Pursuit Of The Cygnus Thief

Chapter 32 - No Reason To Overreact

Chapter 32

“No Reason To Overreact”

      My father sagged into a chair at the kitchen table. I poured him a muddy cup of coffee, black, no sugar, and placed the newspaper in front of him while his warm steak and eggs waited on the stove. His shirt was still mis-buttoned; blotches of dried blood and spots of dirt on the dingy pale fabric made it seem that my father wore the mottled hide of a liver and white hunting dog. He placed an elbow on the table, rested his thickly stubbled chin in his palm, and used his free hand to lift the cup to his lips. With bloodshot, watery, eyes underscored by puffy skin, my father read the news headline then pushed the paper aside, and took a few more sips of coffee. I flopped his breakfast onto a plate and served him. I’d spent the night cleaning house and doing laundry, queued up a few of his old albums, and wrapped myself in the music that reminded me most of my father. Worry still won, but I’d put up a good fight.

“Blodget’s got a fractured skull. Twenty stitches. Somebody,” my father hesitated, looked at me for a moment as I sank down in the chair opposite him to eat my own breakfast. “Those savages,” he continued. “They hit him in the back of the head with a rock. People he’s known his entire life, friends, neighbors even relations,” he said before sticking a forkful of egg into his mouth.

“Mrs. Blodget got ten stitches. She bit a hole into her own tongue when they knocked her down,” he said. My father was both disgusted and exhausted enough to drop his guard and tell me what had happened. I listened, afraid that if I asked a question he would catch himself and clam up; he ate a little more, drank, then shook his head negatively.

“They’re going to put Mary in a bed at Hillcrest Hall,” he added after a few minutes.

“They all get hurt, Mary gets locked up in the looney bin, and those, savages, get to run free.” My father sawed into his steak with so much force that both fork and knife scraped the plate.

“You stopped them from getting killed last night. That’s why you left.” I tried to make my words sound like a question. He nodded, seemed to notice that his clothing was filthy, and frowned. My father was a mechanic; he got dirty for a living every day, but this was neither motor oil nor grease that could be washed away with harsh soap and water. This was blood spilled in violence; soap and water would erase it from sight, but it would linger in memory and in scars on Mr. Blodget’s head.

“You seen John yet?” he asked. I’d been too busy to think much about John. We’d parted on a scratched note after the pre-empted melee; I hadn’t wanted to hear more from him after he’d seemed so impressed by Mr. Abel. Eliminating a crush on John seemed like an easy task.

“I heard the cellar door open up a little while ago. But no, I haven’t seen him,” I said. My father stood up, suppressed a yawn, the outer corners of his eyes teared.

“Burn these for me,” he said, indicating his blood soiled clothing with both hands. I nodded. My father lumbered out of the kitchen toward the stairway and the bathroom upstairs just as John knocked on the back door.

       When he was not away at a car race, my father would spend a portion of his Sunday attending church. He’d put on his only suit, fold a windsor knot into his tie, then we’d walk to Our Lady Of The Assumption church. There, my father would step across the flagstone threshold, pause, straighten his tie, stare at the altar in the distance for a moment, then pivot one hundred eighty degrees, and depart. Everyone watched. No one ever uttered a word. Ernesto DeCascos was a fine mechanic, and he never price gouged. Miles of blacktop, desert, and the cursed heat between any given points A and B gave him latitude. I enjoyed few other insights on the subject, but I knew that it all had to do with my mother.