My father sobered instantly and floated on his back, watching the dock he’d been thrown from and thinking, “Who’s crying now? (Jim!) Who’s puking now? (Rick and Jim both!),” and it was then, he said, that he realized he’d forgotten to stuff the bust of Hagler, and he’d better get home. So he left Michiana, stopped by the tavern, and came straight home.
He handed me some twenties, said, “Sorry about that.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I can’t decide if I should go back or not,” he said. “To Michiana. If I don’t go back, that’s it for me and Rick, I think. What do I care, though, right? Who the fuck is Rick? More importantly, how was your birthday? What’d you think of that shirt? Did you like the wrapping? I saw the shirt in the window of Sloga Nero’s a couple weeks back and I thought it was funny, but I didn’t know if you would think it was funny, so I didn’t buy it. But then, on Sunday, when I saw the front page of the Herald, I thought, ‘That Jonboat’s everywhere! If I wrap that shirt in this front page, then the kid’ll get a chuckle, at least a chuckle,’ right?”
I said, “Thanks for the shirt.”
“I guess I’ll choose to understand that to mean, ‘Yes, Dad, I liked the shirt. Gave me a chuckle.’ By the way, you know—that whole story I just told you? Not exactly true. We got in a fight, and the oaf did bodyslam me into the lake, and that’s when I remembered I forgot to leave you money, but the fight was about who should pay for bait, which, I mean, since that isn’t really worth getting in a physical confrontation with a friend about, might mean that all the other stuff I told you was kind of underneath it—been brewing for twenty-however-many years, probably—but none of that stuff about the fish’s face or the puking got said, not outright at least. I guess last night, just after I got there, Rick had asked me something about ‘Why doesn’t your son ever come out fishing with us, Clyde?’ and it just built up inside me, that question, like, ‘Is this guy really asking me this question? Who is this fucking guy to ask me this question?’ Anyway, it was mostly about bait, so don’t feel guilty about me getting in a fight to defend your honor or anything. I am glad you liked the shirt so much, though, and while we’re on the topic of it having been your birthday, I’m wondering about that tumbler of water in the middle of the kitchen table.”
Then he asked if it was I who’d left the water on the kitchen table, and, if so, then why had I left the water on the kitchen table, but before I could answer either question, he’d already begun to sarcastically offer a number of reasons why someone who had just celebrated his thirty-eighth birthday might feel entitled to leave water on a table instead of feeling obligated to spill it in a sink and wash its container or, at the very least, rinse its container. He didn’t say container but he didn’t only say tumbler. He named a large assortment of containers—glass, cup, mug, tankard, stein, grail, chalice, etc.—as if he felt that uttering an exhaustive list of names for containers from which one might drink was necessary to bringing his point across with clarity.
When at last he finished speaking, I told him I wasn’t yet finished with the water.
“So finish it,” he said.
* * *
I headed toward the kitchen. My father followed. With my father behind me, especially in a hallway, I always felt as though I were about to flinch, and I knew that if I flinched or even seemed to him to be on the verge of flinching, he’d enjoy my flinching or the promise my being on the verge of it conveyed, and he’d attempt to make me flinch again and again, and so I’d do my best, when my father was behind me, to appear to be casual, even devil-may-care. That evening, in the hallway that led to the kitchen, I extended my arms to run my fingers along the walls.
The walls were warm and their paint was blistered. I pressed down hard and the blisters flattened, though not crunchingly or poppingly as I might’ve expected. It was more like the blisters reluctantly withdrew, like the nosy extras’ heads that stick out of windows overlooking courtyards when lovers’ quarrels end in old romantic comedies set in Manhattan.
Because, I guess, the reaction of the blisters was unexpected, I tried to think of the unexpected word for what I was doing to the wall, the unexpected word for the act of touching. It seemed important to recall the word.
Taction. I got it. Almost instantly. In a hallway with my father behind me, no less. I was sharpening, sharpened, extra-alert—the one advantage to being made to feel jumpy.
And no sooner had I gotten hold of taction than I noticed a short, fuzzy coil of carpet fiber at rest just beyond the slim metal bar that marked the line where the carpeting stopped and the tile began—right there at the threshold of hallway and kitchen. I wanted to tact the coil with a toe, but the movement of my feet as I approached the coil created a vacuum, causing the coil to be sucked between my ankles into the space behind me. I doubted that my father, whose legs bowed widely, made any kind of contact at all with the coil, but I didn’t turn around to confirm this doubt, for fear that my turning might look like a flinch.
However, just a pace from the metal bar—which, owing to a superstition thats origins I can’t recall, I had, for years, taken care to step over, never on—I saw something else: I saw that one of the screws intended to hold the bar to the floor had come up in its hole. I didn’t think to crouch to better fasten the screw, but I realized that in order to maintain the casual, unflinching character of my stride, I would need to step directly onto the bar.
I silently apologized to whom- or whatever one apologizes upon failing to behave in accord with superstition, and did what I had to do to seem casual. The weight of my body caused the bar to flex, which propelled the loose screw from its last bit of threading. The screw became airborne and entered the hallway. Yet I didn’t get to hear what I imagine must have been the small thump it made when it landed on the carpet; I didn’t even think to attempt to hear it. I was far too distracted. Even through the sock, the bar was cold on my sole, and the shock of the coldness caused me to shudder.
My father mistook the shudder for a flinch, and said, “Any second thoughts there, Young Master Billy?”
Though Belt was the name my mother and he had chosen to give me, my father no longer liked that name, hadn’t liked it in decades, and would call me Billy—Young Master Billy if I had just flinched, had seemed to flinch, or had seemed to him to be on the verge of flinching.
“I asked if you were having second thoughts,” he said.
“Maybe,” I told him.
“Maybe’s a shrug. A shrug and a dodge. Maybe’s the sound second thoughts make, son, the pumping of blood in their lily-livered hearts. May-BE, may-BE, may-BE, may-BE…”
Dusk was gaining and the house was mostly dark. The little bit of sunlight that did achieve the kitchen through the sliding glass door was orange and split into rails by the blinds. Each rail widened and dimmed as it traveled away from the door, and the effect on the kitchen was Japanese, especially on the table. Thirteen sun-rails achieved the table and they made the table look extremely Japanese, like the backdrop of a Japanese stage romance, or a paper fan between the fingers of a Japanese actress.