My Man Tomato Can
by Charlie Kondek
The house on the old farm stood at the end of a private drive off Dixboro north of the river, dappled white and leaning into an old barn collapsing under sagging shingles and bent, splintering boards. There was no electricity save what they could run from the battery of a car made to look like the other junkers that populated the lot, a line running from under the hood to a partly opened window and a power strip that animated a small TV set that got six or eight channels, and a microwave oven. A toilet still flushed if you poured water into it. They kept the girl, April, in what had been the front parlor, empty now of furniture save a rat-burrowed couch and gnawed easy chair. Through torn curtains could be seen a spring sun that lowered and spread margarine light over untilled, weedy fields. “It’ll do for now,” Big Tony had said. “But all it would take for us to get busted is one curious Washtenaw County deputy having a closer look.”
Big Tony and Little Tony, the former christened James Anthony Early and the latter Anthony James, had developed in boyhood their adult propensities for harm by fighting viciously over which had the right to be called “Tony.” By the time their single mother and her various boyfriends brokered an armistice through designating one “Big” and the other “Little,” the pair had honed an aptitude for brutality into a near-genius mechanism, as individuals and a duo, for crimes, as petty as they were violent, culminating in this latest enterprise.
Tomato Can wore a permanent rain cloud in his hair, and saw, heard and thought everything through its shroud, but even he could see that, of the two, Little Tony was the more dangerous, an appetite for inflicting pain and humiliation fed by an intelligence narrowed to that purpose. Their fourth conspirator, “Marvelous” Mal, was, like Tomato Can, a professional accomplice, as unencumbered by critical thought as he was tall and long-limbed. Audrene, Big Tony’s girlfriend, kept house and babysat for April’s family, had helped generate the plot, and remained their “inside man.” “Well,” Big Tony said now, “we can’t all stay here and Tomato Can can’t stay by himself. Mal, you stay, too.”
“Tomato Can can listen to her babble all night but I ain’t,” Mal replied. “I’ll sleep in the car.”
“No, no, man,” Little Tony interjected, “you don’t sleep at all. That’s the point. Keep the little freak from running away. You can stay in the car but don’t sleep. Me and Tony’ll be back to relieve you both in the morning, take a turn.”
Mal, like Tomato Can, held an old Remington shotgun, meant to frighten April into compliancy more than anything else, though she seemed barely aware of its presence. “Bring me back a bottle of Beam,” he said, dragging the shotgun by the barrel from their conference on the house’s sagging porch toward the vehicle, a rusty Pontiac Aztek, from which the power cord flowed.
“No,” Big Tony said. “No booze. No weed. No blow, not ‘til this is over. And Mal, if you see anybody poking around, use the car and move the kid. Call us from the new location. Only in an emergency.”
“If it’ll start,” Mal replied, pulling the door of the Aztek open and heaving himself and the shotgun in.
The lowering sun had turned the afternoon sky the light-leeched color of evening, and Big Tony and Little Tony turned now to Tomato Can. “All right, TC. Get back in there and keep an eye on her. We’re counting on you.”
Tomato Can nodded, pulled the surgical mask up over his mouth, and went back into the house.
They’d left the TV on to keep April occupied but she seemed to be ignoring it, sitting on the couch with her fidgeting hands in her lap. April was about 13 years old, with a bright, open face, eyes the blue stones of which glittered as if from the bottom of wells, and a pile of wild, dry, light brown hair. “Where’s Mr. Big?” she asked. “Is he calling my mom? I have to do my assignments.”
Tomato Can lowered himself into the chair and rested the shotgun on the floor beside him, from which he took a plastic bag he lightly tossed at April’s feet. His voice climbed a long way up from deep plumbing to groan past his teeth. “We’re gonna stay the night here. You can watch TV and have something to eat.”
“I don’t want to stay here. You need to call my mom. Is Mr. Big calling my mom? I want to go home. I have to write an essay about the three branches of government. That’s the executive, the legislative and the judicial. Did you know anyone can be president, but you have to be born in America? Or it’s okay if you have American parents but are born somewhere else, like John McCain, who wanted to be president. A Canadian can’t be president. They have a prime minister. I have to write an essay about this. When can I go home?”
Tomato Can had always been quiet, patient and slow, but years of using his body and especially his head to build the records of other fighters had left him in a state where words gathered in a fuzz around him, radio static inaudible unless he turned a certain dial. Bright shafts had been bolted to various places on his skull, ribs and stomach, and he could sit and contemplate these for a long time. He liked to nurse them with beer but could just as easily sit and think about them hanging from him. He seemed to have been waiting years for them to fall away. April talked on to these unhearing ears about presidents and Canadians long into the night. He took her to the toilet when necessary. It grew cold, and he draped them both in coats, hats and army blankets. Sometime in the night, in the darkness outside the television’s light, the seriousness of the situation seemed to finally become apparent to her. She changed her theme. “I want to go home. Is something bad going to happen to me? I want to go home. Are you going to hurt me?”
Tomato Can’s pipes rumbled once again. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. But you have to be patient and wait. And you should be quiet. I don’t care if you talk, but Mr. Big and, well, especially Mr. Little, you can’t keep talking like this or they are gonna get mad.” He turned the TV off. “Why don’t you sleep?”
April didn’t lay down on the ragged couch right away. She was murmuring something now, and Tomato Can, who could no longer see her lips, had to lean toward her to hear. She was praying. “Jesus is always with us,” she said, as if repeating the words of a Sunday school teacher. “He loves the children. I want to go home. Jesus, come get me, take me home.”
There were bright stars over the weedy lot and Mal in the Aztek was probably asleep when April, still mumbling “Jesus take me home” lay down on the couch and drifted off. Tomato Can was tempted to sleep, maybe one of those upright slumbers, head held in place by the shafts in his skull. He was used to having a lot of voices in his head. He assumed they were all versions of his own voice, or someone else’s words that got into his brain and rattled around like pebbles in a pop can. He heard one of them now, amidst his own, pondering sleep, and Big Tony’s, “Keep watch, Tomato Can,” but now this other voice, who was it? Like a cross between the voice that calls you to the principal’s office and the tail end of rolling thunder. It said, I will come get her. I will send someone for her. This was his own voice, right? Pretending to be Jesus? Yes, Jesus. Give us money so we can give this kid back.
***
The Early brothers returned the next morning with cold coffee, water, and more food, Pop-Tarts mostly. While they heated the coffee in the microwave, Little Tony asked, “How’s the sped?” April was awake, but not yet sitting up, and Tomato Can didn’t like the way Little Tony looked at her from under his hat and over his mask. “She’s fine,” Mal said. “She didn’t give us any problems, did she, TC?”
“Wish I could say the same about her old man,” Big Tony said gravely. He gathered them in another room of the old house, what was once perhaps a rear mud room, for a conference.
The note Audrene had “found” and turned over to April’s mother explained the kidnappers would be in touch with details about how to exchange $100,000 for April’s return, and in the meantime April’s parents were not to involve the police or “we will know.” April’s father, whose desires were usually enabled or enforced by the world’s institutions, immediately called the police anyway, according to Audrene, when he had been summoned by this crisis from his offices to the home of his ex-wife. The Earlys had accepted from the start that police involvement was a possibility and that it would not alter their course, only add pressure to it, but the father’s defiance and disregard for their preferences set the wrong tone, reduced their bargaining power and, frankly, pushed Little Tony into one of his lathers. “So we gotta send a message to this prick,” Big Tony explained.
“What message?” Mal asked.
Little Tony said, “Get your phone out and turn on the memo recorder.” He, like his brother, wore his oily dark hair slicked back and bound in a pony tail under a baseball cap. Behind the mask he now lifted to cover it was a charcoal black Van Dyke around a fat, wet mouth. He beckoned the gang to follow him back to the parlor where April was now sitting up groggily on the couch. “Press record on that thing,” Little Tony said, seizing April by the forearm and yanking her to fer feet, “because if the old man doesn’t want to follow orders he can listen to this little bitch scream.”
April did not scream. Her eyes and mouth opened wide in surprise, her cheeks blazing. Mal had thumbed the audio recording app and was holding his phone toward Little Tony, who cuffed April on the head, sending aloft a cascade of light brown hair. “Did you hear what I said?” Little Tony shouted, shaking her by the arm. “Your daddy doesn’t know how to follow orders so now we have to let him know he’s made a mistake!”
April squeaked, “You called my dad?” but before she had finished this query Little Tony buried a fist in her stomach hard enough to cause her to grunt and kneel on the blanket that now pooled at her feet. “Don’t go too far,” Big Tony said, but he didn’t move from where he stood watching. Little Tony, paper mask contorted by heavy breathing, clutched a fistful of April’s hair with one hand and the little finger of her left hand with the other. “Scream, bitch!” he commanded. “Your daddy’s listening. Let him know not to play games with us. Scream!” He began to bend the finger back.
April cried out in pain, thrust one ear into her shoulder and covered the other with her free, twitching hand, but she did not scream.
“Scream!” Little Tony commanded, bending the finger back further, to the point where those assembled could hear, or thought they heard, the beginnings of tendons ripping. “Tell daddy we know he called the police after we told him not to! Come on, sped, scream! Tell him how bad we are gonna hurt you if he disobeys us again!” April’s eyes narrowed tighter, and her mouth spread wider, cheeks scarlet, another whimper of pain escaping her. “SCREAM!” Little Tony roared, and April cried out, “I can’t!” Tomato Can’s body had stiffened, every ancient hinge that held it together grown taut. The shotgun was near him and his fingers curled as if grasping for it.
“That’s enough,” Big Tony said. “Let her go.” To Mal, “Turn that thing off. We have what we need.”
***
It was night again. April was asleep on the couch and Tomato Can sat upright in the chair, head heavy under its crown of constant pain, the shotgun across the arms of the chair. Mal had returned with fried chicken and sides, a handful of children’s books on presidents and some crossword puzzles he’d shop lifted. “These books are for little kids,” April complained. She would only eat the potato wedges and dinner rolls. As before, the Early brothers, obtaining the voice memo from Mal’s phone, left the farm, and Mal took up residence in the Pontiac. April had talked to Tomato Can until exhausted. “I’m going to run for governor. When I’m governor there will be no more kidnappings. I’ll create a special police unit for kidnappers and no kids will ever get taken again. We’ll catch the kidnappers. We’ll make new laws and put kidnappers in jail for a long time.”
Later, she’d asked him, “Are you sorry for what you did? Jesus doesn’t like kidnappers. He loves children. Are you sorry?”
When it was finally too dark to see and quiet enough for him to turn the static down and listen to the voices in his head, he asked, straining to hear the voice like rolling thunder, What if it’s me? Am I the one you sent? Why haven’t I heard from you before now?
A voice like crinkled paper answered. You know who He is – this was his grandma’s voice. I told you who He is and you supposed to learned it. I told you who He is and anointed you and prayed over you. You supposed to belong to Him but you just don’t know it or maybe you forgot because of that shameful mother of yours or the way you been carrying on. You sure ain’t acted like the boy I anointed. You ain’t followed my plans for you.
He remembered. It seemed the only time he prayed was listening to Bill Withers, “Grandma’s Hands,” which made him think of the grandma that raised him for a little while and then died, returning him and his brothers and sisters to their mother who barely acknowledged them. It set the pattern for his whole life, like another song he remembered, “nothing had a chance to be good.”
Everything got sort of taken from him so why would he want anything to do with grandma’s God? He loved his grandmother, she died. He went to school, they treated him like he was dumb, or maybe he was dumb, because he wasn’t good at reading, he was always so slow, but he loved music. He remembered the instruments at school, and the records, and how he wished he could learn to play, maybe those drums or that horn. He’d learn to read good if they let him play the instruments but it always took him longer to know what the words were and what they meant, and he was a little better with numbers but he was always so far behind, so embarrassed, and a little dirty, too, with old clothes and his mother never buying him anything, that eventually he thought, well nothing at school is for me, not the reading or the instruments, and I’m so stupid and so embarrassed so why should I go? And why would he be grateful to White Jesus for that? He died when grandma died. And then, like the song, working at the car wash, after work, he finally got the courage to walk into the boxing gym, and he fell in love with it like he fell in love with the music room. It had its own instruments, its own music. People belonged here, strong, fast, elegant, powerful people. Maybe he could belong here, too, beat leather bags with quick, gauntleted hands and have a muscular body and a dancer’s step, make the rope skip like James Brown “Night Train,” like that older boy, “Marvelous” Mal, that invited him in and let him watch, started to teach him things and introduce him to coaches and managers. But he soon found that, though he could love, and work hard, he was slow, here, too, could read an opponent like he read books so that he was always behind, hit before he could hit back, only good at one thing, flunking, and the managers saw that and made a pro flunker out of him, a constant loser. The price he paid to belong he paid with his body and his too little dignity. Now his hands shook and his body ached and he had rusty bicycle parts in his head that kept him from thinking clearly so that all he was good for was taking out the trash and further plunging his soul down life’s side streets, doing dumb, dangerous tasks for gargoyles like the Early brothers. What did Jesus, brown hair and beard, blue eyes, or Jesus, on a cross, sad, bleeding, want with Tomato Can? Tomato Can wanted $20,000. It was like the song said, too late, baby, now it’s too late.
Tomato Can realized he had stood up from the chair and was standing, one of many, on a hill in Jerusalem, before not one cross but three, and that he had, in fact, addressed these last questions to the dying man bound, nailed and suspended to one of them. Jesus was a lot less white in person. The broken man could hardly move his head, but it rolled a little to one side to look down on Tomato Can and meet his gaze. That’s when it occurred to him that Jesus wore the same marks on his face as a failed pugilist, someone who could hit and not hit back, and a crown like Tomato Can’s that hurt in all the same places. On the other crosses nearby were two likewise broken and suspended men, crooks like him and his “friends,” one repentant, one not.
Charlie Kondek is a marketing professional and short story writer from metro Detroit whose work has appeared in genre, literary and niche publications. More at CharlieKondekWrites.com.
by Charlie Kondek
The house on the old farm stood at the end of a private drive off Dixboro north of the river, dappled white and leaning into an old barn collapsing under sagging shingles and bent, splintering boards. There was no electricity save what they could run from the battery of a car made to look like the other junkers that populated the lot, a line running from under the hood to a partly opened window and a power strip that animated a small TV set that got six or eight channels, and a microwave oven. A toilet still flushed if you poured water into it. They kept the girl, April, in what had been the front parlor, empty now of furniture save a rat-burrowed couch and gnawed easy chair. Through torn curtains could be seen a spring sun that lowered and spread margarine light over untilled, weedy fields. “It’ll do for now,” Big Tony had said. “But all it would take for us to get busted is one curious Washtenaw County deputy having a closer look.”
Big Tony and Little Tony, the former christened James Anthony Early and the latter Anthony James, had developed in boyhood their adult propensities for harm by fighting viciously over which had the right to be called “Tony.” By the time their single mother and her various boyfriends brokered an armistice through designating one “Big” and the other “Little,” the pair had honed an aptitude for brutality into a near-genius mechanism, as individuals and a duo, for crimes, as petty as they were violent, culminating in this latest enterprise.
Tomato Can wore a permanent rain cloud in his hair, and saw, heard and thought everything through its shroud, but even he could see that, of the two, Little Tony was the more dangerous, an appetite for inflicting pain and humiliation fed by an intelligence narrowed to that purpose. Their fourth conspirator, “Marvelous” Mal, was, like Tomato Can, a professional accomplice, as unencumbered by critical thought as he was tall and long-limbed. Audrene, Big Tony’s girlfriend, kept house and babysat for April’s family, had helped generate the plot, and remained their “inside man.” “Well,” Big Tony said now, “we can’t all stay here and Tomato Can can’t stay by himself. Mal, you stay, too.”
“Tomato Can can listen to her babble all night but I ain’t,” Mal replied. “I’ll sleep in the car.”
“No, no, man,” Little Tony interjected, “you don’t sleep at all. That’s the point. Keep the little freak from running away. You can stay in the car but don’t sleep. Me and Tony’ll be back to relieve you both in the morning, take a turn.”
Mal, like Tomato Can, held an old Remington shotgun, meant to frighten April into compliancy more than anything else, though she seemed barely aware of its presence. “Bring me back a bottle of Beam,” he said, dragging the shotgun by the barrel from their conference on the house’s sagging porch toward the vehicle, a rusty Pontiac Aztek, from which the power cord flowed.
“No,” Big Tony said. “No booze. No weed. No blow, not ‘til this is over. And Mal, if you see anybody poking around, use the car and move the kid. Call us from the new location. Only in an emergency.”
“If it’ll start,” Mal replied, pulling the door of the Aztek open and heaving himself and the shotgun in.
The lowering sun had turned the afternoon sky the light-leeched color of evening, and Big Tony and Little Tony turned now to Tomato Can. “All right, TC. Get back in there and keep an eye on her. We’re counting on you.”
Tomato Can nodded, pulled the surgical mask up over his mouth, and went back into the house.
They’d left the TV on to keep April occupied but she seemed to be ignoring it, sitting on the couch with her fidgeting hands in her lap. April was about 13 years old, with a bright, open face, eyes the blue stones of which glittered as if from the bottom of wells, and a pile of wild, dry, light brown hair. “Where’s Mr. Big?” she asked. “Is he calling my mom? I have to do my assignments.”
Tomato Can lowered himself into the chair and rested the shotgun on the floor beside him, from which he took a plastic bag he lightly tossed at April’s feet. His voice climbed a long way up from deep plumbing to groan past his teeth. “We’re gonna stay the night here. You can watch TV and have something to eat.”
“I don’t want to stay here. You need to call my mom. Is Mr. Big calling my mom? I want to go home. I have to write an essay about the three branches of government. That’s the executive, the legislative and the judicial. Did you know anyone can be president, but you have to be born in America? Or it’s okay if you have American parents but are born somewhere else, like John McCain, who wanted to be president. A Canadian can’t be president. They have a prime minister. I have to write an essay about this. When can I go home?”
Tomato Can had always been quiet, patient and slow, but years of using his body and especially his head to build the records of other fighters had left him in a state where words gathered in a fuzz around him, radio static inaudible unless he turned a certain dial. Bright shafts had been bolted to various places on his skull, ribs and stomach, and he could sit and contemplate these for a long time. He liked to nurse them with beer but could just as easily sit and think about them hanging from him. He seemed to have been waiting years for them to fall away. April talked on to these unhearing ears about presidents and Canadians long into the night. He took her to the toilet when necessary. It grew cold, and he draped them both in coats, hats and army blankets. Sometime in the night, in the darkness outside the television’s light, the seriousness of the situation seemed to finally become apparent to her. She changed her theme. “I want to go home. Is something bad going to happen to me? I want to go home. Are you going to hurt me?”
Tomato Can’s pipes rumbled once again. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. But you have to be patient and wait. And you should be quiet. I don’t care if you talk, but Mr. Big and, well, especially Mr. Little, you can’t keep talking like this or they are gonna get mad.” He turned the TV off. “Why don’t you sleep?”
April didn’t lay down on the ragged couch right away. She was murmuring something now, and Tomato Can, who could no longer see her lips, had to lean toward her to hear. She was praying. “Jesus is always with us,” she said, as if repeating the words of a Sunday school teacher. “He loves the children. I want to go home. Jesus, come get me, take me home.”
There were bright stars over the weedy lot and Mal in the Aztek was probably asleep when April, still mumbling “Jesus take me home” lay down on the couch and drifted off. Tomato Can was tempted to sleep, maybe one of those upright slumbers, head held in place by the shafts in his skull. He was used to having a lot of voices in his head. He assumed they were all versions of his own voice, or someone else’s words that got into his brain and rattled around like pebbles in a pop can. He heard one of them now, amidst his own, pondering sleep, and Big Tony’s, “Keep watch, Tomato Can,” but now this other voice, who was it? Like a cross between the voice that calls you to the principal’s office and the tail end of rolling thunder. It said, I will come get her. I will send someone for her. This was his own voice, right? Pretending to be Jesus? Yes, Jesus. Give us money so we can give this kid back.
***
The Early brothers returned the next morning with cold coffee, water, and more food, Pop-Tarts mostly. While they heated the coffee in the microwave, Little Tony asked, “How’s the sped?” April was awake, but not yet sitting up, and Tomato Can didn’t like the way Little Tony looked at her from under his hat and over his mask. “She’s fine,” Mal said. “She didn’t give us any problems, did she, TC?”
“Wish I could say the same about her old man,” Big Tony said gravely. He gathered them in another room of the old house, what was once perhaps a rear mud room, for a conference.
The note Audrene had “found” and turned over to April’s mother explained the kidnappers would be in touch with details about how to exchange $100,000 for April’s return, and in the meantime April’s parents were not to involve the police or “we will know.” April’s father, whose desires were usually enabled or enforced by the world’s institutions, immediately called the police anyway, according to Audrene, when he had been summoned by this crisis from his offices to the home of his ex-wife. The Earlys had accepted from the start that police involvement was a possibility and that it would not alter their course, only add pressure to it, but the father’s defiance and disregard for their preferences set the wrong tone, reduced their bargaining power and, frankly, pushed Little Tony into one of his lathers. “So we gotta send a message to this prick,” Big Tony explained.
“What message?” Mal asked.
Little Tony said, “Get your phone out and turn on the memo recorder.” He, like his brother, wore his oily dark hair slicked back and bound in a pony tail under a baseball cap. Behind the mask he now lifted to cover it was a charcoal black Van Dyke around a fat, wet mouth. He beckoned the gang to follow him back to the parlor where April was now sitting up groggily on the couch. “Press record on that thing,” Little Tony said, seizing April by the forearm and yanking her to fer feet, “because if the old man doesn’t want to follow orders he can listen to this little bitch scream.”
April did not scream. Her eyes and mouth opened wide in surprise, her cheeks blazing. Mal had thumbed the audio recording app and was holding his phone toward Little Tony, who cuffed April on the head, sending aloft a cascade of light brown hair. “Did you hear what I said?” Little Tony shouted, shaking her by the arm. “Your daddy doesn’t know how to follow orders so now we have to let him know he’s made a mistake!”
April squeaked, “You called my dad?” but before she had finished this query Little Tony buried a fist in her stomach hard enough to cause her to grunt and kneel on the blanket that now pooled at her feet. “Don’t go too far,” Big Tony said, but he didn’t move from where he stood watching. Little Tony, paper mask contorted by heavy breathing, clutched a fistful of April’s hair with one hand and the little finger of her left hand with the other. “Scream, bitch!” he commanded. “Your daddy’s listening. Let him know not to play games with us. Scream!” He began to bend the finger back.
April cried out in pain, thrust one ear into her shoulder and covered the other with her free, twitching hand, but she did not scream.
“Scream!” Little Tony commanded, bending the finger back further, to the point where those assembled could hear, or thought they heard, the beginnings of tendons ripping. “Tell daddy we know he called the police after we told him not to! Come on, sped, scream! Tell him how bad we are gonna hurt you if he disobeys us again!” April’s eyes narrowed tighter, and her mouth spread wider, cheeks scarlet, another whimper of pain escaping her. “SCREAM!” Little Tony roared, and April cried out, “I can’t!” Tomato Can’s body had stiffened, every ancient hinge that held it together grown taut. The shotgun was near him and his fingers curled as if grasping for it.
“That’s enough,” Big Tony said. “Let her go.” To Mal, “Turn that thing off. We have what we need.”
***
It was night again. April was asleep on the couch and Tomato Can sat upright in the chair, head heavy under its crown of constant pain, the shotgun across the arms of the chair. Mal had returned with fried chicken and sides, a handful of children’s books on presidents and some crossword puzzles he’d shop lifted. “These books are for little kids,” April complained. She would only eat the potato wedges and dinner rolls. As before, the Early brothers, obtaining the voice memo from Mal’s phone, left the farm, and Mal took up residence in the Pontiac. April had talked to Tomato Can until exhausted. “I’m going to run for governor. When I’m governor there will be no more kidnappings. I’ll create a special police unit for kidnappers and no kids will ever get taken again. We’ll catch the kidnappers. We’ll make new laws and put kidnappers in jail for a long time.”
Later, she’d asked him, “Are you sorry for what you did? Jesus doesn’t like kidnappers. He loves children. Are you sorry?”
When it was finally too dark to see and quiet enough for him to turn the static down and listen to the voices in his head, he asked, straining to hear the voice like rolling thunder, What if it’s me? Am I the one you sent? Why haven’t I heard from you before now?
A voice like crinkled paper answered. You know who He is – this was his grandma’s voice. I told you who He is and you supposed to learned it. I told you who He is and anointed you and prayed over you. You supposed to belong to Him but you just don’t know it or maybe you forgot because of that shameful mother of yours or the way you been carrying on. You sure ain’t acted like the boy I anointed. You ain’t followed my plans for you.
He remembered. It seemed the only time he prayed was listening to Bill Withers, “Grandma’s Hands,” which made him think of the grandma that raised him for a little while and then died, returning him and his brothers and sisters to their mother who barely acknowledged them. It set the pattern for his whole life, like another song he remembered, “nothing had a chance to be good.”
Everything got sort of taken from him so why would he want anything to do with grandma’s God? He loved his grandmother, she died. He went to school, they treated him like he was dumb, or maybe he was dumb, because he wasn’t good at reading, he was always so slow, but he loved music. He remembered the instruments at school, and the records, and how he wished he could learn to play, maybe those drums or that horn. He’d learn to read good if they let him play the instruments but it always took him longer to know what the words were and what they meant, and he was a little better with numbers but he was always so far behind, so embarrassed, and a little dirty, too, with old clothes and his mother never buying him anything, that eventually he thought, well nothing at school is for me, not the reading or the instruments, and I’m so stupid and so embarrassed so why should I go? And why would he be grateful to White Jesus for that? He died when grandma died. And then, like the song, working at the car wash, after work, he finally got the courage to walk into the boxing gym, and he fell in love with it like he fell in love with the music room. It had its own instruments, its own music. People belonged here, strong, fast, elegant, powerful people. Maybe he could belong here, too, beat leather bags with quick, gauntleted hands and have a muscular body and a dancer’s step, make the rope skip like James Brown “Night Train,” like that older boy, “Marvelous” Mal, that invited him in and let him watch, started to teach him things and introduce him to coaches and managers. But he soon found that, though he could love, and work hard, he was slow, here, too, could read an opponent like he read books so that he was always behind, hit before he could hit back, only good at one thing, flunking, and the managers saw that and made a pro flunker out of him, a constant loser. The price he paid to belong he paid with his body and his too little dignity. Now his hands shook and his body ached and he had rusty bicycle parts in his head that kept him from thinking clearly so that all he was good for was taking out the trash and further plunging his soul down life’s side streets, doing dumb, dangerous tasks for gargoyles like the Early brothers. What did Jesus, brown hair and beard, blue eyes, or Jesus, on a cross, sad, bleeding, want with Tomato Can? Tomato Can wanted $20,000. It was like the song said, too late, baby, now it’s too late.
Tomato Can realized he had stood up from the chair and was standing, one of many, on a hill in Jerusalem, before not one cross but three, and that he had, in fact, addressed these last questions to the dying man bound, nailed and suspended to one of them. Jesus was a lot less white in person. The broken man could hardly move his head, but it rolled a little to one side to look down on Tomato Can and meet his gaze. That’s when it occurred to him that Jesus wore the same marks on his face as a failed pugilist, someone who could hit and not hit back, and a crown like Tomato Can’s that hurt in all the same places. On the other crosses nearby were two likewise broken and suspended men, crooks like him and his “friends,” one repentant, one not.
Charlie Kondek is a marketing professional and short story writer from metro Detroit whose work has appeared in genre, literary and niche publications. More at CharlieKondekWrites.com.