It was then that I noticed the figure of my father moving through the gloom of the backyard. He had on a pair of galoshes I’d worn as a kid, the kind with the metal fasteners, and he was wearing a yellow rain slicker and one of those winter hats with the fold-down earmuffs. I couldn’t quite tell what he was doing out there, raking dirt or leaves, something to do with the rain, I guessed—the driveway was eroding, maybe that was it. It never crossed my mind that he might need help. And Robert Rowe never crossed my mind either, nor the fact that his speech had been garbled and slow at the noon hour and his eyes drifting toward a point no one in this world could see but him.
No. I was hungry for something, I didn’t know what. It wasn’t food, because I mechanically chewed a handful of saltines over the sink and washed them down with half a glass of milk that tasted like chalk. I paced round the living room, snuck a drink out of my mother’s bottle—Dewar’s, that was what she drank; my father stuck with vodka, the cheaper the better, and I’d never acquired a taste for it. I had another drink, and then another. After a while I eased myself down in my father’s chair and gazed around the room where I’d spent the better part of my life, the secondhand furniture, the forest-green wallpaper gone pale around the windowframes, the peeling sheet-metal planter I’d made for my mother in shop class, the plants within it long since expired, just curls of dead things now. Finally I got up and turned on the TV, then settled back in my father’s chair as the jets came in low and the village went up in flames.
T. Coraghessan Boyle, Tooth and Claw
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