Balsa and Tissue Paper

Balsa and Tissue Paper Lex Williford Ploughshares, Volume 45, Number 3, Fall 2019, pp. 187-240 (Article) Published by Ploughshares DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/plo.2019.0080 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/736736 [ Access provided at 3 Oct 2020 22:08 GMT from Stony Brook University (SUNY) ] LEX WILLIFORD Balsa and Tissue Paper In memory of my father, Donald French Williford and his father, Carl Lex Williford November 1998 1. The first time I decided to drive to Dallas after I’d stayed away for too many years, my mother told me on the phone, “I’m so glad you’re coming home, honey, and so’s your father. Would you like to talk to your father?” but before I could answer, she’d already handed my father the phone. After a long silence, listening to my father’s breath huffing against the mouthpiece, I told him that when I got home I wanted to spend some time with him, that I had some things I wanted to ask him, some things I wanted to tell him. “What kinds of things?” he said. Not even noon yet, and already he slurred his words. Two weeks later, on a Wednesday afternoon during my university’s short Thanksgiving break, my father met me at the front door and said, “Trey,” as if he’d seen me not a decade before but just the other day. I fought the urge to remind him, That’s not my name, Dad, but I took in a breath and held it, then let it go like I’d practiced in the car for the last fifteen hundred miles. He laid a heavy palm on my shoulder and called out over his own, “Helen, he’s here!” down the stairs to the kitchen of his big split-level show house on Nimrod Trail. He’d designed and built the house in ’69, and I’d lived there from the time I was a Tenderfoot—my hair buzz cut into a high and tight—until I was a Life Scout—just two merit badges short of Eagle when I quit the Lex Williford 187 Scouts, grew my hair down to my ass and started playing the drums. When a car wreck messed up my face and took most of my right ear in ’72, my mother’s boss, a plastic surgeon, Dr. Vorshuk, wrote me a letter for the Texas Selective Service Board, which made it official: Not only would I never be an Eagle Scout like my father, but I’d never wear a uniform of any kind again and would instead become my father’s 4-F bastard son. My father gave me a firm handshake, one of his famous knuckle crunchers, stronger than I expected from a man in his late sixties, and when I matched his grip, he held on tight, his face almost expressionless, squeezing so hard his carotids pulsed at his neck like the earthworms he impaled on fishhooks catching striped bass at Lake Texoma. In the years since I’d seen him, my father’s widow’s peak had shrunk from a peninsula to an island of downy white hair stranded out in the middle of his forehead like a cotton ball, his face much redder than I remembered, bright bursts of capillaries like fireworks just beneath the skin of his freckled nose and cheeks, the scar of a skin cancer Dr. Vorshuk had scooped out from under his right eye, a dime-size white hollow of flesh. My father clenched the wooden tip of his Swisher Sweets cigar tight between his yellow teeth and pressed my knuckles hard, like the nuts he’d gather into Piggly Wiggly bags Novembers in Pecan Park just down the street, cracking open the shells of two pecans against each other almost without effort, each shell crumbling into his fist around the unbroken meat of two almost perfect pecans. “Dad,” I said, wanting to hold him, wanting to hit him, still, after so many years, for reasons I never understood. I didn’t rub my knuckles when he let go but stooped to pick up my small suitcase, the muscles in my back still jittery and sore from two eleven-hour days on the road. I’d given my grad students the day off the Tuesday before Thanksgiving just to give myself more time with my mother. “So, you going to let me in?” I asked my father. “Thinking about it,” he said and smiled, making me wait a good ten seconds until I smiled back. Then he stepped aside, out of the doorway, and there, standing right behind him, was my mother. I tried not to let her see my shock at seeing her face, puffy as her idol Mary Kay Ash’s would be right before she died in her eighties a 188 Ploughshares few years later, my mother still wearing her smiling mask, the too-thick foundation and pink lipstick and dark eyeliner and eyelashes, the steelgray roots of her bleached hair stiff with Aqua Net hair spray. I stepped forward and put my small suitcase back down in the foyer and bent to hug her, and she held me a little too long, pressing her old silicone implants into my chest like two lumpy softballs, and I felt that queasy, familiar impulse to flee from her, to turn around and get back into my ’90 Civic and drive all the way back west without ever looking back. When she let go, I glanced up and saw that my father had already disappeared, off to the kitchen downstairs and his remote control. Three television sets tuned to different channels all blasted at once from different rooms of my father’s house: the tv my father’d gone back to watch downstairs in the kitchen—remote-hopping through random channels almost without stopping during commercial breaks on Fox News—the tv my mother’d been watching in the living room—Maury Povich on a crowded stage of Idaho skinheads—and the tiny, snowyscreened Panasonic black-and-white tv she’d had since the mid-seventies, left on unattended, its tinny speakers still blaring next to her vanity mirror during her hour-long ritual of putting on her makeup. “Got to go put on my face,” my mother used to tell us kids mornings before work every weekday in her frayed terry-cloth bathrobe after she’d cooked breakfast, splashing bacon grease popping over our eggs, the only way our father’d ever eat them—runny yolks sunny-side up. Even without all her makeup, even into her late fifties—her face all dolled up every day for our father in layers of foundation and powder and mascara and blush, like the face of every female newscaster and a few of the men on Fox News—she’d once been a stunning beauty, drawing the stares of men wherever she went. I followed her downstairs from the foyer and sat next to her on the living room couch—a squat, threadbare yellow thing from the early eighties—and I couldn’t shake off the thought of my second wife and me our last six months together, sleeping in separate beds in separate rooms, watching separate television sets at opposite ends of the same house. On the tv across the living room, Maury stuck a microphone into the fisted face of a black woman in the audience, and my mother smiled at me and laid her arm across the back of the couch behind me. “So, honey,” she said, “you doing all right these days?” Lex Williford 189 “I’m OK. I’m—” “That man’s despicable!” the woman from the tv shouted and pointed at a guest on stage, a grinning, muscular Brownshirt with a red-and-black arm band and a shaved head, square as a saltlick block for cattle, tattooed in back with a black-stubble swastika. I flinched and turned my head as if the woman on tv had just slapped me. Then I saw the faint patch of flesh-colored foundation and powder smeared across my shoulder where my mother’d hugged me too long in the foyer. “Jesus, Mom,” I said, my voice rising, “you mind if I turn this goddamn thing off?” I closed my eyes, took in a breath, let it out. Not home five minutes, and already I sounded just like him. My mother looked at me as if I’d just slapped her, and she shook her head and she looked down into her lap and her eyes filled with tears. I touched her hand, and for the first time, I saw the faint liver spots and blue veins and delicate bones just beneath her pale skin, her white knuckles already burling with rheumatoid arthritis, her hands already twisting into claws in her late sixties. I squeezed the tips of her cold fingers, which were once beautiful, and said, “I didn’t mean to snap at you, Mother. I’m sorry. It’s just been a long trip home.” My mother blinked at me and her eyes became hard and she said, “And a long time since you’ve even been home. Either you or Maddie. How long is this going to go on, you and your sister staying away for years, refusing to have anything to do with him? With me?” I picked up my father’s remote on the coffee table and turned off the tv, then put the remote back down and straightened it, lining up its edges with the corners of the coffee table—just the kind of thing he’d do, everything in a straight line, everything controlled from some remote distance. I sat back on the sagging couch and pressed my fingers into my eyes, rubbing them hard, till they hurt, till I saw fireflies. “I don’t know, Mother. I can’t speak for Maddie. She’s not here and she may never come back, but I am. I’m here.” “And just as ready to leave,” she said. “My god, Travis, you’ve not even been here five minutes, and already you’re ready to leave.” “I wasn’t in this house one minute before he left. What do you expect?” I rested my head back against the couch and stared up at the dusty cobwebs and yellow swirls of tobacco tar at the corners of my father’s 190 Ploughshares twenty-foot-high popcorn ceiling. “No, what did I expect?” I shook my head. “Jesus, I’m so much like him and I hate that. It scares me.” I glanced at my mother. “Why does he do that? Why does he always leave?” “It’s hard for him to see you, Travis. It’s hard for him to talk to you.” “Yeah? And why is that, Mother? I don’t understand it. I don’t understand him.” I sat forward on the couch and rested my elbows on my knees and stared down at the beige shag carpet, at the path of matted dirt between the coffee table and the couch that led across the living room and into the kitchen. “Tell me,” I said. “Is he all right? Are you?” “Me, I’m fine,” my mother said. “But your father?” She shook her head and reached for her pink-vinyl cigarette case on the coffee table, shook out a thin Capri menthol and lit it with her pink Bic, inhaled with a wheeze and blew smoke out toward our reflections on the TV screen. “The last three years’ve been hard on him, Travis. He thought things’d get better once he let go of his last draftsman and his secretary and closed his office downtown. Moved his office up to Maddie and Hanna’s old bedroom upstairs. Said he’d be all right. Things’d pick up. But new office buildings in Dallas are standing half empty and no one’s building and no one’s hiring, at least not someone your father’s age. He barely knows how to use a computer, much less how to draw with CAD. He feels obsolete. Like a complete failure. Especially when two of his own kids won’t even have anything to do with him anymore.” I rubbed the balding nap along the back of the couch. “He’s not worked in three years?” “Nope, not once.” “He should retire anyway, don’t you think? It’s time. God knows, he’s earned it.” “He’ll never retire, Travis, you know that—at least, he’d never admit to it. Said he’d rather die first. Besides, we can’t afford it. Not since I stopped working. And, my god, was that ever a bad idea.” “Dr. Vorshuk’d take you back in a heartbeat, I’m sure, if you asked.” She squinted at me, a long, unblinking stare. “The man retired two years ago, Travis, so I didn’t have a choice. If you’d been around, if you’d ever called, you’d know that.” She looked out to the backyard through the wide wall of windows that shot twenty feet straight up from the floor’s scuffed Mexican tiles to the cathedral ceiling. Lex Williford 191 “Working for Vorshuk was my first job,” she said, “my only job really, except when I took the street car downtown and started at the W. A. Green’s Department Store the summer I was nineteen. Then I married your father. A mother should stay home with the kids, he always said. Man raised unholy hell when I got that job in '68. Boy, oh, boy, did he ever make me pay. Made me pay for getting the job. Made me pay for paying the bills he could never pay. Made me pay either way, home or work.” A curl of smoke drifted into my face from my mother’s cigarette, and I fought the urge to bum one from her, waved the smoke away. “Worked for Vorshuk for almost thirty years,” she went on. “Guess I was afraid to look for another job when he retired. Guess I thought nobody’d hire me. Keep thinking I should look for another job. Maybe something on the side. You know, a Sam’s Club greeter, or maybe I could sell Mary Kay again, but I guess this face of mine isn’t exactly an advertisement for…” She stared off, watched a squirrel chase another up an elm in the backyard, corkscrewing around the trunk, then disappearing into the canopy overhead, red, yellow, and orange leaves drifting down behind them. She turned to me, took a long, wheezing drag. “What was I saying?” I opened my mouth to speak, but then she went on. “You know, come to think of it, your father did have this one job. Last year. Helped an old classmate from Texas A&M build an addition onto his house. Big ranch house in Grand Prairie. Helped him shoot grades and put in a new septic tank. A septic tank! Your father might as well’ve dug the hole himself. Drew up a plot plan and a full set of preliminaries and working drawings. Supervised the grading and construction, everything—three months’ work, and then—a month behind on our mortgage—he refused to take the man’s money. It was a favor for an old Aggie friend, he said.” She took a long, lung-creaking drag from her cigarette, a crackling red glow that shot sparks and scrolled back to the filter. She laughed a fist of smoke. “Some friend. Big Fort Worth developer. Big shot in the Texas GOP. Runs the planning commission in Grand Prairie. Man was a Senior in the Corps when your father was a fish. Must’ve given your father a thousand licks his first year, and not once in all those years did the man ever call your father, not until he needed a favor. Made noises about 192 Ploughshares getting your father some city work in Grand Prairie, something about a new community center there, but the city council hired a couple of kids right out of A&M on the man’s recommendation. On the cheap, of course. Corps boys, one of them a Red Pot for the bonfire, the other an Aggie yell leader. Your father sat by the phone for six months, but the man never called him back. Good old good old boys. You scratch my back, and I’ll stick a knife into yours.” She laughed again, then lit another cigarette from the one she’d been smoking, then stabbed the first out into the big glass ashtray, which wobbled on the coffee table like a hubcap on pavement. “You want to know what your father does every day of his life, Travis?” She squinted and blinked at me against the smoke that curled up from her nostrils, blowing smoke into my face as she talked. “The man gets up every morning at dawn and he showers and he shaves and he puts on his tie and his slacks and he goes upstairs to his office and he reads junk mail, crazy conspiracy stuff. Makes phone calls and sends out old résumés to Aggies who died last month, last year. Plays Solitaire on his old computer and enters sweepstakes. Man can barely pay the minimum payments on his credit cards every month, but he’ll drive to the 7-Eleven every week and spend thirty bucks on Texas Lotto tickets and scratch-offs.” “How much?” I said. “How much does he owe?” “God, I don’t know, Travis. Thirty, forty thousand? I have no idea.” She coughed a couple of times, took a long drag, then balanced her smoke on the edge of the ashtray. “He’s never been any good with money, you know that—terrific architect, terrible businessman—and he won’t tell me anything, never has, not until it’s been too late. Not until we’ve been right on the verge of losing everything one more time.” She coughed, then covered her mouth and coughed again, taking a breath. “What about retirement?” I said. “Has he put anything away? Have you?” “What retirement? Your father’s borrowed thousands against mine. Otherwise, we’d’ve lost this house a long time ago.” She coughed again, then again. She tried to catch her breath, but she just kept on coughing. “Jesus, Mom, why didn’t you tell me all this?” “You’ve not been around. You and Maddie’ve both been so damn busy blaming him for everything that’s gone wrong with your lives that you’ve never even asked.” Lex Williford 193 She stopped herself, covered her mouth and shook her head, coughed, then held out her palm toward me as she tried to catch her breath, coughing, straight-armed like a cop stopping traffic, then reached out to touch the back of my hand. “No, Travis, I’m sorry. That’s not fair.” She tried to swallow down another cough, but just kept coughing, fell into a long jag of coughing. I patted her back. “You OK?” A stupid question. She nodded, caught her breath, coughed again. Kept coughing. I rubbed her back and glanced across the room, at three framed photos on the wall behind the tv: one black-and-white photo of my grandfather, holding up my father when he was a toddler, the only photo I could ever remember seeing of my grandfather smiling, a man who’d died in his fifties, when my father was just ten; a yellowing, sundimmed color photo of my father in his late twenties, holding up my long-dead brother Jesse, at two, just before he got the cancer; and next to that a color photo of my younger brother Nate holding up his own son, Travis, at two or three. No photos of Maddie or me anywhere. I waited till my mother’d stopped coughing. “What you say’s true, Mother. True enough anyway. There’s been too much blame all around.” “No, Travis. You and Maddie’ve got your own lives to live and you’ve got to find your own ways of living them. As for him, well, your father’s been in trouble a long time. Ever since your brother died, trouble’s almost all he’s ever known.” I stared at the photo of my father and Jesse. Almost forty years. If Jesse’d lived—I did the calculations in my head—he’d be thirty-eight. Too many years I’d blamed her for not loading us kids into our old ’66 Chevelle station wagon while my father was at work, or wherever he went, then leaving him for good. The ash of my mother’s last cigarette, curling impossibly long over the ashtray, fell, and I mashed it out, sparks popping, stinging the back of my hand, my fingertips smeared with the pink lipstick from around the filter. I swept the hot ashes off and more ash and smears of butter and bread crumbs scattered across the coffee table, then I swept the ash and crumbs into a pile in my palm and dropped them into the ashtray next to my mother’s smoldering cigarette. “Talk to him, Travis,” my mother said. 194 Ploughshares “I’ll try.” She started to stand up, but I held her icy hand. “Why do you stay with him, Mother? I don’t get it. Never have.” She glanced down at me and then sat back down again, away from me, pulling her hand back, the sharp line of her lipstick bleared over her upper lip, black flecks of mascara in her eyelashes, her eyes redrimmed and shining, yellowing around the irises like bloody egg yolks. “He’s not a bad man, Travis. You know that. And he and I’ve been through things you could never imagine. Besides, I love him. I’ve loved him a long time. Longer than I’ve ever loved you.” 2. In the kitchen, my father thumb-punched the remote through the channels, almost at random, almost without a pause, as if he was trying to squash stink bugs on the buttons. I eased out a chair from the kitchen table across from him and sat, my back to the tv, a commercial booming into my ears from Lumber Liquidators. The leaves of the backyard elms and cottonwoods glowed red and yellow in the sunset through the window behind him. “Good to see you, Dad,” I said. “Is it?” he said, muting the remote. “I try not to say things I don’t mean,” I told him. “Not anymore, not unless I’m being ironic.” “Is that right? Glad to hear all that schooling of yours taught you something.” My father dry-spit a splinter from his cigar-tip between his fingers and wiped it on his pants. “Smug and uppity as usual, I see.” He picked up his Swisher Sweets cigar from the big fired-clay ashtray I’d made him in seventh grade—a tight fist with a big thumbs-up sign, glazed in Texas A&M’s school colors, maroon and white, with little divots around the fingers and palms for his old Lucky Strikes and Tareytons, and now for his cigars, big stenciled letters top and bottom that spelled out: I hadn’t seen the ashtray in decades, assumed he’d thrown it away years ago, a constant reminder that I’d never gone to A&M like his father and he had. His alma pater, he called it, the most conservative university Lex Williford 195 in one of the most conservative states in the union. He’d tried to get each one of his kids to become an Aggie, even the girls, even when he opposed coeds on campus in the late ’60s, but the legacy had ended with me. He knocked off the ash into the ashtray’s fisted palm and stared at the end of his cigar, which had gone out, the wooden tip where he’d chewed it frayed with splinters. Then he put the cigar back into the ashtray. “All right,” he said, “so you’ve stopped lying. That’s a start.” I smiled. “Tried to stop anyways, least to myself. That way, I don’t pass the lie around quite so much.” “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” He pushed the ashtray away from him on the kitchen table. “Sounds like a goddamn lie to me. You want a beer?” “No, thanks, Dad. Got a few years of sobriety under my belt now.” “Oh, goody goody,” he said, “he’s a goddamn teetotaler.” Never trust a man who never drinks, he used to say. I shrugged. “It’s been tougher quitting the smokes. So far, I haven’t lit up for six—” “Oh, brother.” He pointed his remote straight at me, like he wanted to shut me off, and the TV clicked off behind me. “Hell,” he said, “you mind if I have a beer?” “Go for it.” 196 Ploughshares He stood and dragged his chair from the kitchen table, the chair legs squalling across the kitchen’s Mexican tiles. He opened the refrigerator door and tried to twist a Coors Light from a six-pack’s plastic ring behind a gallon of milk, then finally plucked it out, the top shelf pinging against the bottom of the can. He opened the beer with a crackling posh and set it down in front of him on the kitchen table without taking a drink. “You said on the phone you had some things you wanted to talk about,” he said. I stared at him. “What?” he said. “I guess I just didn’t expect you to remember.” “Because I’ve got the old timers now, right?” “What?” I frowned. It was the first time I’d ever heard of such a thing, and, later, it’d turn out to be true. “No, that’s not it at all, is it?” he said. “It’s because you think I’m a goddamn drunk.” He grinned and nodded, and when I said nothing back he just kept nodding. “Yep, that’s what I thought.” I stared down at the backs of my hands, my palms sprawled flat against the kitchen table, my fingers splayed, red-knuckled and darkfreckled as his—same long fingers, same white specks under my fingernails. Venial sins, Granny Hanny, my mother’s mother, used to call them, like tiny white freckles under the fingernails, around the cuticles’ pink half-moons. Some sins the same as my father’s. I shrugged. “That’s not for me to say, Dad. I’m not judging you, OK?” “Yeah, right.” He huffed out a laugh and shook his head. “You’re not a very good liar, are you? OK, so tell me, then: After all these years, what is there for you to say?” I took in a breath and held it, let it out. Leaned toward him on the kitchen table. “That I wish I hadn’t stayed away all these years. That I wish like hell the two of us could stop doing this to each other. Why is it, Dad? Why do we keep doing this to each other?” My father pressed his lips together and stared at me a long time without blinking. Then he ran his fingers alongside his sweating Coors can, water puddling around it on the tabletop. As he sat back, his kitchen chair creaked. Lex Williford 197 “What is it you want to talk about, son? What is it you want to ask me?” It was my turn to stare at him. When was the last time he’d ever called me son? Anything other than Trey? When the kids in the cafeteria at White Rock Elementary called me lunch tray? While I was still wearing my green uniform pants and white Banlon shirt at St. Patrick’s before Jesse died? “We don’t have to talk about it right now, Dad,” I said. “We’ll be too busy stuffing ourselves at this table tomorrow. Everybody’s coming here tomorrow afternoon, right? “Yep.” “I can watch the Aggie game with you, if you’d like,” I said. “Maybe we could start up a poker game later with Hanna and Nate, whoever happens to show up.” I’d never much cared for football—especially the Yell Leaders rousing the crowd at Kyle Field, the perfectly timed roar of the crowd rumbling the stands—singing A&M’s fight song, “Hullabaloo Caneck Caneck,” everyone standing at attention at the same moment around me, many in uniform and their senior boots, many of them who’d fight and die later in Viet Nam, all shouting so loud it scared the hell out of me as a kid, like something I’d seen in Mrs. Jaffrey’s class, a crowd of Brownshirts and SS officers roaring in unison in black and white at a Nuremberg rally in the mid-thirties—but I loved poker maybe even more than my father did, having played it from an early age with Granny Hanny, a poker champion, when she kept us as kids, trying to distract my sisters and me from our brother Jesse’s long stays in Baylor Hospital. It was the closest thing my father and I’d ever come to a concession. “Sure,” he said. “Maybe this Friday when the turkey and stuffing and family stuff ’s all settled in our bellies and you’ve nickeled and dimed me to death,” I said, “maybe we can talk then. How’s that? It’s been a long drive home, Dad, and I’ve got a long drive back on Saturday.” “No, son,” my father said, his voice almost a whisper. “We can talk about it now, if you want.” I pressed my lips together, stared down at my hands. “I don’t know, Dad. Not sure if I want to talk about it right now. Not sure if I want to talk about it at all. Not even sure where to start.” I closed my eyes, shook my head. I was tired and my back hurt. I’d have 198 Ploughshares to be careful about what I said and how I said it, if I said anything at all. Almost anything could set him off. “Last couple of years,” I started, “I’ve been thinking a lot about your father. Your mother too, but more about your father.” “What?” He sat straight up in his squeaking chair as if I’d cursed his father’s name and our entire lineage all the way back to the Alamo, his voice grown stern again. “What about my father?” Easy, I thought, easy. Jesus, here we go. No matter what I said, whatever I asked, I’d be questioning a hostile witness. He reached for his beer, took a big gulp, then covered his mouth as he hissed out a burp. “I never knew him,” I said. My father sat back again in his chair. “Barely knew him myself. He wasn’t around much, even before he died.” “I guess I feel a connection with him, Dad. It’s strange, and I don’t know what to make of it. It’s almost like I did know him. Somehow. Like I have real memories of him. Just out of reach. But that’s impossible, right?” My father leaned toward me, his elbows on the kitchen table between us. “You’re a lot like him. And that’s not a bad thing. You have most of his gifts. A few of his faults. My father didn’t have many. He was a gentleman. A gentle man. I admired him, loved him for the time I had with him, worshipped him after he was gone.” “Yeah, that’s what you’ve always told me. But I don’t really know what that means. All my life you’ve said I’m like him, but I know almost nothing about him. You’ve told me stories, sure. Mostly about that summer you spent with him at Texas A&M. Remember? That time in ’69 you took me there when I was a kid, when you and I visited the campus, stood by the bonfire, the game at Kyle Field, the first time you ever got me drunk? You weren’t too happy about the Aggies going coed—I remember that. That’s the first time you talked much about your father. Said you were there with him the summer the bomb dropped and ended the war. Saved all those young Aggie GIs, you said. You and your dad stayed in some old barracks together, if I remember right, but they’d all been torn down by then. He did his experiments during the day, painted watercolors in the evening. Taught you how. Built a balsa model with you. Like you and me. Wrote his little red book on X-raying pavement he researched for the Texas Highway Department. Lex Williford 199 I remember all that, Dad. But that’s all I really know about him, I guess. You never really talked much about the time you visited him in Houston. When he was back home with his mother and sisters, dying.” My father took another swig of his beer, set it down in the round pool of condensation it had made on the kitchen table, closed his eyes and pressed his fingers into them, dragging his fingertips down his cheeks. He sat back into his creaking chair again and shrugged. “Ask me, then. Whatever you want.” I stared off, sat back myself, tried to relax a little, quiet a long time. I was hypervigilant, my therapist had told me once—pretty normal for kids with PTSD, kids with stern men like my father. Probably always had been, she’d said, maybe ever since I was a baby reaching for a scorpion on the hard wood floors of my father’s officer’s barracks at Ft. Bliss, the first time he ever struck me. I took in a breath and held it a moment. “I don’t know if you remember this,” I said, “but years ago you told me you saw your father one time at the Rexall on Greenville Avenue. Right around the corner from your house on Mercedes. You were eight or nine, I think, and he was reading Life at the magazine rack one afternoon in the middle of the week, and you said you were surprised to see him there because he’d told you he’d be gone all that week on a trip to Texarkana. Something about some job with the Texas Highway Department. You said you ducked down behind a big red-metal box of Cokes floating in ice, and you watched him for a long time like a spy, and then you followed him out the door to a boarding house a few blocks down the street and watched him go inside. You remember telling me that?” My father shook his head. “I’d almost forgotten myself. Must’ve been twenty-five, thirty years ago when I told you, sixty when it happened. What the hell’s that got to do with anything now, son?” I leaned forward on my elbows. “Do you have any idea how many times you left after Jesse died? Sometimes I wouldn’t see you for weeks. Up at dawn, gone till midnight or later. Some nights, you’d never even come home. I knew you’d belt me for not being in bed, but I waited up for you anyway. Had trouble sleeping when you were gone.” “I worked late,” he said. “Most weekends. Slept more than a few nights under my drafting table. I had bills to pay. Wadley Clinic. Baylor Hospital. Four kids’ tuition at St. Pat’s. A new house, a big mortgage I couldn’t afford. Your mother wasn’t working then, and that’s the way I 200 Ploughshares preferred it. My goddamn business partner didn’t exactly help, took the money and ran off to Austria with his wife and kids just when I needed it and him the most. I had to dig a business close to bankruptcy out of the hole by myself, and Hap left me with nothing but a lost high-rise job and no Hazard pay.” He tried to grin, finished off his beer in a few gulps, slammed his empty aluminum can clinking on to the table, crushing it into his fist, then stood to get another. He opened the fridge door—the cold air blowing into my face like an icy blast of winter. He held up a Coors Light. “Want one?” I was thirsty, but I nodded, then shook my head. “No thanks.” My father hadn’t joked about his business partner, his old Aggie roommate, Jake Hazard, for decades. Every Aggie joke’s a bad joke, I always thought, especially the stupid nicknames. My father’d explained it all to me years before. Aggie seniors in the Corps had called my father, “Deuce,” his longtime roommate Jake, “Hap.” They’d called Elmore Rual Torn “Rip” too, in the same freshman class with them, but the actor washed out of the Corps at A&M, my father said, and became a turncoat, moved to Austin to study Shakespeare with the teasippers at UT, then went on to New York and Hollywood. “Yeah,” I said, “I know all that.” “I had some serious shit to deal with, OK? Guess, since then, it’s always been that way. Worked all the time, never had enough money, feast and famine, mostly famine, and that was just for starters. What the hell’s seeing my father in a drugstore got to do with anything?” “I don’t know, Dad. Maybe nothing.” My father shrugged, sipped at his third beer. “All right, OK, so my father stayed at a boarding house for a week. So what? He and my mother weren’t getting along, and he had to get away for a while. My mother was hell to live with—you know that. Who could blame him? What’s your point?” “I’ve always wondered, Dad, ever since you told me. How many times did your father leave on those trips for the Texas Highway Department, or at least tell you he did?” “I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Lex Williford 201 “Sure you do. Did you ever go back to that boarding house after he left home for a month or a week or a weekend, to see if he was there instead? I would have.” My father stared at the Coors can on the table. He pushed it across the wet tabletop, then pulled it back, water dripping into his lap. A few times, in the late ’70s, early ’80s, my mother’d accused my father of having a thing for other women, especially his secretary, Charlotte, a stunning strawberry-blonde with big augmented breasts, a coed just graduated from A&M, but he’d always denied it. When she found out he’d taken Charlotte out for dinner at T. G. I. Fridays, then out to a couple of bars on Greenville Ave., my mother’d threatened to leave him, to take us kids with her. He raised unholy hell about it, but he finally had to let Charlotte go. “How many times did you go to that boarding house, Dad?” I went on. “Five, ten, twenty times? Was he there?” I hesitated before I said it: “Was there a woman with him?” My father barked out a laugh, then another. “What, you think my father screwed around on my mother?” “I don’t know, Dad. Did he?” He laughed again, upended his Coors, took a few gulps and swiped at his mouth with the back of the hand. “Where do you come up with this shit? The man was straighter than his T-square. Why would you even think such a thing?” “I guess I just thought maybe he loved somebody else.” “He did. No big secret about that.” “What? Who?” “His first wife.” “Oh.” I nodded. “Yeah.” “She was his first love, all that. He never once talked about her, but you can be damn sure she was a lot easier to get along with than my goddamn mother was. Prettier too. Much prettier. He kept a photo of her at the back of his bottom drawer, a photo of his daughter too, beautiful little girl, all wrapped in the pinafore dresses they’d both died in. My mother didn’t appreciate that too much when she found the dresses while doing his laundry. Wouldn’t talk to him for weeks. He finally had to put all that stuff in a box and let it cook in the hot garage.” “You kids think you got it bad with me?” Our father used to shout at us more than a few times growing up, reminding us again and again 202 Ploughshares as he’d pulled out his belt, shoop through the loops of his slacks, “Good thing you didn’t grow up with my mother, or go through the Corps. Hell, if it hadn’t been for the goddamn flu epidemic of 1918, you kids wouldn’t even be here. You wouldn’t even have a father.” In 1918, the way my father’d always told the story, right after the armistice was signed, my grandfather’s first wife and three-year-old daughter caught the flu on the train from Dallas to visit my grandfather, the Chief Civil Engineer for the US Army Air Corps Sanitation Division in Washington, DC. The great Influenza Pandemic had just begun. They died on the train before it even arrived at Washington Union Station, their bodies packed away, along with half a dozen others, including some surviving Doughboys just back from Europe, who’d died along the way, all wrapped in green-wool Army blankets, in a Swift’s reefer car with a load full of bacon, and when he heard the news from the conductor, he stepped off the platform and onto the train without a suitcase, without a word, no change of clothes, nothing but a little cash he’d been saving, and he rode the train through the rest of its route north, then all the way back to Dallas with their bodies. He didn’t care about catching the flu himself, probably hoped he would, but he never got sick. Buried his wife and daughter in plots he’d bought from a contractor friend who developed the land for Restland later in ´25, two of the first people buried there, in what had been a farmer’s cotton field, half a dozen graves cheap enough to buy with the money he’d saved to take his family for a weekend to Coney Island. He never went back to DC but helped the US Army stage a demonstration trip from there to San Francisco in 1919, along the Lincoln Highway, the first coast-to-coast interstate in the U S, all with the help of my grandmother Eveline, a secretary at the Dallas office of the Texas Highway Department. “Guess he never got over all that,” I said. “Never thought he’d have another family. Thought he was too old to start over. Buried himself in his work, must’ve been lonely as hell to marry my mother. Should’ve thought about that long and hard. But who knows? Maybe she was nicer then. Then they had R.E. and me. It was like a miracle to him, a second chance. Still, he never smiled much when I was a kid— was a bit of a sad sack, if you want to know the truth. Like you.” “Gee, thanks,” I said and smiled. “Sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean to suggest your father had an affair with—” Lex Williford 203 “Might’ve done him some good,” he cut in and finished his beer, stood up to get another, pinging from the aluminum shelf. He turned to me with the fridge door open. “You sure?” “I’m good.” “See? You and me, we’re getting along just fine. I’m having a good time.” He cracked open another Coors and sat. “You apologize too goddamn much, though,” he added. “Always have. Stop apologizing, will you?” I just stared at him. A man should never apologize, he used to say, unless he wasn’t a man. “You know,” he said, “this one time, my mother did kick my father out.” He shook his head and laughed. “Never forget it. The whole thing was kind of funny really. I don’t know what R.E. and I’d done, some kind of mischief—torturing a cat in heat for making a bunch of racket outside our window all night, who knows? R.E. sure hated cats. But it didn’t take much to set my goddamn mother off.” He took a sip of his beer and stared off, his cheeks filling with another burp, till it popped out of his mouth. “This one Friday after a long trip from somewhere in West Texas, San Angelo maybe—he was always going there—my father walks in on my mother whaling on me and R.E. good with her aunt Bama’s horsewhip. She never used it unless he was gone. Guess she must’ve known not to while he was there. So there we were, R.E. and me, with our pants down around our ankles, right? And he just stands there with this funny look on his face. He was a tall man, tall as you, sixfour, six-five. Sees this horsewhip in her hand and holds out his. ‘Give me that damn thing,’ he says. One of the few times I ever heard him curse. My mother doesn’t say anything, just glares at him, but when she glances back at us, he snatches the goddamn thing right out of her hand. Holds it up over his head so she can’t reach it. She’s getting up on her tippy toes and jumping like a little girl trying to get it, but she’s not getting anywhere close. The front door’s still wide open, so he just turns around and tosses the goddamn thing out to the front yard. “‘You can’t do that,’ she said. “‘I don’t have any say about beating these boys half naked with a horsewhip?’ he said. “‘No,’ she said. Then she really lit into him. “‘You’re never here,’ she says, ‘and I don’t know what to do with 204 Ploughshares them. And when you’re here, you don’t father them, don’t discipline them. You just leave it up to me. My father did that too. Just left me with my aunt Bama, and she had to do it. It’s not fair, Daddy.’ That’s what she called him. ‘It’s not fair at all. It’s a father’s job to teach his children. It’s his duty as a father. Especially boys. Boys like these.’ “‘I won’t be any part of this,’ he said. “‘You’re spoiling them, Daddy. Spoiling them rotten!’ “‘Mother’—that’s what he called her—‘there are always other ways,’ he said. “‘No, you do your job or leave,’ she said. ‘You always do your job at work, have plenty of time for that, care more about your work than you care about me, but you never do your job here. Why don’t you just leave and stay away for good? You don’t love me anyway.’ She nods at us. ‘You just love these little animals.’ Then she says it: ‘You just love her. And she’s dead.’ “Man, that shut him up fast,” my father said, “but then he says, ‘Pull up your britches, boys. If I have to leave, I’m taking you both with me.’ “‘And where are you going to take them, Daddy, on the road with you?’ “‘If I have to, yes.’ “‘And what about their schooling?’ “‘I’ll drive them to school. Or take them to another.’ “‘Who’s going to watch them, then? Where they going to live? In your Stutz Bearcat convertible? Some flea-bit hotel?’ “That one stumped him. “R.E. and me, we didn’t know what to do. It was a little embarrassing standing there like that, so I reached down to pull up my skivvies, but she shoots me this look and says, ‘Don’t you dare!’ “Then she tells my father, ‘Go ahead. Leave, then. Leave! You’re not man enough to do your job, and I don’t want to live with you anymore anyway. You’re no father. Never were. Never will be.’ “She was crying then. I’d never seen her cry much before, but R.E. and me, when we looked at each other, we almost lost it. I’m telling you, it was funny. Standing there with our britches down around our ankles the whole time. Our tallywackers hanging out. Guess you’d have to’ve been there to’ve seen it. “All my father had to say was, ‘Get your gear, boys. We’re going,’ and she started shoving at him, shoving him, hard, in the chest. It was kind of funny. He didn’t even budge at first—he was a big man—but Lex Williford 205 she pushed him back a little, then a little more, little steps back one at a time, till she’d pushed him back to the open door. ‘Out! I want you out of my house!’ “‘I pay the mortgage, the groceries, the light bill,’ he said, but he’d already lost. He knew it. So did we. “He shrugged and said, ‘Goodbye, boys,’ and turned around, walked out through the front door, down the steps to the front yard, stooped to pick up that damn horsewhip he’d tossed into the grass, then carried it across the street and dropped it into a neighbor’s garbage can. He slammed the lid down hard—clanking loud as hell, you could hear it a block away—and just drove off. “R.E. and me, we’re still standing there with our pants down around our ankles. It was kind of scary—we didn’t know if he’d ever come back—but it was also kind of funny too. R.E. and me, we always had a good laugh and more than a few beers about that one.” When my father’d finished his story, I said, “Were you angry, Dad? Angry at your father?” He looked at me as if he didn’t recognize me. “At my mother, sure. That’s just the way she was. But my father? Why the hell would I be angry with my father? Hell no, he’d saved us from a big whupping. Didn’t change a goddamn thing, though. “She just walked out the front door and across the street, lifted the trash can lid and dug around in the neighbor’s trash can for a while. Then she walked back into the house with it. It had ketchup or something all over it. Like blood. It was an old horsewhip, something she’d kept with all the confederate currency her aunt Bama’d stowed away, like it might be worth something again, trunks full of all this worthless paper. Her grandfather’d saved it, you know? Used that same horsewhip on his slaves. Hard to believe it’d held together after so many years. There were cracks in the leather, and it looked like she’d beaten us bloody, but we were used to it. She just dropped it to the floor in front of us, then walked into her room and slammed her door behind her. We thought she’d whale on us some more, but that was it. We pulled up our britches and got dressed for bed. She whimpered and whined all night long. It was hard to sleep. Sounded like that damn cat in heat.” My father blinked at me. “Seriously, though, why the hell’d I ever be angry at my father? I loved him, worshipped the ground he walked on. You think I’m like you?” 206 Ploughshares “No, Dad, I wouldn’t say that. I don’t know, maybe you were mad because he ran off more than once and left you with your mother? Somebody who beat you with a horsewhip? Got cancer and ran off to die with his mother and spinster sisters in Houston rather than dying at home with you? Seems a little strange, Dad, don’t you think?” He cocked his head and glared at me. “I never hit you with that horsewhip. Thought about it a few times, but I didn’t. Maybe I should have.” I laughed, couldn’t help myself. “You used your hand plenty enough times, Dad. Belts, boards, anything handy really, a flyswatter, a shoe, an electric cord, your tie, a towel. You were never picky about it.” “It always comes back to the same thing with you,” he said. “I’m not the one who brought up the horsewhip, Dad, but maybe you’re right.” My father stood, trembling, like he was outside in winter without a coat, then kicked his chair out from behind him and it fell over onto its back, and he leaned onto the kitchen table toward me till the table legs lifted a little on my side. “What makes you think you’ve got the right to stay away all these years, breaking your mother’s heart, and then have the gall to come here with all your questions? Who gives a good goddamn about what happened between my father and mother when I was a kid? What the fuck does it matter? Why don’t you just shut up about it? Just shut up!” In a moment, he was gone, his half-filled Coors can spinning out on its side, foam spilling out onto the kitchen table, all over my shirt and jeans, dripping onto the kitchen’s Mexican tiles. Then my mother was in the kitchen, sopping up the suds with a ratty dishtowel, asking me, “What did you do this time?” I pulled a handful of paper towels from the spinning rack to help her, then knelt down beside her, sopped up all the suds on the floor, under the kitchen table. “I pushed him. Pushed him too hard. I tried to avoid it, but I guess I just got a little too close to the truth.” My mother started out of the kitchen, to go look for him. “Deuce? Deuce!” She must not have heard him slam the front door moments before. “Don’t bother, Mother,” I said. “He’s gone and he’ll be gone for a long time and even if you went to look for him you wouldn’t know where to find him.” Lex Williford 207 3. Thirty minutes later, I sat at the end of my old single bed upstairs, fighting the urge to drive to a Motel 6 on the way out of town, or to my baby sister Nettie’s apartment in Turtle Creek, then to make the two-day drive back west in the morning—so much wasted time and gas, such a wasted trip. I’d lost my appetite for turkey and family. I should’ve flown to New York to spend Thanksgiving with Maddie instead, I thought, but the flight was too expensive for the two days I’d have with her, and I wasn’t much in the mood for turkey with her either. My silver-voiced suicidal sister. I’d been a coward not to go to New York, I thought. Maddie’d pretty much begged me to come. She’d gone to the city a decade before to sing on Broadway—had done just that, then gone on national and international tours of Cats and Phantom and Fiddler, her humor and her beauty fading as she neared her forties, she always worried, then mostly doing commercial work for Mickey D.’s, Mr. Clean, and Mr. Coffee—but the last I’d heard from her she was cleaning the apartments of rich New Yorkers on the Upper West Side. I’d be a coward to leave Dallas now too, I thought, but my back hurt, and I was too damn tired even to think about driving. Always, always tired of the damn family drama. I’d come all this way mostly because I missed my mother. I flipped up the latches on my suitcase and opened the door to the walk-in closet my brother Nate and I’d shared as kids. When I turned on the closet light, I saw all my father’s clothes hanging there inside, two rows of suits draped in dry cleaners’ plastic and pressed black slacks and white dress shirts and racks of ties left and right. Then I turned and saw the depression in the center of my old bed in the room that Nate and I’d shared, and it occurred to me that my father’d been sleeping there for a long time alone. I walked into my old closet—my father’s closet now—and I took down one of my father’s pressed dress shirts from a hanger and held it up to my face and tried to breathe in the smell of him—Aramis and Swisher Sweets—but nothing, just the faint scent of Cheer and ironed cornstarch on white cotton. 208 Ploughshares I hung his shirt back up, then parted the hangers and hung up two shirts of my own. I was turning out of the closet when I glanced up and spotted on the closet’s top shelf a squat Johnnie Walker Red box for half-pint bottles and saw the cracked-leather tassels and frayed hemp poppers tied to the end of my grandmother Eveline’s old horsewhip, hanging there from the open box like a ratty horsetail. I reached up for it but pulled down the box it was in instead, carried it to the bed and laid it there on the comforter next to me. I pulled out the stiff horsewhip with its braided leather thong and looped handle, crazed with cracks, with the same musty smell of old shoes that filled a room piled almost to the ceiling I’d seen in Washington DC’s Holocaust Museum—something as inconceivable to me as my grandmother punishing her own sons with a horsewhip. The box was almost full of scattered confederate bills, old hospital receipts for my brother Jesse, a few loose photos of my grandmother Eveline, preliminary sketches my father’d drawn for our old house on Broken Arrow and stacks of bundled letters Eveline had sent my mother over many years, most of them unopened because they all did the same thing: scolded my mother for being a bad wife and a bad mother and an even worse housekeeper. Eveline would go to her death never getting over her youngest son’s marriage to a pretty Catholic girl. Then I saw it, nestled inside, almost buried under all the scattered paper, the yellowed box of a 1/32-scale Guillow’s balsa model kit I hadn’t seen in thirty years, a replica of a long-range bomber from WWII with a 37-inch fuselage and a 53-inch wingspan and features listed on the side of the box: Easy-to-read plans! Scale wheels Bomb-bay doors A generous supply of balsa strip stock and covering tissue Cockpit enclosure Tail empennage Detailed vacuum-formed plastic engines, attaching nacelle shells and nose cowls, gun turrets, observation domes and nose canopy Elevators and tail rudder Made in the USA! Extended main gear Precision die-cut balsa parts Moveable ailerons Lex Williford 209 A banner across the box top read in big, bold letters: boeing b-29 superfortress I took out the model box and opened it on the bed, lifted several flat, unscored sheets of balsa stock and others scored for ribbing and a bundle of yellowing sheets of tissue paper, then lifted two long, twisted rubber bands, stuck to each other, cracked along their edges, used to power the propellers. I tried to pull one from the other and both crumbled into pieces, stiff as the leather tassels on my grandmother’s horsewhip. I looked around like I’d done something wrong and put the pieces of rubber band back into the box fast—exactly as I would if I’d broken anything in this same house as a kid. Then I lifted the half-assembled skeleton of the fuselage and turned it over and around, mostly just balsa and tissue paper. My father and I’d built another balsa plane before we’d started this one, a Sopwith Camel, like the one his father’d flown in sitting behind an RAF pilot during an Army Air Corps flight demonstration at Fort McNair in Washington, DC, during World War I. My father and his father’d built a balsa plane a lot like it the summer he’d spent with his father at the end of the war in ’45. His father, a visiting professor at Texas A&M University, had received a university grant to design and build an X-ray machine—a fluoroscope, he called it—to study asphalt paving aggregates all that summer, trying to find just the right mix of tar, sand, and gravel that would withstand the hot summer sun in Texas, but while he wrote what would be published posthumously in a small red book with his measurements, equations, and findings, his long exposure to the X-rays all that summer soon bloomed a black mole into a melanoma on his shoulder that killed him later that fall. My father’d flown his Sopwith Camel model only once with his own father at Kyle Field in College State, where the Texas Aggies played football, but, unable to find it in his mother’s garage or attic after all those years, he’d bought me another one like it, a Guillows balsa kit, which we built together the few Saturdays he could spare from work while my kid brother Jesse was dying. 210 Ploughshares A sickness of the blood, my mother always called it. My father and I’d flown it only once too, out in the cul de sac down the street from the house my father would lose on Broken Arrow Rd., but when I wouldn’t let my kid brother Jesse play with it, he smashed it. Without thinking, I punched him in the nose, hard, then in the stomach, a boy who bruised and bled easily, and my father, seeing what I’d done, threw me against my dresser, sat on my arms on the floor and punched me a few times in the face and stomach. There’d been about the same difference in size between me, ten, and my brother, three, as there’d been between my father and me. Seemed only fair to me at the time. Three months later Jesse bled to death in a Baylor Hospital bed. A few months after Jesse’s funeral, my father left this model kit on top of that same dresser, in another room in another house, an awful green-shuttered rental house my father’d moved us into on Estate Lane after selling the show house he’d built for his family on Broken Arrow, for just enough to pay a portion of all the hospital bills, a house like the one I sat in now, which he’d designed and built later, in ’69, the model in the box I stared at now meant to replace the one Jesse had smashed when my father could never find another Sopwith Camel like the one that he and his father, then he and his son, had built together. I lifted the tail rudder, light as a dime, out of the box and ran my fingers over the pale, delicate paper still stretched tight over the ribbing, and I remembered gluing it there with Testor’s dope, then wetting the paper with a wide sable brush my father used to paint watercolors. I remembered the paper sagging, then stretching taut as it dried across the balsa ribbing. I ran my fingers along the smooth, rounded edge of the balsa tail and remembered sanding it with fine-grit sandpaper, then rubbed it, as if I were sanding it at that moment as a ten-year-old boy—just as my father, ten years old, had with his own father years before—my father reaching across our kitchen table and touching my hand, touching the tail rudder along that same edge and saying, “Here, Trey. A little more here. That’s good.” I remembered. I remembered it all. Why would my father keep this model after all these years? I wondered as I put the tail rudder and fuselage back into the box and then Lex Williford 211 put the lid on the box and the box back into the liquor box he’d put it into who knows when. That’s when I noticed the small banner below the plane on the box top: america’s first atomic bomber! Then in smaller letters I hadn’t noticed before below the banner: the enola gay The bomber that Col. Paul Tibbets had piloted, named after his mother, which dropped the bomb called “Little Boy” onto Hiroshima from 26,000 feet, at 8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945, the initial blast killing at least 50,000 civilians, the radiation later killing around half the population in a city of 350,000 people. The Saturday morning we’d finished building that Sopwith Camel together, the only day we ever flew it, he told me that he’d finished and flown an almost identical balsa plane with his own father, to celebrate the end of his father’s research, at around 8 a.m. on the same morning the bomb had dropped, the last summer my father’s father was still alive. I stood from the bed and put the box onto my old dresser, where my father’d first put it years before, then walked out of my old bedroom— his bedroom now—wondering where my father’d sleep for the night. I walked across the upstairs hallway into Maddie and Hanna’s old bedroom, my father’s office now, and when I saw that the room was dark and the door was open I turned on the light inside. I glanced around my father’s home office and smelled the blueprint machine’s faint ammonia reek and the rank, sweet stink of cigar smoke, and I felt the growing, familiar sense I’d had at times as a kid that I was a Yankee spy in a Confederate camp. On a bookshelf over my father’s desk were his Texas A&M Sesquicentennial Alumni plaque and his cast-iron GOP elephant, his maroon-and-white A&M baseball cap and his NRA cap and his God Armeth the Patriot cap. Along his bookshelves were Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal—twenty years before anyone could even conceive of the idea that such a man could ever be elected president—Ravi Ba- 212 Ploughshares tra’s The Great Depression of 1990, the autobiography of Oliver North and Rush Limbaugh’s See, I Told You So, then two long rows of dusty Reader’s Digest condensed books and a set of 1973 Sweets architectural specifications catalogs. And over my father’s drafting table two framed portraits, the first of my father’s older brother R.E., a decade dead now from cirrhosis of the liver and stomach cancer—his last days with a distended belly as taut with blood as a dog tick’s in his Baylor Hospital bed—the second portrait of my uncle R.E.’s namesake, Robert E. Lee, white-haired, white-bearded, holding his gray hat to his chest, defeated southern patriot, true to the last. I reached up to flip on my father’s fluorescent drafting table lamp and saw taped to it the words— god, duty, country, family —always, my father would say, in just that order, written in my father’s near-perfect block lettering, which I’d failed to imitate as a draftsman for his architectural firm during my lost twenties, when I’d wasted half a decade trying to give myself permission to be myself, someone other than my father’s namesake: William Barret Travis Truitt, III. I stepped up and sat on his tall swivel chair at his drafting table and pushed his T-square up and down, the rollers squeaking along the wires at the table’s edges, then picked up his short six-inch architect’s scale, crazed with hairline cracks, the quarter- and half- and threequarter-inch scale lines all worn and faint from so many years under his fingers. It was the same scale he’d bought as a student at Texas A&M five years before he graduated—just missing the Korean War, stationed at Ft. Bliss as a Second Lieutenant a few happy years with my mother before I was born in ’54—the same scale I’d used sometimes to draw the Conoco Building downtown and the red-neon Pegasus that rotated on its roof. I worked for him off and on between different universities, different majors, until I turned twenty-six and left Dallas for good. I reached down the right side of his desk, opened the bottom drawer, and pulled it out all the way, till it was almost off its rollers. Then I took out an old Swisher Sweets cigar box full of mechanical pencils and Rapidiographs and Pink Pearl erasers and his sketch pencils with their soft, dark leads. Underneath, inside an unlocked metal strongbox was a stack of magazines—Penthouse, Hustler—and wedged between the Lex Williford 213 strongbox and the back of the drawer, a chrome pint flask. I took out the dented flask, twisted off the cap and sniffed it, shivered a little, as if I’d just taken a shot. Southern Comfort. I shook my head. No comfort in that, not for me—it almost made me gag. But then I felt my father’s hunger, his thirst, considered what it would be like just to take a sip, one little sip. The front door slammed downstairs, and I jumped in my father’s drafting chair. I felt sick a moment, like I might throw up, but I took in a deep breath and let my heart slow, not caring if he found me out anymore, sneaking around through his desk’s bottom drawer, then took my time screwing the cap back on tight and putting the flask and the cigar box back just as I’d found them, just as I’d found them the first time, an eleven-year-old boy looking for colored pencils. I sat there for half an hour staring out the dark window next to my father’s drafting table, waiting for him to come upstairs to the light, but he didn’t. Then I stood and spun out his chair and flipped off his desk lamp, then walked down the hall and down the stairs to the living room, fully expecting to find my father asleep there on the couch. He wasn’t there. Then from the hallway I heard my father snoring in his and my mother’s bed, and I went back to my old bed upstairs to sleep. 4. Eight a.m. next morning, I woke up to the smell of bacon and my mother’s turkey in the oven, a morning show blaring downstairs in my mother’s bedroom as she sat at her vanity mirror putting on her face, a news show from the kitchen downstairs where my father was making his own special huevos rancheros burritos at the stove. He said nothing as I sat at the breakfast table, didn’t even look at me. I watched him spoon out scrambled eggs and crumbled bacon, grated cheddar cheese and sour cream, cilantro and Pace picante sauce onto soft flour tortillas he warmed in the skillet. He folded the ends over, then rolled the tortillas up and put them onto three plates; the first he covered with a dishtowel for my mother, then one for him and one for me, and he carried them both to the breakfast table as if nothing at all had happened the night before. I picked up his remote, its buttons slick with bacon grease, and pointed it at the tv. “You mind?” 214 Ploughshares He shot me a look. I wanted more than anything to flip off Newt Gingrich, but I muted the volume instead, then laid the greasy remote next to my father’s plate across from me. “Sorry about some of the things I said last night,” I said. My father stared down at his food on the table and said nothing, and I took in a long breath and nodded to myself, the one who always apologized, first and last, for the sake of an empty peace. I laid the Guillow’s balsa model kit I’d been holding in my lap onto the kitchen table. “Found this last night in my old bedroom closet,” I said. My father squinted up at the box and me a moment and said, “Yep.” Then he started to eat. “You kept it, Dad. You kept it all these years. Why you didn’t tell me?” He shrugged. “Didn’t think it was important,” he said, his mouth full of white tortilla bits and eggs. “You must’ve kept it for a reason.” My father shrugged again, took another bite. I opened the box on the table and took out the tail rudder and told my father about the night before. “I remembered sanding this thing, right here along this edge, holding the sandpaper like this, over thirty years ago. It was like I was doing it right then, right there, with you talking to me, showing me how.” My father poured more Pace over his folded tortilla and cut it into pieces with his knife and fork, then flipped open The Dallas Morning News. “Dad,” I said. He looked up at me, his fork just inside his open mouth. “Why didn’t we ever finish it?” “What?” “This.” I pushed the model box toward him. “Hell, I don’t know, Travis. We never finished a lot of things. Never will. Do we have to talk about it right now?” “No,” I said, “we don’t.” My father dropped his fork clattering to his plate, and I jumped a little in my chair like the times I’d mouth off and he’d clock me on the top of my skull with his heavy A&M class ring. He leaned forward across the kitchen table toward me. Lex Williford 215 “I don’t remember and I don’t want to remember and even if I did I don’t want to talk about it anymore, OK? Is that all right with you? I can’t go back there anymore, Trey. I just can’t. I’m done with all that.” “It’s hard for me too, Dad. A big part of me doesn’t want to remember either. But I’m trying to understand. Trying to understand you. What happened. Between you and me.” I pulled the model box back to me and sat back, the chair’s wooden joints loose and creaking, a strange sense of dread lifting. “All right, I get it. I understand. No problem.” I looked down at the egg burrito going cold on my plate, ate it fast without tasting it, then stood from the kitchen table and took my plate to the sink to rinse it out and put it into the dishwasher. “Killer huevos, Papa,” I said. “Muchísimas gracias.” “Use a language I understand when you talk to me,” he said, never looking up from his plate. “Sure thing, Dad.” I picked up the old model box from the kitchen table, to take it back upstairs, to put it back into the liquor box where my father’d left it. On my way out of the kitchen, my father flipped off the tv. “I asked you a couple of times,” he said, almost a shout. “If you wanted to finish it. You said no. Said something about some book you’d read at school.” I stopped, glanced down at the model and held it up, squinting at the box, shaking my head, trying to remember. America’s First Atomic Bomber! the caption read. “Hiroshima,” I said and faced my father. “I’ve read the book I don’t know how many times. Taught it for years. A brilliant piece of writing. But that was the first time I ever read it. Couldn’t shake it off. Still can’t. John Hersey’s skinny, scary little book.” “Never heard of it,” my father said. “Sure you did. I told you about it myself. Said you should read it. Everybody should, especially in the US. It came out a year after that summer you stayed with your father at A&M, a few months after he died. First serialized in The New Yorker, took up one whole issue. One of those books that changed my life.” “Sounds like some kind of do-gooder Yankee bullshit to me,” my father said. “Jesus, Trey, didn’t you quit the Scouts right about then? Three merit badges short of Eagle? You were so goddamn close too, and you just…quit.” 216 Ploughshares “No, Dad, two. I was short two merit badges. But other things happened too.” Things I could never talk to him about. Not without setting him off. Like that day he took me without my coat to Pecan Park in the dead of winter to swing a two-by-four at my ass for some asinine act of rebellion I’d pulled in Mrs. Jaffrey’s class in the seventh grade. Part of me wanted to leave the kitchen then and just let it all go, spend some quality time with my mother, then later with my brother and two of my younger sisters and their kids. Talk about safe topics, not start the whole damn thing all over again, tired of feeling that old heavy father-dread, but I needed to research this damn book, and I walked back into the kitchen anyway, pulled a chair out across from him and sat, already knowing that, like the night before, it probably wouldn’t go well. “Mrs. Jaffrey thought I was too young to read it,” I said. “Maybe I was. I was, what, twelve? Thirteen? Like with you, anything she told me not to do just made me want to do it even more.” “Spite.” My father almost spit the word at me, bubbles of spittle on his lip. He folded the Dallas Morning News in half and pushed it away from his plate. “Maybe,” I said. I laid the model box back onto the kitchen table, shook my head. “That damn book scared the crap out of me, man, kept me up nights. We’d been doing duck-and-cover drills in Mrs. Jaffrey’s class, and that didn’t exactly help. I couldn’t stop thinking about all that devastation and horror, not just numbers and stats but stories of real people. People with broken bodies pinned under desks and bookshelves and rubble, trying to climb out. Patterns of their clothes burnt into their skin, their skin just hanging off in shreds. Shadows of people they knew, just their shadows, stretching out on walls and bridges.” My father squeezed his eyes shut. “Jesus.” “One thing almost made me stop reading. I had to put the book down. Couldn’t get it out of my head. This woman’s in the river, badly burned, along with a lot of other burn victims. Trying to cool off, escape the pain and all the fires. Trying to drink the brackish water, which just made them all even sicker. This man reaches down from a boat to help the woman out, too weak to pull herself up, and her skin just sloughs Lex Williford 217 off the bones of her hands like rubber gloves. That’s how I remember it anyway. I should. Taught that damn book more than once.” “Why the hell would anyone want to read a book like that? And why would you want to teach it?” “In a way it was your idea.” “I doubt it.” “No, Dad, that first time it was. I’d just finished working with you on my Architecture Merit Badge. After that, I had only two left to go. You were the only architect in Troop 719, the only counselor for that badge. You took me to a job site, showed me how to measure a room, draw a floor plan. Wouldn’t do any of it for me, did the same thing with me you did with all the other scouts you worked with, some not even in our troop. I was glad you didn’t treat me any different. You made me do the floor plan more than once, were kind of a perfectionist about it.” I glanced at my father, laughed. “Can’t imagine where I got that trait. But you showed me how, were patient with me, let me do it on my own. It was mostly simple stuff, but I learned a lot from you. The basics anyway.” I laid my hand on top of the box. “One Saturday, we were working on this, I remember. I wanted to know the history behind it, but you couldn’t tell me much. ‘This plane ended a world war,’ was all you said. ‘Took a lot of lives, saved a lot of lives.’ To find out more, you suggested I work on some science merit badge, I can’t remember what—.” “Atomic Energy,” he said. “Yeah, maybe that was it. I could do some research, you said, find out on my own, then tell you all about it. While we were building this plane together. Kill two birds with one…” I stared off, blanked out a moment, blinked. “I could become an expert, you said, something like that. And I guess I did, in a way. At a very young age.” I stared at the plane on the box, the chrome fuselage and wings, the number 82 stenciled in under the nose cowling. “I could never look at this thing the same after that. Not without thinking about that woman in the river.” I covered the plane on the box with my open palm. “Could barely even look at it at all.” I shoved the box away. “You wanted to know why, but I couldn’t talk to you about it. Knew we wouldn’t see things the same way. We never did. Not about Nixon or Vietnam. Not about anything really, except landscapes and buildings we both thought were beautiful. Just telling you about the book pissed you off plenty enough.” 218 Ploughshares 5. My mother walked into the kitchen and stopped when she saw us both staring each other down across the kitchen table. “Everything OK in here, boys?” she said, glancing at him, then at me, then back at him. “Am I interrupting something important?” We both turned to her and forced a smile. I nodded. He shook his head. We couldn’t even agree on which of her questions to answer. “Mind if I cook a little while you two visit? I’m running late. Overslept, almost forgot to put the turkey in last night. Woke up at three a.m. and said, ‘Oh, shit!’ Couldn’t go back to sleep after that. Nate, Hanna, Nettie, the kids’ll all be here around four. I’ve got a lot of cooking to do.” She smiled at me, winked. “Making my famous chocolate meringue pie. For my eldest son.” I beamed back at her, a real smile, unstrained, unrestrained. She reached up for her mother’s big flame-blackened stainlesssteel pot hanging with other pans over her island stovetop, dropped it bouncing and clanking into the sink, my father jumping in his chair as she turned on the faucet to fill it. Then she scrambled to the pantry door to pull out a big red-netted sack of potatoes. “God,” she said, “I’d do anything to have Maddie here. Then we’d all be here together.” My father rolled his eyes, nodded to the counter, to the plate he’d covered with a towel and left for her. “You need to eat some breakfast first,” he said. She glanced at the microwave above her big oven, where the roasting turkey sizzled, and she ducked under an apron string and tied the others behind her back, lighting up a thin Capri menthol with her pink Bic, balancing it like a long toothpick from the corner of her mouth. “I’ll warm it up in a bit, Deuce. Just need to get everything else started.” She picked up the sack of potatoes, smoke scrolling up into her eyes, then lost her grip, five or six tumbling out of the open sack, bouncing all over the floor. She fell to her knees to pick them up. I stood to help her. “Sit down, Travis,” she said. “Won’t you at least let me peel a few potatoes?” “I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it. No KP duty for you today. You’re an honored guest. You can carve the turkey later, if you want.” Lex Williford 219 In your father’s house always observe your father’s rules, she always said. “Last I checked,” I told her, “that was Dad’s job.” “Today,” my father told me, “it’s yours.” He had this grimacing grin on his face, as if someone had just pegged his hand to the kitchen table with an ice pick. “Fair enough,” I said and sat, my face muscles twitching with another strained smile, my teeth clamped shut, like I was telling a photographer, “Just take the damn shot, will you?” “You boys have some catching up to do. Just pretend I’m not even here.” Always volunteering to be invisible, my mother. Guess I got that from her. She picked up the potatoes and plopped the ones she’d dropped onto the floor into the big heavy pot without peeling them, then picked the pot up in the sink by both handles, but then, just as she glanced back at me again, she lost her grip, and it slipped out of her fingers, bouncing and banging into the stainless-steel sink again, sloshing water all over her. “Pay no attention to the woman behind the apron,” she laughed, patting herself dry with paper towels. “Good luck with that,” my father said. Jangled like a mortar shell had just exploded right behind him, he reached for the cigar pack in the pocket of his red-plaid shirt, his hand trembling a little, then stripped off the red plastic ring tab around a Swisher Sweets with his teeth, spit the cellophane into his palm, dug around in his pants pocket and pulled out his Zippo, banging it against his slacks till it clinked open and caught. Then he lit up. “Where were we?” I asked him. He grinned. “Incinerating Japs?” Grinding the wooden tip of his cigar between his teeth, he took a long drag and inhaled, blew a mushroom cloud of cigar smoke into my face. Then he stuck out a little sliver of his tongue, plucked a splinter from it and wiped it on his pants. I closed my eyes, shook my head and went on. “When did you hear the news, Dad? You were with your father at A&M then, right?” “What the hell are you talking about now?” “The day we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.” 220 Ploughshares “You say we. I wasn’t there to drop it myself. Were you?” “You know what I mean,” I said. “I’m afraid I do. If I remember right, you weren’t there. Neither was I. But I would be in a few years, or at least in some other godforsaken shithole not too far away—Korea. I was still at A&M when that war ended too, thank god. Two wars that ended while I was at College Station. Young as hell the first time my dad took me there. Lucky as hell the second. My fifth year in architecture school saved my ass, but it could’ve been me. Missed it by just a hair, but I lost a few Aggie buddies there who graduated the year before me, most of them engineering students like my father. Same in-coming class. Marshall Hillin. The Tucker twins. Too many others. Hell, your friend Kenny Ryffe’s stepfather got most of his fingers broke in a Chinese POW camp in the north, if I remember right.” My father nodded and puffed at his cigar, stared at the ash covering the glowing tip, knocked it a few times against his ashtray till it fell off. “I always agreed with my mother about MacArthur. Man told Truman to drop the bomb north of the 38th parallel, and be done with those dink bastards, but Truman lost his nerve and fired the poor son of a bitch. That didn’t make my mother too happy. Or me. You weren’t even born yet. Your life was never on the line.” Before I could say otherwise, he said, “Goddamn 4-F draft dodger.” He stared off, shaking his head, laughing out a little clot of smoke. “I doubt you’d understand.” “I might, Dad. When my friends drafted to Nam came back, they were never the same. I lost more than a few of them, dead or alive. Could’ve been me too. I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about that, but just say the word and we can stop talking about it. Any time.” He glared off at the wall behind me, pinching his cigar between his lips like he was giving it little kisses, puffing, inhaling, then blowing smoke, kissing, puffing, inhaling, then blowing out more smoke. “We didn’t get the news right away,” he went on. “I was playing pool in the mess hall rec room when the CO announced it. I was just a kid, sort of a mascot with the guys that summer, hung out with them while my father did his research, X-raying pavement all day every day, even on weekends. All the Aggie boys eating shit on a shingle in the mess hall stood and cheered, stomping their boots. The whole damn building shook like someone’d dropped a bomb on us. This one senior classman was giving me pointers on how to play nine ball, I’ll never Lex Williford 221 forget. When we heard the cheer go up, boots raising dust from the hardwood floor, someone ducked into the room to tell us the news, and my partner leaned hard on his pool stick. Said, ‘It’s over.’ He’d just got his commission as a First Lieutenant, was shipping out in a few weeks to the war in the Pacific. I got pretty close to those guys that summer. Couple dozen Aggies boys who defended Corregidor had already died in the Bataan Death March, hundreds more all over the world. The bomb saved that soldier’s life and a lot of others.” “Was he there with you?” “Who?” “Your father.” “What, playing pool? God, no. Man was straighter than a pool cue. Was taking down the lab he’d built at the start of the summer, packing up all his paving samples and notes, taking apart the fluoroscope he’d built from scratch. Didn’t want anybody else to use it. Way too dangerous, he said. He was sure as hell right about that.” “Did he cheer too?” “He was an engineer, a scientist. Knew things most of us wouldn’t know for years. No, when I ran across campus to his lab to tell him, all out of breath, there were no cheers from my father, just tears. Only time I ever saw my father cry, except maybe the last week I saw him in Houston. That whole thing troubled him, and the more he read about it, the more worried he got. If the Germans’d got the bomb first, sent them off on a few of their V2 rockets, he said, they’d’ve thought nothing at all about dropping one or a thousand nukes on cities the size of Hiroshima—cities like Dallas or Houston at the time. But we were the ones that did it—us, Americans, the good old U S of A. But we’d crossed a line too, he thought. Said there was no stopping it, no going back. We’d almost lost the power to destroy the world to people who punished without question or mercy. And now we had that same power too. That’s the kind of people we’d become, he thought, if we weren’t careful. I could’ve argued with my father about it, but I didn’t. My mother didn’t agree with him either. But he was my father, and I respected him. I didn’t go around all the time trying to pick fights with him about every goddamn thing. That’s just how it was then, how he was.” I glanced up at my mother, who’d stopped her cooking for a mo- 222 Ploughshares ment and cocked her head at me, giving me that look of hers that said, Don’t you even think about picking any more fights with this old man. I said nothing. She said nothing, puffing at her Capri menthol, one eye squinting against the smoke, as she poured more potatoes out of the bag, dropped them plopping like grenades one at a time into the big pot of boiling water. “Last time I saw him in Houston,” my father said, “right before he died in his mother’s big canopy bed, he was rail thin, bony as the Jews the Allies’d liberated from the camps. “‘I can’t protect you from weapons that could end the world,’ he said. ‘No one can. I can’t even protect you from your own mother.’” “He must’ve taken precautions,” I said. “Must’ve known the danger of X-rays, right?” “‘No dallying or mucking around with X-rays,’” he told me. “Not with things you don’t understand. Too bad he never followed his own advice.” “Did he let you see his experiments?” “Hell no. Not while he was doing them anyway. His lab had this big knife switch high up on the wall, out of my reach—double pole, double throw—for extra safety. This big fluoroscope like an old cathode ray tv he’d gotten from a medical salvage yard somewhere. Whole lab looked like something right out of The Bride of Frankenstein, all set in a place not much bigger than a janitor’s closet. ‘Never touch anything,’ he said, ‘especially not these,’ and he pointed to that big switch, then to that fluoroscope and said, ‘Things like these can get a boy killed.’ Then he shooed me off to go play pool in the mess hall rec room.” My father sucked at his cigar like my kid brother Jesse used to suck on his thumb. “My father knew Edison, you know?” I did, but I just let my father talk. “Well, maybe not personally, but he saw him sometimes when he was growing up in West Orange, New Jersey. My father was born there in 1888, the same year Edison moved his labs and factories there from Menlo Park. Used to see the man some summers, strolling around on the sidewalks, walking into the dry goods store like any other Joe Blow. “My father idolized Edison, Tesla too, wanted to be an inventor just like them. Wanted more than anything to be one of Edison’s muckers, Lex Williford 223 guys who’d just muck around with things all day, come up with new ideas, inventions—electric locomotives, DC generators, you name it. My father read everything Edison wrote. Everything he could get his hands on about the man. Edison was completely self-taught, never got a college degree, and my father admired that about him. But then my grandfather, a railroad engineer for the Great Northern, got a job with the Houston East and West Texas Railroad. Had to move the family to Texas when my father was ten. My father never got a chance to muck around with Edison, but he wanted to get an education anyway and settled on a degree in civil engineering at Texas A&M. “Your grandfather’d never believe what engineers can do nowadays, all these high-rises and skyscrapers and highways and giant spaghetti bowls downtown. Overpasses over LBJ Freeway would’ve bowled him over. But when the president’s limo raced for cover under it, when Oswald, or whoever the hell it was, shot Connelly and JFK, the Triple Underpass my father’d designed and built was already thirty years old. But in the thirties, it was a big breakthrough in civil engineering. Revolutionary, some said. No one’d ever built anything like it, and your grandfather’d designed it, supervised its construction, everything. Took me to the jobsite downtown half a dozen times just to show me how he’d build it. Tons of rebar for reinforced concrete and permanent wooden forms that workers could use again and again, saving the Texas Highway Department thousands of dollars and man hours. “He wanted me to get a degree in Civil Engineering, too—I might’ve died in Korea if I had—and he wanted me to go to A&M to do it, the best engineering school in Texas, he always said, maybe in the whole country. Wanted me to go into business with him, if I ever wanted to, when I’d finished my stint in the Army. He died long before I ever studied at A&M, but the summer of ’45, he taught me how to paint with watercolors. He was good at it, damn good, and that pushed me in a direction neither he nor I would’ve ever expected. I always loved to draw, like him, but if it hadn’t been for that long summer with my father, learning how to paint with him, becoming an architect would’ve never even occurred to me. My father was the one who suggested it in the end. ‘Do what you love,’ he said. ‘Only that.’” * 224 Ploughshares My father stood from his squeaky chair and went to the fridge. Pulled a can of Coors Light from a six pack’s plastic loops and held it out for me to take. I shook my head. “Have I told you all this before?” he said. “Just let me know if I have. I’d hate to bore you to death.” He coughed out a laugh. Then he held the can away from him and cracked the tab open with a hiss and spray of beer right into my face. He grinned, his bright blue eyes burning like the pilot lights on my mother’s kitchen stove. I blinked but refused to wipe my eyes or face, just stared at him, shook my head again and shrugged, grinning back. I’d heard a few of these stories before, sure, mostly as a kid, mostly when I couldn’t make much sense of my father’s cruel, inflexible, always-contradictory convictions, unable to sift the shifting bits of truth from the staggering exaggerations and lies. I’d blocked out a few of his stories too, like a lot of other things he’d done to me, and maybe for good reason, but, as the boy I’d been too many years before and the man I was trying to become, as infuriating and imperfect as he was—as we both could be—I still loved the man my father became when he told his stories, especially stories about his father. He’d loved his father as he could never love me, but that made me love his father too, even though I’d never known him, maybe more than I could ever love my own father, and maybe there was some consolation in that. I’d come all this way home, from so many years and so many miles away, I realized, hoping to hear these stories again and maybe a few new ones that might answer the question, Who is this man, your father? When my father got lost in his stories, I got lost with him. He became animated when he told them, his hands swooping and darting in the air like swifts or bats snapping at gnats at sunset, and he acted out all the parts in his stories, even used different voices whenever the parts demanded it. He was a great joke teller, too—except when he told Aggie jokes. He lost his sense of humor completely the moment anyone else told an Aggie joke in his house or, worse, made fun of an Aggie, especially any of his own kids. He expressly forbade it, gave me a stern look whenever I tried, just to poke at him a bit. Much as he hated anyone who made fun Lex Williford 225 of Aggies, it was all right if he did it himself. He just wasn’t particularly good at it, stumbling over his words, like my mother trying to tell a joke, then almost always forgetting the punchline. To my father, jokes about Aggies were somehow sacrilegious, like jokes that made fun of Jesus or Republicans. “How many Aggies does it take…” he’d start and I’d just say, “I don’t know, Dad. How many?” And I always knew the punchlines, had heard them dozens of times before, just wanted to watch him lose himself inside the joke and ham it up, waiting for the storyteller in him to take over. If I let him go on, he’d talk half the morning or night, smoking his cigarettes or cigars, drinking his Coors Lights or Southern Comfort or Johnnie Walker Red. His built-in sermons would fall away, and he’d just let a story tell itself, instead of whacking me over the head with his heavy hammer of Christian piety and patriotism. If he’d ever fought in Korea, I always wanted to believe—mostly wishful thinking, I’m sure—he might never have become such an insufferable chicken hawk, might have fought to the death to keep me from going to Viet Nam—which I’d missed by one year in a car accident, just as he’d missed Korea by studying an extra year in Architecture, just as his father had missed combat in WWI, too, working as the Chief Civil Engineer for the US Army Air Corps—but my father must have felt like a draft dodger too, on some level anyway, something he could never forgive in himself and would always hate in me, maybe even in his own father, an intellectual who’d abandoned him just like he must have thought his eldest son had done. My father’s stories almost always meant one thing to him and something altogether other to me. Somehow, I understood, even as a kid, that I’d never learn the truth about my father directly, a man who hid the truth from himself so thoroughly, the hinges of his mind almost always welded shut but, lubricated by drink, sometimes swinging open as he exposed, then tried to protect himself from, his wounds like a cornered porcupine, its back to me, hissing, its needles extended, erect and ready to let fly. I’d never learn anything from his terrible pronouncements of moral certitude but only from his digressions and evasions and outright lies, the little, unhealed wounds and pockets of shadow he tried to hide from others and could never reveal to himself. Wounds he’d spent a lifetime avoiding, doomed to project and inflict them upon me and my siblings as his mother and then the Corps had inflicted them on him. 226 Ploughshares * Not yet 10 a.m., and he sat back in his kitchen chair, sipping his first beer of the day. Jesus, I thought, here we go. “When I was a kid,” he said, “my mother always took us boys to get shoes, but one Saturday morning when he was home she demanded that my father take us so she could get her hair done, and he drove us to the one place in Dallas our mother’d never take us to, no matter how many times we begged her. “The downtown Buster Brown shoe store. “Too expensive, she’d say, and she’d always buy us the cheapest shoes she could find, especially when we outgrew them or wore them out in less than six months. We were hard on shoes, she said. But the shoes she bought were hard on us too, as hard as she was. Shoes’d be on sale, but they’d sell out in our size, and she’d buy us both a pair anyway, a half size too small or too big, rubbing big or small blisters on our heels or toes, depending. She made us polish our shoes every Sunday before church, trying to rub out all the scuff marks we got from playing kick the can or kick the cat, but however good we might’ve made them look on the top, our shoes would get paper-thin soles with big holes in them and sometimes would just fall off—once, I remember, right in the middle of a preacher’s sermon. “Our father backed us boys out of the driveway in his ’33 Stutz Bearcat convertible—a good quality used car, he said, outrageously priced, our mother always told him, but it got him all over a state the size of a country on trips for the Texas Highway Department, kept him cool as a pickle without blowing steam from the radiator out in the middle of Nowhere, West Texas. Our father drove down Mercedes Ave. and said we both deserved good quality shoes that would fit and last, too, even if we outgrew them, even if he had to pay a little bit more. “‘What kinds of shoes would that be, boys?’ he said, and from the back seat, wind blowing in our faces, we both shouted, ‘Buster Browns!’ “The downtown Buster Brown shoe store was the only one in Dallas with a shoe-fitting fluoroscope. “You stuck your foot into the bottom of a square hole in this wood contraption and when you looked down through the viewfinder on the top, you could see the bones in your own feet. Get a perfect measureLex Williford 227 ment every time! a sign over the machine said. None of this stepping on a Ritz Stick in your sock feet or having some high-school kid mash your big toe just to see if you had enough room to wiggle it around. “My father’d never heard of a shoe-fitting fluoroscope, spent most of his time at the Buster Brown shoe store asking the manager how it worked and how much it cost, sticking his feet in and out and in and out, staring down at his own toe bones again and again. ‘Amazing,’ he said. He asked the manager to see the owner’s manual, so distracted he didn’t even notice he’d bought us both the most expensive shoes we could find. Our mother made us take them back later, sure, but that just gave our father another chance to take a second look at that shoefitting fluoroscope. “My father was always wondering how he could make asphalt last in the hot summer sun without melting into the gutters or making tar bubbles on the streets we popped barefoot, blistering our toes, and that’s where he got the idea of X-raying pavement. Right there in that Buster Brown shoe store. Staring down at the bones of his own bony feet. “He thought he might be able to adapt the shoe-fitting fluoroscope for his lab, but it cost twice as much as the entire grant he’d gotten to do his experiments at A&M, so he read everything he could find about making fluoroscopes—one strong enough to see through a four-inch sample of pavement—and he researched places he could get salvage parts, and he built the fluoroscope himself, mostly in our garage. Had to rig one of his Aggie buddies’ big laundry trucks just to carry it down to College Station. “The lab A&M gave him for his summer experiments was tiny, barely big enough to hold the machine he’d built, and he wasn’t too happy about that. Had to take apart some of it just to get it through the door. That didn’t leave a lot of room for his paving samples or for him to squeeze in and operate the damn thing. “When he was still a kid in Jersey, my father told me, sometimes he’d see this guy walking around with Edison. Clarence Dally. Edison’s X-ray assistant. One of his muckers. “My father was dying in Houston when he told me, I’ll never forget. “Dally dallied around too much and f-mucked up, my father said, propped up on his mother’s feather pillows. That’s exactly how he said it too. F-mucked up. Hard to say if you try it, but he caught and cor228 Ploughshares rected himself just in time. Turned his head away and blushed like a little girl with her nickers down. “I almost laughed out loud when I heard him say it, but I knew better. “Aggie boys in the mess hall rec room that summer cursed like crazy—effing this and effing that all day every day—but I was used to it, swore like an Aggie in senior boots myself by the time I was eleven. Road crews my father supervised cursed like crazy, too, you can be sure, but my father was straight as a plum line with a heavy bob, and hearing him say that, seeing him blush—his white face gone all red as a ripe tomato—made me turn my head and blush too.” My father stopped and stared off, his eyes shining. “He was really sick then,” he said, almost a whisper. “In a lot of pain, though he’d never let on while I was around. Cancer’d spread to his lungs and liver, all over. He died that week, I think.” My father was quiet a long time, shaking his head. “Jesus, you’d think I’d remember the last day I saw my own father alive, but I can’t. I just…can’t.” My father blinked, one eyelid twitching like my kid brother Jesse’s when the nurses poked his wrist, taped to the transfusion board, again and again, unable to find a vein that hadn’t already been poked a dozen times, but no tears. No tears from my brother, not near the end. He was just three. No tears from my father either, not now, not ever. Tears just pissed my father off. He shook his head fast like he didn’t know where he was a moment, then went on. “Dally built this big fluoroscope, the most powerful he could make. When President McKinley got shot in Buffalo, doctors couldn’t find the bullet, so Dally set up his big fluoroscope to X-ray the president right there in the hospital, but before Dally could ever use it, McKinley died. Gangrene, I think my father said. “‘Don’t dally, boy,’ my father was always saying toward the end. ‘Don’t be mucking around. Or you might just end up like me.’ “Dally dallied around so much, he ended up losing all his fingers, poor bastard. Then he lost the use of both arms. Then he mucked around and had one arm amputated. But he kept on using that damn fluoroscope, don’t ask me how or why, even after Edison told him to stop. Died before he even turned forty. Skin cancer, same as your grandfather. Melanoma dark as black tar melting in the hot Texas sun. Edison almost lost his eyesight too, but the fluoroscope he used was Lex Williford 229 a lot smaller, weaker, and he stopped working with X-rays soon as he saw what’d happened to Dally. Said X-rays were too damn dangerous, especially for any damn fool who thought he might be an expert. “My father read all about Dally while he was dying in Houston— too late then. Read about Madame Curie too, hiding her radium during WWI to drive radiological cars to the front to X-ray wounded doughboys. She might’ve turned the tide for the French in the Battle of Marne, he told me, but she didn’t die from bullets or bombs or mustard gas. All it took was a little radium and all those X-rays she took to save a few brave soldiers. Woman or not, she was a brave soldier herself, my father said. In a way, toward the end, she became his biggest hero, too. “While he was in bed dying, my father read whatever he could get his hands on that wasn’t classified about Einstein and Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Trinity, Tinian, too. Went to his death thinking about what he’d done to himself, what scientists had done, building weapons when they should’ve been building roads and buildings and bridges instead. “Instead of knocking them all down. “This one time—I was six or seven, I guess—he told me no to something I wanted, probably an RC Cola, one of the few times he ever said no to anything I ever asked for, and I took off my shoe and threw it over the sink, right through the kitchen window. “Surprised the hell out of him. Surprised me too. He just stood there glaring at me with his mouth hanging open, shattered glass in the sink, scattered all over the counter, the kitchen tile. “I grinned at him and said, ‘There!’ “He gripped me so hard by the arms I thought he’d break them. Guess I always had it in my head that he was a weak man, hardly ever standing up to my mother, but he was strong as hell. Held me up by my upper arms and shook me hard. “‘What are you going to do with your life, boy?’ he shouted into my face. ‘Make things or break things? Which is it going to be? Tell me! Now!’ “‘Make things!’ I said. ‘I swear!’ “Then he made me sweep up all the shattered glass, took me to the dry goods store to buy putty and a new pane of glass and taught me how to fix a broken window. “‘You’ve got a temper on you, boy,’ he said, and he was sure as hell right about that. 230 Ploughshares “But I didn’t get it from him. That’s the only time I can ever remember him getting angry, really angry, at me.” My father gulped down a few swallows of his Coors fast, his whitestubbled Adam’s apple bobbing, sweat like little bubbles popping out from his forehead and upper lip like tiny blisters in my mother’s hot kitchen. He wiped his forehead and mouth with a napkin and went on. “My father convinced himself that the weapons engineers like him had designed would end the world, including your grandmother, R.E. and me. He never said it outright, but that’s what he must’ve thought. You could see the fear in his eyes toward the end. Not for himself but for us. He read a Gideon’s Bible the last few days, something he’d picked up from a hotel in Sweetwater on one of his many trips to West Texas. The Book of Revelations mostly. But he tossed it into a nightstand drawer, slammed it shut and never even looked at the Good Book again. You’d think he’d’ve got religion in his last days, but, if anything, he lost it. I don’t think he believed any of it in the end. He was never a religious man. His only religion was science.” My father glanced at me, smiled, nodded to the balsa model on the kitchen table. “I suspect he might’ve read that little book you read when you were a Scout too, when we were building that bomber together, if he’d lived a little longer. But he didn’t, and we never finished it, did we? Never will.” He shrugged. “At least we’re still here. Almost fifty years later. My father’d be surprised at that. Surprised we wouldn’t’ve blown ourselves up by now. Man always expected the worst, was a pessimist to the core, like you.” I thought my father was done, but he stood, a little wobbly, and grabbed another beer from the fridge and chugged it all down, tossing the can into the trash and leaning into the fridge with the door wide open, like he used to, to cool himself off hot summer Saturdays whenever he’d mowed the lawn, his breath and sweaty arms steaming a little. Then he sat back in his creaking kitchen chair and went on a while longer. “That summer, we painted watercolors together, skin peeled back red from my father’s knuckles. Blistered sometimes too, like he’d burned himself on the stove. It was hard not to notice. “‘Just a little sunburn,’ my father always said. ‘A little too much sun, is all.’ Lex Williford 231 “Even healthy, the man was pale as bone. Güero, the wetback road crews called him. Blondie. Called him jefe too. He was fair-skinned and a fair boss, something they weren’t used to, maybe the only white man who spoke to them about their families. Knew more Spanish than any other white man I know. Thought it was a terrible thing—those men working in the hot sun all day, laying out buckets of hot tar on desert roadbeds. And for what? Barely enough money to send to their families back home in Mexico. “He got some sun that summer in College Station, sure, but he spent most of his time in his dark little lab. Drove his convertible with the top down sometimes too, never much before that, except to supervise job sites. Even in winter he wore a wide-brimmed Stetson with a long chin strap. Called it his sombrero. Wore long-sleeved guayaberas and leather driving gloves he’d bought in mercados in Juárez, even on days of blazing sun, when it was well over a hundred in the shade along lonely stretches of highway he inspected in the West Texas desert. “I wanted to believe him when he said it, but I knew he wasn’t telling the truth, to me or himself. Maybe he wouldn’t allow himself to think about what he was doing to himself all that summer, about how he’d lose his life and his second wife and me and my brother, like he’d lost his first wife and daughter, and all because of a few samples of pavement. Who knows? Maybe he just didn’t want to live anymore. “Dad wrote his little book with a stack of yellow legal pads and a mechanical pencil, on a dinner tray in his lap, propped up on pillows in his mother’s bed. Black-and-white X-rays and notes with equations I could never understand scattered all around him. Finished the book a few days before he died. Was dead in his grave at Restland at least a year before it was ever published. My mother’d refused to talk to him after he’d left Dallas, but she saw to it. Typed up the manuscript herself when he was gone. Still thought of herself as his secretary, I guess. Got one copy of the book and gave it to me, but I could barely look at it. It’s yours if you want it. After I’m gone.” “Sure, Dad,” I said. “I’d like that.” The first thing I’d said to my father in an hour or more. “That last summer,” my father went on, “sometimes the samples of pavement my father X-rayed were uneven, wouldn’t stay flat on the steel platen, and he’d have to hold them there under the fluoroscope 232 Ploughshares with his bare hands.” My father shook his head. “A stupid damn thing to do, he must’ve known. All it would have taken was a little lead shielding, he told me toward the end, but I guess he didn’t have time to f-muck around with all that. Not until he ran out of time altogether.” My father stared far off, as if he was looking at the sun setting below a far-off West Texas horizon, like the watercolor washes of New Mexico skies he made when he taught me how to paint years before, streaks of bright sunlight splitting low clouds into radiating bands of light. Pink clouds dropping blue curtains of rain across the desert. 6. “That’s about all I got,” he said finally and let out a drooping whistle. “Can we stop talking about all this? I need a break. Going to grab me a nap before all the troops get here.” He started to stand, held the back of his creaking chair to steady himself, a little shaky on his feet. I glanced up at the kitchen wall clock—almost 3 p.m. An hour before my father’s house would be full of children’s laughter again. My mother’d already mashed the potatoes, opened two cans of cranberry sauce and sliced the jellied red cylinders fanning out around a plate, had already made the crusts and pudding and meringue and baked her killer chocolate pies, had already taken the turkey and green bean casserole and dinner rolls out of the oven and covered them with aluminum foil and dishtowels to keep them warm. She’d listened to all the stories about my father and his father too, tearing breadcrumbs from loaves of day-old Mrs. Baird’s bread into a big bowl, as she chopped up hard-boiled eggs and giblets and celery, wiping her eyes as she diced white onions for her mother’s homemade sage dressing. And my father? He’d been talking about his own father for almost four hours straight, stories tumbling out of his mouth like a long deathbed confession after too many years of silence between us. In all that time, he’d drunk maybe three six-packs of beer or more from a case, in the fridge, he’d bought the night before—I’d lost count of all the aluminum cans he’d crushed like paper wads into his fist and thrown clanking into the trash—and he’d drunk each one a little faster Lex Williford 233 as he’d done whenever he’d gotten a few too many beers in his belly, slurring his words a little, his eyes getting hazy, then glazing over, his head weaving and bobbing a little like he was trying to piss standing up in a boat on choppy water. Talking almost nonstop. A man who almost never talked—at least not to me. I’d forgotten all about the digital recorder in my suitcase upstairs, wished I’d recorded everything he’d said, just to hear his voice and his stories again years later, after he was gone, but I knew I’d remember them, remember them all. He’d answered all my questions too, had been generous with his answers, had told me far more than I’d ever hoped to hear, hadn’t been as defensive or combative as I thought he’d be, not like the night before. He reminded me of the man my father could be sometimes, a man I could admire almost as much as I admired his father, the man he’d lost when he was ten, at the beginning of the atomic age. I should’ve waited then, I knew, should’ve known not to ask him any more of the hard questions I’d loaded up with me in my cramped Civic for the two days I was on the road, but after hearing all his stories about his father, I just had to ask. “Dad, did your father ever punish you?” “What?” he said. “What?” He seemed to lose his balance a little, held onto the back of the chair with both hands, had a stunned look on his face as if I’d just ambushed him and punched him hard in the nose. His head swiveled and swayed on his shoulders, faster and faster, like he was trying to shake it off. “Did he ever punish you?” I said. “Hit you. With boards? With his belt? With his bare hands?” My mother was folding stale bread crumbs into a mash of sautéed onions and celery and turkey broth with her own bare hands, and when she heard me ask that question, she stopped and stared down at her knuckles and the backs of her hands, covered with her mother’s famous dressing, then turned her hands palm up—a look on her face like her mother’d just caught her making mud pies in her best Sunday dress. Her mother, Granny Hanny, had punished her and her sisters many times with switches, their panties and summer dresses down around their ankles, just like our mother had punished us kids, making us go out to strip the best green switches we could find from the willow at the 234 Ploughshares side of our house, then drop our drawers, till our shins and calves were striped with bright red welts. Then, like her own father, she’d refused to punish us again after our kid brother Jesse died. Even my mother didn’t know the answers to my questions. “My father?” my father said. “Punish me? He got angry with me and R.E. a few times, sure. Yelled at us a few times, mostly at R.E., but…” My father stared off, trying to remember, shaking his head a little, then more and more, his eyes shining. “No,” he said. “No, son, not that I remember. Not once. Not ever. It was always my mother. My goddamn mother.” I should’ve stopped then. Should have gone easier on him, a lifetime of questions still haunting me, many of them answered now, but still, I thought, just one more question to ask. “Why, then, Dad? When I was a kid. Why’d you punish me so much?” It was a question he could never answer, I knew. Not even I could, after all my questions. As much as I wanted an answer, I’d probably never understand his reasons anyway. “Was it because I hit Jesse that one time,” I went on, “when he smashed that plane we built? Was it because I killed him? That’s what you said the day I hit him. The day you hit me. You killed him. Those were your word, Dad. I’ll never forget.” My father shrugged. “Jesse didn’t die for months after that, son. Would’ve died anyway. Whatever I said, why would you even think such a thing?” “I don’t know, Dad. Because you said it? Punched me a few times in the face and stomach, hard as you could? Maybe because I was a kid? Believed everything you said? Believed you were a god? Thought everything you said was the god’s truth?” He stumbled a little reaching for the half-built balsa model on the kitchen table. He held it up. Held it out to me. “Why don’t we finish this, son?” he said. “We could finish it tomorrow, if you’d like.” “No, Dad. I can’t. I just…can’t.” “Jesus Christ, son, what the hell do you want from me? What’s it going to take?” An apology? I thought. A little understanding? But both were impossible. For him. Maybe even for me. “If you didn’t think I killed him, Dad,” I said, “then, why? I just want to know what I did wrong.” Lex Williford 235 He straightened up, steadied himself and planted his feet, tried to square his shoulders, his face slowly turning to stone. “You sure you want to know why? You sure you can take it? You can’t even take a few licks.” He stared at me with the kind of hatred I’d always known and never understood, his eyes a cold blue burning. “I’ll tell you why. Because you quit the goddamn Scouts two merit badges short of Eagle. Refused to wear a uniform for your own goddamn country. Started smoking cigarettes, smoking dope. Grew your hair down to your ass like a goddamn girl.” He pointed up to the ceiling, to my old room upstairs, right above the kitchen. “Bought a shit drum kit and made a goddamn racket with your goddamn music blaring while your mother was trying to cook supper every night.” “Deuce,” my mother said. He shot her a look. “Some help you were. Shut up. Shut your fucking mouth.” Then he turned back to me and went on. “You really want to know why? Because I’m your goddamn father, you piece of shit. Because it was my goddamn job. To teach you. The difference between right and wrong.” “You taught me all right,” I said. He squeezed his eyes shut, squeezed both his fists together in front of him, trembling. I picked up the model he’d tossed back onto the table and stood with it. “Where you going with that?” “I don’t know. To put it back where I found it, I guess.” He stepped around the kitchen table, took another step toward me to block my way, like he thought I was going to run, but I just stood there. He reached out his open palm and said, “Give me that goddamn thing.” “OK.” I held it out for him, but he didn’t take it. Just stared at it. He nodded. “You know, I get it. I get it now. You just wish my father’d been your father. Instead of me.” “What? I never said that, Dad. I didn’t have a choice, and neither did you. We don’t choose our parents, man. Surely, you wouldn’t’ve chosen your mother.” “You’re goddamn right I would.” “Come on, Dad.” 236 Ploughshares “After my father died, my mother fed R.E. and me and kept a roof over our heads and took care of us whenever we got sick. With the little insurance money my father put away, she put us both through college, four years for R.E. and five for me. Learned how to take shorthand and worked full time but raised us alone. By herself. She gave me everything she ever had, everything I ever wanted, everything I ever needed.” “Did she, Dad?” “What? What kind of question is that? What the hell are you trying to say about my mother?” “I don’t know, Dad, that she hurt you, was wounded herself, maybe even manic depressive? Like Maddie? Untreated, unloved? I’m not judging her, Dad. I’m just trying to understand her. Trying to understand you.” “So you wouldn’t’ve chosen her or me.” “I didn’t say that, Dad.” “But you’d’ve chosen him instead. My father. Just another whiny little sad-sack like you.” I said nothing. Had nothing more to say. He cocked his head sideways, gave it a couple of jerks, like he was trying to get cold lake water out of his ear. Then he sucked air between his teeth and held out his fist, his index finger popping out like a switchblade, and he pointed to the stairs, his whole body trembling. “Out,” he said through his teeth. “I want you out of my goddamn house.” “You’re kidding me, right?” I said. “Go.” He drew back his fist, cocked his head. “Now.” I held up my hands. “OK. All right.” I stepped around my father and started out of the kitchen, then stopped, turned to my mother, her hands still in a bowl of dressing, greasy yellow bread crumbs still gloving her hands. “I’m sorry, Mom. I should’ve known this would happen. Don’t know what the hell I was thinking.” “Deuce,” she said. “Please. It’s Thanksgiving. Everybody’ll be here in thirty minutes.” “Is someone giving thanks here?” my father said. “Do you see anyone here giving any thanks? No. No thanks.” But I was already halfway up the stairs by then, opening the door to my old bedroom, walking into my old closet, taking down my shirts, Lex Williford 237 taking them off their hangers, my hands trembling. I took in a breath and held it, tried to slow down, to take my time folding my shirts so they wouldn’t wrinkle, but I wadded them up and threw them as hard as I could into my suitcase, covering the digital recorder I’d bought just so I could remember my father’s voice. I glanced back at the closet’s top shelf and took down the old Johnnie Walker Red half-pints box I’d found the model in and laid it there on my old bed. When I opened the box to put the model back inside, though, I saw the horsewhip inside, and for some reason I took it out instead, laying it on top of the model box on the bed. I paced back and forth, back and forth, that old familiar dread draping me like a pall, the same tingling panic running down my arms and legs I’d felt too many times in this same room when I was a kid, then the tingling of my unsteady heart, the same electric panic I’d felt whenever I heard my father’s heavy footsteps on the stairs coming up to my room. I walked across the hallway to my old bathroom, put my razor and toothpaste and toothbrush into my toiletries bag and stuffed it into my old suitcase, clicking the latches shut. I closed my eyes, took in three long breaths and held each one. “It’s OK,” I whispered. “OK.” Outside, in my parents’ circular drive out front, I swung my suitcase into the back of my old Civic, then closed and leaned against the hatchback till it clicked shut. My mother stood in the yellow grass of the front yard, crying. Her whole face wet, dark mascara blurring her eyes, she wiped her nose with the back of her hand like a child, smearing crumbs of dressing across her upper lip, and I reached into my pocket for my handkerchief and wiped them off, then handed the handkerchief to her. “This is all on me,” I said. “I pushed him too hard. Fucked up. I’ve ruined your Thanksgiving, Mom. I’m sorry. I’m just not sure if I have enough love in me to keep doing this anymore.” “Where are you going to eat?” she said. “I’ll get something on the road.” “No, no, I’ll go get you something now. I’ve cooked all this food for you.” I held her by the arm as she turned. “No.” 238 Ploughshares She started crying again. “You’re not coming back,” she said. “I know it.” “That’s not true, Mother. I’ll always come back. For you. I shouldn’t’ve stayed away for so long anyway. I know that now. I just wish we’d had a little more time to talk. To laugh a little.” My mother wiped her face with my handkerchief again, smearing her mascara this time, a long, wet slash of black like war paint across her cheek, then held out the handkerchief to give it back to me. I took it, just to wipe the mascara from her cheek, the black tears from under her eyes, then handed it back to her again. “Keep it,” I said. My mother and I’d wiped off all her makeup, and without it she was beautiful, I thought. I bent to hold her, the old impulse to flee from her gone. But I let her go and started for my car. Just then I heard the front door open and glanced back at the house. My father stood there in the open doorway. I waited for him for a moment, but he just stood there with his arms folded. I turned back to my car, saw the balsa model box and horsewhip I’d forgotten in the tall yellow grass along the curb. What the hell had I brought these damn things out here for anyway? I wasn’t going to take them back inside now. And I wouldn’t take them home with me. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I glanced across the street, then stooped to pick them both up and walked to a neighbor’s garbage can at the curb across the street, opened the lid and held it up, dropped them both inside, one at a time, looking back at my father, who stared back at me, unblinking. Then I walked back to my car. My car’s open-door bell chimed again and again, but I turned when I heard my father’s shoes click across the sidewalk behind me, up the steps to the circular drive. He stood in front of me. I waited. Nothing. “OK, Dad,” I said. “Take care.” He held out his hand—to give me another handshake? another one of his famous knuckle crunchers?—but I reached my arms around his broad shoulders instead and held him as long as he’d let me. He became stone in my arms, his arms rigid as boards at his sides, but I held on a Lex Williford 239 long time anyway and then I just let him go. “Thanks for the stories, Dad. The stories about your dad. They mean a lot to me.” Then I stepped away and ducked into my Civic, shut the door and clattered my keys jangling into the ignition. When I turned out of the circular drive, I drove slow up Nimrod Trail, my old street. Halfway up the block, I stopped a moment and turned in my seat to look back. My mother was still there, still watching, still waving, but already my father’d turned around to go back inside. 240 Ploughshares