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June '04 
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ANDREW BOMBACK 20 Stories About My Dead Brother, Ollie |
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Daddy John Leary
This is how we implemented the first stage of plan, the Trap: we stopped fixing the Broken Items. Soon they started to pile up on the porch near the Back Door. A razor scooter, a stackable washer/dryer combo, a DVD player, an electric candelabra, a Wonderbra, an electronic singing Santa Claus -- we just left them there, listing against each other in the rusting rain. Some of us couldn't stand seeing the Broken Items piled and unattended to. If we weren't fixing the Broken Items, we were mostly idle. One of the Phyllises, a master of electrical engineering, was caught tinkering with the broken DVD player one night, and Hiram directed that he be banished to his tent. When Daddy finally came outside, he didn't look as we had expected him to look. We'd heard of a huge Daddy built like John Huston in Chinatown, who would cause the sun to blaze off his bald dome and blind us. We'd heard Daddy's eyes had grown weak; we'd heard of his epic corpulence. We'd heard he was so fat and bald that his brow sagged down over his eyes. We'd heard he used toothpicks covered in felt to prop up the two mini-sausages of his brow to allow him to see. But when he stepped out on the front porch to see Lilly, he actually looked pretty good. Not Tom Cruise-good, but not bad. Better than Tom Arnold, for example. He was taller than any of us, by at least two feet. Whether he was bigger than normal or we were smaller, we have no idea, as we have no way of knowing what normal is. Our new strategy had made Daddy come out. When there was no hubbub about the unfixed Broken Items, when the bean baskets and bandage racks continued to come on Aid Day, we adopted a new strategy. We used Lilly. We spread word to the Wives that Lilly was sick to the point of dying. We placed her mock-festering body there on the back porch, and waited. Daddy came out and looked at Lilly. Most of us had never seen him before. Who knows why he came out? He may have been motivated by mercy or compassion, or the need to gloat or to wave his glory over us. Or curiosity, or sadness. Ultimately, the emotion is not as important as the fact, because everyone has a different interpretation of the emotion and the facts are less refutable. The fact that he picked Lilly up and "cradled" her is pretty irrefutable, though some say there was no cradling; that he picked her up like trash to get her off the porch, looking for a place to chuck her seeping body, her skin dappled with sores and scabs. Others say he, without a thought of contagion or infection cradled her in his arms and sunk his face into her few remaining strands of golden hair. Those same people saw tears drip from Daddy. Then he turned as if maybe to take her inside with him but she pointed No, there, down there, among the tents. It wasn't clear what she said to him, though it is clear that he took two steps forward, stepping right into the inertia skates. He must have felt himself stepping into the skates, because he looked down – but of course he was holding Lilly, so he could not see his feet. Instead, he saw Lilly peeling off her cellophane skin on which we had painted seeping sores, peeling it away like a Mission Impossible mask. Then the fun began. Before Daddy had time to react to what he surely must have suspected was danger, she delivered her line: "Hasta la vista, Da-deee!" A hundred arms then tugged the ropes attached to the pulleys hung high in the Lone Tree and the translucent wires attached to Lilly tightened and she flew from Daddy's grasp, shooting toward the sky then stopping and hovering just beyond his reach like Kim Greist in front of Jonathan Pryce in Brazil. Behind her, the earth erupted into a bloom of red - we were all, all 175 of us, wearing red capes, which we twirled like torreadors, flashing with flair. As Lilly fluttered before him, Daddy, probably against his better judgment, leaned forward. The skates lost their hold, and Daddy cascaded forward and down along the crude track we had built until he smashed his toes into the pile of bricks, and pitched forward into the blue cotton sheet hanging from the bandage racks set atop a small platform. The blue cotton sheet was coated on both sides with a wonder adhesive, and as Daddy flailed in the grasp of the sheet, his momentum caused him to tumble off the platform and land face first in the two plastic children's swimming pools we had cut and laid end to end. The pools were filled with hair and feathers, which immediately clung to all sides of the blue cotton sheet as Daddy struggled and roared. The twelve members of the Red Cape Brigade ringed the pools, each member holding a metal squeeze can of charcoal lighter fluid, which they spritzed onto Daddy as he struggled to stand. The Red Cape Brigade parted to allow Hiram to stand at the edge of the pools. Hiram nonchalantly used one hand to expose his metal fly, and the other hand to strike a blue-tip match across the fly. He tossed the lit match at Daddy, just as Daddy regained his feet and stood. Burning Daddy! Burning Daddy! Hiram had written a burning Daddy song, which many of us sang:
Rip your eyes out screaming Daddy! And there's a little dance that went with it, too.
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