Lawrence Block - The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

He stared down at his hands then, silently, with that look of shame that I’d seen cross his face a thousand times before.

“Have you eaten breakfast yet?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Then let’s get some food in you, okay?” I cooked him up some eggs and bacon and poured him a cup of strong, black coffee. We sat at the table in the kitchen. For a while we talked about the drought that had settled over the state the past four years, wondering how much longer it was going to go on. It hadn’t proved to be as bad as the ’77-’78 drought yet — that one had been the worst in the state’s history — but summer was here now and it was going to be a long time before we were likely to see any new storms move through.

After breakfast, I cleared the dishes off the table, and placed them in the sink. “I’ve gotta be going, Pa.”

“You working today?”

“Len Dozier needs a hand repairing his tractor.”

“Well, you go on, then.”

“Are you gonna be all right?”

“I’ll be fine.”

He walked me to the front porch, the suspenders hanging loosely around his waist, his gait a bit shorter, a bit slower than it generally was when he had had a belly full of whiskey to move him along. Outside, there were shimmering waves of heat rising off the bed of my father’s old pickup, and in the distance, you could see a mirage in the crease between two brown hills. It looked a little like a pond. But there hadn’t been a pond there in nearly five years now. Not since before the drought.

My father had let the farm go to hell after my mother had died. It had always been a small farm: four fifty-acre parcels, about two hundred acres altogether. It sat near the base of the foothills, with South Cow Creek flowing lazily along its southern border. He leased out two of the parcels: one for grazing, the other for beehives in the winter months when the bees were dormant and there wasn’t much call for pollinating. He had his own small herd, too, about twenty head of cattle, and that was pretty much it.

I stopped at the foot of the steps, wanting to be on my way and feeling a little guilty for it.

“You looked yet?” he asked me.

“No, Pa.”

“You gonna?”

“Sure.” I didn’t know when this routine had first started. Like everything else, I suppose it was around the time that my mother had died. Definitely, sometime after he had started drinking. I was used to it by now, and I guess because nothing had ever come of it, it seemed more like a routine than a real concern. But I gave the front end of his truck an honest look anyway.

He drove an old Chevy flatbed with aluminum running boards and an unpainted right front fender. The fender had been replaced several summers back after he’d clipped a fence post — trying to avoid a jackrabbit, he claimed. The rest of the truck was in fairly decent shape, considering its age.

Something was wrong with the front end, though. I noticed that almost immediately. The bumper, which was secondhand scrap he had brought home from the junkyard and painted off-white, had been smashed up against the front grille. It looked as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it. And just above the bumper, the lens of the headlight was broken, its mounting ring dangling loosely off to one side. If that weren’t enough, there was also a good-size depression in the top of the left fender, where it looked as if the metal had been crimped at a weak spot almost directly over the wheel well.

Last night, on his way home, my father had hit something.

“Jesus.”

“What is it?” he asked.

I ran my fingers across the bumper. There was a dark stain that looked as if something had spilled over the top edge and had run down the white paint. It was shaped something like a waterfall, with a mix of thick-and-thin lines flowing unevenly, top to bottom. At first thought, it looked like a kid might have taken a black Magic Marker to it. But when I looked closer, I realized the color was brownish red, and it hadn’t been done by any Magic Marker. Because it was a blood stain. “Oh, God.”

“What?”

“You did it, Pa. You finally did it.” I looked up at him, and he was standing at the edge of the porch with an arm wrapped around the post like it was the only thing holding him up. His face had turned ashen, and for the first time this morning, there was a hint of sobriety behind his eyes. “The bumper’s smashed, and there’s some blood, Pa. You hit something last night.”

I spent most of that afternoon at Len Dozier’s place, working on his tractor. We got it up and running sometime around four, so I stopped by the market in Kingston Mills, picked up a couple of steaks, some potatoes, a 64-ouncer of Coke, and headed back to my father’s place. When I had left, he had been sitting at the kitchen table, staring vacantly into his half-empty cup of coffee. It was only a matter of time, I figured, before the coffee was replaced by whiskey, and if that had already happened, it was a good bet I was going to find him passed out cold on the living room couch.

But that’s not where I found him.

He was sitting on the front porch, next to a pile of plastic bags filled with bottles and cans. I climbed out of the truck with the grocery bag in one arm, and as I closed the door, I watched him toss an empty whiskey bottle into the air. It sailed a good fifteen or twenty feet, landed smack-dab in the middle of a feeding trough with loomix stenciled across the side, and then shattered with the harsh sound of a bottle landing in a recycling bin.

“What are you doing, Pa?”

He didn’t bother to look up. As I went through the gate, he popped the tab off a can of Budweiser, dumped the contents out through an opening between the porch slats, then crushed the can and tossed it in the direction of another pile only a few feet away. It fell short, making almost no sound at all.

“Pa?”

When he finally did look up, his face was drawn and haggard, and though I had seen him like this before, this time was different. This was not a man who had hung one on while I had been gone. It was a man who had looked at himself in the mirror and had been frightened by what he had found.

“Pa, what’s the matter?”

He stared at me a moment, something apparently aching silently inside him. “You ever meet Lloyd’s kid?”

“Joey Egan?”

He nodded.

“Yeah, a couple of years ago, I think. When I was helping with 4H.”

“He died last night,” my father said mechanically. He took a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label out of the plastic bag next to him, gazed fondly at the label, then unscrewed the top and emptied out the whiskey. “It was a hit and run, off Buzzard Roost Road. He was on his way home after a school dance.”

“Are you sure?”

“It was in this morning’s paper,” he said. Then he sent the empty bottle sailing across the yard, end over end. A spattering of sunlight glittered off the glass just before the neck of the bottle landed against the side of the trough and fell apart before my eyes. I’m not sure I even heard the sound it made. It seemed a thousand miles away just then.

“Maybe it wasn’t you,” I suggested.

“You’re forgetting the blood on the bumper, Will.”

“Yeah, but... Jesus, don’t you remember anything from last night?”

“Not after I left the bar.” He pulled another bottle out of the bag, poured the liquid down an opening between the slats, and flung it in the direction of the front gate this time. It landed short, in a soft mound of dirt where my mother had once planted a bed of wild violets and Shasta daisies, even some brown-eyed susans. Just because we live on a farm, she had said, doesn’t mean we can’t have a little color around the place. The bottle kicked up a cloud of dust that lazily drifted away on the evening breeze.