The Secret Society of Demolition Writers by Marc Parent

Author:Marc Parent [Parent, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary, Anthologies (Multiple Authors), Anthologies, Short Stories; American
ISBN: 9780307432629
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2005-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

Ashes

AFTER SILENTLY COUNTING TO THREE, Banks throws his naked body out of bed. He’s already on his feet when he feels the cold bite his prick. He doesn’t bother looking down but stands rooted to the freezing floor, his muscles bunched into a knot, his breath misting the air in front of his face.

Fifteen minutes later, he’s showered and dressed. He leaves Janice sleeping and walks outside to his car. Along the roadside in Somerville, snow is piled a yard high, though only the top few inches are fresh and white; these he cleans off his windshield with a gloved hand.

While the engine warms, he sits behind the wheel staring at a photograph in a clear plastic frame bolted to the dashboard: his father standing in a driveway, grinning beside a red and white ’58 Corvette, lug wrench in hand, sleeves rolled up and grease smudged on his muscled forearms. A man about the same age Banks is now. A married man with a job and a pretty wife and a five-year-old boy, who are not in the picture. The car, recently waxed, gleams under intense sunlight. His father looks proud, happy. The grin on his handsome face says there’s nothing that can’t be fixed; anything can happen, the grin says.

It was Banks, aged five and a half, who discovered his father’s body hanging from a beam when he wandered into the garage looking for his Wiffle bat one morning. That’s what his mother—understandably perplexed that he could ever forget such a thing—continues to insist. But Banks himself has no memory of that day; in fact hardly any memory of his father at all. If not for the photograph on his dashboard he might almost believe that he’d never had a father, had never seen a red and white ’58 Corvette with his own two eyes. Sometimes it feels to Banks as if the photograph on his dashboard is what he has instead of his father. He never grows tired of looking at it as he drives from job to job through the streets of Boston and the outlying suburbs. He finds the picture of his dad reassuring company but also somehow suspenseful, expectant, as if one day it might just start to talk to him.

WHEN THE ENGINE’S warmed up, he’s on his way.

He checks his clipboard. Two installations in the morning and three in the afternoon. At Dunkin’ Donuts, he fills his commuter mug with hot black coffee, then catches the traffic report on the radio. There’s an accident on the expressway, so he decides to go through Harvard Square, take Mass. Ave. to Storrow Drive, and Atlantic into the North End.

The curving, narrow side streets are still unplowed after yesterday’s snowfall, and the slush is inches deep. His tires hiss through the muck like sizzling fat. He slows down, the speedometer dropping to twenty, then to ten. Small islands of dark tar scattered with road salt appear through the grime-streaked windshield. And Banks remembers the night, twenty-five years

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