Father and Son

by Larry Brown

  “Was that him?” Said Glen.

  “Yeah. That was him. Headed home.”

  “He’ll come after me. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Naw, I don’t know that.”

  “Well. I do.”

  That was all he said about it. They stopped in town and bought alcohol and bandages. Glen sat in the car with his feet in the street, leaning out the open door, pouring the alcohol over the cuts, closing his eyes for the way it burned. He drenched it good and wrapped the whole thing in gauze and while he was sitting there thinking everything over, he figured he might as well go ahead and finish it, now that it was started.

  Virgil was sitting on the porch when they pulled up. A Redbone puppy with long legs and big feet was lying beside him. It raised its head sleepily and got up, looking around to see who had come. It wagged its tail appeasingly as it got out of the way, head turned to look sideways apologetically or just to be careful. It disappeared around the side of the house.

  The place looked pretty much as it always had, the old unpainted house nestled in the weeds and the tin of the roof rusted to a mottling of gray and brown. The abandoned ’48 Chevy coupe was still parked out to the side with four flats, and his father was there in the chair just as he had been the last time Glen saw him, as if time had warped and nothing had moved these three years he’d been locked down.

  Puppy had his door halfway open, looking back at Glen. “Well? There he is. You gonna get out?”

  Glen muttered something and stepped out. They stood in the thin grass of the yard looking up at their daddy. He was still a big man and the cane he held seemed out of place and too small for him. His hair was grayer now, but his hands and his arms still looked strong. His skin was dark from the summer sun.

  Glen opened the back door of the car and brought out the rest of the beer. He walked across the yard and set it on the porch at his father’s feet. Virgil watched him for a few moments and then reached down slowly and got one. There was an opener hanging from a nail driven into a post. He opened the can, his big hands flexing, and white foam spewed out. He waited for it to stop, holding the opener out for somebody to take. Glen took it, opened two more beers, handed one to Puppy, and stood in the yard drinking silently, looking around. In the garden out by the coupe, turnips the size of softballs rested their purple heads against the dry ground. Rotted bean stakes still leaned against a rusted piece of barbed wire, sheathed in dead vines. Dried catfish heads littered the dirt.

  Glen’s daddy finally set the can on the porch beside his cane and then moved the cane between his knees as he pulled makings from his shirt pocket and set to rolling Prince Albert. He did it swiftly, from long practice. His fingers were steady and soon he was done. With the cigarette between his lips he glanced up.

  “Well,” he said. “You don’t look no worse for wear.”

  Glen didn’t answer right away. He was thinking of the days he had worked in this garden with his mother, of wandering its rows of tomatoes with a jar in his hand for the worms that crawled over the young green globes. He would pick them off and put them in his jar. She punched holes in the top for air. Or she would send him every other day to cut the okra with the small dull paring knife. When they needed beanpoles she would drive them down a dirt road into the creek bottom and they’d walk around the edges of the freshly plowed fields to the stands of cane that bordered the banks. He remembered lashing big racks of them to the top of the car, their long and limber ends. Gathering extra ones for set hooks in the river, wet foggy mornings clambering up and down the muddy banks with his father, the catfish breaking the surface and gasping for water on the ends of their lines. Virgil’s hair was still black then, and his wounds had not slowed him down so much. No bad car wrecks yet. He wrestled a catfish out of a hole in the bank one morning and it weighed forty pounds. They still had the picture somewhere, Glen guessed, but he didn’t need to see it. He could remember Virgil sitting beside the thing fifty feet back from the bank, smoking his readyrolleds then, the muscles of his broad back showing through his wet shirt, the fish breathing steadily in her new world and the sleek thickness of her shining flanks. And the fish fry that weekend, his mother cooking in the kitchen and their cousins and uncles drinking beer with his father at the table. Old voices and old times gone by and the memories of them like faded photos on a screen.

  He looked up at his daddy. “You still just look like an old drunk to me,” he said.

  Puppy swelled up. His face went red. Glen watched him for a second and then told his father, “You too sorry to even put her a headstone up. And he wanted me to come see you. Well. I’ve seen you.”

  Virgil met his eyes with a level gaze and drew calmly on his smoke. He never even blinked. The Redbone puppy poked his head out from the side of the house and watched them hopefully, wagging his tail briefly. He seemed not to want to offend anybody. It was quiet for a moment.

  Puppy sat down on the steps. He stared at the ground. He looked as if all the air had gone out of him.

  “That trip down there didn’t do you a damn bit of good,” he said sadly. He lifted his beer and drank.

  Virgil didn’t say anything. He just sat there in his chair and looked out across the road.

  Glen turned away. Off to the fields and past the trees where the clouds drifted in the sky. He reached in his pocket for a smoke, took one out of the pack, and put it to his lips. “Welcome fuckin home, huh?” he said. He lit the cigarette with a battered gold Zippo, snapped the lighter shut, and returned it to his pocket.

  The house was one of the few things Glen had salvaged from his marriage. It had five rooms and brick siding with a tin roof. Weeds had grown up in the yard and one corner of the porch was sagging. Striped wasps threaded the air over his head as he turned the knob and pushed the front door open. Inside lay the silence of a house long empty. She had taken very little, only her clothes it looked like. The furniture was coated with dust and the television sat in one corner black and dead. Somebody had been in the house walking around, footprints proving it in the solid coating of dust on the floor.

  He walked back to the kitchen. Dirt daubers had built nests on the walls and in the sink lay some dead bugs, a few encrusted plates. He went back outside and closed the door behind him. Puppy was standing in the yard and he was a little drunk. He had taken the fresh battery out of the trunk and it was sitting at his feet. A few wrenches stuck out of his pocket. They opened the doors of the car shed and pulled them back so that the late-afternoon sun glowed dully on the rusted chrome of the bumper. The hood was up. Puppy looked inside and glanced at his brother.

  “Good thing we brought one,” he said.

  Glen looked inside the engine compartment and saw the positive and negative cables lying inside the battery box. His hand was hurting and he wished the monkey was still alive so he could kill it again.

  “I be damn,” he said. “I’d like to know who in the hell did that.”

  “It was in there last time I was out here,” Puppy said. “Get the gas out of the trunk, Glen, and I’ll stick this battery in and we’ll see if she’ll turn over. I need to get on home.”

  It took fifteen minutes to get it running. Puppy adjusted the timing and the carburetor until it would idle and advance. They bled the brakes.

  “I’d put some plugs in it first chance I got and some points too,” Puppy said. “I believe I’d get some new water hoses. They’ll rot when one sets up this long.”

  Glen got behind the wheel and cranked it, revving it a little. He drove it into the yard and cut it off. His brother leaned in the window opposite. “What’s your plans?”

  “I don’t know. Get something to eat. I may go see Jewel. She still live where she did?”

  “She ain’t moved. I wouldn’t get in no trouble if I was you.”

  “You ain’t me, though, are you?” Glen said.

  Puppy just shook his head and looked down at the seat.

  “Naw, Glen. I sure ain’t you.”

  He stopped
at a station two miles down the road for fresh gas, then went inside for cigarettes and two little Cokes. He mixed a drink from the bottle of whiskey he’d stolen and rode around for a while. He didn’t want to get over to her house before dark. The sun was going down and there was mown hay raked in the fields. He hung his arm out the window and smoked a cigarette, cruising past the houses set back from the road with their amber lights showing through the front windows. Suppertime. He drank from the Coke bottle and it warmed his stomach. He finished that one pretty quick and opened the other bottle and mixed another drink.

  At the red light in town he came to a stop and waited for it to turn and drove through it once it did and eased along the storefronts, looking at the cafe. The lights were off and the door was shut. He circled the square twice. A few produce vendors were still doing business. On Saturdays they sold vegetables from the back ends of their trucks, the vehicles nosed into the high sidewalks and little roofs of wood and tin built over them to shade their goods from the sun, big watermelons and bushel baskets of purple hull peas and yellow squash, bright red tomatoes. At one time that was his lot, too, rising early with his mother to go out to the truck patch and pick the produce from vines still wet with dew, loading them into the truck and getting to the square early to set up and hang the scales and lay out the paper sacks, sitting there all day to earn money that his father would drink up that weekend.

  He sipped his whiskey and glanced at the vendors a last time and then headed out of town, reading the signs in the store windows, looking at the cheap furniture on the sidewalks, the lamps and dressers, driving slow and thinking about his old man. He had first fought him when he was twelve and he had fought him five times before he whipped him the first time when he was fifteen, a prolonged battle that went all through the house with both of them knocking over furniture, breaking tables, his mother down on the floor with her hands tangled in her hair screaming for it to stop. That day he had knocked his father all the way through the screen door onto the porch, but it hadn’t resolved anything, since what they had between them could not be resolved then in that place. And maybe couldn’t be now. He smoked and drove and thought about his father, who had survived the long march at Bataan but had come away crippled, having been bayoneted through the hands and the back and the right thigh. In his childhood, Glen had heard him moan and toss and plead through his dreams, and had seen him give himself to long periods of silence when he stared off into the sky and maybe relived old memories that he would talk about only when he was drinking. He wondered if he still did that. He wondered why the Japs hadn’t just gone ahead and killed him when they had the chance. It would have made things a hell of a lot easier for everybody. He could have had a different daddy then, instead of the one he had now.

  Jewel’s room was nearly dark, but he could see the old dresser and the bureau, a tiny rocking chair and some toys scattered over the rug. The lace curtains that had flared out billowing in a black and storm-crazed spring night of his memory when the strobic lightning illuminated them struggling against each other on the bed now hung still and unmoving. There didn’t seem to be a breath of air in the room tonight.

  He stripped off the condom and went down the hall to the bathroom where a small light was plugged into the wall socket and flushed it down the commode. Then he went back into the bedroom and lay down beside her again. The whiskey was sitting on the bedside table and he reached and got it and tilted a drink down his throat. She put her hand on his leg.

  “Can you stay the night?” she said.

  “Not tonight.”

  They listened to each other breathing in the darkness.

  “Lord that was good,” she said. “It’s been so long. You don’t have to go.”

  “I got to.”

  “Will you come back?”

  He didn’t answer that. He found his clothes in a pile on the floor and he sorted through them for a sock or an undershirt. They were tangled with her things.

  “Don’t you want to see him?”

  He paused and looked over his shoulder at her. “See him?”

  “Yeah. I bet he’d like to see you.”

  He pulled on his socks and slipped his shorts over his hips, remembering a big baby in a crib who had stared up at him with dark eyes beneath a cheap mobile that spun slowly, blue fairy horses with knurled horns on their heads, orange suns and yellow stars, little pink bunny rabbits. A silent child who looked like him.

  He sat there and buttoned his shirt.

  “Hell, he don’t know me.”

  “He’s four. He knows you. I showed him the picture.”

  “What the hell did you go and do that for?”

  “I’ll go see if he’s awake,” she said. The lamp came on and he saw her arm pull back from it. She got up from the bed naked and pulled her robe off the chair nearby. She put it on and went barefoot out the door, down the darkened hall. He took another drink. It felt like something near death in here to him. He put the rest of his clothes on and combed his hair in front of the dresser next to the bed. When he turned to face a small noise at the bedroom door she was standing there holding the boy on her hip.

  “There’s Daddy, see Daddy?” she said to him softly. He was not a baby anymore yet he looked small for his age. He fixed Glen with a look of intense interest and rubbed at one eye with a dimpled fist to see him better maybe.

  “Ain’t he growed?” she said. “Look what a big boy.”

  Watching this Glen reached and got the whiskey off the bedside table.

  “Put him back in bed. It’s late.”

  “I just wanted you to see him.”

  “Take him back.”

  She spun quickly and went down the hall almost running. Glen walked through the living room and out the front door. He stood on the porch and took another drink of the whiskey. Then he went and sat in the car and waited for her to come out.

  He heard a noise. The screen door flapped faintly and she was a pale form moving rapidly across the black grass toward him. She bent down to the window and her voice had turned cold.

  “Are you not going to stay with us? After all this time? I want you to see him. You get back out of that car.”

  He didn’t turn to her, just looked out across the hood.

  “I ain’t ready for that. I was still at Parchman last night if you know what I mean.”

  She put her hand on his arm and he felt the strength in her fingers when she tightened her grip.

  “I told you I need to talk to you. Does all this time I’ve waited not mean nothin to you? Trying to raise this baby by myself?”

  “I got to go.”

  “Don’t you leave me like this, Glen. You come back in here and you sit down and talk to me.”

  He leaned back in the seat and looked at her. Her hair was loose and wild and the gown she’d slipped on was open at the top so that he could see her full breasts and her big nipples. All the nights he had dreamt of her and gone to sleep thinking about her, all the days in the cotton patches when only the thought of this night got him through, commanded him to get out of the car and take her hand and fall back into her bed and sleep with her and smell her hair and skin.

  He reached forward and cranked the car, pulled the headlights on.

  “I’ll see you later, Jewel,” he said, and let out on the clutch. She stepped back from the car and said some things, but by then he was going down the driveway and he didn’t bother to listen to whatever they were.

  Virgil was asleep. He was naked in his bed and turned on his side. The Redbone puppy whined through the screen door and a lamp with a few moths batting around it showed the cigarette butts knocked from the ashtray and empty beer cans on the floor, a chewed paper. The news played on the TV screen unheard and the light flickered on his mangled body, the scars that ran up his back and the hole in the side of his leg where they had twisted the bayonet and probed his living flesh with wide grins to his howls for mercy. The marred hands composed now, at rest.

  Glen crossed the roo
m without looking at him much and turned on the hall light and went back to his old room. The Winchester was still there, leaning in the corner. He went to it and picked it up. The receiver and the barrel had some rust showing, but he pushed the release and shucked the slide halfway back easily. A green Remington showed itself at the ejection port, the brass softly shining in the breech. He rechambered it and turned the gun toward the bed and pumped it, the shells tossing and flipping onto the quilt with little muted thumps. He sat down and looked at them. Birdshot mostly, but the first one that had come out was 00 buckshot.

  “Shit,” he said quietly. He stuck the buckshot back in and chambered it and uncocked the hammer and laid it on the bed. He got up and walked into the kitchen and turned on the light. Dirty plates and ruined scraps. Bugs crawling away. He started opening drawers. The first one had a broken glass in it, some bent spoons, a box of matches. He shut it and opened another one. What looked to be an ancient rubber and some big red shells. One was a 10-gauge. Two were three-inch magnums, 12-gauge. His gun was a 12 but it was an old 12 and he didn’t want to blow it up in his own face. He figured that’d be worse than getting shot.

  “What do you want with these damn things?” he said to the room. He slammed the drawer and opened another one. Some old green bread was in there and a plate somebody had eaten off several years ago, looked like.

  “Goddamn,” he said, and slammed that one too.

  He moved to the other side of the sink where some of his mother’s dish towels were hanging on a little wooden rack. He took one and stuck it in his pocket and opened the last drawer. There were four rounds of 12-gauge buckshot in there on a saucer. He picked them up and looked at them. They looked like they’d shoot. There was some dried dog shit on the floor. He guessed the Redbone puppy had been coming in some. The linoleum was torn and scuffed, ripped loose in places. The room was full of dead plants in pots. He turned the light off and walked out.