Father and Son

by Larry Brown

  “Son of a bitch,” Glen said. He put his hand on the door handle but Puppy grabbed his arm. He tried to get loose and out the door but Puppy held him tighter.

  “Now wait a minute,” Puppy said.

  “Wait’s ass. I want to talk to that bastard.”

  “Hell. Don’t get sent back the first day you get home. You know he ain’t gonna take no shit off you.”

  “But I’m supposed to take some off him?”

  “Just wait and see what he wants.”

  “I know what he wants. He wants to rub my nose in it.”

  “Well don’t get out. Just stay in the car. Hear?”

  Glen turned loose of the door handle and jerked his arm loose from Puppy, then eased back in the seat.

  “I ain’t scared of him. I did my time.”

  The sheriff got out of the car with his sunglasses on and left the door open. They could see a racked shotgun above and behind the front seat. When Puppy switched off his ignition they could hear the cruiser idling, the rough stutter of the cam. Bobby Blanchard wore blue jeans and a blue checked shirt. He wasn’t wearing a gun. He stopped about four feet away from the car and nodded to them.

  “Hey Randolph. Hello Glen.”

  Glen didn’t answer, just stared into the dark glasses on Bobby’s face. Bobby’s pants were wet below the knees.

  “I ain’t come to give you a hard time, Glen.” He crossed his arms over his chest and studied the ground, toed at the gravel with his cowboy boot. “There’s not anything I can say that’ll make you feel better.”

  “You got that right,” Glen said.

  Bobby looked off to one side, looked up at the sky, then looked back. “I was just headed home to change clothes and I saw the car. I sure am sorry about your mama.”

  “He’s just upset cause we ain’t got her a stone yet,” Puppy said.

  “If it means anything from me, I hate it all happened like it did,” Bobby said. “I wish a lot of times I had a crystal ball. I could stop a lot of stuff before it starts.” He put his hands in his pockets and he seemed uncertain of what he was saying.

  “I’m gonna make sure he stays out of trouble,” Puppy said.

  “Why don’t you shut the hell up, Puppy?” Glen told him, and pointed to Bobby. “All he wants is somebody to kiss his ass.”

  “The man just wants to talk to you.”

  “I’ve done served my time, I told you. I don’t have to talk to nobody. You can set here and lick his ass all day if you want to but I ain’t.”

  The man who’d sent him up pulled his sunglasses off. He flicked them lightly along his thigh. He hadn’t shaved and he rubbed unhappily at the black bristles on his jaw.

  “I tell you what I’m gonna do, Glen. Just for today. While it’s just you and me and Puppy here. I’m gonna take a little shit off you so we can get it all straight.”

  “I figured you’d get around to that.”

  “I try to do my job. If somebody calls me up at two o’clock in the mornin, I get up and go. If it’s Saturday night and I got the fights on television, I get up and go. I been over at Spring Hill all night draggin a pond for a boy that drowned yesterday afternoon. We found him about an hour ago. Eleven years old. I just went and told his mama.”

  “What in the hell’s that got to do with me?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. I get paid to do whatever needs to be done. I try my best to keep the drunks off the road and the troublemakers in line. Now I’ll be the first one to admit that you had some bad breaks. But it don’t excuse what you did.”

  “I told you he run out in front of me.”

  “You were drunk.”

  “I spent three years of my life in that goddamn shit hole you put me in.”

  “Which a lot of folks think wasn’t near long enough. Ed and Judy Hall would have loved to seen you rot down there. If you’d killed my kid I’d probably feel the same way. But I’m not the judge. I’m just the sheriff. You’re out now. All you got to do is act right. I know we ain’t never gonna be friends. You never did like me anyway.”

  Glen was trembling and he didn’t trust his voice. He said, “Well let me just tell you a few things. I don’t want to be your friend. And I don’t need no lecture from you. Now what do you think about that?”

  Bobby nodded and put his glasses back on.

  “That’s about what I thought. But I tried. You got two years’ probation, right?”

  “Eighteen months.”

  “Who’s your probation officer?”

  “I don’t know. I’m to go to the office.”

  “It’s probably Dan Armstrong. When are you supposed to report?”

  Glen made Bobby wait before he answered.

  “Monday mornin.”

  Bobby nodded a little more and he seemed to weigh this information while he watched the ground. He looked up quickly.

  “Okay. He’s gonna tell you everything, so you don’t need to hear it from me. Your brother there could probably talk a little sense into you if you’d let him. Long as you stay straight, you won’t hear a word out of me. I don’t want you to think you got to carry a chip around on your shoulder. Now if you want to, we’ll shake hands like grown men. Put all this behind us.”

  And he stepped closer and held his hand out, a big strong hand with freckles and fine black hair on his arm. He offered it and stood in the hot silence waiting. Glen spat out the window.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “Since it’s just us three out here. Just you and me and Puppy? You take that badge off for five minutes and I’ll stomp your ass in the ground. Then we’ll see if you want to be friends or not. See if you want to shake hands then.”

  Bobby drew his hand back slowly and said, “You wouldn’t win.” He turned and walked back to his cruiser and got in and shut the door and turned around.

  “Boy that was real smart,” Puppy said. “Man try to do you a favor and you.… Boy,” he said. He cranked the car. “I don’t believe you sometimes.”

  “Why don’t you just carry me somewhere I can get a beer and shut up?” Glen said.

  “You start any shit with him you’ll be right back in the pen.”

  “He ain’t gonna send me back to the pen. He’ll have to kill me first.”

  “If you don’t act right he will. And I didn’t think you was supposed to go in a bar while you’re on probation anyway. I thought you wanted to go home.”

  “I don’t now.”

  After Puppy had pulled out into the road and they were moving again, Glen said, “Hell, you can go in a store and buy me some, can’t you?”

  “I guess I can. Have you got any money?”

  “Hell yes, I’ve got some money. You ain’t got any on you?”

  Puppy shook his head sadly. “Ain’t got much.”

  “Didn’t you get paid yesterday?”

  “I did. And I lost most of it in a card game. And I had to put gas in the car this mornin. Reckon I could get that back from you?”

  Glen was already reaching for his billfold. “How much?”

  “Aw. I guess about ten dollars. Ten or twelve.”

  Glen gave him fifteen. They bumped over the rough old highway through the afternoon sun past stretches of timber and by yards with wrecked cars parked in orderly rows. He saw familiar things, a solitary tree in a field, the rotting hulk of a wooden wagon sinking its way into the ground. He watched everything until they pulled into a place near Abbeville, a little county joint with beer signs in the windows. Puppy parked and got out.

  “What you want and how much?”

  “Get a case and make sure it’s cold. Here.”

  Glen handed him some more money and watched him climb the steps, could see him through the windows going to the big cooler. Cars and trucks passed down the road beside him. Finally Puppy came back out with the case slanted against his hip under one arm. Glen reached and opened the back door. Puppy slid the beer onto the seat, then took a six-pack around to the front.

  Glen looked at the bee
r. He placed his hand on it. Cold in the hot air, clean little bright cans beginning to sweat. He tore one loose and opened it with the church key that was on the dash and turned it up to his mouth and let it stand there until he drained it. He took the can down, belched.

  “That was pretty good,” he said, and got another one.

  “Damn, Glen, they don’t allow you to drink on the premises. Got a sign right there.”

  “I don’t give a shit. Now carry me over to Barlow’s.”

  “You ain’t got no business over there. He’ll be drunk and you’ll be into it before you know it.”

  “You sound like a old woman, Puppy. I got some unfinished business with him.”

  Puppy turned the wheel and looked out the window to see if anything was coming.

  “You had any sense you’d let it slide, too. You don’t need to go over there. Let’s go see Daddy.”

  “I’ll go see him when I git goddamn good and ready. If you don’t want to take me I can find somebody else to run me over there.”

  Puppy studied him for a few seconds, resigned to it.

  “Hell, I’ll carry you. You gonna go anyway. Just don’t blame me if he whips your ass again.”

  “Ain’t no son of a bitch gonna get me down and kick me and get away with it.”

  “Yeah, and if you hadn’t cut him he probly wouldn’t’ve got you down and kicked you. Somebody cut me I’d kick him too. You lucky he didn’t shoot you. I would’ve.”

  Puppy pulled out to the stop sign, then hit the gas. They didn’t talk for a while. The few houses alongside the road rapidly gave way to plowed or planted fields and spotted cows with outsized horns and barns with roofs of brown tin and gray rotting sides. Glen turned the vent so that the hot wind rushed in to ruffle his shirt, his hair. He opened a pack of Camels and dropped the wrapper out the window.

  Puppy looked at him briefly, then turned his face back to the road.

  “What’s the first day like down there?”

  Glen didn’t look around. “Call you out on the grass. What they call the grass. Ain’t no grass, just dirt. Call you out to fight and if you don’t fight they take you down and fuck you in the ass.”

  “You fight?”

  “You goddamn right.”

  “Ever day?”

  “Till they left me alone.”

  “How long did that take?”

  “Bout a week.”

  “You gonna give me one of them beers?”

  Glen reached down and got him one and handed it to him. Puppy steered with his knees and got the opener and punched two holes in the can. Foam spurted from the top and he sucked at it. He drove with one hand, the beer between his legs, glancing out the window from time to time.

  “He might not even be up,” he said. “This early.”

  “He still got that monkey?”

  “Last time I was over there he did. That’s about a ugly son of a bitch. You ever seen the way he acts around a woman that’s on her period?”

  “Goes crazy, don’t he?” said Glen.

  “Shit. Worse than that. Jumped on some old gal over there one night, had his dick run out. She like to had a goddamn fit. He’s bit several people.”

  Glen finished his beer and threw the can out the window. He reached down for another just as they crossed the county line. “He better not bite me.”

  After an eighth of a mile Puppy let off the gas and slowed the car, checking the rearview mirror, shifting down into second, and turning into a rutted dirt road where a weathered sign on a leaning post pointed a crooked red arrow toward BARLOW’S COLD BEERDANCING POOL.

  The place wasn’t visible from the highway at all. It was hidden in a thicket of loblolly pine and the dried needles had coated the roof with a carpet of brown. On the front porch sat a Coke machine, several chairs, two big Walker hounds with slatted ribs and hanging tongues. The dogs rose to their feet with lifted hackles and snarled briefly before leaving the porch. There were no cars in the yard. Puppy eased to a stop against one of the peeled logs there. He cut off the motor. The hounds melted into the surrounding underbrush and were seen no more. Glen set his beer on the floor and opened the door.

  “Watch them dogs,” Puppy said.

  “I ain’t worried about them dogs.”

  He got out and closed the door and stood there for a moment, then crossed the yard with its litter of bottle caps and cigarette butts and stepped up on the porch. He tried the door. The knob turned silently in his hand. He looked back at Puppy, who was raising a beer to his mouth. Glen stepped inside.

  The bar was dimly lit by the sunlight that came through the dirty windows. All the chairs were turned upside down on the tables and the floor had been swept clean. The room seemed heavy with menace, as if all the bottles broken over heads and all the shots fired into human bodies had condensed into a thick and heavy presence of uneasiness and waiting.

  He walked quietly to the bar and stood listening. There was no sound. Even the ceiling fans were stilled. The ranked bottles at the back of the bar held a muted gleam, familiar labels. He thought about pouring a drink.

  The monkey climbed up on the bar ten feet away and sat silently, baring its teeth at him. It was nearly two feet tall, dark hair, a long tail. Long yellow canines dulled by tobacco juice. It grimaced and hissed at him.

  “You nasty son of a bitch,” Glen said.

  In one leap it was on him and biting his hand. The fear came up in his throat the same way it had the day he almost jumped off the barn. The monkey was clawing at him, the little leathery black fingers clutching at his clothes with terribly surprising strength. He managed to get his other hand around its throat and it began to make a dreadful noise, crying almost like a child. The tail curled around his forearm and gripped it tight. He pulled his mangled fingers free and blood spattered over them. Blood on its teeth. He slammed the monkey against the dark wood of the bar, the furry body twisting and writhing at the end of his arm and the teeth bared in that fiendish grin and all the while the scared wailing and screeching. He slammed it again and he could feel the fine bones smashing, the strength going out of it. The monkey was shaking its head and shitting on him. He gagged and threw it down and staggered back, looking at his hand. Deep lacerations, the fingers torn, vein and muscle. The monkey lay on its side until in a sudden rage he kicked it. It landed heavily against the bar and dropped back to the floor. It lay dazed, blinking. He watched it. One of its legs was bent beneath it. It passed a fist over its face almost wearily and rolled over onto its belly and put its knuckles on the boards and started trying to crawl away from him.

  “Bite me now you son of a bitch,” Glen panted. He kicked it again and it fell over on its back with the black hands trembling. He looked into its eyes and he saw shock and revelation there.

  There was one empty beer bottle sitting on the bar. He leaned over and picked it up, bent low over the monkey, and knocked a huge dent in its skull. It trembled and shook the way a clubbed fish will and then it relaxed and was still. He dropped the bottle on the floor and straightened. Blood was dripping off his middle finger, had seeped under the nail. The bar was quiet once again. The same silent chairs. He saw his harried reflection looking back at him from the mirror behind the bar, the bottles like old friends. He stepped back there and took a fifth of whiskey down.

  He turned and walked across the floor, opened the door, and looked at his brother sitting in the car. He blinked in the sunlight as the blood dripped onto the porch.

  He went down the steps. Puppy started out of the car when he saw the blood, but Glen waved him back. He walked around to the other side and got in.

  “What in the hell?”

  “That monkey. Let’s get out of here. Quick.”

  “What? Did it jump on you?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  Puppy cranked the car but could hardly take his eyes off the mangled hand. It was webbed with trails of blood that were starting to dry. He kept looking at the hand while he backed up. He stopped and turned
the car around in the gravel.

  “Damn, boy, you gonna have to see the doctor about that. Ain’t no tellin what kind of filth that thing had on its teeth.”

  Glen got his beer from the floor and started drinking it. When they got to the highway, Puppy stopped and looked both ways hurriedly. “Did anybody see you?”

  “Wasn’t nobody in there.”

  “Did you kill it?”

  “Hell yes I killed it.”

  Puppy pulled out into the road, going through the gears rapidly, getting it up to sixty as fast as he could.

  “Well at least nobody saw you.”

  They rode in silence for a while then. They went across the levee and saw people fishing in the river far below the bridge, their boats and their long glossy canepoles.

  “If he knew I was fixin to get out, he’ll know it was me,” Glen said. “Did you tell anybody?”

  “A few. I didn’t figure it was no secret.”

  Glen lifted his beer and drank. Puppy watched his mirror.

  “Just take me out to my house and help me get my car cranked, then. That’s all I’ll ask of you.”

  “You not going to see Daddy?”

  “Fuck him.”

  “Aw shit, Glen.”

  “You heard me. I said fuck him.”

  “Now listen, Glen. It ain’t right to not go see him. He’s missed you.”

  “He don’t miss nothin but a whiskey bottle when he ain’t got one in his hand.”

  Puppy found a cigarette in his pocket and got it lit and opened the other beer that was on the seat and took a big drink from it, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, still watching behind them.

  “Hell, I’ll help you get your car cranked. I brought another battery just in case. Pour some gas in the carburetor it ought to crank. But let’s go over to Daddy’s first and see him just a minute anyway.”

  “Didn’t even put her down a headstone.”

  “He looked at some. I know he looked at some.”

  A long black car loomed down the road. The driver was opening it up coming into the river bottom. The sun gleamed on the chrome bumper and the car came toward them at some incredible rate of speed. Puppy’s old car rocked with a blast of wind as the thing shot by and hurtled down the road behind them.