Adam Johnson - Emporium

Some days, sure as the sun, I know my father is dead. Others, I hear his Rover circling the oil-field perimeter wire full throttle. I see him on a drilling platform set in a sea of chewgrass, scanning heat waves for signs of motion between the drilling towers, his fingers running in and out the focus of his brass-bound marine binoculars. Maybe he studies the sky, impossibly blue, or eyes distant villages, rising phoenixlike from the tawny-rose savanna clay. Of course he sees women, bronze from this distance, hair dyed like inky wine in the evening sun, as they move their burdens silently along the horizon.

The best version of things I won’t be able to imagine till later, when I am alone in a way I didn’t know people could be. I move to Acapulco, where cliff diving at night is all the rage, and on Friday evenings, Ted and I sit with tourists in silence as we follow bodies that drop through darkness into a pumice-colored sea. On some Sundays, Ted teaches me target-match shooting on the brown plains just beyond the brochure-beautiful mountains of coastal Mexico. Ted’s pistols are of tournament quality, quiet and firm in your hand as they snap and ring the distant silhouettes. On these mornings we leave the church bells and take his Jeep up the winding mountain roads, past Chidiaz and El Agujero, to the high, grassy plains that extend into the heart of mid-Guerrero. The fields whip in the wind, and we shoot into the brown waves whenever the red targets flash through the grass. Ted never produces my father’s binoculars, but it doesn’t matter. We walk into the scrub to see what we hit. We examine the targets, decide angles, hit-and-miss ratios, and then walk out of the brush together to the Jeep, parked on a ridge that divides our view of the world in three: a khaki run of grass, a thin strip of indigo ocean, and the sky, palest of blues.

Ted thumbs the indentations our bullets make in silhouettes of pronghorns and lions and boar. He looks at me hard, in a way he has never done before. He squints. In Africa, Ted tells me, gods live in animals and trees, even in things like tables and radios. There is a big problem over there of gods taking human form and sleeping with women. The god then changes back, and the woman is alone, but for the boy that is born things are worse: he’s a semigod, with small powers he doesn’t understand, and like his father, he’s a roamer, with one wing in heaven, one foot on earth, doomed to wander toward every distant mud city that appears golden in his half-divine sight. His real father might be a bird or storm, sea-beast or lion, so this typical young man, Ted says, must learn to find his fathers where he can.

This story Ted tells me is a good one, though I’m sure he’s probably making it up. I don’t remember my mythology teacher lecturing on this topic. Ted does have a point, though. You can’t go around talking to trees and radios. You must learn to live with the unknown, never taking your eyes off it, but not growing used to it, either. For instance, from this vantage, it looks like these cliffs deadfall straight into the ocean’s abyss. But there’s a strip of land between the ledge and the surf that you can’t quite see from here. You’d have to listen for the church bells or smell for the meat smokers in the market to know this stretch of shore is below. You’d have to use all your powers, because in life you can count on the most important things being beyond your knowing, like a decade you can’t remember, a lost younger brother, or this hidden beach where your mother’s villa is, where she sleeps late after flying all night through turbulence.

The doors to my heart get kicked down in the middle of the night, and I wake still dreaming of muscly ATF agents with black cargo pants, lean haircuts, and tough-luck smiles, so that when my father comes down into the game room, I am sitting up in bed, hot. He flips a bank of light switches at the foot of the stairs, making the darkness buzz as the fluorescent tubes hum-up. I begin to make out my father, crash helmet under arm, the Jughead of Berlin.

He can’t sleep some nights since he quit drinking, and he doesn’t seem surprised to see his daughter awake, either. Judging by his spent eyes and wild hair, he has had the same dream about Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms commandos, though for different reasons.

“So you’re home,” he says, as if he’s surprised to see me in my bed.

I roll my eyes in the stuttering light and reach for my flight goggles. “Like I’m some alley cat slut or something,” I tell him. “I wasn’t even dreaming about sex.”

“Maybe we should ask Randy what he’s dreaming of.”

“I’m a complete virgin, Dad.”

He grunts once, which is military for likely.

Germany is where my father and his friends were stationed during the Cold War — where he learned “importing and exporting,” as he puts it on his tax forms — and though I never learned what he did to become the Jughead of Berlin, the name stuck, and Berlin is all I’ve ever heard him called, even by Mom. When people phone our house and ask for Charles Primeaux, I hang up — it can only be a bill collector, a lawyer, or even the ATF themselves, who sometimes ring up impersonating lawyers and collectors. Everybody in Coubillion Parish knows Berlin.

I’ve taken to sleeping in the game room, and I do so in a shimmery emerald chemise. I swing my legs out of bed, and over green silk, I pull on a thick jersey and jeans, then start to lace my duck boots.

Berlin takes in what remains of his game room. There’s been no gambling down here in the year since they made the riverboat casinos legal, and though he’s pretty much accepted that his past life is over, he still calls it his game room. Here he was once the top pit boss in all south Louisiana, but tonight he just shakes his head at the red-foil wallpaper and boot-blacked windows of a room that now reeks of Petit-Chou , the stupid perfume I’ve armed myself with in an effort to snare Randy.

Sobriety and poverty have made my father newly interested in my affairs. From nowhere, he says, “For God’s sake, Auddie, put on a bra.”

“What? I’m wearing a sweatshirt.”

“We’re going flying. There’s a lot of G forces involved, stuff you don’t even know about.” Berlin acts all pissed, but his voice is closer to a whisper. He’d be better off crashing another plane than waking up Mom, who’s been preparing the house nonstop since we got a tip that we might finally be served a warrant this week.

“I think they mentioned gravity to us in school, Dad.”

“And don’t go rolling your dang eyes.”

I silently mouth yes sir.

He walks away at this and starts fumbling with one of the slot machines we have to ditch before the raid. He grabs a silver dollar off the bar and takes a pull. Seven Bar Seven.

He taps another silver dollar on the bar, then looks at me. “So, am I going to meet this boy before he points a gun at me on Sunday?”

I come up beside Berlin, lean against the poker pit railing. I take a dollar and spin, pulling Bell Cherry Cherry. The slot machines are old, from Cuba, with burnished silver casings and hand-painted tumblers — green stars, black bars, crackled gold bells. Berlin’s probably going to bury them tomorrow, and I don’t know how I’m going to sleep without them in quiet formation around me.

“First of all,” I tell him, pulling again, “the ATF won’t even let Randy touch a gun yet, and second, I invited him to our fish fry tonight. You’ll like him.”

Berlin looks away, then meets my eyes, meaning maybe he’ll like Randy and maybe he won’t, meaning he’s not going to speak to the possibility yet.

As the tumblers stop, three silver horseshoes align, sending a brief stream of Kennedy dollars into the pewter hopper below. But this is not luck. Our family has gotten where it is in this world by knowing the future. In back of each machine, below the scrollwork, is a little screw that adjusts how much it pays out.