16. Shooting Dad

Shooting Dad.” By mistake, I put tonight’s date with my father on my work calendar, something I don’t realize until I’m leaving and Rik teases me about it.

“Jeez,” he says, “I thought you and John got along.” We have a good laugh.

But Rik is right. My dad and I have always been okay with one another. These days Dad is often numb and out of it, but he always brightens up with me. He doesn’t want to talk about his troubles and is just eager to hear about my life, what I’m working on, people I’m seeing, funny stuff I’ve liked on social media, the shows I’ve been streaming. Unlike my mom, he even remembers what I tell him.

My brother and sister still say that as kids Dad paid more attention to me because I was a jock, which is no more than half true. I got a lot of his time, but I always felt he was making up for what went on between my mom and me. Still, I always knew he wouldn’t turn his back on me, even when there was an uproar at school because I had punched out another kid or sassed my teachers or refused to do any homework. My sibs say we both had the same enemy in Mom, but the truth is Dad usually told me to back off and get out of my mother’s face and accept her rules, trying to convince me my life would just be easier that way.

I told him I was sleeping with women a long time before I admitted that to my mother. He’s much more conservative than Mom politically. He even voted for Trump the first time and might have done it again if Johnny and Ella, my brother and sister, hadn’t said they would fly out from Seattle and superglue his fingers together to keep him from marking the ballot. But when I came out to him, I knew he’d be like, ‘Whatever.’ I am sure I’m the only queer person he thinks he knows. But the fact is I know my dad loves me. It would just mean so much more if anybody, including me, respected a single fucking thing he says or does.

Pops just sort of clenches his jaw whenever Dad comes up in conversation. Something bad happened between them before I was born, and neither one will say what. My brother and sister have always sort of channeled Mom and largely disregarded my father. By the time they were five or six, they didn’t bother asking him whether they could watch TV or visit a friend. When they were going out, they wouldn’t even ask him for a ride if there was a chance Mom might be home soon.

As for me, I have always felt kind of sorry for my father. Going back to when I was a little kid, I could tell there was something sad about him. It’s like he thought he was a winner and then found out he was a loser. Which pretty much says it like it is. He was this All Mid-Ten tight end, and one of the biggest deals ever on campus at Wisconsin State. He went to rookie camp with the NY Giants, where he learned there were guys even bigger and faster. He’s been tobogganing downhill ever since.

Since my childhood, he’s had a hard time with work. Before I came on the scene, he had been doing pretty well. My great-aunt Silvia, Pops’s sister, helped him get a job working for her first husband, Dixon, who was this big-time baller on the Kindle County Futures Exchange, but the company more or less collapsed when Dixon died of a heart attack. After that, Dad found several jobs through the Wisconsin State alumni network, until, as he says, people forgot who he was. He’s tried a lot of different things along the way. Somebody from State once hired him to sell package tours—a very odd gig for a guy who doesn’t really like to travel—and then he got his real estate license, where he was no competition for the barracuda ladies. He hasn’t had a full-time job in God knows how long, and went on social security early and is just scraping by. I used to think my mom might still be sending him money, and then a year or so back I realized she had passed the baton. My brother, Johnny, who picks up the phone to call me once a month, was with this startup that sold something to Microsoft. The company got onto the NY Stock Exchange, and now that little fuck, my brother, who has just turned thirty, is actually talking about retiring. I asked him straight up last year if he was supporting Dad, and he kind of avoided an answer, saying he just sends Dad a check now and then. Still. That made me pretty sad.

In the last fifteen years, since Mom kicked him to the curb, my dad has just gone to hell and drinks way too much. He always seems to be waiting to find someone else to tell him what to do, which inevitably turns out to be some rancid woman he’s picked up at a bar or yoga class. In very little time, he has developed a completely toxic relationship with her. Twice now he’s lost all his furniture when he ran screaming from one of these nutballs’ places. When he’s by himself, I come over to check on him in his scruffy little apartment to make sure he’s not getting all his calories from alcohol. He’s put on some weight, but he still works out at home, and for an old guy, he looks pretty good—big with rugged features. That’s about the best thing he’s got going for him, although at his age, women don’t seem to be too picky anyway.

Once every couple months, my dad and I go to the Alamo Shooting Range out in Greenwood County. He grew up in a family of hunters and has always been into handguns, which my mom of course despised. He is very Second Amendment and judges every politician by whether she or he will try to take away his guns. I have the cop attitude, meaning I love guns but I still wish that every moron with money in his pocket couldn’t just score one.

I go shooting with my dad for a couple reasons. One, I don’t really like meeting him in a bar. He doesn’t need another reason to drink, plus he’s always looking around to check out the female prospects, which, you know—he’s my dad. And second, even pushing sixty-five, he remains a really good marksman. We are both excellent, frankly, and we have contests, talking trash and laughing at each other, making up rules like you don’t score unless you hit the other person’s bullet hole, with an extra five points for a through and through that barely ruffles the target.

Afterwards, we go to the same dive nearby, which is famous for its burgers. People have always told me that I eat like a trucker, lots of beef and fried food. Most of the women I hang out with are pretty crunchy—even a lot of the dudes, like Koob—but I am definitely craving this burger, although I do hold on the cheese and bacon, so my dad isn’t tempted to order his that way. He’s not much on willpower.

“So how are you doing with the police chief case?” he asks. He eats like a dog and can’t stuff his food in fast enough.

“Okay, I guess. Rik pretty much neutron-bombed the first two witnesses. Seriously. There was nothing left of them but a couple sweaty handprints on the witness stand. We’ve been thinking the city attorney might even flush the case, but he says he can’t, because people will think the mayor pressured him to do it. The last big witness is next week, but we have a lot of good stuff on him, too.”

“And what about your weird neighbor? Did you ever figure out anything more about him?”

“Oh, that got even weirder.”

“How’s that?”

“I’m kind of seeing him.”

Dad draws back. Like I said, he’s not much for disapproval, and over the years he’s heard it all, so it tickles me when he comes on like a dad with this wary look.

“How did that happen?” he asks.

“Well, you know, Dad. Birds and bees. Besides, I think I kinda wanted it to.”

“Yeah,” he says. “That crossed my mind. So I assume he’s not a spy.”

“Beats me.”

Dad eyes me as he takes a sip of his diet drink.

“Well, does he have spy equipment in his apartment?”

“I’m almost sure he does, but I’ve never gotten through the door. He’s only been in my place.”

“Okay, but what’s he say he does to make a living?”

“Not much. ‘Computers,’ whatever that means. He gets pretty salty when I try to go there. Like I saw him last night and he just finally came out with, ‘How about we do not talk about work—not yours, not mine. No questions either way.’” I amuse myself because I’ve gotten Koob’s inflection down almost perfectly. But Dad still looks confused.

“Do you talk at all?”

“Sure. But it’s odd stuff. You know, life in general. He’s got kids. He misses his kids.”

“Kids?” Dad asks slowly. “He’s married?”

“Divorced. Or getting divorced.”

“And you still think he could be some kind of federal agent working undercover?”

“I really don’t know.” I’ve asked myself if an FBI agent on assignment would start sleeping with the next-door neighbor, and frankly, I think those people are probably like everybody else and forget the rules now and then when it comes to sex.

“Well, do you like him?”

“Definitely.”

“Why?”

“Well, you know, he’s kind of intriguing. Smart. Kind of wry. He just feels like a really good person. But not needy or controlling. There’s plenty of space. I like his vibe.”

Needless to say, my dad is not the person I’m going to take advice from. If you want to know what is wrong with relationships in a couple words, you can look at my parents. Most of my life they were both gritting their teeth, and then once I graduated from high school, my mom just had enough. It couldn’t have been much of a surprise to him, since sometimes a week passed without them even speaking a word to one another. But it killed him anyway, especially since she hooked up with Miguel in about five minutes. Miguel, who Mom insists I refer to as ‘my stepfather,’ is this ultrarich Spanish guy who is getting close to eighty. They seem to have gotten into classical music together and live more than half the year in Scottsdale, where they go to a lot of outdoor concerts. My mom likes to say that by moving to Arizona, she split the distance between her children, but the truth is that while she makes frequent trips to Seattle, she returns to Kindle County only every few months, and mostly to see Pops and my aunt Marta. She and I both take it as progress that we can now get through a kind of stilted lunch together.

As for Dad and her, even though they didn’t have a good thing going, it was better than the alternative, the way he looked at it, which he’s more or less proved since with all these women he seems to have found in a septic tank. Overall, my mom and dad had 0 in common. For years, I could never figure out how they even got together back in high school. I was in my twenties and walking down the street one day when it hit me out of nowhere like a missile: Sex. He was huge and good-looking, and she was this china-doll beauty, and the heat must have been something else. Then add on top of that the fact that both families hated the relationship, which probably cemented them together.

A friend of mine who immigrated from Poland taught me a Polish saying that translates as ‘Sometimes families only look good in pictures.’ Knowing my mom, it was probably a big plus to her for a long time that my dad and her made a gorgeous couple. They were on like the cover of the Wisconsin State alumni magazine twice, and in the suburban section of the Tribune. On his side, of course, it was always clear that she would inherit buttloads of money from her mother. But mostly, I think he liked how much smarter than him she was.

Sometimes, over the years, my parents have talked to me about memories from when they were together. For example, my grandmother—Clara, the one I’m named for—sent them to Italy for their honeymoon as a wedding gift, and now and then one of them will tell me something they remember from that trip. And it just knocks me out that it’s never the same thing. She goes on about the view from the terrace of their hotel, and he talks about great runs he took. She remembers how dressed up the women were on the Via Veneto and eating these amazing fried artichokes, while he—this is true—says he got really tired of not being able to get anything but Italian food. Maybe any two people would be like that, different impressions and memories, but it seems to say a lot that they were living such separate lives inside their heads from the start.

I hug him goodbye tonight and we head off, both of us more or less happy to have been together.

“Phone me about what happened when your hearing is over next week,” he calls. When I slide into the Cadillac, I’m as close to crying as I ever come, because it just seems completely terrible that the most exciting thing in his life is me.