Corpus Christi

by Bret Anthony Johnston

  Robert Jackson—my father—was a man who knew how to do many things. The year I turned ten he added a second story to our house and only twice asked Obie Meek, our closest neighbor, for help. A year later, after a dainty-looking woman repossessed our new Datsun, he paid fifty dollars cash for a van with a fold-out bed, then rebuilt its engine to drive our family twelve hours for a vacation in Louisiana, the state of his birth. Both he and my mother kept pictures from that trip at work, hers in a gilded frame and his under a heavy sheet of glass on his desk. My father supervised the air-conditioning department at the base, and my mother worked as a secretary at a hardware company, where she sometimes stuffed new doorknobs and brass hinges into her purse. On weekends, my father installed them and I kneeled behind him, handing him tools.

  The bad times started four years after he restored the van. It was early January, and I was working barefoot and barechested clearing dead limbs under our persimmon tree—there are no winters that far south. My parents sat inside wearing bifocals—though they were younger than most people who wear them—and punched our debts into an old calculator. I’d been sitting with them, but my mother asked me to water her garden after my father cracked his neck and started cursing about mortgages. Bad language was not uncommon around our house, so I didn’t understand why my mother insisted that I leave, but I walked out the back door and toward her garden. When I passed the kitchen window and peeked at my parents, I saw their elbows on the table, their hands in the air. The window was raised, and as my father pushed back his chair and removed his glasses, he said, “We have to do something.”

  I thought he had suggested moonlighting to pay our bills—he’d done that in the past. Every couple of years he took jobs at a local garage, a furniture refinisher or a lumber-yard, and twice he worked as a night janitor at my school. Some mornings I opened my locker and found it cleaned and organized. Other times notes saying “Always look out for number one,” or “Keep control, keep ahead,” appeared in my desk. They were written in my father’s small, stiff print on yellow squares of paper, which I crumpled before messing up my locker. I told people that the school had contracted him to do air-conditioning work. It usually took the same amount of time for my father to exhaust himself with two jobs that it did for him to grow comfortable with our finances again, and eventually, each time, my mother would convince him to quit.

  On that January evening, he marched into the yard and touched my shoulder. He told me to go back inside and help my mother wash the dishes, then he disappeared into the garage. My mother closed the window when I stepped inside.

  “We’re in a scrape now, Toby,” she said, her hands invisible in the gray water filling the sink. “Your father feels boxed in.”

  I stood beside her and toweled the dishes she handed me. “Is he going to find another job?”

  “No.” She blew a few strands of hair from her face. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “I bet we’ll end up fine,” I said, and at that time I believed it. But my mother understood that we were living with a man who wanted another life for us.

  She scrubbed the remaining dishes and handed them to me in silence. Then she dried her hands. “People go crazy at times,” she said. “They think in ways you can’t understand.” She was talking about my father, and when I saw him later that night I wondered what he’d done to make her say that. He was scanning the want ads and didn’t look insane. I didn’t disturb him, but went to the window and looked at the yard, perfectly trimmed.

  I was earning fine grades. Aside from Olaf Hollins, a kid in my class who’d promised to punish me for refusing to write a paper for him, school never troubled me because I had a good memory and liked reading. My father tacked my report cards to a corkboard above his desk and told everyone I would go to medical school. Neither of my parents had graduated the eighth grade, so they pampered me when it came to my studies. But I wanted something else. I wanted to listen to a car’s engine and understand why it stalled. I wanted to know the difference between a catalytic converter and a driveshaft, the ability to distinguish a burned-out clutch from a shot transmission by the odor. These were my father’s talents, things he mentioned in conversations like names of relatives. But he denied them to me, deeming me too intelligent to clutter my mind with such information. “You’ll have a different life than me,” he’d said more than once. “When you need something fixed, you’ll hire someone.” These words came from beneath one of our vehicles, and in between them my father described what I should hand him. Every time I placed a tool into his greasy palm, I memorized its name, hoping he would quiz me on it later.

  But I believed that my father’s refusal to teach me about his tools stemmed from something I’d done wrong. Maybe I’d answered a question in a way he didn’t appreciate, or maybe he never forgot that in grade school a girl had blackened my eye. Or maybe it hadn’t happened yet. Maybe he saw something in me, a potential for a flaw in my character, that discouraged him. Maybe he knew that in a crunch, I would hesitate and flounder, or I would rush and cut the wrong wire.

  “I’m sorry,” I said when I crossthreaded a nut on my bicycle—when I busted his shovel, when I swallowed a mouthful of gasoline while learning to siphon, when I knocked a hole in a piece of Sheetrock.

  “It’s not your fault.” His voice would be calm, his mind already assessing the damage, plotting the repair. “It was my mistake.”

  “I’ll do it right the next time.”

  “No, Toby.” He always used my name when he tried to console me. My father was good at consoling people. “We’re done with that now,” he’d say and change the subject, and no matter how I tried to pull the conversation back, I would fail. The blame was his now, and it too was out of my range. He’d carry it with him, and I would follow, waiting for another chance to feel close to him. But he would never relinquish it. It would stay with him for the rest of his life, and even after he died any sense of complicity would evade me. I would try to find it, to seize that quality of my father’s which was lost on me, but my attempts were always anchored in inability, as if I lacked the right tools, as if my small, clumsy hands were trying to grab smoke.

  THE PREVIOUS CHRISTMAS, MY PARENTS HAD DECIDED not to exchange gifts. I’d overheard them agreeing on this but didn’t believe it until I actually saw that the only presents they got were what my grandmother and I had given them. They unwrapped a wallet and set of stationery from me, and sweat suits from my grandmother, black for him, pink for her. But neither handed a gift to the other. It still seemed like a good time in our lives, and I hoped that in the future we would look back on it and smile. We were sitting on the floor and listening to my grandmother’s holiday records, when, as my mother pushed herself up from the carpet, my father asked, “Is that a bird in the tree?”

  It was absurd, yes, but we all turned toward the Christmas tree, and on his urging, my mother spread the limbs to look for the bird. “Stop teasing,” she said, and though it sounded like she was going to say my father’s name, her mouth opened too wide for words when her eyes lit on the thin gold chain hanging among the tinsel. She hesitated before taking it from the branches, and when she turned—eyes fixed on the necklace, tinsel tangled in her hair—she only shook her head. Nothing would have pleased her more than to have given my father one small gift, while nothing would have made him more angry, and even then I knew that. When my mother started crying, my father rose and held her to him. He smirked and accused her of scaring away the bird. Then they didn’t say anything for some time.

  After the new year, they started working more overtime and spoke of selling my mother’s car. I said I could find a job—Portland is a town where a boy of fifteen can find dock work and get paid in cash—but my father insisted that I concentrate on school. We canceled our newspaper delivery, and my father pawned his rifle and some of my mother’s rings. Every night my parents suggested ideas to each other, things they’d fretted over all day. Then they argued. Once I overheard my mother say she wo
uld not be a party to such a thing, and if he tried to drag her son down with him, she would disappear with me. That fight ended like the others: My father withdrew into the garage while my mother walked around our block. I closed myself in my room, as if hiding from a tornado, waiting for it to tear the tar-paper roof off our home.

  “THE ONLY IRREPLACEABLE THING IS FAMILY,” MY father said as he and I drove to straighten my grandmother’s garage. My mother was already there.

  At first I let the words pass over me. In my mind I questioned whether he’d even said anything at all. I could only guess that he was laying the groundwork to confide to me that my grandmother was dying, which she was, but we never spoke of it.

  “This van, our house, jewelry, money—they all come and go.” He shifted gears and went silent.

  “I know.”

  “I’m not a rich man and I’m not smart, but I’d do anything for my family. I would do anything for you.”

  “I think you’re smart,” I said, and it was true.

  “I’m not. I’ve got good sense, but I’m not smart.” He didn’t look at me. “You’re smart.”

  “I’d do anything for my family, too. I’d do anything for you.”

  “Don’t ever get sentimental, boy. Ever.”

  We pulled into the driveway leading to my grandmother’s small house, gravel snapping against the van’s carriage. I thought we’d knock on her door and drink a glass of iced tea before beginning, but without telling anyone we’d arrived, my father and I went straight to work. When the sun started to drop, my grandmother eased herself down the steps and into the garage. The smell of lilacs followed her and she patted my wrist when she stepped close to me. My mother stayed in the house, watching us from the doorway. She looked tired. “Oh, yes,” my grandmother said, seeing all the space we’d cleared. “I told her there’d be plenty of room, probably some to spare.”

  That night, Obie came over and my father invited him to stay for dinner. He and my parents drank some beer after we ate, though by nine o’clock my mother had gone to bed and left the three of us watching television. My father poked into their room after a minute, and I thought he would just kiss her good night and return soon, but he stayed in there. Obie scanned the channels and said, “Your parents really love you.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. “Thank you,” I said.

  “All day at work your old man raves about you.” He crushed an empty pack of cigarettes and dropped it into his lap. Obie’s wife had left him two years before, and he told prison stories, though we knew he’d only spent two nights in the county jail for unpaid tickets. “Did he tell you about that rattlesnake?”

  I said he didn’t.

  “Some old boy from the base set one loose in another old boy’s truck. Can you believe that?” Obie shook his bald head. Then, maybe because he was telling the story, I pictured a snake slithering inside the trashed Dodge Charger Obie kept on cinder blocks in his driveway.

  “Yes. I believe that.”

  “Then that second old boy put a trash can full of rotten shrimp on the other’s porch, and set it on fire.” Obie scratched his pink scalp. “I’m sure your dad will tell you. Just act surprised.”

  My father stepped out of the bedroom then, and for some reason I thought my mother was still awake and thinking about us. His eyes appeared hard at that moment, focused on something I couldn’t see, though he quickly snapped back to himself.

  Soon Obie left, and I considered asking my father about the snake, but finally didn’t. We stayed up past the hour when all the stations except PBS sign off. A program about a man missing one leg came on, and we learned that he’d been trapped under a rock while hiking in Yellowstone Park. The man—the program labeled him “Joseph Henson, Survivor”— freed himself except for his right ankle, which remained hopelessly lodged. He claimed to have heard wolves howling in the woods and had seen bear tracks not fifty yards from where he lay helpless. But what finally drove him to rip off his sleeve, tourniquet his calf, and saw off his leg with a pocketknife was the cold. “No one was going to save me,” Joseph Henson said. “I was either going to freeze to death or hack off my foot.” He dragged himself to a ranger station and lost everything from his knee down, due to complications. The camera panned across his family and dropped to his plastic leg. He explained that when he detached the prosthetic he could still feel the ghost of his real limb and sometimes reached to scratch it. My father and I sat in awe, watching Joseph Henson as intently as we would’ve watched a live broadcast of the Resurrection.

  “What else was he going to do?” my father said and took a swallow of beer. “Desperate son of a bitch.”

  ON THE LAST SUNDAY IN JANUARY MY PARENTS again sat at the kitchen table, plugging away at the calculator. I studied beside them. My homework lay scattered among their ledgers, receipts, bills, insurance papers.

  “Done,” my father said. He removed his glasses and rubbed his dark eyelids. “They’re all paid.”

  I looked at him, less because of what he said than the way he said it. His words sounded stiff, rehearsed.

  “Why don’t we just pay a couple a month?” My mother seemed to be thinking aloud. “If you want to know what I’d like, that’s what it would be. To take our time about this.”

  “We’re fine this way.”

  “How much is left?” she asked.

  My father shook his head to mean he didn’t want to answer her. “Jean.”

  “What about college?” She darted her eyes at me.

  “Jean.”

  “We can’t afford this.” My mother touched her fingers to her lips and held them there for a few seconds.

  “They’re almost paid now. Is that better?” He rolled his shoulders. “We’re in good shape.”

  “You have no idea what you’re doing.”

  My mother wanted to say more. I heard that in the silence. But she only stared at my father; his hands hid his eyes. They stayed like that for what seemed like a long time, then she grabbed her cigarettes and barged outside into the night. My father exhaled, loudly, then started double-checking his calculations. After every ten or twelve keystrokes, he raised his eyes over his glasses to consult his figures. He appeared to know what he was doing. The only thing that made him look like a man who wasn’t an accountant was the scar splitting his left eyebrow.

  “How did you get your scar?” I knew the story but wanted to hear him tell me again. At that moment I wanted to hear my father’s voice.

  A man had hit him. My parents had stopped for gas in Baton Rouge, and the man shouted obscenities at my mother as she walked to the restroom. As my father spoke, he didn’t look at me, so I tried to see my mother outside, but I only saw the two of us reflected in the windows. My father had ignored the man in Baton Rouge until he ran toward my mother. He said he’d forgotten how he’d been hit, that he hadn’t even noticed until they were back on the road, which seemed impossible to me.

  “What about the man?”

  “I clocked him with a tire iron and left him on the cement.” My father looked at me for the first time. “Your mother had nightmares about him, but she’s forgotten him now. Every so often I wonder about him, but it doesn’t matter. Maybe he died right there.”

  My father returned to his numbers then, and I imagined telling him I’d hit Olaf Hollins with a tire iron. Olaf muscled everyone around at my school. He took mostly shop classes and smoked while he worked. His shelves and footstools earned A’s, while mine always wobbled and splintered. But I thought of hitting Olaf because he knew that he terrified me, and I didn’t want my father to know anything scared his son.

  IN THE WEEK AFTER MY FATHER SAID HE’D PAID our bills, we ate at restaurants with cloth napkins and my mother received roses at work. My parents went out alone on the first Friday in February and left me twenty dollars for pizza; I stashed it in the jar that I kept under my bed—a sign of thrift I’d always believed would please my father—and watched a baseball game until they returned. My mother came in first, an
d only huffed the word “Unbelievable,” then dropped her purse onto the floor, where it fell over. I could hear her keys and compact topple onto the wood. A minute later my father entered, closed the door behind him, and gathered the contents of the purse. Crouching there, he said to me, “Get some sleep. Tomorrow we’re painting the house.”

  We started before dawn, me stirring the paint and my father taping our windows and bunching tarps around the foundation. I wanted to ask questions, but we spoke very little. It was difficult to see my hands or what color paint I was mixing, and twice I tripped and fell to the hard, black ground. My father showed me how to brush in long vertical strokes, though after I botched a section that he would have to sand and repaint, he relegated me to cleaning our work area.

  Around noon my mother stepped outside and loaded a box into her car. It occurred to me that she might be leaving and might take me with her, but when I asked my father what she was doing, he said she was taking things to my grandmother’s. When she appeared again, handling another, smaller box, I asked her why she wasn’t helping. I intended it as a joke.

  “This is your father’s project.” She sounded irritated and shot a look at him. He was rinsing his brush with gasoline.

  “You’ll like it when it’s done,” he said.

  Then she ducked into the car, started it and drove away.

  Each afternoon we painted for two hours when my father returned from the base. I felt good helping him, so good that I thought about little else. My technique improved and mostly he stopped inspecting my work. When we began preparing to paint the interior, we started sleeping at my grandmother’s to escape the fumes. My father asked Obie to watch the house in the evenings and handed him a piece of paper with my grandmother’s phone number on it. He commented on how fine the paint looked, but also ribbed my father about how long the job was taking. A couple of times Obie invited him to take a break and drink a beer with him, which he did, then he returned and worked meticulously as a thief.