Chapter Fifty-Two Nina #2
The hair on his head was thinning, his eyelids impeding his pupils, the capillaries beneath threatening to burst.
When one opened the door on Fletcher Harrow, they opened it to one of two men. The first was sedated from top to toe, tongue still wagging, eyes rolling, the venom slow-moving. He slept in fits and spurts, never conscious long enough to be of any trouble.
The second was a possessed man. A frenetic one. The tips of his fingers pulling at the tangles of his beard, twisting the hair behind his ear until it broke off. Tongue darting out to wet his cracked lips, eyes moving over you, past you. Hardly seeing you at all.
“What d’you want?” he said, Eastern accent so thick it was barely understandable.
He didn’t look at me long enough for recognition to dawn. But then, had it been so different at the age of twelve? How many times had he confused me for an intruder? For my mother, weeping to know why I’d left him?
I shivered back into that old skin, stung myself on a thousand thorns to do it.
“It’s Nina, Dad,” I said loudly. Those who were closer to hell than earth didn’t hear so well.
I bent slightly to put my face in his line of sight.
He was looking to the street, then down it, as though something beck-oned him.
“He’s strung out,” John grunted unnecessarily, scowling. “Lord… he ain’t got a gun in there, does he?”
“You coppers?” said my father, his eyes oscillating to Patrick’s hands now, then John’s, then mine, as though expecting shackles.
“Dad. It’s me. Nina.”
Finally, he looked at me. “Caranina,” he mumbled. “Like the singer.”
“Yes,” I nodded heavily. “Like the singer.”
Patrick pulled me farther back, as though he could drag me out of this pit and spare me.
“Do you remember me?” I asked.
My father’s eyes narrowed, moving over my face too fast. “Nina?” he said, mouth gaping. Then again, as though he was trying out the sound. “Nina.”
John stepped forward then, his patience apparently spent. He skirted Patrick and stood an inch from Fletcher’s face, leaning down to accommodate the height difference. “All right now, lad? Mind if we come in for a nip?” John spoke loudly, too.
Fletcher Harrow startled, some reflex shrinking him. He blinked spasmodically. “Ain’t got none.”
“Not a beer? Or brandy?” John inquired, looking over his shoulder at Patrick. “Workin’ man like you needs a pick-me-up.” John pulled a bottle of whiskey from his coat. Shook it.
Fletcher’s eyes fell to the bottle, and then he was backing away from the door, leading them inside.
My father was skeletal. His shoulder bones jutted outward, his waist was too narrow with a double-looped belt. When I passed him, his sunken eyes skirted over me, and I shivered.
“Just needs a little weight in the gut,” John was saying conversationally, finding a mug on a shelf—the same shelf my mother had put up. He wiped the grime from the inside with his finger and poured in an ample amount.
Patrick took his hat from his head and looked around the single room.
It was smaller than I remembered. Dingier. It stank sweetly of rot. The counter was laden with every dish and utensil Fletcher seemed to own. Flies hovered lazily, as though even they were sobered by the mess.
I was ashamed to bring Patrick here. To have him see it.
“Here you are, lad.” John pressed the mug into Fletcher’s hands, and the man looked down at it the way I wanted him to look at me.
Patrick seemed to note the shake of his wrists as he drank, the tremble in his legs. He turned sympathetic eyes on me, and I hated it. “How long has he been on the bluff for?”
I shrugged. “Long before me.”
Patrick nodded, then regarded the man sitting now on the one kitchen chair. With a heavy exhale, he stepped forward, leaned down on one knee. “Get that in you, man, eh?” he said. “You ain’t got a shift today?”
“Ain’t a shift to be had,” said Fletcher from the depths of the mug. “Mines’re barren.” With every sip my father took, he seemed to come back into himself.
Patrick grimaced. “And what of the coppers? How many stayed?”
“They guardin’ the pubs now. Guardin’ the liquor an’ sittin’ on their arses. Fuckin’ dogs.”
Patrick watched the spittle leak out the side of Fletcher’s mouth and descend into his beard. “You got any food in here, lad?”
Fletcher slugged the whiskey and winced, then he looked up and around, his eyes landing squarely on me.
They stuck, held. He seemed to stutter in a barrage of thought. “Rose?” he said, eyes narrowing and widening, as though I was expanding before him. “Is that my Rose?”
A tear came free. I let it wheedle its way down my face. I hated this house. I wished I were anywhere else. “It’s Nina, Dad,” I said yet again.
And like some wire had reattached, recognition struck him. He stood slowly, the way an old man gets to his feet. “Not my Nina?” he said.
I nodded once. “Yes.”
“Nina’s some fair Artisan now,” he said disjointedly, waving a hand. “At school.”
“I’ve come home,” I said, trying to stand taller, to shake off the feeling I was regressing into a little girl. I was more afraid of being a child again than anything else.
He left the mug on the table and came toward me, hands out.
And I thought, for one foolish moment, that he might take my hands in his and check they were real.
That he might turn them over and view the lines gouged into them over time, the brand burned out of my forearm, the scars puckering the skin.
But he didn’t do that. Instead, he kept them outward, proffered like a beggar. “You got any coin?” he asked with renewed fervency. “Anythin’?”
Another tear fell. I had feared he would be unrecognizable. I hadn’t known to fear him being the same. “No,” I said.
“Nah, you got somethin’,” he said, hands at the lapels of my coat now, shaking it out for proof I carried nothing.
I didn’t tear his hands away. Not yet. “I don’t.”
“Swank bitch” was what he muttered, his teeth baring themselves, his hand fishing the inside of a pocket, and then he was yanked away.
Patrick had the scruff of his neck in his hand the moment the words left his mouth, his expression having morphed into that of the devil. He pulled Fletcher Harrow back into his chair with the ease one dragged a dog to the back door.
“Patrick,” I warned. “He doesn’t know himself.”
But Patrick was already standing over him, his body a barricade, a wall of bricks. “That ain’t the way to speak to a lady,” he said, hand pinned to Fletcher’s shoulder, thumb digging into his collarbone, holding him there.
“Patty, he’s off his rocker.”
“Nevertheless,” Patrick growled, eyes promising violence. “He’ll mind his manners, or I’ll mind ’em.”
Fletcher’s eyes rattled around his head, directionless.
“Get your wits about you, digger,” Patrick said now, tapping Fletcher’s cheek harder than he ought to.
John poured more liquor into the mug. “Here, lad,” he said, passing it to my father. “Take the buzz out of your head.”
That’s how it once was. Killing the clang of his skull with the booze and the bluff until his head was swimming. If I could crack him open now, I’d find nothing but mush.
Fletcher drank and drank, and what came over him was a nimbus of deadening quiet. A boneless peace. He slumped further and further into his chair as though he might fuse himself to it, as though he hadn’t known relief for days, weeks.
“Thank yeh,” he said, his tongue too slow now. He panted like he’d reached the summit, finally resting after a long climb. He patted the air as though he were stroking the head of a dog. “Thank yeh kindly.”
Patrick and John moved him to the cot in the corner before he slid off the chair, taking either arm in a practiced way.
Fletcher’s feet hardly moved. He let them lift him across his own kitchen, feet scraping the tiles, and collapsed gladly atop the foul mattress.
His eyes shut immediately, a snore already escaping his open mouth.
“Lord almighty,” John said, taking the cap from his head and swiping it through the air as though he could rid the room of its sour smell. “He’s pickled. I hate to say it, darlin’, but he ain’t long for this world. Bluff well and truly has him. Men like him can’t come off it once they’re on.”
No one knew it better than I. It was once me escorting him to the pub to load him up when the bluff ran out, me pouring liquor into a mug to keep his mind soft between doses.
The only times I could remember him sober were the times my mother had tried to clean him up.
She’d grit her teeth and block the door with her body.
Sometimes he heeded her. More often she found herself knocked aside.
“He’ll swallow his tongue,” I said as though I was someone else. “Turn him over.”
Whatever Patrick saw in me in that moment, it seemed to haunt him. He looked at me like he wanted to lift me into his arms and run off with me. Instead, he turned to the heap on the bed that was my flesh and blood and rolled him onto his side.
“We’ll find a room somewhere else,” he said decisively. “A miner’s pub, maybe. Dad, can you find one that’s friendly to Union members?”
“It’s too risky,” I argued, but already I wanted to turn for the door, launch myself over those steps. “We might be recognized.”
“It’s all right, darlin’. We’ll find a room somewhere else.” He said it with finality, turning me away from my father while I proceeded to fall apart. “Even if we have to climb in through the fuckin’ window.”