Old Man

by David A. Poulsen

  Old Man

  David A. Poulsen

  For my children and their children

  and for Glen Huser.

  Author’s Note

  This book is not for everyone. It is, in part, about war and the savagery that is a product of countries sending their citizens into battle against one another. The results are often horrific, frequently tragic beyond our imaginations. For that reason the book is hard-hitting with scenes of violence and coarse language. Those scenes are not intended to shock readers or to celebrate what, in some cases, may be seen as the less admirable human behaviours, nor is the coarse language gratuitous. The author realizes there will be those who will be concerned about those elements of this work, particularly since Old Man is a novel for young readers. I understand those concerns and offer this advisory for that reason.

  Old man, look at my life, I’m a lot like you were.

  –“Old Man” by Neil Young

  Fair is foul, and foul is fair:

  Hover through the fog and filthy air.

  –Macbeth by William Shakespeare

  Last Month of School

  1

  My old man ran off with a college student who was studying to be a dental hygienist. He was fifty-two. She was nineteen. I was five.

  I never called him “Dad” again.

  2

  There were three days left. Three days to summer holidays. Three days to two months of freedom. And a summer vacation that was to be like no other. At least not one I’d ever had. Two months of getting important stuff done.

  I’d even written out all the things I planned to accomplish. Had them recorded in one of my school folders. I’d be like this totally new me in just sixty days.

  Maybe some people wouldn’t have found my list all that impressive, but I was pretty pumped about it. This summer wasn’t going to be wasted on hanging out at the 7-Eleven, practising skateboard moves, spewing one-liners like a comedy volcano, getting acne from eating fast food and looking at every girl with a nice chest that passed by, wishing that once, just once, I could get my hands on them … uh … her.

  Those had been my last two summer holidays. And at the time they didn’t seem that bad — especially the girls with nice chests part. I was sixteen, and I could do some pretty awesome skateboard stuff; I knew where to get the best fries, the best cheeseburgers and the best Dr Pepper slurpees; and I got off a ton of one-liners that had every 7-Eleven kid thinking I was one hilarious guy.

  I also got horny. Pretty much every day. Tried out some of the really funny lines on girls as they went in and out of the store. Unfortunately I also perfected the art of the opposite sex strikeout. I went 0 for July and August. Two years in a row. Apparently people who didn’t hang out at the 7-Eleven didn’t think I was nearly as funny as the ones who did. Actually, a couple of the girls that I treated to some of my Huffmanian humour had a few lines of their own. Not real funny. Not funny at all really, but they definitely let a guy know what they were thinking. And, of course, we all laughed like it was all killer-funny. That way it looks like they’re laughing with you not at you. Except these girls weren’t laughing with me.

  By the way, how does a guy get all the way through grade ten without ever having placed a hand on a lovely lady bump? Not one freaking time. Which is a fact known to no one. All of my guy friends think I’m a fondling machine. Because that’s what I’ve told them.

  Anyway, this time was going to be different. I’d even given it a name. I called it The Summer of the Huffman. A summer with a name. Okay, so here’s the list:

  Win the War against Acne. Wash face twice a day and apply the cream. (I’d bought a bunch of products and had them all lined up on my dresser in my room.)

  Gain five pounds of muscle. (This is a two-parter.) a) drink a milkshake every day and b) actually use the weights that have been rotting (does metal rot?) in the basement since about four days after I talked my mom into buying them at a garage sale two streets over. The reason for this one is football — I got cut last year because I was too light. I’m five pounds heavier since then, and I figure another five should turn me into the Defensive Back from Hell.

  Read two novels, good ones, one each month. I figured I’d start with Catch-22. (My ninth grade English teacher, who also happened to be my best teacher, said it was one of his top ten novels of the twentieth century). It’s about some crazy guys in the war … or maybe it’s about how war is crazy, I’m not sure. Guess I’ll find out. Decide on the second novel a little closer to August.

  Work three nights a week at the grocery plaza. Maybe Saturdays too if I can stand my boss, Helen “Bitch” Boyes, that many times in a seven-day period.

  This is the big one. Take out Jen Wertz. This has been a goal since the first term of ninth grade when I sat across the aisle from her in social. All of the first four points on the list are tied to Point #5. Get rid of the acne, get bigger for football, get smarter, get richer and bingo — get Jen.

  So there it is. The carefully crafted plan for one amazing summer. End result — the new improved Nate Huffman. Oh, and that was new too. No more Nathan, skinny kid with pimples who hasn’t read anything that wasn’t a graphic novel in two maybe three years. Soon it would be the clear-complexioned, almost brainy, football stud with money — Nate Huffman.

  And the plan might have actually worked too. But we’ll never know. Because three days before the start of summer holidays — The Summer of the Huffman … my old man phoned.

  3

  When most people refer to their old man, they’re talking about their dad. I’m talking about my old man. Larry Huffman is sixty-two years old. Which means he was forty-seven when I was born and forty-six when he, you know, got me started. That seems ridiculously old to me, but, to be honest, I figure everyone over about forty should be settling back in a rocking chair with their own monogrammed clicker and staying the hell out of the way of younger people — the segment of society that really makes stuff happen. My segment.

  So my mom was twenty-seven at the time she got pregnant — which seems a little more normal for that whole making-babies thing. The nineteen-year difference between her age and my old man’s — hard to figure that one. But I guess it made more sense than the thing with the teeth-babe.

  And now he’s sixty-two. Sixty-two years old is something that I don’t get — like sines, cosines, and tangents. What the hell do you do when you’re sixty-two? Your kids are out working and having families, you’re about to retire from whatever it is you’ve been doing for the last forty years, you hurt all over, and you can’t find your glasses. Memo to self — die before sixty-two.

  The other thing about my old man is that since he left — eleven years ago — he’s never been back. I hear from him about three times a year: Christmas — you’d expect that, Father’s Day, (I don’t get that at all, it would make more sense if I phoned him that day, which I wouldn’t since the guy sucks at being a dad) … and my birthday. I guess phoning is cheaper than sending a gift … so, a phone call. Except that he doesn’t very often phone right on my birthday, he’s usually three or four days or even a week late. And a couple of times he missed the phone call altogether — which was actually a bonus since a) I didn’t have to talk to him and b) I did get a gift, even though it was a couple of weeks later after I’d pretty much forgotten I’d even had a birthday.

  Never has one of his three phone calls a year been at the end of the school year — which made this one special. No, bad word choice. None of his calls is special; let’s just call it different. The other thing that was different about this call was that he spent a fair amount of time talking to Mom before he got on the phone with me.

  Usually, it’s a quick “hi, how are things” with Mom, and then it’s my turn. There’s a lot of small talk …
what’s the weather like, what do you think of the Broncos this year (he knows I’m a big Denver Broncos fan), have you got a girlfriend … that kind of stuff. And silence, there tends to be a lot of silence. Mostly because my answers are pretty short, and he runs out of small talk material fairly fast. But it’s like he thinks the conversation has to go a certain amount of time to qualify as a dad-kid moment, so there we are in the silence. I’m usually waiting for the thing to end, and I sometimes get the feeling that he is too.

  This time, no small talk. First, he talked to my mom. Like I said, for a long time. Mom wasn’t saying much, and the look on her face was serious through the whole phone call, so I figured the old man was phoning from jail or something. I was knocking back a Dr Pepper and pretending to be reading the crap out of an Edgar Allan Poe short story for English, but since I was only maybe six feet from Mom, I could totally listen in on the call — at least her part of it.

  Which, as I said, wasn’t much. A few one-syllable responses and two longer ones. “Yes, he has a passport,” and “No, he doesn’t have asthma.”

  Great, the old man is sending me to Greenland or somewhere that you shouldn’t go with asthma, and my totally amazing summer of intensive self-improvement is about to become a totally un-amazing two months of intensive boredom.

  4

  I was wrong about Greenland.

  5

  Mom handed me the phone. I shook my head no, but she passed it to me anyway.

  “Hi.” I didn’t say hi Dad for the simple reason that I didn’t call him Dad. Ever. I know I said that before, but you’re supposed to repeat important stuff, so I’m repeating it.

  I was also wrong about the small talk. One question, that was all. “How’s school?”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  Then it was straight to the big stuff. Big stuff for him. Crap for me.

  “I want us to spend some time together, Nathan.”

  “What do you mean by ‘some’?”

  “I guess it’ll take a few weeks.”

  It’ll take? What does that mean? What’ll take?

  “I have some plans — some stuff I wanted to kind of … do.”

  I heard him inhale, then exhale on the other end of the line. Like the doctor tells you to do when he’s got the stethoscope on your back. “Deep breath, then let it out slow.” You wanna piss him off, you let it out fast, all in one whoosh. I’ve done that a couple of times. To see what he’d say. But our family doctor, Dr. Phillip Lam, has no sense of humour. He just moves the stethoscope to another part of my back and says it again, “Deep breath, then let it out slowly.” I always do it right the second time. No sense messing with the guy if he doesn’t get that he’s being messed with.

  “I can promise you a summer you’ll never forget.”

  “This blows.”

  “You can’t know that until we’ve done it.”

  “Done what?” I looked over at Mom, who was avoiding eye contact.

  “Several things. You might learn something and you might even … like it. If you let yourself.”

  He was using the same argument Mom makes when she wants me to try some really gross zucchini concoction.

  “What exactly is a kid my age going to do with someone … your age … that is going to make this summer something I’ll never forget?”

  “What’s age got to do with it?” His voice had a little edge to it. Good. I’m pissing him off.

  I took a swallow of Dr Pepper. “What’s your favourite TV show?”

  There was a pause. I guess he didn’t expect that question. “I don’t know, I guess LA Law or maybe Law and Order. Why?”

  “Mine’s The Simpsons. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  Another pause. “Tells me we shouldn’t watch a lot of television this summer.”

  Yeah, the old man’s hilarious sometimes. A million laughs. Except I didn’t laugh. And that was it. End of conversation. He said he’d call me the next day, and he hung up.

  I was still holding the phone in my hand as I looked over at my mom. “Feel like telling me what that was all about?”

  She turned, wiped her hands on her apron, and looked at the chair across from me. But she changed her mind and didn’t sit down.

  “I think it’s better coming from him.”

  “I got nothing from him.”

  “You will. He’ll tell you about it in his own way.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but I could tell from the way she was shaking her head that she wasn’t going to tell me what the old man had in mind for my summer. I went back to Poe and re-read the same three-line paragraph four times.

  I looked over at her and she was cutting up an onion. I figured that was a good time to ask her. If she started to cry, she could pass it off as that whole onion-tears thing.

  “What’s he like?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I guess the better question is what was he like?” In all the years since the old man had left, I’d never asked Mom about him. Guess I didn’t care to know. And she’d never talked much about him.

  Sometimes I wondered if she missed him or was pissed off at him or still loved him or what, but she never said, and I didn’t ask, mostly because I didn’t want to have any part in a conversation that had the old man as a topic. I was sure of one thing. I was pissed off at him for her. A dental freaking hygienist.

  Mom gathered up the outer skin of the onion and stepped on the pedal thingy that lifts the lid on the trash can. Green metal job with a silver lid. Been sitting in that corner of the kitchen as long as I can remember. I figure that lid has been up and down a few thousand times. She dropped the onion skin into the can and let the lid back down.

  “He played professional baseball.”

  “You’re kidding.” Definitely not the first thing I expected to hear. Not a ball player. A professional ball player.

  Mom was back at the counter chopping the onion. I closed the Poe book.

  “He only played one year, somewhere in Florida. Of course it was before I met him. Just the one year, then he got hurt. Quit baseball to … do other things.”

  ‘What other things?”

  “It would be better if all this came from your dad.”

  I noticed she was chopping faster than usual. “Why?”

  Mom shrugged and scooped the chopped onion into a casserole dish. “It just would, Nathan, you’ll have to believe me on that.”

  “What’s the guy like a spy or something?” It was a pretty lame joke, but I wasn’t trying very hard.

  Mom smiled and shook her head. “No, and I’m not trying to be all secretive. I just think he’d like to be the one to tell you about himself. Maybe he’ll do some of that this summer.”

  “Maybe?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I think he will.”

  “But you’re okay with me going away with him for the summer.”

  Mom turned to look at me. “He’s not an evil man.”

  “Well, he sure as hell ain’t no saint. He left you for a teenager.”

  “No, he’s not a saint.”

  She was sort of defending him. That made no sense to me. Why couldn’t she throw stuff around the house, cut his face out of all their photos, hang up on him? She’d never done any of those things. And now she seemed okay with him and me spending a bunch of the summer together. In a place you needed a passport to get to.

  Parents are hard to figure.

  Later, while we ate the casserole — she had added carrots, tomato, celery, and cheese (but not zucchini) to the onion — I studied my mom’s face. I did that every once in a while. She was an okay-looking woman in a forties-looking kind of way. (What I said before about people over forty doesn’t apply to Mom.) It’s not like she seems younger than she is; in fact, sometimes she seems older, but she always kind of gets people younger than her.

  Her eyes had wrinkles at the corners, but they weren’t laugh wrinkles. Mom’s not a big laugher. She smiles some, and sometimes there’s this little thr
oaty chuckle that’s cool, but I’ve never heard her laugh real hard or real loud. Ever. I couldn’t see any grey in her hair. I didn’t know if that was because she coloured it. I didn’t think so. Mom wasn’t into her appearance very much. I was pretty sure she’d never gone out with a guy since the old man left. Too bad.

  And she didn’t yell either. It was like the laughing thing. Mom could make you know she was mad with her voice and with the looks she’d give you. But she wasn’t much for yelling.

  I worked the casserole for a while. “I had plans for this summer,” I told her between bites.

  “Your dad said he thought three weeks or a month. That still leaves a lot of time.”

  “I had some stuff I wanted to do.”

  She nodded. “Stuff you could do next summer?”

  “Stuff I wanted to do this summer.”

  “But could be done next summer.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe, I guess.”

  “I know this isn’t the way you’d like to spend this time, but I think you should do it, and I think you should give your dad a chance.”

  “A chance for what? It’s a little late for him to be a dad.”

  “Yes, it’s too … no it isn’t, not really. Maybe not a dad as in raising you, but —”

  “What other kind of dad is there?”

  “I guess … I guess the kind who wants to be with you for a while, maybe be your friend as you get older.”

  A couple of times before, Mom had said she wished I knew him better. She didn’t make a big deal of it, just mentioned it. I guess maybe that’s why she was thinking this was all okay.

  “He send you money?”

  She looked at me, raised an eyebrow.

  “You know, alimony, child support? He send money for that stuff?”

  “He sends money.”