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Black Ferris

Brian LoRocco

    On a summer day in July of 2010, Benny Lenotti rode the Ferris wheel with someone who he believed was special.
    It was early July and the sun blazed high above the fairgrounds making it uncomfortably hot—and the girl who described herself as annoying, in a voice with a slight accent (that Benny liked a lot), let him know it. And know it. And know it. She said that it was hot more than two dozen times, and that was no lie. Most guys it would have bothered, but it didn’t bother him. It probably should have, but it didn’t. Being several years younger than he was, he had anticipated and was actually tickled by her immaturity.
    Holding hands they walked down the asphalt pathways, under the spray heads that did their best to cool them, breathing the smell of amusement park, hearing the roar of coasters and the sudden screams of thrill seekers. Looking back, it was hard to even imagine what would happen within a week’s time.
    “How ’bout that?” she suggested, pointing to the regal structure that stood bold over the trees and seemed to touch the sky.
    “You want to go on that?” he asked, and that was how he started thinking of his grandfather. He’d actually heard the old man’s voice in the back of his mind: synergy machines.
    Synergy machines: leave it to his grandfather to come up with something like that. If mom ever found out what Ben knew about her father, she would have been crushed; he was sure of it. For that reason, he’d been good about keeping his mouth shut. Even today, to be completely honest, something felt wrong acknowledging the old man after all that happened, but for better or worse it always started with the same daunting image in his mind. That old, beat up police cruiser. It was double parked in front of his grandfather’s driveway.
    Then the neighbors (who Mom never talked to), Carlos Rivera and his brother, Mrs. Franco and her two boys, and a bunch of others, all of them in the street, all of them with a collective look of curiosity. And of course 37^th Street, like all the fucked-up streets in Union City, being far too narrow—Ben unable to drive past the cruiser. Alan Hernandez, the boy from his little league team being spoken to by a lanky cop, and Mrs. Hernandez bellowing in Spanish at the officer while pointing incessantly at his grandfather’s house.
    And then his grandfather.
    The man himself.
    Being dragged out of his house, hand-cuffed. The crowd becoming rowdy, yelling crap in Spanish (a lot of these words Benny understood quite well.) How frail the old man looked. “You sons of bitches!” the old man cried with ferocity contradictory to his size. Finally tossing the old man into the car with force a man half his age was meant to withstand.
    That was always the first memory.

*    *    *

    He pulled into his mother’s driveway. They lived only four houses down. Though he’d been amped with excitement now, initially, he had been exhausted from doing bread deliveries all night. Hauling fifty pound boxes of bread into diners six days a week was enough to convince him that he had to go back to school. His friend Ralphie preached it all the time. School bro, school. And he would, he would definitely go back but he would see to it his little sister got through school first. That was something important to him. It was also something guys with stability, like Ralphie, didn’t get.
    “Blame your wonderful grandfather,” his mother would often say, but to Ben blame your fucked up husband was more like it. Yet whatever predicament they found themselves, whoever’s fault their lives was or wasn’t, he knew there was a lot of anguish over the years, a lot of hurt, and he sat in that driveway for far too long contemplating what to do.
    He found his mother stirring a pot of stew, with the phone tucked between her ear and shoulder. Whatever his plan was, not that he had one aside from being delicate, all of it somehow went out the window as the words Your father’s been arrested tactlessly came out of his mouth.
    She regarded him with absurdity.
    “It’s true,” he told her, raising his right hand.
    “Jean, let me call you back.”
    Lynn, overhearing what happened, stopped her texting or whatever she was doing and called from the living room, “What did the old douche bag do?”
    Ignoring her, Mom said, “Did you say he’s been arrested?” Curiosity deepened through her brow. Her eyes rolled up and wandered back and forth. In the silence thereafter, all that could be heard were the pockets of air popping in her stew, until finally, she turned her attention to him, searching his eyes, squinting, almost asking him to help remember something they might have suspected the old man of doing. It was soon clear neither one of them suspected anything. “What happened?”
    “I don’t know. When I was pulling in I saw a cop car in front of his house, and Alan Hernandez and his mom. You know Alan, the boy that’s on my little league team? Well, he was out there crying; his mother was screaming, and the next thing I know they’re bringing your father out in cuffs.” As he was saying all of this, he could see his mother’s face getting flush. “I have no idea what happened.”
    Then, ever-so-slowly, the look on her face began changing. “I’m sorry, Mom.” As he watched her face redden, he reached out and gently put his hand on her shoulder, knowing damn well he had opened that cycle of rumination. She took his hand, and considerately gave it back to him.
    With an unusual poise, that he distrusted, she said, “Haven’t I been saying it? All of these years, haven’t I been saying that sooner or later he’s going to mess up. Sooner or later he’s going to come across the wrong person. Didn’t I always say that?”
    “He probably molested the kid,” Lynn called, then laughed, and threw in with a goof voice: “Viagra.”
    “Lynn, enough,” Ben said. “Listen, Mom, I don’t know what he did, but whatever it was it looked serious, and whatever it was I don’t want you to—”
    “Oh,” she said, her vibe suddenly changing, “don’t you worry about me. I won’t. Remember how he acted after your grandmother died?” Ben remembered quite well, but she reminded him anyway. “I made that beautiful turkey dinner, remember that? I brought it over and he basically told me to go fuck myself. Do you remember when he did that?”
    There’s no need to make believe now was what he had said.
    “Then when I needed him the most in my life, when your father walked out on us, remember what he said then?” She mimicked his deep voice, ‘I told you, you should have married an Irish guy’ Two kids, and that‘s what he tells me....”
    Ben drew a deep breath. Her scrambling, borrowing money from friends, him putting off school, and working, and her crying, most disturbing of all, the un-human sound of her wailing at any odd hour — all of these visions flashed across.
    She went on —Benny heard it all before; being taken out of the will, the gambling, the drinking, and the books (he had a fucking book for everything) but primarily about his lovelessness. How distant a man he’d been from his family and how horribly he treated grandma when she was alive; how grandma was afraid to live alone with him. We could have lived in Wayne or somewhere nice, his mom often said.
    What really troubled Ben, however, was the look he saw in his mother’s eyes. He realized then, standing in that kitchen, that no matter how much his mother believed to be liberated from her father, somehow she never would be.
    Later in the evening, she’d asked Ben, “What are we going to do?”
    He told her he didn’t know.

*    *    *

    He never had a relationship with the man. That used to bother him. Not now, but once upon a time it did. Mostly it bothered him when his father walked out. He wondered if his mother did anything to push him away, and that was more out of natural curiosity than anything, because he knew even though she could be a tough lady, she loved him very much, and when she loved someone she would do everything to keep that person in her life (case in point that dick-head of a husband she had). Yet judging by the fact that in the eight years since his grandmother died the old man had never picked up the phone, walked down the street, or even so much as waved hello, spoke enough of its own truth, he supposed.
    Nearly a week following the incident, on a Thursday night, that changed when the doorbell rang. It was ten o’clock in the evening. When Ben opened the door, for a moment, the old man simply stood at the threshold, and Ben merely gazed disbelievingly into his thin, sagging face, and his unwavering blue eyes. Without formal greeting and without further hesitation the old man said, “I need to speak with you.” His voice projected power, carrying this grungy strength, that reminded Ben of a professional wrestler.
    “Whose down there, Ben?” his mother called.
    Ben looked back into the house, and then at his grandfather. Though the old man balanced himself with a cane, he was lurched forward aggressively; the cane did little to betray his projection of arrogance. She called his name again. Ben said, not knowing if it was to protect his mother or indulge his own curiosity: “No one, Ma. Just a friend.”
    “A friend,” his grandfather gruffed.
    “What do you want?”
    “Five minutes.”
    Then the old man turned and started descending the stairs, muttering something that Ben could not make out. He gave the impression of a man who was used to giving orders and having them obeyed. Ben stayed right where he was.
    “Five minutes!”
    Who the hell are you? Ben wondered. And how do you have the nuts to ring my mother’s doorbell after all of these years?
    He decided to find out.

*    *    *

    It had been on the closer side of ten years since he’d last been inside the man’s house—it was that humid afternoon, in late August and it was the day his mother made the turkey dinner— and walking up onto that porch, brought back an unpleasant reminder that he’d been up these stairs many times before, when his grandmother was alive, when he was a child and he believed things were good—though the railing and the clearing were both smaller than he remembered them being.
    “Come on inside.” The house reeked of old roasts that hung in the walls from years past. He followed the old man’s hunched body into the living room. “Have a seat. I would offer you a beer, but all I have is the good stuff.”
    It sounded like a joke, but his grandfather did not laugh.
    Ben sat on the sofa and glanced around the room, surprised to find it was much the way he remembered it. All of the furniture was the same; there were statues arranged neatly in a walnut curio, a TV dating from the late 1980’s with a VCR on top, the two old Victorian lamps that used to scare him and his sister, and the old landscape painting of a vessel westward bound.
    “Tell me,” the old man said, sitting in the love seat, “what you know about the Hernandez boy?”
    “What about him? He’s a good kid, if that’s what you’re asking.”
    “You know his mother too, don’t you?”
    “Yea. She’s not so bad either.”
    “She’s a fat spic,” he muttered under his breath.
    “Wha—”
    His grandfather held up his hand and waved it as if saying forget about that, forget I said that. Then with those hard blue eyes, and those sunken jowls, there was, as Ben saw it, a moment of doubt in the old man’s eyes—a moment where the old man calculated the worth of telling Benny anything at all. Then the old man began rolling up the left leg of his Khaki pants, grunting as he did it. “Come here, I want you to take a look at something.”
    Ben leaned forward, squinting.
    “Oh stop it, come over here and have a look at this. You’re not gonna catch anything.”
    Centered between erect white hairs, there was a reddish, black gouge on the guy’s bony knee, in dire need, Ben thought, of stitches.
    “You act like you never seen a gash before.”
    “How’d that happen?”
    “Stairs,” he said, “Those goddamn stairs. Do yourself a favor, Ben, don’t get old.” He rolled the pant leg back down. “Problem is it’s hard to manage now. It’s taking much longer to heal than I expected.”
    “You go to the doctor?”
    “It’s a gash, young man. You don’t see a doctor over a gash.”
    He decided not to push it—it was after all the old man’s life.
    “Anyhow that’s how I came across Alan Hernandez.”

*    *    *

    The twelve year old boy looked harmless enough, and Vincent knew that he was both a friend of the family and that he had played ball for Ben’s team—that’s what sitting on the porch for hours can do— but more than any of that, this kid just happened to be passing by. Vincent had four bags in the trunk. The bags were heavy. One had a carton of juice, the other a gallon of milk, and there was both meat and poultry in the others. He had four bags, a heap of stairs, and a bad knee. “Say there son, how would you like to make two dollars?”
    “Do you need help?”
    He looked up at those steps, and though he did not want to admit it, with his knee they had intimidated him. “Got a bum knee right now.”
    Alan offered to help, and said he did not need the two dollars.
    To Vincent’s surprise the kid took all four bags at once. “Just lay them down, there on the table. Have a seat. Let me fix you something to drink.”
    “I’m okay.”
    “I insist,” Vincent said, slapping two singles onto the table. “I have coke or ginger-ale. If you say you want diet anything, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
    “Do you have juice?”
    “Juice? Young man like you wants juice?” The kid laughed as if Vincent were the one that was weird, go figure, but the kid was Hispanic, Vincent supposed, and all these people did was drink juice and eat fruits. “Well, I don’t have mango or anything fancy like that. I have orange juice.”
    “That’s cool,” the kid said.
    “Is that cool?” Vincent said now baring those hard blue eyes onto him. He laid a cup before the boy, and shook the half gallon. “It has pulp in it though. Hope you don’t mind?”
    Kid shrugged.
    “Is that cool too?”
    Smiling, Alan said, “Yea, that’s cool too.”

*    *    *

    “So then,” he told Ben, “I got up to go to the bathroom. I told him I would be right back. I remember telling him that I would be right back. I just took a tinkle, and even with this knee, I couldn’t have been in that bathroom, longer than three minutes. And three minutes, quite frankly is pushing it. You with me so far?”
    “Yes,” Ben told him.
    “The boy was still sitting in that chair, drinking his juice. I told him he was a big help and I thanked him, I respectfully thanked him,” he sighed, shaking his head. “Ben, I’m seventy-four years old, and I often believe I have become a good enough judge of character to know within a few minutes what a person is and isn’t capable of. But that is foolish. Even at seventy-four, Ben, even at the age of seventy-four, sometimes I’m blown away. It’s only time that tells us such things.”
    “What happened?”
    “Relax, I’m getting to that.” The old man pointed toward the kitchen, yet never looked in that direction. “Inside there, there’s a key hook, just over the stove. I used to keep your grandmother’s pearls there.” Ben stared toward the empty doorway for a long time, a long time because it took his grandfather several moments to continue. “They hung there on that hook for eight-years. Until one day this boy comes into my house, and takes them.
    “Okay, I told that boy, I’m going to say this and I’m only going to say this to you once. I want two things from you. First, I want you to give me back my wife’s pearls and second, I want you to get the hell out of my home.”
    The boy looked at him with so much genuine confusion that Vincent said he believed the boy was well practiced. .
    “Empty your pockets boy, empty them right now,” Vincent said pointing into the boy’s face. “You know what he said to me then? He called me loco. The little sonofabitch called me loco.” Then the boy stood, as if meaning to hurry out. “Sit down!” But the boy didn’t. Vincent reached out and smacked the child hard across his eye, and the momentum of the shot carried Vincent over the chair where he stumbled to his knees; consequently, it sent the boy running out of the house.
    “Now she’s pressing charges. She’s claiming I not only hit him, but I tried to molest him. Oh, Ben,” he said, raising his fist and biting down on his knuckle. “My heart just can’t handle this anymore.”
    “Why did you call me here?”
    “That’s a good question,” he said, but didn’t answer it. Instead he gazed away.
    “How do you even know he took them?”
    His grandfather slowly turned to him, those blue eyes very much in focus again. The force of that stare, Ben came to realize, could say so much. When the power of his gaze eased, he said. “I want you to talk to Mrs. Hernandez on my behalf.”
    “Talk to Mrs. Hernandez? About what?”
    “Tell her, I want to forget the whole thing. Tell her, if she drops the charges, I’ll give her a check for five-hundred dollars, and we’ll call it even.”
    It seemed odd, and even, to a large extent, and admission of guilt. He thought about that—about how bizarre it would be for him to approach Mrs. Hernandez, and speak on this man’s behalf, and thus be held in association with this guy who never wanted part in anyone’s life. This guy who disappeared into his isolated world after Loretta died, and who wanted no ties to a life with him, his mother, his little sister, anyone. “I can’t do that,” Ben told him, “I’m sorry.”
    He stared back at Ben. Now it was no longer the blue eyes that were speaking but the jowls, the very crevices of his tired flesh. “Well, then, I thank you for coming.”

*    *    *

    He saw Mrs. Hernandez on a Sunday afternoon in Pathmark. He’d actually been pulling into an adjacent spot as she was loading up her car. Alan had both hands on the handle of a shopping cart and his foot on the axel. For no better reason than to be friendly (or so he believed), he said hello. He supposed he could have waited in the car, or pretended he had lost his phone, or taken an entirely different route to avoid them, but he didn’t.
    “Oh hello,” Mrs. Hernandez said. She wore a pink cotton tank that revealed protruding love handles (he could just imagine the choice words his grandfather would have about that).
    “What’s up?” he said to Alan. Alan smiled, and said what’s up, then looked at Ben in such a way that Ben suspected he was trying to show off that blackened eye; yet something—he wasn’t quite sure what—had the opposite effect, and it was momentarily humorous.
    “He’s your grandfather, right?” Mrs. Hernandez said, while shielding the sun with her hand.
    Then the humor was gone. Alan tugged back and forth on the cart playfully, and Ben could feel his cheeks warming with blood. “Yes,” he admitted, “he is. We really don’t keep in touch with him though.”
    “Well let me tell you something,” she said, taking the shielding hand, and raising it to a number one. “Nobody hits my child. Look at him. Look what that man did to him. He’s an animal, and you can tell him he’s going to pay for this. He’s going to pay big time.”
    “I’m sorry. Like I said, my family really does not associate with him.”
    She seemed to not be listening. She asked Ben how a grown man can lose control and proceeded by asking what else the pervert might have done.
    “He actually told me,” Ben said, “he wanted to pay you five-hundred dollars to forget the whole thing.”
    “He wants to pay me five hundred dollars? He wants to give me five hundred dollars? He should be paying Alan; that’s what he should be doing. Anyway, he’s going to have to pay a lot more than that. You can tell him he can take his five-hundred dollars and shove it where the sun shines.”
    Don’t shine, he corrected in his mind.
    She made a curt face, and slammed the door. It was clear to Ben; she thought he was her enemy as well.

*    *    *

    The following evening it rained heavily. It was 10:30 at night, and Ben lay in his bed in the darkness, listening to the rain pattering the window-sill, and splashing down into the alley. He couldn’t sleep. His mind was on the pearl-necklace, and this strange man living in an obscure world a few houses down.
    He wondered how regimented the old man was, and wondered if he would have been asleep. He put his sneakers on and went onto the porch, looked down the street and saw lights on in the old man’s house. Ben grabbed his keys and his hoodie, and without knowing why exactly went down the block.
    When his grandfather opened the door, he was a different man. His eyes seemed soft now, and his smile revealed teeth yellowed with age. “Come on in,” he said. Ben could smell alcohol on him, and as he followed him into the kitchen noticed a half empty bottle of Chivas Regal, beside a book. “Do you like Scotch?”
    “Sure.”
    He slapped down a shot glass. “Well then, drink up.” He’d expected the old man to be eager to hear of Mrs. Hernandez, but the fact of the matter was he hadn’t mentioned her at all. After Ben poured himself a shot, his grandfather did the same.
    He got to talking, or rambling or whatever you want to call it.
    “I’m the type of man,” he told Ben, “that questions things” blah, blah blah. “My life,” it eventually came to. “Ha, my crummy lousy life. Look at how it turned out. Alone. Lonely. You know, I wish I could have been closer to you and to your mother, and your sister, but I’ll tell you something, sometimes when pain gets you into its vice, you can’t get out, you don’t want to anymore. That’s a piss-poor excuse, I know.”
    He seemed like he was already quite drunk. Ben said, “I saw Mrs. Hernandez.” His expression hadn’t changed one way or the other; maybe the old man was too drunk to care. “Do you want to know what she said?”
    “I already know what she said.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “I knew what she would say, as soon as I asked you the question. I could read the reaction in your eyes. I knew it was absurd then.”
    “I didn’t—” he stopped. He meant to say I didn’t even know what she was going to say. The man was drunk, and there was no point in saying much more.
    “I’m going to tell you something, Ben, that I have never told anyone, and I might regret telling you this, but I have to tell someone.” His lower lip began quivering. “I never loved your grandmother.” With that, his breathing became deliberate. “I’m sorry,” he said, “You know what? Give me a minute.”
    The old man made his way to the bathroom. Ben listened to him hack up some phlegm and spit it into the sink, followed seconds thereafter by the sound of a strong stream of urine. The empty key ring above the stove caught his attention. For a moment Ben wondered if the pearls had fallen behind the stove, if that was even possible. It was, he thought, it certainly was.
    “You okay in there?” Ben called. Then he looked at the book on the table. He opened it to the book marked page. On it was a story written by Ray Bradbury called “The Black Ferris.” Ben skimmed through it as his grandfather came back into the room and poured himself another shot.
    “You ever read Bradbury?”
    “In high school I did.”
    “Oh he brings you back. That there,” he said, glimpsing at the book, but really seeing the book marker set in the page “is my favorite story.”
    “What’s it about?”
    “It’s about a Ferris wheel.” He smiled and added something that did not make any sense: “Synergy machines. Anyway, it has this ability to go counter-clock wise, and subtract away a year of your life with every spin, bring you all the way back to childhood.” He was going to go on but said, “I won’t spoil it. Read it for yourself.” He grinned. “You know Ben, I wish there really was a Ferris wheel like that.”
    “To take you back to childhood, right, when things were good?”
    “No,” he said. “Not to childhood. I would go back to more sophisticated times, times that were very special to me. ”
    “When would that be?”
    “The times that I shared balance with other human beings. Do you know what I mean by that?”
    Ben had no idea.
    Looking away from him now the old man said, “Loretta and I fought so much. Oh, we fought so much. The problem with relationships is something everyone knows, but rarely admits. The real problem is love doesn’t work the way people believe it does. People don’t love each other equally. One always loves more than another, or it comes and goes at different times, and some of us never really love at all. It works no other way. Yet Ben, there are these moments, moments when two people are in the same place at the same time sharing the same feelings. It’s synergy. It happens as briefly as the last of a sunset disappearing into the ocean, but I’ll tell you something Ben, it’s the most beautiful experience one person can share with another.
    “I never loved Loretta. I had two children with that woman, and I mudded through forty loveless years, because it was safe, it was comfortable, God forgive me, after the kids it was obligation. It was the biggest mistake I have ever made.”
    “What about the pearls?”
    “Guilt,” was all he said.
    “The girl’s name was— never mind the girl’s name. That’s not important. We only spent a year together.” He stopped and looked Ben hard in his eyes. “You see Ben, and you have the right not to believe any of this, but there was something about when I shared that synergy with her, her head would tilt back, and there was this shine in her eye, this glow that somehow extenuated her face making it strikingly beautiful, and lovingly receptive to every word I was saying. Even now, it’s hard to put into words. And how her body would quiver and her flesh would ripple during our intimacy. Somehow I was connecting to a very deep part of her; it was like I was talking directly to her soul, or whatever you want to call that place where you keep the deepest and truest feelings. In seventy-four years Ben, I’ve never been able to touch somebody that way again.”
    The old man reflected some more. There were experiences rolling around in his head that he probably could never adequately convey with words, but that he knew to be very real.
    “What went wrong?”
    “That’s what troubles me—I like to think neither of us understood, at the time, what we had. Maybe we were afraid of it. I can’t even tell you I understand it now. Maybe it was so raw, it ran its course. Maybe it all went away the moment I took her home, or worst of all, maybe I’m delusional, but those moments of synergy,” he closed his eyes, the shot glass shaking absently in his hand, “those moments of synergy, man,” he said, “that is life.”
    There came silence for a long time. “Did you ever try to get her back?”
    “I saw her after that, and you know what Ben, everything was gone, poof, like nothing ever happened at all.”
    Ben had wondered something else. If his grandfather so valued human interaction, why had he shut off to it?
    “I discovered something too late. I was well into my marriage with your grandmother by then. It might sound strange to you; it might sound selfish, but it’s me; it’s what I’ve come to believe, and ultimately it’s what shut me down. My problem is if you don’t got the real feelings all you got is bullshit.” He drank down the Scotch, shrugged.
    Ben thought about that. He thought about everything the old man had said. When he left, he couldn’t decide if the old man was simply drunk or if he was making any kind of sense, but the old man seemed to believe it all. Eventually, Ben would come to understand something about him. In fact, he vowed to make more time with the old man, but as it turned out he would not have that opportunity—within a week, the old man had gone into cardiac arrest and two days later would lose his life in Palisade General.

*    *    *

    In the summer of July 2010 he was on a Ferris wheel. It was at dusk, and from the ground there were shadows, but in the air, up there on top of the world, where they were untouched, the sun dipped the world in gold, the tops of the trees below them, the sparkle of the roller coaster tracks in the distance, and the park itself; the noise quieting as they ascended, and the warm of a fading summer day upon their skin—initially he thought it would be prettier to ride at night, but when they were on top he realized he was wrong.
    She sat with one leg draped over his lap, her arm around his neck, and they looked into one another’s eyes. There was no weight holding them back—the old man was right. It was one of the most beautiful experiences a person can share with another. He took a breath and before they kissed he believed she had said I love you for the first time, but couldn’t be sure because the machinery sounded.
    In the brief two months: You’re special to me; I never felt this way before: those were her words. That was what he had said back.
    Six days after they rode the Ferris wheel, somehow, to his utter disbelief, it all ended (he couldn’t tell you why exactly either).
    But he realized something.
    Breaking up so near experiencing the synergy his grandfather spoke of made him appreciate the devastation the old man must have felt—the devastation he must have felt living his entire life in the wake of such feelings, where the sun, as he had said, disappeared.

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