Dangerous Men

by Geoffrey Becker

  Finally, she just told him to move. I was nine. “Buddy,” he said to me, “I’m not going anywhere.” He wrote his new phone number on the inside of a book of matches and put it in my hand.

  We stopped for gas at a turnpike service station and he pulled out his wallet. It was stuffed with bills, more money than I’d ever seen him with at one time. He removed a ten and gave it to me. “Candy bars,” he said, solemnly.

  I got change and pushed quarters into the machine until I had extracted four Snickers, our favorite. Then, on impulse, I also bought a pair of cheap amber-tinted sunglasses that were aviators like his. They were small on me and rode high on the bridge of my nose. They cost six dollars and were probably worth about forty-nine cents, but I bought them anyway. When I got back to the car he lifted them off and bent the flimsy frame across the middle, just slightly, then put them back on me.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Now you’re cooking.”

  As we drove, we talked about Canada. Neither of us had ever been, so we made a list of things it was famous for.

  “Canadian bacon,” I offered.

  “Salmon,” he said.

  “The Expos.”

  “Draft dodgers.”

  “Niagara Falls.”

  “That’s in America.”

  “Only part of it. The other part is Canadian.”

  He looked over at me. “Who figured that out?”

  “It makes sense. It’s a natural divider. That’s how they always divide up countries. States too.” When he didn’t say anything, I fell silent for a little while, thinking about how things divided. How did they know exactly where Canada stopped and America began? It was all just water—there couldn’t be any clear line like on a map. I thought about me and my dad—I was halfway to thirty, and he was halfway to seventy. I always had an idea that when I turned eighteen I would experience some obvious transformation into adulthood, but now that I was getting closer, I wondered. The twenty years that separated me from my dad suddenly seemed like nothing at all, if you looked at the whole picture.

  We crossed the Vermont border around sunset and stopped for burgers at a place with two enormous trucks parked outside. It was a classic roadside diner, but somehow not quite real—everything in it was brand-new, though styled to look mid-fifties. It was someone’s idea of what a diner should have looked like—lots of chrome and mirrors and a big, colorful jukebox. I put a quarter in and selected two songs.

  “If they like you, does that mean you’ll have to move to Canada?” I asked, coming back to the table.

  “Could be,” he said. “I don’t know. It all depends.”

  I pictured his apartment over the pizzeria and tried to imagine someone else living there, but it just didn’t seem a real possibility. “I’d miss you,” I said. “Where would I hang out?”

  He tapped the tabletop with his fork. “Well, let’s not count our chickens. They may not want me at all. I’m getting kind of old for this line of work.”

  “How can you say that? Look at the Stones. Look at . . .” I tried to think of someone else. “B. B. King. He’s still going, and he must be about sixty.”

  He yawned. His eyes were red from all the driving, and he looked tired. “I don’t know,” he said. “The way I see it, this may be my last shot. If it isn’t happening, I may just try to get into something respectable.”

  “Like Hal?” Hal was in insurance, and we had a fair amount of fun at his expense. Both of us thought insurance was about the most boring thing you could possibly do, and that by marrying Hal my mother had not so much found a mate as taken out a policy. Actually though, I kind of liked him. He never tried to be my father, he was just Hal. He left me alone when I didn’t want to be bothered, and he was an incredible cook.

  “Exactly. How do you think I’d look in a suit and tie?” He picked up his glasses and pointed them at me, businesslike. “Let’s talk coverage,” he said in his best salesman’s voice. “You tell me you play in a band? Fine. Say one day you get up there on stage, put a hand on your guitar, the other on the microphone. And let’s just say that system isn’t properly grounded. In one blue flash you get zapped right into the next state. What about your wife? Your kids? Who takes care of them? The musicians’ union? You say you’re not in the union? Well, I have a little policy designed just for you. We call it the Guitar Player’s Friend—it provides all-purpose coverage for you and your loved ones, and it’s issued by the Chuck Berry Mutual Accident and Life Insurance Company, a name you’ve known and trusted for years. Believe me, you won’t want to plug in without it.”

  The waitress interrupted him with our food. I waved a french fry. “Brilliant,” I said. “You could be rich.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said modestly. “I’d like to think I’ll be able to leave you something someday.” He sipped his coffee. “If you had all the money you could ever want, what would you do?”

  I chewed and thought. “I don’t know, I guess I’d buy about ten guitars, a small recording studio, and some video equipment.”

  He nodded. “And live where?”

  “Hawaii maybe. The Swiss Alps.”

  “Good choices,” he said. “A little romantic, but you’re supposed to be romantic at fifteen.”

  “So? What would you do?” I asked.

  “I believe,” he said, “I’d do exactly what I’m doing right now.”

  He was tired and didn’t feel like driving much more, so we started looking around for a place to stay. Since we were in Vermont, he said, we ought to find one of those quaint country inns where you slept under thick goose down comforters and they served you up a big New England style breakfast in the morning. We must have spent an hour driving around trying to find one. Eventually we settled on a motor court called Traveller’s Rest, with a blinking neon sign of a sheep jumping over the name. The parking lot was empty, and my dad kept shaking his head over the fact that the one time he actually wanted to spend some money he couldn’t find a way to do it, but I was happy. This was much more the kind of place I’d imagined crashing for the night, and as for the rest of that stuff, it wasn’t really cold enough for a down comforter, and I was never much on breakfasts.

  Our room was hooked up with cable television, and I immediately found an old movie that looked good, a British vampire flick with lots of gore and women nearly tumbling out of their bodices. My dad spent ten minutes going back and forth to the car bringing in all his guitars. It seemed a little odd to me that he’d bothered to take every single one of them along, but I didn’t say anything. This was a very big audition for him, and I figured he needed the extra confidence. He took a pint bottle of Chivas Regal out of his bag, went into the bathroom, and returned with two tissue-wrapped glasses. I’d never had Chivas, but I remembered reading on an album cover that it was John Lee Hooker’s favorite drink. I squinched over to make room for him on the bed, then took the glass he handed me. He turned the sound on the television down.

  “Your mother called me last week,” he said, after a moment. “Says you’re messing up in school.”

  “That’s not true,” I told him. “Just one class. I’m getting B’s in everything else. Anyhow, why should she call you?”

  “She wants us to stop hanging around together so much, at least till your grades pick up.”

  We almost never talked about school, except in the most general way, and having him speak to me like this—father to son, when we were now hundreds of miles from home—seemed a kind of betrayal.

  “That’s stupid,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “I hope that’s what you told her.”

  “I didn’t tell her anything,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you first.”

  I was suddenly angry at my mother for trying to interfere so blatantly with my life, and behind my back, too. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I had been thinking about calling her, just to let her know I was all right, but now I felt like letting her stew a little.

  “You know,” he said, lying back on the bed a
nd crossing his legs, “she’s probably right. I’m thirty-five, still kicking around the same town I grew up in, still trying to land a steady gig. Being with me isn’t going to help you become CEO of General Motors.”

  “Come on,” I said. “You’re my dad.” I sipped at my drink, which made my eyes water.

  “OK,” he said, studying me. “I just wanted to make sure.”

  A question occurred that I was almost afraid to ask. “Could she do something? Something legal I mean?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a possibility.” He got up and went into the bathroom to pee.

  I made a promise to myself that regardless of what happened, things would continue on between us the way they always had. It was hard to imagine my mother actually doing something so drastic, but taking off without her permission had already given me a sense of power. Things could be any way I wanted them to be, I thought. What were they going to do, put me under armed guard?

  “How long do you think we’ll stay in Montreal?” I asked when he came back.

  He looked through the blinds out at the parking lot. “Not long. A couple of days, tops.” Then he slapped a hand down on my leg. “What do you say we head out and see if there’s any nightlife around here?”

  I jumped up and turned off the set.

  We drove around until we found a little roadside place called Mother’s that had pickup trucks parked outside and a flashing red Miller sign in the window. There were maybe twenty-five people inside, not counting the band—five bored-looking guys in checked shirts playing sleepy country tunes. The guitar player didn’t look much older than me, in spite of an attempted mustache. When we walked in I immediately sensed hostility, but I just followed my dad. He walked to the bar, took a seat, ordered us drinks, and helped himself to a handful of peanuts from a bowl they had out. I reached in and grabbed a couple too. The bartender pursed his lips and considered me for a moment, then shrugged and uncapped us two longneck bottles of Bud.

  “Never order anything fancy in a strange bar,” said my dad, tipping back his bottle. “The first thing people notice about you in a place like this is what you’re drinking.”

  I nodded. We sat for a while, just swigging beer. Then I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I got back he was in a conversation with a fat guy he introduced as Al. Al worked as a mechanic, he said. He had huge, grease-blackened hands.

  “This your kid?” asked Al.

  My dad smiled proudly and I stood there feeling like a prize hog. I wished I were still back in the motel room watching television.

  “I got a kid,” said Al. I waited for him to say something else, but for Al, the statement was a complete thought, and he just turned and faced the bar.

  The band shuddered to a halt and went on break, and my dad ordered a round of shots for them, digging into his stuffed wallet and tossing a twenty onto the bar. Then he left me and Al sitting together, went over and got talking to the guitarist and bass player. I thought about all the bars in our town where he’d played. He was always in trouble with the club owners for showing up late, or mixing up dates, but he could smooth-talk them and manage to get hired again regardless. His ability in this respect was legendary. One time he got himself booked into two different places with different bands on the same night, and rather than cancel, did half of one gig, then drove to the other and finished up the night there, using me as an excuse. “You came down with a convenient case of the mumps,” he explained the next day. “I could never have made it without you.” For two days after that, I walked around faking a cough and trying to look weak, just in case someone should want to check out his story.

  Al wasn’t much of a talker, so I drank at my beer and tried to pretend that hanging around in a bar was the most natural thing in the world for me. I counted the bottles of liquor lined up next to the cash register.

  “Jimi,” said my dad, coming over and poking me in the side. “We’re going to sit in next set. What do you say?”

  I looked into his eyes to see if he was kidding. I played a little guitar, but not very well, and never in front of people. The prospect terrified me, and I could see he was serious. “You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll watch.”

  “Come on, we’ll do some blues.” He smiled encouragingly.

  “I can’t,” I said. “Really.”

  “Sure you can,” he told me.

  I felt something close to panic, but at the same time it didn’t seem that I had any choice. They had an extra guitar on stage for me, and the band’s guitarist handed his over to my dad. When he did that he gave me a little smile that made the few dark hairs spread out on his upper lip. I took it as a sign of encouragement and plugged in. My dad called out “Red House,” a Hendrix tune he knew I knew, and started playing. I tried to follow along, but after a few seconds I realized something was off.

  My guitar was tuned a peculiar way. The chords I formed were one disaster after another. My dad kept giving me furious looks, as if I was deliberately screwing around. Everything I played came out wrong. He leaned over and shouted something to me that I could not hear above the music. I could see the band’s guitarist leaning against the bar, laughing. I did the only thing I could think of—I stopped playing. Or rather, I pretended to play, damping the strings with my left hand so that no sound came out. My dad shook his head, turned away, and began to sing.

  He played particularly well. Toward the end he picked up an empty Budweiser bottle and ran it along the strings for a slide, while I mimed along, numb, waiting for it to be over. We got hoots of approval and applause, but I barely heard them in my rush to get off.

  The band’s guitarist said something to me as he took the instrument out of my hands. I jumped down, ignoring the amusement in his eyes, and went and stood next to a shuffleboard table while my dad talked to some of the locals—bearded men in checked wool jackets who clapped him on the back and offered to buy him drinks. Finally he came over to me.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  It was cold in the parking lot, the air smelling of pine, the muted sounds of the bar mixing with the swell and hush of the wind in the trees. My dad walked me to the car and unlocked it.

  “It was in open tuning,” he said, finally. “Set up for slide.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “How was I supposed to know that?”

  “You know about open tuning. All you had to do was think.”

  “I couldn’t think!” I practically shouted. “Nothing sounded right and I didn’t know what to do!”

  “So what?” he said. “You just quit? You can’t let yourself get beat like that.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Well, what do you call it?” He was glaring at me, and I could see that he was really upset about this, more so even than I was.

  “I didn’t quit,” I said quietly. “I stayed up there with you.”

  We drove in a silence that I was afraid to break; the longer it went on the more permanent it felt. He wouldn’t look at me. He was speeding, too, I noticed, but I wasn’t going to say anything. Then, about a mile from our motel we got pulled over by the cops.

  As the officer shined his flashlight into our faces, I thought about the note we’d left. If my mother really had reported us to the police, this was probably it. I wondered what, if anything, they could do to him. I suspected he could get in a lot of trouble. Mostly though, I was worried he might not get to the audition, and that it would somehow be my fault. I sat frozen in anticipation, the cold night air flowing against my face from the open window, hoping as hard as I could for nothing bad to happen.

  “Been doing a little drinking tonight?” asked the policeman as he examined my dad’s license.

  “Yes sir,” he said. “Two beers. But I’m sober.”

  The cop pointed his flashlight in my face. “Who’s that?”

  “My son.”

  “Is that right?” He turned the light away from me and back at my dad. “Taking a little vacation are you?”

  “You might say that.�
��

  “OK, out of the car.”

  I had to sit for ten minutes while they ran him through a series of tasks to determine whether he was drunk. It was hard to watch. He walked a straight line four times, and counted backward from fifty twice. All the while, another cop sat behind us, just a silhouette under the flashing blue light, speaking into his radio. They were checking on us. They didn’t believe he was my father.

  Finally, they wrote out a ticket and let us go. Just like that. This seemed incredible luck to me, and as soon as we were back under way, I let out a little whoop.

  “Man,” I said. “That was close.”

  But he still wasn’t talking. In fact, he wouldn’t even look at me. I wanted to tell him it didn’t matter, to just forget it, but I couldn’t. He didn’t say anything at all until we got back to the motel. He put out a hand and tugged at the top of my head, then ran it down the back of my neck.

  “You could use a haircut,” he said.

  When I woke the next morning, he was in the bathroom, shaving. I went and leaned against the door, watching him slide the razor carefully along the contours of his throat. He put a finger on his nose and pushed it comically to one side to get at his upper lip, turned and made a face at me. I liked seeing him shave. Getting my toothbrush, I fought him for sink space. When he pushed back, I pushed harder, then scooped water out of the sink and splashed him. He dropped the razor, picked up the can of shaving cream and advanced toward me, his face spotted with islands of foam. I ran, but he cornered me by the television and emptied half the can onto my head before I managed to wrestle it out of his hands. We stood there for a while, the two of us covered in shaving cream, laughing. Then he took the can from my hands, flipped it once in the air and went back into the bathroom.