the bright Cleen Green vans.

See, Jackie’s father and my father were brothers and our mothers not just sisters but twins—identical twins. A twin is practically the same as one person divided in half. So I guess if you took slices of Jackie’s cells and my cells under a microscope, they would basically be the same as if we was brothers, because how could people’s cells line up with any more similarity?

Of course, they brought us up the same too. We learned Hungarian at home from Grandma Sala, before English. Then we went to the same grade at Saint Anselmo, though we was ten months apart. Both playing baseball—Jackie at short, me, right field—and Ghosts in the Graveyard and Kick the Can in the street at night. I took diving at the Y because it was good for me, after the polio, and Jackie took drawing, him being good with his hands. He didn’t need to get built up, being the kind of kid born muscled. Even when we didn’t weigh more between us than a man weighs grown, he would be the one showed up at dusk in the alley when one of the coloreds or the Carney brothers called me out. Called me “Gimpy” or “Hopalong” because of the brace on my leg and how it made me walk. And all I could do would be crouch under the lilac bushes that grew wild back there and watch him wade in, whack, twist, drop, butt with his head. The kid would be on his ass scrabbling backward in the gravel, not knowing what come at him out of that little body of Jackie’s. Afterward, he would never act like I owed him for taking my lumps. He seemed to think it was… his job. Jackie would look at you in a way, how do I tell you? Every one of the Carney brothers, them all the size of oxen, thirty of them it seemed to us like there was, they wouldn’t come on Jackie or me after the first time. He was just a small and gentle boy who never went looking for a fight. But once he was in something, he wouldn’t stop. Ever. That was what the look was. You knew Jackie would die before he backed down, and if you were ready to die, that would be all the same for him, too.

He never said an unkind word to me.

Only once.

This is confusing, although it was just normal to us.

Jackie was named for my father, whose name back in the old country was Jukka. They called my dad Jack. And I was named for Dad and Unkie’s father, Grandpa Ivan, who lived down the street with Grandma Sala.

He was called Jackie. I was called Jan.

All them names more or less mean John, you know. From John the Baptist, like my mother said.

Dad’s two older brothers, Josef and Gaston, called Jackie and me a pair of Jacks. Like, pair of jacks beats a pair of tens. When they saw us, they would laugh hard and then say, “Pair of jacks and the man with the axe splits the pot.” The man with the axe is the king of diamonds. They taught us to play poker when I was little, six. All kinds of games. Deuces and Baseball and Spit in the Ocean.

I don’t play cards anymore.

“Jacks are better,” they’d say to us at Grandma Sala’s after Mass, whenever they came home, to eat like ten men for a month and then leave again for six. Josef and Gaston were in the Merchant Marine. They were older than my dad, bachelors who hardly never came home. When they did, they would shove their big paintbrush beards into our faces, kissing us on both cheeks. I guess we felt special, being the only two boys. I was an only child. Jackie had a younger sister, Karin.

Josef and Gaston were the ones who came over first. From the money they made after they signed up, they saved for everyone else, long before Hitler took what we still called Transylvania, a land of dark cliffs and Gypsies. Now it’s Romania, yes, but also part of it is in the former republic of this or that, pulled back and forth between countries in Eastern Europe that never get any of it right and stay poor because of it. Grandma Sala would cry and pray in Hungarian for the mountains and their white flowers and birches. But no one in their right mind would want to go back.

Mama’s family, Papa and Nana, were already there when my father’s family came.

They were not immigrants anymore, even back then.

They were Americans of the third generation. They had lived first up in Wisconsin, then in Chicago since it was farm fields, just out past the El tracks. Our great-grandfather had served in the Civil War as a boy of sixteen. He survived and married a girl no older than he was, and had some acres until he had to give it up because of an accident with a plow blade, left him with a leg like my leg is, only the right not the left. He did various kinds of jobs then, until he come down to Chicago. Because he was good with style, if you want to call it that, he became a hatmaker. Men of business wore hats in his time, every day. He even shipped to Miami and Canada. At first he had to apprentice to an old Dago guy, even though he was already a grown man with a family. The Dagos made the beautiful hats. Shirts, suits, sweaters. Do still. Finally, he started his own store. Cornelius Hats. There was no Cornelius. Our great-grandfather just thought it sounded fancy when he started the company at the turn of the century. Papa grew up and made hats too. Then Papa’s son, our mama’s brother, decided he wanted to go to school for criminal justice instead. Dad let me know on the quiet that he thought hats were going out. He also thought they would squeeze your head until you went bald if you wore one every day. Dad himself never wore any outfit but his blue work pants and shirt. He owned one single suit he wore to every wedding and every funeral, and one blue sport coat. I myself only own one, my wedding suit. And it don’t fit no more, although Joanie keeps threatening to make me go walk around the block with her at night—like she doesn’t work hard enough in the day.

Once, before he had to close the store, Papa asked Dad—I call my father, who’s ninety, alive and well, Dad, in the American way—if he wanted to join him in the business. But Dad was already in the plumbers’ union instead, with his brother, Unkie. The money was so good with buildings going up on the edges of the city. You had to pay a union man very well, then and now. But still Dad and Unkie wanted to be on their own, and do plumbing not only repairs but for schools and new houses. If they didn’t move just outside the city limits, to a suburb called Grant, the union men would have broke their legs for underbidding them in Chicago, which they owned lock, stock, and barrel. So they did move. Together, they bought the brick two-flat that’s the only home I remember having as a child, and they made out good.

I think my grandfather, Papa, was very sad; but he never said nothing, except to sigh about the end of the old ways. Jackie told him someday, when he was grown, he would make fine hats; and Papa gave him a fifty-cent piece. He also gave Jackie a hat and one to me. Jackie looked good in that gray fedora, like he did in everything he wore. I didn’t wear mine. The fact is, hats are coming back today. The black people wear them, and everybody young wears what they wear.

It was also him, Papa, who give us the relics. I don’t mean holy relics, like slivers of the true cross. I mean historical relics. They don’t have anything attached to them sacred or magic.

They couldn’t have.

That’s the whole point.

You see?

They were from his father. He kept them in a Cornelius hatbox.

We were twelve when he gave them to us.

It was summer. We were sitting out on the low, black wrought-iron fence right near the street, waiting to see Patricia Finnian, the oldest of those girls, Joanie’s big sister, walk past, the way she did every night. Patricia was wild. She would come swinging her shiny red plastic purse, with her black hair like a thing with its own eager spine dancing on her back, her breasts plain visible in the sinking light under her cheap cotton dress, and girls didn’t do that then, crossing the two streets from Grant into the city. She was seventeen and she had no eyes for Jackie or me. The Dagos picked her up around the corner in long white Lincolns. Patricia is a lady now. She lives out in Lake Forest in a house the size of a block in a normal place. Joanie and I get asked there for Christmas Eve, like the king asked his stable men to come in and have food on the night Christ was born. She gives us something Joanie and I laugh about the rest of a year, like once crystal bowls you put salt in, with tiny spoons.

That night, though, Papa called us to come over before Patricia came out. He lived across and one building over—and he says, I got this box I got to show you boys some things in.

He untied the strings and lifted off the top. There, in the top, was a flag folded, like for the dead. An American flag but not like one we had ever seen, not with the right number of stars, and so old the white was yellow. You knew it would crack like paper if you unfolded it. There was a big-brimmed hat all tore up, dirty black felt material. And there was pictures of a man with big earmuffs of sideburns. In one of them, he was holding two babies, one Papa’s father and one Papa’s twin brother, Pavel, who died from the scarlet fever. Twins run in families, so my mother turned out to be one.

Papa’s father served with the Sixth Wisconsin, the Iron Brigade, the bravest of all the Union forces, the miners and farmers who wore the big, black hats. The big-brimmed hat in the box was his. I guess that was how Papa’s father got his fondness for hats, those hats worn with so much pride. Papa was probably eighty by then, but he never forgot a thing, old or new. He said his father could do all sorts of things besides grow alfalfa and fashion a fine fedora. Once, after he sold his farm, he taught drawing for a family of girls whose father was rich, but no one could support a family teaching girls to draw. But the first Grandpa Nickolai really could draw anything he saw, Papa said, from his mother’s face in the mirror to the butcher’s hands. In the Civil War he drew dying men crazed with thirst in the fields in Pennsylvania, as they cried out in Dutch or German or with Irish on their tongues. Papa had his father’s music notation book with a black-and-white marble cover—filled with the drawings. Papa showed us them, so fragile and faded. Looking slowly through the drawings, being careful not to smudge the pencil marks more, Jackie said, “Papa, these are real good. Art and also historical. You should give them to the Field Museum.”

Papa said, “He did not mean for people to see them.”

Jackie asked, “Why?” And Papa shrugged as if he knew the answer but he wasn’t to say it. That must have been where Jackie got his gift for art.

There were some buttons in the box, too, and one old boot. The knife with two blades and bone handles was the next thing but one to the bottom. It was wrapped in a lady’s handkerchief.

Jackie was sitting closest, so Papa gave it to him.

Opened up, it looked just like that bug, a praying mantis. Papa said his grandfather got it off a Rebel soldier in the Civil War. Crazy with hunger, our great-grandfather used it to dig something like sweet potatoes from the ground, a farm before it was a battlefield. But he had nothing to cut dry wood with to make a fire so he could cook them. They was too tough to eat raw, since his teeth was loose anyhow.

“They all had scurvy or the dysentery,” Papa said.

“Did he have to shoot the Rebel?” I asked Papa. Papa looked out at the colored boys, who were just starting to sing around a fire in the trash can on the corner under the streetlight, up past where Grand ended and Chicago began.

“Someone made it named Furnace, see there,” Papa told us. “Think of your name being Furnace. Made by Furnace but they call it a Barlow knife. It is from England.” I asked again was he dead, the Johnny Reb, when our great-grandpa took the knife off him, and Nana came out. She pulled my hair and said, “Tcch! Enough!” Right then, my mom came in the back door with a casserole, looked at the hatbox, and cut her eyes at Papa like he’d sworn in Jesus’ name. Papa fell silent, pouty as a little kid. He felt deep in the bottom of the box and pulled out a man’s muffler, a winter scarf. Wrapped in that was what I got, a bayonet. It fitted to the end of his rifle, though no one knew what happened to the rifle.

“It’s American history, Marie,” he said.

“Of war,” Mom said. “We don’t want any more wars like when I was a girl. We’re done with wars.”

Us boys weren’t; of course, we didn’t know that.

Jackie’s knife was the better thing. Sure. He could carry it anywhere. Bring it out and examine it, in front of the Carney brothers like he was figuring who he should cut. The knife made up for a lot, not that Jackie needed it. But he never used it to hurt anybody or anything. He carved with it because it was still sharp as new. First, he made tiny teacups from acorns for his little sister and swords for him and me that we burned until they had points hard enough to pierce human skin. Then he started to carve sculpture things from scrap bits of cherry and mahogany Dad and Unkie brought home from new houses they were doing plumbing on. He carved birds and owls. Then hands. Then finally flowers. Auntie Maggie said the opening rose he made reminded her of the story of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain and the Stone Flower.

“There was a master carver,” she said. “And he could make flowers of stone and wood that looked more real than living flowers; but to do this he had to give up his love and remember nothing of his mother or his loyal sweetheart. But he gave back the gift, instead, and forgot the copper mountain until he was ninety years old…”

She was just getting started. We ran outside. Auntie Maggie could go through three cups of coffee on a story. You could be ninety yourself when she got done. It was rude; but we just heard her laughing after us. We got away with most things.

Even though the Barlow knife was the better, Jackie said my bayonet had stains on it and that they had to be real blood. I told him I bet the bone that made the arms of his knife was tiger bone.

That’s how we was to each other. Tried to make the other one feel good. I don’t know if real brothers would have been that polite. Though our mothers were. They still are.

The only difference between our families back then that I could tell was Jackie’s parents lived in the upper of the two-flat. Because of the stairs, it was a little smaller than our house, though it had more bedrooms. No one ever said a thing about it or the fact that, even with them calling themselves partners—the plumbing truck reading NICKOLAI AND NICKOLAI—actually the rod, the pipe wrench, and the truck itself were Dad’s. The time Unkie left the new snake at the Emerson house and when they went back the snake had crawled off—as my dad put it—that was all he said. He laughed. No reproach. It was like family was a piece of lace that might already have a lot of holes but you handled it careful so it didn’t get more.

One time, my pop got my mother a lamb coat, ’cause she lost a baby girl born way too soon, and Jackie’s mother had to do with a long shawl knitted by Nana. Auntie didn’t complain. She said, “Oh, Marie, that collar brings out the red in your hair.”

And Mom would come right back with, “Maggie, it fits us both the same, so you take it to the Knights dance—”

“Oh, I couldn’t, Marie. If I ever got something on it—”

“No, Sissy, you just take it anytime you want…”

Which was why, with their having a little bit more trouble than us making ends meet, probably because Unkie played the ponies, we were all shocked when Unkie gave Jackie the Studebaker for high school graduation. It wasn’t new, far from it. But it was clean as a priest’s collar, not a scratch on her. We all knew right away whose it was. Marty Jaworsky’s. The diamond dealer’s car. We knew, too, that it couldn’t have had no more than twenty miles on it because Reb Jaworsky didn’t do a thing with it but drive down the boulevard on Friday before sunset taking his family to temple on a magic carpet so black it gleamed like a river in the rain, then have a guy drive them home after. We also all knew Reb Jaworsky wasn’t going to give it up for a nickel less than it was worth. Not because he was a Jew. Because he didn’t have to. Things didn’t go up and down in your job if your job was diamonds.

Then, the Sunday night after graduation, we found out why Unkie did it. He brought cherry wine, dessert wine. And he left on his fancy old-fashioned dress collar from church at dinner. Afterward, he stood up and said, “I want to say I am proud here that my only son, Jukka Andrea Nickolai, is enlisted in the First Calvary, the Big Red One, and will sail nine days after Christmas, with God we hope to watch over him to keep the mountains where our grandmothers and grandfathers lived and now they sleep, free from the evil one.” Auntie Maggie got up and put her apron over her face like she was ashamed and ran from the room, my mother right after her, muttering something at Unkie like she did when my father gave Mr. Emerson ten bucks to bet on a horse—despite Unkie’s problems with gambling.

“Jack,” Mama said later, “he’s Maggie’s only son. What if it was yours? What if it was Jan?”

Anyhow, Unkie was left standing there, looking like he wanted to cry, and the Russian cut-crystal glass right in his hand glowed like an icon with a candle in it at the Orthodox church on the South Side where Papa and Nana still went—though we went to Catholic church by then. The adults went into the living room and put on the radio. The shortwave could get the BBC. I started to ask Jackie why he enlisted; they would come and get a kid anyhow, soon enough, but for the first time in our lives he held up his hand, which told me as plain as words that his father made him do it, maybe because of newer immigrants having to prove something all the time, us being like German in the eyes of born Americans.

It wasn’t the same as my mother’s family. Of course, Jackie couldn’t admit that.

Which left the wine sitting there for us to finish. We did. And we didn’t have no stomach for it. Jackie said let’s take a ride. We went out to the car and polished off the fenders with our coats. Jackie had to stop and heave by the steps and clean his hands with a paint rag and his mouth with the hose before we could go.

I remember this.

Nora Finnian hung out the window across the street in just her full slip and yelled up the block, “Jackie, can I ride in your fine car then?” I couldn’t wait to sit in it myself; but the fact was, I felt about the same as Auntie Maggie. I didn’t want Jackie to go to war. It made me sick, though I knew a brave man should go. I had my own stuff to prove, supposedly. But I wore a shoe with a built-up heel and I never ran or took gym, though I could catch and throw in street games. I told girls poker was my sport. Swimming helped, so I did that. But I had to wear a brace to bed to keep my knee straight. I wouldn’t never be a soldier. Jackie, now, could run like a bastard wind. He disappeared at shortstop. He could outrun all the Carneys, even Amon, the youngest, Amon so thin he was like a rag twisted into a person. I wonder what he would have done, with those hands made for beauty and being able to run like that. Maybe gone for a professor, despite the way Unkie didn’t think men needed to learn much from books. Or I like to think of him playing pro ball maybe. He was so good the college guys came to watch him when we played American Legion.

That night we drove to Seven Sorrows Cemetery to smoke. They locked the front gates of the cemetery at dusk but they never locked the back. I guess they figured why would anyone want to go in a cemetery? So there was beer cans all over the place. We sat there and smoked a butt each, and I noticed Jackie inhaled now, and he said let’s take a walk so we got out, us knowing Seven Sorrows and the lanes between the graves as certain as we knew our bedrooms. We played there so much after dark when we was kids it was the school yard to us.

That night, we got to one of the little houses rich people bought for their dead—family crypts. Everyone knew this particular one; it was all covered with long strings of mirrors between the wrought-iron bars. It had little windows made of mirrors and a hipped silvery roof that came almost down to the ground. It belonged to Gypsies, Romany people the same as us but different. This being July and not long after the longest day of the year, the Gypsy queen and king’s children or subjects or whatever you please had hung ribbons, too, gold and blue and red. Nobody liked the tomb. People said it was haunted. Everybody took a long loop to avoid it, even on a Sunday stroll. But Jackie walked right up, pulled off one of the ribbons, and almost sneered at me when I gasped. He must have thought I was a priss.

“You don’t believe that shit?” he asked me. “Mirrors to scare off the devil if he should see his face, eh? Even Magda and Marie don’t believe that.” What made my hair prickle on my neck was the way he sounded different. Saying our mothers’ given names like they was girls from our street. Like there was a fan belt broke or a violin string snapped in him. Because we would never talk about our mothers that way. You just didn’t.

Then suddenly he had the Barlow knife out and was working away at the big padlock on the door.

“Sonofabitch,” he said quietly.

“Leave it, Jackie,” I said. “Jackie, leave it.” It was like I was nobody, like nobody was there. The lock stuck firm. Pushing his fedora back on his head, Jackie used the knife to pick his teeth for a moment. Then, with his long pale fingers, he made a series of turns and twists and the lock popped open.

“What,” I squeaked, “the hell you say.”

Jesus, I wanted him to stop. I felt like bawling.

“The equinox,” he said, “it’s a big deal to them. Oh six, two turns to the left, then twenty-one and then… that was the combination. I thought of it then, after I saw them ribbons.”

“Let it alone. I don’t want to know. Shut it.”

But now Jackie was picking at another lock, the Yale lock that was deep in the cherry door. Every kid who grew up there knew that the Gypsy king and queen, them dead about fifteen years from a car wreck, was buried in glass boxes with the air sucked out, like saints. The old people said she was dressed in lace and velvet and him in silk, though it was her was royalty. Romany is another breed, with their own church and so forth. I never knew but one; and he was a good man, with nine sons. They keep to themselves.

In the end, Jackie pried the lock right out of the cherry door.

“I’m walking home,” I said to Jackie. “I swear to shit.”

“Woman,” Jackie said evenly, and I saw him glance down at my leg not like he didn’t think of it but on purpose.

I hated him then.

I hated the person on Earth who I never felt anything but as if he was my own reflection.

“Open it,” I said, lighting a smoke so my hands wouldn’t shake so. “Go on. I don’t care. It’s on you.”

He did, and he went up the little marble step. I had to follow him. It wasn’t like there was a big overhead lamp inside. You could barely see.

There were shelves like the benches in a sauna bath, and caskets laid along them, a few of them white and tiny, little mirrors glued on in a circle around the widest part and a painted angel with red wings at the end, where I would imagine the head was. Infants. There were wooden boxes carved with leaves and faces. Older adults.

There was a sound then, of loud bells. Jackie and I grabbed each other. Cold sweat rolled like melted ice down my chest. But it was only those plates and tambors and stuff they had stuck on the outside of the roof, fretting in the wind. Both of us had to laugh.

We walked the few steps to the back.

Her tomb was there just like they said. The queen’s. Glass. We didn’t even look at him, the king.

She was beautiful, her blond braids carefully plaited around her head, her skin as white and soft-looking as soap, the pores the size of the littlest holes in a sponge, but not ugly. The car wreck must have smashed her inside, not her face. She was like a statue. Her eyes were open, with a milky cover, and even if she had been living, they would have looked blind. Around her neck was a rope of pearls in decks. It was like an Egypt collar, with a ruby in the middle the size of one of Nana’s mushrooms. On every finger was another ring, all the stones in them big, square rubies, too.

“Glass,” I said. “They’re glass. You wouldn’t bury a ruby.”

“They’re rubies,” Jackie said. “Glass would be really red.” He took out the knife and started to tap on the glass. “Get a rock,” he said to me

“Nothing doing,” I told him. “A rock’ll sound like a cannon shot in here.”

“I need a diamond,” Jackie said.

“You and me both,” I told him.

“You got a diamond in that graduation ring.”

“It’s just a chip, Jack.”

“But it’ll do. It’s got an edge. Look there. A point shaped like a pyramid.” He took my hand like I was a girl and pulled off the ring, then he cut a fat circle in the glass where the queen’s face was, over and over until the smell of her being dead started to seep through, and then he pushed it in and the sour air rushed out. She didn’t fall to dust or shrivel before our eyes, like you would think. But I couldn’t breathe right in there. It wasn’t putrid, but it wasn’t good. What it was, was like something stewed, set out and forgotten on the back porch, gone bad.

Jackie reached in and took her hand like he was taking her out to the dance floor and removed the rings. I walked out because of the smell, and I heard the rings fall into his pocket, one by one, that chunk sound as unmistakable as the sound of cars hitting each other—a sound you never forget once you hear it and it sickens your gut. And then I heard another sound. It was them pearls, pinking the floor like hail. Jackie had cut the necklace with that knife. To get the pearls off her neck of course. He couldn’t have uncurled it. My mind went chasing after the picture of Jackie pulling her forward so the pearls wouldn’t fall down by her feet, maybe trying to wrestle that heavy rope over her crown, the head lolling back and forth, maybe her mouth coming open. I turned around and run the best I could. I didn’t give a goddamn. I limped until my leg was on fire, but I kept on limping and hopping until I was at the pharmacy on Halsted Street. I ordered a vanilla Coke and drank it all in one slug, standing up. Then I didn’t know where the hell to go. I just stood there. When Jackie picked me up there later, he didn’t speak of it. I didn’t either.

We never did.

A week later, Auntie Maggie was wearing one of those short coats with a fox collar. Unkie had a double-breasted suit. He got embarrassed when I saw him wearing it, when I was out delivering flowers for Buffo’s. Jackie bought all kinds of flowers and a golden crucifix for Patricia Finnian, and one night I saw him with her in the Studebaker, her long white arm around him, Jackie just looking straight ahead, although Patricia was easy three years older. He gave new card tables to the sick home, where the simple kids lived. He spent the money fast. I don’t know who he sold the stuff to. Not Jaworsky’s or anybody who knew our family, or we would have heard.

The “desecration” of the tomb was on page one of the Chicago American. The queen was named Magda, like my aunt. By then, Jackie was already gone, to basic.

He came home after Christmas.

I took good care of the car. Jackie said I could use it anytime, but I only ever used it on Sundays to drive Nora Finnian around for an hour. And I backed it out into the driveway to wash and wax it. The others came over to look. Pat and Tommy Carney and Louie and Herman Kozyk, even though Herman was already married. It was that good a car. I almost felt like it was mine.

My dad had up and decided I was going to go to college. So I was working at a bank, as a teller, a job he got for me from Mr. Cohacki, who built the apartments where the old Wonderland Ballroom and Hotel stood. I had to wear the same two outfits all week, so Jackie’s sister Karin hid some scraps from her sewing class in high school and made me a red shirt and a blue collar to vary things. She give it to me the week before Jackie come home from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Unkie and Auntie were going to have a party before he was sent out (to the eastern front because he could speak German, Hungarian, and a little Russian and Polish, he was that smart). So I had myself barbered up, a real good shave and a three-dollar haircut.

When I walked in, my mom was having coffee with Auntie Magda.

She dropped her cup and screamed, and my mother looked like she was going to slap me.

Auntie ran upstairs.

“What the hell?” I said, forgetting I just cursed in front of my own mother.

“Are you a fool I raised?” she screamed at me. “You get your hair cut before your cousin is sent to war?” She spat on the ground three times like Nana did if anyone sat at the corner of the table or a bird crashed into the window. “Don’t you know this is a worse omen than you could make up if you tried a million times?” She told me to go back to the barber and get the clippings and burn them, and I said I would, but Jesus Christ, who would do that? I sat on the stoop until I saw Jackie come around the corner of Sheffield Avenue carrying his duffle. Man, he looked a foot taller. He looked like a grown man, instead of only seventeen. I felt like I was his baby brother.

“They work you hard,” he said, rolling up his sleeve to show me his upper arm that looked like it had an apple under the skin. Then he kissed me on both cheeks.

“Will you bring Nora tonight?” he asked me, because he knew from the letters I was seeing Nora, and then Auntie Maggie came running, giving me a look like I made the milk sour.

Reb Jaworsky got drunk that night and toasted Jackie and the other boys for fighting like the Maccabees to save his people and all good people; and the whole neighborhood went in and out the doors until my mother just wadded up the newspapers she always laid down to keep the linoleum clean and sat down on the piano stool. She played old songs like Chopin and waltzes, and new songs about the girls who waited for boys who never come home or boys who did. Nora came when she got off work at the store where she sold perfume.

It happened then. Not long after she got there.

Sure, we had some wine to drink. Jackie said he was used to wine by then. The army gave you beer for free. But I wasn’t drunk. Though Nora was an Irish girl, Jackie gave her our blessing, a kiss on each cheek. “You be good to my brother until I come home,” he said. He nodded at Joanie, who was wearing high heels, though she was only in the sixth grade. “Little Joanie,” he said.

“You’re that handsome in your uniform,” said Nora. I was jealous.

Nora had black hair cut real short the way girls were starting to do then, and the kind of eyes some Irish have, like a pond turned over after a storm. Angry at me because I was stuck on an Irish, my mother still melted when she saw those eyes. Joanie has them, too.

Nora is Sister Mary Dominic now, a Benedictine that’s cloistered. She could be Sister Eleanor Finnian these days if she wanted, but she does not want to. She can only see her sisters and her mother and father twice a year through the bars. She went in the convent when she was eighteen, that same spring. But then, she was just a beautiful girl, who loved a laugh and a dance—a girl among five sisters, whose father thought she’d never find a husband, there being so many Finnian girls. She never said a strange word to me before that night or since then. Just, when we went to her veiling ceremony, years later, with all Nora’s family, and saw her married to Christ in her beautiful bridal dress, she looked straight at me, not at her sister. But that one look felt as though she’d grabbed the flesh under my chin between forefinger and thumb and squeezed.

I knew she remembered the night at the party.

She remembered that something had happened. It scared her, like a tap inside her ribs that wasn’t her own heart. That’s what she was telling me at her veiling, not one word said.

And while I’m pretty sure Nora didn’t know what come out of her mouth, she’d seen my face and Jackie’s and what we did afterward. That moment must have slithered over her, the way static electricity will run up your arm just before a storm. For what she said, it wasn’t in Nora’s voice. Nora’s voice was light as a laugh, tilted up with a bit of a flirt or a tease. That voice was slow and dead, and it come like in a trance or what have you, from somewhere else, long ago.

I know as sure as I’m sitting here that was why she took holy orders. Her mom was probably glad of it—raising a nun being almost as good as raising a priest, though not quite. But Nora would have a pack of kids now and a man of her own if it hadn’t been for that moment at the party. She wasn’t no pale, praying kneeler, Nora, but a girl born for mischief. Kathleen was more religious, even Joanie, my wife. Something happened that she couldn’t name, no more than we could. And if she knows the half of it, like I do, she must wake up in her iron bed at night all ice and sweat like me, and she must beg the merciful Lord for his protection. I think of her alone there, and I pray she don’t know all I know. I hope it’s just a sense she has, like a child’s memory of a grandparent who died generations ago. It wasn’t a thing Nora deserved. Or anyone. She was a good girl.

It started when Jackie fished in his pocket and took out a tiny cross, one he’d carved on a base of apple wood. Like I said, he’d been using the Barlow knife for more and more intricate carvings, even before he went into the service; and he went on doing it at night in the barracks to pass the time. He had pockets full of whittlings—tigers and linked chains, little trees, a cup and teapot he’d sent Auntie Maggie, and little cowboys on horses for the little kids on the block. It was natural to him, being an artist, kind of, like he was. He did it as quick as you or me would deal out a hand of cards. That he fetched out a cross instead of a flower or a star for Nora was a coincidence. As far as we knew, Nora soon would be as wild as Patricia. At least that was what I was hoping. I was hoping I’d get me more than a kiss one time—a feel at least. Maybe Jackie hoped so, too. Girls then had a soft spot for boys headed for what might be a young death. Still, a cross was what it was, with clefts and flourishes and even a small blunt image of the body of Christ.

Jackie gave Nora the cross. She reached for it eagerly, but then she closed both her soft white hands tight. She looked down at them. Her nails were dug into her palms, like claws.

And that voice-that-was-not-Nora said, “The man who owned the knife was not dead. He died of thirst. It took three days for him to die.” Jackie jumped and the little carved cross fell between them to the carpet. “The bone in that knife’s handle belongs to the earth. It is a wolf’s bone. Zora’s.”

Not meaning to frighten Nora, I half yelled at her, “What? Zora or Nora?”

I was hoping that what she’d said was just her own name. I knew it hadn’t been. What I was thinking about, of course, was of the old goddess of midnight and dawn, the dark woman Zoraya, that Nana and Grandma Sala told us about when we were babies.

Nora misunderstood me. There was laughter and talk overlapping itself all over.

“Who’s Zola?” She laughed. “Is that your talk for Nora?”

She took a cold beer out of the pail of ice—glancing at her parents first to make sure they didn’t see—and bent down to pick up the cross. “This is a beautiful small thing you’ve made. Thank you, Jack.” She leaned forward as if to give him a hug around the neck, as thanks, the way a girl will. But Jackie’s face was white and moist as new bread. He stiffened and pulled back from Nora and said not a word. For just a second, he and Nora looked like their eyes were bound together on a wire. The sweet, familiar grin melted from Nora’s face. A blush spread over her neck like someone had spilt a pot of pink woman’s face paint. She took hold of the hem of her dress and spun off in that dancing way she had, making sure we saw the turn of her fine legs in their cotton hose. “See you later, boys,” she called back to us.

“You heard it, too,” Jackie said to me then, quiet, so no one under all the gabble could hear him but me. He took the knife out of his pocket and told me to take it. I wouldn’t. I held up both hands like a baby that’s been burned. He said Go, Jan, give it to the Field Museum for nothing. I said I would tell Papa to give it to the Field Museum, and for him to just put it down. We knew Papa wouldn’t. Neither one of us knew if the knife was cursed before Jackie used it to break into the tomb—cursed by our soldier ancestor who stole it off a dying boy—or only afterward. But we could tell the curse had jumped from the knife into Jackie, no matter how many crosses he whittled. We could tell it was so strong that it spread to Nora for a minute. Damned if we knew why. Maybe it was layers of sin, old and new, none of them really Jackie’s fault, waiting for the knife to come out of the box and spring on him, making him different, little by little, taking pieces of him that were good and turning them wrong.

Quickly, I told my cousin, “That’s all there is to it. It was just a strange thing and they happen.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jackie said finally, after he’d gone over to the table and gulped down two fingers of whiskey. “There’s nothing can be done.”

He ran his hand along his short hair and squeezed his forehead. Then he pulled Patricia Finnian out onto the floor and danced with her, their hips together like snakes wound around each other. The two of them took off in the car, not coming back until everyone was gone. If I hadn’t been awake still, I wouldn’t have heard them. I don’t think it was the first time Patricia had been out until dawn; but Auntie Maggie was murderous the next morning, slamming Jackie’s coffee down in front of him like she meant it to slop over and burn him. Jackie made plain he wasn’t his mama’s little boy no more, and just asked for the sugar. If he could fight a war, he could damn well spend the night with a woman.

That night, in honor of the feast day after Christmas, we put our feet together on an axe under the table, the tradition for luck. Uncle Gaston and Uncle Josef were home. And they toasted Jackie and me.

“To the pair of Jacks,” Uncle Josef said, and glanced at our friend Reb Jaworsky, who came to dinner though our old strange ways didn’t mean a thing to him or his wife or their three kids, any more than their feasts did to us. Uncle Josef added, “And to the man with the axe. The king of diamonds.” Mr. Jaworsky blushed. I guess it was in bad taste to mention having money. It was good of Reb Jaworsky to come. He was a white Jew; and we cared how bad it was for them over there. His children were still small, too young for soldiers. He was too old. But he had a brother in Poland still.

I drove Jackie to the train station in his car. He was wearing his green uniform then, and used the sleeve to rub a speck off the black hood. I handed him his big bag and told him not to be no hero.

“Not me, brother Jan,” he said. “I’ll be back for sweet Patricia one fine day.” But when I went to hug him, he pulled away. “Be good,” he said, and swung up on the steps. It was wrong. It was all wrong, us parting from each other that way. But maybe Jackie didn’t want whatever it was to jump to me.

I married pretty young.

Joanie was only seventeen, but our girls took their time coming. We did a lot of dancing and strolling to the movies before we was ever parents—when so many of them we’d grown up with already were.

I went to the place where Jackie is buried almost on a whim, like a jet-setter. I was a father two times already. I should have been too busy to take time away from Joanie and my girls, not to mention my job as the owner of Nickolai and Nickolai Plumbing and Heating. It was Joanie told me to go ahead and take the trip—that Sam, my helper, could manage without me for a week. She knew that something worked on my mind about Jackie, and from her mother, she heard tales of how close we were. We could afford it, and she had not the slightest wish to go along. To her, Eastern Europe was still stained dark with blood. When Joanie travels, she wants to go to California or Florida. She didn’t want to go to where our families came from then or now.

“You’ve been good to me always, Jan,” she said seriously. “You never took a drink or raised your voice to me and the children. If you need to do this, you should.” The dreams had started by then—long before we were married. Maybe Joanie thought the trip would lay them to rest.

After the plane landed, I rented a junk of a car and drove with maps from the Triple A up narrow roads between forested hills. The place was easy enough to find, from the letters sent me by Jackie’s best friend in the war, a boy named Anton—that told me the story of the way they’d got lost from their unit in the night, like we were drinking swallows of fog with every breath. The mountains they finally fetched up against were the Carpathians. The woods were dark and snow-heavy still in March. They found a clearing, and Jackie took out his knife and stripped some logs high up a dead tree, small to burn good. He sat sharpening a twig into an arrow point in case they saw a rabbit. There was no food in their packs but biscuits days old; and although their coats and hats were good, their boots were shot.

They couldn’t even hear the gunshot they were so lost.

Finally, they laid down evergreen boughs and huddled next to the fire in their coats.

It was long after midnight when Anton woke to hear Jackie talking. Anton opened his eyes.

The woman was standing right in the snow, wearing a long white dress, her short dark hair uncovered. She was holding out her hand. She wore no coat and she didn’t shiver.

“It wasn’t me,” Jackie pleaded. “It was my grandfather, no, it was my great-grandfather took it from the man. And when I took those rings, I was just a kid, a fool kid. Lots have done worse.” The woman just shook her head and held out her hand. Jackie finally dropped the Barlow knife into her palm.

The knife went right through and clinked on a rock.

Anton wrote to me that he tried to put himself back to sleep again. He threw himself down and closed his eyes. And he laid with his face in the snow until his skin burned and didn’t move. He licked the snow if he felt thirst. The hours crawled past. He pulled his itching green greatcoat over his head, and God save him, even when he heard Jackie cry out, he didn’t move. He was like us—his own grandmother brought him up on tales of the Wili and the Wampyr. No coat on the beautiful dark-haired girl, he thought, as the wind scored his naked hands. No coat and her arms were bare. A madwoman, he thought, from the hospital that was one of their coordinates on the map they had. And he thought, this poor land, tossed back and forth between bully countries like a child’s beanbag. But all the time, even under the greatcoat, he could sense the woman beside him, soundless and patient. Finally, she said, “You will live long enough to see many children, Ee-van.” Anton was sure he heard it. He asked who was Evon. He wrote me that in the first letter. And it wasn’t until years later, after we had exchanged eight, ten letters, that I told him that Ivan was my own given name.

By the time I was in my early middle years, they could copy even an old picture in a few hours at the drugstore. I had them copy a picture of me and Nora Finnian, that night at that party. I wrapped one copy, the larger one, in office paper and sent it to Anton. I knew he would say that the woman in the white dress was Nora, and he wrote back special delivery and said it was.

And then I never heard from him again. The letters I sent came back unopened; but no postman had written on them, in big letters, NO SUCH PARTY.

All I have to say is one thing more. I wish I could set it down better. I can’t explain.

Anton found Jackie in the morning dead. You knew that. The knife lay beside his head, and Anton picked it up and used it to strip a little birch sapling for a cross and lash it with the supple bark. He buried Jackie under rocks, said the rosary, then threw the Barlow knife and heard it hit the face of the cliff. He ran. German patrols fanned out looking for stragglers never even saw him when he ran right past them. It was like he was made of the fog himself. He ran until his leather boots turned to strips, then barefoot, until he came to a farmer’s barn. The farmer made off like he didn’t know Anton was there but left food for him in the manger every night.

There was not a mark or a drop of blood on Jackie, Anton wrote, in the last letter.

There was only this, a huge nail, driven through his hand. The wound had not bled. It was the long nails Gypsy roofers use, them they call tinkers. Out there in the wilderness where there wasn’t a village or a farm about, there was this nail, like one of those nails so long they could not get an ironmonger in Jerusalem to make one to use to crucify our Lord, and so they had to go outside the city until they found a Gypsy woman, who made the nails all unknowing, like Jackie made those flowers.

I never went to college.

I worked with Dad. When Dad got older, I kept the company and he did the books. The name is the same on the truck, though it’s only me and Sam and my nephew, Karin’s boy Brian Olsky. No more Nickolai boys. I thought I would have sons. And then I had only daughters, five daughters, just like Mr. Finnian did. I keep it the same, though. All my daughters had sons. I have seven grandsons. My daughter Polly went to college for a teacher, but she wants to take over my business, call it Nickolai and Daughter. I don’t think she will, though I would like a family business.

She’s not afraid of anything.

I am.

In that mountain field, I looked the better part of a long summer day and the following morning for the Barlow knife. I knew it was the right place because of Anton’s photos he took when he went back once himself, of this clumber of rocks that looked just like a rowboat and the little birch whip Anton planted over Jackie. It had grown into a tree with fretful arms.

But I never found it.

The nail, I found. What, twenty-five years had passed. It should have been deep under a foot of dirt, what with winter snows and summer mudslides. But it was there, waiting for me. And though I missed Jackie every day, I knew that if I picked it up, all Jackie knew in the shadow of that mountain would fly up into me. I left the nail lie.

Many years later, one of the girls was talking about this band called that: Nine Inch Nails. Sharper than I meant, I asked her did she know what that name meant. One day, in the car, their song come on. Polly turned it up loud. It sounded like someone kicking a pipe organ to death.

I never told a living soul. Only Mama. She tried to make light, but her mouth squirmed helplessly on its own. She made the sign of the cross, the Orthodox cross—head, two hearts, stomach.

It was just chance he got the knife and me the bayonet. Papa didn’t favor either of us boys. What if Jackie got what was meant for me? Wasn’t that nail there—unmarked, uncovered, plain as a judgment? Left alone, all us Nickolais, we live long lives. Polly may call me “Gramps,” but I could have twenty more years. What if your fate got switched with someone so like you in every way it could fool God himself—God or whatever else there is that waits? What if that fate is there still, and knows my given name? It’s like Jackie said. There’s nothing can be done.