Scott Cheshire - High as the Horses' Bridles

We tossed a ball back and forth, before I got up to bat. Mom had insisted we play because she thought it would be good for me, for us. In good weather, the congregation often organized activities: picnics, park hikes, and softball. But Dad usually said no. Or if we did say yes, it was with reservation, even with suspicion. We were both a part and not a part of the congregation. On the outskirts. Dad was suspicious of people with “too much time on their hands,” like weekends — free time that could be better spent studying the Bible, or praying, or making a witness for the Lord. Why read the paper when there’s scripture? Sometimes I just wanted to play Star Wars, and I’d hide out with action figures under the wooden table in our backyard. Why he allowed my mother to buy them for me, I’m not sure; they were probably not realistic enough to cause him concern. I used to hear the kids in the next yard yelling or swimming in their aboveground pool, or tossing a Frisbee, and I’d wonder why I shouldn’t go join them. What stopped me? I also at some point started wondering if I was already too old for action figures. I also knew Mom wanted Dad to just let me be a regular kid sometimes. She said it would be healthy, more balanced. During the softball game, after I’d struck out for a second time, Dad insisted I get another swing. He said it was only right, and they should let me have another chance. The other dads sort of froze. He encouraged me and said, Go on, go ahead, and get ready to swing. The pitcher was a chubby and pimply thirteen-year-old named Kermit and he was whining “But I got him out…” Kermit looked around at the adults to see if really he had to throw another pitch. I happily accepted defeat and left the plate. Dad claimed the game was rigged. He threw his mitt on the ground and kicked it so hard it soared over a high fence surrounding sewage pipes. The mitt was borrowed. I don’t remember being embarrassed by all this. Not exactly. I sort of liked that Dad and I were a team all our own, but I also remember the other boys in the field looking at me like I was some nutcase, like I’d confirmed everything they’d already thought about me. Weirdo. I do remember feeling like I was now seeing my father more clearly, in a brand-new light, realizing that fathers could actually be wrong, and, worse, not even know they’re wrong. I also remember faking that embarrassment, later on, as a teenager, about the very same game. Whenever I wanted to get the man right between the eyes, I’d say something like “you don’t even know how to play baseball.”

Of course nothing as silly as that had happened between us in a long time, but even all the half memories accrue a sort of crust that eventually feels real and whole. Like plaque on a white fake tooth. We hold on to some memories for way too long. Still, sometimes we bickered, father-and-full-grown-son stuff. Is that surprising? I don’t think so. We didn’t fight much anymore. That’d ended years before. I guess the last actual argument we’d had, a real hot one, was after I’d moved to California. We had a shouting match over the phone. Because I think Dad believed I’d never fully go through with it. I’d pack my things, a week or so after I got there, and run back home fast as I could. I think he would’ve been happy to have me stay at home forever. Just us three — me, him, and Mom, one small team. But Mom never wanted that kind of life for me. She was thrilled when I left. Deep down, I think so. I hope so. Then again it’s not like my father and I ever became best friends, either. There was a cooling-off period after the move, after the phone call. I would call and check on Mom, and if he answered he’d pass her the phone. But by the time I met Sarah, he and I had leveled off, and things were pretty good between us. We were cordial. He even asked questions about where I lived. Sarah pulled us closer together because he loved her. So did Mom. Either way, I hadn’t been back to see him since Mom died, and no way was I letting the man get sick. If he was sick. It also seemed my one chance for redemption. Or maybe better to say redemption for all of us, because I was sure Dad was praying, still, for a late homecoming. Because if there was a Heaven — although I could never take the idea seriously — I figured Mom was looking down, and this would make her happy. I sat there in the cab entertaining fantastical thoughts of me swooping in, just in time. I would save my father.

“A shitty park,” Abdullah said. “Used to be beautiful. You should see it Sunday mornings with all the garbage. I should stay in traffic, or go Queens Boulevard?”

“This used to be a kind of scary place.”

“Safe now. Filthy, but safe.”

A game of soccer was under way. Sub-bass music shook the back ends of SUVs in one of the parking lots.

“You know what, take me to Forest Park.”

Not in such a hurry, after all.

Abdullah nodded. I saw his rusty rotting teeth in the mirror. He said, “They’re trying to make this place beautiful again. Spanish families come every weekend. Music so loud the trees dance.” Then he laughed into his phone. He put something in his mouth and chewed.

I said, “I want to drive through Forest Park for a while. And then we’ll go to Richmond Hill.” The house was waiting, and Dad was waiting. They weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

The cab dipped low and took to an off ramp.

When Mom first got sick, her dying was sort of unthinkable. Because I was so young? I don’t know. Remission came and the cancer went, and the years passed by, but then she got sick again. I definitely knew this time where it was headed. Not where, exactly, but I knew what would likely happen, and still I have to say I had trouble grasping the endgame scenario. Even standing there right beside her bed, in the hospital. She was a ghost, surrounded by mint-green walls and silver bedpans, all the humming precision equipment. I was optimistic. And yet, here, in the cab, pretty sure Dad was doing relatively fine, I couldn’t shake my uneasy feeling.

I looked at Abdullah. He put another piece in his mouth.

“What are you eating?”

“You want some?” He grinned. “Is betel nut. You chew the leaves and nut.”

I frowned, making a face at him in the mirror like I have no idea.

“You chew it— What, I have a passenger. What do you mean? Who did?” He punched at the steering wheel. His laugh was all consuming, so great now it almost stole his voice. He wheezed, “Ah, my friend!” We traded glances in the mirror and he pointed at the phone, what’d I tell you about this guy?

A chatter blast of horns screamed out. A drill battering against a distant sidewalk.

He was digging through a plastic bag in the passenger seat beside him. He reached back through the opening in his clear plastic pay box and handed me a small leather pouch. In the mirror he made small fingers at his mouth, a squirrel pawing a prize. “Like this, gives you a zing.” The leaves were semitough, like wet bay leaves, and the nut slices looked peppery. I handed him back the pouch. “No, no. Keep it till we get there,” he said. “We call it paan.” Rhymed with “wan,” and I was getting a little bit carsick.

“Tastes weird.” It was like the tough skin of a new fruit, and the sensation was bitter, but pleasant. My tongue tingled and I looked up, catching his face in the mirror.

He nodded, grinning. “Keep chewing.”

Ahead was Queens Boulevard.

Six wide lanes of stretch limos and smoke-belching buses racing past the strip joints and the pool halls, for the shopping malls and the nightclubs. My first girlfriend, from way back in high school. Her name. It was. Bhanu. Poor girl. We were young. She was so young. We went to a nearby school the size of a Texas prison, cut classes together, and hid in the stairwells. I remembered running from security officers in the Queens Center Mall, just a few blocks away, and how one time we found ourselves in the rug department at Macy’s, on the very top floor, and how we pushed the rolling stairs between the itchy hanging carpets and sat up there for hours, undetected, in the dark, rug dander all in the air. We talked and pretended this was exactly where we wanted to be. I stopped sneezes by cupping my hands in front of my mouth. She covered her mouth so she wouldn’t laugh out loud. It was all very sweet, like something out of a lesser John Hughes movie. We even etched the letters OMD into the wall behind the rugs, but then debated what the letters actually stood for. Bhanu.