The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

David B. Silva Dry Whiskey from Cemetery Dance

When I was a boy, I would look at my father and see everything right with the world. He seemed bigger then. At the end of the day, he would come in from the fields with his shirt slung over his shoulder and the sun at his back, and every muscle in his body would be perfectly defined. I had looked up to him back then, like most boys looked up to their fathers. And I had wanted to grow up to be the same man that he was.

The rub of it is... time has a way of changing the order of things.

My father had started drinking nearly twelve years ago, not long after my mother had died of ovarian cancer. At first, though I was only eleven at the time, I thought I had understood: anything to help forget that bone-thin skeleton, that rictus smile that she had become just before her death. It was an image that haunted me for a long time afterward. And it was an image that had never stopped haunting my father.

Now, I was sitting in the truck, staring at the house, wondering how things could change so much in just ten or twelve short years. It was mid-morning. The sun was already high in the sky, and there was a dark shadow enclosing the front porch. I stared a while longer, then climbed out of the truck and closed the door.

By the time I made it to the front steps, my father had come out of the house, dragging himself across the porch like a man who had been ill for a long time now. The screen door bounced off the jamb behind him. He fell into one of the rattan chairs my mother had bought, hawked up a wad of phlegm, and sent it flying over the porch railing. “What’re you doing here?” he asked.

“Just thought I’d come by and see how you’re doing. That’s all.”

“Yeah?” He scratched at the stubble on his chin, which had been growing for better than a week by the look of it. It hadn’t been all that long ago that the first signs of gray had begun to sneak in. Now, it was almost all gray. “Well, I’m doing okay. Anything else?”

“Heard you were in town last night.”

“Believe I was.”

“Heard you got booted out of the Forty-Niner.”

“Did I?”

“That’s what Len Dozier says.”

My father nodded slightly, as if that sounded close enough to the truth to suit him. Then he buried his face in his hands and let out a slow breath of air that seemed like an effort to control something inside that he found frightening. When he looked up again, I was reminded of the fact that this was the morning after. His coloring was ashy, his eyes bloodshot. “I might have,” he said. “I don’t exactly remember.”

“How’d you get home?”

“Drove.”

He thought maybe he had taken Buzzard Roost Road, which was the long way home no matter how you figured it. But he really couldn’t be certain. He might have gone down Old Forty-Four and across. To be honest, he finally confessed, he couldn’t recall much of anything about last night. “Things get a little fuzzy after I stopped at the Forty-Niner.”

He stared down at his hands then, silently, with that look of shame that I’d seen cross his face a thousand times before.

“Have you eaten breakfast yet?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Then let’s get some food in you, okay?” I cooked him up some eggs and bacon and poured him a cup of strong, black coffee. We sat at the table in the kitchen. For a while we talked about the drought that had settled over the state the past four years, wondering how much longer it was going to go on. It hadn’t proved to be as bad as the ’77-’78 drought yet — that one had been the worst in the state’s history — but summer was here now and it was going to be a long time before we were likely to see any new storms move through.

After breakfast, I cleared the dishes off the table, and placed them in the sink. “I’ve gotta be going, Pa.”

“You working today?”

“Len Dozier needs a hand repairing his tractor.”

“Well, you go on, then.”

“Are you gonna be all right?”

“I’ll be fine.”

He walked me to the front porch, the suspenders hanging loosely around his waist, his gait a bit shorter, a bit slower than it generally was when he had had a belly full of whiskey to move him along. Outside, there were shimmering waves of heat rising off the bed of my father’s old pickup, and in the distance, you could see a mirage in the crease between two brown hills. It looked a little like a pond. But there hadn’t been a pond there in nearly five years now. Not since before the drought.

My father had let the farm go to hell after my mother had died. It had always been a small farm: four fifty-acre parcels, about two hundred acres altogether. It sat near the base of the foothills, with South Cow Creek flowing lazily along its southern border. He leased out two of the parcels: one for grazing, the other for beehives in the winter months when the bees were dormant and there wasn’t much call for pollinating. He had his own small herd, too, about twenty head of cattle, and that was pretty much it.

I stopped at the foot of the steps, wanting to be on my way and feeling a little guilty for it.

“You looked yet?” he asked me.

“No, Pa.”

“You gonna?”

“Sure.” I didn’t know when this routine had first started. Like everything else, I suppose it was around the time that my mother had died. Definitely, sometime after he had started drinking. I was used to it by now, and I guess because nothing had ever come of it, it seemed more like a routine than a real concern. But I gave the front end of his truck an honest look anyway.

He drove an old Chevy flatbed with aluminum running boards and an unpainted right front fender. The fender had been replaced several summers back after he’d clipped a fence post — trying to avoid a jackrabbit, he claimed. The rest of the truck was in fairly decent shape, considering its age.

Something was wrong with the front end, though. I noticed that almost immediately. The bumper, which was secondhand scrap he had brought home from the junkyard and painted off-white, had been smashed up against the front grille. It looked as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it. And just above the bumper, the lens of the headlight was broken, its mounting ring dangling loosely off to one side. If that weren’t enough, there was also a good-size depression in the top of the left fender, where it looked as if the metal had been crimped at a weak spot almost directly over the wheel well.

Last night, on his way home, my father had hit something.

“Jesus.”

“What is it?” he asked.

I ran my fingers across the bumper. There was a dark stain that looked as if something had spilled over the top edge and had run down the white paint. It was shaped something like a waterfall, with a mix of thick-and-thin lines flowing unevenly, top to bottom. At first thought, it looked like a kid might have taken a black Magic Marker to it. But when I looked closer, I realized the color was brownish red, and it hadn’t been done by any Magic Marker. Because it was a blood stain. “Oh, God.”

“What?”

“You did it, Pa. You finally did it.” I looked up at him, and he was standing at the edge of the porch with an arm wrapped around the post like it was the only thing holding him up. His face had turned ashen, and for the first time this morning, there was a hint of sobriety behind his eyes. “The bumper’s smashed, and there’s some blood, Pa. You hit something last night.”

I spent most of that afternoon at Len Dozier’s place, working on his tractor. We got it up and running sometime around four, so I stopped by the market in Kingston Mills, picked up a couple of steaks, some potatoes, a 64-ouncer of Coke, and headed back to my father’s place. When I had left, he had been sitting at the kitchen table, staring vacantly into his half-empty cup of coffee. It was only a matter of time, I figured, before the coffee was replaced by whiskey, and if that had already happened, it was a good bet I was going to find him passed out cold on the living room couch.

But that’s not where I found him.

He was sitting on the front porch, next to a pile of plastic bags filled with bottles and cans. I climbed out of the truck with the grocery bag in one arm, and as I closed the door, I watched him toss an empty whiskey bottle into the air. It sailed a good fifteen or twenty feet, landed smack-dab in the middle of a feeding trough with loomix stenciled across the side, and then shattered with the harsh sound of a bottle landing in a recycling bin.

“What are you doing, Pa?”

He didn’t bother to look up. As I went through the gate, he popped the tab off a can of Budweiser, dumped the contents out through an opening between the porch slats, then crushed the can and tossed it in the direction of another pile only a few feet away. It fell short, making almost no sound at all.

“Pa?”

When he finally did look up, his face was drawn and haggard, and though I had seen him like this before, this time was different. This was not a man who had hung one on while I had been gone. It was a man who had looked at himself in the mirror and had been frightened by what he had found.

“Pa, what’s the matter?”

He stared at me a moment, something apparently aching silently inside him. “You ever meet Lloyd’s kid?”

“Joey Egan?”

He nodded.

“Yeah, a couple of years ago, I think. When I was helping with 4H.”

“He died last night,” my father said mechanically. He took a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label out of the plastic bag next to him, gazed fondly at the label, then unscrewed the top and emptied out the whiskey. “It was a hit and run, off Buzzard Roost Road. He was on his way home after a school dance.”

“Are you sure?”

“It was in this morning’s paper,” he said. Then he sent the empty bottle sailing across the yard, end over end. A spattering of sunlight glittered off the glass just before the neck of the bottle landed against the side of the trough and fell apart before my eyes. I’m not sure I even heard the sound it made. It seemed a thousand miles away just then.

“Maybe it wasn’t you,” I suggested.

“You’re forgetting the blood on the bumper, Will.”

“Yeah, but... Jesus, don’t you remember anything from last night?”

“Not after I left the bar.” He pulled another bottle out of the bag, poured the liquid down an opening between the slats, and flung it in the direction of the front gate this time. It landed short, in a soft mound of dirt where my mother had once planted a bed of wild violets and Shasta daisies, even some brown-eyed susans. Just because we live on a farm, she had said, doesn’t mean we can’t have a little color around the place. The bottle kicked up a cloud of dust that lazily drifted away on the evening breeze.

I plopped down in a chair next to him. “So what now?”

“You can join me if you want.” He handed over a six-pack of beer.

The farm sat at the west end of a valley. It was a little past five now, the last week of May. The shadows from the hills were beginning to lengthen, and I could feel the coolness of evening coming on. I popped the top off the first of the cans, poured out the contents, and began my participation in a ritual that took nearly an hour before it was finished.

We never discussed calling the police. I suppose we should have at least discussed it. But what was the point? It wasn’t going to change the fact that there was blood on the front end of my father’s pickup. And it wasn’t going to bring little Joey Egan back either.

In a strange way, though, what had happened had already started to bring my father back. He had been hiding inside a bottle for a long, long time, but suddenly it looked as if he might at last come out and show himself. If he did, I didn’t want to risk losing him again.

We barbecued the steaks on an old grill out back that night. We had planned to eat outside at the picnic table under the dogwoods, but the mayflies were swarming, so we ended up inside at the kitchen table instead. It wasn’t until we had finished the meal, and I had poured him a cup of coffee that I noticed his hands were shaking.

“Are you all right?”

He nodded, appearing unaffected. “The booze is wearing off. That’s all.”

“You sure?” He looked warm, and a little haggard. Though I had seen him looking much worse after an all-night bend.

“I’ll be fine.”

“You want me to stay tonight?”

“No, you go on home. I’ll be all right.”

I stacked the dishes in the sink, wiped my hands off on a kitchen towel, then turned around and stared at him. When you’re a kid, you never think about your father as being old. I wasn’t a kid anymore, of course. But I had thought of him as an old man for a good many years now, and I wondered briefly when it was that I had become the father, and he the son. And I wondered how much longer he was going to be with me.

“I’ll come by in the morning,” I said.

“No need.”

“Just to check to see how you’re doing.”

“If that’s what you want.”

Joey Egan’s funeral was held three days later. He was buried in a family plot in the Black Oak Cemetery on the outskirts of town, next to his mother, who had died of pneumonia the year before. After the services, I drove my father home and stayed with him that night, because I was afraid that he might start drinking again. He hadn’t shed a tear since the day my mother had died. But in the truck, on our way out of Black Oak, he had broken down and started a long, painful crying jag.

More than just his drinking, I guess I worried about him doing something crazy that night.

The next morning, my father woke up with a hangover.

He came dragging into the kitchen sometime around nine, his eyes bloodshot, his brain apparently pounding unmercifully at the inside of his skull. He stopped at the sink, shading his eyes against the morning sun, and took a drink of water right out of the faucet. It was the 117th straight day without rain, and while the well hadn’t gone dry, it sometimes took a while before anything came out of the spout.

“How’s bacon and eggs sound?” I asked.

He shook his head guardedly. “Nothing for me, thanks.”

“You gotta eat something.” I had already tossed some bacon in the skillet. He hadn’t been eating much of anything since the accident, and I had promised myself not to let him get away with it again. But he looked like the man of old this morning, like a man coming out of a stupor: ragged and foul and slightly out of touch with his surroundings. I didn’t think he was going to be able to keep his food down even if he tried. “Christ, you didn’t go on another drunk last night, did you?”

He looked up at me, his lips dry and chapped, his face expressionless. “You know I didn’t. You were here all night, weren’t you?”

“Then what the hell’s the matter with you?”

“It’s a dry drunk,” he whispered hoarsely. He wiped his hands across the front of his undershirt, where one strap of his overalls was unfastened and hanging loosely. “It happens sometimes,” he said. “When you’ve been drinking as long as I have.”

“All the more reason to get some food in your stomach.”

“Maybe.” He shut off the faucet and moved to the table, where he sat down a little gingerly, and let out a halfhearted sigh. “I saw Joey Egan last night,” he said.

“Joey’s dead, Pa.”

“He came into my room and stood over my bed. There was a mess of cuts and scratches all over his face. Looked like some fool had taken the business end of a pitchfork to him. And I think his left arm was broken. It looked that way at least.”

“It was a dream, Pa.”

“No, it wasn’t no dream. He knew how your ma died.”

“Everyone knows she had cancer. That’s no secret.”

“But the cancer ain’t what killed her, Will.”

“What?” We had never talked about my mother’s death, but she had been sick for a good many months before she died. For a long time afterward, my father had always said that it was the consumption that got her. I guess it was less painful for him to think of it that way. It took a long time before he was ever able to use the word cancer.

“I couldn’t stand to watch her suffer,” he said.

“What did you do, Pa?” He looked up at me, a man whose rounded shoulders reflected the heavy weight they had been carrying, and suddenly I understood everything. All the nights at the Forty-Niner. The way he had pulled back from me after she had died. The way he had pulled back from everyone. I understood it all. “You killed her, didn’t you?”

“I... I placed a pillow over her face,” he said softly.

“Jesus.”

“She was in so much pain...”

And then my father broke down and cried for the second time in less than a week. I sat next to him, with my arm draped over his shoulders, feeling helpless. Guilt carried a heavy price, and my father, I suspected, had been paying a hefty markup for a long, long time.

After a while, he caught himself and took in a deep breath. “I’m all right,” he said uncertainly. He stared out the kitchen window, off to the distance, where a small twister had kicked up and was swirling the dust across the open field like a child swirling finger paints across a paper canvas. I had never noticed the burden in his face quite the way I noticed it just then. Here was a man who had been killing himself for years with booze, and now he was killing himself without it. I wondered if I had ever really known my father, if anyone had ever really known him.

“Things’ll be all right once the booze wears off,” I said weakly. “You hear?”

He nodded.

I gave him a pat on the back. “You sure you don’t want anything to eat?”

“Later,” he said.

I left him around eleven that morning. He was sitting in a chair on the front porch, staring out across the barren terrain, his mind a million miles away. I had gotten myself a six-week stint up in Oregon, hauling trees out of a private co-op that was selectively logging its land, and I reminded him about the job.

“I’ll be back in six weeks. Okay, Pa?”

“I ain’t going nowhere,” he said.

“Six weeks,” I repeated. As I drove out the dirt driveway, I caught a glimpse of him in my rearview mirror. There was something standing next to him, something I couldn’t quite make out. And the man, himself, was hardly recognizable. A man so completely different from the man of my early childhood that I felt a little rattle of uneasiness run through me. What had happened to him? What had happened to the man who had been as strong as an ox, who had put up the barn by himself one summer, using a block-and-tackle, who had been able to stack a hundred bales of hay in a day and still have the energy to shoot some hoops out back under the last vestiges of twilight? What the hell had happened to that man?

He had grown old, I wanted to tell myself.

He had grown old and alone and empty.

But there was more to it than that.

He had also grown frightened.

I called him twice while I was away in Oregon. Under the circumstances, I guess I should have called more often. But that picture of him in my rearview mirror had been haunting me like a ghost. I kept thinking that I had caught a glimpse of little Joey Egan, standing next to him on the porch. That Joey had been that something I couldn’t quite recognize, and that he had had one hand on my father’s shoulder as if he were trying to hold him down.

The first time I called, the phone rang relentlessly, maybe as many as a dozen times, before my father finally picked it up. “No more,” he said sharply. “You hear me? You call me one more time and I swear I’ll come out to Black Oak myself and dig up your goddamn remains. You hear me? I’ll feed ’em to the damn buzzards and that’ll be the end of it.”

“Pa, it’s me.”

There was a sudden, surprised silence on the other end. Then, quietly: “Will?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Christ. Will? That really you? Where are you?”

“I’m in Oregon, Pa. What’s going on there? What’s all the shouting about?”

“Oregon...” he mumbled, in nearly a whisper. And for a moment, I thought he had gone back to the bottle again. In fact, I was certain that was exactly what he had done.

“You’ve been on a drunk, haven’t you, Pa?”

“What’s my boy doing in Oregon?”

“Listen to me. You’ve been drinking again, haven’t you?”

Then the line went dead.

I called him back within seconds, my hands shaking almost uncontrollably as I fumbled with the phone. What the hell was going on? He had sounded like a man on the verge of self-destruction. I couldn’t even be certain he had recognized me. Maybe he wasn’t drinking again, but if it wasn’t the booze I had heard, I hated to think what it might have been.

The phone rang thirty, maybe forty times without an answer. Eventually, I hung up and tried to convince myself that I had probably disturbed his sleep, that I must have caught him in the middle of a bad dream, and that there was nothing to worry about. He had been tired, was all. The call had wakened him and that’s why he had sounded so crazy, because he’d still been half-asleep.

I wasn’t able to get hold of him again until nearly three weeks later. It was the night before I was due to head back to Kingston Mills. I’m not sure what I expected him to sound like after that first call. Still a little crazy, I guess. But he didn’t sound crazy, and he didn’t sound like a man who would be dead in a few short hours. He sounded like a man who had finally forgiven himself.

“Is everything all right there?” I asked.

“I’m finally dry,” he said serenely.

“What?” I thought I could hear something in the background that sounded dry and brittle, something that made me think of autumn leaves and sand through an hourglass. And then he chuckled.

“I think the booze is wearing off,” he said. “My head’s clearing up. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen things this clearly.”

“Look, Pa, I’m coming home tomorrow. Are you gonna be all right till then?”

“Fine,” he said. “I’m gonna be just fine.”

I don’t remember what I said in return. But I remember holding the phone in my hand after he had hung up, and being overwhelmed with a strange jumble of emotions. It had been years since I had felt close to my father, and suddenly I was terrified that I might never have a chance to feel close to him again.

Early the next morning, I left Oregon, arriving at the farm shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon. His pickup was parked out front, in the same spot it had been parked the day I had discovered the blood on the bumper. There was a layer of dust a quarter of an inch thick across the hood, and it was nearly impossible to see through the windshield into the cab. The pickup had sat there like a dinosaur for nearly two months now. In the back of my mind, I suppose I knew it would eventually be buried under that dust like an old desert ghost town. But at the time, I didn’t give it much of a thought.

The front door to the house was unlocked. It had been left slightly ajar, and just inside there was a strange wind-cut pattern of sand and dust scattered across the hardwood floor. Kingston Mills had gone 159 days without rain, and the dust, it seemed, was no longer content to stay outside.

“Pa?”

In the kitchen, I discovered a pyramid-shaped pile of dirt in the sink, maybe five or six inches high. One of the faucet handles had been broken off. It was lying on the lip of the drain, partially buried by the dirt. I took hold of the other handle, turned it, and watched a slow, steady stream of dirt sift lazily out of the spout.

“Pa?”

I found him, or some general semblance of him, in his bedroom at the back of the house. He was lying in bed, on top of the sheets, his hands folded peacefully across his stomach. He was dressed in the same clothes he had worn nearly every day of his life since my mother had died: an old pair of work boots worn at the heels, a pair of blue-jean overalls with one unfastened strap hanging loosely at his side, and, of course, the long Johns he always wore come hell or high water.

Underneath, there was very little left of the man I remembered. Something had happened to him in the few short weeks that I had been gone, something I didn’t think I was ever going to be able to understand. Maybe it had something to do with the drought — after all, the well had gone dry. Or maybe it had something to do with all those damn bottles he had tossed off the front porch the night he went dry. The booze had kept him going for a good many years. Maybe without it, the well of his soul had gone dry, too. I don’t know. All I know is that the man I discovered at the back of the house was all dust and bones.

He looked as if he had been dead a very long time. I had spoken with him last night, but here he was now, less than twenty-four hours later: his skeletal hands peeking out from beneath his shirtsleeves, his teeth bared in a dreadful, lipless grin, his eyes no more than dark, empty sockets.

Like the flowers my mother had planted out front, after an unquenchable thirst, my father had simply shriveled up and died.

There’s a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer that reads: Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection unto eternal life. I find myself often thinking back to these words.

My father was buried in the Black Oak Cemetery, two rows over from Joey Egan. A bunch of the guys from the Forty-Niner came by the house afterward, drank a little beer, and talked about the good times they’d had together. Mostly, though, they seemed to stare off into the distance, reflecting on things that I suppose I will never be privy to.

Late in the afternoon, Lloyd Egan pulled me aside and told me about a man they had locked up in Sparks, Nevada. They had caught him robbing a small Mom and Pop liquor store and during the interrogation, he had confessed to Joey’s hit-and-run. He had leaned across the seat to roll down the passenger window, he had said, and his car had drifted onto the shoulder, and... and there was Joey, turning around, his eyes bright and surprised, just as the car made impact. The man had stopped and got out and realized that the boy was dead, and then he had got back into the car and had driven off. It had apparently been haunting him ever since.

Lloyd took a swig of his beer, and gazed off into nothingness, looking like he was on the verge of tears. I put my arm around him, tried to comfort him, and then led him back into the kitchen, where someone was telling a story about the time my father had had a few too many and had gone home and tried to shoe one of the steers.

Several days later, a storm moved in off the Pacific and dropped nearly five inches of much needed rain across the north state. It was the beginning of the end of the drought. But it had come too late for my father.

To this day, I don’t know what it was he hit coming home from the bar that night. It could have been a deer or a cow, I suppose. But it wasn’t Joey Egan, and I’m grateful for that, grateful beyond description.

I still think back to those times when I was a boy and he would come in from the fields with his shirt slung over his shoulder and every muscle of his body taut and perfectly defined. And like most boys, there are still the times when I wish I could have grown up to be that man.

The shame of it is... I don’t think I ever really got to know who he was.