Shame (4 page)

Maybe it was true that I had never been farther than Dallas—well, I'd once been to the ocean at Galveston on a youth trip—but it wasn't true that I never got out of town. I left almost every night, transported on the broad backs of words. While Michelle graded her papers and made out lesson plans, I wrote letters, little bits of myself carved paper-thin and stuffed in envelopes that would wing across the country, carrying me to all those places—all those people—I couldn't see in person.

Michelle said she did not believe in letters. She said that with computers and the information superhighway coming, paper would be as obsolete as Pop Rocks, the Oh Henry! bar, and the record player.

But, of course, she said this while a turntable in the cabinet behind her filled the air with sweet music.

I just smiled at her and kept on writing.

 

Michael's nineteenth birthday fell not long after Michelle's, and she and I crossed our fingers that with his teen years almost left behind he would now become a model son and citizen. Hey, it was worth a shot; we didn't see anything else on the horizon with much of a chance of changing him short of an exorcism or a lobotomy.

The whole family—Lauren and B. W. with various low degrees of enthusiasm—prepared to throw him a party. We called those friends of Michael's we knew and could stomach and invited them to come out to the house for dinner; we even called Michael's girlfriend, Gloria, a twenty-four-year-old woman with black hair, clothes, and fingernails. I always thought she looked like the consort of Satan in an old Hammer horror film, but Michelle liked her, since Van Morrison and U2 both wrote songs entitled “Gloria.”

Michelle arranged with Mike's manager at Pizza Hut to give him the evening off. I gave my team the afternoon off and set out a dozen thick T-bones to thaw. Lauren baked a chocolate cake. B. W. did Michael's chores, although it wasn't really to recognize the birthday—he had been doing most of Michael's chores for years.

About six, I went out to fire up the charcoal grill and was joined by our old hound dog, Frank, not much of a help with charcoal but something of an authority on steak. I saturated the charcoal with lighter fluid, stepped back, and flipped in a match. There was an eyebrow-singeing
whoomp
, a miniature Hiroshima fireball, and I walked back inside to season the steaks while the charcoal burned down.

I met Michael coming down the hall from his room and ventured some conversation. “You want to come outside and help me with the steaks?”

He stepped around me as though I were a street person who had wandered into his path and walked out the back door, straight toward his truck, my last Chevy except for one.

I had a bad feeling about this exit. I followed.

“Where you headed?” I asked brightly. He turned to look, and his keys jangled in his hand as he prepared to get into his truck.

“Out,” he said, and he climbed in and slammed the door behind him.

A miniature Hiroshima went
whoomp
in my gut, and I was around the front of the truck in a flash, grabbing the door handle and pulling it back open. “Just where do you think you're going?” I asked.

“Wherever I want,” he said. I could feel my pulse pounding in my temples, and I was sure that at that moment I didn't present the most pleasing sight. Maybe if I'd been a little angrier a long time ago, things could have turned out different.

I kept my hands tight at my sides, struggled to pronounce these words calmly: “We're having a party. For you. Your friends are coming.”

“No, they're not,” he said, a touch of impatience in his voice now. “I told them to blow this off and meet me in town.”

I tried one last time. “Michael, we're having a party for you. Here. Now. Your family has planned it.”

He wouldn't look at me, just leaned over so that he could turn the key when I was finished. “I didn't ask you to do that,” he muttered, and then he spoke a vile word, just loudly enough for me to hear, and he cranked the engine to life.

I leaned in some myself and cocked my head sideways. “What's that?”

He revved the engine.

I took his arm above the elbow, none too gently. “Michael, what did you say?”

“I said I don't want a birthday party,” he said, snatching his arm out of my fingers, and now he looked up at me and his eyes burned with hatred.
Hatred
. “Do I look like that big a loser to you?” He snorted. “A birthday party? Dad, are you
trying
to ruin my life?”

Maybe you should never ask a man questions when he's angry, or maybe some lunatic germ of errant truth-telling betrayed me. “Why not?” I said. “You ruined mine.”

And it was out, impossible to take back, impossible to pretend that I hadn't ever thought it.

Impossible that I hadn't meant it.

“What?” he asked, and for a second his eyes were wide and his face was more stricken than angry.

“I'm sorry,” I said, and I was, sorrier than I could ever express. Shame burned in my cheeks now instead of anger. “I'm sorry I said that. It's not true.”

“I know it's not true,” he said, and his voice rose into a higher register. “You screwed up your own life.” He pointed a finger. “You did it. You were so hot to get into each other's pants that you didn't think about anything else, did you? You didn't think about me, didn't think about how my whole life people would talk, point their fingers.”

“No,” I said, and the fireball was gone, and I suddenly felt very tired and very old. “We didn't think at all.” I turned to go.

“You didn't want me, did you?”

I looked back at him. His gaze was direct, piercing, and I was not used to it, not from this young man who hadn't met my eyes for what may have been years. I wished I could lie, tell him that I had been excited, tell him that I looked forward to his birth with the anticipation shown by the shepherds in Judea.

But that was a lie.

“No,” I said. “Not when your mom first told me. I had other plans.”

He smiled now, a horrid smile, maybe because for the first time he had found a place of congruence with me. “I guess you thought that your life was just totally screwed.” He didn't say this, exactly; he actually used that same vile word, and while normally I would have told him that such language was not welcome around me, it seemed like the least important thing in the world at the moment.

“Yes,” I said. It was true. “That's what I thought then.”

“And what do you think now?”

I took a deep breath. “I think it all turned out for the best.”

He shook his head, smiled as though I amused him. “That's pretty weak, Dad.”

I felt a momentary smolder at this, but it was quickly gone. It
was
pretty weak. Still, I had to say something. “This is the only life I'm going to get, far as I know. And I did get something good out of it, after all. I got this family.” I actually managed something like a smile. “I got you.”

He was unconvinced. Maybe what I had to say didn't matter; maybe he'd had this conversation or one like it in his head so many times that now he couldn't hear anyone else.

“You would have been happier without me,” he said.

I put my hand on his arm again as he prepared to close the door, but gently this time. “I thought so once. Not now.”

He shrugged off my hand and shifted into reverse.

“Michael, please don't go,” I said, and again felt shame washing through my veins, a father reduced to pleading—pleading—with his son.

He looked at me, and now there was nothing in that gaze, not anger or fear or even pity; there was just nothing, like he was looking at a tree or a mailbox.

I stepped—almost fell—away from the truck, and Michael slammed the door shut and sped off. At the end of the driveway, his truck became a wispy cloud of dust rising from the road to town.

I walked to the barn, climbed up into the bales about twenty feet off the floor, and leaned back on one, the hay bristling against my back and neck, the smell of dust and decay strong in my nostrils. The smell brought to mind another fall afternoon I'd sat in this barn.

Years back, Michael had decided to stop playing junior high basketball. He wasn't good at it; he'd gotten other things from his parents besides athletic skill, I guess, but still it hurt me to hear him say he was giving it up. “I hate it,” he had said then, his lip curled with contempt. “I think it's a stupid game.” And nothing I could say in the next few days could convince him to just have fun with it. He turned his head away, walked back into his room, and turned up his heavy metal.

But there was an afternoon a week or so later when I had pulled the truck around back of the barn to load some hay, and I heard the sound of the ball bouncing on the slab of concrete my father had poured as a makeshift basketball court. I walked through the back of the barn and stopped far enough inside that I couldn't be seen. I sat down on a bale of hay and just watched as Michael shot and missed, shot and missed, his form awkward and ugly. He stood there at the free throw line, missing shot after shot, and he was sobbing like his heart would break.

I can't say for sure why he was shooting baskets when he thought I wasn't around any more than I can say why it made him so sad that he was no good at it. All I really knew was this: I had struggled to love Michael since the day he was born, and maybe I didn't do such a good job of hiding it. At the very least, he must have noticed that we didn't have much in common. Maybe Michael thought I would love him more if he were a basketball player.

Sad.

What's even sadder is that he was probably right.

After awhile, he checked his watch and dragged himself off toward the house, the ball bouncing behind him. And I just sat there in the hay and watched him go.

Michael probably didn't remember that afternoon. But I always would, and I had always kicked myself for not talking to him, for not trying to build some kind of bridge between us.

It was hard, and never got easier. How could people so alike not understand each other in the least?

Did he think he was the only one who had ever had the desire to get in his truck and run?

I had had my share of those impulses over the years: to stop farming and find a vocation, discover what I could have made of myself; to find out whether Samantha still felt any of the things that had led us once to talk about a life together; to leave Michelle and the kids and a twenty-year accumulation of responsibility, disappear forever, become an unsolved mystery.

But I never acted on any of those temptations. Any of them. Whatever else I was or had done, whatever words I might have used to describe myself—disappointed, stolid, intelligent, quiet—the words I most wanted to apply to myself were simply these: decent and honorable. At times in my life, that decency had seemed an almost intolerable weight to bear, but who knows? Maybe at other times, without my knowing it, it may have buoyed me up, floated me across raging rivers that otherwise might have dragged me under.

Maybe in trying to do what I believed to be the right thing, I had actually done the right thing, at least on occasion.

This, at least, was my fervent hope.

When I heard Michelle calling from the house, I got down from my perch in the hay. I walked across the yard to the patio, where she stood looking down at the charcoal, now nicely white.

“I think it's ready, J. J.,” she said.

“He left,” I said, and my voice broke. Michelle put her arms around me, and I bit my lip to keep from betraying anything else.

“I know,” she said. “I'll bring the steaks out.” And she pulled back to look at me, and I could see the sadness—my sadness—reflected in her eyes. But she brought out the T-bones on the platter where I'd laid them out after rubbing them with cracked pepper and I put them on the grill, and you know what?

The sound of them sizzling and the smell rising up with the smoke didn't just make me hungry. They were some of the best steaks I ever ate.

Lauren's cake was pretty good too.

I could almost feel glad there was more left for the rest of us.

Almost.

October 7, 1994

Miss Candace Tilden
P.O. Box 97443
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87106-7443

Dear Candy,

Hey, kid! How goes it? Know you're setting the curve in your classes. You always do. What's your favorite this semester?

Are you still seeing Arturo? Is it still serious? More importantly, have you told Dad about him yet? You know you're going to have to one of these days. You can't just show up on their doorstep and say, “Hi, this is going to be your new son-in-law,” although come to think of it, that's just about what Michelle and I had to do. But one such trauma in your parents' lives is probably enough, so avoid that method if you possibly can. See if you can't find a way to introduce him into conversation; maybe they'll surprise us.

I like to hear you talk about him, by the way. It seems like I can hear in your voice what he means to you. I can hear pride and affection and—if you'll permit the observation—passion. Just be smart, and be prepared. I don't begrudge you your fun, God knows. Just be careful.

Have you been out hiking lately? I also like the way you talk about those Sandia Mountains. It makes me want to hop in the truck and head out your way. Maybe someday I will.

Mom and Dad seem to be feeling okay, if you can trust them. How did they look when you saw them last? Let me know if they're not giving me the whole truth.

Michael has moved into some new transitional phase, and we're not speaking just now. If you can, will you call and check on him for me so I know he's okay? I think he just might talk to you.

In any case, call or write soon. Your big brother always loves to hear from you and know that you're all right.

Love,
John