LONG AGO NOW—but still as vital a chapter of my moral history as my first kiss (with Jane Templeton at the FFA marriage booth in the National Guard armory) or my first love affair (with Leonna Allen, now an LPN in Lubbock, Texas)—I saw my daddy, Hobey Don Baker, Sr., do something that, until recently, was no more important to me than marriage is to mermaids. In an event even now still well known to the six thousand of us who live here in Deming, New Mexico, my father struck a man and then walked from the sixteenth green of our Mimbres Valley Country Club to the men’s locker, where he destroyed two dozen sets of golf clubs, an act he carried out with the patience you need nowadays to paint by numbers or deal with lawyers from our government.
I was seventeen then, a recent graduate of our high school (where I now teach mathematics and coach JV football), and on the afternoon in question I had been sitting at the edge of the club pool, baking myself in the summer sunshine pale people write home about. I was thinking—as I suspect all youth does—about the wonder I would become. I had a girlfriend, Pammy Jo (my wife now), a ’57 Ford Fairlane 500 (yellow over black), and the knowledge that what lay before me seemed less future than fate—which is what happens when you are raised apart from the big world of horror and cross-heartedness; yet, at the moment I’d glimpsed the prize I would be—and the way it is in the storybooks I read—disaster struck: Rushing up behind me, my mother ordered me to grab my shirt and thongs and to hurry out to the sixteenth green, our road hole, to see what the hell my daddy was fussing about.
“He’s just chased Dottie Hightower off the course,” she said. “Listen, you can hear him.”
You couldn’t hear him, really, just see him: a figure, six hundred yards distant, dressed in white slacks, a white sport shirt, and a floppy bucket hat to cover his bald spot—an outfit you expect to find on Las Vegas gangsters named Cheech.
“I don’t hear anything,” I said.
“He’s out there being crazy again,” she declared. “He’s cussing out everybody.”
We stepped closer to the chain-link fence surrounding the pool, and, my mother leaning forward like a sentinel, we listened.
“You hear it?” she said. “That was language in reference to smut.”
I’d heard nothing but Dub Spedding’s belly-flop and an unappetizing description of what Grace Hanger said she’d eaten for dinner last night. Daddy was stomping now, turning left and right, and waving his arms. In pain perhaps, he snatched his hat off, slammed it to the turf to charge at it the way he attacked the lawn mower when it would not start.
“Look at that,” Mother said.
Daddy was standing in front of Butch Ikard, who still sells us our Chevrolets, and Yogi Jones, our golf pro, and pointing at Mr. Jimmy Sellers, who was sitting in his golf cart and having a beer.
“He’s just missed a putt, that’s all,” I said. “Maybe it cost him fifty dollars.”
But then, by the way she drew her beach towel around her and how her face went dark, I knew that what was going on out there had nothing to do with money.
“Maybe he’s sick,” I said.
His talk was vile, about creatures and how we are them.
“Hear that?” she howled. “That was the word wantonness.”
I could hear birds, nearby traffic, and suddenly, like gunfire in a church, I heard my father. He was speaking about the world, all right—how it had become an awful place, part zoo, part asylum. We were spine only, he was saying. With filth attached. We were muck, is what we were. Tissues and melts and sweats. His voice was sharp the way it became when the Luna County Democratic Party, which he was the chairman of, did something that made the Republicans look selfless.
“You get him right now,” Mother said, shoving me onward.
At the pool nobody had moved: The Melcher sisters, old and also rich, were frozen; even the kids in the baby pool—the ones still in diapers, the toddlers—had stopped splashing and now stood as if they’d instantly grown very, very old.
“What do you want me to do?” I said.
This was a man who, in teaching me to box, had mashed my nose and introduced me to the noisy afterworld of unconsciousness; and now he was out there, pitching his clubs into the sky and ranting.
“Hobey Don, Jr.,” my mother said, leading me by the elbow to the gate, “don’t be so damned lamebrained.”
I do not know now, twenty-five years later, what had ravaged my father’s self-control, what had seized him as surely as devils are said to have clutched those ancient, fugitive Puritans we descend from. I can tell you that he was well known for his temper; and, by way of illustration, I can point to the time he broke up Mother’s dinner party for Woody and Helen Knapp by storming into our dining room, his cheeks red and blue with anger, in one fist the end of a trail of toilet paper that stretched—we soon learned—through the living room, over the petrified-wood coffee table my Aunt Dolly had picked up at an Arizona Runnin’ Indian, down the hall, beside the phone stand which had belonged to my Granny Floyd, and into the guest lavatory.
“Elaine,” he hollered, “you come with me right now.”
Mother had stopped chewing her green beans.
“Woody,” he said, “you and Helen, too. I want you to see this.”
Daddy stood next to me, waving that flowery tissue like a football pennant.
“And you, too, young man.”
What was wrong was that Mother (or Mrs. Levisay who house-cleaned Tuesday and Saturday) had put the roll on the holder backward so it dispensed from the front, not from behind as it goddamn ought. We were a sight: the nearly five hundred pounds that were the Knapps squeezed into our bathroom with Mother and me; Daddy ordering us up close so we could see—and goddamn well remember for the rest of our miserable, imperfect lives—that there was one way, and one way only, sensible as God intended, for bathroom tissue, or anything else, to be installed.
“You wouldn’t drive a car backwards, would you?” He was talking to Mr. Knapp (napkin still tucked under his chin!), who looked as hopeless and lost as any stranger can be in a bathroom. “And Helen there, she wouldn’t eat soup with a fork, would she?”
I could smell us: Mother’s White Shoulders perfume, what the Pine Sol had left, the sweat Mr. Knapp is given to when he isn’t sitting still.
“Things have a purpose,” my daddy was saying—shouting, actually—and pointing at the john itself. “Man, creature, invention—the whole kit ’n’ kaboodle.”
Toilet paper was flying now, shooting overhead like streamers at a Wildcat basketball game. Mrs. Knapp, her shoulders and head draped by enough tissue to make a turban, was looking for a way out, slapping the walls, pawing blindly, and yelping in a squeak Mother said had been picked up at the Beaumont School for Girls in El Paso, “Woody, help me. Help me, now.”
“Remember,” my father was saying, “purpose.” He had arranged himself on the closed toilet seat. “This may seem small to you, but, good Lord, you let the little things get away, next thing you know the big things have fallen apart. Toilet tissue one minute, maybe government the next.”
Another time, while I was doing the dishes—just had the glassware left, in fact—he wandered past me, whistling the tune he always used when the world worked right (“I’m an Old Cowhand”), and flung open the refrigerator. It was nearly seven, I guess, and he was about to have his after-dinner rum concoction. I was thinking about little—the TV I’d watch or that History Club essay I had to write for Mrs. Tipton. And then I heard him: “Eeeeffff.”
The freezer door went bang, and instantly he was at my elbow, breathing in a panic, hunched over and peering into my dishwater as if what lay at the bottom were sin itself.
“What the hell are you doing?” he hollered.
I went loose in the knees and he swept me out of the way.
“How many times I got to tell you,” he boomed, “glasses first, water’s hottest and cleanest—then the flatware, plates, serving dishes. Save your goddamn saucepans for last!”
I was watching the world turn black and trying to remember how to defend myself.
“Here, I’ll show you.”
And he did. Not only did he rewash all the dishes, but he also—now muttering about the loss of common sense—opened every cabinet, drawer, and cupboard we have so he could spend the next five hours washing, in water so hot we were in danger of steam burn, every item in the house associated with preparing, serving, and consuming food. Chafing dish, tureen, pressure cooker, double boiler, candy dish, meat thermometer, basting brush, strainer, lobster hammer—everything disappeared into his soapy water.
“Scrub,” he said. “Hard.” He was going at one dish as if it were covered with ink. “Rinse,” he said. “Hot, dammit.”
A minute later he sent me to the utility room for the flimsy TV trays we own, and then he stopped. Every flat surface in the kitchen—the countertop, the tops.of the freezer and the stove, the kitchen table itself, the trays—was piled high with our plates and such.
“See,” he howled at last, “you see how it’s done?”
There he stood, arms glistening, shirt soaked, trousers damp to the knees. His eyeballs were the brightest, maddest points of reference in the entire universe; and, yes, I did see.
He even blew up one time in Korea, going off the way shotguns do, loud and spreading. Mother told me that one day, unhappy with his duties as the I Corps supply officer, he appeared at the residence of his CO, plucked his major’s insignia from his shoulders, threw them at the feet of that startled officer.
“Pick those up, mister,” he said.
The man looked flabbergasted, so my father said that, owing to shoddiness in the world at large and the preeminence in that cold, alien place of such vices as sloth, avarice, gluttony, backstabbing, and other high crimes he’d remember later, he was quitting—which he could do, he reminded that man, on account of his nonregular Army status as a reserve officer and his relation to my Uncle Lawrence, then a six-term congressman from the Fourth District of New Mexico.
“Colonel,” my daddy is reported to have declared, “this is squalor, disease, violence, and hunger, and I will have no part of it.”
So he had blown up in the past and would blow up many, many times after the day I am concerned with here. He would go crazy when my cousin Delia drowned at Elephant Butte and when the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Later, he exploded when Billy Summer won the club championship with a chip shot that bounced off the old white head of A. T. Seely. He blew up when Governor George Corley Wallace used the word nigger on national TV, and he beat our first RCA color set with my Little League Louisville Slugger when Lyndon Johnson, jug-eared and homely as dirt, showed America his surgery scars. As he aged, my father bellowed like a tyrant when Dr. Needham told him his gallbladder had to come out, and he raged like a cyclops at the lineman from El Paso Electric who tried to string a low-voltage line across a corner of our ranch. When he was fifty, he was hollering about calumny and false piety; at sixty, about the vulgar dimwits loose in the land; at seventy, about the excesses of those from the hindmost reaches of our species. Even a week before he died—which was three years ago, at seventy-four—he lay in his hospital bed, virtually screaming at his night nurse about the dreamland that citizens lived in. “This is a world of ignorance and waste,” he hollered, “no bridge at all over the sea which is our foreordained doom!”
Yes, he had blown up before and would blow up again, so on the day I trudged across our flatland fairways, I assumed he was loco this time because, say, he’d caught Butch cheating. Or that Yogi Jones had spoken unkindly about Hebrews. Or that Jimmy Sellers, whom he seemed most mad at, had gypped him on the Ramada Inn they were partners in.
I have told Pammy Jo many times that mine was the most curious eight-minute walk I will ever take. I have read that in so-called extreme moments—those that Mother associates with the words peril and dire—we humans are capable of otherwise impossible physical activity. In emergencies, we can hoist automobiles, vault like Olympians, run at leopard-like speeds. So it was with my father. As I drew nearer, my flip-flops making that silly slapping noise, Daddy spun, bounced as if on springs, whirled, hopped, and kicked the air. He threw his ball onto the service road. He windmilled his arms, stomped, spit on the putter he’d jammed like a stake into the heart of the green. He even dashed in a zigzag that from above might have looked like the scribbling Arabs have. I was reminded of the cartoon creatures I see on Saturday-morning TV, those who race over the edge of a cliff to hang unnaturally in the air for several seconds, their expressions passing from joy to worry to true horror. And then I realized—almost, I am convinced, at the same moment he did—that my father was going to roar headlong at Mr. Sellers, stop in a way that would jar the innards, and coldcock that man.
“No,” I croaked, and when Daddy left off his tirade about murkiness in the moral parts and the rupture that was our modern era, something tiny and dry broke free in my chest. To my knowledge, he’d never struck a man in anger before, but as he went at it now, like an honorable citizen with a single unbecoming task to do in life, I could see that violence—if that’s all this was—was as natural to him as fear is common to us all.
“James Edward Sellers,” he was shouting, “I am going to tear out your black heart.”
I reached the green just as Mr. Sellers, fingering his split lip, was picking himself up.
“Let’s go,” Daddy said, using a smile and a voice I never care again to see and hear. He seemed composed, as if he’d survived the worst in himself and was now looking forward to an eternity of deserved pleasures. “Grab my bag, son,” he said. Nearby, Mr. Ikard and Yogi Jones had the faces you find on those who witness such calamity as auto wrecks: gray and why-filled.
“Where you going?” I asked.
He pointed: the clubhouse. “Now,” he said. “This minute.”
I hustled about, picking up his clubs, finding his two-iron beyond the sand trap behind the willow tree. This was over, I figured. He had been the nincompoop my mother said sometimes he was, and now he could be again that fairly handsome elder who read books like Historia Romania and the biographies of dead clerics. He would, I believed, march into the clubhouse, collect himself over a mixed drink, and then reappear—as he had done several times before—at the door to the men’s locker. Into the caddy master’s hand Daddy would place a written apology so abject with repentance and so slyly organized that when it was read over the PA, perhaps by Jimmy Sellers himself, those lounging around the pool and walking the links, as well as those in the showers or in the snack bar or in the upstairs dining room, would hush their chitchat, listen as librarians can, and afterward break into that applause which greets genuinely good news.
At the men’s locker, I found the door locked. Twenty people had wedged themselves into the narrow, dim hallway; with amusement, I thought that, as he had done with Woody and Helen Knapp, Daddy had herded them here, mad and delighted, to show them the proper way to fold a bath towel or how a gentleman shines his wingtip shoes or what tie to wear with red.
“That was the trash can,” Mr. Hightower said behind me. We had heard the banging and clatter that metal makes when it is drop-kicked.
Elvis Peacock was shaking his head. “Could have been the towel rack. Or that automatic hand-dryer.”
You heard the crash and whang of doors slamming and a two-minute screech that Mr. Phinizy Spalding identified as the wooden rack of linen hooks that ran from the showers to the ball washers.
Patient as preachers, they listened and I listened to them. A jerky scraping was Dr. Weems’s easy chair being dragged. Pounded. And, at last, splintered.
“What was that?” someone said.
We’d heard a deafening rattle, like gravel on a tin roof.
“Pocket change,” Herb Swetman told us. “He’s broken into the cigarette machine.”
A glass shattered, Judge Sanders’s starting pistol went off, and it was time for me to knock on the door.
“I got your clubs,” I said.
He was moving, spikes clicking and scratching like claws. I had the thought that this wasn’t my father at all but the boogeyman all children hear about. It was nothing to believe that what now stopped behind the door, still as the stuff inside a grave, was the scaly, hot-eyed, murder-filled monster who, over the years, was supposed to leap out of closets or flop down from trees to slay youngsters for the crimes they sometimes dream of.
“What do you want me to do with them?”
I was speaking directly into the MEMBERS ONLY sign, feeling as awkward and self-conscious as I would one day feel asking Pammy Jo to marry me. Crowded behind were Frank Redman and T. Moncure Yourtees, our assistant city manager. Behind them stood the Clute brothers, Mickey and Sam, both looking as interested in this as their Pope is in carnality. Last in line, silhouetted in the doorway, stood Mr. Jimmy Sellers himself. A muscle had popped in my neck and for a time it was impossible to breathe.
“You all right?” I asked. “Mother is real upset.”
Here, then, hushed as Dr. Hammond Ellis says will be the daybreak of doom, my daddy, his face clearly pressed against the doorjamb, told me he had something special in mind. I recognized his voice as the one he’d used ten years before when, drunk and sore-hearted with nostalgia, he had sat on the end of my bed to tell me how his brother, my Uncle Alton (who was alleged to be as handsome as Cary Grant and Rock Hudson combined) had died in the Battle of the Bulge in WWII; it was a story of deprivation, of fortitude in the face of overwhelming sadness, and of what we human brothers—in our German incarnation this time—are capable of in a world slipped free of grace.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“You listen carefully,” he whispered.
“Yes, sir.” He was my father and I was being polite.
He said, “I want you to break those clubs, you hear?”
The news traveled down the line behind me and returned before my mind turned completely practical: “How will you know?”
Mr. Phinizy Spalding had lit a cigar, the smoke just reaching me.
“Junior,” Daddy was saying, “I am your parent and you will do what I say.” He could have been speaking to me as he had to that colonel in Korea years before.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
My mother had given him these clubs—Titleist irons and Hagen woods—less than four months before, and if you know anything about golf, you know that a linkster’s clubs are to him what a wand is to a magician. They had leather grips and extra-stiff shafts, and they felt, even in my clumsy grip, like a product of science and philosophy: balanced, elegant, simple as love itself. They were shiny, cost over seven hundred dollars, and I told him I would begin with his wedge.
“Good idea,” he said.
Snapping those clubs was neither physically nor spiritually difficult. I was strong, and I was dumb. To those folks in the hallway, my actions probably seemed as ordinary as walking a straight line. Indeed, once I started, Mr. Hightower began handing me the clubs.
“I’ll be your assistant, Junior,” he said. He was smiling like the helpful banker he is, and I thanked him.
“My pleasure,” he said, “happy to be of service.”
There was nothing in me—doubt, aggravation, none of it. Neither fear nor joy. Neither pleasure nor satisfaction. This was work, and I was doing it.
“I have your five-iron now,” I said. At my feet lay what I’d already accomplished: a gleaming pile of twisted, broken, once-expensive metal. And then I heard it: the noise I am partly here to tell about. I understand now—because I have dwelled on it and because it once happened to me—that despite what was happening, he was still angry. Angry in a way that fell beyond ordinary expression. An anger that comes not from the heart or the brain, or another organ of sense, but from the soul itself. An anger that, looking down, angels must feel.
For what he was doing, while I wrenched in half his woods and putter, was speaking, in a whisper I shall forever associate with the black half of rapture, some sort of gibberish, a mutter I can only transcribe as funny-pages gobbledygook, those dashes and stars you see in newspapers when the victim of rage empties his mind. It was X, which in the tenth-grade algebra I teach stands for the unknown—as in x - 2 = y. It is everything and nothing; and that day, accompanied by twenty wiser men, I heard Daddy speak it, just as yesterday I heard Dr. Hammond Ellis, our Episcopalian minister, preach about man’s need for fellowship and eternal good. To be true, when I had at last fractured his putter, I believed that Daddy was mumbling as Adam and Eve were said to mumble, in the language of Eden that Dr. Ellis insists was ours before death. Because I am old-fashioned and still a believer, I contend that my father, enraged like any animal that sleeps and eats, was speaking a babble so private, yet so universal, that it goes from your lips to the ear of God Himself; it is more breathtaking, I hold, than the wheel, fire, travel in space—all those achievements, we hope, that makes us less monkey than man.
On Daddy yammered, a phenomenon those in the hall with me found as remarkable as chickens which count by twos.
Mr. Hightower said it was Dutch. “I heard that in World War Two,” he said. “Or maybe it’s Flemish.”
Frank Redman suggested it was Urdu, something he’d heard on TV the other night. “Junior, how’s your daddy know Urdu?”
Elvis Peacock, the only one besides my father to have gone to university, said it was, well, Sanskrit, which was speech folks in piled-up headdress mutter before they zoom off to the afterlife. “Listen,” he said, “I’m betting ten dollars on Sanskrit.”
And so, once again, we listened and were not disappointed. My father, an American of 185 pounds and bristly, graying hair, and a reputation for mule-headedness, was in there—in that shambles of a locker room—yapping, if you believe the witnesses, in Basque, in Mennonite, in Zulu, or in the wet yackety-yak that Hungary’s millions blather when they spy the vast Whatnot opening to greet them.
“Let’s go in,” Dr. Weems suggested at last.
From their expressions, these men seemed ready to vote on it.
“Daddy,” I said, “can I come in now?”
It was midafternoon and it seemed we had waited forever.
“It’s open,” he said.
I sensed he was sitting, perhaps in the remains of Dr. Weems’s easy chair; strangely, I expected him to be no more disturbed or disheveled than our most famous judges.
“Don’t make any loud noises,” Frank Redman said. “I know that man, he’s liable to shoot somebody.”
Slowly, I pushed open the door, stepped over the rubble of his clubs, and made room for those following me. You could see that a hurricane, a storm by the name of Hobey Don Baker, Sr., had been through there. A bank of lockers had been tipped over, many sprung open to reveal what we in the upper class dry off with or look at when doing so. There were shampoo bottles scattered, as well as Bermuda shorts, tennis shoes, golf spikes, bottles of Johnnie Walker Red and Jack Daniel’s, Bicycle playing cards, chips that belonged to Mr. Mickey Clute’s poker game, and a nasty paperback Frank Redman wouldn’t later own up to. In one corner was a soiled bundle of lady’s frilly underclothes that looked worthy of ample Mrs. Hightower herself. And then Yogi Jones noticed Memo Gonzalez, the janitor, who was leaning against the wall to our right, almost facing Daddy.
“You’ve been in here the whole time?” Yogi Jones said.
As a group, we watched Memo nod: Sure, he’d been in here. He was from Mexico—an especially bleak and depressed village, we thought—and the rumor was that he had been a thousand things in his youth: dope smuggler, highway bandito, police sergeant in Las Palomas, a failed bullfighter before Yogi brought him up here, on a green card, to sweep up and keep our clubs clean.
“We been having conversation,” he said. “Where you been?”
Right then, you knew that all the rumors were true, even those still to be invented, for you could see by the way he smoked his Lucky Strike and picked his teeth with a golf tee that he’d seen it, and heard it, and that it—war, pestilence, famine, plague—had meant less to him than books mean to fish.
“Memo,” my father said, “come over here, please.”
I took note of one million things—the yellow light, the smell of the group I stood in, and the rusty taste coming from my stomach. I felt as apart from my father as I do now that he is dead. I wondered where my mother was and what was happening in the outer world. I thought of Pammy Jo and hoped she still loved me. I saw that Mr. Ikard hadn’t shaved and that Rice Hershey was the sourpuss bookkeeper Daddy said he was. A thought came, went, came back, and again I heard, in my memory, the X language Daddy had used.
It was prayer, I thought. Or it was lunacy.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Mother says we’re eating out tonight.”
Standing, one arm around Memo’s shoulders, Daddy looked, except for the hair slapped across his forehead like a pelt, as alert and eager as he did at the breakfast table. I wanted to grab hold, say I loved him.
“Gentlemen,” he was saying, “to cover expenses, I hold here a check for ten thousand dollars.”
There were ooohhhs and aaahhhs and the expressions they come from.
“If you need more, there is more.”
And then he was marching past us, me running to catch up.
Now this is the modern, sad part of the story, and it is a bit about my oldest boy, Buddy—who, like me in the former story, is seventeen—and how I came again to hear that double-talk I thought remarkable so long ago. There is no Memo in this part, nor folks like Messrs. Redman, Hightower, and Ikard, for they, like Daddy and Mother themselves, are either dead or old and mostly indoors. Mainly, though, this section is without the so-called innocent bystander because our world is utterly without bystanders, innocent or otherwise; we are all central, I believe, to events which are leading us, good and bad, to the dry paradise that is the end of things.
Buddy is like most youth these days—by turns lazy and helpful, stupid and smart-alecky, fussy and apathetic. Tall, too skinny through the chest, he speaks when spoken to and has a girlfriend named Alice Mary Tidwell who will one day be a fat but always cheerful woman. He reads periodicals like Sports Illustrated and what is required in school as advanced literature (which is Silas Marner, verse by Shakespeare, and made-up mishmash by New York writers who haven’t lived anywhere). I love him not simply because he is my flesh but because I see that in all things—his own adulthood, for example—he will be decent-hearted and serious-minded, a man who will want, as you do, to be merely and always good. More than once we have talked about this—mostly when he was an adolescent. I used to sit at the end of his bed, as had my father with me, to offer my views on issues like relations among neighbors, what heft our obligations have, and how too often the heart never fits its wanting. One time, but without the dramatics my daddy enjoyed, I took him around the house, showing him what ought to be, not what was; later, when he was ten and mowing our yard, I went out, watched for a time, then stood in his path to stop him.
“What’s the matter now?” he asked.
It was summer, dry but hot as fire gets, and it was partly joyful to see him sweat doing something he’d been told.
“First,” I said, “you have to wear shoes. You hit a rock and no telling what’ll happen.”
He looked at the sandals we’d bought him in Juarez.
“And no more shorts,” I added. “Long pants for the same reason.”
He has his mother’s blue eyes, which were fixed on me as hers often are when I rise up to put things straight in this universe.
“I’m wearing goggles,” he said.
I was pleased, I told him, but then described, as Daddy did for me, how grass is cut in the ideal world.
“Starting from the outside,” I began, “you go around in a square, okay? Throws the cuttings to the center and makes raking up easier.”
Here it was, then, that we had a moment together, a moment which had nothing to do with yard work; rather, it was a passage of time that, to the sentimentalist I am, seemed filled with wonder and knowledge—the first things we must pass on.
“Can I have five dollars?” he asked.
He was going to the movies, he said, with Jimmy Bullard and Clovis Barclay. I was watching his face—what it said about his inner life—and when he took the money from me, I accepted the urge, felt in the gut, to throw my arms around him and lay on the breath-defeating hug I am notorious for.
“Come on, Dad,” he said, “don’t squeeze so hard.”
Mostly, however, and embarrassingly, we are not close. Like my father, I tend to lecture; like me, when I was his age, he is obliged to listen. I have talked about responsibility, the acceptance of which is a measure of our maturity and not nearly the weighty moral overcoat another might say it is, and Buddy has said, “Yes, sir.” I have talked about honor, which is often seen as too ambiguous to be useful, and he has answered, “Yes, sir.” I have talked about politics, which—except for voting—he is to avoid; and debt, which he may accept in moderation; and cleanliness, which remains a practical concern; and trust, which he must reward in others. Other times, I have warned him against tobacco, drinking with strangers, carelessness with firearms, public displays of temper, eating undercooked or fatty foods, wasting time, rudeness, sleeping in drafts, and lying when such is not called for. I have said, in a way Pammy Jo finds most amusing, that there is hardness and cruelty, confusion and turmoil; and there is knowing what’s best. To all he has answered, “Yes, sir.”
I have, of course, told him about his grandfather’s outburst at the country club; to be true, I told him during that father-son talk which becomes necessary when the son acquires body hair and the shoulders broaden toward manhood. I forget the point I intended, but somewhere during a too-clinical discussion of arousal and penis length and courtship, I said, “Did you ever hear the locker-room story?”
We were in our living room, he holding the well-illustrated pamphlet, Growing Up: A Young Man’s Mystery, that Dr. Weems had given me. Outside, the August light was gladsome, and in here, among palaver that made romance sound like sport among Martians, I unloaded, taking nearly two hours telling about one. Giving him names, places, and states of mind, I watched his brain, as betrayed by his eyeballs, figure out what coitus had to do with madness. I watched him imagine my father as more than the grumpy old man he knew; and sexual congress—which, I confess, was the phrase I used—as something more than flesh attached to funny Latin words. I told him about Memo’s tattoos, which were as detailed and epic as Spiderman comics, and about Yogi Jones’s hole in one afterward, and about my mother pitching turkey bones at the clock that night; and then, twilight near and our neighbors home from their trades, I watched Buddy’s forehead wrinkle and his hand fidget while he thrashed about in the events I had recalled, helpless as a drowning mule in his effort to establish a connection between the past and this present business of creation.
Which, in the roundabout way I think appropriate, brings us to recent hours, whose events feature a father, a son, a prophylactic, and mumbo-jumbo from the start of time.
It is early April now, rainy enough to be annoying, and Pammy Jo and our youngest, Taylor, are in the eighth day of their two-week visit to her sister in El Paso. It is an absence which means that Buddy and I eat hot dogs and Kraft macaroni too often, or we visit the Triangle Drive-in for Del Cruz’s chicken-fried steak in white gravy. It is an absence I feel physically, as if what I am missing from my bed and my conversation is more body part than companion. There is a larger effect, too, specifically with reference to time—which seems to stretch forward endlessly to a future ever out of reach. Time becomes inconceivable: It is reincarnation or other hocus-pocus our wishing invents. What I am saying here is that when my wife is around, I know where I am in America; and I can say to anybody that I am forty-two years old, a Scorpio (if you care), a cum-laude graduate of the University of New Mexico (B.S. in mathematics), a shareholder in several companies (IBM, for one), a father, a sportsman who does not care for hunting or fishing, a practicing Episcopalian, and heir to nearly one million dollars’ worth of baked desert rangeland (and the cattle that graze there). But when she is gone—when she visits her father in Roswell or when she attends her social workers’ convention in Santa Fe—my horizon shrinks and loneliness has such weight that I am pitched forward and ever in danger of wobbling to a stop.
The other day I felt this as a restlessness to see my neighbors, a desire to be moving, so I told Buddy I was going out.
“When you going to be back?” he asked.
It was noon and there was no reason to be anywhere—here, this continent, this world.
“I don’t know, maybe I’ll go to the club.”
He was watching Larry Bird and the Celtics make mincemeat out of the Bullets from Washington. Plus, he had a package of chocolate chip cookies and most of the milk in the house.
“Have a good time,” he said, and I was gone.
Yet for the next few hours it was less I than someone else who drove around Deming. At one time, this man who was not me found himself stopped outside a shabby duplex on Olive Street where he had been violently drunk for the first time. He had been with Donnie Bobo and Dickie Greene and, in the company of Oso Negro and Buckhorn beer, he’d seen the night itself fly apart and burn. An hour later, he found himself on one of the line roads that head east through the scrub and brush toward Las Cruces. He had been here twice before with Bernice Ruth Ellis, and the sex they had had been fitful, not at all the hurly-burly described in Penthouse magazine—in part because he was married and because she was the confused daughter of our most celebrated Christian, Dr. Hammond Ellis. This infidelity occurred long ago, in the second year of my marriage, and is an episode I do not forgive myself for. It is one secret I’ve kept, and there are times, especially when I see Bernice and her husband Charlie Potts at the Fourth of July dance or at the Piggly Wiggly, when I think it did not happen at all; or that, if it did, it happened in a place—a crossroads of time and circumstance—in which there was no evil or eye looking down.
Around four, I found myself at the club, one of many husbands and fathers who seemed too bored or too free. My friend Leroy Sellers—yes, Jimmy’s son—was sitting on a camp stool in the pro shop, making sense out of our war with Nicaragua. Bobby Hover was there, looking like the rich real-estate broker he is; so were Slim Sims, Spudd Webb, Archie Meents, and Ed Fletcher, all fellows I’d grown up with or met through my exploits on the football field. In time, aided by the scotch whiskey Spud brought from his locker, we fixed civilization up fine.
After eliminating poverty, we took the starch out of the diets of fat men, dealt with such dreams as are suffered by tyrants, turned winners into losers, fired two county commissioners, and agreed that in humans we liked muscle, the eagle’s eyesight, voices you can hear across the room, plus what they teach in Sweden about freedom. Slim told us about his brother who was building jet fighters for LTV in Dallas, Ed Fletcher suggested a cure for flatulence, and Spud himself took the high ground in defense of intergalactic communication with, say, Venutians—a point he made by drawing our attention to the ten billion stars and planets which were said to be out there. He was standing, I remember, and his workingman’s face had taken on a blissful shine, red and wet the way yours would be were you to win ten million dollars in a lottery.
“They’re up there, I tell you,” he said, daring each of us to contradict him. “You got to be less narrow-minded, boys.”
For a moment, it was possible to believe him—to understand that out there, where light is said to bend toward time, lived creatures, like ourselves, who had our happy habits of wonder and hope.
At six-thirty, while Ed Fletcher addressed the topic of loyalty in Washington, D.C., I called Buddy to say I’d be a while yet.
“No problem,” he said, “I’m going over to Doug Sherwin’s.”
I know now that he had already done it: that he had gone into our bedroom and had opened my bureau drawer, finding the plain drugstore condoms Pammy Jo and I used for birth control. I know, too, that his mind was filled with a dozen contrary notions—guilt and anxiousness and excitement; and I suspect that at the moment we in the pro shop were putting Mr. Nixon on his feet again, Buddy was bringing himself to that point his Young Man’s Mystery book calls “orgasm,” which is defined as a matter of friction and fluids.
I got home late, finding eight lights burning and the TV tuned to a Sunday-night movie about, near as I can tell, greed and those the victim of it.
Buddy wasn’t home, which was just as well because I was drunk. I have mostly forgone heavy drinking, a crutch (Pammy Jo’s word) I leaned too heavily on after my father died. Nowadays, I have wine to be polite or take my alcohol mixed, for there was a time—nearly eighteen months, in fact—when I was addled enough to be drunk virtually every night; those in my family have said that they were truly afraid of me during this period, seeing me as a desperate sort who wouldn’t watch his tongue and who heaped on others the misery he’d heaped on himself.
So, unsteadily and ashamed, I made coffee and ate peanut butter, a remedy I’d heard on Donahue once. I tried reading the Raymond Chandler I like, but the words, not to mention the events and the people shaped by them, kept sliding off the page. I looked at Life magazine but could not figure out what beasts like giraffes and African elephants were doing next to the colorful vacation homes of the rich. I thought, at last, of calling Pammy Jo, but didn’t. She would hear the thing I was covering up and she would be sad. So, believing I would go to bed, I scribbled this note: “Buddy, I’m going to school tomorrow to do lesson plans; you, as promised, begin painting the garage.”
My father claimed, especially in his rage-filled years in later life, that he’d developed the extra sense of suspicion, a faculty he likened to an awareness old-time oilmen have: Roughnecks, it is said, know when a well is about to come in by a “harmonic tremor,” a subtle shaking of our earth heralded by a noise that causes dogs to prick up their ears. I have inherited this sense, along with bony elbows and a mouth that can be set hard as a cue ball. In our bedroom, which is as big as a two-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel room, I knew immediately that something was wrong. My bedsheets looked too tight, and the clutter on my nightstand—a National Geographic, the Kleenex box, the clock radio, plus a water glass—seemed unfamiliar, somehow different. That organ of suspicion, which is composed, I know now, of habit and how you are taught, was well at work in me. I compare it to my dog, a pound-bred beast named Ticker, and how sometimes he becomes three parts attention, one part muddle.
I made my way around my room on tiptoe, feeling myself the intruder here. I have fist-fought twice in my lifetime—the last in the ninth grade with Billy Joe De Marco, which was when I broke my wrist—but, counting the change on my dresser and opening my jewelry box, I was ready. I heard what nighttime has to offer in these parts: Poot Tipton in his backyard next door hollering at his brother; a car going too fast on Iron Street; our air conditioner taking its own pulse. Who was here? I was thinking, and pictures came to mind of robberies and the serious prowling we suffer around here. And then, arms held as I had been taught, tight to the body, the fists on either side of the head, I went into the bathroom.
For several moments I didn’t see the used condom on the water tank for the toilet. Rather, I was studying the man in the mirror who is me. It would be a cliché to say that in my face—particularly the way the cheekbones lie and how the nose goes flat at the bridge—was my father’s; but there he was, at forty or fifty, gazing at me from a mirror my wife had paid too much for at the White House department store. It is also possible to believe that in his face lay the images, as well, of his father, who had gone broke at least twice. In a way quite natural under the circumstances, I let my heart and breath go free, flipped on the lights, and looked at that room as Chuck Gribble, our sheriff, looks at places that are the scenes of small crimes. I report to you now that I found the condom immediately and took note of it as in past years I have taken note of bad news that happens in big towns far, far away.
“Yes,” I said.
It was a word which then meant no more to me than what is muttered in Paraguay. Yet I muttered it again and again—as if an official with important-looking documents had knocked on my door to say, “Are you Hobey Don Baker, Jr.?”
That night I behaved like an ignorant father. I phoned the Sherwin house, but Betty, Doug’s mother, said Buddy wasn’t there.
“You okay, Junior?” she said. “You sound funny.”
For the most part, my voice was coming from my chest and, yes, it wasn’t her friend talking; it was Buddy’s father.
“You see him,” I told her, “it’s time to come home, all right?”
Sure, she said, and reminded me of the barbecue on Wednesday. “You haven’t been drinking, have you, Junior?”
I watched my hand shake and attended to the rasp my breathing made.
“I’m fine, Betty, thanks.”
I called Clovis Barclay and put up with Earl, his father, scolding me about how late it was. Afterward, I stood on the street, watching our neighbors’ lights go off after the late news. It would be a cool night, the clouds racing up from Chihuahua, and I hoped Buddy hadn’t gone out without a jacket. I was not angry, just dislocated—as unhinged as I was when I tried to quit smoking. I heard the same noise over and over: a fierce ear whine. I regarded heaven, which was up and far away, and hell, which was underfoot and near; and then I went indoors to make myself a camp in Buddy’s room.
It is a truism that teenagers have the collector’s spirit. In my time, I’d hoarded baseball cards and kept statistics on the Aggie basketball I listened to on the radio. I had trophies (swimming), drawings and photographs of jet planes that Grumman had sent me. I had saved coins for a while—nothing special—plus books on oceans. Buddy was no different. He possessed a Zenith record player and at least one hundred albums from Fed-Mart: Mötley Crüe, Devo, and foreign-looking groups whose lyrics were about love, or what passed for it. On the walls—ceiling, too—were charts (“Generalized,” of time and rock units) of Canada and the USA. The rocks we stood on, I discovered, came from the Silurian Age. From his desk I learned that apparently he’d never thrown away a single school assignment; you could see him, represented in thousands of pages, go from one unable to spell garage to one familiar with what Euclid had achieved. I am not proud of this snooping, but I had to know, and isn’t knowing—even if it is painful and frightful and small—better than not knowing? And then, after I’d counted his shirts and pants, he was standing at his door.
“Hey,” he said, “I read the note.”
I took a second, trying to strip the age out of my voice. “Who was she?” I asked. “Was it Alice Mary?”
He stepped backward, shaking his head as if he’d run into a cobweb. He was wearing a shirt like the checkered flag at the Indy 500 and pants that are too expensive and too tight.
“You had a girl in here tonight,” I said. “I want to know who.”
It was a shameful question, but I had to ask it again before I realized—my organ of suspicion, I guess—that there had been no girl, or woman; that, instead, he had indulged in what my 1949 edition of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary calls, stupidly, “self-pollution,” which is masturbation and is as normal to us as flying is to birds.
“In my bathroom,” I said. “On top of the commode.”
He went to look and while he was gone I, in my mind, began putting his books in order. Large to small. Good to bad.
“It was Frances Greathouse,” he said when he returned. “You don’t know her. Her old man works for the state police, a sergeant.”
Buddy looked defeated, as nerve-wracked as the time his Little League team was beaten and the world to him had gone topsy-turvy into chaos.
“Stop,” I said. “I don’t believe you.”
It was true, he insisted. She sat behind him last year, in fifth-period chemistry. She had brown hair and was tall. “They live on Fir Street. It’s a white place, I don’t know the number.”
The rocks we have in the world are these: Cambrian, Ordovician, Devonian. And they go back six hundred million years or more, to times that were dark, silent, and wet.
“Go to bed,” I said, “we’ll talk about this in the morning.”
His face was flushed and open, and I could see that it, too, was mine and how I looked a generation ago.
“You’re right,” he said.
A fiber had snapped in my stomach—a muscle or link between nerve and bone.
“It wasn’t Frances Greathouse,” he was saying, “it wasn’t anybody.”
And then, as it had been in that men’s locker, I heard it again, our X-language, a tumbling rush of speech that if put down here would be all z’s and y’s and c’s, the crash of tongue-thick syllables and disordered parts that everywhere is laughed at as madness. It wasn’t anger I was experiencing—that word can’t apply here—but sadness. Sadness that had to do with time and love.
I was in the hall, several paces from Buddy’s door, next to the watercolors of trees and distance we have bought as art, and the world—as it had for my father—fell away from me. Piece by piece. Element by element. A wind had come up, freezing and from twelve directions, and there was nothing hereabouts but your narrator and his fear. I wore the cotton shirt of a civilized man and the long pants of a grown-up, but I could not think, as I am doing now, of how I came to be in this century.
“What’s wrong?” Buddy said. “Dad?”
My arm, as if on strings, went up. Down. Up again.
Dad,” he said, “you’re scaring me.”
I think now I was speaking, as my father had spoken, of deceit and miserable hope and craftiness and forfeiture and my own ignorance—and of, especially, a future too weird and horrible to ponder. I was speaking, using but controlled by X, of the mud and ooze we will one day be. If I had to translate, I would assert that, victim of a grammar composed of violence and waywardness, I said this: We are flesh and it is fallen. And this: The way is the way, and there is an end. And this: We are matter, it must be saved. And this: There are dark waters all around. And this: Please stop, please stop.
In those minutes in my hallway, in a home I still owe eighty thousand dollars for, while my oldest son trembled as if I had struck him, X wasn’t unknown any longer. It had hair and teeth and ancient, common desires. I knew X.
It was him.
It was me.
It was all of us.
Twenty-five years ago, Memo Gonzalez, to whom my daddy had given his ten-thousand-dollar check, stood unmoving next to Dr. Weems’s splintered chair. Jimmy Sellers, who told this to me, says there was nothing at all in Memo’s face. It was stone, with the impression that the nose, mouth, and eyes had been added later. He was strong, built like a toolbox, and nobody—not even Mickey Clute, who’d wrestled heavyweight in school—thought to go over there and ask for the money.
Several minutes passed—the way they do in the dentist’s office—before Memo walked (“lumbered,” Jimmy says) toward Yogi Jones. He set himself in front of Mr. Jones, and twenty pairs of eyes stared at the tattoos on his arms—inky, clotted designs which were of ideas he held sacred and the women he’d known. Death. Conception. Maria.
“I got to be moving along, Yogi Jones,” he said at last. “I quit.”
Whereupon he went out and, as in some fairy tales, was never seen again.
I like that moment. I like, too, the moment I had with my father in his Biscayne in the members’ parking lot later that afternoon. I did not feel like a teenager then; rather, I felt myself to be the trustee of a dozen secrets, none of which had a name yet but all of which would be with me until there was no more me to know them.
“You drive,” he said.
But before he gave me the keys, he touched me, squeezed me at the shoulder, and in that touch, man to boy, was the knowledge that we were the same: two creatures made blind by the same light and deafened by the same noise; that his dismay was the thing I’d grow into as I had already grown into his hand-me-down trousers; that we were harmless in water, or air; that we were put here, two-legged and flawed, to keep order. It is a moment, so help me, that I intend to re-create for Buddy when he gets home from the picture show. It will be brief, like the original, but I hope it will remain for him forever as it has remained for me.