Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

No way! Coke? My father? Wow, I said. Cool. I was suddenly for the first time since I was a little kid very eager to hear about my real father. Usually I just shut down whenever his name came into the conversation and it was like they were talking about somebody I never met and who didn’t have any impact on my life anyhow so why should I care et cetera. But I was like five years old when my father left and I had memories of him and I knew things, although my memories were fuzzy and I couldn’t really see him in my mind except for the picture I once found in one of my grandmother’s albums. It’s this snapshot of him and my mom standing in front of his ‘81 Blazer in the driveway of my mom’s same house which they had just bought then and she got in the divorce later. He’s a lot taller than my mom, taller than Ken too and skinny and he looks kind of good-humored like he knows there’s a joke going on but no one else has caught it yet, and I can see from this long leather coat he’s wearing that he’s on the flashy side, he’s cooler than my mom, he’s a guy who likes new 4x4s and wouldn’t be caught dead in one of Ken’s turquoise nylon jogging suits. Anyhow I never wanted to know much about him, on account of his leaving me to Ken, I guess although he didn’t actually leave me to Ken, I’m pretty sure he never even met Ken, that was after. The point is I just sort of numbed out on the subject of my real father for years and didn’t even want to hear his name. Paul. Paul Dorset.

Now though suddenly I was asking Grandma all these questions, like what kind of work did he do back then and where did he go after the divorce and so on. I think she was relieved to have a normal conversation with me no matter what the subject because she started rattling away and pretty soon didn’t need any questions from me to grease her wheels.

She said that my father’d worked as a medical technician which was cool. An x-ray expert she called him and he made big bucks but she didn’t think he was much of an expert on anything except lying to people since she knew for a fact that he never went to medical technician school or even to x-ray school and he had lied about his so-called military record where he was supposedly an EMS ambulance driver. My mom who worked in personnel at the clinic then knew the truth because she was supposed to check that sort of thing out when they hired anybody and she’d told Grandma all about his lies after the divorce when she was no longer protecting him. Although she had to swear Grandma to secrecy because of Mom being the one to cover for him. He was smart, he’d known to ask my mom out on a date the same day he applied for the job and she fell for him and when it came back that he’d never gone to the schools and that he’d been dishonorably discharged from the air force and all she didn’t tell anyone because by then she was head over heels in love with him.

My father was a fast talker, a smoothie was Grandma’s word which struck me as funny, the idea of my old man being a smoothie and wasting it on Grandma and Mom who were both unusually gullible let’s say especially when it came to men which they pretty much worshiped. But I liked picturing my father’s talents being wasted on them and on the whole town of Au Sable actually, a place that smoothies may come from but if they’re any good at smoothing they never stay. Was he from Au Sable? I asked her. Did he grow up here and have like a family? I’d be related to them if he did. I’d have cousins.

No, he was from away, she said. He was from someplace downstate although you couldn’t believe him about that either and in fact he had a funny accent like he was originally from Massachusetts or Maine where they talk like President Kennedy, all nasal and without any r’s which was attractive and made him sound smarter and better educated than he really was.

I thought that was cool and remembering the picture of him decided that he actually looked like JFK too. The same haircut anyhow. Sort of a young Jack Kennedy, that was my real dad.

So tell me the truth, Grandma, why’d they get divorced? I asked her. I’d been told stuff over the years but mostly it’d come down to him having this girlfriend Rosalie on the side which from letters I found once and read he didn’t really care about, not the way he cared about my mom anyhow. At least that’s what he said in the letters. But usually people don’t go to all the trouble of a divorce especially when they have a little five-year-old kid who loves and needs both his parents equally unless there’s something more wrong than the fact that somebody hooked up with somebody else a few times or even a bunch of times. So I wondered what the real story was.

Well, it didn’t disappoint me they got divorced, she said. The man was no good, he was a drug addict probably which I didn’t know at the time and he drank too much although that’s no sin. But I told your mother that she should be strong and she was.

What?

Strong.

About what?

About getting divorced from him. After she found out he was seeing other women. It was all over town, she said. You wanted her to divorce him?

She said, Oh sure, of course. She was much better off without him.

According to Grandma my father’d claimed to be sorry and all and cried and begged and told my mom he didn’t want the divorce but Grandma made sure my mom got a good lawyer and the judge gave her the house plus a hundred dollars a week child support which she never saw a penny of, and he gave my father liberal visitation rights which he never used since he would’ve had to pay a little child support if he wanted to see me.

So she didn’t let him have any visitations with me? I was wondering if things would’ve been different if I’d’ve had my real father to go to when I was seven and Ken first started in. I think I would’ve gone to him and told and my real father would’ve taken me away with him and for a second I flashed on that, it was like a picture of me and him riding in his Blazer 4x4, he’s like JFK and I’m his little son. With my real father to help me I wouldn’t have been scared to tell like I was with my mom who I couldn’t go to or didn’t think I could because Ken was her husband and she loved him supposedly and never let me complain about him even a little without telling me how lucky I was to have him for a stepfather.

No, Grandma said, I didn’t want that man in the same house with you two. Of course not. Not unless he was willing to pay up the child support he owed your mother. Grandma said she’d offered to move in with me and my mom but by then Mom was seeing Ken and he moved in instead. I could tell that had given Grandma a crossed hair but she couldn’t say it of course or people might think the reason she’d pushed so hard for the divorce was so she could have a nicer place to live for herself. Grandma’s a person with permanent ulterior motives.

I asked her if she knew where my father took off for after the divorce because so far as I knew he hadn’t stayed in Au Sable or even Plattsburgh. No one in town’d ever once mentioned him to me. It was like he was this mysterious stranger named Paul Dorset who looked and talked like JFK and he rode into Au Sable one day and married the prettiest gal in town and then he knocked her up and married her and one day after a little nastiness the stranger rode out of town again and except for the gal and her immediate family no one remembered him as having even been there. They were like, Who was that masked man? And he was like, Hi yo, Silver, awa-a-ay!

Grandma said after the divorce he went to the Caribbean, one of those foreign countries down there like Jamaica or Cuba or at least that’s what she’d heard from someone at the bank, a friend of hers who was a teller who a year or so after the divorce was told in a letter to close out my dad’s account and send the balance to a bank in Jamaica or someplace like that which she happened to remember because right after she did that a whole bunch of checks came in that bounced like rubber balls but there wasn’t anything the bank could do since my dad was out of the country now. They had a warrant for his arrest, Grandma said, for bouncing checks and for nonpayment of child support which she had encouraged my mother to file for since it was criminal for a man not to help pay for his own son’s food, clothes and housing, didn’t I agree?