Into the Web (12 page)

Hopper shook his head. “That’s when your daddy smarted off.”

“And he didn’t stop with that, your daddy.” Hopper’s face was fixed in amazement. “He didn’t stop. The people in the store heard it all.”

“I guess that’s when Porterfield noticed how everybody had stopped what they was doing, how they was watching all this. That’s when he grabbed your daddy by the arm, but your daddy pulled his arm right out of the sheriff’s grip and said some more.”

In my mind I saw Porterfield’s stony glare, the subtle nod he made, then the other two men as they closed in on my father.

“Mr. Warren started rushing everybody out of the store, telling them that he was closing up for a few minutes.”

By then they’d surrounded my father, Hopper told me, three gigantic men, peering down at a small bantam rooster of a boy.

“Once Mr. Warren had gotten everybody out of the store, Porterfield and the others took your daddy to a back room,” Hopper said.

It came to me in a nightmarish vision, my father dragged into a back room, tormented with jokes and
jibes, his slight, wiry frame shoved up against a wall, faces pressed near his, screaming taunts, then the eerie silence before the violence began. I could scarcely imagine how terrified he must have been, how fully his terror must have sucked the life-force out of him, reduced him to a pile of spit and blood faster than he could possibly have dreamed it before the beating began, his swollen eyes barely able to make out the polished shoes of the men who towered over him when it was over, laughing as they poked the tips of their boots at his ribs, trying to rouse him just enough to have another go, puffing blue smoke into the fetid air, finally giving up, filing out.

“They all come out a few minutes later. People seen one of the deputies flicking his hand, like it was numb. Porterfield had pulled his jacket off, rolled up his sleeves. He was dabbing at a stain on his shirt with a handkerchief. They heard something too, the people outside. Heard Porterfield look back into the store, to where Mr. Warren was still settin’ at the counter. Heard him say something like ‘Don’t worry, Henry, that boy’s lovin’ days are over.” He shrugged. “People never was clear on why they done it to him,” Hopper told me. “I mean, he didn’t steal nothing. Wasn’t bothering nobody in the store.”

Wallace Porterfield’s voice sounded like a heavy bell in my mind:
Don’t worry, Henry, that boy’s loving days are over.
“Deidre,” I said almost to myself. “It was over Henry Warren’s daughter.”

Hopper shook his head. “Well, if that’s so, he sure must have cared a whole lot about that girl to take a beating like that.”

“Yes, he did,” I said softly, imagining how broken my
father must have been, groaning on the floor as Wallace Porterfield stood over him, and yet able, too, to imagine him rising from that same assault, determined and unbowed, something at the fleshy core of him turning into steel. “But I’m still surprised it stopped him from seeing her.”

Hopper scratched at his jaw. “Well, he didn’t have no chance to see her. ’Cause Mr. Warren shipped her off not long after that. Out of Kingdom County. To one of them schools they got up north. You know, where kids live at school.” He shrugged. “Anyway, she never come back to Waylord. Nor Kingdom County neither, far as I know. Nobody never seen her around here again.”

I saw her, a teenage girl hustled into the back of a car, her father at the wheel, starting the engine, pulling away, Deidre glancing back toward a town she’d never see again, hills in the distance where a boy lay half dead in a mountain hovel, battered, nearly broken, a boy whose loving days, at her departure, were surely and forever over.

So that was it, I thought as I walked down the stairs to my car a few minutes later. I’d solved the mystery of my father’s unhappiness, found the lost love for which he’d pined through all the years. He’d loved Deidre Warren and for her sake had taken a beating that I knew in the end would not have stopped him, something Henry Warren must have known as well, something Wallace Porterfield, for all his confidence in violent intimidation, must ultimately have told him.
There’s no stopping that boy
, so that they’d finally spirited Deidre Warren away, taken her to where my father, for all the determination of his will, would never be able to reach her.

For a very brief moment, I reveled in the solution to my father’s mystery, pleased, more or less intellectually, to have uncovered it. Then, like an intruder in the night, something dark encroached upon my reverie, the terrible truth that that long-ago beating had not only marked my father, wounded and distorted him, but that ultimately it had done the same to our relationship. For how cowardly and pathetic he must have viewed my response to Porterfield’s son many years later, the way I’d done nothing in the face of the insult he’d shouted at Lila on the mountain road. And for all its horror and devastation, how strangely heroic my father have must have seen Archie’s doomed attempt to run away with Gloria Kellogg.

So now I knew why, even in my adulthood, I had never seemed a man to my father. It was not my education or my job that condemned me. It was the fact that at the critical moment I had not fought for love, but had merely turned away, let Lonnie Porterfield’s insult stand, even made up a limp excuse for his cruelty,
He was young, Dad. He was drunk
, then done nothing to avenge what he had said to Lila, the rape his words must have seemed to her, and by that miserable weakness and failure marked myself forever as worthless.

That you can never gain your father’s admiration, nor even his respect, is the darkest thing a son may know, and as I headed down the mountain that afternoon, I knew it to the full. I might escape the iron grip of Waylord, become in all worlds renowned, but
Pitiful, Roy, pitiful
was an indictment I would never be able to escape.

L
ife deals the cards facedown.

That was a phrase that often returned to me during the next weeks of that summer.

It was my freshman English teacher who’d said it in class one day. What do all writers eventually tell us, he’d asked, then stared out over his students, a field of blank faces. Simply this, he said, answering his own question: life deals the cards facedown.

So much so, as I later learned, that even as the cards are turned, some part remains hidden, like the half-smile on the jack of hearts.

For nearly six weeks after leaving the Waylord mine that afternoon I occupied myself almost exclusively in the daily physical tasks of caring for my father-cleaning,
washing, chores that used up time and kept me out of his sight. I cooked what he called his “three squares,” and took them to his room, where he ate alone, if he ate, the plate in his lap, the television blaring. As often as possible I took my own meals outside the house, usually at the Crispy Cone in Kingdom City. When at home I sequestered myself in my room, the door closed, books scattered about, providing another world into which I immediately retreated at the sound of my father’s tread outside my door.

I felt no pity for him. I knew what he thought of me, and so I returned a judgment just as harsh, brooded on how little he’d made of his life, how dry and loveless he was, a crude old man who deserved even less than he’d gotten. It is a freezing thing to know that you can never rise in your parents’ estimation, that something at the very core of you fills them with contempt, and after Waylord I lived in that icy world, giving my father as little as I could, caring for him as I would have cared for a dog, though with less affection, and no joy, waiting in anxious anticipation for his approaching death.

Even when we talked, I kept our conversation limited to the most inconsequential matters. Archie disappeared from my conversation, as did my mother. Waylord vanished as well. There was no more talk of Lila. Betty Cutler ceased to be, along with Deidre Warren. Since I was no longer involved with Lonnie Porterfield, he also fell out of our discourse, along with his father, though I sometimes saw them both, Lonnie striding down the main street of Kingdom City, the old sheriff seated like an aging potentate beneath the large oak that shaded his vast lawn.

I had banished all these people from my life, banished them along with my father, determined that I would never again let any one of them cast even the most trivial judgment on my character or the nature of my life. I wanted to erase them like chalk from a board. For a time I even believed I had.

Then, on a bright Sunday morning, when I was sitting in my bed, I heard my father tramp down the corridor, and seconds later the rap of his knuckles on my door.

“Come in,” I said dryly.

The door opened, and to my astonishment, he stood before me, fully dressed in a shiny black suit, shaved for the first time in more than a week, his sagging face slick and glistening in the morning light, his body reeking of aftershave.

“Juanita died,” my father said in a tone that was incongruously cheerful. “You know, that old Indian up in Waylord.”

“Juanita Her-Many-Horses,” I said, remembering the last time I’d seen her, a ragged old lady seated on cinder blocks, fanning herself with a mortuary fan.

“That’s the one. Found her yesterday. Laying in a pigpen. Been there for days. Damn old pig ate some of her.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Heard it on the radio,” my father answered. “They’re burying her today. Had to do it fast, I guess, ’Cause of the shape she was in.” He ran his fingers down the lapel of his jacket. “Figured I’d spruce up and go to the funeral.”

He made a slow turn, like an aged dancer, shrunken
but not entirely graceless in his scarecrow suit. “What do you think?”

When I didn’t answer, he cocked his head to the left, glimpsed himself in the mirror on my bureau, regarded himself approvingly. “They’s always lots a females at a funeral, you know. I’m not that bad-looking for a feller that’s dying.” He fingered the cracked brown belt that held his trousers. “Fact is, that’s the best thing about me. From a woman’s point of view, I mean. That I ain’t gonna be around that long.”

“You’re not serious, are you?”

He laughed. “Not about courting,” he said lightly, his tone still oddly bright. “But I’d like to go to Juanita’s funeral.”

“I didn’t think you knew her.”

“I didn’t know her all that well,” he admitted, “but I thought I might see Betty Cutler. They was close, her and Juanita. She’ll be at Juanita’s funeral. Figured I’d say hi, you know, one last time.” His eyes glinted softly, and in them I could see the fading sunlight of his days. “You’d drive me up there if I asked you to, wouldn’t you, Roy?”

I had no desire to return to Waylord, to see Betty Cutler or Lila, and yet, for the first time in weeks, I did feel something, though perhaps it was nothing more than acknowledgment of the inexplicable hold our fathers have over us no matter how much we wish to escape it.

“All right,” I said with a shrug. “I’ll drive you up there.”

“Funeral’s at eleven,” he told me. “We should probably be on the way by ten.”

He turned to leave the room, then stopped, and shifted around to face me once again. “I done something, you know. Done it this morning while you was sleeping. Something I ’spect you might be interested in. Come here, I’ll show you.”

I reluctantly rose from my bed and followed him.

“There it is,” he said when we reached the kitchen.

He pointed to a gallon jug on the table. At the bottom of the jug, several cockroaches spun about madly, antennae frantically probing the glass wall, seeking a way out.

“I’m starting with five of them,” my father said. “If I outlive all five, then I’ll get me some more.” He saw the puzzled look on my face. “It’s like an experiment,” he explained. “Science.” He picked up the jug and turned it toward me. “See, I poked airholes in the lid there. Sprinkled sugar and water on the bottom of the jar. Figured that ought to give them enough to eat and drink. You know, for a normal life.”

“A normal life? In a jar?”

“Well, it ain’t no better for them on the outside. Matter of fact, it’s probably a lot worse. What with birds after them all the time, and snakes. Hell, they don’t have to worry about them things inside the jar.”

“They’re insects, Dad. I don’t think
worry
enters into it.”

He returned the jug to its place on top of the refrigerator. “Anyway, I’m gonna keep ’em in the shade, make ’em nice and comfortable. It’s cool up there. They’ll enjoy it. Living in that jar.”

“What’s this all about, Dad? This experiment?”

He looked curiously exposed, like someone who’d inadvertently revealed a small portion of himself that he’d
long kept concealed. “I had an interest, you know,” he said. “Things in general, I guess. Science, you might call it. Read a book or two about how things work. How things is put together. They had this school they was building just over the county line. Sort of a science school I heard about. So I figured I might-” He stopped, thought better of what he’d intended to say, then retreated into a grin and headed for the refrigerator. “Hell, I’ll set ’em loose,” he said.

“No, don’t,” I told him not only quickly but with a quickening, a small surge of feeling not for my father, but for the ghostly boy his words had conjured up. “We’ll keep an eye on them.”

“Conduct an experiment,” my father said, watching me closely. “Ain’t that how you say it?”

“Yes, it is.”

He smiled. “Okay, Roy, we’ll conduct us an experiment.”

I made bacon, eggs, even a portion of the red-eye gravy I remembered him liking when I was a boy. It was little more than grease and bits of bacon, but he sopped it up with relish.

“Mighty good,” he said after he’d raked his biscuit through the last of it. “Mighty good, Roy.” He wiped his mouth with the dishcloth he used for a napkin, downed what was left of his coffee, then pushed his plate away and got to his feet. “Let me know when you’re ready to go.”