Ham On Rye - Charles Bukowski [23]
“YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH!” he screamed.
I saw him run off the back porch and into the garage. He came out with a two-by-four about a foot long. From the corner of my eye I saw him throw it. I saw it coming but made no attempt to avoid it. It hit me on the back of my right leg. The pain was terrible. The leg knotted up and I had to force myself to walk. I kept pushing the mower, trying not to limp. When I swung around to cut another section of the lawn the two-by-four was in the way. I picked it up, moved it aside and kept mowing. The pain was getting worse. Then my father was standing beside me.
“STOP!”
I stopped.
“I want you to go back and mow the lawn over again where you didn’t catch the grass in the catcher! Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
My father walked back into the house. I saw him and my mother standing on the back porch watching me.
The end of the job was to sweep up all the grass that had fallen on the sidewalk, and then wash the sidewalk down. I was finally finished except for sprinkling each section of the lawn in the back yard for fifteen minutes. I dragged the hose back to set up the sprinkler when my father stepped out of the house.
“Before you start sprinkling I want to check this lawn for hairs.”
My father walked to the center of the lawn, got down on his hands and knees and placed the side of his head low against the lawn looking for any blade of grass that might be sticking up. He kept looking, twisting his neck, peering around. I waited.
“AH HAH!”
He leaped up and ran toward the house.
“MAMA! MAMA!”
He ran into the house.
“What is it?”
“I found a hair!”
“You did?”
“Come, I’ll show you!”
He came out of the house quickly with my mother following.
“Here! Here! I’ll show you!”
He got down on his hands and knees.
“I can see it! I can see two of them!”
My mother got down with him. I wondered if they were crazy.
“See them?” he asked her. “Two hairs. See them?”
“Yes, Daddy, I see them…”
They both got up. My mother walked into the house. My father looked at me.
“Inside…”
I walked to the porch and inside the house. My father followed me.
“Into the bathroom.”
My father closed the door.
“Take your pants down.”
I heard him get down the razor strop. My right leg still ached. It didn’t help, having felt the strop many times before. The whole world was out there indifferent to it all, but that didn’t help. Millions of people were out there, dogs and cats and gophers, buildings, streets, but it didn’t matter. There was only father and the razor strop and the bathroom and me. He used that strop to sharpen his razor, and early in the mornings I used to hate him with his face white with lather, standing before the mirror shaving himself. Then the first blow of the strop hit me. The sound of the strop was flat and loud, the sound itself was almost as bad as the pain. The strop landed again. It was as if my father was a machine, swinging that strop. There was the feeling of being in a tomb. The strop landed again and I thought, that is surely the last one. But it wasn’t. It landed again. I didn’t hate him. He was just unbelievable, I just wanted to get away from him. I couldn’t cry. I was too sick to cry, too confused. The strop landed once again. Then he stopped. I stood and waited. I heard him hanging up the strop.
“Next time,” he said, “I don’t want to find any hairs.”
I heard him walk out of the bathroom. He closed the bathroom door. The walls were beautiful, the bathtub was beautiful, the wash basin and the shower curtain were beautiful, and even the toilet was beautiful. My father was gone.
17
Of all the guys left in the neighborhood, Frank was the nicest. We got to be friends, we got to going around together, we didn’t need the other guys much. They had more or less kicked Frank out of the group, anyway, so he became friends with me. He wasn’t like David, who had walked home from school with me. Frank had a lot more going for him than David had. I even joined the Catholic church because Frank went there. My parents liked me going to church.