Caine's Law (3 page)

“So—how are
we
supposed to—”

“Don’t whine at me, Professional. You were an Actor. You know how this works.”

Director Keller spread his sweaty hands. “Win or die.”

A
week or two after my seventh birthday, my father beat my mother to death.

I remembered it. All of it. Finally.

I remembered the way it was. The only way it’ll ever be.

Listen to me.

Yes, you. Pay attention. This is important. This is the whole story right here. Everything else is just context.

Listen:

The Mission District’s Labor free clinic … Dad and me and the old guy with the scars …

Dad and me, we sat together on a plastic bench, shoved up against the mildew-stained wall a couple meters in from the age-smoked armorglass of the street doors. A girl hunched next to me, twelve or thirteen probably, because to me she looked practically grown up. She was talking, kind of under her breath, and most of the time I couldn’t understand what she was saying and the rest of the time she didn’t make much sense. She was rocking back and forth with one knee hugged to her chest while her other leg
jittered and bounced and kicked out sometimes and she didn’t seem to notice.

On the other side of her was some ancient ragface, probably Dad’s age even, lying on his side on the bench, snoring with his head on a bundle of rags, blowing pinkish bubbles of bloody vomit out his nose.

On the other side of me was Dad.

Elbows on knees, hands dangling limp between his thighs, he stared straight ahead, barely even blinking, and I knew he was looking at something inside his head instead of in the room. He got like that after an episode. Like he was dead, except for moving and breathing and stuff. He hadn’t made a noise since we sat down. Over an hour.

Me neither.

The clinic waiting room was bigger than our whole apartment. Cleaner, too. It was late morning, so there were only fifty or sixty Laborers waiting to see the practitioner. Slowest part of the day. Most of them just had the flushed faces and thick gluey coughs that meant they’d caught the wheeze, which had started early this year. It wasn’t even fall yet. The wheeze could be cured by taking a pill every day for a week or two, but somehow there were never enough pills. Nickles Porter, a kid about my age who lived on our floor in the Temp block, had told me his dad had come home from the clinic worse off than when he’d went in, and that the old man had spent most of the night choking to death.

I remember thinking, when Nickles told me about it, how it’d be pretty neat if
my
dad would come down with the wheeze, because once he was gone, Mom could maybe get us recasted to Professional, and she could teach and we’d go back and live in our
real
house, the one on Language Arts Drive at the faculty compound in South Berkeley.

I sort of figured that Nickles and his mom must have done something like that, because a couple weeks later he wasn’t around anymore. I thought this because I was still new. A few months along, I’d have a more direct understanding of how and why Labor kids disappeared from the Mission District.

Sitting there on the bench, I didn’t worry about Mom dying; I wasn’t
that
new. In the Temp blocks, you don’t worry about what’s coming so much as about living through whatever it turns out to be. If she died, it’d be one thing. If she lived, it’d be something else. Nothing I could do about anything either way. Except sit and wait. And try not to think about the rest of my life.

So that’s what I did until the old guy showed up.

He came in through the street door like he had someplace to be, walking
with one of those hollow plastic crutches tucked into his armpit, even though he didn’t look like he needed it. Except maybe for being old. He looked older than dirt. His hair was mostly grey, and his eyebrows too, and his face was the color of an old paper bag. His nose was crooked and the scar that slanted across it was the lightest-colored thing on his face. He headed straight for the inner door.

“You can’t do that.”

He stopped and looked back at me. “What?”

“You can’t go in.” I pointed over at the vented armorglass reception window. “You check in with the window-lady, then sit out here until somebody calls your name.”

“Sure, kid. Whatever. I’m not here to see the … oh.” He’d looked from me over to Dad, and he stared the way you stare in nightmares when you can’t quite figure out what you’re afraid of, and he sounded like somebody was choking him. “Fuck
me
 …”

He kind of pulled himself together, rubbing at his eyes with his free hand, but he’d gone pale except for that scar across his nose, which had turned dark red, and he didn’t look too steady on his feet.

“You better sit down,” I said. “If you fall here, there’s nobody to pick you up.”

“Yeah.” His voice had gone hoarse and breathy. “Yeah, I remember.”

I didn’t know what he meant by that, so I didn’t say anything. He looked at Dad some more, then he looked at me and he got this expression like he was mad but was about to cry anyway. Then he got over that, and just looked sad. “You’re having a tough day.”

I looked up at Dad, but he was still vacant, like an old building nobody lives in anymore. “I guess.”

The old guy came over and lowered himself onto the bench between me and the muttering girl. He leaned his forehead on the crutch, like this was why he carried the thing, because he was too tired to hold his head up. “Your mom, huh?”

I looked at the floor. He knew stuff he shouldn’t, and I knew better already than to talk to undercover Social Police.

“My mom’s back there too,” the old guy said.

I knew to keep my eyes on the floor, but I never learned to shut up. “You got a mom?”

“Everybody’s got a mom, kid. And everybody’s mom dies.”

“My mom’s not gonna die.”

“Maybe not today. Remember what she says to you? About your dad?”

I remembered. Lying on her cot in the living room, all sweaty and
bruised and still bleeding a little from the corner of her mouth. I remembered how her hand would shake when she’d grab my wrist, and how her grip had no strength anymore. “Take care of your father,” she’d say. “He’s the only father you’ll ever have. He’s sick, Hari. He can’t help himself.”

She used to say stuff like that a lot. About how it wasn’t his fault,
how Dad really loves us and never wants to hurt us
, even though he did anyway. Sometimes bad enough you couldn’t walk much for a day or two. It never made sense to me; who cared whose fault it was?

She also used to say how sometimes
he’s just not himself
, which never made sense to me either, because if he wasn’t himself, who was he? If Dad was
just sick
, why didn’t he ever get better?

And who cares why? What difference does
why
make? A punch in the mouth is a punch in the mouth. Why’s got nothing to do with it.

But Mom seemed to think all this was important for me to understand, so I always nodded and played along, because that was the only way to make her quit bugging me about it.

The old guy watched me like he was listening to my mind. “For there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so, right?”

I looked down at the floor again. “I think you shouldn’t be talking to me.”

“Got that right.” He leaned toward me just a little, tilting his head down and lowering his voice like he didn’t want Dad to hear, which made me wonder if he might really not be Soapy after all, because if he was, he’d know who Dad was and what he was like after an episode already, and he’d know Dad couldn’t do anything right now even if you shot at him. “Listen, kid, I want to …”

He stopped and shook his head, and I could tell he was making a face even though I wasn’t looking at him. “Just one thing, kid. One thing and I’ll leave you alone, okay?”

I didn’t answer because I was looking at his hands.

He sat forward on his elbows, the crutch leaning on one shoulder, hands dangling between his thighs. Which was kind of funny, because that’s exactly how Dad was sitting, but his hands didn’t look anything like Dad’s hands, which were wide and strong and hard as a brick—when he’d start in on me, he’d knock me down without even trying. Without even making a fist. He was working on the docks, and we were still eating okay, and it seemed like he was stronger every day. Stronger than people are supposed to get. Dad’s hands were scabbed and scarred and rough with callus, but they still looked like hands.

The old guy’s hands looked like hammers.

Not deformed or anything—he still had fingers and stuff—but they were covered in scars and some kind of weird stripe of skin across the knuckles and along the sides, skin that was dark as old bruise, thick and rumpled until you couldn’t even really see his knuckles at all. There might not even have
been
knuckles under there—even when he made a fist, all you could see was that the patch over the joints behind his first and second fingers was thicker and darker than the rest.

His hands were made to hit.

“Ugly, huh? That’s what happens when guys like me get old.” He turned them over so I could look at the scars and calluses on his palms too. Looked like his fingers didn’t really work too well anymore; they were crooked and stiff and bulged at the joints. “It’s a little late for me to take up guitar.”

I felt like I ought to say something, and even though I knew I shouldn’t even be talking to the old guy, I didn’t want to be mean. All I could come up with was, “You sure have a lot of scars.”

“Yeah. You too.”

I didn’t have
any
scars, not like his, just some nicks and cuts from fights after stickball and stuff. He was making fun of me. “Making fun of a kid is an
asshole move
.”

I didn’t know exactly what an
asshole move
was, except that the older kids said that when you were mean to somebody for no reason.

“I’m not teasing you, kid. There’s scars, and there’s scars.” He sounded so serious, and so sad, that I looked up at him, and his eyes were extra-shiny, like they were a little more wet. He shrugged and he coughed and he looked down. “These on my hands here, they’re one kind … well, hell, look here for a second.”

He twisted around and tugged the collar of his tunic down off his neck, and he had a
real
scar on his shoulder, jagged as a lightning bolt, rippled and weirdly smooth and white as spit.

“Wow.” I couldn’t take my eyes off it. “How’d you get that one?”

“Guy hit me with an axe.”

“For
real
?” I could just barely imagine it. “That is
so
cool!”

“Not at the time.”

“He could of chopped your
arm
off!”

“Except he was aiming for my neck. Whatever. But look—” He held his arm out and kind of twisted his shoulder in a little circle to show that everything still worked. “That’s one kind of scar. It’s there mostly just to
remind you something happened. Where he broke my collarbone here? It’s stronger than the bone on either side. A lot of scars are like that. They heal back tougher than they were before.”

“Cool.”

“But if, like you said, he cut off my arm instead …” He shook his head. “That’s another kind of scar. You can live through it and learn to work around it and whatever, but for the rest of your life you’re gonna be a little bit broken. Or a lot.”

I got the idea, but I didn’t get what it had to do with me, and I said so.

“Not all scars are on your body, kid. But some of them leave you broken just the same. My mom … she died when I was about your age. You don’t get over that kind of shit. Just … listen, kid. Don’t ever miss a chance to kiss her good-bye. You never know which time is the last time.”