Into the Web (6 page)

“What was it, by the way? That thing you got caught up in this afternoon. With Lonnie Porterfield.”

“I went up to Waylord with him.”

“Waylord?” The very mention of the place appeared to fill my father with revulsion. “What’d you go up there for? There ain’t nothing up there but bad luck.”

“Somebody found a body along Jessup Creek. I happened to be over at Lonnie’s when he heard about it. So I went along with him. Just for the ride, you might say.”

He thumped a cigarette from the pack by his bed. “Whose body was it?”

“Clayton Spivey.”

He said nothing, but I could see that he recognized the name.

“After that we drove up to Lila Cutler’s place,” I added. “You remember Lila, don’t you?”

“ ’course I remember Lila. She was the only girl you ever brought home.”

I saw her as she’d come toward him that night, my father rising to greet her, offering his hand, taking hers gently into his, a strange tenderness in his eyes, as if, at that moment, he’d striven to be some other man he’d failed to be.

“For a while it looked like you was gonna marry Lila,” my father added. “Have kids. Maybe have a normal life. A family.”

“I’m glad you had such high hopes for me, Dad,” I said.

“A family,” my father repeated, his eyes on the charred tip of the match. “Not like it turned out.”

“My life’s really not so bad,” I told him.

He seemed amazed that I could come to such a conclusion.

“But you ain’t got nobody, Roy,” he said. “No wife. No kids of your own. You can’t say that’s normal, can you?”

“It’s the way I want it.”

“But why would you want that? Living alone. With nobody.”

“It’s my life. Drop it.”

“But why would you want a life like that? No family, I mean.”

I stared him in the eye. “Maybe because of what my life was like when I
had
a family.”

My father’s face jerked into a scowl. “Oh shit, you’re not going to start whining about all that again, are you, Roy?”

“We weren’t happy, Dad. Archie. Mama. None of us was happy.”

“Whining, whining. Goddamn, Roy. Why don’t you just get in that car of yours and go on back to California?”

“Maybe I will,” I said sharply.

Something exploded behind his eyes. “Then do,” he snarled. “You don’t have to stay here. Hell, no, by God. I never asked you to come and I ain’t asked you to stay. You can go on back to that … whatever it is. That little room you got. Tend to them little snot-nosed kids that ain’t your own.” He shook his head disdainfully. “Pitiful, Roy. A pitiful life you got.”

I watched him evenly, determined to hold my temper in check. “Try to get this through your head, Dad. My life is none of your business.”

He shrugged, and the volcanic outburst that had erupted from him seconds before settled no less abruptly.

“You’re right,” he said, his tone now oddly broken. “Forget it, Roy. Forget I said anything. Turn that TV on. I don’t want to talk no more. It’s time for my show. Go read your book or something.”

But I remained in place, determined to probe at least some small part of his shadowy ire. “I’d just like to know what you get out of it.”

“Get out of what?”

“Out of insulting me the way you do. What have I done to deserve that?”

He released a long, weary breath, so that for a moment I actually thought he might reveal some clue as to why he found me so pitiful. “You know what your problem is, Roy? You can’t take a joke. You never could.”

He waited, watching me. I knew what he wanted, a fiery return, a dog’s angry snarl.

Instead, I simply faced him squarely and told the dreadful truth as far as I knew it. “You don’t like me, Dad. You have no respect for me or for what I do for a living or for how my life turned out.”

“You talk like a man that’s already give up on everything, Roy. That ain’t got no fight left in him.”

“I left my ‘fight’ when I left Kingdom County,” I replied hotly. “So let’s put that subject to rest, shall we?” I turned to leave, but he drew me back.

“Run off and bury your nose in a book,” he said. “But it don’t change the fact that if you don’t fight for nothing, you don’t amount to nothing.”

I whirled around. “What should I fight for, Dad?”

“That’s for you to come to,” my father shot back. “But I’ll tell you one thing, you don’t forget them that done you dirt. Like you done with Lonnie today. That burns my ass, Roy. Paying that snot-nosed little bastard a visit. Christ Almighty, of all the people for you to go visiting. Forgetting what he done that night, what he said.”

“For God’s sake, he was a kid when that happened. Eighteen. Drunk.”

“He knew what he was doing, that boy. And you know that too. Drunk or a kid or whatever, he knew exactly what he was saying.”

“It was over twenty years ago, Dad. What difference does it make now? Or even then, for that matter?”

“Then?” my father yelped. “I’ll tell you what difference it coulda made then. It coulda been Lila wouldn’t never have wrote you that letter if Lonnie hadn’t said them things.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Maybe she got to figuring How come Roy didn’t do nothing about that? How come Roy just let it go?”

“And on that basis threw me over? I don’t think so.”

“All I know is she could have made a good wife for you, Roy. A normal life.”

“All that’s over and done with, Dad.”

My father cut his eyes toward the blank screen of the television. “Ain’t nothing ever over and done with, Roy.”

“I’m not going to discuss this any further,” I said.

“‘Any further,’” my father imitated. “I ain’t gonna discuss this here ‘any further.’”

We stared at each other icily for a moment, then he shrugged. “I just thought she could have made a man out of you, that’s all.”

He’d said this last remark without ire, nor any hint of accusation, and yet I felt his words like small exploding shells.

“Well, she didn’t,” I said. “And after her I never tried again. End of story.”

And with that I slammed out of the room, rushed down the corridor and out into the yard, and drew in a long, cleansing breath. I knew at that moment that if I could have willed my father dead, simply flipped that mythical switch, I would have done it.

But it’s a hard thing to wish your father dead. And so, with night steadily falling around me, I found myself listening as he dragged himself about his room, attentive to any sign of distress, any sign that he needed me. I knew I owed him nothing and yet I couldn’t stop myself from stealing a look through the window, a glimpse of his emaciated form, the right shoulder hunched, his arm bare in the sleeveless T-shirt, skin loose and flabby now, with nothing left of those rippling muscles that had dug coal and cut wood for over fifty years.

Such was the fate of sons, I thought as I continued to wait out the night, listening to the frail chirp of the crickets and katydids, the air cooling now as I tried to cool, watching mutely as the moon retraced its iron circuit, as tightly controlled as I strove to be, solitary and duty-bound, the man Lila Cutler had not made.

Chapter Five

A
windblown summer rain swept in the next morning. I made coffee in my mother’s battered tin percolator. I remembered her at the stove in the early morning, her hair gathered in a bun behind her head, already an old woman, it seemed to me, though she’d not yet reached forty.

Even now, solitary though my life had been, I couldn’t imagine the cold depths of my mother’s loneliness, the deep isolation of living with a man who did not love her, and never had. I couldn’t imagine their courtship, my father as a young blade strutting before her, she the object of his pursuit, though I knew that there must have been such a moment in their lives. In fact, it seemed proof enough of a dry and loveless marriage that I could not imagine that earlier time, but only the spoiled residue of it, swollen and malodorous, a blackened fruit.

By the time I was eight, my father had seemed hardly a husband at all. He often took his evening meal in silence, then strode directly to the living room and sat chain-smoking through the night.

Mornings, he lingered in his bedroom as long as possible, opening and closing drawers like someone who couldn’t decide what to wear, though his wardrobe, if it could be called that, had never consisted of more than a few shirts and three or four pairs of work pants.

He’d never taken breakfast with the rest of us, but only grabbed a mug of coffee as he trudged past the kitchen table, then on through the front door, banging the screen behind him, and out to his pickup.

The groan of its engine, the scratch of the tires as he pulled away, had always been followed by a flood of relief that he was gone, taking the weight of his unhappiness with him like a heavy bag.

I had always been the most fully relieved at my father’s departure. More than our mother, and far more than Archie, I’d sensed the explosive charge buried deep within him. Perhaps what I’d felt was the sheer, horrific potential of my father for some sudden, annihilating violence, the fact that each day, each hour, seemed to exhaust him in the containment of it. Even in his silence, perhaps most of all in his silence, I sensed a dreadful peril, so that I often felt a wave of relief wash over me when he finally spoke, especially if his words were harsh. When he called me a sissy if I complained about some chore, marveled that I didn’t have to “set down” when I peed, or barked “Get off the rag, Roy” to shut me up, at all those times, no matter how stinging
the rebuke, his words always came to me like a stay of execution.

But it wasn’t my father’s long anger that returned to me most vividly as I resumed my boyhood chores that rainy morning. It was Archie, who had always been so much his opposite, a kind, sweet, gentle boy who’d wanted so little from life and gotten so much less.

While I swept and cleaned, he seemed near me, his schoolbooks held together by a worn leather belt as he headed for the yellow school bus on the road, the very bus on which, one bright September morning, he’d sat down next to a shy, slender girl with long blond hair, a girl who’d smiled at him as no girl ever had before, introduced herself,
Hi, my name is Gloria.

She’d just entered the high school that autumn and she must have seen Archie, tall and slender in his sixteenth year, as a worldly, experienced boy, one who knew the mysterious ways of Kingdom County High School, a boy bound for a diploma, while most all the others had dropped out of school as soon as the law allowed, and after that assumed the lives of their fathers as timbermen, quarrymen, haulers of pulpwood and scrap metal.

To such encouraging prospects, Archie had added his crooning and guitar picking, neither particularly good, but no doubt wondrous to such a girl as Gloria, sheltered as she had always been, crushed beneath the weight of her father’s low regard. “Before Archie saw her,” Lila said to me one night, “Gloria was invisible.”

But once seen, she rose like a comet in my brother’s eyes. For a moment I imagined a different fate than the one that had followed. What if Archie had never met
Gloria? Or what if he’d met her but things had never gone so terribly awry? What if, on that snowy night, I had not seen my brother’s car parked beside the dark hedge, then pulled up beside it?

“You made coffee yet?” my father called from behind the closed door of his bedroom, his voice like a hook, jerking me back to the present.

I poured the coffee into a mug and took it to him.

He was sitting in a chair covered with a ragged patchwork quilt. His hair shimmered in the morning light, curiously soft against the unforgiving features of his face.

“You hear that dog. Barked all damn night.” He took a greedy gulp, wiped his mouth. “Just like that old dog Archie had.”

In my mind I saw Scooter tied to a fence post at the edge of the pasture, his long tongue lolling in the morning heat, my father’s shadow flowing darkly over the grass, Archie and I following at his side.
We’re going hunting, boys.

“Gimme my gun,” he said now.

“You don’t have that gun anymore,” I said, remembering the old pistol he’d once had but which I knew must be locked in some storage area now, tagged and marked
Kellogg Murders.

“Sure I got a gun. Twenty-two rifle. In the closet there. Bought it a few months back. Gimme it.”

I didn’t move. “What do you want with it?”

“What do you think I want with it? I ain’t gonna put up with that barking no more.”

I shook my head. “You’re not going to kill that dog,” I told him flatly.

No more than a month before, my father might well
have risen from his chair, pushed me aside, and seized the gun himself. Now he glared at me threateningly, then the threat faded away. “Hell, I don’t like to sleep anyway. Waste of time. Your mother was always sleeping. Every chance she got. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Always running to the bedroom. Couldn’t face nothing. Especially that business with Archie. Couldn’t face that, remember?”

I remembered it well. Toward the end she’d balled up under the covers, her bed little different from her grave.

My father glanced toward the window, let his gaze linger on the dusty road. “So, what plans you got today, Roy?”

“I don’t have any plans.”

“Not expecting to get ‘caught up’ in nothing?”

“Not that I know of.”

He gulped the last of the coffee, then thrust the cup toward where I stood beside his bed with such sudden force, I stepped back quickly.

“You act like you seen a rattlesnake.” He shook his head. “Jumpy. How come you’re always so jumpy, Roy?”

When I gave no answer, he said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about Lila.”

“You’re not going to bring that up again, are you?”

“Not what we talked about last night, no. Just that I knowed Lila’s brother. The one that died. Named Malcolm. Pale as a sheet most of the time. People called him Puker. ’Cause he was always throwing up. At work. In church. Hell, nobody would sit next to him. TB, people said. TB got him. This was before Lila was born, of
course. Speaking of dying, what happened to that man up there? That Spivey feller?”