by Paul Hawkins
I held ElectronCo near and dear to my heart for three years – it had started out as a whim and a hobby but I threw myself into it once I got started. But after I had gotten it to a productive plateau it began to bore me, and after its IPO I gladly turned operations over to a crew of technowonks and Ivy League biz admin types and kept it in the corner of my mind the way one might keep an African violet on the window sill – something you hoped would grow in spite of neglect.
And after I had neglected it for six month it turned out the dumb asses had released an app. “WattGuard.” What stupid shits. I had gotten my money out of the IPO, but never, ever give something away for pocket change (or worse, for free) when you could get a regulation passed that required it to be hard-wired into every mobile system.
An app?
Good Lord knows how many hard-earned dollars we’d already given away for free, for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to load onto their cellphones. Why buy the cow…?
I wondered what the hell people went to school for to make such bone-headed decisions.
They could have at least called it “Wattzdog.”
Still, after the IPO, I had money of a magnitude I had never dreamed of before. I suppose I told myself that I finally owed myself a higher standard of living – that it was time to set the musty old house aside. For six months I brooded about what I should do with my future. Nothing came to me but to maybe buy an Irish Setter and sip scotch.
It was while persisting in this existence that my son Robert came over, looking as threadbare and angry as ever, his black hair swooped like a raven’s wing over his pale brow.
Since he had turned around 21, something had changed in him. He developed a sudden mania for painting, and he got very good at it. At the same time the everyday world began to be a mystery. Some days it took a great effort of will just to go out to the store. He often did not look people in the eye when he talked. He had had a steady girlfriend since he had been old enough to date, but they broke up suddenly last year.
He waded into me like continuing an argument. “What the hell happened to you, Dad? You didn’t always used to be a robot. You used to be a great dad, always taking us on trips or to ball games or the fair and having fun. But it got to the point where you withdrew from us.”
“I had to provide for my family.”
“You stayed gone more than you had to. You got to like being away from us. You and mom fought more often than not.”
“That’s nonsense! Now look, I know you’ve been unhappy lately – you need a change. I’ve told you time and again that I’ll pay your entire way to a university of your choice. You’re a genius. You’ve got a bright future ahead of you in Physics.”
“Philosophy.”
Since when is it Philosophy?”
He shrugged.
“When do you expect to graduate, switching majors all the time?”
“Maybe I’ll never graduate. Maybe studying is my life the same as software is yours. I’ll quit when you quit software. I’ll make a deal with you: before you go back to living your life as a software mogul, try living my life for just one week.”
“And what’ll that prove?”
“That you’re my father.”
“It sounds ridiculous.”
“Then be ridiculous. You’re the one who tried to break a leg while skiing.”
I considered his proposal. For that matter, I wondered when I’d told him about that. Maybe I was a just a messed up asshole.
“See who I am,” Robert continued. “See what I do. Hell, ride my cruddy bicycle. You used to be interested in me, and then something happened to you.”
“Work happened. I had the chance to make my pile. I did it for all of you.”
“Look, if for nothing else, take up my proposal because Mom would have wanted it.”
“You don’t know what she would have wanted.”
“Can I ask you a question: Did you ever really love her?”
“Of course I loved her.”
“So take me up on my offer. You’re her husband, I’m your son.”
“If you take me up on mine. Let me send you to a first rate school. And graduate – no more drifting through majors.”
My son looked at the floor, but then he held out his hand for me to shake it. I shook his hand firmly. “When do we start?”
“How about Monday?”
“Okay – make room for me at your place. Tell your roommate to take a bath.”
So we agreed and that night I practiced riding a bicycle for the first time in ages because I didn’t want him to be better than me at anything.
*
But one thing he said had gotten to me. I had loved his mother, but why did I feel like I had to prove it to myself? I thought of the secretary I had been tempted by and laughed. I neither knew nor cared where she was now. Life sometimes makes little things seem great in times of duress. She had been such a fiction.
But then I reached into the back of my desk and took out the only picture I still had of a girl I had met when I was young, in my old neighborhood when my heart was new and all it wanted was to be loved in return. I turned on a burner of the stove and walked toward it with the photo in my hand.
My life had been a crooked road until my marriage. I had been a bright man but not always a sensible man. I think my heart got arrested in things.
When she’d left, something had broken inside of me and eventually healed. But life never puts itself back together along straight lines – the seams are always slightly off when fused, like a bone not set by an expert. Who could the expert possibly be? A therapist? Hah. In life we are all amateurs. Anyone who says they are an expert is a liar.
Then for one moment, as I approached the fire, something that had persisted in my heart for years rose up and wanted to break along the old lines again, to feel the wound fresh, to peer back into the mystery when I was young and the heart knew what it was made for before it even had a name for it. But it is a trick of the heart to locate love in the most unreachable of places. There is nothing more unreachable than a past that never really was.
I held the photo above the flames until it blazed at the edges, and then I threw it into the metal trash can and watched it burn until all that was left of it was ash.
*
I had grown up Catholic in a poor neighborhood that was across the river from downtown. It was odd to be a Catholic in predominantly Baptist Oklahoma. While we had sacraments other people had experiences and encounters. I was never jealous of them. Having the sacraments and the dogma gave me a certainty about things. It was like standing on stones. If the stones weren’t real then, well, then nothing was real.
My old man died of what they said was lung cancer but I always thought – and still think – it was mesothelioma. He was in the demolition business in the 1970’s when lots of historic downtown buildings were being destroyed. It had been hard for him getting a job after returning from Vietnam. From what I understand he had never risen in the ranks and had barely managed an honorable discharge. I think he had the same reckless spirit I did, though without my fortune of a finding a channel for it.
My boyish dreams of a silver and black space-race future died watching his face crumple against a sweat-soaked pillow day after day, without the breath in him to even sit up. I was about 12 when he became bedridden, a condition he endured for years. Mother broke her own health caring for him, and over the next few years, without supervision, I became increasingly difficult to handle. I began to hang with a crowd of boys who were thieves. Mother had no control over me, and her only solace was in my sister Alice, who had grown up quickly to be her helper.
When Dad died my mother had to take two jobs to provide for us – she worked in a dime store and cleaned offices at night. She alternately went into fugues and religious mania, all while trying to get us through the difficult time. When I finally got put in jail for busting out some store windows she said maybe that’d finally put some sense in me but it did not.
Then she got a job in the last upscale department store downtown, and she only needed that one job from then on, and she began to look well and fill out and get her color back (she always was a looker), and it was there that she met husband #2, a doctor who was a widower. After they were married he was able to give us the kind of life we never dreamed. We moved out of that poor neighborhood and into a neighborhood full of large houses on rolling lawns, with nice cars and country clubs. My mother never quite took to it. All the rest of her life she had bouts of depression and intensely pious calls to the Lord. I think my father’s death always rattled her with some disbelief in God she tried to paper over with double enthusiasm. My stepfather Don suggested electro-shock, which was prescribed quite casually at the time, and that made me want to punch him square in the face.
My sister took to the new life right away, but it struck up a note of anger in me. I hated the new clothes and I hated the boys at school. I got in many fights, but I seldom lost one. My problems began when I invited the gang of rough boys from my old neighborhood to come up and we began stealing again. I stole a car and got caught, and it was only my stepfather’s good name that got me out on bail, and it was his money (I think) that convinced the other man to not press charges.
Still, I had one year left in high school and my mother had to decide what to do with me, and finally it was decided that I would go out to Fresno for the summer to live with my Uncle Peter, my father’s brother, and pack fruit. It was supposed to be punishment but I leapt at the chance to get out of there.
It turns out my Uncle Peter lived in little more than a shack out in the country and he had a big ham radio tower in back of his house and an old pick-up truck that he always parked slant-ways in the grass out front and he was a bachelor who showed absolutely no sign of changing his state in life at this late date. He was a tall raw-boned man and he had a medical discharge from the war and got a government check each month and he had a keen mind but all he wanted to do was read and, for want of a little spending money, pack fruit. What he usually wanted money for was gadgets he saw in the back of Popular Science and Popular Electronics. He still had the faith that technology could make a better future. He experimented with what was then a technology limited only to hobbyists – communication via fiber optics. And he fixed cars. He always needed parts for cars, and the men and women packing fruit alongside him always needed their cars fixed or their TVs and radios repaired, and he did this for them on the cheap. Often below cost, I think.
When he picked me up at the bus stop he looked me up and down and said I looked like my father and there’d be no hell-raising on his watch because he owed it to my sweet mother, who’d been through more tribulation on this earth than she deserved. And so we left to pack fruit at five each morning and out amongst the orchards it got to be scorching hot by 10:00 but we worked on, grabbing the fruit as it rolled down the conveyor belt and putting the good peaches and plums in a box and dropping the bad ones into a trough beside our workstations, and we got a thirty minute break for lunch. It was hard work, and the sheer tedium was mentally exhausting. I was always glad to get home and do nothing but read at the end of the day, and my uncle seemed impressed that I read anything he had on his shelves, which was mostly books on or by the pioneers of science or electronic theory or telecommunications.
I scarcely talked to him. When he’d ask me what I was up to I’d just grunt. He’d go out to fix a car or hunker down at his workbench with a broken TV and an oscilloscope.
He had the ham radio hut out back. I took to hanging out in that. I talked to a man in Australia who thought the world was going to hell and that the path was through the jungles of South East Asia. I talked to a man in Iowa who thought the space race and advances in agriculture were going to lift the world to a new era of peace and prosperity. And I talked to a man in Canada who didn’t believe in much of anything. You could hear him pause between every sentence to drag on a cigarette. He said he was dying of lung cancer but he didn’t care. The world was a mess and you could never make sense of it. He’d take a drag on his cigarette and he’d cough as he exhaled. Why waste your time, kid? It was all pointless. Just get the most out of it for yourself while you could.
I got sick of listening to him. Let him rot in his own hell. So one evening I just switched off the radio and went outside. Though I didn’t act interested I walked across the yard to see what my uncle was doing. He had his head under the hood of a car.
“Hand me a 9/16 socket,” he said. I did.
“What the hell do you want to sit in that shack all evening?” he said. “Every night it’s the same thing: light and salvation, hell and damnation. That’s why I gave it up. I’d rather tighten a bolt.”
“Damn depressing life,” I said, “helping out these Mexicans. Why the hell do you do it?”
“It makes me happy. I suppose you’d rather be down in the city among the bright lights chasing girls.”
“Hell yes,” I said.
He wiped grease off his hands and looked at me for a long time. “A kid’s got to learn from his own mistakes. Help me fix this car up and it’s yours. That way you won’t have to steal one.”
I handed him another tool when he asked for it.
“Why would you do that for me?” I asked.
“Because you’re my brother’s son.”
I helped him repair that car the rest of the night though we scarcely said two words to each other.
I think Uncle Pete put in a good word for me at the fruit packing plant, so before the summer was over they had me doing office work, helping out with the accounting. I took to it instantly. I could see where they’d been making all kinds of mistakes, and I straightened them out. But there was this girl I had been packing fruit with before I had been transferred and now that I’d been promoted I could see her walk past my office window every night. She was blonde with hair like flax and she was too thin and raw-boned and there was something about her that looked out of place but she said she had to work the same as everyone else and I took to hurrying outside to walk with her. She played coy at first, but not too much. She said her name was Marcia and we talked about work a little and how we hated it and she said she had just graduated from a school called St. Michael’s but that the Baptists had been working her neighborhood hard for converts among the Mexicans but others were invited too and she was going to a revival camp and did I want to come. I said why not and I told my uncle I was going camping with some friends and I had the car by then and so I met her at the First Baptist parking lot with a big group of other young people and we piled into buses and before I knew it we were segregated boys from girls and lodged in cabins like barracks deep in the heart of some woods.
For three days they made us sing praise songs every morning, every afternoon (after leathercraft or archery), and every night around a big roaring fire. And I was beginning to felt gyped because I never saw her but at the revival one night I finally I saw her but she looked moon-eyed because the revival was getting to her. The smooth-faced young youth leaders had been strumming their acoustic guitars wildly through hymns but now they made way for a gruff old preacher who said not all Catholics were going to hell because some accepted Jesus but Catholics who believed in Catholicism were going to hell because they were idolaters who worshipped Mary, but here was a way out if you felt the call and brothers and sisters it was okay if you didn’t feel the call tonight but woe be unto he who hears the call and ignores it because that was the sin against the Holy Ghost that could never be forgiven so listen closely to your heart tonight because tonight may be the most important night of your life and then the youth ministers started strumming wildly on their acoustic guitars again but this time instead of modern hymns they were singing standards like “Old Rugged Cross” and “Shall We Gather at the River” and one by one the girls began falling into hysterics and I watched the girl’s friends stand up then she stood up and then here and there earnest pale-faced boys were rising but I refused to rise, and soon a whole
bunch of people began rising and they marched en masse down under the light of the full moon to the river and I watched her get dunked and a whole lot of them get dunked and I almost wanted to get dunked myself but I did not, but I did watch closely when she came out of the water with her blouse dripping wet and she stared daggers at me but I wouldn’t budge much less go near the river bank. I went to bed feeling frustrated that night and I snuck out to smoke a cigarette and found myself sitting on a log out in the woods next to a girl who had snuck out for the same reason and we found our hands suddenly together and we snuck off between two canoes and that was my first time, and the first thing the next day she got herself dunked to erase it, and I never saw her again.
After that night my heart was just not into my work anymore. Marcia would not talk to me and I realized I had never liked her much anyway. I began making mistakes and my uncle said “Like hell you went camping” but he did not seem that angry and when the summer was over he gave me $50 on top of everything I’d earned and he told me that maybe now I’d believe him when he said to stay away from women, and he scolded me to never give my mother grief and to make something of myself before the world made me into a nothing, and I took his words to heart and I have been trying to make something of myself ever since.
*
When I got home mother seemed even worse. She looked at me and smiled and commented on how tall and strong I had grown over the summer, but she seemed depressed and almost immediately after seeing me she insisted I go down to the church in the old neighborhood to light a candle to the Virgin “for all the little children in the world.” My sister confided that mother and her new husband had wanted to have a baby of their own together but that mother had had a miscarriage and took a long time recovering. My stepfather Don got distant at that time and took to working odd hours at the hospital, although in time he returned to his regular self, and on the whole I’d have to say he’s always been nicer to me than I deserved.
