All of this is rushing in Bob again, filling his head with words, but he never thinks it’s somebody else’s voice.
“It’s me. It’s just me in here.”
He says this aloud.
He’s not crazy. He knows to look around right away to see if anybody heard him and nobody has. Bob’s doing fine, with only cars whisking past, no people, no one to hear. He even has the presence of mind to walk against the traffic in the stretches without sidewalks. He’s not crazy. He can even circle back to his previous thought, the one before the little digression that was worth mouthing.
“I could always find my way in the woods,” he says. “You were okay with me there. Not that you’d let on. But you didn’t fool me. I knew you were okay with me there.”
This he addresses to his father. But Bob’s not crazy. Bob doesn’t think the old man is there with him on Apalachee Parkway to hear. The old man is just a memory to him, maybe hiding out in Charleston and yellowing from his liver or maybe spotlighted this very night in front of some funeral home, but he’s nowhere nearby to hear. Nevertheless, because he’s not crazy, Bob shuts his trap and does his talking in his head where you always are, but when I’m strong — and I’m strong tonight, I know I am, in spite of the situation — I can make you behave, in my head I can take us into the woods, just you and me, and I can make it be the summer of ‘71, a certain day in August and I’ve gone and turned twelve and that was when I learned about the thing you didn’t want me to know. That I was okay by you. Though it was only with the Mossberg.22 in the crook of my arm, that I was okay with the Mossberg going quick to my shoulder and I kill some animal or other that you didn’t even see and it makes you drop into a shooting crouch and lay out some covering fire and then you stop and you look me wild in the eyes and inside you’re going Who the fuck are you? and then you focus and you answer your own question in your head, you don’t want me to see it but I do, I listen into your head and you go, You’re Bobby, you’re my son and you can shoot, by God, I been gone away a big chunk of your life to shoot in some big woods — in some fucking jungles in Vietnam — and I come back and by damn you can use a rifle just as good as any of the boys I been with then you look where I shot and you throw a camouflage tarp over the crack that just opened and shut in your head, and you jump up, but you’re not talking, not saying a word, of course not, you’re not looking at me but I know what’s just passed between us, no matter how you try to camouflage it, I know this thing about the two of us.
“Goddamn you, I know it,” Bob says.
I know it here in the woods even though I will doubt it when we get back home tonight, you will have your way with my head when you’ve got us in our single-wide and you’re in your La-Z-Boy and you’ve got your bottle, and your silence is just your silence, and I better stay out of arm’s reach while you’re sitting there dealing with whatever it is you came home with a couple of years ago. Your situation.
Like Bob has a situation. Like now. Like this long, cold walk he’s on tonight, trying the one thing he knows to try, concerning a place to sleep. A church building along the parkway, maybe thirty minutes by foot east of Walmart, an hour and a half from New Leaf, and longer still from the Hardluckers’ center of town, and as he pushes on east, Bob can’t stay in the woods in his head with his father for all that time, in fact his mind has already grabbed him up and galloped into that trailer park along the Kanawha, out past the West Virginia State campus, out where he’s not okay with his father at all, and even if Bob summons up enough energy to at least drive his mind forward to when he’s older, to when he’s near as tall and rangy as his dad and he can easily fend off the old man when he wants to reach out and give his son a slap — it wasn’t about that really, those slaps were all open-handed, always, Bob knew all along there were worse fathers by far — even when Bob skips forward, his mind only roars louder, because his real fear had to do with whatever it was inside his father that only the old man could see, the things he never talked about. Bob was afraid those things were inside himself already, no matter if his father found them in a jungle halfway around the world, because the two of them were the same, father and son, they were stretched tall in body in the same way, they had the same hands and eyes, and they were the same by that shared thing in the woods, when they were okay together. And the okayness only made everything worse because that was never spoken about either, just like the Vietnam jungle stuff. The good things between them and the bad things that could come to men like the two of them were all one in the same unspeakable place. And so Bob tries to just walk. He just strides hard and lets the pain of the pavement pound through his joints and back and temples and gums and he focuses on what’s ahead.
A pastor out here at Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel leaves the outside door to the groundskeeper’s storage room unlocked on cold nights. They have a food pantry, but this far out of town they do hard-luck families mostly, not the individually lost. Out here, sheltered floor space next to a John Deere is a private little bit of charity by the good pastor that often goes unused, its being attractive only to a Hardlucker without a car. Which makes it a pretty good bet to be available to anyone ready to walk six or seven miles. Especially since the space is needed most when it’s the most daunting to walk, in the cold or the rain.
Two nights ago it was cold and Bob had the place to himself. It was a hard walk. Tonight it’s cold again, but at the moment, with some things talked over, he feels pretty good. Pretty damn good. He’s got today’s newspaper folded in his pocket, a full copy abandoned on a table, waiting for him as he finished his coffee tonight. There’s a light in the storage room to read by. He’s not afraid to read the news. The meal and the coffee are sitting well in him, so his thoughts turn to the man who gave them to him, the man with the same name as his, the rangy older man with the John Wayne jaw: You said it first, my name, and I thought for a second you somehow already knew I’m Bob and it turns out you’re Bob, and my father is Calvin, my father isn’t Bob, if you were my father I’d be Junior and I don’t know what I’d think about that, I think I wouldn’t like it, not at all, my father is Calvin, Cal, my mother is Marie, and what did you mean, Bob, about my having responsibilities in Charleston? Did you know me there? You another of my old man’s cronies are you? What do you want me to do about it?
“I never met you before in my life,” Bob says.
He stops walking.
He’s not feeling so good now.
Things are suddenly getting a little out of hand.
He realizes that.
This was a good man he met. Bob the stranger.
He needs to stop his mind.
He needs to sleep.
The church isn’t much farther.
He walks on and the streetlights are gone, they’ve been gone for a while and the dark is even darker but Bob hasn’t noticed till now. Still, it’s all right, he’s reconciled to the dark for this night, and up ahead now is an upspray of light as if rising from the earth, beaconing a message on another marquee, before the Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel Church: GOD ANSWERS KNEE-MAIL
Somehow this calms Bob for a time. Hardly from the sentiment. But he’s not only not crazy, he’s pretty smart. His mother was smart. Cal was too, in a shrewd sort of way. When Bob’s mind is flailing with deep issues, to hear deep issues turned into banality is a kind of mental speed bump for him. He slows down.