A Tragedy of Sons
Alex Robert Franco
Vacation started as we crossed over into Florida. All three of us—Thomas, our father, and I—felt it, our breath now easy and salt-flecked. Shoulders softened, hands that once gripped the wheel relaxed. The world outside recognized the change too. The trees grew squatter as their leaves widened, more and more blue sky breaking through. Even the dirt changed from red to dusty yellow. I rolled down my window to feel the wind whip my face. Between flashes of silver and blue and white, I spied roadside stands selling pool floats and beach towels. I watched the faces of the men—why always men?—sitting in the shade, fanning themselves as they waited for customers, their skin like leather. Looming over them, the paint faded and chipped, billboards advertised wonders beyond my imagining.
Twenty miles, Joe’s Gator Farm.
Peaches, Peaches, Peaches! Next right!
Visit the Mystery Shack—if you dare!
“Think Dad’ll take us?” I asked, prodding Thomas’ shoulder. He paused his CD player and peeled off a headphone. He looked where I pointed, and sneered.
“That’s kiddy stuff,” he said. For weeks he had complained about the upcoming trip, laying out the reasons why he should be allowed to stay home, but our father would hear none of it. He slouched lower in his seat, grumbling, “I can’t believe I’m missing Stacey’s party for this.” Thomas looked at our father as he said this, but he either did not hear or did not care. He was too busy scanning the looming city, the skyline crowded with the familiar markers—roller coasters, aquariums, crab shacks—and new growths that had sprouted since last summer. As we passed through the shadow of a towering hotel, our father shook his head.
“When I was a kid,” he said, arm sweeping to take in the megaplex and newly risen condominiums, “none of this was here.” This, he reminded us, was back in the sixties, shortly after he’d moved to this country. “You could walk on the beach for miles,” he liked to say, “and the only people you’d run into would be fishermen.” He told this story, or a version of it, every summer, but each time felt like the first. I liked to imagine my father when he was my age—small and shy. America and its loud, round language were new to him. The world he had known before, with its intimacies, its close familiarity, dissolved beneath the wave of unending foreignness. Strangers, suddenly, were a thing when before he could name everyone he encountered, the tight knot of family unraveled in the long journey across the sea. Some inclination, the desire to recognize an unrecognizable face, lingered, born out of a yearning to be liked. But he was quiet and reserved, spending much of his time alone. It was easy to think we would have been friends.
Our father was the first to spot the apartment complex, its white-topped roof just visible as we rounded a corner. We parked in the lot next to a van with a white logo on a field of fresh red. Thomas and I loaded our arms with bags—Thomas carrying one for every three he gave me—as our father fiddled with the keys. We could feel the asphalt sizzle through our flip-flops, but as soon as the door swung open, we were hit with an arctic wave spiked with an astringent tang. The place smelled of cleaning supplies and the sea, as if the sailboat over the couch had capsized in the living room, spilling its cargo of bleach. When I rubbed my bare feet on the carpet or rubbed along the rough grain of the coffee table, I could still feel sand from last year. Summer lived here all year round. Nothing had changed.
Thomas sat, still listening to music, feet propped up on the couch, and our father surveyed the sad state of the empty fridge and cupboards, while I dropped my bags on the seashell bedspread in what would be our room. When we’d stopped for gas in Alabama, I’d changed into my bathing suit, and now I shed my shirt and made out the back door. A wave of ocean air surged into the condo as the door slid open, bringing the taste of salt to my lips. I looked back at Thomas, who’d raised his head at the smell, but he dropped his face as quickly as he’d lifted it, seeing me no more deeply than the curtains twisting in the breeze.
Outside, the ocean sang. White foam splashed onto white sand before being dried up by a white sun so bright it hurt to look at. Sweat broke out on my back, running down and into the folds of fat there, my skin prickling from the heat. Farther out, the sea turned emerald, glinting green like it’d been polished. Multi-colored umbrellas dotted the beach, men and women seeking refuge in their shade, or else sprawled out on towels, their skin roasted golden brown, the sweet smell of sunscreen and tanning oil thick enough to leave a film on the air.
Deciding we could get food later, our father also changed, setting himself up on a beach chair with a stack of books. He would, in an hour or two, get up to stretch, walking down to the water to let it lap his toes, but no farther. He knew how to swim, but had not done so since he almost drowned when he was barely older than I was now. When it had come time for Thomas and me to learn, he had handed us off to a woman from the Jewish community center with hair the color and consistency of steel wool. He preferred instead to spend his time with spies, pages and pages of them, looking up occasionally to wave and ensure we had not floated away.
Despite my begging, Thomas refused to come out from under the shade of his beach umbrella. Sunglasses hid his face, but he had not otherwise changed. During the drive down, Thomas had, unprompted, announced that he hated the beach. This surprised me, as Thomas had spent past vacations swimming in the ocean for hours. He was reluctant to take off his shirt around people now, which also surprised me, because unlike mine, Thomas’ body was lean and strong. I needled and asked and begged, but Thomas would not explain his sudden change of heart, no more than he would set foot in the water.
When my whining threatened to become annoying, I left Thomas on the shore and paddled out till the sand dropped away and the water took my weight. Flipping over onto my stomach, I floated, face half-submerged, watching the people on the beach. In the shallows, a man hopped around a woman, splashing her and laughing. His swimsuit, dark with wet, clung to his thighs. He lifted his arms above his head, the pits of his arms a tangle of hair, and though I was too far away, I imagined I could smell them, the mix of salt and sweat and skin warmed by the sun. The woman placed a hand on his lower back, same as you’d rest against a wall, and the ease of it, that kiss of palm to wet skin, made me angry and sad. Below the water I reached out my own hand, letting the fingers splay out, playing at touch though they held nothing.
Late afternoon rolled in, and with it a skyful of muted gray. What breeze there was disappeared. The ocean went sluggish and the air turned muggy. Thomas and I retreated inside, our limbs heavy from the sun. Our father, who had followed us indoors, loaded our pockets with quarters and sent us to the arcade, reluctant to share such a confined space with us, most likely wanting to put distance between himself and the inevitable squabble we would get into.
Behind the complex’s pool, bulging out of the leasing office like a late-addition tumor, a stout cabana housed a handful of games, only half of which ever seemed to be working. Our father said it had been around since he was a kid, and I liked to imagine how it must have looked then—colored lights blinking in time to overlapping jingles, the animation on the pixelated screens cutting-edge—instead of how it was now. With no windows, it felt more like you were being detained than entertained, the vending machine they’d put in in the 80s perpetually understocked. The lights bled yellow, making everything look like late-night TV. Only the A/C seemed new, the air so cold the first breath felt like a slap.
Thomas made his way to a hunting game, lifting the orange rifle out of the machine’s holster. He fed a quarter into the slot and played a round, taking aim at blocky deer as they bounded across the screen. He didn’t miss; Thomas was good with guns, even real ones, with actual heft and kick. Whenever we visited our family up north, our uncle would take him shooting. Our father promised that once I was old enough, I could go too. Our father owned a gun, hidden away in a duffle bag on the top shelf of his closet, though he still didn’t know that we knew. Thomas had found it one day, and after he’d made me swear not to tell, snuck it out for me to see. I don’t remember where our father was—at the store maybe, or just out, driving perhaps, relishing time away from fatherhood—but the fear of discovery and its awful repercussions were overpowered by the desire to share a secret with my brother. He only let me hold it for a second, but I remembered the weight of it, and the smell—like car repairs and the Fourth of July.
Thomas moved to a racing game, and I took up his place. I lifted the orange rifle to my shoulder, my other hand fishing for a quarter, which I slipped into the slot. I waited, but the screen never changed. I pushed the coin return button and heard a clunk.
“The machine ate my money,” I said.
“Tough shit,” Thomas said. On the screen, Thomas’ car leapt over a chasm, tires aflame. He skidded onto the ground, only for another car to careen into him. GAME OVER flashed across the screen before it went dark. Thomas looked at me like he’d forgotten I was there. “What?”
“The machine ate my money,” I said again, unable to keep the whine out of my voice. “Can I have one of yours?”
Thomas sneered, but reached into his pocket and threw me a quarter. I grabbed for it and missed, and as it bounced away from me, Thomas started up another game. After I’d chased it down, I debated what to do. Reluctant to throw my money away on the same game, I also hoped Thomas, in a rare moment of camaraderie, would want to play with me. I worked up the courage to ask when the door opened.
Hot air like bad breath blew into the arcade before the door swung shut behind a man with thin, greasy hair and the ghost of a mustache on his lip. He wore stained work clothes, the patch sewn onto his breast the same as the logo on the van out front. He knelt by the hunting game, pulling a jangle of keys off his belt. He opened the panel on the front of the machine, revealing a silver mound of money, which he scooped into a bag. While he worked, he whistled.
“Excuse me,” Thomas said, not looking away from his race, “that machine ate my brother’s money.” The man stopped and looked at my brother. He watched him, following not the pixelated oranges soaring from the fruit cart Thomas just crashed into, but Thomas himself, the grip and slide of his hands over the wheel.
“Well, well,” the man tutted, “we can’t have that, now can we?” He squatted down to look me in the eye. From his bag he pulled out two quarters, which he slipped into my pocket with a wink. I watched his hand—the nails dirty, his fingers cigarette stained—as he patted my leg. Thomas swore, and we both looked up in time to see his car hurtle into an animated abyss. The man stood and, leaning over Thomas, fed the machine another quarter.
“Try and take it slower this time,” he said. The game counted down and we watched as Thomas’ car sped off. I don’t think I blinked the entire race, my breath held tight in my chest. When Thomas won, the man clapped a hand to his shoulder and kept it there. “Want to play again?”
“No,” Thomas said, standing, “but thank you.” His cheeks were flushed with the pride of victory, his mouth stretched into a sheepish grin he tried to suppress. He looked down at his shoes, bashful in the way older relatives loved to comment on. The man looked at him. He pulled another key from his belt, opening up the vending machine. The glass front swung open to reveal a smattering of plastic wrappers, candy bars and powdered donuts, crinkling in the light. The man stepped aside and waved us close. “Take your pick,” he said, grinning. “You’ve earned it.”
Thomas took a honey bun, and I grabbed a bar of chocolate. The man took nothing, just watched us eat.
On Tuesday it rained, so we went to the movies. It was about a man running from the government, full of punches and car chases. Our father chose it—it was based on a book, he said—and I loved seeing how much he enjoyed it. Even Thomas liked it, hands gripped tight on the armrests, his face rapt and silver-lit. When the movie ended and the credits ran up the screen—instead of immediately standing to go—we sat there, quiet, not needing to talk, each of us aglow in the wake of the excitement we’d shared, carrying within ourselves something known and familiar to the others’, a rarity I didn’t know I craved.
After, we walked around the strip mall, our hands shaking with sugar. Our father led us to a bookstore and released us, saying he’d be at the sale racks if we needed him. I went to check out the comic books while Thomas flipped through CDs. I found an issue he had been searching for, so I went looking for him. Thomas was still in the music section, but now he was talking with a group of what looked to be college students. He had not seen me yet, so I watched him from behind a stack. I could not hear what Thomas was saying, but I saw how they listened to him, laughed even when he made a joke. I envied this about him, his ease with others, especially those older than him. He became talkative and friendly, something we rarely got to see. So I envied these beautiful strangers, too.
Later, back at the condo, Thomas revealed that the people he’d met were staying just down the beach. He asked our father if he could hang out with them before dinner, and our father sent him off with a wave. I watched him leave, squinting against the sun to find him on the crowded beach, until I blinked and he was gone. Our father went outside to read, and I enjoyed the freedom of being unobserved. I read too, basking in the cool kiss of air conditioning, the television on in the background. I put on whatever I wanted, changing it when struck by a whim. I lied on the couch, spread out, my body freed from constraints.
The day wore on and I began pestering our father with questions about his book until he told me to get the grill ready. We were having burgers, and I laid out paper plates and condiments on the picnic bench outside. As meaty smoke blackened the air, Thomas reappeared, the swagger in his step and the openness of his smile new and unsettling.
“Have fun?” our father asked. Grabbing a burger, Thomas said he did, but offered nothing more. We ate in silence, our father watching the ocean between bites. I sipped my soda and looked at the stranger sitting across from me, this happy, confident boy. Sensing my attention, Thomas looked at me, and when our father turned away, flipped me off.
“Excuse me, are you these boys’ father?”
All three of us turned to look up at the man from the arcade, now dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, standing by our table. “I am,” our father said, an edge of suspicion already in his voice. “Are they in some sort of trouble?”
The man, who said his name was Ralph, assured our father that, no, we were not in trouble. He recounted our meeting, omitting the free game and snacks, and went on to say how polite, how well-behaved we were. “Especially this one,” he said, nodding to Thomas. “Boy, I sure could have used a big brother like that.” Our father visibly swelled, inflated by pride. There was nothing he loved more than hearing his children praised by strangers, those who, without any reason to lie, spoke of us as saints, moved by some force beyond their control. Instead of jealousy at having been overlooked, I was instead overcome with relief, almost joyful to avoid Ralph’s penetrating stare. Our father asked Ralph to join us, offering him food and a beer. He declined the burger, but accepted the drink. Taking out a pack of cigarettes, he asked if he could smoke. Our father noted that they smoked the same brand. Ralph produced a lighter, which they shared along with a joke that made our father laugh but that I didn’t get. They talked about the things men talked about—the economy and politics and women—things I knew or cared little about. I laughed when they did, nodding in imitation of our father, wanting to belong, knowing I did not. They exchanged the outlines of their lives, where they were from, how they ended up where they were. There seemed to be an exchange of some sort, some secret code, as with spies meeting in an otherwise unremarkable location. Something of importance was being discussed, some ritual enacted, but our father might as well have been speaking Greek for all I understood of it. So I watched Thomas instead, hoping to gleam something from him, but he stared off at the sea, unaware of the eyes on him, both mine and Ralph’s. They were still talking when it came time for me to go to bed. Thomas followed, but stayed up in the living room, watching reruns of I Love Lucy. Through the crack in the door I could hear the laughter, canned decades ago, the light from the TV flickering across the floor.
Sometime in the night, I woke up to pee. It was late, past midnight, and as I waddled back to bed I noticed Thomas was gone. Grabbing my glasses, I crept into the living room, then the kitchen. Only the hum of the refrigerator and our father’s snores broke the quiet. An unnamed fear gripped me, and I wondered if I should wake our father, but something stayed my hand. Silent as I could, I slid open the back door and slipped outside. The air still held most of the day’s heat, warm and wet as bathwater. No one was on the beach, though I spied the remains of a bonfire, the aluminum cans scattered around it catching and tossing back the moon’s light. My eyes picked across the dunes, open to movement beyond the murmur of waves and the dance of beach grass, but saw nothing. Not wanting to go back to bed, and unsure where else to look, I went to the pool. Lit from below, it glowed a sickly green, the smell of chlorine almost enough to make me gag. The filtration system gurgled as I dipped a foot in. The pool chairs, scattered about in half-hearted organization, cast long shadows, their forms bent into shapes which lent themselves to horror. Despite the mild night, I began to shiver as real panic bubbled up. What had happened, where was Thomas? I imagined endless tragedies—swept out to sea, eaten by sharks, dead and drowned. Or gone, simply gone, our father and I abandoned. Tears threatened at the thought.
Somewhere beyond seeing, the sound of a door, followed by the hurried step of feet. I followed the noise to the arcade. The lights were all off, but when I pushed, the door opened. Almost too quiet to hear was the sound of sniffling. Someone in the corner, crouched down low, had their back to me.
“Thomas?” I whispered.
As if a switch had been flipped, the crying stopped. Thomas stood, hitching up his shorts, but not before I glimpsed a flash of pale thigh. His face hidden in the dark, I could not tell if he was looking at me or the wall beyond. He walked past me with stiff, brisk steps, pausing at the door to look back over his shoulder.
“If you tell anyone,” he said, “you’re dead.”
The next day, Thomas told our father he wasn’t feeling well. Something he ate, he said. He spent the day in bed, routinely refusing food or water. In the evening, our father tried to coax him out with the promise of ice cream, but he said he didn’t want any. On the drive to the shop, our father asked me if something had happened.
“No,” I lied, more to shield myself from punishment than to protect Thomas’ secret. Whenever the previous night popped into my head—grainy and black and white, like a movie you watched half-asleep—it left me more anguished than before, terrified my rule-breaking would be discovered. Worse, though, were the thoughts of Thomas and whatever had happened to him. I tried and failed to remember when I had last seen Thomas that upset, if I had ever seen him cry before. “Can I get two scoops?”
Back home, I set the styrofoam bowl on the nightstand next to Thomas’ bed. Without rolling over, he said he still wasn’t hungry, so I sat there, watching the rainbow mounds melt into a pool of muddled brown.
The next day when I went out to swim, Thomas felt well enough to venture down with me. He sat, curled in on himself beneath the umbrella, seeming to disappear in its shade. From his perch on the patio, our father browned in the sun, his nose blossoming into red, the cancer that would eventually kill him already fermenting under his skin. From the shallows I looked up to him, so far out of reach I was unsure he would hear me if I shouted. If I knew then that this divide between us would only continue to grow, that one day it would become untraversable, I would have run from the water and into his arms. I would have crawled into his lap, tucked my head under his chin, and told him everything, spoken words whose shape I did not know yet. I would have drawn him to me—Thomas too—and held tight. I would bare myself to them, to myself, let the raw truth blossom under the glare of the noonday sun. And in that drawing in, that closeness, if not love then a comfort, an easing of burdens, could be born. Our father would know me, know us, for the men we would become, and whatever existed between Thomas and me—rivalry or jealousy, apathy or disgust—would be wiped away and in its space something new would grow. But I couldn’t, so I didn’t, and the silence settled between us.
In the afternoon the students Thomas had befriended wandered down onto the beach from whatever house they had rented. Despite the size and volume of their group, I did not notice them until they were right up on me. Figuring Thomas would join them, I was surprised to find him gone. The beach chair sat empty, a depression from where he sat the only evidence he’d even been there at all.
The day before we left, our father told us to pack our things. I grabbed my bathing suit from the chair I’d hung it on to dry, and stuffed it, along with handfuls of shirts and towels, into the duffle bag, the sleeves stiff with salt. I packed up the bathroom too, stowing toothbrushes and toothpaste. In the trash, buried under a heap of wadded toilet paper, I found a pair of underwear—Thomas’—gone crusty and smelling of copper. I stuffed them in my back pocket and told our father I was going for a walk. I went behind the building and threw them in a dumpster, afraid I would cry or be sick.
We ordered pizza for dinner, the three of us eating in silence. I watched our father, who watched Thomas, who watched nothing at all, simply stared down at his food. Like we did whenever the end of our vacation began to loom on the horizon, our father reflected on the weather, which had been splendid, saying how good it was to get away. As if reading from a script, I said I wished we could stay here all year, something I said every summer and which never failed to make our father smile and laugh. We both looked to Thomas, expecting him to roll his eyes but reluctantly agree, but he raised his head, gaze returning from far away, as if he hadn’t heard us at all. “What was your favorite part of the trip?” our father asked. Thomas chewed his bite of pizza, slow, the working of his jaw almost methodical, before he swallowed and said, “I guess just being together.” He stood up and asked to be excused, and with his back turned he was oblivious to the shimmer of joy in our father’s eyes.
In bed later, I stared up at the ceiling, unable to sleep. The comforter felt heavy, like a body, the heat of it keeping me awake. I kicked it to the floor and listened for Thomas’ breathing. From the tightness of it I could tell he was still awake. I sat up and whispered his name.
“What?” he hissed. Silently, I motioned for him to follow as I stood and made my way out of the room. Moving as if compelled, he followed me into the living room and out the back door.
The water was smooth, the moon a drop of white paint. We walked down to the beach, drawn to it. I watched from outside myself as the waves drowned our feet and ankles. It was my body—I recognized the pale rolls of flesh like uncooked dough—but I no longer controlled it. Thomas watched me too, half a second behind me. I turned back and reached out for his hand, and for the first time in years, he held it.
We walked out until we couldn’t, and then we began to swim. When our breath grew short and our limbs cried out, we turned over onto our backs and looked up at the sky. Stars winked down at us, a skyful of them, like so much spilled salt. The water had grown cool without the sun, and my skin pimpled at its touch. I felt myself be carried, felt the lines of myself grow faint and blur, till I did not know where I ended and the ocean began. I turned my head to look at Thomas. His eyes shut, he hung suspended, moonlight falling on his face. Years later, in college, on the night our father would become my father—it’s Thomas, a neighbor heard the gunshot and found him in the garage—I would remember him as he was now: crowned by heaven’s wavering grace.
A swell rose beneath us, lifted us, and cast us apart. My head went under, and when I broke through, I could not find Thomas. Panicked, I called out to him, my throat raw with salt. Then there he was beside me, wet and smiling, as he grabbed my hand and pulled me close. For a time we said nothing, clinging to the other, letting the current carry us away.
