and dread.
At around ten, as he continued to sit alone and unmolested, an African trader in black trousers and a billowy purple shirt approached his table. A lavender turban was wound loosely around his head. He smiled at my father and drew several carved figures from a cloth bag, elephants of various sizes, a giraffe. He arranged them on my father’s table. My father glanced at them, then shook his head.
The trader remained in place, persistent, trying to make a sale. My father shook his head again, then turned away, his eyes settling on one of the tile paintings that adorned the opposite wall, the head of a woman wreathed in luscious purple grapes. His eyes lingered on it, the eyelids slightly drooped, the skin wrinkled, but the eyes themselves still luminously blue, the way they’d looked that night as I’d stood, facing him from the third step.
The trader drew a wooden mask from the dark sack. It was crudely carved and sloppily lacquered, a work done without interest and for little pay. He placed it on my father’s table, edging one of the elephants away.
My father didn’t look at the mask, but only waved his hand languidly, refusing once again.
The trader returned the carvings to his bag, then glanced about the tavern, his eyes large and bulging, his black skin nearly blue in the dimly lighted room. He saw no other likely customers and headed for the door.
My father watched him as he walked away, the lavender turban weaving gently through a cloud of thick white smoke. A woman at the adjoining table gave my father a knowing glance, but my father only shrugged and lifted his glass in a faint, halfhearted toast.
As I sat only a few yards from him, I wondered to what it was he might still offer even so weak a toast. Was it to life? To death? Could he toast others, or were they only doll-sized figures on a featureless landscape, things like a wife and children, things he could do without?
It was nearly midnight when he rose suddenly, startling me far more than I had thought possible. I saw him rise and come toward me from the choking, smoke-filled depths of the tavern. He was upon me almost instantly, his shadow moving in a dark gray wave across my table. As he passed, I felt him brush my shoulder. I looked up and saw him glance down at me, nodding quickly, as if in apology, before he suddenly stopped dead and peered at me frozenly. For an instant, I thought he might have recognized me, and I quickly turned away. By the time I looked around again, he’d disappeared.
But he didn’t go far, only a little way down the same narrow street, and into another tavern. It was emptier than the first, and he took a table at the back. I took a table not far away, and watched him more closely, as if afraid that he might vanish once again.
Under the light which hung above him, I could see the dust that had settled upon the shoulders of his jacket. There was dust on his sleeves, as well, and dust on his shoes. As I sat, watching him, I imagined dust in great brown lumps pressing in upon his guts, his lungs, his brain. I imagined his veins thick with dust, a brown mud clogging the valves of his heart. I could even envision a thick, dusty blood pouring from him as I jerked the blade upward, gutting him in one swift thrust.
He leaned back against the wall of the tavern and closed his eyes. I wondered if, at such a moment, he’d ever allowed his mind to return to McDonald Drive. Or did he go there only in a nightmare in which he watched helplessly as a little boy came down the basement stairs, stopped on the third step, and grimly leveled a shotgun at his panicked and unblinking eyes?
His eyes opened suddenly, and I saw that they were aimed at me. He glanced away and didn’t look at me again. His hand lifted to his mouth, brushed against his lips, then drifted back down to his lap.
I could see a torpor in his movements, a languidness which seemed to pull even at the sharp, sudden darting of his eyes. Moments later, when a dark-haired beauty strolled past his table, he didn’t follow her appreciatively, but simply let his eyes drop toward the glass he cradled gently in his right hand. At that moment he seemed quite shy, captured in shyness, almost shrunken, made of straw, himself a weightless miniature.
And yet I was still afraid of him, afraid of the scenes with his mind, the long walk up the stairs, the look on Jamie’s still-living face, the backward plunge my sister’s ruptured body must have made as the volley struck her, the plaintive, begging eyes of my mother as she’d crouched behind the cardboard box. I knew that there was a hideous gallery of such pictures in his brain, though the fact that he’d lived with them for so long seemed unimaginable to me.
Time passed, but my fear did not.
I could feel my hand tremble each time I thought of approaching him, and it struck me as unseemly to be so afraid of such a spiritless old man. What could he possibly do to me at this point in our lives? His physical force entirely diminished, his moral force long ago destroyed, he was nothing but an empty shell, a shadow.
And yet, I was afraid.
I was afraid because, for all his weakness and frailty, he was still my father, and the line that connected us was still a line that he somehow controlled. In his presence, I felt myself become the little boy who’d moved down the stairs, felt his gaze stop me dead.
I was afraid, and I knew why. I watched his eyes and knew exactly what I feared.
After all these months of hating him, I was afraid that when we met at last, and after I’d confronted him with everything he’d done, rubbed his face in the blood of those he’d murdered, that after all that excruciating pain had been unearthed again, and he sat, stunned, stricken, his blue eyes resting upon mine, that at that moment I would see again, know again, only this time with perfect clarity, that he had never loved me.
It was that which made me hate him again with a fierce, blinding passion. I hated him because he had not loved me enough to take me with him in his flight.
I felt my body rise suddenly, as if called to duty by an overwhelming need. I felt it move forward smoothly, righteously, with an angelic, missionary grace.
His eyes lifted toward me as I approached his table. Once I reached it, I started to speak, but to my amazement, he spoke first.
“Stevie,” he said.
Stunned at the sound of his voice, thrown entirely off track by the fact that he had spoken first, I didn’t answer him.
“Stevie,” he repeated softly, “sit down.”
