The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (11 page)

He placed his hand before me. “Tit for tat,” he agreed. And we shook.

O
NE OF THE QUICKEST CHANGES YOU EXPERIENCE WHEN ENTERING
prison isn’t the compulsory adjustment to the food or square footage, or the privacy you lack during your odd-numbered days in the showers. It’s not even the rapid loss of the former friends and family of your life. Rather, it’s the internal acceptance that finally you have become the person you were meant to be. When you enter, true, you are given a new number, new residence, and new wardrobe; but it is only when you place those garments upon your limbs that you realize that they were designed for no one but you. No former splinters of your personality carry over into prison life. No relationships, fictional or otherwise, accompany them either. Any superficial intimacy you claim to have experienced with another (whether consanguineous or not) when you wore any color other than cocoa brown fades as quickly as a puff of cigar smoke. You are now the person everyone knows you to be.

People on the outside can never understand this, and it takes more than a phone call or a short month of visitation by an outsider—be he lawyer, clergy, or journalist—to revisit that solicitude. Oliver certainly doesn’t understand, no matter how much he tries. He can’t. He enters Muncy with his hands swimming through his pockets, meandering through the visitor’s booth with increasing familiarity, feeling as though he knows everything about me merely because he’s
read my life’s paper trail and once spoke with my father. He strolls in here, sometimes in a full suit, other times in jeans, holding his legal pad like a novelist’s first manuscript, and mentions my father’s name to me every single time. “I still can’t reach him, but I’m going to keep trying,” he says as an indefatigable mantra through the telephone.

Ollie will never speak with him again, that much I know, that much I tried to tell him on his second visit, and yet he continues calling that same number only to be met with disconnected phone lines and irreverent telephone operators serving as scapegoats for flighty refugees, or, in my case, fathers. He needs to accept his shortcomings on his own, though. That is not my responsibility. Failure is not something you can impress upon another. It is something earned, something realized with piquant reward. Were he Japanese, I’d spare him the misery and provide him a tantō sword for his flaws.

Yet, no matter the futility, no matter the reiteration, I don’t have the heart to confirm this for him. He’ll come around to it on his own. He’s still visiting Muncy, after all. He’s still visiting me. And he still wants to learn more about my father, as if the past will somehow echo the vacant telephone line in Canadian Barre Dive, where my father no longer resides, and allow him to suddenly hear me.

The slender arms of the Philadelphia summer gathered and dropped me off at Bar Dive more frequently than planned in the summer of 2002. I grew accustomed to the predictable synchronicity of the relationship so much so that it loosely became a scheduled passing of the days, like cars drifting into each other’s lanes, like ornery spouses on their thirtieth anniversary. No spontaneity, no variation. Just planned order, chess pieces regularly lined up to slide across squares until we collided, either on his turf or mine.

My father decided that his way of repairing twenty-three years without allowance was to have me count a few ledgers and clean a few tables in my spare time. In exchange, he helped me pay part of
my rent. Substitute teaching over the summer in a walking city didn’t exactly boast the highest income potential. Plus, I didn’t have air-conditioning. Bar Dive did. Period.

People came to Philadelphia for the history, for the art, for the food, but were left with the humidity, a possible mugging, and a thin coat of grime on their skin each time they stepped outside. While tourists leaked into Philadelphia to take their pictures with the Liberty Bell or inside Independence Hall, hopped in the back of a hansom cab to be chauffeured around the cobbly streets of the miniature radius that is Old City, I spent my spare time at a bar.

Things, however, changed for us shortly after the Fourth of July. We were sitting together in Bar Dive in the middle of a particularly vacant day, sharing a pitcher of water, as the odor of summer drifted inside. I dunked the same striped cloth from day one into a bucket of soapy water and then spread it over a small table. I don’t know if it was the dirty water or the heat, but it just sort of came out.

“I was arrested once,” I said, almost as an addendum to filling out the Sunday crossword puzzle.

Looking back, I don’t know if I was telling him or just pontificating, though he didn’t waste a second in return. Not with shock, nor empathy, nor pride even. Just plain inquisitiveness.

“What was it for?” he asked, continuing to clean the tables.

“Nothing,” I sighed. “Just something stupid.”

“An arrest isn’t stupid, Noa,” he said, looking up.

“This was.”

“What was it for?” he asked, matter-of-factly. I couldn’t tell if he was more excited and proud than saddened and ashamed.

“Nothing, like I said. Just shoplifting. A teeny tiny misdemeanor three weeks after my eighteenth birthday. It’s on my permanent record, and because it’s so small, I never even have to put it on applications or whatever. But there it is—a fucking abscess on my past.”

That was another thing that changed after I started spending time with my father. I said “fuck” a lot more than I ever had in the past.

“Okay,” he said, turning away.

“You’re smiling? I just told you about this embarrassing smear on my record, and you’re, what?” I paused. “Feeling solidarity?”

He laughed.

“What?”

“What
what
?”

A sunset flushed across his cheeks, rising at the center.

“You honored the tat,” he said, and for a brief moment, I could see how someone somewhere could possibly find him relatively magnetic.

“Oh, Jesus, Caleb, really?” I picked up the dishrag and moved on to another table.

“Really,” he said, standing up. “I believe I owe you two facts now. Any facts. Anything at all.”

I turned back to him. “I’m not doing this.”

“Ask me,” he insisted. “Ask me anything.”

“I think I know all I need.”

I sat down below the air-conditioning vent, exhausted.

“First movie in a movie theater?” he asked me, without hesitation.

“This isn’t how it works.”

“First movie in a movie theater?” he insisted.

I yawned, ignoring him.

“I’m just going to keep asking, you know,” he said. “First movie in a movie theater. It’s not a taste question. It’s a fact one. You can at least do that, right? It must have happened at some point, with a friend, with your mother, at a mall or—”

“
—Scarface
,” I blurted, giving up, unsuccessfully camouflaging a slight smile with disgust. I tossed the rag to Caleb. “Okay?”

He grinned, childishly, as if he had just won at tug of war.

“Yours?” I asked.

“
The Sting
. Paul Newman.”

Predictable, but nonetheless—

“—first record purchased?” he continued.

“Soundtrack to the movie
Cocktail
,” I replied, hiding my face. “And you?”

“Bob Dylan.
Shelter from the Storm
,” he said, tossing me the wet rag.

“Favorite food?”

“Burgers and fries.”

“Favorite burger and fries?” I added, tossing the dishrag back.

“In-N-Out.”

He crunched the rag into a ball as he thought of his next question.

“Favorite city?”

“Why, the City of Brotherly Love.” I smiled. “Country you most want to visit?”

“Antarctica,” he answered, thinking.

“
Country
,” I asked, as he pitched the wet baseball my way. I caught it with my right hand.

“Antarctica,” he insisted, without hesitation. Or an atlas.

“Favorite word?” I asked, holding onto the rag.

He thought briefly. A fly zipped around his face while he considered a response. He didn’t even try to shoo it away. “I think I’m gonna have to say
freedom
. What about you?”

Home. Crystal. Xylophone
, I thought to myself.

“Maybe the same as yours, actually,” I replied.

Half of his mouth opened, and he started wiping his hands together, contemplating his next move. “Let’s get to the good stuff now. First kiss?”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Andy Hoskins. Sixth grade. Tennis courts, out in the doubles margin.”

I tossed the rag up in the air like I was opening a set, and it fell to his hands like a perfectly angled serve.

“Connie Anastasia. Fifth grade. Soccer field,” he said, quickly volleying it back my way. “First love?”

“None yet,” I said, catching it. “You?”

He wiped his hands on his jeans. “Your mother.”

I threw the rag back to him. “Well, I guess you were more like a one-month stand, then.” He didn’t reply. Or catch the rag. Instead, it just fell on the ground in a single thump, like a water balloon that failed to detonate. “All right. I can detect nonresponsiveness when it’s before me.” I sat down at a table and tried to remove the sticky residue
on the edge, but it wouldn’t budge. My father sat next to me. “So, is there anyone now?”

He shook his head. “No, not really.”

“Not really?” I asked. “Or no?”

“No,” he said. “What about you, dollface?”

“Dollface?” I laughed. “I didn’t realize we were there already.”

“What about you?” he repeated.

“Nah,” I said, noting his sudden change of mood. “No one special. Just a handful of guys here and there. There’s a police officer trainee and the guy down at Lorenzo’s, but he’s only for free pizza on Tuesdays. Maybe if you’re lucky …” I winked. “… I’ll get you a slice one day.”

“And here I thought I needed to impress you.”

“Addiction begets addiction, Caleb. You said it first.” I held up my bottle. “Worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“You mean besides abandoning you?”

“Well played.” I smiled, bowing my head to stare at his scar. I watched it jump around as he spoke, connecting each hemisphere of his face like a lock holding the two sides together. He seemed impressed with himself for his last response, and the scar kept tagging along with his healthy grin. “The scar,” I asked, pointing to his upper lip. “Where’d you get it?”

“That’ll take more than fifteen seconds.”

“You have fifteen.” I looked at my watch, waiting for the second hand to arrive at the twelve. “And … go.”

“Seriously? You’re timing me on this?”

“Fourteen now.”

“Fuck, fuck,” he laughed, massaging it.

“Thirteen,” I said, still traveling along with the watch.

“Fuck!”

“Twelve.”

“Shit,” he cried. “Okay.”

“Eleven. Ten.”

“Okay,” he called, one hand up. “Okay, I can do this, here goes:
Your mother. Me. 1977. A razor. A bathtub. A slip. A fall. Taa-dah,” he said, hands out in a bow.

“I’ll follow up later on that.”

“Worst thing you’ve ever done?” he asked, changing the subject.

“You mean apart from meeting you here in February?”

He leaned down to pick up the dishrag eroding the cheap carpet beneath us. “Come on, dollface, answer the question.”

“The arrest,” I said, matter of fact. “And probably dropping out of school.” I sighed. “I’ve got two. Lovely.”

He clutched the dishrag tighter. Wrinkles of dark water dripped out from it, over his hands.

“You know I wasn’t just a one-night stand with your mother. You know that, right?”

I couldn’t take my eyes off of his hands. They were squeezing tightly, as if he needed to inflict pain on himself.

“If you say so.”

“Your mom and me were living together,” he said, sinking into nostalgia. “You can’t actually believe everything she tells you. We were young and in love. What else do you need?”

“I don’t know,” I said bluntly. “Maybe food, a job. Money. Contraception.”

He massaged the scar again.

“You know, I had twelve stitches from that bathtub incident. For weeks, I could barely eat. I had to drink everything with a straw, eat soup and shit like that. I couldn’t even kiss.”

It was difficult to hold in my laughter, but to this day, I’m impressed with my restraint. “I can’t imagine you would have wanted to after that little production.”

My father relaxed beside me, stretching out his legs so far that they reached my own. I winced when one of them touched my calf, but don’t think he noticed. Drops of perspiration materialized over his scar, and I pictured them burnt with anguish, sitting alone in a wet tub while he left my mother or my mother left him for … well, Paramedic One? Bruce, the speed walker?

I stood from the table and walked to the one remaining unwashed table. The previous patrons had crushed peanuts into a spilled bottle of beer, leaving nothing less than La Brea tar pits on the table to excavate. I looked down and waxed over and over to remove the sticky residue on top, but it wouldn’t budge.

My father walked over to me. “Here, try this,” he added, noticing my grip. “You want to clean in circles,” he demonstrated. “See?”