The Trails
The Ash Tree
In 2003, Jason Sweeney, 16 … believed he was on a romantic rendezvous with his first girlfriend, Justina Morley, who confessed to the crime - when he was clubbed and hacked to death with a hammer, a hatchet and a rock. He was murdered for the $500 he had earned working in construction with his father. … "We took Sweeney's wallet and split up the money, and we partied beyond redemption," Domenic Coia [his friend] confessed.
—from the Philadelphia Inquirer
Justina
The emerald weeds leaned against the wind as I lead him.
We were even holding hands, so don’t listen to Dom or Nick.
I can be a doll when I want to be. I prepared him as best
I could. It was a joke, really. Like when I wait for my parents
to go out, and I take one of the goldfish from the tank,
placing it on the coffee table to watch what happens. Their big
lips open and close, sucking at air. But I know they breathe
from gills. I like science. I’d like to be a scientist when I
grow up. The fish flap around so much that they fall onto
the rug, where the cat purrs. I always manage to get there
before the cat. I save them. When they stop moving I put
them back. Sometimes they’re dead. Other times not. I-95
was a snake hissing and coiling in muggy distance, everything
too fast on it to matter. All those cars with eyes, and they
couldn’t see even if they wanted. It was spring and Jay
liked that. “We all used to play ball here when we were
little,” he said. “I was good. But Dom was always better.”
He kissed me, and I let him. Really a sweet kid. Everyone
said so. He wanted to buy me roses. No, I didn’t hate him.
Dominic
nick and me waited a long time in the weeds/ only place
he couldn’t see/ everywhere was flat brown and rocks—
shattered bottle glass/ they was holding hands kissing and rubbing
up on eachother/ nick and me lost it so loud we almost gave
ourselves away which would’ve sucked cause jay was fast/
neither of us could’ve caught him if he figured shit out/ we had
to pretend like we was just running into them on a “morning
stroll”/ morning stroll was nick’s/ funny fucker once you get
to know him/ just took him to the place she decided on so
nick and me walked up a block beneath I-95 then backtracked/
jay didn’t see us at first but just did/ she pointed at us and yelled
“yo, assholes!”/ jay turned round and saw us/ his face was part
of the sunglare and I swear there was a halo around his head/
nick told me to stop talking shit so I did/ he carried the back-pack
full of stuff that would do the job/ a couple of hammers I took
from my old man’s tool box/ a hatchet nick bought at franklin mills/
the other day nick ran around the street waving it in the air
and whooping like a indian/ cracked us up especially jay and just/
our tools rattled in rhythm with our walk/ jay’s face came into
view/ nick was right/ no halo/ only eyebrows hair and smiling lips
Nick
The sun crawled above I-95, the morning getting
old, so we had to get on with it. We first needed
to find out if he cashed his check. Dom was his boy,
so I let him talk him to it. Jay told him he was headed
to Arimingo Ave. to buy some game for Playstation.
When he said that, it was like the three of us had
the same brain. Just stepped back then Dom hit him.
The kid wasn’t ready for it, so he went down quick.
That’s when we reached into the bag to begin.
At first Jay was yelling but he went away, his voice
turning into a bird. I don’t know why. It’s not like
I usually pay attention to them. It sang as it flew,
its little wings pummeling the air. Dom told me later
that Jay was screaming for awhile, and it was
his hammer that finally shut him up. I couldn’t see
how that was true because I couldn’t hear anything
over the bird. I didn’t tell Dom how loud it was, how
it pulled me into a world so big that I could barely keep
myself from floating away. I don’t remember how I
stopped, but when I did, Dom and me were both
splattered in red. Just stood a ways off, stainless. After
we emptied Jay’s pockets, we took off our messy clothes
to put on the clean ones we brung with us. Just came
back. The three of us embraced. No, we didn’t rush.
When we left him there for others to find, we walked.
Across from my parent’s house, there's a beaten-to-hell ash tree,
once one of the few spots of green in the neighborhood. There
used to be a condemned house behind it, where junkies pried
their way in, no matter how many times the windows and doors
were boarded over. Beside the house was a tire factory. The Degennaro
brothers lived down the street, two roving hounds of rage looking
to beat anything weak. Around the corner, Lonnie Thomas’s crew
rolled up on my brother twenty years ago, turning out his lights
with a .38. Now the factory and house are gone, their space taken
by condos. The brothers have kids and Lonnie is serving a life
sentence (tried as an adult) in the state pen. I spent my summers
on the stoop with a forty when Mom and Dad were at work,
watching the tree, waiting for a squirrel to peek out, listening for
a bird to sing as the El passed a block off. Instead, the chattering
houses peered back slack-jawed; like gravestones they gleamed.
Factory men leaving for the day grunted in my direction as they passed.
“Kid,” they said with granite grins, “if you think there’s more
than this, then wait.” In the oncoming dark, streetlamps clicked on,
growing fat shadows that crowded the remaining daylight.
***
Last spring, I came back to my mother's final year. “Not a thing
to be done,” said the doc. Dad needed someone else around
to help look after her. My sister had kids and an asshole husband,
and I had no one, so it fell to me. I quit my nowhere job
in Florida and headed back home to start my new life, sitting
with Mom when Dad was at work and making sure she was comfortable.
She didn’t need much help those first weeks, floating around
the house sucking oxygen as she cleaned. “Ma,” I’d plead.
“The doc says you need to take it easy.” She’d smile and wave
me off. “Plenty of time for that.” So I just watched, trying to imagine
a world without her, all the while my brother Dave grinning from
the walls at various ages: six, ten—and his last face at seventeen.
One afternoon as she napped, I took the opportunity to take up
my spot on the stoop, no forty, only a too-warm can of whatever
Dad had in the fridge. I waited for hints of life in the leaves
of the ash. Nothing stirred but the hissing wind, until a bird shot
into view with a bill full of twigs. It disappeared into the green
for a moment then shot back out. I thought it was a sparrow going in.
Now I could see the distinctive blue feathers flashing as it
ascended. I walked over to the tree to search its bark. There was
red graffiti sprayed there. I looked for the markings I made when
I was a kid: Tonya’s initials, Tara’s, then Danielle’s, scraped
into the wood with the same sharpened screwdriver that I carried
with me everywhere. There was the time I almost used it. I didn’t
know the guy. Short like me, but a lot older. Pale sickly skin.
Probably a huffer. He was from another block, and T.J. and Mike
were yelling: “Stick that motherfucker! Stick that bitch!” I ran
after him. But he was too fast to catch up to. He disappeared into
the alley on Gaul Street, and everyday after, I have thanked him
for my life. When my mother woke up, I told her about the jay.
“They’ve always been there,” she said. “Now there’s just more of them.”
***
I woke to Mom and Dad fighting. At one time these fights echoed
through the house, shivering walls and windows. The loudest
they ever yelled was together at Dave, the last time he came home.
They waited all night for him, but it would be past noon before
he finally staggered in with a swollen lip and a lump above his eye.
Mom screamed and Dad grabbed him by the neck, asking what he
had gotten himself into. Steve told him to fuck off. That’s when they
ended up on the floor punching each other. After that Steve disappeared.
A month later, I answered the door to two cops holding their hats.
I was supposed to leave for school, but instead I lead them to the kitchen.
Dad sat at the table, still in his pajamas. Mom was dressed. She always
rose long before him with quiet house and milky light opening the sky.
Finished with breakfast, she was preparing Dad’s lunch for work.
The minute she saw those uniforms, she lost it. Dad’s pale moon face
never cracked. After they left, Dad said he had to get to work, but he
didn’t move. He just sat there until late-afternoon without speaking.
They stopped fighting in front of me and my sister after that, which is
why now they quickly shut up when I came into the kitchen. But my room
is directly above them, so I overheard everything. Their quarrel
wasn’t new. My father never listened. My mother always needed
the last word. “Why can’t you just take it easy once in a while,” Dad said.
Mom groaned and slammed a pot. “Like some old broad crocheting
her days away until she falls into the grave?” Mom smiled when she
saw me. Dad turned away and stared into space. I looked to the window
above his head and saw some animals navigating our chain-link fence,
tightroping the top of it, making it to the overloaded trashcan in the neighbor’s
yard. “Opossum,” Mom said. “Nasty things. They eat the birds’ eggs.”
***
It became harder and harder for Mom to breathe. Yet she still
refused the hospital bed in the living room. Dad got worse, too.
He brooded from room to room, got on me everyday about what
a bum I was, asking why at twenty-eight, I still couldn’t hold a job?
The portraits of Dave kept staring. Older now than he’d ever been,
they looked to be waiting for my advice. I saw him everywhere now:
bounding down the stairs, in the doorway of our old room—with
the shirtless kids shooting hoop in Newts, all summer bronze and lean
muscle, the best jump-shot in the neighborhood. The same guy who
dragged me to school by the back of the shirt after he found me smoking
a blunt with Jimmy Flaherty and Bobby Shaw. To get away from him
and Dad, I went for walks. There were now trees everywhere: oak,
maple, cedar—even small parks and gardens, the whole neighborhood
emerald, smelling of mulch and manure. Joggers and people with little
dogs filled the sidewalks. Corners were absent of kids and stoops didn’t
have any sitters. New apartment complexes had grown plentiful, hidden
in enclosures behind high walls. One night, I returned home and saw
an opossum nosing around the trunk of the ash. When seeing me,
it darted into the sewer. The jay glided above like a fighter jet looking
for bombers. In the new silence, there was the squeaky call of a hatchling,
but I only heard one. I waited to see if the opossum would return.
When it didn’t, I went inside, the mother jay still patrolling. There was
music playing, Elvis’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” Mom and Dad
were slow dancing in the living room. I hurried to move past them,
wanting to punch a hole in the world. Before I could get away, Mom
reached for me. The music changed to Chubby Checker’s “The Twist.”
She took my hands in hers, a smile beaming through her fogged oxygen mask.
That’s when she pulled the mask from her mouth and took a hard breath.
“A boy has to dance with his mother at least once in his life,” she said.
Brian Patrick Heston grew up in Philadelphia. He received an MFA in fiction from George Mason University and an MFA in poetry from Rutgers University. His poems have won a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. They have also been finalists for the Sow’s Ear Chapbook Contest, the Slapering Hol Chapbook Contest, and a semi-finalist for the Philip Levine Book Prize. His poetry has appeared in such publications as Confrontation, West Branch, Harpur Palate, 5AM, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Poet Lore, and is forthcoming in South Carolina Review. Presently, He teaches creative writing at Community College of Philadelphia.
