Year of the Pig by James A. Gilletti

A STORY FROM THE BRACKET SERIES

Saturday, February 20th – 10:15pm 

 As soon as I slid my key into the door, I felt her hand slyly sweep down my back.

     “Hey, what’re you doing?” I half-jokingly cautioned.

     “Distracting you,” she teased.

     “Just so long as you don’t try to frisk me,” I joshed.

Usually, the strange invasion of unwanted touch throws my ogre switch in a heartbeat, but at that moment, it soothed me. Like that first sip of bourbon from a new bottle, she warmed something in me that had gone untended for ages. Careful, I thought to myself. If this night’s headed where I think it is, I’d better keep my nightshirt on. I wouldn’t want her to catch a glimpse of those old battle scars and run away screaming.

The deadbolt stubbornly shifted aside with a loud crack and I swung the door open. Out of habit, my fingers flicked on the living room lights as we strolled inside. I turned to study her observant eyes in the tungsten glow of my hanging lamp. At first, I couldn’t tell if she was intrigued or repelled by what she saw.

     “This is it,” I announced. “The famous Brackett Manor. What do you think?”

She scanned my face, then the living room. “It’s...rustic with a touch of class.”

     “A touch? That’s a low appraisal.”

     “How do you figure?”

     “Wait’ll you see the smoking lounge and the wine cellar and the billiard parlor. I’ve even got an Olympic swimming pool out back.”

     “You’re always front and center with the wisecracks, do you?”

     “It means you’ve captured my attention. Consider it an honor. So, you like the place?”

     “I do. It’s an acquired taste, as humble abodes go.”

     “What’s it remind you of?”

Her eyes widened and her mouth fell agape. “It reminds me of a cabin where Hemingway would stay for a fishing trip.”

     “That your way of saying it’s a bachelor pad?”

     “What gave you that idea?”

     “Your eyes.”

     “Oh, really?” she asked as she stepped up to my face. “What else are my eyes telling you?”

     “That I should be a good host and fix us a couple drinks.”

She arched an eyebrow and swiveled her head slightly.

     “Hmmm, not exactly what I was thinking,” she half-whispered as she leaned in for a light kiss. “But I won’t refuse your offer.”

I hung up our jackets and headed for the kitchen. She began exploring my living room while I retrieved a pair of glasses from the cabinet.

     “How long have you lived here?” she asked with a mixture of curiosity and remote disdain.

     “Bourbon all right?” I asked.

     “What, don’t you have any gin? I thought you had class.”

     “Fine. Be that way. Tonic?”

     “No. Just ice and lime.”

     “Wow. No fuckin’ around for you.”

     “That’s why you like me.”

I leaned out from behind the kitchen wall and shot her a quick smile. “Twenty-three years next month,” I answered with a drop of crescent cubes into her glass.

     “And you still have the same furniture?”

     “You’re goddamn right, I do.”

     “Why!”

     “See, as you get to know me, you’ll learn that I maintain everything to completion.”

     “Joe, Joe, Joe...you need to get with the times.”

     “Hey, now. Those are high-end items for a cop salary. Just be glad I didn’t throw a blanket over a long stack of phone books and call it a couch. Some guys who do that, you know.”

     “I know,” she retorted. “They’re called bums.”

I let out a chuckle while she moved from the couch to the entertainment wall. The familiar sound of vinyl sliding against cardboard gave away her next move. Perfect, I thought; now she’ll shit on my music. I strolled into the living room with our drinks as she began to pour over a stack of albums.

     “Booker Little,” she read aloud.

     “One of my favorites,” I reviewed. “There’s a great one gone too soon. What that man could do with a trumpet was poetry.”

     “Never heard of him,” she confessed.

     “Oh, I’m sorry. Were you expecting The Partridge Family?”

She took her glass of gin and brushed her sandy hair aside. “What are we drinking to?” she inquired.

     “My stock quote toast is to brotherhood, country, and justice, but under the circum – “

     “How about we drink to tonight?”

     “Simple. You’ll get no resistance from me.”

She set down the records and clinked her gin to my bourbon. Her eyes beamed a hint of mischief in my direction as she took a measured sip. I took a seat on the couch while she made her way to the hallway, stopping to study a picture.

     “Who are these gorgeous people?”

     “Those are my folks.”

     “Awww,” she cooed. “Was this their wedding day?”

     “Yep. June 1st, 1922. Funny story about that picture.”

     “Hold on,” she said, bringing the picture with her to the couch. “You look nothing like your mother.”

     “Except for when I smile, or so she told me.”

     “Really? Let’s see you smile.”

     “Give me a reason.”

     “If you don’t, I will leave the biggest pinch mark on your arm – “

     “You won’t get the chance – “

     “Then smile for me. I’m serious.”

After staring her down for a short spell, I relented. “All right, but just once. This is the sweetest expression you’ll ever see on this kisser, courtesy of m’ma. Now, pay close attention because this is the only time you’ll see this.”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and dropped my chin to my chest. Another breath later, I lifted my head and mugged like Jerry Lewis in one of his goofball movies. Not a second later, she lunged right at me. I was already laughing when she slapped my arm.

     “There!” she exclaimed. “That’s a real smile. How hard was that?”

     “You should’ve seen your face,” I joshed.

She plopped down on the couch next to me and took another sip. “So, what’s the story behind this picture?”

     “You want the synopsis or the scenic route?”

     “I’ll take the scenic...oh! Hello! Manners! What are their names?”

     “Stanley and Francine. Francine’s in the white dress.”

     “I know that. How did they meet?”

     “About a year before that picture was taken, my dad got himself into trouble and had to go to court.”

     “Uh-oh.”

     “Oh, yeah. He was a wild mustang back in the day. See, he was a carpenter. Damn good at his trade, but he was drunk all the time. How he managed to keep it together for as long as he did, I’ll never know. One night, he’s out doing the town with his buddies over by the Thea Foss Waterway and they’re all shitfaced. About one o’clock in the morning, these bozos get their drunk asses thrown out of the last bar on their usual run. So, there these dumbbells are, standing in the street three sheets to the wind like a bunch of idiots. Now, do they decide to call someone to come get them? Oh, no. They decide to keep the party going at one of these dipshits’ houses, except their too drunk to drive, so they hoof it.”

     “No!”

     “Not too bright, that crew. So, they take marching toward Hilltop in the middle of the night, singing, laughing, making all kinds of noise. Pretty soon, some guy sticks his head out a window and tells them all to shut up. Most of the group kept walking, but Dear Old Dad being Dear Old Dad turns around and bellows, ‘Why don’t you come down here and make me, you chickenshit son of a bitch!’ So, the guy closes his window and that was the end of it, or so Dad thought. Couple minutes later, a police car pulls up, the uniforms get out and order these guys to sit on the curb. They go down the line, come to my dad, and discover he’s the drunkest of the bunch. They stand him up, tell him to touch his nose back and forth with both index fingers, walk in a straight line, and count backwards from ten.”

     “Oh, no,” she gasped.

     “Oh, yeah. It gets worse. So, dad gets up and starts to stumble around like some glass-jawed boxer who just got walloped with an uppercut. He counts down to eight from ten when he spins around and ralphs all the over the policeman right behind him.”

     “What?!” she exclaimed.

     “I told you he was wild. So, the next morning, he’s in court fighting the granddaddy of all hangovers when the judge gives him two choices: 60 days in the county cooler or 500 hours of community service. He takes the second choice.”

     “Where’d they put him?”

     “They assigned him to a boarding houses on Yakima Avenue for drunks on the wagon, a place where they could stay ‘til they can get on their feet. My dad’s job was to fix doorknobs, windows, plumbing, electrical, anything that needed repair. His first day there, he walks by the kitchen and sees this short, brown-haired woman in a blue dress out of the corner of his eye. He stops on a dime, turns on his heel and stands in the doorway so he can get a better look at her. She sees him there and shoots a wide-eyed glance right at him. That’s when old pop got slammed with a blackjack.”

     “Ohhhh, love at first sight.”

     “Not for her, it wasn’t. She took one look at him and saw trouble. He tried to strike up a conversation with her, but she had to cook and wash the laundry for all these guys. But Dad kept at her. Every day, on his lunch break, he’d drop by the kitchen and ask if he could take her to eat. And every time, she flat-out told him, ‘No. I don’t go with gutter trash.’ And that was it.”

     “Until the next day,” she chimed in.

     “Until the next day, and then the next day, and so on and so forth. Finally, after he’d been there a few months, he goes walking by the kitchen and she calls him in. She has him get some cans of tomatoes from the cabinets that she can’t reach. After that, Dad says, ‘I’ll be right back.’ After that, he comes back in with his hands behind his back. She asks him what he’s hiding. So, he shows her: a white rose. Of course, he didn’t say he's swiped it from the garden of a house he’d been building. But he hands her the rose and says, ‘I found this and I wanted you to have it because it reminds of you.’ So, she asks him the last time he had a drink. He said six months. Then, she makes a deal with him. She says, ‘I’ll accept this rose, but I won’t go out with you, I won’t let you court me, and I won’t introduce you to my family. But if you stay off the sauce until your service is up and help me out around here when I need it, I’ll marry you. So...”

     “That is so sweet!”

     “It’s kind of like that old song “Big Bad Bill is Sweet William Now”. Before your time. So, it’s my dad’s last day and he strolls into the kitchen wearing the nicest suit he had. For once in his life, he looked like a million bucks. He slicked back his hair, he shined up his shoes, whole shebang. He presents her with a bouquet of white roses, gets down on one knee, pops open a box with a surprise inside, and pops the question. He gets as far as “will you” when she cuts him off and says, ‘YES! Now, get up and kiss me so I take the biscuits out of the oven!’”

She let out a guffaw while I took a snort of bourbon. “So,” I continued. “They settle on June 1st because the weather forecast was warm.”

     “They had an outdoor ceremony?”

     “You got it.”

     “Where?”

     “Y’ever drive by the ASARCO plant on Ruston Way?”

     “I have.”

     “Do you know the smokestack on top of the hill?”

     “Yeah...”

     “That’s where they exchanged vows.”

     “No way! At the top?!”

     “At the top.”

     “How did...? Why!”

     “Back in those days, ASARCO had this bargain where if anybody agreed to get married at the top of the stack, they’d give the happy couple a brand new range and oven. Well, Dad heard about this through one of the guys he worked with and thought it would be fun. It took some arm-twisting to convince my mother, but eventually, she agreed to it. So, the big day arrives, they climb to the top, run through a short ceremony, and they kiss. So, there they are, the newlyweds, beaming and waving at their guests applauding on the ground below. That’s when Dad pretends to lose his balance, pratfalls off the platform, screams, and catches himself on the railing.”

     “Oh, my God!”

     “That was his idea of a joke. Except when everybody came down off the ladder, nobody was laughing. And boy, did my mother slap the hell out of him. But as soon as she was done, then headed off to the reception and the rest, as they say, is history. And as an epilogue, every June 1st, my father gave my mother a bouquet of white roses. And then she’d slap the hell out of him.”

     “What a sweet story. Are they still around?”

     “Nah, Dad’s been gone since ’45 and we just lost Mom last year.”

     “Oh, I’m sorry.”

     “Yeah, they were wonderful folks, but it was their time.”

We spent the next hour or so trading stories about growing up in Tacoma, travel, and how she wanted to start her own psychiatric practice after graduate school. She fired her fair share of pointed questions; some of them I dodged, others I half-answered. Then came a specter of a question I could not stop from haunting me: what was my saddest day on the force like?

The room fell somberly quiet while I rifled through possible responses in my mind: why do want to know; let’s talk about something else; did I ever tell you that story? The problem was I’d already played each of those cards with her, some more than once. There was only one way out of this maze: the truth. The phonograph spun up a subdued cut from a jazz album as I began to speak.

     “It was about a year, year-and-a-half ago. I’m out in the field working a lead on a murder case when a call comes in over the radio: M.D.B. That’s police code for multiple dead bodies. I stick the blue light on the roof, switch on the siren and head to the scene. So, I get there around ten in the morning and it’s already a sad scene. Rough neighborhood down by Parkland. The uniforms have the place cordoned off and there’s a small crowd gathered outside. Some of them are holding umbrellas because it’s raining so hard. Soon as I get out of the car and start walking toward the house, a patrolman sees me coming, steps out onto the front porch, and holds up three fingers. That means three bodies are inside.”

     I took a quick sip to wet my whistle. “So, I head inside this split-level house. Real dump. Food stains on the walls, fist holes in the doors, every room smelled like a petting zoo. I go upstairs into the kitchen and I see a woman in her thirties dressed in a sweatsuit laying on the floor with four gunshots to the chest. Then, I turn around and head into the living room. On the floor in front of the fireplace is a man in his thirties dressed in corduroy pants and a flannel shirt with pressure contact gunshot wound to this right temple. Revolver’s on the floor next to him. On the mantelpiece is an envelope with a rambling, scattered mess of a note inside. You’d think it was the same guy who writes all the damn notes because they all say the same shit. ‘Life is so hard, I can’t go on, Bible quote this, I’ll see you in Heaven that, blah blah blah.”

     “Oh, God,” she muttered sadly.

     “So, I look up at the patrolman and say, ‘Where’s the third?’ He has to hang his head and clear his throat before he can answer me: ‘In the bedroom. It’s a...’ He couldn’t even finish what he saying, so I jumped in and said, ‘Down the hall?’ ‘On the left.’ That’s all he could say. So, I make my way down this dark, dingy hallway and I come to the last door on the left. All I’ll tell you, every step you take down a path like that is worse than the one before it because you’re about to discover something awful. So, I get to the door and I start to open it, but it’s catching on something. I look down and see a baseball mitt. So, I clear that out of the way and then step inside the room. Laying in the bed is a ten-year-old boy with a gunshot wound to the back of his head. He was holding a stuffed pelican and was probably asleep when...it happened. But that wasn’t the worst part.”

     “What was the worst part?”

     I had to catch my breath.

     “Joe,” she implored. “What was the worst part?”

     “He, uh...he looked like my nephew. I’ve never told anybody this. When I got a look at him, I kneeled beside the bed and I held his hand. I couldn’t tell him, “I’ll find who did this.” Because I've said that before, and I've done it. So, I just stayed with him for a little while. And then finally, I told him, ‘I’m sorry you never got a chance, kid. I can’t promise that no one will forget about you, but I sure as hell won’t.’ After that, we did what we had to do and closed up the scene. Soon as we were done there, I stopped by a phone booth and called up my brother. I asked him, ‘Is Tony there? I gotta ask him something.’ So, Ed says, ‘Just a minute.’ And I hear those excited little footsteps running toward the phone and the kid just beams, ‘Hi, Uncle Joe!’ Hearing his giddy voice just lifted me. So, you could say that was a sad day with a happy ending.”

That eerie silence crept into the room again. When I was sure she wasn’t going to say something, I continued.

     “Do you want to know something? I still see that kid. I still see all my victims. They come to visit me once in a while, usually in my sleep. They always appear the way I found them; shot, stabbed, beaten beyond recognition.”

     “What do they say to you?” she gently pressed.

     “Nothing, most of the time. But every once in a while, they have a few words for me: why haven’t you found my killer, why did you let my daddy beat me to death, one day you’ll be here with us. But do you want to know what I wish for most of all? That I can meet them. Not discover them over and over again, like I did at the crime scene, but introduce myself. I want to know what their voices sound like, how it feels to shake their hand or hug them, and most of all, I want to tell them I did the best I could.”

I downed the rest of my drink and looked at Sue. Her face was stained with tears and her every breath echoed the strain of sympathy.

     “That’s pretty crazy, right?” I asked half-jokingly. “You know, if you want to run out of here screaming, there’s the door.”

She leaned in close to me, brushed my face with her hand, and pulled me toward her for the longest kiss I’d had since high school.

     “Everyone I’ve ever asked to be my friend is dead.”

     “How does that make you feel?”

     “I, uh...”

I had to take one last drag from my cigarette just to set my head straight.

     “I don’t think about it that often. But if I did, it would probably hurt.”

     “That’s not all that hurts you, is it?”

     “What is this, your office hours, Doctor?”