The aroma of flowers permeated the
whole room and sounds surrealistically imitating Rorschach images exploded
from all shapes of semi darkness: sobs, chokes, small muffled cries, awkward
half-suppressed giggles, a nose as if being blown off a face, a deep consistent
haunting Irish cough that seemed as if were encased in lakes the colors
of brown-pink phlegm.
Twenty-one year old Michael stood
next to his seventeen year old half-sister Nancy whose breathing sounded
like a scream escaping from one of his nightmares. He still had to
sleep with lights on whatever room it was.
Larry stood next to his full-sister
Clara. They had flown up from "Your vote if we don't like don't count"
Florida. Larry thirty-one years old presumed to be the spokesperson
for his brothers and sisters since he had been the oldest when their mother
had placed them into the Saint Apartheid
Orphanage for "just a little while" that became twenty
or so months. Larry told his uncle Johnny, whom they had laughed
at for attempting to build a hut for them to hide deep inside days before
Johnny's sister Tina was taking them to "The Home" that Danny wasn't going
to make it up to the wake and funeral.
Johnny was four years older than
Larry and looked shocked when Larry told him the reason why his brother
Danny wasn't coming up was because he was slowly going crazy in Florida
cowboy country due to their father Al telling him he had nearly died on
the operating table and Christ had come to
him showing him the way to make millions in antiques
- so he could begin saving all the crippledd children in the world.
The only money they would see - Larry told Johnny - was Al's insurance
money and that was the reason Clara had come with him; to sign the policy.
Danny was wearing a black cape,
a black mask while carrying a large rock asking migrant orange pickers
to smash his head so he could lose the laugh in his head that was planted
there the night after they returned from the orphanage when he had seen
seven drunken men taking turns to walk on a
beam of light into their mother's bedroom where her
nervous laugh greeted each staggering visitor.
When Johnny asked Larry why he
called his father Al, he was told their mother told them that it was all
Al's fault she had to place them where she was since he was a jealous man
always thinking she was cheating on him and that was the why she was divorcing
him; leaving unsaid she could not be
encumbered with four children as she worked in bars
and just then carrying a child born of a generous patron.
Johnny wanted to tell Larry that
in truth his father had caught Tina in the back seat of their car with
the carpenter who was building their "dream house" but Larry began choking
- regurgitating the same sounds that had emmanated from the American-Black
man he had strangled in Rosewood Florida, where forty years before most
of the African-Americans had been massacred by a horde of hyphenated European-Americans
(Irish-Americans, Rebel-Americans and some people from a lost tribe) for
starting the Great depression - for having the audacity to speak to a fine
pretty white woman in
a bar - while Larry's mother, with her brain damaged
after she drove through a stop sign a few years before, was formulating
deformed words into a whisper for Michael: "Dan't begetch de evelobes!"
Tina continued to stare at the
silver tray - envelopes full of money - just to the side of her first
husband's head.
Al, fifty-two years old, lay in
his casket ... dead. Dead. Dead.