from THE BLOOD AND LIGHT OF MEMORY by John Rybicki
A Boat with No Oars
Summertime so I get to stay with my pops through the moon hour and close down his bar/restaurant, Vic’s Café. Tonight he’s a loaf of bread melting into water. That soused. He locks the joint up and wobbles to our ’64 Chevy Impala. We slam the car doors then creep along Forest Avenue through a ghost-town Detroit. We’re on a one way street and I can see just above the dashboard now when I sit on the front seat. With the windows down each parked car hisses past. It sounds like the breaking of the sea inside a seashell, or the tearing of the wind in a swift heartbeat rhythm.
Sometimes I lace my fingers over his to try and take the wheel. We drift on a lazy diagonal across lanes where we turn from car to meteorite sparking against a couple of parked cars. The sparks wash past my father’s face and trickle over the windshield, side view mirrors and maybe a door handle or two snap off. They spin the bottle on the street behind us. That wakes him up just enough to jolt him back into his eyes for a few moments. Then his head begins to roll towards the steering wheel and right itself, roll and right like it might topple right off his neck and fall to the floor.
“Dad, wake up. Please wake the fuck up.”
“Sing me a lullaby and I’ll toss dirt in your eyes.”
After awhile the Impala itself seems to doze off and go drifting from one side of the street to the other. Sometimes we tink lightly off one car and drift back. Sometimes we rub shoulders with four or five cars in a row and fireflies are born in our wake.
“Wake up, Dad, please.”
“Yeah yeah yeah. You cocksuckers. Piss on the cross-eyed kid.”
Some of my cries find their way into the wishing well and he recovers for the left turn down Mt. Elliot. We put Chief Pontiac and his warriors behind us, leave those creek beds at the Battle of Blood Run overflowing with blood. We whoosh past the cemetery and make the rollercoaster ramp down onto the Ford Freeway. Now the wind’s really snapping away at our T‑shirts, though dad’s not gunning it by any means. We’re a lazy boat swooping almost up the Vandyke exit until I nudge the wheel back the other way. Sometimes I grab my father’s face with both hands to keep it aloft. Sometimes I grab the dashboard and hold on as we break the ribbon at French Road and Gratiot and Connor. Up onto the flatlands next to Chandler Park Golf Course and here it comes, Dad, glide right now up the slide at the Chalmers/Outer Drive exit. We make it. Now I’m praying the lights stay green and sometimes they grant my wish and sometimes they don’t. We sail right on through.
We nab the right turn onto what will become Altar Road, hop the boulevard at Chandler Park Drive, swoop the s‑curve past Skateland Park where I’ll dance and purr on four-wheel roller skates as a young man until someone hanging out a car window swipes a knife blade back and forth at me. “White boy killer. White boy killer.”
At one point our car slaps and holds onto a full-blown ghost spread of a newspaper fluffed up in the wind. It’s curling its belly over the front grill onto the hood of our car almost like a little boy made of paper. Lakepointe. Whoosh. Barham. Whoosh. Beaconsfield. At last that tunnel of elms along our street like a green gullet that swallows us whole. Dad jumps the curb to light a Camel and clips a couple of trash cans laughing as if he’d just ran over a drum set.
“Beat down dead dog . . . fucking riots. Fuck.”
All those chess piece houses on either side of us are so sound asleep.
Finally our driveway and a jolt to a halt that makes him laugh again. I still need both hands to pop the door and rush to the driver’s side where my father’s hand falls to my head like he’s palming a basketball. He uses my head to brace himself up the porch steps grabbing the railing with his other hand. It’s the same way up the stairs once we get inside.
“Johnny, I gotta take a piss. You wanna take a piss with your old man?”
I leave him unzipping his pants and leaning against the wall, dive into my mother in their bed and tell her what happened with wet bullets in my eyes. She swallows me in her arms but I can still hear him moaning and singing in the bathroom.
My whole life she and I will take turns: I’ll throw my spirit like a sheet of flame in between her and my father when he is raging; and she’ll throw herself like a soft shield in between my pops and me. But no other time in my life did my mom ask me to do what she asked me to do right then.
“Tell your father how scared you were.”
Now he’s climbing into bed and falling over with my mom nodding her head at me, go ahead son, you can do it.
Blood Trail
“He was scorched so much and you can’t scorch a scab.”
– Herman Melville
My father rides the noon rush at Vic’s Café going solo in the kitchen. He’s dancing around the ring with his flyweight hands flipping burgers and dropping fries into the boiling pool. He ladles gravy over pork cutlets and mash potatoes, dusts an occasional filet mignon for fingerprints, pinching the steak to see is it medium well done yet or still a little red inside. He slows time a bit to savor his own whitefish with lemon potatoes creation. Then he slides the plates onto the silver deck and claps his palm down on the little bell so my mom or Margie can hustle the delectables to the various tables.
In the evening my father takes to tending bar while my mom hums across town to our house on Somerset. She climbs into her nurse whites, or doctors up some SpaghettiO’s with a pound of browned hamburger for us to maw on. We butter up some Wonder Bread for the dunking, slurp up our chow like cow hands then flare out into the neighborhood.
The 1967 riots have already tossed a meteorite into the Detroit pond and sent waves of Germans and Italians, Irish and Polish families rippling in a great exodus out to the suburbs. The bar just isn’t inhaling as many drinkers at night, though the old time Poles from the neighborhood still come and sit in their familiar perches with a rope of carbonation rising in their beer glasses.
Pops has a beer of his own under the counter and a shot glass for a here-and-there thimble of Crown Royal he’ll use to medicate his way through the night.
Who knows if at the end of the night he swept the room with his eyes one last time before he pulled the cord on the day and stepped outside for the first time in fourteen hours.
Perhaps he nodded to the vaporous citizens who now sat as ghosts sipping beer and flipping cards, their voices washing over the hard things of the world. More than likely the bar was just a dirty cave he’d like to erase from his life with his bar rag so he could step out of himself and enter a new life.
When he jangles the keys outside to lock the joint up he becomes a magnet for two men on two sides of him. The white man sidesteps a bit rolling the knife in his hand. If it could at that moment bloom and become a sword it would pierce my father’s navel.
“Climb back up inside this muther fucker,” from the man with night skin on the other side of him.
Pops pivots, sloppy drunk and bone weary, towards the man with the knife. The man with the power in his hand isn’t expecting this sudden lightning, this blossom of an overhand right that pops his nose like a water balloon. The blood comes gushing onto the white man’s cheeks as he and my father fall into the blade rolling like two awful lovers on the street.
The man with the night skin has a billy club like a brother and begins using it all over my father’s ribs and head. When they roll off each other the man with the knife rips my father’s shirt, gashes a knife wound slash from my father’s shoulder to his opposite hip.
They’re already in his pockets and dragging him by his shirt and hair up the steps into the bar when a car hisses past along McDougal emerging from the blind side of the building. The red tail lights and slowing down to a crawl are enough. They gather the wad of cash in my dad’s pocket and thump his face against the steps one last time. Then they dart into the alley and the shadows with one of them leaving a blood trail for the stray dogs to lap up.
Maybe my father’s body has become a postage stamp for an entire city clubbed and beaten. All I know is he begins to crawl up those steps with his head and then his chest and arms and legs getting swallowed through the bar door. Now he’s laughing and spitting blood and spitting sound, “dirty cock suckers.” It looks like some rats have chewed a long time on one of Dad’s ears. “Fry your fucking nuts and serve them to you, eggs over easy coming right up.” Laughing and spitting, crawling along that straight shot path towards the bar. He’s waving at people who aren’t there telling them to help him the fuck up. A sea of chair legs but none of them rise to come to his aid.
Used to do this in the army. Yes sir. No sir. Dirty cock sucker. It looks like a mop has been dipped in blood and dragged along the floor behind him.
Fifteen strides or less from the front door to the bar. He’d be there in a wink if he wasn’t crawling past the wooden Pabst Blue Ribbon sign on the wall now: Next Time Bring Your Wife. He’s an inchworm but finally makes the right turn around the corner of the actual bar onto the little railroad tracks that run behind it. There’s a space in between the slender boards that rest above the actual flooring; better traction I guess, considering all the wet things that get sloshed around and knocked over and poured and steamed to some cleanliness.
Roll yourself over, dough boy, and when he does she studies his arm and likes the watercolors and blood in some ways. His right hand finds it. He pulls his own nightstick out of the holster then slumps down again. It hangs at waist level below the bar where patrons can’t see it.
One time a line-backer-sized man sat in the bar on a stool near the cash register and my father. Early morning with the whole place empty, both doors slung open so natural light and maybe some fresh air could come trickling into that cave. The linebacker sips on his beer, chats about the Tigers a bit and their chances. Then he tells my father calm as calm weather he’s there to rob the place. No gun in my father’s face. No knife. Blank billboard face. My pops finds the perfect words, just like when I was trapped as a boy at a pinball joint, trapped with a black bear in a bathroom and him telling me with his back to the door and me pressed up against the toilet, “I like to study the human body. Take off your clothes.” My pop finds the perfect words and says to the guy, “Who you gonna rob, there’s no one here?” As he does my dad swings his eyes left and right as if to prove to the man what he already knows – the place is empty. It does the trick. The linebacker swings a look over his right shoulder to confirm this fact, and when he does my father’s hand grips below deck and then lets fly across the whole side of the man’s face. The club sends him down off the barstool in a heap – a still warm pretzel there on the floor.
Within minutes a cop from the first precinct with another cop over his shoulder (they eat there for free) splash a pitcher of water onto the man’s face. His legs begin to feel or try to feel the wobbly earth below him as the cops lead him out the front door into the concussive light.
Tonight my pops uses the billy club as his fishing pole. He reaches with his back propped against one of the coolers and begins clanging at the bottles up there he can’t reach: fifths of Wild Turkey, Amarretto Di Saronno, Jack Daniels and finally the nightstick plucks one piece of fruit over the edge and right into my father’s lap. He takes a long pull at the tit of a bottle of Peppermint Schnapps, sets it down and goes to work with the club trying to flick the fat black rotary dial phone off the counter. Got it. He inches himself back up and hits the bottle, dials the number and in a few minutes Margie crashes into the bar in her nightgown, her slippers flapping along the floor. She follows the blood trail and finds behind the bar my pops holding his Teddy Bear fifth and smiling all bloody and boyish.
“Oh, Benny.”
When she bends over her lovelies hang down and my father laughs some more. She finds and begins daubing a wet rag to his face. Come on now. We’ve got to get you to the hospital.
“No way.”
“Jesus, Benny.”
With her kneeling there on an angle beside him and her flesh right there beneath that threadbare gown, she hoists his arm around her neck. “I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“I’m not going. First you have to give me a blowjob.”
“Oh, Benny.”
He laughs his way up onto two legs and they hobble towards the door leaving footprints along the floor. Then she slams the door shut and the car fires and every bar stool and bar chair sits there in the dark with their hands folded in their laps.
John Rybicki is the author of the poetry collections When All the World is Old (Lookout Books, 2012), We Bed Down into Water (TriQuarterly, 2008), and Traveling at High Speeds (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2003).