With the pain in my ribs and the shot I’d taken to the head earlier in the night, I was sure I’d misheard him.
“Did you say my dad?”
Pinkie still wouldn’t look at me, but he nodded.
My stomach fluttered. I tasted bile. I saw dots glistening in front of my eyes and felt like I was going to pass out. Then an irrational anger seized control of me. I grabbed my cousin by his shirt collar.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m sorry, Alex,” Pinkie said, sounding guilty. “Uncle Cliff swore me to secrecy about it years ago.”
I stared at my cousin in disbelief. “You’re saying my father didn’t die that night? He made it through the gorge?”
“Crawled out somewhere right around here,” Pinkie said. “Cliff found him passed out on this ledge long before dawn and long before the police came looking for his body. Your father was seriously busted up.
“Cliff got him out of here, took him to his fishing cabin up on the lake,” my cousin went on. “He nursed him back to health.”
“And told no one?” I asked incredulously.
“Just me,” Pinkie said.
“Why you?”
“Years later, we were up at his cabin. I was probably eighteen. Cliff was away from Aunt Hattie and drinking sour mash. A lot of it. He started getting all sad. And then he started crying, and then he started talking. Once he did, it was like a dam bursting. It all came out.”
Uncle Cliff told Pinkie about finding my dad and getting him to the cabin. He told him how my father had decided it was best if no one but Cliff ever knew he was alive. Nana Mama wasn’t to know. Me and my brothers weren’t to know.
“Why?” I asked, still bewildered and unsure of my emotions, which kept surging all over the place.
“I guess because he did kill your mother,” Pinkie said. “It was an act of mercy, but he killed her, suffocated her. No matter how you looked at it, though, in rural North Carolina, all those years ago, your father was facing a murder charge. Once he healed up, he decided to head south, disappear into a whole other life.”
“Did he?” I asked.
“Yes,” Pinkie replied.
My heart started to hammer in my chest. My father? Alive?
“Where did Uncle Cliff say he went?”
“Florida.”
“Where in Florida?”
“All Cliff knew was that he lived somewhere around Belle Glade, that he worked in agriculture, and that he belonged to a church for a while,” Pinkie said.
“So you’re saying he’s alive?” I asked.
Pinkie sighed and shook his head. “I’m not saying that at all. I’m sorry, Alex. From what I understand, he committed suicide two years after he left Starksville.”
That hit me harder than the kick I’d taken earlier in the evening. One second I was letting the fantasy of actually finding my father build a strange kind of hope in my heart, and the next second I was a grief-stricken boy all over again.
Suicide?
“Thirty-three years ago?” I said, aware of the bitterness in my voice.
Pinkie nodded. “Uncle Cliff said he got a call one night from a woman. She said she’d found Uncle Cliff’s phone number among the effects of a man named Paul Brown who’d committed suicide behind her church. Uncle Cliff said he asked her where she was and she said Belle Glade.”
“What was her name?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Pinkie said. “I don’t know if Uncle Cliff even knew. He was just torn up at your dad killing himself after everything he’d been through.”
I suddenly felt weak and reached out for Pinkie. He grabbed me under the arm, said, “You okay?”
“Not really.”
“Kind of a lot to absorb,” Pinkie said.
“It is,” I said.
“Let’s get you home, have a look at those ribs.”
“Probably a good idea.”
But as I followed him off the ledge, I kept pausing to look at the moon shining on the surface of the upstream pool, and I felt hollow and robbed of something I hadn’t even known I’d had.