Hamilton Stark (14 page)

His father told him, “I don’t give a shit what you do on your own time. As long as you get to work on time in the morning and your hangover don’t slow you down any. And as
long as I don’t have to bail you out of jail. Far as I’m concerned, you’re free, white, and twenty-one. Except when you’re working for me.” He smiled quickly, the movement almost unseen, like a lizard’s tongue. It was a joke. Alvin was supposed to laugh.

His mother was not as sanguine, however. Every night when he went out, dark hair combed slickly back, clean T-shirt and khakis, loafers shined, Feeney outside in the car rapping impatiently on the horn, she would watch him leave and then would sit down and wait for him to return, no matter how late. In the kitchen, seated at the table, working a crossword puzzle and listening to the radio (turned low, so her husband, in the bedroom adjacent, could sleep), she would wait for her son to come home, and finally, at two or three in the morning, she would hear Feeney’s car drive up, and she’d snap to attention in the chair, her eyes dry and red from sleeplessness and fatigue, and when he entered the house, usually by the front door, she’d call to him. “Alvin!”

“Whut.”

“In the kitchen. Come in here, I want to talk to you.”

He would tip and stumble through the living room and take a seat opposite her at the long table. “Whut.” Sometimes he would be wearing a bruise across his face and lipstick across his shirtfront. Sometimes one or the other. Rarely neither.

Then she would begin: “Alvin. Son. You’ve got to get hold of yourself. Look at you. You can’t
be
this way, you can’t become the kind of person who … acts this way all the time. I’m worried about you, son.”

“Well, don’t. I am who I am. That’s all,” he’d answer, lighting a cigarette.

“You’re unhappy, aren’t you?”

“I wasn’t … until I come in here and started gettin’
nagged at.” He looked her in the face, blew smoke at her. One mean bastard, he thought.

She coughed, got up abruptly, walked into her bedroom. “Good night. Shut off the lights before you go up.” Angrily. It ended this way every time she waited up for him. She wasn’t ever going to do it again.

“Yes,
ma’am
.” Sneering. Rubbing out his cigarette in the saucer of her cup. Sliding away from the table and standing up. Going from the kitchen through the living room to the stairs and up to his bedroom, having left the lights on behind him. On purpose.

Whose purpose? He didn’t know. He sat in darkness on his bed, kicking his shoes slowly off. Oh, what the hell, she was right, right about everything, for God’s sake. The nights he turned into a bum, a nothing, a big slob screwing every whore in Belknap County, brawling in every bar and road-house, drinking himself sick all the nights he didn’t have to work for his father… And she knew it, knew that these were the nights he turned into a bum, a slob, broke, drunk, fucked out, the taste of vomit on his teeth, his knuckles scraped, nose swollen, half the preceding six hours completely blacked out, erased from conscious memory, the rest remembered only in terms of sudden movement and roaring… And it was all her fault, his goddamned, sweet, nagging and high-falutin’ mother’s fault. She should’ve left him the hell alone, or else helped him get away to college, anywhere, just away… And it was all Betsy Cooper’s fault too—that touchy, virgin, cock-teasing bitch, and all her ambitions, her promises to write letters to him, all her lies to him, how she didn’t care what he did with his life, she would love and respect it… What a pile of crap that was! In a week she’d be home from college for the Christmas break. He’d go over to that big white barn of a house on the hill, and he’d tell her what the hell he thought
of her, and then he’d fuck her, right in front of that big living room mirror, and she’d watch, and she’d love it, but she’d hate herself for loving it, and when he’d fucked her, he’d get off and stand up and laugh, laugh like a loon, laugh and laugh and laugh, Goddamn it. Goddamn it. Damn it. It was nobody’s fault—but his own. He knew that. Impossible to deny. Impossible to blame anybody else, least of all his mother, least of all Betsy Cooper, both of whom were guilty merely of having thought him better, stronger, smarter, than he was, both of whom loved him—or had once loved him. He deserved himself. Everyone else deserved someone better. Only he was bad enough, weak enough, dumb enough, to deserve being who, in the final fact, he was…

It was mid-December, a blowy, snowy, Friday evening, cold enough that the wind crackled against the windshield of Feeney’s Dodge, and the snowflakes, dry and hard as salt crystals, blew against the car and swiftly away from it, finally settling in long, wind-carved drifts along the sides of the road and edges of the woods and against the buildings they passed, as they drove back from Pittsfield to Crawford.

Feeney wanted a drink, had pulled a pint bottle of rye from the glove compartment as he drove, and poured a few ounces into his mouth, passing it across to Alvin when he had finished. Alvin silently recapped the bottle and replaced it in the glove compartment.

“Whassamatta, doncha wanta leetle drinkee?” Feeney teased him. Looking over at his dark friend, Feeney grinned, showing his small, brown teeth, and he wet his thick lips like a horse.

Alvin said no, explaining that he was tired tonight and just wanted to be out of the house, not out of his head, for chrissake.

Feeney chuckled salaciously and asked for the bottle again. Alvin passed it to him.

“You’re just pissed we didn’t scarf any quiffs at the fuckin’ movies,” Feeney said seriously, trying to be sympathetic. He noted the car’s rapid slide toward the side of the road and whipped the wheel to the left, spinning the vehicle back into line, just missing a two-foot snowdrift.

“No,” Alvin said. “Nothing like that. It’s hard to get too down when you strike out with a batch of fuckin’ sixteen-year-olds giggling in the back of a fuckin’ small-town moviehouse. Besides, I really liked the movie,” he added.
Picnic
it was, with Alvin played by William Holden, Betsy Cooper by Kim Novak in a sexy lavender dress, the plot basically a brief, melancholy meeting between a hungry, lonely, trapped woman and a profound man, the meeting born in conflict between the characters, carried to tragic, compassionate fruition by sex and coincidence, resolved by the sad yet spiritually necessary departure of the man. “That’s my idea of a good movie,” Alvin said, half to himself.

Feeney handed the bottle back to him. “You sure you don’t want a slug?” he urged.

Alvin said no and continued staring out the windshield, the snow firing out of the darkness into the path of the car. Without looking, he put the bottle back into the glove compartment.

They drove a ways farther in silence, through Crawford Parade, along the road to the Center, past the fairgrounds, with the river on their right, iced over, the ice whitened by the snow, following alongside the car as the vehicle wound a careful way home. Driving into the Center, they approached Feeney’s house, dark and dilapidated, like an old railroad hobo, and Feeney asked Alvin if he wanted to come in and have a drink and maybe watch some television or play some
cards awhile. “Christ, it ain’t even eleven yet,” he said in a whining voice, pulling nervously at one thick eyebrow with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand while he steered the car with his other hand.

“No thanks. I might’s well go on home. This snow’s starting to build up now and I’d probably have to walk if I stayed at your place. Nights like this, I start to thinking about my grandpa, y’know,” he added half-jokingly. But half-seriously, too, because it was true that he never remembered any of the stories of how the old man, his father’s father, had died, except on nights like this, when there was a hard, cold snow falling in drifts, and he remembered, pictured, a man he’d never actually seen stumbling home in the dark, drunk, angry, snarling at the wind and snow, and halfway home falling over a stone frozen into the dirt surface of the road, and tumbling off the road into a high drift, forgetting in that second of spinning collapse his anger, the hard, ancient center of his focus, coming softly to rest in the drift and letting go there, falling backward into sleep, at last—to be found there in the morning, rock-hard, with his hands and arms and legs extended, splayed, as if, when he had died, he’d been dreaming of swimming easily underwater, or as if he had been hurled to earth by a god. It was the reason Alvin’s father did not drink, or so his mother had told him.

“Okay,” Feeney said slowly. “I’ll take you up the fuckin’ road. But hand me that bottle one more time, will ya?”

Alvin once again retrieved the flat, brown bottle and passed it to his friend, who took a quick drink from it and blindly passed it back, bumping the bottle against Alvin’s beefy shoulder in the darkness, spilling rye whiskey down the front of his wool loden coat and over his lap. Alvin grabbed the almost emptied bottle from his lap and cursed. Feeney apologized thickly, and they drove the rest of the way to Alvin’s house in grumpy silence, passing no other car
on the road, barely making it up the hill from the Center.

Alvin got out, said nothing, and walked through the snow to the house, stamped his feet noisily at the door, and walked in as Feeney drove off, the red taillights of his car swiftly disappearing behind high fantails of snow.

His mother heard him come in. “That you, Alvin?” she called from the kitchen. “I was worried, with the snow and all…”

“Yeah,” he said sourly. He was standing near a table lamp in the living room, holding part of his coat out in front of him as he studied the whiskey stains on it. “Shit,” he said in a low voice.

“Will you come and have a cup of tea with me, son? I’m glad you came home early,” she called. Alvin could hear her get up from her chair and walk quickly, eagerly, to the cabinet over the sink for a cup and saucer.

Oh, well, why not? he thought. Maybe she’ll know how to get the stain out of my coat. “Yeah, sure, I’ll have a cup of tea with you.” And he walked out to the kitchen, shedding his bulky coat as he entered the room.

She stood next to the counter by the sink, pouring him a cup of tea. Picking up the cup and saucer, carrying it across the room by pinching the saucer between thumb and forefinger, she walked past her son, tiny next to his enormous size, and suddenly, as she passed, she groaned, “Oh-h, Alvin!” With an expression on her face that joined disgust with self-pity, she placed the cup and saucer on the table in front of him, sat down opposite, and petulantly pushed the sugar and milk at him.

“What d’you mean, Oh-h, Alvin’?”

“You
know
what I mean!” she exploded at him. “
You!
You’re what I mean!
You’re
what’s the matter.
Look
at you!”

“You think I’m drunk?”

“
Think!
” She kept stirring her spoon in the cup of tea, her hands shaking as she moved, her rage barely contained by the act. Her dark eyes glowered at him, her head twitching nervously from side to side, her feet tapping against the linoleum-covered floor. “You, you’re nothing but a bum, a drunken bum! That’s all! I don’t know why I even bother to … to hope. You’ll probably end up like your grandfather, the way you’re going now.”

“Not that one again. Jesus. My grandfather. As if ending up like my father is an improvement. Anyhow, I’m stone sober, Ma,” he said quietly.

“You’re a drunken bum! You smell like a brewery. You come in here smelling like a brewery, and then you have the gall to tell me how sober you are, and making cruel cracks about your father, too. You’re a drunken bum, no good for anything. And now you’re a liar, too.”

“Ma, I am not!” he cried, and he stood up, facing her.

She wouldn’t even look at him then, talked into her teacup instead and made him overhear her. “I work and I slave year after year, for what? For
this?
A drunk who can’t even speak kindly to me? A thankless bum who can’t say anything kind about his father?” She continued talking loudly at the teacup and about him, as if he were in an adjacent room, and he moved erratically away from the table, then back again, and finally grabbed her shoulder with one huge hand and shook her, which made her scream directly up at him, “Leave me alone! Don’t you touch me! Get away from me! You’re
drunk!
”

At that instant his father came crashing into the room from the bedroom. The man was dressed in a wildly billowing flannel nightgown, he was barefoot, and the gray hair on his narrow head stuck out like a spiky crown. His face was knotted in fury, and as he rushed for Alvin, he roared, “You son of
a bitch, I’ll
kill
you! Raising your hand against your mother! I’ll
kill
you for that!”

Alvin turned, releasing his mother’s shoulder, and caught the full force of his father’s rush. Falling backward, he broke his fall with one hand and tried to ward off his father’s punches with the other. The older man was swinging at him like a windmill gone berserk, hitting him on the head, face and shoulders, slamming him in the chest with his bony, naked knee, trying to keep him down on the floor while he beat him with his fists. Alvin reached behind him and knocked the cupboard door open, and with no conscious thought, or none that he would remember later, he reached into the cupboard, yanked out a large cast-iron skillet, and swung it at his father, hitting him squarely on the forehead. There was a thick, crunching sound, like that of an apple being broken in half by two strong hands, and the old man’s body went limp and collapsed on the floor.

Alvin, dazed, dropped the skillet, stood up, heard as if from a great distance his mother screaming, “Alvin! You’ve killed your
father!
You’ve
killed
him!” and he ran from the house, grabbing up his coat as he ran.