His father snorted. “You’re as stupid as your stepfather, if you really think that.”
“I’m with my brothers,” Joe said. “We’re a team.” He squared his jaw. “We can have a beer sometime and talk, if you like. But it’s too late for you to act like a real father now.”
“You’ll change your mind,” his father said. Anger flared deep and raw in his gaze. “I promise you. You’ll change your mind.”
Black, choking smoke erupted around him, making Joe tear up. He bent over, coughing …
And the music started up around him again, as if it had never stopped.
A black feather lay on the stage next to Joe’s polished shoes.
Three days later, his draft papers arrived in the mail. Six days later, Joe shipped out to training camp, carrying his saxophone by his side but leaving his brothers behind.
Joe was on patrol in Germany the next time he saw his father. It was the middle of the night and he was alone on his shift when a great black wolf slunk out of the shadows and shifted into the shape of a man in a long black coat.
“Evening, Joe,” his father said.
“Evening,” Joe said, keeping his voice even. He kept walking as his father fell into step beside him. “Pleased with yourself?” he asked.
“Not really. It meant another long trip, and I don’t care for travel.”
“Maybe you should have thought of that before you got me drafted.”
“You had to learn a lesson.”
“If you mean you’ve got a nasty temper, I’ve learned that for sure.”
“No,” Joe’s father said. He stopped walking and stared Joe in the eye as he intoned the words with a street preacher’s intensity. “In the end, you’re alone. You’re always alone.”
“Not tonight,” Joe said. “Unfortunately.”
He started walking again, leaving his father behind.
“You don’t know what you’re giving up,” his father called after him. “I can take you away from all this, boy.”
“Too late,” Joe called back, without turning around.
His brothers had marched down together to the recruiting office the day Joe’s draft papers had come through. That was his family, all over. Sure, Ivan had had big plans, but when it came down to it, they were a team.
They couldn’t argue the Army into putting them all in the same unit, but they made a bargain. All of them had joined the army bands, and they saw it as good practice. As soon as the war ended, they’d be back on the road to Hollywood.
When Joe came back on his next rotation to the spot where he’d left his father behind, all he saw was a tuft of long black fur. He shook his head and let it lie forgotten on the ground.
Joe didn’t see his father for the next three years, and he didn’t miss the old man, either. He marched through days and nights of war, playing his sax for the unit, until the endless German rain rusted his beautiful instrument beyond repair. He played a shoddy borrowed replacement, provided by the army, to cheer the troops as they marched into towns filled with thousands of corpses lying piled on the ground, the aftermath of successful air raids. By nighttime, the corpses had been cleared from the streets with grim efficiency, but their faces filled Joe’s dreams, to a soundtrack of the jazzy two-steps he played in the army band.
The day the keys of his second saxophone rusted over for good, Joe thought he’d tasted true despair. But he was wrong. That came later, when he got the telegrams.
Karl, who played keyboard with the intensity of a man possessed by angels, who’d dreamed nothing but music notes since he was a four-year-old kid, had had his left hand shot off in an accident in the Pacific. Looked like he wouldn’t be playing in any band, in Hollywood or anywhere else.
And Ivan, slick, movie star-handsome Ivan with his great big dreams for the family, was dead, killed by a German sniper as he’d marched with his band.
If Joe’s father had appeared to him then, Joe might well have killed him.
But his father didn’t come.
Joe played a third saxophone, so harsh and squeaky it would have pained him to hear himself play if he’d ever bothered to listen. He was with the army unit that liberated two concentration camps, and the horrors sank deep into his skin and stayed there, like the hollow-eyed stares of the survivors.
The night his unit found out that the war was over, Joe saw his father for the third time.
There was a party in the camp, everyone celebrating with hectic gaiety. Booze flowed hard and fast, as if it could wash away the memories. Joe left after the first round of toasts.
He sat alone in the darkness, smoking one of the free cigars that had been passed around the party. A small black cat crept through the shadows to sit next to him. Joe eyed it warily and didn’t reach out a hand to pet it. A moment later, he knew he’d been right, as the cat shifted into his father’s shape.
“Well, Joe,” his father said.
“Well,” Joe said.
It was hard to tell for sure in the dark, but he thought his father looked older and more haggard since the last time they’d met. The black coat billowed out over a skinnier frame, though the golden eyes were just as fierce in the hollow face.
A year ago, Joe would have killed the man on first sight. Now he just kept on smoking, too numb to move or say any more. Faint light and the sound of voices filtered out from the mess hall nearby.
“My condolences,” Joe’s father said.
Joe stopped smoking and looked up sharply. He couldn’t read an expression on his father’s shadowed face.
“They wouldn’t have been here if it weren’t for you,” he said.
“Who?” his father said.
They blinked at each other in mutual surprise. Then his father said,
“I was talking about your mother. She passed away two nights ago, in her sleep. I thought that you should know.”
Joe took a deep breath. Then he kneaded his fingers over his forehead, closing his eyes against the lance of pain.
He wasn’t completely numb yet, after all.
“She was a good woman,” his father said, tentatively. “She did her best for you. By her standards.”
Joe nodded. He couldn’t speak.
“I was thinking,” his father said. “I could take you back to see her, if you want.”
Joe looked up. “You could do that?”
“I could,” his father said. “She would have liked it.”
“Did you—?”
“I was with her at the end,” his father said. “She’d forgiven me, by then.”
Joe tasted a story he’d never know, and let it go. “Fine,” he said to his father. “Take me.”
That was the night Joe found out what it meant to be his father’s son.
They flew some way as crows at the beginning of the journey, but crows weren’t fast or strong enough for an ocean crossing. They turned into smoke for part of that, then caught a lift on the wings of a military airplane.
Flying in the cold, thin altitudes, half disintegrated into smoke, Joe felt the wind blow through the pain. Pure, freezing numbness overcame him, and finally, he thought he understood what his father always felt.
Freedom. He could have flown forever, and never had to touch his pain or memories again.
At the end, well past midnight on a dark, cold Ohio night, they shifted back into human shape to jimmy open the window of the funeral home and crawl inside to the room where Joe’s mother was laid out for viewing.
Joe touched her cold fingers and tried not to cry in front of his father.
“She was the prettiest girl in Kravarsko,” his father said. “She wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone. Not even me.”
“She turned us into a team,” Joe said. He looked down into his mother’s face, calm beneath the layers of paint, and for the first time in over a year, he felt a clear point of resolution form underneath the brittle shell of numbness and the swirling, scattered layers of pain that had been hidden underneath. “She’s the reason we all take care of each other.”