Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [27]
When they arrived at Grandma Iris’s house, Jack drove up on the lawn. He leapt out, went to the trunk, and threw Red’s suitcases onto the grass.
“Get out of the car,” he said to Red and took out his pocket knife, pried open the blade. Red scrambled away and watched as Jack plunged the knife into the headliner, cut a long gash, reached in, pulled Smoky out by the leg and hurled him, a black fright wig, out into the yard. The cat sprang to his toes, unhurt, and dashed into nearby orange groves. Without another word, Jack climbed in his car and drove off, his face curtained by the flap of torn headliner.
Red never saw his father alone after that. Subsequent meetings were stiff, virtually silent half-hours in the presence of a grandmother or aunt. When his mother married Giles Southerly and brought Red to live with them, it was easier for everyone if Jack stayed away.
Eight years ago, a private investigator sobered up at Round Rock and Red let the man work off his bill in trade. Red asked him to locate his father, an assignment both assumed would result in the address of a cemetery. Within a week, however, Jack was found traversing the country in a mid-size motor home with a Choctaw woman named Winnie. Red sent a telegram to a Kansas KOA campground, and ten days later Jack and Winnie rolled into Round Rock. Almost forty years had passed since Red had seen his father. Jack was now a fragile stick of a man, face wattled in loose skin, head crowned by a wavering white flame of hair. Jack and Winnie parked the motor home next to Red’s bungalow and drank gin around the clock until Red had to ask them to leave. Two years later, Red was summoned to Monrovia to identify his father’s body and collect his possessions: one green woolen overcoat, one pair of black steel-shank boots, sixteen dollars and change.
Since his father’s death, Red had had a recurring dream. There was no story or sequence of events, merely landscapes of water: hills and mountains of water, and, of course, gardens, with sparkling clear dahlias, surging hedgerows, weeping willows.
Red smoked and reread Yvette’s note until he knew for certain no rebuke or threat simmered between the words. He laughed a little at the strength of his own inexhaustible fears. The boy just wanted to run track, for Christ’s sake, to be on a team with other boys. Red could go up there to see him. Cheer him from the sidelines. There was still hope, after all: it was just possible that he and Joe would not end up lost to each other, two heartbroken strangers.
LEWIS showed up in Red’s office the following afternoon.
“Yes?” Red looked up from the computer.
“I finished that writing.”
Red looked confused, so Lewis held up a sheaf of pale-green paper covered with blotchy ballpoint scrawl. “My drinking history,” he said.
Red’s face cleared. “That was fast! What’d you do? Stay up all night?”
Lewis shrugged—three a.m. was all—and started to hand the pages to Red.
Red crossed his arms. “Read it to me.”
“Oh, that’s okay. You can read it.”
“I’d rather hear it, if you don’t mind.”
“Really? Right now?”
“Is there something else you need to do?”
“No. But you …” Lewis couldn’t imagine that Red didn’t have other, more pressing items on his agenda.
“I’m here. I’m ready. I’m listening.”
Lewis sat in the green armchair closest to the desk. “All of it?” he asked.
“All of it.”
Lewis straightened the pages and began to read.
FAMILY DRINKING PATTERNS
The one grandmother I knew, my mother’s mother, went to a bar every afternoon. The bar, on Loden Street, was called Lloyds of Loden, which made my parents laugh and laugh—I didn’t understand why for years. When this same grandmother took us trick or treating, she wore a big heavy serape and a wide brimmed hat and carried a heavy coffee mug. At each door, she held out the mug and boomed,