Into the Web (6 page)

And with that I slammed out of the room, rushed down the corridor and out into the yard, and drew in a long, cleansing breath. I knew at that moment that if I could have willed my father dead, simply flipped that mythical switch, I would have done it.

But it’s a hard thing to wish your father dead. And so, with night steadily falling around me, I found myself listening as he dragged himself about his room, attentive to any sign of distress, any sign that he needed me. I knew I owed him nothing and yet I couldn’t stop myself from stealing a look through the window, a glimpse of his emaciated form, the right shoulder hunched, his arm bare in the sleeveless T-shirt, skin loose and flabby now, with nothing left of those rippling muscles that had dug coal and cut wood for over fifty years.

Such was the fate of sons, I thought as I continued to wait out the night, listening to the frail chirp of the crickets and katydids, the air cooling now as I tried to cool, watching mutely as the moon retraced its iron circuit, as tightly controlled as I strove to be, solitary and duty-bound, the man Lila Cutler had not made.

A
windblown summer rain swept in the next morning. I made coffee in my mother’s battered tin percolator. I remembered her at the stove in the early morning, her hair gathered in a bun behind her head, already an old woman, it seemed to me, though she’d not yet reached forty.

Even now, solitary though my life had been, I couldn’t imagine the cold depths of my mother’s loneliness, the deep isolation of living with a man who did not love her, and never had. I couldn’t imagine their courtship, my father as a young blade strutting before her, she the object of his pursuit, though I knew that there must have been such a moment in their lives. In fact, it seemed proof enough of a dry and loveless marriage that I could not imagine that earlier time, but only the spoiled residue of it, swollen and malodorous, a blackened fruit.

By the time I was eight, my father had seemed hardly a husband at all. He often took his evening meal in silence, then strode directly to the living room and sat chain-smoking through the night.

Mornings, he lingered in his bedroom as long as possible, opening and closing drawers like someone who couldn’t decide what to wear, though his wardrobe, if it could be called that, had never consisted of more than a few shirts and three or four pairs of work pants.

He’d never taken breakfast with the rest of us, but only grabbed a mug of coffee as he trudged past the kitchen table, then on through the front door, banging the screen behind him, and out to his pickup.

The groan of its engine, the scratch of the tires as he pulled away, had always been followed by a flood of relief that he was gone, taking the weight of his unhappiness with him like a heavy bag.

I had always been the most fully relieved at my father’s departure. More than our mother, and far more than Archie, I’d sensed the explosive charge buried deep within him. Perhaps what I’d felt was the sheer, horrific potential of my father for some sudden, annihilating violence, the fact that each day, each hour, seemed to exhaust him in the containment of it. Even in his silence, perhaps most of all in his silence, I sensed a dreadful peril, so that I often felt a wave of relief wash over me when he finally spoke, especially if his words were harsh. When he called me a sissy if I complained about some chore, marveled that I didn’t have to “set down” when I peed, or barked “Get off the rag, Roy” to shut me up, at all those times, no matter how stinging
the rebuke, his words always came to me like a stay of execution.

But it wasn’t my father’s long anger that returned to me most vividly as I resumed my boyhood chores that rainy morning. It was Archie, who had always been so much his opposite, a kind, sweet, gentle boy who’d wanted so little from life and gotten so much less.

While I swept and cleaned, he seemed near me, his schoolbooks held together by a worn leather belt as he headed for the yellow school bus on the road, the very bus on which, one bright September morning, he’d sat down next to a shy, slender girl with long blond hair, a girl who’d smiled at him as no girl ever had before, introduced herself,
Hi, my name is Gloria.

She’d just entered the high school that autumn and she must have seen Archie, tall and slender in his sixteenth year, as a worldly, experienced boy, one who knew the mysterious ways of Kingdom County High School, a boy bound for a diploma, while most all the others had dropped out of school as soon as the law allowed, and after that assumed the lives of their fathers as timbermen, quarrymen, haulers of pulpwood and scrap metal.

To such encouraging prospects, Archie had added his crooning and guitar picking, neither particularly good, but no doubt wondrous to such a girl as Gloria, sheltered as she had always been, crushed beneath the weight of her father’s low regard. “Before Archie saw her,” Lila said to me one night, “Gloria was invisible.”

But once seen, she rose like a comet in my brother’s eyes. For a moment I imagined a different fate than the one that had followed. What if Archie had never met
Gloria? Or what if he’d met her but things had never gone so terribly awry? What if, on that snowy night, I had not seen my brother’s car parked beside the dark hedge, then pulled up beside it?

“You made coffee yet?” my father called from behind the closed door of his bedroom, his voice like a hook, jerking me back to the present.

I poured the coffee into a mug and took it to him.

He was sitting in a chair covered with a ragged patchwork quilt. His hair shimmered in the morning light, curiously soft against the unforgiving features of his face.

“You hear that dog. Barked all damn night.” He took a greedy gulp, wiped his mouth. “Just like that old dog Archie had.”

In my mind I saw Scooter tied to a fence post at the edge of the pasture, his long tongue lolling in the morning heat, my father’s shadow flowing darkly over the grass, Archie and I following at his side.
We’re going hunting, boys.

“Gimme my gun,” he said now.

“You don’t have that gun anymore,” I said, remembering the old pistol he’d once had but which I knew must be locked in some storage area now, tagged and marked
Kellogg Murders.

“Sure I got a gun. Twenty-two rifle. In the closet there. Bought it a few months back. Gimme it.”

I didn’t move. “What do you want with it?”

“What do you think I want with it? I ain’t gonna put up with that barking no more.”

I shook my head. “You’re not going to kill that dog,” I told him flatly.

No more than a month before, my father might well
have risen from his chair, pushed me aside, and seized the gun himself. Now he glared at me threateningly, then the threat faded away. “Hell, I don’t like to sleep anyway. Waste of time. Your mother was always sleeping. Every chance she got. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Always running to the bedroom. Couldn’t face nothing. Especially that business with Archie. Couldn’t face that, remember?”

I remembered it well. Toward the end she’d balled up under the covers, her bed little different from her grave.

My father glanced toward the window, let his gaze linger on the dusty road. “So, what plans you got today, Roy?”

“I don’t have any plans.”

“Not expecting to get ‘caught up’ in nothing?”

“Not that I know of.”

He gulped the last of the coffee, then thrust the cup toward where I stood beside his bed with such sudden force, I stepped back quickly.

“You act like you seen a rattlesnake.” He shook his head. “Jumpy. How come you’re always so jumpy, Roy?”

When I gave no answer, he said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about Lila.”

“You’re not going to bring that up again, are you?”

“Not what we talked about last night, no. Just that I knowed Lila’s brother. The one that died. Named Malcolm. Pale as a sheet most of the time. People called him Puker. ’Cause he was always throwing up. At work. In church. Hell, nobody would sit next to him. TB, people said. TB got him. This was before Lila was born, of
course. Speaking of dying, what happened to that man up there? That Spivey feller?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

He looked at me doubtfully. “You ain’t got no idea at all?”

“There was a gun next to him. And there was blood on his face and mouth.”

He suddenly grew very still. “Lila know him?”

“I suppose she did. He lived on her land.”

“They wasn’t related, was they?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then how come you went up to her house?” “That was Lonnie’s idea.”

The mention of his name seemed to fill my father’s mind with an odd suspicion. “What’d he say? About going up to Lila’s house?”

“Just that Spivey lived alone. On Lila’s land and so she—”

“-Must have something to do with that feller being dead.”

I shook my head. “Lonnie didn’t give any indication of—”

“Snooping after dirt,” my father interrupted. “His old man was always up in Waylord doing the same thing. Snooping for dirt on people just like Lonnie’s trying to get dirt on Lila.”

“Why would Lonnie want to ‘get dirt’ on Lila?” I asked.

“Them Porterfields don’t need a reason to go after somebody.”

“He was just doing his job, Dad,” I said, eager to drop
the subject and thereby sidestep the enmity that seemed the very bedrock of my father’s life.

“Lonnie’s going after Lila,” my father said with absolute certainty. “You better go see Lila. Let her know what Porterfield’s up to.”

“You don’t have any evidence that Lonnie’s up to anything,” I reminded him.

“Maybe so, Roy, but it wouldn’t hurt, you going up to have a word with Lila.”

“What’s on your mind, Dad? What’s this business of me going up to see Lila all about?”

He appeared to search for a lie into which he could retreat but found none, and so perhaps answered with the truth. “I just figured maybe you two could start up again. You’d like to do that, wouldn’t you, Roy? I mean, you ain’t never really give up on her, have you?”

What had never ceased to amaze me was how right my father could be, how clearly he could see the mark, hit it with a word or look. He had read a thought I’d barely perceived myself, that I’d never wholly given up on Lila. But I’d also learned that fruitless love is just another added ache, and so I’d learned to think of Lila like a character in a book, distant and unreal. In an instant, my father had seen all of that, how carefully I had worked to rid myself of Lila, and how fully I had failed to do it.

“It ain’t too late for you or her to … get together,” he said.

“Yes, it is, Dad. I’m not going to get involved with Lila Cutler. I’m not going to marry her somewhere down the line. I’m going to teach school in California,
live alone in a small apartment. That’s my future. I know you don’t like it, but you might as well accept it.”

My father’s eyes lowered slightly, and he released a soft breath. “Okay,” he said. “I just figured she probably still loved you, that’s all. In that way, I mean, that you do just once.”

“I’m not sure she ever loved me like that.”

“Seemed to,” my father said. “From the way she looked at you.”

He meant the night I’d brought her to meet him, the only time he’d ever seen us together.

“Bet she cried her eyes out when you left for college,” he added now.

“Why can’t you let this go, Dad? About Lila and me.”

He looked vaguely insulted by my question. “Because I’m your father, and it’s my job to make a difference. To maybe say that you don’t have to live the way you do, Roy. That maybe it ain’t too late for you and Lila to—”

“Why are you so intent on Lila being the one I should marry, the mother of my children, and all that?”

“ ’Cause I know she’d be a good one. Wife and mother. Comes from good stock.”

“Good stock? She’s not a heifer, Dad.”

“Don’t answer me in that smart way, Roy.”

“You know the point I’m making.”

“Well, here’s
my
point,” my father said. “I know Lila comes from good folks. ’Cause I knew her mother back in the old days. Betty Cutler. She was the best friend of another girl I knew. Girl I used to squire around a little. Deidre, her name was. Deidre Warren. And, like I said, Betty was her best friend. Always together, them two.
People used to say it like it was one name, like they was just one person. ‘Here comes Betty-and-Deidre,’ they’d say. And sure enough, there they’d be. Betty-and-Deidre out for a stroll. Betty-and-Deidre having ice cream at the company store.”

“So this was when you worked at the mine?”

“That’s right. Betty was a miner’s daughter. A miner I worked with back then. Harry was his name. Big feller. Cussed all the time.” His eyes lowered to his hands again, the mangled fingers that he couldn’t shape into a fist. “When you started going up to see Lila, I knew who she was. Knew she was Betty Cutler’s girl. From good stock, like I said. Salt of the earth.” He nursed his thoughts briefly, then added, “I guess this thing with Spivey, him living on Lila’s land, I guess that brought it all back. Them old days up in Waylord.”

During the long summer of our courtship, he’d never said a single word against Lila. The reason had always seemed obvious to me. Lila was a girl from the hills, from fabled Waylord, a girl whose family name my father had instantly recognized. A pretty girl. A smart, lively girl. From the first glimpse of her, he’d given every evidence of being pleased to see her, even honored by the fact that I’d presented her to him, though even then he might well have guessed why I’d done it. That it had come from my need to show him that I’d won a girl more beautiful than my mother had ever been, a smarter girl, more ambitious. I’d waved Lila like a red cape in my father’s face.
Take that
, I’d thought as I’d drawn Lila beneath my arm,
Take that, old man.

She’d worn a dark green dress that night, her long
hair falling to her shoulders. My father had risen from his chair to greet her.

“So you’re Lila,” he said. He drew the cigarette from the corner of his mouth, slapped a bit of tobacco from his taut belly. “Excuse my appearance. I wasn’t expecting Roy to bring nobody by.”