Father and Son

  She came out of the bathroom slowly, a little woozy, maybe a little apprehensive. Maybe she’d thought everything over in there. Where she was and what was going on here. He patted the side of the bed for her, his smile frozen and his eyes glazed, but not with whiskey.

  She didn’t want to get on the bed with him and he got up and tried to kiss her but she made sounds of wanting to leave so he stopped playing around with her and just threw her on the bed. He climbed on top of her while she kicked him. She was strong for being so small but he forced her head still and smothered her mouth with his, licking her whole face and trying to unfasten his pants with the bad hand. She was a little demon of flashing eyes and surging limbs that seemed to undulate beneath him and move in all directions at once. He started to hit her and did double up his fist but he didn’t want to mark what the world could see. In that one moment of hesitation she slapped his right eye and kicked him hard in the throat. With the quickness of something raised in the woods she was off the bed and across the room and would have been out the front door but for the thirty-cent hardware bolt he’d slid shut when she went into the bathroom. He caught her by the hair and walked her backwards to the bed, watchful for kicks to the balls, keeping the hurt hand behind him to protect it. She was screaming but there was nobody to hear and whoever it was that drove by a time or two probably just saw an old car parked beside an old house, high grass in the yard, nothing more, nothing to report here, all secure. He pushed her back down on the bed with her entire body fighting against him, every muscle and fiber, her fingernails seeking his eyes and her own eyes wild like a trapped animal. He pinned both her wrists behind her head with one hand while she tried to bite him with her flashing white teeth. He laughed at that and they struggled and shook the frame of the bed. It was hard to stop her from moving.

  He was careful not to tear her clothes but sometime before they were both naked she gave up and started crying. Each little button and buttonhole he manipulated with a grandmother’s touch. She seemed to want to hug him for protection against what was happening to them. Tears leaked from her eyes and ran down to her ears. She begged him to stop and she never really stopped begging and just before he rose up over her he put one hand over her mouth and watched her eyes as they widened and then went glassy. He forced his way inside her a few millimeters at a time and then rode her hard down into the pillows where she bucked and gagged and snorted. Her eyes fluttered and he thought she was dead. He told her things, the names of the parts of her body, how they felt, what he was doing to her, how much he liked it. After a while she seemed to stop listening. He did it slow and long and hard and even when he saw that she was bleeding he kept on. Dust rising from the sheets and drifting over into bars of sunlight that slanted across a vacant spot on the wall where a picture had hung. The headboard making its mindless thumping, the springs in the old bed passed down from some dead member of his family squeaking and keeping time. He pulled out and shot it onto her belly, her ribs. He got off her and went to find something with which to clean himself. When he came back with a sheet he’d found under a cabinet she was lying on her side with her legs together and she’d puked a small neat puddle of vomit onto the floor. He didn’t try to talk to her. After he wiped himself off he pitched the sheet at her and put on his clothes and took the whiskey out to the front porch where a rusted kitchen chair sat against the brick siding. There was never a sound from within. He smoked cigarettes and drank the whiskey. It was twenty minutes before she came out, for the first time the way she would so often look the rest of her life, head lowered, eyes downcast. He examined her critically. She didn’t look much different. But she wouldn’t look at him and she went straight to the car and opened the door and got in.

  On the way in to town he tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t talk. No laughter at his dirty jokes now. Just the wind coming in the windows and the dregs of the whiskey in the bottle on the seat between them. He thought it odd that she took a drink of that but with no more notice of him and his presence than if the car had been driving itself.

  It was early afternoon still. He didn’t take her back to her car. Nobody saw him stop on a street just off the square and let her off there. He told her that if she wanted some more she knew where he lived. She had already turned her face away and she got out without a word, closed the door softly, then walked slowly away. He drove past her, smoking, drove past her car and noted the heat of the day and eyed his gas gauge and then headed out of town, toward cool rooms and dark paneled wood, those jukebox lights and those sad country songs about cheating and a woman and love fucked up.

  Bobby parked the cruiser next to one of the big pin oaks that cooled his mother’s front porch. He got the revolver from under the seat but left his hat in the car. Her Buick wasn’t in the car shed and he figured she was probably heading to the house from where he’d come. The swing looked inviting, freshly painted and filled with pillows, and he went up the steps and got his key from his pocket. She locked it even when he was sleeping there, which wasn’t every night but often enough that he still called it home. He unlocked the door and stepped inside.

  He dropped the gun in a chair and took off his shirt. When he got back to his room he pulled off his T-shirt, wadding it and pitching it and getting a fresh one from the drawer. The phone rang one time and quit. He stood listening. It didn’t ring anymore. He sat down on the bed and took off his boots and his socks, the shiny hardwood floor cool and clean under his bare feet.

  The hall was wide and the walls were hung with pictures of old relatives long dead and gone, uncertain girls in ruffled dresses holding sprays of flowers or the reins of spotted ponies. Outdated wear on a slim boy in knickers who was his mother’s husband. He stopped and looked at him again and studied him, then the brown-tone image beside it of that grown child in barracks cap and captain’s bars. Shot down over Africa, his bones maybe bleached beneath the shifting sands of a distant continent and the flaming wreckage he rode down burning alive leaching slowly back into the substratum. A man he never got to know. Charles Blanchard, deceased stranger.

  She’d already cleaned up from dinner and out of habit he looked in the refrigerator to see what she’d left him. Cold pork chops and a tossed salad. He reached back for a beer and grabbed a pork chop and nibbled it while he opened the bottle. A long cold draught, a fly humming near the ceiling. He pushed the icebox door shut with his foot and wandered to the back door, then remembered his cigarettes and went back to his room for them. It was bad that he’d left the way he had. He couldn’t explain it to Dorris, but he probably already knew. Sometimes he thought everybody did.

  His cigarettes and lighter were on the dresser. He shoved them in his pocket and walked back through the kitchen. The clock was ticking softly on the wall. He looked around the room. Everything was neat and orderly, the bread stashed in the corner of the counter, the floor with its dull shine, the table holding only the salt and pepper shakers. A dead and empty room. He got out the back door holding the beer and the pork chop and stepped to the edge of the porch, looking out over the yard. It was filled with flowers and their brightly colored blossoms were stirring in the breeze. He saw the old man’s body in the dirt again and he couldn’t understand what could have happened between Byers and his father to bring them to that. Maybe it was nothing more than whiskey.

  Bobby could see his cows grouped under a big scalybark just beyond the fence and he went down the steps and walked out there. Omar looked around and saw him, turned his massive head up and sniffed the wind. Bobby leaned on the fence, gnawing the scraps of meat from the bone. He tossed it over the fence and the bull came toward him, his tail lashing the flies away from his hindquarters.

  “Hey big boy,” Bobby said. He took a long drink from the beer and set the bottle on the ground. He bent a little more and reached under the bottom board of the fence for a corncob that was lying there and he waited with it, his arms resting on the top board. The bull came up, all two thousand pounds of him, all sleek black muscle
with a hide that rolled and shifted as he walked. He stopped just short of the fence and his heavy bag swung gently between his legs.

  “Come on up here and I’ll scratch your old head. Come on.”

  He hadn’t had a halter on him in a long time but he was still pretty tame. He stood there watching Bobby.

  “I ain’t got nothing to eat. Come on up here.”

  The bull turned and walked down the fence a few steps and then turned again and came back. He stopped with his head near Bobby’s hand. He extended his head and sniffed. A big horsefly was feeding on his shoulder and Bobby reached out and smacked it flat with his hand. It lay crushed in a patch of black hair matted with blood.

  “Hurts don’t it?”

  He reached out with the corncob and started rubbing it between Omar’s ears and the bull stood there swinging his tail. The cows watched them on their knees, quietly working their jaws and twitching their ears at the flies that constantly tormented them. In the pond down in the pasture they sometimes walked to their knees and then up to their hips and lifted the clouds of flies from their backs, coming all wet and slick from the water, wearing leggings of rank mud that dried and cracked later.

  The bull closed and opened his eyes and turned his head aslant on his neck and Bobby smiled watching him.

  “You like that, don’t you? Like getting that old head scratched.”

  He patted Omar a final time and dropped the corncob. The beer was half full and he picked it back up and got out his cigarettes and lit one. The grass felt good on his toes. He went back across the yard, just looking around. Just killing time. Mary had cut the grass the day before and that didn’t need doing. She’d hired three painters for the house in May and they had scraped it and put on two coats, repainted all the trim, so that didn’t need doing. There was always something on the stove. If a cow got sick she called the vet out. He didn’t worry about her staying by herself because she was better with a pistol than he was and she had one in her nightstand, a little chrome .380 with black plastic grips. He didn’t even know why she kept that picture in the hall. It had to be for herself because surely it wasn’t for him. Maybe it was just a little reminder of what could have been. But that picture didn’t do him any good. It didn’t make it any easier to grow up with only a mother to show him things. He still didn’t know anything about working on a car. Still didn’t know how to slip up on a squirrel. He knew she’d done the best she could. And she never had lied to him about who his father was. There wasn’t any need to. All anybody had to do was take a good look at him. But it still didn’t stop him from asking her: Why didn’t you just get married again? To somebody. Anybody. So I could have had somebody to show me the stuff I needed to know. So you could have had somebody too. But he knew the answer to that. She didn’t want anybody else. She never had and never would. He guessed that was real love, the real thing. To wait for years and years and sleep alone and grow old waiting. Like Jewel had been waiting. The thought of her with Glen was too awful and the image was something he’d managed to keep out of his head so far.

  He wandered around the side of the house and out across the front yard. The trees were old and big. There was always a breeze out there and he stood in it. A car came down the road and he waved. The horn blew.

  “Yep, the sheriff’s drinking a beer in his own front yard,” he said to it. And he turned the bottle up and finished it.

  He stood there debating, holding the bottle with one finger down inside the neck of it, gently tapping it against his thigh. It was only four o’clock. He didn’t like to drink more than a couple since the phone could always ring.

  “Hell,” he said, and went back into the house for another beer. This time he stretched out on the swing with the paper, his head propped against a bank of pillows, the chains creaking slowly and the breeze wafting over him. News of the world far off and near. Beetle Bailey and Snuffy Smith. Once in a while he lifted the beer and took a cold sip. But the paper couldn’t hold his interest. He reclined there with the pages scattered over the painted boards of the porch and watched the trees. He could see them in the bed together now and the things that occurred there in his mind were horrible. He sat up in the swing and looked out across the road to the crops under the sun and the sky that lay beyond them.

  “God,” he said softly. “Help me.”

  She didn’t come in until nearly six. He was still in the swing and the ashtray beside him was filled with cigarette butts. She pulled in fast like she always did and put the Buick in the car shed. He’d told her over and over that she was going straight out the back end of it one day and he didn’t like to ride with her. The door slammed. He heard the crunch of her feet on the gravel and she came up the side steps with her purse in her hand.

  “What you doing, Maw?” he said without looking at her. She sat down in a rocker next to him, taking off her shoes and stretching out her legs.

  “I been over at Sue’s. Lord that was pitiful.”

  “Wasn’t it, though.”

  “They said you’d been by but they didn’t know where you went. I hated to leave and I hated to stay and watch it. Did you find something to eat?”

  “Yes’m. All them people still over there?”

  “A lot of em’s left. We washed all the dishes and cleaned up her kitchen. I never saw the like of food in one house in my life.” She rocked a little and crossed her fingers over her stomach. “How long you been home?”

  “Couple of hours.”

  “What about all that mess you had to go to?”

  “Well,” he said. “It’s a damn mess all right.”

  He rolled over on his back and gripped the swing chain with his toes.

  “I don’t see how Sue’s gonna live through it,” she said. “I swear they have the worst luck. It’s only been two years since their house burnt down.”

  The sun was sinking a little lower in the sky and the oaks were letting a few rays through, tiny spots of light winking as the limbs shifted in the breeze.

  “You going out to the funeral home?” she said.

  “I don’t know. Are you?”

  “I hadn’t decided. I know it’ll be full of people. I hate not to go. I need to fix you some supper.”

  He pushed the swing chain with his toes and let it rock back and forth. The chains creaked a little.

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll probably take a cruise after while anyway. I got to go by the jail and fill out some papers. Make sure nobody’s escaped. I can fix me a sandwich when I get in. I wish they’d let me get a night’s sleep tonight. I’ve bout had it.”

  “I saw Jewel at church,” she said.

  “That’s what I heard.”

  She took this in silence for a while, just rocking. He wasn’t going to volunteer anything. He would have told her himself that he didn’t need her advice if she’d offered it but he guessed she knew better than to try that. He stayed where he was, waiting.

  “Where’d you see her?”

  “Over at her house.”

  “You went by there?”

  “Yep. Sure did.”

  “In your patrol car.”

  “I didn’t turn the siren on.”

  More silence. More waiting and rocking.

  “Well. It’s your business.”

  “That’s right. It sure is.”

  “Was he over there?”

  “Nope.”

  “What would you have done if he had been?”

  “I guess one of us would have left, Mama.”

  She just shook her head. She picked up her shoes and her purse and she got up and started toward the door. She stopped halfway across the porch. “You coming home tonight?”

  “I’m planning on it. Nothing don’t happen.”

  She shook her head some more but she didn’t say anything, just went on inside the house and left him out there by himself.

  Things were quiet at the jail when he went by there around seven. Harold had gone off duty an hour before and Elvis Murray was watching ??
?Lassie.” He was an old man and he’d been the jailer there long years before Bobby ever had thoughts of running for sheriff. There was some coffee in the pot and Bobby got a cup and sat down at the table with him.

  “How’s it going, Elvis?” he said.

  Elvis swiveled around in Bobby’s chair and pulled at his nose. “Everything’s fine, I reckon.”

  “Everybody get fed?”

  “Yep. They had a good supper. Chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes and gravy. I had a plate myself.”

  Bobby lit a cigarette and looked at Lassie for a minute. She was barking frantically and trying to tell Timmy something.

  “You heard anything out of Byers?”

  “He wouldn’t eat his supper and I heard him crying one time.”

  “You talk to him?”

  “Tried to. I asked him did he need anything and he said yeah, a hacksaw blade. How come him to kill his daddy?”

  Bobby looked into his cup. “I don’t know.”