Red King

We split the house, Simon and me, and I couldn’t complain. I got the garage. Simon had it worse. God knew what was still collecting dust in the old house, our father’s collected history of us, of his life before the divorce, before he moved in with Denise to hers, and, eventually, the pair of them pulled up stakes to find their own new frontier untrammeled by memories of either ex. I visited that new house once, the year after they moved in. It looked like a real-estate staging. Here’s the living room. Here’s the dining room. Here’s where we’re planning the addition. Here’s the kitchen. No pictures on the walls. This is the world we built, without you in it. And why shouldn’t he? He brought us up, as best he could, along with our mother. Why did I feel like he owed anything to us?

I went for the car right away.

The thing grew up in our minds into a kind of myth when we were kids. With his help, I’m sure. It was a kit. He’d convinced us it was some kind of priceless rarity. I remembered sitting in it when I was a kid. I wanted that thing so bad, growing up. Little white two-seater with suicide doors. The only one of its kind in town.

I settled into the car. It was cramped, not how I remembered it. Age cracked the vinyl seats, which squeaked as I sat down. I flipped down the visor on reflex. I remembered him saying “Keys out of the ignition, even if you have a garage. Drains the battery.” Who knew if that was true but I always did it. I fumbled at the keys as they fell and dropped them to the floor. Shit.

As I groped around blindly, face against the wheel, my fingers grazed against something, and the bottom fell out of the world.

I couldn’t tell you how long I’ve waited for something like this, for the rain to fall. Now it was here and I didn’t know what to do with it. Twenty thousand dollars. I could pay off the gas bill, I could pay back Steph for my half of rent these past six months. The numbers added up in my head, numbers that had slowly snowballed over a year of living without a job, on credit, on borrowed time.

There was something else inside the small duffel bag. It was a notebook: old, the leather softcover worn at the edges and along the spine. Inside were columns of notes in a script that was barely legible and instantly recognizable. The last few pages were blank and it hit me like a lightning bolt that he would never finish it. There were numbers--dollar amounts, I supposed, and names. One phrase that cropped up again and again toward the end: Red King. I googled the phrase and found a Godzilla monster, something to do with Game of Thrones, a Wikipedia entry for William II, and something to do with the alchemical tarot. I spent half an hour down the rabbit hole of the alchemical tarot alone in that car with the door open before Simon found me.

“What’s in the bag?” he asked.

“Clothes,” I said after a split second hesitation. “Old clothes.”

Simon didn’t seem to register. He nodded at the open door of the old kit. “You get her going?” he asked.

“Let’s find out,” I said, turning the key. Against everything I’d come to expect from my father, the car roared to life. We both laughed.

We should split it, I thought. I couldn’t make myself say the words. Twenty thousand dollars. Twenty thousand dollars under the seat. Simon could use the money. We both could. I should say something. It was the right thing to do. I could say something. Say something right now. Right. Now.

“Have you ever heard of the Red King?” I asked, instead.

“The deli?”

“The what?”

“Red King deli. It’s on Primrose.”

I told Simon I wanted to take the car for a spin, then headed out to Primrose Street. I parked in a small lot that hugged a squat brick building, a faded sign roughly looking like the King of Diamonds above its red awning. I must have driven past here a hundred times. The duffel was in the passenger seat. I hadn’t figured out what to do with it, so now I hurriedly stashed it bak under the seat. What was he doing here? Only one thing for it.

Fluorescent bulbs. Racks of candy and packaged foods, beer coolers along one wall. A TV set to some breezy morning show. A grill, dormant in mid-morning, and a narrow counter that ran the length of one wall to a faded red door which read “employees only.”

Out of the Employees Only Door a man, aging and heavy in a way that showed he’d carried most of it as muscle most of his life, emerged. He wore a paper mask slung under his jaw. “Can I help you?” he asked in an accent I couldn’t identify. I could barely catch a glimpse at the room beyond that door. A desk. Boxes. Old beer posters.

What was I going to say? Did you know my Dad? My dead Dad who had twenty thousand dollars in--I guess--gambling winnings stashed under the seat of his car? Did he play poker in that back room or what the hell exactly is going on? Questions crowded in and bottlenecked and I just stood there like an idiot until I managed to blurt out “Iced Teas?”

The man offered a disdainfully matter-of-fact jab with his index finger and I ambled through the process of finding something and bringing it back. I pulled out my card in time to see another disdainful little jab, this time with the thumb, at a sign declaring all credit transactions had to be over five dollars. I should have brought money from the car. It didn’t even occur to me.

I stared at the sign as though it were written in a foreign language. “That’s...okay, I actually have some money in my car, I’ll just--”

“Know what,” he said, flatly. “‘S no charge.” I started to protest but he kept on. “You look like you’ve had hell of a day.”

Hell of a day is right, I wanted to say. I wanted to say everything. Instead I just nodded, mutely, and left.

I sat in the car, drinking canned iced tea with twenty thousand dollars in my lap. I half expected it to be gone when I got back, vanished like a dream. I’d missed a call from Simon. A text from Steph. I felt as though I’d come to the edge of my map of my father. That part where the seas fell away and there were dragons.

I should go back in, invite that old man to the funeral. I should go to the bank. I should call Simon back, I should go home, I should put my son to bed, I should tell Steph that I think it’s going to be okay. I put the car in gear, and idle slowly out of the lot, uncertain, but forward.