Hit Man - Lawrence Block [25]
“You were impotent.”
“You know, you’re very sharp. You never miss a trick.”
“You blame me for your impotence,” Breen said.
“Do I? I don’t know about that. I’m not sure I even blame myself. To tell you the truth, I was more amused than devastated by the experience. And she wasn’t upset, perhaps out of relief that I wasn’t upset. But just so nothing like this ever happens again, I’ve decided I’m changing my name to Dick Hardin.”
“What was your father’s name?”
“My father,” Keller said. “Jesus, what a question. Where did that come from?”
Breen didn’t say anything.
Neither, for several minutes, did Keller. Then, eyes closed, he said, “I never knew my father. He was a soldier. He was killed in action before I was born. Or he was shipped overseas before I was born and killed when I was a few months old. Or possibly he was home when I was born, or came home on leave when I was very small, and he held me on his knee and told me he was proud of me.”
“You have such a memory?”
“I have no memory,” Keller said. “The only memory I have is of my mother telling me about him, and that’s the source of the confusion, because she told me different things at different times. Either he was killed before I was born or shortly after, and either he died without seeing me or he saw me one time and sat me on his knee. She was a good woman but she was vague about a lot of things. The one thing she was completely clear on, he was a soldier. And he got killed over there.”
“And his name—”
Was Keller, he thought. “Same as mine,” he said. “But forget the name, this is more important than the name. Listen to this. She had a picture of him, a head-and-shoulders shot, this good-looking young soldier in a uniform and wearing a cap, the kind that folds flat when you take it off. The picture was in a gold frame on her dresser when I was a little kid, and she would tell me how that was my father.
“And then one day the picture wasn’t there anymore. ‘It’s gone,’ she said. And that was all she would say on the subject. I was older then, I must have been seven or eight years old.
“Couple of years later I got a dog. I named him Soldier, I called him that after my father. Years after that two things occurred to me. One, Soldier’s a funny thing to call a dog. Two, whoever heard of naming a dog after your father? But at the time it didn’t seem the least bit unusual to me.”
“What happened to the dog?”
“He became impotent. Shut up, will you? What I’m getting to’s a lot more important than the dog. When I was fourteen, fifteen years old, I used to work afternoons after school helping out this guy who did odd jobs in the neighborhood. Cleaning out basements and attics, hauling trash, that sort of thing. One time this notions store went out of business, the owner must have died, and we were cleaning out the basement for the new tenant. Boxes of junk all over the place, and we had to go through everything, because part of how this guy made his money was selling off the stuff he got paid to haul. But you couldn’t go through all this crap too thoroughly or you were wasting time.
“I was checking out this one box, and what do I pull out but a framed picture of my father. The very same picture that sat on my mother’s dresser, him in his uniform and his military cap, the picture that disappeared, it’s even in the same frame, and what’s it doing here?”
Not a word from Breen.
“I can still remember how I felt. Like stunned, like Twilight Zone time. Then I reach back in the box and pull out the first thing I touch, and it’s the same picture in the same frame.
“The whole box is framed pictures. About half of them are the soldier and the others are a fresh-faced blonde with her hair in a page boy and a big smile on her face. What it was, it was a box of frames. They used to package inexpensive frames that way, with a photo in it for display. For all I know they still do. So what my mother must have done, she must have bought a frame in a five-and-dime and told me it was my father. Then when