MOTORMOUTH was a biker bar set on a strip of gravel off State Route 914, just inside the Mason Falls jurisdiction. I didn’t see a squad car when I pulled up, so I parked beside a row of choppers and got out.
Inside, the place was flooded with greenish-blue light, and an old Harley Panhead was hung from the ceiling. Couples in leather crowded the place. My father-in-law, Marvin, was nowhere in sight.
“Machinehead” from Bush blared through speakers: Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in.
Old Marvin liked to drink. There was a time when he drank at home, back when his wife was still alive. And then there was a time he drank on the road. Like the night my wife and son were killed.
In the last few months, he did his drinking at the Landing Patch. That’s what had brought me to that strip bar in the first place. I was doing therapy, trying to resist beating the shit out of Marvin, sitting there in the parking lot. Watching him go in. Wondering if he came here because of the location, right beside the Tullumy. Right where his daughter and grandson had gone in the drink.
But tonight, he’d come to MotorMouth instead. To some random leather bar. Why?
I found a bartender. “MFPD.” I badged him. “Was there a uniform in here earlier. Settling some fight?”
He pointed out the back door. I moved out of the place and across a dirt overflow parking lot. Signs stuck on cars and bikes advertised a Harley-themed New Year’s Eve party.
A black and white was parked under a tree on the far side of the lot.
Patrolman McRae saw me and got out. He was short and stocky, with a bald head. He’d been on the force about six years, and for a little while we’d been in a poker game together.
“I’m sorry it took so long, Fin.” I put out my hand.
“No problem,” he said, shaking my hand. “I had some paperwork to finish. The snoring’s been what’s bothered me most.”
I peered into the back of his patrol car. My father-in-law was passed out across the seat. He wore jeans and a white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His head rested against the side window. Little gray hairs sprouted from his dark brown ears.
“What happened?” I asked.
“If you believe what Marvin said, someone was talking trash about you.”
“Me?” I blinked.
McRae nodded. “Marvin asked them to step outside and promptly got his ass kicked.”
I didn’t believe a word of what my father-in-law said.
“Listen, P.T.,” he said. “I’m not one to tell you your business, but your father-in-law said you hadn’t talked to him in three months.”
I didn’t want to hear what McRae thought of me, but I also knew he was doing me a solid by not arresting Marvin. “It’s a long story, Fin,” I said.
“It’s also the holidays,” he said. “Why don’t you take the old guy home. Get him into bed.”
I got Marvin out of the squad car. Stood him up. His eyes flickered opened. “Paul,” he said to me.
Steering him across the lot toward my truck, I put Marvin in the passenger seat.
“I didn’t do it, Paul,” he said as I fired up the engine. “There was a car. It came along the highway.”
I’d heard this before. That Marvin hadn’t been behind the wheel of his car, pushing my wife’s car with his, the night she died.
“I can’t talk about it,” I said.
When I got to Marvin’s house, I saw he was asleep again and grabbed his house keys.
I opened the door and looked inside. The hall was full of framed pictures of Lena and Jonas, and it smelled like my wife. Like her house had smelled when we’d first met. When things were easy.
I blinked. Held my eyes shut. Then opened them and hurried to the bedroom. Pulled back the sheets on Marvin’s bed.
As I passed the spare room on the way out, I saw pictures of cars taped up all over the wall. They were cropped photos of the fronts of sedans from the ’90s.
“Son of a bitch,” I said, feeling the anger rise inside me.
The old man had only been charged with a wet reckless, back on December 21 of last year, even though his blood alcohol level was right at 0.08. Most of this was based on Marvin’s account of what had happened, which the DA believed. That he had been called by his daughter Lena, whose car battery had died. That he’d found her stranded off I-32, just south of the bridge. And that he was talking to her, leaning against the driver’s-side window, when a car came along and rammed into the back of his own parked car, pushing it into hers and off the road.
Lena’s 2001 Jeep had picked up speed as it careened down the hill. Within seconds, it had been dumped into the cold waters of the Tullumy River and carried downstream.
I stared at the pictures taped to the wall. Close-ups of the front grilles of cars.
When we’d inspected Marvin’s Chrysler 200 last year, we’d found a broken rear taillight and a dented fender, both with white paint on them. Marvin had argued it was from the car who had hit the back of his sedan. He’d also told anyone who’d listen that he would know the front of that car if he ever saw it again.
I walked out to the truck and opened the passenger side.
I had a much simpler theory on how I’d lost my wife and son the week before Christmas last year. It was the story of a drunk father who already had that white paint on his smashed-in bumper. Who misjudged his speed while trying to push-start his daughter’s old Jeep while he was loaded drunk.
I poked at Marvin. “Wake up,” I said.
He stared at me. “Paul.”
“Don’t say it,” I said. “Just get in the house.”
I helped him into bed. As I pulled up the covers, he grabbed my arm.
“The guys who beat me up,” he said to me. “They said you had become a drunk like me. But that you were still bumbling around and finding shit you should stay away from. That if you didn’t quit, they’d put you in the ground.”
“What did you say?”
I shoved him backward, and his head banged off the headboard.
“They said you were—”
“I’m nothing like you,” I said. “You’re a drunk and a fool. We’re not the same.”
I stared at him. Was someone threatening me? Was it possible?
Then I remembered who I was talking to. A liar.
“You killed your daughter, Marvin.”
Tears ran down his face. “I swear,” he said.
I turned and left.