CHAPTER FOUR

In which it becomes increasingly obvious that all is not as it should be

 

And where was my Daddy while all of this monkey business was going on?  He of course was at his job, doing the right thing.  In fact he was so concerned with doing the right thing that he would bring his work right on home with him in his briefcase, and spread out his papers on the sofa on all sides of him, and proceed to wrestle with the black beast Elsie while trying to please his boss at work, who was not even there to be impressed.

Now I could have wasted my energy moping around wishing that my Daddy would pay attention to me, but instead I just chased my brother around the house until he fell over his own shoelaces and started screaming.  With pity in my heart, I tried to pick him up but in my sincere efforts I only managed to poke him in the ear with my elbow, at which point my Mama and the rest of her children joined forces to bring forth some part of my Daddy to be present in his own home where his body and his concerns were taking up all the space on the sofa where my Mama could otherwise have been sitting, where they could be fondling each other and smooching, or whatever couples in love are supposed to be doing.  At finding himself surrounded by screaming children, all of them pointing their fingers at me, it clearly had become his duty to call me over to him to instigate a heart-to-heart father and son talk.

I hear you punched your brother in the eye, he said so softly I could barely hear him, because I thought he had said, I fear the monkey lovers in the sky.  When I said nothing in response, he set down his pencil on top of one of his piles of papers and looked me right in the eye, and said, Come here Maxwell, come see your Daddy.

With fear and trembling, I took a couple steps closer and he reached out and grabbed me by the wrist and hauled me in a little closer, till I could smell him.  I always liked the way my Daddy smelled when I was that age, though I have gotten used to it now and whatever that smell was then, it either has gone away or I no longer notice it.

And my Daddy started in telling me how I am bigger than my brother and on and on, where have I heard this before? and then he opened up with both barrels and said, Don’t hit your brother, hit me instead.

So I was standing there and he was waiting, and saying that’s right, next time you get mad don’t hit your brother, hit me, because I’m big and I can take it.  Come on over here, put up your dukes and give it to me, hit me as hard as you can, right here in my face.

And he was waiting, but I wasn’t doing anything except getting lost in his big sad brown eyes, when all of a sudden his outsides fell off of him and his inside soul parts were revealed to me in all their paternal glory.  Over on one side of him was his Mama standing at the window, wringing her hands and crying, and waiting for her husband to come in out of the fields.  Over on his other side was his Daddy, sitting silently in a chair with nothing to say.  Piled up on top of my little boy Daddy were five brothers and sisters, teasing him and stuffing him into a big old tire and rolling him down the hill.  And then there was this man at his job who hated him for getting the job he thought he should have got, and this man was locking himself in his office every afternoon with his secretary and he didn’t care who knew  what went on in there, because he knew my Daddy wouldn’t tell on him because my Daddy was a nice boss who would work late and take his job home with him, and take home anybody else’s job that didn’t get done, because now that my Daddy had been made boss of the whole district he made it his responsibility to make the whole county look good.  And standing behind all these grisly characters was the grisliest character of them all, glowing with the fires of hell, leering out at me:  my Daddy’s high school music teacher, and he was telling me in all kinds of explicit detail just exactly what he had made my Daddy do on the pretense of giving him a job at his farm.

I turned away, hoping my Daddy would zip up his soul and not show me any more, when as if from inside a big deep hole I heard his voice begging, Hit me, Maxwell . . . So I hauled off and bonked him with my little white knuckles and ran into my room crying, trying to push all my Daddy’s little soul tumors out of my empty shell.

The trouble with being an empty shell is that there are all kinds of parasites out there always trying to fill it up for you.  It’s not their fault; they don’t like being parasites and are just trying to get under your skin to escape their own empty goddam shell.  The grass is always greener in someone else’s shit-hole.

But that wasn’t all there was to my Daddy.  He used to take me for the most wonderful rides in the country with him late at night when I should have been in bed having nightmares.  Here’s how that sort of thing would happen.

I’d be sitting on the rug watching TV or picking my nose or trying to get Dirk to play with me but he knew better, or grabbing my oldest big sister Glenda’s crotch and making her squeal, but what was really eating me was that just before my Mama and my Daddy disappeared into their bedroom and shut the door behind them, they were saying, The kids this, and the kids that, and on and on, and then they were in there raising their voices because now that they were behind closed doors they could really get it on and no one would know, and all I could think was, What did little old me do to make my Mama and my Daddy so angry?

And then my Daddy flung open the door and stomped out of the room with his face all squeezed up like it was gonna bust wide open, and us kids just hung open our mouths like zombies and stared at the TV hoping it would all go away, except for Dirk who was starting to squeak because my Daddy never flung anything, not even doors.  And here came my Daddy right over to me and grabbed me up and shouted back toward the bedroom where my Mama still was, We’re going for a ride, me and Maxwell, and you’ll be lucky if you ever see us again, and I don’t know why I’m telling you this because we know you don’t love us and you don’t care if we come back anyway.

And then he put my coat and my shoes on me and put on his own coat, and while my sisters and my brother started to fuss about wanting to go along for the ride, he combed my hair because I was not allowed to leave the house without having my hair combed, and he explained to those other kids how maybe they could go along next time, but not this time, because they were all wailing by now and my sisters were sucking their thumbs and Dirk was grabbing my Daddy’s leg and hitting my foot with his little fist, and Mo was saying, But Daddy aren’t you ever coming back, and he said, Yeah, but don’t tell your Mama, because she hates me and she doesn’t care if I come back anyway.

So off we went out the front door and into the car, me plopped down in the seat next to him but scooting away from him towards the other side of the car, because the way he was screeching the tires and peeling off away from the house, I was about half froze up and didn’t know for sure whether I wanted to go for a ride or not.  In fact, if I could speak at this point I’d have said, Why can’t we bring the whole family, but something in me was frozen and besides I couldn’t stop hearing this voice in my head saying, Don’t say a word, and right then that voice sounded like it was dripping with true love and real concern for my soul compared to what was going on in that car.

So my Daddy drove me out to the country explaining to me what a fool and an unloved bastard he was, and going on and on about how much he does for that woman my Mama and she doesn’t appreciate him and won’t listen to anything he has to say, which was a surprise to me because I never heard him say anything much, but maybe he was talking about those conversations he and my Mama had behind closed doors while me and my brother and my sisters were pretending to watch the TV.

And then after awhile he started shrieking and beating his fist against the dashboard of the car, all the while keeping one hand steady on the wheel because he was a very conscientious Daddy and wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize my safety, because as he was explaining to me between fits of shrieking, You bitch, you bitch, he was all the while explaining to me that I am the apple of his eye, and he loves me so much he could just pop.  That’s when he pulled on over to the side of the road and turned off the car where we were, on some little dirt road in the middle of nowhere, and I was all squeezed up against my side of the car but he grabbed me and hauled me over onto his lap and squeezed me between him and the steering wheel and started to cry like a little baby, barely able to talk but managing to babble something about I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, over and over till he was all spent and I could tell he really meant it by the way he was dribbling snot all over my head and down my face.

Now let me stop right here and say this right now:  my Daddy never ever touched my pee-pee.  He would never do a thing like that after what his music teacher put him through when he was a senior in high school and supposed to be dating girls and drinking beer with his friends, if he had any.  My Daddy was no kind if incestual child fornicator and to tell you the truth not only did he not ever touch my pee-pee, but he hardly ever touched any part of me at all, so it must be obvious to all that he was a very good and kind and sincere man who always held the interests of others at the center of his heart.

Then after about an hour of quietly weeping and beating his forehead against the steering wheel and dribbling snot down the neck of my pajamas, he would wipe me off with his shirtsleeves as good as he could in the dark, and he would get out and stand in the night wind for awhile and look at the wind blowing at him from over the hill, then he would blow his snot into his hanky which he always carried in his back pocket, then he would haul out his big pee-pee and piss on the world when he thought I wasn’t looking.

After that he would drive me home and take off my shoes and put me in my bed and pat me on the head and tell me what a good sport I was for going on a ride with him and talking to him, which sounded funny to me because I never said a word the whole time we were out there riding around.  Then he would crawl into bed in his room and I would look at the ceiling and wait for morning, because I was afraid to go to sleep, because who was going to keep the prowlers and monsters and criminals from coming in the house and killing my Daddy if I went to sleep?

I only got to go on about a dozen or two of those rides with my Daddy because one day he took my sister Mo along and after that it wasn’t any fun for us anymore.  Actually she took her self along, having climbed on my Daddy’s shoe as he stomped out the door, and since she was still hanging onto his leg when he got the door slammed behind him, she got to go along too, and boy was she glad.

Now since my youngest big sister Mo was with us in the car, my Daddy was much more sedate and refined in the way that he carried on, and in fact he didn’t mention my Mama at all because he knew all the women in his house, and in the whole world in general, were plotting against him, and he didn’t want his knowledge of this fact to get leaked out to womankind in general, for fear of how such information might be used against him.  So he changed his approach considerably from the way it was when it was just me and him, and this is how it happened.

First he told my sister Mo that we might be going for a very long ride and she said when are we going to go back?  Because she missed her Mama.

My Daddy didn’t say anything about my Mama in return because of why I just said.  Instead he said to my sister Mo, Tell me that you love me, and she said I love you Daddy.

Now I must veer off course and reveal something about myself that perhaps has not been too apparent because I have not yet mentioned it.  When my brother or my sisters wanted attention from their Mama or their Daddy, or wanted to say something to their Mama or their Daddy, they would say Mama or they would say Daddy, and then they would say whatever else they wanted to say.  But with me nothing was ever that simple, and while I was thinking up what I wanted to say, whenever I got to the part where I should have thought up to say that word “Mama” or “Daddy,” I couldn’t even get myself to think those words, much less to say them.  I have beat my brain for many years to try and say those words, or words that mean the same thing, or at least to figure out why I can’t do it, but all to no avail; I am as helpless to explain my inadequacy in this regard as I was when I was four years old.  So when I wanted something, I just said Hey! and my Daddy would say back, Straw is cheaper, which didn’t make any sense to me at all but I was just a little stupid kid so it’s no wonder.

Anyhow, that’s why I keep saying Mama this and Daddy that every chance I get while I write this book because for some reason it is relatively painless to type these words, although I must admit I won’t let my wife read over my shoulder as I type, because it makes me feel very embarrassed to think of anybody knowing I typed those words.  But what I don’t see can’t hurt me, and I’m sure that when I send this book off to my Mama and my Daddy after I finish it, although I will be very nervous to see how they react to seeing their real names and not just “Hey,”  as likely as not, they won’t mind all that much and if they feel really silly about being blamed for being my Mama and my Daddy, they will probably just keep it to themselves.

So getting back to the story of me and my Daddy’s last ride in the country when my sister Mo got to ride along, here is what happened next after she muttered her heartfelt love for her Daddy after his kind prompting.

My Daddy next said, Please say it louder like you mean it.  But instead of saying it louder she said it softer like she was afraid to speak up or something.  So my Daddy said, I can’t hear you, please say you love me and say it real loud this time.  Well that sister of mine must’ve been confused because she started in whimpering to herself how she wanted to go home to her Mama, and my Daddy said, I won’t take you home until—

But he didn’t get the rest of it out because my sister Mo only heard those first few words “I won’t take you home”, at which she jumped to conclusions, being only seven years old and having a general lack of sophistication when it came to keeping up with the thought processes of adult people.  So in her confusion she started screaming, You’re not my Daddy!  You’re going to leave me alone out here in the dark country and the coyotes and owls and rattlesnakes are going to eat me, and on and on.

Well my Daddy was quite taken aback by this kind of talk and mentioned calmly once again that in order to get to be taken right on back home to her Mama all she had to say was how much she loved her Daddy in a real loud voice like she really meant it.  But by now she was convinced that she was coyote food, and she was curled up on the floor of the car screaming so hard she couldn’t make any noise, tears squirting out of her face like blood out of a new gash, and my Daddy and I were just sitting there not doing anything, me because I was paralyzed from the eyebrows down, and him because he didn’t dare let it show how hurt his feelings were by her little display, until finally he lost his patience and pulled the car over on one of those little side roads.  About now my sister Mo was all but going into convulsions, her eyes all squeezed up tight and her arms and legs wrapped around her body, and jerking and twitching like a bare nerve.  My Daddy got out of the car and came around to her side and hauled her out of there with one hand, and took her out in front of the car and shook her till her legs came uncoiled and she stood up on them.  Then he sat down on the bumper of the car and turned my sister Mo over his knee and spanked her bottom till she stopped crying.  Then he led her by the hand back to the car, and she got in and sat down all stiff as a board, her legs pushed out straight in front of her like she was trying to push the car home faster with her feet.  At least she wasn’t crying anymore.

As for me, I was still paralyzed from the eyebrows down, and was not sure I had really seen what I just saw, because my Daddy never hit anybody, especially a girl, and I never had ever before seen him touch anybody’s butt, not even my Mama’s.

When we got home Mo ran in the house and went in her room and closed the door very softly, and my Daddy took me into my room and ripped my shoes off and threw them over in the corner, and tossed me into my bed and went into the living room without saying a word and sat down on the sofa in the dark.

I went to sleep instantly, feeling sorry for my Daddy because my sister had ruined his ride and he didn’t get to cry and get it all out of his system like he usually did.

When I woke up sometime later it was still dark night, and I wanted to see if my Daddy was still sitting in the living room by himself in the dark.  Boy was that a mistake, and later on I wished I had just went back to sleep and had some regular nightmares, because when I got out to the living room and peeked around from behind the chair which I was hiding behind, there was who else but the black beast Elsie standing in front of my Daddy while he was slumped down in the sofa snoring.

I found myself paralyzed again, and forced by the frozenness of my condition to watch as the black beast Elsie bent down over my Daddy and opened her slimy black oozing mouth full of nasty rotten fangs, and started eating my Daddy’s face off, first his lips and then his eyes and then his nose, and it was right about then that I must have fainted or something because I can’t remember what happened next.

In the morning my Daddy was gone and in his place was a man who looked just like him but who never got mad at my Mama, or took anyone for any nighttime rides in the country, and never threatened to take anybody to be eaten up by coyotes.

And sadly enough, my sister Mo was also gone and in her place was a little girl that looked just like her, but was stiff as a board and from time to time seemed compelled to wait until she thought nobody was looking and then she would turn around and start beating the tar out of me.