She watched me get dressed, still holding on to the money like someone was going to try to steal it away from her. She said, “You can’t just leave me wondering like this. Why do you want to know about me? What’s it to you?”
I was already fumbling with getting my shirt buttoned, and having her ask such questions, when all I wanted was to never hear her voice again, got me aggravated to the point of maliciousness. If such words existed, and if I could have found them, I would have spoken the incantation to wipe her forever from my memory, as well as from the living world itself. I said, “That’s not how it works. We had an agreement. You got your money. If you wanted more, you should have negotiated better when you had the chance.”
I blacked out briefly on the staircase, and when I came to I was in the middle of the front parlor with Dad standing between me and the door, a drunken smile stretched across his face. He seized me by the shoulders and shook me, looking around at the other patrons who weren’t paying the slightest attention to the scene we were making. I couldn’t look into his eyes, but I’m sure they were full of pride. He said, “There’s the man. How do you feel?”
My heart was beating like I had just gone up fifty staircases instead of coming down one. I said, “Good. I feel good.”
“Told you there wasn’t anything to it. Most natural thing in the world.”
“I think I’d like to leave now.”
“In a little while. I ran into some associates from Bakersfield over at the bar. Come have a drink and give us some details.”
“I can’t take any more drinking tonight.”
“It won’t kill you. Besides, you never forget your first drink after your first time.”
“I said I’d like to leave!”
Dad let go of my shoulders and backed away slowly. I think I startled the whole room with my outburst. The girls on the sofas were all looking around idly, as if they had never seen the wallpaper before, while the men at the bar, Dad’s so-called associates, were watching us with their eyebrows raised in cautious bemusement. Dad shook his head.
He said, “All right, fine. Let’s go.”
I was two steps ahead of him all the way to the door; four steps by the time we reached the Charger. Dad hoisted himself into the cabin and set us cruising back down the driveway. Neither of us bothered with a seatbelt. Glancing through the side mirror at the lighted windows of the whorehouse, the full delayed reaction of everything I had just discovered, the truths and lies and nightmarish implications, came and settled over me like the early symptoms of some debilitating nervous condition. Once as a child I had sprained my ankle playing soccer and felt no pain until hours later when I crawled into bed. That’s what it was like. My face and arms went numb, my throat contracted, electric needles danced across my kidneys and spine. I wasn’t even sure if I was still drunk. And still the thing that scared me most was the fact that Dad hadn’t said a word since we left the establishment.
I could see him on the edge of my periphery, darkness shrouded in darkness, enormous arms gripping the steering wheel, eyes unwavering even as his heart was pumping more whiskey than blood. The farther we drove along that deserted stretch of valley road, the more aware I became of the immense and terrible presence of his body, and of all the terrible acts it was capable of perpetrating, directly and indirectly.
I said, “Dad. It’s been a long day. You mind if I grab a quick nap till we get to the hotel?”
He looked away from the road. I was too out of it to realize what an ominous sign that was, or to perceive the narrow tightrope I was walking. “As a matter of fact, I do mind. You don’t go to sleep when someone else is driving. It’s bad manners.”
“Sorry. I didn’t think of that.”
“Speaking of bad manners, you never thanked me for introducing you to Livia. Seems like the sort of thing you should make a point to do, to show your appreciation. You should do it now, in fact. Right now.”
I could feel the tension building the longer Dad waited for me to thank him. It was easy to lie. I was just beginning to realize that. But this time I chose against self-preservation. I said, “Introducing us. So that’s how you see it.”
Dad started to swerve into the opposing lane. He jerked the wheel abruptly to get us back between the lines. “I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and trust you’re too drunk to know what you’re saying. But whether tonight or tomorrow, come hell or high water, you are going to thank me for all I’ve done for you tonight. That’s not an option.”
“Have fun waiting for it, then.”
“I’m not joking around. You keep running your mouth and I’ll run us off the road.”
“Go ahead and do it. See if I care.” I stared out the window and waited for the road to disappear out from under us. Of course he would never really do anything so dramatic. Not if it meant putting his own well-being at risk. One day in his company and I already felt like I understood what was going on in his head, even if what lay in his heart remained a fearful mystery to me. I said, “Just tell me one thing. Why her? Of all the girls you could have picked out, why that one?”
I waited for an answer as the Charger continued to barrel ahead through the omnipresent darkness. At long last he said, “I wanted you to enjoy yourself. She’s a tight piece of ass with plenty of meat on her. I figured she’d be able to show you a good time. If not, you should’ve said something while we were there, instead of making a scene.”
I sat up in the seat. “How do you know? That she’s a tight piece of ass?”
“How do you think?”
“Pull over.”
“Christ, you’re uptight. What, you think you’re the first boy ever became milk brothers with his old man?”
“Pull over.”
“If you didn’t have fun with the girl, then it’s your fault, not mine. It’s about time you grow up and stop blaming everyone else for your own problems.”
“Pull over! Now!”
Dad took his foot off the gas and eased us over to a strip of ground that sloped down drastically as soon as the asphalt ended. The Charger settled to a stop at an extreme slant, and when I opened the door it was like falling straight down into the upturned soil that bordered whatever kinds of trees were assembled like legionaries in front of me. My feet sank into the earth, and I only managed a few steps before curling over. It was so dark I couldn’t see the vomit splattering even as my head hung just a few paltry feet off the ground. A cigar flared in the corner of eye. I looked up to see Dad standing on top of me, puffing away in the darkness.
He said, “I told you to drink responsibly. Maybe next time you’ll listen.”
I don’t remember how I managed to make it to town. I had no money, no directions, and the supermarket parking lot where I awoke was six miles to the north on the edge of a small farming town whose name I only learned because I had to (Western Union and Mom both came through for me in a pinch, though the latter had plenty of I-told-you-so’s to impart over the phone). If my subconscious really had tried to repress that night, then I wish it would have repressed what happened next, instead of preserving it in such perfect, step-by-step detail. I threw a punch, my first and only. I saw the look on Dad’s face as he ducked out of the way, watched the cigar fall from his lips, and felt his massive fist collide with my jaw. And even as I lay sinking into the warm soft ground, and felt his size 14 oxford slamming between my ribs, I couldn’t shake the wonderful-awful sensation that I was finally getting exactly what I had been looking for, that the truth had finally been revealed to me, and that not even Death, lurking among the trees, could raise me from my earthly, earthy abyss. I was a new kind of Adam, and I had created myself.