Phoenix Island by John Dixon Page B

poor imitation of the perma-smile before bursting into laughter.
    The Spook . Carl’s dad.
    It took Carl, who had never witnessed cruelty like this, half a block to really understand. He was vaguely aware of Tommy pulling on his arm, saying those guys were dumb, they didn’t mean anything by it . . . and then Carl was at the end of the block, and Liam’s friends were punching and kicking him and calling him crazy, and Liam—despite being older and bigger than Carl—was on the ground, covered in blood and moaning, half-conscious. The older boys knocked Carl down several times, but he pulled himself off the sidewalk every time and waded back in swinging, until Tommy’s dad broke up the fight. The older kids were all too willing to get Liam onto his feet and peel out of there; even in his rage, Carl could see the look of fear in their eyes.
    “What is it?” Tommy’s dad asked, but Carl was too angry to do anything but struggle and yell after the fleeing boys.
    When Tommy told the story, his dad, whose hands were rough from tree work and weather, hugged Carl hard, saying with his lingering brogue, “Oh, Jaysus, Carl boy, Jaysus. It’ll be all right. I’ll just have a talk with their fathers, and they won’t ever say nothing like that again. You mark my words, Carl boy.”
    He’d been right about that. The boys never had. But the damage was done.
    Carl’s innocence was lost.
    The fight with Liam had filled him with fury. Before Liam, Carl couldn’t have imagined such cruelty; after Liam, he couldn’t forget it. If someone could joke that way right in front of the house, how many people were calling Carl’s dad the Spook behind closed doors? His old assumptions—that his dad was universally hailed as a hero and that most people were good, law-abiding citizens—came crumbling down, and into the vacuum of their absence raced burning rage.
    Carl grew quiet. He spent all his free time on the porch, his father’s tireless, silent defender. His grades dropped. It was hard to practice long division when he had the need to look up every time someone passed thefront porch, had to watch and listen for the slightest clue that someone thought his dad was a joke. When people stopped by—something that happened less and less frequently as the months passed—Carl grunted in response to questions, refused to smile, and made most people so uncomfortable that they soon left.
    For his mother’s sake, anytime someone came by and laughed, or looked up and stared, Carl squeezed his fists and waited. Once they crossed into the next block, he tore off the porch after them, out of her sight. No matter how old they were, how big they were, or how many of them there were, he attacked without warning, without mercy, and without the slightest hesitation. Sometimes he won, and sometimes he lost, but he always fought his hardest, and nobody could keep him down. By the time he was ten years old, he had a reputation as a fearless, heavy-handed nut.
    Then he got in real trouble.
    His first court date was a rainy Tuesday. His mother pulled him out of school. She wore her church clothes and cried the whole ride over. She’d missed a lunch shift at the diner, but that wasn’t why she was crying. She cried over the shooting and Carl’s life as a caregiver and his trouble with fighting. Thinking back now, remembering how her hands had shaken as she unscrewed the cap of the aspirin bottle she carried at all times by this point, Carl realized she’d been crying about something else, too. The headaches had already started. Had she known, even then, that she had only months to live?
    The previous night, waking from a nightmare, Carl had risen and gone to the kitchen, where he sweated and shook and sipped water, listening to the clock tick and staring at the closed door to the living room they’d converted into a space for his father. He went to the door and cracked it open so a little slice of illumination fell over the face of his father, who