Chapter Nineteen

“Do you love me daddy?” the Tail asked.

        “Why of course,” his father answered.  “Of course I do.  You’re my boy, aren’t you?  And I’m your dad, aren’t I?  I love you more than anything in the world.”

        They were sitting on a pile of rocks near the ocean, with the waves breaking below their feet.  His mother hadn’t been feeling well that day, so she hadn’t come out to the ocean with them.  Twenty minutes before, his father had bought him an ice cream cone, and they had sat on a bench in front of a small café while he had finished it.  Then they had gone to the pile of rocks that stood just past the shoreline.  It was a solitary place, at the end of a long jetty.

        The café was little more than a wooden shack, mostly brown with windows on every side.  It had a rather elaborate roof that came to a point, with eaves that offered shade far beyond the walls of the building.  There was a wooden ramp leading to an entrance on the opposite side of it, and a rectangular gravel lawn stretched before it on the seaward side, with several wooden benches set around the perimeter of this lawn.  Behind the lawn, the Tail could see his father’s rusting Dodge and a few other automobiles, pickups and station wagons owned by local farmers.  Behind the café a two-lane highway wound along the coast, and behind the highway there were small farms where cows grazed, in the sight of rolling treed hills that followed slow, lazy waterways into the heights of mountainside and evergreen forest.  The Tail viewed this panorama from his rocky extension of coastline, a coastline which ranged north and south alongside the calm ocean, northward into a hilly cape adorned with a lighthouse, and southward into the places where pastureland gave way to rolling dunes and beachfront property.  It was the kind of place that tourists stopped to admire, but never stayed in for long.  One might glimpse the tourists’ camping gear and confident smiles inside the café, but those people were always on the way to somewhere else: somewhere more scenic, somewhere more historic, and somewhere more important.

        The Tail’s father, a portly man in flannel and denim, a portly clean-shaven man with a shock of wild white hair, was picking at a crevice in one of the stones.  The Tail was a nondescript boy.  Not fat then.  Not old enough for glasses.  Just a boy, like many others.

        “But mom said I wasn’t even your real son,” he added after some reflection.  He was staring out into the crashing surf, his eyes tracing the paths of gulls.  “Mom said she didn’t know who my father was.”

        His father was very quiet for a long time.  “Your mother’s ill, son,” the older man said thoughtfully, “And she says things she shouldn’t say.  I know I’m your father.  It couldn’t have been anyone else but me, and I want you to remember that.  Why, you look like me, don’t you?  You have my eyes.  You even tell stories like I do!  You’re my son for sure.

       “It’s just that your mom, well, she gets confused sometimes, and once she gets confused she starts getting angry.  Angry people say many hurtful things, even when they don’t mean to.  Even when they love someone, like your mother loves you.”

        The boy had found a stick jammed into one of the nearby rocks, and was using it to pry at some growth just above the waterline.  He was wearing a red Captain Marvel T-shirt, a pair of corduroy slacks with worn out knees, and a pair of tennis shoes.  His hair was a mess, and he would need a bath after they returned home.

The sky and sea were very blue that day, and it seemed that they had the whole coastline to themselves.  All the other patrons of the café were inside, quietly drinking coffee or enjoying local gossip.  They all knew about the Tail and his father, the man who worked for the Forest Service and his young son, that crazy wife of his locked up in the farmhouse - all if it.  The Tail could see their faces behind the windows of the café, engaged in a conversation that would endure for as long as people inhabited that place.  It was a story transformed over lifetimes, yet static in its way, its limits defined by the oldest living patron and the youngest living patron, the story that was and the story that was coming into being.  And the Tail could feel his presence inside of that story, inside of their gossip.

        The Tail was still only 5, so he didn’t understand everything his father said about his mother.  The boy sounded very mature for his age, but there was still a lot that got by him.  His father, an older version of himself, was a quiet, pensive sort of man who happened to be very kind.  His father was too kind even to curse the day he had met the boy’s mother, but there were days when he sat alone in his office, and wondered after all the spiteful things she said in private.

        And it wasn’t just the drink with her.  It was something else.  It took him a long time to realize that the drinking was her way of masking the symptoms, her way of balancing things out.  She was trying to maintain the same sense of reality as everyone else, but there were times when things fractured, when her nightmares became real, and when she was dancing to some other tune, beyond others’ hearing.  It was in those moments that she could be truly terrifying, even to the boy’s father.

        “I did like you told me, daddy,” said the boy.  “Yesterday she tried to put me in the closet again, but I got away.  I didn’t listen to her talking then.  I just ran.”

        “That’s good,” his father answered, “That’s a good boy.  You just remember to do that when she’s not herself.  Find a place to hide if I’m not there.”

        But his father knew that this would only work for so long, and the memory of the episode with the scissors was still fresh in his mind.  She had been very lucid for most of that day, and it wasn’t until the boy was tucked into bed that she got the idea about the scissors, and what bad little boys deserved.

        Thankfully the paramedics had arrived quickly, and there was no permanent harm done.  He, the father, had thanked the doctor with tears in his eyes, and the doctor had spoken of getting the boy’s mother committed.  He knew that the doctor was right, but it was so difficult to rid his mind of the woman he had married, so many years before.  That woman he had married was impossible to forget – beautiful as an August sunset, eccentric, and brilliant.  The memory of that woman haunted his days, and her shadow obscured the more frightening episodes with a hope that she might be getting better.

        The boy was growing cold, and his father could see that it was time to start heading for the car.  They had been out a long time, and it was getting late.  He thought they might stop by a diner on the way home, and maybe once inside the diner he could pull all of those papers out of his briefcase, and contemplate institutionalizing his wife for the hundredth time.  He wanted to think that any illness that lasted so long was bound to get better.  He wanted to think that death was always quick, and never slow.  

When he and the boy’s mother had first married, he had told her stories of how they would be together for the rest of their lives.  But it had only been a few months before she was drunk most of the time, or shouting nonsense, or hurting their pets.  She lost control so quickly, and in her more rational moments she had to play spectator to her disease, hearing stories of all the horrible things she herself had said and done, all of the damage and distrust she herself had engendered.

        “Come on,” he said to the boy, “Let’s get back to the car.  You feel up for a hamburger at the Old Mill?  I know you just had ice cream and all, but I’m hungry!”

        The boy laughed at this, and it was good to see him smile.  “Daddy, you’re always hungry!” he giggled.

        “So I am,” said the large, beaming man, “But there’s nothing wrong with that!  I’m bigger than most around these parts, and if I don’t get my dinner soon I’ll… I’ll eat up the nearest boy!”

        He grabbed the Tail in his arms and made as if to eat him.  The boy, almost overcome by joy, squealed in surprise.  They chased one another over the rocks as they slowly made their way back to the Dodge.  As they did so, the sun dropped lower and lower beneath the horizon.  An autumn sunset.  Earlier and earlier every day.

        Where was I?  The Tail later asked himself.  Did we live in San Francisco then?  Or Oregon?  Out by Aberdeen?  He could remember how gloriously alive his father had been, and how a fearful thing – his mother – stalked through the corners of his house, only to die – finally – soon after.  What did my father do with the house?  Where was he working?  How did we live, after?

        And then he remembered that it must have been the Fourth of July, because fireworks filled the heavens on the drive home.