I cupped my hands as Dad had showed me, and after every other stroke I tilted my head so that only my mouth was out of the water for a quick breath, all the while kicking my feet. And my feet, like the rest of my body, were big: that year my shoe size matched my age.
I counted the laps in my head for a while, but finally gave up. The larger the number, the heavier it weighed on me and pulled me down in the water. My arms and legs burned. As my swimming slowed, I sneaked peeks for Dad. Pal and Mountie were still there standing guard, but Dad had disappeared. I stopped against the wall in the shallow end, gasping and standing with my knees bent.
“You better get to swimming, boy,” Dad said, walking out of the house.
“I’m tired.”
“Back in the Navy they put us in a pool with no shallow end, and made us tread water for hours. So I don’t want to hear about you being tired.”
He had a towel over his shoulder and black swimming trunks on, with the drawstring tied in the front. Dad’s chest was covered with thin gray hair. His skin was pallid, unaccustomed to sunlight, but the skin was rough from being often bared and sunburned when he was younger.
His shoulders, while broad and powerful, swept down into a wide chest which like mine, sagged. Time and age had sunken his; mine had never risen.
He walked to the edge of the pool, stood with his feet together, made a pyramid with his hands, and dove over me into the water, making a small splash. Dad rolled onto his back and gracefully backstroked to the other end, and breast-stroked back to me, swimming up slowly like a predator, half of his face underwater. He spat water at me, and I smelled beer on his breath.
“Get on,” he said, and squatted with his back to me.
I grabbed his shoulders and he crab-crawled to the edge of the shallow end where the bottom sloped toward the deep. He took a deep breath, pushed off with his legs, and we surged like piggy-back boats through the water. Dad hadn’t given me a ride on his back since I was four or five. Back then, he would swim underwater with me hanging on. Dad didn’t swim underwater this time, but he carried me back and forth through the pool, and for a moment I was a little boy and Dad was a good man.
After swimming I don’t know how many laps, I slept hard that night and deep into Saturday morning. Or at least what Dad considered late in the morning: eight o’clock. “Get up, boy.” He kicked the foot of my bed. “We got quail to kill.”
The sky was blue, not a cloud defacing it, and, rubbing sleep out of my eyes, I followed Dad, who carried a white Styrofoam cooler, to the birdhouse.
“Now only catch the fat ones,” Dad said. The quail were in a cage Dad had built out of scrap lumber and chicken wire, and it stood on wobbly wooden legs to keep rats from eating the quail at night. I reached my hand into the cage and the quail ran in a pack to the back of it, where they stepped on each other. Once they piled on each other, I couldn’t differentiate a fat one from a skinny one, so I just grabbed one.
“He’s not fat,” Dad said, and pushed me out of the way. He clamped his hand on the pile of birds and brought out three at once. They didn’t look any fatter than mine, but Dad set them
inside the Styrofoam cooler. He eventually took out a dozen quail, and I carried the cooler outside and set it next to sawhorses that Dad used to cut lumber on for new cages. Dad went to the house and returned with a gallon pot full of scalding water. Wispy steam rose from it and fogged Dad’s glasses. My hands were sweating; they always did when I worked with Dad.
He set the water on the wrought-iron table and walked the few feet to the quail and me.
He grabbed one by the feet and slammed its head on a sawhorse. I heard the quail’s skull shatter, saws its neck break, and its eyes roll around in their sockets.
“Think you can do that?” Dad asked. “Just take ‘em by the feet and smack their head. But do it hard: you want to kill ‘em instantly.”
Their feet felt scaly, their bodies fragile, and they had sad eyes that stared at me. I held one with its feet between my thumb and forefinger, and I stared at the sawhorse. There wasn’t a scratch, mark, or remnant where Dad had slammed his. His quail didn’t even bleed.
“You afraid?”
“No. No, sir.”
“Then what you waiting on? When I cook ‘em tonight you’re gonna want to eat ‘em.”
I looked at the quail hanging upside down in my hand, and hoped that maybe all the blood would rush to his brain and somehow kill the bird naturally. That was wishful thinking, and Dad was losing what little patience he possessed. I raised my arm, the quail light in my hand, and smashed it into the sawhorse. Its head flopped and its body jerked, its eyes were still sad, and I could tell it still saw me.
“Harder. You didn’t kill it.”
I raised my hand above my head again and held it there a moment before lowering it with what I hoped was as much force as Dad used to kill his. The quail’s skull thudded on the wood and its neck crimped.
“There you go,” Dad said. “Do the rest of them like that and then help me clean ‘em.”
As difficult as it was to bash that first quail, it became easier with each passing one. It only took one blow across the sawhorse to end the lives of the rest, and by the time I finished, I had developed my own technique and rhythm: I raised my hand above my head, held it there a second, then, just before they made contact with the sawhorse, snapped my wrist. It seemed to be all in the wrist.
After Dad dunked the quail in the hot water to loosen their feathers, cleaned them, and set them in the refrigerator to marinate, he made another one of his lone trips to the store. As always, I didn’t know what he went to buy; all I knew was that while he was gone I had time to play electronic football. Handheld video games were new at the time and a Godsend for an only child.
Dad, with his interest in electronic gizmos, was all for buying me educational games. I had “Speak-and-Write” and “Speak-and-Spell” games—the first ones Dad bought me—and he liked them because they advanced my levels at school. Though I would start sixth grade in the fall, I read, in part due to the games, at the eighth grade level.
Fun video games, Dad did not buy as readily, but the football game and a Space Invaders game were his two concessions. I earned them by making straight A’s throughout elementary school. With Dad, there was always a price to pay. We drew up a contract, which Mom witnessed at the beginning of my first grade year.
Mom was in the greenhouse and I was in my room, about to go for a two-point conversion so I could beat the machine, when Dad found me and told me to come outside. He hadn’t been gone but about an hour. It was not a good sign when Dad returned quickly from his solo shopping sprees.. Possibly a clerk pissed him off, was short with him or didn’t give him back the right amount of change. Any number of things could set Dad off, and I prepared for the worst.
“Put these on, boy.” Dad threw me a shoebox.
I opened the box and found not shoes but red and white eight-ounce boxing gloves. We were on the brick patio, in the shade of the massive oak tree that Dad grilled under, and the pigeons with their tail feathers fanned out colored the top of the tree.
“Try this too,” Dad said. He reached in the paper bag and pulled out a mouthpiece unlike any I had ever seen. I already had a mouthpiece that was clear plastic. But this new one wasn’t
clear, it was tan, almost flesh colored, and it was a double-decker. I didn’t know they made such things, but leave it to Dad to find a grandiose mouthpiece.
“How those gloves feel?”
“Ok,” I said, and hit them together in front of me like I saw boxers on TV do when their name was called before a match.