He finally caught his breath and slid the window up, wishing for a crank to turn instead of a button to delicately press, wishing for hard mechanical things to put his hands on, vinyl to press his sweaty head against instead of soft, fragrant leather.
His father turned down the music again and they rode in near silence, but it didn’t last for long. “Got that out of your system, you little shit?”
“Whatever,” Marshall answered, exhausted.
“Okay,” his father said, suddenly swerving the truck off-road. Marshall gripped the seat and the door, something more than fear blooming in him as he realized that there were no cars around, these were still the little-traveled roads of backwater Florida, and this was his father’s country, not the open waters of the Gulf he was more familiar with.
The truck, nice as the interior was, was still a real truck, and it ate up the dry grasses beside the road in great jouncing strides as his father headed toward the heavier brush. The ride got noticeably rougher within seconds, and Marshall would have screamed again when a canal suddenly loomed in front of them, but terror had seized up his throat, and he clutched the door when his father made a hard left and took them along the canal and into a stand of melaleuca trees before slamming on the brakes and throwing open his door.
As soon as his father hit the ground and slammed his door shut, Marshall punched the automatic locks and watched in terror as his father rounded the back of the truck and came for his door. Sadly, his dad had the keys and he quickly hit the unlock button and jerked the door open at the same time, while Marshall frantically poked at the button.
“Dammit, Marshall,” his father yelled. “I’m not going to hurt you. Now get down here. When have I ever touched a hair on your head? Hell, I probably should have, I probably should have beat the crap out of you the way my father did me and Randy. But I didn’t, did I? And I’m not gonna start now. So get down here.”
His father stepped away from the truck and folded his arms across his chest, as if to prove he wasn’t going to wrap his hands around Marshall’s throat. Marshall wasn’t convinced, but he slid down from the seat and sidled against the truck, watching his father carefully, his heart racing. His father didn’t move.
“Shut the door,” he said, and Marshall leaned over without taking his eyes off his father and slammed the door shut. He jumped at the sound of the doors locking, and then his father turned around and set off through the melaleuca, calling over his shoulder, “Come on. I want to show you something.”
He stood by the truck for a minute. It felt a lot like a mob movie, and even though his father was telling the truth—he hadn’t ever laid a hand on him—he felt a lot safer near the truck. But his father just kept going and Marshall finally followed him, his back suddenly feeling vulnerable.
The melaleucas had nearly ruined the Everglades, but Marshall loved them, their mellow, camphor smell, the way the trunks shed their silvery, paperlike bark in velvety sheets. He used to peel it off and tell Meghan that the Indians used to pound it flat and make paper from it. Complete crap, of course. But she swallowed it, like she swallowed everything he ever fed her.
Had he shelled a peanut right in front of her and held it out she would have opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue like a novice taking communion. Jesus, she was so stupid and naïve and trusting. He tramped behind his father, breathing in the scent of his childhood, his feet trudging through softer and softer ground.
His father finally broke out of the stand and stood waiting on the banks of a wide canal, the remains of an old, wood bridge crossing to the other side, where palm trees curved out over black water. His dad was looking hard at the bridge, and Marshall followed his gaze, taking in the rotting planks, the sagging supports.
“We actually used to drive across that,” he father said, shaking his head, a small smile on his lips. “Randy had a Scout, that thing could do about anything. He used to pull people out of the canals with it all the time. We’d come out here on the weekends.” He turned, looking over the overgrown banks, the palms. He pointed to a palm dripping with dead fronds like a giant’s hula skirt. “Used to jump off that into the water. Randy could do a flip off it. I’d like to break my back when I tried it. Come on.”
His father made his way to the edge of the bridge, and Marshall watched in disbelief as he slid his foot forward and tested his weight on it. The plank held and he looked back at Marshall. “I’m going over.”
He left it open, but the challenge was clear. Marshall watched him, almost crying out when his foot broke through, but his dad gained his balance and grinned over at him. “It’s just water, you know.”
Marshall looked down at the water. It looked safe enough, but the “just water” could have anything at all in it. Water moccasins, gators, amoebae that could crawl up his nose or his urethra and grow in his brain, his gut. But his dad was making it, even seemed to be enjoying it.
Marshall picked his way down to the end of the bridge and gingerly edged his foot forward, feeling for a solid base. He closed his eyes as he transferred his weight. It held. He toed his way across like that, only glancing at his father once. Cal was standing on the bank, watching him intently. To Marshall, he looked like an outfielder with a killer at bat, tense, waiting for the ball to come straight at him. He knew, without a doubt, that if he fell, it was likely that his father’s body would hit the water before his did.
He felt more confident with that, and covered the second half of the bridge more quickly, jumping the last five feet of nothingness to land, crouched low, on the bank beside his father. He grinned up at him. “Holy shit,” he said, forgetting for a moment that this was anything other than a testosterone packed day out with his father, proving his manhood by daredevilry and swearing.
His smile faltered when he recalled that his father had asked him to prove his manhood in another way not fifteen minutes ago in the truck and he hadn’t been able to. He considered Ira and the ritual of a bar mitzvah. How much easier it would be if he’d had some cultural, public agreement that yes, he was a man, instead of these constant, fluctuating, daily tests in life that he was never certain he’d passed, but nearly always knew, undeniably, when he failed.
“Come on,” his father said, walking along the bank, swishing the hard, broken stem of a dead palm frond through the grass in front of him. Marshall followed his father’s path, remembering the king snake he’d found as a child and brought to his father, planting his mother’s gardenia near the house. His father had gone white, and with his perma-tan that had been an astonishing sight indeed.
“Throw it,” he’d said quietly to him, pointing toward the side of the garage. Marshall hadn’t known why but he’d known that tone of voice was not to be contested, and so he’d thrown it. The instant he did his father had taken two giant steps in between him and the snake and used the shovel to cut the head off the snake.
Marshall had wailed in protest, and his father had picked up the body of the snake, still squirming, and shown him the markings, so similar to a king snake, but actually that of the poisonous coral snake, just a simple inversion of band colors, and taught him the rhyme he still repeated whenever he was in snake terrain. Red to black, you’re OK, Jack; red to yellow, you’re one dead fellow. He muttered it under his breath now as a black racer darted in front of him, and he heard his father laugh softly.
His dad stopped at the base of one of the palms curving over the water and looked up it, shaking his head. “Jeez, I can’t believe we ever got all the way up that thing,” he said, with the wonder of a middle-aged man remembering his ill-spent youth. He turned to Marshall and said, “Want to give it a try?”
Marshall squinted up the length of the tree and then out over the water. “No thanks,” he said.
“Yeah, probably kill yourself,” his father agreed.
That would solve a lot of things for a lot of people, Marshall thought.
There was a large, cleared area in a rough semi-circle behind the palms, with a rickety, silvered
picnic table under the overhang of a feathery poinciana, its spent orange blooms scattered across the top like spilled gems. An unofficial, unpaved road led away through the brush, its deep ruts testament to how long it had been there.
His father brushed some of the flowers off one of the benches and sat down. Marshall slowly sat across from him, the air nearly ten degrees cooler under the massive old poinciana tree.
“We skipped a lot of school to come here,” his dad said. “Brought as many girls as we could, hoping for some skinny-dipping. Never happened, but we never stopped hoping. Randy drove that Scout like he was trying to kill us all. Threw me right out of the back one time.” His father pulled the hair behind his ear back and traced a thin white line. “Should have gotten stitches for that one, but we were having too good a time, I guess. Bled like a bastard.”
His father looked around the clearing and Marshall stayed silent, hoping for the next tidbit. He’d never noticed the scar before. He himself had no scars, except four round ones on the top of his foot from fire ant bites when he was seven. Hardly the stuff of adventure, hardly the stuff of family lore.
“I’m not gonna sit here and tell you my life story,” his father said, pushing his sunglasses up on his head, squinting across the table at him. “I’m gonna tell you a couple things because you seem to think I owe it to you, and if it helps you get past whatever the hell it is that’s got you so screwed up, well, all right.”
“Could I—”
“No,” his dad said. “You just get to sit and listen. I don’t know what my mother told you, maybe nothing, but I figure she told you some bull about how great my father was and how misunderstood Randy was and how she was such a loving mother and how loving Jesus can make it all better. Am I right?”
Marshall looked down at the table and shrugged. If he had to wrap up everything his grandmother had told him in a few sentences, yes, that was probably how it would come out.
“Yeah, well, your grandmother was so busy loving Jesus she didn’t have time to love anybody else. You remember that.”
His dad let out a guttural, frustrated moan and raked his fingertips against the sides and back of his head, hard enough that Marshall winced.
“I left all this, Marshall,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Marshall whispered.
“Yeah. Okay, so, my father was a minister, a preacher, really. We were raised on the Bible. I didn’t know there were any other books until I went to school. I could probably still recite the thing from memory. Bet I could whip you on it.” He looked at Marshall as if about to challenge him right then and there.
Marshall remained silent. He was pretty sure that there wasn’t a thing in the world his father couldn’t whip him at. He’d given up the challenge for good by now.
“You already know that your grandmother is one tough woman, but my dad was a hell of a lot tougher, so how you figure me and Randy wound up? I grew out of it all pretty quick, though. I always knew I wanted to get out, but I don’t think Randy thought he could. He got heavy into drinking, drugs. She tell you he’s a criminal?”
Marshall nodded. “She didn’t say what he did, just that he couldn’t come back because he’d be arrested.”
“Yeah, well, I imagine he would. He got started young, burned down a deserted church when he was ten. Nobody found out about that one, I was the only one who knew. But, he kept doing it, burning down churches. Got caught when he was fifteen and wound up in juvenile hall ’til he was seventeen. He came back and lived at home for a year or so, then my dad’s church got torched.”
“Oh no,” Marshall said. His father nodded once and tightened his lips before answering.
“Yep. Dad came home, grabbed his gun, and him and Randy went at it in the carport, but he was just too old and Randy was too strong and all pumped up from the fire. I tried to stop it, Ma tried. There wasn’t anyone stopping what was happening though. Randy got the gun away, and I don’t think he meant to do it, I really don’t, but Dad got shot. Last time I saw Randy, he was taking off down the road in the Scout with my mother shootin’ after him. My dad died three days later. Ma dug the bullet out of him, sewed him up, and everybody prayed. Didn’t help him, either, Marshall. He died on our couch.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me before?” Marshall whispered, suddenly afraid of the woman he’d been staying with.
His father just looked at him for a moment as though he was even stupider than he’d thought. “That’s not something you tell your kids, Marshall. I was ashamed of it. I am ashamed of my family, of what I come from, bunch of hellfire-and-brimstone nuts. Christ, all I ever wanted was to get away from it, make my own family, have a decent life. Your mother doesn’t even know. I’m gonna have to tell her now, and I want you to know that I am pissed off about that. I’m pissed off at a lot, I admit that, but that part . . . having to hurt her like that...” His dad trailed off, shaking his head.
His father’s meaning was clear. Marshall had dragged them all down. “So, you asking me all those questions about God and faith and everything, I was just trying to keep you steered away from all that, but you just kept goin’ after it and goin’ after it. I thought if I let your mom handle it, she’d, you know, do it in a scholarly way. She had me convinced it was you just learning, like history.”
Marshall shook his head. “No,” he said softly.
“Yeah, well, I get that now. So, okay, ask me what you want to ask me now, and then we’re done with this. If you still have to experiment, you’re gonna have to keep it to yourself. I won’t have any more of it. Got it?”
Marshall nodded, his mouth dry. He looked around the clearing and wished desperately for a cold Coke. “Then you don’t believe in God?” he finally asked.
“I never said that. I don’t believe in my parents’ god. I don’t believe some old man with a beard is up there punishing us, giving AIDS to gay people, making terrorists blow up innocent people to teach us a lesson, sending us to Hell if we’re not white, right, and baptized in a river. I’ll never believe that.”
“Then what?”
His father sighed and looked over at the palm tree again. “God? I don’t think about it much, Marshall. I figure when the time comes, I’m going to know one way or the other anyway. I don’t think you have to think about it all the time, wear it like a badge. I think you have to do the right things in life. You see a turtle in the road, you pull over and stick it in the canal. Your neighbor’s in trouble, you take over a casserole. Kids need clothes, you send what money you can. Feed your family, love your wife, teach your kids how to tie their shoes, balance their checkbooks, tell right from wrong.”
He looked in wonder at Marshall. “I thought I did that. I really did.”
Marshall looked down at the table. “You did,” he croaked out.
“Then, what the hell, Marshall? Maybe I didn’t understand you, maybe I didn’t tell you I loved you enough, all that crap, but I gave you everything I could think of. I never beat you, I never asked for more than I thought you were capable of. You want me to talk about faith?
“I’ve had faith, Marshall. I had faith in you, in our family, in how we were living our lives. That’s what faith is, knowing you’ve done what you needed to so the people you love can do the things they need to. Religion just gives you a language, things to say for people too ignorant to figure that out.”
“I just don’t believe that,” Marshall protested.
His father slammed his open palm down on the table. “And nobody’s asking you to! That’s what I believe, and you asked, dammit. I’m not some idiot who doesn’t believe somebody else can believe something else. Faith is nothing but opinion to me, Marshall, and you got a right to one, but dammit, when your opinion threatens my family, all bets are off, period. That’s my religion, buddy, and you ever cross it again, you’ll wish there was a Hell you could go to.”
His father was red in the face and breathing heavily. He spread his hands, with the scars Marshall knew better, the ones from fishing
line and hooks, fish and motors, open flat on the table as if he were going to rise, but he continued to sit there. Marshall was afraid—he’d be a fool not to be—but he was also fascinated that they were having this conversation at all. He remembered what his father said to him in the car. You’re gonna have to be a man one day. I suggest you make it today.
He took a deep breath and started, this time where he knew his father wanted him to. With Ada. With her skin, and her hands, and her calm, knowing center. And the sex. And the way it had gotten all mixed up with the praying. He didn’t know why he’d become so obsessed, but he guessed his father was right; it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that he’d allowed something to happen to Meghan. It was just that simple.
And he didn’t have a good answer for how, or why, except he’d gotten caught up. Maybe the way Randy had gotten caught up in the fire. He could understand that. But he’d never tell his father that. And he had really believed, he had.
For a few moments on that boat, when Meghan breathed again and Ada turned to him with her eyes wide and her cheeks just starting to burn, he had felt what he’d always wanted to feel.
He got through finding Grandmother Tobias’s letter and getting in touch with her, through making the decision to take Ada there, their plan to go to Nebraska and then let her “community” help them go underground, and then his father interrupted him and told him all they’d learned from the detectives and the FBI agents.
Marshall was smart enough to be scared all over again.
“And then she stole your car and left you in the middle of the night?” his father asked, almost—almost—sympathetically.
“No,” he answered in surprise. “No, I gave her the car.”
“What? What the hell did you do that for?”
So much for sympathy, Marshall thought. “I’d made my decision, but I couldn’t make hers,” he said with a shrug. “I felt like, in a way, I’d gotten her into this. So I gave her some money and told her to go.”
Matters of Faith Page 27
