Faces

----- Original Mess
"Why Biagi? Where do you go?" she said totally confused by his
behavior since her husband's father died.
He couldn't say. In his mind as vivid as the color of her blue eyes,
he could see himself again crossing the German school yard, where no
longer a kindergarten existed, shooting from the hip and behind the
wall of his aim staggered a "nazi" clutching at his throat as if a raw
clam were bleeding up through his mouth and nose.
"B", as his close friends called him, took up his jacket as if it were
a rifle and left. He was all ready late for his date which was his
seventh in just two weeks. He had a lot of catching up to do since his
long walk from Northern Africa to Germany.
"Biagi could I ..." his father began to say but stopped seeing his
son's eyes like the black steel of a gun barrel looking through him
unlike his own eyes that were puffed up and blotched with red from his
constant crying over his wife's death whom he had often told smilingly:
"Just going out for some strange piece of ass! Just like the Bible!"
.... He tried again only this time looking down, "Would it be OK If I
came to live with your family. I'll sleep in the cellar. Your dear
mother's ghost haunts me in the old house. She whispers that I'm going
to hell with all the hypocrites who used God as a conning tool."
B looked at this old man nearing retirement - this viscous man who had
tied him and his younger brother to pipes deep underneath their South
Bronx tenement after beating them with a strap - and then let them
remain bound in the dark cellar occupied by rats walking in the
night.
His father's bald head glistened just like the church dome in the
small Italian town they had captured. He looked at him with deep
contempt; recalling after a compassionate neighbor had called the cops
their beatings did not stop as the cops winking and whispering told the
beater that to keep shit off the streets were making their jobs easier
and making all the "big sirs" happy their streets were clean.
He looked into his father's beady eyes that would get smaller and
smaller the more he drank and said: "Only our dog Justice sleeps in the
cellar!" ....
B drove carefully through the Burywater slum in a town where many
crosses stood atop churches like middle fingers jabbing the sky with
all its discrimination and hate for foreigners and all the other
"different people" wondering what had all his fighting been about and
then he castigated himself for having said those biting words to his
father. Couldn't a simple no have been enough? he thought and then he
spoke aloud to the windshield words he should have used instead :
"Papa, we can't have you stay with us. There's just enough room for my
wife and our two kids." Then taking a turn by "Deadmanmanslake"
seeing the dark waters made him remember all the hours of darkness in a
cellar and he shouted: "No! No, I'm worried you'll try to get my
American-Polish wife again - like you tried when I was over there
fighting for the big lady chained in the harbor! Remember Papa how you
and Mama got that citation from the president telling all about my
bravery and two wounds and the two Purple Hearts I earned for a country
that taught me to be a good citizen and just enough to hold a gun?
Remember how Mama would go every day to the Red Cross trying to find
out where I was for three months and they told her for a small donation
they would try to find out from the president who took over for FDR why
I was missing and instead that two-faced guy was planning on sending
more sacrificial lambs to some place called Korea in the near future
and instead of going with Mama you sneaked off to go see Dora and asked
her if you could drink up all her body juices. She threw up as she was
throwing you out of our place. Do You remember?" ....
B gripped the steering wheel tighter as he could see himself ripping
the cross from the young German girl's neck and then spitting in her
face - that could have been his father's face.
Biagi stopped the car; opened the door nonchalantly; making it obvious
he was looking at the woman's gorgeous legs. She jumped in; folded
herself into the seat as she gave him a pretty smile. He kissed her
face that could have been his wife's .... END