I started to speak almost immediately, but my tongue felt strangely heavy and I couldn’t get my thoughts arranged in any coherent order. I took another gulp of water and ran my damp hands over my face. “Why does it have to be like this? Why? You show up out of the blue and ask me to take this trip with you. So why do you feel the need to ride me like this all night? Why can’t you treat me like a father ought to treat his son?”
The deep red embers pulsated dimly at the end of his cigar. He said, “I could ask you the same thing.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Ask me the same thing?”
“You know what I mean. You sit here with my food and drink inside you, and you have the gall to ask me why I don’t treat you better. But when have you ever treated me like a son ought to treat his father? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“Jesus Christ, Dad. What did I do? What did I ever do that was so terrible?”
“Don’t act like you don’t remember. Spitting in my face. After all the effort I put in.”
“I never spit in your face, Dad. I don’t even know what you’re saying anymore.”
“Right. It must be some other son I’m thinking of, then. Some other son who takes the present his father gets him for his birthday and throws it away like it’s nothing but garbage.”
“What present? What birthday?”
Dad lowered his head and hacked violently into his fist. Afterwards he stared at me with eyes full of vindictive rage, as if I had been the one gagging him instead of the cigar smoke. “You really don’t remember. The bicycle meant so little to you.”
“Bicycle?”
“Yes, goddamn it, a bicycle! A brand new fire engine red bicycle that any eight-year-old boy in the country would have been proud to call his own. Any boy except you, of course. Oh, you pretended to be interested in it. You even took it around the block and made a big show of how much you liked it. But the next time I came into town, it was gone. You had traded it to a Mexican boy down the street. Swapped it like it was a rusty old dime-store piece of crap, instead of an expensive import that took a lot of research and legwork to find. I tell you, I’ve been betrayed many times in the past, and it stung like hell when it happened, but I never felt as double-crossed as I did the day I came home from the road and found that bicycle gone. It was like even then, at age eight, you were trying to say that you didn’t care for me or what I had to offer. It was like you were already laughing at me and you could barely tie your shoelaces.”
Dad sloped down low over the table. He had started to chew compulsively on the end of the cigar, staining his teeth with its earthy brown juice. I began to worry that I was in just as bad a shape as him, and that the second wind I was feeling was nothing more than the vodka’s way of covering its tracks for the damage it had already done.
I said, “I’m sorry, Dad. I don’t remember any of that. Why did I give my present away?”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing for ten years. It was a beautiful bicycle. It was worth so much more than the monster you replaced it with.”
“Did you say monster?”
Without any warning, Dad slammed his fist against the table so hard that our drink glasses rattled. The nearest other diners were all the way on the other side of the room, and still they looked over at us with nervous alarm. Dad took a breath and said, “A fucking iguana. That’s what you accepted in exchange for your birthday present. A dirty, disgusting lizard with jagged claws and lumps on its neck like something out of a medical journal. You used to keep him in a glass box with a heat lamp and feed him old cabbage so the whole house stank of rot. Damn thing would pull food into its mouth on the tip of its tongue like a frog. I watched it being fed one time, just once, and nearly threw up from the sight of it. But to you the little bastard was worth more than my gift ever was. It was a good trade in your eyes. That’s how little value you placed in what I did for you. That’s how little you thought of me.”
I sat there stunned, staring into my father’s otherworldly eyes and feeling the bitterness that permeated every aspect of his being. An iguana. I had owned a pet iguana as a child. Of course I remembered it all so vividly now, the proud, menacing curve of the creature’s back, its slow crawl across the kitchen floor to the sunny spot under the windowsill. But I hadn’t thought about it for years until Dad brought it up. I couldn’t even remember the name I had given it. Still, it was more than I remembered about the bike. I could have sworn Mom had bought the iguana for me, even though affection for any type of animal, especially reptiles, was completely out of character for her. But no. I had made a deal for the iguana, and in doing so had wounded Dad enough to make him resent me secretly for nearly a decade. What could I even say to make it up to him? The whole episode was a blank for me, a piece of original sin of which I never realized I was guilty. I didn’t remember trading the bicycle to a Mexican boy when I was eight. I didn’t even remember the Mexican boy.
“Dad. I’m sorry I upset you. I’m sorry I didn’t appreciate the bike. I know raising a child is never easy. But come on. I was eight years old. You can’t seriously hold it against me. It was just me being a dumb kid. Nothing more.”
I really should have known better than to try being sincere with him, at least when it came to something like this. It would have been better if I had lied and said I wanted to hurt him, if I had confirmed his suspicion that the eight-year-old me had been full of contempt, that I had been angry at him for some reason or another, that the lizard was my own cheap way of getting back at him, and then apologized and promised never to hurt him again. He could understand pettiness, and he could understand revenge, and maybe he could have forgiven both. But he would never accept that such a slight against him, even one committed by a grade-schooler, could have been perpetrated thoughtlessly, without intent. It would have meant going against his whole perception of the world and his place in it. If on some cloudy day he had suddenly found himself caught in a downpour, it would have been more comforting to believe the skies held some secret grudge against him than to accept that they were totally indifferent.
He shook his head and said, “Spite. That’s what this is. You were a spiteful child then, and now you’ve grown up to be a spiteful young man. The sort of pathetic person who blames his father for the hair in his soup.” He took his sweaty palm off the tablecloth and held it in front of his face. The tips of his thumb and index finger were so close they were almost touching. “I came this close to poisoning your damn lizard. Would have been so easy, too. Just a couple squirts of pesticide in the cabbage and I’d have been rid of that nauseating thing once and for all. Your mother was all that stopped me. Said she’d lock me out of the house if I tried it.”
I looked at him for a long second and smiled. I said, “It’s funny. Even now, after everything you’ve said, it still doesn’t change the way I feel. I mean, I can think all sorts of nasty things about you, even more so now that we’ve had this time together, but the core feelings stay the same. I love you, Dad. I always have.”
He stared at me for so long after that that a trickle of brown drool began to seep through his lips and soak into his beard. He put the cigar out in his water glass and wiped his face with a napkin. I didn’t see him cry that night, nor did he ever give me the impression that he was on the verge of breaking down. But just seeing him flummoxed as he was, taken aback by his spiteful son’s words of love, was enough to give me chills. There were some things that seemed too unnatural for me to comprehend at that age; God never dies, the sun doesn’t set in the east, and Dad doesn’t get choked up. That’s the way of sheltered adolescence. All great truths go together, or they were never really true to begin with.