Father and Son (3 page)

“I'll go see him when I git goddamn good and ready. If you don't want to take me I can find somebody else to run me over there.”

Puppy studied him for a few seconds, resigned to it.

“Hell, I'll carry you. You gonna go anyway. Just don't blame me if he whips your ass again.”

“Ain't no son of a bitch gonna get me down and kick me and get away with it.”

“Yeah, and if you hadn't cut him he probly wouldn't've got you down and kicked you. Somebody cut me I'd kick him too. You lucky he didn't shoot you. I would've.”

Puppy pulled out to the stop sign, then hit the gas. They didn't talk for a while. The few houses alongside the road rapidly gave way to plowed or planted fields and spotted cows with outsized horns and barns with roofs of brown tin and gray rotting sides. Glen turned the vent so that the hot wind rushed in to ruffle his shirt, his hair. He opened a pack of Camels and dropped the wrapper out the window.

Puppy looked at him briefly, then turned his face back to the road.

“What's the first day like down there?”

Glen didn't look around. “Call you out on the grass. What they call the grass. Ain't no grass, just dirt. Call you out to fight and if you don't fight they take you down and fuck you in the ass.”

“You fight?”

“You goddamn right.”

“Ever day?”

“Till they left me alone.”

“How long did that take?”

“Bout a week.”

“You gonna give me one of them beers?”

Glen reached down and got him one and handed it to him. Puppy steered with his knees and got the opener and punched two holes in the can. Foam spurted from the top and he sucked at it. He drove with one hand, the beer between his legs, glancing out the window from time to time.

“He might not even be up,” he said. “This early.”

“He still got that monkey?”

“Last time I was over there he did. That's about a ugly son of a bitch. You ever seen the way he acts around a woman that's on her period?”

“Goes crazy, don't he?” said Glen.

“Shit. Worse than that. Jumped on some old gal over there one night, had his dick run out. She like to had a goddamn fit. He's bit several people.”

Glen finished his beer and threw the can out the window. He reached down for another just as they crossed the county line. “He better not bite me.”

After an eighth of a mile Puppy let off the gas and slowed the car, checking the rearview mirror, shifting down into second, and turning into a rutted dirt road where a weathered sign on a leaning post pointed a crooked red arrow toward
BARLOW'S COLD BEERDANCING POOL
.

The place wasn't visible from the highway at all. It was hidden in a thicket of loblolly pine and the dried needles had coated the roof with a carpet of brown. On the front porch sat a Coke machine, several chairs, two big Walker hounds with slatted ribs and hanging tongues. The dogs rose to their feet with lifted hackles and snarled briefly before leaving the porch. There were no cars in the yard. Puppy eased to a stop against one of the peeled logs there. He cut off the motor. The hounds melted into the surrounding underbrush and were seen no more. Glen set his beer on the floor and opened the door.

“Watch them dogs,” Puppy said.

“I ain't worried about them dogs.”

He got out and closed the door and stood there for a moment, then crossed the yard with its litter of bottle caps and cigarette butts and stepped up on the porch. He tried the door. The knob turned silently in his hand. He looked back at Puppy, who was raising a beer to his mouth. Glen stepped inside.

The bar was dimly lit by the sunlight that came through the dirty windows. All the chairs were turned upside down on the tables and the floor had been swept clean. The room seemed heavy with menace, as if all the bottles broken over heads and all the shots fired into human bodies had condensed into a thick and heavy presence of uneasiness and waiting.

He walked quietly to the bar and stood listening. There was no sound. Even the ceiling fans were stilled. The ranked bottles at the back of the bar held a muted gleam, familiar labels. He thought about pouring a drink.

The monkey climbed up on the bar ten feet away and sat silently, baring its teeth at him. It was nearly two feet tall, dark hair, a long tail. Long yellow canines dulled by tobacco juice. It grimaced and hissed at him.

“You nasty son of a bitch,” Glen said.

In one leap it was on him and biting his hand. The fear came up in his throat the same way it had the day he almost jumped off the barn. The monkey was clawing at him, the little leathery black fingers clutching at his clothes with terribly surprising strength. He managed to get his other hand around its throat and it began to make a dreadful noise, crying almost like a child. The tail curled around his forearm and gripped it tight. He pulled his mangled fingers free and blood spattered over them. Blood on its teeth. He slammed the monkey against the dark wood of the bar, the furry body twisting and writhing at the end of his arm and the teeth bared in that fiendish grin and all the while the scared wailing and screeching. He slammed it again and he could feel the fine bones smashing,
the strength going out of it. The monkey was shaking its head and shitting on him. He gagged and threw it down and staggered back, looking at his hand. Deep lacerations, the fingers torn, vein and muscle. The monkey lay on its side until in a sudden rage he kicked it. It landed heavily against the bar and dropped back to the floor. It lay dazed, blinking. He watched it. One of its legs was bent beneath it. It passed a fist over its face almost wearily and rolled over onto its belly and put its knuckles on the boards and started trying to crawl away from him.

“Bite me now you son of a bitch,” Glen panted. He kicked it again and it fell over on its back with the black hands trembling. He looked into its eyes and he saw shock and revelation there.

There was one empty beer bottle sitting on the bar. He leaned over and picked it up, bent low over the monkey, and knocked a huge dent in its skull. It trembled and shook the way a clubbed fish will and then it relaxed and was still. He dropped the bottle on the floor and straightened. Blood was dripping off his middle finger, had seeped under the nail. The bar was quiet once again. The same silent chairs. He saw his harried reflection looking back at him from the mirror behind the bar, the bottles like old friends. He stepped back there and took a fifth of whiskey down.

He turned and walked across the floor, opened the door, and looked at his brother sitting in the car. He blinked in the sunlight as the blood dripped onto the porch.

He went down the steps. Puppy started out of the car when he saw the blood, but Glen waved him back. He walked around to the other side and got in.

“What in the hell?”

“That monkey. Let's get out of here. Quick.”

“What? Did it jump on you?”

“Yeah. Let's go.”

Puppy cranked the car but could hardly take his eyes off the mangled hand. It was webbed with trails of blood that were starting to dry. He kept looking at the hand while he backed up. He stopped and turned the car around in the gravel.

“Damn, boy, you gonna have to see the doctor about that. Ain't no tellin what kind of filth that thing had on its teeth.”

Glen got his beer from the floor and started drinking it. When they got to the highway, Puppy stopped and looked both ways hurriedly. “Did anybody see you?”

“Wasn't nobody in there.”

“Did you kill it?”

“Hell yes I killed it.”

Puppy pulled out into the road, going through the gears rapidly, getting it up to sixty as fast as he could.

“Well at least nobody saw you.”

They rode in silence for a while then. They went across the levee and saw people fishing in the river far below the bridge, their boats and their long glossy canepoles.

“If he knew I was fixin to get out, he'll know it was me,” Glen said. “Did you tell anybody?”

“A few. I didn't figure it was no secret.”

Glen lifted his beer and drank. Puppy watched his mirror.

“Just take me out to my house and help me get my car cranked, then. That's all I'll ask of you.”

“You not going to see Daddy?”

“Fuck him.”

“Aw shit, Glen.”

“You heard me. I said fuck him.”

“Now listen, Glen. It ain't right to not go see him. He's missed you.”

“He don't miss nothin but a whiskey bottle when he ain't got one in
his hand.”

Puppy found a cigarette in his pocket and got it lit and opened the other beer that was on the seat and took a big drink from it, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, still watching behind them.

“Hell, I'll help you get your car cranked. I brought another battery just in case. Pour some gas in the carburetor it ought to crank. But let's go over to Daddy's first and see him just a minute anyway.”

“Didn't even put her down a headstone.”

“He looked at some. I know he looked at some.”

A long black car loomed down the road. The driver was opening it up coming into the river bottom. The sun gleamed on the chrome bumper and the car came toward them at some incredible rate of speed. Puppy's old car rocked with a blast of wind as the thing shot by and hurtled down the road behind them.

“Was that him?” Said Glen.

“Yeah. That was him. Headed home.”

“He'll come after me. You know that, don't you?”

“Naw, I don't know that.”

“Well. I do.”

That was all he said about it. They stopped in town and bought alcohol and bandages. Glen sat in the car with his feet in the street, leaning out the open door, pouring the alcohol over the cuts, closing his eyes for the way it burned. He drenched it good and wrapped the whole thing in gauze and while he was sitting there thinking everything over, he figured he might as well go ahead and finish it, now that it was started.

Virgil was sitting on the porch when they pulled up. A Redbone puppy with long legs and big feet was lying beside him. It raised its head sleepily and got up, looking around to see who had come. It wagged its tail appeasingly as it got out of the way, head turned to look sideways apologetically or just to be careful. It disappeared around the side of the house.

The place looked pretty much as it always had, the old unpainted house nestled in the weeds and the tin of the roof rusted to a mottling of gray and brown. The abandoned '48 Chevy coupe was still parked out to the side with four flats, and his father was there in the chair just as he had been the last time Glen saw him, as if time had warped and nothing had moved these three years he'd been locked down.

Puppy had his door halfway open, looking back at Glen. “Well? There he is. You gonna get out?”

Glen muttered something and stepped out. They stood in the thin grass of the yard looking up at their daddy. He was still a big man and the cane he held seemed out of place and too small for him. His hair was grayer now, but his hands and his arms still looked strong. His skin was dark from the summer sun.

Glen opened the back door of the car and brought out the rest of the
beer. He walked across the yard and set it on the porch at his father's feet. Virgil watched him for a few moments and then reached down slowly and got one. There was an opener hanging from a nail driven into a post. He opened the can, his big hands flexing, and white foam spewed out. He waited for it to stop, holding the opener out for somebody to take. Glen took it, opened two more beers, handed one to Puppy, and stood in the yard drinking silently, looking around. In the garden out by the coupe, turnips the size of softballs rested their purple heads against the dry ground. Rotted bean stakes still leaned against a rusted piece of barbed wire, sheathed in dead vines. Dried catfish heads littered the dirt.

Glen's daddy finally set the can on the porch beside his cane and then moved the cane between his knees as he pulled makings from his shirt pocket and set to rolling Prince Albert. He did it swiftly, from long practice. His fingers were steady and soon he was done. With the cigarette between his lips he glanced up.

“Well,” he said. “You don't look no worse for wear.”

Glen didn't answer right away. He was thinking of the days he had worked in this garden with his mother, of wandering its rows of tomatoes with a jar in his hand for the worms that crawled over the young green globes. He would pick them off and put them in his jar. She punched holes in the top for air. Or she would send him every other day to cut the okra with the small dull paring knife. When they needed beanpoles she would drive them down a dirt road into the creek bottom and they'd walk around the edges of the freshly plowed fields to the stands of cane that bordered the banks. He remembered lashing big racks of them to the top of the car, their long and limber ends. Gathering extra ones for set hooks in the river, wet foggy mornings clambering up and down the muddy banks with his father, the catfish breaking the surface
and gasping for water on the ends of their lines. Virgil's hair was still black then, and his wounds had not slowed him down so much. No bad car wrecks yet. He wrestled a catfish out of a hole in the bank one morning and it weighed forty pounds. They still had the picture somewhere, Glen guessed, but he didn't need to see it. He could remember Virgil sitting beside the thing fifty feet back from the bank, smoking his readyrolleds then, the muscles of his broad back showing through his wet shirt, the fish breathing steadily in her new world and the sleek thickness of her shining flanks. And the fish fry that weekend, his mother cooking in the kitchen and their cousins and uncles drinking beer with his father at the table. Old voices and old times gone by and the memories of them like faded photos on a screen.

He looked up at his daddy. “You still just look like an old drunk to me,” he said.

Puppy swelled up. His face went red. Glen watched him for a second and then told his father, “You too sorry to even put her a headstone up. And he wanted me to come see you. Well. I've seen you.”