His Father's Son

by Bentley Little

My mind is blank for the last six miles. I think of nothing; I just drive. I get off on the Balcolm exit, still speeding, and leap the trench. A car honks at me as I dart into traffic on the street, and I am so rattled that I flip it off without first looking. I cringe and wait for the bullet, but it is just an old man and his wife, and they flash their brights a few times and then leave me alone.

  I turn onto Bradley. A car pulls next to me at the stoplight. A gray Ford that I know I should recognize but do not. I glance over and look in the front window of the car, and the man at the wheel is my father. He is usually at home asleep right now, and I am not sure whether to honk my horn or hide. He is laughing happily, and I cannot remember the last time I saw him even smile.

  A woman’s hand snakes around my father’s shoulder, and as he shifts position I see the woman’s face. It is old, horribly wrinkled and caved in on itself, painted with overbright makeup that highlights instead of covers up, and it is the hard face of a seventy-year-old hooker.

  My father laughs and kisses the woman, and the lipstick that comes off is dripping and looks like blood on his lips. Then his car moves forward, and I realize that the light has changed, and I press down on the gas pedal and speed by him, and out of the corner of my eye I see for the first time that he is wearing a dark green jacket.

  I just want to get home. I wish I had never left the apartment today. I think of Mom. I know I won’t tell her about my father, but I wonder what she will say when I tell her that I couldn’t smell the air and I could hear the machines.

  I pull into the alley. The open garages on both sides of ours are lit, but our bulb is either broken or burned out, and the double space within the garage is dark. I back in, and in my rearview mirror I see the piles of newspapers and cans, bathed in red brake light. Then I stop the car, take my foot off the brake and everything is black again.

  I open the car door and my overhead light dimly illuminates the center of the garage. In the corner, I see a shape. A dark shape, more solid than the blackness of surrounding shadows. The goose bumps pop up on my arms as a chill passes through me, and I am shaking as I close the car door. I try to hurry out of the garage as quickly as I can. I see the shape out of the corner of my eye, and it seems to be suspended there. It does not seem to be touching the ground. It does not seem to have feet.

  It appears to have shoulders the shape of a wire hanger.

  I close my eyes. Please let it be a prowler, I pray. Please let it be a rapist. Please let it be a murderer.

  Please let it be a person.

  Anything but a dark green suit.

  Fourteen

  His father died alone.

  No one was in the room Tuesday when he passed away at approximately ten a.m. Steve was at work, his mother was at home, and the hospital staff was busy elsewhere. It wasn’t until a nurse came in to deliver his medication at eleven that it was discovered he was gone.

  Steve cried when he received the news. He hadn’t thought he would, and the tears surprised him. He held them in until he reached the restroom, passing by the office work cubicles, past Gina’s desk, down the corridor to the recessed swinging door of the men’s room. He stood before the mirror above the sink, looking at his face, and the tears began to flow. It wasn’t his father’s death, exactly, that made him so sad. That had been expected and was, in all honesty, something of a relief. It was the fact that he had died alone, that in his last moments there’d been no one there to keep him company, to care, to mark the end of his long and complicated life. Steve was crying for himself as much as for his father, at the thought that this might be how he too would end up. For while he saw himself marrying Sherry sometime in the near future; he could also see them apart, broken up, divorced, and he could easily imagine himself dying alone in a room with no one else in attendance.

  He examined his face in the mirror. Someone—a visitor, certainly, not someone who worked here—had scratched the word “dipshit” into the glass, and it sat there beneath his chin like a caption. He was not sure what he hoped to see as he watched the quivering of his mouth, followed the shiny trail of a tear down his cheek, gazed into his red blurry eyes. Was he looking for similarities to his father? If so, there was very little resemblance. Physically, at least.

  He stared at himself until his features became unrecognizable. It was a trick he used to do as a child, a type of self-hypnosis. For he’d found early on that if he stood before a mirror and concentrated hard, unblinking, his perception of himself would change. His face would become clearer, sharper, the background fading into blurriness behind that ever-expanding face until at last it no longer looked like his own but was distinct, separate and entirely unfamiliar. In the final stage, just before he had to blink, his head would appear three-dimensional, pushing outward from the flatness of the mirror. He had always liked that feeling of disassociation, the sense that he was outside of himself and seeing his face as others did, but he hadn’t done that in years, probably not since early high school, and he realized now that the times when he used to do it were usually the times that he’d had problems with his father.

  Someone else walked into the men’s room—Jay Botiggi, from sales—and Steve pretended he’d just been washing his hands, reaching for a paper towel and crumpling it in his palms before tossing it into the wastepaper basket and heading out the door.

  Back at his desk, he called his mother and told her he was coming by to pick her up, before informing Gina and McColl that he would be gone the rest of the day and possibly the rest of the week. Gina was solicitous, overly so, uncomfortably so, and Steve found himself almost grateful for the department head’s aloof disinterest. He got out of the office as quickly as he could and drove straight to his parents’ house.

  His mother’s house.

  He had only one parent now, and he suddenly realized how much extra work and responsibility that was going to be. He’d been shouldering a huge burden ever since his father’s stroke, but for some reason, in the back of his mind, the situation had always seemed temporary. He’d been under no illusion that his father was going to recover, but still, everything had been in flux, and emotionally that had enabled him to handle the situation by acting as though he would be doing it only for a while. Now, he realized, he was responsible for his mother, for the house, for the finances, for . . . everything. He felt overwhelmed thinking about all he would have to do, and if he were a less reliable son, he would have just stayed on the freeway and kept driving, losing himself in a new city, creating for himself a new life.

  But he wasn’t that kind of person, and he pulled into the driveway behind the Chrysler. He looked over at the lawn. He should probably take an hour or so this week and mow the grass, he thought, walking up to the door.

  His mother had obviously been waiting for him, because she opened the door the second he stepped onto the porch, holding the screen for him. He’d expected to find her crying, or at least red faced and teary eyed, but she looked the same as she always did, perhaps a little more annoyed than usual. She had not bothered to change but was wearing one of the faded flowered housedresses she usually wore when at home.

  “Do you want some coffee?” she asked.

  He looked at her. “No, Mom. I think we should go. They’re waiting for us.”

  “I’ve been cleaning,” she said, and led him through the living room to the bedroom, where a pile of his father’s clothes lay on the bed. She had to have been more broken up than she let on, had to have felt something for him after all those years together, despite the problems they’d had at the end. But her set face revealed nothing, and she told him flatly, “Go through his things and take what you want. I’m donating the rest to the Goodwill.”

  “We need to go see him first,” Steve said. His mother nodded her acknowledgment, and he motioned toward her ratty housedress. “Do you need to change?”

  She stared at him. “Why?”

  “I thought—”

  “I’m fine.”

  “All right.” He sighed
. “Let’s go.”

  They were silent on the way over. He did not trust himself to talk, and his mother seemed to have no desire to speak to him. He was angry at her, and he told himself that if she mentioned anything negative about his father or brought up unrelated subjects as though what had happened had not happened, he would go off on her. She was a selfish and self-centered woman, and it was long past time that someone called her on it.

  But she didn’t speak, neither of them spoke, and they arrived at the VA hospital shortly after one. It was the busiest time of day, and the parking lot was full. He dropped his mother off at the entrance, then looked for a spot. He would have parked on the street, but the entire block was ringed with No Parking signs, and he ended up parking at a Wendy’s two blocks away. The signs in the Wendy’s lot said that parking was for customers only, so he bought a Coke, saved the receipt to prove that he was a customer, then ran back down the street to the hospital.

  He was drenched with sweat when he arrived. His mother had not moved, had not even gone into the air-conditioned lobby to wait, but stood outside, clutching her purse and staring primly out at the parking lot as a hairy wheelchair-bound man smoked a cigarette on the sidewalk next to her.

  “Come on, Mom,” Steve said, and led her inside. Out of habit, he almost walked over to the elevators to head up to the second floor, but then he remembered and went over to the front counter to ask where they’d taken his father’s body. While the man behind the counter called someone to find out, Steve looked around, realizing that this was probably the last time he would have to come to the hospital. For that he was grateful.

  “Sir?” the man said. Steve turned back toward him. “Mr. Nye has been taken downstairs to the morgue. Just take that elevator”—he pointed—“and press the button for B-one. Turn right when you get off, and you can’t miss it. Dr. Curtis will meet you there.”

  “Thank you,” Steve said.

  “Sorry for your loss.”

  His father’s naked body was not in a drawer or under a sheet; it was lying atop a metal table in the center of the room, and when the technician let them in, the sight was a shock. Dr. Curtis was standing to the side, reading what was doubtlessly his father’s chart, but Steve could not help staring at the old man’s embar rassingly exposed form. His dad’s body was pale and looked both smaller and pudgier than he would have thought. Though his eyes and mouth were closed, the expression on his face was not peaceful, not one of rest or repose. Rather, the cheek and jaw muscles were frozen grimly in what appeared to have been an attempt to stoically deny tremendous pain.

  He glanced over at his mother to see her reaction, but there was none. Her features were emotionless, unreadable, and her attention was squarely on the doctor, who looked up at their entrance and proceeded to give them a more comprehensive explanation of Joseph Nye’s death and the events surrounding it, emphasizing that both a nurse and an intern had checked on him twice—before and after an orderly had fed him breakfast—and that this was the same routine that had been followed each day since his admittance. It sounded to Steve a lot like an attempt to shield the hospital from blame, but he didn’t think it was negligence that had led to his dad’s death and doubted that his mother did either.

  Dr. Curtis said that while the exact cause of death could not be pinpointed until an autopsy was performed, his best guess at this juncture was another stroke, with an outside chance of heart attack.

  There were forms to be filled out, claims and releases, and Steve and his mother spent the next half hour reading and signing what seemed like volumes of paperwork. Most families, he assumed, were grateful for the numbing distraction this offered, but his family was not normal and needed no such diversion to blunt their emotions. Neither he nor his mother were the type to break down or go into hysterics. Indeed, after completing all of the paperwork and discussing a few more details with Dr. Curtis and a morgue attendant, they rather formally said their good-byes and left.

  The autopsy was performed later that day, and it was determined that, despite all of the medication and treatments, he had had another stroke, this one fatal. It was Dr. Curtis who called with the news, and he assured Steve that death had come quickly, that there’d been no pain or suffering. He had already called Steve’s mother to give her the autopsy results, and out of curiosity, Steve asked if his mother had had any questions.

  “No, none,” the doctor said. “I suspect she’s still in shock.”

  She doesn’t care, Steve felt like saying, but he merely agreed.

  Did he care?

  On one level he did, but deep down, he suspected, he did not. His interest seemed more clinical than emotional, but by the time he hung up the phone, after promising to arrange for retrieval of “the body,” he found that he was crying again.

  He forced himself to stop, and the waterworks ended abruptly.

  After pouring himself a stiff drink—an old-school drink, the kind his dad liked—he called his mother to talk about making arrangements. He would have preferred to speak with her in person, but she had been unbearable on the ride home, and when he had suggested that he should stay with her, she had told him angrily that she didn’t require a babysitter. It was not that she needed to be alone; she just didn’t want him around. That was fine. He wasn’t thrilled with her either, and secretly he was relieved that he wouldn’t have to watch her. He had offered only out of obligation, anyway.

  She sounded irritated when he called, and she seemed to have no interest in talking about the disposition of his father’s body, offhandedly letting him know that he could call the hospital and whatever funeral home he chose and do what he wanted. He tried to engage her, but she seemed on the verge of hanging up, so he asked about his father’s belongings. “You were going through his clothes when I picked you up. If you need any help—”

  “I don’t need help,” she said in a voice at once defensive and angry. “I’ve already sorted through everything. Look at it and take what you want. I’m donating the rest.”

  He didn’t quite understand this immediate need to erase all trace of his father from the house, but Steve promised that he would come over the next day and look through his dad’s stuff.

  After that, he called funeral homes. He had no idea how to pick one, so he did what he did when searching for any consumer item: He opened the yellow pages, went down the list alphabetically and called them all, intending to choose the one that was cheapest and closest. He settled on Reichman and Sons in Santa Ana, and the Reichman to whom he spoke assured him that his father’s body would be picked up tonight and taken to the mortuary. Since Steve had no preference in regard to cemeteries and had not had a chance to look at caskets or headstones (or even decide whether burial was preferable to cremation), a “consultation” was set up for ten o’clock the next morning.

  Steve hung up the phone and wondered if, even now, Reichman was ordering some flunky to head out to Long Beach and retrieve his father’s body. What kind of vehicle did they use? Was it something like an ambulance or a variation on a hearse? And how was the body transported? In a bag? In a box? In a temporary coffin?

  Recalling his father’s pale, lifeless form, an image that had not left the forefront of his consciousness all afternoon, Steve found himself thinking about the autopsy. He had never really considered exactly what an autopsy entailed, since, prior to this, that word had come up only in the context of television shows or news stories. There’d never been any sort of personal involvement. But he realized now that the doctor performing the autopsy had had to cut his father open and physically examine the heart, the lungs and other vital organs. He could envision the scene in detail, and he wondered what it would be like to slice someone open himself, to use a knife or scalpel and actually saw through skin to reach muscle and fat and vein. It would be one thing to cut someone who was dead; quite another to do it to someone alive. The carving of living flesh, the severing of a vein or artery through which blood still pumped, would be much more interesting and exci
ting. Gross, yes, but gratifying.

  He looked out the window at the apartment complex across the street, which was a mirror image of his own. Most of the windows in the three-story structure were dark, and even the ones with lights on were visible only as a squarish outline around the edges of closed blinds and shades. The sidewalks, as always, were empty—no one walked in Irvine—though occasional cars passed quickly by on the street in between.

  Night in the city.

  Weren’t those the lyrics of an old ELO song? One of those that had been recycled into a commercial jingle? He was pretty sure his father had had that album when Steve had been a kid. What had happened to it?

  He continued to stare out the window, and in a sky ordinarily too bright to see such things, he caught in his peripheral vision the split-second streak of a falling star. He thought of Flagstaff, and it occurred to him that maybe his father had been behind the stabbing of that coed. He’d been seeing the killing through the victim’s eyes, through the filter of the media and the police, but looking at it now through the other end of the lens, Steve realized that he knew next to nothing about the young woman. Just because she’d been attending college didn’t mean she was some virginal saint. She could have been an evil, scheming slut or a vicious physical abuser. It had been the ferocity of the killing that had originally convinced him his father had not been behind it, but he wondered now if the violence had been justified—in which case, his dad could have been behind it.

  He needed to go back and look at the case more carefully.

  As odd as it might seem, he found it comforting to think that there was still more to learn about his father.

  He was still staring out the window ten minutes later, thinking, when Sherry called, asking if he wanted her to come over, wondering if there was anything she could do. There was, actually. She could come over, suck his penis, then go home. But of course he couldn’t tell her that, was embarrassed he’d even thought of it, and he told her wearily that he was exhausted and just wanted to sleep. He would call her in the morning.