Catch
My mother saw it.
My dad, for some reason, could not.
If he could, everything would have been different.
Harley spent the night, but was gone before I got up in the morning. He had a job at a warehouse all set up by some of his other prison buddies, but he hadn’t gotten a place in Albuquerque just yet. He found an old Airstream trailer for sale and parked it in the parking lot of the warehouse. He got my dad a job at the warehouse as well. I thought it would make my mother happy, my dad getting a job and becoming a ‘citizen’ again. “A productive citizen. That’s my goal,” my dad would say. “I don’t want to do anything fancy. Just make enough for bread and take care of you and buddy there.”
My mother kept working at the laundry, like always. She said she would quit as soon as they were sure the job at the warehouse would hold. She squinted her whiskey eyes when she talked about ‘The Job’, as if it were not a real job. Even though he came home tired and sweaty from unloading trucks. It seemed real enough to me.
Sometimes, he didn’t come home until late. Sometimes, until after midnight. There was a strangeness to him then. His voice was growly and slurry, and his eyes would coast over me, not really seeing me. He smiled different. And he stank.
I understood that these times he had been out with Harley. That they had ‘tied one on’.
On those nights my mother was very quiet. She sat at the table in the kitchen turning the pages of a book or a magazine while the blue light of the television flashed in the living room. I would sit on the kitchen floor shoving my Hotwheels around their orange track and watching her out of the corner of my eye. Had she gotten smaller? Was she shrinking? Sometimes my heart pounded. I was scared without knowing why. I loved her more than I loved myself.
Those nights I did not like my dad. I peeked in on him, slumped in the battered armchair in front of the TV, smiling that new stupid smile, nodding along with the voices on the TV until his head stopped coming up and he was asleep. I wanted to kick him, to punch him.
Other nights it was all right. He bought himself a glove and a bat and we played ball out in the lumpy vacant lot. High pop-flies lost in the evening sky. The chirping of crickets that fell silent when you came too close. His skinny arm lofting the ball and the crack of the bat.
“Great catch, buddy.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Love and death.
Harley came by sometimes. Those were the worst nights. Sitting around the table and listening to his stories. Listening to my mother try to laugh. And watching him watch her. Was my father getting smaller as well? Were both of my parents shrinking? Harley was huge, his belly sagging over his belt, his carp-arm swimming over the table to shovel more food onto his plate. After dinner they sat in the living room emptying a bottle of Jack.
My mother would walk with me on those nights, down to the liquor store. The evenings were warm. The ground kept the day’s heat inside itself. The ground pulsed with heat like skin. You could feel the earth breathe. We went the long way and under the street lamps I stared at her. The filament glow of her sand-colored hair, her crooked front tooth when she smiled down at me.
Sitting on the curb in front of the liquor store, sucking on my creamsickle, I asked her the question. “Is Harley a good man?”
She looked at me like she’d never seen me before. “I don’t know . . . I guess he is. What do you think?” She was always asking me that. And she always meant it.
“I think he’s a fat dumb lying bastard. And his stories suck.”
She put her hand on my head. I loved it when she did that. I knew it meant that I’d done something right.
The bad nights came around more often. The weather started to change. School started, and the high desert winter came, the cold cutting wind sweeping off the mountains, the dirty scum of snow and black ice at the curb. My dad would drop me off at school. In the warming car he wanted to talk. Sometimes I would talk to him. Sometimes—after a bad night—I would just stare out the window. He never got angry at me. Even though I wanted him to. I wanted him to shake me and yell at me and ask me what was wrong with me. Then I would have told him how much I hated Harley. How Harley was eating them up. How they were getting smaller, and I could see it.
He never got angry.
