American Dream

American Dream

J.J.Brown

Copyright 2012 J.J.Brown

Smashwords Edition

ISBN-13: 978-0-9838211-7-5

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or to people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1. Castle

CHAPTER 2. Sparrow

CHAPTER 3. Sister

CHAPTER 4. Hospital

CHAPTER 5. The Call

CHAPTER 6. Carmella

CHAPTER 7. Psychiatrist

CHAPTER 8. Lawyer

CHAPTER 9. Last Visit

CHAPTER 10. Will

CHAPTER 11. Lion’s Den

CHAPTER 12. Cremation

CHAPTER 13. Going Home

CHAPTER 14. Burning

CHAPTER 15. Film Opening

CHAPTER 16. Inheritance

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

For Book Clubs

CHAPTER 1. Castle

Rising from the rock cliffs like a vague image in a dream, ruins of a castle stand at the edge of the Hudson River north of New York City. The blackened stone walls are relics of a prosperous past in a present plagued by loss, debt, foreclosure, and homelessness. People crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge see it and wonder, who owned that abandoned castle on the river? Who lived there?

The Marcellos once lived there.

Daniel Marcello makes his final visit driving through an early summer thunderstorm in an old, borrowed Honda. It’s the first time he’s driven in years and yet the winding highway approaching the castle is still familiar. The car’s wipers beat rhythmically at the blur of rain outside in an exhausted lament. Daniel’s bringing his son, a frail four-year-old who he’s allowed to see some weekends.

The boy explores the curves of rose petals and points of thorns carved into a maple box, running his little fingertips along the designs. The box is the size of a large book and has a rubbed oil finish.

Dad? What’s in the box?

The tires lose their grip on the slick road and the small car skids across the lanes of the highway down a steep hill. Daniel’s son Anthony shrieks and slides up against the car door. The box scrapes along the seat next to him. He reaches over and grabs it. Daniel focuses on steering the car in the direction of the skid and at the bottom of a hill they slow to a stop in a pond of pooling water. The car stalls.

Anthony laughs nervously, That was weird.

Give the engine a minute. I’ll start it up again.

Anthony clutches the box. Dad. I asked you before. What’s inside the box?

Ashes, Daniel says, listening to a peal of thunder break and fade.

He turns the key in the ignition, it catches and he cautiously merges with traffic. His thoughts wander to Carmella. She’s working security in the city today and it’s generous of her to loan him her car but he has to remember to tell her about the tires. He drives along a winding road leading up through the hills away from the river.

They reach the Marcello Castle and the storm has passed; clouds are breaking. Daniel parks at the side of the road. The place he remembers as his childhood home is now utterly abandoned, dream-like. Daniel looks through the car window at the charred and crumbling remains of the east end of the castle. The looming structure was a jewel of twentieth century industrialists, built by his family three generations back. But it is no longer that.

As the clouds disperse, the sun streams down over the wet grounds. He notices red signs printed with bold black letters. Posted: No Hunting. No Trespassing. The offensive signs line the perimeter of the castle grounds, presumably put up to deter small game hunters, vandals, and thieves. They probably meant me, he thinks. He rubs his hands over his face and through his hair. Whoever posted the grounds may have wanted to scare away local children, to stop them from playing in the ruins. He hopes that his son can’t read well enough to ask about the signs on his first visit to the old place.

Anthony is poking at the box in the front seat and doesn’t look up at all. He likes the box. He wonders if he’ll get to take it with him when the visit with Dad ends and it’s time to go back to Brooklyn. He guesses his Mom won’t let him keep it anyway.

He asks, What’re ashes for?

Daniel opens his car door and the old metal parts scream against one another. Rainwater drips off the roof, down the open door frame, and in around him. He steps out, surrounded by fog that nestles in around him. It feels good to get out of the cramped car and stretch his thin frame. He breathes deeply. The oxygen-rich air is loaded with thick perfume spreading from locust blossoms. The flowers dangle from tall old trees that seem to guard the castle. Sunlight cuts through the fog in streams and glistens on the No Trespassing signs.

Daniel touches a sign where it sticks out of the wet grass at an odd angle. Hard plastic held by rusted metal staples onto an unfinished wood two-by-four post; a poor job, ugly and ineffective, he thinks. Back in the city, posting a sign like this would mean nothing. High fences topped with spiral razor wire, electronic surveillance, pit bulls or mastiffs trained as fighting dogs, or even armed security guards would mean something. The idea of drawing an imaginary boundary seems absurd to him, here where it appears that no one ever visits, much less actually uses the land. Baffling. As if the person who posted the signs thought they could prevent others from using the land.

An early childhood memory of Father crosses his mind. Some legal entanglement over a man found shot near the castle. The victim turned out to be one of the neighbor’s relatives. It was said that the man wandered onto their property while hunting, trying to track a wounded deer, but the man didn’t live to tell about it. Being shot at would be a deterrent to trespassing, definitely.

Daniel looks back in the car and sees his son hasn’t moved. He wonders, what would Father have thought of the boy if he had met him?

Come on out, Anthony.

Door stuck.

Come out this way. Daniel leans into the car, reaches for Anthony’s hand.

Daniel takes a pair of sunglasses out of the glove compartment with his other hand. Dilated pupils are one of the side effects of anti-depressant medication, but tolerable, because without the pills, where would he be? Not here. And not with Anthony. As the sky clears, the bright light is already triggering pain behind his eyes. He knows he’ll need the glasses.

The little boy climbs by the steering wheel and tumbles out of the car, landing in wet grass. Daniel watches him scramble up and stand beside him.

Daniel puts on his sunglasses and lifts the wooden box from the seat. He cradles it in his arms. Home, I’m bringing you home. Do you know the place? Chicory, burdock, and nettles choke the path to the castle now. The wet weeds drag at Daniel’s jeans reminding him of a dirty winding sheet, the kind used to wrap and cover a corpse in the old days.

Little Anthony leaps over the trampled weeds, trying to keep up. He frowns at Dad’s back. In the deep silence of wide open country spaces, the child feels alone. He is suddenly nervous; he struggles to Dad’s side and reaches to take his hand.

Wet, Anthony complains. He wiggles his little hand free again and kicks at the tall plants.

Daniel watches him. Beautiful though, in a way, up here. Imagine each drop of rain that fell is somebody who used to live up here, a soul.

A what?

Soul. The whole place is haunted, Daniel says, without thinking, and then wishes he hadn’t said it.

Anthony feels his foot getting wet. He realizes he’s lost a sneaker. Creepy story. People don’t like if you say things like that, Dad. Anthony stops, picks his sneaker out of a clump of grass and pushes his little foot back into it. Don’t like rain. Don’t like your story.

A crow caws from the top of the crumbling castle walls, sounding an alarm to others in the surrounding trees. More crows respond in a cacophony announcing visitors. Daniel listens to the calls echo off the cliffs and hills over the Hudson River. Fresh tracks from small animals mark the wet soil beside him. The wooden storage barn behind the castle used to be home to a large family of raccoons. That was when he himself was a child about his son’s age, back before the old barn burned down. Not a trace of the barn remains, except in memories.

Anthony points to the box. Why’d you bring ashes here?

Daniel regards the smaller image standing beside him. The entire future of the Marcello family looks back at him. The boy is a treasure in the ruin of Daniel’s life. Black silky hair, round face, large dark eyes, Anthony is a serious boy. Daniel owes him a story. But what he remembers is no story for a child. He thinks Carmella may have been right, he shouldn’t bring the child up here to the castle.

Daniel takes off the sunglasses and rubs his eyes, remembering how it all started. The twisted family history of the last six, volatile months runs through his mind. The story plays like the reel of a silent film in an empty theater. What can I tell him?

A crow glides down from the stone walls. The bird flaps close by Daniel’s head and flies on past him. A raucous burst of caws erupt from where the others assemble, hidden in the dark wood of the locust trees. They’re family, Daniel thinks. He’s grateful he didn’t bring the ashes back to the old place by himself.

*****

CHAPTER 2. Sparrow

Mentally frozen in place beside his son at the base of the old castle, Daniel goes through this memories, struggling to select a version for the child. Daniel remembers it like this, starting six months ago. Winter, December.

*****

The day that changes everything, rasping is the only sound in the room, from graphite on compressed wood fibers as Daniel drags pencil along paper. The scratching sound creeps around the corners of the one-room, East Village apartment he occupies alone in New York City. He hasn’t been out of the apartment in days. He’s unsure how many days. Not even Carmella has come by to visit. But he remembers what Leonardo da Vinci says about the artist, He has the universe in his mind and hands. Daniel creates his universe on paper.

The friction of pencil tip on paper lays down lines that suggest the outline of a form. His new drawings always start with isolation and with friction. Line by line, a medieval castle emerges on the page. Here is the tower; now the edges of the stones, silhouettes and shadows, turrets like those of the Neuschwanstein Castle. He draws the castle set back on jagged cliffs over a wide, slow-moving river that circles around it like a moat. Something dark is falling there. Is it snow, rain? Or ashes from a fire? It must be ashes.

His stained fingertips work the pencil back and forth. Black graphite particles press into the ridges of his skin and stick, obscuring the fingerprint, the individuality. Now he creates figures of monstrous, stone gargoyle statues. They crouch along the top edges of the outer castle walls. As he draws, he becomes the drawing. He transforms into a frozen winged gargoyle who sits atop the castle on the cliff, watching the world below him. Now he is the stone object, the thing that he must bring to life.

He belongs here, in this drawing, at this castle. Not alone in a small cold room. Not in an impoverished and crowded corner of the city here, now, at the beginning the twenty-first century. No, here he is lost, meaningless, nameless, homeless.

Something small crashes into his apartment window, driven by a winter rainstorm. It sounds like a bird flapping in shock and pain. The body slides down the wet glass, falling, nestling in where the window is open a crack. Wings beat against the glass, loudly and franticly at first, then weakening. Raindrops tap relentlessly at the window like tiny arrows and the bird finds no shelter. Daniel senses something more, something else has gone wrong, listening to the rhythm of the rain.

They took me to the hospital, Daniel hears. He’s sure it is Mother’s voice, although here, he is alone.

He runs his fingers through his tangled hair, turns and looks around him at the corners of the empty room. Nothing. Empty water bottles, drawings, books. His room is a general mess but no visitors come here and so it bothers no one. At the window, is only the stunned sparrow. Unnerved by the coincidence of the voice and the bird’s appearance, he continues to work more slowly on the drawing, but stays in bed. He tries to concentrate. He draws crows flying away from the castle, detailing the spreading wings, the fanned feathers. His sketching is as persistent as the tapping of the rain at the window. This is his own personal storm.

Sketching alone in his apartment for a good part of every day or night, depending on when Daniel is awake, is how he spends most of his time. He’s been up all night. After the first few hours, he gets into the zone. He gets a tingling feeling between his temples that he imagines is happiness, and it lasts for as long as he continues drawing. Endorphins, he thinks Mother would have said, the natural opiates of the body, produced in response to extremes of happiness, pain or exertion. She had a story for every chemical, every molecule, when asked.

He listens to the ticking of the radiators. The pipes clank and the furnace four floors below kicks and pushes, transforming water into steam. It runs hissing through the ancient curves of the system. He imagines the furnace is winning the battle against the winter chill in the small rooms of the old building.

A metal frame bed takes up nearly all the space in the room where he sits propped up by a rolled, gray wool blanket. His desk is against the wall under an iron-gated window. It leads to the fourth-floor fire escape and the street below.

Remnants of the past days’ activities are discarded beside the bed. Empty water bottles, a pile of mail litters the room. He scans his mess and reflects on his isolation; people reach out but he doesn’t, or can’t, reach back. Why doesn’t he want to? Simply no desire to, none at all. His eyes land on an envelope from the art agency; that might have been a welcome piece of mail, but as it turned out it wasn’t. No payment was inside with the letter. Requests for donations, unpaid bills, the mail relates to things he won’t, or can’t take care of now. Most of it is of no