Troy Weaver: Witchita Stories

My dad’s a Vietnam War veteran who smokes two packs a day and works for the United States Postal Service. He works third shift, his secrets seem numerous, and when he’s at home he’s just a soft squishy surface in front of the television. He watches the news and talks excessively about the “incompetent” leadership in America. He’s patriotic, but not grossly so like some dudes. He’s never flown the flag all over the front yard, never gotten a license plate made special for Vets, never claimed to be anybody’s hero. He is though, a hero, I’ll tell you that right now. He used to be an alcoholic, too, before he married my mom and had the idea of creating children. Grandpa was both verbally and physically abusive. The story my mom tells us is that my dad bore the brunt of it, being the oldest of three children. Maybe that’s why he’s always been so cold and distant. Or was it mostly the war that did that to him? It’s really hard to tell sometimes, I know that much. Or maybe it was a combination of everything in his life to a point. My dad caught a bullet in the leg, I think the left one, when he was over in the jungle, and now he has a funny way about him when he walks. He retired from bowling and golf in his mid-twenties. Sometimes when you wake him up for dinner he’ll wake with a start and stare at you as though you were never there at all. And if you ask him about the war, he’ll tell you all the things you weren’t really asking for. He’ll tell you about the time a new guy in the lab did a botch job on a VD test. Apparently how these tests work is, you take a scalpel and heat it red-hot under a flame, then you dip it into sterile water to cool it. After it has sufficiently cooled, you scrape the infected area, put the scrapings under a microscope and look for signs of gonorrhea or herpes or whatever. Well, the new guy forgot the step with the water, the scrapings never made it to the microscope and one good soldier went back to his wife with VD cauterized into his penis under a scalpel-shaped scar. These are the stories he tells us. He doesn’t tell us about all the death and destruction he witnessed, the horror and misery, but goes for the lighter stuff, the goofy and reasonable, the stuff that could put a smile on any old face. There’s another one, about a guy who caught shrapnel in the ass while shitting in the jungle, and you sit there when the story is done and over ( and then? and then? ) just hoping this will be the day he comes out and says it, comes out with all of it, the more serious stuff, the things the movies are made of, the Rambo shit. But he never does. If you ask my dad about the bullet in his leg, most likely he’ll delve into another one of his hilarious VD stories and nothing more. But if you ask him at just the right moment, in the right kind of light, he’ll steady his shaky gaze to greet you, head hung like a dusty trophy between his shoulders, and tell you all about the magic bullet that brought him home.

He picks me up in the alley in his rusty old pickup. He just sort of grunts when I get in and goes for the gas. I take the hint and stare through the window at the trees. Pretty soon they’re little more than a wide green strip pressed against the greying sky.

I say: Cindy says you’ve been hanging around with Scott.

I say: Looks like maybe some rain.

I say: Why’d you want me to come if you aren’t even going to talk to me?

He says: Last night, I saw two fat momma raccoons with seven little babies. I watched them awhile, scavenging around for food. But I got cinder blocks on the garbage cans with bungees strapped across the tops, so they weren’t getting anything there.

He laughs, spitting tobacco juice in a Bud Light bottle, one hand on the steering wheel, digging the curves of his crotch with the other.

He says: I saw they were about to give up, so I went inside and dug some scraps of meat out of the trash. And you know what — you know what they did?

I say: What’d they do.

He says: I’ll tell you what they did. They tore each other fucking apart.

He spits again, a big ole glob of amber, and turns the radio up a notch — a bunch of fuzz with a preacher’s voice bleeding through it.

He says: Those fucking animals.

I say: Always up to something, aren’t they?

He says nothing. He’s all eyes thrust against a wet windshield and alcohol in his veins.

I say: So you’ve been hanging around with Scott?

He says: See that cloud swirling up there?

He says: Man, rain’s really starting to come down.

I say: Maybe you should slow it down a bit.

The sky is grey, the rain blowing sideways in sheets, and when I look over to inspect the odometer, the needle’s stuck at 90.

I say: Pleeeeeeease. Sloooooooow. Doooooooown.

I say: How can you even fucking see?

He says: You’ll be all right. You always are, aren’t you?

I say: Just slow the fuck down, okay?

He slows down just a smidge.

I notice some blood on his shirt, shape of Florida, as a semi passes, all headlights and weight, one unhealthy motherfucker behind the wheel, skulking roadways for something to do come nightfall.

I say: What’s on your shirt?

I say: Is that blood on your shirt?

He says: Listen.

He says: I thought I already told you.

He says: I haven’t been hanging around with Scott, all right?

I nod and slide down into my seat, lighting a cigarette, alone, hoping the sky changes to pink to orange to light. But the storm only thickens, and a couple times I feel the truck hydroplane beneath me, all four tires skipping over the water like eroded stones — and I don’t even know where we’re going.

When I was twelve or thirteen my parents made me see a lady, a black woman named Sarah, because they thought I was dangerous. I guess it was true. I was constantly getting into fights, I never fit in with anybody, and when it came to defense, I couldn’t control myself once I got started. The thing is: my folks were afraid I’d kill somebody someday. Me? I couldn’t kill anybody, not on purpose. I don’t know how many times I tried telling them that, but they wouldn’t listen. The whole time I was in counseling with this lady I never said a word, except maybe hi and bye. Otherwise I just sat there in silence, a respectful void between us. She was so patient with me. She’d just stare at me and wait until I felt comfortable enough to say something. I never felt comfortable. I went to see her every other week for a few months, and in all that time, we both materialized patience within one another unlike anything I’ve witnessed since. Even though I never talked to her, or very little, she helped me. I stopped hurting people, stopped fighting back when I was taunted. I took the abuse and turned it inward. I began hating myself instead of others. Then puberty came on like a plague. I started taking Prozac and listening to music that reflected my feelings through its feedback. I hid further inside myself, deeper in my guts, because I knew it would be nearly impossible for anybody to find me there. I felt comfortable in this sadness, alone, deep down in the void of myself, laid out on top of pitiful pillows in a dirty bedroom, where I never found any kind of useful sleep or even rest from the misery of being me.

My brother’s skinny friend, the Seminole who took PCP in my basement the night the redheaded dude showed us his shins, was always coming over late at night, sneaking in with a backpack full of booze, DVDs, CDs, and random magazines, and we’d all sit around drinking and sampling music, watching a mute TV screen full of fucked and flickering images. Movies: David Lynch, Harmony Korine, Werner Herzog, and David Cronenberg. Music videos: Richard Kern, The Nine Inch Nails VHS called Closure. Old Betty Page peep-show shit, a three-disc set, and serial killer documentaries on A&E. We’d listen to Pigface and KMFDM and Nick Cave and Ssab Songs and My Bloody Valentine and Leadbelly and Joy Division. We’d lower our faces and glower, knowing even with all of our combined musical ambitions and artistic visions we could never possibly dream of being so good. Different, yes, but come on, we were dealing with the greats here, weren’t we, and we barely had the right kind of equipment to get going on a cover song, let alone an original. Besides, my brother traded my guitar for an eight ball of meth, and he was nearly into his second week of no sleep, concocting ideas for all the songs he would write after he got his hands on another, “cooler” instrument. What about a bass? Seriously, what if I got a bass?