Rodolphus: Saying Good-bye to Papa

J. Rodolphus

Contest Darkly

The Dread Cowboy

My Father: The Killer

Perhaps the World

Saying Goodbye to Papa

When Angels Perish

Rodolphus Dark Fiction

Saying Good-bye to Papa

J. Rodolphus

“Jenny, I killed Papa.” I would howl this confession to my sister later in the day as we stood together in the dilapidated cemetery twenty-six years after the fact — I clenching a “magic” coin in one hand and Jenny, as ever, wearing her bracelet.

Returning to the field of weather-eaten posts and standing before the only bronze marker in the lot — a rare monument that, perhaps due to superstition for those not well loved in life but celebrated in death, has stood vigil twenty-six years unmarred by vandalism, seemingly impenetrable to burying snows and weathering rains — Papa comes alive to my senses, if only for a few stutters of my pulse.

But as I stand and stare at the final bastion of my heroic Van Gogh Papa, it becomes painfully evident the bronze beast is not Papa. I am no longer a precocious child possessing him, owning every moment of his time. I no longer ride up high, against his chest, with my smooth young cheek flush with his hard and scratchy jaw.

Odd, how when sojourning back, over the years, embracing a beloved face with nearly three-dimensional clarity, separating a single expression from thousands, we suddenly discern the truth, the termite-consumed timber beneath the facade; how easily we as adults are able gauge the pain, the fear, the anxiety that we as six-year-old children might never perceive.

The day the police came to my school and stole me away from Papa I was not allowed to say good-bye to him. But I seem to remember his expression that morning when he dropped me off at the nursery school — that single expression snatched from thousands, a mental photograph mounted lovingly in the album of my mind — it seems there is some knowledge of the pain to come etched in the dear lines of his face.

But at the time — I was six years old — I felt Papa betrayed me. At that time, in my adoring eyes, he was Superman and the Lone Ranger combined. Not even the police should be able to fight him.

After Papa was gone, when I was seven years old, I received a letter from Papa’s best friend, Uncle Clarence. Along with the letter was an invitation and a photograph. The letter, lost to many moves and time, I do not remember (other than the declarative sentence written therein, a Webster definition of the word “embolism”), but the photograph I still possess, still cherish — the subject a richly sculpted wolf.

Eleven years passed before I acknowledged that invitation.

“Don’t go starting trouble with your daddy,” said my mother, chain-smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table.

“Buddy out of hair of the dog?” I riposted, brash, self-absorbed as any teenager.

“Don’t be joking, and don’t call him Buddy, he’s your father,” snarled my mother, cigarette punctuating her words from her long, stabbing fingers.

Buddy was possibly tenth in a line of men after Papa (I picture them stretching away from our door: shifting from foot to foot, glancing anxiously at watches, bumming cigarettes and joints from each other, cheerfully discussing football and oral sex).

Jenny, seated next to me, peered through the tops of her eyes and her too-long sheepdog bangs, green alien eyes whisking between mother and brother. Her lips held the grin which was ever at odds with the melancholy crescent of her eyes.

“Don’t you start, girlie,” mother hissed. “And take off that ridiculous bracelet!”

Jenny grinned into her oatmeal, the expression a small taller lifting of her cheekbones, ever stroking the delicate golden jewelry upon her wrist.

Everything about Jenny was bizarre, from her scary silences to her fluid motions which were somehow melodically enchanting. I hated Jenny; however, I also admired her, even then, for her ability to remain aloof from our environment, almost controlling that freak show through the palpable lack of her participation. If someone were to whisper that Jenny was suckled at the paps of a community of shewolves — I would believe completely. When one of the rowdies threatened to burst in her ten-year-old head with a baseball bat, Jenny had fetched the instrument and waited calmly for the blow.

When Buddy entered the kitchen, bleary-eyed and haggard-haired, his filthy sweatshirt on backwards, not five minutes passed before he and I rose from our chairs like mongrel dogs, each energetically snarling its designated role. He lifted me from the kitchen floor and punched my back three inches deep into the plaster wall.

Jenny began to howl. Not figuratively, and not in protest of the imminent death of her brother (all mother’s “men” were large), but in celebration of the daily ritual of perpetuating violence in our world — violence, whether a foot to the backside or virtual gang warfare — celebrating: her head back, shaggy hair parting to expose the jutting angularity of her face, mouth open and all four barrels of her carburetor full bore. My fingers came away from Buddy’s throat and his from mine in an attempt to shield our ears from the booming siren.

I laughed until I wept. Buddy, cradling his head, exited the room and our lives. Our mother pursued Jenny with a steak knife and Jenny dashed about the kitchen table, laughing and winking to me. Howling, Jenny always howling, running and grinning and winking. That is Jenny.

This was when I noticed my sixteen-year-old sister was a woman, complete with breasts, curves, long delicate limbs and an exquisitely formed face. But it was not this realization that locked me in place, unblinking and breathless. Something about her made the hair rise upon the back of my neck. Jenny looked otherworldly, howling, head tipped, eyes clenched shut, lips a circle. She looked so very much like a young and fey wolf cub, lanky, too splay-limbed, too spindly of leg and long of throat.

Papa. On what alien beach did you birth? Papa. An individual in a clone society of liberal and conservative sheep, sheep all of them, the masses. From what eldritch egg did you hatch?

Jenny looked like Papa.

I fled that house to my motorcycle and it seemed as if suddenly I was at the cemetery, my shoulders heavy and eyes clogged with grime, with no memory of the frantic flight across two states to reach that small fading cemetery, a place slipping into weed-choked memory.

I stood before the lone beast, not knowing what to say, not knowing exactly how to feel.

“I wanted to say...” I had no notion of how to express the poisons congealing in my guts, all those years. There was nothing to say. Yes, oh yet, yes, shit, there was something I wanted to say, should have said all of twelve years before — but children are selfish. Express the anger, the pain. I crouched and petted the beast’s head. Be angry. At fate, at family. Be angry. But children are selfish. I swallowed. I wanted to say something, desperately. I wanted to leave something behind.

I did not, could not, speak.

I noticed the journals, however; mostly spiral-bound college-ruled notebooks and some leather-clad “blank” books — the journals scattered about the lone beast, many wedged beneath the bronze paws and I glanced through a few of the offerings and began to discern that perhaps my Papa was more than my memory. I would soon learn that my Papa was a master of rejection, a toiler of brain sweat, a writer. Or failure, writer and/or failure, I guess they are one and the same in the world, in Papa’s world, anyway. His unsuccessful struggles were gaining strength, potency after his death. That people, strangers all of them, remembered, they remembered something that Papa never had in life. But isn’t that the way it is with the masses, always isn’t the way it is?

I departed from the cold bronze beast in the fading cemetery, all guilt of young selfishness intact.

Children think of “me,” of self, I thought as I slowly cruised my motorcycle back across two states — an eighteen-year-old man-boy, angry and confused — to the living. Children think only of the self, but not because they are bad; not because of poor rearing. They think of themselves because children — humans — must learn love of self before ever truly loving others. That’s just us, kids, we’re shits, but that’s just a part of life, the law of the jungle. But if only we could reach back and inject our present-day thoughts and decipherings back into our young heads, oh how I could reach out and touch my Papa, give him the understanding and love he so very much needed.

You have heard a beautiful woman protest: “Oh, I’m not pretty!” and observed a child shift uncomfortably from sneaker to sneaker when the exceptional grades on his report card are praised. Regardless what we must learn, we are taught that to appreciate the self is conceit; we mature with the conviction that selfishness is improper, that recognizing uniqueness is vanity, and that acceptance of self is negative, is bad, is evil. We are permeated with the notion that self-despise is being good.

When I lived with Papa I suppose I was well on my way to being a very “wicked” person. Proud. Conceited. Special. I believed I inherited a purpose in life, that I was armed with talents, destiny, a mission. As things — my life, world, fate — resolved, I am splendidly “good.” As good as the great open expanses of the collective zero, the bliss of society and liberal and conservative sheep. Baaaaaaaaa. Uh, baaaaaaaaaaa.

Uncle Clarence said to me over thousands of miles of snaking fiberoptic arteries: “Goodness, what a life he had. Like a book. Like Van Gogh.”

Not really my uncle, but Papa’s best friend, Uncle Clarence, three hundred pounds of pale white flesh, completely bald, a four-pack-a-day chain smoker. Pavoratti meets Night of the Living Dead. It was Uncle Clarence who pushed Papa’s writings into notoriety. Not that Uncle Clarence even liked Papa that much, not really. But that congenial hatred, that rubbing up against greatness that breeds fury and contempt and bitterness, it is almost stronger than love. And Uncle Clarence hated my Papa with a passion, like a schoolgirl crush in the heart of a cobra.

“Goodness, what a life he had. Like a book. Like Van Gogh.” He said this a week before my second visit to Papa’s resting place, the day “Sunflowers” sold for a ridiculous sum to the type of person who would not release five dollars for a Van Gogh painting when the artist was alive, and it infuriated me — and it depressed Uncle Clarence — that the leeches who repressed Papa and Vincent now embraced them, “purchased” them in death. Perhaps this anger motivated me. Pushed me to visit Papa the second time, and perhaps this time I might successfully say the thing I should have said when I was six years old.

Odd, that on this day, my thirty-second birthday, I am two years older than the man whose body once lay whole beneath this marker. This time I will come away with something — my memories will intensify, clarify — flare and Papa will be real, alive again, giving me my crucial chance.

My memory of Papa. It is difficult to differentiate between the imprints of actuality — at the very least the interpretation of truth by a child; and what I have imagined, dreamed, embellished — and what is a melding of all those. I remember big hands, holding me near, sweet breath, and a deep voice that rumbled my body. But don’t I also remember being held over the fireplace bricks and a slurred voice screaming: “I’ll bash his head in, I’ll bash his head in!” — or is that a planted recollection? Cigar smoke and moon viewings and storybooks at bedtime and movies, movies, adult movies and children movies and especially James Bond and vampire movies. But also Papa’s temper, his face flushing red, veins popping out of his neck and forehead, the lupine eyes burning dark and deep. Wolves, no matter their beauty, are not tame, they are not lapdogs.

That amalgam, memory, rivaling a lifetime of society’s sly propaganda, claiming its desire to protect the child of a famous father, and the left-handed maxims of an angry, troubled mother/wife.

Society claimed Papa did not have his chairs pulled up to the table. That someone had snatched one can from the six-pack — too many Jokers in the deck — that Papa was Loony Tunes.

My mother said he was bad, was mad, arrogant, mean, lazy. A bum, a failure, a nothing, that those who are against the big expanse of collective zero, are in fact the wastrels, the homeless, the freaks of failure. Papa.

Today. There is nothing permeating the ground, the atmosphere, no portents, secret messages nor signs. Nothing more than on my first visit fourteen years before when I viewed the lone beast through teary eyes.

There is nothing to do but leave, again, without speaking.

Then Jenny surprises me. We have not seen each other in nearly ten years. She arrives with a vanguard of some frightening motorcycle club, the great glistening machines of chrome obscuring my lone motorcycle. I almost do not recognize her in raggedy jeans tucked into men’s boots, scuffed motorcycle jacket and jangling jewelry, her head comically hung, slim shoulders hunched, her long hands buried in threadbare pockets, raggedy blonde hair blowing long and shaggy; she gifts me a wolfish grin.

“Can we finally say it, Harri? After so many years can we just go ahead and finally say it?” Her eyes sparkle. So sad, always so sad. A crazy melancholia.

It was not my fault, I want to shout. But I only shake my head. You have to be good. Virtues, like vices, are truly hard to break.

“Let yourself remember,” she whispers as I pass her to leave.

“No,” I whisper, screaming within the confines of my prison head.

“We wouldn’t say good-bye because we loved him,” Jenny says. Jenny, owning far less of Papa than I. She had always hated him, detested him, would never touch him, no embrace, no kiss, and I think it kills her now.

“We were selfish.”

“Kids are supposed to be selfish,” she returns, and reaches.

I take her hand. “But he would have, would not have...” I cannot finish, because tears flood my sight and voice. “Jenny, God, I killed Papa.”

And unbidden, frantically repressed all these years — twenty-six years — the memory explodes like a firebomb behind my eyes.

“Say good-bye to your father,” my mother growls, flanked by a sheriff and Benny, possibly fourth in that never-ending line of eager men. The gifts, bracelet for Jenny and “magic” coin for me, are unopened on the table. Papa, with a face pale, smiles for Jenny, then for me. Nine minutes have passed since Papa rang the doorbell. They say Papa kidnapped me and now he is not allowed to visit us and if he stays the sheriff will arrest him. I have not spoken to him. It was his fault, was it not, that we are apart? Jenny, four years old, peeks at Papa from behind our mother’s legs. “Good-bye, my little wolves,” Papa whispers, and he seems to stare unseeing. He moves backward. He is going away. I never want to see him again. How I hate him. I love this lonely beast more than anyone, anything. I pounce. Seize his precious hand. Don’t go! Papa, please don’t go. Don’t leave me, Papa! A strange smile blooms upon his lips. “Papa! Papa!” Jenny cries. She is there, tugging at Papa’s other hand. Now a lowly trickle of red appears in his nostril. “Say good-bye — get out of here you bastard! Get a towel, my carpet!” our mother screams. And briefly, Papa looks — at me, at Jenny — he sees us. He truly sees his children. His face shines with the most glorious smile. And Papa, our gentle father, bends down, to one knee, as if he is going to whisper a secret in our ears, he sinks slowly to both knees, between Jenny and me, he continues downward, down, blood trickling from his nose, and slowly, so quietly, our Papa is gone, Papa and his visions and his love are vanished, he is gone, all his work and worry and soulmate quests, flying away, disappearing, vanishing before our wondering eyes, his hands held by his children.

Jenny wept quietly at my side, her hand a butterfly on my arm.

“I couldn’t say good-bye,” I said, choking.

“We weren’t supposed to,” Jenny said with anger, “we were babies. He was Papa.”

She seized me. “I love him,” she whispered, lips near, “and I love you.”

She kissed me on the cheek, then knelt. She petted the beast’s head. I watched her unfasten the gift from Papa from her wrist, and clasp it about a bronze forepaw. “Good-bye, Papa.”

Odd, how we hated him, Jenny and I, how we loathed him and the things we said about him, seemingly all our lives, as if he, Papa, was the cause of every stubbed toe, every ticket collected from vile cops, that Papa was the great nemesis of our lives, and here we are weeping, saying we love him. It’s a wonder his ghost does not appear and strangle us.

Strong Jenny walked away.

We were children. Babies. Now, adults — adults; however, the childish selfishness lurks ever close in the heart. I kneel by the beast. I look at the coin in my hand, grip it once, hard, then slip it between the bronze forepaws.

“Papa. Good-bye, Papa,” I say. And I’ve said it, finally, with all the declarations of love and yearning buried within the pat phrase. Good-bye, Papa.

As I turn to leave the lonely beast, again, for perhaps the last time, I sense Papa’s spirit, a shadow of some purer light — the most glorious smile you ever saw — like an encouraging arm embracing me near, very close, very dear.

Good-bye, Papa.

J. Rodolphus

Saying Good-bye to Papa

short fiction by Rodolphus

HE monument, two feet high and three wide, is a wolf, ears flat, eyes clenched, lanky body close over spindly legs, head back for final lunar lament.

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