—When at a rest stop, don’t park next to an antique school bus that looks like someone has been living in it for years.

There’s a middle aged couple living in an old yeller and I’ve seen them more than once at an I-70 rest stop in Missouri and Kansas. I’m convinced they are time travelers because they both look a little too much like Charles Manson, hippies who have driven through some portal that has brought them here from the 1960s. If you chat them up for too long they will invite you inside for a cold one. They seem cool and maybe they are just nice to fellow travelers. But also maybe they are trying to bring you into their free-love cult, maybe that cold one they didn’t open in front of you has a few hits of LSD in it, and maybe they are not the couple you should be tripping with. Just park a few spots away, save yourself the dilemma.

—Don’t listen to John Cougar while driving through Indiana.

Really, don’t listen to John Cougar while driving through any other state, but that shit hits harder and worse in Indiana and I can’t explain why. When I was 19 I worked at an underground warehouse where the federal government stored cheese and tea bladders in case of nuclear war. No shit. I worked with two other people and our job was to pack the tea and shrink wrap it on pallets and load them into shipping containers after that. We couldn’t get radio reception that deep inside the cave. S we had a boom box. The boss was a John Mellancamp mega fan. That summer I heard every song he ever wrote. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

—I can’t prove it, but there are more “holy shit they got away with it” murderers living in the Arkansas Ozarks than anywhere else in the world.

This is a vibe thing, really. You get on those rural highways down there in those valleys and you can feel it, man, you can feel that if you break down in the wrong place someone is going to be watching you, someone is going to be suspicious of you, someone who has been lammed up for years after they got away with something real bad up in KC or St. Louis, or down in Dallas or Little Rock, and they never come out of those hills for any reason, and as you’re poking around under the hood you can see someone up on the ridge sneaking around, eyeing you, making sure one way or another you don’t stay there too long.

—Join a roving band of former tow truck drivers if civilization ever collapses.

Those people are fearless and it only makes sense that they will all band together. They will either pull of a full rebuild of society or get themselves annihilated by the first pack of cannibals they come across, because people who drive wreckers don’t give half a fuck about their own mortality. I don’t even think they’re aware of it. They walk, stomp, and crawl around the pavement with heavy chains hanging off their arms so they can hook to behemoth frames, and they’ll raise up drive axles all calm and collected like there isn’t 80,000 pounds flying past them only inches away at 80 miles per hour. They have seen it all, heard it all, have had a thousand near death experiences, and they know every culvert, backroad, outer road, side road, outhouse, henhouse, and nuthouse between here and Sugar Tit, South Carolina. When the Great A.I. Nukey War is over, when it’s all warlords crossing the human made deserts in search of water and the last drips and drops of gasoline, be on the side of the draggin wagons.

—If ever you walk into a truck stop bathroom and a man is using the toilet with the door open, do not under any circumstances make eye contact with him.

He’s had a rough day. He had a mystery meat meatball sub, and after he bit into it he clocked that the beef looked not just a little gray, but a lot gray, and kind of green, the swirling color of a gnarly bruise, and he thought, “Eh, it’ll be fine,” which always means it will very much not be fine, and he hurried in here, barely made it, and then found that the door neither locks nor stays shut, and his arms are too short to hold it, and now he’s wondering how his life decisions have led him here, and if you make eye contact with him it might be the one last final thing that sends him over the edge.

—Always keep an extra pair of underwear in your glove box.

It’s just a good idea. See above.

—People do all manner of sexual activity while driving. Try not to stare and never honk.

I have seen [redacted] and [redacted] and [redacted] and [redacted] [redacted] and believe it or not I’ve even seen [REDACTED]. It’s tempting to stare, mostly out of the sheer admiration for the daring nature of the activity while speeding down the interstate at a brisk 75 miles per, risking life and limb (for real), but don’t be a creep, no matter how curious you are, no matter how much you are wondering why the woman driving is also stroking the guy in the passenger seat, no matter how unfair you feel this distribution of labor is, just keep your eyes on the road, bud. Let them have their moment.

—There are still, even now, a few working pay phones in rural Kansas.

If you know where they are, and if you find yourself within ten miles of them, you have to stop and call someone from it. This too is time travel, in a way, and any time one can participate in time travel…one must. And who knows, maybe it will somehow summon the portal for the hippie couple in the yellow bus, maybe it will call them home, get them back to where they belong.

—If you’re ever at a family owned roadside diner and a man walks in wearing a t-shirt that says “I ❤️ Coitus” you must immediately make friends with him.

It will be the beginning of a lifelong friendship full of hijinks and hullabaloo and grab ass.

—If someone at a truck stop asks you for five dollars to put into their gas tank, give them ten out of respect for the hustle.

They’ve run out of gas. They’re trying to get home to KC or Louisville or Chattanooga, and sir could you please spot me a five. It’s the oldest hustle. They don’t like participating in it and you don’t either, and we’re all being exploited until we are no longer useful to the economy anyway, so just go into the Love’s and buy a Gatorade or a pack of smokes, get ten bucks cash back, and tip your cap as you hand it over. You never know if one day you might have to pull this hustle, and it doesn’t hurt to put the good karma out there.

—Beware the Full Moon, beware the planets, it is a real thing, it must be respected.

The moon, the planets, all the celestial bodies coming and going, all of them doing weird things (CATS AND DOGS, LIVING TOGETHER!), it… is… real. I try real hard not to believe in this shit, but I can always tell when it’s a full moon or if mercury is in centigrade or whatever, because people start doing squirrelly things around you. Weird stuff starts happening. You will get cut off within an inch of your bumper at 2 a.m. when there’s only maybe two or three other cars for miles, or you will see some dude pass another vehicle in the grass median, or you will see a drive axle fall off a tractor and pogo stick it a few feet up into the air and somehow the trucker will keep the shiny side up, or you will see a CNG tank catch fire for some random reason at the top of a fairing, or you will see another trucker driving with a locked up wheel and he will drag the tire until it comes off and spins down the highway, gaining speed and barely missing oncoming cars, or you will see some guy walking in the middle of the hammer lane in the middle of the night. You will see it all, if you drive long enough, and it always happens when there’s some planet shit going on. Always.

—A pin puller is the most versatile tool ever made. Get one.

Get yourself a pin puller, babe, even if you’re not a trucker. You can use it as a hammer, an axe (if you sharpen the pin hook a little), a leverage tool, a shovel (in a pinch), and a weapon (see above). When society collapses you can join forces with the tow truck drivers and become your own band of roving warriors. You can crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.

—Sometimes the most beautiful sunrise you will ever see will be in your rearview mirror as you drive west on I-70 through the Flint Hills, east of exit 303, before Manhattan, Kansas.

Like anything magnificent, you can’t look directly at it. You can only glimpse it, see it out of the periphery of your vision, and if you’re lucky enough to catch the sun rising up after an overnight storm, the pure blue sky waiting for you out west, and some kind of brilliant pink orange purple thunderheaded column of rainbows behind you, with burning golden flames escaping the embrace of the clouds, those rays reaching for you, purifying you, and right there in that moment you will consider so briefly that maybe we are not alone in the universe, and maybe nothing ever really dies, that maybe it’s possible that everyone you’ve ever loved and lost is somehow united in a mysterious eternal braid of all souls, that maybe, somehow, it is possible we all become this unified shy collective spirit that only ever reveals itself like this, indirectly, in the fleeting moments when our brains are so busy and burdened, but even then, despite it all, we can help but see it, can’t help but feel like we are part of it, stretching endlessly onward, all of us, trying to find our way back to each other.

Every family along the Kansas-Missouri border has a Jesse James story, it seems. My family lore, told to me years ago by my granddad when I was a kid, is that his own great-granddad was shot down on his front porch when he confronted Quantrill’s Raiders (a group of psychopaths that included the James and Younger brothers), as they tore through Norton, Kansas. Well if you look at a map this is…impossible. Norton is halfway to Denver and way north across the mean plains, and those particular murderers stayed more or less within a few dozen miles of each side of the border. But, by god, old Granddad spoke of it like he was there, like he saw the bullet bite into our ancestor, like he held the dying man’s head Lincoln-like as he died.

I grew up playing on Frank James’ grave, my little kid legs running over and around the small boneyard stones to a nearby playground at what used to be Hill Farm but is now a park. Granddad would holler at me to have a little respect for the dead and I would laugh like a scoundrel. Nowadays I live a few miles up the road from the creek where John Brown stood from his supper upon hearing about the first sacking of Lawrence and the bludgeoning of Charles Sumner, slammed his palms on the table, and wordlessly pulled his rifle and cutlass off the fireplace mantle and walked out. His sons followed him. Hours later five of Brown’s pro-slavery neighbors lay beheaded outside their homes. The Pottawatomie Massacre. In retribution, pro-slavery Missourians attacked and burned the Brown homestead just after the family escaped into the woods. “God sees it,” John Brown is said to have said as he watched the smoke columns twist into the air above his home. Months later his son Frederick would be killed. I drive by his grave twice a day on the way to and from work.

Kansas only got more violent after that. John Brown broke the seal on something, gave a sort of permission to the Abolitionists and Free Staters to fight back against the likes of Quantrill. Thousands of people on both sides of the slavery issue had poured into the Kansas territory back then to establish residency and try to vote it in as either an enslaving state or a free state. For nearly half a decade these factions would intimidate or kill each other, reprisal after reprisal, the real beginning of the Civil War. On the right side of history there were true believers like Brown and his sons, Abolitionists so offended by the evil institution of slavery that they were willing to kill and die to keep it out of the state, There were also white supremacists who didn’t want slavery because they didn’t want black people in the state, and there were criminals like Doc Jennison and Jim Lane who didn’t give a shit about the issue but only wanted to use the Abolitionist cause as an excuse to rob and steal from anyone they could. Jennison, a Union Colonel during the Civil War, would get kicked out of the Army for murder and robbery. Lane, who at one point hatched a failed plan to assassinate all the members of the pro-slavery legislature in Lecompton, Kansas, would eventually serve as one of the state’s first two U.S. senators. On the other side were dozens or more bands of marauders like the one William Quantrill, a former school teacher, had formed, recruiting murderous pups like the James and Younger brothers to burn towns and kill everyone who they thought needed killing, man or woman or child.

I could not resist imagining an Abolitionist family amidst all this, on the periphery of all the main figures of history but also deep inside the core of the violence, taking all the stories I’ve heard about and read about all my life, all my own hikes and drives through these violent hills and plains, and put them into a narrative. The Bierhal Family. They have come to Kansas from Ohio to help vote in Kansas as a Free State, and we see them greeted with violence right off the ferry as they head up the Federal road toward Leavenworth, Kansas, one of the more violent towns of the era. Peter wants to be a preacher, wants to build a church and save souls and turn minds against slavery. He is the closest thing we get to a true believer, but he’s not built for this. His brother, Oats, is more of a Jennison type, out here to rob and steal under the banner of the Free State cause. Glenna, Peter’s wife, is in charge of kids she doesn’t much like, and has tagged along to make her escape from her frail husband, and motherhood, as soon as she gets the right opportunity. Then there’s Grandad. Peter and Oats’ father. He has come back here to settle a score that has boiled inside him for decades, since his fled this place for Ohio as a young man when he attempted a murder and wanted to avoid a noose. Then there’s the kids. The afterthoughts, so much of the time. Maggie and Luther. They are at the mercy of these adults, and very quickly they will only have each other to rely on.

Because True Grit is my favorite book, I, a 42 year old man, made the mostly ridiculous decision to tell this story through the eyes and in the voice of 12 year old Maggie Bierhal. She is my best shot at an homage to Mattie Ross. They are literary sisters, if I can be arrogant enough for a moment to write that sentence. Like Mattie, Mag is one tough little bird, often smarter than the adults around her, but too often rat fucked by their dumb decisions and unreasonable egos. I think if you like Larry McMurtry, Charles Portis, EL Doctorow, Philipp Meyer, James McBride, and Daniel Woodrell (I can’t quite bring myself to write Cormac McCarthy), then I think you will dig this.

Let’s go up the road:

11Worth

A weekly serialized novel about a family trying to survive the most violent days of Bleeding Kansas.

By Mike Marshall Wilson

“Nowhere is it the same place as yesterday.
None of us is the same person as yesterday.
We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.
This downward cellular jubilance is shared
by the wind, bugs, birds, bears and rivers,
and perhaps the black holes in galactic space 
where our souls will all be gathered in an invisible
thimble of antimatter. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Yes, trees wear out as the wattles under my chin
grow, the wrinkled hands that tried to strangle 
a wife beater in New York City in 1957.
We whirl with the earth, catching our breath
as someone else, our soft brains ill-trained
except to watch ourselves disappear into the distance.
Still, we love to make music of this puzzle.”
	-Jim Harrison, Becoming

This summer your oldest daughter will turn 19, the same age you were when you moved out of your parents’ house, never looking back after you were gone, you wouldn’t even speak to them for almost a decade. She’d be born just a few years after you moved out, and when you look at her you can’t believe that you were barely older than she is when you became her dad. You were such a kid, and you can see that more clearly now than ever, putting yourself in charge of another human after you’d barely just gotten here yourself, so young that it almost makes you forgive yourself for some of your bigger fuck ups over the years. Almost. One of your best and worst qualities is you can never fully forgive yourself.

She’ll attend university in the fall. You think it would be good for her to move out, not the way you did, running as fast as you could into a shitty apartment where you paid a now laughable $580 a month in rent and lived above a father and son who got high on their back porch every night together, and often offered you hits off the joints they’d smoke as you came in from work. You hope she’ll move into the dorm of a small liberal arts college about an hour away, far enough for some independence but close enough to drive back even for an afternoon visit whenever she wants. It would be good for her, you think, because high school was excruciating for her socially. She’s painfully shy, unlike you back then, you and the personas you developed to make friends with anyone anywhere at any time, some kind of emotional survival thing you try not to think too much about, and she came out of high school with only a few friends, no close ones, none of whom she will stay in touch with. Dorm life at a small school would be good for her, you think, would force her to interact with people, to make real friends, the kind of long term relationships that she will carry into her twenties and thirties, people who will be there for her in ways she will need, rather than the solitude she has now. Instead, though, she has chosen to live at home, to attend a commuter school in the city, and you’re afraid it will be the same cycle, four years and very few friends, a robust social life being a thing she both craves and rejects, aching for a thing she refuses to pursue, and you wonder why human beings are so paradoxical. You want her to go because you think it will be better for her, but you’re glad she’s not dying to get away like you were.

You are driving to Wakeeney, Kansas, halfway to Denver, when your own childhood best friend calls, the only person from your own youth you’re still friends with. It is 4 a.m. and you are both on the road, have both somehow become truckers, both calling always when the highway starts to float in front of you, trying to stay awake just like you both did when we were 14, when after midnight you’d be on the cordless watching MTV together or playing video games, mostly listening to each other breathe, breaking the solitude and anxiety of your own lonesome brains from just knowing the other is out there. He says, “I don’t think my son loves me, and my fucking gout is flaring up.”

“Why do you say that?” you say.

“About the gout or about my boy?”

“Dude…” you say. How many times in your lives has this one dumb word — dude — carried enough emotional weight that all either of you has needed to do is utter it? Your sons are about the same age, brooding teenagers, and you both muse often about how baffling they are. You’ve grown old enough to be completely out of touch with the teens you each used to be, how you both partly bonded back then because you’d each had fist fights with your own dads at one time or another, how you’d hated them and loved them. You have both been way better fathers than your own dads, which maybe isn’t saying much, but it is confusing when they act like normal teenagers who want nothing to do with you despite your best efforts.

Your friend says, almost in tears, “He just…he doesn’t want to be around me. Doesn’t talk to me. Acts like he can’t stand me. I asked him the other day, I had to, I said, ‘Do you even love me anymore?’”

You don’t like giving advice, mostly because you don’t like getting it, especially about things like this. No one knows what they’re doing, not ever, especially not you. So you say the most unhelpful thing, probably the dumbest thing anyone could ever say to something like this. You shrug as if he can see you, and say, “Sometimes shit sucks, man.” You two are quiet for a few miles. It’s a long time for a silence like that. You have to say something, anything, you can’t just leave it at that, some dumb crass nihilism, and you can’t tell him you’ll call him later and then turn on the old timey country station you like to listen to out of Topeka, though you are tempted. You say, “It’ll get better, bud,” and you believe this, you really do, or you wouldn’t say it. You’ve gotten better the last few years at not saying things you don’t believe or mean.

There’s a lot they don’t tell you before you’re in charge of a whole tiny human, before you get to be way too much of an influence on their personality and psychology during the most important and formative years of their life. You go into it thinking you know exactly how to do it because you know exactly where your own parents went wrong, how they fucked you all the way up. By the time you are a parent you will have spent most of your life ruminating on all the ways your folks went wrong. You will have a list of reasons why they never should have had you in the first place. You will know all the fine details about how they ruined you. And you will be different, won’t you, of course you will, except the problem is the only thing you’re an expert about is how to parent that child version of yourself. You know what that kid needed to hear, needed to feel, the gestures that would have made him happy and secure, that would have made him somewhat whole and not the nervy fuck up you feel like all the time now. You’ll have a PhD on how to be a parent to your own young self but the problem is — and god damn it is a pretty big problem — your kids ain’t you. They are totally different people with different needs from whatever you had, different fears, and they grow up in a way different time, so different that it might as well mean they’re growing up on a whole other planet. That PhD of yours is useless. You can’t just do the opposite of your parents and call it good. Maybe that’s only barely even a good start.

On the night of your 42nd birthday your son comes into your room and puts his hand between your shoulders and rattles you awake. “I need to talk to you,” he says, and though you are nearly deaf at this stage of your life you can hear so clearly the vibrato of panic in his voice, so you spring up and reach for your glasses. He’s waving you to his room, saying it’s about Jen, his girlfriend. For whatever reason you are certain he’s about to tell you she’s pregnant, that maybe he’s just gotten the news from her, and you’re prepared for this moment because it has been a fear of yours the last year or so, and you’re ready for it, ready to tell him, “Okay, buddy, everything will be okay,” because you believe that. A teenage pregnancy ruined your dad’s life and if it happens to your son you are by god determined not to let it ruin his, no matter what, you’ll be there for him for whatever they decide or whatever they need. But by the time he gets to his room he’s pacing and crying in a different way. This is a young man deeply in pain, the body language of anger and grief and confusion. And now you too are worried in a different way, though you don’t exactly know what that way is, you don’t have a name for it. You tell him to just say it, come out with it. “She had a fight with her dad and he smashed her phone, and then she left, and…” and he pauses. You are terrified at what he might say next. You expect him to say he can’t get ahold of her, that he’s worried she’s been in an accident, and even though you are standing shirtless in front of him you’re ready to just say, “Let’s go,” ready to go hop in the car and find his person, his best friend, you’ll drive all night if you have to. But you stay quiet, you let him talk. He says, “Her dad hit her. She’s on her way over. Can she stay here?”

Of course you picture it. It plays in your mind, a father hitting his daughter, a grown man throwing hands at a teenage girl, the brutality of it, the cowardice of it, and you hate violence but you start thinking of ways to get away with brutality of your own, start tying to figure out how to get away with beating the hell out of a man who’d hit a kid. But this feels like one of the most important moments of your son’s life. You need to get this right, god damn, you can’t let your own stuff invade this moment, you can’t resort to childish pronouncements of righteous anger and wrath, and so you say, not so eloquently, “Hell yes she can come over, of course,” and you both go downstairs to wait for her.

She cries when she comes into the house, when she sees your son, and you step back as they hug, and soon she is sitting on the couch. Her face is red. You can see right where she got struck. You ask what happened, and she tells you, and it is not something you can or should write about.

Here is what you see as the night goes on. You’ll stay up until 5 a.m. and a lot will happen. There will be phone calls and texts with her parents, and threats will get made back and forth, and you will stay mostly composed, though there will be moments you’ll want back, moments you’ll think about later, how you should’ve done or said things better. You can never know what to do in the moment, only afterwards. And sometimes not even then. You get one sweet life, as they say, and you have no choice but to get everything right in the first and only go. Everything feels so consequential, the stakes so high, you should get chances to revise and redo, but you don’t. None of us do. We are all stuck with the rough draft of our life, with the crushing weight of regret waiting for us at the end.

It’s simple when they’re babies. Feed them, change them, clean them. When they get a little older you quickly realize that they are alway trying to die, that you have to be within a foot or two of them at all times or else they actually might. Those are some tough years and it only lasts, oh, maybe just shy of a decade. Soon you see that they are constantly becoming different people and you are constantly behind. By the time you figure out how to be a good dad to that little three year old boy who runs everywhere he goes, he will be a round faced bespectacled sweetheart who you worry plays too many video games. By the time you understand that boy, he will fade away into the mind and body of a very moody and sometimes mean as hell middle schooler who you will peek at one morning before work and find a weed vape near his pillow. You’ll never really figure out how to be that kid’s dad, no matter how hard you try, but it’s okay because you’ll blink your eyes and he’ll be absorbed by a cocky high school point guard who still thinks you don’t know shit about anything, but he won’t be as hateful about it. Lately you have started to figure out how to be a decent dad to that kid just as he has begun to disappear, replaced slowly by a curious minded upper classman who still works tirelessly on his jump shot but also reads about gnosticism, is affectionate, and even likes to hang out with you sometimes. You will figure him out years from now, when he is once again someone new and foreign to you, but also maybe you’ll feel a little less behind than you used to. Maybe that’s the best any of us can do.

But as you sit there, in the early morning hours of your 42nd year on the planet, during those first minutes after Jen comes into the house, as she’s telling you in her own words what happened and as your mind is spinning about what to do, about how the fuck to handle this from one second to the next, you’ll see your son grab her hand. Their fingers will lace together. He will put his arm around her as she cries. He will cry too. You will be thinking of her, mostly, but you will also think this about your son as you make the observation: my god, you will think, he is good. He’s a good young man in a world where there aren’t that many of those. He is good despite any of your own fuck ups with him, despite anything you’ve gotten wrong or right, he’s good, all on his own, he is good. He and his goodness are part of what Jen needs right now, and he is being it all the way, reacting to her grief and fear with his own grief and fear, he is being in the moment with her, and he is in this moment being part of what she needs. It will be a long day with lots of really hard things to sort through. But you know you will think back on this night for the rest of your life. You think about it with a heavy heart. With a sadness that will never go away. You will need someone to tell you “It’ll get better, bud,” even if you aren’t sure you’d really believe it if you heard it. The one thin string dangling you above pure despair, the thread that keeps you from dropping deep into it, will be seeing your son like that, seeing him there for someone he loves in a moment when she needs him, so that she isn’t alone in the pain she doesn’t deserve to have.

When I was 17 I suffered an accidental overdose of ephedrine (it’s a long and very dumb story that I probably should just take to the grave), and I spent two days in ICU, four days total in the hospital, and my first day home was September 11 2001. My dad called the house as I was still sleeping off the exhaustion of my hospitalization, hollering into the phone, “Wake up man they’re bombing us!” His Tommy Chong-y voice in that moment is hard for me not to laugh at as I sit here and remember it now. I turned on the TV and had corn flakes a few minutes before the second plane flew into the second tower, a little bit of milk dripping down my chin as I tried to process what the hell I just saw.

Just that quick the 90s were over. We all had convinced ourselves that we were at the end of history, the last man, all that Francis Fukuyama stuff, and within months we’d enter the Forever Wars, stuck with the reality that for the rest of our lives we’d be in the purgatorial hell of the ultra-consumerist National Security State, stuck always too deep inside The Imperial Core to ever really get a good grip on how bad it really is here. For years, as we invaded one country after another, as the housing crisis materialized in 2008, as mass shootings became the norm, as right wing fascism swelled and evolved into whatever it is now, as a pandemic overtook the world, as we have now found ourselves in another Middle Eastern war, all the while I’d repeat a quiet refrain to myself as I became more politically aware, more socially aware, I’d say, “Well I guess it can’t get any worse,” but always the thought that would follow right after that was one I’d heard one of my all time favorite baseball managers say in the midst of a Royals 100 loss season. “Never say it can’t get worse.”

I threw myself into books that year, the fall of 2001, really for the first time in my life. My dad was drinking more than ever — and he’d let me know often that it was because he was so stressed from hospital bills, “Ten thousand dollar ambulance ride!” he’d scream in a similar hysteria as he did on the phone as the planes crashed — and I had to miss the entire high school football season (a dumb thing to look back on now, but back then it was the most important thing to me, my entire identity was captain of the football team and all that shit), and I’d made the mistake of talking to a Marine recruiter who wouldn’t leave me alone and occasionally called me a pussy when I’d dodge him in the school hallways. I had some of the emotional scars of young on again off again love. Things were grim but books were there. The Count of Monte Cristo was the novel I was reading to escape all this, and to impress my French teacher, who I had a huge crush on. Well, she didn’t fall in love with me (who could have predicted that!) but she did tap me on the shoulder one day as I was nearing the end of that book, really honestly I ignoring her class too in order to finish it, and she said she was proud of the book worm I had become. It’s funny how validation even this small can change a person, can keep them on an important trajectory, the way her words did for me. I have tried to remember this as an adult, now that I’m around teen boys all the time, my son’s friends, always at the house, sometimes (maybe one out of a hundred times) getting that gleam in their eye when I say something encouraging or affirming to them. But most of the time they ignore me.

After I finished my copy of Dumas (which I still have), I’d get to school early every day to read and then to browse the stacks in the library, always looking for whatever the next thing would be. Like a lot of teens, an American rite of passage, I was making my way through Stephen King’s body of work, and that day I was reading The Shining, a book that kept me up at night and that I connected too much with, a story of a father terrorizing his family in an empty haunted hotel, and I was so deep in that good ol’ reading flow state when I felt a tap on my shoulder. The school librarian stood above me, looming like I’d done something wrong.

“Yo,” I said. I actually said this.

“Follow me,” he said, and I did. We walked through the stacks and into some room he had to use a key to get into, and from there he moved to another door he also had to unlock. He flicked the lights on and waved me in. It’s the closest I ever came to feeling like Henry Hill in Goodfellas as he and Karen hit up the side entrance of the Copacabana to go through the kitchen and down long hallways and past storerooms to bypass the long line and find their front row seats against the stage, because as that light came on I saw what I can only describe as a separate library, a private one, but there the books were piled instead of shelved all neat, waist high, pillars of books. “We’re getting rid of these,” he said, “you can take as many as you want.” He may or may not have realized he had just changed my life. I like to think he knew.

I’d fill my backpack every day after school, for weeks. Sometimes the librarian would look over my shoulder as I chose a book, and he’d go, “Oh yeah,” or “Great choice” as I loaded up, feeling always like I was doing something wrong, committing the greatest heist there ever was, getting away with something that seemed too good to be true.

Soon books for me were more than an escape. In so many ways, in too many ways, they were my life. Whatever terrible thing was happening in the real world or in my real life, I’d dip into a book to escape it all, and, a little later, maybe after my frontal lobe was fully formed, to understand it all. Or at least try to. Books have marked the time for me. At this point in my life I have probably a thousand books on the shelves in my living room, and I can look at any of them and tell you what was going on in my life when I was reading it. I was reading Rabbit, Run when my oldest daughter was born, which is wild because I had no idea how that book ended and when I got to that ending it was hell on my nerves. I was reading Heart Songs by Annie Proulx when my dad died, True North by Jim Harrison when two of my oldest friends died a month apart from one another.

Some of my books are starting to show real signs of age, with covers that are in rough shape, yellowing pages, foxing. Some of them are brittle enough that I don’t like to crack them open unless I have to. It bothers me more to see my paperbacks falling apart than it does to look in the mirror and see more gray filling in my beard, or those weird long eyebrow hairs I’ve started to get after turning 40, or my aching back, my creaking knees, my worsening hearing loss. I’m at midlife, hopefully, and am starting to reckon more and more that there really are too many great books to read and not enough life. It’s not hard to measure out the 30 or 40 books I read every year and add it up and feel sad that, if I’m really lucky, I only have enough time to read less than a thousand more books. Damn. It’s not enough, not even close. Why is it that way with life? With all the best things, there’s never enough.

I try not to say morbid things to my kids. When I was little my dad would come home from his job as a carpet layer and he’d empty out the contents of his tool pouch on the kitchen table, and he’d point at the pile of carpet fibers that covered his knives, and he’d say, “When I die have them cut me open because I bet my lungs are filled with this shit. File a lawsuit.” Or he’d get ten beers deep and call me over to the same kitchen table and hold out his palm and say, “Look how short my lifeline is, dude. I’m gonna be dead any day and you’ll be the man of the house.” My first memory of him doing this was when I was maybe eight. I was like, “Okay. All right. Well. I guess I’m gonna go shoot hoops in the driveway…” But my oldest daughter is 18 and we often have deep conversations, the existential kind, and sometimes I will find myself mildly repeating this traumatic pattern, hopefully in a less damaging way. I’ll say, “Hey, if anything ever happens to me, make sure my books don’t just end up in a dumpster.”

She says, “Dad I would never do that.”

“Just make sure you guys keep them or donate them. You never know who might need them,” I say. Because if they don’t want them, maybe there’s some kid out there who needs, say, my old brittle copy of Dumas. Some kid who needs to read about a prison break, way back then.

If I Can Dream

Did I ever tell you I saw Elvis Presley, years after they said he was dead? Saw him right after I first moved to town, walking through the parking lot of that run down, barely hanging on truck stop over off of Highway 45, a place called The Hungry Hauler. They said he lived in the nearby woods and would come in on occasion to eat and wash up. They were used to him and wouldn’t make a big deal about it, and didn’t like people who did. He was an old man by then, and moved slow any time he emerged from the wilderness to limp into the dining room. A beard the color of dirty snow hung loose off his face, like it was trying to escape the sour smell of his rotted teeth. The hair on his head was well past his shoulders and he’d wear it in braids like a Comanche. His clothes were rags on rags, a patchwork quilt that he’d wash in their bathroom sink. If you went in at the right time you could see him naked as a newborn, jiggling around and humming his own songs to himself as he worked on cleaning the layers of dirt off his skin. I snuck in there once when he was washing, crept in out of pure curiosity, like a real perv. He was all dangles and stink — there were no sequins.

He’d always eat the same thing after his sink bath, waffles and sausage, but would never finish the food on his plate. More than once I was tempted to walk by and sneak a bite just to say I’d shared a meal with the King of Rock n’ Roll, but I never did. And he always paid with cash that was dated before 1977. They even let me see it once, crisp and fresh as the day it was printed. When he left he’d do it without saying goodbye. You could watch him walk back into the woods, not to be seen again for weeks or even months. Sometimes folks new to town would mistake him for Bigfoot when they saw him near a tree clearing or out wandering a deer path.

Over the years I hiked every inch of those woods in every direction, looking for him. But I never could find where he was living, never came across evidence of a cook fire, never saw a lean-to built against a small cliff face, or a tarp folded over a branch as a makeshift tent. I followed for miles every creek I could find that he might have used as a water source. I would cup my hands over my ears to try to catch the faintest gasp of him humming to himself out there, maybe even singing.

At night I’d sit in the garage with my guitar, playing the same three chords with my two working fingers, strumming them in every order and pattern I could think of, trying to lure him out the way fishermen down at the lake cast their fly baits over the different lilly pads to get the bass to jump out of the water. My wife would come out and sit with me when she’d hear me playing. We’d share one can of beer and talk about our son, laugh with each other about the good old days. Sometimes we’d stay out there so long we’d fall asleep in our lawn chairs, holding hands like a couple of teenagers at the drive-in movies, and we’d wake up in the wee hours and itch the welts swelling over us from the mosquito bites — what a fine feast we made for them — and we’d pat each other’s forearms as if to say it’s time to go up to bed darlin’, and she’d go in first and I’d fold up our chairs, and half the time I’d forget to close the garage, and she’d tell me the next morning that we needed to watch for snakes or rats or bats out there for a few days. I’d say at least the bats will eat all the mosquitos.

I thought I saw him once, on one of those nights, as the garage was going down, not Elvis, but our son, our boy, grown into middle age, limping up the drive in rags of his own, probably with a bad back like mine, his own beard hardly sprinkled with gray the way mine was at his age, finally outgrowing the boyish looks he still had when he left, when we told him he wasn’t welcome anymore, because the preacher said we had to cut him out of our lives, to stop enabling him — it’s always the preachers who give you the worst advice — and I ran out, ducked under the closing overhead door, the thing chomping down like a mouth behind me, and I hustled out to meet our son, to tell him I was sorry, that I didn’t know what I was doing back then, that no one ever knows what to do in this life, no matter how much you try to learn, we are all too stupid for how smart we are, and I was ready to jump into his arms, let him cradle me, his old man father who had just moved faster than he’d moved in years, let us fall to the ground in one another’s arms, dizzy and concussed from the blow of this return. But when I got there all I saw were footprints. Or maybe they weren’t even footprints. Just the gravel blown into little divots by the shifting wind of an incoming storm. I had to knock on our door and ring the bell to get Fran to let me in. She came down and asked what had happened, was I getting so old that only one beer and a little nap could get me so out of sorts. I laughed and said maybe I have finally gone senile.

This morning Frannie was working in the flower bed in front of our home, planting tulip bulbs, doing her favorite thing, making our dot on the world beautiful. She has said recently she hopes she’s doing exactly this the moment she dies. We are old enough that we have both realized we could die any second of any day, without warning at all. She says she loves the thought of going out like that. I tell her I hate the thought of her being dead. I tell her she can never die, that she must break all the rules and conditions of our existence here and become immortal. Then I tell her I’m going for a hike. She says bring your compass and don’t go too far.

I still look for signs of him. Even though I am well aware that no elderly man could survive in these woods for very long, that Elvis has probably been dead for years by now and his bones are likely out here weathering into flaky ashes, his soul gone into flight through the universe, I still look for signs he was here. Maybe I’ll come across a carving he made into a tree. Maybe I’ll stumble over an old stone monument he made, inspired to do so by the stars the same way our ancient cave dwelling ancestors were. Or perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to uncover some notebooks hidden in a tin box under a shelf of rocks, words he never spoke to anyone but himself with pen and page. I wouldn’t read them. It’s not my place. But it would be nice to know they’re there, to find the signs of an old moment when he was here, nearby, living and breathing our shared air. Maybe in that notebook would be an old memory of his, maybe an observation, maybe how he’d walked past a strange old couple’s house one day, that they sat in a cluttered garage together and played notes and sang songs, howling out to someone they’d never find.

You’re probably thinking who really cares about this old dead white guy who wrote all that cowboy shit. Hey, I get that, I do, I had the same skepticism when I, cliche that I am, picked up a copy Lonesome Dove and thumbed through the opening pages as I approached mid life. I can’t tell you why I picked it up other than I think there is some sort of calling for people (mostly men) of a certain age, like me, in which we are drawn to it almost involuntarily, like we are little meteorites pulled from the big empty by Earth’s gravity, burning hot as we are fall toward the open desert plain below, dropping into that dusty opening scene in which we see, of all things, a pair of blue pigs fighting over a snake while Gus McCrae babysits some biscuits nearby. That image, for whatever reason, grabs you by your feelings-resistant heart and won’t let you go, and you never really want it to. The book, its world and characters, puts you into a sort of trance that a lot of readers, I think, spend their reading lives seeking out but only find a handful of times. And it’s not the adventure and grab ass, the herding or river crossings, the kidnappings or gun fights or fist fights or the myriad fresh gravesites along the way that cast the spell. It’s something else, an underlying tone and theme that all of us in middle age relate to too much: it’s that you are for about 800 pages living inside the story of those midlife crisis-y men wandering up the trail toward the Milk River and ruining a bunch of lives because they are, well…they’re bored, that’s all. They can’t stand to sit in a chair in a room alone, so to speak, can’t be content with the boredom of tending to some biscuits. How unfortunately relatable. How human.

The thing I love most about Larry’s great novel is that it’s mostly a failure. He set out to write a cowboy novel that subverted the John Wayne Joh Ford Marlboro Man bullshit myth that this simple minded country grew up on, but got separated from that intention, lost as he went up his own trail. Larry, the nephew of an actual Texas Ranger, saw them as genocidal organization and wanted to portray them that way, or at least close to it. Years before Dove was even a glint in his eye he wrote in the essay “Southwest Literature?” about Texas writer Walter Prescott Webb, arguing that Texas has no literary tradition at all (and Larry essentially calls his shot that he will be the one to produce the first actual literature of the Lone Star state, a state he always seems like he can’t stand but also can’t quit) and therein he accuses Webb of whitewashing the Rangers:

“In 1847, when the Rangers accompanied the United States Army into the City of Mexico, a sneak thief stole a handkerchief from them. They shot him. Another Mexican threw a stone and they shot him too. Later a Ranger named Allsen’s was killed in a violent district of the city and the Rangers shot eighty Mexicans in retaliation…His most glaring whitewash, however, occurs in the chapters in which he describes the career of Captain McNelly, a Ranger’s Ranger and a man whom Webb seemed to admire above all others…Early in 1875 McNelly and his men were sent into the infamous Nueces Strip…McNelly’s job was to rid the area of cattle thieves, of which there were a great many. He did a brilliant, brave job, and his methods were absolutely ruthless. Any Mexican unlucky enough to be caught was tortured until he coughed up information, then summarily hung. Mexicans found with cattle were shot…Webb is aware that McNelly’s methods might be conceivably criticized, but he satisfies himself with the remark that ‘Affairs on the border cannot be judged by standards that hold elsewhere.’ Why they can’t is a question apologists for the Rangers have yet to answer. Torture is torture, whether inflicted in Germany, Algiers, or along the Nueces Strip. The Rangers, of course, claimed that their end justified their means, but people who practice torture always claim that.”

So this is what was in Larry’s mind when he wrote that first scene as the men of the Hat Creek Cattle Company gathered for breakfast, when he began to spend his first moments with Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae. He is often harsh about their actions and emotional inner lives, trying to resist the whitewashing he observed from Webb. Captain Call is numb to his own feelings, often cold toward others, using duty (eye roll) as a behavioral cudgel and an excuse to keep others at a distance. Toward the end of the book his failure at connecting with the son he won’t acknowledge is to me one of the more heartbreaking moments in anything I’ve ever read. Call’s compañero, Gus, probably my favorite character in all of literature, is bold and loving and generous and brave and mostly selfless. And constantly horny, no matter how dire the circumstance. But his good sense of humor, his bravery, his selflessness, it’s all an emotional shield of his own. Sure he will cross the Rio Grande into Mexico to steal thousands of cattle with his oldest friend, and then together they will drive them north for thousands of miles while nature tries to eat all of them, and sure he will absolutely storm into a camp of outlaws to save his abducted friend Lorena (she is the true hero of this book, if there is one), and yeah he will help track down some serial killers in Kansas along the way, and absolutely he will admonish Woodrow for not doing right by his son, but I god when he stands in front of the love of his life, Clara Allen, as her dying husband is about to make her an available widow, don’t dare ask him to commit to her, because he won’t be able to do it. But don’t worry, she’s too smart to take him back anyway.

It is fascinating in these pages to watch Larry try to subvert the cowboy myth but then lose himself in his affection for his characters. He can never quite level a fully harsh judgement of these men, and they become a lovable bunch in spite of their creator’s intentions. He can’t bring himself to portray Call and McCrae as the McNelly-types adored by Prescott Webb. Though the various tribes they encounter along the way are all shown to be starving and stomped out by generations of McMurtry-like settlers, their land and lives stolen from them by the whites who relentlessly kept showing up, the great villain of the book is a “half breed” Comanche named Blue Duck, a fierce psychopath who gets not much in the way of development, and it is Blue Duck who sounds the most like McNelly. As a character he’s just a foil for our boys Call and McCrae. Not different enough than Chief Cicatriz in John Ford’s The Searchers, if you ask me. As hard as he tries not to, he inevitably writes from the point of view of the descendant of white colonizers. But god damn I love him for trying. Not enough white dudes of his generation even gave it a thought. The Great American Novel probably doesn’t exist, but Lonesome Dove is one of a dozen or so books that get damn close.

“My experience with Lonesome Dove and its various sequels and prequels convinced me that the core of the Western myth — that cowboys are brave and cowboys are free — is essentially unassailable. I thought of Lonesome Dove as demythicizing, but instead it became a kind of American Arthuriad, overflowing the bounds of genre in many curious ways. In two lesser novels, Anything for Billy and Buffalo Girls, about Billy the Kid and Calamity Jane, respectively, I tried to subvert the Western myth with irony and parody, with no better results. Readers don’t want to know and can’t be made to see how difficult and destructive life in the Old West was. Lies about the West are more important to them than truths…” And I think Larry also couldn’t bring himself to fully write those truths either. He tries real damn hard in the sequel to Lonesome Dove, a very nihilistic book called Streets of Laredo, in which Captain Woodrow Call, truly an old man in this book, is almost killed by a teenage outlaw, and ends up living out his final days never fully healed from his wounds, residing in a barn and in need of constant nursing by Lorena’s daughter, and he’s forced to sit with his thoughts and memories. He can’t get up and distract himself anymore. I don’t know if Larry ever passes a full judgement on the character, but his fate is a harsh punishment. In the two Dove prequels, Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon (and it is so satisfying to read them in this order, the order they were published, I highly recommend it), Larry does his best to retool the failures he saw himself succumb to in Dove. Blue Duck is given a fuller psychology and emotional life, the various Captains of the Rangers before Call are shown to be more like the McNellys of that world (or worse), and the war Chief Buffalo Hump isn’t presented as some villainous foil, but is instead a person in charge of a people fighting for their lives. Comanche Moon ends with Buffalo Hump leading a raid that happens mostly off screen, an assault that becomes legendary to the people in the region and lore of the book, but we know that the future white historians will call this type of thing a massacre, will call it savagery, will use it to justify genocide. But it is a small triumph for the war chief, even if, as we know, all it does is buy these people a little more time.

So that’s the cowboy shit, Larry’s great attempt at deconstructing the white American myth. The topic would dominate most of his late career, mostly because he needed money after an open heart surgery. Most of those books are fun and interesting, but he never recaptures what he found after that first scene with blue pigs. Before Lonesome Dove, though, he was mostly interested in relationships. He seemed, like most of us, fascinated and confused by how humans interact with each other, the ways in which we fall in and out of love. He wrote ten books before he penned his Pulitzer Prize winner, and by my count six of them would probably be called Romcoms nowadays. In her review of his 2004 novel Loop Group, Janet Maslin called him the father of “Chick-Lit.” I mean, I hate that term, but I love the compliment, if by it Maslin means Larry was a dude who explored the inner life of relationships from all points of view, something most men of his generation weren’t really interested in doing.

His first book, Horesman Pass By, is okay, is definitely a first book by a young writer, and it’s mostly skippable, though it did get made into a good Paul Newman film, called Hud, which Pauline Kael wrote a pretty great essay about in the summer 1964 edition of Film Quarterly, very worth your time if you ever want to check it out. His second book, Leaving Cheyenne, is about throuple. No shit. The book isn’t as emotionally mature as his later stuff but he’s writing about two men in a romantic sexual relationship with the same woman over decades. In Texas. In the 1960s. And everyone is mostly cool about it (which is probably the book’s flaw). “The story bears some resemblance to Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim,” said the man from Archer City, Texas, current population 1642.

It was Larry’s third novel that put him on the map, his first really great book, The Last Picture Show, and it was with this book that we get the first of his extremely interesting lifelong relationships with famous women. Larry visited the set of Picture Show and befriended the director Peter Bogdanovich, who during the shoot left his wife Polly Platt for Cybill Shepherd. Cybill also befriended Larry, and the two would begin a relationship that lasted decades. She’d call him the “love of her life.” Larry’s mid career novel Texasville is dedicated to her. When he died she called him, “One of the greatest men who ever lived.” Damn, dude.

After his first wife, Jo, left him for a poet, Larry didn’t remarry until he was in his mid 70s, when he married Ken Kesey’s widow, Norma Faye Kesey. They were together the final decade of his life. In between he had very close, very supportive, seemingly platonic relationships with Susan Sontag, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Diane Keaton, whom he said was in the habit of calling him on the cellphone whenever she was stuck in LA traffic, about whom he wrote a delightful essay in The New York Review of Books. His divorce book is called Moving On, is way too long and probably not a good book, but, like in Lonesome Dove, Larry would fall hard for his characters, and this flawed book would give him characters that would power some of his later greater works, books that better explored the inexplicability of human relationships. Danny Deck, Larry’s alter ego, wanders through the hilarious pages of All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers making a mess of his life and having lots of sex. And if Larry hadn’t written a sequel to it (Some Can Whistle, 1989) we’d probably conclude that the story ends with Danny’s suicide as he wades out into the Rio Grande on the last page. Always a bold way to end a book. The director Mike Nichols, when he tried to adapt it into a film, couldn’t understand Danny’s depression. “If he’s getting so much pussy, why is he so depressed?” he is said to have said, to which I say MIKE, NOOOOOOOOOO!!! If I could have my way, Richard Linklater would take a swing at adapting this book some day.

Moving On also give us the first appearance of Emma Greenway, her husband Flap, and her mother Aurora, whom Larry would write about in Terms of Endearment. This is probably my favorite of Larry’s works not named Lonesome Dove, and it’s the most Victorian of anything he wrote, I think, his attempt to take a real look at “the fibers and textures of life.” It’s a book about courtships and a failing marriage and parenthood and, of course, an untimely death from an incurable disease. Hello, James L. Brooks. Hello to one of the great movie canons ever. Is Terms of Endearment the best Brooks film or is it Broadcast News? My answer to that is double feature.

And oh by the way, as Larry was writing these books he, as a single dad, raised a son who, no big deal, is the great — and I do mean great, actually great — singer songwriter James McMurtry. It’s hard to find an artist with a better batch of songs than what James has. In interviews he bristles at the notion of songs being autobiographical, but you can’t listen to his 2021 song “Vaquero,” from his album The Horses and the Hounds, released 4 months after his dad died, without thinking it’s somewhat of his musical elegy to his old man. You damn sure can’t listen to it without thinking about your own dead dad, if you have one of those, which means you can’t really hear it without getting a little moist in the eyes or at least staring off into the distance for a few moments.

I could fill the rest of this thing with so much more about Larry McMurtry. I am, after all, writing in a flow state I very rarely enter into, and I could go on for another two thousand words, or maybe more. I could talk about Larry’s career as a book dealer (and it would give me the chance to use the irresistible term “Bookman” a whole bunch), and I could tell you that he had one of the largest collection of books in North America at one point in his Archer City store Booked Up. I could tell you about how he almost met Thomas Pynchon once when the two lived in Houston (“He was said to be living somewhere near the Ship Channel; he was said to need work. I think I sent him a note saying I could probably find him a little teaching, and I think he sent me a polite note declining to become involved in academia…”), or how his first editor was EL Doctorow, or how his own personal favorite novel he wrote is a book about a man going to therapy for the first time late in life (Daune’s Depressed), or how he ended up wearing blue jeans to the Academy Awards to collect his Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (Brokeback Mountain, 2005) with his then writing partner Diana Ossana, or how Kip and Joanna Gaines were the rich people who bought Booked Up after he died (and how it’s an online store now that you can spend an entire day browsing if you want to). What can I say other than the guy was one of the most interesting humans alive during his time on the planet.

I’ll shuffle off the stage with this: Larry had some great opinions, most of them cranky, especially as he got older. He was a person who said things, man, wasn’t afraid to let ‘em rip, and you can almost feel him grinning any time he pokes at other writers. Probably my favorite example of this is what he wrote about Paul Schrader. Gird your loins, film bros: “Consider Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of at best modest ability. Schrader has commented lately about how easy it is for him to swing deals in the $300,000 to $600,000 range. News like that, affably served up in the Village Voice, besides being in abominable taste, does an active disservice to the craft of letters…Making it sound easy will send God knows how many youngsters (and oldsters) rushing to their typewriters futilely; and, worse, it will send them rushing to the typewriters to try to become Paul Schrader.” Holy shit. His essays are peppered with delightful needlings like these, and he also wasn’t shy about giving himself a poke. I can’t remember where I read it, but somewhere he wrote that America had only produced two major writers, and he did not include himself in this short list (which was, I believe, only made up of Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner). Instead, he called himself a minor regional novelist. Probably he’d say this with a grin too. My favorite story of my favorite old guy making fun of himself, which he wrote about at least twice that I know of, in Literary Life and in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, is the one he tells about getting the news that he’d won the Pulitzer Prize:

“The day I found out that Lonesome Dove had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, I happened to be lecturing at a small college in Uvalde, Texas…James was living in San Antonio at the time — Uvalde was not far so he came over to celebrate, a doomed effort since I was dead tired from all day lecturing and had to drive to Austin, which was pretty far…As I was preparing to leave Uvalde I noticed the marquee of the Holiday Inn where I had been staying. When I arrived it read ‘Welcome Larry McMurtry, Author of Terms of Endearment.’ By the next afternoon, despite a bunch of reporters showing up to interview me, the marquee had already been changed. Now it read: Catfish Special, $3.95.”

Woodrow, quite a party.

I was 18 when the war criminals of my youth invaded Iraq. The Shock and Awe bombs (jerk off motion) dropped down on an ancient and hugely populated city a few months before I graduated high school. The war criminals were on TV all the time back then in the lead up to it, telling us it had to be done because of Saddam’s WMDs (jerk off motion again). Colin Powell went to the UN with a vial of Anthrax and waved it around and told everyone that the dose he held in his hand was enough to wipe out everyone in that room. George W. Bush went around saying awe shucks if we don’t do something we could wake up one day to another 9/11. Fox News had our parents convinced that a nuke might show up in some shipping container one day and just like that we’d have no more Baltimore. Remember how they freaked us out about dirty bombs?

I remember the Marine recruiter showing up in the front hallway of my school every day that spring, all antsy and twitchy, catcalling all the young dudes, so horny for the impending war. He was meth-head skinny, a Skeletor face, sociopath eyes, and he called me a fucking pussy when I walked by him and wouldn’t stop to talk. We watched the war play out on TV. We saw a statue of Saddam fall, pulled over by a tank — I was eating cornflakes as I watched this — and we witnessed the president actually land a jet on an aircraft carrier and declare victory, Operation Enduring Freedom (one more jerk off motion) was, according to him, a success. Remember the Mission Accomplished sign?

When it all started there was nothing bigger or more important in our society, I don’t think. No one talked about anything else, our culture, in my memory was dominated by it for years. There were anti-war protests in all the big cities while in the suburbs the country music stations played horny for war anthems, and they held remote broadcasts in which they drove big Ford trucks over Dixie Chicks CDs piled up by listeners. People who didn’t like the idea of war were told to love it or leave it. But then the thing dragged on. Dozens of soldiers came home in a box every week, mostly kids who probably also had gotten called a pussy by some recruiter somewhere before they’d signed up. When it was all said and done we don’t even know how many millions of Iraqis died because of those bombs. Four or five million? The thing devolved into civil war. Sectarian violence broke out in the bombed out ruins. I remember that this was seen and spoken of by the talking heads as the ultimate failure of everything: a failed state, chaos.

Now I have a kid graduating this spring. She is 18. And here we are again. Back at it, cycle of American life, a country addicted to death, our representatives buying Raytheon shares as we are once again dropping bombs on another middle eastern country. One of our present day war criminals brags about death from the sky, seemingly half drunk at 8 am, leaning against the podium, looking like he wants to mickey a woman’s drink as he tells us that rules of engagement are stupid. Stupid! He is wearing his serious face, his angry face. A lot of us have seen this face before on the alcoholic fathers of our youth, guys who’d pop their wives in the lip for getting a little mouthy. You can tell he wants to call everyone in the room a fucking pussy for questioning anything they are doing.

The war criminals are half hearted about selling it to us this time. They couldn’t be bothered to wave a vial of anthrax around, didn’t really even try to freak everyone out. They can’t even get their stories straight on why they started the thing in the first place, and might as well admit it was a Mar-a-Lago whim, an old man who was bored.

Like their forefathers before them they think they can bomb a country into defeat, and just like those forefathers they’ll find out that, oh shit, all they did was kill millions of people and make the next generation hate us more. These jokers in charge now are trying to cause a civil war in the country they’re hallowing out — trying to cause the same sectarian violence that their predecessors viewed as the worst case scenario in the neighboring country. Eventually the missiles will run out or there will be nothing left to bomb. Then what? They don’t have an answer to that. All they know is they’ll get richer along the way as those Raytheon stocks go up up up, and they will win a whole lot of “will they or won’t they do a war crime by this date” bets on their Kalshi burner accounts.

And it feels like nobody really cares? Maybe because it was so sudden and we are all still processing, but it doesn’t seem protests are ready to break out across the country like it did almost 20 years ago. Maybe we are so desensitized to the constant flooding flowing pumping mania of right wing sadism that we are, all of us, in some sort of numb fugue? We have had war declared on us (something we don’t even bother to do anymore), and so many people are just carrying on, looking the other way, checking the NBA scores, buying new books, avoiding too much news, because it’s all doom, all of it, the news is all bombs dropping and pedophile rapists walking around free because somehow they are now also too big to fail. And I see this tepid willful moment by moment ignorance as a personal failing, of course I do, I feel ashamed of that. But I can only see so many bombs exploding inside the tiny black rectangle of death I hold in my hands every day. My brain is broken from it. We are deep inside the imperial core, on camera 500 times a day, our votes will be suppressed more and more and more and more, the wealthy class has never had more power while regular people have never had less crumbs to fight over. It feels very over. We have arrived at the future we all sort of new was coming for us all along and it’s every bit as bad as we thought it would be. The billionaires have spent their millions to break society as they have built bunkers for themselves to ride out whatever might be coming next. The only thing that can kind of sort of make me smile a little bit when I think about this shit as my wheels spin over the highways and interstates is that if they all survive in their bunkers, and they all emerge to see a planet that looks more like Mars than Earth (you did it, Elon!), all they will have is each other. It is exactly what they will deserve, even if they’re too vapid to see it for the curse that it is.

I don’t know how to write non-fiction. I really don’t. How do you write about the hidden things in your life, the stuff that keeps you up at night, all that shit that has you staring at the ceiling and noticing your own kick drum heartbeats? How do you present the shrapnel packed deep in your chest to any single living soul without at least the soft candy shell of fiction as a sweet little buffer? I tried to write this as an essay about twenty different times, tried to make sense of it with straight facts and feelings and analysis, no deviation from the truth of things, but over and over I failed and failed. It’s about my dad. Who else? It’s about how he took off the night I was born, a story I’ve never gotten a straight version of from the people who raised me, an original sin that defined his disposition toward me for the 32 years we were on the planet together. It was only when I thought of it as a short story that something clicked and I could write with the freedom I guess I needed. Even after all these years, even after he’s been gone for a decade this April, I find myself weary of confronting this dead man with some sort of direct truth. So here. A story that is both autobiographical and not, with plenty of facts that are, as I understand them, the whole true and nothing but the truth so help me god. And then there are the parts that are fictions, things I’ve made up, all mixed in together, like any human life. The result is this version, the sum of it all, and it is probably more true emotionally than anything I could call non-fiction. If you actually read this thing you’ll get to a scene in which I put on a Vonnegut costume and drop myself into the narrative. It’s sort of silly, I know, I get it, but I just couldn’t resist the time travel of it all, the chance to have a conversation with my dead dad and finally, a decade after he’s been gone, tell him something we both knew was true when he was alive, something that went unsaid all those years. Thanks for reading it if you do.

Drifter

A reluctant short story

Their argument starts around 11 p.m. It is over a truck, of all things. Tim owns a three year old 1981 Chevy Silverado, red with cream panels, and a camper shell over the truck bed. He had big plans for this pickup when he bought it last year, before he met Linda, the woman he’d get pregnant after only two months of seeing, who he’d marry when she was five months along, and who he’d leave a week before her due date.

He had wanted to travel the country in that truck, see all of creation, sleep in the back when it was too rainy or cold to slumber under the stars. He loved the way people stared at it whenever he cruised around town, loved how it looked like a steel pack of Marlboro Reds on wheels. But tonight Linda has told him she wants him to think about selling it. She hasn’t given an ultimatum or told him it needs to happen, or must happen, and she hasn’t said anything close to, “Here’s how it’s going to be, Tim,” though this is pretty much how he takes it. She’s only brought it up, as they lay in bed together, talking money, a subject she’s always afraid of when it comes to him. She says, “Maybe we could trade it in for a car, something more fit for a safety seat, and then maybe we’d have some cash left over to get a chest of drawers or something, a place to keep the baby’s clothes?” She is saying reasonable things. But soon he is saying fuck you and no way and he can’t believe she’d try to make him give up that truck. And then he’s saying, “Chest of drawers, chest of fucking drawers?” as if this is an accusation of some kind. She doesn’t argue. She only says it’s fine, don’t worry about it, and she rolls over so that her back is to him.

“Fuck this!” he screams, after laying there for twenty minutes, long enough that, as Linda twitches out of sleep, she isn’t even sure what he’s saying fuck this about. Tim jumps from the bed like he has been laying on a coil. He goes to the kitchen and rips a trash bag from under the sink, and soon he’s back in their room ransacking their dresser like he’s a burglar. She sits up and asks what does he think he’s doing. He doesn’t answer. She’ll make a scene if he says what he’s thinking, which is that he is leaving. She is the type to go out and lay down behind his truck and scream that he’ll have to drive over her first. Tim had already tried to break up with her way before she ever got pregnant, back in those first weeks together, but she wouldn’t let him. When he told her it was over and didn’t want to be boyfriend and girlfriend anymore she laughed and said no and then just kept coming around. Like a stray dog, he told his friends.

She stands in the doorway after he has packed his trash bag with clothes and two cans of unopened Coors and his stash box of weed. She tells him he forgot socks and he says get out of my way but she digs her feet into the stained carpet and holds her arms out across the door frame. She is like a modern day Samson ready to crush them both by pressing this load bearing wall out from under the ceiling. When Tim pushes past her she goes ass first into the hallway wall like this is a hockey match instead of a husband leaving his pregnant wife. Her shoulder lands just below a patched divot of drywall where he had punched a hole last weekend.

Outside he backs into the street and aims his truck north and spins the tires so that a thunderhead of smoke gathers behind the bumper. Linda gets to the porch and hollers for him to grow the fuck up. He dumps the clutch and the pickup fishtails up the road and almost takes out his father-in-law’s wooden fence next door. A few years from now he will actually take out this fence during another fight. A whole section of it will fall under the pea green AMC Gremlin they’ll trade in the truck for, and it’ll get it stuck in the yard, and he’ll have to knock on the door and have Linda’s dad help him drag out the car with the old Fordson tractor parked out back.

Linda walks over to her parents’ house after Tim is gone. Right after the wedding her folks had kicked out the tenants of their rental so that Tim and Linda could move in and live there mostly rent free, paying when they could, but never making them catch up when there were months they couldn’t it. Linda’s parents did this because they feared this exact moment, and when she knocks on the door and says, “Tim’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone!” she is so hysterical that for a moment they think maybe she means he’s dead. But he won’t die for another 32 years. He’ll have a heart attack in front of her one night in April, and when that night comes she’ll also run to her neighbors for help. Only she won’t say he’s gone he’s gone he’s gone, she’ll instead be screaming sounds from her throat that won’t form into any words at all.

Linda lays on the couch and stares at midnight in the TV. She’ll lay awake for hours, and every time she sees the headlights of a car coming down 42nd street she’ll pull the curtains back so she can be running out the front door by the time he gets to the driveway, so that she can yell that he’s a no good piece of shit bastard son of a bitch fuckhead motherfucker before he even opens his door. But it’s always a different car, all night long.

Around three in the morning Linda wakes up from a short doze and checks the driveway next door but it is empty. She needs to do something, anything, and the best thing she can think of is to make herself is a cheese sandwich. She finds of loaf a stale bread in the breadbox and a few slices of Swiss in the fridge. Her water breaks before she can even swallow a second bite. I’ll be born later that morning, at 7:47 a.m. I’ll be a C-section baby because I tried to come into the world feet first, as if I knew what I was getting into with them as my parents, these two, these kids.

Tim has already driven from across the entire state of Missouri and is well into Illinois by the time I am born. He has seen the sunrise and smoked half a packet of cigarettes by then, and he is not the type to pause and think of his life as some kind of narrative, but he does so during this particular sunrise. He pulls over and feels good for the first time in years. The sun is blooming on a new day, he thinks, and laughs at himself, at this Hallmark card of a thought, and he sees himself in this moment as a born again heathen — a man walking into a new life. He can be anyone, do anything, can even give himself a new name if he wants.

At a Waffle House outside of Indy he catches a few hours of sleep in the parking lot. It’s the afternoon when he wakes up. He is starving. He checks his wallet and finds two fresh hundred dollar bills in there. This is all the money he has in the world. Plenty to last him all the way to the coast, he thinks. He wants to be a fisherman when he gets there, he decides right now in this very moment. He’ll go out to Maine maybe, get work catching lobsters. Over time he could save up enough for his own boat. Live on it for a while if he has to. He can work half the year and party in the winter when it’s too cold to go out. He actually has no idea if this is how fishermen live, but it sounds right. It sounds like he could be a real life modern day pirate. He goes into the diner and spends the first few bucks of that $200 on an omelette and toast. And he treats himself to an orange juice.

He is on the road again for a little more than twenty minutes when I decide that this is as good of a stretch of highway as any to talk to him. The lanes are straight for miles and there’s no traffic at all. “Dad,” I say. He twitches with surprise and jerks the wheel to his right as if swerving away from a deer that has wandered out onto the pavement. The Chevy drifts and shutters over the rumble strip before he guides it back between the white lines. Then Dad looks at me and sees a middle aged man slouching against the window, squirming in a seat that was empty for hundreds of miles before now. He squints like he thinks he might recognize me, but he isn’t sure.

“Don’t freak out,” I say, holding up my hand as if this will calm him, the way you’d try to calm a stray dog. He is probably thinking someone at the restaurant dosed his OJ with LSD. Dad pulls over and stabs the brakes. A sheet of dust catches up to us and soon passes over like a tanned ghost. I say, “Just tell yourself I’m probably a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep and extreme stress.”

He shakes his head at this, not wanting to take advice from an apparition. He ignores me, won’t look over, just stares straight ahead. This has always been his go-to move when it comes to me. Then he unrolls his Marlboros from his sleeve and takes one from the pack. When he lights up I tell him who I am. “I’m Mike,” I say, “I’m your son, dude.” I tell him that I’m kind of from the future, but I guess technically I’m here from another dimension. I tell him that Mom went into labor a few hours after he took off. I say, “You’re gonna lie to me about it though. You’ll say that there was no work back home so you and Mom decided you should go on the road, working construction. But even when I’m a kid I’ll be thinking hey that sounds like bullshit.” I laugh a little. His cigarette smoke reaches my nose. This smells like home to me, even after all these years, the scent of my childhood — Cigarettes and leather and burnt coffee and Brut aftershave.

Dad doesn’t say anything to this. Instead he puts the truck in gear and aims back out into the right lane and soon we are speeding east again. His mouth keeps hanging open as if the hinge of his jaw has come undone, like he might have to hold his mouth closed with his hands. Like Robespierre or something. “I’m a writer,” I say. “I do short stories, mostly. Most of them are about you, actually, which is a little embarrassing because I probably should get over it already, all of it. But I sat down today and am trying to write one about how you left Mom the night before I was born. I thought it would be funny and interesting to drop myself in as a character. But I am just now realizing that I’m writing it like this so that I can talk to you again.”

Then Dad says something he never would have actually said. He says, “You’ve got pretty bad daddy issues, huh?”

“Oh dude you have no idea,” I say. After a few more miles he seems somewhat relaxed. He’s getting used to me being around, which is something he never really did after he came back to Mom.

“Me too,” Dad says, which is also something he never would have admitted. Dad’s staring at the open road in front of us, when he says, “What’s going to happen?”

I shrug and say, “I don’t know much about this time of your life. You never talked about it. You miss out on my whole first year, I know that much. You told me once that it cost you a lot, but I don’t know what that meant. We never had the type of relationship where I’d ask a whole lot of follow up questions. I was always so scared of you.” I tell him that he’ll be homeless for a stretch, living in this thing. I tell him he’ll spend some nights on beaches in New Jersey and Miami for some reason, and that in Florida he’ll get mugged.

Finally he looks over at me. I am feeling now what I’ve always felt from him. Which is not much. There is no electricity that jolts between us. Our connection is a dead wire. It is a tragedy for him that I was conceived, that I was born. He won’t be able to stand it that my physical appearance favored my mom’s side of the family as I grew, a clan that hated him so much he wouldn’t even walk next door to sit on the couch there for a few hours during the holidays. To him I will be their kid, not his. For whatever reason it won’t be this way with my little brother. He will be born five years from now and he’ll be my dad’s doppelgänger. My dad will adore him so much that at times it will seem in of spite of me. Like he will show much how much he doesn’t care about me by loving my brother with everything he has. They will be best friends. His death will send my brother into a decade long depression, the kind of thing people go through when they lose a child, not a parent.

I stare at Dad as we drive. Even now he grinds his teeth when he’s mad, so that his ears bob up and down. His mustache is thin and patchy, not the thick thing it will become in middle age. His long hair is fine, has no heft, and even when he tries to tuck it behind his ears it falls instead over them. He doesn’t smell like yeast yet, the way it will leak out of his pores once he really starts drinking heavy in the next few years. His face is sleek and young. There are no bags under his eyes. His cheeks aren’t yet swollen. His nose doesn’t glow red the way it will when I’m a teenager. His teeth are straight and mostly white, aren’t yet the rotted tombstones they will become in the next decade. I say, “I came here to say so much to you, Dad, things I never could when you were alive. But I’m sitting here looking at you and…you’re just a kid. Goddamn. You’re what, 23? I’m almost twice your age. I turn 41 next year, if you can believe it.” I almost tell him my own kid will be his age in a few years. And for the first time I wonder what the fuck am I doing here, what even is the point? There’s no reason for me to haunt him like this, the way he haunts me. It seems cruel to be here, to treat this kid like someone he hasn’t quite become yet, to treat him like my dad. I start to go, to inhabit my actual body again as it sits entranced in front of the computer, but before I do I say one more thing. I say, “There’s one thing you can do.” He looks over at me with a look I’ve seen thousands of times. Sagging eyes that say please, anything. “You should stay away. Whatever happens out here that gets you to come back, don’t do it. Resist it. Stay gone. And not because it’s what I want. It’s funny because when I was a kid I used to think a million nights in a row that we’d be better off without you. But sitting here, looking at you…I want it for you. There’s nothing there for you if you come back. There’s just hurt. Years and years of it. And I don’t want you to feel it the rest of your life. It’ll never go away. It only ever gets worse.” He looks at me like he could hug me, like he could put his lips right under my ear and say thank you.

And then I’m gone, back in front of the computer, following the rest of these words to see where he will go, what he will do. The first thing he does is rub his palm over his face, a thing I saw him do all the time when he was weary. He pulls into the first Super 8 he sees off the highway. The room costs him nineteen dollars of the money he has left. Already he can feel himself going broke. He sleeps the rest of the day, wondering a handful of times if his son really was born on this morning in June, wondering if the baby is back in KC sleeping too. Do babies dream? he thinks. A few times he picks up the phone to call, but doesn’t.

For dinner he walks across the street to a trucker diner where he orders a five dollar steak. The waitress flirts with him a little when she brings him his plate, probably because he is the only man in here whose whole body doesn’t smell like grease and oil and ammonia. She asks him is he just passing through or is he here permanent, will he be a regular of hers. He thinks about trying to pick her up, lets himself fantasize for a second about taking her back to his room and doing what people do to forget everything about everything. But with his luck he’d probably end up getting her pregnant too, and how many kids can you abandon? So all he does is shrug, and all she does is walk away.

The Silverado throws a rod near Atlantic City. For the first time he misses home, really misses it. His own dad loves to help him fix cars. The only way the old man knows how to tell anyone he loves them is with a wrench, and Tim could use that kind of love right now. It costs Tim half of his money to tow it to a garage. Once it’s there they tell him it needs more front end work. They say a caliper has been sticking and he has ignored it for too many miles and now the thing needs new rotors and brake pads. He won’t even have enough money for a motel room by the time he pays the mechanic. He’ll have to sleep outdoors while it’s in the shop. There’s a beach nearby. He sleeps in the sand, right out in the open, figuring if he is so much in plain sight no one will fuck with him. As he lays there he knows his inter-dimensional son was right — he’ll get sick of this and want to go back home. If he’s lucky he’ll be away long enough that Linda will move on, find someone else. If he’s really lucky the new guy will be a good dad to the boy and maybe they’ll agree to some sort of adoption. And then Tim could move on, live his old life again, the one he has realized he wants more than any new life.

Over the next year there are a lot of things that happen that should send him back home. He gets work as a construction laborer in south Jersey. There’s enough work through the autumn but the foreman makes no promises about the winter. In November Tim falls ten feet off of a scaffold and breaks a bone in his foot, an injury that won’t heal right and will get arthritic before he’s even 30, and will be a physical reminder of these days for the rest of his life. There’ll be no workman’s comp for him because the foreman is mobbed up and fighting for a claim with a guy like that will probably lead to at least one more broken bone. So he drifts southward toward the warmer weather.

In one of the Carolinas he pays a woman for sex and ends up with some kind of VD they don’t have a name for. Still, he stays gone. In Georgia his foot is healed enough to work and he gets a job picking fruit alongside some Cubans. But he doesn’t like it because they all speak Spanish all the time and he feels often like they are making fun of him. So he moves on again.

In Miami he finds himself on a beach again, sleeping out in the open, curled up in the fetal position, and he is awoken one night by the boot heels of two teenagers, each stomping his face and head, and they take his wallet out of his pocket and the shoes off his feet. He stands and chases them down the beach and they drop his wallet when they find no cash, but he doesn’t get his shoes back. None of this is enough to drive him back to his family in Kansas City.

I watch him every step of the way until I see the thing that does it. It will be when he goes into a corner store one morning in Pensacola and tries to buy a can of peaches for breakfast. The can is twenty five cents and all he has is a dime. He tries to reason with the clerk, but all the clerk does is reach out and take the can from his hands. He’s hungry. And he’s tired. He has a half tank of gas and nothing else to sell. He will drive northwest until the tank is almost empty, and he will stop wherever he is and take odd jobs until he has enough money to buy a loaf of bread and a stick of butter and a few more gallons of gas. For an entire month he lives on butter sandwiches and limps the Silverado a few dozens miles ahead at a time. As he drives he decides that the first thing he’ll do when he gets back is to sell it. The second thing is he will go see if Linda will take him back. And she will. Without even thinking about it she will take him back. Tim will watch suspiciously as the baby grows into a boy, will eye him to see if that boy will end up looking like the person who appeared next to him somewhere on I-70. And he will. He’ll have the same thick brow and beakish nose as Linda, the same fine hair as his father. Tim won’t know how to say it, but he will mostly hate the boy, and he will wonder if it was because of the imagined visit in that cab, the grown boy begging Tim not to come back. Tim will get physical with the boy at an early age. More than once Tim will reach out and grab the boy by the throat. Tim will hear himself threatening suicide whenever the boy gets mad about certain things, and thus threat will somehow make the boy feel horrifyingly sorry for his father; the boy will do anything to make his dad feel loved enough not to leave the planet like that. Tim will say things that he won’t admit are meant to drive the boy away. And when the boy leaves the house for good at 18, Tim will finally be relieved. Tim will tell him to go away. Stay gone. There’s nothing for you here if you come back.

This time of year I love to read a new-old Stephen King, one from his most unhinged years that I haven’t yet read. I’m running out of them and it makes me sad. This year I’m reading Needful Things, his first novel after getting sober, a delightfully weird, sometimes way overwritten book penned at the tail end of the Reagan 80’s when our parents were told that buying as much bullshit as possible was the cure for everything, including the traumas they inherited from their own folks and then passed down the line to us. In Needful Things, a charming con artist manipulates the nostalgia of disturbed small town citizens, and once they are in his thrall he gets them to do heinous things to one another. Sound familiar?

I know that Steve is not the most sophisticated writer when it comes to language or even plot and form. He indulges a cliche now and then, and sometimes he can get a little fast and loose with the colloquialisms. And that particular rural northeastern racism can sneak up on me sometimes in ways that feel too unconsidered by the author. He’s often a little or a lot weird when he tries to write about women in this era of his work (I’ve read the phrase “dirty pillows” one too many times in Steve books whenever he’s inclined to write about female breasts). But god damn it he captures the slow burning economic desperation of his characters so well in his 70’s, 80’s, and early 90’s novels. Sometimes his characters are downright Raymond Carver-esque, people who don’t know how to get out of their own way, don’t know where their next paycheck is coming from, and can’t stop fucking up the lives of the people they love. His books are full of abusive or absent fathers, drunks, mothers taking out their PTSD on their kids, teenagers who never really had an actual childhood, and feral neglected younger children who are oftentimes the scariest of all when you imagine what they’ll grow up to be. The flawed humans and their actions toward one another are more terrifying to me than any of the supernatural shit he writes. And it’s the reason I love him no matter how often I imagine him sitting at his desk going, “Damn how do I explain these spooky happenings…Oh oh oh I know, I know — Native American curse!” So here. This is the only ghost story I’ve ever written. It’s not so much spooky as it is just flat out sad as hell. The fear it confronts is the most terrifying thing of all to me: losing a child. So take that as your trigger warning if you read it. And I also indulged my inner Steve by sitting at my desk and trying to use my sad characters to interpret the confusion I felt during the George W. Bush years, the pointlessness of the criminal wars he waged with a military and ideologies built up by Ronnie Reagan, the source of so much of our current rot. This thing originally appeared The American Literary Review. Happy Halloween, buddies.

Birthday

My son called me last night. When I held the phone to my ear he said, “Dad?” before I could even say hello. I hadn’t heard his voice in almost fifteen years because that’s how long he’s been dead. “Manny?” I said. And then I could hear him smiling when he said, “Yeah, Dad, it’s me,” and I said holy shit. And then for a few moments I couldn’t talk at all.

The same thing happened to me at his funeral. I went up there and tried to speak but made the mistake of looking right at the sealed casket as I got to the podium — they sent it back like that, sealed up like a can of Campbell’s or something. They said I wouldn’t want to see what was in there. “All of him probably didn’t even make it into that casket,” my dad said when they brought it to the funeral home.

I looked out at all our family and friends after I stared at his casket. They were looking back up at me but I could only see my father. Dad wasn’t crying but his hand shook atop the cane he always carried but never really needed. It was the same cane I took from him when Manny was five years old, after Dad smacked him across the neck with it. I snatched it from Dad and poked him in the chest with it like it was the barrel of my old Browning; I told him it was one thing that he’d hit me with it when I was little, but I wasn’t going to let him do Manny that way. He laughed and told me that if I didn’t tie my son to a rod he’d grow out instead of up.

Then I tried to speak my son’s eulogy, but all I could do was blow air out of my mouth like I’d just taken a drag off a cigarette. All I could say after that was, “Hug your babies,” and I tripped down the stairs as I went back to my seat. Everyone thought I was drunk.

I act like everything is normal when I get to work in the morning, like I haven’t spent the entire night talking to an actual ghost. I go through the metal detectors and can’t hold in a smile as one of the other guards wands me and asks to see what’s in my hip pockets. I show her my keys and my cigarettes and lighter. “Not supposed to bring those in,” she says. “What are you so chipper about, old fart?”

I put my belt back through the loops and clip my mace near my gun holster and then slide my badge over the leather next to the buckle. “Had a good night last night,” I say.

“Ah,” she says, and winks. “Good for you. I guess old men need loving, too.”

I play along and shrug and then grab my smokes and put them in my breast pocket and she flicks her head as if to ask why I still thought I could bring those in. So I say, “You know a thing or two about that, don’t you?” People standing near us probably think we’re sleeping together. But she isn’t sleeping with me. She’s hooking up with an inmate over in the Minimum. She’s gotten caught a few times by a few of us but so far no one has said anything to any of the bosses.

“Fine, but if you get caught you better keep my name out of your mouth.”

“I’m no snitch,” I say as I go over to the armory closet. I pick out my Glock and slide the magazine into it and holster it. Death Row guards are the only ones in this place allowed to carry weapons on the inside, which doesn’t make any sense, because the guys over there are the least dangerous ones in here now that they’re in here.

When my cellphone rang last night at 3:00 in the morning I thought something was wrong, even though by then I hadn’t had anyone to worry about like that for years. When I heard Manny say, “Dad?” it was the first time I’d heard his voice since the week he died. They were allowed one call a day back then and he’d alternated between calling us and his wife. He called and said that they were all real hungry because they were rationing their MREs because the Taliban had stolen their food. I asked him how the fuck did their food get stolen. He said they were in such a remote park of the country that they had to have their supplies dropped in by parachute. Manny said the enemy had gotten to their food before they had; he said crates of ammo were missing, too. And grenades. He said they were running low on food and bullets and bombs but other than that things were going good. He asked me if his mom could make some chocolate chip cookies and send them over. He said that by the time they arrived they were always broken into chunks from the trip but they were still good that way. “And see if she can send some underwear,” he said. “And socks. And sunscreen.”

At the sound of his voice last night I pressed the phone hard against my ear as I stood and walked downstairs to the kitchen. I needed light. And water. I said his name again as I went.

“Dad,” he said, “are you okay?”

I didn’t want to answer. I thought on it for a minute and said, “I’m trying to be,” which was as honest a thing as I could say. Felt like it summed up the gambling, and the private room of the strip club that I gave my tax refund to every year, and the gin I poured into my coke every night, and the time I hit his mom before she left me, and how much I hate it that she’s been re-married to her new husband now for almost as long as she was married to me. Then I asked him how he was doing, and he laughed and said, “I’m dead, Pop.” And I laughed too. Or I might have been crying. I couldn’t tell.

There’s going to be an execution inside the prison on Friday. It’ll be the first one the state has done in 53 years. The guy losing his life is my age and everyone around here says he deserves what’s coming to him but I wouldn’t really know because I’ve made sure not to hear rumors about any of these guys over the years and I never read up on the details of their files because I like most of the guys I guard. Life is better for all of us that way.

The man we’re putting down is named Warren Henry Wallace. He likes to be called Hank so no one calls him that. He’s in his early sixties, wears the state issued horn rimmed glasses, is balding and what little beard hair he has on his face is all white. His face is pitted with acne scars. His teeth are perfect white rectangles, like smaller versions of the bars of soap we stock in the showers, and no one is sure how he gets them that way. He looks like the type of guy who’d sell you a mortgage if his life had turned out different. It’s kind of terrifying how normal he is. When I see him today I tell him to follow me and we walk back all the way down the corridor of Death Row, to the wing’s only exit. I shackle him once we’re outside and lead him down the hallway and a few officers buzz us out and we walk all the way through the Medium until we’re outside where the guys from the Minimum are pulling weeds and mowing grass near the sidewalks. From there I help him down the hill until we come to an outbuilding where we store all the tractors. “Here it is,” I say to him. “This is where those two were hung. Hanged. Hung? Whatever, this where it happened.”

“Here?” he says. “Right here?”

“Well I don’t know about right here, but hereabouts anyway.” We’re standing near the spot where the state executed Perry Smith and Dick Hickock all those years ago. “You think Truman Capote stood here?”

“Hereabouts,” I say. I hand him a cigarette. He puts it between his lips and I light it for him. I tell him he’s lucky I was able to sneak these smokes in here; I tell him the guard who almost took them from me is sleeping with an inmate and I’m one of the lucky few who knows about it. Warren says, “Man, why would she bang one of these dirtbags?” I ask him if he’s just jealous and he says of course. He asks if I can set him up with her and I tell him one last cigarette is the best I can do. Then I tell him come on, let’s get going, that the only reason I was able to bring him down here for a minute is because the big boss is in Topeka today and I had to bribe a couple of the tower guards with NASCAR tickets. He laughs probably because he thinks I’m joking.

One of the first things I asked Manny over the phone was if I was dreaming. “Is this real? Am I really talking to you?”

He said, “I don’t know if it’s real, Dad, but I’m definitely talking to you.” I told him that was pretty far out, a real mind fuck. He said, “Imagine being dead.”

“I miss you so much,” I said. “I think about you every day. Every second of every day.”

He said, “I know.” I asked him how did he know. He said, “I don’t know how to explain it, but I can just feel it.” We were quiet as I tried to take this in, tried to understand it. Then he said, “So make sure you don’t die. Because then I don’t think I’d get to feel anything at all anymore.” I said I’d do my best.

A few months after Manny died I called his widow and asked her for some of the life insurance money the government paid out to her. They had gotten married during the two weeks between Manny’s return from Basic and his post at Camp Lejeune. They hadn’t even been high school sweethearts. And we all knew what type of family she came from. I told her it wasn’t fair that she got to keep all that money. I said, “He’d still be here if your dad hadn’t talked him into going down to talk to that recruiter!” I waited for her to say something back but she didn’t. To this day I’m still not sure if she even stayed on the line to hear the next thing I said, which was, “You barely knew him. I knew him for twenty years.” And then I called her an asshole. And I called her dad a cunt. I got my words mixed up. She’s been re-married now for a long time, too.

Their wedding reception was at an abandoned Wal-Mart that some wealthy family in town had turned into a banquet hall. The remnants of his high school rock band played the same five Allman Brothers songs as we ate catered ham sandwiches and talked about his training. He said, “It wasn’t what I thought it would be.” He’d say these words to me again a year later when he called to tell me he’d volunteered to go overseas. As I was screaming at him about it he’d tell me the whole thing wasn’t what he thought it would be, that he hadn’t signed up for the Marine Corps to mow a Sergeant Major’s lawn and pull weeds from the Camp’s flower beds. He said he’d signed up to go kick some fucking ass. “Well what did you think Basic would be like?” I asked as I picked a piece of meat out of my teeth. “Different how?”

He shrugged. He bit into his sandwich and said, “Like, you just take a shit right there in front of everyone. The toilets are just right there. No stalls or anything. And when you shower they seriously only give you like thirty seconds.” I laughed at this. “I’m not joking, Pop, they stand there and count down, screaming in your ear the whole time and everything. Stop laughing,” he said, and then he was laughing, too. Later, in one of his e-mails from overseas, he’d tell me about how they had to shit into buckets of diesel fuel so they could burn it once it got full enough. He said things can always get worse.

Warren is reading from the Bible on the day before his execution. He also has the Quran and a small Bhagavad-Gita paperback stacked beside him. I pat him on the shoulder and ask him if he’s hedging his bet. “I think you’re supposed to pick one,” I say.

He looks up at me and says, “Thanks for being my friend over the years.”

I sit down across from him and say, “I’m not your friend, Warren. I just try to treat you decent.”

He nods and looks back down at his book. “I ever tell you what my dad did to me? When I was five?” he says.

“You have, Warren.”

“Oh, right. So I’ll see him in Hell if none of this works,” he says, pressing his fist into the cover of the Bible as if it’s a tiny door. “Wonder if I can kill him again down there.”

“Probably not,” I say.

“Yeah. Probably not.”

I start to stand and leave him alone with the scripture, but then I can’t move. All I can do is speak. I say, “I know what happens after you die, Warren.”

“Me too,” he says. “Supposedly anyway.” He holds up his book.

“No, I mean, I really know what really happens.”

He says, “Yeah, it’s all streets of gold or something. Sounds horrible. Sounds fucking depressing.”

“No, listen,” I say, and I look around and lean close to him and say, “promise not to tell anyone?”

“Sure?” he says, grinning.

“I’m serious.”

“They’re killing me tomorrow, man.”

“Warren, I talked to my son. He called me.”

“I didn’t know you have another son.”

“I don’t. I talked to Manny. He called my cell. I talked to him almost all night a few nights ago.”

Warren leans back in his chair and looks at me like he can see my heart beating inside my chest. He presses his teeth together as though he’s trying to turn them into powder. I wonder then if this was the look on his face right before he committed the crimes that got him here. Then he leans forward and says, “You okay?” I say I’m not sure.

The whole family was over the day we found out Manny had been killed. I had just gotten the burgers off the grill. I carried the platter of meat inside and poured myself another glass of tea. “Has he called yet?” I said.

“You think I’d let you stay out there if I had him on the phone?” my wife said. She stood at the sink, washing a head of lettuce. She smiled at me. This might have been the last time she’d ever smile at me.

“I’m just nervous,” I said. We were all going to sing Manny happy birthday when he called. His actual birthday wasn’t for another three days but wasn’t going to be able to call us for another two weeks, so we all thought it’d be a nice surprise to hear from the entire family. Thought it might lift his spirits a little. I scooped three or four tablespoons of sugar into my tea and then my wife said she was proud of me.

“For what?” I said.

“Just...days like these, with the family over, you being around your dad and your brothers,” — she shook her head — “you used to get so hammered with them. I know it can’t be easy.” I said that my brothers probably needed to face the fact that maybe they had a drinking problem, too. I grabbed the raw steaks and went back outside to the grill. These steaks were for me and Dad. “Haven’t had a peaceful meal with him in so long,” I’d said when I picked them up from the store. I went out and put them on the grill and then stood on the patio and looked out at all the family around my house. I stood there and tried to think all the way back to the day Manny was born, how he’d been so small that his skin sagged off of his arms like a sweater that was two sizes too big. I was still thinking of that day as I held a can from the cooler up to my face, as I walked back to the grill to turn the meat, as a strange car pulled up against the curb out front, parked all crooked like the driver was going to break into the vehicles and then make a quick getaway. It was a gray Ford Taurus with a broken front headlight that sagged down like an eyeball starting to come out of the socket. A man in uniform limped through my lawn and up to my front door. The doorbell rang. Then my wife screamed. I ran inside. Later she would tell me that she knew what he was going to say, standing there in front of her with perfect posture like that, so she’d screamed to keep him from talking. He was holding her up when I got in there, the man from the Marine recruiting office near the Long John Silver’s in town. The man who had signed Manny up. The man who had promised him a signing bonus and free college and a marksmanship badge. My wife was vomiting by the time I got my own hands on her. She screamed that he was dead. Then I started hitting the Marine with my spatula, swung it like a hatchet, chopped at him until he backed through the door and out into the yard.

The night he called I asked Manny what it felt like, if he remembered it, the actual act of dying. He said he remembered everything. He was in an armored Hum-V, he said, beneath the turret. His job was to feed ammo up to the gunner, he said. They were driving along behind an MWRAP, clearing a supply road of IED’s, when they stopped to disarm one. The rockets came almost as soon as they stopped, he said. Vehicles ahead of him and behind him got hit by rockets. Manny said seeing that felt like winning the lottery. He said he couldn’t remember how many bullets hit the armor by the time he realized they were shooting at him. “And I don’t mean like that they were shooting at our Humvee in general. I mean I realized they were shooting right at me, Pop. He said the ammo boxes had flown out of the window from the explosions and the gunner was firing tracers and screaming for more bullets. Manny said he got out and gathered the boxes close and tossed them back up inside and as he turned to climb back in he was killed. I asked him to tell me more. “Tell me all of it,” I whispered. He said a rocket came in and hit the front wheel just two feet from where he crouched. “The last thing I heard was a rattle. It sounded like one of those Diamondbacks we’d sometimes see when we were out hunting, Dad. That same exact sound. I actually had a split-second to look for it.” I asked him if he felt anything. He said he felt everything.

“A second later he was part of the universe,” I told Warren.

“Part of the universe?”

“Yeah.”

“So you become part of the universe when you die?”

“Yeah, but you don’t really die.”

“So, then you stay alive? Like the Bee Gee’s?”

“You’re gonna make a fucking joke out of what I’m telling you, Warren?”

“I’m just scared,” he said. “So...part of the universe?”

“That’s what Manny said. He said it’s hard to describe. He said you’ll see.”

Warren leaned forward and put his hand on my forearm and whispered this next thing as if he were whispering it to his oldest friend. Maybe he was. He said, “I think you might have a brain tumor.” I told him I hoped so. Warren said, “Will you be there tomorrow? Will you be there to hear my last words?” I told him I would. “I don’t know what I’m going to say. Been thinking real hard, trying to come up with something halfway good.”

I stand in the gallery at 11:45 p.m. They’re going to execute Warren at 12:01 a.m. “Why do you think they do it at a minute after midnight like that?” Warren had said to me, after I told him I’d be there to hear out his last words. “It’s like they’re making a point of it being the first thing anyone is going to do that day. Like killing you is the most important thing for everyone.”

“It’s kind of a final fuck you to you,” I said.

After they strap him down and tap his vein the doctors give him a chance to speak his last words out into the room. They say it will be recorded for posterity. He laughs at that. When one of the doctors bends down and whispers in his ear that he should go ahead and speak one last time, Warren says, “Uh, okay.” Then he pauses. He looks at the doctors, who are looking away, and says, “I still can’t think of anything.” Then they move forward and put the syringes into the IV. I leave before they press on the first of the three plungers.

A few hours later I go to clear out Warren’s cell. All the food from his last meal is still scattered on porcelain plates across his desk. He’d ordered chicken fried steak and a hamburger and mashed potatoes and a slice of lasagna and scrambled eggs and chocolate cake and a Coca-Cola but all we have around here is Pepsi products. He didn’t touch any of it. Not even a bite. Before I leave for the day I rinse out the Tupperware I’d brought my own lunch in and go back into his cell and scoop the potatoes and lasagna and the hamburger patty into it. I take it home with me so that I don’t have to eat microwave dinners for a few days.

As the Marine recruiter made the left onto the long stretch of Hollingsworth road, Dad sat by himself in a lawn chair smoking his Marlboros. Even he was smiling as we watched Manny’s cousins throw a baseball back and forth, each sharing my son’s old leather from when he was their age. I had hugged Dad moments before that. It had been the first time in years and he hadn’t hugged me back, and I had joked with my wife that I would need to talk to the therapist about that, and she laughed at this, and then she hugged me and said she’d always hug me back.

I bent over the cooler before I went back over to the grill and I held up a can of beer that I was going to save back for Manny so he could have a drink from his 21st birthday party once he got back. Smoke rose up from the coals in sheets like ghosts escaping the burial grounds. Manny’s bird dog sniffed at everyone’s heels as they walked by. Everyone started migrating to the patio to eat and wait for Manny to call. Hip hop music leaked out of the old boombox I’d had since I was Manny’s age. Dad turned and asked me to turn it down so he could hear if the phone rang. I told him I would as soon as I checked on our steaks. I looked inside at my house. It was so full. Everyone was dressed so nice. It was a Sunday.

I usually don’t like writing about you-know-who because he is so pervasive in our daily lives, a roadkill umbrella looming over all of us, the rot of him and his disciples invading every part of everything as he carries out his mission to destroy all he can while somehow calling it great. There’s some kind of balance between being aware of the daily horrors and raising hell when we can, while also not letting him ruin us mentally moment by moment. I didn’t find that balance in his first term and I haven’t found it here and now. It feels like he has been our overlord for a decade and there’s still a long way to go. We need our escapes. And for me reading and writing is one of them, a quick trapdoor where I can turn off my brain for short stretches. So it feels like a kind of sadomasochism to write about him in here, but he recently posted an AI video of Barack Obama getting arrested by the FBI in the Oval Office and caged in a prison cell. In the video Trump looks on gleefully and the background music “YMCA” by the Village People, a choice the breaks my brain a little. His trolling is the least objectionable thing about him, obviously. There are too many real things he does to real living breathing people to get too worked up about bullshit like this. But we all know he really would love to arrest all the former presidents, and it doesn’t seem impossible or laughable anymore when he amuses himself with posts like this. If you woke up tomorrow and saw that he’d actually done it, well, you’d probably nod and be all like, “Yeah this tracks.” Anyway, I wrote a short story about this in the twentieth issue of Barrelhouse in 2019. The story felt a little more absurd than plausible when I wrote it back then. Now it feels more plausible than absurd. It is dark and kind of funny and, ultimately, is about the anxiety of not being able to be present in the lives of our children. And it’s about not being able to protect them as we head into the near future that will, as we all know, prove to be more dystopian than we can wrap our heads around at the moment. So here is, a story from then about what I imagined now might be like. Thanks, buddies.

Final Final Way

Whenever I look in the mirror I see Barack Obama looking back at me. That's why I avoid mirrors. But whenever I see my daughter, I see my old face — the one I had when I was her age, way before all this.

My daughter walks up to me right now as I smoke a cigarette near my car. Her daughter is right behind her, tugging at her mother's back pockets like she might climb up her legs and slide her tiny feet into the denim pouches. "Carry me," she keeps saying, because she is afraid of the surveillance blimp. The blimp is so white and catches so much sunlight during the day that it looks like we have a second star shining above the city. It floated into our skies a week after all the former presidents went into hiding. They haven't found Obama yet. I smash out my cigarette and wave the smoke away from my girls' faces. My daughter looks up at the blimp and says, "Why do you think it's here?"

"I don't know," I say. But I know exactly why. It has drifted above our neighborhood because the Facial Recognition Eye has been reading me as a 91% match of the former president. Despite the beard. Despite the glasses and the contact lenses and the Sox cap I never take off. Despite never looking up. It has seen my reflection somehow, or reflections of reflections.

I moved into the same apartment complex as my daughter a few years after Obama left office. Apt. 44 was available when I was making my choice, but I leased #51 instead because I hate irony, and because it was closer to my daughter anyway. Three doors down from hers.

My daughter doesn’t know she’s my daughter. She thinks I'm an old man with PTSD and a government disability pension who is harmless enough to get her daughter off the school bus and babysit for two hours every day until she gets home from work. All of which is true enough.

Rumor is Obama and his family are somewhere up north. Everyone thinks he will be smuggled across the border and given asylum. The current president is threatening military action if that happens. There are also rumors that they are closing in on him somewhere in the southwest. And of course there’s the rumor he’s here in the city still, hiding in plain sight. My daughter says, "I think he's in some real trouble if they're sending high tech balloons after him." When she says this I can't tell if she's being serious or sarcastic.

Several months ago my daughter came over to pick up her daughter from my apartment. I asked if she wanted to stay for a bit to watch the basketball game on T.V. “Playoffs,” I said. She said no, that baby girl had to practice her math because there was a test coming up. "You can just tell me no if you want. You can just tell me that your boyfriend is coming over instead. It's cool. I'm not your dad -- ain't like I can boss you around, ask you why you’re giving that joker another chance.” I wanted to say more, was tempted to point out that any man who pushes a woman around when he's arguing with her will eventually do more than that. But I didn’t need to say more. She already knew that. Pointing it out would’ve only pissed her off more. That protective fatherly instinct is hard to suppress even if you’ve never really been there for her. My daughter said, “Again, I’ll remind you to mind your fucking business, please, thank you.” At least she was polite.

I don't think the Obamas are up north or in the southwest. They’re not here either. Don't know where they are, but I do know that there are a lot of people out there like me. Not former Federal Doppelgangers, per say, I was the only one the administration had, but there are still hundreds of people in this country who know what to do if the president were to need to disappear for a few days. Or weeks.

About a year after I first met her, my daughter sat across her kitchen table from me. She and her daughter shared a piece of chocolate cake I’d made. I asked her about her folks. About her dad. She shrugged at the topic. It had been years since she'd been truly sad about me. Now I was an afterthought. My daughter fed her daughter a bite off her own fork and said, “He died a long time ago. We don't know exactly what happened. I mean, there was foul play and all that. My mom used to think that he was mixed up in some kind of love triangle. She thought some jealous husband caught up to him and…” She made a gun out of her hand and fired it at me.

"That's sad."

"I guess."

"You guess?"

"I mean, I was little.”

“Do you remember what happened?”

“Yeah. If I think about it, probably.” She stared at me and I held my palm out to her as though she might lay the story into my hands. “Well, he called Mom and said his boss was keeping him late. He asked if she would put his dinner plate in the fridge. Never came home." This was the last conversation I would ever have with my wife. I've thought about this conversation every day for the last fourteen years. “I do remember exactly what we had for dinner that night. Like when I say exactly, I mean exactly: cod fish sticks, french fries, peas, and chocolate cake for dessert. Like this.” She fed her daughter another bite. “Is it stupid that I remember it like that?"

"How could it be stupid?"

"I hated fish sticks. I whined about it, asked her why couldn't she make something I liked, since I was pretty much the only person gonna be eating. Mom never ate much. It was just the two of us at dinnertime whenever dad couldn't make it home. My brother had been dead for almost three years by then."

"Your brother?" I said. It felt like a real question. I hadn't thought about him in years.

"Leukemia," she said.

"That's terrible."

"It was hard on my mom."

"I'll bet," I said. I wiped at the corners of my eyes. "I can only imagine.”

"Mom kept calling him that night. He wasn't answering. I remember asking her if everything was all right. She said yeah, go to bed, all that, and then later that night some cops showed up."

"Cops?"

"Said they found his car. Engine was still running. Later we’d find out there was some blood on the floorboard. Not much, but some. His cell phone was on the dash. Bunch of missed calls. Never found him."

I shook my head and said, "Your mom. What’s she like?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"I don't really talk to her much."

"Why not?" I said. She only looked at me. “Is it because of him? You don't talk to your own mother because of your boyfriend? Because of that man?"

She whispered her answer after she sent her daughter over to the television. "Everyone tells me to get out of this relationship, but what am I supposed to do? Let her grow up without a father?"

Six years ago my daughter and her boyfriend were living in a rented a house a few blocks from here. There had been an argument. Another woman. A confrontation. Evidence. Cell phone video. She chased after him when he swiped the cell phone from her hand, ran along the curb, saying, “Oh hell no!" to him like she was some kind of pro wrestler. She hadn't told him yet that she was actually pregnant with his actual child. She kicked the car door when he got down inside. She punched him in the ear through the open window, spat at him. Then my daughter reached inside for the cell phone, for the evidence, saying that she was going to blast it all over Facebook. He took off when she was waist deep into the driver's side window. She fell out. The car went over her arm. Broke it in four places. Could have been her head that broke in four places. The surgery scar on her bicep was one of the first things I asked her about when we crossed paths at the apartment complex just after my granddaughter was born. "That's a nasty scar," I said. "How'd that happen?"

She said something I’ll never forget. She said, “Fear."

The blimp has drifted down even closer. Like a lantern hanging from the ceiling. Like I could reach up and touch it, scrape my fingernails against it. Like maybe someone has called in a tip.

My daughter walks up the steps this afternoon and stands outside my door for a long time before knocking. I am playing checkers with my granddaughter; I ask my daughter if she wants to come in while we finish this last game. She says maybe for just a minute.

When she sits next to me her face is so close that I can feel her breaths against my shoulder. I wonder if she can see the small pieces of my old face under my beard, if she can see the acne scars that always had to be covered with make-up when I made those few appearances as the president back in the day. Does she notice the scar on my eyelid, just below my eyebrow, where her mother scratched me once as we fought beside our daughter in the kitchen of our old apartment? It was a fight that left all three of us in tears, mine rinsing down my cheeks in red paths as the salty drops from my eyes merged with the blood leaking from my brow and fell to the floor like water turning to wine, like some kind of backwards miracle. Did she see this scar that I can always spot in the mirror, a tiny smile grinning at me like it really knows who I really am, a scar that the plastic surgeons didn't bother to fix because not even they saw it.

The sleeves of my white shirt are turned up just enough. The very bottom of my tattoo shows -- not enough so that she can see what it is of, exactly, but the blue ink juts down like veiny puzzle pieces covered by my sleeve like a stage curtain. I can feel her straining to see through the white of my shirt, to clarify the shadows of ink against my brown skin. It feels like she might even say my name, but instead she points at the game board and says, "You shouldn't let her win. You're not doing her any favors by coddling her."

"I'm not letting her do anything," I say. "She's smart."

Then my daughter says, "What is that?"

"What's what?"

"Your tattoo. What’s it of?"

"It's just something I got when my oldest kid was born."

"You never told me you had kids."

“Haven’t seen them in a long time. They don’t want to see me.” It’s as close to the truth as anything I can think of.

"That's sad," she says. I tell her it's why I'm trying to be such a good neighbor to her; I tell her she reminds me of my own daughter. “I'm trying to make up for some of the shit I've done in my life.” My daughter starts to say something but her phone chimes out as if it can hear us. She holds it up just below her chin and looks at me after she reads the text.

"What is it?"

"News notification," she says. A lie. "It says they arrested Obama's son-in-law." They must be getting close. My daughter tells her daughter to get her things together, says they need to get going. I ask where they’re going but she ignores me.

I sit there as they move toward the door, watching my daughter, her skin dark like her mother's, and my granddaughter, her skin the color of sand like mine, a shade closer to the white skin of her own father. That's when I see the bruises. They are high up on her arms like she has been grabbed, like she has been tossed. I follow the two of them down the steps to help them inside the car. My daughter lifts her daughter into the seat and hands her the coloring book I bought for her at the drugstore. She closes the door and says, "I know."

"You know what?" I say.

She tells me she is waiting for the right timing. She says this is the first time he’s gotten rough with her; she says she won’t let it happen again. “The only way to make sure of that is to leave him,” I say.

“And go where?” she says. “With what money? It isn’t so easy.”

"Yes it is," I say. "You just leave. It's the easiest thing ever." Then she says she might kill him. She says she’s thought through how to get away with it. She says she’ll do it while he’s sleeping, make it look like someone robbed his place. “Holy shit,” I say. “You’re serious.” She says, “It’s one thing for him to pick fights with me. I can fight back — hit, kick, bite. Scrap. But he ain’t touching her ever again.” When she drives away I can see her eyes looking at me from inside the tiny sliver of her rear view mirror. It’s like looking at my own eyes.

As I tug at the ends of my beard hair to cut it away, I wonder if Obama has grown hair over his face like this, if maybe he sees me when he looks in the mirror. When the hair is short enough I lather the shaving cream over my face, pull the razor down over my cheeks, over my chin and neck. I leave the mustache for a moment before I fully become him again, before I step into my old life. Those old responsibilities.

He wrote me a note once. Since we were never supposed to be within thirty miles of each other he never got to thank me for my public service, for the sacrifice I made, the family I walked away from. He said he also knew a few things about all that. He said any president has been successful if they don't have to call upon the men like me to do our jobs. I wish I could write him a note today, tell him some things too. Tell him thanks for giving me a chance to do what I’m about to do.

When I’m done shaving I rinse the bright white dye from my hair. And there it is. Black, ashen, like warm charcoal. I button my shirt, tie my tie. The suit coat still fits. I reach in the breast pocket and take out the old note from the president. I read it one more time before I burn it. I crease my slacks and slip into my dress shoes before I press both thumbs against the tiny implant that still exists beneath my Adam's apple. I speak to the mirror. “Good evening,” I say, and I smile when I hear that Voiceover still works even after all these years. I look in the mirror and tell him good luck.

Her boyfriend comes out of the Sears. The parking lot of this store is where he has been picking up the product he hustles. I'm parked next to his car, my seat reclined. The surveillance blimp saw me from the moment I stepped out of my front door and now it hovers right above my car, like it might drop a bomb on me. There will be agents soon to lay eyes on me, to corroborate the camera's alerts from overhead. There will be confusion amongst them. Chaos. I am the origin of everything.

I hold the gun against him when he opens the driver's side door. He hasn't heard me walk up behind him. His body stiffens like he knows what this feels like. For a moment I think of pulling the trigger. For a moment I try to pull the trigger. To drop him right here, to force him out of my daughter's life in some final final way. I squeeze the gun with every finger except the one that counts. Press the barrel harder into him. "Get in," I say. He does. I slide into the seat behind him, tell him to drive. As he pulls away I lean my head out the window and look up at the blimp. I look up until I know the software will tell them they're getting another 99.9997% match.

My granddaughter's father sees me in the rear view. He says, “What the fuck?” I tell him I need his help. That I need him to drive me east. "Drive as far as you can as fast as you can," I say. This might give the president a day; might give him a week. I can't say exactly. But it will give him more time to get out, to get away, to gather his family, to help them keep moving. They will interrogate my daughter's boyfriend. He will be out of her life long enough for her to do something. If she wants to. She will not be able to reach him the entire time. Maybe she will think he left. Maybe experience will tell her men who leave don’t ever come back. She will find the money I left for her, and the note, and the advice for how to disappear.

I tell him to keep his eyes straight ahead as we speed toward the highway, past the apartment complex. Both our daughters are there. They are walking up the steps. She puts the keys into the lock, twists it, and before she steps inside she looks at the door down the balcony from hers. I crane my neck to watch what she does next, as the road bends and the speed takes us away. She taps her fingernails against her glass windows of my empty room. I can almost hear her asking if I'm home.

All right so it’s Father's Day and I’m sitting here thinking about my dad. He’s been dead almost ten years and to this day his death is the most confusing and hardest to process event of my life. He spent most of my childhood terrorizing me. He was mostly drunk most of the time. He was the type to punch holes in walls, kick a locked door until it splintered, cuss you out through his teeth if you made the mistake of walking into the same room as him. He smoked three packs of Marlboro Reds a day, drank anywhere from 10 to 20 Buds. He never ate dinner. Most mornings I’d wake up to him puking his guts out — the perfect acoustics of the toilet was my alarm clock. He’d get physical with me from time to time as a kid. Then we’d get physical with each other when I was a teenager. I can count on one hand the number of good memories I had with him during my childhood. Mostly I avoided him. The majority of memories I have of him are attached to some sort of violence. Like just now I remembered how one time when I was five or six years old I saw him fly into a fit of rage and hack at some shelving in the laundry room with a katana. These are weird memories to have waiting there, ready to step out into the front of your awareness, ready for you to suppress them again in one way or another.

I was the second kid he’d fathered out of wedlock. He became a father first at 17 and then again at 23. I grew up not knowing my sister until I was 16, acutely aware at the time when I was meeting her that I was just barely younger than my dad had been when she was born. It made me feel the first real twinge of sympathy for him that I ever had. I guess becoming a dad so young could just about ruin any person. Still yet, he made no bones about how he’d never really wanted me. Especially when he was drunk. I grew up hearing about how women will trap you with a baby and how kids ruin your life. He was never happy. He was the type of death wish dad who always spoke of how young he’d be when he finally died. Eventually he turned his back on me and I turned my back on him when I told him I couldn’t have a relationship with him unless he got sober. We didn’t speak for damn near a decade, those years I was myself becoming a dad. And then of course he died young, three years after drying out. I barely got to reconnect with him and then, poof, he was gone. My dad the drunk prophet had predicted it right.

So most of my writing life I’ve written stories trying to make sense of people who fuck up their lives, and most of these people I’ve written about are, you guessed it, dads. I’ve never been able to break free of writing about booze and death and the men who create ruin, fathers who finally get around to trying to make things right just a little bit after it’s too damn late. So here’s another one. It’s called “Handbook for the Living” and it’s a story about a confused guy facing the end of his relatively young life. He’s trying to understand what exactly the fuck it was all about. And also to make things right with the person closest to him who he’d hurt the most.

Maybe you are thinking about quitting this writing thing. I mean, of course you are. Life is hard. The world is full of suffering on a scale we can’t really comprehend. The people responsible will never be held accountable in any way for any of it. We’re getting ripped off in every direction, at all times. Nothing ever seems get better, and as individuals plodding away over the earth we feel powerless to cause even the smallest degree of change1. So you write. Because it’s what you do. And that’s wonderful. But then you’ve got about a one percent chance of publishing that short story or essay you just wrote, and let’s face it — when it’s published you’ll only have about five to ten people who will actually read every word of it. Maybe you write something longer. A novel or a memoir, something that takes you years to complete. Cool. Last I heard, about .4% of writers who complete a manuscript are able to find an agent to represent them. And if you do find someone to champion you, you’ll probably end up parting ways with that agent once your book doesn’t sell. But let’s say you beat all the odds. You do it, you pull it off, you actually find a publisher. Awesome! No one’s going to buy it, not really. Larry McMurtry, author of every dad’s favorite book, Lonesome Dove, never sold more than 5000 copies of any book before he wrote about those idiot men getting themselves killed on their cattle drive from Texas to Montana2. Books like The Last Picture Show, Leaving Cheyenne, All My Friends are Going to be Strangers, Terms of Endearment3, all these wonderful books didn’t sell for shit during a time when we had an actual reading culture. There’s no audience. There’s no money it. There’s no such thing anymore as the literary celebrity, but if there was you wouldn’t want that anyway4. You’re going to end up getting arthritis in your fingers and probably a bad back from hunching to look at a screen. You’re going to be grateful to get form rejections because it’s better than getting ghosted. This writing gig is such a wildly masochistic thing to do to yourself if you, like most people, would like at least a medium amount of validation for your artistic vision and effort. So because of all this you’re thinking of quitting and, well fuck, I don’t blame you.

But like…don’t quit. Just don’t. At some point when you keep coming back to this frustrating blank page you’re going to feel zen about all of it5. You’re going to feel so free knowing that there’s no one else you’re writing for other than yourself. You will lose all self-consciousness, all second guessing, you will be free, you will be happy. Writer’s block won’t happen because you’ll be more willing to try weird shit on the page. All you have to do is shrug your shoulders if it doesn’t work. And if it does work you can send it to your few friends who will really care, who will be truly excited to read this cool thing you just wrote, and you can talk to them about it, these things you’re chasing in your head. You get to write whatever you want. You get to process your one sweet chaotic life on this pale blue dot one thought at a time, one page at a time, writing to whoever you’ll be a few months from now when you sit down to coldly edit it. Because that’s who it’s really between anyway: your present self and your future self. Your words won’t matter as much to any other person as they will to your own self down the line. It’s the only real time travel there is6. Your lifelong writing oeuvre is, in the grand scheme of the grand scheme, so myopic and ridiculous, nothing more than really really complex cave paintings7. But that’s also beauty of it. Don’t quit. Make your cave paintings. Keep coming to the blank page, keep having fun, keep exploring your own brain, keep surprising yourself, laugh out loud at your own lines when they are both great and terrible. You just won’t be the same you if you quit. You won’t get to come back and see the moments when you felt a little silly one day and had a craving to quote Shakespeare, when you were in a footnote-y mood, when you most of all wanted to share this terrific Richard Linklater quote about mellowing out from the mania of your youth. When you wanted a reason to mention George Jones. When you pretended to have read Proust.

And okay. One last thing and then I’ll get out of here. Herman Melville, on the eve of starting Moby-Dick, wrote this: “It is now my settled purpose to write novels that are said to fail.”

It is a Wednesday. I am on vacation — off of real work to do other kinds of work around the house, work I will inevitably not do, tasks I’ll put off until the next vacation. My son has a friend over. They shoot hoops in the driveway, scooting over the concrete, shit talking each other, admiring the arc and spin of the ball each time they fade each jump shot. Soon they come inside and look for food. There isn’t a damn thing to eat. I haven’t made my twice daily trips to the store — once to get things we have run out of and another to get the things I forgot to get the first time. Since I am Cool Dad I say hop in the car, fellas, lets run and get some lunch.

At Chipotle the line is short even though it is noon. I stand behind my boy and his buddy, trying to decide if I want anything too since I’ve already eaten. I’m probably getting too old for second lunch but oh well, who am I to pass up sour cream and guacamole? I’m also trying to decide if I should debit this or put it on one of the credit cards since I don’t know exactly what’s in our bank account at this exact moment, when the door pulls open and a guy walks in carrying an American flag bandana, holding it like he might start waving it around, and it’s funny to me later that this is what I first noticed before the gun and knife: a triangle folded Old Glory, Walmart bought patriotism for $4.99 or some such. He heads for the bathroom, walking fast like he either has to take an emergency shit or like he’s about to come out firing, because it is then that I clock the gun on his hip, a massively phallic .45, and the long tactical blade of a Kabar knife reaching down his thigh, sheathed in leather. He also has, for reasons I don’t understand, shotgun shells on his belt. I don’t know what to do. My son and his friend don’t see this dude. They are asking for cheese and lettuce, eyeing the chips, wondering what they want to drink. Should we abandon this order, should I grab them by the arms, lead them out to the car, drive across the street to Arby’s? I am weirdly considering decorum, strangely aware that I don’t want to seem panicky and afraid, even though I am both of those things. I walk down the line and stand behind my son. I am thinking of the 1970s baseball player Hal McRae in this moment, of all things. In my mind I am seeing images of the old school baseball player running towards second base and launching himself into middle infielders to break up double plays, making a career out of these gloriously dirt bag moments, flying chest first into other players to save an out. I will do this, I think to myself, if this guy comes out shooting. I will run at him like old McRae, will shield these two teenagers behind me, and they are quick, I think, they have young legs, they’ll get out of the restaurant in two or three steps, maybe, if I’m lucky.

I look around and think to myself that this can’t be it, it can’t end here, this randomly, just trying to get these kids fed on a random summer day. It can’t be that I’ll never see my wife again, or see our children into adulthood, and I have ambitions and dreams I’m still chasing, and repairs to get to around the house, and this is not how I want it blink out, in this line, in this place where nobody is thrilled to be, but all I can think is that this is America, buddies, this is how it ends for thousands of people every year, with these exact thoughts that I’m having right now, these the last feelings so many people have.

The man comes out of the bathroom. No one notices him. Everyone is eating or looking at their phones, or both. He stands in the back of the line, behind me, as I shuffle over behind my son’s friend, and I am watching this armed man in every reflection, my body turned just so, forty-five degrees, like a small forward about to receive a pass from a point guard and pivot into the paint, and my jittery feet are ready to turn and make myself big in front of this guy if he pulls the howitzer on his hip, and I’ll raise my arms and howl like a grizzly. We make eye contact several times. And he grins because he is the type who loves this. He is the kind of person who likes to open carry a small armory on his body just so that he can make others nervous, people like me, and I can almost hear his thoughts, hear him thinking that I am a beta boy, a real scared ass bitch, and later I will think how glad I am to hate guns, to have never owned one, happy that I wasn’t myself carrying a pistol of my own, that two nervy armed people weren’t standing next to each other in front of the fast food slop. After a few seconds I realize there’s nothing I can really do. All the randomness and thoughts of ultimate bad luck will drive you out of your mind if you think on it for more than a few minutes. So I don’t think on it, even as it is right next to me. I pay with the Mastercard. I wait for the boys to fill their cups with Coke. I look back over my shoulder as we walk out to the car. The man has his bandana in his hand like he might tie it around his face, like he is some sort of old timey outlaw bandit, a six gun raider straight out of a 1970s Sam Peckinpah movie, ready to ambush some horseman and rain down the apocalypse as he points to the salsa he wants on his burrito. He chooses the Tomatillo-Red Chili Salsa™️.

Where I’m Hauling From

Hutch is called Hutch because he’s from Hutchison, Kansas, a town where every other person who lives there works at the level 4 prison or the Wal-Mart. Level 4 is a fancy way of saying maximum security. I don’t know Hutch’s real name even though we’ve now teamstered this tractor and trailer from KC to the Meadowlands to Louisville to Wyoming, and now we’re headed back home to KC.

“Hutch did you ever do time in Hutch?” I ask, because I feel like this is a funny thing to say. I expect him to do what he always does when I blurt out a dumb thing — to laugh and shake his head and light a cigarette, to mostly ignore me.

“Yep,” he says, his voice a hiccup. “Spent eleven years of my one fuckin life in that cage.”

“Oh,” I say, “fuck. Sorry.”

“It’s all right. I ain’t ashamed.”

I do the math. Somehow I’ve spent 3000 miles riding with a person who committed a violent enough crime to be in a max. At least it wasn’t a super-max, I think to myself, trying to see the bright side. We have 900 more miles to go. I’m tempted to ask him what he did to get locked up but even I know you’re not supposed to ask that. Then Hutch says, “Aren’t you curious what I went to prison for?”

“No, man,” I say, “no, it’s all good.”

“You could be riding with a god damn serial killer, you don’t want to know?”

“Am I riding with a serial killer?”

Hutch laughs. He says, “Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

He says, “I only ever killed one person and no one knows about it but me.” He laughs again. I laugh too because hopefully he is joking. Then he says, “Nah man, I don’t talk about what I got convicted of. If you’re curious, type it in on Case Net.”

I shake my head and say, “We’ve come this far without me knowing.”

Hutch says, “That’s stupid. I’d want to know.” We go under a bridge and I am tempted to jerk the wheel into one of the columns. Not because I’m suicidal, but because I don’t like him having the last word, being all condescending like that. My ex says I’ll do anything to win an argument. I’m starting to think she’s right.

My ex-wife also says I am terrible at reading people. When we get back to KC I’m tempted to stop by her new place and tell her how right she is about this. To give her that much, let her win this one thing about the kind of person I am. But the problem is I don’t know where she lives. I’ll have to look her up. She put our old house up for sale last month and the closing was supposed to happen while I was out on the road this time. She wouldn’t tell me where she’s moving to or give me any other way to reach her. Fuck, she could be moving out of the state for all I know. I told her it’s not right of her, that we raised two kids together, that we had three good decades and why couldn’t she tolerate one bad one —because three out of four is not such a bad winning percentage, right? — and I said she’s too much a part of my life for me to not even know where the hell she’s laying her head at night. She said no, that that was the whole point of paying the attorneys all that money, so that she didn’t have to tell me these sorts of things ever again. Hutch says she probably has a new man. He’s probably right. And I think it might break me to have to look her up, my own wife — it might be the final thing that finally breaks me.

The mountains eye us as we head toward them, driving through the angry flatland wind, and Hutch points at them and asks me what’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. I tell him the view of the pacific ocean driving up Highway 1 is the most amazing thing I ever laid eyes on. “It’s all an endless dome of a whole other universe under there and we can’t even begin to understand the first thing about it. You can follow those currents all the way to the Mariana Trench — there’s whole worlds there we’ll never know about,” I say, hoping he sees the wonder in my eyes, that this is not a thing inside me that has died yet. Hutch rolls his eyes. He tells me the most amazing thing he ever saw was when the BTK killer cut his prison jumpsuit into a thong singlet, somehow dyed it pink, and then walked around in the yard humming the melody of some 80’s pop song no one knew the words to. He says BTK is one hairy son of a bitch.

After a few more miles I say, “You serious about killing someone?”

He shrugs.

I say, “I could never kill anyone. Probably not even in self-defense. I flat out don’t have it in me.”

“Yes you could,” Hutch says, “anyone could. There’s nothing to it.”

“No, no, I really don’t think so, Hutch, I’m not the type. I could kill myself, I think, I could see myself doing that, but not someone else.” Hutch tells me not to have those thoughts when I’m behind the wheel while we’re hauling 80,000 pounds of steal on our backs. He says killing yourself is for pussies.

When we were younger my wife and I used to joke about a suicide pact. We said we wanted to spend every minute we could together until we were 75 or so. As far as we could tell, everything concerning the human body and mind went downhill after the mid-seventies. We figured that by then we’d have had five good decades together. Fifty years is longer than a lot of people even get to live a whole ass life, I’d say, so we’d find the most painless way to die and pick a day to shuffle off the stage together. We’d escape this life without any real suffering, if we could.

“How romantic,” Hutch says when I tell him about it. The engine grunts as we go up the mountain.

“You ever heard of the law of LD-50?” I say back. He says he knows exactly what it is. I raise my eyebrows as if to say prove it. He recites the definition to me, says that LD-50 is the toxicology unit that measures a lethal dose of any substance. Everything can be lethal, he says, depending on the dosage. “So then would you like to know what the LD-50 of ice cream pints is?” I say. I half expect him to tell me.

“Sure as hell would,” he says.

“It’s 37. You eat 37 pints of ice cream and that’ll do it. Coronary, I guess, maybe. My wife and I were gonna do that instead of a nursing home — go to the store, pick up 37 pints, all different flavors, and enjoy poisoning ourselves. Have fun with it.”

“But what if the store only had, say, 30 pints to sell?” Hutch says to this.

I tell him he is just like my wife, always poking holes in my ideas. “Stick ‘em in the freezer and wait a week. Wait for another truck to come in. There’s always another truck coming in.”

“You’re a weird motherfucker,” Hutch says.

I walked through our old house before Hutch and I went out on this leg. I pretended that I was an interested buyer, called my wife’s real estate agent, and asked her if she could show me the house. She said it was already under contract. I said sure but what if the deal falls through. “It happens,” I said, and she agreed to meet me after her lunch break. My wife used to do this. When we were in our late 20’s she’d pretend to be a homebuyer and she’d get these realtors to show her through houses and she’d steal shit from people, and then the one time she got caught she said she’d blow the realtor if he didn’t tell. He let her blow him but then snitched on her anyway. This was all before she got clean, back when she had her Xanax addiction. She’d do a couple ladders with some red wine and black out, and I was on the road too much to notice.

Hutch says he doesn’t believe I didn’t notice. He says I just didn’t want to deal with it, that I was hoping it’d go away.

“The point is I stuck with her through all that, all the fucked up things she did…why couldn’t she stick with me?” I say. “Give me a chance to make things right?”

“People change,” Hutch says. He also says I sound like every other divorced guy he’s ever talked to, that I wanted to put all the blame on her for not having enough tolerance of my bullshit.

“Fuck you,” I say to him, but all he does is laugh. I pull over and tell him it’s his turn to drive, that I’m taking my siesta in the back.

A little while later I come out of the sleeper bunk as we go down the other side of the mountain. We are tilted forward so much that Hutch is standing up out of his seat. I sit down and light a cigarette, put my feet on the dash and pretend I am skateboarding. “Go back to sleep,” he says.

“Make sure you stay off the brake,” I say. I laugh. I tell him we don’t want a tire fire. I remind him of the guy we both heard about who a few weeks ago had a fire while he was hauling fertilizer. Ultimate bad luck. “We’ll freeze to death out there in five minutes if we have to abandon our unit fleeing some flames, Hutch.”

“Go back to bed, please.” He guides the wheel like we are sailing some ancient vessel out into the mysterious pacific. I tell him if he’s going to roll us down the side of the mountain I want to get in one last cigarette before it happens. I laugh again. I quote Groucho Marx to him. I say the only true laughter comes from despair. He tells me he can see why my wife kicked me out.

The next morning I come out of the back to see that we are parked and Hutch is gone. I’m a little hungover because after I went back to try to sleep I could feel that Hutch had a few trouble spots going down the mountain, and I kept imagining one of the steel beams back there on the flatbed coming through the sleeper cab and impaling me right into the side of the mountain, and then I’d die while vultures peck away at me. So to cope I drank most of my mouthwash. The point is I am not with it enough to realize Hutch has parked us at a truck stop and I have both drank an entire bottle of water and peed into the empty plastic before I realize I can go inside and use the facilities like a proper civilized human. When I walk in to brush my teeth I see Hutch over in the diner. He’s sitting across from some kid who is not really a kid. He’s in his early thirties, this kid, and he looks like he could be Hutch’s twin. I can see what Hutch looked like when he was young and broad in the good way (as opposed to broad in the way we have both become) and his ruddy hair is parted in the same comb over as Hutch’s, though instead of looking like antique twine it is thick as the prairie grass we will be driving by in a few hours. For a moment I imagine that we have travelled through time somehow, that Hutch has found his younger self and is warning him about some things. I wonder how fast I could find my own younger self in this particular dimension, or if I’d even have anything wise to say.

I stop by the payphone as I go back out to the tractor, because this also makes me feel like a time traveller, and I drop in some change and call our old number. My finger itself remembers all ten numbers before my actual brain can even recall it. This number has been disconnected for almost a year now and each time I’ve called it the robot voice has told me I’m sorry but this number is no longer in service…as if anyone uses landlines anymore. We didn’t even use it. We only kept it because we were dinosaurs and liked to hear it ring once in a while, to know that someone out there still remembered us. I’m so surprised to hear a voice on the other end say, “Hello,” that I almost wince. “Hello?” the voice says again. An older woman’s voice. A smoker. She says hello one more time and I don’t say anything and then finally she says, “Mark?” and I’m quiet until just before she seems like she’s about to hang up, and then I say, “Wait…”

“Mark?” she says again.

“I’m sorry,” is all I can think to say.

“For what — what are you talking about? Where even are you?” she says, and I hang up.

I’ve got the tractor nice and warm for when Hutch gets back in. I’ve figured out by now that we are in Colorado Springs, off course a little but not by too much, only maybe an hour or so. If it’s a windy day coming in from the west we should be able to make up the fuel some, but even if we don’t I’m not going to say anything to Hutch. Who knows how long it’s been since he’s seen his kid, which is something I’ve decided I won’t ask him about unless he brings it up.

He glares at me in the windshield reflection after he climbs back up inside. He thinks I can’t see him staring but I can. He lights up a smoke. “Fuck. I don’t know what I expected.”

A few miles down the road Hutch tells me the story. He says one night, years ago, back when he could afford cocaine, his wife found his stash and snorted all of it. “And I mean all of it. A fuck ton of grams,” he says.

“A whole fuck ton?” I say, but he doesn’t laugh. He says he freaked out, not because she’d just put thousands of dollars of his shit up her nose, but because it was plenty enough to OD. He says her heart had to be doing about 800 beats per minute, that it was ready to pop like a balloon. I ask if he took her to a hospital. “No,” he says, “I beat the shit out of her.” He shrugs. He says he was high on coke too and it seemed like the right move at the time. He says he thumped her in the nose hard enough that she wouldn’t be able to snort anything ever again if she survived the night, and he pulled clumps of hair out of her head and ripped her Aerosmith t-shirt clean off her shoulders, and he even chased her down the street as she fled to the neighbor’s house. They let her in before he could get ahold of her, he says, and he was afraid they’d call the police so he went and hid in the woods. Stayed out there all night. Problem is, he says, the neighbor was the landlord. Other problem is, he says, they left their kid — the now fully grown younger version of Hutch — alone in the living room all night, and when the boy got up and saw that Mom and Dad weren’t there, he wandered out into the night, all the way up the street to the 7-11. Hutch says, “You live and you learn,” and I say I’m not sure that’s how that phrase should be used but oh well. “We got our eviction letter the next day and then a few days after that SRS shows up and hauls J.P. away to be ward of the state for a while.”

I ask what does J.P. stand for. He says Jared Patrick. I eye Hutch’s wedding ring. It’s catching some sunlight right now, the diamonds are sort of glimmering as if fate itself is trying to make a point of me noticing. “You two still together?”

I expect him to say hell no are you crazy are you nuts hell fuckin no. I expect him to say this is wife number four or something, that he got married in prison to one of these babes who has a fetish for inmates. But he nods and says, “Yep. We’ll be celebrating 29 years this spring.” Then he says, “I don’t understand how it is she can forgive me but our boy can’t. Especially now that he has kids of his own, how he can’t see how impossible it is know what you’re doing in this life.”

This is something I will say to my wife when we get back to town, when I look her up and call her and beg her to at least think about giving me another chance. She won’t see it but I will be on my knees, pleading. I will say I just rode almost four thousand miles with a guy who was a violent criminal drug addict wife beater and possible murderer, and if his wife can forgive him why can’t you forgive me, why not, what did I ever do that was even one percent as bad as any of that? I will confront her about what she did to our old house, how she erased any trace of me. How she got rid of my work bench in the garage, the one I built by hand the first year we moved in. I wonder, did her boyfriend take the crowbar to it, pry it apart piece by piece, or did she do it herself, did she take it apart the way she’s taking my life apart right now, board by board, nail by nail? I will confront her about the new ugly ass paint color — baby shit yellow — and about changing out the carpet in the front room, which we’d only just changed a few years ago, when we’d picked it out together, when we got down on hands and knees with these swatches and eyed the fabric and really debated what would look best, and did she remember how she laughed when I turned to her and said, “Do you want to wrastle?” even though we didn’t wrastle hardly ever anymore, but she did laugh and that was always my third favorite thing to do with her. That laugh of hers. All those changes to our home, all those decisions we made together that now she made alone, and couldn’t we have made those last decisions as a couple if this was how it was going to be? And she sold my stuff, the things I hadn’t gotten the chance to haul away, she’d had a god damn garage sale and she’d sold it, all of it. How did it feel to haggle over quarters and dimes as she liquidated my things, really, I want to know, how did it feel? Probably good, is the answer, probably it felt damn good. But I was entitled to half the money then, by god, if this was how she wanted it, I was entitled to half, even if it was fifty bucks, I wanted my twenty five, I wanted enough to buy a pizza and some beer after years of accumulating all that stuff on all those credit cards. And did she have to give the rest away to Goodwill? Did she think I hadn’t driven by and seen all my things piled up on the curb, with the sign taped to it — DONATIONS — like I was the dead husband instead of the divorced one?

“You’re a bit of a stalker huh?” Hutch says, and it’s only then that I realize I’m talking aloud, ranting to myself, that I’ve maybe spent too much time alone all these years.

I lean back in my seat, put my hands out like I’m being crucified. Hutch grins at my gesture. I say, “You can’t stalk your own wife, that’s not how it works.”

“Oh, brother, yes you can. Yes you sure as hell damn well can, I know about a hundred guys who did.” I tell him not to compare me to his inmate friends. I watch the road for about a dozen miles, watch the ditch unwind like one long ribbon. Eventually I say, “And don’t call me brother, Hutch.”

A hundred miles before home — “home,” a different word for me now, which used to mean our house south of Holke road across from a fire station and behind a grade school, but is now an extended stay motel on 40 Highway, bookended by cop bars — we stop at our last truck stop. It’s been a warm day which this time of year means a ripping wind up from the south, and our load is heavy and we didn’t have enough diesel to make it the rest of the way after our detour. We need fuel. That’s all this job is, really. One truck stop after another between chasing the white lines, refueling in some way or another.

I pull through the pumps and Hutch jumps out before I can even get stopped, like he is escaping me, as if I’d ever kidnap a stinky smart ass like him. He asks if I want anything but I ignore him. I check my phone, wondering if maybe she’s called or texted, even if it’s to call me a lying bastard or a wet brain. I’d take that right now from her, anything but for her to ignore me for forever, to write me out of her life, like I never existed, like we were never even together.

A hundred and fifty gallons later Hutch comes out and I climb up into the cab. He throws me a candy bar and says, “Here, since you’re being a moody little bitch I thought you could use this —” and then as he’s putting his seatbelt on he sees something across the lot that stops him from moving altogether. His jaw slacks and he goes quiet, even stops breathing, and his eyes go so wide that for a second I wonder if I’m soon going to be giving him mouth to mouth and pumping my hands into his chest.

“You’re not gonna die are ya?”

He points, his finger barely above the dash, and says, “My god holy fuckin shit, it’s them. What a small fuckin world, I can’t hardly believe it.”

“Who?” I say. “Who’s them, them who?”

“Right there,” he says, pointing, and it’s like they can sense themselves being noticed, being singled out, like it’s some kind of super power, and they look right at Hutch. They stop walking and stare. They too have gone in for a snack, a pair of women, one who is a little older, in her early 60’s maybe, and the other is in her late 30’s but it’s hard to tell from this distance. “Look at them. Fucking legends.”

“Legends?”

Hutch turns to me, fully faces me, and he’s so excited that he’s gesturing as he talks. “Back like, I don’t know, almost 20 years ago, there was this mother-daughter prostitute team in Indiana—”

“Oh I don’t like where this is going. Hutch, this story is gonna make me more depressed and I really don’t want to be more depressed than I already am.” But he keeps talking, like he doesn’t hear me at all, and says that they’d roam the truck stops and extended parking lots all over the state, that they’d find the most pervy truckers they could find, the kind who’d be into the idea of a threesome with them, and they’d get these fellas all wound up and ready to go, all excited, get them stripped down and naked in the back, “And then they’d fucking rob a motherfucker at knife point. Take cash, credit cards. Jewelry. Wedding rings. Guns. Whatever they could grab and stuff into their little duffle bag. Old boys in Indy would cry all over the CB radio when they’d have a run-in with these gals. I figured some psycho would’ve killed those two by now, that they’d eventually run out of luck and rob the wrong crazy ass bastard. Ha,” he slaps his thigh, “good for them.” He starts waving at them.

“Stop that, don’t wave them over, what if they’re still robbing people.”

“I actually seen ‘em work a Love’s one night, seen some feller chase ‘em across the lot naked as a hog, all rolls and cock and balls, all danglin and swingin and sweatin.”

Instead of coming over to us they haul ass across the lot and scurry into their car and drive out in a rush, maybe figuring us to be two maniacs from their past who they’d ripped off while they were just trying to survive. “You know what that is?” I say. “That’s two people looking out for each other. That’s true love.”

Hutch stares at me for a while, like he’s really turning my words over in his head. For a second it seems like he might actually agree with me. “Nah,” Hutch finally says, “that’s just what society does to some people.” I laugh and tell Hutch I didn’t figure him for a commie. He says, “Let’s get rollin, comrade, I miss my wife.”

Back in town I drop Hutch off in the Costco parking lot. I watch as he climbs down from the rig and his ass gives all the shoppers an inverted smile and he makes a big dramatic effort to pull the waist of his pants high up on his hips after his feet hit the ground. He’s so glad to be back ashore. For a moment it seems like he might drop to his knees and kiss the earth. Instead he looks at me and shrugs, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t wave goodbye, only turns and ambles over to his wife, waiting for him in an old Crown Vic, the kind detectives drive. Hutch lowers himself inside and to passersby it might look like they’re discussing which crime scene they should head to.

Twenty minutes later I park my rig in the empty parking lot across from the extended stay. Home. Is there any other word designed to fuck you up more? I go in and shower and shave and then sit on the edge of the bed. I get my phone out and start to type my wife’s name in the search engine, to look her up and see if maybe she’d at least be open to hearing my voice on the phone. But I already know the answer. And what does it even mean to look someone up these days? It’s not like it used to be, just open a White Pages and flip to a name. Nowadays it’s all cellphones and social media pages, and people can block you on all of it and I guess that means they don’t want you to exist to them when they do that. For you to be, at best, a ghost. I still love her. That’ll never change, never, even if I make it to my 75th birthday and make a run to the store to buy all 37 pints of ice cream, hold up my end of the bargain. But what the fuck does it mean to love someone who doesn’t love you back? I want to call Hutch and ask him because he of all people is wrestling with this one too, but he and I have talked enough. After sitting with my eyes closed against the headboard for a while I come up with something of an answer. If Hutch and I go on the road again together I’ll tell him what I’ve come up with, even if he chews on it and spits it out at me feet the way he likes to do. I’ll say loving someone who doesn’t love you anymore means you keep that shit to yourself now, I guess. The only way I can show love to my wife the rest of the way — my ex-wife — is to give her what she wants from me. To do the hard thing for once and stay the hell out of her way, to not call her, to not drop in on her, to stop trying to convince her she should feel something other than what she does. To not make it about me. To not look her up, to not even have that knowledge in my brain because that’s how she wants it. Respect her wishes, I guess, probably for the first time in our whole relationship. I can hear what she’d say to this if she could read my thoughts. “You were always a slow learner,” she’d say.

And I’d say, “That’s me, sugar, forever two steps behind and runnin in circles.”

“And always such the martyr,” she’d say.

“Yeah,” I say aloud, to her voice in my head. “But no. Not just now. For once, no.” And I guess no one knows that that’s the truth but me. And I guess that’s how that sort of thing is supposed to work. Maybe that’s something close to true love.

I lay back and call my dispatcher. I tell him to find me my next load out. He asks where I’m hauling from. I tell him. I say, “Home.”

Dad died spraying weeds. My wife found him five days after he died, his body curled up into a ball behind the mower, near the spot where the wildflowers show up every year. His fingers were wrapped around the nozzle of the sprayer he’d filled with old engine oil to kill some brush near the fence line. A clump of choke weed grabbed at his legs, as if the earth were trying to absorb him. He would have laughed at this detail. He would have quoted the Bible, would have said, “That’s some Ecclesiastes shit right there.” Here’s what he would not have liked: the notion that some critters had picked at him before Holly found him. He would have hated the thought that parts of his face had been eaten and shit out by opossums or raccoons or field rats or especially birds. Of all the types of shit, he hated bird shit the most.

Here’s another thing he wouldn’t have liked: that I’ve slept the last two nights on the back porch. He would have been furious with me for the reason Holly kicked me out of our home. He would have said, “What the hell’s the matter with you? Didn’t I tell you not to fuck up your life?” He would have said this like it was that easy, like he hadn’t paid me this advice as we sat drinking on that porch when I was thirteen. A year older than he was when he started, so maybe he figured it was progress.

Holly’s feet crunch over the dirt and gravel as she walks around to the back porch to find me where she knew she’d find me. I fake like I’m asleep and I hear her stop, can feel her sizing me up, can feel her holding her breath, trying to figure out what she’s seeing, if I’m still me or if I’ve become a thing, like Dad. “Don’t do that to me,” she says, seeing right through me, like she always has. I sit up.

“Will you go in there with me?” I say.

She looks at me like she wants to leave, like she’s seen all she needs to see and doesn’t need anything more. I’m surprised when she says, “Okay.”

This is what we see inside the motor home: a tin pot full of red beans and rice on the stove; an old pair of jeans laid out over the arm of the sofa; yellowed white bath towels on the floor that still smell of vomit; work boots by the door; a thrift store paperback face down beside a paper plate with crumbs scattered like bird shot; a styrofoam cup with a few ounces of gin at the bottom; pill bottles; his wallet.

I open the cabinets and they are bare except for a few canned goods and mouse droppings. Of all the kinds of shit, I have always hate rodent pellets the most. Holly stands near the door as I grab a can of Vienna sausages. In all the years we’ve been together, with all our history behind us, those decades, it has come down to this: this is what I have to offer her amongst the dirt and dust and dried vomit and crumbs and old booze. I say, “Are you hungry? I could heat these up for us?” She laughs even though I’m not trying to be funny.

“I’d rather starve,” she says. I take his wallet and we walk back outside.

Here is what he did: he made a sandwich and poured himself a drink and ate his lunch and then took enough oxy to kill two or three men. Then he went outside to spray the weeds.

Here’s what I do: I walk with my wife while she’s still my wife. I focus on every step as if I’m learning to walk drunk again for the first time, even though it’s been weeks since I’ve had anything. She walks me to the spot where she found him. Oil rests atop the mud puddles. If I ever tell this story to someone who doesn’t know better I’ll make this part into a happy ending. I’ll tell how she took me back. I’ll make a joke about it, say she gave me three second chances and thank God because it finally stuck. I’ll talk about how the wildflowers keep growing out there despite the oil Dad sowed into the ground. I’ll say that he left a note in his wallet, one that explained everything and said goodbye. I won’t say that what I really found was a grocery list. I won’t tell what really happened. I hate that ending.

The last time I saw him we were each in our early 30’s and he claimed to own a tattoo parlor that was also a bar. I’m no sanitation expert but I was certain this combo violated some kind of regulation. But all I did was nod and say, “That’s cool, man.” I could never call him on his lies, couldn’t bear the thought of embarrassing him. Few people ever made me laugh harder. Few people hugged me as tight as he did. Why take these fantasies from him, I thought. He was escaping something with them. We all need our escape hatches. He died in 2021. They said it was the alcohol withdrawals that killed him, but this sounds like a lie he would tell if he had been alive to tell it.

Matt. He died two months later. He came home from work and passed out on the couch. His girlfriend said she figured he’d had a long day, no big deal, that he needed to sleep off some stress. He woke up while she was cooking dinner, went into the kitchen and started speaking gibberish to her, talking all kinds of nonsense, slurring his words, even crying a little as she cooked, I heard. She figured maybe he was drinking again, that he’d spent the afternoon overdoing it and hadn’t sobered up yet. She told him to go lay back down, that she’d tell him when the food was done. He’d get something on his stomach and then later she could chew his ass, give him some tough love when he was ready for it. But when she went to wake him up his eyes were already open. He was staring up at the ceiling as if he was as surprised by his own death as she was. His mouth open as if to say one last thing.

DJ moved in with Matt senior year. Lived in the garage where he slept on a pallet made of two sleeping bags and a box springs, the same place where we’d all three have our band practice. This was DJ’s home after his parents got evicted from their duplex and lived for a time down at the City Union Mission, and then in their car. Matt’s dad got out of jail that year. None of us ever knew what he was in for. That was a secret Matt kept from everyone. The thing I remember most about his dad is that he walked around wearing a Vietnam Vet ball cap. He came home and slept on the couch until he violated his parole and was led out of the house in bracelets by a pair of cops, shoved into a patrol car nosed in front of the garage where we’d later practice the one song we wrote together, composing it as a speed metal screamer of a song, 160 beats per minute, called “I Don’t Care At All,” and we could never play it in tempo. But we played it as if it was the most important song ever written. We turned the amps way up and paced in front of the sound waves while I strummed power chords and Matt plucked the same three base notes. The two of us would meet in front of the kick drum while DJ pounded the sticks down on the snare and cymbals. We’d put our faces inches apart and scream into a microphone that wasn’t even plugged into a PA. DJ would scream too, his body trapped inside the kit, his bed leaning against the wall beside us, the box springs slumping like a drunk watching a talentless band at a dive bar. Our voices reached out for random notes — they’d echo out into the valley across from Matt’s house. We wanted everyone to hear us hollering out our lyrics. To hear those cries of ours.

            This photo of you was taken in 1988. You are 27 years old here, standing in front of a Chevy pick-up, a cigarette is dangling between your lips and the smoke from it is rising up so that it looks like a ghost is posing next to you. You are grinning at me from inside there, your mouth tilted beneath your mustache with the kind of look you would give us whenever you knew something the rest of us didn’t, as if you are fully aware you have already lived half your life by the time this picture has been taken.

            At least two hundred people must have showed up to your wake, all of them holding their hands out one at time, telling those of us who stood in front of your casket how they knew you. I held myself together until a woman twice your age came walking up, smiling at me as she wrapped her arms around Mom and then me, whispering as she came close, saying, “I used to diaper your daddy.”

            The night you died you woke from a dreamless sleep and went straight to the toilet where you began to vomit. You clutched your chest instead of your stomach. Mom noticed this. She said, “I’m taking you to the Emergency Room.”

            “Can we talk about it later?” you said. You took in a deep breath and heaved again and after that you said, “I’m kind of in the middle of something.” When you were done you stumbled out of the bathroom and told Mom to put the phone down. You told her you were fine. You said if she called an ambulance out to the house that you’d just send them away.

            After that you went down to the garage to smoke. Two days later I would stand right there where you had stood that night. I’d look over your workbench at the piles of mail and paper coffee cups, spare keys and cracked sunglasses, old lottery tickets, empty packets of Marlboro. On the corner of your workbench lay a small blue flashlight older than me. I hadn’t seen this relic in twenty-five years but I knew it had once belonged to Mom’s dad; I knew that you had stood near his things like this the day he died all those years ago and that you had tucked it into your back pocket before you forced yourself to leave back then. You emerged from his garage that day and took me by the hand and put me in the car and we drove up to the liquor store where I waited in the front seat as you went in and bought a 24 pack of Coors. I remember seeing that exact flashlight peeking at me from your back pocket as you walked inside. When we got back to the house I watched you hand out cans to the family as they arrived one at a time, and I remember thinking about how much it reminded me of the communion I saw at Mass every Sunday. As I stood over your things the day after you took your last breath, I reached out and took one of the Marlboro packets between my fingers. It crumbled when I held it, empty and thin, and I waved it in front of my nose and breathed you in. I slid that packet into my glove box when I left. I’ll never take it out of there. I halfway wonder if one of my own children might find it years from now whenever something happens to me, and I wonder if they’ll know what it is or if they’ll think I had secretly taken up the habit.

            You showered after having a smoke. There was a pain high between your ribs. It was a new pain. So you said, “Okay,” to Mom as you stepped out of the shower. “I guess I’ll have to let you drive me.”  You slipped into a pair of boxer shorts and then you sat in the recliner you had not long ago dragged next to your side of the bed in place of a night stand. You ran your electric shaver over your face. Mom combed your hair for you. She’d part your hair and comb down the back. When she was done she would move away to get into her own pair of jeans. That’s when it happened.

            When they finally let us see you that night you had tubes growing out of your mouth and they told us that they were sorry but they couldn’t remove them until the coroner examined you. They said this was because you were so young and had no known health conditions. You’d have hated this, your mouth agape in this way and tiny stains of blood outlining the edges of your lips, and a part of me expected you to reach up to your face and pull those tubes out and toss them into the trash and turn to us and say, “Let’s go, let’s get the hell out of here.”          

            “Can you close his eyes?” Mom said. “Can you please just close his eyes?” The nurse nodded and stepped forward and pressed his fingers over your eyelids. A droplet fell from each eye when he did this. No one could look away from you when this happened, the drops sliding down your cheeks and clinging like dew to the whiskers you’d missed when you’d shaved.

            Mom wanted your wedding ring before we left the hospital. “I bought that for him at Montgomery Wards thirty years ago,” she said of this ring. “He told me not to spend the money but I didn’t care.”  She had trouble slipping it from your finger. Then she laughed. Later, as I lay in my bed and watched the bars of sunlight grow through the blinds, as I tried to replay your voice in my head over and over because I am terrified that I might one day forget the sound of it, it occurred to me that this was the last time Mom would ever laugh in your presence. I asked her what was funny. She said, “It was a size too big. So instead of having it sized, he just bent it.” I asked how. I asked if he had put it on and slipped his finger between the clamps of his vice and spun the bar until it was forever crimped below his knuckle. Mom nodded. She told us you said you were proud of the fact that it would never come off. We were all laughing then. And crying. It was hard to tell which.

            We all walked out together. We looked up as we moved. A handful of stars watched us behind a ripped black canvas of clouds. It started to rain as we all got to our cars. The skies poured down globs of heavy rain that burst out like tiny bombs around us. You wouldn’t have liked this part of the story; you’d have thought it was the one part I made up. You’d have said I couldn’t resist. You’d have wanted me to take it out.

            Three years ago you lost your own father. Your suit didn’t fit. Somehow it was too big on you, too baggy in the shoulders and waist. You’d lost weight even though you’d always been thin. So you bought a new one, a plain black one that fit just right and you wore it as we stood there at his service and carried him up the hill on a snowy March day to the place where we’d leave him. You’d pick up all the spent shells after the men from the American Legion fired twenty-one blank rounds toward the tree branches, and you’d come up to me and place one in my hand. I put my forehead against the shoulder of this new suit as you put your hand over mine, this suit you would wear as we carried you down the hill on a warm and windy April day five days after that night at the hospital, the same hill where you’d once sat with your own grandfather when you were a boy and the two of you watched the trains scrape over the nearby rails.

            You sat there in your recliner that night. You were showered and shaved, your hair was combed, and Mom stood on the other side of the bed. She looked down for her shoes. When she would look up you would be lowering yourself onto the bed and she would being witnessing your very last second of life on this earth. You would be there, on your side of the bed, both hands low against your chest, almost at your stomach, and you would make eye contact with her as you whispered the final thing you’d ever say. She would hear the rattle of your final breath; the sound of this would send her fleeing, running out of the house, screaming as she went next door, yelling for help.

            In the second that you stood from your chair, just before the pain really hit you one last time, you had decided to push yourself onto the bed because you thought maybe if you could just rest there for a minute that you might feel better and that everything would be all right. You were so tired, you thought to yourself, and while you waited on Mom to finish getting dressed you thought it might be good to rest your eyes for just a moment before heading out. You knew the doctors were going to admit you. It was going to be a long night, you thought. That’s when you felt the final twinge of pain you’d ever feel, and you spoke during your last breath. You said the most ordinary of all words. You said, “Oh.”

            I got to the hospital at the same time as the ambulance. They pulled into the circle drive as I found a parking spot and eyed you from a hundred feet away. I got out at the same time as the paramedics. They threw open the double doors like a pair of hollow shutters and they rolled you out of there, walked you inside and around a corner. I ran up to the ambulance and looked inside. “What were you looking for?” you’d have said. And I would have told you I wasn’t sure. One of the paramedics came walking up behind me. He asked if I was all right. “That’s my dad,” was all I could say, pointing inside. He stepped close to me and told me that they had worked hard on you, that they had gotten your heart going. He told me you were fighting. It wouldn’t be until weeks later, until this exact moment as I type these thoughts into words, that I have pushed away from my desk and sat here and realized that I was the last person of those you loved who saw you while you still had a heartbeat.

            As I sit here at this desk and think about this, I am drawn to this picture of you again, at you looking back at me from another time and place, and I trace my finger over your face and I try to imagine what happened right after this picture was taken. I imagine it was Mom who took it. “Get one picture of me with this pick-up before we sell it,” is what I hear you saying before it was taken. You loved that Chevy. It was the one you and Mom drove around town in, the one you camped out of, worked out of, a truck in which you stored boots and hammers and fishing poles and six packs and cartons of cigarettes. I imagine myself standing next to Mom, near her knee, and after it was taken I came running up to you. You would be able to get one more drag from your cigarette before I got there and you flicked it away to burn out in the gravel as you crouched down and picked me up. You would hold me close to you, my arms wrapping around your neck, my cheek grating against your whiskers, and you would press me tight against your chest so that the heart of your four year old was aligned with your own heart, and you would rest your chin on top of my head. Our hearts would beat across from each other like the intake valves beneath the hood of that Chevy. “No,” you would say if you were reading this over my shoulder right now. “Change that. Say our heartbeats drummed. Say each beat drummed into one another as if to keep the other going.”  That’s right, I say to my dad as he looks out at me from that photo. I tell him it’s like he was trying to feel my heartbeat with his own.

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