Blood Groove

by Matthew Bell

The Captain doesn’t hear out of his right ear. If you try to talk to him from that side, he’ll jab a finger toward it and throw his palm up peevishly like you should know better than to communicate with me from over there. His right side was his M-16 side. No wonder then that after two tours and countless rounds his ear gave up. He describes the hearing loss with the same nonchalance he uses explaining a knife’s blood groove. “If a knife didn’t have a blood groove,” he told a ten-year-old me, pointing to a shallow channel along the side of a Ka-Bar, a military-issue knife he kept handy during the live-in years, “it’d create a vacuum, which would make it tough to pull out.” Out of what? I didn’t have to ask. But I wish I would have, just to hear him say it.

People still use pay phones in Oakland. It’s that kind of town—a mangy pay phone city in a cell phone world. Lake Merritt—Loch Merritt to the Captain—is the town’s running joke of a body of water—a sad, shallow lake in a sad, shadow town. Around its neck hangs a string of orange lights like plastic beads from the 99¢ store. Underneath it, brown, mottled grass peppered with Colt 45 cans. I took sailing lessons here when I was young, the goal being not so much to sail as to stay out of the water. Word around town had a couple bodies dumped here, but more commonly it’s just trash. The Captain lives in Oakland. Has since coming home.

It was our custom, the Captain and me, to eat lunch somewhere lakeside whenever I made it back to the Bay. Hot dogs at Casper’s. Vietnamese at the Hanoi Café. Steaks at Philly Cheese Steak. We do Casper’s this time—dogs that snap at your teeth and molten chili thatnapalms the ceiling of your mouth.
“Let’s drive by the old house,” he suggests afterward, piloting the Mazda toward the hills. An odd idea, the house where I grew up. The house he left. The house with the skinny backyard and dirty bronze light through my bedroom window. I don’t remember him walking out of this house. I remember empty rooms, The Cosby Show alone, and a pitcher of chocolate milk.

He’s not a nostalgic guy, the Captain. I wonder what peculiar pique compelled his urge to swing by the old place. I had been by the house a few months ago, and the creeps now occupying it had put a big decorative rock in the front yard where one boozy Easter the Captain and his neighborhood buddy, sledgehammered themselves, sledgehammered to atoms an undesirable concrete walkway. The moms sat in beach chairs and watched gigglingly from the sidewalk, while we kids hunted eggs.

The Mazda is a convertible. A budget-constrained, late-middle-age crisis. A small car, cramped in the back, tight up front, trim all around. Not the obvious choice for someone like the Captain, for wrapped untidily in his crumby sweater vest is a stomach of cartoonish proportion—like half a lonely exercise ball, perfectly inflated. The paunch came to town after the double bypass, after all the steroid treatments. Barry Bonds gets a big head and chest from steroids, the Captain gets pregnant. He carries this thing bent slightly forward, tilting like it’s a weight he’s hurrying to set down on a table. Leaning and wheezing, making me want to scream and run circles around him. But somehow the gut fits in the Mazda. He has the driver’s seat slid all the way back and the thing propped right up on the steering wheel.

Lakeshore Avenue and the lake at our left. Not a mile away, the Hells Angels started. Not five miles away, the Black Panthers started. The sky is gray. The lake is algae green. The truck on our right at the interminable stoplight candy apple red. It’s one of these lifted affairs, sitting up on platinum rims and as glossy as a hooker’s lips. Two cholos inside. Bass-heavy ranchero spilling out. This is not a functional pickup. With its bed covered over, there’s nothing to be picked up but chicks. The Driver, with a mustache, looks down at the Mazda and the two of us, and I see the mischief light up his eyes. The Captain’s just being the Captain—looking straight ahead and huffing and puffing like he’s preparing for another sprint. Driver says something, but it’s muffled. The Captain doesn’t notice. My heart speeds up, my eyes stay forward, praying the red light green. But it’sred. Driver’s really got something on his mind. He leans out his window, craning toward me. “How you drive with that thing?” he asks. It takes me a moment. That thing? The Captain? Oh, that thing. His stomach. Passenger is laughing now, too. The Captain as yet unperturbed. “Yo, you ain’t gonna pick up no chicks with that, bro,” he says, tossing the comment out the window as carelessly as a civilian would a cigarette butt. The Captain looks over. Impatiently points to his right ear. Offers up the peevish palm. He didn’t hear it, thank god. “Do you drive with your hands or with your fuckin’ gut, bro?” This time Driver offers a visual aid, scooting closer to his own wheel and turning it back and forth with his stomach. Loud cackles.

Green light.

We pull off. The truck pulls out ahead of us.

He probably didn’t even hear it.

Except that he definitely heard it.

“Pieces of shit,” I offer, trying nonchalance. Unsure who I’m trying to protect. The Captain has no comment, which is not uncommon, but in this moment is like pins. He’s sunk a little more into his seat. His eyes more forward, more lidded. Something’s percolating in that spherical head—it always is—but it’s closer to a boil now. Me, I’ll diffuse into the gray sky, into something so insubstantial the pins can’t prick.

Ahead of us the truck bangs right on E. 18th. I file that away.

Astride the Mazda, we climb wordlessly up out of the flatlands, from Oakland to Piedmont. We breeze right by the old house on Arbor. Nothing said. He doesn’t even slow down. We climb.

Take back the night. When the gin-drunk Captain told us that he wanted to talk take-back-the-night, we thought he had suddenly gained an interest in feminism. But no, his interest in take-back-thenight
predated the campus marches Little Brother and I conjured.

For many centuries, proper combat was a daytime affair, with the requisite outfits and drums and piccolos. Night meant rest. Campfires and tin cups full of crude coffee and a mustache playing fiddle. Modern warfare changed that. Night became a conquerable territory. I’ve never seen a Vietnamese night, but the Captain has. They’ve got dark over there you wouldn’t believe. In the war years control of the night was a real priority.

The Captain trained as an Army Ranger in Malaysia with soldiers from New Zealand (“savages”), England (“savages”), and Scotland (“unintelligible savages”). From my understanding, he learned to walk many miles through the jungle at night without making a sound. We would hike together in the Oakland hills, pre-paunch. The whole while, he’d smoke Basic cigarettes, snapping off and pocketing the butts. He’d smoke the unfiltered coffin nail down to a nub, jab it out on the sole of his tennis shoe, and then squeeze the flakey remaining tobacco into the wind, lick his fingers, roll the leftover paper into a tiny ball, and toss it into the wilderness. He called this “field stripping a butt,” which I suppose is a prudent strategy when being followed. I’m not certain how necessary it was hiking through the redwoods of Oakland, but what do I know.

In the jungle, the dark is no simple passage of unlit time. It’s the land of the seriously scary. Training to take it back must involve willfully overriding the most basic instincts we have.

The night is a catchall for the unknowably bad. The whole of life, really, a tense negotiation with the dark. You gotta be a bad man to claim victory over that kind of territory. The Captain was a bad man.

When I’m in town, I stay at my mother’s house, across a narrow valley from the Captain’s one-bedroom. I wait the sun out and take her car down to Lake Merritt. I take the Ka-Bar knife the Captain left two decades ago. It’s heavy in my hand, the blood groove smooth. It’s got a compass built into its butt, the better to know in which direction you’re stabbing.

I drive down from the hills, through the dark, looking for candy apple red.

Past the scene of the crime. Left on 18th off Lakeshore. Left on 3rd Ave. Another left on Wayne. Head on a swivel. The lake’s gaping dark interrupted only by the orange lamps.

I pass the preschool I attended. I peed my corduroys there one day when I stole three nickel-sized plastic bears, shoving them deep down in my pockets because I just had to have them. I was so scared when I got home that I buried the bears in the backyard, under two inches of dirt, and shoved the crime from my mind.

The streets are dim and empty, save a straggler here and there. Some Doppler-warped bass rumbles by, and then deeper into the city. I widen out my circling by a block. Then another. Down E. 14th, back up Foothill. 3rd Ave. through 9th up and back. Looking for candy apple red.

I can see the Captain’s face at the stoplight. He had his smudgy sunglasses over his splotchy face. Lifeless, slate hair slipping out from his faded Stanford hat. Gravity less kind to his jowls than normal.

He probably didn’t even hear it.

But if he did, woe betide this candy apple motherfucker. He couldn’t possibly have known, but still. Still.

You could spend a lifetime up on that mental tightrope, never looking down—Don’t Look Down! Then candy apple pulls up beside you, checks you off your rope, and all of a sudden there it is. The jig is up. The Captain has no clothes. Naked, there, your dad with his face beat to shit, swollen, red. His slack gut propped up on two sticks of chicken legs, not unlike your own chicken legs. He can’t walk a city block without wheezing into the concrete like he’s ready to shuffle off. Chicks? No. Chicks don’t dig this look—the old, divorced, introverted veteran on full disability driving a sad sack Mazda convertible. I’m walking a wire. I know this. But I do not want to be made to look down.

Then I find it. Same candy apple red pickup truck with the same Chivas sticker on the back, on 20th Ave. and E. 14th. Squat clapboard buildings here, mostly, with a smattering of fake happy Section 8 condos. Two blocks away the Nimitz Freeway whirs.

I park up the block. I grip the knife in my right hand. I’ll wait. He’ll come out. And then, then. Then I’ll slide the knife in and out, without a vacuum. Then he’ll know, this Driver, how sharply he stung me. I’ll take back his night. Take back his everything. The Captain owns the night, I’ll educate this guy. He conquered something you, Driver, only know as the blank space between today and tomorrow. A whole swath of time, defeated. Owned. You own a flimsy, candy apple red pickup truck and a recreational mustache that in most parts of the world is a sight gag.

Go run, I’ll say. Run into the jungle and let the Captain hunt you. Take five minutes. Try to lose yourself. Try to lose the Captain. He’s got a knife with a blood groove, and it will not stick on its way out. He is not afraid.

I wait. The dark’s not going anywhere. It’s calm here, the only action, really, my chest heaving.
I get out of the car, Ka-Bar in my pocket. I pace past the truck, through the night, trying to quiet my crunch on the loose gravel. A cat across the street saw me coming a million miles out and beelines
up and over some chain link. I’m in front of a two-story building. This must be it. He lives here. Sleeps here. I’ll go in. Tiptoe up the stairs. Knife in, knife out. No vacuum. Balance.

Then, headlights. A creeper down the street, maybe three blocks out. I snap to. Realize the knife is out, brandished, and that maybe it shouldn’t be. I holster the thing, put my head down, recross the street, get in Mom’s BMW, turn my own lights on, and pull off.

I swing onto Lakeshore, nobody behind me. I point the car up. Try on resignation. Home to sleep, I think. Still, this prick pulled the curtain open on the Captain. Resignation doesn’t fit.

Seized, I swing onto E. 18th, to the lakeside Quick Stop with the hilly parking lot. We bought booze here during high school: 40s of Crazy Horse malt liquor. It came in a jug with a handle and an etching of the proud Sioux chief on the side. The poor fucker, what a fall from felling Custer to his own bottle of bottom-drawer hooch. I walk inside and it’s brighter than ten suns. They don’t have Crazy Horse anymore, the counter man responds. But that’s not what I’m here for. I ramble to the back coolers, grab a sixer of Grade A eggs.

Back out onto Lakeshore. A turn. A few blocks. Candy apple red again. This time I pull around the corner. I know what I’m doing. I know what needs to be done.

I’m out of the car, six shooter of huevos at my side. I slink up, quieter than ever. I take out a big brown egg. Smaller in my hand than I’d predicted. I bring it up over the hood—no, the windshield. That’s better. The windshield. Better get going. There are five more after this. Better get breaking…

I don’t. I pause. Alone on an Oakland avenue at midnight, chicken egg cradled in my hand just above the hood of a candy apple red Ford pickup. I look away. The freeway a hush now. The dusty Tribune building the city’s lone beacon.

Gingerly, I settle a single egg on the windshield wiper, then step away. City silence is different than real silence. More the breathy sound you make fogging a window than quiet altogether. Several moments pass here, the city wheezing gently.

I get back in my mother’s car. I drive. No radio.

I park. Lakeside now. The bean-shaped lake a mirror of the black above. An incomplete carton of eggs in one hand, the blood-grooved Ka-Bar in the other, I step down to the water. It’s lonely down here. It shouldn’t be so lonely. I toss them in, eggs first—plunk—knife next—plunk—into the liquid sky of scummy water, into the depths with the Colt 45 bottles and bodies.

I’m back three months later. It’s raining and I’m driving, the Mazda wounded. We roll down to the Saigon Café. Orange curry and vats of vegetable soup. The Captain used to come here with his
vet buddies, he tells me.

The walk back to the car is an eternity. I want the wheezing and clumsy tottering to stop. I want some reprieve from the out-ofbreathness and the paunch and the sweater vest. I’m horrified that some would-be Good Samaritan will stop and offer a hand. He doesn’t need it, I’ll say. He’s the Captain. He’s just fine.

We head up. He’s got that tip-of-his-tongue look, with his swollen paw gripped around the handle above the window, sitting forward as if something supercompelling will at any moment visit him and launch verbally. We have little common language. We have politics, and that’s what’s on the tip of his tongue. Something about the GOP. Something about McCain. Our common tongue.

At some point during my lifetime the deed passed back, and the night took back the night. The Captain didn’t own it anymore. He wasn’t even the Captain. Just my dad, if even that. He couldn’t take the night. Struggled with the days. Hit his head on trips to the grocery store and remembering birthdays—even regular days. He didn’t own a home. Rented an apartment. Possessed the Mazda in the nebulous way a bum does a shopping cart.

We’re on Lakeshore, the good Lakeshore now with coffee shops and used book stores. A lithe Oakland chick in skinny black jeans slips down the Avenue. “Wowzer,” I say, following her with my eyes.

He probably didn’t even hear it.

“Mercy,” he says, smiling.

“Mercy,” I say. Smiling.