by Jason Mott
“What?”
Reverend Brown sat forward in his chair, then he stood and approached the map. It did, in fact, seem as though the dragon was not swimming the waters between continents, but drowning in them. The agape mouth—which, only seconds ago, had been one of power, ferocity and menace—was now somber and frightened, almost calling for help. Isaiah could almost hear the sound of the waters rising above the creature’s head, and he wondered how he had ever seen anything else when he looked at the image.
* * *
Tom and his son sat at the dinner table loading food into their mouths by the forkful and listening to the sound of the wind pushing through the pines outside beneath the moonlight. Now and again there was the clatter of silverware against the plate. The low scraping sound of a small hill of rice being corralled in one corner. The entire house smelled of sage and thyme and onions and crushed red pepper. There was a cast-iron heater in the living room with a fire burning gently inside, the flames flapping their wings. The smoke went up and out into the cool, autumn night, rose for a short distance, then flattened and crept out over the yard.
Tom was staying in the barn at the Johnsons’ place. For years the barn had housed horses and other animals, but when the farming became a more difficult means of making ends meet Robert Johnson got rid of the animals and, for many years, the barn remained empty—save for the occasional sick cow or horse stabled at the behest of some neighbor with no other place to put it. Then Robert’s wife had the idea of converting the barn into an apartment. “In case of company,” she said, even though the couple rarely entertained anyone. Robert resisted, citing better uses for the money and the couple’s scarcity of guests. But his wife wouldn’t be swayed and so the top portion of the barn, which once held hay and tools, was insulated and dry walled and painted and filled with all of the other amenities of the “civilized world”—as Robert’s wife had put it. The only niceties lacking were a television and internet—things the hidebound couple both felt weren’t particularly indicative of civilized people.
Fortune smiled on the Johnsons. They finished the renovations just two weeks before the air show tragedy in Stone Temple. All of a sudden the town was filled with people needing a place to stay, and all of them having good, old-fashioned money to spend. There were plenty of people they could have rented the apartment to but, when he was a younger man, Tom had helped Robert on more than a few occasions. And Stone Temple was still a place that favored familiar faces over well-heeled strangers. So when Tom called and asked if they could put him up, the Johnsons were more than happy to get him squared away. Now he and Wash were settled into the apartment together. It smelled of fresh paint and old horses. The smell was in the wood, cured into it after years of holding animals, but like so many things in life, it was a condition that was not so oppressive that it couldn’t be ignored.
Tom had been staying in the apartment for a week. Wash had come to join him two days ago.
“This ain’t so bad, is it?” Tom asked.
Wash finished the last of his food and placed his fork in the center of the plate. He rubbed his palms back and forth against his thighs. “No, sir.”
“We get along okay, don’t we?”
“Yes, sir.”
Tom rose from the table, shaking his empty beer can. He got a full one from the refrigerator and leaned against the kitchen sink. “Tonight,” he said, taking a sip, “tonight was good. I’m glad Grandma finally changed her mind about this. Maybe she’s not quite as much of a hard old bird as I remember.”
Tom settled across the table and looked long and hard at his son. Wash sat with his hands in his lap and his eyes downward toward his dinner plate. Outside the breeze picked up and there was a light flapping sound in the ceiling as a few loose shingles caught in the chilly wind. Wash’s father listened to the sound of the shingles and to the slow popping of the fireplace in the other room. He heard the gentle hum of the refrigerator and the low roar of the wind, the rhythmic breathing of his son and the pale moon sweeping by above the world. He heard the impossible sound of everything and, as he listened, he fiddled with the top of his beer can and that tinny, metallic sound of his fingers playing against the metal was the only sound that he could hear.
He took a sip. “Did I ever tell you how your mother and me met?”
Your mother and I, Wash wanted to say, but he only said, “No, sir.”
“We met at church,” Tom said, grinning nostalgically. “Not many folks would believe it, but I used to go. Anyway, we were very young. Around your age, maybe. I’m bad with dates and details and all that. But I wasn’t much bigger than you and neither was she. Your grandma and grandpa had come to visit our church. It was normal back then for people from one church to visit another. I guess folks still do that, don’t they?” He paused to reflect.
“Well, I kept noticing her all through the service. I don’t really know why I kept noticing her, not then I didn’t know, anyway. She wore this white dress—perfectly white. With little pink frills around the bottom and at the sleeves. She used to tell me that she hated that dress. She said it made her look like a doll.”
Tom laughed.
“It did. It was a little goofy, I guess. All puffy and frilly. She wore these white shoes with white socks. My God, it must have been horrible to wear something like that, a girl at her age.” He leaned back in his chair, laughing a little. “You wouldn’t know it about your grandmother now, but she used to love seeing your mama in dresses like that.” Tom took another sip of his beer. “It was years from the time I saw her in the church that day to our first date. Not until I moved here to work at the mill. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if the two of us had grown up together. Maybe we would have been childhood friends. Maybe she wouldn’t have been willing to go out with me when I finally did ask her. I don’t know. Nobody can ever say what might have happened. ‘If this’ or ‘if that.’ Wondering about what might have been doesn’t do anybody a lick of good. That’s a fact.”
He paused reflectively.
“Can’t nothing be undone. It’s all just ashes and missed opportunities.”
Tom looked down at his hands, then glanced over the table at his son. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. He stood and cleared the table and, after drinking down his beer and getting another, he motioned for Wash to follow him as he started down the stairs.
It was still early in the evening but already the countryside was dark and empty. Inside the Johnsons’ house the blue glow of a television shimmered and danced. The porch light burned softly above the front door.
“Can you drive?” Tom asked.
“I’m thirteen.”
“True,” Tom said. “But that’s not what I asked.” He looked into his beer can for a moment and then, in one long draft, finished it. “Let’s go,” he said.
Tom’s car was an old Chevy Nova. It was painted a deep, rich blue with two white racing stripes running down the center. It was a car meant for movies, Wash thought.
“Get behind the wheel,” Tom said. “I’m a little past curfew, if you know what I mean. Can you drive stick?”
“No, but I know the basic idea,” Wash said. Inside, the car smelled of beer and cigarettes and grease and paint and leather—all the things that cars of that age were known for.
“There’s nothing to it,” Tom said, smiling. The long scar on his cheek did its familiar transformation into a single, long S. The two of them slammed the car doors closed. “Press the clutch in and start her up,” he said.
Wash was tall for his age, even if he was thin, and so he was able to manage the clutch without much trouble. He fastened his seat belt, and when he turned the ignition the car started with a bark from the exhaust. It was a lumpy, metallic sound, like an animal waking from slumber.
“You’ll have to take it easy,” Tom said, slumping back into the seat.
“Are you going to put your seat belt on?” Wash asked.
“Never need one,” Tom replied. “Now focus on the car.
It can be a lot to handle if you’re not careful.”
Wash wrapped his hands around the steering wheel and, for a long moment, he sat and let the vibration of the car crackle through his fingers. He took in the sight of the old, circular gauges.
“Right foot on the brake,” Tom said.
Wash nodded and complied. Immediately the car stalled.
Tom laughed. “I didn’t say take your foot off the clutch, son.”
Wash started the car again.
“Now, it’s just a matter of being slow and easy. Don’t be afraid of a clutch,” Tom said. “You’re not driving if you’re not in a manual. It’s what separates us from the animals.”
Wash chuckled.
Tom held up his hands and used them to demonstrate how to work the clutch and the throttle. His explanation was long and sprawling, as Wash had expected. But he did not care. He listened to the sound of his father’s voice and he felt the vibration of the car and he realized that this was a moment that he had spent his entire life dreaming about.
“Got all that?” Tom asked.
“I think so,” Wash said. “It’s like dancing.”
“You dance, son?”
“No, but I’ve read about how clutches work. You’re putting two things together, basically. They’re both spinning at different speeds, doing their own work, and you have to ease them together so that they match. So that they can share the same space.”
“Like dancing,” Tom said softly.
On his third try, Wash got it right.
They rode in silence through the dark countryside. They took the road north, away from the town, away from the people and the noise of Stone Temple. The course was Wash’s to choose, and he did not want to share his father with anyone.
After a while Tom, who was almost asleep, reached into the glove compartment and retrieved a silver flask. He took a sip. “You’re a natural,” he said, his words lazy and slurring.
Wash nodded, but kept his eyes on the road. Now that they were at speed, there was no more gear shifting to be done, but there was still the nighttime road to navigate. He had ridden along this stretch of highway more times than he could remember, but it was different now that he was driving it. It was exhilarating.
“Can I ask you something?” Wash said, almost calling Tom “Dad.”
“Don’t ask if you can ask a question,” Tom said. His words were more slurred as the alcohol seeped deeper into him. “Just ask your question. Be confident.”
“Would you have stayed if Mom hadn’t died?”
“I don’t know,” Tom replied quickly. He scratched the top of his head and coughed to clear his throat. “Have you ever flown anywhere, Wash?” he asked.
“I’ve never been so far away that I needed to fly,” Wash replied. The road ahead was dark and smooth. It flattened out between a long valley and the car seemed to glide through the world.
Tom tilted his head back and closed his eyes. “At night, from high up in a plane,” he began, “the world looks like the bottom of the ocean—the dark, deep parts, like you see on TV specials sometimes. It just stretches out forever. Now and then you see the lights of cities or houses. Only they aren’t cities. They become something else—all light and curves, like those glowing jellyfish they say live at the bottom of the ocean. Just a blob of beautiful light. And a whole city passes by that way—all the people in it, everything, everyone—gliding past you in the darkness. And you wonder if there is anything real about it.”
His breathing shifted for a moment, but still his eyes were closed, his body collapsed like a man worn out by life. “You can believe you might see anything outside your window, Wash. Kind of like all you have to do is believe it and wait for it and look hard enough into the darkness and, somehow, she’ll come back.” Finally, his eyes opened. He gazed out the window into the night. “Sometimes I really believe it,” Tom said.
“Why don’t you play music anymore?” Wash asked. The moment the question left his lips, he regretted it.
“Because I’m a fuckup,” Tom said directly.
Wash didn’t know how to reply to his father. All he could think to say was, “Am I doing okay?”
“I’m bad at everything,” Tom said. “The thing I do best is quit. And I know I’m not a good dad, but I love you, Wash. I loved you every day of my life, from before you were born. And I loved your mom. I just wish I was better at it. Better at everything.” His voice shook and he looked down at his wedding ring. Then, slowly, and with a tone of sorrow, he said, “Too bad that girlfriend of yours can’t do anything for me. Can’t do anything with the type of brokenness I’ve got. I’m sorry that this fuckup is all you get as a father, Wash.” Then Tom was asleep and there was only the sound of the engine, the tires upon the pavement, the wind beyond the windows.
The road became something Wash had never known it could be. It was liquid, smooth, sliding beneath the car. But there was no fear, no uneasiness. The car moved over the road with grace and ease, and it made Wash believe that he could go anywhere in this world, do anything he wanted. It made him believe, if only for a little while, in the possibility of grand and sweeping things. It made him remember that there was a life to be had in this world.
Then he downshifted to negotiate a turn and, when he went to find the next gear, the gearshift shuddered in his hand and there was a loud pop from the bowels of the car and the engine revved, but it felt connected to nothing. The steering wheel lurched in the boy’s hands, but he held it. He called for his father, but the man was too drunk to hear. The car eased off the road just as it was reaching the bottom of a hill. It was only luck that they were driving along a field. The car bucked and bounded into the grass, all the while with Wash clutching the steering wheel with both hands, hoping and praying that nothing would suddenly leap out in front of him. In the headlights he saw only grass and brambles and the light layer of fog that was draping over the field.
Eventually, the car squealed to a stop.
Wash’s heart beat in his ears. “Dad?” he called. “Dad!” He shook Tom, but it was to no effect. Wash unbuckled his seat belt and got out of the car. Around him there was open field and the sound of the insects and above him there were stars. He walked around the car, using the glare from the headlights to help him see the car as best he could. There were some small dents in the front of the car, and one of the tires was flat, but that was the worst of it.
Wash placed his hands on his head and sighed and thought about what might have been if he’d lost control of the car up on the mountain. He stood there in the night and looked in the window and watched as the man that was his father slept, oblivious to it all. He went back and sat inside the car. The glove compartment had come open in the tumult. When Wash went to close it the registration fell out. The name on the registration was not Tom’s name. Wash considered this, then he considered his father. Of course the car wasn’t his, Wash thought. But he had tried, hadn’t he?
Then he heard the low, hissing sound of a car driving over the fog-soaked pavement. In the rearview mirror he saw the glare of headlights. He could just make out the silhouette of the car descending the hill. “Shit,” Wash said. He shook his father. “Dad! Dad, wake up! Wake up now!”
It did nothing to wake the man.
It was then that the blue glow of police lights glittered in the night, off and on, illuminating the thirteen-year-old boy and the stone-drunk father who had put him behind the wheel.
* * *
“It’s the kind of a thing that a child gets taken away for,” Macon said. He paced back and forth in front of the jail cell. Inside, seated on a cot, was Tom. He held his head in his hands and there was a cup of coffee placed on the floor in front of him. “Brenda’s on her way over to pick up Wash,” Macon said. “What happens next will be decided between the two of you, I suppose.”
Tom rubbed the sides of his head. “I just want to thank you, Sheriff.”
“For what?” Macon asked.
“For whatever,” Tom said. �
��For everything.”
Macon stopped pacing. He and Tom were alone in the holding area. And he’d made sure to keep it that way. These days, with all the new officers on the force in the wake of the air show tragedy, he didn’t know who he could trust. Already, one of his men had gone on television to tell his story about how the boy Ava saved was almost killed when his drunken father let him get behind the wheel of a muscle car. He even went so far as to volunteer information about Tom’s police record—drunk driving, drunk in public, drunken and disorderly. Always drunk. That was Tom.
“Drink the coffee, Tom,” Macon said. Tom looked down at the mug on the floor between his feet. “Brenda will be here any minute, and you’re going to need every bit of your wits when she comes through that door.”
Tom picked up the coffee and sipped it. “She never did like me,” he said.
“And you’re giving her all the reasons she needs to keep not liking you, aren’t you?”
“I gave it a try, though,” Tom said, cupping the mug between his hands. He leaned back on the cot, resting against the concrete wall of the jail cell. He rubbed the scar on his cheek and looked at Macon. “I guess we can’t all be parent of the year, can we?” Tom said.
“Nobody’s asking you to be, Tom,” Macon said. He placed one hand on the bars of Tom’s cell. “But there’s got to be something in you that’s better than this. Maybe not parent of the year, but how about parent of the week? Parent of the day? How about spending more than a week with your son without getting locked up?”
Tom laughed darkly. “You know me, huh?”
“No,” Macon said sharply. “I don’t. But I know Wash. And, hell, I know Brenda. And the sad part is that neither one of them hates you, not even Brenda.”
“I was never cut out for this shit,” Tom said, lifting the coffee mug to his lips, drinking hard and fast. It was still steaming hot and it burned, but he did not stop.
“You can learn,” Macon said.
“Why?” Tom asked. “Why the hell does it matter to you?”
“Why the hell doesn’t it matter to you?” Macon replied sharply.
