As You Were Page 9

  It takes some time for him to stumble onto the spiraled steps that lead to the second floor, where he finds the two bedrooms and the bathroom. He laps a drink or two out of the calcified toilet bowl before making it from Dad’s room to the spare bedroom. You can hear all this, along with his nails clinking on the concrete through the register. He seems at home until the two of you hear a heaving of metal and the sound of something falling apart. The sound makes you look out the window, thinking he made it out onto the overhang.

  His being a runner makes you a runner, too. You rush up the steps faster than you should. The vinyl treads are slick, moist, damp from the humidity that never escapes the house, and you should know this. For your forgetfulness, you nearly faceplant on the steps.

  Jerry Lee lies in the center of the camping cot you use for a bed, making it sag, almost touching the floor. A few springs are missing, shot across the spare bedroom, lost in the piles of things Dad doesn’t want to look at or throw away. From the top of the stairs, some of the metal straps look bent, useless—even if you can manage to find the springs—so you holler out for Dad and wait for him to climb the stairs. When he sees what you see, he says, “Well, shit, guess we’ll have to find a bed now,” and he finds a monstrosity of a brass bed someone spray-painted a dark chocolate-looking shade of brown.

  Time and time again, you wake, folded in two, with Jerry Lee standing with his four paws teetering on your stomach the way a circus elephant balances atop a ball for all the ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages. Jerry Lee stares into your eyes and waits to hear Dad bellow out, “Take him outside!” losing all semblance of calm once he hears “outside” travel up through the register.

  It doesn’t take much imagination to realize Dad sends Jerry Lee upstairs and waits to hear you groan so he doesn’t have to get up from his recliner or leave his cup of coffee, or whatever he’s using to lubricate himself. You slip on some shoes and try to make it to the bathroom, but when a dog that outweighs you shepherds you down the stairs, the two of you take your morning piss on the same tree.

  You can’t keep up when the morning walk turns into the morning run. Sometimes the leash rips right out of your hand, which gives you an idea: skeetching.

  Skeetching is when a skateboarder trails behind a car, clutching onto the bumper. The only difference is that you’ll be holding onto Jerry Lee’s leash, sailing down the fresh blacktop the county used to pave Idaho Street. There’s not much of a straightaway until you get alongside the woods that serve as a buffer for the abandoned steel mill turned abandoned coke plant. It’s mostly a curved road circumnavigating Morgan Park, which has a horseshoe shape to it, with a river wrapping around the town the way the Mississippi does with the crescent-shaped city of New Orleans.

  Idaho can be a busy street. But if you look up the top speeds of a timber wolf and a German Shepherd, you’ll see there’s no reason for anyone to bitch when the two of you are barreling down the middle of the street at close to forty miles an hour, when it is posted for thirty.

  You take Jerry Lee out the back door and grab your skateboard, along with the ten to twelve feet of leftover rope from when Dad cut a new anchor line. Then it’s a straight shot toward the bridge, past the Lutheran home for bad kids, where you wait for a lull in traffic. Once the city bus passes, you look toward the bridge, crouching a little to see all the way to the highway. It’s clear, so you slide the tail of the skateboard off the curb and push the nose to the left and right until it gets rolling pretty good and Jerry Lee trots alongside. You shove the nose left and right and get going even faster, a cue he takes to mean you want him to take the slack out of the rope and run. The board begins to wobble once he gets up to speed, the kind of wobbling which happens right before a skater eats shit. But you get low on the board, and everything balances out.

  The two of you make it to Ninety-Second Street, the other side of the abandoned block that separates your block from the Lutheran home for bad kids. By then, Jerry Lee is in a full sprint and the skateboard wheels are howling. Then you come up to Ninety-First Street, your street, and look left for Dad or Dad’s car, so it’s a safe bet he hasn’t budged from his recliner. When you look back to see where you and Jerry Lee are headed, you know the straightaway is less than a block away, so you get a little lower and lean forward a little. That’s right about the time a rabbit comes hightailing it out of the alleyway, across Idaho, and into the woods that serve as a buffer for the abandoned steel mill turned abandoned coke plant.

  Jerry Lee follows and sends the skateboard off into the grass while you skid along the fresh blacktop. It’s where you got the matching oval-shaped scars on your left knee and elbow, neither of which ever go away.

  Luckily, Jerry Lee is just enough German Shepherd to get stuck in the thicket of briars and broken branches and dead saplings that got choked out by the bigger birch trees and poplars. So you find him searching spastically for a way deeper in—once you peel your bloodied self off Idaho, that is.

  Your jeans are ripped, but not in the post–hair band eighties, pre-grunge band nineties kind of way. The blood comes out of the shirt, but the thorns and thistles you weave through to get to Jerry Lee turn your shirt into something Dad uses when he needs to check the oil in his car.

  You tell Dad, “Jerry Lee saw a rabbit,” without mentioning the skateboard, and Dad laughs and tells you where the hydrogen peroxide is.

  Walking Jerry Lee doesn’t always involve a wardrobe change. He’s a great wingman. Neighborhood girls come outside to pet him. Sometimes this turns a walk around the block into an hour-long affair. At night, you don’t even have to watch where you’re going; people just get out of your way. And when Dad doesn’t come home, Jerry Lee lies at the foot of the bed, staring at the bedroom doorway while you sleep. It’s easy enough to picture Jerry Lee doing the same thing after the school nurse sends you home, right before Christmas break, with pneumonia.

  Dad won’t pick you up since it’s only a two-block walk, so when you make it through the door, he points to a pint glass sitting on the TV tray and says, “Drink that, then go to bed. Don’t get me sick,” without ever taking his eyes off the screen.

  When you wake up and stumble back down the stairs, there’s a plastic bag sitting in the empty recliner, tied in an impossible knot. You pick it up and take a seat, and before you can ask, Dad says, “Merry Christmas,” which makes you squint at the calendar tacked to the closet door on the other side of the living room.

  Your eyes are still fuzzy, your head is pounding, but you no longer have flu-like symptoms. “What’d you give me?” you say, closing your eyes against the blinding light of the table lamp.

  “Open it and find out.”

  “No. To drink.”

  “Oh. Wild Turkey,” he says. “Same thing we put in your baby bottle when you were teething.”

  You tear the bag open to find a pair of shoes tied to one another with the laces knotted, no box. Displays sold as Blue Light Specials, in other words. A pair of knockoff British Knights.

  “For track, in the spring,” Dad says.

  You run the hundred-meter hurdles, the high jump, and the long jump. The long jump is your bread and butter. You manage to jump sixteen feet and eight inches one day during practice and run home to tell Dad what the coach told you, that it’s a record for junior high boys in this region. Dad says, “What’s the high school record? Tell me when you beat that. Now, sprint to the fridge and grab me a beer.” He laughs until you hand him his beer, but you stop going to track practice.

  Instead, you pick away, trying to make your way through guitar tablatures you’ve pulled out of the dumpster at the gas station until you break a string, and then Dad won’t buy you more because “You’ll just break them again.” Instead, you shovel two hundred dollars’ worth of snow and buy your own guitar.

  The next spring, Jerry Lee isn’t standing in the kitchen, waiting to see who is messing with the lock when you come home from practice. He’s not in the living room
either, lying between the recliners like he sometimes does when he’s home alone. He’s not plopped down on your bed. He’s lying on the bedroom floor gnawing on a baseball like it’s the leg of a felled deer and he wants the marrow. He has the Kirby Puckett pop fly ball you caught during the 1987 season playoffs. The ball fell from your hand and got scooped up by a grown man from the next section over. You stood there, staring at the man while he went back to his seat. Then someone yelled, “Give it to the kid,” and, after two or three iterations, it turned into the whole section chanting, “Give it to the kid,” until he did give it to the kid.

  Jerry Lee ripped the stitching and peeled the leather off the baseball. You don’t yell, “No!” or “Stop!”—you fall on top of him, punch him, try to pry it from his jaws, trying to get him to give it to the kid. But nothing will get him to give up the ball. You keep wailing on him until he yelps and whimpers. The ball is ruined, but you keep wailing away until you feel yourself float up into the air. You make sure to kick him in the head before you float too far away. Even if it’s only a tap with the toe of your shoes.

  The air grows stagnant when you float up toward the ceiling. The air is heavy with the smell of sweat and stale beer and baby powder and Brylcreem: Dad.

  He’s bear-hugging you, pinning your arms to your sides, squeezing the air from your chest. He pulls you out of the spare bedroom and wrestles you down the stairs to the kitchen. But he never hits you. He plops you down in the chair and says, “You can’t—” trying to catch a breath, pointing upstairs to where Jerry Lee is, “You can’t do that.”

  He gets no response from you, but keeps on talking.

  “Jesus Christ, you can’t do that. Don’t make me a complete failure,” he huffs, still trying to catch his breath. With wet eyes stinging from his sweat dripping from his brow, he says, “At least let me be an example of what not to be.”

  Jerry Lee is just enough German Shepherd to become affected by hip dysplasia, causing crippling lameness and painful arthritis. By the next spring, he’s not a runner anymore. You are. You try out for track again and fall in with the long-distance runners. At five foot nine, your stride is longer than most other boys in junior high.

  On the second or third day of track practice, the pack of long-distance runners is sent out to run a mile-long loop around the school. From Eighty-Eighth Street, the group heads toward the abandoned steel mill turned abandoned coke plant. Then they turn right to where Eighty-Eighth turns into Idaho Street. On Idaho Street, everyone takes turns leading the pack, leapfrogging the whole way, switching each time they pass an intersection: Eighty-Ninth Street, Ninetieth Street, and again on Ninety-First Street, where you see Bob-the-Dog-Catcher’s Animal Control truck parked in front of the house.

  You slow the pace, slide to the back of the pack and watch Bob- the-Dog-Catcher and Dad come out the front door carrying Jerry Lee toward the back of the Animal Control truck. Right then, the pack slips behind the trees and overgrowth of the abandoned block separating Ninety-First Street from the Lutheran home for bad kids. Right then is when you lose your wind, get a cramp in your calf, get a stitch in your side, wave the team on when they look back, tell them you need to walk the rest of the way.

  Jerry Lee’s leash and collar are going back into the box of leashes and collars that once belonged to dogs Bob-the-Dog-Catcher never found homes for and put to sleep.

  Dad didn’t want you to see Jerry Lee leave like that. He didn’t want you to be home when it happened. He doesn’t want to be home when you come home and there is no more Jerry Lee. He doesn’t know how to be that kind of dad. He’s only good at fathering children.

  That much he knows.

  FISHING IN THE DARK

  DJ JAZZY JEFF & THE FRESH PRINCE thwump out of Glen’s boombox speakers. The two of you stomp your feet along with the bass, sending ripples across the otherwise calm lake.

  It’s one of those especially hot days when Grandma wears her one- piece swimsuit, the brown and beige one with leaves and flowers on it, the one that looks a lot like the couch cushions. All the adults sit in the shade of the cabin’s screened-in porch, sweltering, cooling themselves with Grasshoppers: a concoction made from crème de menthe, crème de cacao, and Schwan’s French vanilla ice cream.

  The two of you are twelve and nine—too old for bobber fishing—so you cast and rap along with the cassette about how parents just don’t understand and reel lures in faster than any fish could swim. But being out in the boat on the lake is the summertime neutral zone—kind of like how the couch and coffee table were safe while the carpet was lava, back when Grandma went to ceramics on Wednesday nights and Grandpa let you be a kid for once.

  After changing lures out three different times, you conclude it’s the boombox, on the bottom of the boat, scaring the fish away. Neither of you wants to head back to the cabin. Instead, the two of you want to see who can cast the farthest.

  Of course, there’s some cheating, but it’s not really cheating when there aren’t any rules, so you swap out the Hula Popper for a Dardevle spoon meant for muskies, which is damn near too heavy for the five- pound test line, considering your knotting talents. You can’t really call it winning either, considering you lose your grip and get to watch the rod and reel sail through the air and plunge down into the lake.

  The bay echoes your “Fuck—” back to you. Glen adds a chuckle to his. You do not. His laugh is a nervous one, knowing full well the ass beating coming your way once you make shore.

  You contemplate rowing over to the nearest dock, dropping off Glen, living out your days in the boat. At least until the lake freezes. Then they can walk out and get you. So that won’t work. You lost Dad’s fishing rod in the lake. Minnesota means cloudy water, after all.

  Lost it is.

  Glen agreed to tell his uncle about the rod and reel, but the tradeoff is you’ll have to row the boat all the way back to the cabin—which you do, staring at Dad’s Evinrude motor the whole time, cursing the building blisters. Glen gets out of the boat, says a silent prayer for you, heads up to the cabin to deliver the news. You sit there and never once loosen your grip on the oars. You sit, twisting your wrists, readying yourself, waiting for someone to summon you up to the screened-in front porch of the cabin.

  Dad doesn’t say much when Glen tells him what you did. Rather than exploding, he takes down the beer he’s nursing and fishes his tackle box and a spare rod and reel out of Grandma’s boathouse on the way down to the water. You feel him lift the bow off the sand and shove the boat out with a flick of the wrist. He hurdles over you on his way to the back of the boat to claim his seat next to the motor. He doesn’t have any desire to discuss your fuckup with you, so he sits and glares out of the corner of his eye.

  Rowing the boat back to where you’d lost the rod and reel is easy enough. The spot was directly between the two docks on the other side of the big weed bed.

  Dad laughs and tells Glen the music, and you banging your feet on the bottom of the boat, scared all the fish to the other side of the lake. Lunkerville. He’ll be going over there as soon as he gets his rod and reel back. “Whole lake could hear you dingbats,” he says to Glen and pulls a deep-running lure from the bottom of his tackle box, snapping it onto his leader.

  The treble hook dangling from his lure looks big enough to work as an anchor.

  Dad casts his line way out and sets the reel with a whir, thwump, click, and goes back to glaring at you, still saying nothing. There’s nothing to say. He has no time for you. He’s merely waiting for the lure to sink down to the bottom, waiting for it to sink into your thick skull what’ll happen to you once you’re back on shore.

  Though there’s no question in your mind what’ll happen.

  When he figures out his lure is laying down in the sand and silt and loon shit, he reels his line back in real slow-like and shakes his head from side to side just as slowly, like he’s contemplating whether to give you the belt or let Grandma grab the flyswatter. Either way, the rest of the day will be
spent with blistered butt cheeks in the bottom of the bunk bed.

  Your only escape will come when you get brave enough to ask to go to the outhouse. Dinner, too. But you’ll have to listen to them, dishing out ice cream and popping popcorn. You won’t be able to turn on the light to read or color, so you’ll have to use the sliver of light coming under the door to make sure you stay between the lines once the sun sets. God help you if Grandma finds another page where you’ve gone outside the lines, wasted her money.

  Dad’s line snags, and the tip of his pole dips down toward the water, making the air in your lungs go icy. The longer it takes to get his rod and reel back from the bottom of the lake, the more pissed he’ll get, and the worse the beating will be. Call it causality. If he snaps the line and loses another leader and lure, you’ll get it even worse than what’s already coming.

  But he doesn’t bother trying to free his lure from the snag by letting out his line or lifting his rod up in the air, slow and steady, like how he taught you. Instead, he keeps reeling back in—slower now. His rod tip bends lower and lower with each turn of the reel. When it touches the water, he lifts the spare rod over his head, and his rod comes up with it—caked in mud and loon shit and weeds, but the line and lure and reel are all still there.

  One single, solitary cast, and he brought it up from the bottom of the lake. Dad doesn’t look the least bit surprised. Glen’s face is frozen in a look of Holy Shit, Uncle Dickie. Your face is frozen too. How the hell are you supposed to react to something like that? You don’t. You sit while Dad undoes his lure from his leader, puts it back into his tackle box, and wait to get cuffed upside the head hard enough to dive into the water.