Terminal Island Read Free

there. Henry, come open the door so I can give you your birthday present. Come on out and we’ll go get cake and ice cream . After the man left, Vicki waited a good long time to make sure he was gone, telling Henry it was all a game, just a silly little game. When she finally opened the door the hallway was full of thick smoke—there was a fire somewhere. Trying not to breathe, they made their way out of the building to the front sidewalk, where she told him to sit still while she ran back in to help her parents and the other few tenants get out. Amid the commotion, Henry noticed the hotel’s big gray tomcat lying dead in the middle of the road. As firemen and policemen came and went, and Vicki flirted with them, he sat on the curb watching the cat’s curious metamorphosis from a familiar cat shape to a mangled pink pulp and finally—traffic taking its toll—to bits of flattened pelt curing in the sun.
    The fire was blamed on Gladys. And since Gladys died in the fire, she made no defense. Of the mostly faceless tenants, Gladys was only one Henry ever remembers feeling close to. She was a hugely fat, sweet-natured African lady who was close friends with his grandparents and doted on him, always having a piece of butterscotch candy ready when wee Henry visited her squalid room. She told African stories and sang African songs and read people’s fortunes and had a collection of African masks and other artifacts that were deeply fascinating to Henry. Because of Gladys, he can never look at Aunt Jemima or any other mammy stereotype without a guilty rush of affection. Poor Gladys, who died smoking in bed…or so he was told. And why would they lie?
    Of the other guests, he mainly remembers doors ajar and glimpses of beer bottles and stockinged feet propped on coffee tables beside clattering electric fans, and radio music wafting out to where young Henry lurked, peeping from the shadows.
    One day he discovered he had cousins, Peter and Paul, one older and one younger than himself, whose parents brought them to live at the decaying keep so they could get to know their dying grandmother, and whose favorite game was sitting in adjoining stalls in the hotel’s echoing communal restroom and discussing all the whimsical things their turds resembled, as if describing constellations or cloud formations:
    Ooh! Mine looks like an old man with whiskers!
    Mine looks like a pointy wooden shoe!
    I made a rattlesnake!
    An only child, Henry was jealous of the clannishness of his cousins, as well as the sense of their being privy to a branch of the family from which he was strangely excluded. Also there was their rough-and-tumble boyishness, so different from his hesitance and general awkwardness.
    This became only more pronounced as time went by, though to some degree he bonded with Peter—the two of them being the older ones. But any time Henry started to feel truly accepted or complacent about his position, there would be some little reminder of the barrier between them; evidence that he could never be one of them.
    In the presence of their wizened elf of a grandmother, who spoke no English but only a peculiar mixture of Italian and Attic Greek, his cousins continued to natter fluently long after he had become estranged from that dialect, so that Henry could only tag along and nod, clumsily hanging on whatever sparse vocabulary he still possessed: “ Buon giorno , Nonna . Come stai? ” “ Panta rhei, panta rhei.” But he was outside the loop, imagining that they were pityingly discussing him.
    Over time the strange sticking point—the difference between them—became excruciatingly clear: Henry’s cousins had a father, while he did not. The sternly generous man who appeared from time to time to take them all on beach outings in his camper truck belonged to them, not him.
    In some ways this was good. It meant that when they got into trouble, Henry didn’t have to share the whippings—as Peter and Paul were dragged off to face the