Stone Ghost

The night my uncle's factory burned we got the news before the first siren.

It was after supper had been cleared--my brother was washing the dishes.  Even in those days he liked boxing, and you could hear him making punching sounds under his breath, imaginary jabs and hooks while he sudsed the salad plates.  The only boxer who ever hurt my brother vanished a long time afterward, a six-foot welter-weight with a drinking problem. 

Uncle Stanton showed up at our back porch.  He asked to speak to my father, and he would not step inside.  He was sweating--panting--and did not come in through the back door even when my mother appeared and joked with him about it, flirting with him in her automatic come-on that is both sexual and mechanical, the only way to get men to budge.  He repeated the request that my father come out and talk to him, moths ricocheting off the porch light.

Afterward, my father sat in the room, his head in his hands.  We had a large kitchen, and a big old oak table that had been stripped and revarnished by my father.  You could see the permanent stains, though, where someone had kept an ink well.

"He never had a grip on himself," said my mother.

"He got a grip, all right," said my father, referring to my brother after he had left.

I could see the tattoo on Dad's upper arm.  The Gorgon's head was well-defined, her eyes rolled up into her head, snakes all over.

My mother never referred to the tattoo directly, although she did say, one day when we were all at the beach, with my father well out of earshot, "Don't ever get yourself permanently disfigured."

The day my uncle got out of jail for burning down the furniture factory we all dressed up, like people going to church, and went over to his house.  We lived only a couple of miles from his single-story, but over the last couple of years we had been avoiding the place.       

The neighborhood was vacant lots, light-industry interspersed with stucco houses.  My uncle's place was behind a cinder block wall, and he had a Great Dane who would stand up on his hind feet and bellow.  The animal was lean; to pet him was to feel vertebrae and ribs.  The creature was not friendly, but not utterly unfriendly, used to enduring long months alone.  He sniffed us, let us feel his backbone, and then went back to his rawhide knot.

"Not so bad," said Uncle Stanton.  He did not want to say more, and we were all relieved to see that he looked the same, but heavier.  "They had me spray-painting chairs," my uncle added.

Well, that was smart of them, one of us said.

My brother and I were pleased to slip out after dinner and stand in the middle of the big empty place that had been the factory.  My uncle had bought bentwood chairs, thousands of them, when an importer had gone bankrupt.   When the market died he had set the fire to it all, and did his two years in Vacaville.  It was a first conviction, and Uncle Stanton had been on the water board and well-respected.

The empty place crunched under our feet, old bits of window glass and plastic packing tape--the factory had not burned very well.  The sounds of family celebration came out to where my brother and I were looking around for wooden cookies--the stub ends of oversize chair legs. They were European maple--my dog loved chewing them.

Inside, my dad and my uncle laughed and laughed, while their wives were quiet.

My latest woman friend works for Coldwell Banker as an agent.  The houses in the hills are worth seven figures, and even a shotgun stucco in the flat land will sell for round dollars.

When she gets her broker's license Rochelle will be cutting three to six percent of a pretty beefy pie.  She says he could sell this place for me, the one I bought from my brother when his medical problems kept him from making the mortgage payments.  I got a bargain, but until I get my contractor's license my money is in spurts.  I should cash out, move in with someone kissed by fortune and start chapter three or four of my happy life.

"What are you waiting for?" asks Rochelle.  “Your future starts now,” she adds, one of those people who listen to nothing but talk radio.

When my uncle drowned himself last year it was a surprise.  He had seemed so accustomed to being a younger brother, an attractive loser, a man who understood life without hating it.

The medical examiner found an overdose of Seconal in his blood, saved up from many years ago when barbiturates were more common, and people thought nothing of a few beers, a couple of pills, and maybe not waking up in the morning.  He had sat on the edge of the fish pond of his new place, we surmised, until the medication took effect.

The trouble was that my father had been asked to look at the corpse.  My father asked me to come along.  I was living in a duplex in El Cerrito, doing non-union work pouring cement.  I'm good with a trowel, but the work has always been sporadic.  It was as though I was retired, just like my father, who had endured ups and downs with his investments. We drove together to the coroner's office, not talking.  

At least he had not been in the water long, my father said as we sat in the pickup afterward, looking straight ahead at the ivy on the parking lot wall.

If I sold the place there'd be pest control inspectors.  There'd be estimates of repairs, engineers surveying the imperfections.  Starting to wonder, getting suspicious, ordering x-rays of the concrete.

My mother called last night to say that my father had vanished.

For a moment I could not make a sound in response.  I thought that she was using one of her searing euphemisms, and that my father had dropped dead, the way she had given me the news about my brother and his subdural hematoma.  She had just finished talking to the police.

"Three days ago," she said. "Got up, walked out." "He's vanished out of your life," I said, feeling relief now that I understood her. "Into someone else's."

"I'm glad," she said, in a determined tone.

He had it removed.

This is what my mother said in response to my query.  The question surprised her, or irritated her.  "Covered up, really," she added.  "Kaiser doesn't pay for that sort of thing."

I must have remarked that I had admired it, or at least that I was used to it.

"He went to a tattoo shop," she said, "and got it filled in." When my mother called back later, crying now, she told me to make a list of "descriptive details, for the detective."  I said that I would.  I called my brother and he said you'd still be able to see it.

"Her," he corrected himself, speaking pretty well when you consider.  "Medusa was female."  For three weeks he been comatose in a Vallejo hospital after the skinny southpaw nailed him in the second round.

After the call I went out to the patio I poured myself.  It was cold out, low evening clouds skimming in from San Francisco Bay, the sort of weather I like.

Years later I still had not felt an ounce of forgiveness.  I ran across the weathered but still tough-looking Golden Gloves champ and held the bottle for him while he drank, out behind the Ranch 99 Market on Pierce Street.  And then I sat with him while he told sad stories of the deaths of neighborhood names, too drunk to walk, and then I sat on him, my forearm in his throat, until he wasn't moving.  I plunked him in the trunk of my Celica, in among the crumpled beer cans I recycle when I get around to it.

He worked at the Touchless Carwash on Bancroft Avenue, getting too old for a fight card, the kind of guy you see with a new too-young woman laughing at his jokes.  I asked around, he'd been in Vacaville for aggravated assault, kept in shape with the Department of Correction gym equipment.  He gave me a smile, a bottle of Rebel Yell just-opened beside him.  "Hey, I always did feel bad about that," he said, reaching up to shake my hand, mistaking me for my brother.

We look somewhat alike, it's true.  My uncle had looked pretty good dead, with an expression of concentration scoring his features, a man trying to spell a technical word.  The family resemblance was plain, a rough estimate of my dad's good looks turned into a corpse.    

"Not so bad," my father said.  

But you can only endure so much.  You get tired.  Not weary.  You get wise, and hungry for something more.  That's why I go out sometimes to the nicely cured cement in my back yard.  You can still see it, but only if you know it's there, the one-hundred and sixty pound body shrinking, leaving a declivity shaped like an aging boxer as he vanishes.