You Can’t Go Home Again
Tom lit a cigarette and muttered to the dead house. “Jesus said you can’t go home again. Now I know why.” He shook off his muttering and waved his hands at the moldering entryway. “Welcome to my childhood home.” He let his cigarette smolder in his face while he shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at his surroundings. “It took more than forty years of being abandoned, but this place finally has the right atmosphere to suit my memories of it. When I was a kid, it was a house of horrors, but it looked nice. Now it’s rotten. It was rotten then too, but now it looks like it should.
“I hate this house. I hate my memories of it. I hate everything that ever happened inside of it. I probably should have burned it down instead of leaving it abandoned, but I would have had to come back to it to burn it, so here it stands. Here it stands as evil and menacing as it ever was. Do you feel it? I feel it. The house knows I’m here. I’m filled with dread, just like I used to be every minute I ever spent here.”
I stared at my father. I’d never seen him so emotional. He drew on his cigarette and plucked it from his face so he could use it to point at me. “I see the way you’re looking. You’re wondering if the old man has gone round the bend. Don’t worry, son, I haven’t lost my mind yet. Not quite yet.”
He beckoned with the cigarette. I moved to stand at his side with my feet on the door. Tom pointed at the water darkened wooden floor at the bottom of the ornate staircase. “My mother died right there. She and my father had a fight.” He shook his head. “That’s not true, not really. My father didn’t fight with anyone. People fought with him. He always stayed placid until he could shove the knife in your back. My mother had been after him like she was always after him for his drinking or his gambling or his whoring. They were on their way down for dinner when he had enough of her fault-finding. He gave her a shove, and she tumbled down the stairs. She broke her neck on the banister and landed here in a heap. I saw it happen. I was four. My sister was barely weaned.
“I still remember the way she looked as she lay here with her eyes wide open, and her head bent to an impossible angle. I can still see the surprise on her face that she was dead. She was dressed in a seafoam evening-gown fresh from her recent trip to the fashion boutiques of New York. They took her away in that dress. I guess the mortician cut it off her on a marble slab in the basement of some long-forgotten hospital. It happened right here, in April of 1955.”
I stared at the spot on the floor and tried to imagine the dead woman and her four-year-old son. I was surprised to hear Tom mention a sister. I never heard about her.
He flicked his cigarette at the foot of the stairs. It landed on the spot where he said his mother died. He stepped off the door to crush the butt under his heel. “Don’t feel too badly for my mother. She married my father for his money, not because she loved him. My father was impossible to love, and she was a grasping wretched person. She was a lot like this house, beautiful on the outside, but corrupt to the bone on the inside. She liked to complain about my father’s whoring, but she was no better. The only difference between the two was she was more discrete about her infidelities. The fact that she died the way that she did should have come as no surprise to anyone, especially her.
“My father and his influence said that she tripped at the top of the stairs and fell. No one questioned his story. No investigation was done. If anyone suspected he murdered her, they never said, or at least, they never said it to me. Once she was in the ground, my father didn’t have any reason to be discrete about anything. His excesses became even more excessive. My sister and I were raised by the help and my father invited his whores to practice their debauchery right here in the family home.”
Tom put one foot on the bottom of the staircase and started to climb. “Come on, son. The tour has just begun.”
I hurried around him and tried to go up first. “Let me clear it at least. There might be someone hiding up there.”
He swept me to the side and pinned me against the wall with an indifferent arm. “It’s kind of you to worry, but I only asked if you were carrying for your benefit, not mine. It would be too perfect for me to be killed in this house. I’m going first.”
My father held me back while he climbed the stairs. They groaned under his weight but supported him until he made the landing. He paused at the top just long enough to light a cigarette, then he shoved his hands into his pockets and turned his steps along the hall. I hurried up behind him. I unholstered my gun and held it at my side in case we had to confront the unknown.
The second floor was in worse shape than the first. Most of the plaster had fallen out of the ceiling and the wooden lathe was water stained and rotten. I could see directly into the attic all down the hallway. Daylight was visible here and there where the roof had failed completely. Tom stood with his back to the wall. He faced a closed door. His hands were still in his pockets. He smoked the cigarette which burned from the corner of his mouth.
I moved next to him to match his gaze. When Tom explained, his voice was low and soft, like he was nervous of alerting whatever might lurk behind the door. “This was my father’s room. I’ve never laid my hand on that doorknob in all my life.” He nudged me and nodded at the door. “You open it.” I reached for the glass doorknob, but he stopped me. “Careful!”
I didn’t know if he wanted me to be careful of real danger or imagined. I took a practical precaution instead of a paranormal one. I moved to the hinge side of the door and stood with my back to the wall and my gun in the air. I reached with my left hand and turned the knob. I gave the door a shove and waited to see if it would open. To my surprise, the door swung easily on silent hinges. I turned my body into the opening with my gun pointed ahead. I could immediately tell that there was no living threat inside. Tom moved behind me until his big gut bumped into my back. He peered into the room over my head.
The bedroom had once been grand. The furniture was still inside. A four-post canopy bed commanded the middle of the room. It was built from some fine, exotic wood and carved with flutes and frills and angel heads. A matching armoire stood against the wall on the opposite side. Heavy nightstands flanked the bed. Overstuffed upholstered furniture filled the voids left by the hard furnishings. A small breakfast table with three chairs was gathered into the corner.
Every surface in the room was blackened with foul smelling mold. The windows were intact, and the shades drawn. I hoped Tom wouldn’t try to enter. I didn’t think his compromised respiratory system would survive a lungful of the poisoned air.
He made no moves to go inside. He stared and smoked until his cigarette burned down. He crushed the butt on the hallway wall and whispered. “Close it, please. It’s best if it stays just as it is.”
I pulled the door shut and made certain it latched. Tom didn’t move until it was. When he started again, he walked more slowly, carefully. He didn’t bull his way through the house like he had since he smashed the front door. The glimpse into his father’s room had done something to him; sobered him somehow.
He picked his way along the hall and took great care with his footsteps. Each time he shifted his weight from one foot to another, he did so gradually to make certain the decayed floor would support him. Several times the structure groaned in protest, but it held. He spoke again when we were several paces down from his father’s room. His voice was as low and careful as his steps.
“My mother’s room was on the other side of the hall from my father’s. I don’t care to see it. It didn’t remain hers for very long after she died. My father rotated one whore after the other through it. I call them whores, but they weren’t streetwalkers. They were social climbers who were willing to offer themselves to him for a chance at a higher station in society. My father used them for what he could get and tossed them out when they no longer interested him. He gave them nothing; no money, no status, nothing.”
Tom stopped at another closed door. This one he threw open and stepped through without hesitation. I went in behind. He turned on his feet with a motion of rare grace and held a hand in the air. “This was my room.”
The furnishings and fittings were simpler than those of his father’s room. The proportions were smaller, but it was still a fine room. The windows were smashed and vines grew across the ceiling. The room was heavily damaged by rainwater, but it hadn’t moldered like his father’s room had. I could still make out posters which were thumbtacked to the papered walls. Each one was a Motown great. Some of the posters were cut from magazines. Some were concert advertisements. Some looked like they’d come inside the jackets of long-playing record albums. Martha and the Vandellas posed on a background of wavy purple and black stripes. All five of the Temptations smiled from a glittering stage. Sly Stone was frozen in a flying leap across a white background. The Supremes made pouty duck lips in long pink dresses.
There was an old console stereo in the corner of the room, and a strangely undisturbed record cabinet nearby. A full-length mirror on a wooden stand stood against the wall. The glass was crazed and broken but still in the frame. Tom moved in front of the mirror.
“I used to play my records and dance in the mirror. There were these crazy music and dance shows on television back then. You’ve seen the reruns of ‘Midnight Special’ and ‘Soul Train.’ They came later. The local station had a show they called ‘Outta Sight.’ They had all the big names on. Aretha Franklin, Little Stevie Wonder back when he was a kid, Al Green, Marvin Gaye when he still wore a suit, Gladys Knight and the Pips, poor Tammi Terrell before she died. My God it was fun. I’d watch the show and try to dance like they did.”
Tom clapped his hands and hunched his shoulders. He took a deep breath and whistled a tune I recognized immediately. He shuffled sideways across the floor and rocked his upper body back and forth in time to his whistling. He turned on his toes and clapped his hands. He sang the title and hummed the lyrics of a Martha and the Vandellas hit. “Bum bum bum bum bum, bum bum bum bum, dancin’ the the street, dancing in the street.” He whistled some more as he took long, sliding steps back to where he started. He turned again and clapped his hands and came to rest.
I applauded his performance. In spite of my father’s unwieldy size, he could move smoothly when he wanted to. That was the only time I ever saw him dance. He smiled at my applause and at the rare happy memory.
“Music was one of my few joys when I lived here. Sometimes Constance would come across the hall and dance with me. A lot of the time, she’d sprawl on my bed and watch me make a damn fool of myself. She was sweet about it. She never made fun. She watched the same shows I did. There wasn’t much else on back then, so she knew all the moves I was trying to do. She used to help. She’d give me tips so I could get better. I loved her, so much.”
I was so wrapped up in the telling of Tom’s happy memory, I asked an ill-chosen question. “Where is she?”
Tom’s face went from bright to black. I realized I shouldn’t have said anything, but it was too late to suck the words back in. He took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. He left the room and crossed the hall towards another closed door. He opened it and paused in the doorway. The sound of fluttering bird wings and startled sharp chirping filled the air. Tom took his cigarette from his lips and let it smolder between his fingers.
I squeezed into the doorway next to him so I could see what he saw. The roof was gone from the room, but it hadn’t fallen in. Somehow it had been peeled back like the lid of a sardine can. The far wall was mostly gone as well. Bright sunshine flooded in. A canopy of green leaves replaced the ceiling. The flapping and chirping had been from a pair of finches who were building a nest in the open drawer of a weathered white dresser. Tom rubbed his cigarette out on the door jamb. He tossed the butt into the hallway behind him, as if it would be a desecration to smoke in the room.
“Constance was beautiful. She was lovely and pure and kind and pretty. She loved me and she hated my father. She especially hated the social climbing whores he associated with. I should have stayed here for her, but I didn’t. I was stupid and selfish. In my senior year of high school, my father told me that he was sending me to Northwestern. That’s a very good school outside of Chicago. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to be a businessman like my father was. I told him I wanted to make my own way in the world. We all said shit like that in the sixties. It was a time of generational strife. A time of change. We thought we were going to throw off the shackles of all that was old and evil and climb up to a new pinnacle of kindness and beauty and light.
“My father called me an ass. I’ll admit to being naïve. He said that no namesake of his was going to fiddle for a living. I was going to Northwestern, and that was that. I let him think I was going to obey his wishes. I bided my time. The day I graduated, I went to the recruiting office and joined the Marine Corps. When I told my father, he hit the ceiling. He didn’t raise his hand to me. He was too Goddamned old, and I was too strong for that nonsense. He tried to use his influence to get his way. He called the congressman he had in his pocket to get me out of my recruitment. The Vietnam War was in full swing, and the congressman was up for reelection. He refused to help because he didn’t want it known that he’d assisted a young person to avoid going to war.
“I went into the Corps, and my father seethed. Because I was out of reach, he tortured my poor sister. She sent me regular letters that complained of the ill treatment she suffered at his hands. I sent her my condolences and my pay. Constance had no money of her own. Neither of us did. We planned that she would build a nest egg for us both, that way we could escape when I was done my tour. Poor Constance didn’t last long enough. One night, when my father was drunk after he booted his most recent whore to the curb, he attacked and raped my sister.”
“My God.” I said in shock.
Tom shook his sad head at my choice of words. “Funny you should mention God. I wondered for years where He was on that terrible night. It’s one of the things I plan to ask Him when we meet before too much longer. Constance wrote me a letter after it happened. She explained what my father had done, and she begged me not to blame myself, because she knew I would. How in the hell could I blame anyone but me? She slipped the letter into the pile of mail bound for the post office. When she was done with her writing, she filled a bathtub and climbed into the hot water. She cut her wrists with a straight razor…with my straight razor.
“The telegram which carried the news of her passing and my orders home for the funeral got to me before her letter did. I came home from Nam, confused, bereft. I didn’t understand why she’d done it. I thought she had everything going for her. My pay was building up. Once I got home, she and I would have money to move out. The money wouldn’t have lasted long, but I was going to work, and she planned to go to school. She wanted to be a nurse. She wanted to help people. We were willing to do anything to get away from our father.
“I knew he’d done something to her, but I didn’t know what. As bold as he usually was about his misdeeds, he wouldn’t even look at me when I came back. I was certain he was at fault for my sister’s death. That’s why, when I was drunk and bewildered at the luncheon after my sister’s service, I attacked him. I blacked his eye and threatened to kill him. I did it in front of everyone. I was wrong to threaten my father in public, but I was young and hot-headed and stupid. I never made that mistake again.”
Sounds of chirping and the fluttering of wings stole Tom’s attention from his bitter memories. The finch couple had come back to add to their nest. They both had building materials in their beaks. Tom took a step back, out of his sister’s room and pulled the door shut. “Let’s get the fuck out of here. Constance’s birds want to finish their nest.”
Tom left the house like a condemned man on his way to the gallows. When we reached the street, he threw the car keys at me. “You drive. I can’t. Take me away from this place. I don’t care where.”
I had no idea where we were in relation to where we’d been. I got the GPS unit from the glove compartment and programmed it to take us back to the waterfront where I’d been earlier. Tom was silent for the entirety of the forty-minute ride. He didn’t even smoke.
I parked where I had before and took my father to the edge of the river. The peacefulness of the area seemed to bring him back from wherever he’d gone. He expressed pleasant surprise at the attractiveness of his surroundings. “All this used to be industrial. It was abandoned for decades. Even when I lived in this city, most of what used to be here was shuttered.” Tom lit his first cigarette in almost an hour. “I guess they cleared it all out and built a park. It’s nice here.”
We found a bench and sat. Tom smoked and finished his story. “The letter from Constance was waiting for me when I got back to Nam. I went crazy. I planned to desert and fly back to murder my father. The men I told you about, the members of my team, kept me from following through.
“Jim Beam was a smart son of a bitch. He still is. He forced me to tell the whole team what it was all about. When I finished, he asked what my father was worth. I said as near as I could tell, better than ten million. Jim asked how much of it I’d give him after I inherited it. I told him he could have it all if he could arrange for me to inherit it. Jim agreed to my terms, then he laid out a plan with me and Jack and Jose and Johnnie. The plan he made the night I got back from my sister’s funeral, changed the rest of my life, and yours.”
“Mine?” I asked.
“Yours.” Tom confirmed and chain lit another cigarette. “Jim said there were too many irredeemable people in the world. We all agreed, but we didn’t know what we could do about it. Jim suggested we kill them. I thought he was nuts, we all did. Jim wasn’t nuts; he was a visionary. ‘What if we had money?’ He asked. ‘What if we had money and influence and could take out the pricks who make the world suck? Would you do it? If we could prevent what happened to Tom’s sister, would you? Would you all join me and do it with me? None of us seem to mind killing. It’s something we’re all good at. That’s why the Corps put us together into this team. Why should we waste the skills they taught us? I want to take out bad people. I’m talking about murderers, mob bosses, drug dealers, rapists, pedos, anyone with nothing but darkness inside of them.’
“Jim said that my father’s money was the start-up cash he needed. With ten million, and help from Johnnie, who was a financial whiz, he could build a bigger fortune, big enough to pay us a salary and to fund his idea. He wanted to have two parts of his operation. One would be the political side. That side would pick the targets and use money to buy influence to keep the authorities off our backs. Jack Daniels wanted to be in charge of that side. He was always better at the spit and polish stuff. The other side would do the actual killing. Me and Jim and Jose were to take care of that. Jose didn’t make it out of Nam, so it wound up being just me and Jim.
“The plan required that we gain control of my father’s fortune. The first step was for us to finish our tours and go quietly back to our lives. Once we were back for a while, Jim murdered my father while I was conspicuously elsewhere. The cops closed the case pretty quickly. My father had a lot of enemies, and Jim made sure to mess the place up enough to make it look like a burglary. I inherited my father’s money and transferred control of it to the organization we formed. The transfer was done through shell companies which Jack and Johnnie set up.
“We called it ‘The Organization,’ because we could never decide on a better name. Jack thought we should name it after my sister, but I didn’t agree. Constance wouldn’t have wanted her name on an outfit that murdered, even if it was for a good cause. Everybody played their roles, and the outfit worked. We went from killing bad guys in Nam to killing bad guys right here in the US. We even managed to take down a few criminal enterprises just by eliminating the heads and letting the underlings destroy each other. We were proud of the work we did. In the nineties, Johnnie got in with the government and turned us into an NGO, which is a non-government organization. About half of our money comes from the feds now. They don’t know what we do, but they pay us all the same.”
I opened my mouth to ask the obvious question, but Tom put his hand up to stop me. “I have no idea how they get away with it. I asked Johnnie once and he gave me some rigamarole about how big the government is and how an invoice that looks right will always get paid. None of that ever mattered to me. What mattered was that I got to kill bad people and that my father was punished for what he did. The one condition I held out for before I agreed to Jim’s plan was that my old man had to see it coming and he had to know why he was going to die. Jim promised. He held up his end and I held up mine. I went to work for The Organization in 1973. Sixteen years later, I met you. You know what happened after that.”
I nodded, then I shook my head. Something in Tom’s story didn’t add up. “The day you came to the house I lived in, you told me that the man and the woman took something they shouldn’t have and that’s why you were there to kill them.”
Tom agreed that my memory was correct. “In the early 80s, we expanded The Organization to be able to take out more targets. We increased our numbers from the original core group of the four of us, to more than a dozen. In the late 80s, before we were an NGO, Johnnie’s financial wizardry hit a snag and money got tight. Jim tried to diversify to get some cash into the coffers. We took a few jobs on the open market to pay the bills. None of us cared too much because we were still killing bad people. The only thing we didn’t like was that we were killing them at the say so of other bad people. The couple I was sent to kill the day I found you were thieves. They grabbed a shipment of rock from a local mob figure. I killed them, then I killed the mob figure.”
“And you adopted me.” I reminded my father.
“And I adopted you. I never wanted a family. After my sister died, my heart felt like lead in my chest. I never wanted to care about someone as much as I cared about her. I didn’t date and I never married. I kept everyone away, until I met you. Your situation got to me like nothing else ever had. I brought you home because you were who The Organization was trying to protect. I kept you because you reminded me of me. I tried to do right by you. I hope…I hope you’re alright with the way things turned out. I did my best. I don’t think I’d ever win a father of the year trophy, but you seem to have turned out alright.”
I almost launched into a great, big show of affection for the love and care Tom gave me, but the moment didn’t seem right. My father looked tired; more than that, he looked old. He had a long night and a busy day. He’d managed to take me all the way to Detroit and then forty years back in time. I knew he’d appreciate a small show more than a big one. I kissed the side of his face. “I wouldn’t change a thing, Dad.”
He threw a heavy arm over my shoulders and pulled me sideways into his body. “You’re a good boy.” He said like he usually did when he was particularly pleased with me. We sat for a while like that and watched the river. A long, narrow freight ship went by while we watched. Tom said it probably carried coal or iron ore. He said the ships were built narrow like that so they could fit through the Saint Lawrence Seaway. I didn’t know what that was, and I didn’t ask. I didn’t care. I just wanted to spend time with my father.
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