A SPECIAL THREE-PART SERIES:
Part 1: Anto Aino
Epileptics speak of a door being opened in their heads at the onset of a grand mal seizure. Sights, sounds, voices, even smells from their past will surround them in an aura. That is what happened to me in the first few hours of my return to my hometown since leaving my berth aboard the Charles M. Pierce. For one thing, I always avoided coming home when the Pierce tied up for winter, sometimes in Buffalo, more often in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.
Those earliest memories of home came flooding in even before I had unpacked in the B & B in Northtown Harbor.
For the first time since childhood, I had freedom. I wasn’t stuck with a pair of four-hour shifts in the twenty-four-hour day, living my life on an ore boat by shift changes. Having money in the bank and no dependents, I felt uneasy–even a little guilty–because all my life, I’d worked to make a living just as my father had. Only rich people wake up every day knowing they have nothing to do but whatever pleases them. My working-class sensibilities were askew.
The first thing I had to do was organize my day now that I had all these hours to spend. I made a list of people I could contact, old friends who might still live in town. I had not kept in touch with anyone in Northtown, and that included my parents and siblings. My first berth was the J. Burton Ayers right out of high school. I had just wrecked my car the night before. Cited to appear in court, I skipped town on an ore boat arranged by my uncle, who worked on the Hewlett unloaders on the docks. With a brand-new ordinary seaman’s ticket in my pocket, I desperately wanted to get away and start living life at eighteen. I found out later my father went to court for me and managed to get me off the legal hook. I never thanked him for that.
Names from the old neighborhood included some cousins and a few more who might be willing to talk to me about the suicide of a boy I went to Catholic elementary school with. He drank from a bottle of Drano. No one knew why. The mystery of it ate at me for almost twenty years. I had no idea whether Tony Kantola had any living relatives. My parents were long dead; my siblings didn’t speak to me after I ignored the letters about my parents’ deaths within six months of each other and the funerals. I scanned my list for a place to begin and found it: Anto Aino.
His real name was Antoki Harmaajärvi. Nobody knew why we called him by our name any more than we could remember who named the derelict building on Hulbert the Ice-Cream Factory where we made our army films with my cousin’s Super 8 camera.
Everybody called him Anto Aino. He changed his name one day in high school and shortened the last name. Nobody, not even his teachers, asked if he could do that legally. You didn’t question him. He was a legend and by far the scariest boy I had ever known. We all knew stories about him. Some of us saw him in action. He beat up high school boys when he was in eighth grade. He jumped out of tree limbs onto cars going by. Cops made regular stops at his house.
Rumor said his parents in Finland couldn’t control him, so they shipped him to an aunt in America. When he confronted me down at the slip in Bumstown, where I was fishing for carp, I was alone with my dog. He showed up like a ghost—white-blond hair in a buzzcut. He loomed behind me, like an albino wolf, then clambering on all fours down to the shoreline. He stuck a lit M80 into a dead carp’s mouth and blew it up near me. Without any emotion at all, he regarded me and said he was going to cut my throat. My dog, out chasing muck rabbits, appeared just in time to save me. I never saw him again in the flesh after that until the day I knocked on his door.
He was listed in the phone book with a Tivision Avenue address. Tivision was in the poorest part of the harbor. Once full of dock workers’ homes, it was primarily a black and Hispanic section with a lot of small churches with obscure and semi-mystical names. The Catholic elementary school I had attended was derelict. Most of the houses were in bad shape or showed signs of rot. Some males affecting the gangbanger look with pants lowered to the crack of their buttocks eyed me with disdain or sat on porches with rap music blasting away at eardrum-splitting decibels.
Aino’s place wasn’t a house but a pair of rooms on the top floor of a three-story rental. There wasn’t a distinguishing feature of the house—a mustard-yellow rectangle tipped on its end without a secondary color for the trim.
Standing in front of his door, I breathed heavily; it wasn’t the walk up those narrow, winding back stairs as much as my uncertainty at my private investigation into the death of a boyhood companion. I had no skills for extracting information. Doubts piled up in my head when the door was flung open, and Anto Aino, the boyhood terror, stood there.
“What do you want?”
“My name’s Jack Schroeder,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you about Tony Kantola’s suicide.”
“I don’t know him or you. Screw off.”
I was taller, although thirty pounds lighter, from how his t-shirt stretched across his belly. This boy-monster from my youth was a flabby, tattooed man with a bristly mustache and a receding hairline. I had to check my surprise at seeing the reality as opposed to the larger-than-life creature of my youthful imagination.
I told him who I was, repeated an extract of what I’d prepared to say, and asked if I could speak with him.
He opened the door, and I walked into a noxious vapor of odors. A reclining chair occupied the middle of a floor devoid of other furniture except for a hi-def TV set on a coffee table. A glossy magazine lay folded over the arm of a ratty sofa like a tropical bird stretching its wings in the heat. The floorboards were uneven, planking painted a gunmetal gray like the one I had used belowdecks in bad weather as a deckhand. A chrome bar stool was the only other chair in the room; nothing on the walls, not a picture or a print of any kind. There was a fuggy smell of rancid meat, cigarette ash, and male sweat.
Aino stepped back to let me in. I decided to forego an attempt to build camaraderie—a couple of harbor kids from the old days. He gave off waves of menace just from his posture. A rush of that boyhood fear surged through me before I could get myself under control.
“I’m here about Tony Kantola’s suicide twenty years ago. He was—”
“You said that already.”
“He was my best friend back then. I’m trying to find out why he did it.” A little confidence returned in the sound of my voice.
“What’s it got to do with me?”
“Tony’s mother and your friend Craig Mäki’s mother were good friends—”
“Shit, man, I haven’t seen old Craig since high school.”
At least my opening had prodded something other than a hostile smirk from Aino’s face.
“I was wondering, maybe hoping is the better word,” I said, “that Craig’s mother might have said something to him about Tony’s death, and Craig could have passed on that to you at some point.”
It was a thin reed to hang anything on.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Aino said, more bored sounding than threatening.
I headed for the door and then caught myself. I had no reason to be running from this out-of-shape thug. Turning to face him, I stared at his tattoos. Both arms from the wrists to the shoulders, where parts of his ink disappeared under the sleeves. Clowns, spider webs, a lion rampant, some tribal symbols I couldn’t make out, and one covering most of his right bicep that resembled some cross-protection symbol.
“Like my tatts, faggot?”
I saw the word Sisu inked on the inside of both wrists. Finland. Something was wrong with the grin on his face. He hadn’t smiled yet.
“Hard to make them out,” I said. “I assume your cellie did most of them?”
He was fast. He went from relaxed to war in a split-second, and the balled fist that hit me on the underside of my left jaw snapped my head back and sent me backward into the hallway. I tried to get on my feet, but I had Bambi legs, and my head was wobbling on my neck, although that was just the impression from the incoherent images going off like a string of firecrackers. I struggled to my feet after a great effort and was about to charge at him when the door slammed shut. I heard Aino’s laugh or grunt behind the door.
I raised my fist and banged on the door. I don’t know how long I knocked or stood there. My brain was still scrambled, but when I began to think coherently again, I realized I was in no shape to fight him. I made my way downstairs one step at a time, tripping twice as my feet didn’t seem to want to follow commands from a damaged brain. Blood leaked from the corner of my lip where a knuckle connected; my tongue touched a cracked incisor. That gave me pleasure in the hope that his hand was cut. A human mouth is as filthy with bacteria as a dog’s. Please, give the bastard a staph infection so bad they cut his hand off.
When I returned to my B & B, I was nauseated and had to throw up in the street. I made my way to my room more by instinct than by sight. I closed the window shades and fell on the bed. I know you aren’t supposed to sleep after taking a blow to the head. I’ve had a couple of concussions before. Lying on my stomach, fully dressed, seemed to be the only sensible thing to do. I shut my eyes and tried to make myself as small on the bed as possible. I had one unpleasant image of my brain sloshing around in my skull like the water in a toilet bowl in choppy water—the only time I got seasick sailing on the lakes: a coal run down Lake Michigan to South Chicago made the chop judder against the hull in a way that gave the vessel a fast, rolling pitch. I lay there for hours in the dark, semi-conscious but feeling well enough to get up by eight and drink some water.
I didn’t leave my room for three days. When I did, I was ten pounds lighter if the notch on my belt was any indication.
How do you explain it—those hurts of childhood? They never leave, and you can’t redeem them or change a single one. Everything is back there somewhere in the abyss like matter and antimatter: love and friendship, betrayal, death and loss. We were children becoming adults, and that passage was more than we could understand about life—or ever would.
Two boys I knew—one well, one vaguely, both blond—exist in my memory on a sliding scale between good and evil, dark and light. I am caught between them, magnetized, unable to move from my exact center. Like the molecules that make me, I cannot touch anything. I cannot act. Like a fish, I’m rotting from the head down.
-END of Part One-
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Bumstown Reverie: A Mystery
By Terry White
BIO- Terry White was born and raised in Northeastern Ohio, Terry White has published several crime, noir, and hardboiled novels as well as genre and mainstream stories in various magazines and anthologies under such pseudonyms as Robb T. White and Terry White. Nominated for a Derringer in 2019, his crime story “Inside Man” was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2019. Betray Me Not (Grand Mal, 2022) was selected by the Independent Fiction Alliance as a Truly Independent Book of 2022.
Follow Terry White at:
TWITTER- @tomhaftmann
