“Isn’t that…?”
“Yeah,” I mutter. Milestone doesn’t have two giants. After what happened at Eddie’s it shouldn’t even have one. But that’s Wintry up there, doing what looks to be some kind of a slow-motion drunken war dance around the fire.
“You know what to do,” Cadaver says. He is hidden in the shadows beside the tree, shadows that refuse to be burned away by the light from the fire. Wintry tries to fill his lungs with enough air to power the words, but gives up at the realization that there is nothing he can say that the old man doesn’t already know. He wants to die now, but it appears even in his darkest fantasies he’s been wrong to think even an end to his suffering would come without a price. And tonight, here, that price has taken the shape of a dark pair of hands wriggling their way free of the oak tree’s trunk, pushing forth from the rotten bark, thick fingers trembling.
It is dark despite the fire.
It is cold despite the heat.
And those hands, now clenching and unclenching at the end of scarred and meaty forearms, are hands Wintry knows.
Near the roots of the tree, a battered work shoe is wrested free. Dirt and bark tumble; the fissure widens. At the top of the tree, almost but not quite at eye level, pale white orbs, striated opals, fix Wintry with a raging glare. Beneath it a sharp nose, shooting breath to clear the passages of bark and rot. Inevitably then, a mouth, dirty teeth bared above a pointed chin bearded with moss.
“Loser,” says the black devil as he jerks free of the tree to stand before his son. “No-good sonofabitchin’ loser.”
“You know what to do,” Cadaver says again, but now that there are two men before the fire, it is unclear to Wintry who is being addressed. His father does not spare the old man a glance, but nods faintly.
“Pop,” Wintry croaks.
“Lucius,” his father says, and the mere mention of Wintry’s given name is enough to unleash a cascade of unwanted memory:
That voice, resentful, and almost always raised in anger.
That mouth, sneering, twitching a little with each punch of those piston-like arms, smiling slightly at the cries, the injury, the fear.
Those hands, blackening his mother’s eye, shattering her nose, loosening her teeth.
Those hands…tousling the boy’s hair before bedtime, before the bad time.
Those hands, ripping off his clothes, breaking his bones.
Those hands. Around his neck, squeezing. And the words: Toughen up you little shit. Fight me. I’ll keep hittin’ until you do.
“How are you here?” Wintry asks, softly, not because he is threatened, which he is, but because his throat is raw and sore and the words feel like rocks being forced through a whistle.
“Don’t matter.” His father takes a step closer. He is a big man, bigger than his son but not as tall. The difference never mattered though. His father’s fists were always a great leveler, as Wintry suspects they will be now. “What matters is I’m here, and I’m more here than you, palooka.”
He advances another step and Wintry, already quivering from the shock of his injuries, is close to rattling free of the shoes that have been melted to his feet. Into the firelight steps his father, a man who, until tonight, existed only in memory.
“I don’t want this,” Wintry says, then turns his head to look at Cadaver who appears to have woven himself into a mesh of dead branches. “Make it stop.”
“Only you can do that, son,” Cadaver replies.
Narrow face taut with rage, the man before the fire chuckles. “Hell, he ain’t gonna do shit. He ain’t never done a damn thing worth a damn thing. He nothin’ but a worthless punk sent to steal all I had from me and make my wife ashamed of what she let into the house.” His smile widens, teeth gleaming in the amber light. “Shit. He didn’t find out till prison that we wasn’t his folks.”
Wintry sighs. “What do you want with me?”
“To put you down, boy. Just that. To put you down so’s you remember what you done.”
“I don’t need to fight you to remember.”
“Sure you do. You think you got ghosts now Lucius, but you’re forgettin’ all the good ones. All the real big mean ones, ain’t that right ’ol man?”
Cadaver says nothing, just goes on watching.
“So right here, tonight, me and you’s gonna dance. You gonna get the chance to swing a few, see if time’s taught you somethin’, see if you grew some balls up the river, and if you don’t, then you gonna be hurtin’ even worse by the time I get through with you. But I’ll be your Pop for a spell and do you a favor, for ’ol times sake. I’ll let you in on a secret.”
Whatever the secret is, Wintry has no desire to hear it. The fire is licking at his skin though he’s far enough on the other side of it to be out of reach of the flames, and the worst of the heat. Every nerve screams with pain, every muscle spasms, every organ revolts. He wants to lay down and die, most certainly does not want to be here in the heat facing down a man who died of prostate cancer while his son was in prison.
“For every blow I land on that cooked-up face of yours, you’ll remember somethin’ you forgot. You’ll remember some of the bad things you done that you don’t blame yourself for no more. You’ll see the little bits of truth. You’ll see yourself. Then maybe you’ll understand why I was the way I was with you.” His father leans over the fire enough to let the flames singe his short scraggly beard. “I saw what you was becomin’ boy, and you was becomin’ me.”
For just a moment, Wintry sees an aspect of the devil floating in the flames. “You want me to fight you?”
“Yeah, that’s it.” His father is enthused. “Go a few rounds with your old man, see what happens. See what you remember. See if you’ve changed.”
“I…can’t fight. I’m hurt bad.”
“Everybody hurtin’, Lucius. That shit don’t fly with me. Think I weren’t hurt when my brother dropped you off on my doorstep with no money to keep you? Think I weren’t hurt when my wife left me for a bucktoothed guitar playin’ crackhead from San Antone? Think I weren’t hurtin’ when every bit of company I tried to keep got scared off as soon as they heard tell of a kid? Or when they fired me from a job I’d had for over thirty years? Fired for drinkin’ and why, Lucius? Why was I drinkin? Because nothin’ ever worked right for me, and you weren’t nothing but another wrong thing in it. Everythin’ I had I gave up to raise you right and you fought me all the way no matter what I did to toughen you up. So you stand tall now boy and be a man. Fight me for the last time. This here’s long overdue.”
Wintry raises his head, realizes that at some point during his father’s seething monologue, he has fallen to his knees. The wet grass burns rather than soothes and it takes every ounce of strength he has left to stand again. When he does, the fire turns gray, then a darker red, and the hands, his father’s awful hands are poking through it and separating, like a swimmer parting water.
Tongues of flame lash from the fire, one of them narrowly avoiding Wintry’s face. Instinctively he ducks, groans and shields his eyes, wondering as he does so why his father spoke so passionately about fighting if he means to burn him alive. But the fire carries on past him until it touches the grass a few feet away and ignites. It is as if someone has touched a match to a gasoline trail poured in a perfect rectangle. The perfect shape for a boxing ring, the name of which has always puzzled him, because it isn’t a ring at all.
“This won’t…” Wintry starts to say, but gives up, the words too heavy in a mouth too weak.
“Straighten up,” his father commands, and steps through the flames. Wisps of smoke curl from the shoulders and sleeves of his denim jacket, which he shrugs off to reveal a soiled and yellowed vest beneath. The gray tangle of his chest hair streams smoke, blackens and curls. He stands three feet from his son. “Let’s go boy.” Sinewy muscles grow taut as he assumes a fighting posture, shoulders hunched slightly forward, fists raised so that only his eyes are visible above the dark work-roughened knuckles. He bounces every so slightly on his toes, an old man trying to prove he’s still as fast as he was in his glory days.