Red X by David Demchuk

Author:David Demchuk [Demchuk, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2021-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Screaming.

Tony winced, stretched, opened his bleary eyes. Pallid grey light filled the room. Faces. Eyes. What was that? A dream he’d shaken off? A thin shard of memory, something he’d tried to erase?

He blinked and blinked, trying to pull the room around him into focus. Maroon silk curtains, cream damask wallpaper. His mother-in-law’s house. He was in her house, on her diamond-tufted floral velvet couch, and his son Angelo with his black, curly hair and wide, serious eyes was standing next to him, staring into his face. He wore a yellow rubber rain jacket with an orange sun visor and shiny black-and-white eyes on the sides that made him look like a large, curious duckling.

“Jesus, kid, don’t scare me like that. You’ll give your old man a heart attack. Where’s your mom?”

“Getting dressed,” the young boy said. “It’s raining outside.”

“Ella,” Tony called out.

“Yeah,” came a voice from two rooms away. She sounded tired. Glass clanking against metal—dishes in the sink. And then the jingle of keys being grabbed off the table.

“It’s all right, I’m awake, I can take him,” Tony said.

“No, it’s okay, you stay there,” Ella called back, then popped her head into the doorway. “Angie, you leave your dad alone, he’s not feeling well.”

“I feel fine,” he called back to her. Then to Angelo: “I feel fine.”

“He smells funny,” Angelo shouted to his mother, wrinkling his nose.

“Yeah, well, you smell funny too,” Tony answered. “Come give your dad a kiss.”

Angelo wrinkled his nose again and gave Tony a peck on his forehead. Tony felt something wet smudge up above his eyebrow. He reached up, touched it, knew before he even looked at his fingertips that it was blood. The scent of it, the tang of it. He pulled back. A thin trickle of red ran down from Angelo’s nose over his lip. He stuck out his tongue to taste it.

“Hey, buddy, be careful,” Tony said. He dug a wrinkled tissue out of his shirt pocket and used it to wipe his son’s face. “How did that happen?”

He shrugged. “I saw Uncle Hank in the yard today. He had one, and then I had one too.”

Hank.

Hank is dead. He had forgotten for a moment, and now he remembered all over again, as if the last few weeks just happened in the last ten seconds. Hank is dead.

“You say you saw who?” Tony asked, keeping his voice steady.

“Uncle Hank,” Angelo said shyly, looking down at his fingers. There was dirt, blood, under his nails. Kid never washed his hands.

Hank is dead.

“Now Angie, I told you,” Tony cautioned. “Uncle Hank had to go away for a while. You can’t be making up stories.”

“I saw him,” the boy said. “He came back.” He kept his eyes away from Tony, still looking at his hands.

Tony couldn’t really blame him. They hadn’t properly explained Hank’s sudden absence, hadn’t really known what to say. Angelo had seen dead squirrels and birds, he seemed to understand what death was and how it worked, but when it came to people, well, you couldn’t be sure.

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