We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone by Ronald Malfi
“Hurry, mate,” Tommy McCurry said, water splashing in his face as he bobbed at the surface. Jay thought his voice sounded surprisingly calm. Blood oozed from a gash in his forehead.
“I’m sorry,” Jay Conroy said, winding the rope back into a coil. “My knees…I’m sorry…”
Something flickered behind Tommy McCurry’s eyes. Then he jerked his head to the left in time to see a blackish-gray dorsal fin cleave through the water. When he turned back to Jay Conroy, there was undeniable fear in his eyes.
“My knees gave out,” Jay Conroy said. “You were right. The cage got too heavy and my knees gave out.”
Wiping blood from his eye, Tommy McCurry said nothing.
Janet peered over the side of the catamaran at the submerged steel cage. She turned and looked sharply at Tommy McCurry. “It’s an interesting and beautiful life,” she said. “And I can’t stop thinking of those sharks.”
“Get me up,” Tommy McCurry said.
“Look!” Janet said, pointing at the horizon. “There are two more!”
Jay Conroy looked. Indeed, two more dorsal fins wove through the surf toward the boat.
“Mate,” Tommy McCurry said, his eyes pleading with Jay Conroy. He lifted one hand out of the water and held it out for him.
“Poor sad dead Mr. McCurry,” Janet sang.
“Mate!” Tommy McCurry cried, though this time half the word was interrupted as the tour guide took on a mouthful of water as his head sank briefly beneath the surface. When he resurfaced, the guide looked around wildly. Blood streamed down his face. Another pair of fins appeared just a couple of yards away. “God have—” He went under again. This time, when he resurfaced, Tommy McCurry was screaming.
“Beware the shark molester,” Jay Conroy said, then turned and headed across the deck toward the pilothouse. Peering over the portside railing, Janet laughed.
* * *
With the sun down, the beach was cool and breezy. They dragged a small folding-table through the sand and established it close to the rising surf. Jay Conroy started a fire on the beach and heated a handful of coals until they were red and glowing. He drove iron rods into the sand on either side of the fire and ran a rod barbed with tiny iron hooks between them. He cut strips of fish—what the Africans called “snoek”—and hung them from the little iron hooks over the fire. The smell was instantaneous.
Looking up, he saw Janet winding down the face of the cliff. She carried two candles, already lit to cast light on the stony path. She looked pale and ghostlike in the moonlight.
When the fish was ready they ate it at the little folding-table while admiring the rippling sea. The reflection of the moon in the water was large and blue and interrupted by many waves.
“The fish was very good,” Janet said after a while. She’d cleaned her plate. “What is it called again?”
“Snoek,” he said, pronouncing it snook. “Snoek braai.”
“They sound like alien words.”
“They do.”
“What a marvelous day, and a marvelous trip. This will be a hard trip to beat.”
“I think we can manage,” he said. “Where would you like to go next?”
The Glad Street Angel
We stop for lunch at the Harbor Grill, although neither of us are really very hungry.
“You gotta get your act together now, Gideon, gotta keep your nose clean,” my father tells me. I watch as he arranges a mound of crumbs into a straight line with his pinkie. “There are no more second chances.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“For real, man. You’re eighteen now. Ride’s over.”
“Yeah,” I say again, “I know.”
I watch him take two bites of a hefty club sandwich from across the table. He chews slow and methodically, as if the act itself requires much thought, and his eyes alternate between me and the throng of cars along Pratt Street. My father and I don’t really get along. Throughout my childhood, I maintained the constant notion of him as some brooding, elusive cloud on the horizon, rattling the ground below with thunder. I can remember watching him shave before the bathroom mirror, the sink half-full with water and clogged with shaving cream icebergs. He seemed so big. Once, I held a ladder for him while he scooped gunk out of the gutters of our duplex. I remember looking up and seeing straight up his shorts. His genitals looked like snarled, graying fruit.
“What are you thinking about?” he says suddenly.
“Mom,” I lie.
“Well,” he says, exhaling with enough zeal to send the queue of crumbs scattering like fleeing troops, “your mother, she’s not feeling well. She’ll be glad to see you, Gideon, but she’s not feeling well.”
“What is it now?”
“Her headaches.”
“I thought she was taking something for that.”
“She is,” my father says. “The pills, they don’t work like they used to.”
“Is there anything else she can take?”
“Sometimes she can’t even get up,” he continues without hearing me. “You remember what she was like when she first started getting them? Goddamn migraines.”
Suddenly, I’m thinking about pills. One day out of the blue, when I was a freshman in high school, I was struck by these dull, throbbing stomach pains, but not really in my stomach—more like on either side of my stomach, and just below it. The groin area. It felt like someone had stuffed two billiard balls just below the lining of my belly. My plan was to wait it out and not worry about it—tough it out like a man—but the pain wound up lasting for several days, and I grew increasingly frightened. All I could think about was my junior high sex education class and if there was a possibility I’d contracted some venereal disease from Jenna Dawson, even though we’d never gone all the way. So I panicked and wound up passing out one morning in the school bathroom, cracking the side of my head against a grimy urinal. I’d imagined my urine coming out in thick, coagulated, snotty ropes (it didn’t) and that sent me swooning. I awoke sometime later in a bed at U of M with my father at my side. His first words to me had something to do with how real men don’t whimper like little girls, and just what did I think I was doing in that bathroom anyway? Was I on something, for Christ’s sake? When the doctor recommended I take pills, my father scoffed and told him I didn’t need any pills. The pain went away after about a week, anyway. The problem was never diagnosed.
I sip my Coke and don’t touch my roast beef sandwich.
“Anyway,” my father says, “things are gonna change. They have to. You understand that, right? You understand that your mother can’t handle your crap anymore?”
I tell him yes, I understand.
“And I’m through dealing with it, too.”
I tell him I understand.
“I got you a job,” he tells me, “doing some construction work for a friend of mine. This friend, he knows the deal—knows what you been through, I mean—and he’s doin’ me a favor by bringing you on. That means you don’t embarrass me. I said it’d be okay if he gives you a monthly drug test or something. Told him I’d prefer it, really. I think that made him feel good about the situation. He’s a good guy. Just don’t screw shit up.” He sighs and looks instantly miserable sitting out here on the verandah with me. Maybe he’s thinking of my mom and her headaches. Or his construction worker buddy. Or whatever. “You start Monday,” he says after too long a pause. “You better buckle down, Gideon.”
I tell him thanks.
He is mulling something over in his mind. Caught in the throes of concentration, my father looks the way a washing machine might look if capable of thought, his brain all jumbled with faded chinos, polo shirts, worn house dresses stained with grease. “All right,” he says finally, and there is some sort of resignation in his voice, “let’s see ’em, Gideon. Up on the table.” He says, “Let me see your hands.”
I show him, holding them palms up, and there is no expression on his face. I feel I owe some sort of explanation. I say, “I haven’t done it since I don’
“Yeah, okay,” he says, and only because he isn’t quite sure what to say. He does not understand my hand thing. Neither do I, really.
A lumbering silence passes between us. I think of him shaving in the mirror again, his shirt off, his doughy paunch obtruding over the frayed band of his Fruit of the Looms, a wiry braid of black hair spilling out of his bellybutton.
“Can we stop at the gas station on the way home?” I ask. “I need to grab some smokes.”
My father sets his hands in his lap, anxious to leave. I am familiar with almost all of his idiosyncrasies. And I am familiar with his hands, too. I start to think about the way he rolled his handgun around in his hands that night, sitting on the edge of his bed, his head down. I am still thinking about this when he finally opens his mouth and says, “Anything you want to get off your chest before we get home?”
“Like what?”
Casually, he rolls his shoulders. He looks goofy doing it. Simple, somehow. “Anything,” he says. “Anything. Whatever.”
I think about my time in rehab, almost laugh, then shake my head.
We leave.
* * *
There is something frightening about my mother. And I realize I haven’t seen her in five months.
She is sitting in a green recliner in front of the television set, her white hands pressed firmly in her lap, her eyes glazed over. Her hair is pulled back into a bun, gray and dull in the slivers of daylight that slide in through the partially-shaded windows, and her mouth is drawn tight as string. Seeing her, I am suddenly reminded of my grandmother’s funeral and the way my mother had pressed rosary beads into the palm of my hand, insisting that I pray as we stood before the casket. She pressed hard, leaving behind tiny pea-shaped indentations. I cannot recall her words, cannot recall what Nona had looked like packaged in her satin-lined mahogany tube; I can only recall the brush of my mother’s hair against my cheek, frizzled and damp with tears, and the stale-sweet smell of her breath in my face. Funeral breath. Mourning breath. Breath that cannot be masked by a million slabs of spearmint gum.
She looks up and sees me and smiles in her medicated way. Struggles to get up. I picture scarecrows swaying in a corn field and feel something hard and sick and moist roll over in my stomach.
“Ma,” I say, and advance toward her before she has time to rise. Too much movement and her headaches start up.
I bend down and she hugs me, kisses the ink-spot birthmark just over my left eyebrow.
“Gideon,” she whispers, squeezing me tight. I can feel the dull knobs of her fingertips pressing into my back. She is crying now. “Honey. You look too thin. Your father said you were being fed at that place…”
“I was fed,” I tell her.
“Ralph,” she continues, and her eyes—now wet and muddy in their sockets—shift beseechingly toward my father. She looks much older than I remember.
“They fed him,” my father promises her from the tiny kitchen. He is searching through the refrigerator.
“How you feeling, Ma?” I ask.
She ignores me. “Are you angry with me for not coming to see you? I wanted to, I did, but your father, he said it would be too much, that I should stay home because it would be too much—”
“I’m not angry, Ma.”
“I wanted to go and to bring you some food, some good food from home, and I can’t image what...” She trails off. “My God, Ralph, they didn’t feed the poor boy. Look at him, will you?”
“I’ve seen him,” my father says back. “He’s fine.”
It’s already too much. Five months at Crownsville and I’ve forgotten how easily people cry. Particularly mothers.
The apartment is smaller than I remember, too—much smaller than the old duplex. The carpet is an amber-colored shag, filthy and stiff with dried food and spilled cola, and the furniture looks cramped and uncomfortable against the paneled walls. There are only a few windows, the shades all half-drawn, and the room is musty and oppressive. I think of retirement homes and abandoned cars left on the side of the highway.
“I’ve been planning this all week,” my mother says, finally pushing herself up from the recliner. She is all skin and bones, like a blouse and sweatpants threaded with pipe cleaners. “We’ll sit down tonight, have dinner together like a family. I’ll make something, cook it up. What would you like, Gideon?”
“You don’t have to, Ma.”
“It’s your first day home. Tell me what you want.”
I tell her hamburgers would be perfect, and that seems to make her happy.
While she busies herself in the kitchen, I move down the hallway and see my father staring without interest at some framed photographs on the wall.
“Look at these,” he mutters.
“She doesn’t look good,” I tell my father.
“What are you talking about?”
“How long has she been this way?”
“What way?”
“So out of it,” I say. “You can’t tell?” I think maybe he’s been around her too long to notice. “She needs to see a doctor.”
My father finally looks up at me and his face is stern, his jaw set…yet his eyes seem hurt. I am not used to seeing him in this way. He says, “Your mother’s fine.” He says, “They’re only headaches, for Christ’s sake, Gideon. Just migraines.” He says, “You worry about yourself, that’s all you need to worry about.”
Later, I go to the bathroom, urinate for what feels like an hour, then find myself standing before the bathroom mirror for a comparable amount of time. I have taken some of the clinic home with me, I notice: my face is pale like the walls, and peels like plaster. My cheeks are chapped and cracked and interrupted by a network of very faint blood vessels. My eyes look sucked into my skull, hollow like busted light fixtures. My skin is jaundiced, the color of the mashed potatoes served on Fridays. It is also the same color as my mother’s skin.
Rinsing my hands at the sink, I scrutinize my palms. It used to amuse me the way my father would ask to see my hands, to hold them out for him. Yet today at the restaurant I found I only felt sorry for him. For whatever reason.
I stick my tongue out at my reflection, wag it back and forth, and go to the kitchen for dinner.
* * *
My bedroom seems alien to me, and I think it’s only because we’d been living in the apartment just a few months before I was arrested. It’s small and smells vaguely of turpentine. There are a few scattered comic books on the floor, some Star Wars figures still in their packages tacked to the drywall. A large poster of Jimi Hendrix covers the back of my door.
I lay on the bed in silence for a long while, thinking about my hands and that night on Glad Street. I remember thinking about my father the night I was arrested—sitting in the back of the police car, I had summoned the image of him on the edge of his bed, holding his handgun. It was odd to think of that then. Odd now, too.
Once my mom has gone to bed, I creep down the hallway and grab my jacket from the hall closet. It’s been five months and I expect it not to fit, or to just feel strange, but it fits and doesn’t feel any different than I remember. In the kitchen I load my pockets with matchbooks and stuff a pack of Marlboros into my jacket. Without having to look I can tell my father’s watching me from the living room. He’s seated in the recliner in front of the TV, but he’s not watching television—he’s watching me.
“What?” I say, not looking up. I pretend to busy myself with the zipper on my jacket. “What is it?”
“Where are you going?”
“Out for a while. That a problem?”
I can tell that it is, but he does not say so. Instead, he tells me not to stay out too late, that I need to keep my shit together and my head clear. He does not articulate his intentions very well, my father. What he really means is he doesn’t trust me and that he’s worried I’m going to fuck things up again. But what my father doesn’t understand is that different people deal with things in different ways. My w
Not for the first time, I wonder what my father would say if he knew I saw him with his gun that night.
“Don’t be home late,” he calls after me, but I’m already out the door.
Outside, I am hit by a strong October wind. The air reeks of the harbor, even in the cold, and it is an unsettling chemical smell. The city streets are poorly lighted, surprisingly desolate, and uniquely Baltimore. There are a few Halloween decorations in some of the tenement windows. I walk and smoke, my destination premeditated.
When I get to Glad Street, I stop walking and just stand on the curb. I’m directly beneath a lamppost and my shadow is smeared across the empty street ahead of me. Someone has stolen a number of placards from the city’s drug campaign—those ridiculous BELIEVE posters that do nothing but irritate property owners who remove them from their sidewalks whenever they appear—and a number of them now lay strewn in the street.
Shivering, I remain standing beneath the lamppost. Five months ago I was dragged across this street and slammed against the hood of a police car. My first offense, I had only to spend some time in rehab. So I was sent away and the city feels it’s doing its job, getting punks like me off the street. Punks like me who pay no attention to BELIEVE posters. Whatever.
Something white flits through the darkness; I catch it from the corner of my eye. Turning, squinting down the blackened alleyway, I see nothing…but I suddenly feel much colder than I had just a moment ago.
No rest for the dead, I think, still trying to peer into the darkness. Looking for a shape, a visage…anything recognizable…
I see nothing. In the cold and the dark, I hang around Glad Street for forty-five minutes and still I see nothing.
* * *
Carter Johnson is my father’s construction worker buddy, and he looks like someone stretched a pair of filthy coveralls over a city bus. His face resembles a burlap sack with eye-holes and his breath is an aromatic amalgamation of unfiltered cigarettes, peppered beef jerky, and steamed cabbage. He talks at an unnecessary volume and highlights every third sentence with profanity of a sexual nature. I immediately dislike him.