by Chris Fabry
“Where was your room?” I said to my dad.
He pointed down a hall. “Last one on the right.”
“Can I go see it?”
Dad stared at the old man. “Yeah, go ahead. Just watch out for wild animals.”
The floor creaked with every footstep, and that’s saying something because I really don’t weigh that much. I kept waiting for the two of them to start yelling at each other, but it was quiet behind me. There was carpet as thin as sandpaper in the hall. The bathroom to my left had a brown ring around the bathtub as dark as the old man’s teeth.
I got to the door at the end of the hall and pushed it open. There was an old bed in there and a dresser with a couple of the drawers falling off and dust everywhere. I stepped inside and saw a bookshelf, which was just a couple of cinder blocks with a piece of wood between them. On there were a few Hardy Boys books, the blue hardcovers, and several paperbacks. Where the Red Fern Grows was one of them, and I knew that was one of Dad’s favorites. A story called The Old Man and the Sea. To Kill a Mockingbird.
And a little red book that turned out to be a Bible. I picked it up and opened to the first page. “To Johnny, from Uncle Franklin. Walk with the Lord. December 1982.”
I looked in the closet and there was a uniform in a plastic bag. Black boots stood on the floor with dust all over. I kept looking for any of my dad’s toys or games or maybe an old baseball glove, but there was nothing like that in the whole room.
I heard their voices from the end of the hall, but I wanted to look under the bed. I lifted the cover and found a shoe box. I pulled it out and blew off the dust. When I opened it, I couldn’t believe what I saw, because there was this skinny little boy with the same grin my dad has and I knew it had to be him. There were a whole bunch of pictures thrown in there, and one was of a lady with lots of lipstick holding him and giving him a big kiss. There was only one that had the boy and the old man. They were standing a yard apart and staring into the camera. There was something sad about it, but I couldn’t figure out why.
There were also a few pictures of him in a football uniform and one with a graduation outfit. And then several in a military uniform where his face looked hard as a rock. I shoved a couple pictures in my pocket and took the rest with me into the hall.
“And where’s her mother?” the old man said.
“I don’t have an answer to that,” Dad said. I thought it was interesting that he didn’t call him Daddy or Dad or Pop or even any name.
“Is she dead? Did she run off? Something must have happened to her.”
“You’re right. I’m sure something did, but I don’t know what.”
I just stood there, afraid if I walked they’d hear the floor creaking.
“What did you come back here for?” the old man said. “If you’re looking for money, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. I’ve been on disability since after you lit out, and I can barely get by as it is.”
“I don’t need money,” Dad said. “I need to borrow a car.”
The old man cackled. “If I had a car, I wouldn’t be sitting around here. Truck’s all I got but the transmission went out last month. Don’t have the money to fix it. What happened to yours?”
“Wrecked it. We lost everything.”
“Insurance ought to cover that.”
“Didn’t have insurance.”
The old man groaned. “I raised a infidel.” There was silence for a few moments. “When you came back from the war, where’d you go?”
“I had to say good-bye to a friend of mine. Pay my respects to his mother.”
“And then what? You just went out and got a woman pregnant?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“How’d you get the girl, then? Buy her at Goodwill? If so, I’d say you got cheated. Red hair like that? Ugly as sin.”
“Shut up,” Dad said. “You’ve got no right to talk that way.”
They just sat there not saying anything, and I wondered if this was how it was back when Dad was little.
“Don’t say another word about her,” Dad finally said. “She’s the best thing in my life and about the only thing that kept me going.”
I wanted to cry and smile at the same time. I’d never heard anything so mean in my life. I always felt ugly compared with the kids I saw at the stores, but this was the first time I heard my dad stick up for me like that.
The old man must have raised his hands and let them fall on his lap because that’s the noise it made. Just kind of a slap sound. “Well, from my perspective it don’t sound like you have reason to come in here all high and mighty. You should just take her and get out.”
I walked down the hall and handed Dad the shoe box. He took it and leafed through the pictures. The old man muttered something about thinking he’d thrown them away.
“How do you get to the store?” Dad said.
The old man leaned back. “I call the widow Perkins. She’ll come get me every week or so and take me down to the Big Bear. Or I walk to the Foodland. Prices are higher, but if I get in a pinch I can go there.”
“Where does she live?”
The old man shook his head. “No, you’re not gonna bother her and mess up my chance of getting a ride next week.”
Dad pulled me close to him and kept looking through the pictures.
I pointed out the one with the woman and him. “Is that your mama?”
He nodded.
“His mama would have liked you, little girl.”
“Shut up,” Dad said to him.
The old man gave a wheezy cough. “She liked to throw away the good things and hang on to the worthless.”
“I told you to be quiet,” Dad said.
“It’s my house, if you didn’t remember. It’s not much, but I get to speak my mind. If you don’t like it, get out and take that ugly thing with you.”
Dad jumped up as fast as lightning and stood toe-to-toe with him. Dad was about a foot taller, but that was because the old man had shrunk. I guessed they had probably been about the same height at one time, judging from the pictures.
“You don’t scare me,” the old man growled. “I’ll call the police quick as look at you.”
Dad looked around. “You don’t have a phone.”
“Neighbors do.”
Dad just stared at him, turning his head while he was looking, and finally in a squeaky voice, he said, “Why? Why didn’t you take care of your own? What did I ever do to you that made you care so little?”
With all the emotion in my dad’s voice, I thought maybe the old man would say he was sorry or something or try to explain it away, or even give his son a hug.
But he gave a sick grin and all those black teeth showed through. “Is that what you came back for? Some kind of apology? To boohoo about what a bad parent I was? Get over it. Grow up. Life’s not a bed of roses, if you hadn’t noticed.”
Dad reached around and took my hand. “Come on.”
I grabbed the pictures in my other hand and followed him.
“You leave those be,” the old man shouted. He reached out and tried to take them from me but I avoided him.
“Those are my pictures,” he yelled. “I been looking for them. That’s all I got left of the memories.”
Dad took the box from me and dropped it on the table behind us. He opened the front door and it scraped against the metal frame something awful, taking a couple strips of wood with it. Instead of walking toward the road, he went to the shed out back.
The old man followed, cussing and ranting and telling us to get off his property.
Dad got an old rusty shovel from the side of the shed and tested it out, and I guess he was satisfied because he walked toward the road past the old man. I was scared that he was going to hit his dad with it, but when the man yelled, “Leave that shovel alone,” Dad kept walking.
The old man stumbled off the porch and came down the side of the yard. I was surprised at how fast he could go. Inside he could barely move, but now he
was churning his legs, and his hands were balled into fists. He jumped right in front of my dad and grabbed the shovel. He was breathing heavy out of his mouth, and his face was white. “You want to know why I couldn’t take care of you? You want to know why it was so hard? why I left you alone?”
Dad stared at him like he was from some other planet while both of them held on to that shovel.
“Because every time I looked at you, I saw her,” he said, and there was a whine in his voice, like a tied-up dog that wants to run free. “Every time I looked into your eyes, I saw her eyes. Every time I saw you, it reminded me she was never coming back.”
“I was a kid,” Dad said. “I needed a father. All you could think about was yourself.”
The old man pulled back, and his voice got meaner. “I’m not excusing what I did. I’m saying that’s what went through my head. I don’t need your forgiveness, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
They were both still holding on to the shovel, which would have looked funny if it hadn’t been so sad.
“You’d be real proud of the man your son’s become,” I said, and both of them turned like they’d heard a ghost. The look on my dad’s face was priceless. I could tell what I’d said had hit home.
But the look on the old man’s face wasn’t as nice. “What would you know about men? You probably don’t even know who your father is.”
Dad pushed the shovel against him, and the old man let loose and fell on the little hill beside the driveway. He grunted and groaned, but I don’t think he really got hurt.
“Come on, June Bug.” Dad took my hand in his, and off we went down the road with that rusty shovel being the only thing he took away from the house.
The old man shouted something behind us, but I couldn’t tell what he said.
When I asked my dad, he hugged me close and said, “Don’t look back.”
I did look up at him once, and there were these big tears running down his face that he wiped away real quick.
25
So this was Dogwood. It didn’t look like a place newspeople would come, but I guess they don’t get to decide when and where the news is going to happen. Dad and I walked down the road and had to move to the side a bunch of times because there were these big trucks that passed us, blowing the weeds by the road, and it felt like we were going to roll down the hill. He was walking fast, as if he didn’t want to spend any more time here than he had to.
Off to the left there was this nice brick house, but right beside it was a trailer park with weeds coming up in between. I saw a couple of people outside, one guy with long, stringy hair and no shirt. He was smoking, and when he glanced up I wondered what could make him look like such a shell.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“I used to know a few people in town. Maybe we’ll find a ride.”
We walked behind a grocery store, and there were a bunch of blue bins in the back and some rats gnawing on stuff, crawling around underneath. It gave me the creeps. Then we went by this tiny gas station and crossed onto the other side. There wasn’t any sidewalk here, just road and yards.
He took a road that looked sort of like an alley, but there were no houses on either side and I wished I had my bike because I could have ridden it up and down all day. The end of that road stopped at the volunteer fire department, which Dad said had burned down when he was a kid. That made me laugh—not that a fire is funny, but that the very place that’s supposed to protect you from a fire would burn down is just a little humorous. There’s a word for that, I think, but I don’t know what it is.
On another street were more houses and next to them gardens growing with big stakes holding up vines with green tomatoes. Dad said there were corn, cucumbers, and probably potatoes in those rows, and when they were ready, the people inside the houses could come out and pick off the vine for their lunch or dinner. I thought that was like a drive-through without the driving.
It was sweltering hot, and every chance I had to get into the shade I took. In fact I ran ahead of Dad and jumped into the shade and waited there for him as he looked along the road.
“Sure has changed,” he said. “This used to be a dirt path we’d take to my grandparents’.”
“You didn’t tell me you had grandparents,” I said.
“Everybody has grandparents. It’s just that some of them are alive and some of them aren’t.”
“Do I have grandparents?”
The shovel clanged on the blacktop. “Yeah. I’m sure you do.”
“Then where are they?”
Dad kept walking into the shade of a big tree. “I don’t know the answer to that.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Do you know my mama or not?”
He stopped by a little green house with a porch swing and an apple tree in the front. “Wait right here.”
I followed him up the sidewalk anyway because I wasn’t about to be left out of another conversation.
An older woman came to the door, and my dad asked if a Mrs. Burris lived there.
“Law, she hasn’t lived here for years,” the woman said. Her cheeks hung on the side of her face, and I couldn’t help but watch them bounce up and down when she talked. At the bottom of her arms was the same kind of skin, just big globs of it swinging back and forth when she lifted one up to scratch her head or point. “Last I heard they was headed down to Florida. Had a son or daughter that lived down there. Boca Raton, I think. Or maybe it was Tampa. I can’t remember which. I bet I could find out from a friend of mine over in town a ways; she keeps up with them.”
“No, that’s all right,” my dad said.
The woman looked past him at me and smiled and lifted her glasses. “Who you got here?”
“That’s June Bug,” he said, putting his arm around me and patting my shoulder.
“She’s a cute one. I love that red hair of yours, darling. You all want some lemonade? It’s hot out. My lands, you must be about ready to melt out here.”
I was so hot I could feel my face turning red and inside was the low hum of an air conditioner and it looked cool and inviting. I could just about taste that lemonade and feel the water running down the side of the glass on my hands, and I pictured myself putting that cool glass to my forehead.
But there was a noise behind us and Dad said, “We have to be moving along. Thank you.”
“It won’t be no trouble,” the woman called after us, but Dad was already off the step and headed toward the road. “I can bring it out to you.”
There was an old truck that rumbled past and then stopped at an intersection. When the driver saw Dad come out to the edge of the road he turned around, smoke coming out the back of the truck and gears grinding.
“Why can’t we have a glass of lemonade?” I said, and I could tell by the way Dad didn’t look at me that I was whining.
The truck was blue with a bunch of white places all around, as if somebody had changed their mind what color they wanted it to be. Where the truck bed was there were rusted-out holes and you could see the tailpipe. My dad has taught me to look at tires carefully because a blowout when you’re riding in an RV can be a life-changer or a life-ender. So other than the rust and the holes, I noticed that the tires were about as smooth as the floors at Walmart. The truck stopped with both windows down. I stood on my tiptoes and was surprised to find it was the old man, Dad’s father who had been so mean.
“Put that shovel in the back and get in.” He said it more as a command than a request.
Dad looked at me, then at the old man. Then he opened the door and climbed in to sit in the middle, which I thought was nice that he wouldn’t make me sit next to the old codger. I didn’t want anything to do with him, and I just stood on the road.
“Come on,” Dad said. “We need to go.”
“He’s mean. And he told us his truck doesn’t work.”
Dad glanced over at him. “She’s got a point.”
“I told you the truth. My truck doesn’t run. This is a
neighbor’s. Said I could use it in an emergency if I needed it.”
“Why didn’t you tell us that before?” I said.
“Get her in here. There’s somebody coming behind us,” the man said.
“You said I was ugly.”
“I was upset. You’re not that ugly.”
Dad held out a hand, but I crossed my arms and stood there thinking about the lemonade I was missing and the fact that this was the meanest man on the face of the earth that was offering us a ride.
“June Bug, this is the best we’re going to do. Now come on.”
The car behind slowed, then went around the truck. If this was the best we were going to do, we were in a bigger pickle than I thought. But I got in anyway, slowly, and closed the door. I didn’t do it hard enough, so Dad had to reach over and open and close it again.
“Now where do you need to go?” the man said.
“Reservoir,” Dad said.
The old man stepped on the gas, and the truck chugged a couple of times, hesitated, then took off. The lady was still on the front porch watching us, and I waved at her because anybody who says I’m cute is nice in my book. I wondered if I’d ever see her again.
If I were my dad at that point, I would have done all kinds of yelling and asking questions and giving his dad what for, but he didn’t. The two of them sat right there next to each other and didn’t say two hoots, and it liked to drive me crazy because I knew what had to be going through my dad’s head. Why did the old man go to the trouble to find a truck and then come looking for us? Was that supposed to erase all the hurt and the pain? Or maybe he was going to get back at Dad for pushing him down. It was just the most perplexing thing and I half wanted to scream about it but I didn’t.
“Things have changed a lot around here,” the old man finally said. “Everything’s built up.”
“I’ve noticed,” Dad said.
“They put in a Sam’s Club just up Route 60. You don’t have to drive all the way to Cross Lanes anymore.”
Dad glanced out the back window, and I asked him what was wrong. “Used to be a Brazier Burger right there.” He looked at his dad. “You took me there once for a hot dog, and I can still taste those toasted buns.”
