Abandoned

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Killing another human being, man or woman, is like concrete and dirt,” his father said when the Boy was sixteen.

The Boy always listened closely to anything his father said, but his interest sparked stronger now, not because of the subject but because of the hint of poetry in its speaking. Dad was not a poetic man. He enjoyed his Dali and the thundering violins of classical music, but those were anomalies as a means to an end.

“The airy-fairy squad tells us about things like wind and the sky. Feelings of freedom, all that jazz. Maybe they exist, maybe they don’t. All I know is that you can’t touch the sky or see the wind. But everywhere you look, far as the eye can see, you’ll find concrete and dirt. It’s real. You feel it against your feet or your car tires.

“Killing another human being is something you do against concrete and dirt. It’s where the blood goes as they die and where the body goes after they die. It’s where you’ll end up too.”

Dad had been looking off as they sat in the backyard. They were having a barbeque, just the two of them. It was the Fourth of July, and the sun was setting in a panoply of runaway reds. Dad held a long steel spatula and used it to turn over the burgers as he exposited on the subject of killing.

“The sea,” the Boy said, without thinking, and then shut up quick, his ears going red to the tips.

“What’s that?” Dad asked. “Speak up, Son. Once you say something, own it.”

The Boy cleared his throat and straightened his back. “Sorry, sir, it was just a stray thought. You said it was everywhere, concrete and dirt, as far as the eye could see. But … not on the ocean, sir. There it’s water.”

Dad turned a burger and nodded. “True enough. But think harder, Son. What’s all that water sit on?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Dirt. Throw a body in the ocean, and it sinks to the bottom, which is sand and rock. Even if that body gets eaten on the way down, whatever eats it dies and ends up there anyway.” He peered at one of the burgers with a critical eye. Somewhere, a string of firecrackers went off. “You can escape the water, Son, but you’ll never escape the dirt.”

Dad was right again, as usual. It occasioned a surge of pride in the boy. He was lucky to have the father he had.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll remember.”

“Good boy.” His father flipped another burger. “Someday, Son,” he said, changing the subject without warning, as was his way, “you’re going to be on your own, and you’re going to start examining everything I’ve taught you with a more critical eye.”

“I’ll never question your lessons, sir.”

“I believe you as you say it now. But things change, Son, people most of all. You’re under my thumb now. One day you won’t be. You’ll likely stop sometime—a full stop, probably—and the key question will come to mind.”

The Boy waited for his father to continue. When he didn’t, the Boy realized he was waiting for a prompt. “What’s the key question, sir?”

His father turned a burger. “The key question, Son, is: What makes him an authority on all this stuff?”

His father leaned back on his heels and gazed up at the sky. The Boy watched him and pondered. He didn’t really get where his father was going with this. Question his right as an authority? That was crazy talk. He was an authority because he was Father. What other explanation was needed?

“You listen to me now because I’m the biggest piece of meat between us,” Dad said. “Boys grow, Son. You might never be bigger than me, but one day you’ll be stronger. What will you use to explain my authority then?”

“Sir—”

“Don’t worry, Son. I’m not trying to make you agree to something that’ll I’ll punish you for later. Listen up and I’ll get where I’m going.”

“Yes, sir.”

Father moved the burgers off the grill and put some raw ones on. “When I was a boy, we were poor. I’m not talking about missing a radio or a new pair of blue jeans. We had handmade furniture and an outhouse and didn’t always know where the next meal was coming from. Mama helped make ends meet by whoring. Daddy was a no-good who drank every cent she couldn’t hide.

“Daddy wasn’t too particular about who he fucked when he got a drunk. I had a brother and a sister, and all three of us got the touch now and again.”

He flipped a burger and the Boy listened, rapt and fascinated. Father had never talked about his own past before. Never.

“Mama died when I was fourteen. I was the oldest, but not by much. Sissy was thirteen, and my younger brother—Luke—was twelve. Daddy had no intention of getting a job or quitting his drinking, so he put us to work fucking for money, all three of us.

“Sissy was the weakest of us three. Always had been. She lasted two years before she got Daddy’s shotgun and blew her head clean off.” Father paused, staring into a memory. “I came in just after I heard the blast. Blood was in the air like a thin red fog. It was like dust when it settled, but it was wet.” He stared for a moment longer, then seemed to come back to reality, reaching down to turn a burger as though he hadn’t just traveled in time.

“Daddy had us bury her in the woods. He beat us and told us we were going to have to do her share now too. And so we did.”

The Boy noted that his father’s voice had changed. A strong accent had crept in, along with a rhythm and mode of speaking that had only been hinted at before. He had no idea where his father came from. He only knew the here.

“Luke went next. Some freak strangled him to death while he was fuckin’ him. Daddy had me kill the freak too and bury them both in the woods. He went to beat me again, but I decided I’d had enough of all that.” Father examined a burger, voice calm as he relayed these horrors. “So I killed him and buried him in the woods too.” He paused, looking off. “That was the day I understood, Son: There ain’t no such thing as the soul. I tried pretending there was, because my mama had lied and said it was so, and do you know what that pretending made me?”

“No, sir.”

“Pathetic, boy! It drove me to try to love that man, in spite of all the things he done to me. It made me happy when he smiled at me, it even made me cry sometimes when he wouldn’t love me back. I was like a puppy dog, begging for scraps at his feet, just a touch or a smile or a kindly spoken word. All the time thinking I needed it because I believed in such a thing as the soul.” His father leaned forward and spat on the ground. “I learned the truth, and I never let it go, and I swore if I ever had a son of my own, I’d teach him right, so he wouldn’t make the same mistake in his own life.”

Firecrackers went off, but the Boy barely heard them.

“Anyway, I buried Daddy, and then I lit out and joined the army. I ended up at the hard end of the Korean War. Managed to fake my age and get in where the fighting went rough.” Father paused, staring off into the then again. “I saw things you couldn’t imagine, boy. Men firing rifles with their guts hanging to their feet. Cannibalism in the snow. A dead woman getting fucked ‘cause the man raping her hadn’t realized she’d gone and died.” Father kept on staring, his eyes wider now, in some kind of wonder. “People think we were righteous then, and maybe most were, but there were savages in all that rock and bone too. Men-beasts who lived for war. I wasn’t quite one of them, but I understood the notion.”

His father turned to him then and looked down on him with a huge fierceness and intensity. It was a look from the void, and the Boy glimpsed, just for a moment, what a man-beast might be. Men who’d eat men and sell their children and have sex with the dead.

“So when that time comes, and you question what I’ve taught you and what makes me the man to say, remember what I told you today. It’s because I been, Son. Been and done and come to know. There ain’t no God in this world. I’ve seen that truth, right down to the dirt we walk on. There’s just the eaters and the eaten.”

The look continued until the Boy began to sweat because he felt an absence of his father in spite of his physical presence. He felt himself toppling into the chasm that had opened up in his father’s eyes.

Then his own voice spoke to him, like the voice of that God who didn’t exist, huge and booming, full of authority and fire.

I am my father’s son!

It was a sudden thought, random as a bolt of lightning, and as powerful. It flashed once, lighting up all the dark landscape inside him, and it brought a feeling of pride he understood and a sorrow he didn’t.

He blinked and it was done. Father had turned away from him, back to the grill, where one burger had burned to black. Firecrackers exploded somewhere.

“Burgers are done,” Father said, his voice normal again. “Let’s eat.”

It wasn’t the first time they talked about killing, or the last, but it was always the most memorable. For reasons he couldn’t define, ever since that day he equated the coldness of death with the rich burst of cooked flesh in his mouth. Not as a point of sensory enjoyment but more as a sense of déjá vu.

He frequently thought of firecrackers when he killed.