I said, “The door was unlocked.”
Sin — at this point he wasn’t but sixty-three years old — looked at the door. He said, “It used to be that the door locked when I turned that little knob up and down. Now up and down means unlocked. I don’t like this one bit. I can’t keep up. Where’s Patricia? I miss seeing your wife.”
I walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, just out of nosiness. Nothing seemed unusual, except that he had an inordinate amount of fast food — acquired condiments stacked neatly on the top three shelves, categorized. There was no McDonald’s, Burger King, Long John Silver’s, Arby’s, Sonic, Hardee’s, Krystal, Jack in the Box, or Taco Bell within fifty miles of my childhood home. He had some from a place called Swensons, which I knew from my travels only existed in and around the Akron, Ohio, area, some six hundred miles from Calloustown. I got a can of ginger ale out and said, “What’s with all the mayonnaise and mustard? What’s with the horsey sauce, taco sauce, three pepper sauce, and ketchup?”
I walked back in. Sin said, “You still married to Patricia?” He said, “Listen, you should read some of the articles in these newspapers I’ve been reading. There’s a shoe-hoarding man in South Dakota who owns a white slave, and it’s legal! The slave even says he likes it! His name’s Thompson, and he says he’s working to be in the Guinness Book of Records for most shoes shined in a lifetime. There’s a picture of them in here,” he said, picking up one of the papers, “and the South Dakota guy has Thompson wearing a choke collar, on a leash. America!”
I didn’t say, “Those stories are made up, Dad.” I didn’t say, “Don’t believe everything you read, Sin.” I said, “I bet the slave owner’s got something on Thompson,” because I didn’t know what else to say.
“Kind of like your mother had something on me. Is that what you’re saying?”
I shook my head. I grabbed the channel changer and turned on the TV, even though I knew intuitively that it wouldn’t work. Sure enough, the radio came on. I said, “I’m allergic to shellfish.”
“Back to the question,” Sin said. “I have figured out a way to garnish my sandwiches without having to pay for it. It saves me a fortune. See, I’ll drive to one of those places, go inside — that’s where everyone makes a mistake, going to the drive-through — and buy the cheapest thing on the menu to go. Then I walk over and absolutely overload my bag with packets of condiments. I’ve been meaning to get me a few empty jars and spend one of my nights squeezing what I have into them so it won’t take up so much space.”
I said, “The price of gas, Sin.” I said, “Why am I here again?”
My father shook his head. He reached up and pulled at a patch of gray hair that grew mischievously to the left of his crown. He walked over to the window and looked out at my car. He said, “I thought you were going to bring me some pussy. Hey, you want to go throw some tin cans at a BB pistol out in the front yard?”
I sat down on the couch. I looked up at the photographs my father had put on the wall since my last visit — all of them pictures of various birds one might find browsing a Yankee feeder: goldfinches, sparrows, cardinals, bluebirds, Carolina wrens. I said, “You mean take the gun out and shoot at cans, like when I was a kid?” There were also photographs of crows, hawks, blue jays, and woodpeckers, a lone osprey — birds that didn’t visit traditional feeders.
“You’re not a kid anymore, Duster,” my father said.
“Why’re these birds on the wall? Are you into birding nowadays?” I got off the couch and corrected a frame. I said, “Who took these photos? They look professional.”
My father looked at the frames on the wall as if he’d never noticed them being there. He raised his eyebrows up three times, then squinted. He said, “I was hoping you’d bring someone with you. I always kind of liked Patricia’s mother. She’s classy, you know what I mean? I mean, Patricia’s mother’s classy.”
My wife’s parents had been married for forty-plus years and from what I could tell thrived unapologetically up in Wise, Virginia. They keep a sign in their front yard that goes VIRGINIA is FOR LOVERS, like it was some kind of non-argumentative statement on par with Rain Falls Downward. I said, “I think Patricia’s mom’s out of your league, for one. And she’s unobtainable for two. Three, Patricia’s dad has never liked you, and he would kill you. He was a sniper in the old days, you know. He was a sniper in the Army, or whatever. He shot actual people. He didn’t throw things at his own gun.”
My father walked out the door without saying anything. He got in the passenger side of my car and sat there. Of course most people I would tell this story later would think, “That man is going through the first stages of dementia!” They would say, “He’s the kind of man you read about for two days under the ‘Editor’s Picks’ section of the MSN homepage!” I was used to it, though. I went out to the car, opened the driver’s side, and said, “You want to go to Worm’s Bar?”
“After,” he said. “I didn’t call you to drive all the way down here to take me to the bar. Hell, I can walk down there if I want to. Or hitch a ride. I can drive my own truck if I feel like the fucking cop is taking a nap. I can get on the riding lawn mower.”
“After what?” I said. I went ahead and got in the car and cranked it. I didn’t feel sad or indifferent or happy or excited. I’d been going through this routine for a while with Sin. I said, “Where we going?”
My father said, “I need to go see a doctor. I mean, yeah, after Worm’s, I need to see a doctor. I’m afraid with the way things are going, I might live forever. I don’t want to not die, Dust. Who wants to live forever?”
_______
The hot-water tap turned cold, and vice versa. When he tried to quit smoking and put on a nicotine patch, it made him crave cigarettes more. One time he told me that his vices began at age seventeen with heroin, which led him to cocaine, which led him to marijuana, which led him to bourbon, which led him to the occasional domestic beer. My father swore he bought my mother a parrot that never learned to talk, and rescued one of those non-barking Basenji dogs that ended up howling all the time, then running off. His mousetraps worked better without peanut butter on the little tray.
I don’t like to think of myself as a bad son, but I drove my father straight to one of those emergency care clinics out off Highway 78 instead of the bar. I had called up Patricia from the driveway, for my father said he needed to go back inside and apply layers of black bloodroot salve on his torso and limbs before hitting daylight for too long, what with the lesions and hives and shingles that arrived like bad cousins, one after the other. To my wife I said, “I don’t know why I’m here.”
She said, “Yes. That’s one of the great existential questions. Sometimes when I’m unraveling, it’s the only thought that goes through my mind.”
I told her how my father seemed listless and depressed, that he looked like he could no longer take the world, that he’d given up on fighting. “He wants to go to a bar, so I told him we could go there for a while. But in reality, I want to take him to see a dermatologist. Can you get on the Internet and Google something like ‘Dermatologist/Calloustown, South Carolina/unexplained neurological disorders/ex-wife married an oyster shucker,’ and find out if there’s any kind of medical center within a fifty-mile range?”