Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [26]
Old fears arose, tireless as waves. Was this another ploy to disenfranchise him? Or was Joe trying to avoid him? Was Yvette exacting punishment for yet another perceived failure in parenting?
Not that Red was a terrific father even by his own standards. He ached for Joe, yearned to spend more time with him, yet often felt awkward, shy, almost afraid around the boy. At fifteen, Joe was going through such rapid physical and emotional changes, Red worried he’d embarrass or appall his son, miscalculating him from one visit to the next. And then there was the steady bass beat of dread that Red would unconsciously emulate his own intemperate, well-meaning father, who, through no effort or guile, had managed to harm everyone in his path.
Red shared with his father the same name, John Robert Ray, which neither ever used. John Senior went by “Jack.” He was a tall, lean man who had both the gift of gab and “the failing.” He would gauge the needs of others with uncanny accuracy and then promise to fulfill them—which, of course, he never did. In a few short years of marriage, he gambled away the farmhouse in Azusa and a modest sum of money his wife had inherited from her father. Red distantly remembered a series of shabby motel rooms made huge, almost infinite with waiting, always waiting for his father to return from the bars.
His parents separated when Red was five, and his mother took a teaching job in Glendale. Red was left behind, to be shuttled among his aunts and grandmother. He saw his father with increasing infrequency. At one point, Jack was enlisted to move Red from his aunt Maude’s house in Redlands to his grandma Iris’s house in Pomona.
“We’ll make a day of it,” Jack told Red over the phone. “Get you moved, then pay a visit to the water gardens. Sound good to you, son?”
Red, seven years old, had no idea what water gardens were; he envisioned a landscape where running water was piped and channeled to flow in the shapes of trees and flowers, a park whose foliage was transparent, boisterous, ever in motion. And yes, that sounded very good to him.
Red waited for his dad in the front yard with two suitcases and Smoky, an adolescent barn cat he’d acquired from the ranch next door. From the way Jack Ray slammed on the brakes and spun his tires in the gravel drive, Red sensed that his father was in a terrible hurry and that he, Red, was to blame. Jack Ray had a craggy face and sandy hair. Aunt Maude called him “a tall drink of water” to Red and “a long list of troubles” to everyone else. Jack grabbed Red’s suitcases and loaded them into the trunk of his ’42 DeSoto coupe. “Put the cat down and get in, son,” he said.
Red would not put Smoky down. Smoky was his cat. He rolled Smoky up inside his sweater, ran to the edge of the property, and refused to get into the car until Aunt Maude appeared on the porch and told Jack that it was okay, Iris was expecting Red to bring the cat.
Jack reached an arm impatiently toward Red. “Give him here. I’ll put him in the car.”
Reluctantly, Red handed Smoky to his father. Jack tossed the cat into the trunk and slammed it shut.
At dazzling speed, they drove west on Foothill Boulevard, Route 66, through stretches of scrub desert alternating with vineyards and orchards. The front seat was black leather, warm and slippery. Red clung to the armrest and saw mostly sky over the dashboard. They’d gone only a few miles when Smoky started to yowl, a desperate, guttural noise of impossible length and resonance. Red’s father said nothing. The yowling persisted, in waves, each louder and more protracted than the last. Red glanced around and saw that, somehow, Smoky had crawled up between the roof and the sand-colored headliner, and was slowly coming their way. Red could make out four convex points—Smoky’s paws—as he advanced, step by step. Occasionally, a translucent claw broke through the headliner’s weave. With a series of ripping sounds, the liner pulled free from where it was glued to the