Danny's Story

 Danny’s Story

You can’t choose your family.  My father used to say that acquiring family was like playing the slot machine. Sometimes, you came up with cherries across the board for the good ones, other times it was bananas for the crazy ones or lemons for the sour ones.

I first heard the news at work but no name was attached to it. It was on the car radio on the drive home. It was the top story at six o’clock, but still no moniker was released.  It was all over the Internet with condolences for the family.

It wasn’t until the next morning when I checked my phone that the haunting image of that face, one that I knew very well with those hypnotic eyes and that sad, yet likeable smile penetrated and shattered my life.

“It’s cousin Danny.”

I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to be angry, but couldn’t muster up that emotion.  There was nothing to laugh at. There were so many emotions that were running through my brain, heart and body that it was a miracle the whole machine didn’t explode.

“Cousin Danny was the shooter.”

I hadn’t heard from my cousin for years. I had tried to contact him, but never got any messages in return.  I knew that the guy had been in and out of the psych ward. I knew that he had travelled a really rough road for a long time. These were bits and pieces I heard through the family grapevine.  

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

I had a much older sister. By the time that I was entering middle school she was graduating from college. Danny had one sister just a couple of years older than him. We always agreed that secretly we were each other’s brother.

His mother and my father were second cousins.  For some reason, we never visited because there was bad blood between the parents. The two families lived about four hours apart.

Danny and I grew up together.  Every summer, we would spend a good chunk of our time together at our grandparent’s farm. It was the perfect place for two little boys to find trouble and mischief seemed to follow us around like a bad smell.

There was the time that we found a can of green paint in the shed. It was just a small container and it had been sitting on the shelf for a very long time. It took all of our creative genius and limited muscle to open it.

The green was an awful colour.

Danny grinned.

“Remember what grandma said the other day?”

I shook my head.

“She said that we spent so much time on this farm that our names should be all over it. Do you see our names all over it?”

I smirked. I didn’t have to guess what my cousin had in mind.

So we took a couple of twigs and wrote our names all over the farm. We covered the barns, inside and outside, the sheds, the chicken coop, the farm machinery and last, but not least, the house.  

It was there that grandpa Gus caught us.

“What are you two little Devils up to?  Who said you could paint the house green?”

We ran and he chased after us despite the arthritis in his right knee. He eventually caught us hiding in the barn and boxed our ears.

“Let’s go Picasso and Rembrandt, you have a lot of cleaning up to do.”

We spent the last few days of summer vacation cleaning and scrubbing green pain off every surface that had been attacked.  

“If I ever catch you puling this kind of nonsense again, I will spank your bottoms so hard that you won’t be able to stand up for a week.”

The next summer, we left all the paints alone. We had discovered something much more fun.

The farm included a clump of trees. We had explored every inch of that forest many, many times.  We had built tree forts and enticed Danny’s slightly older sister Eleanor to come and see the great building only to douse her with a bucket of slime water.  Our butts were sore for a while after that one.

But, that year we found a giant ant hill stuck between two trees.

“You thinking what I’m thinking cousin?”  Danny smirked and I just shrugged my shoulders.

In minutes, the two opposite Tarzan swings had been set up.  They were about thirty feet apart.

“The winner knocks the other off the rope into the ant hill.  Have fun, cousin.”  Danny smiled.

I tried to act tough.  Honestly, I thought it was a little crazy, but if I didn’t go ahead with things, he would razz me something awful.

We swung toward each other and smacked hard both trying desperately to hang on while attempting to knock the other off.  It didn’t work the first time, so we tried it again.

Finally, on the eight try, it worked in my favour.  I managed to knock Danny right into the ant pile.  

The ants were all over him instantly.

I laughed so hard that I nearly fell into the ant pile.

“The ants are biting my nuts!”

Danny stripped in one swift, clean motion dancing around brushing the ants off of him as he maneuvered away from the ant hill.

I called it the ant dance.  

I couldn’t stop laughing and this only irritated him even more.

“Shut up, jerk, or I’ll go up there and drag your sorry ass right in the middle of it.”

“I can see your little hot dog.”

“That’s it, you’re dead cousin.”

Danny, who was completely naked, ran to the tree that served as my sanctuary and realized climbing it without any clothes could be worse than an ant attack.

So he retrieved a long stick and slowly, methodically pulled out all of the clothes out of the ant pile. He carefully and roughly brushed all of the ants off them. By the time he was dressed, I was long gone.

Danny found me in the kitchen talking to grandma.

“Danny where have you been?”

“Just skipping rocks across the pond.”

“You mean stones, honey.  Rocks are great big things that you can’t even pick up unless you want a hernia.”

“Grandma, what’s a hernia?” I asked.

“Your grandfather had one years ago. It is man pain.  It happens when you pick up something too heavy or pull your groin the wrong way.”

“Like if you were to land in a pile of angry red ants and you jumped out and danced like a crazy person possessed by the Devil.” I smiled at grandma, while Danny gritted his teeth.

“Well, who would be foolish enough to do something that?”

I grinned at Danny.  

There were paybacks.

We slept in the same room and that night I found myself gasping for air. Cousin Danny had taped my mouth shut.  I looked over in the next bed and he was feigning sleep although the brat was laughing so hard he was shaking.

There was also the time we played gladiators. It was a simple game. We had found some old cork laying around (grandpa suffered from pack rat syndrome and never threw anything away).  We attached the cork to the end of bamboo poles. Then we went to the pond where there was a log perched over the water.

We stood a few feet apart and pounded one another trying to knock each other off the log.  It was great fun until Danny knocked me off and I smacked my head hard enough to earn a first-rate concussion.

Danny picked up my head by yanking on my hair.  

I was swimming in and out of consciousness.

“Oh, my God, come on cousin talk to me.”

Later, he told me there was blood leaking from my ears and nose. That’s when he got really scared.

Danny picked me up. It was no easy feat since we weighed about the same and carried me to the front door of the old farmhouse. He screamed his ass off.

“Grandma, grandpa, hurry up and come quick.”

They ran out the door.

“Jesus, Mary and all the Saints, what have two knuckleheads been up to?” Grandpa Gus was angry.

Grandma ran back in the house and called for an ambulance.  Despite the fact that they lived out in the boonies as grandpa was fond of saying, the medics arrived rather quickly.  

It was probably grandma’s urgent and panicky voice that convinced them it was a real emergency.  She also screamed damn loud.

Grandpa and Danny drove to the hospital some twenty-five miles away and had lots of time to talk.

“How did it happen and don’t lie to me boy or I’ll take the switch to you?”

Danny didn’t sweat it because he knew that grandma would never let grandpa take the switch to them.

I was okay and we were packed off home a few days earlier than planned.

There had been a thousand more adventures.

But, we couldn’t stay mischievous little boys forever.  We grew up and landed jobs in our respective hometowns.  We were thirteen the last time we saw each other. It was ironic, because we both had cars, but there was always something in the way like baseball practice, homework, girls and just growing up, I guess.

When grandpa died, Danny never came to the funeral.  

“Where is Danny?” I asked his mother and father and sister.

“He had to work.” Eleanor looked guilty.

“But, Grandpa Gus was good to him.”

She just walked away.

When grandma passed away, Danny once again failed to show up for the funeral.  This time, only Eleanor showed up.

“Where is Danny? Doesn’t he know that grandma died?”

“He knows, but he is away.”

“Do you have a phone number I can call him at?”

“It’s best that you don’t.”

“Give me an address so I can write him a letter.”

There was no Internet or cell phones back then.

“Give me your phone number and I’ll have him call you.”

He never called.

We drifted apart some more.  

After much effort, I finally got a hold of Danny’s phone number.

“Danny, I am getting married, I want you at the wedding. You have to be there.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

He never showed up.

The bits and pieces of what Danny was up to arrived like a few drops of water in a very dry desert. 

My mom informed me of this tidbit one day.

“Danny got married and he didn’t invite me?”

The connection had been severed. There was no explanation, no story, no reason.

And, then his name showed up again this time in a very unfavourable way.

The headlines said it all: ‘Man kills eight and injures twenty-six in wild spree at local mall.’  Then, he turned the gun on himself.

“Good bye, Danny,” as the tears ran down my cheeks. I closed my eyes and a soft, sour smile came to me remembering the ant dance of a million days ago.