His Father's Son

by Bentley Little

  Ultimately, Steve thought, he did the right thing because it made him feel better about himself. And maybe, just maybe, somewhere deep down, his father was aware of it and knew it too.

  He stopped by a Del Taco on the way and had a quick, unsatisfying dinner sitting in a plastic bench in front of a plastic table. The sun was down when he got to the VA hospital, his father asleep. For that Steve was grateful. He settled into the chair with a sigh. It was easier, somehow, when the old man was out of it. He could sit by the bed like a dutiful son, but he didn’t have to actually see the effects of the dementia. Trying to communicate with his dad was nearly impossible unless he was in one of his brief periodic bursts of lucidity, and Steve much preferred being here when his father was not awake. It was familial devotion without the mess.

  There was a low, strangled cough, and Steve jumped, startled. He glanced over at the bed. The room was nearly dark, and even the lights in the hallway outside seemed subdued, toned down for the night. The privacy curtain was open because one of his father’s roommates had been transferred elsewhere this morning and the other had been released two days ago. He felt afraid all of a sudden, scared, like a child who thinks he’s heard a ghost, and he realized that there were no other patients screaming or crying out. The entire floor was silent.

  His father’s eyes opened wide, the pupils too dark in the dimness, the whites too white.

  “I killed her.”

  The old man’s voice was dry and raspy, and in the rhythmic quiet of the hospital room, it sounded absurdly loud.

  Steve felt chilled. But his first reaction was to quickly reach over and close the door so that no one passing by would be able to hear. That seemed important.

  Behind him, his father said it again.

  “I killed her.”

  The door swung shut, and Steve turned back toward the bed. His father ’s eyes were closed; he’d fallen asleep once more.

  Steve breathed deeply, the hairs on the back of his neck still prickling as his gaze focused on the old man’s lightly open mouth. He was tempted to wake his dad and ask him what he’d meant, but even if his father knew what he’d meant, he probably couldn’t explain it. Very little of what he said made sense anymore, and most likely this was meaningless, a non sequitur dredged up from someplace deep in his brain that had nothing to do with anything. Still, there were occasional periods of clarity—just yesterday, his father had recognized him, asking about his job and his car before his mind drifted away and he confused Steve with his long-dead uncle Gene—and it was possible that, intentionally or unintentionally, he had revealed something true.

  Besides, it felt real. There’d definitely been a confessional tone to his father’s cryptic utterance, and try as he might, Steve could not dismiss it out of hand.

  I killed her.

  That dry, raspy voice haunted his dreams when he returned home and went to sleep, and the nightmare he remembered upon waking was a rerun of one he’d had in childhood. In it, he had been a kid again, sleeping in his old bed in his old room in Phoenix. There was noise from outside, a low rustling he could hear because the night was hot and the window was open. He stood on his knees at the head of the bed and pushed the curtains aside, peering out into the backyard. He could see nothing at first, but he could still hear the rustling—and what sounded like a hissing laugh as well. His eyes adjusted to the darkness, and suddenly, through the rusty screen, he saw movement. It was a man slithering along the ground like a snake, legs together, arms at his sides as he wound his way along the ground through the bushes. A shaft of light from the back porch lamp shone for a second on the figure’s face, and Steve saw that it was a clown, a smiling clown with torn satin clothes and poorly applied makeup smeared with dirt. Then the dream took a right turn, changed from the original, and the clown slithered over to the body of a woman that was lying directly below the bedroom window. The clown looked up and spoke. His raspy voice was that of Steve’s father. “I killed her,” he said. “I killed her.”

  It was probably something to do with the war, he thought at breakfast. If it was anything at all. His dad was in the VA hospital because he was a veteran, and while his father had never been one of those guys who shared war stories with his son—did any Vietnam vets do that? wasn’t that mostly a World War II thing?—Steve knew that his old man had seen combat. Admittedly, what he knew of the war he’d learned mostly from movies, but it wasn’t that much of a stretch to think that if his dad had been over there, he had probably killed people, some of them no doubt civilians. And it was quite possible that one or more of them had been female.

  So maybe that was what he’d been talking about; maybe that was what he’d been remembering.

  Strange, Steve thought. His father had killed people. His dad was a killer. He’d never thought of that before, never seen it that way. In his mind, his father was . . . well, a father. And a husband. And an auto parts salesman. A regular, middle-class guy. But there had been a time in his life when he’d spent three years in a foreign country, shooting at people and trying to kill them.

  It was an odd and disconcerting realization. But his father was not alone. The fact was, Steve’s generation and the ones immediately surrounding it, those who had come of age after the abolition of the draft, were an anomaly. Up to that point, nearly all of the men in the country had been trained by the government to kill people—and many of them had. The uncomfortable squeamishness people his age experienced was not typical. It was probably why, when he was growing up, no parents had ever had any problem with their kids playing with guns and pretending to shoot and kill one another. Moms and dads who would have a shit fit if little Johnny pretended to be a pusher or little Julie pretended to be a whore, gladly gave their kids toy pistols and rifles so that they could act out killing bad guys—even though, in the real world, murder was considered a much greater crime than either drugs or prostitution.

  He’d heard it said that man was a naturally violent species, and maybe that was true. Maybe that was why the crime rate was so much higher now than it had been fifty or sixty years ago. Back then, men got to take out their aggression in wars. People these days, unless they wanted to spend years of their lives working for peanuts in the armed forces, had to resort to violent confrontations here at home in order to satisfy the same jones.

  What the fuck was he thinking? That was lunacy. The stress from all of this was muddling up his mind. His dad hadn’t killed anyone.

  So why was he already trying to come up with ra tionalizations?

  At work, Steve could not seem to concentrate on the article he was supposed to be writing. Gina smiled at him when he came in, gave her usual cheery greeting, but though Steve said hello and smiled back, in his mind he saw her on the sand in her string bikini with that paunchy older man. Between Gina and his father, he remained distracted all morning, and by the time noon rolled around, he had completed exactly two sentences of his article—and neither of them was very good.

  He met Sherry for lunch at Wahoo’s Fish Taco, but even as he listened to her describe a hectic morning dealing with irate patrons furious that the library’s computers were down, his father’s words continued to echo in his brain.

  I killed her.

  Steve had given up all pretense of believing that his father had been out of it when he spoke. He hoped with every cell in his body to be proved wrong, but until that happened, he was going to assume that his dad had been telling the truth.

  I killed her.

  Who could her be? He wanted to cling to his war theory, but the personal connection implied by the word “her” made that seem increasingly unlikely. So who, then? A friend, an acquaintance, someone off the street? Had Steve had a deceased sister he’d never known about? Could it have been his paternal grand-mother, whom he’d never known? His father’s sister? An old girlfriend?

  The questions remained with him throughout the rest of the day.

  On impulse, he asked his mother, “Was Dad ever married before?”


  It was after work, and they were sitting in the kitchen, his mother slicing coffee cake with her good hand. Her reaction was not what he’d expected. “Yes,” she said, eyes downcast. “I was not his first choice.” She handed Steve a plate.

  He was stunned into silence for a moment. His mother gave him a fork for the coffee cake, and, numbly, he took it.

  “Who was she?” he asked finally.

  “His high school girlfriend. They married the summer after he graduated from high school, before he was drafted.”

  “What happened—”

  “She died.”

  Died. Steve’s pulse quickened. “How?”

  “I don’t want to talk about her.”

  “How?” he pressed.

  “I don’t know. It was before I ever met your father.”

  “You must know something about it.”

  “Everything I know I learned from Marion, your father’s sister.” Steve remembered his aunt Marion. He’d met her only a couple of times, when they’d gone back to New Mexico for a visit. He hadn’t liked her. Several years ago, his parents had gotten a notice in the mail that she’d died. “She told me on the day we got engaged that your father had been married before and that his first wife was a much better match for him than I was.”

  “But didn’t you ever ask Dad about it? Weren’t you curious?”

  She shook her head, lips tight. “No.”

  “That’s why you never told me?”

  “It’s not something we talked about. And it was none of your business. It didn’t concern you. It was not something you needed to know.”

  Steve continued to ask questions, but that was all the information he could get out of her. She felt that she had already revealed too much, and when he suggested that it was psychologically healthier to discuss this and get it out in the open rather than hide it and keep it a secret, she got angry and told him that if he did not stop talking about it, he would have to leave. She did not ask why he was so interested in this subject, however, did not wonder why he had asked about his father’s first wife to begin with, and he found that more than a little odd.

  It really was time to leave, and Steve made nice, thanking his mother for the coffee cake, promising to drive her to the VA hospital tomorrow for a visit, and they parted on good terms. But halfway home, instead of taking the Santa Ana Freeway back to Irvine, he turned west on the Garden Grove Freeway and headed toward Long Beach. He hadn’t realized he was going to do that until he did, and though he considered getting off the freeway and turning around, he didn’t.

  He found a parking spot near the hospital’s front entrance.

  His father was awake. His mind might not be clear and rational, but his eyes were open, and they followed Steve as he walked into the hospital room, closed the door and sat down in the chair at the side of the bed. “Dad?”

  The old man nodded.

  He was here.

  Steve scooted his chair closer to the bed. His father was undergoing therapy—anger management and memory training—as well as receiving medication for his condition, and Steve knew he should talk this over with the doctors first, make sure it was all right, confirm that he wasn’t throwing a monkey wrench into their treatment plans. But he also knew that if he thought about it too long he wouldn’t do it, so he leaned next to the old man’s ear and asked, “Who did you kill, Dad?”

  There was no answer for a moment, and he thought that his father hadn’t heard or that he had slipped away or that maybe the question had triggered some unwelcome reaction within his dad’s head.

  Then came that whisper, the dry, raspy voice that had been echoing in his brain for the past twenty-four hours. “My wife.”

  These periods of lucidity were extremely short-lived. If he was going to find out anything, he’d have to do it fast. “What happened?”

  The same words again, in the same voice. “I killed her.”

  “Where did you kill her?”

  His father chuckled, and it was the creepiest thing Steve had ever heard. In this place, under these circumstances, the sound of his dad’s dry chuckle sent goose bumps racing down his arms. “I took her to the top of the roof,” he rasped. “The bank building.” He coughed.

  And then he described what happened.

  Four

  He lures her up to the roof of the bank building on the pretext of seeing the view. It is a gorgeous day, and the brown brick structure is the tallest in town. She is thrilled to be there. It is the lunch hour, so the bank and the offices within the building are closed. There are very few people inside, but he cannot afford for them to be seen with each other—one sharp-eyed witness could unravel the entire plan—so he walks ahead of her, pretending they are not together. It is not until they are in the stairwell, walking up the concrete steps, that he slows and takes her hand.

  On the roof, they walk about, strolling along the bordered edge, admiring the view of the town from every angle. “I love you,” she tells him.

  “I love you too,” he says.

  He was planning on poisoning her at first, and he went to the library to do research on toxic substances, but she has steadfastly refused to take any of the “medicine” he provided for her chronically upset stomach. Is she suspicious? He doesn’t think so, but still he has decided to take a different tack.

  He got the idea yesterday when, standing up after sitting on a bench, she fell. For a brief, hopeful second, he thought she’d hit her head on the concrete hard enough to do damage, but then she struggled to her feet and he offered her a hand.

  He would be the primary suspect, however, should anything happen to her, so he needed an extra precaution, something to throw suspicion from himself. He remembered that she’d done well in Spanish class in high school, and again he went to the library. He found a Spanish-English dictionary and wrote, in disguised handwriting, in Spanish, a vaguely worded paragraph that could be interpreted as a suicide note. At home, last night, he’d asked her to translate it for him—he told her a guy at work had received it and wanted to know what it said. She started to tell him, but he asked her to write it out so he could give it to the guy.

  This morning, on his break, he had placed the note in an envelope and mailed it to her parents. He had typed their address.

  Now it is time.

  She turns to him, puts her arms around his neck and kisses him. “What a perfect day,” she says.

  They are close to the edge.

  He looks into her eyes. “Yes, it is,” he tells her.

  Then he pushes her over the low wall, and she falls off the building, screaming in terror until her head hits the sidewalk below.

  Five

  Steve stayed at his desk for lunch. Usually he went out, sometimes by himself, sometimes with Jim Cristlieb, the production manager, or Pete Hughart, the art director, but today he’d brown-bagged it, and he waited until McColl was out of his office and Gina had left before using his computer to look up information about his father’s first wife.

  It was easy enough to do. After all, a good portion of his regular job was spent tracking down the whereabouts of high school and college graduates who had somehow fallen off the radar of their classmates or whose current address was unknown by their former schools. Although Will liked to make fun of what he did for a living, Steve found it both challenging and rewarding. He was almost like a detective, and if he did say so himself, he was pretty damn good at locating people, even women who had since married and moved.

  He didn’t actually have a name for his father’s first wife, but if he searched public records in Copper City, New Mexico, under the last name Nye, he figured he’d be able to come up with one pretty quickly. Steve calculated back. He’d been born in 1982. His parents had been married for ten years before they had him. If his father had been married right after high school and sometime within the next year or so been drafted for a four-year tour of duty, that meant the first marriage would have occurred sometime in the early 1960s. If he focused his search on marr
iages recorded between 1960 and 1965, he should be able to come up with a name.

  Steve took a bite of his brown-bagged turkey sandwich and Googled Copper City, New Mexico. He found a Web site for the city that was aimed at tourists, and while it offered no links to public records, he did find out the name of the local newspaper, the Copper City Sentinel, and learned that the community was located in San Miguel County. He accessed the county recorder’s Web site for San Miguel and was able to locate a marriage certificate for Joseph Nye and Ruth Haster, dated August 21, 1961.

  Ruth Haster.

  Ruth Nye.

  He tried to imagine what she’d looked like, what type of person she’d been. His father was no prize, so she couldn’t have been a great beauty. He imagined that she was probably a perky, somewhat cute, typical small-town girl, less dour than his mother perhaps, maybe a little more outgoing. What if she’d been his mother? Of course, that was a biological impossibility, but even if it weren’t, he would be a completely different person today just by virtue of being raised by someone else.

  Maybe he’d be better off. Maybe he’d be happier.

  She was a skeleton now, Steve realized. She was rotting in a cemetery somewhere because his father had pushed her off a roof and killed her.

  Why, though? Why would his father have done such a thing? His dad wasn’t a psycho, so it couldn’t have come completely out of the blue. She had to have done something. Had she hurt him? Had she lied to him? Had she cheated on him?

  Ruth Haster. He wrote down the name, then searched for a death certificate but could find none. There’d probably been an obituary, he reasoned. Calling up the Web site for the Copper City Sentinel, he found that the newspaper had no archives online, although he did print out a mailing address and telephone number for the paper. He then tried the local library, but it too had only a rudimentary Web page that offered no way of looking up any of its holdings.