Even on his finest days, pitching a shutout or topping the school record for completed passes, Seeley's awareness of himself was that he was the son not of one but of two madmen. Alone in their room, he and Lenny entertained each other by walking about like cartoon monsters, legs goose-stepping, arms straight out and frozen into sticks, abjuring the other to beware, I am Lo thar! I vill seize you and destroy you!
Beneath the card table, both of Lenny's feet tapped wildly.
“For God's sake, Lenny, go to the bathroom if you have to pee.”
“You've got to help me, Mike.” The boy's lips trembled. “I'll give you all the money in my jar. You have to get rid of this for me.”
It was past eight o'clock and the aroma of roasting meat loaf had long since faded. Their mother had by now settled in the parlor and was knitting or mending or on the telephone with one of her church friends. In the empty kitchen, the television played at top volume; on the evidence of the laugh track, it was tuned to a sitcom. In Seeley's memory, the television, though rarely watched, was always on. It could have been a fifth member of the family and the only one to be counted on for laughter.
From under the card table, Lenny brought out a package and pushed it toward his brother. When Seeley only looked at it, Lenny, his voice breaking, said, “Take it, Mike. You have to get rid of it.”
The bag, an ordinary lunch sack creased and stained from his brother's handling, was tightly wrapped around the object inside, and the moment Seeley lifted the package, he knew from its heft what it was.
“Does he know you took it?”
Lenny shook his head.
“Put it back before he gets home.”
“I can't.” Beads of moisture had formed on his brother's upper lip. He nodded at the bag. His voice pleaded. “Open it.”
Seeley emptied the bag onto his bed. In the bright light of the room, the chrome barrel glowed. The gun was intact and the cartridges, which Lenny had emptied from the cylinder, were all there. Then Seeley saw why Lenny couldn't return the revolver to their father's dresser. The barrel was scarred and abraded as if it had been smashed repeatedly with a rock. Black shards of some hard material clung to the cartridges. Seeley looked at the gun's grip. Lenny's efforts with the rock had shattered the cast black rubber. The larger pieces he had reattached with rubber bands and what looked like library paste.
“What were you trying to do?”
His brother emerged from the closet with the half-full pickle jar. “I wanted to break it and throw it down the sewer.”
“Why didn't you?”
“I was afraid. Take the money, Mike! You have to help me.”
“I don't want the money.”
“You have to get rid of it!”
It seemed to Seeley that he had shielded his brother since before Lenny learned to walk. A table lamp shattered on the floor; grape juice splashed from a glass onto a lace curtain. It was easier for Seeley to absorb the blame than to have to listen to his brother suffer a beating. The logic that the role of the strong was to protect the weak was too ingrained for him to do anything else.
Their father could arrive home at any moment, and Seeley thought quickly. Outside it was still twilight, but even if the neighbors had gone indoors, the narrow backyard offered no place to hide the revolver. There was the shadowy cellar where his father spent long hours drinking beer and working on his hunting and fishing gear, but the man knew every spider-filled corner of the place. The living and dining rooms were hopeless: the sofa and easy chairs, covered in stiff transparent plastic, were impenetrable and the cabinet with his mother's collection of porcelain figurines was mostly glass. The two small dressers in the boys' bedroom were the first place his father would look. It seemed odd to Seeley that a house so filled with secrets should have no hiding places.
When Seeley opened the pickle jar and carefully shook the coins and currency onto the table, Lenny misunderstood. “Take the jar! You can have it! Just get rid of the thing.”
On his own forays into his father's bedroom dresser, Seeley had examined the revolver more than once. The grip and barrel now appeared shorter than he remembered and, in proportion, the trigger and guard seemed outsized. For some reason that difference now underlined for him the weapon's deadliness. He pressed open the cylinder and, one by one, inserted the six loose cartridges. The smooth movement of the parts-he clicked the cylinder back into place-was almost comforting in its precision. He quickly covered the bottom of the jar with coins, placed the revolver in the center of them, and distributed the rest of the money on top of the revolver and around it. He screwed the top back onto the jar. The hard black crumbs he gathered up from the bedcover and dropped in the wastebasket. Even if his father were to look there, drunk as he was by the time he got home, he would not connect them to the missing gun.
Seeley examined the jar doubtfully before returning it to its corner in the closet. “I'll toss the gun on the way to school tomorrow.”
Leonard said, “Maybe he won't come home.”
That was Lenny's fantasy, but Seeley had his own version. At around this time, the U. S. Justice Department had, with much publicity, initiated the prosecution in nearby Cleveland of a local autoworker for fraudulently entering the United States by failing to disclose that he had been an SS guard at two death camps in Poland. It took no great forensic leap for Seeley at age fifteen to conclude that Lothar Seelig, also an autoworker and immigrant, had himself been an SS camp guard. Surely the brass key in the carved box would unlock the incriminating evidence. Some day, like the Cleveland autoworker, neither of the two madmen would come home.
One sitcom had replaced another on the television when a slamming door shook the house. Seeley's mother must have come into the kitchen because his father's ancient tirade-booming, guttural, unforgiving-at once filled the house with its complaint of incompetence and betrayal. The sentences had lost their meaning long ago, but the fact that the words were English, not German, momentarily loosened the knot in Seeley's chest. When his father spoke English in the house it meant that his drinking had not yet carried him past the last edge of decency.
There was a heavy thump and again the house shook. From experience Seeley knew that his father had hurled his mother against a kitchen wall. Her cry, if there was one, was drowned out by the television. There was a long silence before the heavy boots staggered down the hallway, stopping at the closed door behind which, Seeley on his bed, and his brother at the card table, neither breathed nor moved. The boots turned into his parents' bedroom. Lenny started shaking and, though terrified himself, Seeley was astonished to discover, peeking out from some corner of his soul, a spark of mischief, even glee, anticipating the roar of the dumb, confounded beast pawing through drawers of socks and underwear as he discovered that his gun was gone.
Drawers opened and slammed shut in the next room. Then, as Seeley expected, the mindless, anguished cry. Wo ist es? Wo ist mein Revolver?
The door to the boys' room swung open-the latch had broken long ago-and the massive figure, all chest and gut, a blown-up version of the boys' pantomime monster, crashed in, the fierce stench of alcohol filling the room. He didn't ask who took the gun. The bloodshot eyes that locked onto Seeley's announced that he had already been convicted of the theft. Wordlessly, his father ripped one drawer from Seeley's dresser, then another, flinging them against the wall, before doing the same with Lenny's. Ignoring Lenny, who was frozen in his chair, the monster seized the table by a leg and flipped it over. The wastebasket he flung against the wall, and black shards rained onto the floor. He didn't notice. Pants, shirts, jackets, followed by wire hangers flew from the closet. The monster again turned to Seeley and glared at him.
To avoid the man's gaze, Seeley's eyes swept past Lenny and the telltale closet, fixing instead on the ocean scene that decorated the wallpaper directly opposite his bed. Against a blue-gray ground, horizontal rows of sailboats alternated with parallel rows of tropical fish. The sailboats were the same color as the sea, separated only by a thin red outline tracing the hull and sails. The fish bore pastel stripes and spots, but, like the boats, were otherwise transparent to the color of the sea. Improbably, the fish were three times the size of the boats. The gross unreality of the images cemented Seeley's terror, as if the fact that these forms could coexist on his bedroom wall implied that any horror was possible; that in this house so rarely visited by outsiders, anything could happen.
The gun's discovery was inevitable. The house was too small, the furnishings too spare, to hide the smallest secret from this man's rage. As if reading Seeley's thoughts, his father swung back to the closet. For an instant, the single swiping movement of his boot threw him off balance but then shoes and sneakers hurtled out into the room.
