—and the room spun, then just as suddenly shuddered to a stop like a jammed gear. Paxton blinked hard, awake now.
His father loomed over him, a huge shadow limned in daylight. "I thought I’d made you up," Harlan said.
Pax slowly sat up. His arms and neck trembled to keep him upright.
His father said, "I’ll make you breakfast," and turned toward the kitchen. He moved like a man in a heavy diving suit, plodding across the ocean floor.
Pax got to his feet. He felt light-headed, then waited until it passed. Morning light burned through the windows. Jesus, he thought. Passed out all night? He shuffled to the kitchen doorway and leaned against the frame.
"I’m not going to a hospital," Harlan said. He stood in front of the open refrigerator. The blisters seemed to have receded, but his face, which had been slack and baggy last night, had filled like a balloon. Harlan peeled back the lid of a Cool Whip container, sniffed, then tossed the bowl onto the top of the pile of garbage.
"Tell me," Pax said, and then coughed. "What the hell’s going on, Harlan?" His father hated it when he called him Harlan.
"I’m fine," his father said. He opened another plastic bowl and put it back in the fridge. It was the kind of thing you did for someone you loved. "The women from the church drop this stuff off, leave it on the porch. It goes bad fast." He bent and reached deeper into a shelf. "If you’re here for money I don’t have any."
"What? No." How fast the man could piss him off. Pax had never asked him for a thing since he left home. "I’m here because Uncle Lem told me to be here."
Harlan shifted his bulk, stared at him. "Lem talked to you?"
Lemuel Martin was Paxton’s great uncle, on his father’s side, another man who’d never left Switchcreek. The last time Pax had seen him, when he was nine or ten, his uncle had to be over seventy years old, morbidly obese and rarely talking.
"I could hardly recognize him, but yeah. Five days ago." Lem gargled like a man drowning from the inside.
"How did he find you?"
"Jesus, does it matter?"
"You move around like a hobo. Arizona, New Jersey, Chicago."
"I’ve been in Chicago for the past five years, Harlan. It’s not too hard to look up a phone number." His father had called him exactly twice in twelve years. "Christ, all you have to do is call Aunt Jen, I always keep her—"
"Stop talking like that—Christ this, Jesus that."
"Tell me what’s happening to you, Harlan." His father scowled, and Pax said, "Look, I know there’s something that runs in the family, something on your side, that you guys never talked about. I wasn’t completely oblivious as a kid." Harlan grunted, a sound that could have meant anything. Pax said, "I thought it was just the size thing, like Uncle Lem, or, I don’t know, depression. God knows that makes sense. But last night you were hallucinating, and there was that, that stuff."
His father turned back to the fridge. "What did Lem tell you?"
"Nothing that made sense. He was rambling, talking senile. He said you were sick—terribly sick. He sounded like a scared child."
"That’s it?" Harlan asked.
Don’t forget mortal danger, Pax thought, but stifled that. "Before he hung up he made me promise not to tell anyone he called, especially not Vonda." Lem’s daughter. She was a little younger than Harlan, so had to be in her sixties by now. She’d lived with her father her entire life, even as a couple husbands moved in and moved out. Pax said, "You were talking about her last night, too."
His father slammed the refrigerator door. He went to the counter and fished through a pile of mail. "Here," he said, and tossed Paxton an envelope. "Cash this and get me some groceries."
"You’ll have to tell me what’s going on sooner or later, Harlan. And you have to see a doctor."
"You’re staying?"
Pax shook his head. "I’ve got to be back at work by tomorrow morning."
"Didn’t think so."
Paxton crossed the two-lane bridge and then slowed as he came into town, though that was too big a word for the short strip of buildings. Half of them were boarded up, and the others—the Gas-n-Go, the Power Rental, the Icee Freeze—looked slump-shouldered and tired.
He parked outside the Bigler’s Grocery. Only four other cars in the lot. He leaned against the roof of his car for a moment, breathing in, breathing out. He felt not so much hung over as wrung out. No drink or drug had ever hit him that hard, that fast.
Inside the store he tried to move quickly, filling up his cart with canned goods and frozen dinners, anything his father could make in a microwave, anything that would keep.
He saw Jo Lynn before she saw him, and turned down another aisle. He walked quickly, his chest suddenly tight. Then he heard light steps behind him and she said, "P.K.?"
P.K. Preacher’s Kid. Nobody had called him that since he left Switchcreek.
He turned, putting on a relaxed smile. "Hey, Jo." She looked the same. A dozen years, ten extra pounds, the shitty polyester Bigler’s smock—none of it made a difference. Still beautiful.
"What are you doing here?" she said. "Visiting?"
"Just for a couple days."
They talked for five minutes. He memorized everything she asked him and instantly forgot his answers. He looked at her tiny feet in the cheap black shoes, at the ring on her finger. He remembered a day a few months before he left town, lying in the grass on the hill below the cemetery, looking up at her. She stood with her legs apart, the light making a scrim of her pale yellow sundress, her thighs in shadow. She reached up to her shoulder, and that moment—the moment the spaghetti strap slipped from her sunburned shoulder—he’d felt a white blast of lust that had never been matched in his life, before or since.
Jo pursed her lips, waiting. She’d asked him about his father.
"He’s doing fine. Well, no, he’s not actually. He’s not been taking care of himself."
Her eyes went sad. Harlan had been her pastor since she was a baby, and she’d refused to think badly of him even when he was trying to break them up, even when he showed her the stripes Harlan had laid across his back with his leather belt. "I’ve been worried about him since he left the church," she said. "I’m glad you’re there for him."
"I’m hardly doing anything," he said. Truth that sounded like false modesty—a special class of lie. "Listen, Jo ... "
This was the moment he’d run through his head on a thousand nights, the 3 a.m. rehearsals that kept him from sleep. In the first few years after he left, he’d called her house countless times and hung up before anyone could answer. He’d written a hundred letters that hadn’t gone further than a sentence.
She looked at him, and he said, "It was good seeing you. I better go, though. He’s waiting for me."
"Tell him I’m praying for him." She touched his arm. "And you too, P.K."
He forced a laugh. "I’ll take all the help I can get."
The warmth of her fingers lingered on his skin.
He took the long way home, past the elementary school, over the single-lane bridge to Piney Level road, and on toward the church where his father had been pastor, the church he’d grown up in. When he rolled past it he realized where he was really going.
He told himself he’d just drive by, look at the house and move on. He needed to get the groceries home. Then he was pulling into the long driveway of Uncle Lem’s house.
His great uncle and Vonda lived in a tin-roofed framehouse cut into the side of the hill, the red clay rising up like a tidal wave behind it. Between him and the house was a cement patch holding half a dozen vehicles, a couple late models but most of them beaters. Out in the fields to his left, a few more junkers—an El Camino, a blue pickup, a van-sized RV—huddled beside the gray, knock-kneed barn, drowning in tall grass.
Pax was halfway to the screen porch when a tall, beefy kid, maybe 18 years old, banged through the door and stood at the top of the step. "Back," he said. "Back to your car."
He was a big, block-faced kid, shirt
less, with a pale chest and a whiter belly. He wore long, Vols-orange basketball shorts and spotless white athletic shoes. In his left hand was a lime-green aluminum baseball bat.
Pax stopped, held up his hands. "I’m Paxton Martin," he said. "Harlan’s son." He tried to think who this kid could be. Too young to be Vonda’s son. Her grandson, then? A complete stranger?
"Grandma’s not here," the kid said. His face and chest shone with sweat, as if he’d been working out inside the old house. "You better leave now."
"Who are you—Clete? Bonnie’s boy?"
"Travis. Clete’s my brother."
"We’re cousins, then. Your grandmother Vonda’s my second cousin, so you’re ... " Shit. Gazillionth cousin? Thug twice removed?
"I’ll tell her you called," Travis said.
Pax nodded toward the window at the left side of the house, where his uncle’s bedroom used to be. "I just came to see Uncle Lem. I’m only—Jesus!"
Travis jumped the two steps and landed with the bat raised. Paxton backpedaled. "What the hell’s the matter with you!"
Travis swung hard but didn’t step into it, not really trying to connect. The brush back. "God damn vampire," the boy said, and took another step forward, cocked the bat. "God damn junkie ... "
Pax backed up fast. He refused to turn and run, not for this chubby punk. The kid let him climb into his car, and when Pax drove away he looked in his rearview mirror and the boy was standing at the end of the driveway, the bat in his hands, like a God damn caveman.
His father sat on the couch, snoring in front of the TV, mouth open, jowls sagging. Deflated again. The sight stopped him, and something in his chest twisted like an old wound.
Let him sleep, Pax thought. He carried the groceries into the kitchen and began putting things away. God, the mess. Maybe it was a mistake to bring in fresh food with the kitchen so filthy. He opened the windows, turned on all the lights. Ten years in the restaurant business, working every position from dishwasher to waiter to line cook, had inured him to vile substances that bred in the dark. He cleared the counters and the refrigerator, threw out everything that was remotely suspicious, filling two garbage bags, working as quietly as he could so that he wouldn’t wake his father. Then he started pulling dishes from the sink and stacking them on the counter.
At the bottom of the sink he found a stubbed out cigarette. He picked it up, pinched the damp thing between his fingers. His father had never smoked a day in his life.
He thought he heard a phone ringing. He threw away the cigarette and went into the living room, where the TV and his father’s snores drowned out everything. He turned off the TV, then tracked the faint noise to his father’s bedroom. The ringing stopped as he walked in.
The room looked much as it had a dozen years before: a long, mirrored bureau, wood veneer bedside tables, the long gauzy drapes his mother had liked. The bed was unmade, the bedclothes pushed against the wall. The box spring had been lifted off the frame and reinforced by a row of 2x4’s, but his father’s weight had still pressed a hollow into the mattress.
Pax found the phone jack in the wall and followed the cord to a pile of laundry. If his father had wanted to turn off the phone he could have just yanked the cord. Or maybe he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to plug it back in. Pax unplugged it and carried the cord and receiver to the living room.
His father was staring at the blank TV screen. "I was watching that," he said.
"Tell me the name of your doctor, Harlan."
Harlan closed his eyes.
"If you don’t tell me, I’m just going to call one at random." Pax went to the wall and squatted to plug in the phone. "There’ve been people in the house, too. You know that, right?"
"Of course I know it. Now help me up." He raised his arms like a child.
"Was it Vonda?" She wants to milk me like a cow. "Vonda or her grandson?"
"Up," he said.
Pax stepped in front of him. His father was just so damn big. Pulling him upright, Pax realized, would be an engineering problem, an exercise in mechanics and leverage. He straddled one of his father’s legs and got a hand under each arm. "Ready?" he said.
Pax braced his feet and leaned back. His father held onto him, then with a lurch rose from the couch. For a moment they held each others’ arms like dance partners: London Bridge is Falling Down. He was shorter than Pax remembered. Or maybe his spine was compressing, fat and gravity conspiring to mold him into a sphere.
His father looked up at him and laughed. "He arose!" Like that his mood had lightened. He moved slowly toward the bathroom, planting each huge foot a few inches in front of the other.
Pax made them a supper of canned spaghetti and afterward they sat together on the couch, watching TV, the way they had after Mom died—until the fighting started and it became impossible for them to be in the same room, the same town, and finally, the same state. They talked only during the commercials and said nothing of consequence. Pax did not bring up the way his father had beat him for any infraction. Harlan did not bring up how Paxton had run around, drinking and smoking dope and getting girls pregnant, bringing shame to the preacher’s house.
Neither of them brought up Mom.
His father favored the Discovery Channel. Animals killing animals, raising animal babies. Funny, Pax thought, how they showed so much of the killing but so little of the screwing. Pax was bored and anxious, irritated by the smell of his father that covered them like a tent, and growing impatient because he knew the next fight would be coming—or rather, the old one would resume. But he sat there until the end of the fucking program, so he could check off another point in his Dutiful Son column. When I leave, he thought, Harlan won’t be able to say I didn’t help him. He won’t be able to say I didn’t try.
"I know you’re going home in the morning," his father said. His voice was slow, as if he were falling asleep.
"I’ve got to work," Pax said. At a shitty job that he would have been happy to quit. But a job.
His father nodded. "Do you have a girlfriend?" When Pax didn’t immediately answer he said, "You’re not married, are you? You don’t have children?"
"God no. No children. I’m not exactly husband material," Pax said. "Or boyfriend material. Actually, I’m not sure I’m material."
His father grunted. Was that a laugh?
They watched the screen until another commercial break, and his father said, "Twice a week."
Pax looked over and said, "Dad!"
Harlan’s face had flushed. Liquid gleamed on the backs of his hands. "Twice a week she comes, sometimes three," he said. "But with you—with you here it’s different. You have to leave, Paxton. You’re just making it worse."
"That’s it, I’m calling the doctor. We can—"
Harlan grabbed Paxton’s bare arm. "Don’t." His father’s hand was damp with sweat. "Don’t have any sons. Even if she begs you. Don’t do it."
Pax scrambled off the couch. His skin tingled where his father had touched him.
Harlan’s robe lay open. The blisters had erupted again. They were everywhere on his skin, all sizes, weeping and glistening. His father reached for him again and Paxton stepped back. He remembered that electric rush of emotion that had struck him last night, left him lying stupid on the floor. Love, or something like it. Connection. The eggshell had cracked open and for a moment everything had run together; he’d forgotten who was Paxton and who was Harlan. The feeling had been exhilarating and suffocating at once. A child’s emotion: Love indistinguishable from total immersion.
Watch yourself, he thought.
His father’s eyes were wide, roaming the room. "Every good tree," he said. "Every good tree brings forth good fruit. And every corrupt tree ... "
Pax went into the kitchen and brought back a plastic garbage bag and a roll of paper towels. A blister near his father’s neck had already split, weeping liquid. Pax put the bag over his hand and crouched beside his father. He touched a corner of a paper towel to the spot, and the substanc
e soaked into it. He held it away from himself like a lit match and dropped it to the floor.
But the serum kept flowing. Pax tore off more towels, pressed them into the blisters, made a pile of damp paper on the floor. He worked for fifteen, twenty minutes—an eternity—until finally the flow subsided. His father had fallen asleep, his breaths coming deep and easy now.
Pax stood up, dizzy and sweating. He retrieved another garbage bag, shoveled the crumpled and damp paper into it, then finished by pushing the first bag into it as well. He carried the sack outside to the back yard.
It was evening but not yet fully dark. He held the bag in his hand, letting it twist, and stared up at the tops of the pines, dark against the bruised sky. Despite the heat and the thick humidity, he felt an anticipatory chill, as if he were thirteen again steeling himself to jump off the high rocks into the ice cold water of the Little River.
He opened the bag and reached in.
3.
Vonda and her grandsons showed up three days later. They climbed out of a beat up Ford Explorer and walked across the yard, Vonda in front, Travis and another huge boy—had to be his brother, Clete, they looked so much alike—clumping behind her. Vonda was a small, bony woman, angular as a voodoo fetish, her tank top and frayed cutoff jeans hanging off her like laundry.
Paxton stepped back from the door’s tiny window. He knew they’d come, sooner or later. He’d been listening for the slam of car doors, waiting for the hard knock. She said, "I know you’re in there, Paxton. Open the damn door."
"I have a gun," Pax said. His father didn’t keep any firearms in the house, not even a .22 squirrel rifle. It was probably the only weaponless household in East Tennessee.
"Well good for you," Vonda said. "Now open the door so Travis can apologize. He told me he was kind of rude to you the other day."
He stepped back from the door and listened. His father still snored in the back bedroom. He spent a lot of his time sleeping these days. So did Paxton.
He opened the door halfway. Vonda stood on the step with her hands on her hips—bones on bones—brown skin baked and cracked by sixty years of sun and cigarettes. A heavy smoker who’d been heavily smoked.
Unpossible Page 15
