Fear the Night

father argued, how he wanted it to sound. He didn’t want to hear the things they said to each other.

But sometimes, like tonight, the words worked their way through the buzzing:

“. . sold or pawned everything we owned!” His mother. Her hopeless voice, the one with fear in it. Dante recognized it because it was the same fear he felt. How a boat might feel breaking up on a vast and violent sea. Soon the protective shell would be gone and every fierce and terrible thing that lived in the wild ocean would have its way.

“Like you can’t get a fuckin’ job!” His father. Joel. Dante still worshipped Joel despite the things he’d said lately to his mother. His father was sick (he’d heard his mother say). Para. . something.

“I don’t know anything, Joel! Not anymore.”

“And what I know how to do, the city won’t let me do!” The city. That was what was keeping his father from going back to work. The city. “Different departments went ahead and hired the other guys that got axed. Guys with less seniority than I have. Me, I didn’t just get axed, I also got knifed-in the back.”

“Nobody’s out to get you. It’s in your head, Joel. You’re paranoid and you need to get help.”

Dante clamped his hands over his ears. He knew what was going to happen now. When his mother called his father paranoid, his father almost always went wild. That was when the real shouting began, when the neighbors might complain, when Dante heard fists striking flesh with a sound like he heard in the butcher shop; then the police would come.

It was happening again, now, and he didn’t know if he could stand it. When his parents weren’t fighting about money, about what the city had done to his father, they were fighting about him, how he was skipping school and his grades were terrible for a boy so smart. It was such a waste, they always-

“Joel!. .”

His mother. There was a new horror in her voice.

Dante waited for it to begin.

But his father was silent for a long time.

“Joel!. .”

Joel had been finished arguing, finished fighting, finished with her, with everything, with life in a world that was so devious and unfair, unfair. He didn’t want to hit her. Not this time. He saw himself as if he were standing off to the side, watching, and he was somebody else at the same time, and that was how he understood. He understood it all, that there was no hope, it wasn’t going to change, nothing was going to change unless he changed it by ending it. Let them win. He surrendered. Let them win.

He had no idea how he’d gotten in the bedroom, didn’t remember going there, opening the closet door, and finding the gun behind the folded winter sweaters on the top shelf, the gun he’d found in someone’s trash, and tell me that was an accident and see if I believe you, the gun he’d wanted to use on Dugan and Sal but didn’t and shouldn’t have because it wasn’t them, it was the city and the gun was no accident. Try and tell me that was an accident.

Back in the kitchen.

“Joel!. .”

The explosion in the kitchen was deafening.

Dante stood up from the sofa and dropped his arms to his sides, his hands clutched in fists. He was rooted to the carpet with shock, with the terrible certainty that something awful had happened and was rushing toward him.

And he had to go to meet it. Had to see it, to know what it was he feared. It was a dark kind of duty.

He made himself walk to the kitchen door, made himself open it.

The smell of the burning onions almost overcame him, making his eyes water. There was his mother lying curled on the kitchen floor. One of her eyes was gone, and the side of her head was missing. On the floor near her head was uncooked meat that had somehow dropped from the frying pan. That was what it was. That must be what it was.

His father said his name once, Dante, as if he loved him.

Dante saw the sadness and pain in his father’s face, the kindness. He did love him. Saw the gun his father was aiming at him. The gun must be a toy, though it sure looked real. What would his father be doing with a gun, like people on TV or in the movies?

Then he looked again at his mother and knew the gun was real, and knew what had happened. What he feared.

“You’ll be better off out of it,” his father said. He began to cry, to sob, trying to hold the gun steady. “Evil everywhere! Everywhere in this city. Goddamn this city!”

Dante didn’t know what he meant, what had happened to him, and why he’d done such a thing. Such a wrong thing.

His father wasn’t evil.

Dante saw the gun’s hammer draw back as his father’s finger tightened on the trigger.

Saw the cylinder with the snub-nosed bullets like dull jewels slowly rotate.

Saw and heard the hammer drop.

The firm metallic click! struck panic in him. He saw his father staring down at the gun with a betrayed expression. It was no surprise that the gun would misfire, that it would trick and taunt him like everything else in his life.

Dante ran from the kitchen, through the living room, and toward the door to the hall. The hammer would be drawing back again and this time the gun would fire; he knew it. He was dead. He was dead. His father was close behind him. He was dead.

He was in the hall. There were the stairs. He could fly down the stairs. Escape.

The gun exploded again, a sound like the one that had killed his mother, only not as loud, not as close.

Dante didn’t break stride. He did almost fly down the stairs, barely touching the banister, stumbling, almost tumbling-landing, steps, landing, steps, foyer, and outside into the cool city air. The dark city air that smelled like onions.

He wasn’t going back. He couldn’t. He knew he was never going back.

He found a dark doorway and lay in it exactly the way his mother had lain curled on the hard kitchen floor. The darkness wasn’t so bad. It sheltered him. His mother and father were part of the darkness now.

Dante barely moved all night. Not when the roaches crawled on him, or when the men and women passed nearby, laughing and cursing.

In the morning, in the cold light, he knew he’d have to get to his feet and move and keep moving or someone would stop him, report him, make him go back to where he never wanted to go again, where, like every place else, there was nothing for him but loss.

By noon in the city it was easy to find a slightly used New York Times in the trash receptacles that stood like ragged sentries at busy intersections.

Dante was lucky. He not only found a paper, he found a wrapped, half-eaten hamburger someone had thrown away last night.

The morning was sunny but chilly. Dante had on a long-sleeved shirt, but he was still cold.

Trying not to shiver, he sat on a low stone wall, people and traffic streaming past him, and read in the paper what he knew had happened last night: The news item was brief, on a back page. A man in an apartment that had the same address as Dante’s apparently shot and killed his wife and then himself. Neighbors said they were a troubled couple who often argued. The man had recently lost his job with the city.

They had a twelve-year-old son, the neighbors told police, who was missing.

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