Kyle Minor - Praying Drunk

So I said, “Sure, buddy bear,” and I took him up the road to the Baskin Robbins, and he ordered what Danny always ordered, which was Rocky Road with green and only green M&M’s sprinkled over top, and we got a high table for two, and I sat and watched him chew exactly the way he used to chew, and lick the spoon exactly the way he used to lick the spoon. He said, “Can we split a Coke, Dad?” and I said sure, and went up to the counter and ordered a large Coke, and when I forgot to get an extra straw, I regretted it the way I used to regret it, because he chewed the straw down to where you could hardly get any Coke out of it.

After that he wanted to go walk the old stone wall like we always did when we came to Lexington, so I took him down there and parked the car and got him out and hoisted him up on the wall, and held his hand to steady him as he walked on top of it, and he said, “Tell me about the slaves, Daddy,” so I did what I used to do and told him about how all the black people in Kentucky used to belong to the white people, and how this very wall he was walking on had been made by their hands, one stone at a time, and the mortar mixed with probably some of their sweat and maybe some of their blood, too, still in it, and how even with all that Kentucky fought for the Union and could well have been the difference in that war. While I was saying it, I was remembering how I used to believe things like that, and the feelings that used to rise up in my chest when I said them, feelings of pride and certainty, and warm feelings toward my people I had come from. These were stories my own dad and granddad used to tell me and which I was now passing along to my own son, and this little Danny, walking along that wall, holding my hand, said the same thing the other little Danny had said in a moment a whole lot like this one but which couldn’t have been, if you think about it, any more different if it was happening on the other side of the world. He said, “It wasn’t right, was it, for people to keep other people to do their work for them? How did anybody ever think it was right?”

And I said the same thing I said then, which was, “People don’t always do what’s right, son, but you and me get the privilege of making our own choices, and we have to make good choices. That’s what makes a person good, is the choices you make.”

Right then is when we went off the script. Could be that something was wrong with his making, or could be that I wasn’t leading him right, but right at that moment, he took a wrong step and fell. He didn’t fall off the wall altogether, but he caught his shoe on a stone that was sticking up at a bad angle, and when he fell, he caught his arm on another stone, and it cut deep into his skin, and when he tried to stand up, he pulled away and didn’t seem aware that his skin was caught on that rock. I guess they don’t build those things in such a way that they feel pain the same way you and me do, because as he stood up, the skin of his arm began to pull away from what was underneath, which wasn’t bone or sinew, but cold lightweight metal, what I now know they call the endoskeleton, and what began to drain from him warm wasn’t his own blood, but somebody else’s, and the reason it was in there wasn’t to keep him alive, but just to keep his skin warm and pink, just to make him look and feel like someone alive.

“Danny,” I said. He must have heard the alarm in my voice, and I could tell it scared him. He looked down and saw his metal arm, the skin hanging off it, and the blood pouring out in a way that wasn’t natural, and then he gave me a look that sank my soul, and I realized what I should have realized before I signed what I signed, which was that I had got them to make a boy out of something that wasn’t a boy. All that was in his head was all that was in Danny’s head a long time ago, back when Danny was himself someone different than who he became later, and it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know what he was, and the sight of it was more than he could handle.

His lip began, then, to tremble, in the way Danny’s did when he needed comforting, and I lifted him down off that stone wall and took him in my arms and held him and comforted him, and then, in the car, I stretched the skin back to where it had been, and took Penny’s old emergency button-sewing kit out of the glove compartment and took needle and thread to it and got him to where none of the metal was showing. I didn’t take him to Penny’s like I had planned.

He was real quiet all the way home. He just stared straight ahead and didn’t look at his arm and didn’t look at me. Near Winchester I asked him if he wanted to hear some music, and he said all right, but we couldn’t find anything good on the radio. “How about the football game?” I said, and he said all right again, and we found the Tennessee Titans and the Dallas Cowboys, and I made a show of cheering for the Titans the way we always had, but when he said, “How come all their names are different?” I didn’t have a good answer, and after that I asked if he wouldn’t mind just a little quiet, and he said he wouldn’t mind, and I leaned back his seat and said, “Why don’t you just close your eyes and rest awhile? It’s been a long day and I bet you’re tired.”

He did. He closed his eyes then, and after some time had passed and I thought he was asleep, I stroked his hair with my free hand and made some kind of mothering sounds.

It was dark when we got to the house. I parked the car by the bedroom window, then went around to his side and picked him up like I was going to carry him sleeping to bed. I held him there in the dark for a little while and thought about that, carrying him up to bed, laying him there, laying his head on the pillow, pulling the covers up around his shoulders, tucking him in. It would have been the easiest thing to do, and it was the thing I wanted to do, but then I got to thinking about Penny, and sooner or later, I knew, she would have to be brought in on this, and even though I thought I had done it for her, I could see now that I had really done it for me, like maybe if I showed up with this little Danny she would come back home and the three of us could have another go of it.

But already this little Danny was wearing out. I could feel it in his skin. He wasn’t warm like he was when I had picked him up, I guess because the blood had run out of him on the stone wall. He was breathing, but he was cold, and a little too heavy compared to what I remembered. There wasn’t any future for him, either. I got to thinking about how if I put him in school, everyone would get bigger than him fast, and it would get worse every year, the distance between who he was and who his friends were becoming.

He was stirring a little, so I put his head on my shoulder, the way I used to do, and patted his back until his breathing told me he was asleep again. Then I went around to the front of the house and reached up to the porch and took down my axe from the wood pile and went off into the woods, down the path I had mowed with my riding mower a few weeks back, and which was already starting to come up enough that I had to watch my step.

I kept walking, him on my shoulder, axe in my free hand, until I reached the clearing. Then, careful not to wake him, I unbuttoned my jacket and got it out from under him and took it off and laid it on the ground. Then I laid him down on it and made sure he was still sleeping. Then I lifted up the axe and aimed it for the joint where his head met his neck and brought it down. In the split second right before blade struck skin, I saw his eyes open, and they were wide, and what I saw in them was not fear but instead some kind of wonder, and then, fast as it had come, it was gone, and all I could tell myself, over and over, was It’s not Danny. It’s not Danny .