The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [84]
He turned down the street to Junior’s bar. We all watched him go. “You’re ashamed of us?” Lori called after him.
Dad just kept walking.
Four days later, when Dad still hadn’t come home, Mom sent me to go find him. “Why do I always have to get Dad?” I asked.
“Because he likes you the best,” she said. “And he’ll come home if you tell him to.”
The first step in tracking down Dad was going next door to the Freemans, who let us use their phone if we paid a dime, and calling Grandpa to ask if Dad was there. Grandpa said he had no idea where Dad was.
“When y’all gonna get your own telephone?” Mr. Freeman asked after I hung up.
“Mom disapproves of telephones,” I said as I placed the dime on his coffee table. “She thinks they’re an impersonal means of communication.”
My first stop, as always, was Junior’s. It was the fanciest bar in Welch, with a picture window, a grill that served hamburgers and french fries, and a pinball machine.
“Hey!” one of the regulars called out when I walked in. “It’s Rex’s little girl. How ya doin’, sweetheart?”
“I’m fine, thank you. Is my dad here?”
“Rex?” He turned to the man next to him. “Where’s that old polecat Rex?”
“I seen him this morning at the Howdy House.”
“Honey, you look like you could use a rest,” the bartender said. “Sit down and have a Coca-Cola on the house.”
“No, thank you. I’ve got kites to fly and fish to fry.”
I went to the Howdy House, which was a notch below Junior’s. It was smaller and darker, and the only food it served was pickled eggs. The bartender told me Dad had gone to the Pub, which was a notch below the Howdy House—almost pitch black, with a sticky bar top and no food at all. There he was, in the midst of a few other regulars, telling one of his air force stories.
When Dad saw me, he stopped talking and looked at me the way he did every time I had to track him down in a bar. It was always an awkward moment for us both. I didn’t want to be fetching him any more than he wanted his ragamuffin daughter summoning him home like a wayward schoolboy. He looked at me in this cold, strange way for just a moment, then broke into a hearty grin.
“Hey, Mountain Goat!” he shouted. “What the hell are you doing in this dive?”
“Mom says you have to come home,” I said.
“She does, does she?” He ordered a Coca-Cola for me and another shot of whiskey for himself. I kept telling Dad it was time to go, but he kept putting me off and ordering more shots, as if he had to gulp a whole bunch of them down before he could face home. He staggered off to the bathroom, came back, ordered one for the road, slammed the shot glass down on the bar, and walked to the door. He lost his footing trying to open it and sprawled on the floor. I tried to help him up, but he kept falling over.
“Honey, you ain’t getting him nowhere like that,” a man behind me said. “Here, let me give you a lift home.”
“I’d appreciate that, sir,” I said. “If it’s not out of your way.”
Some of the other regulars helped the man and me load Dad into the bay of the man’s pickup. We propped Dad up against a tool chest. It was late afternoon in early spring, the light was beginning to fade, and people on McDowell Street were locking up their shops and heading home. Dad started singing one of his favorite songs.
Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home.
Dad had a fine baritone, with strength and timbre and range, and despite being tanked, he sang that hymn like the roof-raiser it is.
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see
Coming for to carry me home?
A band of angels coming after me
Coming for to carry me home.
I climbed in next to the driver. On the way home—with Dad still singing away in the back, extending the word. “low” so long he sounded like a mooing cow—the man asked me about school. I told him I was studying hard because I wanted to become either a veterinarian or a geologist specializing in the Miocene period, when the mountains out west were formed. I was telling him how