The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (12 page)

“You’re right,” I agreed, watching as the rag in his hand swallowed the crushed peanuts superficially glued to the table. He continued, though, even after the table was spotless, pushing the dishcloth on the glass and pulling specs of moisture off, the rag always in his grip as if it were a crutch. We were silent there for at least another minute, his hands continuously moving clockwise, and up and down, side to side, cleaning tables as if in an unconscious chant—tables, which had already been wiped at least three times, being wiped and rewiped by my father’s calloused fingers and palms coated with scars and remnants from a past I’d never truly know. Each of those nicks and swollen joints got him here; each of those marks brought him to me in Bar Dive, in the humidity of summer, and at that moment, I realized that even though he shared their origins, that even though he’d repeat his stories weekly to me with caricature embellishment, I’d never really know how they appeared. From one of his drives over the border? From the prison boxing ring? From my mother, who had probably attempted to replace my father for the next ten years with varying mustachioed lovers? Without witnessing history, everything that follows is pure perspective.

Eventually he realized what he was doing and stopped, placing the rag in a corner. He wiped his hands on his jeans, took my hand, and sat me down. A brown slither of leather appeared from his right back pocket, and in it, a water-soaked photograph of me from my high school graduation. My mother must have sent it to him after the postcard delivery.
If he wanted to be a father, he would have been a father
, I heard her say. Then he peeled an old photograph stuck to its back, and handed it to me.

“This was your grandmother. My mother. Her name was Dorothy,” he said. “Dot. She went by Dot to her friends.” Caverns of air pushed in and out of his chest before he continued. “She would have been seventy-one years old.”

I took the photograph and held it between my fingers, trying not to leave my prints all over it. She was alone in the photo, spread out on a beach in a polka-dotted swimsuit, thick red lipstick, and a white scarf tied around her hair. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five in the photo, maybe thirty, at most, and commanded that lens like Audrey Hepburn’s less attractive sister. I couldn’t quite tell where she was, but it looked balmy and tropical.

“You know how I told you that it was because of her that I wanted to find you?”

“Sort of,” I said. “It kind of got lost in there a bit, somewhere in the illegal coyote phase and knocking up my mom.”

He smiled, penitent. “Right. Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that.” I was a child when her parent is handed news of an illness. The more he tried to talk, the faster the disease spread. “I was with some buddies in Cincinnati and they wanted to do a bank robbery,” he continued, struggling. “I was just the driver. I didn’t go into the bank. I didn’t do anything. To be honest, I barely even knew the guys. But I did agree to it and we got caught, and even though I just drove the car, I got five years for it. And I had to serve every goddamn one because of my history. They knew about everything, from Macy’s to Tijuana, and at that point, probation became laughable. I had about two months left on my sentence when my mom got sick. Really sick. The warden actually came and delivered the news himself. He handed me a letter, and just said, ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

“She died?” I asked, nervously, holding my hand out to him. He didn’t take it.

“No. Not at that point.” He rubbed her photo between his fingers. “She had written a letter asking the warden if I could be released early. She knew she was going to die. She knew where I was. She had been keeping tabs on me from Kentucky to Ohio and everywhere in
between. She knew exactly where I was even when she cut me out of her life decades earlier.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said to him.

He looked up to me and tried to smile in appreciation, but what came out was a sort of Picasso rendering of mixed grief.

“She wrote in her letter that she wanted me to come home to Philadelphia no matter what. She was begging the warden for my release, but—”

I shook my head, no.

“Claimed it would be a break in procedure or a fucking floodgate or something,” he continued. “So I sat in that cell for another two months knowing that my mother was ready to speak with me, regardless of where I was. I just sat there and thought.” He laughed, and the Picasso expression scattered like a cluster of pins dropped on the floor. “I know it’s sort of dumb. I mean, I’d been in jail. I’d been in prison before for a really long time, but I never really spent any time thinking in there, you know? There’s weight lifting, there’s TV, there’s chores. I guess I could have spent a lot more time over the years sitting and thinking about my mom. Or about you,” he said, looking my way. “But I didn’t.”

“You never know what you’ll do in a situation like that,” I said. It was the only phrase I could muster—a vacant platitude just like my salutatorian speech. “Nobody does.”

“I suppose,” he said, unmoved. “By the time I got out and came to Philly, she had already died. She left her house to me, and with it, a box with a handful of letters from your mom and some pictures of you growing up.”

My chest pinched.

“I sent you a postcard pretty soon after I came home, and when I never heard back, I realized that it was pretty clear you were going places and I was not. So I sold the house, bought the bar, and …”

I nodded in acquiescence. Of what, I’m not sure, but there was something about the way he smiled back at me that confirmed that he wasn’t lying. I didn’t even think he needed to hear a story in riposte,
but the pressure was too strong, and I just couldn’t keep it inside any longer. My hand reached out to his and he accepted.

“… and,” I said.

It was now my turn. I know he wasn’t asking. He didn’t even need anything more, but it was my turn, and I was finally ready.

O
N MY PENULTIMATE VISIT TO
B
AR
D
IVE
, I
STUMBLED IN AT
nearly one in the morning unannounced, just as the bar was closing. It was pitch dark when I deboarded the bus, avoiding a dead rat and a homeless man (who smelled curiously like tulips) on my way. Before I could start walking the few short blocks to the bar, I noticed a shadow lurking on the corner, a diffident amalgamation of restraint and might all in the same amorphous splotch. When I looked over to him, instantly he glanced the other way.

He is not real, I thought, and continued walking the two blocks remaining toward Bar Dive. The more I walked, though, the more the elongated smudge of his feet followed. The more I shifted my gait, the more his dirty trim shifted, so much so that the head of his confused shadow connected to the shadow of my moving feet, and when they first touched, a tender shiver swept down my spine. I felt dirty from our shadows’ intercourse. I couldn’t tell where mine ended and his began, but I walked faster, our shaded unit traveling as one, until it split when I ambled in front of the bar, just below the dangling tennis shoes still suspended from the sky, still perched over the wire, still providing notice to drug addicts of where to get their fix; only now, they were drenched with darkened exhaust from car engines, cigarette ash floating out from open windows on third-floor apartments, and acid rain. I stood under them, prayerlike, my hands placed together as if I were in church. Grant me this one wish, I thought.
Grant me just this one. When I turned around, he was no longer there. My hands were still touching in prayer and I was still standing directly beneath the dangling shoes.

I rushed to the door and jiggled the locked handle with my left hand, looking up into the camera, hoping my father would see me and the handsome set of lines squatting between my eyes.

It took less than a minute for him to open the door and pull me inside. I think he asked me what was wrong. I think he asked me why I was calling for help. But I can’t remember calling for help. All I can remember is telling my father that someone was following me. A man in all black with brown cowboy boots and glasses.

“Stay where you are,” he instructed.

There was a loud jingle of bells, a creak of a door opening, and then nothing. Blackness of a dreamless night. A vacuum of all of my fears in one. And without hesitation, without sensation of any sort, my father vanished. Everything happened quickly from that point. I ran my hands across my arms, tenderly, inspecting them for injury. No spheres of pain erupted anywhere on my body. No mounds of future bruises forecasting a night sky on my temple or my chin or my back or my thighs or anywhere else. Just a beat inside the bar and nobody else beside me.

“Dad?” I called out, quietly.

I looked out front, but nobody was there. I looked in the back room, but he wasn’t there, either. Finally, I ran to the back door leading to an alley, scattered with trash bags and metal cans, opened the door and saw my father, hunched over the shadowman, breathing laboriously, as he was on the evening we first met.

“Dad?” I called again, screaming toward him. (In retrospect, I know that my voice carried barely a decibel of volume, but in my head it was so much louder.)

He didn’t respond. He didn’t hear me. He was too busy fighting off the shadowman who had abandoned his trail on me, or who had used me to get to him, or had mistook me for someone else or—

“—look out!” I called, as he pounced onto my father. On cue, my
father mulled his fist into a ball of friction and began pounding the shadowman’s right temple until he retreated.

I hobbled toward him, and as I got closer, I saw that although the shadowman didn’t seem to be fighting back anymore, my father was still punching him on his right temple with his fist, once, twice, three times, dislodging the man’s eyelid from its home. I counted as he thrust. Five. Six. Seven. The man’s face twisted toward me in the most grotesque, disfiguring motion I’d ever seen, before falling flat on the concrete. It was at this point that I noticed how young the shadow was—perhaps not much older than me.

I didn’t know what I should do, but I couldn’t stand where I was, inches from my father, and watch as he put this man in the hospital and himself back in prison. In an instant, a thick pulse traveled from my feet all the way up to my heart and lips. I had never seen such precise fighting. I never told my father that, although I was scared of the thump in my heart, it was one of the most intoxicating moments of my life.

The shadowman pleaded for my father to stop, but he didn’t care. My father’s left hand, clean and untouched from the previous beating, lifted magically from his body and pounced into the thin shadowman’s gut, eight, nine, ten more times, until he bent in half, perched on the ground like a folded shirt.

“Stop!” I cried. “That’s enough!”

My father looked up at me and speared me with anger, with love, with devotion. His hands were twisted and torn. Spores of skin peeled from his knuckles.

Now, someone might think that I should have stopped him earlier. That I should have prevented another aggravated assault charge for my father or an ER visit with forty stitches and a concussive monthlong headache for the shadowman. But I didn’t. Nobody knows what she’ll do when she feels her life threatened. Or how he’ll react if he feels his family in danger. And my father was attacking him to save me. A man twice his age, using both right and left hands in self-defense, saving my life. It was one of the few times I saw any part of
myself in my father. In anyone, for that matter. Perhaps I really did have the same gift of instinct, of self-defense, of violent protection: a present wrapped ineloquently with the two violent hands of my father, but a gift no less.

“Is he okay?” I asked.

My father didn’t reply. As soon as he caught his breath, he pulled me back to the bar with one hand. I nearly tripped over the cracks in the sidewalks. Had he not dragged me inside so forcefully, I might have fled in the opposite direction. I think about that moment in here at least once a week. What would have been had I not gone back into the bar with my father?

“What was hell was that?” I cried, just as my father locked the door behind us.

Inside, he bent over to catch his breath, and for a brief moment, it was strangely smooth. Like molasses, even, it spilled in thick globules, each richer than the previous drop. No coarseness, no coughing. A trail of dark blood formed in the corner of his mouth.

“How did you—?”

“—come with me,” he insisted, pulling me into his office in the back of the bar. He wiped his mouth with his bloody shirt and pulled out a small box from his desk. In it was a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver. Had I not been in North Philadelphia, had I not been with my long-lost father, had I not just been nearly attacked, had I not been sleeping with Bobby McManahan, had a lot of things not happened in my life, I would have thought that it was a toy. A sort of silver and metallic utensil with thick grooves where your fingers rest. Pillows for your hands designed with comfort and purpose in mind. It was relatively small and compact and sat in his hands like a remote control.