To be a Father

It was just like having a dog, to had been a father. The dog laid there on the piece of carpet that faced the bathroom door as she took a shower, my wife, and put a pause on its joy until the faucet was off. It was just like that, only worse. Another being considered me a second citizen in a country I help build from limestone and sweat. Heck, my hands were still dirty with asphalt and sulfur from cobbling up the streets that my son’s car would roll on, and every morning I plucked the remnant splinters from the time I built him a white oak crib, but as soon as life confronted him with the big questions, he wished to be as far away from me as possible. 

I had never figured out at what junction my wife became the hero, and I the villain, but as I drove to the last known coordinates of his phone, that didn’t really matter. I had always wondered at what point boys became men. The answer came to me that day with my hands on the steering wheel in front of a red traffic light, a police officer sitting on his bike next to me, the passing of my father five years prior, a wife fast asleep on our master bedroom, and my missing son, now a year later. It eventuates when you meet the impossible while grievously alone.

I took too long to move. The disproving honk behind me yelled it, and it jolted the tears right out of me. It was the first time I had cried since this whole thing happened. I didn’t know why I held them back, though, probably because in a marriage there needed to be one to hold the fort while the other allowed themselves the freedom of feelings. I took the ten ton mantle, put it over my shoulders, and never released it. 

The cop turned and signaled the traffic to go around me. His knock startled me, but his face told me he had been knocking for a while. “Sir, is everything alright?”

No, I wanted to say after rolling down the window. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry.”

“Why don’t you pull over right there?”

Because my lunch is getting cold. 

“License and registration, please.”

At a different time, I would have asked questions, but that day I simply conceded. The faster I got rid of him, the faster I could continue my insomniac trek.

“Laurier? Zachary Laurier? Are you…”

“Yes.”

“Awful. Just awful.”

“Yes.”

“I heard from a friend at that precinct. Just awful.”

“Yes. You said that.”

“Alright, why don’t you go on home to your wife? You look like you could use the rest.”

But I didn’t go back to my wife, and instead drove North for a half hour, away from the mountains of Fort Davis and into the dust of Pecos, and turned around the corner of 17 and 131. I looked around the warehouse again, now closed at seven in the evening. The green dumpster stood in place outside the building. The owner, a superstitious Latin-American, had replaced it when the investigation started. 

“It’s bad for business. It’s bad luck,” he had said when the police found the phone; its ringtone absorbed by the construction debris. 

I was in the parking lot when they rolled the new one in to replace the cursed one. Its color was glossy green, with stickers that cautioned the eyes of the curious. I saw the stickers lose their vibrance from the seasons of the weather. Maybe I had lost some of my colors, too, and that’s why people looked at me funny all the time, or why dogs barked at me on the street.

We had found our favorite place to eat. As my son had gotten older, we barely talked for more than a couple of minutes at a time. But I remembered stopping at Six Gun Charlie’s once on our way to Roswell, when he had been obsessed with aliens. He was younger and very chatty back then, before he became a recluse. That’s the way I wanted to remember him: as if he would burst at any moment from too much life. Not the brat he had turned to when he walked out on me in the middle of every conversation. It boiled me with anger.

Through Pecos, the road laid still and deserted, except for the seesaw of the machines digging for oil at either side, and the pickup trucks of the men who operated them. He had been very handy with his phone, and he had found us a food truck that appeared in front of us as if he had conjured it with some ancient wish. The food truck had filled an empty corner of an RV park, where people who worked the oiling factories went to live their remaining hours of the day. It had become a community on wheels, and they had cemented their roots with mud, farm animals and all, on the empty promise of steady work. The eggs I had ordered came from the chickens in the farm. I didn’t know where the pancakes had come from, but I tasted nothing like them since. He had ordered a burger that day. And now I order two burgers every week.

“How’s your kid? I haven’t seen him in a while now,” the lady asked every time.

“He’s hanging in there.” I always tell her. I probably meant me.

“College kid, huh?”

I always stopped the lie from growing further and smiled. Whenever I remembered the future that would never be, I couldn’t help but recount life as it had been.

My wife and I had moved to Fort Davis in our youth after a pleasant and peaceful weekend getaway. But things never lived up to it the second time around. After our years in busy Austin, we had agreed upon a checklist before signing the mortgage of a new home. The one we had signed for passed all the items with flying colors, and even had a few extras, like the view of the mountains, and the shed for my woodworking tools. And if the nest had not been perfect enough, our son decided the life we built was good enough for him, and arrived soon after. I remembered rocking him on the front porch during first light to give my wife a few extra hours of sleep. He looked at me as I talked about the trees and the mountains, and how their shades turn lighter in the distance, as if the words would reach him instead of evaporating into the air. I always saw in his eyes the answer I was looking for, and everything was fine.

My wife always had the damnest stories whenever she drove into town for errands. People looked at her funny, she had said, and I just chuckled. That’s the thing about attractive people. Everyone looks at them funny. I always did my best to acclimate my eyes to her, and looked slightly to the right of her whenever we talked. I wanted to remind her of her beauty, I really did, but held back on account of keeping her. If my twenties gave me something other than an irreparable sleep schedule, it was the knowledge that beautiful monsters only stayed when the getting wasn’t scary. And obsessed men are scary things, more so if the obsession is one of love, or lust. I only threw in a sonnet when she forgot I was a changed man, but not a second earlier. 

According to the official report, though my sleeping wife would have said otherwise, my kid disappeared on the night of November the 14^th of the previous year, and the only thing they found was his phone which now sat lifeless in an evidence room inside a plastic bag. There had been no blood on the scene. I couldn’t help myself from smiling when they had said that. Maybe I was crazy. 

Everyone made friends in college, even the quiet ones. Take me, for instance. What took me three years in high school, I gained in a week in college. One of them went out to become a police officer, Kevin Lancaster, and the other a psychiatrist, Edward Miller. You could learn a lot from your friends, if you let them teach you. 

For example, Kevin told me what happened to items in the evidence room: when the case lost itself in dead ends, and became colder than a butcher’s freezer, the evidence also withered away with it, and depending on the precinct there might not be enough funding to have someone maintaining it, if future developments in the case should arise. The area of Fort Davis was not a priority to Texas. 

Ed had shared with me a peculiar thing he had learned in one of his classes. In the 60s and 70s, psychiatrists would give women, sometimes on the advice of their husbands, psychopharmacological medications to help them deal with motherhood. Mother’s Little Helpers, they called them. 

“Imagine if they did that now?” Ed had said, and we spent the rest of the afternoon staring at the ceiling, time traveling while smoking a tube of green.

After finishing up my lunch, I threw the extra burger in the dumpster. 

“Bon Appetite, son.” I said and drove out of there. 

The dusty air rose in the background of my mirror. I smiled again. When I was alone, I sometimes did that. I didn’t feel like driving home just yet, so I drove around town. In a small town like Fort Davis, they packed everything together like sardines in the salty city center. There were always empty parking spots near everything, and I heeded the call. The door opened almost by itself, pulling me out into the world. There wasn’t a single cloud in the serene blue sky. According to color theory, blue was the color of confidence. I closed my eyes and breathed the confidence in. My legs took me to the main road, near the intersection of the beginning of the city center and the outside incoming traffic. I could always tell when the car coming in was of a local or a tourist because of how many times they turned their heads around before driving forward. 

There were a couple of cafes and restaurants, but mostly small hotels. There was also a little library in the corner, where they left boxes full of books stacked against an outside wall free for the taking, even though they were books no one would take even if they paid them to. Across were the business offices where most people, the ones that didn’t enjoy manual labor, worked. We had a small bank and an old printing press, both struggling to remain open. Next to it, there was a building where police officers could spend the day waiting for crimes to happen; they seldom did around those parts. A plaque outside displayed the employee of the week, and a smiling picture of Kevin Lancaster looked straight at me as I walked by. He watched over me, over all of us. Right next to it was the office of Edward Miller, the psychiatrist of Fort Davis, with its white bricks and a cherry wooden door that took me right back to olden, simpler times. I built that door for him; he didn’t commission me or anything, I just did. I had showed up one day, carrying it all by myself, all hundred and fifty pounds of it. The door remained locked until the front desk attendant unlocked it, on account of keeping the loonies out, at least the ones without an appointment. If someone wanted to come inside, they needed to use the iron door knocker, slam it on the door, and hope they heard them. Unless it was me, of course. Doors opened for me with little effort. They said knowledge was power, and I knew things that opened doors, at least in that town.

Most people needed to go through the front office girl before they got to the doctor, but Edward came right out. “Did you run out already, Zachary?”

“I started giving her two this week. One wasn’t doing it.”

“She’s building up a tolerance. You have been giving it for too long. I told you—”

“Just give me the damn pills.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t.”

I just looked at him. He knew what I was thinking, and in time he’d think it, too.

“I can’t.”

I looked at him some more. At any moment, his memory would come back.

“Fine, but this is the last time.” He had been saying that for a year. The girl handed over his little notepad, and he wrote a prescription. “Don’t go over two.”

I stepped outside the pharmacy with my little junk-food-looking white paper bag, and I gave my gratitude for the convenience of the doctor right across the street. I walked past the police station again, and this time my friend Kevin was sitting at his desk. He turned around in his rolling chair and he looked at me through the glass walls. His forehead wrinkled, and I realized his jaw clenched by the rise near his cheeks and temples. He just had an awful face, overall. I nodded, he nodded back. I showed him my little paper bag and smiled. He swallowed hard and turned back to his computer, but he wasn’t doing anything at all; the screen was pitch black. Crazy town.

I pushed the silver bar on the front glass door. I loved the sound of the little bell that rang every time I opened the door. Kevin rose at once and hurried to me with a hand in his pocket.

“Here. Just take it and leave,” he said, whispering and looking all worried. “Don’t come around here anymore, you hear me?”

The mountains rose on the horizon, some lighter, some darker, and I pulled in front of the rocking chair where I used to put my son to sleep. I walked past the pictures of my life. Some of them turned down on their faces, because it was too painful, and got to the master bedroom. No matter how quiet I tried to be, in a house of dead silence, I was always too noisy. My wife was still passed out, but my presence woke her up. The sight of me riled her up a bit. She tried to speak, but her weighted tongue took too much effort, and she made little sense. She looked at the little white paper bag and became even more animated, but barely moved an inch. The entire routine would be funny if it wasn’t for the tear that made its way down her lashes and around her cheeks. That nearly killed me. I took two pills out, and to my surprise she took them with scanty fight.

I unlocked my shed. The tools had moved to the sides to make space for the altar I had built for my son. My wife had stopped taking me seriously after she had seen me carrying one of his witchcraft books around the house. But she had allowed it, like a mother allows her child a toy she hopes they will grow out of. Only I never did. Some people had given up too easily, giving condolences when there was still so much to try. After spending most days by herself, my wife had walked into the shed once and saw what I had been working on. I could tell she had been sobbing. I could also tell she had no faith left for anything. She had no faith left to believe in me, in what I had been doing. I had tried to explain the altar, the book, and the body of her son hanging up against the wall. But her grief grew into accusations, and the accusations into a threat I could not ignore.

With the heavy book in hand, I knelt before the altar. The rough hardback cover hung to the side when I opened the book. His phone, now outside the evidence plastic bag, sat over the mensa. It was warm inside the windowless shed, and I would sweat away if I didn’t hurry it along. I read the short sonnets written in old Latin, and with every word, I felt him closer. It was the same hair-raising feeling I got when I sensed someone approaching behind me. After the poem, I knocked on the altar the instructed amount of times. On the third knock, I heard his voice. A possession he held dear had been the missing ingredient.

His vocal cords were the only thing of his that moved. 

I rose. “That’s OK, son. Scream. Scream all you want. I will knock every day until you’re ready to talk to me like you used to.”

I left the shed after putting him back to rest, using the spell on the page over. Outside, the air had the chill of altitude. There was calm all around. Nature was a placid sight that cured all ailments. When it rained, the rain washed away just about everything. Then the Sun rose and dried whatever was left over. Over there, the spot where I knocked on my son’s head with a rock the size of my fist looked as tranquil as when we moved in. A gust of wind forced my hair to rise and fall, and whistled in my ears the ancient song of love, like the one Kusa-Hibari sung. And everything was fine.