The Faults of Our Fathers

Jason was concentrating on his computer screen. He would type a sentence or two, and then stop, think a bit, then type a sentence more. The story he was writing unfolded in his mind and transposed to the page. It was a story about a boy, no more than ten. 

He began to type:

****

The boy sprawled on the living room floor, the snow blowing against the window. He was excited to be missing school. Earlier, his mother, haggard, with little sleep, black circles under her eyes, had taken his temperature.

“It’s 101,” she said to the boy who was laying back in bed. “You’ll be staying home.”

The TV lineup marched ahead like a Christmas parade to the boy. I Love Lucy, followed by Andy of Mayberry, followed by Dick Van Dyke. Perfect, the boy thought, reflecting on the process of holding the thermometer tip against the lightbulb in his bedroom. Just enough. Just enough to get to 101. He popped a Hershey’s Kiss in his mouth, didn’t chew, but let it slowly dissolve. This is living.

What he didn’t do was explore the sunroom of the modest middle-class house, the room his father stayed in all day while his mother went to work as a high school English teacher. The boy didn’t know until he was older, but thorazine dripped through his father’s mind, the days passing one after another. What the boy did know was his dad broke free from the haze and visited the local bar two days a week. A shot of Seagram’s 7 and a beer, both cutting the edge, would start things. Later, the storm would erupt in his house with screaming and all-night bouts. And when the boy was much older, older than his dad had been when he died, he knew his dad didn’t think he was really living. In his dad’s mind, he was just too much of a coward to die.

****

Jason continued writing:

****

“We interrupt this program with an announcement.” The black-and-white TV flickered, the picture stark. “The President has been shot. Kennedy has been taken to the Dallas Medical Center. No word yet on the state of his life.”

****

No. That doesn’t work, Jason thought. Too dramatic. How about just implying that Kennedy might be shot? He deleted, ‘We interrupt… life.’ and wrote on: 

****

The TV flickered when Jason turned the channel. And there was a guy calling himself Walter Cronkite, something about Kennedy arriving in Dallas. 

****

Better, but not good enough. Jason continued. He deleted and re-wrote:

****

The boy turned the channel, a gray plastic knob with three stations, to get away from Walter Cronkite and something about a Dallas shooting. He found the station with I Love Lucy. Lucy was in her bathtub with her toe caught in the faucet. How was she going to get out of that one? And the bubbles are melting! He started laughing at the TV screen, not out loud, but to himself.

****

That’s better, but still not right. Let me think, maybe not the living room but playing army outside in the—

“What are you doing? Writing again?” Melissa yelled. Jason’s wife was in the kitchen.

Jason glanced up. “Yes. Another story.”

“Is it your journal?”

I don’t write a journal, Jason thought to himself. I have nothing to say. His mind popped to Hemingway. 

"Either write, or do something to write about," Hemingway said. He was wearing a blue cardigan and had a gray beard. 

Fine for you to say, Mr. Hemingway, but I don’t have anything in my life worth writing about. 

“Not my journal,” Jason called back to his wife. “I’m hip deep in a story.”

Melissa stuck her head in Jason’s office. “I think my computer has a virus. Can you look at it?”

By now it was the afternoon and Jason’s computer was still open. He saved the story with a file called lettinggo1.docx and opened another. A blank document page stared back. File, Home, Insert, Draw, Design scrolled the top, the page white and empty. He began typing:

****

Jessie’s best friend welcomed him at an outdoor courtyard in Aspen. “Hey man, you can crash at my place.” 

****

Hey man? Really? Jason removed his fingers from the keyboard and pumped his fist at the screen. He deleted “Jessie's…place,” and put his fingers back on the keys:

****

The mountains in Colorado loomed on either side of a pass called Independence. Snow still collected on the shoulder even though this was July, the heat of summer, a bright blue day. Jessie wound down the gears of his Harley Davidson and pulled to a rest stop. It was cold, and over 12,000 feet, he guessed, shivering in his leather jacket. Rumbling up the pass, a green Volkswagen bus swung off the highway, the exhaust spilling fumes, and a woman joined him at the overlook. They chatted a while about the view. Jessie noticed she started crying, her flower patterned scarf tight on her head, her face grimacing. 

“Are you ok?” he asked. The woman looked forty with creases coming off her eyes. She was darkly tanned.

“I’m alright. I need to go.” She turned.

“No. Really. What is it?” 

She faced back to Jessie and her eyes were still filled with tears. He noticed her eyelids sloped down like she’d carried the sadness of the world. But happy at the same time, Jessie thought, curiously.

They looked together at the waves of mountains rolling forever to the west. 

“I’ll tell you because you’re here and I want to say it.”

“What?”

“I left here two years ago. Cancer. I never thought I’d be back. I KNEW I wasn’t coming back. And now here I am with you and the mountains and the sun and the green Douglas trees and the smell of it and hell it’s just great, you know?”

****

Re-reading the words, tears came to Jason’s eyes thinking of the woman. He had reached a fleeting moment where he had forgotten he was writing and the words on the page were the events and tastes and sound and sights that lived in his head. He didn’t care if it was good, or would hold up, or sell, or win a prize. It was that small moment of being with the emotion of the woman that made him cry. 

But you’re lying, his inner voice said. You do also care if it’s good, and you do want to be read. All writers do. 

You caught me.

Later, Jason flipped burgers on the grill and opened a bottle of wine. The table was set and he joined his wife.

“We’ve been invited to the Johnsons on Saturday. The same group,” his wife said, chewing her burger.

“Great. That will be fun. Nicholas is always talking about his sculptures. He’s a creative guy.”

“Well, Liz bought a new Audi. You wouldn’t believe the gadgets these days. She took me out and—where are you?” Jason’s wife’s eyes lasered on his.

“I’m sorry. I was thinking about something else. The pinot noir has a nice chase, don’t you think?” 

But Jason was lost in thought about his writing as his wife went on. The story should be better. It should always be better. Maybe they should be in the mountain town and he meets the woman returning to Aspen in a boutique hotel. Maybe they’re on a porch swing and it’s night. No, she wouldn’t be on a swing, that’s too intimate for strangers. Maybe in town or maybe the park. And does the sentence have too many ‘ands’? Does it run on and take the reader out of the story?

“Where are you?” his wife asked. “Be here, be now, Jason. You’ve been gone a lot. I explain to our friends you are in Jason World.”

“It has nothing to do with you. I love you. You know that.”

“I hope so.”

Jason lay in bed next to his wife. For an hour he’d been thinking about the story of the boy and his dad. Silently, he snuck out of bed and went to his office. He began typing:

****

Why had the boy cried in the bar? Not every boy would be such a crybaby. But the boy was in his cub scout uniform and his dad had picked him up from a meeting. They had stopped at a bar where a white neon sign hung on one rusty hinge saying Vinnies. The boy crouched on a red plastic bar stool next to his dad.

“What you drinkin’ kiddo?” the bartender asked, his voice sounding enthusiastic. 

But the boy didn’t think the bartender was enthusiastic, only rough, and scary. So the boy cried on his stool and couldn’t stop. His dad did shots of Seagram’s 7, one after the other.

A man came up behind him. He smelled like the beer and urine from the alley they’d entered, and the boy held his breath. The man put his cheek next to the boy from behind him and the boy felt the grizzle from unshaven skin. It felt like sand being rubbed into his face and it hurt.

“Always be prepared,” the man joked. The half-dozen men in the bar laughed. 

After a while, the boy noticed the bartender jerking his thumb at his dad. The bartender’s thumb pointed to the door. 

At home, the screaming and the bouts lasted all night. Before dawn, their mother brought the boy and his four siblings down to the living room. They lined up like soldiers in front of their dad.

“What’s wrong with me?” he asked each one.

“You’re sick,” was the right answer and once each child said it, they were permitting to go to bed.

The next morning, the boy went down to breakfast.

His mother asked, “Where did you get all the candy? Your jacket is filled with candy.”

“I don’t know.”

****

Jason stopped and re-read what he had just written. I don’t think it works, he thought, but he kept it because he might edit it later. But what is later? he asked himself. Maybe never. He started typing again:

****

The horseman was alone in the desert and reined up at the crest of a rise. The caldera spread around him where in the time before memory a volcano had carved fifty miles of mountains. In the eons that passed, the ridgeline was all that remained. He studied the land and prided himself on seeing clearly across the desert. ‘Your eyes are a gift from the devil,’ the witch in Sonora had told him. He didn’t believe her about the eyes. Devils, he did believe, as he’d seen them. It was hard and hot and he leaned over the side of his horse and spit, but his mouth was dry and only a spot of dreg came out. His tongue ached swollen.

****

After re-reading the passage, Jason could see in his mind's eye the desert, the ridgeline, the cloudless sky, and the dime sized spit splattering on a rock. I’m no cowboy and I’m no Elmore Leanard either, he said to himself. At the same time, he couldn’t get the picture out of his mind. He could feel the saddle and the heat. He felt free. So free his office blurred, and the story remained clear. He was no longer in his office; he moved into the mind of the horseman, if, for just a while, to see what happened next.

Later, he took his place in the living room with the TV on. The movie blasted a car chase with squealing and loud crashes. Machine guns held by crime lords fired away.

“Who is the woman with the briefcase?” he asked his wife. 

“That’s his daughter. She’s got the money from the robbery. Have you been paying attention?”

“Sorry.” No, I have not been paying attention, Jason thought, focusing on his story about the boy. How is the boy? I think he needs to be going away to college, or working in a menial job after college. But what is the conflict and where is the tension?

The next morning Jason was in his office and began to type on the keyboard:

****

“I’ve lost weight. See my belt buckle holes?” the boy’s father said. They’d just finished up eating at a steakhouse, his mother’s choice. It had been a long time, a year, since the boy, who was now grown up, had talked to, or seen, his parents. 

“I wish you didn’t live so far away,” his mother said. 

“The company transfers me a lot.”

“I just wish we could see you more.”

“I know, Mom. Me too.”

The boy’s father needed to use the restroom. He returned and rounded the corner into the dining room approaching the table. My god, he’s old, the boy thought, the light hitting his father’s face and highlighting his pale white skin, the sharp angles of his cheekbones. The boy thought of a skeleton. The boy was no longer the age of a boy. He was thirty, but he still didn’t know about old people like old people do. This was his first brush with it.

With dinner over, the boy hugged his mother in the parking lot and shook his father’s hand. “I guess I’ll see you in April when you come through again.”

His parents drove away in their lumbering sedan. 

The boy, at that moment, felt like he heard the whisper of God, and knew he would never see his father again. He had run from all he came from, but he couldn’t run from how he felt about his father. This was a man he’d never had a substantial conversation with his whole life, a man who some month’s later a priest at his funeral would say was a ‘product of war and The Great Depression’, a man whose only participants at his funeral were his wife and children, one of whom was his son Jason. 

None of that mattered to Jason in his office writing the story. What did matter was Jason thinking back to when he last saw his father on that gray fall day in the parking lot of a steakhouse. What did matter was on that day he had an overwhelming desire to give his father a long hug and simply say, ‘I love you, Dad’, an action and words that neither father nor son had ever taken in Jason’s life. What mattered most, despite the overwhelming desire, was he had done nothing, and for this he could not forgive himself, nor could he amend. But the boy called Jason, in his office room that morning, so quietly his wife couldn’t hear, and for a long time, let it go. Love meant far more than the faults of his father, or for that matter his own negligence. And with this letting go, maybe, just maybe, the boy became a man.