Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse

of box tops from specially marked boxes of the cereal. My mother thought she’d given me the box tops for safekeeping. She hadn’t.
    â€œWhat do you mean you can’t find them?” she screamed. Calming her down was impossible. Nakome and I were trying to decelerate a moving train. I was filling with a drowning panic, triple-checking under cushions and in my pockets for what I knew wasn’t there. I had jeopardized our trip, and now neither of us could go home, ever.
    â€œWe can’t leave now! I don’t have any money to buy your ticket!” (Once we were back home, I’d see her pull from between her breasts an egg-shaped clump of blood-stained twenty-dollar bills Paul had slipped her during our visit.)
    â€œI’ll just leave you here!” she shouted. “You’ve taken enough of my life from me!”
    My mother grabbed my throat. Then she pulled me across the trailer the way a girl would drag a lifeless doll up a flight of stairs. She threw me shivering onto the bathroom floor and then snatched one of Nakome’s leather knife holsters and stabbed at my neck with it. It was empty; the holster tip didn’t cut, simply folding inward. She tossed it aside and yanked me over to the toilet like a mop.
    My mother wrapped her hands around my neck again and pushed my face in the toilet water while I flailed my short arms trying to reach the flush handle. My resistance frustrated my mother; her grip tightened, and her nails pierced my skin. I was drowning and choking, and it would be seconds before I lost consciousness.
    Nakome wedged himself in the bathroom doorway, grabbed my mother’s shoulders, and uncorked her off me. My head slapped in a wet puddle on the ground. There was a synchronous sound of shallow breathing from us all, our chests rising and falling at different rates, our breathing a relay game.
    When the box tops were found, an apology was grumbled, but my mother explained to me that being strangled had been a natural consequence of my “carelessness.” Not being given the box tops wasn’t an excuse; I should have asked for them. Later, as I got older, whenever my mother got unwelcome mail from the welfare office or the IRS, when I couldn’t unjam a tape from her VCR or “fix” her wonky phone line, when I was the closest male at hand on whom to take out her frustrations with men, or, above all, whenever she was afraid, she’d bellow for me from her bedroom.
    â€œBrrrrraannndo!”
    It was a chain-saw howl, a concussion blast, that to this day makes me jump at loud noises. When she called my name, I stopped being her son and turned into a hunchback lab assistant scurrying through our horror B-movie castle, searching for the one essential ingredient she needed to complete her experiment. Of course, I’d always lack this one crucial piece of her puzzle. It was, like those box tops, something she’d already forgotten she’d never given to me.
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    Paul was paroled in November 1978, two months after our visit, but instead of moving to Los Angeles to be with us, he went to the Saint Louis area to live with his wife. A wife my mother hadn’t known existed.
    While he was incarcerated, Paul began a correspondence—interestingly, under the name that my mother might have helped him create, Paul Sky Horse Johnson—with a high school girl named Frances. They’d been married in prison several months after my mother received Paul’s first letter, in the fall of 1977. Paul told his bride he had a son named Brando in Los Angeles and proudly hung a picture of me as a toddler—taken back when Candido was living with us—on his wife’s apartment wall.
    My mother now had to share a second Paul Skyhorse with his own legitimate wife. First, she was stunned, then angry, and then . . .
    â€œThat’s what Frank is for,” she said.
    In my memory, the transition between fathers