Fallen Angels - Casady McEvoy

The first time my father died started with him tying a noose around his forearm in our shared bathroom. A skinny needle prepped and deftly dipped in a dirty spoon, suctioned through the tiny hole with the poison soon to be found in my father’s blood stream. He was kneeling on a peeling tile, the large plastic sheet over unsanded wood floors. He tied his noose with his teeth.
 
My aunt was working the grill, she had me chopping the vegetables. I had a big chef’s knife that was kept in a delicate dark box and was my uncle’s prized possession. I was cutting onions with my cousins. We played a game trying not to cry. Slicing circles from the whole, peeling back the layers to find the center.
 
“That’s who we really are,” my father once said, staring at the center of the onion before eating it.
 
I felt the sting in my eyes, the revenge of the onion. A final moment, lashing back at its attacker–me. My cousin, Lil Moose, got close to my face, inspecting my eyes, “If you cry, you’re gay.” Which in our teenage lexicon meant you were weak. You were nothing.
 
But the onion lashed out, sharing its truths with a putrid sting. Tears formed against my will like clouds gathering for a storm. I still thought in nature metaphors then, still remembered my kindergarten’s misguided celebration of Native American day. Each of us got an appropriative-esque name, like ‘Blue Cloud; because I was “floaty” on my toes and cried when my parents left me. When there was still an innocence to cultural insensitivity I was forced to be a part of instead of embarrassment and regret.
 
Lil Moose started calling me names, the kind he wouldn’t say in front of his mom; slurs he heard on television and from his father when he drove to work. After failing the onion game I surrendered my blade to my cousin Marvy. He had a tougher skin than me. He didn’t tear up, he didn’t make a face. He kept slicing the onions unphased. Lil Moose said something, a personal slight, comparing Marvy to the genitalia of a woman.
 
Marvy took an onion ring in his hand. I watched his thick fingers tread the sticky surface before squeezing it in his eyes. Palms found his eye sockets, pressing down as if to blind himself. He took heavy breaths and shouted, “See, no tears.”
 
This is the Marvy that will be found dead at twenty-one from a brutal beating. The Marvy who believed “if you want me to stop, you have to kill me.” And they did, but here we didn’t know that. Marvy was just never weak. Capable of giving such pain and, more importantly, receiving it.
 
Marvy showed me once his most prized possession he kept in his closet. A wooden statue of the crucifixion where Jesus’ penetrated hands dripped a glazed red. The feet once washed with care by Mary Magdalene, now dirty and red. Marvy handed the bloodied crucifix to me, told me to examine the head of Jesus. He looked up toward the sky, his jaw agape in indescribable pain.
 
“Do you believe in god?” I handed the crucifix back. It wasn’t cool to believe in anything.
 
“He could endure this, man. That’s tough, that’s hard.”
 
“It’s amazing what the human body can endure.”
 
“He ain’t human,” Marvy looked offended, he looked at the Jesus inaudibly crying out. A body spread out, bolted to wood. A bird nailed to a tree trunk, “When you die hard, you’re more than human.”
 
But at the family barbeque my father was missing and we started to look for him. It was
 
Uncle Moose who realized he was in the bathroom. He pounded on the door.
 
Inside, my father was as still as a broken statue. He could not hear his brother banging on the door. He did not feel anymore, his body betrayed him, his heart refuted him.
 
Big Moose kicked at the door, but his name was no longer accurate after his own past bit into his bones. He called all of us. Big Moose and all the kids used our bodies to bust open the door. It took three tries and it left a bruise on my right shoulder. I didn’t feel it at the time, adrenaline caused by fear made me numb to pain and splinters. I wouldn’t feel anything until the morning. Or, maybe I felt it in the waiting room.
 
My father was a fallen angel, bathed in his own blood, arms spread like wings–feathers plucked out as penance. When he fell, my father thought he was flying.
 
Big Moose flipped the body that was my dad over. He started checking my dad’s pockets.
 
One of the aunts called 911.
 
I don’t know if they said overdose. What I do know is Lil Moose led us into the backyard. The family gave us bongs, pipes, needles, tinfoil squares, and one ounce baggies. The backyard was overgrown with trees and weeds. We ran until Lil Moose stopped and we took turns digging and stuffed everything inside the holes.
 
By the time we got back fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars were in the driveway and front yard, lights still on but sirens silenced. My father was on a gurney, illuminated by red and blue. Big Moose and the aunts were interrogated.
 
One of the police officers looked at us and called out, “We got the kids.” Lil Moose gave us all a look to remind us of the golden rule: Say nothing to cops. And we were separated.
 
A uniform took me to my room and sat me on my bed, the only real place to sit. A few cops were inside, upturning everything. The bookshelf that held the books and dad’s records was knocked over, pages were being bent, spines were being ruined, and they stepped on the records without discrimination.
 
A cop held up a suncooked leather bag that had delicate tools I never learned how to master, “What are these?”
 
“Mine.” I reached for them but stopped. The uniform turned his head, curious. At fourteen my dull mind knew I made a mistake, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
 
“Do you know what these are?”
 
“Yeah.”
 
“Say it.”
 
I looked around the room. My black light was unscrewed and searched. They tore down all of my posters and crumbled them up to join my books.
 
“They’re my lockpicks.”
 
“Thieves tools,” the uniform confirmed, “Did you know this is illegal to own?”
 
“But it’s a free country.”
 
I had gotten the lockpicks from a garage sale, my dad was teaching me using easy locks. It was a pastime of his or more like a skill from a past life. He would advise me and tell me stories that made him a character in the theater of my mind. The time he broke into a club and stole all the cocaine he could find.
 
His last B & E:
 
“I went in through a window,” my father thought lockpicks took too long, “I never liked this guy and I knew his kid was at a Birthday Party. So, I thought I’d steal everything I could so next time I’d see him he’d be all down on his luck. He was a real asshole. But what had happened was they came back,” it depends when he’s telling the story how long it took for the victim and his wife to show up. Sometimes it’s mere minutes and sometimes it was closer to an hour.
 
“The couple came back. I thought they’d stay with their kid. I squeezed into the kitchen drawers, under the sink next to all the cleaning supplies,” my father was small, able to fit in cramped spaces at only 5’6’’. I can imagine him, knees to his chest, trying not to make a sound.
 
“Smelled like bleach, nauseating. But the married couple did what married couples do.
 
Not having a kid around they had sex–hot and hard sex–for like three hours. Then they left.”
 
My father laughed, he didn’t steal anything, “Last time I ever tried to steal.” Which wasn’t exactly true, but wasn’t exactly a lie either.
 
I was looking at the tan bag in the uniform’s hands.
 
“I just thought they were cool,” I watched the uniform pocket the picks before walking out, “Is my dad okay?”
 
The police were interrogating and writing tickets. Big Moose was assigned an addiction class because of the pills in his pocket. The aunts were mostly given small tickets and hard talks about their future.
 
When they finished, teary-eyed aunts and uncles drove us to the hospital. No one had any answers and no one really talked to us.
 
The kids had to wait in the waiting room while the adults got to see my father. The aunts took turns watching us. The first few hours he was just a beep on a machine, a steady line going up and down.
 
He had died for a solid minute, but in later tellings it would be five or seven minutes.
 
Paddles were used, electrocuting his heart like a car needing a jump. My dad took a few hours to wake up, everyone showed relief by screaming at him. Informing him how much of a screw up he was, how he ruined everything he touched. Later, I will see these genes in my own bloodstream. But then, he just closed his eyes and tried to ignore them.
 
I was allowed to see dad, hooked up to all those machines. I thought he was a bionic man.
 
He opened his eyes to see me.
 
“I must have scared you,” he spoke softly, like it was difficult to talk.
 
“Are you okay?”
 
He coughed and failed to sit up.
 
“I died.” He sounded like he didn’t believe it. So much hadn’t killed him but tried to in his life. But one tinfoil square put him under.
 
“What was it like?”
 
He stared at me for a moment, I remember thinking I shouldn’t have asked, he said, “My wallet’s on the drawer over there, get some food for us.”
 
He only answered the question once. By then he found God and went to church on most Sundays. He said he was clean, but it was by his own definition. It meant he hadn't found a needle in his vein. He was still drinking at least a fifth a day and he wasn’t always certain where he was.
 
He was cogent at Marvy’s funeral. At 21, Marvy would have still had his baby face and the body of undeserved muscles. The mortician would have cut his blonde hair into something manageable and he would have worn a gray suit–the first suit I’d ever see him in.
 
But it was a closed casket, whoever saw him last robbed us of his face. It was a small service, Marvy’s friends were too busy, he had a girl with a kid on the way but we never met her.
 
We buried him next to his dad. After I got lunch with mine, we didn’t talk much anymore. It was hard to find the time, it was hard to talk to him when he didn’t always know what was going on.
 
“What do you think death is like?” I took a bite of a poorly made sub.
 
“I know what it’s like.”
 
“Oh yeah,” I looked at him, “What’s it like?”
 
“I didn’t see God or nothing.” My father was eating soup, slurping as he talked. “It was just all black. Like being nothing, like it was all over.”
 
“Sounds horrifying.”
 
“No. It was peaceful. I’ve been chasing that my whole life. That feeling that it’s all over, that everything’s alright.” He crumbled some crackers in his soup.
 
When Marvy died did he think himself like Christ? Did he hoped I would pray to him after such a painful death? Was he martyred by pain?
 
“You okay?”
 
“Yeah,” I put some money on the table, “For some reason I was thinking about crucifixion.”
 
After lunch, dad and I went separate ways. The sky was dark, the clouds hung low, and I thought it was going to rain.


Casady McEvoy (they/them) is a Los Angeles based writer who has done multiple local readings in Louisiana and California, they graduated from University of Louisiana at Lafayette and are currently enrolled in an MFA program at Antioch University of Los Angeles.