Brave Man’s Death
By: Nathan Truzzolino
The morning I was born, my old man was halfway through a 24-month stretch at the state prison in desolate Deer Lodge, Montana. When the hospital came calling for my father, he was washing dishes in the prison's industrial-sized kitchen.
My mother waited on the other end, exhausted.
When he took up the receiver and heard the news, he asked if I had cried during the birth.
She said I had.
"Then he isn't mine," he told her.
The 12 months he had served in prison up until my birth might have justified that statement, but he had been furloughed for a weekend nine months back for his father's funeral and had sex with my mother seven times in three days, nearly missing the funeral because said acts. Mom found she was with child two weeks later, and as she always would say, "that is that."
I know all of this grim and unsettling detail because ever since I can remember, my mother would sit me down on my birthday, buy me a lackluster diner meal, make the waitress sing me a song, and then retell this bitter and worn out tale.
"He looks like you." my mom continues the collect call.
"No newborn looks like anyone. No son of mine would cry on the day he was born."
Silence rang out over the long-distance wires, and the buzz of tape recorders filled in the static gaps.
"I won't put my name to him. I won't be the first in my family whose son cried when he was born."
And with that, he hung up.
Thus my birth certificate reads James Raymond Cassidy. Jimmy Ray they called me.
Cassidy is my mother's maiden name. It has been around for centuries, aging back to ancient Ireland's original warring Celtic tribes. The ones infested by the red-headed Vikings.
My mother blamed my father for every problem we had in our household, and rightly so. If the car broke down, it was because of "your daddy." When the school bully beat me in 4th grade, it was because daddy wasn't there to teach me to defend myself. You hear a narrative long enough, and you begin to believe it. In my childhood, mama was the reverend, her stories were the Bible, and as she would say to me every chance she got, my daddy was "the god damn devil."
One night dear ol' dad did decide to come home unannounced. He knocked with his .410 shotgun, leaving one hell of a mess on the living room floor. Dad's second knock went through my mama's bedroom door, leaving a bed of splinters on our futon. Mama was also out of the house, knocking boots with a third-rate diesel mechanic. I was sleeping on a real twin bunk bed at a friend's house.
The authorities issued a warrant for my father's arrest, and unfortunately for mama, it wouldn't be the last time she would cross paths with my old man.
--
Twenty-two years after that prison city phone call, my first son would be born. During birth, he also cried. We were living in Great Falls, Montana, and I had a decent job with the railroad. The still-frozen spring that April was my second 'tour' on the rails. I'd travel around the state doing two-week stretches repairing and replacing track.
After my son's birth, my sweet wife was pregnant three more times in the next five years. Only one would come to term. A little girl. My little angel. Each tiny death took years off of both our lives.
A year after the last miscarriage, my father wrote to me saying he was back living in Montana. The old son of a bitch wanted to see all four of his grandchildren. He did not know of the other two passings. My father is now shacked up in Lincoln, Montana, logging and drinking his days away.
I wrote him back saying the family was in Philipsburg hunting blue sapphires, but I'd like the just the two of us to roust up some pheasants. We set to meet in Power Montana the following weekend, on a large ranch where the railroad owned a maintenance station. The shack is a small 12 x 12 plywood shanty with one window and a pine door that sits in a dry river bed gully cut by migrating glaciers millions of years ago. Inside the fragile shop was a phone with a wire that went to the rail switch house and nowhere else. The old rotary dial sat on an old wooden pallet-turned desk covered in decades of dust.
The quail and pheasants were undisturbed, and no Wardens were permitted to come on-site. We would have a go at it, one way or another. I packed two shotguns, my pistol, and a shoebox with various ammunition.
The "hills" are small but determined in Power compared to others in Montana's mountain pocked state. Yet the hilly topography of our destination is not the reason for the need for good tires and high clearance. The road is rutted, not appropriately maintained, and would rip the undercarriage out of any car not clearing at least four inches from Earth. Only a 4x4 pickup would be able to reach the rail maintenance station.
My father raddled up the two-track in his beat-up Ford Ranger and came to a rest next to my rig facing the station. He stayed inside the cab, killing his Miller Lite, crushing the can and tossing it over his head and out the window into the back of his truck bed, where five more Miller soldiers lay dead and dehydrated.
I stepped out of the one-room maintenance station and dismounted the three steps with quick and soft feet with my shotgun in hand.
I aimed and shot two rounds through his windshield. The first being the slug and the second being the buckshot. I dropped the shotgun, unholstered the pistol from my belt loop then slugged him twice with a .9MM. The last shot hit him in the throat, spraying blood in a 180-degree radius, reddening out the remaining windshield.
He looked out his passenger window at me and smiled. A small tear came down his eye. He tried to talk, but blood came from his mouth instead of words. It dribbled down his mouth like a bumbling baby.
After clearing out the blood in his throat, he gurgled out a wheeze and croaked out with a laugh, "I can't think of a better way to die."
On the seat next to him were three roses and a stuffed bear covered in glass and blood.
"Happy to oblige," I told him. Those were the only words I had spoken to my father in person.
I buried him next to the maintenance shack and covered his corpse with heavy floodplain clay. I paid the rancher who owned the property $100 to dispose of the shot-up Ranger. The rancher never asked what happened; he knew it wasn't in his best interest to ask.
-
My two kids, the wife, and I moved to Hamilton, Montana, a year later.
A year after that, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Six months after that, she was on her deathbed in a hospital in Missoula, Montana.
I blamed the children. After each pregnancy, they tipped her cup more and more until her life was nearly drained. Now she was nothing but skin, bones, and chemo.
The morning she died, she took my hand and told me, "Take hope, JR. Life is worth the pain."
I took the kids to Sheridan, Montana, to live with their Aunt, their mama's sister. I knew if I were to keep them, they would do to me what they did to their mother. I could feel the life being drained right outta me after my wife went North. I was dying a slow death.
My son was seven and my daughter three. I signed them away, and for the next twenty years, I would run away from them in any direction I could.
-
After abandoning my children, I left Montana and took the railroad to New Orleans. I shortly went to North Michigan and mended the rail broken by bitter cold. I defrosted in Costa Rica until the disease got to me. I rehabbed in Miami, then wasted away again in Tampa Bay on booze and pills. I fished for a living until my hands stopped working. After that, I hitched a rail car west. I planted myself and grew weak desert roots in Phoenix, Arizona, where I could operate a steam roller in the 130-degree heat. When an emergency care doctor told me I could do no more physical labor due to my poor heart, I hired on at the world-famous jail Tent City. Tent City would hire on an old broom as a guard if it had a pulse.
One year while watching the inmates shuffle their dehydrated legs from tent to tent, a new inmate mad-dogged me when he checked into Tent City. He found me at my station that day and put his large hands on the bullet-proof glass. He was new here and didn't know any of the rules, written or otherwise. I gave the bulky bald biker a break. I gently tapped on the glass with my shin crusher gesturing for him to take his hands down from the glass. He stared at me hard, examining my face and putting a kind of fear inside me that I had not had in a long time. He was fixing to end me. Make a name for himself here in Tent City as the new big dick in town.
He shuffled in his slippers to the side door, which was cracked open for fresh air. I always carry a knife in my boot, just if a real 90 caliber cast iron came my way. Palming the knife, I waited for him to open the door. The door slowly opened, and from a distance, he squinted his eyes to read my stitched and velcro strapped nameplate. He leaned on the glass and, we stared hard at each other for what felt like an eternity.
"I knew it," he said.
He laughed hard, took a step back, and nonchalantly confided in me that he knew my son. Served with him overseas, both Iraq and Afghanistan. He was his best friend over there. They saved each other's lives multiple times. He said it was an honor to be watched over by Kid Cassidy's old man.
The inmate directed me on how to search for my son on the internet. I checked it out, and he was correct. A picture on a site called Facebook showed two men with shaved heads and dark sharp-angled sunglasses dressed in desert fatigues with eons of sand behind them. It was my boy, all right. In his profile photo, he looked exacly like his mama. He was now 28 years old. The age I was when I buried my father where the buffalo roam.
-
I planned on dying by my hand in the desert in the next few years. The space I had been renting was going to sell to a land developer, and I figured it was easier to kill myself than move all my shit again.
Maybe I'd wait until football season was over. Throw all the scratch I have on the Birds, and see if I can double or triple my wager. After that inevitable dire outcome, I'd take what money I had left, drive out onto the Navajo Reservation and pray to the native spirits and wild animals to guide me away from hell and towards Valhalla or whatever the Indians call heaven. I'd get a fifth of rum and a cheap but powerful handgun, something like a .38, then give myself over to nature, give the buzzards and coyotes a feast for the next few days. It was November, so I had a few months before Super Bowl Sunday, and then, well, Jimmy Ray's season will be over too.
A dive bar called Duke's in Mesa, Arizona, shows the Montana Cat v. Griz rival college football game every year. The owner is a Butte, Montana guy and charges $20 a person to come in on that particular November Saturday and watch the frozen men of Montana tackle each other in the arctic air. The game was in Bozeman, Montana, this year with a balmy temperature of 20 degrees and clear blue skies. I watch with 50 other exiled Montanans, all while we wear extra layers of clothing to warm us from the pounding central air pumping inside, intending to shield us from the still boiling winter Arizona sun.
After the game, I paid my bar tab and paid my bookie in the corner the vig for a lost wager I had the week prior. He told me earlier in the week there was a young man in here looking for me. The bookie said this stranger looked like me if I had lost 50 pounds. My hair now stands on end, and a shock of dread streams from my cerebral cortex to my balls. The sudden smell of alfalfa and copper fills my nose. The remembrance of the feel of a cold shotgun in my sweaty hands. The ringing of gunpowder and lead echoes in my depleted eardrums. The sight of my gasping father churns like a carousel in my mind. Suddenly, upside-down dumping in my stomach and a twisting tension between my shoulder blades. I ride the wave of nostalgia out into the afternoon sun.
-
My stucco apartment building sits right off the Prima Freeway, next to the dry Wal-Mart, and has a nice view of the tall casino resort on the Navajo reservation. It would be a decent place to live if it weren't for the highway fumes that fumigate my living room. This time next year, the apartment will be a new REI Outdoor Goods.
I play midnight bingo at the casino every Thursday. Bingo brings out plenty of older ladies willing to pine over me, keeping me busy for the rest of my limited days on Earth.
One dark early Thursday morning, I am leaving bingo penniless and long drunk on watered-down vodka. I find my old beater car in the dark parking lot has a new hood ornament. A slim man with a scar on his bicep the size of a snake leans on the hood of the old Mercury.
He looks deranged and overwhelmingly disappointed. I suspect I would be too. My dead wife's eyes stare at me in disgust and pity.
I walked to him slowly, knowing my pistol was in the car, and the only thing I had to defend myself was a shout for help. We both know I won't be doing that.
It's funny the things you think of when death punches your ticket to hell. It's random. Like that joke you had forgotten at the bar or suddenly remembering where you stashed that last bottle of booze. That is all I remember before my son rushes me and collects me in the last embrace I will ever have. The long hug I always wanted. In my ear, I hear my son's breath quiver. He dry swallows to allow himself to finally say what he had probably been rehearsing for weeks.
"You ran a good race. Time to go home." He whispered into my ear as he dug his knife into my stomach.
I grabbed his wet hand and felt my blood drying fast in the desert heat.
More inconsequential thoughts race through my mind. I remember the knife in my boot. A thing I should have remembered, but instead, I think of forgetting to fill the cat's dish before I left for bingo. The cat will be alright, I guess. Or he won't.
I rest my head on his brawny shoulder, and a wave of relief crashes over me.
"I always wanted to die like a man," I told him.
He smiles. He holds me tight and then slowly helps me lay down on the ground. I look up at his haunted face. His face rapidly aged while fighting other men's wars. My eyes go blurry with tears when an angel appears slowly from behind my son's figure. She moves to my left and squats on her haunches next to me. I look up at my daughter and son draped in the neon casino lights and desert moonlight on the ground. The moon, so bright and round, a flat circle, repeating and repeating and repeating the cycle.
"Kimi," I softly say with a loving smile. I try to move my hand skyward towards her, but all my energy is gone.
My son looks at me, confused, then to my left and back at me with a worried look.
My son throws the long knife onto the hood of my car, making an echo that signals to wild coyotes it's dinner time.
"Kimi's gone."
His face tightens hard when he says this, his eyes and mouth squeezing tight, reinforcing the dam, so no tears seep out.
I look at my son, and we both know what I am now trying to mask on my own face.
I never knew.
She puts a hand on mine and smiles down at me with love—no tears of sadness. A look of pure joy etched upon her face.
That feeling I had when I killed my father is back, making every vein and artery in my body throb…vibrate with love. I had not felt love since that day in Power Montana.
I realized then I hadn't truly loved my children until this very point in time. They had finally given me what I truly wanted my entire life.
A brave man's death.