Daddy's (9 page)
Authors: Lindsay Hunter
It’s no biggie, he says. He takes my hand again, pulls me onto the bed next to him, and we lie like that, side by side, looking up at his ceiling, at the flickering pattern the leaves make on his ceiling, at the flickering blue light between each leaf.
Have you heard of fucking? he asks, raising his voice over Danny’s mother’s screams.
I think so, I tell him.
Good, he says.
Oh, definitely, I say.
After a few minutes he reaches down, pulls my nightgown up. I’m going to look at you, he says. I hear the toilet flush, try to keep my voice as quiet as possible when I say, Okay.
He doesn’t pull my underwear down like I thought he might. Instead he uses two fingers to yank the crotch over to the side, and I have to open my legs a bit wider. I can feel the breath from his nostrils down there, he is taking deep, calm breaths. It smells a little, he says. Not a bad smell, but definitely a smell. An odor, really. But again, not bad.
Oh, good, I say. That’s good.
Hang on, he says, and jumps off the bed, pushes things around on his desk. Danny’s father brandishes an axe, smiling, laughing. When Peggy’s brother comes back he has a magnifying glass and a flashlight, and when he is next to me again he pulls the panties over with one hand, holds the magnifying glass in the other, bites the flashlight between his teeth. He prods a little, the way my mother does to her pizza dough on Friday nights, then pulls the two folds apart.
Wow, he says, the flashlight bobbing up and down. It’s so ugly, but in a very great way. You know? I want to look at it forever.
The flickering pattern on the ceiling flickers faster, the wind picking up and faintly whistling, and I remember my dad telling me at breakfast that it would rain tonight, folding one corner of his paper down to look at me, then snapping it back up once I’d said, Oh, really? Oh yes, he’d said, we are going to have quite a storm.
It’s this thought, the thought of my dad in his work clothes in our yellow kitchen this morning, reading the paper, letting the dog lick bacon grease from his fingers, that makes me want, more than ever, to get out of Peggy’s brother’s room. I have to go, I tell him.
Wait, he says, holding me by the hips, spitting the flashlight over the side of the bed and tossing the magnifying glass over with it. He locks eyes with mine, and I feel dared, I recognize the dare whirling behind his eyes, feel his heartbeat pick up against my thigh, and then he is lowering his head, I see the heart-shaped bit of his scalp at the top of his head, I feel his soft lips, hear the same smacking kiss my mother used to place on my forehead at night, hear him say, I just really wanted to kiss it. And then he lets my underwear go, lets the crotch snap back in place, he pulls down my nightgown, says Don’t step on my magnifying glass on your way out.
When I leave, Danny’s father is limping through a snowy maze.
In the living room the girls say Where the h-e-double-hockey-sticks were you? and You missed it—Grace and Peggy just touched each other’s boobs for fifteen whole seconds, and It’s your turn—Truth or Dare?
Dare, I say, and I’m dared to go outside in the rain and roll naked in Peggy’s mother’s garden. Which of course I do, because the garden is right underneath his window, and maybe somehow that makes me part of what comes through his window, part of what’s flickering on his ceiling, part of those shapes, part of that light, part of that blue blue light.
LOVE SONG
It was my birthday and Daddy picked me up and he was drunk and we drove to the mall and I waited at a Ruby Tuesday’s and ate me a pot of French onion soup while Daddy did the rounds at the various jewelry stores trying to sell jewelry from God knows where. I sat by a window so I could see him at the Kay’s across the way and he was showing the turquoise rings he wears on his own hands to the lady behind the counter and it was clear she was ready for him to move on. She had on a red turtleneck that made her boobums look all cone-shaped and I wondered did she stuff her shirt with some kind of funnels? She folded her arms up under them things and it just made the situation all the worse, and then Daddy leaned over and poked the lady right over her heart, he was making some kind of point that appalled the lady with its passion, passion’s a big thing with Daddy, and the lady dropped her arms and looked around her and out into the mall hoping someone would come in for a watch or a pair of earrings and save her, and then Daddy leaned back, holding his palms up to show how harmless he was, then pulled his pinky ring off and shoved it onto the lady’s finger. Daddy calls that going in for the kill. The lady held her hand out like he’d taken each finger into his mouth and sucked off the salt, and Daddy flicked one of his business cards onto the counter and backed out, holding his palms up again, like, Look at me everyone, I just tamed a wild beast and made it my wife. After a couple steps he tripped on the carpeting and the spell was broken, his hands flopped down to his sides and he looked around like he’d been beamed there from somewhere else, and he turned on his heel and went around the corner and disappeared, on his way to the Zales or the Jared’s down at the other end of the mall. The lady with the pointed boobs shook her hand till the ring fell off and I couldn’t tell where it landed. She reached down and brought up a spritzer of blue cleaning solution and spritzed her hand a dozen times, then wiped it with a cloth. Her hair was askew and I knew she was rattled, but she’d get over it, everyone gets over it, or they don’t.
I drank me four more Cokes and then Daddy come back in with his tie all undid and one of his shirttails hanging out looking like it had recently been wadded and then dipped in something wet. He slid into the booth and took a swallow from my fifth Coke, said You need you some kick to that, girl, brought out the flask from his coat pocket and poured in a fistful of something colorless, took a long pull, muttered, Good girl through wet lips. He played with a dinner roll, the rings on his fingers clinking quietly. She was a twatter, ain’t she? he asked, gesturing with his forehead toward the Kay’s. The roll looked all punched through and hollowed out and Daddy put it in his mouth and stood up, tucking in his shirttail. Let’s hit it, he said.
In the car Daddy had on the music real loud, singing “I ain’t never been with a woman long enough / for my boots to get old / we been together so long now / they both need resoled. / If I ever settled down, you’d be my kind / and it’s a good time for me to head on down the line.” He turned it down long enough to say, You listen real good girlie, they’s lots of truth in this song. He had both windows down and his tie was blowing every which way, the wind playing in his hair, his smile showing gummy bits from the roll, and I could tell he wanted me to glean something real deep from the song, something about him, but sometimes hard as you try meaningful moments like that are just moments like any other, the sky up in the sky and traffic going by and Daddy stopping playing the air flute just long enough to swerve around a semi and his breath like something aflame. “Always something greener / on the other side of that hill / I was born a wrangler and a rounder / and I guess I always will. / Heard it in a love song / heard it in a love song / heard it in a love song / can’t be wrong.”
We turned into Gator’s, Daddy’s favorite establishment, and as we parked he belched my name, drawing it out, something I used to love, then he added I planned something real special for you on your special day, his breath going out at the last word, sounding wet, him pounding his chest a little till the red in his face turned to pink. Shew, he said in his normal voice, then Damn blast it! when he dinged the car in the next spot with his door as he got out. I need me a drink, he announced, hoisting up his pants, breaking into a jog toward Gator’s.
Inside, the music was loud and Daddy did a little soft shoe up to the hostess. Darlin, we have a reserve, he said, under Birthday Girlie. The girl walked us over to a small table with two stools. These your menus, she said, but we out of chicken fingers because they spoilt the other day. Daddy ordered a double whiskey and two Cokes, and when the hostess wandered off he presented me with a Ziploc of quarters. Happy Birthday, sweetness, he said. That’s enough for at least two games of eight-ball, if you can stand it. You ready to get your tail whupped? The flatscreen on the wall behind him was playing the Home Shopping Network. A woman with a helmet of hair gritted a smile and held a doll toward the camera like it was radioactive. The word BEAUTIFUL was stamped across the screen in urgent block letters, flashing like a neon sign on its way to burning out.
Daddy racked and hit all the solids into the pocket, pointing at me and laughing with every ball sunk, but he got distracted by his third double whiskey and seemed content just wilting into his stool while I watched a man swab what looked like streaks of blood off a woodgrain floor with a supersize Q-tip on the TV. A lady walked by and Daddy’s eyes lit up and he lurched off the stool and grabbed her elbow. The woman’s hair looked fragile with bleach, her face pocked and her eyes lined in blue. She smiled at Daddy and I could see where she was missing one of her bottom teeth. Honey, he screamed, this my girlfriend Sewanee. The lady threw back her head and laughed like her throat was working metal against metal. Is that what we calling it now, she said when her head was righted. Daddy laughed and said, Yeah and it was obvious he hadn’t heard what she said. This my child, he told the lady. She’s sixteen today. Pleased to meet you, the lady said, holding out her hand like I should kiss the leathery knuckles. She leaned in, said Let me ask you, you a tough bitch yet? You made of chain mail yet? I could smell her cinnamon chewing gum and her powdery perfume. When I didn’t answer she said You work on that. Work on getting mean, hear? Daddy was swaying and staring hard just to the right and I knew he was trying to get back his focus. I put my hand in his, said I got to go home now and do my homework. The lady patted Daddy on the cheek and sat herself at the bar and Daddy slurped down the rest of his drink and followed me out the door.
It was dark out, the lights in the parking lot doing more to make the sky look dark than anything, and Daddy fumbled for his keys for a while before they spilled from his pocket and landed at his feet. I’m fixin to drive, I told Daddy. Aw-ight, Daddy said, but don’t be thinking I ain’t still got a pair, girlie, your Daddy’s just all fucked up tonight and empty as a pocket.
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