Chapter OneFoghorn
Impressions.
Caesar's father, Victor, has an impression of him. Caesar's got an impression of his father, too. Victor is a used-to-be-drunk but now he's a recovered, round-the-clock sober unbearable nervous twelve-step pain-in-the-hole who adds his own thirteenth step to the AA deal because these days nothing is intense enough for him. Victor's step thirteen is, for all the life you pissed away those many years in the bottle, you have to rededicate yourself to choking the hell out of the lives around you, probably with some kind of freak notion of getting back some of what you wasted. Caesar doesn't really appreciate Victor's occupation or his avocation, security guard and church deacon, which the kid says both amount to about the same thing. "Sobocop" is a thing Caesar called his dad sometimes. He isn't a for-real cop, but he is for-real sober and wears that part of himself like a sheriffs tin star. In reality be was a roving security guard, going where he was told by the outfit that supplied him with the badge and the flashlight but no, absolutely not, no gun. Victor has a big ol' heart that you can practically hear ticking, and never goes anywhere without his nitroglycerin pills.
All that, in Caesar del Negro's opinion, explains the absence of any mother in the house. She hung for all the boozing, which she had no problem with. It was the one year of bitchin' sobriety that blew her out.
He's a soft-spoken sober, Victor is. Like he's apologizing all the time, for being good. When he was bad he was loud, he was a force, he was a foghorn. People were drawn to the foghorn, they followed it. Nobody follows a whisper.
In Caesar's opinion, Victor's volumecontrol was attached backward.
Victor's opinion of his son goes about like this:
"What are you gonna do, Caesar?"
Caesar is sitting on the edge of his bed, head hanging, long black hair falling like a curtain between them as the son ties his shoes. He finishes tying, dangles in that position anyway.
"Caesar. Look at me, Caesar."
Slowly the kid pulls himself back to upright position. His head is slushy and hot from the upside-down. He smiles at this, and drops down for more.
It's not like he's never heard it all before anyway.
"Pick your head up and look at your father," Victor says evenly.
Caesar does as he's told because, despite impressions, he is a good boy, and his every impulse is, as it has always been, to do what he is told to the best of his ability.
Victor looks at Caesar's face, peeking out between twin sheets of fine middle-parted hair. "You got so many pimples now, Caesar. You gotta cut your hair, or at least get it off your face somehow. You got such a great face in there, y'know? Thank god you come out like your mom that way. But don't spoil it."
Caesar blushes, feels the same blood rush as when he hung upside down, even though he knows his father is lying, about his great face, and telling the truth, about the acne. Caesar pushes the hair back, smoothing it out on both sides, then lets it go. The hair falls right back over forehead, eyes, cheekbones.
Victor sighs. "What are you gonna do, Caesar?"
Caesar knows what the man means. He asks the question a lot. He asks it in the morning before the two of them head out, he asks it once in a while in the dead of night, crouched beside Caesar's bed, sweating, red-eyed, and puffing out coffee breath likean insecticide fogger. And he asks it, like now, when the boy is on his way out into night. Caesar knows what he means.
"What do you mean, exactly, Victor?" Caesar groans.
"You know. Wit' your life? What are you gonna do? You're not even thinking about it, I can tell. And time, Son, time." Victor stops to look at the floor, to shake his head ruefully, to choke back whole bunches of things. "Time ain't helpful. It don't stand still, and it don't rewind, and it don't give you back nothin' you didn't take with you the first time around."
"Let me ask you this," Caesar says, standing and buttoning his shirt in front of the brown oval mirror that's attached to what used to be his mother's brown square vanity. So awfully brown, dark and dull lifeless brown, for a vanity, which Caesar believes should be white for a lady to be sitting in front of it. "Do you mean, what am I going to do, longterm, or what am I going to do in the future immediate?"
This is progress. They had never before gotten even this deep into the discussion, Caesar always stopping things with a quick and heartfelt I don't know. Victor is encouraged.
"I'll take whatever," he says with a shrug. "Anything you got on your mind, I'm happy to hear it out."
"Well, Victor, long-term, I still don't know. But for right now, Caesar's gonna go plow his ladygirl."
Sometimes those things just come out of Caesar's mouth, uncontrollably, like he has some kind of a condition. He doesn't really want to hurt his father, but his father is pressure, and pressure tends not to bring the best out of Caesar. Pressure corners Caesar, makes him squirm. It also makes him call himself by his name, Caesar. He'd heard athletes do it, with ahundred microphones stuck in their faces, and it seemed to make them happy and confident, proud and calm. All those unimaginable, superhero qualities that had to be faked....
Chris Lynch is the Printz Honor Award-winning author of several highly acclaimed young adult novels, including Freewill, Gold Dust, Iceman, Gypsy Davy, and Shadowboxer, all ALA Best Books for Young Adults. He is also the author of Extreme Elvin, Whitechurch, and All The Old Haunts. He holds an M.A. from the writing program at Emerson College. He mentors aspiring writers and continues to work on new literary projects. He lives in Boston and in Scotland.