Kyle Minor - Praying Drunk

By time he got to Benny Gil’s house, he had worked himself up into something cold enough that Benny Gil didn’t argue, didn’t even need to be shown knife or gun to know it was in his best interest to give up Penny’s location and get Danny on his way. I don’t know what that means, exactly, except to say that Benny Gil is not a person I’ve ever known or heard of to be afraid of anyone or anything.

What Benny Gil told Danny was that Penny was staying with her sister’s husband’s nephew Kelly, a bookish boy we never knew well because he never came around to family things, probably because he, or more likely his mother, thought he was better than us, from what they call a more refined stock.

Kelly was, by then, well-to-do, UK law degree in hand, specialty in horse law. He even had a office at Keeneland and another at Churchill Downs, and if he thought as highly of himself as he seemed to every year on the television, sitting there next to some half-dead Derby owner who needed a oxygen tank just to breathe, sipping a mint julep, then I’m sure him and Penny made a fine pair.

There’s no way to know it now, but my guess is that Danny, when he heard of it, came to the same idea I did when I first heard of it, which was something not right was happening between Penny and that boy, but I put it out of my head at the time because it was too horrible a thing to look at directly.

At any rate, what happened next is the part of the story that got out into the world. Danny drove east on Interstate 64, stopped at the Sonicburger in Mt. Sterling and ordered and ate a egg sandwich, then headed toward the big expensive stone houses by the airport, where Penny and Kelly was shacked up.

When he got there, he rang the doorbell three times — that’s what Kelly’s security company came up with later — and nobody was home, and I guess he didn’t want to wait, and I guess he knew well enough what ended up being true, which was that there was something worse for a mother than to be killed by her son.

At the funeral, the preacher and everyone else said that wasn’t the case, that Danny was sick in the head and that these things happen in the brain, something trips or snaps or misfires, and then somebody is doing something they wouldn’t do if they were themself. But I think that’s the kind of thing people say when what they want to do is make themselves feel better instead of look straight ahead at the truth and all its ugly. Because what I think and pretty near to know happened goes like this:

When he got there, he rang that doorbell three times, and nobody was home, and he got to thinking, and what he was thinking about was clear enough to him, and what he was thinking was that he had come all this way to hurt his mother, and his stomach was full from that egg sandwich, and that Browning 9mm was in his hand, and what if instead of killing her and just hurting her that one time, what if instead he did himself right there where she would have to come home and find him, and wouldn’t that be something she would have to live with, and go on living and living and living? And wouldn’t that be the way to hurt her again and again, the way she had hurt him and us by running off?

So that’s what he did. He sat down in front of Kelly’s front door, and put the muzzle to his right temple, and turned his head so his left temple was to the door, and when Penny came home that night, what she found was the worst thing you can ever find, and when I heard about it, I couldn’t hate her the way I wanted to anymore.

At the funeral, they sat us both on the front row, but far apart from each other, with a bunch of her brothers and other male relatives between us so I would know clear as daylight that I was meant to stay away from her. But before the service got started, the preacher came over and asked if there were things each of us needed to say to the deceased, and we both said yes, but for me it wasn’t because I had anything to say to Danny. He was dead and gone and wherever it is he ended up, and that was hard enough to bear without making a show of telling him something he wasn’t ever going to hear. It was Penny I wanted to say some things to, and I thought maybe up there next to Danny she might in that moment have ears to hear them.

Her brothers didn’t leave the room when the preacher asked, but they did go stand in the back and give what they must have thought was a respectful distance. Me and Penny went and knelt beside the casket, her near his head and me near the middle, maybe three feet separating us. She bowed her head to pray silently, and I did, too, although I didn’t right then have any words to say, and then she said some things to Danny too personal for me to repeat, although I don’t think it would be wrong to say that the things she said, if they were true, moved me in a way I didn’t think I could be moved by her.

When she was done, she looked over at me. It seemed like she was able to keep from crying all that time until she looked into my eyes, and I was reminded that it was our looking into each other’s eyes that was happening while we were about the business of getting him made in the first place, and maybe that’s what she saw that finally broke her down when she looked over at me. Maybe that, and all the years we had together, the three of us, and how there wasn’t anyone else in the world who knew what those years were, and how there wouldn’t ever be anyone else again.

It was right then, though I didn’t say anything at the time because it didn’t seem like the right time, that I decided I couldn’t live in a world where Penny would go on being as unhappy as she had been made to be.

First thing the next morning I went down to Lexington again and went to the place where we had taken Danny to get scanned when he was six years old. It was gone, boarded up, the part of town where it had been now all but forgotten by people in business to make money. The only place in the storefront where the lights were still on was the WIC food stamp place, and I went inside and was told where to go on the Loop, to a part of town I remembered as Lexington Green but which was now called Stonewall.

The business had changed its name too, was now called Livelong, and occupied a building the size of a city block. The woman at the front desk said my number was A83, gave me a smartpad to fill in and told me to take a seat.

By time they called my name I had run my fingerprint and verified all my information and watched the screen that said the scan we had got was old technology, and while the guarantee we had bought was still good, the Danny we would get would eventually wear out, but would not age the way the ones they could make now could. We’d get him six years old, and six years old he would stay.

They made me meet with a kid in a suit and tie, and all he said was the same thing I had heard from the smartpad. He was looking at me funny, and I said, “All I want to get is the service I paid for eleven years ago, near to the day,” and he lowered his head for just a moment, like he was ashamed, and then he said, “You’re entitled to it, and we’ll give it to you if you want, but what you need to know is sometimes what you want isn’t the same as the thing we can give you.”

Even though he was a kid, what he was saying was true, and I knew it then, and it made me want to pound the sense out of him, and even so I wanted what I wanted.

I walked out of that Stonewall storefront that afternoon holding the warm flesh hand of a thing that moved and talked and looked for the life of me just like Danny did at six years old, and it was nearly unbearable, at first, to touch him or hear him say, “Now we’re going for ice cream, Daddy?” and to remember the bargain we had made with Danny the day we took him to get him scanned. You be good through this , we’d told him, we’ll take you to get whatever kind of ice cream you want .