The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

I remember my sister’s screams as she pulled Mr. Wrong Turn off of me. I remember her yelling something about a goose and a golden egg. And then I remember the hatred in her eyes. “You take this as a warning,” she said. “You stay out of our way. Maybe, if you do that, we’ll stay out of yours.”

The man with my father’s face nodded solemnly, cracking his knuckles and grinning the way a man grins after a satisfying meal. “Well,” he said by way of conclusion, “it looks like Dad finally gave you a beating, after all.”

I passed out for a while. Then I stumbled to the bed and curled up in the bedspread. Somewhere in the middle of the night I made it into the bathtub and cleaned up. I soaked in the steaming water for a long time, eyes closed — the right one swollen shut — and when I opened my eye the bath water was pink with blood.

At the end of Wrong Turn, Tom Cassady is driving. But he’s got no place to go. All his life, Tom Cassady had nowhere to go. His road was one straight line. He killed a man with his fists and did time for it, but that didn’t change him. He lost his wife and family, but that didn’t change him. He got another wife, and he was the same way with her that he was with my mother, but wife number two was afraid to do anything about it. And he went back to work in the movies, where he pretended to lose his grip, pretended to hit people, shoot them, hurt them in a dozen inventive ways.

It wasn’t much of a stretch.

One day Tom Cassady didn’t wake up, and the thing that had burned so hot inside him was dead. But it wasn’t gone, nor was it forgotten. I remembered it. So did Jo. We remembered it every time someone discovered who our father was. We remembered how that simple knowledge could make a person’s eyes shine, the way the desk clerk’s eyes had shined in the lobby of the Cal-Neva when she recognized me.

We all want to do that. Put the shine in someone’s eyes, I mean. Sometimes, what we’ll do for that particular thrill amazes me.

I guess that’s why I wrote the book.

I was five when Dad went to San Quentin. Jo was seven. As far as I know, he never laid a hand on me. Never touched Jo, either. I don’t remember the man, to tell the truth. He never visited us after his release, never even sent a birthday card. Most of the time I spent with him, he was on a television or movie screen and I was eating popcorn.

The book was a lie. That’s what Jo and my half-brother had been able to hold over my head. I didn’t know my father. But the book was something else, too. It was the little piece of Dad that I had carried inside me for thirty- five years. It was the shadow of anger that always churned in my gut when I tried to assure myself that I was a thinker. Every key I pushed on that computer keyboard was a little jab. Every word I spoke on that book tour was a little knife. And when I cold-cocked that talk show host, I was thinking that I was going to make a million eyes shine all at once, all across America.

Because the talk show guy had pushed my button. He’d asked about Dad exploiting his crime in order to boost his career. And then he’d held up a copy of Killer Cassady, and he’d said, “Like father, like son?”

I couldn’t answer, because the thing that had burned so hot in Dad took hold of me then. I could only react, and for a short instant everything felt so very right. It was the way I felt when I wrapped the telephone cord around Jo’s neck. The way Jo felt when she saw our half-brother standing there in the doorway. The way he felt when he tore into me.

I don’t know why I thought I could steer clear of Jo and get away with the whole thing. But I took the chance. I dug Dad up. I brought him back.

But I knew, soaking in the bathtub in Room 602, that it was time to bury him. After thirty-five years, it was time to get off Dad’s road.

I had to make sure that I was off it for good. I got out of the tub. My wallet was on the floor and I picked it up. A few other credit cards were now missing, but they hadn’t touched my cash. I took the money, dropped the wallet on the floor.

I managed to get dressed. My face didn’t look too bad, if you could ignore the shut eye and the gash above it. My lips were puffy and kind of purple, but my nose looked in pretty good shape. Overall, the swelling almost had an odd symmetry. I didn’t feel very hot, but seeing that my brother hadn’t managed to crack any tile with my head made me feel a little better.

I didn’t drain the pink water from the tub. I didn’t wipe the blood off the tile. I didn’t hide the bloodstained bedspread. My wallet lay on the floor, stuffed with I. D. that bore the name my father had given me, and I didn’t pick it up. Maybe somebody would make something of it. Maybe they wouldn’t, but I had a hard time believing that. The California-Nevada state line bisected the Cal- Neva. Maybe it bisected Room 602. If that were the case, the FBI might enter the picture.

It was late. I didn’t want to think about it.

I passed the desk, showing my left profile. My right hand covered my swollen eye while I pretended to take care of an itch on my forehead. It didn’t matter. No one noticed me. I got to my car without attracting any attention.

I pictured my half-brother and my sister driving down Dad’s road, running south toward Hollywood, wearing Dad’s signature grin on their faces.

I knew they were heading for a wrong turn.

I drove north.

SPYDER

The sun is the best bullfighter, and without 

the sun the best bullfighter is not there.

He is like a man without a shadow.

-Ernest Hemingway,

Death in the Afternoon

I’ll never forget Layla. Even though nearly thirty years have passed, I still picture her every time I hear a woman laugh. Still. But I see her now the same way I once saw my face up there on the screen, chiseled flat and somehow unreal. Just a dream in the dark, but spooky as hell.

The things we did together. Like the time we drove from Hollywood to the Napa Valley and back, all in one night. Impossible. I mean the Spyder was fast, but it wasn’t that fast. Layla knew how to make it move, though. A couple of drops of her blood in the carb, and that little Porsche sports-car roared like a Sabrejet.

Nothing could slow us down on a night like that. I’d worked all afternoon under a director who’d jabbed at me until I was nothing but a tangle of emotional razor-wire, and Layla had spent the evening doing her spook show, but that didn’t keep us from flying up 101 like a couple of ghosts. Layla even looked like one in her trademark ghoul makeup and the black dress with the plunging neckline, the costume she wore when she did her Rigormortia routine on TV.

It was all kind of cute. Me stealing a look at her cleavage when I had the Spyder cranked on a straightaway, just because I knew she wanted me to look. Layla laughing, catching my telegraphed glance, now and then flashing suntanned breasts knifed by Lugosi’s favorite greasepaint.

Layla loved me, I guess. In her way, she loved me more than anyone else. Maybe it was because I never surrendered to her like the others did. Maybe that’s why she kept coming back for more, each time expecting that she’d finally break me and I’d be all hers. I guess that’s a strange kind of love, but Layla was strange. She had her