Five Days (A Warm Up)

This happened about a year and a half ago, early January, when I still worked on Saturdays.   After work, I stopped by the gym, and right before I stepped into the shower, my youngest brother, Daniel, called.

“Hey man, you coming home soon?”
“Yeah, just getting showered.  Do you need anything?”

“No, no.  Just shower and come home.”

“Okay.”

Showering at the gym is a somber affair, bare feet on mosaic tile, and standing aside for the hot water to get started.  It wasn’t uncommon for Daniel to call, so I didn’t think much of it.  While toweling off, I got another phone call.
“Hey, man, you should come home.  Dad is acting all weird and drunk but he didn’t drink anything.”

And I remember thinking, “Oh, he’s had a stroke.”

It turns out my dad had his stroke WHILE driving the car, with my mom and youngest brother as passengers.  He suddenly began driving erratically, and decided to go all the way to the farthest lane, a lane he had no business in. My mom, sensing what was going on, ordered him to pull over.  Instead of pulling over, he REVERSED the car.  No one was hurt, but my dad was quickly promoted to worst driver in the family.

When they got home that afternoon, pulled the whole, “No, no, I’m fine.  Just tired. . .what’s. . .what going on?” act and it wasn’t until the following day he was admitted to the hospital , where they proclaimed, “Yes, it was, in fact, a stroke.”  He spent the following night at the hospital, under observation.  Monday night, he came home, and we thought that was that.

It was three am when I heard the repetitive thunking sound outside my bedroom window.  Not the awkward thunking of a skull against a headboard when a couple hasn’t quite coordinated their sex life, but something more malicious. It went on for minutes, and there was some muffled talking, maybe some yelling, then silence.  Because I have the survival instinct of someone in a horror movie, I definitely wanted to know what was going on.  Craning my neck to look out my window, I saw nothing but the empty lot next to our house.

I thought maybe my parents’ room would have had a better view. 

A few months earlier, my mom had a complete hip replacement.  After the surgery, she hadn’t been able to walk for three months and there was a huge wound on her side from where the doctor opened her up, chiseled away at the bone, and inserted a metal ball-and-joint.  She told me somewhere in the middle of the operation, the anesthesia began to wear out, and she awoke to the sound of her bones cracking before a vigilant nurse decided to put her under again.

As a result of the surgery, my mom slept in a complicated way, pillows and limbs making shadowy, unnatural structures.  There were various pill bottles at her bedside, like silent gnomes praying to some terrible god.  Nevertheless, I clambered onto the wooden bed frame and tried to look outside.  She woke up.  

“What’re you doing?”
“There’s someone outside!  I think I’m gonna go out to look.”

“What?!  Just go to bed.  We can look in the morning.”
“Okay.”

I hopped off, and went back to my room, waited about 15 minutes and went outside.

It was dark, and the neighborhood was still asleep.  I walked onto the road, the cold asphalt hurt my bare feet.  My dad’s car was a mess of dirt and broken glass.  A rock had been smashed through the mirrors, and it looked like the same person had tried to do the same to all the windows.

Not wanting to be the only victim in the oncoming tragic slaying, I went to grab brother #2.  Groggy and confused we walked back to the street.  Looking around we viewed the damage, but figured there was nothing we could to until the sun came out.  It was 3:45am, and trashed front yards could keep. 

Suddenly, a white van down slowly on our street, it turned on the cul-de-sac, then slowed down in front of our house.  Its slowly turning wheels were our heartbeats.  Illuminated by the light of our garage, Gabriel and I must have shared one of those brother-sister psychic moments, “When it comes down to it, will we be able to kill someone?”

A woman, portly and bespectacled, someone you would see at church, stepped out.  “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, my son did all of this.”

The story she told was this:  She had been recently hospitalized for a broken leg, and had to get corrective surgery.  During that time, her adult son hadn’t been taking his medications.  She was hospitalized for a few days, and when she came home earlier that evening, he had already gone missing.  He had apparently been terrorizing the entire neighborhood.  They were already working with the police, and they would happily take care of the damage to the car, and don’t tell your dad, we wouldn’t want any more stress to happen to him.  By the way, in addition to damaging the car, my son also stole some stuff.

All through this exposition, the son in question paced back and forth, griping a stone.

Unloaded from the van were things I hadn’t noticed missing, Daniel’s bike, some toys, baby Jesus from the ornamental manager scene in from our front yard.  Baby Jesus was basically a plaster picture mounted upon a stake.  At about four in the morning, a woman and her under-medicated stood in front of me, armed with what was basically a vampire slayer.  “He must have known that Jesus will bring him through this trial.”  A gem of helpfulness emerged from Gabriel, “He can keep him, if he wants.

As they had an impromptu prayer circle in our front yard, Gabriel and I decided we should probably take down their license plate number, in case we all ended up dead in the morning.  When they finally drove away, we squinted into the darkness, but couldn’t make anything out.

The next day wasn’t spectacular; I arranged to have the following day off, to get the car repaired.  On the phone, the woman was cordial and I was blessed many times.

The car was fixed without a hitch, and I used it to pick Daniel up from grade school.  While we drove down the beach road leading to our house, I saw a naked man hanging onto a fence, his skin a deep and smooth and even brown.  He was yelling at the sky.

“Hey, Daniel, did you see the naked man?”

“What naked man?  There wasn’t a naked man.  You’re a liar.”
“There was definitely a naked man.  Want me to turn around?”

“Fine, turn around.”

We drove by in silence, and this time, the naked man on the fence was on the passenger side.  The sunlight shone off his buttocks as he yelled obscenities. 

“There’s totally a naked man!”
“I told you so!”

And now, we were headed the opposite way from home.  Once again, we had to turn around.  By now the man was growing a crowd.  I pulled off to the side, and called the police.

“Hi, I’m in Waiehu. . .”
“Is this about the naked man?”

I had just begun to describe our location, when three squad cars arrived, and the operator breathed a sigh of relief when I relayed this.  I could hear the police trying to coax the man off the fence. 

While we were still parked by the side of the road, Gabriel pulled up next to us, “Did you see the naked man?”

That night, I saw lights in the creek behind our house.   Probably drugs, I figured.  But I was tired and it was only Wednesday.