Probable Cause
Punkin felt it all started while watching some stupid TV program. The black and white frame, a big square eye featuring a stern, priest-like judge, asked the audience to imagine one of their own hands being held to an electric stove burner for ten-seconds. Mary Jo took a deep breath, while Punkin’s older brother, William, not fully understanding, watched with a surly smile. Joseph shook his paternal head at the abuse. Sylvia stared off, as if she were trying to find the motivation required for another troubled mother to hold her three-year old’s hand to such a cruel and unusual disciplinary flame.
Well, she murmured furtively, I’m just glad it wasn’t one of her feet!
Joseph stood up, suggesting they watch something a little more happy. He changed the channel to Divorce Court.
Punkin looked down at his two good hands, thinking of the adobe bricks they made earlier that day. He and brother William helped the neighbor-boy gather straw to layer into the rude wooden forms. They used a garden hose to wet red clay to a soupy consistency. Punkin thought it looked a little too wet. But his friend assured him it was right, according to an authentic Pueblo Indian recipe.
This is better than playing cowboys and Indians, cheered William.
Maybe this mud was bricks before, speculated Punkin aloud, and now it’s happening again.
The two other boys looked at him like he was crazy, and then started laying the bricks out on a rack made of plaster lath, letting the hot Southern California sun do the baking.
The day before, the Bruno boys discovered an ancient train set in their grandfather’s store room. Battery powered, it ran on three-inch tracks. Their grandpa told them it was older than their mother.
It’s a Lionel, touted Tony Bruno, before turning it over to his grandsons, a real collector’s item. That business is about to go belly up, he predicted, puffing on his twenty-five cent cigar. Lionel’s nephew, Roy Cohn, had bought up the family’s electric toy train business thirty-cents on a dollar. Tony had just read this in a recent edition of The Wall Street Journal at the barber shop.
The boys’ grandfather stood, and tapping his cane, told them to take care of it like it was the last toy train they’d ever get. But these words of wisdom were lost on the two boys, now absorbed into connecting together the semicircular sections of track on the cement floor.
The next day found William and Punkin running their prized train set in the dirt and gravel beside the driveway at their rural route development, just north of town. The athletic, red-headed neighbor girl road up bareback and asked the boys if they wanted to play in her hay loft. A provocative invitation, they thoughtlessly ditched their toys in the mud as it started to rain, and then climbed up onto the high horse’s back, the lanky thirteen-year old helping them up with a strong, freckled forearm. Once in her barn, she pulled her Levis down, and as she hooked her thumbs into the waist band of her pink panties, told them not to look.
The boys immediately put their hands to their face. Remember now, she teased, you can’t look. But Punkin quickly spread his fingers, tracking the panties as they slid past her crotch. Red pubic hairs sprouted out of her venus mound like a half-pear swarmed with tiny fire ants. A taunting discoloration, a mysterious indigo dappling, Punkin would be much older before realizing these were black and blue marks she gingerly examined.
Suddenly halting her concerned exploration, she quickly replaced her garments.
OK, you can look now, she commanded.
He peeked, reported William, pointing his finger at Punkin.
You only know that because you looked too, defended little brother, incriminating them both.
The agile Tom-boy leapt up, and grabbing a riding crop, demanded the boys now show her their privates. They looked at each other guiltily, and haltingly complied.
Too slow, she complained. Holding the threatening switch aloft, she quickly unsnapped their breeches, and then pushed them onto their backs.
Laid out upon the scratchy hay, now with their pants and rumpled white undies pulled down around their ankles, each had a very different reaction to her urgent demands.
Punkin, lacking his brother’s dread, looked on excitedly as she officiously checked them, feeling their tiny testicles and having them cough. William turned away in defiance, betraying his powerlessness—or perhaps just remembering the school nurse made him do the same during a recent physical examination. After admiring their robust nakedness for what seemed to William an eternity, she pulled up their pants. Warning them not to tell, she gestured to a menacing set of hooks penetrating the hay bale beside her.
All the way home, William made Punkin promise not to tell anyone what had happened. Little brother nodded absently, still preoccupied by the bruised fruit image of their budding abuser’s pudenda.
That night, the boys were wrestling in their room, and William bit Punkin on the forearm. Little brother ran screaming into his father’s room to find Joseph sitting up in bed, dressed only in his bathrobe, spitting up gobs of discolored mucous onto the floor, now carpeted in soggy newsprint. Revealing older brother’s vicious teeth marks, Joseph, furious, grabbed a belt out of the master wardrobe and then angrily went after William.
Finding him hiding in his sister’s room, the boy’s only friend the family’s molting parakeet, Punkin witnessed William’s brutal spanking through the door left ajar. Just having to look, a peeking Punkin saw up-close the results of his tattling: William, draped against his father’s lanky lower-body, was held upright by Joseph’s firm left hand. His other hand held a bundled leather slap. William shrieked with each smacking to his bared bottom.
Stripped and punished twice in one day, observed an awed Punkin, who then recalled how his mother had saved him from just such an awful outcome when his father caught him playing in the piles of dirt out back. An essential ingredient to Joseph’s business, these adventure-inviting mounds were strictly off-limits. Caught on top of one, Punkin was then immediately hauled inside through the kitchen door. Sylvia, risking patriarchal retribution, reached down and picked up her favorite, setting him safely atop the kitchen counter. By throwing her sheltering arms around the chunky heap, her husband, secretly softened at the sight of her selfless protection of his youngest son, abandoned his cruelty.
Punkin recalled Mary Jo’s especially odd behavior on the following day, a fateful Sunday, after she rode-up on her horse, Star Thistle, late afternoon. While her parents were in the kitchen rehearsing old, tiresome issues, she invited her brothers into their parents’ bathroom. Beside the toilet, forming a semi-circle of waste, were six indignant little turds.
Go get your Tonkas, she instructed her brothers.
The boys knew what she meant. They returned with their yellow earth-moving toys.
Let’s clean up this filth, before we all get into trouble, she ordered.
William and Punkin set about scooping up poop with their model of a front-loader tractor considerably larger than their father’s real life one, and then deposited it into a toy six-wheeler dump truck. William lifted the truck above the potty, releasing its truck bed, while Mary Jo rinsed its remaining contents out with a glass of water.
It’s then their father called out from the kitchen: Kids, come in here! Your mother and I have something to discuss with you.
Quickly, whispered Mary Jo.
Punkin grabbed toilet tissue and cleaned the floor, while William escaped with the toys back to the boy’s bedroom.
Assembled in the kitchen, their father, Joseph, looked troubled and at tether’s end with his wife. Their mother, Sylvia, looked stern, but also bemused, unconvinced of the situation’s gravity.
Your mother and I, he gives her a disgusted look, have decided to file for divorce.
Yes, it’s what I want, immediately defended Sylvia, a new life, far away from him and his father’s constant bullying.
Who’s bullying? shotback Joseph.
That sentence was never parsed, but the important thing about this moment, Punkin reminded himself, is what happened immediately afterward: Mary Jo, besot in ragged tears, bolted—a sad and selfish response he would observe repeatedly throughout their youthful lives.
Where did she go might be a sane mother’s response. But it never came, reminded Mary Jo. After all, she commented later, during a siblings' reunion, what two people should be more concerned about each other than a mother and her daughter? Especially when one of them goes missing!
Where she went was to the barn out back, while the boys retreated to their shared bedroom to face anew their obvious differences: William was in dread of living with his crazy mother while Punkin rather relished the idea. No two boys stood farther apart in temperament and nature. Yet they still had each other, and now more than ever!
Meanwhile, Mary Jo, seeking a more instinctual counsel, entered the rank barn housing her prized horse, inhaling deeply the dried sweat, urine dampened hay, and the day’s tardy bowel movement. Overlorded by a strong dark shadow, dimly lit by a profiled half-moon, stood her true love and refuge of last resort fifteen-hands high, the white star above his darkly pooled eyes there to guide her.
During this time of Mary Jo’s troubled soul-making, it's first recalled the two brothers dawned Sir Lancelot playsuits, plastic swords and shields, and then snuck into their sister's room where they began poking their swords into the molting bird’s cage, taunting it into a furious flight until a rain of feathers filled the room. Not that it had been their thoughtful aim, but the poor thing, frightened for its life, eventually succumbed to a heart attack.
Decades later, while grieving the death of his own beloved parakeet of many years, Punkin, now called Peter, recovered quite a different memory, one dictating it was he alone who had entered his sister’s room and killed the innocent bird quite intentionally. Perhaps this version is the product of a guilty filter, as Peter Bruno, the grown man, had failed in several ways to properly care for his precious parakeet. Perhaps it's this that got us thinking about the night of the divorce announcement, and two families' stymied attempts to properly handle a mental health crisis.
