Altar Read online

  ALTAR

  Philip Fracassi

  DUNHAMS MANOR PRESS

  East Brunswick, New Jersey

  © 2016 Philip Fracassi

  Cover art by Matthew Revert

  Published by

  Dunhams Manor Press

  An imprint of

  DYNATOX MINISTRIES

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Jordan Krall, Joe Zanetti, Matthew Revert and Laird Barron, for supporting my work. To my social media friends for their lovely words and constant good will. To Stephanie, for keeping me safe, and sane.

  Gary stared anxiously through the humidity-smeared rear window of the station wagon. The grill of the white Cadillac trailing behind them twinkled in the heat, the chrome glinting like a metal mouth bearing down on the rear bumper every time the brakes squealed them to a stop. Gary stared absently at two shadowy figures, blackened and hazy, hovering behind the Caddy’s sloping windshield like strange voyeurs from another world, a world in which things like air-conditioning and tinted windows proliferated.

  Martha had a tendency to brake hard and turn hard, forcing Gary to use the palms of his hands to balance himself against the hot plastic of the car interior with every change in direction, digging the heels of his bare feet into the rough fabric of the wagon’s rear bed at every all-too-brief red light. To make things worse, Gary wore nothing but a swimsuit, and the sun coming through the large wagon windows was sliding across his skin in slanted hot white quadrangles, smearing like hot butter across his small frame with every twist of the road. He felt like a bug trapped under the concentrated bright eye of a magnifying glass.

  Despite the front windows being down there was little ventilation in the rear, and though the ride was short his skin was already moist with sweat. Particularly annoying was the purple sugar spilled across his chest and the back of his hand from the ripped-open pouch of Lik-M-Aid Fun Dip, which had coughed out a puff of powder when Martha barreled over a particularly large pothole. The crashing bump had briefly levitated him before slamming him down against the wide floor of the wagon’s rear hold, making him bite his tongue while simultaneously creating the Fun Dip fiasco he was currently saddled with.

  “Sorry!” Martha said, floating a hand in the air without turning her head. Then to herself, “Been more and more of those lately... damn roads.”

  “Mom, god,” snapped Abby, her voice chiding but her eyes never leaving the notebook where she was scribbling love letters in bright green ink to Timmy Northrup, her teenage crush. “You made me mess up,” she mumbled.

  “Sorry,” Martha repeated, her tone more weary than sorrowful. “Didn’t see it.”

  Abby turned her head absently toward the rear of the wagon and caught Gary’s eye. She smiled, her expression one of amused surprise, as if he had just now come into existence.

  She lifted a hand to her mouth, pantomiming a cup, and pretended to drink from it. She followed this with a cross-eyed look and a wobbling of her head. Gary knew she was pretending to be drunk, and almost laughed, but when he shifted his eyes to the back of his mom’s head his smile disappeared. His mother did drink. He knew that sometimes she drank a lot. It was one of the reasons their father had left them, at least according to Abby.

  He looked back at the still-smiling Abby, and as the sun hit her face, he thought for the millionth time how very pretty she was. She had black hair and blue eyes like he did, like their mother, but her complexion was more olive, like their father’s. Gary knew boys thought she was cute—enough of his friends had told him so—and he certainly held no argument with it. He wished he was more like her, and often imitated her expressions, her mannerisms, in the hopes of being thought of as highly as she was by other kids. But he was small, he knew, and thin, and paler than she. He was skinny and boney like his mother, who they called Martha at her request but never felt right about it. Martha was quite pale, quite thin, having become more so since their father left. But she, also, was quite beautiful. He knew that. He knew she had been.

  Abby snapped her fingers, bringing Gary back. He looked into her eyes, tried to smile. She returned his smile and then she gave him “the wink.” The Wink wasn’t a quick, darting wink, but a heavy, prolonged, wink—the kind where her whole face got into the act—a snarl of her lips and a crease in her cheek and forehead, her eyelids squeezed together in a passionate, overlapping embrace of lashes.

  Gary loved that wink, and it always made him smile. It was the one Abby always gave him when things seemed bad but always ended up okay. The one that said: “Don’t forget, don’t worry. We’re in this together.”

  They arrived at the pool.

  Martha dropped down the rear gate of the wagon and grabbed a large canvas bag filled with towels, sunscreen, snacks, and water bottles. Gary clutched his own towel and his blue swimming goggles tightly to his chest, waiting for Martha to hurry it up so he could slide out the back.

  “Do you want your sandals?” Martha asked, grabbing a smaller mesh bag that carried Gary’s sandals, t-shirt and the tattered paperback she’d been reading for the last month. He saw a flash of something monstrous on the cover of the thick little book, its hateful black eyes staring out at him from within the dirty white crisscrossed plastic mesh of the bag. He hated that book and didn’t understand why his mother was reading it. He preferred Encyclopedia Brown himself, or his books about the nice fat lady, Ms. Piggle-Wiggle, who always knew the right things to do about bad, nasty children. In the last one he read she had made a boy stay locked inside his dirty room until, one day, the room was piled so high with filth and garbage that the boy was trapped, and he couldn’t eat or sleep or get out of the room and he likely would have died had he not realized, at the very end, that in order to survive he must be clean. So the boy cleaned everything up and never dirtied his room again. Gary thought that was a book worth reading.

  “Gary?” she said again, now holding his small flip-flops between her fingers, jostling them for his attention. “The pavement’s hot.”

  “Okay,” he said, just to keep things moving; anything to get out of the hot, stuffy wagon and into the cool, clear water. He slid his bottom onto the hard plastic shell of the dropped gate, sat patiently while Martha slipped the blue plastic sandals onto his feet. He could hear laughter and joyous screaming coming from just over the high brown-brick wall that separated the pool from the parking lot.

  His mother finally took a step back and allowed Gary to slip to the ground. Abby walked ahead, weaving carelessly between parked cars toward the black-glassed double-doors below the entry sign reading Akheron Community Center, a low-slung beige-bricked building that served as a portal to the recreation center sprawled beyond. He clutched his towel tightly and ran to catch up with her.

  “Watch for cars, please!” Martha yelled at his heels. “Even parked cars move sometimes, you know!”

  Abby turned, hearing the slaps of the sandals on pavement. She smiled vaguely, then turned back and kept walking. Gary could see the straps of her bikini through the sunlit white-and-green-striped cotton dress she had pulled over it. She also had on flip-flops, silly ones with sparkly stones all over them, and carried her own bag with things Gary
couldn’t imagine needing at a pool. He knew what was in there because he snuck a look when they were waiting for her that morning.

  Sunscreen and a magazine made sense, but she also brought make-up and a hair brush, plus a couple other “girl” things he didn’t understand. A paper-wrapped tube, weird clips that he supposed were for her hair, and a small canister filled with pills he didn’t think were aspirin.

  He also thought it was a fake canister, that the pills were hidden. But he loved Abby, and would never tattle on her.

  When he caught up to her she absently dropped a hand down and grabbed his. He had to shuffle his goggles to his other hand quickly so as not to drop them, but he didn’t mind.

  “Stay with me and you’ll be safe,” she said, not looking down at him. He nodded and looked down to watch his feet cross the black asphalt of the parking lot, only looking up when they reached the dark double doors.

  They passed through together, hand-in-hand.

  Tyler Lippon hated his wings. He was almost eight years old now and he told his mother again and again that he could swim just fine. She knew he could because she’d come to see him do the classes at the YMCA. He didn’t even use the float board for the kick exercises because he didn’t need it, not really. Plus, he knew how to hold his breath for a really, really long time.

  “You’re still too small, and there’s a hundred crazy kids in the pool bigger than you,” his mother said, pushing one tight blue inflated ring over his narrow bicep, the rubbery surface irritating his skin.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said, working hard to pronounce the last word, recently learned, filled with its host of syllables and mysterious angry meaning.

  His mother smiled and kissed him on the forehead and he knew he’d lost.

  “Next year, old man,” she said, tapping his nose lightly with the tip of her finger, her red nail polish matching her one-piece suit and lush ginger hair. Tyler hated the nickname, something his parents called him as a tease because he was smarter than a lot of kids, and had what his Grandpa Sam referred to as an “old soul.” But he didn’t think his soul was old at all. He figured it was right around eight, just like he was.

  Escaping his mother’s warm hands, Tyler spun, checked once for oncoming kids, then made a running jump into the pool’s shallow end. Kids splashed mercilessly around him but he didn’t mind, part of him actually grateful now for the wings that kept him easily aloft, although he’d never admit it to his mother. As he was prone to do, he put his face down into the water and opened his eyes, ignoring the dull sting of the chlorine.

  The underworld of the pool was beautiful. It was cloudy and blue, filled with hips and legs of kids jumping, spinning, walking and kicking, all of it in a dreamy slow-motion. When the water overlapped his ears the sounds of the surrounding children became muffled and far away and he felt alone, like an angel floating around heaven looking at the saved ones fighting their way up, up through the clouds. He smiled under the water and kicked his legs. As he swam out of the shallow end, he spread his buoyed arms wide to either side and watched gracefully as the coarse white concrete bottom of the pool dropped further and further away from the surface, giving him the delicious impression he was spreading his angel wings and flying higher and higher into the sky toward God.

  Martha watched her children enter the recreation center and sighed. It was so fucking hot. She wondered if she had time for a cigarette, then remembered the pool passes were in her purse. She pictured the kids standing by the bored clerk, Gary’s feet parading up and down in a frenzy of impatience while Abby sulked gracefully, one hip jutting out, her lips in a pout and her wide blue eyes batting mercilessly as she waited for her poor, sad, old mother to arrive with the passes so the kids could go play.

  Normally Martha just dumped the kids off, went and met up with Suzanne for an afternoon martini at the Chi-Chi’s by the mall, but today she’d decided to join the little monsters, get some much-needed sun. She felt run-down, pale and out-of-shape. She wanted to go out more, to work out more, but she was always so damned tired. It had been a long week with work and the kids, who were always a handful in the summer without the time-suck of school. The late-night drinking had kept her from sleeping well, and on top of everything she had the weekend to contend with. She dreaded the thought of seeing Dan and his stupid, smug, smiling, benevolent face walking up her driveway in some combination of khakis and Brooks Brothers oxford - his typical lawyer weekend wear.

  She and Dan were still thick in the middle of the legalities, and even though he’d blamed her drinking for his leaving, it was his affair with Abby’s eighth-grade teacher of all fucking things that gave her primary custody of the children. Small blessings, she thought to herself, then smiled. Mr. Clean. Mr. Holy. Mr. Better-than-fucking-thou was caught red-handed bopping Ms. Kulowsky, formerly of Middlemarch Middle School, now full-time fuck-buddy to a civil lawyer on the wrong side of forty in the middle of a nasty divorce. Who was balding, she couldn’t help but notice the last time he had come for his weekend with the children.

  Fuck ‘em both, she thought. They deserved what they got, and she’d be more than happy to spend his hard-earned money for the next ten years or so until the kids were out of school. And then... well, yes, and then.

  And then you’ll figure it out, she thought, and smiled even wider as she opened the door to the rec center. Her skin collided with the chilled burst of air-conditioning and she nearly gasped with the shock of it. She removed her sunglasses in the darkened interior, saw the kids waiting impatiently by the clerk, and reached into her purse for the pool passes, silently thanking Holy Dan for the money he provided to pay for them.

  “Coming,” she said, thinking once more about stepping out for a smoke once the kids were set up by the pool. Hell, she thought to herself cheerfully, if it stayed this hot she might even take a dip herself.

  Gary split up from his mother and sister, detouring into the boy’s locker room—a wet, steamy, germ-fused abyss where he would have to pass through a gauntlet of naked and half-naked men and boys, through the communal shower room, past the bathrooms and finally out into the bright, golden nirvana of the pool deck. He always went through the locker room with his eyes lowered and pointed straight-ahead, not wanting to see more than he was forced to, and always traveled to the pool in his suit so he would only have to spend a few dashing moments traversing the locker room area.

  When he was younger he would come with his dad, who always changed in the locker room and always made Gary wait with him while he did. It was a torturous, horrifying passage of time, especially when his father would see someone he knew and, always a chatterbox, stop in mid-dress to talk about things Gary neither understood or cared about, all the while keeping him from his time at the pool. But now his father didn’t take him swimming anymore, because now his father lived in a different town that had no pool, and despite the sadness caused by his parent’s break-up, this was one of a few small blessings for which Gary was grateful.

  Finally making it through the hellish, flesh-writhing, overly-heated swamp of the shower room and the adjoining, foul-smelling toilets, Gary stepped out onto the white concrete pool deck, the fresh chlorine-scented air and sounds of laughing children washing away the grim experience of his passage.

  He turned to his left and saw his mother and Abby stepping out as well, apparently in some sort of heated discussion. Abby looked at Gary and rolled her eyes, and Gary waited until he felt the worst of the interaction had passed before approaching them.

  “Martha,” he asked, “can we camp by a wall?”

  Gary greatly preferred to set up their “towel camp,” as his mother called it, against one of the high brick walls, so that while the afternoon wore on they had a better chance of being overtaken by the elongating slice of shade the wall would provide, assuming they picked the proper position.

  “Sure,” she said curtly, already scanning the perimeter for a clear patch of concrete.

  Gary looked out over the pool, ga
uging his eventual position in the water, weighing his options for entry, figuring the best course of travel once submerged. The pool was a large blue rectangle with a buoy-filled rope separating the deep end where the diving boards were stationed, the moderately-deep section and, beyond that, the shallow end. If you scanned all the way to the left, you could see a circular set of stairs traipsing down from a curved corner that designated the entry for the very shallow end, no more than two feet deep, for children who might not be able to swim. Gary remembered the day he first ventured out of that safety zone. He and his friend Jerry had, under mutual agreement, ventured deeper, letting the rough pool bottom separate from their heels, then their tip-toes, and then, in a rush of adrenaline-fueled buoyancy, they were floating. Jerry had swum a few strokes out, but the heavy splashing of some teenagers had sent him back to where he could stand on his toes while, at the least, he could lift his mouth just above the surface of the water. He had turned to Gary, who had not swum out with him, and smiled, water slipping past his lips and into his mouth with each passing ripple as he spoke. “I think this is deep enough,” he said, sputtering the words through quick breaths. Gary nodded and they had both stood in that spot, bouncing on their toes, smiling like fools, their heads tilted upwards to avoid swallowing water, the sun bright and warm on their faces as kids pranced around them like malicious mermen.

  “Gary,” his mother said sharply, catching him “dazing” as she called it. Startled, Gary saw his mother was already moving through prone bodies toward a clearing.

  Abby, waiting for him, rolled her eyes—playfully this time—and ruffled his short black hair. “You are such an airhead,” she said, and put her arm around his shoulders.

  Gary knew a lot of kids would be embarrassed by this, and he also knew most siblings hated each other. He’d heard enough war stories from his own friends to realize this was the norm. But even though Gary was only twelve and Abby three solid years and two grades older, he loved her very much, and he was always careful never to be an annoying little brother. When Martha was out and Abby snuck a boy over, Gary was always diligent about staying out of the way, finding a book and huddling in his room while giggles and thick silences permeated from the living room. He had even discovered (he wouldn’t use the word “caught,” because he wasn’t sneaking or anything) Abby and a boy named Jackson sipping from Martha’s bottle of Vodka once. But she had just shooed him away with her hand and he had gone quietly, never saying a word about it. Because in this world, if he didn’t have Abby as an ally, he didn’t have anyone. His parents were too worried about their divorce, and his friends had their own problems. So Gary stuck by Abby, and together they could float above the broken house, the disjointed parenting, the drunken mother. Together they could pull through.