by Dan Chaon
Things have changed since then. When they walk into the trailer and his father turns on the light, Scott is again aware of how unfamiliar everything looks. The smell and the clutter have been cleared away, leaving only the acrid, flowery odor of old peoples’ houses, and a certain hollowness, like the inside of a shell. He remembers the carpet and most of the furniture from childhood, the cigarette burns on the sofa, the stain rings left by beer cans on the coffee table. But the place has no real connection with the past, he thinks. As always, Scott’s high-school picture, sitting on the TV set, catches him: that bright, self-congratulatory smile makes him wince. He was the first in his family to graduate high school. He wishes the picture weren’t there.
“Do you want coffee?” Scott’s father asks him. “Decaf ?”
Scott has picked up this habit, too, and he nods. There’s a long silence, and at last Scott says, “Sounds good.”
He takes a piece of cold toast, saved from breakfast, and begins to nibble around the edge as his father scoops instant crystals into two mugs. His father counts out the scoops, moving his lips—one, two, three—and then puts the kettle on the stove. Scott has noticed that his father does everything methodically these days, as if he’s gone blind and knows the room only as a diagram of its positions.
As Scott is leaning against the counter, he notices that the Bible his father has lying there is opened to a different place—Matthew, now, instead of Luke. It makes Scott nervous. Though he’s never seen his father read it, Scott knows he must, in private. He tries to imagine his father praying, and it makes him shudder. Just seeing the Bible there, the first time, sent a chill through him, the idea that his father had changed so much. Scott dreaded the moment his father would bring it up, sitting him down at the kitchen table to discuss Jesus and being born again, and he would feel obliged to listen politely, like he did the time he accidentally invited the Jehovah’s Witness girls into his fraternity’s living room. But Scott’s father has never said a word about religion. He doesn’t seem to know what to say most of the time, and Scott often feels as if they’re strangers trapped in an elevator together, slowly shifting their weight and staring at the unopening door, the small talk drained out of them.
“So.” His father sighs at last. “Pretty good meeting tonight. I like that Taylor. He’s a bright guy.”
“Mm-hmm. He’s good.”
“I don’t suppose you’ll want to take any psychology when you get back to college. You’ll have had enough of that.” His father smiles, pouring hot water into their mugs. He stirs the coffee with a fork and his expression doesn’t change, as if he’s forgotten that he’s still smiling.
“Probably,” says Scott. This is one of the games they have going between them—at least that’s how Scott thinks of it. They are pretending that Scott is going back to school in the fall. Maybe Scott’s father half believes it. But all Scott himself can think of is how it will feel to be at a party, standing there with a soda while people are laughing and dancing and drunk, watching them passing out cups of beer at the bar. He imagines his friends saying guarded things: “How are you doing?” trying not to let their eyes drift down to the drinks in their hands. Scott wouldn’t be able to stand it for a minute, he knows for a fact, though he can’t bring himself to admit it to his father. September is still months away.
“I don’t think you’ll have any trouble getting your scholarship back, do you?” his father says. He keeps at this point, meticulously as at everything else.
“Probably not,” Scott says. He sighs, sips coffee. They blink at one another in the sharp fluorescent light.
Even now, after all that has happened, Scott still finds himself longing for a drink. One of the first things he learned in detox was that, for him, sleep and alcohol are intertwined. After the coffee and cigarettes it takes to get through a day, he’ll lie down and the soft hush hush of his heart will start to pump in his ears. It seems like only a drink can muffle the sound.
There are times, during the day, when Scott is sure there’s nothing wrong with him. Everybody overindulges when they’re young, he tells himself, and maybe everyone was overreacting to the thing with the ouzo. Maybe all that people wanted, really, was to give him a good scare, teach him a lesson. But then, as the day wears on, his hands will start to shake, or his head will hum, and he’ll wonder whether he belongs back in the psych ward. He’ll start to feel like he’s become as tired and used up as his father.
It doesn’t help to be here, at his father’s place in rural Nebraska. To see the fields and untraveled dirt roads stretching out in every direction. To hear the soft static buzz of cicadas and the cows lowing in the pasture across the road and the slow thud of a distant irrigation pump hovering in the air as he tries to close his eyes.
Scott’s father is a short, dark-haired man with a heavy brow and leathery, sun-wrinkled skin. People are afraid of his looks, Scott has noticed, not just because of his eye, but also because there is a kind of inborn intensity to his expression that is apparent even in baby pictures.
He never used to have any hobbies, except drinking and reading, sometimes—he liked a certain kind of lurid detective novel, the kind that featured screaming, half-dressed women on the cover. But these days, Scott has noticed, his father keeps busy. He spends a lot of time in the shed behind the trailer, making things out of scrap metal. Maybe, Scott thinks, he finds it therapeutic. Maybe, since he is no longer a welder by trade, he does it out of nostalgia, or to keep in practice. He works with old automobile parts and barbed wire, nails and brass pipes, making things like candlestick holders, picture frames, book-ends. Recently he made Scott a belt buckle out of thin slices of copper tubing welded together like a honeycomb. Though Scott can’t imagine wearing the thing in public, certainly not at his college, he does like it. There is a kind of strange beauty to it, Scott thinks, as if it were a relic from another planet.
Four days a week, Scott’s father works at a feedlot. They are looking for people, he has told Scott on several occasions, and on the morning after the meeting he brings it up again. “I really think a little hard work would do you good,” he says. They are standing in his workshop when he suggests this, surrounded by bits of metal and junk, and when Scott doesn’t answer, it seems to him that the old engines and bedsprings close in a little. “I don’t think it’s good for you to sit around all day, brooding,” his father says. “That’s the worst thing for you right now.” The father has a flat piece of metal in a vise, and he’s slowly pounding it into a helix. He grits his teeth.
“Or,” he says, grunting, “you could try to get a job somewhere else if you want. But I’ve always said that it’s the physical work that keeps your mind off your troubles.” He looks up, his forehead sweaty. He cocks his head slightly, in order to fix on Scott with his good eye.
“Sure,” Scott says. He edges his foot along the ground, scattering bolts, spark plugs, washers. He shrugs.
On Monday, Scott goes into the office to fill out an application. Cowboys and old sixties-Vietnam types with scruffy beards are milling around, and some of them turn to look at him as he passes. Scott had long hair and two weeks’ growth on his face when he went into detox, but they insisted that he cut his hair and shave daily. Now he looks clean-cut, squeaky clean, he thinks, like someone who folds his hands in his lap when he sits down, someone who constantly smooths the creases of his pants.
The man behind the desk is wearing a Western shirt and a string tie, and his hair is slicked across his balding head. He rubs his knuckles as he looks at the application. “We don’t get many college kids out here.” He frowns. “This is hard work—physical work.”
“I know,” Scott says. He looks at his feet, trying to shift his leg so his argyle socks aren’t visible to men passing behind him. His father was the one who told him to “dress up.”
“Where did you learn of this position?”
“My dad works here,” Scott says quietly. He glances across the room to where his father is punching a time
card. “Larry Sullivan.”
“Mmm.” The man’s eyes narrow, and he writes a quick scrawl across the application. “We’ll get back to you.”
When Scott goes outside, his father is standing by the door, waiting. Scott tells him he doesn’t think he’ll get the job, but his father just smiles.
“Do you want to ride around with me for a while and look the place over?” he says. They are walking by a parked pickup, and Scott can see two paunchy cowboys leaned up against it, trading what looks like a joint back and forth. He can’t think of an excuse to get out of staying. “I guess so,” Scott says, and follows, keeping pace with his father’s slow, regretful walk.
The truck Scott’s father drives is an old ten-ton, the kind Scott remembers seeing when he was out at his father’s place in those long-ago summers. He can recall trucks like that, loaded with wheat, bearing down on him like some roaring dinosaur as he rode his bike along the hazy dirt road.
They call it the “dead truck,” his father tells him. His father’s job is to drive through the rows of cattle pens and pick up the ones that have died. Wearing thick leather gloves and coveralls, he attaches a chain to their bodies and cranks them up into the back of the truck. Later, Scott’s father explains, they’ll be taken to be made into dog food and fertilizer.
The cattle shift and mass in their pens, staring uneasily as Scott and his father pass. After a few minutes, Scott’s father spots one in the midst of the ebb and flow of brown-and-white bodies. He points it out, and Scott sits, looking at it—the swollen belly, the stiff legs that point in the air at odd angles. “We lose sometimes thirty a day,” his father tells him, and Scott can picture them, lying down in the heat and mud and the maggots that thrive in the fresh manure, lying down and never getting up again.
He watches through the rearview mirror after his father backs the truck up to the narrow edge of the pen. The cattle bellow, scatter away, then circle like bystanders at a respectful distance. His father bends over the dead animal and lifts its head so he can work the chain under its body. He strains, pulling the chain under the torso, hooks it under the front legs, which sway lazily. When he activates the crank, the watching cattle bolt again, and the dead cow’s body jerks once, then slowly begins to sidle along the dark, tadpole-colored ground, and finally Scott sees it lift. He stops looking. It’s impossible to imagine, he thinks—days, weeks, months of this: the sickly sweet smell of the dead and the manure; the boring maze of dirt roads that trace around and around the circumference of the pens. You would almost have to be drunk or high, Scott thinks, just to make yourself go to work in the morning.
His father climbs back into the cab of the truck and wipes his face with his forearm. Scott lets his gaze drift over his father’s gloves, then, involuntarily, to his eye, which is fixed on some distant point—the hills, the faint white line an airplane is making along the sky.
“What’s the matter?” His father puts his gloved hand on Scott’s knee, and Scott can’t help but flinch. “Oh,” his father says, and his expression wavers. He takes off his gloves. “Not a pretty sight, is it? But it don’t take much to get used to it.”
“Yeah.” Scott looks away, ashamed of his own squeamishness. “No big deal,” he says. He tries to sound upbeat. He doesn’t want to offend his father, to seem prissy or snobbish. Besides, he’s almost positive he won’t get the job, anyway.
“It’s only to September, even if you don’t like it,” his father says. They nod at one another, neither sure of what to say, and Scott’s father clears his throat. “Well. How about some of that coffee?”
Scott pours him a cup out of the thermos, balancing as the truck jogs forward. He is trying to concentrate on making himself believe that there will be a time when his life is back in order, when he’ll be back at the university, walking through the quad with a load of books or looking out his window at night and seeing the bright dominoes of city lights on the horizon. He remembers how, once, when he was little, his father drove him to the top of a hill at night, and how they stood there, watching a red airplane light move among the stars, his father trying to convince him that this tiny light held hundreds of people, all of them on their way to California or Hawaii or Japan, all of them oblivious of anyone down below. College seems at least that distant and unreal.
“Don’t look so down in the mouth,” Scott’s father says. “You should have seen me when I came back from the cure. You’re tougher than I was. All you need is something to keep your hands busy.”
Out the window, the white faces of Hereford cattle are ghostly in the waves of heat—pale, skull-like masks, staring as the truck rattles by. “Yeah?” Scott is playing with the neck of his shirt, crumpling it, and he smooths it out when he realizes what he’s doing. He and his father nod.
A few hours later, his father parks the truck for lunch, and they pass a sandwich back and forth, trading bites. “I guess my life is pretty good these days,” Scott’s father says, chewing thoughtfully. “Things are calmer now. More peaceful. I fiddle around in the shop. Go fishing. I’m getting older, you know, all I want is the easy life. You’re lucky. You didn’t let this thing drag on and ruin your life.” His eye searches Scott’s face, but Scott remains blank. “Don’t worry, son,” he says softly. “Things will turn out fine for you, just you watch.”
Scott doesn’t say anything. But what he is thinking is how it would be to go back to school; the way it would feel to move his things out of the fraternity house, looking up to see his friends’ stares shift quickly away; the way it would feel to stand in the doorway of an empty dorm room and see the nights ahead buzzing endlessly, like a fly around a lightbulb. He closes his eyes for a moment.
“Don’t you think so?” his father says.
“What?” Scott says. And then, “Yeah.” He draws in breath. “I’m sure things will work out fine.”
On days that Scott’s father is at work, Scott tries to think of at least one thing he can do so when his father comes home and asks, “What have you been up to today?” he can prove that he hasn’t just been sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and brooding. He mows the ragged patch of lawn, and puts out sprinklers, or cleans the shop, sweeping the tiny dollops of melted metal into a pile, rebaiting the mousetraps hidden behind a stack of old pipes, picking through the coffee cans full of nuts and bolts and nails and separating them into individual cans. Mostly, he does these things in the afternoon, so that he won’t finish too soon and have hours and hours left to kill. If he starts late enough, he’s still busy when his father comes home from work. Scott looks up, as if surprised that the day has gone by so quickly, and waves at him.
Mornings are the hardest part. Scott wouldn’t like for his father to see him, walking through the trailer from one end to the other, or snooping through things, as he sometimes does. His father keeps old pictures in the bottom drawer of his dresser, and Scott likes to take them out. There are photographs of his father as a young man, wide-eyed and alert in his navy uniform, his smile taut, anticipating the flash of the camera. When he was little, Scott used to dream of having a father like the man in those pictures—the firm, determined jaw, the noble posture. There was a picture of him on the deck of a ship, smiling an eager, innocent smile, an expression Scott had never seen.
He had a fantasy, back then, that if he could somehow trap his father in a room for a week without alcohol, that he’d be cured. He’d be transformed, suddenly, into that calm dream-father. Scott used to imagine caring for him, bringing him food as he lay there in his locked room; he even imagined sitting on the edge of his father’s bed and wiping sweat from his face with a damp cloth. How grateful he would be afterward! Scott knew the way his father would hug him, knew the way his father’s tears would feel on his neck.
One night, just before he turned thirteen, Scott tried to do it. He locked his father in the bedroom and barricaded the door. For a while, his father cursed him, and threatened, and hollered. Then everything was quiet, and Scott began to get frightened. And
when, finally, crying, he opened the door, he discovered that his father had squeezed through the tiny bedroom window and escaped into the night.
Scott had searched for hours. He had hidden his father’s car keys, and so his father had gone off on foot. Scott walked the dark dirt roads with a flashlight, calling for him, the dust-filled beam of light tunneling all the way across the fields, to infinity. When he found his father at last, he was curled up like a baby in the high weeds along the side of the road, asleep.
Sunday, after they’ve washed the dishes and stacked them carefully away, Scott and his father play poker. These are the times that Scott’s father seems most like himself, the way he used to be—or so Scott thinks, anyway. They play for cigarettes, and Scott’s father deals the cards with a smooth, magician’s precision. As he does this, he tells Scott about a woman, a widow, older than him, who comes to AA meetings. He has spoken to her several times, seen her in the grocery store and said hello. He lingers over her physical qualities—the wide, generous mouth; the milky skin.