It began two months back, at the beginning of January, when Charlie got a call from Barkley to meet him at church. He immediately groaned, firmly entrenched in the leather folds of the living room couch, mowing through a film noir triathlon of The Maltese Falcon, Sunset Boulevard, and Double Indemnity. This coming from the aftereffects of watching Transformers 2 on Netflix, and stumbling around afterward like a child who’d been force-fed sugar until his eyes bled. But his mood, which he’d been monitoring for months, was solid. Docile, even. And the most telling sign was that gradually, piece by piece, scene by scene, he found himself enjoying movies again.
He’d also begun what he thought was a slightly assertive cleanup process. He called up Bobby Leeds to talk about his disappearance abroad. He applied for some jobs at local gyms and weight lifting facilities. He almost contacted Veterans Affairs, but felt better about the idea of talking to Al, and so they’d had another meeting. He even drove downtown to visit Barkley, and there had been a night out during which he hadn’t drunk too much or even felt like he needed to.
A few days back he’d finally reached out to the army buddies who’d come home—not Bruiser, but JB and Locklear and a couple of the others who were in the general midwestern area. JB, after losing the leg, had come down from Amherst, Wisconsin, where he’d settled into a job working for Central Waters Brewery with two of his cousins. Locklear had trekked cross-country, driving across white and windswept cornfields from Des Moines, Iowa. Both of them wanted to hang in Chicago, a midwestern Oz from their corn-fed perspectives, and so Charlie obliged. He gave them a tour of his old stomping grounds in Wicker Park, drinking and drinking more as that lakefront winter wind howled. They moved from Blue Line to Piece, pounding microbrews and thin-crust pizza, before finally crashing at the dive bar contours of Beachwood Inn, whose worn interior felt like the inside of an old baseball glove. They drank more beer and reminisced, the whole time Charlie waiting for some sort of judgment, some comment about what had gone down on that highway and how Charlie had to answer for it, had to pay. But soon enough it was clear that there was no judgment, and later JB had put a hand on his shoulder and said, we’re proud of you, man, and Charlie had stared back, ready to throw a punch if his buddy was fucking with him. No dude, he’d said, I’m serious. What you’ve been through, and how you’ve stayed strong, it’s amazing. We all think so. We know how hard that hit you, and everyone knows it was a simple mistake. A snap judgment. Any of us could have done it, and you’ve got to know we have your back.
Two days later, Charlie still tried to remember every syllable of that speech JB had given him—he wanted to own a music box that would infinitely play his friend’s words into his ear. But the encouragement had been given amid copious alcohol consumption and clattering pint glasses and a jukebox twanging with Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick.” He’d only retained the drunken vapors of JB’s speech, and so he’d tried to write the speech down. In the meantime, the old movies were always good medicine. He was thinking seriously about calling up Bobby and restarting Cue Mark Reviews, when Barkley called, babbling about this meeting at a church.
“Are you serious, dude? I’m trying to finish a movie. Can’t we meet, like, I don’t know, at the house that’s five minutes away from you? The house you grew up in? Do I really need to go on a religious pilgrimage?”
“It’s not a religious thing. We just need to talk.”
“So come here, man. I’m ready to talk, let’s do this. I’m all ears.”
“No,” Barkley said, through a crunch of static. “We can’t. Mom can’t hear anything about this.”
“Okay, so Ballydoyle.”
“Bars are a bad idea. I can meet you at the park. You want to meet at the park?”
“Two dudes sitting on a bench, feeding pigeons, touching pinkie fingers? Don’t you have a girlfriend for that sort of thing?”
“Right, so just come to this church—it’s not religious, we just need to talk. Sound good? There’s going to be that Wednesday night service, so don’t freak out, just sit in the back.”
When Charlie arrived, wearing jeans and a Chicago Bears sweatshirt, he felt a sense of complication. It was a long, rectangular room, with Technicolor stained glass and a bronzed organ sporting rows of meticulously cleaned pipes. Yet looking at the stained glass made him think of the murals on all those Afghani jingle trucks, and the organ pipes looked like a truckload of RPGs, and then Charlie reminded himself that he was thinking clichéd, ex-soldierly thoughts again, going the Christopher Walken route, and he sat down in the pew and shut up.
“Charlie? Charlie Brunson? Julie’s oldest son, am I correct?”
An old woman, covered in wrinkles and shocking white hair, was looking down at him. Her face triggered a vague familiarity, but he shrugged off trying to guess who it was. His old mind might have raced to procure a timely recognition of identity, but one of the benefits to having served was that civilians, thinking a soldier might be damaged, didn’t take offense at the steady ignorance of social expectations.
“It’s me,” Charlie said, nodding. “And forgive me, I’m forgetting your name.”
“Mrs. Potter, from down the street? We moved across town when you were in middle school.”
“Oh, that’s right. I remember now. You always had that ‘Helping Hands’ sign in the window. And the tree house in the backyard, from the previous owners, with the nailed-in ladder.”
“Guilty. And speaking of guilty, I haven’t seen you here for a few years now.” She sat down next to him. Her pouf of white hair looked like an electroshocked Maltese.
“Well,” Charlie said, “you know how it goes. Attendance declines after confirmation…” and he let the words trail, seeing if she would smile knowingly, or glower like the hard-bitten churchgoer he remembered—nearly Third Reich in her staunch, regimented attendance. If he remembered anything about Mrs. Potter, it was the way in which her eyes had glowered when they’d run under her elm tree during freeze tag, or gone into her daffodil patch to retrieve a fallen Super Soaker 300. And from the way the corners of her mouth made a little downward jab, Charlie knew he’d misfired.
“So you’ve stopped attending, Charlie?”
“I’m on hiatus.”
“The sermons have been excellent,” she said. “Pastor Rick, he really brought the humor out, and we were upset about his leaving, the whole congregation discussed it at length. But Pastor Wallace, the man is a true believer.”
“I’ll bet he is. He looks serious.”
Indeed he did, mounting the podium with a look of stern urgency, his robe the color of dry-cleaned doves. His face, though clearly in its sixties, still looked pink and babyish, almost innocent, and the wrinkles gave him the look of an infant in a windstorm.
“Where’s the rest of your family?” Mrs. Potter asked, placing both hands gingerly atop her exploded hairdo.
“Oh, busy I think. Different directions, responsibilities.”
“Church is changing,” she huffed. “The meaning of a service, what’s implied, what we’re meant to do with it.”
“Well, I’m where I want to be,” he said. “Life-wise. I’m doing what I can.”
“And you’ve served your country, is the latest I’ve heard. The neighborhood is very proud of your service. You should know that. Spreading God’s word in those terrible regions of the world, destroying ignorance among the savages.”
“Spreading God’s word,” Charlie repeated.
She touched his arm. “What you did over there—everything you did—is for the greater good. Defeating ignorance with righteousness.”
Charlie debated summoning the energy for an argument, but then he heard footsteps, and saw Barkley’s unmistakable form ambling up toward the pew.
“And look at this, here comes the little brother,” Charlie said.
“Oh, Barkley, I hardly recognized you,” Mrs. Potter said.
Barkley nodded, smiling grimly. “Hello, Mrs. Potter, it’s great to see you again. I’m just going to talk to Charlie privately for a second here.” He slid into the pew to Charlie’s right, looking steely eyed and gaunt, while Mrs. Potter huffed slightly before scooting to the other end of the pew.
“You look weird,” Charlie said. “Why do you look possessed?”
“I’m focused.”
“B-Team, the only thing I’ve ever seen you focused on is dragons fighting zombies. And are you eating, dude? You look like you’ve taken a Somalian vacation or something.”
“You know,” Barkley said, “zombies against dragons is actually a pretty good idea. I don’t think that’s been done. And just think—they could be zombie knights! Wait, wait—zombie knights on fire!”
“Uh-huh. On zombie horses, too, I’m assuming. And you still look emaciated, man.”
“I’ve lost fifteen pounds. That’s a positive. And like I said, I’m focused.”
“What the hell are you so focused on? Teaching Chaucer?” Charlie assumed it was Ginny—she was fun, but Charlie wondered how many hoops his little brother had to jump through to keep her happy.
“School,” Barkley said. “I’m focused on school. And I’ve got American Lit, not Brit Lit. I’ve only got about fifteen or twenty minutes and then I’ve got to get back to the city to lesson plan.”
“Lesson plan?”
Barkley stared straight ahead. “I’m taking it to another level. No one over there is pushing me around.”
“Who the hell is pushing you around? Want me to snap their collarbones?”
“It’s not like that.”
“You’re scaring me, B-Team. Look at you. You look like an unfed cyborg. It’s like that time I came back from football, and what was that girl’s name—Jessie—she’d denied you for homecoming the same night I caught that touchdown bomb against Glenbard? You remember that? And you were just sitting in the living room, practically comatose, reading the annotated version of The Hobbit.”
Barkley looked up, smiling. “You actually remember my annotated Hobbit? With all the pictures and footnotes?”
“Just because I remember it doesn’t mean I liked it. But yeah, I remember. It had the green-and-blue cover or something.”
Barkley leaned back and sighed. “That book was like therapy in high school. God, I love books with footnotes. It’s like reading a novel, and then finding out the novel has tunnels inside it you can crawl through, which lead to more tunnels, which take you even further away from all the bullshit you’re really dealing with. You know, aside from the famous scenes with Smaug, I used to always reread the first paragraph. In the end I tried to memorize it.”
“Still got it?”
“Of course I’ve still got it.”
“So recite it, you chump.”
“I’m not even embarrassed, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
“So show this esteemed institution what you’ve got, B-Team.”
He cleared his throat. “‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole, with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.’ Boom! Word-for-word, and yet another Barkley accomplishment.”
“You’ve accomplished laying a dork bomb inside a church. Congrats.” But Charlie was grinning, at ease. “So what’s the news?”
Barkley sighed, and his smile flatlined. “It’s about Dad, okay? And it’s serious. He told me not to tell, but—I don’t know, I just assumed this would be figured out somehow. That he would do the right thing, or cave in, or whatever. But nothing has been figured out. He didn’t even see us during Christmas. And I’ve got too much going on right now to not tell anybody. I seriously don’t know about telling Mom. She’s doing good, you know?”
“I don’t need to hear about what Dad is doing, either, man. We all know what he’s doing. He’s never going to own up to it, so just let him be.”
“He’s sick, Charlie.”
“Sick in the head? You’re telling me.”
Barkley groaned. “No, I mean he’s physically sick. He’s dying, Charlie. He’s terminally ill.”
Charlie opened his mouth to speak, but found he barely had enough torque in his lungs to breathe. He clenched his hands and closed his eyes and felt something in his chest, some tether he wasn’t sure was good or bad, snap cleanly in two, like a bungee cord severed during free fall. He looked up at the stained-glass windows. There was a depiction of a man handing a tiny container to a woman, and above it some sort of light.
“What did you just say?” Charlie finally hissed. Information like that about his father—it shouldn’t feel good, of course, but it certainly shouldn’t affect him so brutally, not like this. Yet he was already imagining himself in a bar fight, smashing faces into mirrors, tossing hapless drunks into regimented lines of whiskey bottles.
“He’s sick,” Barkley said again. “It’s stage four. He literally, like, made me promise not to tell anyone. There’s been chemo. I didn’t know what to do, Charlie. It’s insane. I mean, I’m trying to respect the guy, but this is just crazy. People need to know.”
Charlie felt a thick emotion, viscous and oily, clogging his ability to think. “This is such bullshit. Such complete and utter bullshit. I can’t believe it.”
“I know, man. I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you guys right away, but after a while, I didn’t want to say anything to anyone. I mean, you and Mom seem like you’re doing good, and I saw that you guys got pissed when he left those voice mails about coming home, and this would only have made things worse.”
“I appreciate that,” Charlie said, nodding stiffly. “I see what you did. I see that. But I’ve got to get out of here, dude, before I start throwing punches.”
“Okay. Do you want to call Dad? Both of us?”
“Hell no. He’s been hiding this shit? What is wrong with that man?”
“I mean, maybe he’s trying to protect us. Maybe he has good intentions. I don’t know. I just drive him back from chemo—that’s pretty much the only time he’ll see me. We could go visit him downtown or something, though.”
“That means he uses his sickness to bring us back to him, as opposed to using words, like a normal person. It’s not fair. He’s not answering for anything.”
“I know.”
“Damn it!”
From the other end of the pew, Mrs. Potter looked at them quizzically. Charlie stood up.
“I’ve got to get out of here, Barkley. I’m not mad at you, we’re good. You kept a promise as long as you could. It was a tough spot. But I’ve got to get out of here before I hit something.”
Charlie drove home from the church with his fingers feeling like loose wires spraying sparks. He could hardly grab the steering wheel. All this time mad at his father, his father mad at him, and the old man secretly dying, wasting away in some tower in Chicago, and for what? The idiocy of it all made Charlie want to kill someone—to bash heads against wooden bar tops, to strike a face until it turned to putty, to curb stomp some bastard until teeth scattered like dice. He went home and punched three succinct holes in his bedroom wall, then grabbed the phone number his mother had given him, the one for Jack Schoenwetter, the old man boxer who was probably senile anyway. He dialed immediately.
“Yeah?” a voice answered. There was the sound of a motor, or maybe a purring cat, in the background.
Charlie hung up.
The next day, he called again, around noon, and when Jack Schoenwetter picked up, Charlie heard the rhythmic drumming of gloves smacking bags, the slapping of plastic jump ropes against stone floor, and the creaking of a canvas boxing ring, weighted by fighters.
“That’s some fantastic reception you have,” Charlie said. “You must have about forty boxers over there, slugging the shit out of each other.”
“And just who in the hell is this?” Schoenwetter said.
“I’m Charlie. You’re dating my mother. And I’m hoping you can train me to beat some meatheads to a pulp, due to the fact that I’m a very angry young man.”
Three days later, Charlie had his first appointment at Hamlin Park, an eight-acre Chicago Park District sprawl in North Center, whose perimeter was filled with a remarkable number of double-wide strollers and early-thirty-something couples. Charlie drove up and saw the baseball fields, the outdoor pool, and the brick and mortar field house, which led to the pit that held the boxing gym. The pit was gray and mottled yellow—red bags hung like old meat on the far wall, a sagging canvas boxing ring opposed them, and there was a small amount of humid open space to practice punches in front of a mirror. It was perfect, Charlie thought. And at ten in the morning on a Sunday, the place was empty.
Charlie walked around silently, circling the equipment, imagining the release that would come from striking, from getting struck. Hell, after Budapest, it was already clear that he liked it. He hit one of the strung-up bags with his left hand, then again, then a third time. Pop, pop, pop. Reset. Pop, pop, pop. Reset.
“That jab is already quick enough,” a voice said. “But you want that right hand up against your cheekbone. And you’re not a southpaw, are you? Get that right leg behind you. You don’t want to get your ass knocked over.”
Charlie turned and saw him—strong jaw, a few dovetails of wrinkles and scar tissue, and kind blue eyes. Eyes that had possessed fierceness once, but had eventually been softened by something else. What kind of thing that could be, Charlie didn’t know.
“Jack Schoenwetter,” the bulky man said, stretching out his hand.
Charlie shook it. “Charlie. I’m Julie’s oldest.”
The locker room door opened, and two Latinos entered the gym and immediately went into the ring, wearing sparring helmets. A gaunt white man who had to be around six foot five followed them.
“You know, your mother and I are just friends,” Schoenwetter said, bouncing from one foot to another.
“You’re not dating?”
“Well, we’re dating when she says we’re dating.”
Charlie laughed. “Honestly, as long as she’s in a good mood, I think everybody’s happy. By the way, I heard you were a Chicago fireman.”
“Retired, of course. I’m over at Links Hall most of the time, which my wife used to run, but I’m here on Wednesdays and Sundays. Now, before we continue, you need to know that your mother just suggested training you to get in shape—she doesn’t want you fighting.”
Charlie heard a bell ring and watched the two Latinos circle each other in the ring, each wearing a different-colored tank top. The smaller one lunged forward and unleashed a series of jabs and crosses, followed by one lightning hook that made Charlie shiver. The taller one fell back.
“Well, Mr. Schoenwetter, let me talk to my mother. But my goal is to fight. I want to fight everybody you’ve got, and then I want to go to the tournaments.”
Schoenwetter chuckled. “Well, you’ve got your mother’s spirit, that’s for sure. I guess I can ask her—”
“Look, I like how you’re respecting her with this whole boxing thing. But right now, I want you to separate the two of us. I need to train, and then I need to fight. It’s not want, it’s need. You see, I’ve been doing some thinking, and I think I’d start feeling a lot better if I could start doing something physical. Maybe certain kinds of pain are good, I don’t know. But I’m sure at some point, you felt the same way, too. I’ll pay you, of course.”
Schoenwetter looked at him for a moment longer. He had deep creases under his eyes, bird nests of pulpy flesh that had no doubt come from time in the ring. Finally, he nodded, and Charlie felt a surge of victory.
“I’m still going to talk to your mother,” Schoenwetter said, “but let’s go get you some gloves.”
All through January and February, Charlie trained with Jack Schoenwetter. He learned all the punches, Schoenwetter sometimes telling him to keep his form and stop punching so hard. He didn’t care. It felt good. When he came home, he drank recovery drinks and watched television and listened to his mother screech on the phone at his father. They were talking again, which was strange, and every time the conversations started Charlie turned up the volume, hoping to drown out the image of his father, secretly sick and wasting away. He’d actually given in and called him twice since finding out the news, but as usual—no response.
On the phone, Dad threatened to come home, and his mother threatened to leave the moment he did. Something about divorce papers. About time, Charlie thought. One of them would always hang up on the other, but it was clear a dark momentum was gathering—storm clouds emerging from the cellular ether. A change was going to happen, sooner rather than later.
Occasionally Jack would be over when his father called, and in those cases he would watch TV with Charlie—turned out the old fogy liked the black-and-white film noir classics, too, as well as anything boxing. They could watch any flick from the 1940s to about 1990—Goodfellas seemed to be the man’s cutoff—and the boxing movie debates always came down to Rocky vs. Raging Bull. They’d sit there and each have a Goose Island 312 while his mother got rid of Dad, and then she would come into the family room, smiling sheepishly and groaning in the direction of the phone. And his mother was in such strong spirits—even though Charlie thought she should know what was going on, some force wouldn’t allow him to speak of it. It was between the two of them, husband and wife. He just hoped his father wouldn’t cause any more damage as he blazed down from the sky like a falling fighter jet.
Charlie trained through the end of February, getting back into the shape he’d been in during basic, slathered in sweat and coiled muscle. He hit the bags expertly, followed directions, worked hard, didn’t punch too hard (usually), went running for at least two miles after each practice. Eventually, he sparred with the short Latino who had given his buddy such a ringer, and Charlie had come at the smaller man with body shots, crosses, and uppercuts, blocking some punches, forgetting to block others, before a right hook from his opponent sent tangerine fireworks across his vision.
“Watch for the goddamn right hook!” Schoenwetter yelled. “We’ve been over this!”
Charlie fought back from the stinging blow, throwing in body shots, jabs, and crosses, and eventually they’d ended in a draw. The bell rang and the Latino came over and tapped gloves with him.
“Good fight. I’m Oscar, by the way.”
“Charlie.”
“You gotta watch out for those blind spots, you hear? You’ve got some good punches, but the hook is coming at you undefended.”
Charlie nodded, took a drink from the water bottle, and heard Schoenwetter saying it was time to call it a night. He stretched out his arms and his legs and breathed in the humid air of the gym. Every Wednesday and Sunday he practiced, attending with the same dedication that Mrs. Potter attended church, but with Schoenwetter as the preacher and Charlie the parishioner and punching the prayer. Good. It made more sense than anything else. And Oscar or whoever could hit him all they wanted—after all, he didn’t mind being struck or even beat up—and in the end, he’d keep hitting back. He packed up his things, walked toward the exit.
“Hey Jack,” Charlie said, bag on his shoulder, hand on the door.
“Yeah, kid?”
“Sign me up for that first fight, all right?”
“Charlie…”
“No. No more waiting, no more waffling because of my mom. A fight. A real fight. With that South Side lug your buddy was talking about.”
“Huntington? Maybe another month or so of practice—”
“No, Jack. Set it up.”
Schoenwetter looked at him, and Charlie looked right back.
“All of this practice, Jack? It means nothing without the fight. I’m in this to fight. That’s the point of it all. Okay? I’ve been trained by the army and I’ve been trained by you. I’m ready. I’m good. I can take a punch. Now sign me up.”
Schoenwetter shook his head and walked away, but Charlie knew by his body language that the answer was yes. Maybe he’d give him some scrubs to fight first, but he’d get his big match soon enough. And why not? It wasn’t pay-per-view boxing, it wasn’t televised, it was simply a square ring in Chicago with two men and one agenda. It was the last day of February, and he finally felt like there was something to hold on to.
He drove back to Downers Grove thinking of the Chain Bridge in Budapest, about pathways over water and how they carried weight. He thought of the stone lions that marked the entrance. The big white bulbs, the vast Danube, the dim-lit boats that seemed to fade into dusk. He pulled into the driveway and noticed that the hairs on his neck were standing on end.
Something was different. Charlie opened the back door and felt a strange sense of absence, but also a change in voltage that made him queasy. Kitchen was dark—a mess. When he strode into the living room, he stood stark still and felt his heart lurch. His father was sitting on the couch, big feet tossed up on the coffee table, alongside two empty Guinnesses and a Lou Malnati’s pizza box sprung open like a messy wound.
Charlie dropped his gym bag on the floor.
“So,” his father said. “You’re boxing now. Have some pizza.”
It took Charlie a moment to focus. “What’s happening here? What is this?”
His father belched. “What is this? It’s a deep dish. Sausage, pepperoni, giardiniera, basil, and garlic. Is that perfect or is that perfect?”
“No, what is this, as in you in this house. You don’t talk to me, you don’t call me—”
“I don’t talk to you?” his father growled.
“You haven’t even been—”
Henry thumped his fist on the coffee table. “Running away from your life, your job, your responsibilities. Not returning e-mails in fucking Afghanistan. And now accusing me, your own father, the one who threw you the life vest in Europe? Asking me why I’ve returned to my own home? Look at you! You don’t talk to me, brat!”
“Brat,” Charlie said, rolling the word over. He felt his hand ball up, begin knocking against his leg. And then he remembered that his father was sick.
“If you don’t like what I say to you, kid, then don’t earn the words.”
Charlie grit his teeth, tried to calm himself. “Okay, Dad, you know what? We’re going to give each other a mulligan here. Let’s start over. Like I was saying, what are you doing here? And are you drunk?”
His father looked away and seemed to lose the blunt force of his anger. “It takes more than a couple beers to get your father drunk.”
Charlie sat down on the old rocking chair by the fireplace, the farthest possible seat he could take. His old man was wearing a tattered gray sweatshirt proudly displaying Gold’s Gym, New Buffalo, MI. He had the beginnings of a beard—silver and bark-colored stubble covered his cheeks and jutting chin. A third Guinness was clutched in his right hand.
“You still have your hair,” Charlie said.
His father nodded, before taking an enormous pull from the Guinness. “So you know the score, then. Barkley told you?”
“Does it matter? Leave him out of it.”
His father looked at the television screen.
“What’s your weight at, Dad?”
“Who knows?”
“I know you know. You’re obsessive-compulsive and a narcissist. I bet you know down to the hundredth of a pound.”
“Don’t push it,” his father said, and there was an edge to his voice that made Charlie wary.
Unbelievable, he thought. He’d been to war and back, he’d boxed and fought and trained, he was in the best shape of his life, and he still felt queasy if his father got that tone. By the front door, he noticed, was a pile of broken glass.
“You remember this gym?” the old man asked, pointing at the sweatshirt.
“New Buffalo? I think so. That’s the gym that’s built out of that train station, right?”
“Not a train station. A roundhouse. The Pere Marquette Roundhouse, if you know your history. Built in 1920.”
“I just remember you insisting on working out every day at like, seven in the morning. Crazy Nazi regimen. That was your ritual, wasn’t it? Leave the family early, pretend that you were on your own. Then again, how many times did you wake me up when it was still dark out and try to get me to come with? Like every time.”
“And you never did come. I could never get you to follow suit with anything. I’d say, ‘Wanna work out with your old man, kid?’ And you’d say, ‘Nope, let me sleep.’ And I did, didn’t I? I let you sleep as long as you wanted.”
“Dad, I still worked out, just not at the ass-crack of dawn while we were on vacation. It was a vacation, remember? At what point did you forget how to have fun?”
His father said nothing, appeared to be lost in thought. Charlie remembered this stare from when they were all a family unit—Henry Brunson animated one moment, totally engaged, and then moments later, preoccupied—looking out at darkened windows, the ceiling, the dents in the kitchen wall, his big hand massaging his jaw.
“There was always something wrong, wasn’t there, Dad?”
His father grunted and rolled his eyes. “We haven’t gone up to Michigan in years, you know that?”
“You’ve been gone, Dad. Gone. No one understands it. No one knows what you’re doing.”
“We used to go up into Harbor Country almost every summer when you two were in school, renting those lake houses. Remember how there was always something wrong with the houses? Like the one that had cockroaches? And the other had biting flies?”
“The whole of Michigan had the biting flies that summer.”
“I know, Charlie. I’m making a list—”
“They were ravenous. I remember that jogger who was covered—”
“And then there were the other houses, you remember? None of them were what they were cracked up to be. The one with no air-conditioning? And the one in the weird little town where everyone was a territorial beach hermit? Then there was that pristine house, when you were twelve or thirteen. You remember that, I’m sure. The white one, with the bay windows on the bluff—in Union Pier? That son of a bitch flooded on the third night.”
“That house was actually pretty nice,” Charlie said, remembering a row of skylights, a view of grass-speckled dunes leading into Lake Michigan, and, on the last night, finding a Penthouse magazine that one of the previous guests had left behind. “I’ll admit it was nice. But seriously, remember the biting flies and that jogger?”
His father closed his eyes. “I remember how that drugstore in Union Pier had no bug spray left. They were plucked clean—only lotto tickets and ketchup. I bought all the tickets and made three dollars. Call it a push. And I remember how the damn flies would follow us out to the sand bar—biting our fucking scalps—I mean, they were goddamn flying black hyenas that year. But I don’t remember any jogger. I’ve got no recollection of that at all.”
“Dad, we were driving back from dinner or something, and it was still light out, and that overweight jogger was covered with biting flies. You looked at Mom and said, ‘Bubble butt buffet,’ and I got the joke, even though I wasn’t supposed to. You don’t remember that?”
“I’ve got nothing for you, kid. But then again, you can’t remember whose house this is, and you ask your own father what he’s doing in it. So I guess we’re even.”
“Dad, you’re sitting there like you’re looking for a fight.”
“You’re the one with the hand wraps, kid.”
Charlie thought on that one for a moment.
“You like boxing, then?”
“Sure, Dad.”
“I’m serious. You like it?”
Charlie sensed the tinnitus coming on, but then eased up and it faded back. “Yeah, Dad. I like it a lot. It’s the blue-collar version of physical therapy.”
The old man chuckled at that, and they lapsed into silence. The television was on mute. Charlie wanted to say a litany of things, about how his father being sick didn’t take away what he had done, or how he had done it. It didn’t take away from his total lack of ethics with their mother, his lack of acknowledgment of or appreciation for his son’s service, his lack of explanation, maturity—Charlie felt too many words swirling through his skull, and realized that he couldn’t say any of them. He felt a grudging sympathy, too, but found that emotion burying itself with the rest. For some reason, his father in the room, even sick, changed the way he was able to talk.
“Barkley says your service is over, and that you’ve been discharged,” his father said. “But you’re not telling anyone why. Not that I can complain about keeping secrets, mind you, but what happened over there?”
Charlie hesitated, but he realized that the subject of his discharge, like his guilt, had finally relaxed its grip. “It was an honorable RIF, Dad.”
“RIF?”
“Reduction in Force,” Charlie said, measuring his breathing. “But everyone wanted me to apply for something else. For another kind of discharge. I refused. I … I just couldn’t do what they asked anymore. And when I refused enough times, some people who cared, who actually gave a shit, pushed for the RIF, just to get me out.”
“They wanted a discharge for something else? Like what, PTSD?”
Charlie fixed his eyes on the television. “I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this. I haven’t told anyone else.”
“I’m your father.”
“Right.”
“I am, Charlie. And so? I’m the history buff, remember? Was it PTSD? That’s what they wanted the discharge for?”
Charlie pursed his lips. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? It doesn’t matter how fucked-up I was or am or whatever. I got an honorable RIF, not the other thing, and that’s that. Facts are facts and I’m out of the army and back here in Downers Grove.”
“And now you’re boxing.”
“That’s right. And now I’m boxing.”
They lapsed into silence again. Charlie understood, more clearly now, that the path he was on was certainly not perfect—but it was workable. In and out, he breathed. He could do this. He could speak and form thoughts and get through it, just like Al said.
“So,” Charlie said, waiting for his father to meet his eyes. “Are you going to tell me what you’re really doing here? And yes, I understand it’s your house.”
He finished the Guinness. “I’m moving back in.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me, loud and clear.”
“You’re home? Like home-home?”
His father nodded, then shrugged. “But your mother’s gone.”