I stared at the phone, at my sister. Jo’s pouting lips twisted into that signature grin that always spelled trouble in Dad’s films, the same expression my half-brother had worn when he rose from my living room couch with a copy of Killer Cassady in his hands.
I hated that look, even when I saw it in a mirror.
“Do you know the number, Tommy?” My name hung there in the quiet room, dripping with sarcasm. “Or do you need me to dial it for you?” I didn’t move, and Jo lifted the handset. “And you thought you were so smart. Thought you’d come up here and set what’s left of your family straight, buy them off for the price of a couple dinners.” It was dark in the room, but her eyes were shining laser-bright.
“Hey now… let’s think about this,” she said suddenly, replacing the handset. “Did you ever think of becoming a producer, Tommy? Just how much money did you make from that book, anyway?”
Jo’s eyes burned with confidence. She was trying to cut me down to nothing. My hands were shaking. I smelled my own sweat.
And then my world went black and white. I entered the world of Wrong Turn. I entered Dad’s world. I was in some cheap whore’s apartment, and I was beginning to understand that a complete idiot had outsmarted me once again. Jo’s eyes were slicing me to ribbons while her laughter marked me a sucker.
And then Jo wasn’t laughing anymore. My fingers locked around the phone. The cord bit into her neck, and I tugged on the phone like a fisherman playing a big one on a whispering reel. A tight smile bloomed on my lips as I tried to cut off my father’s hissing laughter. The phone was hard and reassuring in my hands and I couldn’t wait for the cord to do its work because then I was going to smash the whole thing against my sister’s face, my father’s smile.
Her eyes weren’t shining now. They were almost empty, nearly colorless. And she wasn’t laughing anymore. She couldn’t laugh; she couldn’t even scream.
And then the door to Room 602 swung open.
There — live, in living color — stood my father.
Even in that moment I knew the man was my half-bother. The hammerhead-colored suit told me that. But it was startling to see his face twisted just like Dad’s had been during the climax of Wrong Turn, a mask of violent desperation. And I froze up seeing him so close. He wasn’t a man in black & white on a television screen, but a man with a face red from alcohol and hurt and hate and pride, a man with knuckles the color of spoiled meat.
He was the same man who stepped into his kitchen one night and found a charming Frenchman fawning over his wife.
He wasn’t thinking straight, that man.
He wasn’t thinking smart.
And I realized with complete clarity that I hadn’t been smart in coming here.
I had barely dropped the phone when he laid into me. I should have known it would be a left hook. I should have seen it coming, because I’d seen it coming in all those movies. But I didn’t see it and it dropped me.
He wasn’t finished, of course. He took me into the bathroom, where it seemed there was an acre of gleaming tile.
I remember the sound of a human skull used as a hammer.
I remember my sister’s screams as she pulled Mr. Wrong Turn off of me. I remember her yelling something about a goose and a golden egg. And then I remember the hatred in her eyes. “You take this as a warning,” she said. “You stay out of our way. Maybe, if you do that, we’ll stay out of yours.”
The man with my father’s face nodded solemnly, cracking his knuckles and grinning the way a man grins after a satisfying meal. “Well,” he said by way of conclusion, “it looks like Dad finally gave you a beating, after all.”
I passed out for a while. Then I stumbled to the bed and curled up in the bedspread. Somewhere in the middle of the night I made it into the bathtub and cleaned up. I soaked in the steaming water for a long time, eyes closed — the right one swollen shut — and when I opened my eye the bath water was pink with blood.
At the end of Wrong Turn, Tom Cassady is driving. But he’s got no place to go. All his life, Tom Cassady had nowhere to go. His road was one straight line. He killed a man with his fists and did time for it, but that didn’t change him. He lost his wife and family, but that didn’t change him. He got another wife, and he was the same way with her that he was with my mother, but wife number two was afraid to do anything about it. And he went back to work in the movies, where he pretended to lose his grip, pretended to hit people, shoot them, hurt them in a dozen inventive ways.
It wasn’t much of a stretch.
One day Tom Cassady didn’t wake up, and the thing that had burned so hot inside him was dead. But it wasn’t gone, nor was it forgotten. I remembered it. So did Jo. We remembered it every time someone discovered who our father was. We remembered how that simple knowledge could make a person’s eyes shine, the way the desk clerk’s eyes had shined in the lobby of the Cal-Neva when she recognized me.
We all want to do that. Put the shine in someone’s eyes, I mean. Sometimes, what we’ll do for that particular thrill amazes me.
I guess that’s why I wrote the book.
I was five when Dad went to San Quentin. Jo was seven. As far as I know, he never laid a hand on me. Never touched Jo, either. I don’t remember the man, to tell the truth. He never visited us after his release, never even sent a birthday card. Most of the time I spent with him, he was on a television or movie screen and I was eating popcorn.
The book was a lie. That’s what Jo and my half-brother had been able to hold over my head. I didn’t know my father. But the book was something else, too. It was the little piece of Dad that I had carried inside me for thirty-five years. It was the shadow of anger that always churned in my gut when I tried to assure myself that I was a thinker. Every key I pushed on that computer keyboard was a little jab. Every word I spoke on that book tour was a little knife. And when I cold-cocked that talk show host, I was thinking that I was going to make a million eyes shine all at once, all across America.
Because the talk show guy had pushed my button. He’d asked about Dad exploiting his crime in order to boost his career. And then he’d held up a copy of Killer Cassady, and he’d said, “Like father, like son?”
I couldn’t answer, because the thing that had burned so hot in Dad took hold of me then. I could only react, and for a short instant everything felt so very right. It was the way I felt when I wrapped the telephone cord around Jo’s neck. The way Jo felt when she saw our half-brother standing there in the doorway. The way he felt when he tore into me.
I don’t know why I thought I could steer clear of Jo and get away with the whole thing. But I took the chance. I dug Dad up. I brought him back.
But I knew, soaking in the bathtub in Room 602, that it was time to bury him. After thirty-five years, it was time to get off Dad’s road.
I had to make sure that I was off it for good. I got out of the tub. My wallet was on the floor and I picked it up. A few other credit cards were now missing, but they hadn’t touched my cash. I took the money, dropped the wallet on the floor.
I managed to get dressed. My face didn’t look too bad, if you could ignore the shut eye and the gash above it. My lips were puffy and kind of purple, but my nose looked in pretty good shape. Overall, the swelling almost had an odd symmetry. I didn’t feel very hot, but seeing that my brother hadn’t managed to crack any tile with my head made me feel a little better.