Isaac
“What the fuck was that, Marty?” I asked, when the last cast member left for the night. “Smitten? I looked fucking smitten?”
Martin just regarded me placidly. “I’m not going to change how I direct my show,” he said. “I call it as I see it. But I was hoping…”
“Cut it out with the hoping. Direct the show however you want, but keep your matchmaking bullshit out of it.”
His eyes hardened and he crossed his arms over his chest. “I call it like I see it,” he said again. “If you give it to me, I’m going to incorporate it into the scene.” He took a step toward me. “Nothing you can do about that, but there’s something you can do about her.”
“It’s too late, Marty,” I said, the anger draining out of me. “I’m moving out of Harmony. Whether your talent scouts take me or not.”
“I hope you find whatever you’re looking for when you do. But I also hope you don’t miss what’s right in front of you.” He clapped my shoulder. “It’s never too late. Those two words are the greatest, most powerful killer of hope mankind has ever invented for itself.”
I opened the door to my trailer and found Pops passed out on the couch, a lit cigarette still smoldering in the ashtray on the coffee table. A pile of unpaid bills served as a coaster, stained by beer and whiskey and the remnants of his fast food dinner. If hopelessness had a smell, it was stale beer, grease and an overflowing ashtray.
“It’s not too late to get the fuck out of here,” I muttered.
But instead of packing my shit and heading over to Marty’s place, I stubbed out the lit cigarette and turned out the lights.
The following morning, I poured milk into a bowl of cereal and ate it standing at the kitchen counter. Pops eventually snorted awake and sat up, blinking at me with bleary eyes and scratching the stubble on his chin. “You going to work?”
“I have the day off.”
He sat back on the couch. “You’re taking a day off?”
My body tensed, every muscle and sinew going on high alert. He was in a fighting mood and hadn’t even gotten off the couch yet.
“I’m not taking the day off, Pops,” I said evenly. “I don’t work Tuesdays.”
The body shop I worked at in Braxton wanted to give me full-time, but I alternated working there and helping Marty in the theater. No way in hell Pops needed to know that.
I ate my cereal faster.
“What are you going to do all day? Rehearse that stupid play? Prance around in tights and breeches while spouting off a bunch of bullshit no one understands.”
“Yeah, Pops, that’s exactly what I’m going to do,” I said.
He stared at me for a moment and I stared back.
“Don’t get smart with me,” he said in a low voice, like the rumbling of thunder that warns of a storm.
He stared me down for another moment more, then grunted. He found his lighter and began rummaging around the cluttered coffee table for his pack of smokes. Frustration mounting, he scrounged faster, knocking over empty bottles and beer cans. Finally, with a muttered curse, he upended the entire table, sending cigarette butts, ash, bottles and cans across the floor.
“Jesus, Pops.”
I set my bowl aside and grabbed a trash bag from under the sink. I kneeled beside the mess and began to clean up, putting cans and bottles into the bag.
Still sitting on the couch, Pops bent down for an empty beer can and tossed it into the sack. Then he took one of the bottles by the neck and slammed it into the side of my face.
“You don’t get smart with me,” he bellowed, brandishing the bottle.
I stared, my heart crashing against my chest. My breath came fast and I felt the right side of my face start to swell. With every heartbeat, hot pain throbbed on my cheekbone and under my eye. Blood trickled down my cheek.
With a cry of rage, I knocked the bottle out of his hand, grabbed his wrists and pinned them to his chest. I pressed him back against the couch, leaning over him with all my weight, my face inches from his. The blood streamed down my cheek dripping onto his plaid shirt.
“Never again,” I yelled between clenched teeth. “Never fucking again.”
He’d hit me hard, a lifetime working with heavy steel behind the blow. But my guard had been down. I was stronger than him now. He didn’t bother to struggle and a glint of fear touched his eyes.
I gave him a final shove and stood up. I stared down at him for a few more minutes, trying to remember a time when he didn’t look at me with contempt. A time when he and my mother and I were together and happy. I had a photo in my mind of the three of us, but now it showed only my mother and me. The man who’d been my father had faded out of the picture.
I headed toward the bathroom. Behind me, Pops gasped and caught his breath, muttering curses. I shut the bathroom door and looked at my reflection.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
My right cheekbone was swollen and puffy, the skin split by a half-inch gash still streaming blood. An alarming patch of red stained my white T-shirt.
I grabbed the hand towel by the sink, ran cold water over it and cleaned up my cheek. I probably needed stitches, but I wasn’t about to incur a bunch of Urgent Care charges. I had a stockpile of butterfly Band-Aids for just such an occasion. It took me three tries to get one on fast enough before the blood made my skin too slick. I put a second one beside the first and a regular Band-Aid over both.
My whole face throbbed now. The swelling would probably last another couple of days. Another couple of rehearsals where the cast would stare at me with pity, but no one would ask me what happened because they already knew. Marty would pull me aside and tell me, yet again, his door was always open. His hospitality there for the taking.
As I stared at my reflection I wondered why the fuck I just didn’t take it.
When I left the bathroom, I understood why. My father sat on the couch, his hands in his lap, staring at nothing. Sad and lost. Splotches of my blood dried to maroon against the green of his plaid shirt.
He looked up and his eyes went immediately to my wounds. I saw the pain and regret fly across his face before he looked away quickly.
I put my Hamlet script in my backpack, grabbed my car keys, my Winstons and my jacket. I went back to the coffee table to grab the TV remote and he flinched as if I were going to hit him. That hurt almost as badly as my face.
“You want the news?”
He nodded. I turned the TV on and went out.
I walked to the eastern edge of the scrapyard, toward the overturned truck by the chain link fence. I lit a cigarette as I walked and took a deep drag. I let it out slowly, willing my nerves to calm down. I stopped when I heard Benny’s low singsong voice.
“Goddammit, Benny.”
I heard a bonk followed by a curse. Benny came out rubbing his head.
“Damn, you scared the crap out of me.”
“Why aren’t you in school?”
He shrugged sheepishly at the ground. “I don’t know,” he said. “Don’t want to go.” Now he looked up from his shoes and his eyes widened. “What happened to you?”
“You know what happened to me,” I said. “I want to know what’s happening with you. You can’t not go to school.”
“Why not?” he spat back. “You don’t go to school.”
“I stayed in school until they kicked me out and now I’m taking a test to finish. You are in the eighth grade. You’re fucking up your future if you don’t go.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, no commitment in his tone. I hadn’t gotten through to him. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what to do or what to say. I didn’t have the words. I wasn’t his dad. I was just the neighbor with the drunk father.
And suddenly I was so fucking tired. Weary to my bones.
“You want to help me run lines?”
“You’re not going to take me to school?”
“I can drive you there every day of my life, Benny, and it won’t matter if you don’t know it’s important. This play I’m doing right now? It’s important to me. So yeah, I could use the help.”
“Yeah, sure.”
I handed him my script and he sat down on the semi-truck tire. “Where are you at?”
“I have it marked.”
He found the dog-eared page and flipped it open. “To be or not to be?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” I said, taking a final drag off my cigarette. I dropped it, ground it out with my boot. “I’m not acting it, just running it for the lines.”
“I’m ready,” Benny said.
I stood in the middle of the scrapyard clearing and closed my eyes.
“To be or not to be, that is the question.
Whether t’is nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
or to take arms against a sea of troubles
and, by opposing, end them?”
My shoulders sagged. “To sleep. To die,” I said my voice low. “To die, to sleep perchance to dream.”
“You skipped a bunch of stuff.”
“I know.”
“What does it mean?” Benny asked, his voice hushed now.
“He’s asking if it’s worth it. To keep going or not.”
“Is it?”
I don’t know, I thought. Sometimes I just don’t know
“What’s the next line?” I asked.
“Ay, there’s the rub,” Benny said and wrinkled his nose with a small laugh.
I went through the rest of the monologue, Benny stopping me now and then to correct my mistakes. I got to the end, where Ophelia entered, and fell silent. My thoughts filled with Willow, imagining her stepping onto this stage with me—this crappy junkyard—looking beautiful and fragile, but strong and resilient too.
Benny thought I had forgotten my lines. “In your orisons, may all my sins be remembered.” He wrinkled his nose again. “What are orisons?”
“Prayers,” I said. “She can’t hear him yet, but he’s asking her to remember him in all of her prayers. Like saying goodbye.”
“Is he going away?” Benny asked.
“Yeah, he is,” I said, the words dropping from me like stones. “And he can’t take her with him.”
I walked over to Benny and took the script out of his hand to shut it.
“Benjamin, if you were ever my friend, you will stay in school. For me and for your mother. You have to take care of yourself because no one’s going to do it for you. Your mom is going to try her best but it’s up to you, in the end.”
“Where you going?” Benny asked, blinking back tears.
“I’m going to go stay at a friend’s house for a while and after Hamlet closes, I’m leaving Harmony.”
“Will I see you again?” His voice trembled now.
“Yeah, of course. You’ll see me around. And I’ll come say goodbye before I go.”
Benny sniffed and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his shirt. “Sucks, man,” he said. “But I’m glad for you. I’ll miss you.”
I reached out, ran my hand over his close-cropped hair. “Come on. I’m taking you to school.”
I dropped Benny off at Elizabeth Mason Middle School, then drove my truck back to the trailer, my thoughts still full of Willow and a page covered in little black X’s.
I would ask nothing of her. She owed me nothing. But I’d give her the play as best as I could. I’d help her get through to the end, to tell her story and find the relief she kept asking me about. And when it was done, I would go.
Pops was in his room with the door shut when I came back. I went directly to my own small room and packed up a bag of my things. It wasn’t much. Everything I owned fit in one small suitcase.
Outside my dad’s bedroom door, I paused. I raised my hand to knock and then let it fall again. Instead I tore out a sheet from my script and wrote on the back:
I’ll pay the bills and send you money. You don’t have to worry about anything.
--Isaac
I set the note on the coffee table that was now free of debris except for one ashtray and a pack of Winstons. Just to be safe, I propped the paper against the smokes so he wouldn’t miss it.
Then I left.
I drove across town to the neighborhood beyond the amphitheater. Streets of large, comfortable homes, most dating back to the Civil War. I knocked on the front door of the Fords’ red brick house with the wrought iron fence. Brenda Ford opened the door, her hair and smock smudged with paint, a big smile at the ready. Her expression morphed into shocked concern as she took in my bloodied clothes and swollen cheek.
Her eyes dropped to the bag in my hand and the suitcase behind me. A myriad of emotions splashed across her face: sorrow, concern and finally, relief.
“Come in, Isaac,” she said, opening the door wider for me. “Come right in.”