Page 43 of Reaching Hearts
I scream out and my dad smacks me hard in the face. “Shut it. Take it like a man, not a fuckin’ pussy.”
Having no choice, I squeeze my jaw tight and fight back impossible tears, focusing on the covered light bulb above us in the garage, light refractions pulsing out from it with each burst of pain, a glowing heartbeat.
“Man, I’d hate to be you right now!” my cousin Bruce yells out from somewhere, voice sounding muffled, hollow. I didn’t know he was here, but of course he is. I should have known the whole family would have to be involved. I crane my neck with sweat dripping down it. He’s in my car, cleaning blood off the seat. They must have brought the car inside the garage when I was passed out. Probably while they waited for Uncle Paul and Bruce to show up. What time is it?
“You better get all the blood out, Bruce, or I’ll kick your ass,” I shout at him through clenched teeth.
“Yeah, yeah,” he yells back. “Hey! Here’s a wallet. Looks like he got Brendan’s wallet, at least!”
Dad and Uncle Paul are both hovering over me and I close my eyes, the metallic taste of blood in my mouth telling me I bit my own tongue.
My dad calls over, “Bury the wallet deep. How much money’s in it?”
Bruce counts it and calls back, “Sixty-two dollars.”
“Give it to me,” he holds out his hand without looking back, the sunspots dark on his arm. My dad was a good-looking guy, but his love of the pool and no sunscreen have weathered the fuck out of his body.
Bruce walks over a little too daintily and slaps it in Dad’s hand. “Why don’t I get to keep it for cleaning the car?”
Dad yells in his face, “Are you really asking me that, Brucie?!”
Paul, his beady eyes squinting with determination, mumbles, “Walter, shut the fuck up so I can concentrate.” The fingers of his free hand push open the hole in my skin to give him room to see.
“Jesus! Can’t you give me some fucking drugs or something?!”
My uncle ignores me and cuts his eyes to his brother. “Who’s Brendan?”
With a booming voice, my dad grandstands, “Brendan is my boy’s gauge for how badly he’s fucking up!”
“Stay still now,” Paul mutters. “Hold on. I’ve almost got it. It’s ripped into the muscle is the problem.”
Dad chuckles like the evil sonofabitch he is. “Told ya the gym wasn’t gonna do you no good.”
I try not to breath, stay as still as I can, while Paul slowly pulls the bullet out, his long whatever-the-fuck-they-are tweezers rubbing the sides of the hole. Triumphant, he holds it up for us to see, a small bloody ball of metal.
“That’s great. I’ll frame it,” I mumble, sitting up with effort, my hands clenched on the side of the workbench.
Paul steps back to put the bullet on a piece of plastic to be disposed of where no one will ever find it. The wallet will go with it. This, I know. “You should be easier on the boy, Walter. You were in this scrape when you were his age.”
Dad side-eyeballs his brother to shut up and I look from one to the other. My cousin calls out from my car, “I never get tired of this story!”
“How you comin’ along in there, Bruce?” I ask him, tired and gritty. I’m not ready to stand, but weakness is unacceptable so I jump down and grimace as the impact jars my body all the way up.
“It’ll be good as new. But I don’t see why I have to do this…” He mumbled that last part.
My dad swivels and hits the hood of my car, hard. “Quit your whining! You get a percentage just like the rest of us, so you gotta work for it, Brucie.”
Brucie. He hates being called that, but he can’t say anything. My dad’s old school and even though he fucks with him about his feminine ways, if Bruce ever really came out, my dad would kick his ass. So Bruce always acts like he’s into women more so than if he were. If there’s a girl with big tits anywhere near us, Bruce will call out to her like he wants her when we all know he doesn’t.
We all act like something we’re not, in some way or another. We do this for my dad, the patriarch and the scariest piece of shit that ever walked around suburbia, pretending like he fits in. Bruce acts like he’s straight, my mom acts like she loves my dad, Paul acts like he doesn’t hate us all, and I act stupid.
I’m not even a little bit dumb.
We come from a long line of dropouts including my father, except for me and Bruce. My mother came from a long line of intelligence that didn’t stop with her, but I can’t ever show my dad my IQ if I don’t want a beating. So I use words like ‘ain’t’ and ‘gonna’ to appear his equal or lesser than. That’s how it’s always been. When I got into Yale, Stanford, and Princeton, I picked San Francisco State so my dad didn’t disown me or cut me out of the family business.
We steal. That’s what we do. It’s what we’ve always done as far back as we can trace our lineage. We were carpetbaggers in the Civil War and after that, we’ve stolen by all sorts of methods. In this generation – mine – it’s armed robbery and burglary. This ring was from my first take when I was eight. I lied when I told Rebecca otherwise.
It was too big for my fingers, then, but Dad gave it to me and said, with his chest stuck out like a proud papa rooster, “When you can wear this ring without it falling off, is when you’re a man. Now run.” And I did. I ran all the way out of the three-story Colonial into the dead of night, racing as far as my eight year old legs could carry me, my chest pounding with a heart that felt like it wanted to beat me there.
Two blocks away, uncle Paul was waiting for me, with Bruce, two years younger than me, in the backseat wishing it had been his turn. I didn’t blame him, because I felt higher than I ever had, sneaking into that house and robbing it of everything I could find. I climbed into the backseat of Uncle Paul’s sedan, sliding in next to Bruce, and whispered, “It was great.”
Oh man, it was great.
Dad opened the passenger car door and leapt in with the grace of a panther stalking prey; he’d done it so many times. “Go!” he told Paul, and looked back at me with a proud, twisted smile. I grinned back at him, still catching my breath. “You done good, Tommy. That’s my boy.”
He never says that anymore.