Six Bad Things_ A Novel - Charlie Huston [44]
After that there wasn’t much to do except decide what everyone wanted for dinner.
NOW DAD and me come in and sit down at the kitchen table with Mom. She’s sipping a glass of red wine and Dad is drinking some brandy he got from a bottle that was buried at the back of one of the cupboards over the sink. He pours himself another and looks at me.
—Sure you don’t want one?
—No. I had a drinking thing there, Dad. In New York. I was drinking too much, so I had to stop.
—Yeah, we heard something about that.
Mom moves her hand so that it covers mine.
—People said a lot of things, Henry. We didn’t know what to believe. Except about the killing. We knew they were wrong about that, we knew you couldn’t kill anyone.
My left forearm is lying there on the table, the six hash marks exposed. I open my mouth, close it. Dad sets his glass down and covers my hand and Mom’s with his own. He has big hands, nicked and cut and bruised from the shop, a thin rim of grease permanently tattooed under his fingernails.
—Why are you here, Hank?
Someone threatened to kill you and I came home to make sure it doesn’t happen.
—There’s just some more trouble, Dad, and I need to take care of it.
—But why, what did you do?
—I.
I helped a friend. I tried to protect people. I did everything I was supposed to and the only thing that worked was killing the people who were trying to kill me.
And then I took their money.
—Dad, I just tried to do the right thing.
He pours himself another drink. His fifth. I’ve never seen him drink this much before.
—So what now?
—I’m gonna take care of it.
—How?
—I’m gonna give these people what they want.
THEY GO to bed a short while later, and I page Tim. And wait. And then I page him again. And again. And again. And again. I page him ten times and he doesn’t call back, and finally I’m just too tired to care.
AFTER MY leg was shattered and I couldn’t play baseball anymore I took all my old trophies and plaques down, boxed them up, and stuck them in the attic. Sometime in the last three years Mom or Dad must have gotten those boxes down to look through them, because all the old trophies are in my old bedroom. My bed is still in there too. Other than that, it’s a different room. Mom uses it for her sewing and crocheting and the several other crafts she’s thrown herself into since she retired last year.
I lie in the too-small bed in the darkness and watch light from a street lamp glinting off of all the fake gold and silver. Outside, it’s silent except for the occasional bark of a dog, quieter even than my beach in Mexico, where there is at least the sound of the surf.
On the nightstand is a small, framed picture of me. I’m sixteen, my hair is almost white from years under the California sun, my face is golden brown and unlined, and I’m wearing a cap from my high school team, the Tigers. I remember the day the photo was taken. I had pitched a shutout for the varsity squad, hit a homer, and had five RBI. I was six feet tall, a hundred and sixty pounds and still growing, working out every day and eating anything I could get my hands on, trying to build muscle for the inevitable day when I would be a Major League player. To this day, it is the face I expect to see when I look in the mirror.
NORMALLY DAD would take the truck parked in the driveway to work, but today he fires up the tiny MGB in the garage. He hits the automatic opener, the door flips up, and he pulls into the street.
—Where did you park?
—Over on Traina.
There’s been a lot of turnover on Dale Road in three years. A lot of people I used to know moved out during the year of constant attention from media, police, and sightseers that followed my adventures. But even the newcomers know who my parents