by George Wier
The Talk lasted an interminable thirty minutes. It was one of the longest half hours of my life. We touched upon boys and what they were after―which got me the most disbelieving look I’d ever seen―and Jessica had to agree that, yes, she knew perfectly well what they were after. Then I launched off into the subject of school. She had the one semester left to go and I didn’t want to see her screw it up completely. Thus far she had come terribly close. So I was about to go off into teachers and showing a semblance of respect, but somehow got off onto the touchiest subject of all: smoking marijuana.
“Of course, dad,” she said. “I’ve done it. But I’m not a pothead.”
I was taken aback for a moment, but only so. “That’s good,” I managed. “It’s not that I don’t want you to become a pothead. It’s that I don’t want you to smoke any. Anymore. For any reason.”
Her eyes never wavered from mine and I didn’t dare blink.
“I want,” I said, “for you to have your wits about you every minute of every day. I want you good and sharp. Life throws things at you from out of the blue, and you never know when it’s coming. Life does that constantly. It does it to me every single day. There is no replacing confidence, and when you’re high, you’ve got none, zero, zip, nada confidence. Capeche?”
“I get it, dad. I won’t smoke any.”
“Alright.”
“So where are you going? I know you’re about to go somewhere.”
“Oh,” I said. “That. I have to go help a client of mine. He lives over two hundred miles from here. There’s no way to avoid it.”
“I’m going with you,” she said.
“Wait a minute. What?”
“You want me sharp. You want me to have my wits about me. But you won’t let me drive mom’s car, and I don’t want to drive your car. Seriously, dad, you need a new car, and I’m embarrassed for my friends to see me in yours.”
“Well thanks.”
“You know what I mean. If you want me to get experience driving, even though I’ve already passed the exam and gotten my license, but you’ll only let me drive your car when you’re riding with me, then it makes sense that I go with you.”
She started to rise up from our back porch steps.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To ask mom if I can go with you,” she said.
“Sit down,” I said. “You don’t have to ask mom anything. I decide those kinds of things.”
“Ha!” she said, but sat down anyway. “I don’t think so!”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Watch this. Follow me.”
I got up and dusted off my slacks and went into the house with Jessica in tow.
“Honey!” I called up the stairs.
“What?” Julie yelled down.
“I’m taking Jessica with me to East Texas.”
“Of course you are!” Julie said. And that was that.
Try to put one over on me. I tell you.
*****
Jessica was to drive the first leg of the journey. I felt it safer since she knew all the streets and highways until we got well out of Austin. Later, when she started getting into unfamiliar territory in the night and she started getting tired at the same time, I’d take over for the remainder of the trip.
I was proud of myself until we turned east on Highway 71 and I reviewed what had happened―how I had been set up. Women were telepathic. They had to be. There was no other possible explanation. If they communicated with each other that way and made silent agreements and put us into positions where we thought we were making our own decisions all along, then we were... mere pawns. And if that were the case, maybe they were evil after all. And my daughter was one of them.
Sometimes fatherhood hits a little hard.
One day I’d break their code, and there would be hell to pay.
And so it went, around and around inside my head and on into the night.
CHAPTER THREE
Jessica drove us through Bastrop, one of Texas’ oldest cities, and without having to be told, she cut across to Highway 21 and on east and north through the Lost Pines region. The pines were tall, black sentinels against a starry sky, crowding the divided highway through the rolling hills. I rolled down my window and inhaled the scent of pine on the cold, crisp air.
I had read somewhere that perhaps a million or more years back the Lost Pines was part of one vast forest stretching across Central and East Texas. The forest through which we passed was a distant cousin to the larger pine forest that stretched from south of Texarkana all the way down to the Gulf Coast.
There is a feeling that those woods always give me as I pass them by. It is a sense of things primeval. An ancient watchfulness and at the same moment a secret and introspective silence. I had always thought that one day I might retire to a cabin in those woods.
After ten more miles we left the last pine tree behind us and moved on. Small towns came and went and the traffic was slight.
“Dad?” Jessica asked after a long period of silence.
“Yeah?”
“Why did you marry mom?”
“What?” I asked.
“Well, you had this job making lots of money, and mom says you went on this adventure to get the money back from Carpin and to get me, and you did it, then me and mom moved in with you and you got mom pregnant. Then you married her and had Jennifer. In the meantime you don’t just work, but you run off and do all this weird stuff like that time we went after the devil worshipers―”
“That’s enough,” I said. “I get what you’re saying. Let me explain.” And then I realized I couldn’t explain a damned thing.
“Uh, dad. I’m waiting.” She turned to look at me.
“Keep your eyes on the road,” I said.
“Sure,” she said. So?” She was looking back at the road, but cutting her eyes at me every chance she got.
“So, nothing. I don’t know. That’s the real truth. I just don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s predestination or someone banging away on a typewriter up in the sky, writing out my life like it’s some damned script. Other times I think... other times I still don’t know.”
“But you love her, right?”
“Oh! Of course I do. Although I’ll tell you something, and you can’t ever tell anyone on Earth I said this because I’ll disavow all knowledge.”
“Okay,” Jessica said. “I’m sure as hell listening now.”
“Alright, here goes. There’s words and there’s things. And the words are not the things, get me?”
“Dad, what the f― I mean, what are you talking about?”
“It’s like this. There comes a moment when you feel a certain way about a person. You feel it hard and it’s got a sharp edge to it, and maybe it hurts or maybe it just makes you feel sick or maybe it just gives you a headache, follow me?”
She nodded.
“So you’re going down the road with someone that you’ve felt that way about many times, and she turns to you and says ’I love you.’ Well, you have to say: ’I love you, too.’ But do you? I mean, at that exact moment, are you feeling the same thing you once felt? No. You’re thinking about how maybe NASDAQ is going to start showing a sell-off of tech stocks. But at that moment you’d better drop NASDAQ like a hot potato and respond in kind. Why? Because you once felt that way and you know you’re going to feel it again, maybe today, tomorrow, or next week, and especially you’re going to feel it in a bad way if you ever lose her. If you can admire someone and feel a bit of sympathy for them at the same time, well, that’s love, Jess. That’s all it is. It’s not a word. Not even close. But you’d better not forget the word. And that’s all I know about it.”
“Whoa, dad. That’s too deep for me.”
“You asked,” I said. “And you’re getting too old, too quick.”
“I know,” she said.
“I give you a hard time,” I said. “But you’re my daughter, for better or for worse and it’s all legal and so you’ve got to put up with me. But I’m d
amned proud of you, kid.”
Jessica took her eyes off the road and I allowed it, for the moment.
“Dad, have you been smoking dope?” she asked.
I laughed. “Just drive. Eyes. Eyes on road. Are you tired?”
“Not a bit.”
“And you know where you’re going? Know where the turnoffs are?”
“I glanced at the map. I have an uncanny sense of direction, remember? It’s my evil power.”
“Good evil power,” I said. “Alright then, I think I’ll take a nap. If you even begin to get tired, you wake me up.”
“Cool. Go to sleep,” she said.
So I tilted my seat back and did just that.
*****
As I drifted off I thought about Holt Gatlin. Holt had worked his entire life away, and had very nearly lost everything in less time than it takes to click the shutter button of a camera. My mind drifted with the night and I tried to close my eyes but they kept popping open. So I drifted also with the images that sprang up out of the darkness in our headlights and were just as quickly cast behind us, and somewhere in there I went to sleep.
“I go to sleep with them every night, Bill. Every night of my sorry life.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Holt,” I said.
Holt and I were playing chess. He picked up his black knight and took my queen’s pawn. It was a silly move as his knight was now so much fodder.
“Bayous?” I asked.
“What about them?”
“Bayous back in there nobody’s ever seen?”
“Yeah. Cypress knees protruding from duckweed-covered water like the spines of pre-historic water dinosaurs and Spanish Moss hanging down like the beards of all the grandfathers of the Ozarks.”
“Very descriptive, Holt,” I said. “You should have been a writer instead of a chess-set maker.”
“Never could abide the game,” he said.
My head jerked at the sudden scream.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The people.”
“What people?” I asked.
“The dead people. They’re fifty years dead and gone. But they live off of our dreams. That’s what gives them power. The children of the swamp. What music they make! I go to sleep with them every night, Bill. Every night of my sorry life.”
There was another scream, this one closer.
“When will it stop?” Holt asked, and took his knight with my king’s pawn.
“I don’t know, Holt,” I said. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll just let it go.”
“What’s that, dad?” Holt asked, which was sort of funny in that he had a girl’s voice. In fact, his voice sounded like―
“Dad!”
I woke up and Jessica was hitting the brakes.
She swerved at the last moment and was around the beast.
“Jiminy Crickets!” I exclaimed. “You scared me.”
Jessica got the car back into the correct lane and punched the gas.
“Sorry,” she said. “What was that thing?”
“That was a feral hog.”
“A hog? It looked like a monster.”
“Some of them are,” I said. “Monsters, that is.”
*****
We switched places in Bryan, Texas. I drove the rest of the way and we made it to Marshall by 2:30 a.m. It was good time, but we were both exhausted. Jessica woke up when she detected the slowing of the car.
I drove by the Marshall Hospital but decided against stopping by. It was the wrong time of the night for a visit to Holt Gatlin. Instead I turned us around and drove back to a quaint hotel I had passed moments before.
When I pulled into the driveway I began to have second-thoughts. The place looked as though it was left over from about World War II. There being few other options, I parked and got out into the chilly air and stretched my legs.
“You gotta be kidding me, dad. What about the Hilton?”
“They don’t have a Hilton here, Jess,” I said. “It’s the middle of the night. This will have to do.”
“Whatever,” she said. “I just want a bed and a pillow.”
I had to agree with her on that point.
I practically had to stand on the buzzer at the drive-up window of the main house, but five minutes later the sleep-filled eyes of the night manager appeared in the fluorescent-lit room. I asked for a room with two beds. The fellow mumbled something, took my credit card and handed me two keys.
The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke and my mattress was lumpy. It was a far cry from my comfortable bed at home and Julie’s warm body, but I adjusted the thermostat and settled in.
I had one fitful dream that lasted most of the night and into the day.
Holt stood on an island at the edge of the water. He held his fists against his ears while behind him the trees swayed and groaned.
“The trees,” he said. “They came from the bayou and they’re attacking the people.”
I looked. The trees were indeed alive and a mass of people were being torn apart.
“Get in my boat, Holt. I’ll get you out of here.”
“That won’t work. They’ll follow. They always follow. It never stops.”
I got out of the boat and ran amongst the trees, screaming at them to cease, but I was met with a deep, booming laughter that filled the air.
Meanwhile the arms and legs and heads of the people flew about in the air around me.
I shuddered awake, but only because Jessica shook me.
“It’s daylight, dad,” she said. “I’m hungry.”
*****
“Dad,” Jessica said over breakfast at the IHOP.
“Yeah?”
“We’re rich, aren’t we?”
“Well,” I said, and took a bite of pancake, “you’re not rich. But really, neither am I?”
“How much money is rich?”
“Hmm. That’s a good question. As I see it―and this is a personal definition―rich is when your money works for you, only you have so much that you don’t have to make it work for you. You just spend it. Wealthy, on the other hand, is where your money works for you. Me? I still have to work for my money. It’s more of a percentage thing.”
“Explain, please, to your responsible and very intelligent non-pot-smoking daughter who wants her own car.”
“Okay. More than fifty percent of our income comes from me working. When that ratio changes to where our income, as a family, is higher than fifty percent from the interest off of invested money we have to work for us, then you could say we were... comfortable.”
“Yeah, we’re not gonna starve. Thanks for clearing that up. I think I’ll have another order of pancakes.”
“No you’re not,” I said.
“Whatever,” she said, and then acted as if she didn’t care.
I ended up placing another short stack order for the two of us to share.
CHAPTER FOUR
Willett Mahoney was in Holt’s hospital room when we arrived.
“Bill,” Willett said to me and nodded.
“Hiya, Willett,” I said. Neither one of us bothered to shake. Willett wasn’t the handshaking kind, and I wasn’t the kind to shake with anyone who wasn’t.
Holt Gatlin was fast asleep. One of his legs was elevated in a cast and had a sheet draped over it. His toes stuck out of the end of the cast.
“Who’s this?” Willett asked.
“I’m Jessica, and you can talk directly to me.”
“I suppose I can,” Willett said.
“This is my daughter,” I said.
“I can see the resemblance,” Willett said.
“I’ll bet,” Jessica stated. She gave me a look and a slight roll of the eyes. I knew the look all too well.
“How’s Holt?” I asked.
“Touch and go. Tough old bird, though,” Willett said.
“That’s for sure.”
There was no other chair so I stood there at the metal rail of Holt’s hospital bed.
Holt�
��s upper body was also slightly elevated. It didn’t appear to be the most comfortable position for him, but considering that he also had a cast on his right arm from above his elbow down to his thumb and the bent-knee cast on his right leg from just below his groin all the way down to his heel, it was difficult to imagine how any position could be comfortable.
Also, I noted that he wouldn’t be signing any papers anytime soon. Not with his right hand, anyway.
I looked at the old man’s seamed face. He looked pale and wan, but at the same time he looked restful. Of course that’s also the way a body looks when it’s lying in a coffin. I shook the thought out of my head.
No, I decided. No funeral. Holt was going to make it.
Holt’s eyes came open slowly. He looked down toward Willett, and then at Jessica. His eyebrows raised in surprise, but then he detected that someone was standing close beside him and turned his head slowly towards me.
“Bill,” he whispered.
“Hey, Holt,” I said. “You look good.”
“Yeah? Like hell. I feel... like I lost a fight with a tornado.”
“Mm-hmm.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“And who’s this?” Holt asked and nodded towards Jessica.
“That’s Jessica,” Willett said, then added, “ and she can speak for herself.”
“Of course she can,” Holt said.
“Hello, Mr. Gatlin,” Jessica said. “I heard you got hurt.”
“I did. I most certainly did.”
Holt looked up at me. “She’s a fine girl, Bill.”
“A bit of a pain sometimes, but I’m not looking to trade her in. Yet.”
“Willett,” Holt said, “I need to talk with Mr. Travis a bit.”
Willett stood. “I’ll be in the cafeteria,” he said, and stood up. “I need a cup of coffee anyway.”
