Acre Under a Green Sky

Here I am fresh from my father's grave morphing between the man I am and the boy I used to be. Memories come to me in snapshots. Here's one. My father is standing bare-chested in front of the bathroom basin exploring his face in the mirror –– exploring his life in the mirror. I'm ten-years-old spying from behind the doorframe. He senses my presence. He turns to me and our eyes lock. Snap. We are seeing into each other through unguarded eyes. Each of us has been caught unmasked. I see his naked aloneness, and he sees mine. It is a terrible exchange of embattled souls lasting an eternity in that split second –– in that cobalt-tiled bathroom. I run to my mother's bed and dive in under the bedclothes that smell like her and then I burrow in under her like a suckling whelp.

My father and I shared something that morning so intense; so intimate that we cast ourselves as strangers from that day on. But fearful as intimacy is we grope toward it in spite of ourselves. He and I would seek each other out the rest of our lives together. Finding a safe distance; knowing it had to be a fighting distance, because we loved each other too much. It was the right thing to do.

Here's another snapshot. This one would change all our lives. Perhaps it was just minutes later that same morning. I'm out on the porch laughing with my friend, Garry.

Garry was my best friend though I don't know why. We fought constantly, and much of the time I didn't like him. His hair was so fair it was almost white, and his skin appeared sunburned year-round. He had trouble hearing, so he listened with a hard squint. Later in life, that quizzical squint would transform a very ordinary face into something playfully charming and interesting and would make him very attractive to girls.

Anyway, I'm out on the porch laughing with Garry, because Chuck Luka across the street parked his old '49 Dodge half up on his yard the night before.

"Must-a-been snot slinging drunk for sure last night," Garry was saying.

"You figure he's still in there? In the back seat or something?"

"Damned if I know. Go look!"

"Maybe he's in the trunk."

"Uncle Will says Luka shouldn't drink cause he's allergic. Alcohol makes him break out in handcuffs."

We double over laughing at that one when Garry adds the P.S.: "Sure would like to see Mrs. Luka naked though."

We were disgustingly candid with each other on every subject; especially girls, or to be more exact on the subject of what Garry looked forward to doing with girls. Things I didn't think possible until much later. How did he know so much so soon? It was as if he had done all these wonderful things before and couldn't wait to do them again.

Garry made me realize that we don't pick our best friends anymore than we pick our families. They just show up. Usually just in time.

The screen door slams behind us, and there's my father with his suit and tie and hat and battered briefcase looking as if he had just been startled awake. His face doesn't look so much shaved as scraped. He has a nasty blemish on his cheek which I hate.

"Good morning, Garry," he says which I hate, because he really doesn't give a shit about Garry. He's trying to touch me. It's a touch no one can feel.

"Mr. Wiley." Garry says with a nod.

Then my father sees the car across the street and shakes his head, and I know it is his disapproval that I hate more than anything in the world. His unhappiness and his disapproval of everything I find wonderful. Luka is wonderful. His getting "snot slinging drunk" is wonderful. Driving his car up over the sidewalk and half onto the lawn is wonderful. Everyone loves Luka. Except my father.

He's getting into our car now. It's a brand new '55 Ford. He's saying something to me about something meaningless. I can see his lips moving, but I'm not listening. He feels he has to say something to me. It doesn't matter what. It's a touch no one can feel. Then I hear:

"Sweep the porch today, will you, partner."

There it is. I've been told that he's my father and I'm his son, and that everything is right between us –– that we are partners. But we both know it's not true. I can see by Garry's smile that he knows, too.

Then: Garry is tugging at my shirt. My father is frozen with one foot in the car; his hand on the open door. They are both staring at the Luka house. Snap. Luka is standing on his porch at the top of the steps in his underpants and undershirt with his arms outstretched as if he wanted God to pick him up. His face is contorted in a grotesque, soundless cry; and he is covered in chocolate. Only it's blood. Looks like chocolate. Only it's blood. Blood you can smell. All the way over here.

Garry and I are laughing; hugging each other laughing. My father is going over there with a terrible look on his face. We follow him laughing and hopping up and down –– reeling in the unbearable exhilaration of terror. My stomach feels like a banana in a monkey's fist; a feeling I would come to know well from that day on. My father stops us with an outstretched arm at the bottom of the porch steps; his eyes never leave Luka.

"Chuck," my father says as if he were gently waking him. He starts up the steps, and Luka sees him for the first time as some kind of intruder. My father stops, and now I'm scared. Luka is gagging, choking; trying to speak, but gagging, choking. His eyes are big and begging for something. My father's eyes are begging for something, too. Luka falls into my father's arms, and I think he's getting blood all over my father. His suit and everything. They are embracing; these two men who don't even like each other, are embracing and searching into each other's eyes. I turn to see Garry running home. I start to cry. I'm trying to pull my father away from those eyes. But it's too late. Snap. These men are changed. They are bound together forever. They are best friends, and nothing will ever be the same again.

Suddenly, my mother is there with us. She grabs my arm and flings me aside as if I were a baby. She starts patting Luka down. She's lifting his arms, turning his head from side to side, searching for the wound; the source of all that blood, the wound. He's like a child in her hands –– compliant, trusting –– just as I have been with her in a million similar situations. Where are you hurt? Where's the wound? Then:

"Where's Gwen? Where are the kids? Luka, where are they?"

My mother and father exchange a terrible look. Someone has embraced me from behind. It's Mrs. Jett, a neighbor. She's holding me as if I were hers. I try to pull away, but she won't let me go. For the first time, I'm aware of the others there. Mrs. Eagle. Others. I look to them for help. My father is going into that house. Mrs. Jett has no right to hold me like this, and my father is going into that house.

"The thing about it was the quiet," my father would later tell us, ". . . so quiet the clock in the kitchen sounded loud. That's where I found the first one. The mother-in-law, Estelle. Lying on her stomach on the kitchen floor with her head turned to one side –– her eyes staring open. I saw those eyes, but somehow didn't see them. All I saw was her blue bathrobe. It was long –– down to her ankles I guess. Blue with fluffy pebbles in rows running up and down –– side by side. I got fixed on the rows –– the pattern of wool balls going up and down –– the blueness. It didn't register she was dead –– that there was a dead woman on the floor in front of me. I must have been in shock. It was both real and unreal at the same time. Then I went up the stairs and about halfway up I tripped over Chuck's shoes. One of them rolled all the way down to the bottom. I watched it roll all the way down. That's when I noticed his pants and shirt draped over the stair railing. I went up the stairs and down the hall straight ahead to their room. Gwen was in the bed. Her eyes were open and her breasts were exposed. I turned away like you do walking in on a naked woman. I even said, "I'm sorry," I think. When I looked back, all I saw was blood. The whole bed was blood. That's where I threw up, and I knew it was murder. It was real. I wanted to get out of there, but when I left their room I looked through the door to my right and there was little Marilyn lying dead on the floor with her arm outstretched like she was reaching for the door. The boy was in the bathtub. In his pajamas. No water in the tub. I saw him in the mirror above the sink. What happened was I got sick again in the bathroom sink, and when I raised my head and looked in the mirror I saw something was in the tub behind me. It was the boy. Just placed there out of the way. Or maybe he had been hiding there. I don't know. That's when Chief Mosko came up and got me."

Garry's uncle was the Chief of Police. Everyone called him "Will", but since my father was a lawyer in town, he called him "Chief Mosko". Garry had run home and told his Mom, and it was she who called the police that day. I don't know how I know that, but I'm sure it's true. Kids have an almost mystical way of knowing things. Perhaps because they are not as self-conscious about knowing things as adults are. Kids either know or don't know. They are shameless that way. We kids knew an awful lot about these murders almost from the start. We knew things we had no idea we knew. One thing we knew for sure. Luka didn't do it.

Chuck Luka was arrested that morning and taken to jail. I knew the Waterstop Police Station well, and of course I knew that there were two cells in back, but I was never allowed to see them. I always imagined they were like the cells you see in Westerns.

"Kids are portable," my father use to say, so when my mother said she couldn't "abide" us after all that had happened that morning –– that she was about to scream, my father packed Danny and me in the back seat and drove off. Being portable, we kids were papoosed into every facet of our parents' lives, and we weren't the only ones. The doctor made house calls with his kids. The shoe maker had a playpen in his shop, and the plumber always had at least two of his kids waiting outside in the truck. So no one would be surprised to see my father pulling up to the Police Station with two kids in the back seat. My brother and I were told to wait in the car, but the invisible cord that attaches children to parents pulled me into the police station after my father; and likewise the invisible cord that attaches younger brothers to older brothers pulled Danny in after me.

Here's a curious thing about the police station: it was converted from an old auto showroom. The place was a veritable fishbowl on the corner of Main and Chestnut with two vast windows in front and another one facing the side street.

By the time I got the big glass door open for Danny and me, my father was already talking to George The Dispatcher.

"What do you mean, 'he's gone'?" my father was saying.

"I mean, the man isn't here –– in this place –– on these premises, that's what I mean!"

George The Dispatcher was standing behind a counter and appeared to be a head taller than my father, but the truth was he was standing on a platform back there and wasn't much taller than I was at the time. Ugly garish taboos on both arms disappeared under his rolled up sleeves and may have gone on to cover his whole body for all I know. He had a charming Scottish burr and was easily riled when anyone suggested he was Irish; which, of course, the other men did at every opportunity.

"Look, George, I haven't got time to play games with you," my father said, "Now, where the fuck is Mr. Luka?"

George The Dispatcher's baby face turned bright red and his cheeks trembled. He clenched both fists against the countertop and took a moment to collect himself before trying to respond.

"And by whose authority . . . "

My father had no patience for George's petty condescension. He called out, "Chuck! Chuck Luka!" Then he walked around the counter and through a swinging gate labeled, "Police Personnel Only", and into the vast expanse of partitioned cubicles and waiting areas; all the while calling out Luka's name as loud as he could.

"He's in the hospital," George shouted after my father.

"What?"

"He had some kind of fit or something, so I had my men take him to the hospital."

"What kind of fit?"

"I think his heart stopped for a minute, I don't know. My men took him to the hospital."

I should mention here that George The Dispatcher was not even a police officer much less anyone's boss. He had a uniform made for himself and fashioned a dispatcher's badge so that he looked like a policeman, but he was a civilian employee –– no more than a glorified clerk assigned to answer phones and to pass on messages either by phone or car radio. Still, he had me fooled. I assumed by his attitude that he was Commissioner of Police or something, and I liked him tremendously, as did just about everyone else. He was a pretentious little man who needed desperately to be important, and I think it was an act of love and the height of generosity that no one ever burst his bubble.

My father was shouting loud enough for everyone to hear that Luka better not have any bruises on or about his person. Something like that. Something like a joke that's really a threat. Then, he grabbed our hands and pulled us out the door. I swear he threw us into the back seat of the car; he was that mad. Scared and mad. I wish he drove all the time like he drove to the hospital that day. I really liked him scared and mad.

This time, he made me promise to stay inside the car. I was so mad I punched Danny. My father hit me across the back of my head, and said, "Cut it out!" I was in a rage as I watched him begin the long walk across that gray desert of a parking lot to the hospital entrance. I had no idea the Visitor's Parking Lot was so far from the hospital, but then I had always been rushed into the hospital by way of the Emergency Entrance. It's much quicker. You just hop out of the car and into an arm cast or onto the operating table to have your tonsils yanked out.

What does a boy do stuck waiting in a car all alone with his little brother? He makes him cry, of course.

"He's not coming back, you know."

"Yes he is."

"Nope. We'll never see him again."

"He'll be right back. He said."

"Dad's real sick. Why do you think we came to the hospital so fast?"

"Dad is not sick!"

It's working. His lower lip is trembling and curled. His voice is shaky and his eyes are mad.

Danny is just eighteen months younger than me, and too good for words. I don't know why I torment him.

"Yeah, he's dying all right."

"He is not!"

Danny hits me.

"Yes, he is!"

I hit him back.

Now he attacks me with both fists flying, and I feel an eruption of joy as we wrestle like two wet cats in a barbed cage. God, I love my brother.

I swear I didn't plan it, but it couldn't have worked out better if I had. Danny jumped out of the car and started running toward my father. I gave him a little head start, then started after him. Danny was crying out, "Daddy! Daddy!"; and sure enough, when my father turned back, it appeared that I was trying to stop Danny. Danny was already in my father's arms when I reached them.

"Will you guys give me a break here!" my father said.

He grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the hospital entrance. "You're not fooling anyone, my little friend. And mark my words, one of these days Danny is going to kick the shit out of you. I just pray to God I'm there to see it."

My father sat us down in the waiting room just inside the hospital entrance. Then he stood over us and said, " I swear to you, the first butt off that couch gets a beating. I'm talking pink ass here. Do you hear me? Now, I mean it!"

"How come it's just me you're looking at?!" I said.

"Don't push me," he said, "You don't want to push me right now. Just stay put!"

I watched him walk over to the admissions desk and talk to the nurse. Then he hurried down the hall and out of sight. I jumped to my feet, and Danny grabbed my shirt.

"You're gonna get it!" he said.

"I want to see Luka," I said, pulling my shirt out of his grasp. I ducked past the admissions desk easily. Now I could see my father moving far ahead of me down the endless corridor. Everything was going great until a nurse stopped me.

"Hold on there. Are you twelve or older?"

"I had my tonsils out here. That's my father," I said, pointing to my father's back as he disappeared around a corner.

"Who's your doctor?"

"Doctor Mace. I got to hurry."

I was skipping backward away from her so that she had to raise her voice to be heard.

"Is this a follow-up visit then?"

"Yes," I shouted back before breaking into a run down the hall and around the corner. And there was my father a short distance down the hall stepping into the elevator. The elevator door closed before I reached it, but I was able to read the floor indicator on top. It went to the third floor.

When I reached the third floor, I ran out of the elevator and smack into my father and Doctor Mace standing by the nurses station.

"Hey, you're not supposed to be up here," Doctor Mace said with a smile.

"I want to see Luka," I said, more to my father than to Doctor Mace. My father apologized to the doctor with a shrug.

Doctor Mace put his hand on my shoulder and led me a short distance over to a chair against the wall by the elevators.

"I don't think that's such a good idea right now. Why don't you just wait for your father here. He won't be long."

Dr. Mace was the only grown-up I knew who actually smelled good. He joined my father again and they spoke in hushed tones.

Chuck Luka was dying, Doctor Mace said. His pancreas and liver were bad. He was having seizures. He was mute from shock; physical and mental. Both his body and his mind had been struck dumb by whatever happened in that house. Dr. Mace gave Luka forty-eight hours to survive or die. It was up to Luka, he said; and then he walked away leaving my father stuck there on the tile floor with a funny look on his face like he couldn't breathe.

After a time, my father shook off the feeling and moved on down the hall and entered Luka's room on tiptoe like a thief. I waited for the door to close and then followed him through the door. I was greeted by three men in bare-assed hospital gowns playing poker around one of the four beds in the room. My father was peering behind a curtain in the corner of the room.

The man with the red hair said, "You're not supposed to be here."

"I had my tonsils out here," I said.

"My kids can't visit. Where do you come off marching in here breaking the rules? "

He was actually directing his comments to my father, but it was useless. My father hadn't budged; hadn't even acknowledged my presence in the room until I stepped up beside him. Without even looking at me, he put his hand around my shoulder and opened the curtain a little more so I could see.

Chuck Luka was never a good-looking man; but life, animation bestowed a kind of beauty on him. He had mischievous eyes deep set under wildly erratic black bushy brows which he seemed to cultivate rather than control. They were like wire. His teeth were crooked and stained from years of Camels, but his smile was so lovely, so endearing, so embracing that you didn't care. And his laugh made you laugh. It was a raucous, dirty joke kind of laugh that touched your funny bone, and you laughed with him no matter what was going on. His voice was deep and raspy. You could scratch an itch with his voice. Something about it made you listen to every word he said. He told the greatest stories, and those eyes of his always let you know when he was pulling your leg. No one was ever embarrassed around Luka. Every joke was on him, and everyone of them was funny as hell. But most importantly, there was something about the way he worked that misshapen conglomeration of outsized features he called a face that made you feel that you and he shared a very private joke; a very secret important joke about life. With just a wink, you were okay by him; that somehow he knew you and all you had ever done or thought or felt, and you were still okay by him –– that maybe what you take so seriously about yourself is just a private joke after all.

But what my father and I found lying there on a white hospital bed was a yellow, bloated corpse of a man asleep with tubes up his swollen, pockmarked nose. His cheeks were purple with veins afire. His face in repose was a battlefield from which no one survived. Chuck Luka's life force had blinded everyone to the damage he had done himself through the years. My father called out his name, "Chuck". He reached for Luka's hand, but tubes were sprouting from there, too. He touched his shoulder and called out again, "Chuck".

Then Luka opened his eyes and looked at my father.

I stepped forward, and said, "Hey Luka."

"He can't hear you," my father said, "Look at him."

Luka's eyes were the eyes of a dead man. There was no one there. I wanted to run out of the room; but instead I said, "Come on, Luka, wake up. It's me."

Those eyes closed again never having heard. My father pulled me back and made some gesture with the sheet like tucking Luka in; then closing the curtain behind us, we confronted the poker game still in progress.

This time a different man said something. His arm was in a full cast and was frozen in a ridiculous half-salute position made all the more silly by the splay of cards he held in that hand. My father waved him away. He was in no mood to argue. But the man was insistent.

"Hey. I think your friend's calling you."

It was Luka calling my father's name; calling, "Josh".

We rushed to his side. The eyes of a dead man now showed some slight sign of life. An effort. A question. Something. Luka took hold of my father's wrist and held it. I looked down at Luka's ham hock of a hand; scarred and beaten from years of labor with tools that too often missed the mark. The back of his hand was horribly discolored from repeated efforts to insert the needle taped there for some monitoring device. On the underside of Luka's wrist were two small scratches.

My father could never tell me exactly what Luka did for a living. Something to do with building. "Luka was the best damn finish man in town," someone had told him, "once you got him on the job." My father had no idea what that meant. I looked into Luka's begging eyes again, then back to my father and said, "What does he want?"

"I don't know. Probably wants a bed pan."

Instead Luka said, "Did they get him? Did they get the guy who did it?"

My father pulled his wrist out of Luka's grasp, and stepped back from the bed.

"Do they know why?" Luka said, "Why? Why? . . . "

The word echoed in my brain as Luka drifted off to sleep or unconsciousness taking the word with him: "Why?"

We left Luka's room in silence and didn't say another word until we found ourselves alone in the elevator.

"He didn't know me," I said.

"No."

"Is Luka gonna be okay now?" I said.

"He's in a lot of trouble."

"Are you going to help him?"

"Yes. I am."

I think he made up his mind in that moment. For me, it was a done deal. He would fix everything. But for my father, it was a declaration of war.

The next morning, the street was deserted except for Austin from across the street. Austin was a large, old, auburn-colored retriever; and as dear a friend to everyone on the street as any human. He lumbered across the street and joined me on our porch.

Children and dogs ran loose in those days. Everyday was a great adventure beginning with stepping outside your door in the morning. Alone. Just you and the sun. Summers were long; seemingly endless. And there was absolutely nothing to be afraid of. We were unleashed. Free. The dogs and the kids. But no more. Murderers now lurked unknown; unseen.

Austin seemed as mystified by this turn of events as I was. I truly loved Austin. He was very much like my grandfather; big and smelly and always willing to have a good time. Always happy to see me. But where were the others? The dogs and the kids?

The Luka house across the street loomed like a funhouse monster. Yesterday, the police were all over it like ants; and the street was crowded with people. People I had never seen before with their dogs and kids. There were police cars and ambulances neatly parked along the curb sometimes in double rows making Luka's cockeyed Dodge look bewildered and frightened like a backward dog caught in the middle of traffic with its tail between its legs. No one had thought to move the car; to legitimize it, to make it right. And so there it stood this morning; less fearful but no less shamefaced.

Only then did it occur to me that I would never see the people who lived in that house again. I didn't care. I didn't much like them anyway, except for Luka. Marilyn was a scabby-kneed sneak thief with long, stringy yellow hair and a mean baton. She was my age, and she beat me mercilessly with that thing. It was a perfect weapon; a cold, sleek and wondrous shiny rod with a large gray rubber knob at one end and a smaller rubber knob at the other. The rod was etched with stars at each end so that it appeared encrusted with diamonds when the light hit it right. Marilyn loved shiny things. She was a pack rat for shiny things –– preferably other people's shiny things. Marilyn carried that baton everywhere; twirling, twirling, but secretly hoping some innocent boy would wander by so she could beat the crap out of him. She was vicious and all-powerful. She knew that we weren't allowed to hit girls; and she knew that much as we wanted batons of our own, no self-respecting boy would so much as touch a girl thing. I hated Marilyn.

Her little brother, Jeff, was Danny's age and had the remarkable ability to disappear. He and Danny were best friends so I had the opportunity to see a lot of him when and if he wanted me to. If you spoke to him directly, he would answer so feebly that you had to bend down over him to ask what he said and he would become smaller and smaller and smaller until you were on your hands and knees shouting, "What?!" to the sidewalk. We soon learned to speak to Jeff through Danny who obviously had learned the art of lip reading when nobody was looking. Everything we came to know of Jeff's wit and exploits, we learned from Danny –– often while Jeff was standing right next to him like a vacant-eyed ventriloquist's dummy. It was Danny who discovered Jeff's hidden talent. Jeff did a perfect impersonation of Jerry Lewis. The transformation was alarming.

My mother was not impressed. Everyone did Jerry Lewis. Even so, she often asked Jeff to perform; because when Jeff was doing Jerry Lewis, he was not only visible, he was big. My mother loved Jeff. She referred to him as "Danny's imaginary friend".

Mrs. Luka was like my mother only not as pretty. Her long brown hair was always carelessly pulled up at the back of her head and magically held there in a kind of knot. Fine ropes of hair; often of different red and golden colors, would escape the knot and drape about her neck and face. Then, with a deft maneuver of her slender fingers, she would collect them and exquisitely reassemble the knot all the while explaining why we can't swim for at least an hour after eating. If there was a hairclip back there, I never saw it. My years in the Cub Scouts never taught me a knot that would accomplish what she did so handily, so prettily.

I never dared ask her for instructions, of course. It would be wrong to show any interest at all in such things, so I secretly admired that particular feminine skill just as I secretly envied Marilyn her baton. My curiosity did arouse a kind of innocent lust in me; but then all curiosity is lust, especially in little boys. Mrs. Luka was a good mom. She was even-tempered and liked to laugh. Only sometimes, like my mother, she was preoccupied with a busy kind of sadness. You left her alone then.

Her mother, on the other hand, was funny. She never meant to be, but she was in spite of herself. Her name was "Estelle", but they called her "Gran", and she was always bickering about one thing or another. There was always too much noise, too many kids. Luka drank too much and didn't work enough. The house was never clean enough. No one ate properly or went to bed at a respectable hour. The children were dirty and dressed in rags. The house was falling down around her ears. Her daughter didn't have a decent thing to wear. All true, of course.

Estelle's eyes were dark and wide; perpetually startled by the horrors around her and the fact that no one else appeared to see. Her shoulders were set in a fixed shrug. Her mouth was tightly pursed with spoked lines radiating out from it. She was clean and gray and totally ineffectual. No one heard a word she said. She was a mosquito no one swatted or even waved away. She was ludicrously funny. If only she had taken the hint and stopped complaining, she wouldn't have become such a fool.

But, of course, she did stop complaining. Sometime late that night after the high school graduation and the picnic in their back yard, someone killed them all.

Suddenly their house with its brown shingles seemed to expand as if it had lungs. Austin saw it, too, and made a move to go over there, but I grabbed his collar and pulled him close to me. It had a secret; that house. It appeared to boast its secret; to dare me to imagine what happened in there. It was not ashamed like the car jig-nosed out on the lawn. Neither was it exactly proud. For the first time, it had a presence of its own apart from the people who had lived there, and that presence was resolute: I will not let you rest until the truth be known. I will be a torment to all those around me until I am turned inside out and the horrors I have witnessed are exposed. I am not murdered, and I am not going away.

I could hear my mother and father arguing. I was glad to turn away from that house across the street and to enter my own home even if there was fighting.

"It's not their job to do it, that's why." My father was pacing the living room floor.

"And I suppose it's mine!"

"I'm sorry, Nora. I don't know what to tell you. There is no one else. There's no one left. Luka sure as hell can't do it."

My mother always argued from inside the kitchen. The quarrel might begin anywhere in the house, but my mother always found her way to the kitchen and argued from there. I don't know why she chose the kitchen. It was her least favorite room.

If she wanted to make a point, she would frame herself in the kitchen doorway. Otherwise, you saw her darting this way and that past the kitchen doorway. My father paced in the adjoining living room with his head down as if he were listening to a particularly disturbing radio broadcast.

"We have a little boy in the other room who is heartbroken because his best friend is dead. Do you know that?"

"Yes, I know that," my father said.

I didn't know that. Danny never said a word to me about that. Just then my little sister teetered into the kitchen right on cue. She took to raised voices like a referee to a clinch. Later, I would find out she felt responsible for their fights.

"You really ask too much," my mother went on. "You really do."

"Someone's got to bury them."

"Why us?! Why not Will and his storm troopers? Or someone else? Anyone else?! What are you getting us into? Do you know that?"

Baby Ruth was trying to latch onto my mother's leg, but it was moving too fast. It looked like she might be run over.

"Over here, Baby Ruth," I called to her.

My mother turned on me:

"Don't call her that! Her name is 'Ruth'!"

"They want it done today," my father went on, "In and out. They're sending a man over at three."

"Is he a client then? Is that what you're telling me?"

"We're talking about Luka and Gwen here."

"I know who we're talking about!"

"All right," my father said, "I'll do it myself."

My mother appeared quiet in the doorway with Baby Ruth attached to her leg.

"You wouldn't know what to pick," she said, "You'd get all the wrong things. I'll do it."

"I'm sorry, Nora."

I could see her dragging Baby Ruth across the floor and opening the kitchen cabinet. She spiked her coffee with vodka, took a sip, and looked up to the ceiling.

"They're really dead, aren't they?"

My father went to my mother and put his arms around her. He rocked her gently from side to side. I had never seen my father hold my mother before. He was not in the least awkward about it, but it looked awkward. Baby Ruth was hugging their legs. My mother started crying, and dammit, so did I. It was involuntary, and it enraged me. I threw an ashtray to the floor as hard as I could, and ran out of the house.

My mother and I were going into that house to get clothes for the funeral. A policeman I had never seen before was waiting for us on the porch. Not a town cop. Probably State or County. My father was meeting with the District Attorney in Lincoln.

Earlier I had begged my mother to let me come with her and she said I could if I promised not to tell my father. She said she didn't want to be alone in there with a policeman watching her every move. She held my hand tight as we crossed the street. Her hand was peaches and cream with perfectly shaped fingernails; long and red. Sometimes, they dug in and hurt me. Her wedding ring was a simple sculpted gold bow like you'd find in a girl's hair or on a small gift box. That ring fascinated me. Had my father tied that perfect little bow of gold around my mother's finger? And was she the gift all wrapped up?

The only time I let her hold my hand was crossing the street, which was stupid since I crossed this street a million times a day without her. Her beautiful pale hand with its blood red claws was now cold and clammy wet, and she was holding my hand so tight I couldn't wait to get to the curb.

I ran ahead up the porch steps to where the policeman was standing guard. I hated him on sight. He was as broad and as solid as a door, and he had a pronounced belly which he seemed to flex as if it were a muscle. Perhaps it was. He looked at my mother, and said, "The boy has to stay outside".

"Like hell," my mother said, and she took my hand again.

"Why don't you fix Luka's car!" I said, "It's crooked!"

"I don't want him running around, you understand?" the policeman said, as he unlocked a padlock that wasn't on the door before. The back door was padlocked, too.

"Let's just get this over with, okay," my mother said, as we started through the door.

"They haven't found the weapon yet," he said from behind us.

"What?!"

My mother stopped dead in her tracks. She was breaking my hand.

"The murder weapon. They haven't found it," he said.

"You mean it's here, in this house, somewhere?"

"They'll find it."

My mother wouldn't let go of my hand. I was pulling and pulling.

"I don't think we should be here, then. My husband is Mr. Luka's lawyer. You don't think he hid the knife in here, do you?"

"It's okay. We'll find it. Don't worry."

"Oh Christ!" my mother said, finally releasing my hand.

We entered the house. The stillness was jarring like an impenetrable wall. The silence was maddening. I immediately scanned the living room for the TV so I could turn it on and make some noise, but of course they had no TV. I knew that. Jeff watched Howdy Dowdy at our house with Danny, and Mrs. Luka watched Uncle Milty with my mother. They all used to watch Ed Sullivan at the Eagles' house next door to them until Mrs. Eagle and Estelle got to hating each other for some reason. Luka said he wasn't going to buy a TV until they "perfected the damn things", but we all knew they couldn't afford a TV.

I ran all the way into the kitchen just inches out of the policeman's reach while my mother was calling me back. I turned on the portable radio sitting on the window ledge over the sink, and "Bebop-a-Lula; she's my baby!" blared out at top volume. The policeman reached for the radio, and I was sure he was going to turn it off, but he lowered the volume instead. He was relieved to have some noise, too. We all were.

The kitchen sink was full of dirty dishes, and there was a bad stain on the blue and white block linoleum; a big, round stain like the one under Luka's car in front of the house. Estelle would have had a fit if she saw it.

The policeman grabbed me by the back of my shirt collar and escorted me back into the living room where he flung me at my mother as if he were discarding a bag of garbage. I ducked behind my mother and put my hand in her skirt pocket. No one can touch me now. She will tear him to pieces if he takes one step towards me. I knew it, and he knew it.

My mother had not moved an inch since we entered the house. She stood there and gazed about the room as if she were making some kind of inventory. Both the policeman and I followed my mother's gaze. Something about the look on her face impelled us to see what she was seeing. It was a ghost. The ghost of a day-to-day life now dead. A sofa where small children had once trampolined now stood dormant; unmoved, unmoving. Full ashtrays with no smoke in the air. A pile of newspapers and magazines beside the easy chair with Estelle's doilies covering the cigarette holes on the arms. The floor lamp behind the chair no longer cast an amber glow over Gwen's Life Magazine pictorials. The clutter, the litter, the mess living people make living; now a horrible testament to death, to living stopped on the upbeat.

My mother picked up a dish towel lying at her feet; then let it slip out of her fingers to float down to the floor again. A half-full coffee mug with "Daddy" printed badly across it sat on top of a bookcase full of toys and no books. A cigarette butt floated inside the mug like a dead fish. We'd seen it all a hundred times, but now every stick of furniture, every object, every "thing" stood starkly mute and somehow four-dimensional without life; without the living associated with every "thing". It was people in the process of living who made these "things" live, and without people, they were dead. They were ghosts. Ghosts of reading the Saturday Evening Post after putting the kids to bed. Ghosts of crocheting fine white thread to Guy Lombardo on the radio. Ghosts of sitting on the floor making train wrecks. Ghosts of sipping hot black coffee before shoveling your car out of the snow.

My mother fixed on a pile of something on the floor at the far end of the sofa, and uprooted herself for the first time. It was a bedspread and pillow. She started to fold the bedspread, but gave up and threw it on the sofa. Everything seemed to deflate her.

"This is my brother's," I said, picking up Danny's bright red yoyo.

"Leave it," my mother said.

"But it's Danny's!"

"Just drop it! I don't want you touching anything."

"What if I find the knife?"

Yes, the knife. The cobra in the grass. The spider in the drawer. It's in here with us. Or so they say.

"Let's get on with this," the policeman said.

We climbed the stairs and entered their bedrooms one by one rifling closets and drawers. My mother selected articles of clothing and dumped them into my outstretched arms. First Estelle's room, then the room Jeff and Marilyn shared. The baton was there on the floor at the foot of the bed. I can't believe they shared one bed. Danny never told me. I wanted the baton. My eyes never left it. I was willing it to come to me, but it didn't budge. That baton was mine by right. I had suffered countless blows for it. It was a trophy. I would hang it on my wall like the stuffed head of the man-eating tiger who had stalked the neighborhood for years. It was mine.

My mother paused for a moment before entering Gwen's room; her hand frozen outstretched for the doorknob. Finally, with an escape of breath, she turned the knob and flung the door open. The bed confronted us at once. My mother stared at it with her hand at her throat. The mattress was gone. It was a harmless frame with crooked slats where the mattress had been. No big deal.

The closet was immediately to the right of the door. She opened it and stepped back. This closet was amazingly neat compared with the others. Great care had been taken here; almost reverence. She took a plastic covered man's suit from the pole and hung it on a hook inside the open closet door. Then she stepped away from the closet and out into the hallway. I thought she was going to be sick. So did the policeman who had been watching her every move just as she had predicted.

"It's all there," my mother told the policeman, "as if she had planned for this day."

It was true. With the exception of Estelle, there was one clean and pressed outfit for each of them neatly bagged and hung in this closet. At the bottom of the closet, highly shined shoes; one pair each, were stacked in their boxes. There were two shopping bags for purses. On the top shelf, five dust-free hat boxes were marked, "Chuck", "Spring", "Fall", "Summer", and "Winter".

Now my mother was rejecting clothes she had picked earlier; grabbing things from my burdened arms like a mad rag picker and tossing them into the air. Finally, she took Luka's suit off the hook and laid it over Estelle's long black dress.

"But Luka's alive!" I said.

"And he'll want this for the funeral, don't you think."

One by one, she laid the packaged outfits over my arms. Then she pulled out the one outfit that wasn't wrapped. It was a dark blue suit, and she hung it on the hook. We both recognized it at once. It was Mrs. Luka's blue suit. Her silky white blouse with two ties at the neck was under the jacket. There was even a pair of nylons draped over the skirt. My mother opened the jacket and touched the seams. Then she reached into the jacket pocket and pulled out a gold circle pin and two small cuff links with blue stones. She looked at them in the palm of her hand for a long time before replacing them. Then she just stood there looking at the blue suit hanging on the hook.

"What is it?" the policeman said.

"Nothing," my mother said.

Then she did something very strange. She looked deep into my eyes as if to say, "Do you see it, too?" I didn't. She laid the suit over the others and went about her business.

There was nothing special about that suit. Mrs. Luka wore it all the time. I can see her now. Stepping out of the house and carefully down the porch steps because her heels were so high. Opening her black bag and dropping a white hanky inside before moving on down to the sidewalk. Adjusting her little black hat with the veil over her forehead and moving on down Ledge Avenue until she was out of sight. Maybe not everyday, but often. Once a week, at least. No big deal.

When my mother was finished, she took most of the clothes herself. The policeman was carrying the shoe boxes; all the while arguing that dead people don't need shoes. Back downstairs, I ran for the kitchen.

"Hey!" the policeman called.

"The radio," I called back.

I turned the radio off all right; and one thing more.

I ran smack into his proud belly on the way back. He looked at me with such profound suspicion, I was sure he knew what I had done.

"Let's just have a look here," he said, as he started searching me. All he found was Danny's yoyo in my back pocket.

"Satisfied?" my mother said.

"Yeah, satisfied?" I said, too.

The policeman helped us carry the stuff home, then left without a word of good-bye. My mother had offered him a drink, too.

For a long time that afternoon, my mother sat in the living room with Baby Ruth asleep on the floor at her feet. She wasn't reading anything or listening to music or talking on the phone. She was just sitting there with her drink –– thinking.

I sat on the sofa across from her pretending not to watch her, but I was watching her. She fascinated me.

I guess I was trying to figure her out; to paint a picture of her that was true, but it was impossible. If it was a picture of her laughing face, and she did laugh with her whole face, it was somehow a disservice to her pain and fury; to her downcast, solitary gaze into God's eye. She would speak to herself under her breath when she was enraged and thought no one was looking. She won long and convoluted arguments alone; arguments she had no patience for with others. She loved dirty jokes, but could never remember them. She pretended to hate parties, but unwittingly jumped up and down like a little girl when guests started arriving. She despised women who jump up and down like little girls. She was fearful of people, but couldn't stand being alone. Everything about her was a contradiction. She was dangerous that way.

Baby Ruth woke up and crawled onto my mother's lap dragging her little comforter along after her. My mother made all the necessary adjustments without giving it a thought. Her mind was elsewhere. And then she caught me watching her.

"I don't like how you're treating your Dad. It's very unattractive. And you could be a lot nicer to your brother, too."

"Sorry."

"That mean-streak of yours is beginning to scare me. It's not honest. If you're angry about something just spit it out."

"Okay, I said."

"You're hurting your Dad, you know."

"He just makes me mad."

"Well, he makes me mad sometimes too, but I try not to be mean to him."

"Tell me about Hollywood again."

"I don't feel like it."

"C'mon. 'What wondrous creatures we were!'"

"I said I don't feel like it."

Our history was the best story I knew –– better than Treasure Island or Robinson Crusoe. And I loved hearing her tell it, though it had been a very long time since she did. Her dad used to be a carpenter for MGM in Hollywood. He knew all the big stars like Garbo and Gable, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; the legends. He and his wife, Winnifred, had immigrated from London shortly before my mother was born. Moving to a classless society changed Winnifred. Suddenly finding herself as good as anyone else made her superior to everyone else. She took on airs, and started orchestrating teas. Her dead common accent in London was regarded with some awe in America; or so she imagined. At last, the tables had turned. She was high class. She was a bigoty snob. Everyone hated her sad little superiority; most especially, my mother.

My mother worked for MGM, too, in a variety of ways. Waitress. Typist. She even appeared in two movies; once with a line to June Allyson about a telegram. My mother was a beautiful woman, but no one ever knew what color her hair was. My father was working in radio when they met and fell in love. He was beautiful, too.

There's a snapshot of the three of us when I was a baby. We were all beautiful in Hollywood. She has dark hair in the picture. Then my mother became pregnant with my brother, and my father decided to move us all back to his hometown –– Waterstop, Pennsylvania. He would become a lawyer like his father; she, a housewife and mother like her mother. They had recast themselves in roles and in a location totally unsuited to them –– all in search of a happy ending. And so we drove across the country without a backward glance arriving at the home of my father's parents in the wee small hours of the morning. The house was dark. Everyone was asleep. My father put us all to bed in one of the bedrooms, and we fell asleep.

The next morning both my mother and I were to meet my grandparents for the first time. The story goes that my mother came down the stairs in her dressing gown. She was blonde then.

My grandmother embraced her and said, "Now what can I get you for breakfast?"

"Pork chops", my mother said.

My grandmother would hate my mother from that day until the day she died many years later. My grandmother starved herself to death in a nursing home; willfully, artfully starved herself to death. She was insane.

My grandfather and grandmother divorced soon after we arrived, and their house was converted into the Wiley & Wiley Law Building forever known as "the office". My father was the junior partner in spite of the fact that in short time he was doing the bulk of the work. It was small town law; deeds, wills, divorces, title searches, petty arbitrations. It must have been deadly dull, though I never heard my father complain. He had a wife and three children, and he was doing the right thing.

My grandfather moved into "the farm" which wasn't really a farm at all. There were gardens, of course, and an apple orchard, and a pine grove, chickens, ducks in the pond, a corn field and corn crib "for the rats", my grandfather used to say because if you put the corn in a bank vault, the rats would still get in. I never saw one, but you could hear them gnawing on the rock hard corn at any time of the day. But it wasn't a farm in the way the neighboring Harley Farm was a farm. The Harley's had to have six sons just to work their farm and they barely managed. The distinction between my grandfather's farm and a real farm is that word "work". No one "worked" my grandfather's farm. My grandfather's farm was pruned, manicured, plucked. It was a twenty-eight acre playground everyone called, "the farm".

"What wondrous creatures we were!" That's how my mother would begin the story, "What wondrous creatures we were back then in Hollywood!" I sat across from her wishing she would tell the story again when a thought occurred to me. Earlier that day in the Luka house, she had tried to communicate something to me with her eyes.

"What did you see in Luka's closet?" I asked, "Something about Mrs. Luka's blue suit."

"None of your business," she said, and I could see that she was crying. She wiped tears from her eyes, and I asked if she was sad.

"Oh God, I hate my life," she said.

It was alright. I had already learned not to listen to what she says, but to watch what she does.

Later that evening, I heard her say to my father:

"Gwen was not lying naked in that bed for Luka."

"What do you mean?"

"She wasn't sleeping with Luka anymore. She was sleeping on the couch. I found her bedspread and pillow downstairs."

"So?"

"So who was she expecting in bed?"

"Great! You just gave them a motive."

"Or another suspect."

I didn't care. I was waiting for Garry to come over. He would want to hear all about my day in the "Death House", as the Daily News called it. He would want to know if there was any guts on the walls. But I had more important news for him. I had plans. I had unlocked Luka's kitchen window.

That night as I lay in my bed I heard Danny crying. His pain was beyond my comprehension. I tried to imagine how I might feel if Garry had been killed. I couldn't. Other people's feelings mystified me. I seemed to experience things differently than other people. I got mad. Danny cried. And yet I felt that in some way Danny was right to cry and I was wrong. He seemed to have access to a world of feeling that simply eluded me. I had made up my mind a long time before that he was good and I was bad. It seemed the simplest and best explanation for the differences between us.

But I did care about him. I wanted him to stop hurting –– to stop crying. I wanted to be good, too. I found the red yoyo in my jeans and took it over to him. I sat beside him on his bed like my mother sometimes did and offered him the yoyo.

He recoiled from it with a start –– almost afraid. As soon as he realized I wasn't going to hit him or pick on him, he looked bewildered. What new trick was this? I offered him the yoyo a second time; saying, "Here! Take it." And he did.

"Where'd you find it?" he said.

"Over there."

"Thanks."

Then, with a supreme effort, I said, "I'm real sorry about Jeff."

"That's okay," he said, and I rushed over to my bed swearing I'd never do anything like that again.

Then I heard Danny say:

"I left two 'Superman' comics and one 'Spiderman' over there at Jeff's house."

"So?"

"So they're Angel's."

"So?"

"So I have to get them back to Angel."

"Angel won't know the difference."

"He knows stuff."

"So what am I supposed to do about it?"

"Couldn't you get them outta there? You know, like you did the yoyo?"

"Maybe. Go to sleep."

"Promise?"

"I said, 'maybe'. Now go to sleep."

Then out of the stillness, he said:

"I sure wish Jeff wasn't dead."

Late that next morning, Garry and I were on my front porch planning our Death House break-in.

"Tomorrow morning," I was saying, "Soon as it gets light –– 'bout six o'clock."

"Right! It's summer. We got no school, and I'm gonna get up at six in the morning. You gotta be crazy."

"Okay, nine o'clock."

"I don't know. That's early, too."

"Don't you want to find the knife?! Don't you want to hold the knife in your hand?!"

"I guess."

"I can't believe you don't want to hold the knife in your own hand that killed four people!"

"Why don't we do it now? Here we are! There's the house! Let's go now!"

"Look around, dummy. This place stinks with witnesses! There's Old Lady Eagle sitting over there on her porch," I said, waving to Old Lady Eagle across the street.

Garry turned to see Old Lady Eagle waving back at us. Just then, he was struck with a thought:

"Oh! I forgot to tell you. Old Lady Eagle heard a scream that night –– the night of the murders –– and she knows what time it happened."

"What?!"

"I heard my Dad talking to Uncle Will last night."

"I can't believe you! 'Oh!' –– 'By the way...' ––'I forgot to tell you'. Only the biggest news yet!"

"I forgot. Is that okay?!"

"So tell me! What did they say?"

"I told you. She heard a scream in the night! It woke her up!"

His words struck me to my very soul, and I had no idea why.

"Go on," I said.

"Let me see," he was trying to remember what they had said the night before, "She heard this scream and it 'established a time for the murders' and 'it didn't support Luka's story at all'. There!"

"What is Luka's story?"

"Damned if I know, and you want to know what –– I don't give a monkey's shit!"

I looked over to Old Lady Eagle sitting there on her porch.

"You want to know something else..." Garry was saying, "I don't think I want to break in Luka's house with you, asshole!"

I wasn't listening. I was watching Old Lady Eagle and trying to figure out what was gnawing at my gut –– something about that scream. It was then Mrs. Eagle joined her mother on the porch, and she had the hatchet.

"Chicken killing time," I announced to Garry.

He was halfway across the street before he noticed I wasn't with him. He turned back and said, "Aren't you coming?"

"I got to think," I said, "You go."

Mrs. Eagle was just rounding the house and heading back to the chicken coop when Garry caught up to her. The handle of the hatchet was like an extension of her arm as she strode out back. She was a squat bulldog of a woman, and at that moment she looked to me like a gunslinger walking down a deserted Western street with her six-shooter already drawn and at her side.

I looked back to the house, and I think I saw Old Lady Eagle smiling at me. She was Mrs. Eagle's mother, so of course her name wasn't 'Eagle' at all. Still, that's what we called her.

And everyone called the house, 'the Eagle house'. It was next door to Luka's and was large enough to house three families. Upstairs, there was Mrs. Eagle and her son, Rod, who was a bank teller in town. Downstairs, Old Lady Eagle had an apartment, and Mrs. Eagle's sister and brother-in-law lived in the attached side house with their son, Angel.

Angel was an obese man of perhaps forty years with an ageless face and the mind of a child. He was a kid like us, and he had the most extensive collection of comic books in the world. He sat cross-legged on their small side porch floor and read comic books from morning until his mother turned the porch light out at night. There was always a large cardboard box next to him full of comic books. He was not the least bit proprietary about his comic books. We might join him for an hour in the morning or afternoon; always without conversation, or we might borrow a comic book for a day or two. That porch was the local lending and reading library, and there were times when it was so littered with young readers that Angel's mother could not get the screen door open.

Angel's best friend was his cousin, Rod, the bank teller. Rod was ridiculously tall and thin –– Ichabod Crane in a dark business suit which we wore everyday; morning, noon and night. I don't remember ever hearing Angel speak to anyone other than Rod –– not even his own mother. These two men; bound together since childhood, shared something exclusive and rare. They seemed to have a language all their own that embraced them like a cocoon, sheltered them, elevated them above all others present.

And Rod spoke beautifully. This bean pole of a man had a voice that could melt steel. Down at the bank, he was called upon to soothe tempers with a simple, "Now, what's the problem?" If it ever occurred to him to be seductive; and I don't believe it ever did, he would have scored every time, in spite of his looks.

The story goes that Rod liberated Angel from near-total isolation by way of the adding machine. He was sensitive to Angel's attraction to the machine, and he encouraged Angel to play with it. In time, believe it or not, he taught Angel all the functions of the machine. They say Rod taught him to read using comic books. I don't believe that. I don't think Angel could read words, but he could read numbers and math symbols. I know, because I've seen Angel add, subtract, multiply and divide at the adding machine. He was fast. He was expert. He was a whiz.

The larger front porch was Old Lady Eagle's domain. She was an ancient woman with bright blue eyes and a magical smile. Small, circular steel-rimmed glasses perched daintily halfway down her perfectly straight nose. Her face with its high cheekbones and hollow cheeks might have been chiseled in white marble. She must have been an exceedingly beautiful young woman. But her most attractive feature was her high-backed wicker wheelchair with its large umbrella spoked wooden wheels. With very little prodding at all, she would allow us to help her move the few steps she could manage to one of the porch chairs so we could ride the thing up and down the long porch sometimes at speeds that frightened her. She might have been a very lonely lady if not for that chair. As it was, she was thrilled to see us and actually solicited some conversation during these marathon races.

And it was she who was awakened by a scream in the night. And despite a hundred oaths to secrecy, the word got out. But sitting on my porch that day while Garry was up watching the killing of chickens, I wasn't concerned with that particular secret. I had my own, or so it seemed to me. At least, it felt like a secret. I didn't know what it was, but I thought I knew what a scream in the night was, and it raised a terrifying question for me. Was it my mother's scream she heard that night?

My bed was a magical and terrifying place. It was identical to my brother's –– red maple with a three masted schooner carved on the headboard. That ship was the first thing I ever drew with paper and crayon. It was a dream ship, and I sailed it through the tranquil seas of fantasy and daydreams as well as the storm tossed seas of illness and nightmares.

We kids didn't fall asleep. We were sucked down from wakefulness without warning –– without conscious awareness. Lying on the living room floor in front of the TV, draped over your mother's shoulder in the middle of the day while she goes on chatting with neighbors, in the back seat of the car –– sleep takes you down so effortlessly that you don't know you're asleep until you regain some degree of wakefulness again. And there are degrees of wakefulness. There's the awareness that you are no longer at the drive-in watching Jerry Lewis, but that you are now being carried under your father's arm. You're outside. There are voices, and you hear the car door slam. That's the porch step he just went up. Now, someone is pulling your shoes off and you're in your bed.

And it's all mixed up in a dream. And sometimes the dreams are heart-pounding 'scareful', and you cry out and suddenly there's your mother in her white gown bending over you in the dark with just the light from the hall behind her so you can see her figure through the sheer cloud of her nightgown. And you're sucked back again wondering if the smell of her is real or a dream.

Then there are the bizarre fever dreams brought on by illness. Along with hot tomato soup and the smell of Vicks on your chest and a blanket of coloring books comes the sick dream. Mine was smoke. I dreamed a waft of smoke as if from a cigarette left burning in an ashtray rising without a source into the air. Clearly, the goal was to have it be laser true with just the slightest wavering, but invariably a breath of air would disturb it and set it oscillating wildly and breaking up into uncontrollable clouds of smoke.

There seems to be no bridge between wakefulness and sleep; just a precipitous drop, but the way back is a slow ascent through layers and layers of thick sleep with images of real and imagined creatures; of sounds and smells and touch. Half awake is half asleep is half real is half a dream. It's all a netherworld. It's the reason kids can believe in fairy tales.

Parents make frightening noises in our sleep. The sounds of love making are dangerous and violent. We half hear them till they wake us. All of us. Danny once said, "If it feels so good, how come it sounds like it hurts?!" I knew then that he, too, had been awakened in the night by cries and a chorus of bedsprings thrashing to a mad metronome.

Voices are raised in our sleep. Arguments, safely tucked away on the top shelves of closets out of children's reach until they are bedded down for the night, are then brought out and allowed free rein. Words; sometimes whole sentences intrude into our dreams:

"Coward! You're letting him run your life!"

"I don't care! I hate this town and everyone in it!"

"For Christ's sake, what do you want from me?!"

"And what about me?! What am I supposed to do?"

"Be a man!"

"What kind of wife . . ."

Cries are heard. Weeping is heard. Doors slam.

The night world of my parents was an awful, mysterious world in my sleep time. It was a secret half-told amid dreams and nightmares. It was a secret I had to keep, because deep in my heart I believed it was their real world and that the world of day was a pretense. And a scream heard by Old Lady Eagle could shatter that secret. If it was a scream; a real scream, and if it was my mother screaming. It could have been. I think I might even remember it. I don't know.

Garry and I had settled on an 8AM break-in. The plan was to find the bloody knife, but I had another trophy in mind. And if there was time, I might find Angel's comic books for Danny.

"This is stupid," Garry said, as he proceeded me through the kitchen window knocking the radio into the sink full of dishes, "We're never going to find that knife."

"Why not?"

"Cause every cop in the world looked for it and it's not here. Let's get naked."

"Brilliant! I'm going to find the knife."

"Well, I'm going to jerk off in their bathroom."

"Suit yourself."

I could have slit my throat when I said that, because my father was always saying, "Suit yourself." It was his white flag; his surrender. He thought he was being liberal, but he was just pouting. I hated it.

Another thing I hated was masturbation, because everyone was doing it and I couldn't. I knew how. Everyone told me how. Garry showed me how, but nothing happened. It was dumb. A few years later, of course, it would become my life's work.

I went straight to Marilyn's room –– to the baton. I held it in my hands; felt its weight and balance, and suddenly all of its appeal vanished. I didn't need to have it anymore. I was overcome with a kind of sadness. I missed Marilyn.

I gave the baton a clumsy twirl and heard a clink come from inside the baton. There was something in there. I began twisting the large rubber knob off when I heard the front door open and male voices entering the house. I turned round and round like a fool before running out into the hall. The bathroom door was closed and I couldn't get it open. Garry was pushing it shut from the other side. I whispered Garry's name through the door and barely heard him say, "Hide!"

The two men were starting up the stairs. I ran into Luka's room and did another stupid reel round and round looking for a place to disappear. I got in the closet just as the men reached the top of the stairs. It was pitch black in there, but there was plenty of room thanks to my mother's raid for funeral clothes. The baton was still in my hand though I couldn't see it. I sat on the closet floor and knocked something over with my foot or the baton, I'm not sure which. The sound of it exploded in my blood-soaked brain like a bomb. My ears were throbbing with terror, and I held my breath to stop the bellows-like roar of my breathing. Without thinking, I reached in the blackness for the thing I had knocked over as if making it right would erase the sound it had made. The two men were in the room now. My one free hand groped in the dark until it lighted on something smooth like cold skin. It had shape. It was a bottle –– nearly full by the weight of it –– a stashed liquor bottle.

The baton might as well have been a serpent for all the control I had of it. Finally, I got it rested across my lap without a sound, and I was still.

Only then did the voices filter in as if someone had slowly turned up the volume. One of them I recognized as Will Mosko, Chief of Police. The other man was a stranger to me.

"Well, not off. The nightgown was ripped open. It was actually in a ball around her waist," Will was saying.

"Was she raped?"

"No, none of them."

"Any of them insured?"

"Nope."

"So it started here, you figure?"

"If you say so."

"Don't fuck with me, Will. This man is going to the chair. You understand?

"Yes, sir."

"This was premeditated as hell. Smart, but first degree right down to his bloody shorts."

"Whatever you say."

"Look, we need your cooperation with this thing. I'm real sorry bringing Dave in, but this is a job for the County and he is the Sheriff."

"I don't give a shit about that. Luka was my friend . . . "

"Exactly!"

" . . . and you want to burn his ass."

"You saw the kids! You saw what he did to that woman!"

"He must be crazy."

"That's it! Right there! That's what we're up against. Insanity. Well, crazy men don't hide the murder weapon, get it?!"

"I'm way ahead of you, Matt. But you're wrong. This is all wrong. Dead wrong."

"Take another look at those kids, Will. No, here! Here! I got snapshots. Take a look. Here! Who's wrong? Who did wrong here?"

Everything became deathly still for what seemed like an eternity. I began to wonder if they had left the room, when the stranger broke the silence.

"You didn't think he was going to get away with this, did you? Friend or no friend. Now, this Wiley guy . . . "

"Josh Wiley. He found them."

"Right. You're sure he didn't see anything?"

"Positive. He would have told me."

"What a schmuck! First time out, and he takes me on. Made in heaven. It was all I could do not to kiss his cheek yesterday. Now, where's this bathroom? I want to see that tub."

"Right through here."

My heart stopped. Garry was made. There was no escape. They would find Garry in the bathroom. In about one minute, they're going to open this door, and I'll be dead, too. But nothing happened. I could hear the sound of muffled voices through the wall and then the sound of the toilet flushing. I found the door knob and opened the closet door a crack. They were heading down the stairs. Then they were out the front door and gone.

I dropped the baton on the closet floor and ran into the bathroom. There was no place there for Garry to hide. I called out Garry's name in a whisper. Still, nothing. Where could he be? The open window next to the toilet! He must be hanging out the window. I stuck my head far out the window and was startled to see Will and the other man on the ground just below. Almost simultaneously, I felt a tap on my shoulder and withdrew so quickly I bumped my head hard on the window. Garry was right behind me smiling that stupid smile. I know the two men below heard the bump on the window. I'm sure they did. Garry was giggling now and whispering about how he had sneaked out of the bathroom and into Marilyn's room. I expected the two men back any second, but they never came. We were safe.

We looked out Luka's bedroom window and watched the two men drive off in separate cars. Only then did I begin to breathe normally.

"I finished under Marilyn's bed. Jerking off. It was great."

"Do you know what a 'schmuck' is?"

"What?"

"He called my Dad a 'schmuck'."

"Never heard of it."

Garry was helping me down to the ground from the kitchen window when something suddenly occurred to him:

"Oh! They found the knife in the bathtub. The morning after the murders. I heard them talking in the bathroom."

I don't know why we weren't allowed to go to the funeral, but we heard all about it. They dropped us off up the street at the Sisters McConnell's house like always.

The Sisters McConnell had white hair and a garden everywhere; front yard, back yard, hanging in baskets from the porch, everywhere. There were mice in the garden in spite of their cat, Fats. Fats was as big as a cocker spaniel and hissed viciously at anything that moved. Everyone hated him except the Sisters McConnell. Irene was short and fat, and Janet was tall and thin. Imagine Abbott and Costello in house dresses and you've got the Sisters McConnell. But they were very, very nice.

For a very long time, there was nothing especially distinctive about the Sisters McConnell except the mice in their garden. No one could explain the infestation, nor apparently could anyone do anything about it; least of all Fats. Then something bizarre happened, and all those mice had to take a back seat.

For as long as anyone could remember, Irene stayed at home and Janet was the librarian at the Waterstop Library. When Janet retired from the library, her picture appeared in the Daily News, and for some reason, it got picked up by the Pittsburgh Press. Sometime later, a man showed up at Mrs. Moskowitz' house across the street looking for his long lost mother. He was carrying that Pittsburgh Press clipping.

Now, everyone knew that Janet McConnell was an old maid like her sister, but here was this man asking Mrs. Moskowitz to go across the street and smooth the way for some mother-son reunion. But there's more. He claimed her name wasn't Janet McConnell at all but was Janet Banner, and that Irene McConnell wasn't her sister but her lover who some thirty-five years earlier had come and broken up his happy home back in Lima, Ohio.

As ill-luck would have it, Mrs. Jett was there that day and heard everything, so the word was out. The Sisters McConnell were ... well, you know ... homely-sexuals. It would be years before I got that word right.

If I appear to make light of it, it's because the storm that followed is long passed and forgotten. There were, nonetheless, black threatening clouds over the Sisters McConnell's house and hearts for some time. My mother, of course, embraced the Sisters McConnell and campaigned vigorously for them. In fact, their new standing in the community endeared them to her as never before. Prior to this, she had thought them "mouse-happy bores".

Gwen Luka happily joined my mother in favor of the Sisters McConnell probably for no other reason than to spite her mother, Estelle, who thought the Sisters were "an abomination". She seriously suggested they be run out of town. She was white with rage that this sort of thing might be tolerated in decent society.

This was, after all, another time; another perspective. Why else would the Sisters live such an elaborate lie? But then, lies were the order of the day back then. Appearances were everything. Everyone lied to maintain the appearance of propriety; of normalcy. And some of us came to believe the lies we told. The most ruinous lies are the lies we tell ourselves. Public exposure was a terrifying prospect, and so everyone cloaked themselves in lies and everyone was afraid –– whether they knew it or not. And so the Sisters McConnell became pariah, except at our house.

While all the other kids were being warned off, we were suddenly being dropped off at their doorstep at every turn; sometimes overnight. When I asked my mother to explain their relationship, she said, "They're in love with each other, dummy!" Meant less than nothing to me. All I knew was my mother had become their best friend. That was obvious to everyone.

Ultimately, the scandal liberated the Sisters McConnell. Janet and her son worked out their differences, and the month of August brought two granddaughters and a grandson to stay with Janet and Irene. They were nearly grown, so we kids had little to do with them except when the Sisters baby-sat us. Like the day of the funeral.

I was in a torment about the knife that day, and Janet McConnell sensed it. She sat me down on the front porch swing away from everyone.

"Is it about the murders, then?" she asked. Her years in the library had created a kind of permanent whisper that was both soothing and conspiratorial. She was stooped from years of half bending over books.

"What if you know something," I said, "but if you tell, you'll get in trouble?"

"What is it you think you know?" she asked, with that air of confidentiality she had.

"I'm just asking. I don't know anything."

"I think we may have the same problem. You see, I may know something, too. It's a frightful weight to carry, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Especially if you're wrong. Are you absolutely sure about what you know?"

"Oh yes, I heard it plain as day."

"Well then, perhaps we both should talk to your father about what we know?"

"He'd really give it to me then!"

"Is it so bad; what you did?"

"Oh yeah."

"I understand perfectly. We do have the same problem."

"What did you hear?"

"Just talk. Vicious talk that could get a lot of people in trouble if it's true. And hurt a lot of people if it's not. The point is I know of someone . . . There's someone very angry, and I believe, capable . . ."

She stood up unable to finish her thought. She shook out the apron she was wearing, and added offhandedly, "I guess everyone's got ideas about this thing. Probably all nonsense."

"Why don't you tell my mother . . .?"

"Oh no!" she said, turning on me with a fearful look on her face. "No, I couldn't do that. You see, your mother is not very good with secrets. Especially when they make her angry. You understand?"

"I guess."

"She'd go off like a roman candle. No. If I were to tell anyone, it would be your father. He'd know how to handle it. Your father's a good man."

"Yeah."

"Probably all nonsense anyway."

Before I could say another word, the screen door slammed on her backside and she was in the house. I gave the swing a good kick, and swung my legs up onto the swing to ride it out. Between the hanging plants all around the porch and the flower boxes attached to the porch railings, I could barely see the deserted street beyond the foliage. Everyone was at the funeral, except us. Fats joined me on the porch, and together we watched a mouse jump from one hanging plant to another. Fats stretched and yawned. I might have, too, were it not for my problem.

If my father knew we had broken into Luka's house, he would kill me. But I should tell him they found the knife that first day. No. If my father doesn't know already, I'm sure someone will tell him. There's no need for me to incriminate myself yet. And what the hell was Janet talking about? Maybe she knows who did it, after all. God, I wish I was at the funeral. We never get to go anywhere good.

Chuck Luka showed up for the funeral in the fresh suit we had found in his closet and in a wheelchair. The entire service took place at the grave sites at Meadowlands Cemetery. Everyone was there, and they all greeted Luka warmly. My father said he had no idea Luka had so many friends. He said it a lot. He said how he went up to the District Attorney, Matthew Bradley, and said, "I had no idea Chuck Luka had so many friends." And how Mr. Bradley just scowled at him.

My father always referred to the DA as, " . . . Mr. Matthew Bradley, or whatever his real name is!" because Mr. Bradley's real name was "Neibauer". He changed it.

Reporters and photographers from all over were there asking questions and taking pictures. This was a big deal. Luka cried the whole time with his right hand over his eyes like a visor. I saw his picture on the front page of the Daily News. It made me glad I wasn't there to see it. There was another picture of him half standing out of the chair pointing with his whole arm at Chief Mosko and some other policemen. The look on Luka's face was terrible like a newborn baby wailing. The paper said he was screaming, "Why don't you find the man who did this!" My father was standing right behind him with his hands on Luka's shoulders, and you could see a bit of my mother off to the side. That was a terrible picture. I had never seen such unbridled pain and outrage. It showed up again in the Sunday Pittsburgh Press.

No one noticed at the time, but there was someone else in that picture. Standing alone on an incline behind the policemen and away from the others, you could just make out Joe Scarceletti, the owner of the Royal Grill. No one would ever have noticed if he hadn't been cropped out of the Pittsburgh Press picture. He was noticed by default.

Luka had been brought to the funeral from the hospital and was expected to return immediately after; but Matt Bradley decided that if Luka was well enough to attend the funeral he was well enough to go to jail and he ordered Chief Mosko to take him into custody right there on the cemetery lawn. My father made a big scene for the press about the State's total lack of compassion not just for the husband and father of the victims but for the entire community. Privately, he called it a public relations disaster for the DA. All in all, my father had a very good day.

My mother did not have a good day. When she got home, she withdrew into her room and stayed there until the next morning. My father fetched us from the Sisters McConnell, and told us to leave my mother alone. She was grieving, he said. Once, during the evening, she called out my father's name so shrilly we all jumped in fright. He attended to her like a nervous midwife scampering to her room with hot towels and whispers. It was the beginning of whispers in the house.

Later, I heard from Garry that my mother had fallen down at the cemetery; that my father had to help her to the car. But he said a lot of people were "real broke up; crying and all". I asked him if my mother was crying. He said, "No".

The next morning, my father took us kids to the office with him. My grandfather was sitting at his barge-like desk when we entered the waiting room. As soon as he saw us through the open doorway, he jumped to his feet with a loud, "Ho!", and bounded from behind his desk into the waiting room with his arms outstretched the whole way. We piled into his arms, and he was radiant with love. We were like puppies all over a big, old dog.

My grandfather was ugly and smelled like the inside of a pencil sharpener; but he was the happiest man I ever knew which made him beautiful. He was a big bull of a man with a loud lusty laugh and warts on his face. Life was fun for him, even when it was difficult. He was also a skillful attorney and a thief which made him rich; but never nearly as rich as he let on. My father was never rich.

My grandfather knelt there with us on the carpeted floor like a boy with three Christmas gifts; not knowing which to unwrap first. He held each of our faces in his hands with a look of awed wonder as if he were seeing us for the first time. He did a cursory inspection of hands and fingers and feet and knees all the while smiling and grunting approval. Then, one by one, he took hold of our shoulders tight between his powerful hands, and looking squarely into each face, he asked: "Are you having fun? Is everything all right? Have you learned anything yet?" In all the excitement, I can't remember any of us ever answering him.

My father watched all this joylessly from inside his office. My mother told us that my father envied us this attention, because he had no memory of ever getting anything like it himself. Perhaps that's why my father could not reach inside of us and grab hold the way my grandfather could.

One by one, my grandfather picked us up off the floor and bounced us down on the red leather couch across from where Liz was busy typing. Then he entered my father's office and shut the door.

Liz sat at her desk as straight as a West Point cadet with her elbows close to her side and her hands delicately poised over the typewriter. She wore a white sweater that accentuated her high pointed breasts. Her head was turned just slightly toward the small desk easel holding the material she was copying, and she appeared never to look at her magical flying fingers. A diamond engagement ring and wedding band flashed over the keys, and it seemed to me she was more a musician making music than a secretary typing. She was young, slim, and pretty; and I don't think we exchanged more than a dozen words all those years she sat there playing the typewriter.

Suddenly, I could hear voices raised from inside my father's office. Liz didn't bat an eye. Baby Ruth crawled onto my lap and wrapped her arms around my neck. There was a fight going on, all right.

"You're not going to make a dime! You'll never see a penny out of this, and if you do it right, it'll be a year or more before you have time for a real paying client. Boy, you're not thinking this through!"

"Christ, why does everything have to come down to money?! There are other things, you know."

"Like what? Prestige!? Where's the prestige in losing a murder case? The man's guilty as hell. Plead him "guilty" and get the hell out of it!"

"How do you know he's guilty?!"

"What makes you think he isn't? You haven't even interviewed the man."

"I'm seeing him later this morning."

"I'm not staking you to this one. I don't approve. You're taking this loser on without my approval. Don't come running to me for a handout six months down the line when . . . "

"You've got some fucking nerve. I've more than paid my way around . . ."

"Don't you ever talk to me like that!"

"Dad. Just this once, let me . . . "

"I won't have that language . . . "

"Shut up! I'm taking the case and that's that!"

"You don't shut me up, you little piss ant! You're here on my dime and don't you forget it."

Even Liz stopped typing after that. We all sat frozen in our seats listening for a fall, a blow, a gun shot, something! Again voices were heard; this time soft, conciliatory, punctuated by painful silences. My father's door opened to the sound of my grandfather's voice:

" . . . you're on your own. Deal?"

"It's what I studied law for."

"Deal?

"It's a deal."

My grandfather passed through the waiting room and into his office without so much as a glance in our direction. Baby Ruth followed after him, but his door closed before she could reach it. My father appeared a moment later, and took us downstairs to the conference room. There was a long table with lots of chairs, and the walls were books; floor to ceiling shelves of books. Law books. We were given our office collection of pads and pens and coloring books and paints and set loose. Baby Ruth rode her tricycle up and down the tiled hall outside. I couldn't help feeling sorry for my father. He barely said a word –– he was that upset. I understood. After all, he just "got it" from his father. But I couldn't say anything, could I?

Sometime later, he came down again to tell us he was on his way to the police station.

"To see Luka?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"Tell him "hi!" for me, okay."

Once again, our eyes met and a whole world of communication passed between us, or so I imagined. I was on his side this time, and he thanked me. All without a word.

"This shouldn't take long," my father finally said, "Then, we'll go down to the Royal for a burger. How's that?"

"Great."

My father started for the stairs when I heard myself say, "Wait! I want to go with you."

He looked me straight in the eye as if I had just asked him the hardest question in the world. Then he smiled and handed me his briefcase.

"All right, partner," he said, "Let's go."

My father's briefcase was beaten and scuffed like a farmer's boot. Its mouth opened wide at the top like a satchel. And when it was closed, two bald handles stood at attention to accommodate his grip. The brown leather was faded and veined with cracks –– all of its stiffness years gone. If he were ever to empty the briefcase it would fall into an ugly brown puddle on the floor. The police station was a short drive from my father's office, and I held the briefcase on my lap the whole way. I needed both hands to carry it into the police station –– it was that heavy.

George The Dispatcher was at his post –– ever-watchful, ever-diligent. From his elevated perch there behind the counter, he could see everything going on inside and outside the glass-enclosed station room. The converted auto dealership was the perfect blind for hunting night speeders on Main Street when the town was dark and deserted. Boredom had made him maniacal in his pursuit of speeders. He would jump up and down gleefully at the sight of one. Then he would radio one of the two police cars to make an arrest. But unfortunately for George, everyone in town got wise to him. He had nabbed so many of them. So everyone got in the habit of braking to a funeral procession crawl past the police station; sometimes with a wave to George, then they would burn rubber as soon as they were well out of view. It was a funny sight to see.

My father told George that we had come to see Luka. George phoned the message on to Chief Mosko in back. It was obvious that George The Dispatcher was still smarting from our last visit. He was famous for his grudges. He often bragged that he didn't speak to his brother for three years over a soccer bet. Now he was giving my father the cold shoulder, and I had a feeling my father was grateful.

Will Mosko came out looking like a man with a million things on his mind –– all of them sad. He gave me a cursory nod and got right to the point.

"We're moving Luka to County this afternoon," Will said, averting his eyes the whole time.

"So soon?"

"Bradley wanted him there this morning, but I arranged to keep him here for your meeting today. I'm afraid it's the best I can do."

"I understand. I know how it's done, but I was hoping procedure might be waived in this case. I mean ..."

"I know," Will interrupted, "I know it's going to be hard on you –– driving all that way every time you want to see Luka, but Matt's the boss."

"Yeah, well I never expected any courtesies from Matt Bradley, or whatever his real name is, but I was hoping."

"I tried, Josh. I really tried for you."

"For God's sake, Will," my father said, "You're not responsible for any of this. You don't imagine I blame you, do you?"

Will looked down at his feet and backed away a step.

"There is one thing more," he said, "Doc Mace doesn't want Luka getting any booze."

My father laughed and raised his arms as if submitting to a search. Only then did Chief Mosko look him squarely in the eyes. "Christ, Josh. Isn't this hard enough? I'm not gonna fuckin' search you. Come on."

Clearly, my father was shocked by Will's response. Will held the gate open, and I grabbed my father's briefcase and followed him into the inner sanctum. George puffed out his chest and gave me a sneer, but there was nothing he could do or say about it. That briefcase was my passport, and the Chief of Police himself had invited me in. When all was said and done, poor George was no more intimidating than a worm of toothpaste.

We followed Will through the station toward a back wall with a large glass window facing into a darkened room. It was a holdover from the auto-dealership-days. A car salesman could sit back there with his morning paper or a client and still see the action on the floor. My father took his briefcase from me and sat me down in one of the chairs lined up against the wall. I was told to stay put, and he followed Will around a corner and out of sight.

Then with the flick of a switch, the window was lit like a movie screen. I stood up and turned to see my father entering the little room. Two officers joined me there for the show.

My father sat at a small table with his briefcase on the floor to his right. Without looking, he reached into it for two long, yellow legal pads. Then he reached into his inside jacket pocket for two new, dagger-sharp yellow pencils. He placed a pad and pencil in front of the empty chair facing him, and kept the other for himself. He scribbled something on the pad; all the while making an effort not to acknowledge the prying eyes on him.

The interrogation room was no more than an enclosed cubicle with a table and two chairs. Florescent bulbs on the ceiling provided more light than anyone could possibly need. My father sat facing the door Luka would enter. And to his left running the length of the cubicle was the window facing out onto the station area where we stood watching. The effect must have been claustrophobic and intimidating whether it was intended to be or not. Supposedly, the room was chosen for the attorney's protection.

I turned to one of the officers and asked what was taking so long. He simply shrugged.

My father didn't appear the least bit impatient. I would later learn that he was used to being kept waiting in this fishbowl by other police officers. It was a petty exercise in power, and one he accepted graciously. But Will Mosko was a direct and honest man of conscience; a smart man, who had never pulled this kind of shit before. Chief Mosko understood; even welcomed the limitations of police work. He had plenty of weight to throw around without pretenses of more. This was not like him.

Just then, the door opened; and Luka stood before my father. Chief Mosko removed his handcuffs, and closed the door on the two men. Luka turned to see us gawking from the other side of the window, and almost simultaneously Chief Mosko appeared to shoo the officers away. I stood transfixed.

I had never seen Luka look like this. I couldn't figure out what was different about him. He looked pale and unwell, but there was something else. Then it occurred to me. I had never seen Luka not smiling.

Luka did not move, but turned his hardened eyes on my father. Then I heard Luka say, "I gotta know. Do they really think I did it?"

My father was visibly shaken by both the rock hard intensity of those eyes and the substance of his question. Luka went on, "I can take it if they really think I killed Gwen and all. But if they're just covering their own sad asses –– well, I just can't live with that. I'll put myself down, I swear it."

"Sit down," my father said; and for some stupid reason, I thought he was talking to me. I took my seat; grateful that I could hear everything so clearly.

"What are we supposed to think, Chuck? You were there with them. Who else?"

"I got just one reason to live. To get the man who did this. But if they're not looking for the real killer, what chance have I got?"

"Sit down. Please, Chuck. Sit down."

"You think I did it, too?"

"It looks bad, Chuck. Surely, you can see that."

"Yeah. I guess so."

"I need to know what happened that night."

"I told them. They wrote it all down."

"I need to hear it from you."

"I go home and go to bed. Next morning, I get up and go to the bathroom. I take a leak. Then I splash some water on my face and look in the mirror. There's something in the tub. It's Jeff. Dead –– all bloody. I run to get Gwen. She's dead. I've got blood all over me. Then Marilyn. Then Estelle. Then you. It's all a nightmare. You gotta understand. It's not real. None of this is real."

"Start with leaving the Royal Grill that night."

"I don't remember leaving the bar. I don't remember going to bed. Most nights, I come home drunk after everyone's in bed, and I take my clothes off downstairs and my shoes so I won't wake anybody and I go upstairs in the dark and fall down next to Gwen. It's been like that for years."

"So you have no memory of that night?"

"I remember the bar. Billy and the gang and having a great time dancing and talking and joking around. I remember the picnic. You were there. In our backyard."

"You were drinking at the picnic, too?"

"Right. It was Graduation Day."

"And you were able to go out afterward to the bar?"

"I got some shut-eye on the couch first. Like I always do."

"You sleep on the couch, then?"

"Sometimes, why?"

"Why did you go up to your room that night?"

"It's my bed. Where I sleep?"

"Why not the couch?"

"What are you getting at? A man goes to bed in his bed, for Christ's sake!"

"Nora had an idea someone was sleeping on the couch every night. She thought Gwen."

"You don't know Gwen! Nobody's going to chase her outta her bed. No, I'm the one gets put out when the time comes."

"What do you mean?"

"Like if we have a fight or something, you know."

"Like that night?"

"No, we were okay that day. We were great that day. You saw us."

"Yeah, I did. So what happened that night, Chuck? Lay it out for me."

"You mean, the murders?"

There wasn't a sound. My father wasn't answering Luka. It was as if someone had turned the volume off. I stood up to see what was going on.

Luka was sitting opposite my father. He absentmindedly picked up the pencil and began toying with it. My father was sitting back staring at Luka as if he'd never seen him before. Luka started doodling on the pad; and then he looked toward the window, and I ducked back down into my seat.

I heard Luka say, "God, I'd give anything for a beer right now."

Then my father spoke. He said, "Luka? Do you want to talk about the murders of your family?" And icicles hung on every word. I felt a familiar chill of fear. This was my father's killing voice.

"Sure," Luka said, "That's why we're here."

"When did the murders happen?"

"While I was at the bar. Sometime that night."

"And then you drove home drunk and walked through a house full of dead bodies and crawled into bed next to your murdered wife, is that what happened?"

"What else could have happened? If I'd been there, he would have killed me, too."

"Who?"

"What?"

"Who is this guy? This killer?"

"That's what we gotta find out."

"Who would want to kill Gwen?"

Here was a new voice to me; not icy with disapproval and reproach, but cruel and red hot. This voice was truly lethal. I was frightened for Luka. I jumped to my feet to watch; prepared to sound the alarm if by some ironic turnabout the attorney attacked the client.

"Who would want to kill Estelle?" my father went on, "She got any enemies you know of?"

My father was on his feet now, and Luka was squirming in his seat as if it were on fire; all the time shaking his head. Something terrible was stirring in my father; something he appeared to have no control over.

"Who would want to kill Marilyn? Maybe it was Jeff he was after. Chuck, listen to me. Maybe they weren't all dead when you got home. Maybe Marilyn was still trying to crawl into the hall as you passed by. Let's look at this picture, okay? Here's a man who parties all night getting shit-faced drunk leaving his mother-in-law, his wife and two kids all alone at home so some madman can come in and slaughter them. And this guy –– you, I'm talking about –– you get so drunk you blindly climb the stairs and crawl into a blood-soaked bed with your dead wife and pass out. And the cops are victimizing you. And the DA is victimizing you. And you're not absolutely sure you want to live. But, it's Graduation Day! Tell me, you drunken slob, what was the excuse the day before? You really piss me off, Chuck. I had no idea how much you piss me off."

Luka turned his head abruptly toward the window and looked directly at me; then back to my father. His face contorted; his whole body seized in pain. "Oh, my God!" he said, "Oh, my God!"

"What? What is it?"

"Oh, my God! What have I done!"

Few of us ever see what I saw that day. I stood there and watched Luka disintegrate –– empty out. It began like a death rattle, but so deep and so low it seemed to echo from his groin, then change into a sustained kind of whine in the mask of his face, until finally his whole being erupted in a terrifying wail; and he plunged the pencil into his thigh.

George The Dispatcher jumped to his feet and ran over to me by the window. My father held up a halting hand without ever taking his eyes off Luka who was now crying into his folded arms with such deep, racking sobs that the table shook. My father went to Luka and pulled his shoulders off the table. Luka's head fell back as if his neck were made of rubber. His mouth was open like a newborn chick craning desperately for nourishment. The pencil had penetrated his leg and broken in half. My father pulled it out of his leg and threw it into the corner. Luka appeared oblivious to the operation.

I know now that the truth penetrates by degrees; going deeper and deeper and deeper. There's the truth that something bad happened which is an assault to the mind. Then the truth of grief; an assault to the heart. And finally, the truth of shame, an assault to the soul. Luka may not have killed his family, but he didn't do anything to save them either. He was absent that night. He had not been present for years. He had wept for himself, and now at last, he was weeping for them.

And this was no accident. My father had done this to Luka intentionally. He could see what I had failed to see –– that Luka was completely detached from any feeling. Breaking through Luka's shock was an essential and very tricky business. He was of little use as he was. There were truths locked in there with his feelings, but more importantly, his lack of feeling made him appear guilty; even cold-blooded. Many innocent men have passed through trial and onto the gallows wrapped in that same shroud of shock; convicted in large part because of it.

Luka's crying subsided into sporadic chokes and sighs until he was breathing fully and more deeply than he had in years. My father stood by Luka's side with his hand on his shoulder. George finally lost interest and moved back to his counter.

"Did you kill them, Luka?"

"No," Luka said, "I couldn't have."

"Do you have any idea who did?"

"No. No one."

"The police say you left the bar at 1:30. How long does it take you to get home."

"Ten –– fifteen minutes, I guess."

"And the truth is you don't know what you did from 1:45 that morning until you woke up about 8:30 that same morning. Is that right?"

"I didn't kill them, I know that! Don't you think I'd know?"

"I don't know."

"I couldn't have killed them. I couldn't!"

Walking down Pine Street was fun because it was so steep you had to lean back and teeter on your toes to keep from running. If you let yourself run, sheer propulsion would send you flying past Main Street and the railroad tracks and into Collier's Creek. We were walking from the office down to Main Street and the Royal Grill beyond. My father was carrying Baby Ruth, and I was walking beside him. My shoulder ached, so I was twirling my arm like a pinwheel. Danny was lagging behind as usual. My mother would have said that Danny was, "Butterfly McQueening it!".

My father and I were still talking about Luka and the murder. I wanted to know how he knew Luka was innocent.

"Life is messy and nothing's messier than murder. A guilty man tries to clean it up. Luka didn't. Luka got it about as sloppy as it gets."

"You mean he didn't clean up the blood?"

"No. I mean he didn't paint a pretty picture of himself with clean habits and fine intentions. Everything he said about himself that night was pure Luka. And he didn't give me any long-winded alibis accounting for every second. Those things always get you in trouble, because everything always takes longer than you think. A guilty man will cram an hour's activity into the twenty minutes in question. So obvious! But Luka didn't. I believe him. And I'll bet my life Chief Mosko does, too."

"What about the knife?"

"What about it?"

"Where do you think it is?"

"I suppose the murderer has it."

"Is that what Will says?"

"No. They claim Luka disposed of it –– stashed it away somewhere. See, if that were true, Luka could be charged with first degree murder. Anyway, it implies presence of mind, planning, maybe even premeditation. The big question is motive? Who on Earth would have a motive to kill these people?"

"What if they found the knife and didn't tell you?"

"They wouldn't do that. That's against the law."

"But what if they did?"

"What advantage would that be? It doesn't make sense."

I wanted desperately to tell my father what I had overheard after breaking into Luka's house, but the truth was like a barbed fish hook in my stomach. I felt that getting the truth out would tear my insides out with it. The fear of exposure flooded my brain and made my skin tingle. I had no idea what I was afraid of. Guilt had made a nest in my shoulder and with each ache it was telling me to keep its secret or die.

The Royal Grill was the most beautiful place in the world. It was a mirrored jewel even before you entered it. Outside, glass brick and window surrounded a heavy red door. The facets of glass brick reflected red, blue and gold neon. Inside the Royal Grill behind the bar, a mirrored wall reflected row upon row of sparkling jeweled bottles. On the bar itself, squat crystalline glasses shimmered with diamonds floating in molten amber and quartz. Day or night, the room was awash in moon glow. Faces were starlit and beautiful. Music everywhere seemed to come from nowhere. The music buoyed the room like hot air in a garish balloon. It was a magical, bejeweled ice palace where everyone laughed and sang and told wonderful stories about wonderful people. And they served great burgers and fries.

Billy Kiernan was working the bar when we entered. Ordinarily, we would sit at one of the booths and have Gladys serve us, but the bar was empty except for Biff McCoy bent over his Kick In The Ass at the far end, so we climbed up on the stools at the opposite end of the bar near the entrance. My father was anxious to speak to Billy anyway.

Billy was an old man with eerie pale blue eyes and huge ears. You could bathe a baby in one of his ears. He knew us all by name and prided himself on having your order down before your butt was. The burgers and fries were working, and three cokes and a draft were sweating in front of us. Billy could make Baby Ruth laugh with just a look, and he and Danny used to play catch with an ice cube. You had to be fast, because the last man to get off a sliver of the melting ice won. I just wanted to hear him talk.

It was Billy who invented the Kick In The Ass. It was supposed to be a hangover remedy, but Billy confessed to us that, ". . . it does nothing but taste really awful. Man wakes up with a hangover, he wants punishing."

Billy had a stool back there behind the bar, and if you were one of the chosen few, he would pull up the stool and sit leaning with one elbow on the bar for "some chit chat". It always felt like the supreme compliment when he did that, though we kids tended to go unnoticed to the point of disappearance when Billy got started. Children very often are the proverbial fly on the wall.

"You're sitting on his stool," Billy told my father, "We ought to have a plaque."

"What?"

"That's Luka's place right where you're sitting now. And Gwen used to sit right here next to him. Haven't seen her in months though."

"Were you working the night it happened?"

"Graduation night? Hell, yeah. That's a big party night. Had to be here. What a night! A good time was had by all."

"And Luka was here?"

"Right where you're sitting now. Closed the place. It was 1:30 on the dot. No mistake about it. Luka was always the last to leave, and I poured him outta here and closed that door at 1:30AM."

"How did he seem to you when he left?"

"Like always. Drunk as a skunk. Oh, it was a wonderful night. You shoulda been here, Josh. Everyone had a ball."

"Luka, too?"

"Especially Luka. No one loves a party better than Luka." Billy burst out laughing just thinking about it. "You know that little Patty McIntyre girl? What a little beauty! Well, she graduated; believe it or not, where does the time go? Anyway, she sorta latched onto Luka because her date passed out in his car somewhere and the two of them sat here and had a good old time. The whole bunch of them came in around 11:00 after that dance at the school, and it was three deep at the bar. Her and Luka danced and joked it up. Beautiful girl in her white gown and she had this orchid pinned on her, and Luka was saying how her other tit should get flowers, too. Well, it was funny at the time. She's quite a little flirt, you know. She put that orchid behind his ear, and someone else put one of those black graduating caps on his head, and he did a jig with her to some Elvis Presley crap on the juke box. You know, Luka loves to play the fool. The kids loved him. He's a kid himself, for Christ's sake. At heart, he is. He picked up her skirt. You know, one of those parachute things with miles and miles of gauze or shit down to the floor. He picks up her skirt, and crawls in under there like it's a pup tent, and she screams and laughs. But it was good-natured fun. It was a real pleasure to see those two together having fun and all. Reminded me of the old days with him and Gwen in here. I miss her. I really miss her."

His eyes suddenly glistened like jewels. He seemed startled by his tears and jumped up and moved on to the other end of the bar where he stood leaning with both hands on the bar until our food order was put down in front of him. He was all right when he came back with the food.

"Luka didn't do it," he said, reaching for the ketchup. "One thing I know for sure. Luka doesn't have a mean bone in his body. Drunk as he gets, I woulda seen it, believe me. You can't hide that kind of temper from a bartender. If it's there, it's damn well gonna come out sometime. No, sir. He did not do this thing!"

It was about then my father caught sight of Joe Scarceletti passing through the bar on his way to the office in back. My father called out his name, but Joe pretended not to hear and kept right on until he was out of sight. Billy gave a shrug and shook his head.

"I don't know," he said, "I don't know what's wrong with him. He never gets behind the bar anymore. Been a year or more. Doesn't talk to anybody. Never got over that Martha Brennan business, I guess."

Two men sat down at the bar, and Billy left us to serve them.

"Who's Martha Brennan?" I asked my father.

"When you're older."

Joe Scarceletti's mud colored Mercury was famous in Waterstop; part of the lore of the town. One Saturday morning, it wound up in front of Ellie Roth's house and stayed there attracting all kinds of attention until sometime late Wednesday night. More often than not, you'd see it sitting outside one of the three popular motels on Route 19. That mud colored Mercury was the source of a lot of speculation and much giggling. It was like a ghost ship appearing out of nowhere and just as silently disappearing again. But its presence could mean only one thing. Be it in a parking lot or on a back country road or at your curb, you knew that somewhere love was in the making. But all that was before the Martha Brennan business.

The story of Joe and Martha was an unwritten folksong that went something like this: Martha Brennan was a local wonder; well-built with short, straight shaggy blonde hair cut close to her skull like a bathing cap. Her eyes were large and blue, and she outlined them with black pencil to further accentuate them. The effect gave her a waifish, startled look, but it was the vulnerability emanating from those eyes that truly endeared her to people; especially men, who were drawn to protect her at the same time they were drawn to possess her. She wore only black misshapen skirts and tops. The overall look was one of kooky defiance. But the truth was she had a dreadful need to be noticed and to be loved. She was nineteen-years-old.

Martha Brennan gave birth in the ladies' room at Gimbel's Department Store in Pittsburgh. She wrapped the newborn baby in the sweater she had just purchased, and put it in the Gimbel's shopping bag they had given her. Then she went out into the street and hailed a taxi cab. She told the driver to take her to Waterstop some twenty miles away. At some point about midway down Route 19, she asked the driver to pull off onto the shoulder of the four-lane highway. There was nothing there but countryside. She got out of the cab with her shopping bag and disappeared over a little incline for a few minutes, then returned without the shopping bag and told the driver he could go on.

The driver dropped her off downtown, and went straight to the Waterstop Police. The girl appeared sick, and there was a terrible smell in the cab. And, of course, there was the business with the shopping bag. They were able to find the shopping bag, and miraculously the baby boy was alive. They also found Martha's charge slip for the sweater in the shopping bag. By the time they got to her home, she was hemorrhaging badly. She died that night.

Joe Scarceletti sought out my grandfather. He wanted to claim his son. Martha's parents were the Brennan Furniture Store. A custody battle ensued, and the courts gave the boy to the Brennan Furniture Store. The boy would be raised in the same home where Martha had so painstakingly hidden her pregnancy.

After that, Joe became like a phantom haunting the Royal Grill; always on the periphery, passing through like a half-seen shadow, never really there. And the mud colored Mercury? Well, if it's not parked behind the Royal Grill, you might see it sitting in front of the Brennan's house or alongside the Waterstop Nursery School playground.

When we returned home from the office early that evening, my mother set upon us even before the door closed on our backs.

"That woman was here today!"

She was pacing the living room waving her half-full glass about as if it were a conductor's baton; punctuating her comments with it, rattling the ice cubes like a rattlesnake –– raging:

"That woman with her prim little hat and her rat-headed furs with the tails dangling down! Furs! Only your mother would dare wear furs in summer. Eighty-five degrees and she comes in here with those furs! And those cold black eyes of hers like onyx buttons and her mouth sucking on itself. You have her eyes! Terrible little black disapproving eyes like a rat! And what the hell is she doing with her mouth? Tasting herself? Constantly working that mouth around her bitter tongue. God, I hate that woman! 'Please tell me Josh isn't going to get involved with this business across the street,' she says. 'It'll ruin him,' she says. She standing there in a suit buttoned up to her neck with those rat-headed furs in eighty-five degree summer telling me I should talk to you, persuade you, show you how 'ill-advised' it would be to get involved with 'people like that'! Surely, I can see that, she says.

"'But Luka didn't do it!' I said, 'I know he didn't!' And she finds it all so distasteful. 'Even to have to discuss such matters.' With me!!-she meant. That bitch is standing in my living room tugging on the wrist of one of her gloves. Gloves! Your mother came into my house wearing gloves!"

At last, she seemed to require some response from my father.

"Have you been drinking all day?" he said.

"Haven't you heard a word I said? That woman was here today! And if she ever comes back, I'll kill her! I swear I will!"

That woman was my father's mother who years later would starve herself to death in a nursing home. Her name was Natalie, and it was the purest coincidence that both she and my grandfather would try to stop my father's involvement in the murder case on the same day. They were certainly not in cahoots. The fact that they agreed was probably testament to the wisdom of his pulling out of the case. It was not, however, a statement of their common bond. If anything, they were bound together by hatred.

As a young woman, Natalie was extremely attractive to a score of young men as well as to my grandfather. She was pretty and she had a high sense of style and she was insane. Only her mother knew the extent of her mental illness, and she was not shy about warning off suitors. But, sadly, Natalie's insanity was not the off-putting kind. It was wildly intriguing and invariably misinterpreted as flamboyance with a mix of superiority and danger. The mood swings of a very pretty girl can be both unsettling and arousing to a young man. Being highly excitable one moment and morose the next can strike a young man as daring when the turn of expression is on a lovely pale face with dark penetrating eyes. Physical agitation is downright alluring when it is the bod