The House of Daniel (41 page)

“Boy, that guy sounds like he knows you,” Harv said when old Leather Lungs wouldn't shut up no matter what.

“And loves you,” Wes added. I laughed—more than he must've figured the joke deserved. But it tickled my funny bone.

The Chinooks got a run back in the fifth. The loudmouth did everything but bang on a big bass drum. They might've plated more, only I ran down a long line drive. The guy in the stand hadn't used up all his bad names. He found some new ones, just for me.

He found some more when I walked, swiped a bag, and scored in the seventh. We got a couple of more then, and another two in the eighth. A Chinook hit one over the center-field fence in the bottom of the eighth. The way it would have in Wenatchee, that sounds more impressive than it was. The fan with the big trap kept right on rooting.

It didn't help. They tried a ninth-inning rally, but that fell short. We came out on top, 6-4. I ran in from right as fast as I could. I didn't think the loudmouth would move real quick himself, not after all that beer, but you never could tell.

Everybody was staring at me as I hustled over by the third-base dugout. Wes and Eddie and Harv must have figured I wanted to punch out that guy. Not exactly. “Don't go!” I yelled at him. “You hear me, Pa? Don't you go!”

 

(XVIII)

He'd started up the steps, half a dozen rows toward the way out. Now he stopped and turned and looked me over. I wasn't sure he'd recognize me. He'd never seen me with whiskers before (he had some of his own, too, but just the I-didn't-shave-the-past-couple-of-days kind). And he'd been drinking all through the game, at least—I didn't know how long a running start he'd had before it.

“Jack?” he said while people heading to the exit tramped past him. “Is that you, boy?”

“It's me, all right.” Hearing my own name felt funny. The House of Daniel guys, they called me Snake most of the time, and I was getting used to it. Hearing Pa's voice again, that felt stranger yet. It had all through the game. I'd known it right away, even if I hadn't heard it for years. It's not the kind of thing you're ever likely to forget.

He started coming down the stairs, toward me. “What the devil you doing here, Jack?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” I said. “I thought you were in California.”

“I was for a while, over near Eureka,” he answered. I didn't know then where Eureka was; I've found out since. Pa went on, “Went up into Oregon, and then up here. Don't quite know how I got to be a lumberjack, but I did. It ain't a bad way to make some money, and there's lots of chances for jobs.”

“If you say so.” I wondered how they liked him crocked in the woods. Because he
would
drink. I knew that. He'd been drinking at least since Ma died. Maybe before then, too—I can't remember so far back. I asked him, “Have the day off today?”

He nodded. “Uh-huh—the whole weekend.” I'd forgotten it was Saturday. When you were on the road, each day blurred into the next. He went on, “Wanted t'come out an' see the Chinooks play the House of Daniel. Never reckoned I'd be watching my own kid.” He eyed me. “You look peculiar with a beard.”

“It's part of the uniform, like,” I answered. And it was, just as much as our spikes or the roaring lions on our shirts. We were the baseball team with the beards. The beards and the hair were what people knew us by.

From behind me, Eddie said, “This guy here is really your dad, Snake—uh, Jack?”

“That's right.” I looked around. Half the team had gathered there. Having somebody they played ball with run into his old man out of the blue wasn't something that happened every day, or even every week. “This is my pa, Clayton Spivey. Pa, these're Eddie Lelivelt and Wes Petersen and Frank Carlisle and Amos Funkenstein.”

“How about that?” Pa said. “How'd you get to play on a hot team like this, anyways? I didn't reckon you were that good.”

“Thanks a bunch,” I told him. He'd sure poured down enough so he didn't care what came out of his mouth. Trouble was, that didn't mean he had it wrong. I still wasn't sure I was good enough to stick with the House of Daniel.

Harv came over, too, so I introduced him and my pa. Harv said, “After we clean up, we're gonna have some supper. If you want to come along, Mr. Spivey, we'd be glad to have you.”

I kinda wondered about that; Pa wasn't the sort who grew on you when you knew him longer. Before I could say anything, though, or even figure out what I should say, my father answered, “I dunno…” I understood what that little whine meant. I'd heard him sound that way when folks in Enid were dunning him. It meant he was busted, flat, broke, skint.

“I'll spring, Pa,” I said.

Well, that put his nose out of joint. I might have known it would. “So you're a rich man now with your baseball, huh?” he said.

I laughed. I couldn't help it. And all the House of Daniel guys standing in back of me, they laughed, too. How could you do anything else? Nobody gets rich playing semipro ball. Nobody. Dang few—I mean
dang
few—make any kind of living at it. I knew how lucky I was to manage that much.

The laughs only made him huffier. I might have known they would. “I don't aim to be any kind of bother,” he said. Even drunk, he was proud, in his way. Maybe I get it from him. I don't know. How can you know something like that?

“Okey-doke,” I said. “Tell you what, Pa. I saw some kind of joint over on Girard Street, maybe a block from here. Let's you and me go there by our lonesome. I can walk back to the boarding house after we eat. I know where it's at.” Talking with him, more Oklahoma came out than it did with the team.

He finally decided that was all right. I cleaned up under Battersby Park and got back into my street clothes. Eddie took charge of my baseball stuff. That was nice of him. “Go on,” he told me. “How often do you get the chance to spend some time with your father?”

“It's been a while, sure enough,” I said. “Now I have to work out whether I want to.”

Pa waited out front, near the ticket booths. He'd got hold of another bottle of beer from somewhere. He killed it when I came up to him, and tossed the dead soldier in a trash can. “Well, boy, let's get going,” he said.

He ordered stuffed cabbage at that place I'd seen. I had liver and onions. He ordered a beer, too. So did I. The food came quick enough. It was … food. Not terrible, not worth remembering. He shoveled it in. He didn't talk.

After a bit, I did: “How come, Pa?”

“How come what?”

“How come what?” That made me mad. “How come you went and disappeared? That's how come what!”

He took a pull at his Olympia. “'Cause I couldn't stand that stinking shack or that stinking town one more minute, that's how come. Plain enough for you, sonny boy? You didn't need me no more. You were old enough to get by on your own. You must've been, hey? You went and did it.”

I bit down hard on that one. Except 'cause he took all the money in the place, I hadn't been any too sorry he was gone. Still … “You could've let me know where you went. Sent a CC message or had somebody write a card for you. Something.”

“Like you cared,” he said. I bit down hard on that, too. What was he, back in Enid? A no-account town drunk. I knew it. So did he.

One more time, though—still … “You're my flesh and blood. You're about what there is of it. And are you so much better off out here?”

That made him laugh. It was a nasty laugh, not one I cared to listen to. “Oh, you bet I am!” he said. “There, I'd been worthless Clay Spivey since I was twelve years old. Everybody had me tagged. Here, half the loggers are on the run from crap like that. And you've got your high and mighty nose in the air on account of I drink some? Oh, yes, you do—I can see it. But next to a lot of the fellas I crew with, I'm temperance. And you can take that to church, 'cause it's the Gospel truth!”

He meant it. He was too sore not to mean it. “Lord help 'em, in that case,” I said.

“Lord helps him who helps himself.” He waved to the fella in the greasy apron behind the counter for another bottle of beer.

I'd wondered if he would want to know about what had gone on in Enid since he pulled up stakes. He didn't care. As far as he was concerned, he'd made a clean break. As far as he was concerned, he'd made a clean break with me, too. It was odd that we'd run across each other, and kind of funny, but that was all it was to him.

Was it that way to me? The longer we sat across from each other, the more I saw it would have to be. “Well, I'm glad I got you here for a supper, anyways,” I told him: a last try.

“Yeah, you got me, and a hell of a git you got,” he said. It wasn't the kind of father-son reunion they put in stories and films. I wanted it to be. Some of me did, anyhow. But it just wasn't.

“Here.” I put money on the table for both of us. “I better get back to that boarding house. We'll be heading … wherever we're heading pretty early tomorrow mornin'.”

“Thanks,” Pa said. “I'll do the buying next time we meet up.”

“Sure.” I pushed back my chair and stood up. I held out my hand. Pa shook it. I turned around and went on out. I haven't seen him since.

*   *   *

I had a ways to walk before I got to the boarding house. Bellingham's not the big city, but it's no tiny little town, either. It's the biggest place north of Seattle and the towns around there.

Because it was so far north, summer sundown came late. Sunlight still slanted across the sky while I mooched along. I wouldn't have to worry about vampires jumping out at me, not unless I was walking the wrong way and had to waste a lot of time backtracking. And I wasn't. That was good, because I had plenty of other things on my mind. One of those critters could've sunk his teeth into my neck before I even noticed he was around.

There were a lot of things I'd wanted to tell Pa: things I'd done, things I'd seen, things I'd thought, things I'd felt. But to tell him things like that, I needed him to be the kind of man who cared about them. I needed him to be the kind of man who didn't walk out the door without telling me he was leaving.

He wasn't that kind of man. He never had been. He never would be. He didn't give a damn. He never was gonna give a damn. And I couldn't do one thing about it.

To be fair, he didn't look for me to give a damn about him, either. I wanted to, but how could I when he pushed me away as hard as he could without using his arms? There was nothing between us. There never had been, not since I was tiny. There wouldn't be. It wasn't over. How can something be over when it doesn't start?

Shadows kept getting longer, but the sun's gotta be up to cast shadows. I almost would've welcomed a vampire, if I saw it before it got me. It would've given me something to fight, and I was looking for something to fight just then.

Maybe, instead of buying Pa supper, I should've punched him in the nose. That might've got through to him. Nothing I said to him while we were eating did—I'll tell you that. What can you do? Sometimes things don't work out the way you imagine they might. Then you're stuck with it. There I was, walking through Bellingham, stuck with it.

The rest of the guys were already back at the place when I finally got there. Some of them had already gone to bed. Some were sitting around in the parlor, looking at papers or magazines or playing hearts.

Wes looked up from his cards. “How'd it go, Snake?”

I'd known he would ask, or somebody would. I kind of spread my hands. “It didn't.” I stopped for a second, trying to find a way to put it. “The bridge is out.”

“There's no there there,” Wes said. “Somebody said that about somewhere or other. It stuck in my head. I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean, but it sounds like it oughta mean something.”

“It does, doesn't it?” I thought about it. Then I nodded. “It's pretty close. There's no connection between me and him, for sure.”

“That's too bad. That's a crying shame, as a matter of fact,” Wes said. “Long as you've got a father, you ought to have one who's worth the paper he's printed on.”

“It's no big surprise,” I said. “I wish he was different, but he ain't. He'll do whatever he pleases, and he won't think about me or anybody else before he does.”

“Almost better to have no father at all than to have one like that,” Wes said.

I won't try and tell you the same thought hadn't crossed my mind, because it had. It's a miserable thing to think, a miserable thing to say, about the fella who's half the reason you're in the world at all. But what can you do? Things happen the way they happen, not the way the folks they happen to wish they would. Everybody would be a lot happier if that worked the other way round.

All I could do there in the parlor was shrug. “I wish things were different,” I said. “I won't try and tell you anything else. But at least now I've got some answers instead of questions. They may not be the answers I want, but I've got 'em. Did Harv tell you guys where we're going next?”

“Down to Tacoma,” Wes answered. “We might not go there if Seattle was in town, but they're on the road. Me, I think Tacoma'd be worth stopping at even if the Indians were at home. It's Seattle's kid brother, and it doesn't like the big city up the road even a little bit.”

I could laugh when I wasn't thinking about Pa. “Where have we seen that before?” I said.

“Only everywhere,” Wes answered, and that was about the size of it.

*   *   *

Tacoma's pretty near the size of Spokane. Wes put it just right: that's the right size to remind it it's not nearly as big or as important as Seattle right next door. Tacoma is a port, a lumber town, a fishing town, a railroad town, and a town that works metal. One great big smelter has a tall, tall stack that spits out a smoke trail you can see for miles.