Hand Down from Malmedy
Forest Arthur Ormes
On Christmas day two policemen came to our house, grabbed my father and took him to the mental hospital. My mother sent me to live with Reverend Stiegler, the minister of her church. Then she ran off with that Pontiac man. I never saw her again.
Three months, two weeks and four days later, when I was getting ready for Good Friday services, Reverend Stiegler looked up from the pages of the sermon he had been polishing and casually said that he knew my mother’s religion well enough, what about my father’s?
I hesitated because I knew that the Universalist my father declared himself to be, whatever it was, was different from the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics and other religions that I heard mentioned in church. I knew that they had the power to snatch my father and lock him up on Christmas Day simply because I had asked him who that man was that let my mother out from that red Grand Prix Pontiac.That question had triggered my father to start chasing my mother through the house, threatening her with no more than two open hands of outrage, declaring with those open, shaking hands that she had no business in the business of infidelity, asking what was the purpose in her God’s name for a marriage vow anyway? And her laughing and declaring that he was an unemployed, useless bum and that is why she climbed out from that Grand Prix owned by a man with far more manhood than my father ever could muster. Finally my father collapsed in the middle of the living room rug and began opening can after can of beer, threatening to kill himself rather than live in a world where your wife proudly declared infidelity on Christmas Day. The police arrived just as my father was crying out, “I could stab myself right now,” raising an empty, shaking hand as if it held some blood-smeared dagger from one of Shakespeare’s plays.
I knew that, if grown-ups could do such a thing to my father on the day of Christ’s birth, they could do something just as horrible to me on the day of His resurrection.
Before I could put the brakes on my nine year old mouth, I blurted out: “Universalist!”
“Universalist?” he responded.
Reverend Stiegler’s face turned into a threatening frown.
Ten days later I got sent to that first foster home.
Truthful answers, I learned, could be dangerous.
I lived in the Woods house twenty-seven days short of nine months.
Mr. Woods worked long hours, arriving home after dark in the winter months. One cold February evening, after he had finished another long day at his publishing company job, Mr. Woods stuck his head into my bedroom and listened to me complain how I was having a real wrestling match with my homework on fractions. Mr. Woods sat down in a chair beside my desk and began explaining denominators and numerators in such a thorough and patient way that I not only understood, but enjoyed subtracting fractions from that night on.
Mrs. Woods liked to remind me to wear a sweater under my coat so I wouldn’t get cold when she sent me out thirty minutes early to wait for the school bus so she could read her paper and drink her coffee in peace.
I got the message. And that message got put into the following subtraction: how many minutes before the bus arrived that I wanted to leave – ten minutes – subtracted from the actual thirty minutes Mrs. Woods obliged me to wait. Twenty thirtieths reduced to two thirds converted to a percentage equaled: 66 and 2/3%, rounded off to 66.7%. Sixty six point seven percent was how much it was worth Mrs. Woods to send me out into the snow, rain, freeze and sleet while she read her paper and drank her coffee minus the presence of Franklin whose last name was Cotton and not Woods.
Nine days before Christmas, Mrs. Woods gave birth to a baby boy. Six days after that a social worker in a gray pants suit drove up to the Woods’ house and, along with two large plastic bags stuffed with clothes, escorted me into her pea-green Chevrolet. She transported me to a place in the country where I was deposited on the front steps of a large wooden house occupied by a short stocky gray-haired woman named Mrs. Josephine Kransen along with her husband, Luther Kransen, Sr. Luther Kransen had retired three years before and had been wheel-chair bound the past year.
I had been living there six months when, one afternoon, I grabbed a rope from Mrs. Kransen’s garage and threw it around the branch of a tree. I hoisted myself halfway up to dangle back and forth, making believe I had been ambushed and lassoed by bad guys. Mrs. Kransen came out and, standing below me, ordered: “Get your butt down from that rope right this minute.”
I lowered myself to the dirt. With her thick forearm, she smacked me across the butt three times with her open hand. Mrs. Kransen liked the number three. Then she banished me to my upstairs bedroom. From the window, I watched her take a kitchen knife and cut off the section of the rope dangling between her head and the ground, leaving the remainder of the rope swinging in the breeze.
Less than an hour later, locked in my upstairs bedroom, I opened the window and dropped to the ground. Mrs. Kransen was waiting for me below with her cat-o-nine tails. As she started whipping at my thighs and butt, I got the idea that this was not going to be one of her usual three-lashes-and-finished whippings. She was heaving into it and began trotting after me as I jumped out from her range. I shifted into full throttle – I was small for my age, but fast – and ran across the garden patch behind the house and into the thick horseweeds growing around the abandoned house next door. By now it was summer and I was able to stay hidden in those acres of horseweeds and mosquitoes until dark when I quietly slipped back into the house. Mrs. Kransen was spooning soup into her husband’s mouth when I entered the living room.
“Sorry. Mrs. Kransen. I won’t do it again,” I said, interrupting the silence.
My timing was lucky because she only glanced my way and said: “Get to bed.”
On August 4th, three days after I had turned twelve years of age, a tall social worker wearing green pants, a red vest and yellow blouse, driving another pea-green Chevrolet, pulled up in the driveway. Mrs. Kransen met her at the top of the porch. I had been ordered to pack my clothes and told that I was going to be transported to somewhere and don’t ask because I wouldn’t get an answer.
I stuffed six pairs of socks, six t-shirts and underpants, four shirts and two pairs of jeans into the green duffel bag that Mrs. Kransen’s grandson had given me when he had come home from having served 12 months on the edge of the 38th parallel of the Korean peninsula. The army-issued pea-green stocking cap that I planted on my head had also been a present from her grandson. One last piece of authority which Mrs. Kransen perpetrated was to order me to “remove that woolen rag from your head.”
“August,“ she said, “is no time for it.”
At least she let me keep it.
The social worker grabbed one end of the duffel bag while I grabbed the other. As we lowered the duffel bag down into the trunk of her car, I glanced at my severed lariat still swinging from the branch of the tree. I could see Mrs. Kransen as I climbed into the Chevrolet and we began backing out from the driveway. She held a spoon in her thick right hand, faithfully serving breakfast to her invalid husband.
“Now there’s just the three of you,” I thought. “Mr. Kransen, you and your cat-o-nine tails.”
As I was driven to somewhere I dared not ask, I broke my life down into fractions. The Stieglers, the Woods, the Kransens all added up to thirty seven months. I was one hundred and forty four months old. Thirty seven of one hundred forty fourths converted and rounded off into: 25.7%. Twenty five point seven percent. That’s how much of my life had been spent with strangers.
The social worker transported me to an apartment building in the city where she helped me tote my duffel bag up the stairs to the third floor. She knocked on the door of apartment number seven. Answering the door was a man in baggy slacks, wearing a white long-sleeved shirt rolled up to the elbows. An odor of stale sweat escaped from his armpits.
Franklin Cotton, Sr. looked down at me. The social worker, who was almost as tall as my father, dropped her end of the duffel bag. My father shook the social worker’s hand, lifted the duffel bag from my grasping hand as if it was a pillow, uttered – “I haven’t seen one of these since the war” – took me inside his apartment and closed the door.
My father kept a pile of envelopes on his desk in the bedroom. He would type and mail letters to potential employers all over the Midwest and sometimes as far west as California. He worked at temporary jobs ranging from two-week projects of sorting files to less frequent assignments of writing stringers for the local newspapers. When a mobile home company extended their business into vacation trailers, he wrote a bio about the man selected as their new travel trailer division executive director -- a job he was destined to get himself, but not until he had knocked around temporary jobs for two years.
In the afternoon on our first Christmas Eve day together, my father sat at the kitchen table finishing off a pint of whiskey. He was going on about how he had been ordered to drive a colonel to a place called, Malmedy, during the war. My father was left with a company of soldiers under orders to identify eighty four GI’s who had been shot by Hitler’s troops.
“I’ll never forget him!” he hollered.
“Blood type: O.
“Serial number: 17451724. T-43 for Tetanus date.”
“Next of kin: Ethel Howard.
“Oliver Howard was clutching his dog tag when a German put a bullet through his head.”
He finished off the pint.
“I’m going out for another pint,” he said. “Stay put.”
When my father didn’t come back, I put on my sweater and jacket and went out into the back courtyard to throw a rubber ball off the cement wall of the apartment building. By the time I was throwing my seventy seventh pitch, the equivalent of seven innings, 77.8% of a complete nine-inning game, my right hand was forcibly halted in the middle of its arc. I was grabbed by the neck and shoved against the cement wall.
“I told you to stay put!” my father sneered.
“You never came back!” I said to the face behind the hands holding my neck.
He released me, then spread open his two hands and stared at them as if they were separate from his arms.
“Hands,” he uttered.
He took a deep breath.
“Hands, he repeated, and then turned and walked off.
I turned to watch him heading east along the sidewalk.
Four years later, on Christmas Eve, I was heading east toward the pool hall and grill where I could get two slices of beef on bread, mashed potatoes smothered in a rich brown gravy and a second helping of potatoes if I asked. A scattering of patrons were bent over the pool tables when I entered. The metal covered bulbs above them shined a dull light upon expressionless faces.
I nodded at Myron, the owner behind the counter, a short, stocky man in his fifties who had spent twenty years in the navy before retiring here. He motioned with a return nod toward the back of the pool hall. I walked between the rows of pool tables, stopped at a closed door in the back and knocked. A man in his thirties wearing Buddy Holly glasses, jeans and a gray sweat shirt opened the door. He might have been mistaken for a nerd except that, at six-one and well over two hundred pounds, no one dared call him one.
He looked down at me. I raised a closed hand as if I held a set of keys. He put his palm forward to catch them. My hand jerked open to let thin air fall into his open palm.
“April Fool,” I chuckled.
“Come on, come on,” he snapped. “We got a game going. I got no time for kid stuff.”
I raised my left hand, and dangled the keys. He grabbed them, held them up to make sure they were not some throw-a-ways I had picked up.
“I wouldn’t do such a thing,” I said.
“You sure as hell wouldn’t.”
I waited
“What year?”
“Chevrolet. Impala. Sixty-two.”
“Good enough.”
“Where?”
“I lifted it from Buchanan Street half a block from Fifth Avenue. It’s parked behind us half way down Wilson Place, west side of the street.”
“License plate number.”
“I switched plates. WK-37-1224,” I answered.
“The cops patrol Buchanan, regularly. Why take chances?”
“It’s Christmas Eve.”
John shook his head and smiled. He pulled out a wad too thick for a clip and pulled out four twenties from its nest.
“Merry Christmas, Frankie,” he said.
“Merry Christmas, John,” I answered stiffly.
He capped our deal with a handshake which in spite of myself I valued.
As I turned to walk away, John’s voice stopped me.
“How you getting back home?”
By now my father had been employed with that travel trailer division for two years running and was renting a house on the western outskirts of the city. He had arrived home around one o’clock that afternoon and was drunk by the time I left at five thirty.
“Buy gym shoes, John. Lifting two in one night would be… taking chances.”
“It’s Christmas Eve. You ought to be home.”
“This time… every year… my father… he starts with the war stories. I wised up real quick to stay out of his way the first Christmas Eve they put me back with him.”
“Who's ‘they?’”
“What about your card game?”
“Fuck them.”
“Tall social work lady in a Chevrolet.”
“Is that why I get so many Chevrolets from you?”
“You want a Grand Prick next time? Eight cylinder, 424. Red. You want one? I’ll get you a Grand Prick Pontiac. ”
John reached from the middle of his wad and gently unsheathed a five.
“Take a cab back home, Frankie. It’s Christmas,” he said, handing me the five.
He opened the door just wide enough to pass through and disappeared.
I walked back to the cash register at the front of the pool hall.
“Table seven,” the owner told me.
“Thanks, Myron.”
Beneath the dim light of table seven, I racked the balls. I made a sloppy break with the four ball barely dropping into one of the pockets. I shot a combo stripe on solid with the solid dropping easily into the corner pocket. Solid on solid, stripe on stripe were the rules, but I was playing against myself so it didn’t matter.
The following April, on Good Friday, my hands wrapped themselves around the black tray of balls. A priest of medium height and build entered through the front door of the pool hall.
“Can I help you Father Jeremiah?” Myron asked.
The priest looked across at the three pool tables that were occupied by guys in their early twenties. He moved his gaze toward the rear of the pool hall where the door to the back room was kept closed. He threw a curious look at me, then turned and said to Myron:
“Not today. Thank you.”
“Have a good Easter, Father,” Myron said as the priest disappeared through the same door he had just entered.
“Number seven’s taken,” Myron turned and said to me.
“What’s with the priest?” I asked.
“Watch what you say to Father Jeremiah,” Myron answered.“He goes around looking to see which kids from his parish hang out here. He’ll ask you: ‘Do you know Robert Sullivan?’ “If you tell him, ‘Sure I do, Father. See him in here every day,’ he’ll call Robert Sullivan’s parents and tell them to keep their son out of here.”
“Like who?”
“Have you seen Robert Sullivan around here lately? I got a call from his mother threatening to call the police on me for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I told her: ‘Go ahead and call. There’s no law against kids shooting pool.”
“Baptist ministers are no better than priests,” I answered. “They’re real concerned whether you’re one of them. And if you’re not, then out the door you go without so much as a ‘Look out below,’ before they throw you out to get your ass whipped with leather straps.”
“He’s just doing his job, Frankie. I don’t take it personal.”
“I do take it personal. I say to hell with all of them.”
“I thought you were a Universalist like your father.”
“I am a Universalist. I want every church and temple and whatever else people pray in to look just like your pool hall.”
The detective opened the rear door and pushed me into the back of the unmarked detective car. He slammed the door shut, lowered himself into the driver’s seat and radioed in. The car I had been joy riding was stalled at the northwest corner of the paper mill parking lot.
“What the hell did you think you were doing speeding back and forth down this road!” he sneered over his shoulder at me.
“I wanted to test how fast it would go. Chevy, Impala, stick, 283.”
“We’ll test you down at the station.”
As he turned to listen to the voice on the police radio, I pulled the handle of the door. To my surprise it opened. I sprang out and ran across the road and into the trees. I glanced over my shoulder and spotted him running after me. I started running along the path in the trees bordering the river. Then I scrambled up the hill. I looked down the road to make sure he hadn’t doubled back to the squad car. Nothing in sight. I sprinted with everything I had across the bridge, kept running and turned at the second block. I made my way home by zigzagging among the blocks of houses. On pure instinct, I came up through the alley behind my house. As I turned to go through the yard, I could see the headlights of the unmarked detective car waiting for me.
“Of course they didn’t bother to turn off their lights,” I thought. “If they know where I live, then they know who I am. If they know who I am, they can snatch me any time. Myron’s. School. Buchanan Street. I’m fucked.”
Joseph Corday had been a probation officer ten years. He had been born on Christmas Day on a reservation out in South Dakota. When he turned eighteen, Uncle Sam drafted him and sent him to Europe to fight in the same war my father fought.After the war ended, he used to have to drink to forget his experiences of the war.
“They thought I was mental. I wasn’t mental. Just a drunk,” Joe told me.
When I told him I understood exactly what he was saying, he answered: “At your age?”
It wasn’t until he nearly died from DT’s in a VA hospital that Joe finally put a cork in the bottle.
He told me he hadn’t had a drink for as long as he had been a PO for juveniles. He had been attending meetings of veterans ranging from Catholics, Methodists, Jews, Baptists plus one Japanese-American from the 442nd regiment who was Buddhist. At the end of each meeting, they prayed to the man upstairs with no rules telling you who the man upstairs was or how to pray to him.
”Like a Universalist?”
“You might say so,” he answered.
“I like that,” I said.
Joe finished by saying they all covered each other’s back like they did in the service except now they used telephones and coffee to do so. Then he stared across at me.
“You know what I just did?” he asked.
“Sure. You talked about war stories like my father.”
“Now I want you to do the same. I want you to tell me your stories, Franklin.”
“I got no stories to tell.”
“I want you to write down the stories in your life,” he continued. “You can call me Frankie. That’s what they all call me at Myron’s.”
“Including John the Chopper who pays you for the stolen cars you hand over to him.”
“Is that what you want me to write! How to be a rat to your PO so the cops can snatch guys off the street.”
“No one’s asking you to be a rat.”
“What kind of PO are you? Stories. You’re trying to trick me.”
“No trick intended, Franklin.”
“You like repeating my name.”
“The story is mandatory.”
“Who?”
“You have to write it. It’s part of your probation.”
“My buddies… they don’t have to write….”
“I heard you the first time. They don’t have me for a probation officer.”
“And if I don’t write anything?”
He stared back at me.
“Then it’s the Audie Home, right.”
“What you write is your choice. As long as you don’t write that you’re planning to commit a crime, it stays with me.”
“I wouldn’t be that stupid.”
“Share your words on paper as best you can,” he continued. “I’m not going to report you to anybody. You’re on probation until your eighteenth birthday regardless.”
Then he added: “Screw the bravado, all right.”
“What?”
“Don’t try to make yourself out a big man. Simply share. That must seem stupid to you, I know.” He paused a few seconds. “Franklin, if you can’t share, you can’t heal. And if you can’t heal, you’re going to wind up in the penitentiary…. If you believe nothing else I tell you, believe that.”
“I got wised up real fast about sharing when I was a kid.”
“You’ve got to write something, Franklin,” he answered.
“What if I draw a blank?”
“Here’s a suggestion for you.What do you think about at the word, Christmas?”
“You must have taken a lot of ribbing, being unlucky enough to get born on Christmas Day.”
“What comes into your head about Christmas?”
“My father, ok. Can I write about him? Or is that against your rules?”
“If your father is what comes to mind, write about him.”
Joe Corday opened his desk drawer, pulled out a notebook and dropped it on the desk.
“What if I run out of pages?”
He pulled out a second notebook and placed it over the first.
“See you next Friday.”
I reached out with my left hand and wrapped my fingers around both notebooks. Then I raised my arm and spread my right hand in front of Joe’s face as I stood up from the desk.
“See this hand?”
“Yea, I see it.”
“This hand has shot a lot of pool. Grabbed keys that didn’t belong to it. It’s grabbed the leather straps of a cat-o-nine tails…. It’s turned the pages of a scrap book and come to a picture of the father of this hand, standing alone in front of … that Arc in Paris.”
“Arc de Triomphe. I stood in front of it during the war.”
“My father’s not at home. I’ve pulled this scrapbook from the closet and my hand stops at a picture of him in his uniform, standing in front of that Arc… that Arc of….”
“Triomphe,” Joe repeated.
“Standing with the… Arc de Triomphe… behind him. He was standing alone. He looked uncomfortable. It bugs me, my father standing alone. When you stood in front of that… that Arc de Triomphe… I bet you got your snapshot standing with your buddies.”
“Yea, I did.”
“I wonder why that snapshot bugs me? You got an answer for that?”
“If you were to play a hunch as to why, what would that hunch be?”
“I don’t play hunches.”
“There’s no right or wrong answers to this, Franklin.”
“My father… standing there alone… bugs me because… seeing him standing alone probably makes me sad.”
“What do you think about when you’re sad?” he asked.
“I don’t think about it. I forget it about it.”
“Try, Franklin. It might help.”
“Feeling sad never helps.”
“It could help you get started on your story. And once started, then you’ll be through in no time.”
“You gotta be careful when writing stuff down on paper!”
I opened the door to his office.
“See you next Friday – with your notebooks,” Joe said as I walked out.
All right, Joe. I have two notebooks to fill, and I’m going to fill both. That will keep you busy. Just in case you try to snatch anyone, I’m saying to you right now that everything I write in these pages is total bullshit. It’s fiction, you understand. All made up. That means you can’t use my words to go snatching John or Myron, or even my dad. I may not like some of these people. I may even hate some of them. But I don’t want to see them getting snatched.
Now that I’ve graduated from calculating my life into fractions to putting it into words, if I add the 37 months in foster homes, forty three months with my father, plus the twenty one ahead with you with no criminal acts or it’s the Audie Home, multiply them by one hundred, then divide them by the two hundred and sixteen months I will have lived when my case is closed with the department of corrections, that comes to, when rounded off, forty six point seven percent of my life spent with strangers, a drunk father and on probation.
Forest Arthur Ormes
On Christmas day two policemen came to our house, grabbed my father and took him to the mental hospital. My mother sent me to live with Reverend Stiegler, the minister of her church. Then she ran off with that Pontiac man. I never saw her again.
Three months, two weeks and four days later, when I was getting ready for Good Friday services, Reverend Stiegler looked up from the pages of the sermon he had been polishing and casually said that he knew my mother’s religion well enough, what about my father’s?
I hesitated because I knew that the Universalist my father declared himself to be, whatever it was, was different from the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics and other religions that I heard mentioned in church. I knew that they had the power to snatch my father and lock him up on Christmas Day simply because I had asked him who that man was that let my mother out from that red Grand Prix Pontiac.That question had triggered my father to start chasing my mother through the house, threatening her with no more than two open hands of outrage, declaring with those open, shaking hands that she had no business in the business of infidelity, asking what was the purpose in her God’s name for a marriage vow anyway? And her laughing and declaring that he was an unemployed, useless bum and that is why she climbed out from that Grand Prix owned by a man with far more manhood than my father ever could muster. Finally my father collapsed in the middle of the living room rug and began opening can after can of beer, threatening to kill himself rather than live in a world where your wife proudly declared infidelity on Christmas Day. The police arrived just as my father was crying out, “I could stab myself right now,” raising an empty, shaking hand as if it held some blood-smeared dagger from one of Shakespeare’s plays.
I knew that, if grown-ups could do such a thing to my father on the day of Christ’s birth, they could do something just as horrible to me on the day of His resurrection.
Before I could put the brakes on my nine year old mouth, I blurted out: “Universalist!”
“Universalist?” he responded.
Reverend Stiegler’s face turned into a threatening frown.
Ten days later I got sent to that first foster home.
Truthful answers, I learned, could be dangerous.
I lived in the Woods house twenty-seven days short of nine months.
Mr. Woods worked long hours, arriving home after dark in the winter months. One cold February evening, after he had finished another long day at his publishing company job, Mr. Woods stuck his head into my bedroom and listened to me complain how I was having a real wrestling match with my homework on fractions. Mr. Woods sat down in a chair beside my desk and began explaining denominators and numerators in such a thorough and patient way that I not only understood, but enjoyed subtracting fractions from that night on.
Mrs. Woods liked to remind me to wear a sweater under my coat so I wouldn’t get cold when she sent me out thirty minutes early to wait for the school bus so she could read her paper and drink her coffee in peace.
I got the message. And that message got put into the following subtraction: how many minutes before the bus arrived that I wanted to leave – ten minutes – subtracted from the actual thirty minutes Mrs. Woods obliged me to wait. Twenty thirtieths reduced to two thirds converted to a percentage equaled: 66 and 2/3%, rounded off to 66.7%. Sixty six point seven percent was how much it was worth Mrs. Woods to send me out into the snow, rain, freeze and sleet while she read her paper and drank her coffee minus the presence of Franklin whose last name was Cotton and not Woods.
Nine days before Christmas, Mrs. Woods gave birth to a baby boy. Six days after that a social worker in a gray pants suit drove up to the Woods’ house and, along with two large plastic bags stuffed with clothes, escorted me into her pea-green Chevrolet. She transported me to a place in the country where I was deposited on the front steps of a large wooden house occupied by a short stocky gray-haired woman named Mrs. Josephine Kransen along with her husband, Luther Kransen, Sr. Luther Kransen had retired three years before and had been wheel-chair bound the past year.
I had been living there six months when, one afternoon, I grabbed a rope from Mrs. Kransen’s garage and threw it around the branch of a tree. I hoisted myself halfway up to dangle back and forth, making believe I had been ambushed and lassoed by bad guys. Mrs. Kransen came out and, standing below me, ordered: “Get your butt down from that rope right this minute.”
I lowered myself to the dirt. With her thick forearm, she smacked me across the butt three times with her open hand. Mrs. Kransen liked the number three. Then she banished me to my upstairs bedroom. From the window, I watched her take a kitchen knife and cut off the section of the rope dangling between her head and the ground, leaving the remainder of the rope swinging in the breeze.
Less than an hour later, locked in my upstairs bedroom, I opened the window and dropped to the ground. Mrs. Kransen was waiting for me below with her cat-o-nine tails. As she started whipping at my thighs and butt, I got the idea that this was not going to be one of her usual three-lashes-and-finished whippings. She was heaving into it and began trotting after me as I jumped out from her range. I shifted into full throttle – I was small for my age, but fast – and ran across the garden patch behind the house and into the thick horseweeds growing around the abandoned house next door. By now it was summer and I was able to stay hidden in those acres of horseweeds and mosquitoes until dark when I quietly slipped back into the house. Mrs. Kransen was spooning soup into her husband’s mouth when I entered the living room.
“Sorry. Mrs. Kransen. I won’t do it again,” I said, interrupting the silence.
My timing was lucky because she only glanced my way and said: “Get to bed.”
On August 4th, three days after I had turned twelve years of age, a tall social worker wearing green pants, a red vest and yellow blouse, driving another pea-green Chevrolet, pulled up in the driveway. Mrs. Kransen met her at the top of the porch. I had been ordered to pack my clothes and told that I was going to be transported to somewhere and don’t ask because I wouldn’t get an answer.
I stuffed six pairs of socks, six t-shirts and underpants, four shirts and two pairs of jeans into the green duffel bag that Mrs. Kransen’s grandson had given me when he had come home from having served 12 months on the edge of the 38th parallel of the Korean peninsula. The army-issued pea-green stocking cap that I planted on my head had also been a present from her grandson. One last piece of authority which Mrs. Kransen perpetrated was to order me to “remove that woolen rag from your head.”
“August,“ she said, “is no time for it.”
At least she let me keep it.
The social worker grabbed one end of the duffel bag while I grabbed the other. As we lowered the duffel bag down into the trunk of her car, I glanced at my severed lariat still swinging from the branch of the tree. I could see Mrs. Kransen as I climbed into the Chevrolet and we began backing out from the driveway. She held a spoon in her thick right hand, faithfully serving breakfast to her invalid husband.
“Now there’s just the three of you,” I thought. “Mr. Kransen, you and your cat-o-nine tails.”
As I was driven to somewhere I dared not ask, I broke my life down into fractions. The Stieglers, the Woods, the Kransens all added up to thirty seven months. I was one hundred and forty four months old. Thirty seven of one hundred forty fourths converted and rounded off into: 25.7%. Twenty five point seven percent. That’s how much of my life had been spent with strangers.
The social worker transported me to an apartment building in the city where she helped me tote my duffel bag up the stairs to the third floor. She knocked on the door of apartment number seven. Answering the door was a man in baggy slacks, wearing a white long-sleeved shirt rolled up to the elbows. An odor of stale sweat escaped from his armpits.
Franklin Cotton, Sr. looked down at me. The social worker, who was almost as tall as my father, dropped her end of the duffel bag. My father shook the social worker’s hand, lifted the duffel bag from my grasping hand as if it was a pillow, uttered – “I haven’t seen one of these since the war” – took me inside his apartment and closed the door.
My father kept a pile of envelopes on his desk in the bedroom. He would type and mail letters to potential employers all over the Midwest and sometimes as far west as California. He worked at temporary jobs ranging from two-week projects of sorting files to less frequent assignments of writing stringers for the local newspapers. When a mobile home company extended their business into vacation trailers, he wrote a bio about the man selected as their new travel trailer division executive director -- a job he was destined to get himself, but not until he had knocked around temporary jobs for two years.
In the afternoon on our first Christmas Eve day together, my father sat at the kitchen table finishing off a pint of whiskey. He was going on about how he had been ordered to drive a colonel to a place called, Malmedy, during the war. My father was left with a company of soldiers under orders to identify eighty four GI’s who had been shot by Hitler’s troops.
“I’ll never forget him!” he hollered.
“Blood type: O.
“Serial number: 17451724. T-43 for Tetanus date.”
“Next of kin: Ethel Howard.
“Oliver Howard was clutching his dog tag when a German put a bullet through his head.”
He finished off the pint.
“I’m going out for another pint,” he said. “Stay put.”
When my father didn’t come back, I put on my sweater and jacket and went out into the back courtyard to throw a rubber ball off the cement wall of the apartment building. By the time I was throwing my seventy seventh pitch, the equivalent of seven innings, 77.8% of a complete nine-inning game, my right hand was forcibly halted in the middle of its arc. I was grabbed by the neck and shoved against the cement wall.
“I told you to stay put!” my father sneered.
“You never came back!” I said to the face behind the hands holding my neck.
He released me, then spread open his two hands and stared at them as if they were separate from his arms.
“Hands,” he uttered.
He took a deep breath.
“Hands, he repeated, and then turned and walked off.
I turned to watch him heading east along the sidewalk.
Four years later, on Christmas Eve, I was heading east toward the pool hall and grill where I could get two slices of beef on bread, mashed potatoes smothered in a rich brown gravy and a second helping of potatoes if I asked. A scattering of patrons were bent over the pool tables when I entered. The metal covered bulbs above them shined a dull light upon expressionless faces.
I nodded at Myron, the owner behind the counter, a short, stocky man in his fifties who had spent twenty years in the navy before retiring here. He motioned with a return nod toward the back of the pool hall. I walked between the rows of pool tables, stopped at a closed door in the back and knocked. A man in his thirties wearing Buddy Holly glasses, jeans and a gray sweat shirt opened the door. He might have been mistaken for a nerd except that, at six-one and well over two hundred pounds, no one dared call him one.
He looked down at me. I raised a closed hand as if I held a set of keys. He put his palm forward to catch them. My hand jerked open to let thin air fall into his open palm.
“April Fool,” I chuckled.
“Come on, come on,” he snapped. “We got a game going. I got no time for kid stuff.”
I raised my left hand, and dangled the keys. He grabbed them, held them up to make sure they were not some throw-a-ways I had picked up.
“I wouldn’t do such a thing,” I said.
“You sure as hell wouldn’t.”
I waited
“What year?”
“Chevrolet. Impala. Sixty-two.”
“Good enough.”
“Where?”
“I lifted it from Buchanan Street half a block from Fifth Avenue. It’s parked behind us half way down Wilson Place, west side of the street.”
“License plate number.”
“I switched plates. WK-37-1224,” I answered.
“The cops patrol Buchanan, regularly. Why take chances?”
“It’s Christmas Eve.”
John shook his head and smiled. He pulled out a wad too thick for a clip and pulled out four twenties from its nest.
“Merry Christmas, Frankie,” he said.
“Merry Christmas, John,” I answered stiffly.
He capped our deal with a handshake which in spite of myself I valued.
As I turned to walk away, John’s voice stopped me.
“How you getting back home?”
By now my father had been employed with that travel trailer division for two years running and was renting a house on the western outskirts of the city. He had arrived home around one o’clock that afternoon and was drunk by the time I left at five thirty.
“Buy gym shoes, John. Lifting two in one night would be… taking chances.”
“It’s Christmas Eve. You ought to be home.”
“This time… every year… my father… he starts with the war stories. I wised up real quick to stay out of his way the first Christmas Eve they put me back with him.”
“Who's ‘they?’”
“What about your card game?”
“Fuck them.”
“Tall social work lady in a Chevrolet.”
“Is that why I get so many Chevrolets from you?”
“You want a Grand Prick next time? Eight cylinder, 424. Red. You want one? I’ll get you a Grand Prick Pontiac. ”
John reached from the middle of his wad and gently unsheathed a five.
“Take a cab back home, Frankie. It’s Christmas,” he said, handing me the five.
He opened the door just wide enough to pass through and disappeared.
I walked back to the cash register at the front of the pool hall.
“Table seven,” the owner told me.
“Thanks, Myron.”
Beneath the dim light of table seven, I racked the balls. I made a sloppy break with the four ball barely dropping into one of the pockets. I shot a combo stripe on solid with the solid dropping easily into the corner pocket. Solid on solid, stripe on stripe were the rules, but I was playing against myself so it didn’t matter.
The following April, on Good Friday, my hands wrapped themselves around the black tray of balls. A priest of medium height and build entered through the front door of the pool hall.
“Can I help you Father Jeremiah?” Myron asked.
The priest looked across at the three pool tables that were occupied by guys in their early twenties. He moved his gaze toward the rear of the pool hall where the door to the back room was kept closed. He threw a curious look at me, then turned and said to Myron:
“Not today. Thank you.”
“Have a good Easter, Father,” Myron said as the priest disappeared through the same door he had just entered.
“Number seven’s taken,” Myron turned and said to me.
“What’s with the priest?” I asked.
“Watch what you say to Father Jeremiah,” Myron answered.“He goes around looking to see which kids from his parish hang out here. He’ll ask you: ‘Do you know Robert Sullivan?’ “If you tell him, ‘Sure I do, Father. See him in here every day,’ he’ll call Robert Sullivan’s parents and tell them to keep their son out of here.”
“Like who?”
“Have you seen Robert Sullivan around here lately? I got a call from his mother threatening to call the police on me for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I told her: ‘Go ahead and call. There’s no law against kids shooting pool.”
“Baptist ministers are no better than priests,” I answered. “They’re real concerned whether you’re one of them. And if you’re not, then out the door you go without so much as a ‘Look out below,’ before they throw you out to get your ass whipped with leather straps.”
“He’s just doing his job, Frankie. I don’t take it personal.”
“I do take it personal. I say to hell with all of them.”
“I thought you were a Universalist like your father.”
“I am a Universalist. I want every church and temple and whatever else people pray in to look just like your pool hall.”
The detective opened the rear door and pushed me into the back of the unmarked detective car. He slammed the door shut, lowered himself into the driver’s seat and radioed in. The car I had been joy riding was stalled at the northwest corner of the paper mill parking lot.
“What the hell did you think you were doing speeding back and forth down this road!” he sneered over his shoulder at me.
“I wanted to test how fast it would go. Chevy, Impala, stick, 283.”
“We’ll test you down at the station.”
As he turned to listen to the voice on the police radio, I pulled the handle of the door. To my surprise it opened. I sprang out and ran across the road and into the trees. I glanced over my shoulder and spotted him running after me. I started running along the path in the trees bordering the river. Then I scrambled up the hill. I looked down the road to make sure he hadn’t doubled back to the squad car. Nothing in sight. I sprinted with everything I had across the bridge, kept running and turned at the second block. I made my way home by zigzagging among the blocks of houses. On pure instinct, I came up through the alley behind my house. As I turned to go through the yard, I could see the headlights of the unmarked detective car waiting for me.
“Of course they didn’t bother to turn off their lights,” I thought. “If they know where I live, then they know who I am. If they know who I am, they can snatch me any time. Myron’s. School. Buchanan Street. I’m fucked.”
Joseph Corday had been a probation officer ten years. He had been born on Christmas Day on a reservation out in South Dakota. When he turned eighteen, Uncle Sam drafted him and sent him to Europe to fight in the same war my father fought.After the war ended, he used to have to drink to forget his experiences of the war.
“They thought I was mental. I wasn’t mental. Just a drunk,” Joe told me.
When I told him I understood exactly what he was saying, he answered: “At your age?”
It wasn’t until he nearly died from DT’s in a VA hospital that Joe finally put a cork in the bottle.
He told me he hadn’t had a drink for as long as he had been a PO for juveniles. He had been attending meetings of veterans ranging from Catholics, Methodists, Jews, Baptists plus one Japanese-American from the 442nd regiment who was Buddhist. At the end of each meeting, they prayed to the man upstairs with no rules telling you who the man upstairs was or how to pray to him.
”Like a Universalist?”
“You might say so,” he answered.
“I like that,” I said.
Joe finished by saying they all covered each other’s back like they did in the service except now they used telephones and coffee to do so. Then he stared across at me.
“You know what I just did?” he asked.
“Sure. You talked about war stories like my father.”
“Now I want you to do the same. I want you to tell me your stories, Franklin.”
“I got no stories to tell.”
“I want you to write down the stories in your life,” he continued. “You can call me Frankie. That’s what they all call me at Myron’s.”
“Including John the Chopper who pays you for the stolen cars you hand over to him.”
“Is that what you want me to write! How to be a rat to your PO so the cops can snatch guys off the street.”
“No one’s asking you to be a rat.”
“What kind of PO are you? Stories. You’re trying to trick me.”
“No trick intended, Franklin.”
“You like repeating my name.”
“The story is mandatory.”
“Who?”
“You have to write it. It’s part of your probation.”
“My buddies… they don’t have to write….”
“I heard you the first time. They don’t have me for a probation officer.”
“And if I don’t write anything?”
He stared back at me.
“Then it’s the Audie Home, right.”
“What you write is your choice. As long as you don’t write that you’re planning to commit a crime, it stays with me.”
“I wouldn’t be that stupid.”
“Share your words on paper as best you can,” he continued. “I’m not going to report you to anybody. You’re on probation until your eighteenth birthday regardless.”
Then he added: “Screw the bravado, all right.”
“What?”
“Don’t try to make yourself out a big man. Simply share. That must seem stupid to you, I know.” He paused a few seconds. “Franklin, if you can’t share, you can’t heal. And if you can’t heal, you’re going to wind up in the penitentiary…. If you believe nothing else I tell you, believe that.”
“I got wised up real fast about sharing when I was a kid.”
“You’ve got to write something, Franklin,” he answered.
“What if I draw a blank?”
“Here’s a suggestion for you.What do you think about at the word, Christmas?”
“You must have taken a lot of ribbing, being unlucky enough to get born on Christmas Day.”
“What comes into your head about Christmas?”
“My father, ok. Can I write about him? Or is that against your rules?”
“If your father is what comes to mind, write about him.”
Joe Corday opened his desk drawer, pulled out a notebook and dropped it on the desk.
“What if I run out of pages?”
He pulled out a second notebook and placed it over the first.
“See you next Friday.”
I reached out with my left hand and wrapped my fingers around both notebooks. Then I raised my arm and spread my right hand in front of Joe’s face as I stood up from the desk.
“See this hand?”
“Yea, I see it.”
“This hand has shot a lot of pool. Grabbed keys that didn’t belong to it. It’s grabbed the leather straps of a cat-o-nine tails…. It’s turned the pages of a scrap book and come to a picture of the father of this hand, standing alone in front of … that Arc in Paris.”
“Arc de Triomphe. I stood in front of it during the war.”
“My father’s not at home. I’ve pulled this scrapbook from the closet and my hand stops at a picture of him in his uniform, standing in front of that Arc… that Arc of….”
“Triomphe,” Joe repeated.
“Standing with the… Arc de Triomphe… behind him. He was standing alone. He looked uncomfortable. It bugs me, my father standing alone. When you stood in front of that… that Arc de Triomphe… I bet you got your snapshot standing with your buddies.”
“Yea, I did.”
“I wonder why that snapshot bugs me? You got an answer for that?”
“If you were to play a hunch as to why, what would that hunch be?”
“I don’t play hunches.”
“There’s no right or wrong answers to this, Franklin.”
“My father… standing there alone… bugs me because… seeing him standing alone probably makes me sad.”
“What do you think about when you’re sad?” he asked.
“I don’t think about it. I forget it about it.”
“Try, Franklin. It might help.”
“Feeling sad never helps.”
“It could help you get started on your story. And once started, then you’ll be through in no time.”
“You gotta be careful when writing stuff down on paper!”
I opened the door to his office.
“See you next Friday – with your notebooks,” Joe said as I walked out.
All right, Joe. I have two notebooks to fill, and I’m going to fill both. That will keep you busy. Just in case you try to snatch anyone, I’m saying to you right now that everything I write in these pages is total bullshit. It’s fiction, you understand. All made up. That means you can’t use my words to go snatching John or Myron, or even my dad. I may not like some of these people. I may even hate some of them. But I don’t want to see them getting snatched.
Now that I’ve graduated from calculating my life into fractions to putting it into words, if I add the 37 months in foster homes, forty three months with my father, plus the twenty one ahead with you with no criminal acts or it’s the Audie Home, multiply them by one hundred, then divide them by the two hundred and sixteen months I will have lived when my case is closed with the department of corrections, that comes to, when rounded off, forty six point seven percent of my life spent with strangers, a drunk father and on probation.