Unpossible (23 page)

"Didn’t think so."

Paxton crossed the two-lane bridge and then slowed as he came into town, though that was too big a word for the short strip of buildings. Half of them were boarded up, and the others—the Gas-n-Go, the Power Rental, the Icee Freeze—looked slump-shouldered and tired.

He parked outside the Bigler’s Grocery. Only four other cars in the lot. He leaned against the roof of his car for a moment, breathing in, breathing out. He felt not so much hung over as wrung out. No drink or drug had ever hit him that hard, that fast.

Inside the store he tried to move quickly, filling up his cart with canned goods and frozen dinners, anything his father could make in a microwave, anything that would keep.

He saw Jo Lynn before she saw him, and turned down another aisle. He walked quickly, his chest suddenly tight. Then he heard light steps behind him and she said, "P.K.?"

P.K. Preacher’s Kid. Nobody had called him that since he left Switchcreek.

He turned, putting on a relaxed smile. "Hey, Jo." She looked the same. A dozen years, ten extra pounds, the shitty polyester Bigler’s smock—none of it made a difference. Still beautiful.

"What are you doing here?" she said. "Visiting?"

"Just for a couple days."

They talked for five minutes. He memorized everything she asked him and instantly forgot his answers. He looked at her tiny feet in the cheap black shoes, at the ring on her finger. He remembered a day a few months before he left town, lying in the grass on the hill below the cemetery, looking up at her. She stood with her legs apart, the light making a scrim of her pale yellow sundress, her thighs in shadow. She reached up to her shoulder, and that moment—the moment the spaghetti strap slipped from her sunburned shoulder—he’d felt a white blast of lust that had never been matched in his life, before or since.

Jo pursed her lips, waiting. She’d asked him about his father.

"He’s doing fine. Well, no, he’s not actually. He’s not been taking care of himself."

Her eyes went sad. Harlan had been her pastor since she was a baby, and she’d refused to think badly of him even when he was trying to break them up, even when he showed her the stripes Harlan had laid across his back with his leather belt. "I’ve been worried about him since he left the church," she said. "I’m glad you’re there for him."

"I’m hardly doing anything," he said. Truth that sounded like false modesty—a special class of lie. "Listen, Jo ... "

This was the moment he’d run through his head on a thousand nights, the 3 a.m. rehearsals that kept him from sleep. In the first few years after he left, he’d called her house countless times and hung up before anyone could answer. He’d written a hundred letters that hadn’t gone further than a sentence.

She looked at him, and he said, "It was good seeing you. I better go, though. He’s waiting for me."

"Tell him I’m praying for him." She touched his arm. "And you too, P.K."

He forced a laugh. "I’ll take all the help I can get."

The warmth of her fingers lingered on his skin.

He took the long way home, past the elementary school, over the single-lane bridge to Piney Level road, and on toward the church where his father had been pastor, the church he’d grown up in. When he rolled past it he realized where he was really going.

He told himself he’d just drive by, look at the house and move on. He needed to get the groceries home. Then he was pulling into the long driveway of Uncle Lem’s house.

His great uncle and Vonda lived in a tin-roofed framehouse cut into the side of the hill, the red clay rising up like a tidal wave behind it. Between him and the house was a cement patch holding half a dozen vehicles, a couple late models but most of them beaters. Out in the fields to his left, a few more junkers—an El Camino, a blue pickup, a van-sized RV—huddled beside the gray, knock-kneed barn, drowning in tall grass.

Pax was halfway to the screen porch when a tall, beefy kid, maybe 18 years old, banged through the door and stood at the top of the step. "Back," he said. "Back to your car."

He was a big, block-faced kid, shirtless, with a pale chest and a whiter belly. He wore long, Vols-orange basketball shorts and spotless white athletic shoes. In his left hand was a lime-green aluminum baseball bat.

Pax stopped, held up his hands. "I’m Paxton Martin," he said. "Harlan’s son." He tried to think who this kid could be. Too young to be Vonda’s son. Her grandson, then? A complete stranger?

"Grandma’s not here," the kid said. His face and chest shone with sweat, as if he’d been working out inside the old house. "You better leave now."

"Who are you—Clete? Bonnie’s boy?"

"Travis. Clete’s my brother."

"We’re cousins, then. Your grandmother Vonda’s my second cousin, so you’re ... " Shit. Gazillionth cousin? Thug twice removed?

"I’ll tell her you called," Travis said.

Pax nodded toward the window at the left side of the house, where his uncle’s bedroom used to be. "I just came to see Uncle Lem. I’m only—Jesus!"

Travis jumped the two steps and landed with the bat raised. Paxton backpedaled. "What the hell’s the matter with you!"

Travis swung hard but didn’t step into it, not really trying to connect. The brush back. "God damn vampire," the boy said, and took another step forward, cocked the bat. "God damn junkie ... "

Pax backed up fast. He refused to turn and run, not for this chubby punk. The kid let him climb into his car, and when Pax drove away he looked in his rearview mirror and the boy was standing at the end of the driveway, the bat in his hands, like a God damn caveman.

His father sat on the couch, snoring in front of the TV, mouth open, jowls sagging. Deflated again. The sight stopped him, and something in his chest twisted like an old wound.

Let him sleep, Pax thought. He carried the groceries into the kitchen and began putting things away. God, the mess. Maybe it was a mistake to bring in fresh food with the kitchen so filthy. He opened the windows, turned on all the lights. Ten years in the restaurant business, working every position from dishwasher to waiter to line cook, had inured him to vile substances that bred in the dark. He cleared the counters and the refrigerator, threw out everything that was remotely suspicious, filling two garbage bags, working as quietly as he could so that he wouldn’t wake his father. Then he started pulling dishes from the sink and stacking them on the counter.

At the bottom of the sink he found a stubbed out cigarette. He picked it up, pinched the damp thing between his fingers. His father had never smoked a day in his life.

He thought he heard a phone ringing. He threw away the cigarette and went into the living room, where the TV and his father’s snores drowned out everything. He turned off the TV, then tracked the faint noise to his father’s bedroom. The ringing stopped as he walked in.

The room looked much as it had a dozen years before: a long, mirrored bureau, wood veneer bedside tables, the long gauzy drapes his mother had liked. The bed was unmade, the bedclothes pushed against the wall. The box spring had been lifted off the frame and reinforced by a row of 2x4’s, but his father’s weight had still pressed a hollow into the mattress.

Pax found the phone jack in the wall and followed the cord to a pile of laundry. If his father had wanted to turn off the phone he could have just yanked the cord. Or maybe he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to plug it back in. Pax unplugged it and carried the cord and receiver to the living room.

His father was staring at the blank TV screen. "I was watching that," he said.

"Tell me the name of your doctor, Harlan."

Harlan closed his eyes.

"If you don’t tell me, I’m just going to call one at random." Pax went to the wall and squatted to plug in the phone. "There’ve been people in the house, too. You know that, right?"

"Of course I know it. Now help me up." He raised his arms like a child.

"Was it Vonda?" She wants to milk me like a cow. "Vonda or her grandson?"

"Up," he said.

Pax stepped in front of him. His father was just so damn big. Pulling him upright, Pax realized, would be an engineering problem, an exercise in mechanics and leverage. He straddled one of his father’s legs and got a hand under each arm. "Ready?" he said.

Pax braced his feet and leaned back. His father held onto him, then with a lurch rose from the couch. For a moment they held each others’ arms like dance partners: London Bridge is Falling Down. He was shorter than Pax remembered. Or maybe his spine was compressing, fat and gravity conspiring to mold him into a sphere.

His father looked up at him and laughed. "He arose!" Like that his mood had lightened. He moved slowly toward the bathroom, planting each huge foot a few inches in front of the other.

Pax made them a supper of canned spaghetti and afterward they sat together on the couch, watching TV, the way they had after Mom died—until the fighting started and it became impossible for them to be in the same room, the same town, and finally, the same state. They talked only during the commercials and said nothing of consequence. Pax did not bring up the way his father had beat him for any infraction. Harlan did not bring up how Paxton had run around, drinking and smoking dope and getting girls pregnant, bringing shame to the preacher’s house.

Neither of them brought up Mom.

His father favored the Discovery Channel. Animals killing animals, raising animal babies. Funny, Pax thought, how they showed so much of the killing but so little of the screwing. Pax was bored and anxious, irritated by the smell of his father that covered them like a tent, and growing impatient because he knew the next fight would be coming—or rather, the old one would resume. But he sat there until the end of the fucking program, so he could check off another point in his Dutiful Son column. When I leave, he thought, Harlan won’t be able to say I didn’t help him. He won’t be able to say I didn’t try.

"I know you’re going home in the morning," his father said. His voice was slow, as if he were falling asleep.

"I’ve got to work," Pax said. At a shitty job that he would have been happy to quit. But a job.

His father nodded. "Do you have a girlfriend?" When Pax didn’t immediately answer he said, "You’re not married, are you? You don’t have children?"