Lawrence Block - The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

He had grown old, I wanted to tell myself.

He had grown old and alone and empty.

But there was more to it than that.

He had also grown frightened.

I called him twice while I was away in Oregon. Under the circumstances, I guess I should have called more often. But that picture of him in my rearview mirror had been haunting me like a ghost. I kept thinking that I had caught a glimpse of little Joey Egan, standing next to him on the porch. That Joey had been that something I couldn’t quite recognize, and that he had had one hand on my father’s shoulder as if he were trying to hold him down.

The first time I called, the phone rang relentlessly, maybe as many as a dozen times, before my father finally picked it up. “No more,” he said sharply. “You hear me? You call me one more time and I swear I’ll come out to Black Oak myself and dig up your goddamn remains. You hear me? I’ll feed ’em to the damn buzzards and that’ll be the end of it.”

“Pa, it’s me.”

There was a sudden, surprised silence on the other end. Then, quietly: “Will?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Christ. Will? That really you? Where are you?”

“I’m in Oregon, Pa. What’s going on there? What’s all the shouting about?”

“Oregon...” he mumbled, in nearly a whisper. And for a moment, I thought he had gone back to the bottle again. In fact, I was certain that was exactly what he had done.

“You’ve been on a drunk, haven’t you, Pa?”

“What’s my boy doing in Oregon?”

“Listen to me. You’ve been drinking again, haven’t you?”

Then the line went dead.

I called him back within seconds, my hands shaking almost uncontrollably as I fumbled with the phone. What the hell was going on? He had sounded like a man on the verge of self-destruction. I couldn’t even be certain he had recognized me. Maybe he wasn’t drinking again, but if it wasn’t the booze I had heard, I hated to think what it might have been.

The phone rang thirty, maybe forty times without an answer. Eventually, I hung up and tried to convince myself that I had probably disturbed his sleep, that I must have caught him in the middle of a bad dream, and that there was nothing to worry about. He had been tired, was all. The call had wakened him and that’s why he had sounded so crazy, because he’d still been half-asleep.

I wasn’t able to get hold of him again until nearly three weeks later. It was the night before I was due to head back to Kingston Mills. I’m not sure what I expected him to sound like after that first call. Still a little crazy, I guess. But he didn’t sound crazy, and he didn’t sound like a man who would be dead in a few short hours. He sounded like a man who had finally forgiven himself.

“Is everything all right there?” I asked.

“I’m finally dry,” he said serenely.

“What?” I thought I could hear something in the background that sounded dry and brittle, something that made me think of autumn leaves and sand through an hourglass. And then he chuckled.

“I think the booze is wearing off,” he said. “My head’s clearing up. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen things this clearly.”

“Look, Pa, I’m coming home tomorrow. Are you gonna be all right till then?”

“Fine,” he said. “I’m gonna be just fine.”

I don’t remember what I said in return. But I remember holding the phone in my hand after he had hung up, and being overwhelmed with a strange jumble of emotions. It had been years since I had felt close to my father, and suddenly I was terrified that I might never have a chance to feel close to him again.

Early the next morning, I left Oregon, arriving at the farm shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon. His pickup was parked out front, in the same spot it had been parked the day I had discovered the blood on the bumper. There was a layer of dust a quarter of an inch thick across the hood, and it was nearly impossible to see through the windshield into the cab. The pickup had sat there like a dinosaur for nearly two months now. In the back of my mind, I suppose I knew it would eventually be buried under that dust like an old desert ghost town. But at the time, I didn’t give it much of a thought.

The front door to the house was unlocked. It had been left slightly ajar, and just inside there was a strange wind-cut pattern of sand and dust scattered across the hardwood floor. Kingston Mills had gone 159 days without rain, and the dust, it seemed, was no longer content to stay outside.

“Pa?”

In the kitchen, I discovered a pyramid-shaped pile of dirt in the sink, maybe five or six inches high. One of the faucet handles had been broken off. It was lying on the lip of the drain, partially buried by the dirt. I took hold of the other handle, turned it, and watched a slow, steady stream of dirt sift lazily out of the spout.

“Pa?”

I found him, or some general semblance of him, in his bedroom at the back of the house. He was lying in bed, on top of the sheets, his hands folded peacefully across his stomach. He was dressed in the same clothes he had worn nearly every day of his life since my mother had died: an old pair of work boots worn at the heels, a pair of blue-jean overalls with one unfastened strap hanging loosely at his side, and, of course, the long Johns he always wore come hell or high water.

Underneath, there was very little left of the man I remembered. Something had happened to him in the few short weeks that I had been gone, something I didn’t think I was ever going to be able to understand. Maybe it had something to do with the drought — after all, the well had gone dry. Or maybe it had something to do with all those damn bottles he had tossed off the front porch the night he went dry. The booze had kept him going for a good many years. Maybe without it, the well of his soul had gone dry, too. I don’t know. All I know is that the man I discovered at the back of the house was all dust and bones.

He looked as if he had been dead a very long time. I had spoken with him last night, but here he was now, less than twenty-four hours later: his skeletal hands peeking out from beneath his shirtsleeves, his teeth bared in a dreadful, lipless grin, his eyes no more than dark, empty sockets.

Like the flowers my mother had planted out front, after an unquenchable thirst, my father had simply shriveled up and died.

There’s a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer that reads: Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection unto eternal life. I find myself often thinking back to these words.

My father was buried in the Black Oak Cemetery, two rows over from Joey Egan. A bunch of the guys from the Forty-Niner came by the house afterward, drank a little beer, and talked about the good times they’d had together. Mostly, though, they seemed to stare off into the distance, reflecting on things that I suppose I will never be privy to.

Late in the afternoon, Lloyd Egan pulled me aside and told me about a man they had locked up in Sparks, Nevada. They had caught him robbing a small Mom and Pop liquor store and during the interrogation, he had confessed to Joey’s hit-and-run. He had leaned across the seat to roll down the passenger window, he had said, and his car had drifted onto the shoulder, and... and there was Joey, turning around, his eyes bright and surprised, just as the car made impact. The man had stopped and got out and realized that the boy was dead, and then he had got back into the car and had driven off. It had apparently been haunting him ever since.

Lloyd took a swig of his beer, and gazed off into nothingness, looking like he was on the verge of tears. I put my arm around him, tried to comfort him, and then led him back into the kitchen, where someone was telling a story about the time my father had had a few too many and had gone home and tried to shoe one of the steers.