No Heroes (18 page)

“Then you've got nothing to worry about.”

He says good-bye and hangs up. He's right, of course. The world is a simple place. It is the imagination that makes it complex, and writers are highly imaginative people. Arthur is reacting like a writer with the jitters, but he's not a writer, he's the page on which history was written. Arthur is the book.

The phone rang. I answered and my mother told me that my father would call later and invite me to lunch.

“It would mean a lot,” she said.

“Okay. We'll meet in town.”

“He wants you to pick him up.”

“Okay. Maybe we can eat a late lunch and he can ride back home with you after work.”

“He wants you to take him to a place in Carter County. It's his favorite restaurant.”

I said okay and hung up the phone. The conversation surprised me because my father has never been interested in spending time with me. He did not visit when I was single in my twenties or married in my thirties. His reasoning was simple: He avoided airplanes due to a leg wound he received while fighting in the army of Genghis Khan. My father was completely serious about being stabbed in another life. It was important that I understand he was not a cavalryman or an officer, but a mere foot soldier.

The only time I remembered seeing my father in a restaurant was the occasion of Arthur and Irene's first visit to Morehead. In a far corner of the restaurant sat a mother with a crying baby. My father stood and pretended to draw a pistol from an imaginary holster. He slowly and deliberately screwed a silencer onto the barrel. He extended his arm, aimed his finger at the baby, and pretended to shoot it three times. He returned the pistol to its invisible holster and continued eating in a casual manner. Arthur and Irene looked at each other and then at their plates. They said nothing for a long time.

No one in my family ever served in the military. My grandfathers came of age between the world wars and I missed Vietnam by four years. I have no uncles. My father suffered a severe asthma attack at his physical for air force induction during the Korean War. He was spared combat and never had asthma again.

The phone rang and I picked it up with the trepidation I always felt when anticipating a call from home. My fathers phone manner was a remnant of his salesman days—fake voice pitched low, a bullying cheer that brooked no options.

“I was thinking we'd have lunch today,” he said.

“Okay. Can we meet in town?”

“No, that won't suit me. You can pick me up and we'll go to a restaurant in Carter County.”

“Okay.”

“I want to eat lunch with each of my kids. It might be the last time.”

“Okay.”

He told me what time to arrive and when I said goodbye, he said cheerio in a British accent copied from television. We'd never shared any private meal together—no breakfast, lunch, supper, snack, coffee at a diner, or milkshake at the drugstore. He saw tomorrow's meal as the last lunch, but I knew it as our only lunch. I felt certain that his insistence meant he had something important to tell me.

Rita was surprised by the phone calls from my parents.

“They want you to drive sixty miles roundtrip for lunch. Why not meet in town?”

“I don't know,” I said. “It doesn't matter.”

“I don't understand.”

“Maybe it'll be a memorable lunch. I hope so.”

“You always hope things like that,” she said. “What you should do is say something meaningful instead of waiting for your father to.”

I drove to town and past the old Trail Theatre. The only other time I remembered being alone with my father was at a movie when I was twelve. I was so excited I could barely talk, and when I did, the words came out in a rush that irritated him immensely. The movie was
Billy Jack.
At the concession stand my father picked candy for me, a kind I didn't like. After the movie we went to the bathroom, and he said that I was an Alpha male. He told me that an Alpha male is more or less the boss dog of any outfit. It meant that pretty women liked to talk to you, and that men naturally looked to you for orders. He said that there were also Beta males, which were plumbers, doctors, and engineers. And below that were Gamma males, which included everyone else. My father assured me that I was an Alpha male. He said that there were three types, and that Billy Jack was an Alpha Two. He waited long enough for me to understand that I was supposed to ask who was an Alpha Three, which I did.

“Me,” he said.

The road up the hill to my parents' house was blacktop now instead of dirt, and I remembered that during election years it received a fresh coating of rock dredged from the creek, full of broken glass, old boots, and angry snakes. Walking the woods was much safer than the road. The trees in my parents' yard were taller, and the spreading boughs cast more shade. The edge of the hill had fallen away. As the earth receded, the woods approached like the sea eating away the beach. I wondered how long until the entire hill went over the hill.

My father stepped from the house and I got out of the car. He looked better than he had in years. His face held color and he'd lost weight.

“Barely late,” he said.

I nodded. He opened the car door and eased in.

“Seat's too far forward,” he said. “Your mother always moves it back for me.”

My father adjusted the seat to his comfort, looked out the windshield, and waited. I drove off the hill, following the creek past the bootleggers old shack, into the foreign territory of Carter County. Charles Manson was from here, although no one will admit it. We passed a famous haunted house, site of poltergeist activity often mentioned in books. Houses jutted from the hillsides, the front porches resting on columns of stacked brick with cardboard pressed into the window frames. Trash filled a creek. Skinny dogs stared at the car.

My father was unusually silent, looking at the road ahead.

“Where's the restaurant?” I said.

“Olive Hill,” he said. “A little further.”

“What's their specialty?”

“Just lunch. It's a lunch place.”

“You must like it a lot.”

“Not really. It's almost as close as Morehead, but I don't have to talk to every damn fool in town.”

“I thought you liked talking.”

“Not while I'm eating with you. We never had lunch together, did we.”

“No, this is a first.”

“I'm damn glad,” he said. He gestured to the car ahead of us. “You can pass this guy if you want to.”

“I guess I'll just take it easy.”

“That's the difference between you and me, Chris. You don't take as many risks.”

I said nothing. We reached Olive Hill and made a few wrong turns and wound up on a dead-end street.

“They've changed the names of the streets,” he said.

“You think?”

“How else could I get lost?”

I found the restaurant and parked in the lot. He wanted a different parking space and I moved to it. He told me to lock the door. I said I left the keys in the ignition, and he told me it wasn't a good idea. I said nothing.

We entered the small diner, which contained a Formica bar, a few tables, and a row of booths. I was relieved at the absence of women with babies. My father took a table and the waitress gave us menus,

“Can I help you all?”

“Yes,” my father said. “You can give me the name of the architect who designed this booth.”

The waitress was confused by this request. My father continued talking.

“He should hang by his thumbs for making this damn thing so uncomfortable.”

I chuckled to let the waitress know it was a joke. My father delivered his public laughter, loud enough to attract everyone's attention. The cook poked his head around the corner from the kitchen. I examined the menu. Everything was deep-fried and I ordered an egg sandwich with cole slaw. My father asked for a chicken sandwich. We sipped our coffee, careful to avoid meeting each other's eyes.

“I'm glad you suggested this,” I said.

“Yes, a man should eat lunch with his children.”

“That's important.”

“I've been watching more baseball, too.”

“Lunch and TV.”

He lowered his voice to a dramatic tone and leaned forward. I listened carefully.

“I want you to know,” he said, “that you're the first.”

“Okay.”

“I haven't eaten with the others yet.”

“Well,” I said, “thank you.”

He leaned back and began to study the decor, which met with his approval. Everything on the wall was devoted to the documentation of a local musicians career. We were seated in the front window and he peered at the lot.

“Your car's still there,” he said. “Good thing I picked this booth.”

“You bet.”

The waitress brought our meal. My father followed her with his eyes as she walked away, then turned to me.

“Your mother and I were virgins when we got married.”

The egg was greasy, the toast cold. I took a few bites, then excused myself to the bathroom. I splashed cold water on my face. I lingered long enough for my father to finish his meal. When I was a kid, I would have given anything for this time together. Now, I just wanted to get it over with.

I left the rest room and watched my father from a distance. I had rarely seen him out of the house. It occurred to me that his discomfort in the restaurant was not because of the booth, nor was it due to being with me. He was uneasy at being exposed in the world.

I returned to the table. The waitress brought the check and my father complimented her hair. I paid the bill. We began walking to the door. A man sat by himself in the corner wearing a beat-up hat, dirt on the crown and brim, sweat stains along the band. It was clear that he was simple. My father stopped and spoke.

“That hat is a good-looking hat.”

He smiled at the man, whose grin broke light across his face. I opened the door and held it for my father. In the lot, he said, “It's easy to make someone feel good, Chris. I made his day.”

We drove home without talking. The meal seemed to satisfy my father. I parked at his house and we left the car. I played football here, raked the leaves, wrestled my brother, mowed the grass. I knew where the jack-in-the-pulpit grew, when lady's slipper bloomed low to the ground.

“Thanks for the invite to lunch,” I said.

“You paid.”

“I love you.”

He nodded. Behind him stood the house I grew up in. I remembered Rita's advice.

“My biggest source of pain,” I said, “is the tension between us. I hoped that coming home would help fix it.”

“You are quicker to take offense at me than anyone on the planet.”

I said nothing. To protest was to prove him right. I hugged him but it was like touching a board. I got in the car. He turned his back. When I honked the horn he did not look toward the sound. His back faded in my rearview mirror—a white-haired man getting smaller and smaller.

While driving home, I thought of a dozen answers to his final comment. Ultimately, though, I was proud of my response—none. I remembered being a teenager in the kitchen and my father handing me a note after an argument. On the paper, he'd written: “Your need to have the last word makes it impossible to talk with you.” That sentence is branded forever in my consciousness. To speak was to confirm his point. He had silenced me as surely as cutting out my tongue.

I have stories by the hundreds. What cruel story you want to hear? I was just thinking that the worst of the whole thing is those people are real people. I survived because someone always fell before me. Very simple. They killed a couple other guys instead of killing me. I owe them and I don't do them justice. I'm telling this story to distill their blood.

I have a tremendous disappointment with my inability to react. Why did I passively endure? There is so much a man can take and then he has to react in order to be called a man. And many times I did not react and I cannot forgive myself for that.