Daddy's (7 page)
Authors: Lindsay Hunter
Later Lily asked me did I see the fire reflected in Pop’s glasses, did I see how it looked like millions of goldfish swimming up the lenses. You were watching the wrong fire, I told her. I beg to differ, she said. She’d heard this somewhere and had figured out a way to use it, I could tell by the smug way of her mouth and how she was exhaling through her nostrils.
Another thing to know about out there is there’s a pack of wild dogs that claim it as their home. The story is that a farmer loaded up his sheepdog and her puppies one day, drove out there and pushed them out of the truck because he couldn’t bear to drown them but he couldn’t afford to feed them either. People hear that story and get disgusted but some of these same people have driven the family dog out there and set it free to join the pack, Pop did that to Jinx but said it was good news, Jinx was with her own, was back roaming the desert sands the way God intended, and all I could think was how Jinx didn’t have that many teeth, who would soak her food in water so she could get it down? I’ve never seen the dogs but if you’re out there burning a car or anything else at night you can hear them barking in that wounded way, a whole choir of them sounding like they’re being kicked or shot with BB’s.
The point is Pop knew both of these things. A place where people come to burn cars, a place where abandoned dogs eat sand or each other: these are not comforting facts. But that did not matter to Pop. What mattered was tradition, albeit a tradition starting with me and Lily. This is your legacy, he shouted at us from inside the car. Your rite of passage. If you make it you will be men. If you don’t I’ll lickety-split a prayer for each of you come Sunday. Then he peeled out, left us coughing in his dust. Lily said, Don’t he know we’re girls? How are we supposed to become men then?
It didn’t take long for Lily to start crying. Some book she read described how an orange sun is the deadliest, how letting its rays coat your skin is akin to taking a lye shower, how the orange was from God’s bloody iris, when I asked her if that meant the sun was God’s eye and if so was he a Cyclops she slapped her own face, said she had itches under her skin, it was the orange rays coming for her. She took off running. I let her. In the flat desert I knew I could see her for miles.
Then I learned a third thing about out there. I was watching Lily run, her arms up to shield her, looking like a shimmering exaltation not a hundred feet in front of me. I looked down at something itching my calf and when I looked up Lily was gone. Wasn’t even a dustcloud in her wake. That’s the third thing. The desert is a warp master. Lily warped or I warped but either way the desert opened up its coatflap to take something in and when the coatflap closed again I was alone. I knew it wasn’t any use but you have to go through the motions when something shocking happens. I called Lily’s name. I spun around in place. I followed her footsteps but they petered out and I wondered if I was back where I started. I screamed for her till the sun came down, then I sat in the sand and watched the unlikely colors in the sky, the purple and the silver and the green and the white white line of the horizon which was the last to go.
The dark out there was a navy quilt sewn with pearl buttons. There was part of a moon wedged in the sky that gave off a dull glow. The dogs started around then, yelping and whining and getting closer and closer. I brought my knees up to my chest and concentrated on my shoes because I could see them, they were a fact, they were indisputable, I remembered putting them on in the morning, I remembered retying the laces after school, how they were black in their creases from when I jumped into the lake wearing them months before. A furry thing knocked against my back, knocked again, it was terrible in its boniness, it rubbed against me like a cat, a tongue swiped my arm, paws clawed at my legs, they were crying like they were trying to hold it in but couldn’t. They smelled like mothballs and corn chips and old blood.
Pop always talked about mirages, how they happen outside of the desert all the time, like television, like the produce aisle, like any woman in a wet swimming suit. What I noticed first was the black flickering, I wondered how I could see black flicker in all that dark, then my eyes saw the rest of it, saw the orange flames which formed the black flicker, saw them shooting up, undulating tall, saw the fire, saw the fire, saw the fire, and I ran to it.
The desert is a good lesson in life. It proves that what you want most will most likely stay out of reach. That fire was mine, was my love, was the breath in my lungsacks. I heard the dogs behind me singing their brutal chorus, I knew they remembered what it was to beg, that fire moving fast toward the end of the earth.
But out there is different from your typical desert. Because it was Pop burning up our car, drinking from a milk jug, Lily sleeping in the sand like a punished doll, and by the time I reached them the dogs were gone, weren’t making a peep. That Jinx you were running from, Pop asked, laughing wide. His glasses got the worst of the black flicker and I decided not to look at him directly, possibly forevermore. When Lily woke up we thumbed it home.
FINDING THERE
He drove. Called his best friend from a motel with a swimming pool. I don’t know if I can go on.
Everybody thinks that, his best friend said.
He had a wife and some kids. With every state line they became more like lace drapes in a window, with every state line he had to remind himself to miss them. He didn’t know how hard it could get.
In New Mexico the clouds had stretched across the sky like blown sugar. In Oklahoma he poured a jug of water into his engine. He pretended his car was a great paintbrush, that he was leaving a black creek behind him.
He watched the news, the free movie, the scrambled-porn-channel oil painting, turned the volume up to hear the uh, to hear the oh, to hear the yeah, you like it.
The nights were fine. They were dark, they were the bottom of something. At twilight he pressed his stomach into the railing outside his room, swallowed what he was missing into the watered-down sky.
At a Golden Griddle in Alabama he met a woman at the counter. Bought her a cup of coffee and watched her stir it one way and then the other. She pressed her finger into some spilled sugar, told him she was missing the part of her tongue that recognized sweet. At that, his eyes filled.
Back in his room she stood at the foot of the bed and undressed. Her thighs were toned, bits of pubic hair peeked out the sides of her underwear. She bent, crawled up the bed, straddled him. The air conditioning kicked on, light came through the windows lazily, he thought of his middle daughter holding something up, saying Can you open it? He fucked the woman, those were the words he used when confessing to his best friend days later. He didn’t tell his friend about the scar he found over her heart, a scar that had teeth, didn’t tell his friend that she asked for money and he gave her everything in his wallet, that he’d asked to braid her long black hair and she’d laughed at him and walked out and left the door wide open, him on the bed naked and sweating and empty every which way there was to be.
He kept driving. Veered toward the Gulf and rented a room a block from the beach. Kept his shoes on as he waded into the water for fear of jellyfish. It felt natural to be pulled by the tide, to be tempted to let it take him, and then for the tide to finally let go and push the other way. He stood like that for some time, dipping in his fingertips at one point and tasting the salt. He saw a shark’s fin on the horizon and it wasn’t until later that he realized it was probably just a sailboat.
On the way back to his room a teenaged boy said Hey man, you got any change? and then, You want a date? He brought the boy back to his room, sat on the bed and waited while the boy went into the bathroom, locked the door, turned on the water. He put the TV on, some kind of soap opera, interrupted by a weather report hinting at a tropical storm in the next day or so. The bathroom door opened and the boy walked out, wet hair, no shirt, drips of water running down his neck, hands shaking. His heart filled and he stood up, put his hands on the boy’s shoulders to try and calm him. Don’t worry, he started to say, and the boy punched him in the sternum. It wasn’t a hard punch, but he guessed that it was supposed to be enough to knock him down, so he played along, landing on his stomach, clutching at his chest, moaning, trying for breath. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty, held it in the air like a small green flag. The boy took it, backed away from him, called him a pervert and then a motherfucker and then a perverted motherfucker, opened the door so hard that it slammed into the wall. He could hear the boy’s boots on the metal steps outside, then as they ran across the parking lot. Only then did he push himself up onto his knees, wipe the carpet bits from his face. The weather report was showing an animation of the tropical storm growing until it covered half the state. The weatherman assured him that it wasn’t a definite, but that he had to be prepared.
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