by Aaron DiMunno
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\nBANG!\u00a0 BANG!\u00a0 BANG!<\/p>\n
A hammer, outside, in the night.<\/p>\n
Summer dusk has settled, thick and dark and damp in the trees and grass behind the distressed solitary blue-gray farmhouse where Joey Melluso lives. \u00a0Now and then, phantom headlights flash rectangles of light between the staggered tree trunks that separate the backyard from the rural highway beyond. \u00a0Yard bugs are making their music in the dark.
\nEvery window of the forlorn home is illuminated, but it sits silent and still. \u00a0On a well worn rug, in a tiny bedroom up the stairs, curly-haired Joey is playing with his Matchbox cars alone.<\/p>\n
Each night Joey’s mother Diedre makes sure to kiss him good-bye before she leaves. \u00a0Deidre works nights down in town, serving beer in cans and thick glass mugs to old drunk guys with abandoned faces. \u00a0And ever since the summer before last, just after Joey’s mom vanishes in a swirl of lipstick and cigarettes,\u00a0his dad, Frank, disappears too.\u00a0 Out the back of the kitchen, with a creaking slam of the torn screen door, to his workshop, an old barn-like shed.<\/p>\n
Frank\u00a0usually putters around\u00a0for a short time after Deidre leaves.\u00a0 Messing with household repairs, looking at notebooks and loose scraps of paper marked with stuff that Joey doesn\u2019t understand, smoking nervously at the window. \u00a0The smoke goes in his eyes but he never squints. \u00a0Now and again he’ll stare blankly at Joey with a wet woeful gaze before suddenly\u00a0smiling out from under his mustache and turning away.\u00a0 Joey is old enough to know that something is wrong, but too young to have any idea what it is. \u00a0Just feels the dread in his belly. \u00a0Like climbing the basement stairs alone with the darkness chomping at his back.<\/p>\n
It’s his father’s eyes that make Joey wish his mother was home.<\/p>\n
Not long ago, on a muggy summer Sunday evening, Joey sat crying in the running car while his father tossed a knotted burlap sack of rocks and kittens into the pond down the road.<\/p>\n
The kittens had been mewing nonstop and Joey could feel their ribs when he tried to calm them. \u00a0But their mom \u2013 a calico mouse catcher named Pumpkin \u2013 wouldn\u2019t feed them. \u00a0The veterinarian recommended a clean clinical death but charged more than Frank or Deidre could pinch from their pockets.<\/p>\n
Joey recognizes the look in his father’s eyes. \u00a0It’s the same look he had when he came back to the car that day and slammed it into gear. \u00a0It makes Joey want to cry. \u00a0So he spends the evenings in his bedroom until his dad comes in from the shed and sends him to bed.<\/p>\n
Joey has a baby sister named Marisa. \u00a0She makes him feel like crying too. \u00a0The doctor found a brain tumor and now Marisa’s face is all slouched and scrunched like a doll-sized old man. \u00a0Her hair is falling out in patches, heightening her geriatric visage. \u00a0Joey doesn’t want to think about his sister. \u00a0So he plays.<\/p>\n
BANG! \u00a0BANG! \u00a0BANG!<\/p>\n
Joey quits his carpet car chase and shuts his bedroom light off. \u00a0Miniature cars paused mid-wreck, he puts his hands in the dusty canal of old paint chips and dead bugs filling the open windowsill. \u00a0The window screen adds a metallic sour to the thick current of night squeezing through its galvanized mesh. \u00a0Joey presses his nose to the flex and air. \u00a0It’s the only way he can see the big shed out there in the dark.<\/p>\n
Cracks and crevices in the wooden hodgepodge of planks that make up the walls of the outbuilding, unseen by daylight, expose themselves as a plexus of sharp bright slashes. \u00a0When a slash dissolves and reappears, Joey knows it’s his father moving around in there. \u00a0He has no idea what his dad is up to every night. \u00a0But Frank always brings Marisa with him.<\/p>\n
Joey hasn’t been allowed in the shed since his father started working in there all the time. \u00a0He used to play out there, hiding under the workbench, loading caulking guns with tubes of construction adhesive to defend against the imaginary alien hordes assaulting his lunar outpost.<\/p>\n
Two years ago, just before the end of the school year, his dad put a big rusty lock on the door\u00a0and it stayed that way.<\/p>\n
Joey remembers those last few weeks of school. \u00a0They were learning about jobs and a policeman had come in to speak to the class about his occupation. \u00a0The teacher asked each of the students to tell the class what their parents did for a living. \u00a0When it was his turn Joey got excited and forgot all about his mother. \u00a0He stood up and beamed at his classmates.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy Daddy’s a carpenter!\u00a0 He builds things.\u201d<\/p>\n
BANG! \u00a0BANG! \u00a0BANG!<\/p>\n
The hammer again. \u00a0From behind the plank walls, the toothy “zoop” of a handsaw biting into wood. \u00a0Then nothing.<\/p>\n
A few crickets begin to tune up and then the nighttime concerto begins.<\/p>\n
Then, all at once, the whine and grind of a power drill obliterates the backyard insect orchestra.<\/p>\n
The yard falls silent again.<\/p>\n
BANG! \u00a0BANG! \u00a0BANG!<\/p>\n
From beneath the barn door Frank\u2019s shadow licks the graveled earth and sharp stones of the short driveway. \u00a0The door slides open and the ground turns a sickly mustard yellow. \u00a0Frank stands silhouetted in the doorway, the angry glow of a cigarette swelling red one last time. \u00a0Then the tiny point of flame arcs into the wet grass like a comet.<\/p>\n
There had been a night last fall when Joey had been down in the kitchen, up on a stool, about to pour himself a glass of milk. \u00a0His father came through the wooden screen door from the backyard carrying Marisa in her baby seat. \u00a0She was asleep. \u00a0Frank’s formidable forehead of creases and dents was glistening with sweat and his shirt was soaked with dark patches. \u00a0He stopped short when he saw Joey at the counter and put the baby seat down.<\/p>\n
“Whaddya doin’ sneaking around the house at night?” \u00a0Frank snatched the carton from his hands and smacked him on the back of the head. \u00a0“Get back upstairs. \u00a0I don’t wanna hear it from ya muther.”<\/p>\n
Joey was stunned. \u00a0His dad never hit him before. \u00a0But he did as he was told and the glass sat empty on the counter.<\/p>\n
Now Joey watches his dad crossing the midnight lawn toward the house and he’s frightened of him. \u00a0He isn’t carrying Marisa.<\/p>\n
Frank comes for Joey in his bedroom. \u00a0Doesn’t speak a word but takes him by the hand and leads him through the deep dark night of the backyard. \u00a0The cuffs of Joey’s pajama bottoms get wet and heavy and cold against his ankles. \u00a0The dampness is shocking. \u00a0Joey has never been out in the grass this late. \u00a0Not after the dew.<\/p>\n
Father and son reach the entrance to the workshop. \u00a0Joey stands stock-still in his sailboat pajamas. \u00a0He is momentarily blinded as his father opens the shed door and lets go of his hand. \u00a0Frank walks into the light.<\/p>\n
Joey’s eyes slowly adjust to the bright light and the first thing he sees is his old go-kart in the corner. \u00a0It looks burned.<\/p>\n
Before Joey learned to ride a bicycle, Frank built him a go-cart out of plywood, using the wheels, axles, and steering apparatus of an old pedal-powered fire truck. \u00a0He had used a hacksaw to cut the end from a silver pipe on an old canister vacuum and installed it at the back of the car like a tail pipe. \u00a0He even transferred the rusty silver bell, tying it to a string so Joey could ring it racing down the hill.<\/p>\n
The go-cart was too heavy for Joey, though, and Frank quickly grew tired of pushing the weight of all that wood and metal back up the hill for another go.<\/p>\n
“I wish it had a engine,” Joey had said to his dad after his last ride. \u00a0But the car went to the back corner of the barn to be forgotten.<\/p>\n
Joey moves his gaze from the go-cart and finally sees what his father has been building.<\/p>\n
There, in the barn-like shed, on the cracked concrete floor, under the highest part of the disintegrating roof, stands a rocket.\u00a0 The rocket is made of wood.\u00a0 Frank is beaming up at his unlikely creation.<\/p>\n
It looks like a cartoon. \u00a0Or as if a 1950s\u2019 sci-fi landing party might emerge with helmets and laser guns. \u00a0Joey’s father helps him up the aluminum hardware store ladder leaning against the side of the craft. \u00a0The rungs have ridges and Joey remembers his father holding the same ladder for him when he climbed onto the porch roof for a styrofoam glider gone astray.<\/p>\n
The ladder leads to a small circular opening just below the nose of the rocket. \u00a0The opening is sanded down and smoothed to perfection. \u00a0No splinters. \u00a0No sharp edges. \u00a0The glow from the incandescent bulbs strung about on orange extension cords projects a perfect stage-light oval into the interior of the craft, directly onto Marisa. \u00a0An old vaudevillian in a child’s safety seat, she flails her little baby arms and a laugh burbles from her strangely septuagenarian face. \u00a0Her right eye droops instead of carrying the smile.<\/p>\n
\u201cGive ya sister a kiss, Joey,\u201d says Frank from down below, his voice thick.<\/p>\n
Joey climbs into the wooden rocket. \u00a0Tears are on his cheeks. \u00a0The interior of the craft, walled and floored with rough damp plywood, seems incomplete and desperate. \u00a0It smells of sawdust and sweat like his father after a day of hard work.<\/p>\n
It also smells of gasoline.<\/p>\n
“Go on, we gotta get goin.'”<\/p>\n
Joey kisses his sister on the cheek below her good eye. \u00a0She spits and giggles. \u00a0Frank prods him back down the ladder.<\/p>\n
Joey is a zombie. \u00a0He’s out on the driveway. \u00a0He feels the press of his father\u2019s mustache on his forehead and the heavy T-bone-steak weight of his father’s calloused hand on the top of his head.<\/p>\n
Frank goes back into the shed and closes the door. \u00a0Joey doesn\u2019t know what to do. \u00a0Warm pee soaks his pajamas against his legs. \u00a0It turns cold in the night air and he stands there.<\/p>\n
From behind the barn door he can hear his father\u2019s work boots clanking up the ladder and Marisa’s distant muffled baby laughter… then the alarming clatter of aluminum on concrete. \u00a0Silence returns and the insects get back to their music.<\/p>\n
At first there is just a vibration, the ground and rocks trembling against his bare feet. \u00a0The driveway is warm. \u00a0It hasn\u2019t cooled much since the sun went down.<\/p>\n
The rumbling quickly becomes a roar and there is a tremendous flash. \u00a0An invisible wave hits Joey in the face and he is on his back, skidding across the wet. \u00a0He can’t grab a breath and his ears are ringing like he exploded a whole roll of cap gun ammo with a rock.<\/p>\n
The shed nearly explodes as what’s left of the roof blasts up and everywhere and the wooden rocket shoots out against the stars.<\/p>\n
Joey just lays there, dumbfounded and sobbing in the grass.<\/p>\n
The cartoon rocket ship is not a cartoon at all. \u00a0It is real and it is made of wood. \u00a0Almost immediately it catches fire and plummets back to the earth. \u00a0The fireball drops like an apocalypse down behind the dense border of big trees that separates the backyard from the old turnpike.<\/p>\n
There is a second explosion and a screeching of tires across that thick summer night. \u00a0Then silence, before the bugs begin again. by Aaron DiMunno BANG!\u00a0 BANG!\u00a0 BANG! A hammer, outside, in the night. Summer dusk has settled, thick and dark and damp in the trees and grass behind the distressed solitary blue-gray farmhouse where Joey Melluso lives. \u00a0Now and then, phantom … Continue reading
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\nAARON DIMUNNO<\/strong> likes putting words together and having sex and sleeping in a sunny bedroom. He\u2019s taking a break from New York City to do more of the words and sunny bedroom thing. Too much coffee makes him shake and shit. Right now there are squirrels fighting on a branch outside his window.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"