The Bad Angel Brothers, page 2
“There’s a short answer and a long answer to that,” he said of my harmless greeting. “The short answer is ‘I’ve got a ton of things on my mind.’” His eyes dismissed this as he agitated his folded hands. He said, “The long answer is what I have on my mind, the details. I keep thinking, when Dad was my age he had a small insurance agency, and was in debt because of some bad faith policies, and two young kids. I don’t know how he kept his composure . . .”
I started to say, Dad was an optimist, and was going to add how he was positive and spiritual, his piety giving him strength, but Frank had unfolded his hands to gesticulate and was still talking.
“. . . something to do with not facing facts, being a kind of dreamer. Ask him what he did for a living and he’d say, ‘Insurance, but what I’ve always wanted to do was some sort of forestry-related work.’ He wanted to be a forest ranger! I could never live like that. What I never understood . . .”
Dad never wanted to be a forest ranger. But instead of correcting Frank, I said, “He admired you for having important friends.”
This seemed not to register. Frank said, “Think of it. How he died before the reckoning came. It was Mum who had to face the music. She had her feet on the ground.”
“And her parents’ money.”
Frank wagged his finger, using it to clear my statement away. He said, “She paid back every penny.”
This was an old story I’d heard before. In an early version the debts were forgiven, Dad was absolved, but Frank had advised Mum on the procedure. Today, Mum was the heroine, having settled Dad’s bad faith debt. Something was unspoken, too. I had always been Dad’s favorite, and Frank’s disparaging him as a deadbeat seemed a dig at me—another of those roundabout, untranslatable family slurs I referred to earlier.
“Can I get you gentlemen a drink?” It was the waitress, an older woman with a weary smile, and a pad in her hand. “And what else can I do you for?”
“Tomato juice, please,” I said. “No ice.”
Clasping his hands again, Frank said, “Water.”
“Still or sparkling?”
“Tap water.”
“Shall I tell you today’s specials?”
“Pass,” Frank said in a snippy voice.
Seeing the woman wince, I said, “I know what I’m going to have. A cup of clam chowder and the grilled haddock.”
“Good choice. Mashed potato or salad?”
“Mashed potato.”
“And you, sir?”
Frank said, “Same here.”
The waitress repeated the order, reading from her pad. She then said, “I’ll be right back with your drinks.”
Frank leaned toward me. “Imagine, Dad an insurance stiff grandly calling himself an importer.”
“It was his hobby. Some of the stuff he sold was made overseas. China, for sure. Like a lot of my drilling equipment.”
Leaning closer, as though to someone on a witness stand, Frank said, “Think how hard it is to be who you say you are.”
Leaving me with this enigmatic thought, he sat back, looking pleased with himself.
The waitress set down my tomato juice and Frank’s glass of water and said, “Food’s on the way.”
Frank tapped the side of the glass with one finger, as though to test its temperature. “What was I saying?”
“Mum paid back every penny.” I did not correct him. I was enjoying this skewed version of the story.
And there was more, the valiant widow repaying her late husband’s debt, using her own money. And Frank taking time off from his law practice to help her. As he talked I noted the variations in the story, Dad now portrayed as selfish and neglectful, concealing his profits, squirreling money away, defaulting on his debts, undermining the family.
At a certain point in this conversation, my interest waned, I found this painful to hear, as though listening to it I was being disloyal to Dad. I said, “What about the things Dad did that had nothing to do with money? His sacrifices. His great heart. How he never complained. He loved Mum. He adored her. That counts for a lot.”
Frank stared at me as I spoke, expressionless, his slanted lips narrowed, unimpressed, or else not listening. He was a relaxed and expansive talker, but he was an impatient and agitated listener, and his blank stare was an example of his impatience.
He said, “Every time I pick up a screwdriver I think of how Dad used the tip of a knife as a screwdriver. So all the knives in our cutlery drawer had a sort of twist at the tip, a weird little kink, where it was used to remove a screw.”
“I do that sometimes.” Frank knew that, he’d often mocked me for it. Some of those damaged knives might have been my doing.
“And not only the knives,” Frank said. “What about the time he lunched the car door?”
He was disparaging Dad, yet I smiled at a Littleford word I loved, like bollocky for naked, tonic for soda, hosey for choose, and What a pisser. Lunched meant “ruined,” but I hated hearing it applied to something Dad had done.
“Banged the door against a parking meter in a hurry to see a client.”
“Just a ding,” I said.
“Then, trying to smooth it out he pushed too hard on his electric buffer and fried the coil—lunched that, too.”
“Two lunches, what’s the big deal.”
“One lunch too many,” Frank said.
“Clam chowder,” the waitress said, sliding the cups toward us. “Haddock’s coming up.”
“Consider being a woman that age,” Frank said, as the waitress hurried away. He was nodding knowingly. “Probably fiftysomething and still hustling for tips. You know what waitresses make? Probably around a buck and change an hour.”
He said this sourly, so I said, “She’s about my age—and younger than you.”
Frank rapped on the table and said in an insistent hiss, “Cash is king.”
I was looking at his lips, how they trembled with these words, and expected him to say more. But there was no more. His statement was assertive, but his eyes looked unsure, as with the Dad story of debt, and the one about Dad using a kitchen knife as a screwdriver, and lunching the car door, and the obnoxious aside about the waitress’s pay.
Dumping oyster crackers into my chowder, I began eating. Watching me with damp lips, Frank stirred his chowder, dabbing at it with his spoon, but instead of eating any, he went on fiddling with it, like a chemist with a potion. His not eating disconcerted me and made it hard for me to swallow until, self-conscious, I gave up and pushed my half-eaten cup aside.
Frank was still poking at his untasted chowder. He said, “Took Dad and Mum to the Governor’s Ball. Mum just sat, dazzled. Dad goes up to Senator McBride and says, ‘I remember your father.’”
“Dad was very congenial. The only people he couldn’t stand were lazy aimless types. Remember his expression?”
Frank was staring at his chowder.
“He’s like a fart in a mitten—nice.”
But Frank said, “McBride’s father was convicted of bank fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud. He served six years in a federal lockup.”
The waitress returned with two plates. “Still working on that?” she said to Frank, who’d left his spoon in his untasted chowder.
“Take it,” he said and nudged it with his knuckles.
The waitress set down the plates of haddock and clearing away the chowder cups said, “Let me know if you need anything else.”
“Thanks,” I said and started to eat, but seeing Frank poking at his fish and not eating I was thrown, and in this delay, as though Frank was trying to find out if the fish was edible, I found it hard to swallow.
“How’s your son?” I asked.
Frank said, “Look in the mirror and ask yourself that question.”
He lifted and dropped the food on his plate, seeming to seek something underneath it, and he did this studiously, with a faint scowl of disgust on his lips.
I wondered whether he’d ask me about my son, Gabe. I was proud of Gabe’s academic record but decided not to volunteer anything unless Frank asked. Frank’s head was down. He was making a little hut of his heap of mashed potato, squaring the sides, hollowing out the middle, roofing it with flakes of his broken fish.
Just then a shadow fell over our booth, a man in a fedora, leaning toward Frank.
“Sorry to interrupt.”
Frank looked up and at once his face glowed with lunchtime charm, its opposing features seeming to resolve into a smooth smiling whole of welcome. He dropped his fish knife and lifted both hands to enclose the extended hand of the man who’d happened by.
“Well-met, well-met!” Frank said, sounding warmly grateful, and he hung on, tugging the man’s hand.
It was Dante Zangara, an old school friend of Frank’s who’d been a politician in Littleford for years and was now the mayor. Zangara greeted me, a casual fist bump with his free hand, saying “Who’s this stranger?,” but Frank was still talking excitedly.
“Who said, ‘The art of public life consists of knowing exactly when to stop, and then going a bit further’?” And with visible reluctance he released Zangara’s hand.
“Search me,” Zangara said. He had small close-set eyes over a hawk nose, and a way of licking his thin lips and spacing his words that made him seem as though he was speaking to someone taking dictation. “But, hey, I would not call that guy a chadrool. Listen, how’s the family?”
“Never better,” Frank said, a sweetness in his voice. “What about la famiglia, Zangara?”
“Connie’s a wreck.” Zangara raised his arms in an operatic gesture of despair. “Gina’s applying to college.”
“How can I help?” Frank said. He seemed to levitate in his seat, rising toward Zangara, his intense gaze fixed on the man.
“She wants to go to Willard, maybe study veterinary science. The kid’s nuts about animals.”
“I know a guy,” Frank said. “He has the ear of the dean of admissions. I could write a reference.”
“Frank, that would be fantastic.”
“A distinct honor,” Frank said. “Gina will make all of us proud.”
They hugged, awkwardly, because Frank was still in the booth, canted forward, the table edge jammed against his thighs, Zangara toppling, and then breaking free.
“The Bad Angel brothers,” Zangara said, straightening his jacket, coming to attention, with a little salute, touching his hat brim in homage. A high school nickname is forever, and it annoyingly defines you when you’re still living in your hometown. “You guys are fabulous.”
When this sunny visitation ended, and Zangara left the diner, Frank seemed to subside and become smaller, twisting himself back into his seat, to resume toying with his food. He’d fallen silent, but still was not eating.
I watched him resisting his food, and his stubbornness made me recall his slights and abuses when we were younger. In my angered imagination I pictured myself dragging him out of the booth and violently force-feeding him. It was the way an imprisoned hunger striker was fed, first immobilized, strapped to a six-point chair, a nasogastric feeding tube pushed into his nose and snaked into his throat, and nutritious slop hosed into him, while he gagged and struggled to breathe. Force-feeding had been used many times, by the U.S. and others on prisoners, and it was deemed torture—cruel, inhumane, and degrading, and sometimes fatal—but torture as a fine art, making it especially pleasant for me to contemplate with Frank (who once mentioned to me that he approved of it), intubated and choking to death and unable to speak, or to tell me another bullshit story.
“McBride later joined the D.C. branch of my old law firm.”
I needed to remind myself that this was the father of the senator Dad had apparently insulted.
“Became a lobbyist.”
Frank launched into a vaguely familiar story about lobbying, setting up businesses on Native American tribal land in Idaho, leasing agreements and financial schemes, saying, “Some of that land is fractionated,” and repeating the phrase “Cash is king.” But as he was still poking at his food—sculpting it, so to speak—and not eating, I could not understand his story. I knew I had heard it before, something about casinos, but this time it had a different emphasis that got my attention and seemed personal. “Mineral rights,” he kept repeating, and I wondered whether he was referring in some enigmatic way to the cobalt deposit I’d discovered in that same area of the state. Yet as long as he pushed his food around his plate, and did not eat any of it, I was too distracted with my fantasy—force-feeding him to death—to follow his story.
To get him to stop, I said, “Do you want anything else?”
“Yes,” he said. “I want to find the rich jerk who took a dump on me—kept me waiting in an outer office for almost an hour, seeming to take some pleasure in it, and then snubbed me when he deigned to see me. ‘We’ll get back to you. Have a nice day.’”
“When was this?”
“When I was nineteen, the summer I did office work for that Boston law firm.” He pushed his plate aside. “I’d like to punch him in the face.”
In an early, much longer version of this story the rich jerk was a young woman, and Frank had an exquisite rejoinder to Have a nice day. He said, I have other plans. In another version, it was an older woman and he demanded to see her boss. Getting even was a mission with Frank; but you never really get even, you just do more damage.
“Anyway, I heard his wife ditched him.” Frank folded his arms, presiding over his strange mounded plate of uneaten food. “Turned out he wasn’t doing his homework. But here’s the kicker. He claimed he stumbled on some stairs and bumped his wang on the newel post. So what does he do? He sues the building’s owners for loss of consortium. Because of the injuries he sustained in his stumble, his wife has been deprived of her”—Frank lifted his hands and clawed air quotes near my face—“husband’s services.” He twisted his swagged face into a smile. “Her comfort and happiness in his so-called society have been impaired by his damaged wang. Hey, I hated the guy but I learned something.”
I wanted to ponder “loss of consortium,” but I had indigestion. I was disgusted by my half-eaten meal, and I was disturbed at the sight of Frank’s uneaten meal, which, scraped and combined, was lumped like garbage.
“Fidge,” Frank said suddenly, shoving his cuff. “Look at the time—gotta go.”
He slid out of the booth, lifted his coat from the hanger, and left in a hurry.
He had not eaten anything. He had not asked me a personal question. He had deflected my questions. To a passerby—such as the waitress who was approaching the booth—his stories were rantings, if not borderline insane. But I knew they contained a meaning.
“Someone wasn’t hungry,” the waitress said.
I thanked her, gave her a bigger tip than she was expecting, and spent the rest of the day reflecting on the lunch—what Frank said, what he didn’t say, his having eaten nothing of what he’d ordered, and I grew melancholy.
That was the first lunch. I was puzzled. He dislikes me, I thought, and went no further, because who wants to enter the head of the person who hates you? But it also occurred to me that he might have had a stomach upset—he tended to be bilious in every sense—and maybe it was too painful for him to talk about. Maybe he was depressed, though apart from his divorce from his first wife long ago and a period of deep gloom, I’d never known Frank to be depressed. He made a point of being jaunty, especially in his cruel teasing. So I gave him the benefit of the doubt and began to think I was reading too much into his ambiguous stories and his uneaten meal. That plate he’d left, however, the mass of food, that slop disturbed me. He had hovered over the plate, and lumped it and pushed it around, making it his own, then rejected it, making a sort of statement I needed to interpret—very Frank.
Yet my birthday. He had not mentioned it, nor had he given me a present as he often did, even a token, as in the past, like the key chain, or baseball cap, or ballpoint pen, logo items he’d gotten free at a luxury hotel. I knew they were cheesy mementos he’d regifted, yet they showed he remembered.
And my cobalt strike, the Idaho mine, a big payday—he had not said anything about that either; and speculation, mentioning me, had been in the business news that Frank habitually read when trawling for clients.
He had not asked about Vita, and in the past he had never failed to do so.
You think: Odd not to mention any of this, but one of Frank’s perversities was emphasizing the importance of something by not bringing it up. I wondered whether that was the case at this lunch, and of course there was the sight of his mangled plate of food that he’d left looking punished, an obvious power move.
That night I told Vita about the lunch—the stories, the uneaten food, the references that seemed directed at me. As we were going through a bad patch at the time, I suppose I was looking for sympathy.
“He’s a piece of work,” she said, yet before I could agree she said, “But so are you.”
“It’s my birthday, Vee. He didn’t say a word about it.”
“That’s the sort of thing you might do.”
“Maybe by accident, but this seemed deliberate.”
“You forgot my birthday one year.”
“I was prospecting in Zambia, Vee!”
“Husband comes down with a severe case of amnesia in Zambia,” Vita said.
One of the characteristics of a troubled marriage is that wisps of half-remembered slights from the distant past appear fully formed and offensive in the present, to be marshaled as evidence.
“A lunch, Vee. A lunch where one of the lunchers doesn’t eat anything.”
“Maybe he wasn’t hungry.”
“The way he played with his food seemed hostile.”
“You play with your food sometimes,” she said.
“Vee, there was something unspoken at that lunch. It wasn’t just that he didn’t eat anything and told those stories about Dad. It was all oblique and empty, like a ritual.”
“Ritual,” she said, doubtful, as if I was overdramatizing the event. “Of what?”
