Four Seasons…July

Reggie was the kind of kid who would gladly bend over backwards onto a pile of rusty nails if he thought it would seize a few seconds of his father’s attention. Unfortunately, it seemed that between baseball and beer Reggie was receiving less and less of his share. Knowing his father’s affection for history and encyclopedic knowledge of seemingly every battle ever fought where someone lived to write about it, it took Reggie all of two seconds to decide the subject of his summer project.

“I’m doing my project on the Civil War,” Reggie proudly announced to Ms. Fisher three days before the end of the school year. At least if he had to do homework over the summer, he could work on something that would make his dad proud.

“Why the Civil War?” Ms. Fisher had asked, though Reggie noticed no wonder on her face.

“Because my dad says that if you know all about old wars, it’s easy to understand what’s happening now. History repeats itself, it’s our job to look for patterns.” Ms. Fisher only smiled, but Reggie could practically feel his father’s hand tousling his hair.

He ran every other block the entire trip home, even though he knew he’d have at least an hour to kill before the old man stepped through the door.

Turned out it was two, maybe three or four. Reggie decided to stop clock watching soon as he felt the hunger rolling through his stomach. He microwaved himself a burrito, then headed online to read up on the War Between the States.

“Hope you’re not looking at anything you’re not supposed to,” his dad said, shutting the front door behind him.

“Of course not,” Reggie shook his head and pointed at the screen. “I was reading about the Civil War.”

“Civil War, huh?” Reggie’s dad looked past his son’s tufts of dirty blond hair and onto the computer screen at a browser filled with old faded photographs of rolling knolls of piled bodies. Some wore uniforms of deep blue beneath the sun, but they were all forever captured in shades of dingy gray beneath the fading black and white of antiquity.

“So why are you reading about the Civil War?” Reggie had to guess at the end of the sentence as his father trailed into the kitchen.

“It’s our summer project. Ms. Fisher said we could either write a story that we make up ourselves, or we can do a research paper, but we got to decide on whatever subject we wanted. I chose the Civil War.”

“Oh yeah?” Reggie’s dad cracked the pop top of his Coors and brought the thin tin to his lips and guzzled. “Why’d you decide on the Civil War?” he wiped his mouth. “Why not World War II or at the Spanish Civil War or even Thermopile? Civil War’s been done.”

He didn’t wait for Reggie to answer. Just picked up the remote from the coffee table in exchange for his half empty beer can and then plopped his body onto the couch.

That was a month ago.

Reggie had been working on his project every day since. He’d spent the first couple of weeks online. He had the house to himself all day and loved getting lost in the endless sea of links, starting each morning at Wikipedia and then seeing where the day took him. But after a while he grew tired of staring at the same screen and decided he’d rather make the relatively short mile and a half walk to the library instead.

“Idiot!”

Reggie was on his way back home from that day’s jaunt to the library and approaching the end of the block when he heard the usual insult chased by the giggle he’d grown to loathe during the last eleven years of his life living in the second to the last house all the way at the end of Eureka Ave.

“Retard!” he heard a slightly older voice agree.

Reggie kept walking. “Sticks and stones…” he heard the voice of his mom, now almost three years silent. He tried not to spend too much time missing her, but it was always in moments like these when her memory snuck up and slithered inside him with the sudden dull thud of sorrow.

His dad had promised to come home early, the two of them making plans the night before to hit the batting cages. It didn’t matter what the Davis sisters had to say, he was an hour or so away from sharing a plate of nachos with his dad and waiting for his turn in the cages. That was all that mattered.

Reggie set his book bag on the concrete and pulled three days worth of mail from the box, mostly junk, then gave a subtle kick to the gate. The lock had been busted for almost three years, but the padlock was still there and people always assumed it was locked. His dad had moved the mailbox from the front door out to the fence since every time there was a shift change at the post office they’d end up going a week without getting their mail.

His dad said it was easier to move the mailbox then it was to fix the latch.

Reggie fished around in his pockets for maybe a minute and a half before surrendering to the reality of a lost key. He was locked out with nowhere to go and had at least an hour to kill before his dad would be home. He yanked on the front door knob, even though he knew there wasn’t the slightest chance it would budge. After all, he was the one who who had locked it in the first place.

Reggie tucked his bag beneath the bougainvillea that draped over the front side of the house and headed back to the sidewalk to retrace his footsteps, scanning the pavement a few squares in front him. He made it two blocks down Eureka, right to where he would’ve needed to turn onto Burnett, when he decided to abandon his search and head home to wait for his dad on the porch. His dad would be pissed that he’d lost his key, but would be twice as pissed if Reggie wasn’t there waiting when he got home.

Reggie strolled down the street, picking up his pace only when making a quick dash across the Davis’s front yard. “Fag,” he heard, “dumb ass” right behind.

He didn’t bother checking any of the other doors or windows since he always made sure everything was sealed before he went anywhere. Reggie sank to the ground, put his back against the front door, then opened his bag and pulled out a large volume so swollen with tattered and dusty pages, Reggie wondered if the Civil War was a recent event when the book first went to print.

He slowly thumbed through the pages and did his best to lose track of the passing minutes, but found it impossible to ignore the sun dipping behind the far off hills two hours after his father swore he’d be home.

At least it was the middle of summer and the batting cages would be open late. Reggie’s stomach surprised him with a sudden growl and he realized he hadn’t had a thing to eat besides a bowl of cereal early that morning and the half banana he’d chewed on before deciding to dump it into the first trashcan he’d passed on the way to the library.

He ignored the rumble and went back to the book, running his fingers along the pages and picturing his finished project along with all the pride that would march behind it. Reggie knew his father loved what he was doing. He had been leaving evidence of his progress on the table at night. Mostly photo copied cut-outs, though there were a few pages he’d printed from the computer and some handwritten essays in rough draft. Even though he left a mess on the table every night, his father hadn’t asked him to clean it once.

When would he be home?

Another two hours disappeared and Reggie found himself with his back pressed against the front door, now without the book and doing his best to ignore the ominous shadows around him. Every noise rang through the dry air with the echo of a threat, every car a broken promise.

Reggie heard the cackling laugh of a madman, or perhaps the crack of breaking, brittle leaves, and gave involuntary vent to a squeal that barely squeezed through the narrow hose of his throat. His face was crimson from the heat of embarrassment as the sound of mocking laughter from the Davis sisters standing above him.

“Look at the retard playing camping trip on his porch,” Amy sneered.

Jess, the younger of the two, took her cue. “Maybe he’s too stupid to realize he dropped this.” She wagged his house key in front of his nose, then snatched it away at the final moment, sending the two sisters into a riot of giggles.

Reggie could feel the rage inside him rolling toward a boil. He made a silent prayer to whoever might be listening that his father wouldn’t drive up at that moment only to find his son about to lose his temper at the two neighbor girls.

“Give it back to me,” Reggie held out his hand.

“Make me, re-tard,” Amy sneered.

The two of them laughing should have launched Reggie to motion, but instead he let his anger and embarrassment mingle around and bubble beneath his skin.

“Tell you what,” little Melissa Davis pointed her tiny nose at Reggie. “You tell me that I’m the prettiest girl in school, and the nicest, I’ll give it back to you.”

Instead of saying no, Reggie threw a rise into his shoulders and lowered his body so he was hovering over little Melissa. “Even if you were the prettiest, you would never be the nicest and that makes you ugly to me. You can keep your key.”

Melissa turned around and put all her tiny weight into hurling the possible evidence as far as she could into the ink black street. The clinking thud sounded a second later, somewhere in the distance, perhaps against a car and into grass. The Davis sisters stormed off.

Jake collapsed against the door again. Why had he let them get to him? Why hadn’t he just played their game and earned his key. He could already be in the house and his father would never know what happened.

He slammed the back of his head against the front door. Headlights flashed against the side of the house bringing Reggie to his feet. Something about the swath of light didn’t feel right and he knew it probably wasn’t his dad, but cars at this time of day were a rarity at the dead end of Eureka.

The car sidled toward the end of the street as though in search, then spun around and headed in the opposite direction. Reggie felt a cold chill rattle his body as he realized he was starting to feel truly frightened. His dad was getting later all the time, but this time it felt different.

Panic was a rising tide inside him as Reggie realized his father might have been trying to call for hours and he never would never have been able to hear a single ring.

The next hour crawled. The house had become a tangled shadow of earth tones behind him, and even sitting under a star filled sky, Reggie could not draw enough light to untangle the text in his book.

What if his father was dead?

The thought was enough to jar Reggie from whatever peace he had any hope of finding. The sudden realization that God might be planning to finish off what he’d started when he stuffed his mother full of cancer three years earlier began to suffocate Reggie’s otherwise sound reasoning. He buried his face between his knees and tried to control the chattering of his teeth as a torrent of heaving bellows shook his entire body, starting with his heart and working outward until all ten toes were twisted with grief.

Please, please, please don’t let my dad be dead.

Please, please, please don’t let my dad be dead.

Please, please, please don’t let my dad be dead.

Please, please, please don’t let my dad be dead.

Please, please, please don’t let my dad be dead.

Please, please, please don’t let my dad be dead.

Reggie began to rock back and forth, losing himself in the metronomic chant, slowly convincing himself his father would return home any minute.

Please, please, please don’t let my dad be dead.

Please, please, please don’t let my dad be dead.

Please, please, please don’t let my dad be dead.

Please, please, please don’t let my dad be dead.

Please, please, please don’t let my dad be dead.

Please, please, please don’t let my dad be dead.

His dad wasn’t ever coming home. It was nearing ten. He was dead in a car accident, lying on the side of the road. Alone. And Reggie would be alone for the rest of his life. They would come to the house, take him away and throw him into a big room filled with all the other kids without moms, dads, or thinnest beam of hope.

A thin shaft of light pierced the thick mottle of bougainvillea and Reggie once again rose to his feet, face streaked and shoulders shaking from the acute terror of a worst possible future.

A sound that settled somewhere between a purr and a growl seemed to oscillate through the Juniper tree in the side yard causing Reggie’s heart to stop. The pool of sweat on his face was suddenly covered by a sea.

The sound rattled through branches again, this time closer.

Something leapt from the tree and landed at Reggie’s feet. The scream that wanted to leave his throat died a grisly death at the edge of his lips. Suddenly brave, he ran right past the modest sized raccoon that may as well have been a dragon, and into the street toward the oncoming headlights below the clattering engine he’d been waiting hours to hear.

Thank you, thank you, thank you Reggie murmured, swallowing the series of sobs and snivels that were barely holding back the vomit in his mouth.

Reggie’s dad exited the car and slammed the door. “What in the hell are you doing out here?” he asked, “and why aren’t there any lights on?”

Reggie was grateful for the abundance of shadows, glad his father couldn’t see his tear streaked face. It was over. His father was home. Everything was better now. Reggie allowed a final succession of shivers to flutter through his body before finally opening his mouth to answer. “I was locked out,” he admitted. “I lost my key.”

“Why the hell didn’t you head over to the Davis’s? How long have you been sitting out here for?”

“I was waiting for you,” Reggie said. “You promised you’d be home early and we’d go to the batting cages. Where were you?”

“I went out, I needed a moment.” Reggie could taste the missing apology like every granule of sugar stripped from a gallon of Kool-Aid, but it didn’t matter. His dad was home. He followed his father up the porch and waited for him to open the door. It made no difference that he was cold and alone, hungry and scared.

His dad was home. Everything would be okay.

Reggie’s father bent down to retrieve his son’s bag and saw the open library book lying face down. He picked it up and stepped in the house, then flipped on the light and looked at the cover. “The Civil War, eh?” He looked back at Reggie with a hint of approval wrapping around the edges of his mouth. “What got you interested in this?”

“It’s for my summer project,” Reggie said.

“What project?” his father walked into the house and headed for the fridge.

Writer Dad

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