by Shaun Meeks
I looked at my dad again, and thought that it must be a divorce. All the arguing that had been going on over the last few years, all the screaming, the wall punching, the building up of rage and hate towards one another, it was all heading to this. I wanted to cry right then and there, to run to him and hope that he would reassure me, tell me that nothing like that was going to happen, that he wasn’t going to go anywhere. I could feel my eyes burning with the threat of tears as the song of cicada hummed electrically around us, and I opened my mouth to say something to him, but right then, he stopped walking along the path and moved towards the creek itself.
I watched him walk up to the murky water, expecting him to stop on the edge as always where he would take off his boots, socks and roll his pants up before going in like he usually would when he was searching for crayfish. Instead, I saw him just walk straight into the creek, not even pausing for a second on the edge, water splashing up, soaking his jeans almost immediately.
“Dad? Are you okay?”
He didn’t turn right away and I was more afraid than I had ever been in my life. There had been moments of fear and terror before; getting chased home by two boys that were much bigger than me that decided one day they wanted to beat me up, or walking in an alley on my way to the lake and seeing a huge dog foaming at the mouth and growling at me, clearly being rabid and wanting to spread his joy, but nothing could quite add up to seeing this. The sight of my father walking into the dirty water, ruining his beloved boots, moving like a zombie in Night of the Living Dead which I had seen only a few weeks before, was enough to make my skin explode in a wave of goose bumps and made my cock try to retreat back up inside my body.
I called out to him again, following him towards the creek, but I didn’t step into the water with him. I stood on the edge, my shoes sinking into the slimy looking mud slightly and wished he would just turn and tell me that everything was great, that the world was just as I knew it.
Once he was in the middle of the creek, he slowly turned back towards me and I saw for the first time in my life, tears spilling from his eyes and immediately I began to cry too. It wasn’t just that he was crying, it was that his skin suddenly looked paler, his eyes sunken in deeper than I had ever seen and it was almost as though a shadow was cast across the familiar wrinkled face that I knew, darkening all his features and turning him into a stranger. He didn’t look at all like the man whom I looked up to so much for so many reasons.
“Dad? What’s wrong?” I asked and saw that he was trying to smile at me, but the smile was dull and faded almost as soon as it appeared.
“Last night, I had someone come to see me. Someone I haven’t seen since I moved away from Alabama.” He final spoke, his voice quiet and timid, more like a child himself than a full grown man. “I hadn’t really even thought of him in years, but I guess he remembered me well enough.”
“Who was it?”
“Did I ever tell you about when I was down at the creek with Tommy, Bobby and William, the day we ran into little Charlie Carty?” I shook my head and my dad’s eyes fell away from me and down to the running water that he was standing mid-shin in. “I’m not surprised. It was not one of my greatest moments.”
“Dad, can you come out of the water? Let’s go sit under a tree and you can tell me about it.”
“There’s not a whole lot to tell, son. Sometimes we do things that seem fine at the time, but once they are done, there’s no undoing them, even if you know how wrong you were. When Bobby saw little Charlie swimming all naked in the creek that we considered ours back then, a rage came out of him that I had never seen before. Bobby had a mean streak in him, hell, he was one of the toughest kids I had ever met in my life, but when he saw the little black boy swimming and saw that the kid was dressed only in what God had given him, something boiled in him that I had never seen before. I think his dad, a Klansman, had put enough of his ill-bred hate in him over the years that it just overflowed that day.
“He made us follow him to where Charlie’s cloths were and threw them into the bushes a little ways off. He didn’t throw them all in though, he pulled out twine that Charlie had been using as a belt, smiling a grin that I didn’t like while he did. Bobby had made fun of some of the poor kids in town before for having to use rope as a make shift belt, so at the time I thought it was just going to be more of the same teasing.”
My dad paused and stared up at the sky above him, sighing deeply and running his fingers through his long hair. He was whispering the word sorry over and over as he did, then looked back at me and continued.
“When Charlie stepped out of the water, Bobby was on him like a fly on shit. He threw the naked kid to the ground and started punching, kicking and spitting on him. The others boys joined in and before long, I was doing the same. I was laughing as I did it. Why the Hell would I laugh at something like that? I saw him crying and bleeding, heard him begging for his mom and for us to stop, but we didn’t. I didn’t stop and I don’t know why.
“After a while we did stop beating on him and I figured Bobby had had enough and that we would head down to Mr. Hinkle’s store and grab a Dr. Pepper and some licorice, but it seemed that Bobby had other plans.
“Do you think I’m a bad person? Do you ever worry that I will hurt you, your brother or your mom?” He asked me with a sincerity that hurt.
“No. I never think those things.” I told him, reassuring him with a lie that I hope he didn’t see. The fact was, there were times when my mom and dad would fight, where his voice would explode like a bomb, echoing in my head. There were nights where I would wake up from a dream where he was screaming the most hate filled words, and even as I came awake, I could still hear that voice echoing in my head. Did I want him to know this, or that there where days where I would pull the safety scissors from my school pencil case and hide in my closet with them, sure that he was going to kill us all and those dull kids tools were my only protection? I looked up to my dad, in a way he was my hero, someone to be proud of, but I knew there was something dark in him that I always feared. When he asked me if I believed he would ever hurt us, I thought of those days where I was terrified that he would go off drinking and come home, fly into a rage that left us all for dead, but in the state he was in, I hoped that he would buy the lie.
“I am not an evil man. No matter what you think after I tell you this, I am not the same person that was there that day.”
“Let’s just go home, dad. Please. Let’s go home and sit down and talk. Maybe we can make a model plane or something.” I pleaded, but he shook his head, obviously determined to go on with what he had to say.
“We stepped away from Charlie who was lying on the grass in the fetal position, pissing himself while we laughed. Bobby looked down at him, pulled the twine from his back pocket and I knew what was going to happen even before it did.
“I wanted to tell him to stop, tell him that we should go home, just like you are doing to me now, but nothing came out of my mouth. I watched as he made a make shift noose with the rope, tied it around the boy’s slim neck and used it to drag him over to an old weeping willow tree. Charlie struggled and cried as his naked body was pulled twenty feet across the grass, but the closer he was pulled to the tree, the quieter he became. Charlie looked at me as he was dragged, the fear and pain seeming to drain out of his face, staring at me as though he was questioning me, like he was asking me why we were doing this to him. To be honest, I had no answer to that, so I turned away from his face and his judgment.
“Once we were at the tree, Bobby flung the end that was not tied to Charlie’s neck over the thickest of the lower branches and told us all to grab it and pull. Bobby yelled at the three of us, but none of us did what he told us to. We all looked down at little Charlie, who looked right back at us and we were frozen there in that moment, unsure as to what to do. ‘I said grab the fucking rope boys or this nigger is going to have him some company swinging from this here tree!’
“We knew that Bobby wasn’t just say
ing some idle threat, he meant what he said, and so we followed his order, grabbed the rope and began to pull. You know, when I was going through school, we did this report on Germans during WWII, about how most of the soldiers involved were not bad people, but they felt as though they had no choice in what they were doing. Our teacher had told us that when given a choice between a wrong and a right, people will normally do whatever keeps them alive the longest. I knew the teacher was right, despite how many kids in class thought he was full of shit because right then and there I felt as though I was one of those Germans and Bobby was my Hitler.”
My dad laughed, but there was no humor in it at all.
“We pulled on the rope and lifted little Charlie up of the ground, and I held back tears right away as I heard him gasping and choking as the rope squeezed against his windpipe. I pulled and watched his eyes begin to bulge, his fingers tearing uselessly at the rope choking him and heard Bobby yelling ‘This is how a nigger swings’. It would have been easier if we had hung him the way the Klan normally did, making the victim stand on something, then push them off so instead of being strangled to death, it was their neck snapping that killed them. At least that way it would have been over fast and I wouldn’t have had to see the life slip slowly out of that harmless boy the way I had.
“I tried not to look right at Charlie, tried to look at the ground as he choked and made the most horrific sounds I had ever heard, but even then I saw his bare feet kicking away as though trying to find the ground and save himself from death.
“It didn’t work though, his feet found no ground to save him from the slow death. He died, after the longest five minutes of my life he finally stopped moving and Bobby told us to let him loose. We all let go at the same time, watching his lifeless body just crumple to the ground like some limp doll, his eyes open and wide staring up at us as though in death he was accusing us, judging us for what we had just done. Beside me, William began to sob and I wanted to join in, but Bobby punched him in the stomach hard enough to make William puke and fall beside Charlie’s body. ‘Why are you crying for some dumb ass nigger? They ain’t nothing but outdated farm equipment you idiot, so stop it or you’ll be swinging from the tree too!’ he yelled and I held back those tears, knowing that as bad as I felt for little Charlie, I wanted to live even more.
“I know that makes me a bad person, but I have done everything I can to make up for that day, to be a better person. It was only a few weeks after that; I ran away from home, ran away from Bobby and my friends, away from the racism that seemed to be everywhere there and from little Charlie’s dead eyes that were full of pleading and judgment. I ran and forgot all about it, pushed the day out of my mind so hard that aside from nightmares, I didn’t even remember it happening. It became one of those repressed memories that everyone seems to talk about, but you can’t keep it hidden forever. Secrets, especially dark ones, want to be heard and the dead want their cries heard no matter how far in the past they are. Last night, after you and your brother went to bed, I was sitting in the living room, watching All in the Family and the past reared its ugly head, right in my own home.”
Somewhere in the distance, a fire truck siren echoed through the still air and my dad turned his head towards it, looking for the source, but all you could see in that area of the creek was trees. Even the mall was out of sight, and for that I was glad. I wondered what other people would have thought if they saw my dad, a man who looked like a cross between a cowboy and a hippie, standing in the middle of the shit filled creek, crying and talking to me.
“There I was, sitting in my chair, everyone in the house asleep, when I heard the floor creaking. I looked over, expecting to see you or your brother standing there in you PJ’s pretending like you couldn’t sleep, but instead, there was little Charlie Carty, naked as the day God made him, the noose still around his neck, cutting deep into his flesh just as it had when we left him dead on the ground.
“I wanted to jump and run, to cry out or close my eyes and convince myself that it was just a dream, but he moved quickly towards me, placed his small hands on my shoulders and smiled. I could smell the water on him, the wet grass, the coppery blood, and I knew that this was no dream, no alcohol induced vision, it was really him. He leaned towards my ear, my heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my ass, and he whispered something in my ear, ‘Your son will be the same man as you are. Your sins are his. History repeats itself. What horror will hang in his past?’ and then he was gone. I could still smell him, smell those old memories of the creek in Alabama that are nothing like this and I cried.
“I wish I could go back and do things differently. I am not a bad person, I am not evil, yet how can I say that with little Charlie there?”
My dad reached into his jean jacket again, pulled his cigarettes out, but they fell from his trembling hands and landed in the water. He sighed, then laughed and looked up at me, a hint of his old self returning to his face, as though by telling me that story, some of the pasts shadow lifted from him. I smiled back and watched as the pack of smokes floated away from him, a little boat on a sea of waste.
“Want to be a sport and run back to the mall and grab me a new pack?” He stepped out of the water, sitting on the edge next to me and removed his boots and socks. “I would, but I have a feeling they would get one nostril full of this stink and kick me out on my ass.”
He laughed and handed me five dollars and I laughed right along with him. I was about to run to the store, when I stopped, looked at him peeling off his drenched work socks and I gave him a tight hug.
“I love you, dad. No matter what happened there, I still love you.”
“And I love you too, Jerry.” He said with more emotion than I had ever heard from him in my life. “Now hurry back. After all that, I need a smoke.”
Dropping my knapsack beside my dad, I ran back towards the mall where the teenagers were still hanging out, and ran passed them without paying them much mind. I heard one of them yell something out along the lines of “fag” or “homo”, but paid it no mind. As I ran, I was too caught up in what my father had just told me. It was a lot to take in, hearing that your dad and his friends had murdered someone, a child at that, for no reason other than the fact that he wasn’t the right skin color. I had always wondered if my dad had seen anything screwed up like that in his life, having grown up in Alabama during the 50’s and 60’s, but I had never once thought he had been part of it, that he himself had hung someone. Whether he was a willing participant or not, I didn’t quite know how to take what he had done. I felt anger, disgust, guilt, love and fear all swirling around inside of me. I had hugged my dad after he had told me about what he had done, but after leaving him and running to the store I had begun to think about what he had said.
I was able to see in my head the boy hanging from the tree, choking, so full of fear as he fought for the life that my dad and his friends were taking from him. How could I tell my dad I loved him after hearing that, after he told me what he had done? I know part of it had been because he was still my dad, and no matter what a parent does to us, or in front of us, no matter how much hurt they cause, there will always be that part of us that is willing to forgive and forget their sins.
Yet this was more than just a spanking, or a divorce, more than just finding out your dad cheated on your mom and had some illegitimate kid. I had just found out my dad had killed a boy, no older than I was, probably younger and there I was buying him cigarettes like it was nothing at all. I guess looking back now, I didn’t want to see my dad in that light, see him as a murderer that was so wrought with guilt that he thought a ghost of the dead child had visited him the night before. Denial was easier that reality.
Once I had the cigarettes, I ran back to where I had left my dad, running past the teens and again they yelled something out. I only half heard it, expecting it to be more of the same, but one of them said something that I thought was strange and only partially heard, yet it sent a shiver down my spine and I nearly stopped
. Amongst the “faggots” and “queer boy”, one of them had yelled “come hang out with Charlie”, or at least I thought one of them had and there was a sudden cold pull in my stomach. I kept running, but looked over my shoulder and saw the group standing there by the over turned carts laughing at me, but there was something else. Since then I have tried to convince myself that it was all the stress, that I was simply imagining it all, but now, I’m not so sure. When I turned, peeking from beside one of the dumpsters that the teens were near, I could have sworn I saw a small naked, black boy, the way I thought little Charlie would look, crouched beside the garbage bin, a thin rope was all he wore. He smiled at me and looked to be calling me over.
I turned away and ran even faster to where I had left my dad, so full of fear from what I thought I saw that I nearly crushed the cigarettes I had bought for him. I moved my feet as fast as I could, not daring to look back even once, afraid of what I might see if I did. I remembered a nightmare I once had, where I was being chased by a monster that lived under my bed, it’s eyes hollowed out, glowing a fiery red, as though Hell lived in its skull. In the dream I was fast as greased lightning until I turned my head to look at the distance between us and once I did, it was as though my legs suddenly filled with lead and I couldn’t move at all. It was that stupid dream that kept me from turning my head, as though it was a premonition and whatever I had seen peeking out from the garbage bin would be on me in a second if I did. So I focused on what was ahead of me and ran and I didn’t stop until I was only a few feet away from where my bag lay, noticing right away that my dad was nowhere to be seen.
