He got up from the bed and walked back to the blind and pressed his nose up against one of the slats and peered out through one of the narrow bands of light. Although he could see out into the street, the gap in the slats was so narrow that his view was fuzzy and unfocused, and his face was pressed up so close to the blind that his eyelashes brushed against it when he blinked.
He could make out the forms of his younger brother and his friend. They were playing in the street. Each took turns picking up something from the dirt underneath the oak tree, acorns he guessed, and lining them up on the pavement. The other would then ride his bicycle down the row of acorns, obviously trying to crush as many as possible under the tires. What a stupid game, he thought, and he grunted unwillingly, suppressing his desire to call down to his brother and tell him to stop playing the stupid, stupid game.
Yesterday he caught his brother and his friend sticking the garden hose into a pile of compost in the garden to drive out crickets, which they would capture and throw up against a brick wall to kill. He threw his brother against the garden fence and punched him and he cried and said that it was just a dumb bug and he told his brother he was just a dumb piece of shit. He grabbed his brother’s collar and called him a crybaby and threw him down on the wet compost and told him that if he ever told his mother, he would tell everyone at school that he still wet the bed and had plastic under the sheets, which was a lie, but he was just his stupid shit little brother so who wouldn’t believe it was true.
Truth.
Between the windows was his father’s chest of drawers. Nothing special about it except for the small box that had always sat on top of it. Searching back into the short span of his memory, he tried to recall if he had ever seen it anywhere else, or for that matter whether or not he had ever seen it opened. He couldn’t remember ever seeing his father put anything into it or take anything out. Pushing himself up off the bed, the boy stood in front of the dresser and ran his hands along the carved molding along the outer edge of the chest’s top.
The color and grain of the box so well matched the stain and grain in that piece of furniture that it appeared that the box could have been attached to the top on the day it was built, or even sculpted from the same huge piece of wood. The box lid was decorated with a copy of a painting that looked like it had been cut out of a book or magazine and glued onto the lid, then had been varnished over with the rest of the box.
It was a picture of George Washington, seated on his horse which reared up its front legs as if to trample the red suited body already crumpled up underneath it. The animal’s eyes were filled with terror, its mouth agape in a scream. Looking at the picture, the boy knew that a scream would never cross the straight narrow lips of George Washington, a stern, if not rather grim, expression on his face. He brandished a sword over his head, ready to cut down all who opposed him, pointing the way for the young men who followed at the heels of his horse. There were rippling flags and a multitude of tattered youth that marched forth from the horizon deep, deep in the back of the box lid, preserved under coats of the glossy varnish. He peered closely at the stern face of George Washington, the skin pallid and yellowing with age, and even in the dim light he could make out the dozens of tiny cracks that ran through the varnish across the face of General George Washington.
He lifted the box from the top of the dresser. He raised it slowly above his head so he could look up at the bottom, not really looking for anything, but driven instead by an odd fear that made him wonder for a moment if the box even had a bottom. A fear that the box was empty.
The box left its silhouette in the dust that had settled on the dresser top, a rectangle so polished that he could see his reflection in it, a muted image backlit by the parallel lines of light from the blinds on either side of the chest. His eyes looked like black pits drilled into his head and he lowered his face to the dresser top until the tip of his nose touched the wood. He stared hard at his own pupils, trying to see something in the wet black pools. He closed his eyes and smelled the faint scent of the lemon oil his mother used to polish the furniture.
His nose left an oily smudge in the once pristine Polish of the dresser top. He put the box on the bed behind him and tried to wipe it clean with his thumb, but the more he wiped the dirtier and bigger the smudge became. He gave up, frustrated, and he sat back down on the bed next to the box.
The box.
It had a small brass clasp on the front, no lock, just the tiny hinge to keep it shut; he pulled it up with his fingernail. He sat for a minute, not opening the lid, but staring at the door and although he knew that there was no one in the house to walk through it, he felt anxious. His stomach jumped and his hand trembled with the thought of his father. He thought of no excuses, but instead stared at the door, his eyes fixed on the white doorknob, thinking only of his father’s worn an hardened hand wrapped around it, waiting for the moment the boy lifted the lid of the box to turn the nob and swing open the door. But he knew that would never happen. He knew.
He opened the box and turned out its contents. The first thing to cash his eye was an old photograph, thick paper with a white border on it like you never see anymore an in the border was printed AUG 68. it was a picture of his father with another guy, both dressed in green fatigues and with their arms over each other’s shoulders. They had beers sitting in front of them and their skin was real tanned, darker than he had ever seen his father’s face. They were both smiling and grinning big like they were trying not to laugh and they were giving the finger to whoever it was taking the photograph. The boy smiled to himself because he was always flipping his brother off and his brother didn’t know what it meant. He looked at the back of the photo and printed in pencil in his father’s handwriting was “Mike Donovan Sept 23, 1968.” He looked at the picture of his father and his friend again. He tried to recognize the other man’s face, but he hadn’t ever seen him before so he figured it must have been some guy he met during the war.
He put the photo back in the box and picked up some coins and looked at them. One was a silver dollar and another was just a plain nickel. He put the nickel back in the box and put the silver dollar in his pocket.