Through Shattered Glass

by David B. Silva

  He nodded.

  I gave him a pat on the back. "You sure you don't want anything to eat?"

  "Later," he said.

  I left him around eleven that morning. He was sitting in a chair on the front porch, staring out across the barren terrain, his mind a million miles away. I had gotten myself a six-week stint up in Oregon, hauling trees out of a private co-op that was selectively logging its land, and I reminded him about the job.

  "I'll be back in six weeks. Okay, Pa?"

  "I ain't going nowhere," he said.

  "Six weeks," I repeated. As I drove out the dirt driveway, I caught a glimpse of him in my rearview mirror. There was something standing next to him, something I couldn't quite make out. And the man, himself, was hardly recognizable. A man so completely different from the man of my early childhood that I felt a little rattle of uneasiness run through me. What had happened to him? What had happened to the man who had been as strong as an ox, who had put up the barn by himself one summer, using a block-and-tackle, who had been able to stack a hundred bales of hay in a day and still have the energy to shoot some hoops out back under the last vestiges of twilight? What the hell had happened to that man?

  He had grown old, I wanted to tell myself.

  He had grown old and alone and empty.

  But there was more to it than that.

  He had also grown frightened.

  I called him twice while I away was in Oregon. Under the circumstances, I guess I should have called more often. But that picture of him in my rearview mirror had been haunting me like a ghost. I kept thinking I had caught a glimpse of little Joey Egan standing next to him on the porch. That Joey had been that something I couldn't quite recognize, and that he had had one hand on my father's shoulder as if he were trying to hold him down.

  The first time I called, the phone rang relentlessly, maybe as many as a dozen times, before my father finally picked it up. "No more," he said sharply. "You hear me? You call me one more time and I swear I'll come out to Black Oak myself and dig up your goddamn remains. You hear me? I'll feed 'em to the damn buzzards and that'll be the end of it."

  "Pa, it's me."

  There was a sudden, surprised silence on the other end. Then, quietly: "Will?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh, Christ. Will? That really you? Where are you?"

  "I'm in Oregon, Pa. What's going on there? What's all the shouting about?"

  "Oregon ..." he mumbled, in nearly a whisper. And for a moment, I thought he had gone back to the bottle again. In fact, I was certain that was exactly what he had done.

  "You've been on a drunk, haven't you, Pa?"

  "What's my boy doing in Oregon?"

  "Listen to me. You've been drinking again, haven't you?"

  Then the line went dead.

  I called him back within seconds, my hands shaking almost uncontrollably as I fumbled with the phone. What the hell was going on? He had sounded like a man on the verge of self-destruction. I couldn't even be certain he had recognized me. Maybe he wasn't drinking again, but if it wasn't the booze I had heard, I hated to think what it might have been.

  The phone rang thirty, maybe forty times without an answer. Eventually, I hung up and tried to convince myself that I had probably disturbed his sleep, that I must have caught him in the middle of a bad dream, and that there was nothing to worry about. He had been tired, was all. The call had wakened him and that's why he had sounded so crazy, because he'd still been half-asleep.

  It was nearly three weeks later before I finally able to get hold of him again. I was due to head back to Kingston Mills the next morning. I'm not sure what I expected him to sound like after that first call. Still a little crazy, I guess. But he didn't sound crazy, and he didn't sound like a man who would be dead in a few short hours. He sounded like a man who had finally forgiven himself.

  "Is everything all right there?" I asked.

  "I'm finally dry," he said serenely.

  "What?" I thought I could hear something in the background that sounded dry and brittle, something that made me think of autumn leaves and sand through an hourglass. And then he chuckled.

  "I think the booze is wearing off," he said. "My head's clearing up. It's been a long time since I've seen things this clearly."

  "Look, Pa, I'm coming home tomorrow. Are you gonna to be all right till then?"

  "Fine," he said. "I'm gonna be just fine."

  I don't remember what I said in return. But I remember holding the phone in my hand after he had hung up, and being overwhelmed with a strange jumble of emotions. It had been years since I had felt close to my father, and suddenly I was terrified that I might never have a chance to feel close to him again.

  Early the next morning, I left Oregon, arriving at the farm shortly after one o'clock in the afternoon. His pickup was parked out front, in the same spot it had been parked the day I had discovered the blood on the bumper. There was a layer of dust a quarter of an inch thick across the hood, and it was nearly impossible to see through the windshield into the cab. The pickup had sat there like a dinosaur for nearly two months now. In the back of my mind, I suppose I knew it would eventually be buried under that dust like an old desert ghost town. But at the time, I didn't give it much of thought.

  The front door to the house was unlocked. It had been left slightly ajar, and just inside there was a strange wind-cut pattern of sand and dust scattered across the hardwood floor. Kingston Mills had gone a hundred-and-fifty-nine days without rain, and the dust, it seemed, was no longer content to stay outside.

  "Pa?"

  In the kitchen, I discovered a pyramid-shaped pile of dirt in the sink, maybe five or six inches high. One of the faucet handles had been broken off. It was lying on the lip of the drain, partially buried by the dirt. I took hold of the other handle, turned it, and watched a slow, steady stream of dirt sift lazily out of the spout.

  "Pa?"

  I found him, or some general semblance of him, in his bedroom at the back of the house. He was lying in bed, on top of the sheets, his hands folded peacefully across his stomach. He was dressed in the same clothes he had worn nearly everyday of his life since my mother had died: an old pair of work boots worn at the heels, a pair of blue-jean overalls with one unfastened strap hanging loosely at his side, and of course, the long johns he always wore come hell or high water.

  Underneath, there was very little left of the man I remembered. Something had happened to him in the few short weeks that I had been gone, something I didn't think I was ever going to be able to understand. Maybe it had something to do with the drought – after all, the well had gone dry. Or maybe it had something to do with all those damn bottles he had tossed off the front porch the night he went dry. The booze had kept him going for a good many years. Maybe without it, the well of his soul had gone dry, too. I don't know. All I know is that the man I discovered at the back of the house was all dust and bones.

  He looked as if he had been dead a very long time. I had spoken with him last night, but here he was now, less than twenty-four hours later: skeletal hands peeking out from beneath his shirt-sleeves; teeth bared in a dreadful, lipless grin; eyes no more than dark, empty sockets.

  Like the flowers my mother had planted out front, after an unquenchable thirst, my father had simply shriveled up and died.

  There's a prayer from The Book of Common Prayer that reads: Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life. I find myself often thinking back to these words.

  My father was buried in the Black Oak Cemetery, two rows over from Joey Egan. A bunch of the guys from the Forty-Niner came by the house afterward, drank a little beer, and talked about the good times they'd had together. Mostly, though, they seemed to stare off into the distance, reflecting on things that I suppose I will never be privy to.

  Late in the afternoon, Lloyd Egan pulled me aside and told me about a man they had locked up in Sparks, Nevada. They had caught him robbing a small Mom and Pop li
quor store and during the interrogation, he had confessed to Joey's hit-and-run. He had leaned across the seat to roll down the passenger window, he said, and his car had drifted onto the shoulder, and ... and there was Joey, turning around, his eyes bright and surprised, just as the car made impact. The man had stopped and gotten out and realized the boy was dead. Then he had gotten back into the car and had driven off. It had apparently been haunting him ever since.

  Lloyd took a swig of his beer, and gazed off into nothingness, looking like he was on the verge of tears. I put my arm around him, tried to comfort him, and then led him back into the kitchen, where someone was telling a story about the time my father had had a few too many and had gone home and tried to shoe one of the steers.

  Several days later, a storm moved in off the Pacific and dropped nearly five inches of much needed rain across the north state. It was the beginning of the end of the drought. But it had come too late for my father.

  To this day, I don't know what it was he hit coming home from the bar that night. It could have been a deer or a cow, I suppose. But it wasn't Joey Egan, and I'm grateful for that, grateful beyond description.

  I still think back to those times when I was a boy and he would come in from the fields with his shirt slung over his shoulder and every muscle of his body taut and perfectly defined. And like most boys, there are still the times when I wish I could have grown up to be that man.

  The shame of it is ... I don't think I ever really got to know who he was.

  A Time To Every Purpose

  After the summer we had both graduated from junior high and he had moved away with his mother, I had never expected to hear from Jeremy Taft again. We had been friends of a sort that summer. Not so much because I liked him or he liked me, but because we shared the kind of secret that binds two people together, whether they like it or not.

  That was the summer Andy Bale reportedly fell off the edge of Dead Man's Lookout and landed, nearly unrecognizable, at the bottom of the cliffs.

  It was the summer Melissa Jenkins disappeared for four days and came back with a hollow, faraway gaze behind her eyes.

  And toward the end, during the bristling hot days of August, it became the summer Jeremy Taft and his mother finally moved back to the mid-west somewhere, much to my delight.

  I suppose over the years I had fooled myself into thinking that I had put that summer behind me. Twenty-some-odd years had passed since then. I was married now, with two kids, one eight, the other six. My hair was beginning to thin. There was an extra fifteen pounds around my mid-section. And though I had recently given up my Pall Malls, the last time I had gone hiking with Ellen and the kids, I had been the one bringing up the rear.

  That other summer, just after junior high, belonged to a different person, from a different time. Some things, though, no matter how far toward the back of the file they're buried, have a way of working themselves to the front again.

  The call from Jeremy came in a little after nine. "I need to see the place this afternoon, Dave. Sometime before three. That a problem?" If he hadn't introduced himself first, I'm not sure I would have recognized his voice. In school, Jeremy had been the invisible boy, sitting at the back of the class, silent except for those few times when Mrs. Crawford had specifically called on him. That was not something that happened often. I think after a time, teachers learn instinctively which kids are worth their while and which are best not to tangle with.

  "You're back," I said, trying not to sound as uneasy with the idea as I felt.

  "Just for a few hours," he said. "I've got some business at the house, then I'll be on my way again."

  The "house" was an old Victorian two-story off Tule Elk Road on the other side of the river. Before they had moved, his mother had made arrangements with Banner Realty to handle the rental and upkeep. It had only been a year or so since Fred Endore had retired and I had been asked to take over the property. And it had been less than six months now since Jeremy's mother had written and asked us to give notice to the current renters. She wanted to make certain the house was vacant this summer.

  "It's empty, isn't it?" Jeremy asked.

  "As of three weeks ago."

  "What time can you be there?"

  I had a walk-through at eleven-thirty; a young couple from out of town had expressed interest in seeing the duplex off Sutter Street. And after that ... "How about one o'clock?"

  There was a short silence on the other end, as he gave it some consideration. "Can you make it a little closer to two?"

  "Sure, that's no problem."

  "I appreciate this, Dave."

  "No trouble."

  "Meet you there, then?"

  "Two o'clock," I said. I hung up, and sat at my desk for a while, staring numbly out the window at the traffic going by. Not much had changed since Jeremy had left. The town was a little larger now, but not much. They had built a new middle school next to Leighland Park in the early eighties, and Southern Pacific came through only once a day now, usually late at night when the town was sleeping soundly. Most of the kids I had grown up with had moved away long ago. A few of them were still around, though, trying to raise their own kids the way they had been raised. I suppose you could argue that time had stood still here.

  Outside, a delivery truck rolled by. Across the street, eleven-year-old Brian Aickman was trading shoulder-slugs with one of his friends. They were laughing, so it all must have been in good fun. Then Brian motioned that he had to get going, and without even a glance over his shoulder, he darted out into the street. A white Ford van skidded to miss him, leaving a couple of black streaks in the pavement and a cloudy exhaust of burnt rubber in the air. For a moment, it brought it all back again...

  And I felt a shudder tear through me, because it had been so close to what had happened to...

  To Andy Bale, I thought coldly. I had spent the past twenty-odd years trying to forget, and for the most part, I guess I had done a fairly decent job. No matter how deep you bury a corpse, though, eventually the smell finds its way back to the surface.

  Andy Bale.

  He had been twelve years old the day he died.

  It had happened on an overcast afternoon, less than a week after school had let out for the summer. Mom was visiting her sister in Tucson that day. I remember because she brought back a poster of a skull bone of a cow leaning up against a wagon wheel. Underneath it said: Rest Stop. She thought it was the funniest thing she had ever seen, and for several years I kept it pinned to the wall over my bed.

  Dad was working at the lumber mill in Kingston Mills that summer. He came home late most of the time, usually well after I had gone to bed. And he was usually gone in the mornings by the time I came down for breakfast. But sometimes I could smell the damp, pulpy odor of sawdust still lingering in the kitchen, and it was almost as if he were still somewhere in the house.

  That morning, the morning of the day that Andy Bale died, the faint odor of my father had still been in the air when I came down for breakfast. Though I had nearly forgotten about it by the time I accidentally met up with Jeremy at the rail yards.

  He stepped out between two box cars in front of me, his thoughts faraway, a look of surprise crossing his face when he looked up to notice me. We had never spoken in class, but for some reason I guess I'll never understand, he called out my name as if we were the best of friends. "What're you doing down here?"

  I shrugged uneasily and looked past him, both of us feeling a little uncomfortable by the surprise encounter. "Nothing much."

  "Yeah, me neither," he said. "Been looking for railroad spikes. Not much luck, though."

  I remember thinking he didn't seem like such a bad guy after all. His hair was kinda long, especially in the back, and he was wearing an old khaki shirt that looked like it had come from the Army Surplus shop next to the Chevron on Placer Street. Still he seemed friendly enough, and somehow we ended up sitting on the edge of a flatbed, talking about how boring summer could be and how he hoped he'd get to see his f
ather before school started again and how we both thought Melissa Jenkins was the best looking girl in class.

  For awhile, I suppose I thought we might actually become friends, me and Jeremy.

  But then Andy Bale showed up and everything changed.

  I don't know what he was doing down at the rail yards, either. Probably just kicking around like we were, killing time on a boring summer afternoon. It was Jeremy who saw him first. He tapped me on the shoulder and pointed across the tracks at Andy, who seemed lost in his own world, playing hopscotch or some other damnable thing on the railroad ties.

  "Wanna have a little fun?" Jeremy asked.

  I took a good look at Andy, and thought how small he looked. He was one grade behind us. His father worked over at the mill in Kingston Mills like most of the fathers in town, and we had played together on occasion, mostly at back yard picnics and such. He was an okay kid.

  "Come on," Jeremy said, sliding down off the flatbed. I followed him down the tracks, where we crossed behind a box car and circled around, maybe thirty yards behind the kid. The sun had finally burned its way through the overcast, and there were shimmering waves of heat rising off the ties. Somewhere behind us, I could hear the faint rumble of the five o'clock freight train to Oregon.

  "What are you going to do?" I asked.

  Jeremy looked at me, that coldness I had always seen in class suddenly back. "Just scare him a little, that's all."

  "Let's just leave him alone, all right?"

  "I won't hurt him." He picked up a rock from next to the tracks.

  Andy was still lost somewhere in his own world of thoughts, unaware, as far as I could tell, that we were even there. And I guess that took some of the fun out of it for Jeremy. I think he wanted to be able to look into the kid's eyes and see the fear there. I think that was the real thrill for him.

  "Hey, Bale!" Jeremy called.

  The kid turned around, unconcerned at first, and then a slow recognition crossed his face and that expression of fear that Jeremy had been looking for, was suddenly shining brightly from behind the kid's eyes. He had picked up what looked like an old rivet, but his fingers went slack and it slipped out of his hand and fell to the ground, kicking up a small cloud of dust. For maybe another five or six seconds everyone stood motionless, and then without a word, Andy Bale took off running.