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Nancy Zafris Vantage Point |
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Thanksgiving day. The changeable
weather has changed again. From the top of the hill Don Capachi
can spot golfers in shirt sleeves. It’s a pretty sight, the golf course, the
mowed countryside that stretches around these little holes with flags
sticking out of them. That’s all the game used to be to him, but through the
years he’s watched from his secluded hill and learned more about it. He has nowhere to go on
Thanksgiving. He won’t go to a restaurant or hotel and eat alone. He won’t go
to the free dinner at the convention center and take his place as an
80-something sad sack. For the past ten Thanksgivings he’s come here, and if
the weather is warm enough, like today, he’ll spread out a picnic and watch
the golfers squeeze in a game before football and turkey. Otherwise, he’ll
turn on the motor and eat in his car. Don Capachi
pops the trunk of his Buick, works the heavy bag of charcoal over the lip
until the weight topples it to the ground. He drags it over to a bare spot,
sets up a lawn chair, then looks up and freezes. He hears a noise. It’s not a
squirrel. Someone else is here. That’s never happened before, not on this day.
He stops what he’s doing. A woman stands at one of the
headstones, staring down. Her head
bobs as she carries out both sides of the conversation. Don Capachi backs up to a respectful distance. He waits,
watches, bows solemnly to the woman when she finally leaves. Watches her go
down the hill, her shoes crunching the leaves, to the car he had somehow
failed to see as he drove in. When her car is out of sight, he walks over to
where she stood, finds the flowers that mark the grave. He reads the stone. A
set of parents, dead on the same day. Poor girl. No wonder she had a lot to
say. In summer the trees partially
obstruct his view of the golf course. Not today. Don Capachi
sets up the grill, gets the charcoal going. He plants the lawn chair several
steps away. He won’t need the charcoal’s heat today. He carefully places two
wieners on the grill. Across the road a kind of crazy
whooping noise spins the air on the golf course. Striding to the 16th green
are two happy men with their shirts off. It’s warm but not that warm. They’re
young men, still maintaining their shape even with a layer of beer fat. They
look up and sniff the air and laugh. Don Capachi
wonders suddenly where Worm is buried. Here in They were about the same size,
he and Worm, but Don Capachi had shrunk down to
meet him. Was a time he was a lot bigger, a lot stronger. A lot younger, too.
Goes without saying. Worm was so young, so small. So stupid, too. Every day the sign in big red letters said it again: DO NOT LUBRICATE GEARS WHILE MACHINE IS RUNNING! How many times do you have to
say it? Obviously once a day was not enough for Worm. Don Capachi
pours his favorite drink into a crystal tumbler and inhales the bouquet. Scotch,
neat. Expensive scotch. He’s got a cupboardful of
the stuff, blended and single; he collects and sorts them like different
grades of copper. Blended’s for everyday. Single’s for special occasions. He’ll often decree a day a
special occasion just to get a dip of it:
a blue moon, a Friday the 13th, a ride home without any red lights, a
day with no telephone solicitations. Those graced evenings bring him single
malts. But even among his special occasion grades he never touches the Springbank, aged 15-years, unless he’s drinking with his
mother. He saves the very best for her. Today is a Springbank
day. He raises his tumbler, toasts her, reaches over to her gravestone and
clinks the crystal. Every night while she was alive they had a drink together.
Sometimes it tasted watery so he knew she’d had a little during the day. His mother always sat in the
same chair. She was always sitting exactly there when he came home from the
metal shredders. There was never anything in her lap. She was never doing
anything. The T.V. was never on. She was sitting there waiting for him. He
came home from work and walked through the door and there she was. Waiting
all day perhaps. Perhaps not even having done one single thing except wait
for her son. She didn’t change expression upon seeing him but her hands
lifted to the armchairs and she began to push herself up from the cushions. She
shuffled to the kitchen table, gathered her handbag and put on her coat and
tied a scarf around her head, walked out the door and waited for him in the
passenger seat of the car. After he cleaned and changed clothes, they drove
over to the MCL Cafeteria. They were long-time regulars. His mother didn’t
even have to go through the cafeteria line. The tray bussers,
older ladies themselves, picked her out something they knew she would like. Then
they’d go home and have their drink, and sit just the two of them. He’d try
not to feel lonely. Every night he’d think about Mary and the nine years they
were married, and how he had let her down, how she had died,
suffering, and how he had sold his soul to the devil. On Thanksgiving he and his
mother would eat at the MCL, and on Christmas Eve they were there early
before it closed. It got so the people at the cafeteria were like his family.
They came to his mother’s funeral. He tried going back there after she died. There
were some female regulars waiting to be his companions. But the people didn’t
seem like family anymore, or rather, they did seem like family but it wasn’t
comforting. He changed eating places and started going to a McDonald’s. Night
after night to the same one, and when they started to know him and greet him
like one of their own, he went across the street to Wendy’s, and then to a
Burger King, and then to another McDonald’s. He didn’t deserve for anyone
else to like him. Worm liked to kid him. Had lots
of nicknames for him. “Jet-setter” was Don Capachi’s
favorite. Made no sense. That’s why he liked it. Worm asked him, “Hey,
Jet-setter, wanna go to my hideaway and toke up?” Worm,
that little boy-man who never listened to anyone, was about as close as Don Capachi came to liking someone again. He almost told Worm
about the old man who was their boss and owner. Sometimes, after a couple of
drinks, he’d think someone ought to know. He’d be sitting alone in his house,
his mother dead. If Worm had been sitting next to him, he would have told him.
He’d started up with the old man.
Not many people knew that. Bonner & Capachi,
that’s nearly what the metal shredders came to be called. Don Capachi had been working as a musician. He played the
clarinet. He played with a group of fellows first at church groups; then they
moved up to the Deschler and Neil House. Downtown
spots, everyone dressed up. Sometimes musicians traveling from out of state
would board with him and his mother and they’d make a little money that way. One
day one of the out-of-state musicians wrecked his car and left it on their
front lawn and took the bus home. They were struggling to scrape together the
rent so Don Capachi draped a Parts for Sale banner
across the car and started selling it off piece by piece. He sold everything
salvageable, the driver side door, the seats, the battery, the
two tires that were still good. He put
the unsold hubcaps in a box. With the money in his pocket he towed in another
wrecked car and did the same thing. Eventually he had a parts emporium going,
and it was paying some good side cash. The old man showed up one day,
pretending to be searching for some hubcaps in a crate marked Hubcap
Heaven! By then Don Capachi had a quite a
collection going. By then as well their landlord had found out what they were
doing, the yard they had ruined and the illegal business they were operating.
Old man Bonner, he was sly. He
seemed to know all about this angry landlord. He suggested leasing a regular
spot and doing it right. They found a place together and ran a fence around
it and put up a sign, B&C Salvage. Don Capachi
operated it while the old man messed with his other businesses. After a while
the old man offered to buy him out, enough money for him and his mother to
make a down payment on a house of their own. Enough
money for him to get back to his music. Of course John Bonner wasn’t an
old man way back then. He had thick hair brushed up funny because of a
cowlick. He seemed almost to have a limp but it was his fireplug build and
the way he pushed forward in his stride, as if he had to power through wall
after wall. After he was bought out, Don Capachi
returned to his dream of being a musician. He was traveling some, still
hoping to make it big. John Bonner let him come and go on the job. There was
always work when he showed up and it wasn’t like the
business was booming enough to miss him during his absences. In How anything worked was a
mystery to him. But once love had worked for him. One night he had met Mary
and something beyond him had acted in his favor. He didn’t know how it had
happened, so he had no idea how to repeat it. He never thought it would need
repeating. Across the road the two
shirtless golfers finish the 16th hole. At the 17th green they wash their
balls, then sit down on the bench and pop a beer. They pass it back and forth.
Don Capachi watches them. How golf worked—just
another mystery. He had watched it from this vantage point for ten years and
he knew what was supposed to happen, but he didn’t know how it happened. How
the ball flew in the air and landed where you wanted it to land, how you
chose what club to move you where, how you laughed or congratulated your
partner or said pick it up or avoided the water. How you sat on the
bench like those young men were doing now and felt so good about a job
well-done you were reluctant to get up and finish. How love had brought him and
Mary together was as startling as walking up to those young men right now
(limping, bent over, 82 years old), and choosing in their bags among all
those metal sticks looking exactly alike, the right stick, and swinging it,
the right way, and walking up to the green and finding that the ball had
landed right where it should have. Once love had worked like that. But he
didn’t know how. He was ready to leave his forties, youth and promise way
behind him, and it had finally happened, nearly a half century old and he had
met Mary and somehow fought through the brothers and father guarding her, had
somehow done and said the right thing and won her, and he thought that would
be the final score, that he would be happy the rest of his life. When Mary
died he knew it was over for him. He’d sold his soul to the devil to keep her
well and it hadn’t worked. Even if he knew how to fall in love again, God
would never permit it. Sometimes Worm took him to his
secret spot behind the mountain stack of flattened autos. Don was small
enough to inch through the tunnel, slow and careful, feeling his way along. Worm
could do it at a trot. Worm had set up an extra chair for him. He took out
his kit and set things up and Don found out what “toke up” meant. Worm
thought he was introducing something new to him but the musicians knew all
about that, they just used a different word. He much preferred his Worm once asked, “Jet-setter,
how come you always lived with your mama?” Don Capachi
remembered saying something like “I was her only child,” but the accurate
thing to say would have been “I didn’t live with her all the time. Not while
I was married.” Worm would say, “Jet-setter,
give me ten,” and Don Capachi would list ten codes
at random, Ebony, Malic, Twitch, and so on,
the metals they corresponded to: red brass, old nickel, fragmentized aluminum.
He had the old man beat cold on that account. It was as easy as musical notes
to him, these codes. He had a natural talent that he’d just let die. He could
have owned the business with the old man, not that he minded how it had
turned out instead, the old man in his leather chair and him at the punch clock
C what bothered him was the cheap price his own soul was selling for. How
easily he was bought. In truth, he had been content
doing low wage work, the grading and sorting work. It could be mindless or it
could be mindful. It was music. Some days he was a composer; other days he
was a passive listener. Either way the job got done and took nothing out of
him. He went home to Mary. Every Wednesday his mother came over for dinner. Every
Saturday they played cards. Those days he was glad he wasn’t part owner. The
job would have taken him away from Mary. Then Mary got sick and his
mother started staying over more. He’d come home and it was his mother
waiting for him with a dinner she’d cooked, not Mary. Mary was sick in bed. Together
they went up to the Cleveland Clinic and they said she had pernicious anemia.
There was nothing to be done. Blood transfusions made her feel better. The
doctors said the transfusions were just prolonging the inevitable. So why
bother? they seemed to be saying. But so was life,
he wanted to answer. Life itself was just prolonging the inevitable. So why
live? Don Capachi told the doctors to keep giving
her the transfusions. Keep giving the transfusions. The doctors said the
insurance was going to stop covering them because they just prolonged; they
only ameliorated, they didn’t heal. But his Mary was like a vampire needing
her blood, and he couldn’t deny her. He put his house up for sale. The old man knew what was going on, of course he knew. He was at his best when his workers were sick and needed help. He gave Don Capachi, his old partner, all the time off he needed. He gave him a big Christmas bonus. He had groceries sent over; he arranged for a second opinion. He was good that way. If it had ended there, that would have been all right. When the insurance was about to
cut off the transfusions, the old man came to Don with a problem of his own. The
old man promised Don Capachi that if he helped him
with his problem, he’d take care of Mary’s transfusions out of his own pocket.
Damn the insurance, she’d have the best care she could possibly have. The
house wouldn’t need to be sold. He and the old man met a couple
of times in the office after everyone else had gone home. There was a fish
bowl on the desk. The old man liked fish. He was talking about building an
aquarium into the wall. He had ideas like that. He was rich now. Don Capachi could have been rich along with him. But that had
never mattered to him until now. Now he saw the one good use for money. When
you had to make panicked repairs to your happiness, money kept you from
begging the wrong saviors. The old man said somebody’d been hurting his daughter bad and now they had
to get hurt. He kept talking about “they” so that Don Capachi
imagined the mafia or a group of outlaws with bandanas masking their faces. He
imagined how they must have left the old man’s daughter when they were
through with her. He didn’t know how he, one man, strong admittedly, but just
one man, could possibly take on a mob of them. The old man said, “He needs the shinola wiped off his behind, you know what I’m saying
now, right?” but listening to him, Don Capachi had
no idea. Eventually he realized they were
talking about only one man and that this man was her husband. The old man said take a tire iron and whack him a few times. Before
Don Capachi could catch his breath, swallow, and
say I’m not killing anyone, the old man added, “Just knock the wind out of
his sails, let him know somebody means business.” Don Capachi
looked at the framed photo of Bonner and his wife and grown kids and a couple
of grandkids. Next to it was a framed copy of one of the old man’s original
sayings: Your Metal Is Your Mettle. The old man had a lot of pride. He
had patriotism and didn’t like long hair on boys. Don Capachi
made himself ask, “What did he do?” “Running with whores,” the old
man said. “He gave my daughter the clap. Now she’s the one looks like the
whore and word gets out even if doctors are sworn to privacy. I think he’s
going to have to give her a divorce and I don’t think he’ll want to ask her
for any of her money either. I think he might want to go on his merry way
with his overactive tail tucked between his legs. I think you might want to
convey that message to him.” The old man tapped distractedly on the fish bowl
as he talked. He kept sprinkling in fish food. The next day all the fish were
dead. Don Capachi
didn’t mean for it to be Valentine’s Day when he did the job, but the old man
seemed extra-appreciative of his timing and slipped him a twenty. Mary was in
the hospital, her worst episode yet, and they were saying
no transfusions absolutely not and all his sanity abandoned him. He
didn’t know whether it was rapture or madness he was feeling. He knew somehow
the feeling preceded grief and that he couldn’t afford to sit back and almost
enjoy it, perversely enjoy the delirium. He waited for the husband late at
night in the parking lot outside the Ding Ho Chinese Restaurant on Every day since that night Don Capachi had lifted the tire iron out of the trunk of his
car and held it in his hands and wondered how he could ever swing something
so heavy and lethal at a human being. He couldn’t. He took a couple of socks
and filled them with sand, and when Mary, dying, went into the hospital he
found the will to swing frenziedly at the figure in the dark. When he struck
the husband, the sock burst apart and sand nettled their faces. He swung with
his left arm and the other sock burst. Only then did he think to ask, “Are
you Mary wouldn’t leave the hospital
this time. The person waiting for him down the long hospital corridor was the
old man. Not old then, of course. A vigorous man just tipping into his
sixties. He’d come to offer support and sympathy. They walked down the
corridor. John Bonner’s arm made it around his shoulder. The other hand
slipped a twenty-dollar bill into his pants pocket. The nurses as they passed
made no sound. The way their shoes stepped along lively and soundless was a
comfort to Don Capachi, music’s new passageway. He
heard his own hard soles tapping along, scratching out the final defeat this
time. His hands were bandaged and broken; he told the nurses he had beat them
against a wall when the doctors had denied a transfusion. He didn’t realize he was being
guided until he found himself pausing in front of a patient’s room. He was
pausing because the old man was pausing. The old man came around to face him,
as if they were going to talk, important, intimate talk that couldn’t be done
side by side while walking. As the old man came round to
face him, he kept swinging to the other side. Don Capachi
turned to meet him and before he knew it he had walked into the patient’s
room and found himself standing at the foot of the bed. The patient’s eyes
raised in alarm, darted briefly to Don Capachi’s
hands, settled weepingly on the old man. Don Capachi thought, I must have
been kicking him too. “Thought you’d like to meet an Italian friend of
mine,” the old man said. Don Capachi
felt crazed and dizzy as the old man made cheerful small talk before guiding
him out so that he and Across the road the golf course
is empty. Don Capachi pushes in the last bite of
the hotdog. The shirtless golfers have left. He strains to see if there’s
anyone else out on the course. A straggler far out, playing alone. The
countryside stretches like regular countryside, the flags invisible to his
sight. He sits in the lawn chair. The sun is behind a cloud. He didn’t bring
a watch. It’s warm enough to sit a while longer. He should have told Worm. He
should have told Worm the story. Who is left to tell? Mary’s father is dead now, and
at least some of her brothers. Maybe all. She shouldn’t be there in He’s done with his job at John
Bonner and Son Metal Shredders. He gave it his life. He sold it his soul. He
doesn’t need to tell them he’s leaving. He just needs to go. He’ll go to |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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GC&SU is a member of |
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