you see how it’s done.” Billy held out the .45; he had to get close to take it from him. The box of cartridge clips, he took that too.
After Billy went back to his trailer, Danny followed the path to the creek. He pushed back the log and laid the .45 down without looking at the harmonica. He set the box of clips beside the .45.
He picked up the car a little later. Uncle Walton had done the best he could do. The front end had half a header, the other half twisted metal like someone with half of his face gouged out. The right headlight stared back at him, the signal lights hanging down like an ear. You could put your hand on the radiator. His car was parked all by itself, in back of Uncle Walton’s paint and body shop. He had walked all the way from the trailer.
Uncle Walton was on the telephone. He was talking to Dee, yes I’ll be there Dee, looking off at the paint on the wall.
How many times do I have to tell you get rid of that goddamned piece of junk? I don’t want to see it anymore, Slade had said to him. And you take them dead squirrels out to the woods. He saw Slade coming out of Knott’s Tavern. Wait till he’s about to get in his car. Put the pressure on slow, squeeze the trigger. Head shot, blow out his goddamned brains. Uncle Walton, still talking to Dee.
Uncle Walton wouldn’t have anything to say to him because he wouldn’t know he had a gun. Watch where you’re driving next time. Don’t head south to Florida yet. Don’t do it, Danny, I’m telling you! Keep talking, you’re just wasting your breath. Danny stared at the blood in the water cooler, blood squirting out into paper cups, Slade’s blood, his goddamned stepfather’s. Pipe blood in from the bathtub, from Slade’s body, knees up, throat slashed big. Little snort out of the cooler, Slade. Count Dracula’s premium brew for you.
Danny was parked outside of Knott’s Tavern. He watched a line crew moving a hot line. There were two bucket trucks, a bucket for each lineman. Rubber hoses sheathed the secondaries, clothespinned rubber blankets encased the insulators. Knock you to kingdom come. The linemen worked deliberately, aloft, aloof in their buckets. They were moving the line to a new pole, numeral plates flush with the secondaries catching bits of unapproachable light.
He waited another hour. The linemen tied in the primaries, came down, the elbowed lifts folding in on themselves, setting the linemen on the pavement again. They peeled off their tool belts and hung them up on a rack in the back of the truck. The ground man taped up a coil of copper wire, rolled up the rubber blankets, stashed the hoses, gathered up pulley lines. One lineman went to the water cooler embedded in one side of the truck. Clear cold water for this good man, for all the good men in the line crew.
That night they got into it about the goddamned squirrel with its throat slit with his mother’s carving knife. All they could do now was drink and fight. His mother burned the frozen pizza. Dragging it charred from the oven, she stepped on little Ben’s skateboard. She skidded across the linoleum. The pizza sailed up off the cookie sheet, splattered in Slade’s pig face, his ape hands thickened with cheese, blackened anchovies, tomato splotches, then Slade’s pig face behind the network of hands. Danny was swinging the frying pan, trying to get to Slade’s pig face. He felt it wrenched away in Slade’s big hands. He heard the frying pan clang against the stove. Something crashed in his head and he went down.
When he came to Slade wasn’t there anymore. His mother couldn’t get up. Bits of cheese were stuck to his mother’s face. She put her hands on pink rollers. Danny breathed in the acrid smoke. He went to the door and opened it, letting warm air in to thin out the smoke. He was running now, down the path to the creek. The creek was overlaid with shadow. He couldn’t help his mother anymore. He pushed the log back, picked up the harmonica, puckered his lips on a mouth hole, blowing a sustained, soothing note. The .45 and the box of cartridges were where he’d left them, beside the harmonica now. His fingers touched metal. He would leave the harmonica under the log, where he had kept it all these years.
It was dark when he left the creek. He went to his car first and put the .45 in the glove compartment. Then he went to his room in the trailer. He got a suitcase out of the closet. He emptied his dresser drawers on the bunk, picked out some things to take with him, left other things, including his baseball cards. He was on his way out when his mother came in. She was holding an ice pack against her jaw. She held a bottle of sherry pressed to one of her breasts, about half-full, with a cork in it. She still wore rollers in her hair.
“You’re leaving me.”
“You can come with me.”
“I have to take care of little Ben.”
“I’ll take both of you to Uncle Walton’s. Tonight. He’s willing to have you.”
“Dee isn’t willing, you know that.”
“You stop drinking she might have you.”
“I can’t do that, Danny.”
“All right, don’t do it. You can stay here, but I’m going.”
Her face leaned into the ice pack. She set the ice pack down on Danny’s bed. She uncorked the bottle of sherry. “You can’t go. You’re all I have. I lost your father. Now I’m losing you.”
He had lost his mother a long time ago. He remembered her, how she was before Slade, with her hair in rollers then like now. It was that way when the telephone rang, while she put on her uniform, fixed her face. She asked Danny to answer the telephone please. He remembered the telephone on the wall, something brown and thick then, a blotch on the wall like a silverfish against the blistered paint and loose plaster, yet thinking maybe he’d hear something good like winning the lottery, like getting rich, like his mother not having to work anymore but his father maybe he should work, be a lineman, but not in bad weather, he thought, work part-time, not on a hot line, he thought, just be up there in your chariot looking proud and tall and good.
It was Tom Brown, his father’s foreman. I would like to speak to your mother, please.
Not his mother but Tom Brown in his mind. A tall man who kept his back straight. His father used to do him but not to his face. Striding in from the kitchen, his father stuck out his Tom Brown jaw. He looked up at the ceiling fixture, the way Tom Brown looked up at a spot where a transformer would be hoisted up, or up at the crossbeam not yet in place, the bright wire not yet tied in to the glossy new spool insulators, or looked down to the spot on the ground where the new pole would go, the hole not dug, the posthole diggers unused yet, the cant hooks not yet clawing the pine, the pikes not biting wood yet. His father would stretch his lips in imitation of Tom Brown’s distended grin. Here’s where the work is boys, his father would say Tom Brown would say. That’s all Tom Brown ever says, his father would say.
His mother was standing close to him. “You’ll be hearing from me. I’ll be all right,” he said.
He leaned out to kiss his mother’s lips. She kissed him goodbye, she held him close. This is goodbye, this is it.
Little Ben in the passenger seat, his white face set, was waiting for him in the car. “I’m coming with you, Danny.”
“You can’t come with me,” Danny said. He was going where Ben couldn’t follow him, already knowing he would have to pay, already seeing the time he would do like a long road without an end.
The View from My Father’s Window
My father, Paul Creel, isn’t the man he used to be, hasn’t
