Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

Oscar put his hand on the doorknob and whipped the door open. There in front of us was the Bat, his dad, standing in the hallway, his grimy hands made into fists. His mouth was open, and you could see in there, most of the way down into his stomach. You wouldn’t want to send postcards with this guy on the picture side. I had expected somebody older. And bigger. The Bat was shorter than Oscar, more kind of pint-sized, very ratty and low-rent, with long Brylcreem greaseball hair swept back in hoodlum waves, and this brown mole just to the right of his nose. He looked like one of those smelly little cigaretted guys who ran the Tilt-a-Whirl at a seedy backwoods carnival, just waiting for someone to barf. That’d give him a tickle. They had shaved the warm-and-fuzzy off this guy a long time ago. From the odors in the air you could tell also that he was, heads-up, a full-time drunk. He’d gone way past the hobby stage. He had stare-at-the-jury eyes and funny pointed bat ears to pick up screams. Also: the deadest expression I had ever seen on a human being was equipped into this man’s face, like he was a failed rapist or something, and couldn’t get over it. The small wiry guys are the meanest. He’d kill you for a nickel. Under the hall light, he looked at me and panted. He would be the first customer for the video we were going to make, I just had a feeling.

“Hello Missy,” he said, lookin’ at me, proportionating me.

“The name’s Chloé,” I said. “Pleased to meetcha.” I was keeping up the civilities, because maybe someday this ghoul would be my father-in-law. Didn’t hold out my hand, though. Give me some credit. Anyway Oscar had my other hand.

But what Oscar did, was, being brave, he just had my fingers in his and took me, like we were the cool kids, down the hall and out the front door, Oscar saying nothing. I guess he didn’t want to start a fight exactly at that moment.

“Don’t you come into this house again unless I invite you,” the Bat said. “I don’t want that stuff going on here. There’ll be trouble I can’t be responsible for. Real bad trouble.” I heard his ineffectual voice fading, a mean-streak voice floating in the air, rising up to the atmosphere, and because nothing in the universe is ever lost, heading out to the galaxies, and I thought: Jeez, what a bad ambassador for Earth that guy is!

Short fathers can be so weird. There must be something about short-fathering that makes men so crazy. If you’re middle-sized or tall you’re usually okay as a father. Otherwise, it’s mysteriously unreal for everybody and inexplicable, in addition.

We got into Oscar’s junk car, this old AMC Matador, with doors that sang when you opened them. I loved that sound and feel I should mention it.

“That son-of-a-bitch,” Oscar said. “I’m gonna kill him.”

“You could try to never see him again,” I said.

Oscar put his head down on the steering wheel. This old car, I loved it, and I wanted to cheer Oscar up but couldn’t think of how.

“It’s ’cause of him,” Oscar said, “I was sort of a junkie for a while. How I got my start.”

“Wow,” I said. “I can see that.”

“I don’t want to talk about it though.” He started the ignition and the engine magically turned over. “Chloé,” he said, “we gotta make some money. We just gotta set ourselves up. I’m gonna kill him otherwise. Who’s this Janey person, this video woman?”

So I explained to him about it, one more time. When I finished explaining, he nodded. I figured that was the go-ahead.

Charlie, now you know. Now you know how we got ourselves into show business.

SOMETIMES I FEEL as if my life is a murder mystery, only I haven’t been murdered yet, and I don’t plan on being murdered at all, of course. But it’s puzzling — my life, I mean — the way a murder mystery is puzzling, with something missing or dead out there where everyone can see it — what happened to Bradley W. Smith — only I don’t know what it is, just this intimation of violence. I need a detective who could snoop around in my life and then tell me the solution to the mystery that I have yet to define, and the crime that created it.

For example: every morning, driving Turbo, my car, on the fifteen-minute commute to Jitters, I go around three curves. On two of these curves someone has planted little white wooden crosses to memorialize sudden vehicular deaths, and next to each cross, a display of artificial flowers. Artificial flowers! Petunias, these are, and violets, probably. Weeks pass, and they don’t fade. I wait for them to droop as in a natural cycle. But they are stubbornly unalive and therefore unwilting, so they must be plastic, with machine-made blues and yellows and whites. Imagine that: plastic-flower sorrow. It’s not ennobling. The quality of the grief has a discount aura, like a relic tossed haphazardly into a bin. I just mark it down and store it away every morning. I notice these things for my own protection.

It’s a short drive that I have to do, each dawn of the working week, and there are few signs of violence on it except for these crosses. I watch for minute changes in the landscape. I steer a straight line past the reddish-yellow-brick high school, ease my way around one of the fatal curves, and there’s the Tiny Tot Drop-in Day Care Center, its sign decorated with pseudofestive balloons and a teddy bear waving an American flag, followed by a few acres of scrubby farmland with two FOR LEASE signs planted near the highway.

The last cash crop on this acreage happened to be pumpkins. Just before Halloween two years ago, the pumpkins covered the lawn fronting the highway, and the farmer sat behind a card table, wearing his feedstore hat and collecting his money. From the farmhouse chimney, smoke rose day and night, from autumn till spring. Woodsmoke spread across the highway like a porous blue curtain and enveloped the passing cars in a domestic living room odor, also blue. The farmer, too, smelled of woodsmoke, and his skin looked like treated lumber. He dropped his meager earnings into a little steel box. He seldom smiled. Then we never saw him again. Another section of his land was bought up, and condominiums stand there now, a complex called The Polo Fields. No more fires, not now.

A drive-in bank is located near the second curve (you’d think the manager of the bank would try to remove the white cross and the plastic flowers from the edge of the bank’s manicured lawn, but no), and then you see a strip mall where the office of my dog’s veterinarian, Dr. Hasselbacher, is located. After the mall you would see, on this route, three separate apartment and condominium developments, one called Appleton Estates and the other One Pine Lane. At One Pine Lane, the eponymous white pine, a token tree five feet high, stands planted near the entrance. It’s amazing that the kids haven’t killed it by kicking it to death. What I mean is, day after day, freshly scrubbed schoolchildren wearing backpacks are lined up for the bus, jostling one another, early morning kids, dressed in bright-colored kid-clothes, yellows mostly, and nautical blues. The boys bravely kick the tree, ripping off the bark. The girls watch, some avidly.

I like seeing these kids, though I wish they’d leave the tree alone. I recall being a kid myself. I was a successful child. I count these multicolored schoolchildren each morning and try to remember how many are wearing backpacks and how many are carrying lunch boxes. Sometimes their parents come along and stand with them, smiling proudly and distractedly. This thought keeps me occupied and momentarily removes the image of those drive-by crosses and plastic flowers.

I drive with one hand on the wheel, holding my cup containing coffee mixed with vanilla and chocolate-chip ice cream in my other hand.