HIS FATHER turned up when he came through the front of the house. The light above him was bright and felt fluorescent; his father’s scalp slick pink beneath it.
You’re dirty, he said.
He bent again over the black and white print magazine on the table in front of him. He turned a page and looked back up, pointed at Terry’s knee busted red from practice.
Knee’s broke.
Terry nodded, dropped his bag at the kitchen floor.
Is it the cap? Your patella?
It’s just a grass burn.
Terry looked at his hands, lines stood white in the red of the palms; he closed them hard to fists a few times. The blood went to the tips of his fingers.
Those hurt?
Not so much.
He would not bathe, but ran water in the shower, anyway, because he liked the sound. He pissed at the drain and pulled the plastic curtain back when he finished. He took off the practice shorts and dropped them into a lump on the tile. He put on jeans, cupped water at his hands and rubbed his face. He took dope from an empty aspirin bottle in the medicine cabinet, dark, tight smoke he got from Curtis Rigby sometimes; it sparked and hissed when burned. He kept a small pipe John Michael Johnson sold him for a dollar inside the aspirin bottle, gold finished, shaped like a spark plug. He rolled it in one hand, metal cold against his skin. He opened the window and stuffed the bigger hole on the pipe, put the lid down on the toilet and sat there. He struck a lighter, bobbed it in front, pulled slow until the metal got hot on his lips and then he held the smoke until his eyes watered. He studied his knee; caked over, gone to scab. He pulled out pieces of grass left. The backyard outside the window was dark; on the north end of the roof, gutter rain fell through a floodlight. Small brown moths batted the windowsill. He blew smoke at some from the toilet, and one putted inside, drifted to the sconce over the medicine cabinet. The moth was thin, brittle, scrap tissue paper. He stood up, tapped the brushed glass covering the light. The moth flew out and landed on the white porcelain lip of the sink, fluttered terrible brown wings. He heard it thinking; not words, but something like the gray hiss wind put to trees when it blew hard. He put an index finger soft under one of the moth’s wings, and it stepped between the first and second knuckle, stayed there still for a moment.
Benjamin Webber didn’t say a word when he came back to the kitchen and told him he was ready to go. Terry was high, beaten, sure the air moved at his father’s head and shoulders, sure he heard songbirds turned to smoke and crying inside the chimney.
Terry watched houses squat and brick on the way to the church.
What are you thinking about? his father said.
Terry didn’t know how to answer. He didn’t want to talk; nothing came of words neither one knew the meaning of. The road fell beneath them. Terry put a hand on the door latch. The grass burn throbbed on his knee. He winced.
Fuckall, he said.
I feel a little sad, his father said. Not sure why, really.
The tires caught another hole. Terry turned the radio louder. His father let it be for a moment, then twisted the knob back down.
You mad?
No.
Did you use soap?
What?
In the shower before.
You don’t smell so good.
Neither do you.
Did you change clothes?
Stop with those goddamn questions already
Maybe wash them again.
Both were quiet then for a few minutes, the streetlamps passed burn marks.
You miss that girl, his father said.
Some.
Terry didn’t know how to miss her; she was there some weeks, for only a few moments. Sometimes he didn’t know if she was anything at all, but something maybe he came across during sleep.
His father followed a house with his eyes when they passed.
Every day when I went to school I walked by this river, he said. In the mornings it was green, bright green sometimes, like algae in a swamp.
Terry scratched at his knee through the jeans.
But then in the afternoon, when I came back along that same river, it was red.
There’s no such thing as water like that.
What do you know about it?
I’m just saying.
In all your fourteen years of fucking expertise.
Almost sixteen, dammit.
Terry scraped the grass burn on his knee with his fingernails, the throb gave to the scratch, and when he stopped it went back the other way.
I know when your birthday is. Two months you’ll be sixteen.
Benjamin Webber changed hands on the steering wheel, left to right, wrist settled above the finger grooves. He looked quick to the passenger seat, square chin banded in yellow streetlight, and then he turned back.
Stop picking your goddamn knee, he said.
It’s eight months anyway, not two, Terry said.
I knew that.
You didn’t.
Terry leaned back, put a hand over his eyes and shut them. He pictured the pain in his knee, growing then, a red sun, and he focused on pushing the edges of it, shrinking it to nothing, but it stayed, and grew brighter.
You’ve got a mouth like a damn pirate.
Just stop man.
I told you a valuable story
Tell me what it means then.
Maybe nothing. Or, you know, whatever you want. The fact that a river was one color in the morning and another in the afternoon? Sometimes the world goes against what you’ve got set in your mind, you know, the path you’ve laid out for things. See I was little. Second grade, maybe third. I didn’t understand downriver there was a factory spitting out dye every day at noon.
Terry put his face to the window and the dark trees passing. He thought to speak, but did not.
The church was brick and Episcopal, stained, glowing, named for a saint, or many saints, and he didn’t mind it then because it was quiet, and he was high, and there was a great deal of color.
He sat with his father in a pew near the back, listened to the priest and long prayers everyone stood up to say. Terry couldn’t understand any of it; communion of saints, resurrection of the body, right hand of God the father almighty, the quick and the dead and all that. He read the origins of songs from the list in the back of a hymnal; Danish, Korean, Welsh. He scribbled on the bulletin with a pencil from a slot on back of the pew, and then he wrote fake names on small cards used to request membership, general information, or a pastoral visit; Copernicus Donleavy, Roscoe Barakas.
The priest spoke low and even up front, palmed a small brass bowl. He said the ashes filled inside were made from burnt greens used at Christmas to decorate the sanctuary during advent; the big tree and the smaller ones, wreaths tied with wire and ribbon at the doors and the altar rail. He faced the small table below the pulpit. The ones he named stood up from the pews and walked silent to the front; he gave one the heavy brass candlesticks, another one the cross, and then he folded the green veneer cloth from beneath all three like a flag and handed it over; at each one he said our lord is dying. These are his limbs, he said, this is his heart.
He stood in line behind his father, watched his shoulders click beneath the white oxford dress shirt, one of two he owned, both of them old, full of starch and sweat, stained yellow at the neckline and on the chest. His face was newly shaved, hot water pink. Terry felt at his chin and cheeks, the sharp hair come in a little, wondered how the body knew when, how much, how to stop.
The priest spoke of dust, and when they got to the front of the line he crossed their foreheads with ash; when they were back in the pews he said our lord has begun the long walk, the long cold walk, and he does it every year, our lord, every year he sees his death, and he dies anyway, and then he does it again forever.
Benjamin Webber opened the front door, and Terry went inside. He rubbed his forehead and looked at his fingers. His father still had the lopsided and flaking cross above his eyes. He closed the door.
You shouldn’t rub it off.
Terry stopped in the hall and looked back at him.
It’s dirt.
It’s not. It’s not at all.