I didn’t say anything. What was there to say?
“You think driving seven hundred and forty-one miles is worth seeing your brother for an hour? That’s an eleven-and-a-half-hour drive.”
“Yes,” I said. “I do think it’s worth it.”
My father smiled at me. “I think so too. It’s a little less than three hours from Austin. We can stay the night in Austin and then head for Huntsville. You can see your brother at one o’clock.”
“Something doesn’t seem right. This all sounds a little unusual, doesn’t it, Dad?”
“Well, I guess you’ve learned how to smell a fish. There’s a guy who works for the Texas Bureau of Prisons. His name is Michael Justice.” My dad laughed. “I’m not kidding you—that’s really his name. I fought in ’Nam with him. If you want to know the truth, they called the whole thing off. I asked to speak to Mike. They asked me why I’d like to speak to him. And I told him what I told you—that I fought in ’Nam with him. That’s all I had to say. He made it happen.”
People always say it’s who you know. And that isn’t always such a bad thing.
* * *
I hadn’t seen my brother since I was six years old. Eleven years had passed, and he had become nothing more than a memory. But he was more than that. Of course, he was much more than that. People aren’t memories.
I kept thinking: What could you say in an hour? Maybe all of this had nothing to do with what you said. Or what he said. Or what anybody said.
Dante made me fall in love with words. And sometimes I hated them. Sometimes I had no use for them.
Sometimes words just took up space. I wondered if they were depleting the world’s supply of oxygen.
* * *
You get to talking about a lot of things when you’re on a seven-hundred-and-forty-one-mile drive. I don’t know why but I started asking my dad if he agreed with Mom—about what Susie and Chuy and I referred to as the Livermore incident. “And I think Mr. Robertson is a dick.”
My father laughed. “You’re seventeen years old. It’s your job to think that.” I could tell that my father wanted to say something more and that he was trying to measure his words. “You know, Ari, racism is something that’s almost impossible to talk about. And so most of us don’t talk about it. I think that we somehow know that we’re all implicated. Racism is a finger that points at all of us, and every few years, there’s an explosion—and we all talk about it for a little while. And everybody raises their hands and says, ‘Racism? I’m against it.’ We’re all against it. And we feel a solidarity. We make a few changes here and there—but we don’t make any real changes. It’s like we buy a new car but keep driving in the same direction.”
“But why?”
“Because we don’t know how to talk about certain things. And we’ve never learned. We’ve never learned because we’re not willing to change because we’re afraid of what we might lose. I don’t think that we want Black people to have what we have. And when it comes to Mexicans, this country loves us and hates us. We’re a country of immigrants that hates immigrants. Only we pretend not to hate immigrants.” He laughed. “I know a few guys who think Native Americans are immigrants.” He shook his head. “Americans are not really very nice people. And I say that as an American.”
“But, Dad, how do we change that?”
“That’s what your generation is going to have to figure out.”
“That’s not fair.”
My father gave me this look like what I’d just said was about the stupidest thing you could ever say. Then he said, “Sometimes the weather is fair. We’re going to have a fair-weather day. And then somewhere else there’s a tornado killing a hundred people. Across the globe, there are places where the weather isn’t fair.”
I knew what he was telling me. Saying things like “That’s not fair” said nothing and did nothing. And maybe he was trying to tell me that only children fighting on a playground said things like that.
We didn’t say anything for a while, and he was thinking, and I was thinking. I finally asked, “How many battles have you had to fight, Dad?”
“Only one that matters. I stole it from a writer named William Faulkner. I’m paraphrasing. The battle of my own human heart against itself.”
* * *
“Did I ever tell you the story about the time someone let out a bunch of lizards into your mom’s classroom?”
“That happened? Did Mom freak out?”
“Of course not. Your mother happens to like lizards.”
“Seriously?”
“Oh, yeah. She said if you had lizards in your house, you wouldn’t have a mosquito problem because they’d have them for dinner. She said that everyone in small villages welcomed lizards into their houses because they ate all those unwanted insects. She used to keep lizards in an aquarium until her mother made her get rid of them.”
“Mom? My mom?”
“What makes you think your mother’s a scared little girl? Why should she be afraid of lizards? They’re harmless. So, anyway, your mother had this awful class one year and she was tearing her hair out. And some kid in that class lets loose about twenty lizards. The first thing your mother did was rush to the door and seal the cracks with cleaning rags to make sure the lizards couldn’t get out, and the girls were screaming and some of the guys weren’t all that thrilled either. Your mom managed to get ahold of one of the lizards and let it crawl on her, and she said, ‘Does anybody know who this little guy belongs to?’
“She’d already figured out who the prankster was. ‘Jackson, let’s put them back in the box you brought them in and then let them out in the desert, where they belong. They’re not interested in American government.’
“Your mother didn’t run to the principal. Your mother took no punitive actions against any of those students—even though she knew they were all in on it. And your mother won twenty-seven admirers that day. Her worst class became her best class. Jackson was an African American student. He lived with his grandmother. She couldn’t come to parents’ night, so Liliana started going to her—to talk about Jackson’s progress. That was many years ago. Do you know what happened to Jackson? He’s an attorney who works for the Department of Justice. He sends your mother a Christmas card every year without fail. He always writes a little note. And he signs the card, ‘Lizard.’ ”
“Why doesn’t Mom tell me all these stories?”
“Because she’s not the kind of person who likes to go around trying to get her name in the newspaper every time she does something to change a kid’s life.”
Wow, I thought. Wow.
* * *
My father pulled the car over to the side of the road. There was a small town just ahead, but my dad liked parking on the side of the road. It was the loner in him. “I need a cigarette.”
We both got out and stretched our legs. My dad liked to make noises when he stretched. I got a big kick out of that. He lit his cigarette and leaned against the car. I don’t know why the words came out at that very moment. “I hate being gay.”