A Stranger in This World (2 page)

I looked at him. I couldn’t think of what to say. I heard the accusation in his voice, but I didn’t know if I was guilty or not, and I didn’t care. I was already as full of guilt as I was going to get. And these lunges toward honesty were never my father’s best moments. When he was drunk the world and all the people in it appeared to him in bright primary colors of love and hate.

“It’s just that you’re so quiet,” he finally said. “It’s a good way to be—quiet. I never have been able to carry it off.”

“I brought you some clothes,” I told him, trying to change the subject.

He looked at me like I’d slapped him, leaning on the hood of our old Plymouth.

“You’re a cold-blooded little bastard, aren’t you?” he asked me, breathing hard. He meant the words to sting but it was just another emotional cloudburst, a break in the weather. In a minute he would go on to something else, and he did. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Every time they call about Ellen it seems to get worse.”

“I know,” I said. “We should get going.”

This made him angry again, but anything I said would have made him angry. I’d learned long before this not to get
my hopes up. Inside my father, at least when he was drunk, I pictured a multicolored mess, like a spin-art picture, bright colors spilling everywhere. I just wanted to go. Shaking his head sadly at me, disappointed, he crawled into the backseat of the Plymouth and sat straight up on the hump in the middle of the backseat, blocking the whole rear-view mirror.

It was eleven o’clock by then, or eleven-thirty. The greasy kids from my high school were driving up and down King’s Boulevard in their cars, engine noises and screaming, the sound of breaking glass, while we lumbered toward the interstate in the Plymouth. This car was everything my father believed himself to be and was not: it was safe, it was slow, it was green, it was square, it was as reliable as a cinder block and about as fast. It had four doors, an AM-only radio and an aftermarket air conditioner that you banged your knees against. Advantages: dependability, good gas mileage and a backseat wide enough for making out, on the beach or parked in the palmetto scrub, soft Florida nights. And this car was invisible to cops, or should have been—my father had gotten his third DWI the year before, and now had to take the bus to work, and drink within walking distance. I never had any trouble with the car, not in high school, or for a long time after. The way that things go on seems remarkable to me. Children are born, parents die, marriages start and bloom and begin to fade and still the Plymouth runs along, needing only a set of tires sometimes, or a voltage regulator.

My father was asleep by the time we got to 95, a bag of laundry with a necktie on, slumped across the backseat, where I’d been almost-fucking with Penny Silvers the weekend before. I stopped at a gas station at the edge of the city sprawl,
filled the tank and bought a twenty-four-ounce coffee, then eased back into the stream of northbound trucks, driving limousine-careful so I wouldn’t wake him. This was one of those summer nights that seemed as full of possibility as the day. I eased the window down slowly, carefully, and let the damp wind fill the car, and this trip began to seem almost like a pleasure cruise, an escape from a dull summer. I couldn’t completely forget what was in front of us, but I was able to put it off to the side; I had money in my pocket, a full tank of gas and Georgia stretched out in front of me. A hundred miles into the trip, I didn’t know how far I’d gone or how far I had left to go. I was easy in the driver’s seat, relaxed, enjoying the night air and the rock and roll from the beach-town radio stations I was able to pick up.

As we passed Savannah the road turned inland, and then for some reason I started to remember. A few hours from now, maybe even the next morning, we would see her and she would ask us why we had left her. The question was for me. She could understand my father’s deserting her, he wasn’t strong himself, but I was her son. And this was true and it was always true and I couldn’t deny it. She was always my mother, always recognized me and reached for me, even when she was so filled with rage or fear that she didn’t seem capable of holding anything else. I wanted to say, she’s not herself, like the other visitors in the wards. But it was never true. She was always herself, always mine, always my mother. And I’d tried to deny her. I tasted ashes in my mouth, following my headlights north, the red and yellow marker-lights of the lumbering trucks. The thought of seeing her the next day brought ashes to my mouth; the sight of my father, inert in the backseat, brought ashes to my mouth; the memory of Penny Silvers, the
stupidity of trying to escape from the only life I was ever going to have.

Somewhere in South Carolina I stopped for gas, a lonely station in the middle of nowhere. The prices were bad but it wasn’t my money. I checked the oil, paid the kid behind the counter and pulled the car around to the side. In the bathroom I splashed water on my face, stared at my face in the mirror. When I came outside again, my father wasn’t in the car.

I saw him through the window of the gas station, pulling at the doors of the beer coolers inside—but it was after two, they were locked, and the kid told him so.

“What the hell,” my father said. I could hear him through the open door. He was in worse shape now than he’d been when he went to sleep, which happened sometimes. I don’t know if it was the last drinks catching up to him, or if it was the sleep that confused him. He looked like a drunk in a TV comedy, like Johnny Carson playing drunk, reeling around the aisles, yelling at the kid. “There isn’t anybody around to see you,” he said. “Come on! All I want is a damn six-pack.”

The kid was my age or a little older, a skinny, nervous-looking guy with bad zits. One of those country kids, he’d never been anywhere. “We can’t sell no beer after two,” he said. “That’s a state law.”

“All I want is a damn beer,” my father said. “Just open up the damn cooler for a minute and sell me a damn beer, all right? OK?”

As he stumbled toward the counter, I saw the boy’s hand go down and take hold of something—a baseball bat, maybe, or a tire iron, but it looked like a gun to me, just from the way he was holding it. “Dad!” I yelled out, but he didn’t hear me. I couldn’t move, I could only watch.

“It’s a state law,” the kid said.

“Just open the cooler, OK? That’s all I want.”

My father’s voice was tired and easygoing now, but he kept walking, slowly shuffling toward the counter, and I saw the kid’s hand tighten, the tendons in his wrist standing out like wires.

“Look, you get out,” he said, but my father didn’t seem to notice. Now, I thought, it’s going to happen now. And I was locked into my place, just watching. I couldn’t seem to move. I closed my eyes and in my imagination I saw the kid raise the gun, the shots, blood spattering, and I thought, Go on, go ahead and pull the trigger.

I waited to hear the sound of the gunshots but nothing came.

When I opened my eyes a moment later, my father had stopped. “I don’t know what kind of damn place this is,” he said. He stood there a moment longer, then left the store, went out to the car, sat upright in the backseat. The kid came to the window and looked at my father. He saw me out there in the dark and I wanted to hide from his eyes. I was ashamed for myself, not for my father. After a minute the kid went back to his counter and my father lay down again in the backseat.

I could hear crickets everywhere around me in the dark.

I walked out into an empty field next to the station, with my heart still beating fast. Big interstate trucks roared by on the highway, which was up on an embankment, twenty or thirty feet above my head. Their headlights threw my shadow out in front of me in the dirt, a long thin shape of a man racing around in a half-circle as the trucks passed by and then lost in the darkness, to form again as another pair of headlights passed. I
had money in my pocket and a suitcase full of clothes. One of the trucks would stop for me, sooner or later. I thought of all the places I could be by the next day: Key West or New York City or Chicago, heading west.

It wasn’t so much that I wanted somebody to kill him, I didn’t care if he was dead or not. I just wanted that weight off of me. I stood there watching my shadow circling around in the headlights and thinking about Wyoming, a place where I had only been to once, the summer before. I was hitching out to Seattle and I got a ride all the way to Wyoming from a girl named Karen. I still had her address in my wallet, frayed and faded to almost nothing. It wasn’t boyfriend-girlfriend or anything, we just got along. I always thought I had a friend in Wyoming, a place I could go to. All I had to do was step up onto the embankment and stick my thumb out. If I wanted to I could go back to the car first and get my clothes, maybe leave my father some gas money in his jacket pocket. He didn’t have a license but he’d be OK to drive, once he slept through the night—unless the kid in the store decided to call the cops after all, or unless he decided to drive while he was still drunk, the way he did sometimes. Unless, unless, unless. There were all kinds of things that might happen.

I was just going to walk away. I was just going to let his life be his own. The next month, September, I would turn eighteen, which was old enough for anything.

In Wyoming, after the rain, the smell of the sagebrush is ten times as strong as before, like sagebrush perfume. I tried to imagine a sky full of Western stars, cold and distinct, instead of this mottled, milky Southern sky. Where I could be the next day: Kansas City, Cedar Rapids, New Orleans or Minneapolis,
on the way to South Dakota, on the way to Wyoming. I looked at the trucks passing by on the highway again and I watched my shadow circle around me in the headlights, the thin man torn to nothing in the dark, again and again. After a few minutes of watching I turned back toward the car, where my father was sleeping.

LET
’
S SAY THINGS STOP WORKING OUT FOR YOU. LET
’
S SAY YOU
run out of money in a city that doesn’t know you, and the only job they find for you is killing dogs on the night shift. Your car dies. Your apartment is not quite far enough from the shelter.
That distant sound of barking dogs is amplified by your memory, by dreams, so that it fills your grainy, sleepless mornings, the way that barking fills the shelter like water, a thick, swirling weight of sound that makes it hard to move, that spills out of the shelter, that ebbs and subsides and then, one dog at a time, starts again. Every kind of sound, yipping shih tzus, baying coonhounds, Pomeranians and Dobermans and vocalizing mutts. Some of the dogs bark so long and loud that they lose their voices before you can kill them, they go out with puny squeaks, shaking their heads, wondering what’s wrong. You give them a shot, pile them in the chamber, pump the air out. Then the incinerator.

The trees that you remember every morning in your dreams, midwestern oaks and elms and leafy poplars, are shrunk to bitter twigs here. The only green in this city carpets the cemeteries. The remaining life is draining down into the roots: half-empty old women wander the supermarkets, the libraries, pardon me, pardon me. The knuckles of old men. While the bodies of the dogs you kill are beautiful, especially the greyhounds: piled in the cart on their way to the incinerator, they look like sleeping ballerinas, waiting for Cinderella. They belong onstage. The racing dogs arrive on your shift, dozens of them, on the night that racing season is over for the year. You picture them under the lights, straining toward the artificial rabbit while the tourists scream their names.

You report at eleven, you kill the night’s dogs at twelve, from two till four you hose down the cages, after four the shelter doesn’t care what you do. Once a month the phone rings but it’s a wrong number. Each dog has a little card posted on the outside of the cage, a card filled out by the owners:

Name, Breed, Sex, Weight, Spayed/Neutered, Shots, Reason. You read the Reasons and wonder who could ever pass this test: Not good w/ kids; Needs company; Moving to new apt. does not allow pets; Barks. You fill out cards on the owners and slip them into the card file at night, knowing that no one will ever look, tens of thousands of Names, of Reasons: Not good w/ animals.

The shelter uses these multiplying library cabinets as proof of its efficiency, but the names don’t matter, just the number, the bulk of them. These empty hours before dawn, the shelter bursting with the voices of the reprieved, you review the accidents that brought you here, and the intentions. Let’s say that your mother died young. You lost a picture of yourself. Some nights you bring a half-pint of Jim Beam to doctor the coffee.

There’s a procedure for leaving a dog to be killed, you try to tell the girl, but she is just gone, tires smoking gravel out of the parking lot. The dog looks through you, frantic—a pretty little bitch, some sort of Border collie cross or Australian shepherd. Who will do the paperwork? You take out a card and begin to make things up: her name is Ginger, the girl that Gilligan never got. The bitch is two, more or less—you guess it from her teeth—and her owner was a college girl, so she’s had her first shots but not the recent ones. Ginger’s claws skitter on the linoleum floor, trying to follow the long-gone car. It’s just light, quarter to five. When you get to the line for Reason you see the apparition of the college girl: bottle-blond, a little heavy, she drove some little American shitbox like a Chevette. Not one of the beautiful ones, the ones who couldn’t lose. Her makeup was smeared in black profusion across her cheeks, as if she had been crying.

Think of a dog’s loyalty, the weight of that uncomplicated love. You remember minutes after you first made love, staring out the window of a girl’s suburban bedroom at the dirty snow in her yard, the dark bones of the trees, and wondering how you would stand up under the weight of love that had been entrusted to you, the promises you meant to keep—promises that meant everything to you, though not as much to her. Later this gets mixed up with the barking, but the idea of snow, of virginity, starts tears in your chest. You reach down, unclip the leash from Ginger’s collar and hold the door for her to go, running, racing toward the college girl with all the grace of her beautiful dog’s body.