“He’s going to get us a motor home, and we’re going to live in it.”
“That’s bullshit,” she told me. “He’s going bankrupt. He can’t even afford to make payments on his car. He’s lying to you. He lies to everyone.”
✴
DAY AFTER DAY, I tried to think of what else he might lie about. There had been the afternoon when the two men stopped us on the valley road and he lied about not being himself. The police hadn’t come again, so maybe he’d tricked them. I denied the bad things I did, so why wouldn’t he? And he misbehaved even more. The list was long.
He drove like a daredevil.
He’d been in lots of fights.
When we lived by the ferry, he’d knocked a man unconscious and broken a woman’s jaw.
When he was angry, he yelled at my mother.
She’d tried to run away, and he’d just followed her.
Often, he made cruel jokes.
If I did stay with him, I might starve, since he ate candy bars and Pepsi the way a gerbil lived off brown pellets and water. And yet he was wild and didn’t care what others thought. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. An exciting new disaster might happen at any moment.
And I loved the tricks he played. He called everything an old Indian trick, so that I pictured an old brown Native man telling him, “Don’t forget to blow on a fire to get it to start,” or “If you’re losing a fight, kick him in the balls and then in the face. Who gives a shit if he’s down. Kick his teeth out. It’s a fight.”
“This,” he said, “is my favorite old Indian trick.” He was storing the chain-link fencing he used each winter at his tree lots, and after he stood the rolls on end, he propped cinder blocks on top, just out of sight. If thieves tried to steal the fencing, the blocks would fall on their heads.
Once, on his big lot downtown, he discovered that someone was climbing the corner of the fence each night and stealing a tree.
“Here’s a good old Indian trick,” he said and emptied a bag of dog shit on the ground. He rolled a tree in it and then he propped it in the corner where the thief had been. The next morning, he took me outside the fence to where the tree lay near the road. We laughed long and hard about the thief who’d gotten smeared with shit.
But sometimes his antics didn’t make me feel that good, as when he caught a long-legged spider on his dashboard. We were waiting at a light. It was summer, the windows down, and he said, “Look at that old goat!” In the car next to us, a geezer with thick glasses hunched over his steering wheel as if it were a book in the hands of a nearsighted reader. My father leaned past me and threw the spider onto his bald head.
Now I had to decide. I was sitting on the couch. Hinges creaked in the mudroom and footsteps crossed the kitchen. My father stood in the doorway. The skin on either side of his mouth was slack, his gaze too still.
“Is that for school?” he asked.
A Jules Verne novel lay on my lap. It had enraptured me, the idea that a land existed beneath the earth. But I said nothing.
“You read too much,” he told me. “You should get some exercise.”
As I tried to think of what to say, a feeling of loneliness, still beyond words, dawned.
“I got in a fight today,” I told him.
“You did?” He raised his eyebrows but then yawned, lifting his forearm to hide his mouth. “That’s good. I’m glad you’re standing up for yourself.”
I’d been trying to be tough at school, using fuck and goddamn to swear kids to tears and run them off. When Matthieu had pulled on my jacket, I’d called him a fuck banana. He’d appeared so dazed that I’d taken the opportunity to punch him.
“Good. That’s good,” my father said, eyeing me. “You really let him have it, huh?”
“Yeah, I let him have it pretty good.” Hearing myself, I felt that my victory was far grander than it had seemed.
My father leaned against the doorjamb and yawned again. He went into the kitchen. The fridge door opened, bottles clinking.
“Goddamn it,” I heard him say, “there’s nothing to eat.”
I closed my book. I had to make up my mind. Maybe I should leave with my mother.
He came back, anger all around him, like the smell of cigarettes on a smoker’s jacket. He sat and put the peach-colored phone on the armrest, and then lifted the receiver. He pushed his jaw forward and began to dial.
Seeing his expression, I knew that he was going to swear at someone. The sadness eased from my throat, and an odd feeling of lightness came over me. No one could swear like him! It was his gift. Each insult came from his stomach, not like a belch but like the sudden act of vomiting, a sound that caught in the throat and burned in the sinuses like bile.
The faint ringing from the earpiece reached me, and a tired tinny voice said, “Hullo.” My father didn’t even introduce himself. He shouted, “Don’t you fucking play games with me!” Then he took a breath so deep I could see all his teeth and the lines of his many fillings and the red of his throat.
“Motherfucking cocksucking piece of shit, I’ll kick your stupid fucking ass!”
Without realizing it, I jumped up and began dancing on the carpet in victory.
He grabbed his address book and threw it at me.
✴
THE END WOULD be like a fishing trip, a long drive through night mountains and washed-out roads, to a dawn over a river where all that mattered began.
I went into the woods and closed my eyes and turned in circles with the intention of getting lost. I had to hone my survival skills. Wandering, I searched for tunnels under bushes or magic portals beneath the low branches of trees.
And then I just sat. There was something I couldn’t understand, that made it hard to breathe, my throat thick with sadness. My father had always told me I was like him, and I did my best not to cry in front of him. But my mother watched me sometimes, her brow furrowed, a wetness in her blue eyes, as if just seeing me race through the door might make her cry. She liked it when we talked or read books, but he wanted me to be crazy at times, quiet at others. I never knew which.
In novels, something bad happens so that the hero has to travel and change, but my life just dragged on. Only when I read did the pressure in my chest go away. As I turned pages, I felt a rush of vertigo, tingling along my arms and face. Even telling stories at school, I became transfixed, lifting into the air, toward the sky, more and more distant from the truth. And once I’d told a story, no matter how outlandish, how embroidered with magic, I knew it was true.
To my classmates, I bragged about the immense salmon and steelhead trout that my father reeled from icy rivers, standing deep in the current, almost swept away. They listened, but at some point—when the salmon bit his leg or gashed his hand or wrapped the line around his boot and tried to drag him downriver—someone snorted and called me a liar.
What they didn’t realize was that their stories stank because they thought too much about time. There was too much walking, too many opening and closing of doors. They didn’t see that two shocking events years apart, on opposite ends of the country, longed for each other the way a smiling girl across the room made me want to sit next to her. Hearing my father, I forgot the slow march of minutes. A dog had once tried to bite him, and he’d also reeled in a forty-pound salmon, so it seemed natural that the injured fish would bite him too. Minutes and hours had to be done away with, the thrilling moments of life freed from the calendar’s prison grid.
Soon, I told myself as I walked home through the forest, my life would be a story, and I’d be free.
✴
SCHOOL