Catch
My dad.
Not just Some Jerk.
A man who could catch a baseball bare-handed.
A man who knew how to break glass quietly by taping it, and then pulling it away in a single piece.
A man who had spent five years in prison sharing a cell with Harley Madson. He called himself Harley, but my dad said his real name was Kimberley. His parents had wanted a girl.
My dad said a lot of things.
In prison you end up owing people. My dad owed Harley, for reasons I would never know. For reasons he didn’t talk about. So when Harley showed up at our doorstep and needed a place to stay the night, he stayed.
The two weeks before Harley came were the best fourteen days of my life. My new dad was gone all day looking for work. He had been a mechanic, and he had been a janitor, and a pump jockey, and a barback and a dishie and a short order cook. But he had also been a felon, and that was what people saw. Like an angry red scar down the side of his face. Like a missing eye. Felon. Jailbird. Thief. Liar. Dirt.
In the evening we played catch. He fixed the chain on my bike and showed me how to patch a tire. He sat in a lawn chair on the doorstep, and my mother sat in a lawn chair next to him, and between them their hands were linked. They didn’t talk much, but sometimes my mother’s eyes glittered, and sometimes my father would lean over to her and whisper something, and then they would go inside. I would hit the jumps on my BMX and fly up into the hot red desert air and come down easy. I would fall and not wince. I tried not to think of him touching her. I could never get used to that. Holding hands was okay, but inside they did something else. Something you turned the lights out and locked the door for, and I didn’t like it.
It was the price I paid for having a dad.
That was the way I saw it. It was like dues.
My mother had hair the color of postcard sand, and brown-gold eyes. Like whiskey in the bottle, with the sun coming through it. When Harley came my dad got the door, and in the kitchen my mother, who was straining macaroni noodles, closed her whiskey eyes and put her hand to her forehead, like she had a fever. I was standing in the middle of the kitchen saying, “Mommommom.” Because my inside clock had gone off and I had to make sure dinner was coming in say the next five minutes or so.
In the front room my dad’s voice said: “Honey, is there enough for a fourth?”
A new voice said: “Don’t worry about me, David. I don’t—”
“Honey?”
My mom opened her eyes again and said, “Of course there is!” in a sweet voice that didn’t match the empty, awful look in her eyes. She blinked like someone trying to wake up.
I wanted to go in the other room to see who it was, but somehow I was scared. I didn’t like the way my mother was acting, and I didn’t like the way my dad’s voice sounded. Weak. Like a kid’s voice.
“Honey, come on in here and meet Harley Madson. We shared a cell in Folsom.”
We sat around the table and ate macaroni and cheese and drank Pepsis. Harley did most of the talking. He was a big man with an even bigger voice, and a tattoo of a carp swimming down his right arm—splashing out at the elbow and darting toward his wrist. My new dad laughed at all of Harley’s jokes, which mostly went over my head, being about women or prison, two things in which I was inexperienced. My mother laughed, but her laugh was polite and stiff. Harley kept looking at her in a way that made me want to stab him with my fork. Her cheeks were red.
“Time for bed, champ.” My dad winked at me. I didn’t want to leave. I felt somehow like I needed to stay. To keep an eye on things. But I had never made my dad angry. I didn’t know him angry, and I was afraid (with that instinct of a child) of what I might see.
I lay in the dark and listened to Harley’s big laugh, my father’s little laugh, and the polite titter of my mother. Harley had been nice to me. He’d winked at me and told my mom how big I was and how strong I looked. If anyone else had done those things, I would have liked them. But I could not like Harley. There was something about him. Something that then I could not put into words, but now I can. Every expression Harley made was a different mask. His face was not his own. His expressions were exact, and the emotions they conveyed went no deeper than the muscles he had trained to take their shape. His eyes watched from behind. Flat blue eyes the color of faded denim. His eyes were murderous, even crinkled at the edges in a smile. Anyone should have seen he meant no one in this wide world any good.
