Oh, really? said Ray. That’s okay. Roasts are an awful lot of work.
Actually they’re not, I said. The butcher said they were easy. You put them in before you go to church and when you come home they’re done.
Well, said my dad. They’re easy to lose.
Well, no, I said. Only complete idiots lose roasts. He told me I wouldn’t believe the amount of meat he’d lost in his life. Yeah, yeah, I said, and stared out the window.
We can always get another roast, Nome, he said. I didn’t say anything. I closed my eyes.
Right? asked my dad. He turned to look at me briefly and I opened my eyes and noticed him smiling so I smiled back at him and said yes, he was right.
We were supposed to pay a dollar to get into the dump but the guy there knew Ray and waved him right in. VIP? I asked him. Well, he said, he hadn’t wanted to brag but he never has to pay when he goes into the dump. Then he told me that he sometimes cleans up at the dump late at night after the guy at the gate goes home and the dump people liked that.
You clean up the dump? I asked him. At night?
No, no, he said.
Yeah you do, I said.
Well, yes, he said, I do.
That’s cool though, I said thinking Jesus, let’s not be the kind of family that tidies up the dump at night. The dump is the dump though Dad, I said. The central idea at work in a dump is that it’s not a clean place.
Ray said: Well, yes, but I organize the garbage in a way I feel makes sense. I patted him on the arm. Not so much to encourage him, but because I needed to feel something solid right then.
Being there was kind of nice though, like the beach but less oppressive. Smoky with thousands of seagulls, which was odd, like they were lost, and a pair of gloves my dad gave me that had little rubber bumps on them for grip. I liked the way he rubbed his forehead with the back of his wrist.
We talked a bit about eyebrows and their purpose. Then other hair topics. He said if he kept losing hair he’d have a forehead he could show movies on.
Like a drive-in? I asked him.
He said yeah, he’d stand out in a field and get paid.
You could sit, I said.
I’d have to sit, he agreed.
In your lawn chair, I added.
Yes, Nomi, in my lawn chair, he said. He knows I have an irrational hatred of his lawn chair. We saw a little red cowboy boot sticking out of a heap of badly organized garbage that did not make sense and my dad said to me whoah, remember Misty? Misty was a palomino I used to barrel-race in rodeos before I accepted boys and drugs into my heart.
That horse could turn on a dime, said my dad.
Yeah, I said. Powerful hindquarters.
You used to take those corners like Mario Andretti, he said, staring off dreamily at acres of decomposing trash.
Well, I said, it was fun. My dad used to shout, take it home Nomi! on the final stretch of the race. Remember when you’d yell, take it home Nomi! I asked him. He looked at me.
I did say that, didn’t I? I nodded. Was that wrong?
No, no, it was funny, I said. I remembered him leaning up against the log fence of the corral in his suit and tie and jacket. The only person in town formally dressed for a rodeo. A kid had come up to him once and asked him if he was one of those clowns that distract the bull while the cowboy escapes.
He nodded and stared at the boot. Should it be there? I asked him. He shook his head but didn’t move the boot. I knew he wanted to move it more than anything. He was working really hard to appear normal, for my sake.
Let’s move it, I said.
Oh…no, he said. He waved off the idea.
Yeah, c’mon, I said. I picked up the little boot.
Where to? I asked.
Oh, really, he said. He tried to act dismissive.
No, c’mon, I said. Where should it go? He stared at me for a few seconds and smiled.
Fine, he said. I’ll indulge you by allowing myself to be indulged. He took the boot and we walked about a hundred yards to a different section of the dump that included broken wagons, Hula Hoops, bent and rusted-out pogo sticks, cracked-up Footsies, headless dolls and some other assorted brightly coloured broken plastic stuff. Ray put the little boot in the middle of it and said, good. We walked back to where we’d been. The dump was kind of like a department store for Ray, but even more like a holy cemetery where he could organize abandoned dreams and wrecked things into families, in a way, that stayed together.
twenty
We got home to find a bullet hole in the middle of our picture window. Who would shoot our house, I asked Ray. He stood in the grass staring at the hole and shaking his head.
The cop came and said it was going around — kids, BB guns…summer holidays around the corner. Any enemies? he asked Ray who shook his head yet again and then said well, there’s a boy I’m keeping back next year. The cop nodded and said there you go, could be.
Ray thanked him and we went inside and sat on the couch.
Who’re you keeping back? I asked him.
The cop’s kid, he said. I read the paper while he stared at the hole in the window through his large square glasses. After a while I got up and made him a TV dinner and he said mmmm…my compliments to the chef in the type of upbeat manner that made me simultaneously want to curl up in his lap and cuff him in the head.
When negative experiences such as having one’s house shot at occur in my dad’s life he tends to come alive. His confusion lifts. Pieces of life’s puzzle fuse into meaning, like the continents before that colossal rift. It’s entirely logical to him that his house has been shot at and when he’s able to spend a minute or two in a world that makes sense he appears almost happy. And when he gets happy he does decisive things like this time he went over to the bulletin board in the kitchen and took down the city bus arrival schedule that we’ve had up there since Tash left and before the bus depot itself closed down. He put it in the garbage can under the sink. Phew. Done. Goodbye past.
But then I imagined him on a day when shitty things weren’t happening and he’d be feeling his usual mystified self and go to the dump and there he would see that little piece of paper with the schedule on it and it would bring him to his knees. Just destroy him for a minute or two, and he’d probably pick it up and wipe whatever seagull crap there was on it and straighten it out with the side of his hand and bring it back to the kitchen bulletin board and arrange it on there so you’d know it was the centrepiece of his life.
But for now, he was tripping ’cause our house had been shot at and things were as they should be, as he had suspected they had been all along, so he could relax and get rid of stuff that was keeping him down. He kept on saying corny things even while bits of glass dropped onto the living-room carpet and I glared at him stupidly. I don’t know why. It’s an act. It’s a thing we do when something strange has happened and we don’t know what to say about it. It’s like we play these conventional roles of idiot dad and rebellious teenager even though we’re way beyond that — we’re more like two mental patients just getting through another day. It’s like he’s trying to dynamite his way through a mountain of so-called teenage contempt by saying goofy things knowingly in the hope that I’ll grant him mercy for identifying his own shortcomings before I can. It’s just an old sitcom script we fall back on. We have no idea how to act.
Bye, I said.
Have fun, he said. Be good.
Gotta make up your mind, I answered back, because he expected me to.
After Tash left, my mom’s church singing got quieter and my dad’s got a little louder. I developed insomnia. Nightmares of Tash screaming while she burned, a hand reaching out for help, my name on her lips, her face melting while the screaming echoed on and on and on. I’d wake up at night to find Ray gone, out on one of his nocturnal missions, so named by Tash before she took off, and my mom lying on the couch in the living room, reading.