Father and Son (7 page)

His daddy tossed the rest of the biscuit to the puppy, who had come from under the porch. He sniffed it, picked it up delicately, then trotted back out of sight wagging his tail.

“It's just company. I didn't even know you was here till I got up. What time did you get in?”

Glen came back down the porch with a cigarette in his mouth and stopped to stretch near the steps.

“I don't know. Twelve-thirty or one.”

“You go see Jewel?”

“I went over there and fucked her.”

Virgil got still and didn't move. He'd almost given up on trying to get along with Glen but never had given up on blaming himself for not unloading the gun that morning. He didn't know how one man could keep so much hate inside him. Especially his own boy, especially for his own father. Puppy was right. Going down there didn't do him any good.

“I don't see how you can talk about her like that. Like she ain't nothin.”

Glen snorted. “What you gonna do about it, whip my ass? You got too old for that a long time ago.”

It was getting hot already. The bright spots of a thousand drops of dew gleamed in the grass and with the sun risen the spans of new webs stretched down from the clothesline and over the rusted fence and the vines of morning glory threaded through the wire.

“I just think she deserves a little more consideration than what you give her.”

“Consideration?”

“Yeah.”

Glen hooked a ladder-back chair with his toe and slid it close enough to sit down. He crossed his legs.

“Okay, old man. Lay your wisdom on me. What do you consider I ought to do about her?”

“She's in the mess she's in cause of you.”

“Ain't you a good one to talk about stuff like that? A man who never made a mistake. Seems like I talked to one of your mistakes yesterday.”

Virgil half turned and leaned his shoulder against a post, then looked into the eyes that studied him with such contempt. A face so like his own mocking him.

“When I was sick last year she come by here and cleaned this house. Fed me too.”

“I never asked her to do a thing for me. You neither.”

“She brought that boy over here too.”

“She better not bring him no more.” Glen flicked his ashes idly on the porch and slumped in the chair and stretched his legs out. “I know what she wants. Same thing ever woman wants. Get married. I've done tried that and it don't work. Does it? You tell me.”

Virgil stood up and hitched up his pants. He walked a couple of steps and caught hold of the door. “It's what most folks do. I didn't blame Melba when she left you. You the cause of that, too. Only good thing about it was you didn't have any kids. And I'm damn glad of it, too. Cause I don't know what the hell they'da eat for the last three years.”

Virgil stepped inside and went to the stove and got the coffeepot and took off the lid. He was shaking. There was some mold on the grounds
inside. He took out the strainer and knocked it against the garbage can and refilled the pot with water from a gallon wine jug that was sitting on the kitchen table. The coffee was in a blue can beside the sink and he fixed it all and clapped the lid over it and set it on the burner and lit it with a match.

“You ever feed this dog anything besides a biscuit?”

Virgil picked up a small bag of dog feed and pushed the screen door open. The puppy was walking around on the porch with his tongue hanging out. He poured some of the feed into a plate and the puppy started eating. They watched him. Occasionally he'd lift his head and crunch his breakfast loudly to let them know how it was going, look around, wag his tail.

“What's your plans?” Virgil said.

Glen flipped the cigarette butt out into the yard and stood up. He locked his fingers behind his head and stretched again.

“I don't know. I got to work on my car some more. I might see if I can get my job back.”

“If you go to town sometime I wish you'd pick me up a contact switch for my pump. I can straight-wire it to run but I don't want to burn it up.”

“I thought it run dry.”

“It ain't run dry. They's thirty foot of water in it.”

“That's what Puppy said.”

“Puppy don't know shit about a well.”

Glen opened the door and went into the kitchen with his father following him. The coffee was perking on the stove.

“Why don't you clean this place up?” Glen said. “Looks like a bunch of pigs lives here or somethin.”

He looked through the cabinets for two clean cups and it took a while. Virgil picked up a dish towel and grabbed the pot and poured. Glen
opened the refrigerator to see a hunk of dried cheese, some rancid bacon, a can of evaporated milk.

“I'll get around to it,” Virgil said. He spooned sugar from a bag into his cup and tossed the spoon into the sink. Glen poured milk the viscosity of motor oil into his cup and looked at it.

“Damn,” he said. “What do you do for food around here?”

“I got some chili and stuff in that cabinet. Puppy's good to bring stuff over. I can always walk down to the store.”

“Where's your cane at?”

“It don't hurt every day. Just some days.”

“Does it hurt today?”

“Naw.”

They sat down at the table and lit cigarettes. The Redbone peered through the ragged screen door and then flopped down against it. It sagged in and out with his breathing. Glen looked above the door. The two bent horseshoes were still hanging there on their rusty nails. He blew on his coffee and stared at nothing.

“How's it feel to be out?” his daddy said.

“What do you care?”

“How'd they treat you?”

“Keep you in a pen about like a cow. Can't sleep. Always somebody yellin some crazy shit at night.”

Virgil looked at the dog lying against the screen door. He seemed to sleep about twenty-three hours a day.

“How you like my dog?” he said.

“Looks like a shit-eater to me. Where'd you get that bag of bones?”

“He ain't no shit-eater,” Virgil said. “That's a pure-blood registered Redbone. He's Purple Ribbon bred, by God. That there's a good dog.”

Glen picked up his coffee and sipped on it and said, “Good for what? Run rabbits probly. He's pore as a damn snake.”

“He just needs a good wormin. I'm gonna worm him soon as I get me some worm medicine. Clean him out good he'd gain some weight.”

Glen shook his head and made a face at the puppy. The puppy stretched his legs out on the porch boards and yawned before he lowered his head.

“What do you want with a coon dog? You ain't no coon hunter.”

“He's just company,” Virgil said. He made a little motion with his cigarette. “Gets kinda quiet around here sometimes.”

“Did you drink up the money for Mama's headstone?”

Virgil raised his eyes. “Who said I drank it up?”

“Nobody. But I know you.”

Virgil turned away from him in the chair and watched the dog. This was no time to tell him about his mother. Not with him already starting in like this.

“You ain't even gonna say you sorry are you?”

Virgil didn't look up. He couldn't reason with him. Not when he got things in his head and kept them that way. It wasn't any use to try. He was worn down and he'd had a long rest but now his rest was over and he didn't know if he could take this all over again. Even Theron would have said enough by now. If he knew what he'd gone through. Did the dead see? Did they know? Did they take pity on what the living did? Did Emma?

He turned back around in the chair and got up.

“I'm gonna go up front and watch TV and lay down. I don't want to get into it with you. Whether you believe it or not I'm glad to see you.”

He put his cup in the sink. The puppy raised his head and looked at him, then sat up and pulled a hind foot to his head and started scratching his ear. Virgil glanced at him and walked out of the kitchen and up the hall. He thought he'd watch a little of the church music on television. He didn't go to church except for funerals but he liked to turn it on on
Sunday mornings and not be completely heathen. The television had a tall wooden cabinet and a round screen about a foot in diameter. He turned it on and sat down on his chair right in front of it and waited for it to warm up. Saturday afternoons he got the Slim Rhodes show out of Memphis with Dusty Rhodes and Speck Rhodes. He liked to sit there and have a drink and listen to that before he went down to the VFW.

He heard Glen come into the room behind him but he didn't pay any attention to him. The picture was starting to come on and it was rolling. He got up and opened a panel in front and adjusted a knob until the picture settled down. Some choir was singing. He sat down. Glen sat down on the couch with his coffee.

“Your mama used to like this show,” Virgil said.

Glen didn't say anything. Virgil wished he'd just stay in the kitchen if he was going to be hateful. The choir finished its number and the camera moved to the preacher. Virgil laced his fingers across his stomach and stretched his legs out.

“What you want to watch this crap for?” Glen said. “All that fucker wants is you to send him some money.”

“I don't send him no money. I just watch him preach.”

“Why don't you see if there's some cartoons on?”

“They don't show em on Sunday mornin.”

“They used to.”

“They don't no more.”

“Turn it over on another channel.”

“I want to watch this.”

“I want to see if the goddamn cartoons is on.”

Glen got up and moved toward the television and Virgil started to get up but then decided he'd just let him see for himself. Glen flipped the channels, bent over the set with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. More preaching. More preaching. Bugs Bunny.

Glen settled back on the couch.

“Told you.”

“This is my TV,” Virgil said.

“This is Mama's TV.”

“It's in my house.”

“This ain't even your house. Uncle Lavester give you this house.”

“It's mine, though.”

“Yeah, till he dies and Catherine decides to boot your ass out. Then where you gonna stay?”

Glen turned his attention back to the set and Virgil watched him watching it. Then he got up and walked back to the bedroom.

His shoes were sitting beside a chair and he sat down to put them on. Glen was laughing up front. He wished he'd just go on and leave, let him alone. He tied his shoes and got up to comb his hair. There wasn't much black left now, just a streak here and there. It didn't take long to get old and he wondered where all the time got to. Like the war. It seemed so far back but still so close. It didn't seem possible for that much time to have passed and left him like this. All the stuff you were going to do tomorrow turned into today's stuff. You could screw around all your life and it looked like he had. Glen was right. He didn't even own the linoleum he was standing on.

The closet was still full of Emma's clothes and he pawed through the hangers on his side, looking for a clean shirt. He thought he'd just get out of the house for a while, maybe walk over to the store. His leg felt okay today and he liked to get out whenever he could. Sitting around the house got old.

He found a shirt that wasn't too dirty and he put it on and buttoned it up, tucked the shirttail inside. His money was on the dresser and he stuck it in his pocket. When he went back to the living room, Glen was still sitting there, watching a commercial.

“I'm gonna walk down to the store,” Virgil said. “You gonna be here when I get back?”

“I don't know.” Glen didn't look up, just sprawled there on the couch in his bare feet.

“Well. I'll see you sometime.”

“Right.”

He went on out the door and the Redbone came trotting around the corner of the house to meet him.

“C'mere,” he told him. The puppy followed him over to a little tree by the end of the porch and Virgil bent to pick up a tattered dog collar that was wired to a piece of Emma's clothesline. He put the collar around the puppy's neck and snapped the clothesline into an eye hook he'd threaded into the tree and left him there. There was a pan of water with a few dead bugs floating on the surface and the shade of the porch was close enough for him to get in under it if he wanted to. He glanced up at the house. The television was still going and he could hear Glen laughing at the cartoons again. There wasn't any need in talking to him.

The heat seemed to turn up a few degrees as he walked the dirt road. Deep green ridges lay thickly wooded in the distance and cows stared at him from behind their fences as he went along. The cotton was tall everywhere in spite of the dry spell. Once in a while a vehicle passed him, folks dressed up and going to church in their pickups and rusty cars, rattling through the gravel and spreading a cloud of light brown dust that washed over him and went into his nose and settled over the ditches and roadside grasses. He was a man seen often walking at odd hours of the night or day and those passersby mostly ignored him as he did them.

On this fine day the pale clouds hung far and near in their slowly changing shapes, now flat and unbunched or colliding softly as the sun rose higher and gaining height, folding and refolding their masses to
recombine in new banks that climbed the sky and built and drifted. He walked beneath the sky and on top of the land, a tiny figure moving like an ant.

He was sitting on a stump at the corner of a property line where a big sycamore shaded his cigarette-rolling when a '54 Chevy sedan came easing around the curve just above an idle. The car had originally been blue and white but now it sported a red front fender and a green hood. Above the grill a chrome-winged nymph leaned swimming into the wind. Virgil licked the length of his paper tube and stuck one end into his mouth as the car jerked to a halt beside him and died.