Lawrence Block - The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

I plopped down in a chair next to him. “So what now?”

“You can join me if you want.” He handed over a six-pack of beer.

The farm sat at the west end of a valley. It was a little past five now, the last week of May. The shadows from the hills were beginning to lengthen, and I could feel the coolness of evening coming on. I popped the top off the first of the cans, poured out the contents, and began my participation in a ritual that took nearly an hour before it was finished.

We never discussed calling the police. I suppose we should have at least discussed it. But what was the point? It wasn’t going to change the fact that there was blood on the front end of my father’s pickup. And it wasn’t going to bring little Joey Egan back either.

In a strange way, though, what had happened had already started to bring my father back. He had been hiding inside a bottle for a long, long time, but suddenly it looked as if he might at last come out and show himself. If he did, I didn’t want to risk losing him again.

We barbecued the steaks on an old grill out back that night. We had planned to eat outside at the picnic table under the dogwoods, but the mayflies were swarming, so we ended up inside at the kitchen table instead. It wasn’t until we had finished the meal, and I had poured him a cup of coffee that I noticed his hands were shaking.

“Are you all right?”

He nodded, appearing unaffected. “The booze is wearing off. That’s all.”

“You sure?” He looked warm, and a little haggard. Though I had seen him looking much worse after an all-night bend.

“I’ll be fine.”

“You want me to stay tonight?”

“No, you go on home. I’ll be all right.”

I stacked the dishes in the sink, wiped my hands off on a kitchen towel, then turned around and stared at him. When you’re a kid, you never think about your father as being old. I wasn’t a kid anymore, of course. But I had thought of him as an old man for a good many years now, and I wondered briefly when it was that I had become the father, and he the son. And I wondered how much longer he was going to be with me.

“I’ll come by in the morning,” I said.

“No need.”

“Just to check to see how you’re doing.”

“If that’s what you want.”

Joey Egan’s funeral was held three days later. He was buried in a family plot in the Black Oak Cemetery on the outskirts of town, next to his mother, who had died of pneumonia the year before. After the services, I drove my father home and stayed with him that night, because I was afraid that he might start drinking again. He hadn’t shed a tear since the day my mother had died. But in the truck, on our way out of Black Oak, he had broken down and started a long, painful crying jag.

More than just his drinking, I guess I worried about him doing something crazy that night.

The next morning, my father woke up with a hangover.

He came dragging into the kitchen sometime around nine, his eyes bloodshot, his brain apparently pounding unmercifully at the inside of his skull. He stopped at the sink, shading his eyes against the morning sun, and took a drink of water right out of the faucet. It was the 117th straight day without rain, and while the well hadn’t gone dry, it sometimes took a while before anything came out of the spout.

“How’s bacon and eggs sound?” I asked.

He shook his head guardedly. “Nothing for me, thanks.”

“You gotta eat something.” I had already tossed some bacon in the skillet. He hadn’t been eating much of anything since the accident, and I had promised myself not to let him get away with it again. But he looked like the man of old this morning, like a man coming out of a stupor: ragged and foul and slightly out of touch with his surroundings. I didn’t think he was going to be able to keep his food down even if he tried. “Christ, you didn’t go on another drunk last night, did you?”

He looked up at me, his lips dry and chapped, his face expressionless. “You know I didn’t. You were here all night, weren’t you?”

“Then what the hell’s the matter with you?”

“It’s a dry drunk,” he whispered hoarsely. He wiped his hands across the front of his undershirt, where one strap of his overalls was unfastened and hanging loosely. “It happens sometimes,” he said. “When you’ve been drinking as long as I have.”

“All the more reason to get some food in your stomach.”

“Maybe.” He shut off the faucet and moved to the table, where he sat down a little gingerly, and let out a halfhearted sigh. “I saw Joey Egan last night,” he said.

“Joey’s dead, Pa.”

“He came into my room and stood over my bed. There was a mess of cuts and scratches all over his face. Looked like some fool had taken the business end of a pitchfork to him. And I think his left arm was broken. It looked that way at least.”

“It was a dream, Pa.”

“No, it wasn’t no dream. He knew how your ma died.”

“Everyone knows she had cancer. That’s no secret.”

“But the cancer ain’t what killed her, Will.”

“What?” We had never talked about my mother’s death, but she had been sick for a good many months before she died. For a long time afterward, my father had always said that it was the consumption that got her. I guess it was less painful for him to think of it that way. It took a long time before he was ever able to use the word cancer .

“I couldn’t stand to watch her suffer,” he said.

“What did you do, Pa?” He looked up at me, a man whose rounded shoulders reflected the heavy weight they had been carrying, and suddenly I understood everything. All the nights at the Forty-Niner. The way he had pulled back from me after she had died. The way he had pulled back from everyone. I understood it all. “You killed her, didn’t you?”

“I... I placed a pillow over her face,” he said softly.

“Jesus.”

“She was in so much pain...”

And then my father broke down and cried for the second time in less than a week. I sat next to him, with my arm draped over his shoulders, feeling helpless. Guilt carried a heavy price, and my father, I suspected, had been paying a hefty markup for a long, long time.

After a while, he caught himself and took in a deep breath. “I’m all right,” he said uncertainly. He stared out the kitchen window, off to the distance, where a small twister had kicked up and was swirling the dust across the open field like a child swirling finger paints across a paper canvas. I had never noticed the burden in his face quite the way I noticed it just then. Here was a man who had been killing himself for years with booze, and now he was killing himself without it. I wondered if I had ever really known my father, if anyone had ever really known him.

“Things’ll be all right once the booze wears off,” I said weakly. “You hear?”

He nodded.

I gave him a pat on the back. “You sure you don’t want anything to eat?”

“Later,” he said.

I left him around eleven that morning. He was sitting in a chair on the front porch, staring out across the barren terrain, his mind a million miles away. I had gotten myself a six-week stint up in Oregon, hauling trees out of a private co-op that was selectively logging its land, and I reminded him about the job.

“I’ll be back in six weeks. Okay, Pa?”

“I ain’t going nowhere,” he said.

“Six weeks,” I repeated. As I drove out the dirt driveway, I caught a glimpse of him in my rearview mirror. There was something standing next to him, something I couldn’t quite make out. And the man, himself, was hardly recognizable. A man so completely different from the man of my early childhood that I felt a little rattle of uneasiness run through me. What had happened to him? What had happened to the man who had been as strong as an ox, who had put up the barn by himself one summer, using a block-and-tackle, who had been able to stack a hundred bales of hay in a day and still have the energy to shoot some hoops out back under the last vestiges of twilight? What the hell had happened to that man?