“As a joke, I FedEx’ed Rex a poison chew toy.”
“Rex, the dog?”
“Hank told Maurey and Maurey called the Secret Service.”
I considered the implications—cost times bother times time, “How do you poison a chew toy?”
“Soak it in Raid for two days, then sprinkle on some crushed d-Con.”
What could I say? My mother thinks she can improve the world by assassinating famous dogs. “This is all very interesting, Lydia, but about my fathers.”
“Forget the phantom fathers, your actual mother needs sympathy. Now.”
“Remember when you drove Maurey and me up from Rock Springs after she almost aborted Shannon, you told us this story where Caspar was supposed to come home Christmas Eve, only he didn’t, so you invited some boys over for a party and they got drunk and raped you over and over and urinated on you and that’s how I was conceived.”
There was a long silence, which is weird for Lydia. Lydia abhors silence. “What’s the point?” she said.
“What I want to know is, did you know the names of the boys who raped you?”
She didn’t answer.
“You told us one was the brother of a school friend,” I said, “so you must have known their names.”
“God, Sam, it happened over thirty years ago. How am I supposed to remember the names of stoolheads I only met once thirty years ago.”
“Those stoolheads are my father. At least, one of them is. I’d think if a boy rapes you and makes you pregnant, his name would stick out in your memory.”
Another silence, followed by an impatient exhalation. “Mimi’s brother had a silly frat boy kind of name—Sport or Slick, something like that.”
“Skip?”
“That’s him.”
“You told me Mimi’s last name was Rotkeillor, but the Skip on Shannon’s list is Prescott.”
“What are you, Perry Mason? Maybe I mixed up my Mimis. All I remember is he had a syringe he used to shoot vodka into oranges.”
“Was another one named William?”
“Why, at your age, are you suddenly obsessed by sperm donors?”
“Shannon looked through old yearbooks and came up with five names and I need to be certain they’re correct.”
“Why for God’s sake?”
I had no answer. “Why didn’t you tell me my fathers’ names?”
She made a bitter laugh sound. “Hell, Sam, you never asked.”
Good point. “I’m asking now.”
“There was a Billy. And Jake. A big kid named something like Bubba.”
“Babe?”
“That’s it.”
“How about Cameron?”
“Maybe.”
“I have to be sure.”
“One of them was named Cameron.” She paused. “Sam, what difference can it possibly make now?”
It’s my theory that most humans only make two or three decisions in a lifetime. The rest is random luck. At that moment, I made a decision.
“Lydia,” I said, “it’s time I met Dad.”
Saturday morning I fell into a clitoral fantasy at Tex and Shirley’s Pancake House. Over cheese blintzes I discovered Linda Ronstadt sitting next to me while my hand under the table dipped into her silken panties. As I rubbed lightly, side to side across the top, Linda lifted a section of orange to her mouth and with dainty teeth bit off the very tip. Drops of orange juice sprayed across the fine fuzz on her upper lip. A low, Spanish moan rose from her breasts. I went into my world-renowned fingertip figure-eight maneuver.
“More coffee?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll bring your check.” I hate reality. There’s nothing so deflating as a waitress pulling the plug on a daydream. It’s almost worse than not finishing the real thing.
Linda Ronstadt has been a regular part of my erotic imagery for almost twenty years, and she only grows sweeter as the time passes. I take pride in my loyalty toward dream lovers. No jumping from rock star to movie star to cover girl for me. What I do is find an unknown, a starlet on the brink of fame, so I can be the first before every college kid with five fingers and a jar of Vaseline claims a piece of the action. This might be another revolt against my gang-bang heritage.
After the waitress cleared breakfast, I spread a street map of Greensboro on the table and drew five Magic Marker stars on the addresses of the five fathers. High school sports heroes, as a rule, don’t wander. It’s the big fish–little pond syndrome; once you get used to being treated like you matter, it’s hard to uproot and move somewhere where you don’t.
After I added one more star for my own Manor House, the pattern on the map was not unlike the six stars on the front of a Subaru. Skip Prescott and Cameron Saunders lived next door to each other in the Starmount Forest development, which surrounded the Starmount Country Club—home of the Bull Run model golf cart—and meant big money.
William Gaines was just off the west edge of Starmount Forest, not three blocks from Tex and Shirley’s Pancake House. It was a sharp edge, cash wise, but still respectable enough to mean his life hadn’t been a bust. Babe Carnisek lived south of downtown. Men in his neighborhood drove American pickup trucks sporting South- Shall-Rise-Again bumper stickers and worked by the hour for people they didn’t like. A number of my golf cart welders came from West 23rd.
Jake Williams’s star sat dead center of a black neighborhood I’d never actually driven through, although not so much because it had a reputation as dangerous. The area just hadn’t come up.
Time to move. I wished I could arrive in my 240Z, or at least a Dodge Dart with a muffler, but some days you’ve got to take action now, to hell with the conditions. You wait for conditions to be right and nobody’d ever do anything. Twenty years after first hearing of my fathers, I was finally going to meet them. As Shannon said—more than once—the night before, it was about damn time.
A man with glasses was kneeling in a garden in the side yard of 147 North Glenwood. The man didn’t look like a rapist. Rapists don’t garden. The house was one of those two-story red brick jobs that sprang up like hives across the South after World War II. A screened-in porch ran the width of the front, through which I could make out a figure at a table.
As I climbed out of the Dart, the man in the garden looked over and waved. I waved back and walked up the crushed rock walkway to the front door. The whole scene felt domestic, as regular as hell. When I knocked on the screen door, a tenor voice barked. “What?”
Inside the porch, a teenage boy sat at a card table, writing furiously in a store-bought journal. As I slid through the door, his face kind of jumped out. He stared at me with anger and said, “Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”
I said, “Walt Whitman.”
He said, “Nine out of ten men are suicides.”
I said, “Benjamin Franklin—
The boy was dressed in black. He stared at me with what I took as a tragic sneer. His neck had the rose
