“When your momma was having you, she should have aborted you and flushed you down the toilet. I flush better things than you down the toilet every goddamned day.”
And I wouldn’t say a word. At least not outwardly. Inside I was screaming every obscenity known to man. But it didn’t help a bit.
I tried so hard to make him see I was good, that he could be proud of me. I was doing poorly at school, so according to Poppa I had crap for brains. So I worked as hard as I could and started doing better. According to Poppa I was then nothing more than a stinking no-good cheater.
When I worked six hours after school to help pay for what the welfare checks couldn’t, I was an ungrateful piece of garbage for not being there to wait on him. When I brought home the prettiest girl in school, she was a goddamn whore cunt for being with an ugly worthless bastard like myself. I tell you, some things a man has no right to say to anyone no matter how much he might be hurting. Some things should be made to choke in a man’s throat.
* * * * *
After the stroke, the doctors told him he had to quit drinking, but that was like telling a baby not to drool. He gave me holy hell for not bringing booze back to him. But I wouldn’t do it. He knew he wasn’t supposed to drink and if he wanted to, well, he’d just have to get to a bar himself. So he would curse me like all hell, and get out of his bed, and with his crippled body, struggle the two blocks to the Black Horse Pub, moving like a falling apart wind-up toy.
If I had brought him the alcohol he would never have left his bed. It wasn’t that I enjoyed watching a crippled gimp humiliating himself for a lousy drink. That wasn’t all of it, although I’m sure that’s what he thought. I wanted him out there on the streets.
I was seventeen when he was killed in a hit and run accident. He had gone out late that night and with the money he took from me I knew he wouldn’t be coming back until closing time. Before then I found a car and hot- wired it. I wanted it to look like a bunch of drunken kids who were too sloshed for my poor poppa’s good, so I brought along a half-dozen bottles of booze. After spilling some of the alcohol around and taking a few drinks myself, I drove the car about a block from the pub and waited. I thought of Momma, and I thought of the sisters he stole from me, and my body started shaking worse than the goddamn motor, worse than the times I’d bent over him with his razor.
This time, though, I stood my ground and waited.
Right before it happened, he turned and saw who it was behind the wheel. I could see his face frozen into a ridiculous mask of self-pity. He tried flinging his crippled body away from the car but he didn’t have a chance.
I jammed the gas pedal to the floor and slammed into him, just about tearing his body in half. I backed up and did it again, and then I got out of the car and ran. I kept on running until the pounding in my head died down.
My original plan was to go home and wait for the police to give me the bad news. I would then play like the devastated son, beating my chest in sorrow and wailing worse than any old alley cat. But I couldn’t do it. My nerves were shot. Instead I stole a car and headed out of Carson City as fast as I could. I drove for two days, sobbing like a goddamn baby. At times I was sobbing so hard I couldn’t see where I was going. I’d thought once I’d done it, the sickness that had been choking me inside for so many years would leave.
But it didn’t.
Chapter 23
I was at Charlie’s Silver Dollar Bar in two hours and so was he, but it was a good twenty minutes before he saw me. I wanted a chance to study him and get an understanding of what I was up against.
Charlie’s was the type of dive where drunks and rummies shuffle off to as soon as they wake in the morning. A dank musty-smelling hole where half the customers wore urine-caked pants and had more fleas than your average junkyard dog. The old man seemed right at home.
He was sitting hunched over his table, his throat blown up like a bullfrog’s, his small black eyes bugging out, nervously jerking towards the door. He needed a drink bad, which was giving him the shakes. Whenever the shakes would take him over, he’d wet his lips and start to order something, and then clamp his mouth shut. I guess he thought it’d be better to hold out and try to keep his wits about him. That was a mistake. When you’re as bad off as him you need the alcohol to clear your head.
I’d had enough of looking at him. I approached his table and when he saw me he jerked a little in his chair, and then his thick lips cracked into a smile.
“So,” he said, nodding, “you know me too.”
I knew him alright. Bert Debbles, one of my poppa’s drinking buddies. I knew him when I saw him in Oklahoma City. Of course, if I’d recognized him right away I wouldn’t have offered him my hand, or introduced myself, or told him where I could be found. Instead, I would have walked right out of the train station.
Thinking about him had troubled me that night. During the train ride back to Denver I was worried sick about whether he had recognized me, and then I realized it didn’t matter. It could be taken care of. I sat down across from him and didn’t say a word.
“Clem Smalley,” he croaked. “I knew you as soon as I saw you. You don’t fool me none with this Mister Johnny Lane crap.”
“So you know me.” I shrugged. “What of it?”
“Don’t you wise-ass me!” he yelled, spittle clinging to his chin. “I know who you are and I know what you did!”
“Yeah, go on. Tell me about it, pops.”
“You killed your daddy!”
“What?” I laughed. “You’re senile, old man. Your brain’s gone soft from booze.”
“If it ain’t the truth,” he said, a crafty look playing on his face, “why’d you come here for?”
“Just curious.”
He shook his head. “We all knew you did it, running off the way you did the night your daddy was kilt. What you take us for, a bunch of idjits? Anyways, police back home have a warrant for your arrest. They still have it, too. I checked.” He nodded. “They still looking for you. If I told them where to find you they’d come and get you, don’t you think they wouldn’t! Not after what you done. Run your poor daddy down like a dog in the street!”
“He was worse than any dog!” I growled, shaking my head to keep the redness out. “He got what he deserved!”
“No man deserves to be kilt like that, treated worse than any animal.”
“No? What does a man like him deserve? A man who forces himself on his own daughters, who beats his wife until her heart can’t take anymore. A man who treats his only son like he was a-”
I didn’t finish the sentence. How could I? How could I put it in words?
He stared at me with eyes that were dry and lifeless. “No one saying your daddy was an angel. He had his faults but he shouldn’t been kilt like that.” A contemptuous look deepened his frown. “Anyway, he told me what a no-good little bastard you were. He saw what you really were and that’s how he treated you.”
He shouldn’t have said that, oh brother he shouldn’t have. I smiled-there wasn’t a chance in hell I could’ve kept it off my face.
“What you smiling at, you danged fool? You an idjit also?”
Yeah, old man, I was keeping score. Go ahead, keep it up, it was too late for you anyways.
“No, pops, just amused. What do you want?”
“What I want is to see you hung for what you did to your daddy!” He lowered his eyes. “But I guess that wouldn’t do no good. You the only boy he got, and he was a big enough man to have forgiven you. But you got to pay for it, boy. You gonna pay me for it. Fifty thousand dollars.”
“What if I told you to go to hell?”
“You can tell me that if you want. You can tell me anything as long as you give me the money.”
“Go to hell,” I said. “You’re lucky if I don’t kick you out this door.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me none if you tried,” he said. “Not with all your daddy told me about you being a
