Forst was the kind of man to say Houston, all systems go before he farted, but I’d also once heard the fast slapping of his belt loops as went for leather in a hurry. Now he seemed serious.
He stared at me. It felt like he could look right inside me, and I took a chance. I asked him if he had been in the navy.
“Semper fidelis,” he answered. “Marines.”
“What are navy men like?”
“They screw each other.”
I tried to model that in my head, avoiding Kris Kristofferson, whom I’d been picturing in a uniform for some time. “From the front or from the back?”
Forst paused on this question. “From the back.”
“It really works like that?”
“Everybody gets screwed,” Forst said.
About that time, I started watching my mother sleep.
* * *
Standing in the bedroom doorway, quietly eating my cereal, I would take her in: the skewed shape of her under fern-print sheets, the hair stuck to her face, the shine of her shoulders, rising and falling, an arm stretched across the empty space where my father would have been. At night I sometimes dreamed I could walk around and breathe underwater. I wondered what went through her mind as she slept off long nights at the lab, a place where she looked deep into people’s blood and tissue, gazed into tumors, trying to trace the history of cancer. I envied her for that ability, but I didn’t think she stopped to consider that people could miss a scoured lung or bad kidney, that in the hollow left behind, there was only emptiness, or worse, room for stranger things to grow. I didn’t think she ever watched me sleep, from my doorway, wondering what I was dreaming.
Finally she caught me. I remember it was the week Ralph’s dog died. She sat up in bed and I saw her lab coat was still on. Patting the covers, she signaled for me to sit with her, but I didn’t want to. “Have it your way,” she said. “But I talked to your father last night.” She lit a cigarette, something else that had come with the shift change, while she paused to let that news sink in. “He wants to visit.”
She’d used this one before. “When?”
“Soon, baby. Think of it, all of us together again.”
“All the Wolverines,” I said.
“Don’t be like that. It will be good for you, having him around.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She was still unused to the smoke, and she fanned it from her face, leaning, trying to get away from it. “You’ll love him. He’s handsome,” she said and closed her eyes for a moment, like maybe she was picturing him.
For some reason, I thought of that man in the movie theater just then.
“What’s the point?” I said and went to eat my breakfast.
That week I sorted a lot of tile. I wasn’t supposed to be at Ralph’s too early, and I remember Forst coming out in his bikini briefs, his hand shielding the bright morning light, to find me in his tile bin. I sat sorting on top of a stack of boxes, and it scared me to be near eye level with him. Once in a while one of the tiles would cut you, so I had a finger in my mouth as we looked at each other. I couldn’t explain what I was doing there and I didn’t try. Shuffling tiles into bins just made sense to me. They were something to hold. They had weight and purpose. I could see my reflection in some of them. Forst squinted at me for a long time, and then he seemed to understand something and went back inside. We didn’t even speak.
Ralph was a little leery of my enthusiasm, but to us things had always been clear: the tiles needed sorting, and the solution was to dive in and get to work. The task was impossible on the surface, but you could picture a day when all the tiles had found their homes, and this knowledge carried us through long stretches of sorting where we didn’t speak, where there were only the soft clicks and chinks of subtle progress. At home, there was no preparation for my father. No one vacuumed or cleaned the guest towels. No one whistled the Wolverine fight song. No one found the magazines I looked at, red under the hot bath lamp, as I sweated and stared into the eyes of women who seemed to know the primitive math I was working on their bodies. There was no hiding of a robe for a man who may or may not have prowled the seventeenth parallel.
When I rode up on Saturday morning, Ralph stood staring at his dog Hans, dead of unknown causes in the mud behind the house. There was a water spigot on the side of the tile palace that dripped, and here was where the dog liked to dig and wallow. To keep him from burrowing under the tile bin, Forst always threw the cracked tiles in the hole, and this is where Hans was, sprawled on the broken shards, tongue in the mud. I approached and we stood silent for what seemed a great while.
“Dang,” Ralph eventually said and marched off to get Forst.
Hans’s coat was a little past charcoal, near black where his fur was soaked, and lying there, mouth open, gums graying, he looked lost and thirsty.
Ralph came back with Forst, who asked “what the hell?” of nobody in particular, and stood in shorts and socks sucking his fingers. I think he’d been eating barbecue potato chips. He licked the palm of his hand with several long strokes, and then nudged Hans with his toes. Next he kneeled down in the mud and used his thumb to open Hans’s eye. “Shit,” he said and hooked the dog’s upper canine with his finger, swiveling its snout up, the throat falling open, so Forst could look inside. We leaned in close. He sniffed the dog’s mouth but gave no reaction.
Forst then touched the dog’s stomach delicately, tenderly almost, before putting his ear to Hans’s belly, his other arm cautioning us to be still. I held my breath.
After a while he turned to us, and Forst, on his knees, stared straight in Ralph’s eyes. “Did I teach you to care for that dog?” He pointed down but none of us looked.
Forst got up and shuffled through the yard in his socks, pausing to search here or there in the grass with his toes, and I was pretty sure he was looking for a piece of rope. Ralph crossed his arms and squeezed his shoulders while we watched, but Forst only kicked around the yard for a while before disappearing.
It gave me the creeps to see Forst like that, and I didn’t know what to think. Ralph dropped his arms to his sides after Forst left, and the handprints on his shoulders made it look like he was being held, the way someone steadies you before they kiss you or punch you good. I felt held too, that day, that summer, but I had no such outward way to show it.
Forst returned with a short, hooked-blade linoleum knife and simply opened Hans up. The sawing motion jarred the dog in quick convulsions, briefly animating it. Suddenly, whole volumes of seething, blind worms poured milky pink from Hans’s belly. We all stepped back and watched them writhe.
“Jesus,” Forst said.
“Dang,” Ralph said.
But I said nothing. It was a moment of swirling clarity for me, and I wished I could see the inner workings of all things so plainly, that someone would touch and listen, dig even, for all the strange things I felt growing inside me. I had to sit down. Through the sliding glass door I could make out Ralph’s mother standing alone, observing us from the dark of the house. She looked on us as strangers, like she was already trying to find a way to put this behind her as she watched her husband wipe a knife on his sock. Looking at her, I considered the possibility it was a submarine my father was really on, and I hoped he wore a similar face every time he surfaced on the other side of the world.
Ralph’s mother balanced a yellow plastic laundry basket on her hip, and through the greasy dog-paw prints on glass door, I could see the the lip of her hysterectomy scar peek out above her low-slung house-shorts. I wanted to go to her, just to touch her maybe, but what good would that do? From the grass, I stared at the scar and wondered if my mom had maybe worked on that uterus in her pathology lab, if she had held it up close in the light and peered inside, or just dry-froze it for cross-sectioning.