“You’re not aggressive enough,” Dad said, taking a swig of his beer. “Not sure of yourself. And you’re soft.” He poked me in the belly. “Starting tomorrow I’m gonna hit you every time I walk by you. Every time I see you’re not paying attention. That’ll toughen you up.”
I looked at Dad, silhouetted in the dusky light. His nose had been broken when another man kicked him in the face as they climbed an obstacle course wall during basic training in the
Navy. As a result, it resembled a twisted eagle’s beak and showed the wear of a lifetime of head-to-head battles. Dad’s hands were thick, wide pallets, and his forearms rippled even when relaxed. He stood just under six feet and had a graying receding hairline.
A backhand caught my left eye.
“You said you’d start hitting me tomorrow.”
“You can’t always believe what people say. No one! Fuck them before they can fuck you. That’s the key to life, son: you’ve got to beat the other guy to the fuck.”
I watched the smoke spew from the grill as Dad checked the steaks. What could I say to him? What he said sounded pretty cut and dry. But was it true?
“Everything in the house is ready,” Mom said. Her brown hair was wet above the ears. She worked in the greenhouse all day, keeping Royal Nursery alive. We had two greenhouses, a forty-eight-footer and a seventy-two-footer, and they were both made of hard plastic and sat side-by-side. Only Dad had turned the smaller one into what he called “the birdhouse,” which sat next to the patio where we grilled and was roamed by chickens, quail, and pheasants.
I knew Mom didn’t see Dad backhand me. If she had, she would have said something to him. Mom was one of the rare people who spoke her mind to Dad. I didn’t say anything to her
about it because he hadn’t hit me that hard. And I didn’t want them to start fighting, because then Dad might hit Mom like he had when I was younger, and I’d rather he hit me.
Though she’d been on her feet all day potting, tending, and selling plants, Mom didn’t join us at the wrought-iron table. She was short, a little heavy (Dad said she was skinny till she had me), and twenty years younger than Dad. That made her closer to the same age as my classmates’ parents, while Dad was older than most of my classmates’ grandparents. I knew for sure he was older than Roger’s and James’s grandparents. Mom’s family was half Cajun and half Indian, but none of her relatives, all of whom lived back in the cypress marshes of southwestern Louisiana, agreed on the tribe. Still, Mom had the prominent cheekbones that everyone in her family said was a sign that they were part Indian and her skin had a faint terra cotta hue.
Mom stood by the table a moment longer before going back into the house. She was Dad’s fifth and sixth wife. Though they divorced when I was six, they only stopped living together for a couple of weeks. Mom filed for the divorce because of Dad’s temper and his violence. The judge gave her custody of me and we rented a trailer in the back of a trailer park—sorry, Mom always corrected me and made me call it a “mobile community”—on the other side of Pensacola. Dad showed up two weeks later and brought us to a house—not this one, but its predecessor. He said he’d sign the papers on the new house as soon as he got Mom’s OK, but she didn’t give it until the end of the month, when the rent came due on the trailer. All that time, Dad stayed in the trailer with us. Mom and Dad even shared the same bed, from his first night there until our last. If I had not been in the courtroom when the judge announced their divorce, I wouldn’t have believed that they ever had been.
“Best steak sauce in the world,” Dad said, thrusting a slice of steak into his mouth. His eyes glowed much in the way that they did when he was angry, but without the edge of craziness. We were at the dining table. Blood dripped from his steak and the meat inside was bright pink. All of our steaks were pink inside. Dad insisted we eat them cooked in the correct manner: his way. I had learned to love the taste of blood mixed with garlic and spice.
Our dining room table was a long dark brown rectangle with extensions at each end. We never used the extensions, because that would make the table twelve feet and it was already six and took up most of the room. A narrow path ran from the kitchen past the head of the table, where Dad always sat, to the back hallway that split in two. To the left was Mom and Dad’s room, straight ahead was the bathroom, and to the right was my room: a small square box the same size as Mom and Dad’s room.
The dining room table was where we spent a lot of time, and from it we looked out through two barred windows onto the wooden deck where the hot-tub was submerged; beyond the deck was the Olympic-size swimming pool. It was a Buster Crabbe model. Dad wanted it specifically because he respected Mr. Crabbe as a swimmer and one fine Tarzan. Supposedly if you gave Mr. Crabbe five thousand dollars, he would come out and autograph your pool. I never understood where he was going to sign his name on a pool.
Dad took pride in the pool because he had been captain of the swim team at his military high school and while at Texas A&M. He was going to try out for the Olympics but was drafted
into the Navy and sent to the South Pacific for three years. Because of his tour of duty, Dad would not buy anything Japanese: electronics, automobiles, cameras—nothing.
After dinner that night, Dad showed us his newest purchase: A big screen TV that measured 52-inches and an accompanying VCR. At the time, 1981, both were fairly new to the market, at least that’s what the delivery man told Dad. We were the first ones on Tonawanda Drive to have one, or at least I believed so because Donnie and the other kids at school never talked about watching tapes on TV.
The 52-inch TV was encased in a wooden shelf, had a roll-away cover for the screen, and a mirror on the bottom part that had to be pulled out in order to project the picture onto the big screen. When closed, the TV resembled a huge free-standing closet in our living room. All through dinner Dad had a little smirk on his face as he devoured his steak and boiled potato covered with butter and sour cream. Mom was too tired to notice his smirk. She sat across from me, and I got a good look at her: the gray that shaded her eyes and the slight wrinkles making their way from her cheeks to her mouth. Yet Mom still did not look her age. Thirty-five was as high as most men guessed when they shopped for plants, to make up to their wives was what Mom would say after they left, and flirted with her in the process. None ever thought she was actually forty-four, and all believed her to be Dad’s daughter, not his wife. But Mom always set them straight—at least about her marital status.
When the Curtis Mathes—definitely not a Japanese name—delivery men arrived as we finished dinner, I understood what Dad’s smirk was about. Dad often made lone buys and had
them delivered unannounced. Mom cleaned the dishes, put up the extra salad—there were never any leftover steaks—and stayed in the kitchen while Dad was shown all the special functions of
his new toys. Dads looked happy like a little boy, smiling and flush in the face. As happy as Dad was, I could tell Mom was just as angry. She didn’t say anything in front of the delivery men, but I braced myself for what was to come.
“You just had to piss away some more money,” Mom said. “We’ve got a TV in our bedroom, and Wesley’s got one in his room. Why did we need this monstrosity?”