“Those stoolheads are my father. At least, one of them is. I’d think if a boy rapes you and makes you pregnant, his name would stick out in your memory.”
Another silence, followed by an impatient exhalation. “Mimi’s brother had a silly frat boy kind of name—Sport or Slick, something like that.”
“Skip?”
“That’s him.”
“You told me Mimi’s last name was Rotkeillor, but the Skip on Shannon’s list is Prescott.”
“What are you, Perry Mason? Maybe I mixed up my Mimis. All I remember is he had a syringe he used to shoot vodka into oranges.”
“Was another one named William?”
“Why, at your age, are you suddenly obsessed by sperm donors?”
“Shannon looked through old yearbooks and came up with five names and I need to be certain they’re correct.”
“Why for God’s sake?”
I had no answer. “Why didn’t you tell me my fathers’ names?”
She made a bitter laugh sound. “Hell, Sam, you never asked.”
Good point. “I’m asking now.”
“There was a Billy. And Jake. A big kid named something like Bubba.”
“Babe?”
“That’s it.”
“How about Cameron?”
“Maybe.”
“I have to be sure.”
“One of them was named Cameron.” She paused. “Sam, what difference can it possibly make now?”
It’s my theory that most humans only make two or three decisions in a lifetime. The rest is random luck. At that moment, I made a decision.
“Lydia,” I said, “it’s time I met Dad.”
Saturday morning I fell into a clitoral fantasy at Tex and Shirley’s Pancake House. Over cheese blintzes I discovered Linda Ronstadt sitting next to me while my hand under the table dipped into her silken panties. As I rubbed lightly, side to side across the top, Linda lifted a section of orange to her mouth and with dainty teeth bit off the very tip. Drops of orange juice sprayed across the fine fuzz on her upper lip. A low, Spanish moan rose from her breasts. I went into my world-renowned fingertip figure-eight maneuver.
“More coffee?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll bring your check.” I hate reality. There’s nothing so deflating as a waitress pulling the plug on a daydream. It’s almost worse than not finishing the real thing.
Linda Ronstadt has been a regular part of my erotic imagery for almost twenty years, and she only grows sweeter as the time passes. I take pride in my loyalty toward dream lovers. No jumping from rock star to movie star to cover girl for me. What I do is find an unknown, a starlet on the brink of fame, so I can be the first before every college kid with five fingers and a jar of Vaseline claims a piece of the action. This might be another revolt against my gang-bang heritage.
After the waitress cleared breakfast, I spread a street map of Greensboro on the table and drew five Magic Marker stars on the addresses of the five fathers. High school sports heroes, as a rule, don’t wander. It’s the big fish–little pond syndrome; once you get used to being treated like you matter, it’s hard to uproot and move somewhere where you don’t.
After I added one more star for my own Manor House, the pattern on the map was not unlike the six stars on the front of a Subaru. Skip Prescott and Cameron Saunders lived next door to each other in the Starmount Forest development, which surrounded the Starmount Country Club—home of the Bull Run model golf cart—and meant big money.
William Gaines was just off the west edge of Starmount Forest, not three blocks from Tex and Shirley’s Pancake House. It was a sharp edge, cash wise, but still respectable enough to mean his life hadn’t been a bust. Babe Carnisek lived south of downtown. Men in his neighborhood drove American pickup trucks sporting South-Shall-Rise-Again bumper stickers and worked by the hour for people they didn’t like. A number of my golf cart welders came from West 23rd.
Jake Williams’s star sat dead center of a black neighborhood I’d never actually driven through, although not so much because it had a reputation as dangerous. The area just hadn’t come up.
Time to move. I wished I could arrive in my 240Z, or at least a Dodge Dart with a muffler, but some days you’ve got to take action now, to hell with the conditions. You wait for conditions to be right and nobody’d ever do anything. Twenty years after first hearing of my fathers, I was finally going to meet them. As Shannon said—more than once—the night before, it was about damn time.
***
A man with glasses was kneeling in a garden in the side yard of 147 North Glenwood. The man didn’t look like a rapist. Rapists don’t garden. The house was one of those two-story red brick jobs that sprang up like hives across the South after World War II. A screened-in porch ran the width of the front, through which I could make out a figure at a table.
As I climbed out of the Dart, the man in the garden looked over and waved. I waved back and walked up the crushed rock walkway to the front door. The whole scene felt domestic, as regular as hell. When I knocked on the screen door, a tenor voice barked. “What?”
Inside the porch, a teenage boy sat at a card table, writing furiously in a store-bought journal. As I slid through the door, his face kind of jumped out. He stared at me with anger and said, “Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”
I said, “Walt Whitman.”
He said, “Nine out of ten men are suicides.”
I said, “Benjamin Franklin—
Poor Richard’s Almanac
. You’re going to have to do better than that to beat me at death quotes. When I was your age, I knew them all by heart.”
The boy was dressed in black. He stared at me with what I took as a tragic sneer. His neck had the rose speckle of recently cleared-up acne.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll get over it.”
“Are you here to fix the freezer?”
I tried reading his journal upside down, but all I made out was his name—Clark Gaines—in the top left corner and the word PUTRID, underlined three times.
The boy’s forehead puckered into a series of folds. “I’m dying. Did you know I’m dying?”
“I hope it’s nothing genetic.”
Obviously not the response he’d hoped for. “Genetic?”
“Inherited. I hope you didn’t inherit whatever you’re dying from.”
“What difference does it make what anyone dies from? I’m dying, you’re dying, the whole planet is rotting like a dead cat’s eyes gorged with tiny white worms.”
I saw the picture. “Then you’re dying as in ‘We are all dying every day.’ You’re not dying as in knowing when or how.”
“Do you realize all the humans on Earth are loose excrement, including you?”
There’s nothing sadder than a Southern male poet. “This is a stage, Clark. Someday you’ll grow out of it and look back and gag that you were ever like this.”
“Who are you to say I’ll outgrow death?”
Who indeed? But I considered myself an adult, and one of the duties of an adult is to tell the young that when they grow up they won’t be miserable anymore.
Time to bring the conversation back to my mission. “William Gaines?”
The boy nodded toward the man in the side yard. “Saint Billy is tending his garden.”
“Why is he Saint Billy?”
“Old Billy Butch believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. Religion to him is garden tomatoes and calling his mother Miss Ellie. The sap would be hilarious if he wasn’t my father. Have you read
Nausea
by Jean Paul Sartre?”
“When I was considerably younger than you are now.”
The kid seemed surprised. “Then why haven’t you experienced suicide?”
“Sartre didn’t know his ass from an avocado.”
Clark’s forehead rippled like he expected me to hit him. Or wanted me to. I swear, tears appeared in his pained eyes. I decided it was time to talk to Saint Billy.
***
He had a face like Dennis the Menace’s father—the TV show, not the funny papers. He wore cotton gloves and sturdy shoes that L. L. Bean makes especially for people who work in dirt. As I approached, he stood up with a small spade in his right hand.
“Thank God,” he said.
“Why?”
“You’re here for the freezer.”
I didn’t say anything. There’s an awkwardness to telling a man he may or may not be your father. What if he tried to hug me?
Billy said, “Come on, then,” and, pulling his gloves off as he walked, he led me around the house. I watched him for signs of me. He was thin, like I am, but also tall, wore glasses, and had straight hair—no matches. Billy probably wasn’t the one, and, if so, did I have the right to bring back an act of violence from years ago? Maybe I should fix his freezer and go home.
“Two days ago when Daphne opened the lid, it made a whistle sound and the motor quit,” he said. “We’ve kept it closed since, but goods are beginning to thaw.”
We stepped into the back utility room, which held wasp repellent, used flower pots, a washer and dryer, and a chest-type freezer, what grocers call a coffin case. Billy stood looking at the freezer as if something might happen, then, after a short pause, he opened the top and a wave of warm air drifted into my face. Fish—the warm air carried fish and a hint of spoiled milk. In the freezer, rows of butcher-papered and neatly labeled foods leaked on each other.
“I did not come to fix your freezer.”
He looked up from his soft fish. “I’m losing a lot of meat here.”
“Do you remember a girl named Lydia Callahan? You knew her in high school.”
He folded his gloves and stuffed them into his back pocket. “No, I don’t recall a Lydia Callahan.”
I counted to three and jumped in. “Lydia is my mother. She says you and four other boys had group sex with her on Christmas Eve 1949.” I couldn’t bring myself to say
rape
. “I was born nine months later, so there’s a five-to-one chance you fathered me.”
Silence. Billy’s facial color dropped a shade, but other than that I saw no physical reaction. He blinked a couple of times, watching me.
“That night was an unfortunate mistake,” he said.
“For everyone but me.”
Billy took off his glasses and looked down at them in his hands. “I shouldn’t have been there.”
Sometimes it’s best to shut up. Billy seemed lost in memory, not really seeing me or the open freezer or anything. I suppose he was reliving the ugliness, wishing he could change the past. I suppose.
“Have you told the others yet?” Billy asked.
The door to the house was open and I couldn’t help but wonder if Clark had slipped in to listen. “You’re the first.”
“Mr. Prescott isn’t going to like this.”
“Skip Prescott?”
He nodded. “He owns Dixieland Sporting Goods. I’m in charge of footwear.”
“Why should Skip Prescott not like this any more than the rest of you?”
Billy turned to face outdoors. It was a nice backyard—magnolia tree, wicker swing, brick barbecue. He took good care of his stuff.
“What do you expect me to do now?” he asked.
“I don’t know. How do you feel?”
“How am I supposed to feel?”
“A possible son has appeared from nowhere. That should make you feel something.”
He blinked twice more. “I already have a son.”
“I met him. He seems interesting.”
“Clark is a sensitive boy.” He let it go at that. “What’s your name?”
“Sam Callahan.”
“What do you do?”
Interesting question. “I make golf carts.”
We fell back into silence and mutual staring at the melted meat in the freezer instead of each other.
“Maybe we should have lunch or something,” Billy said.
“Or something.”
“How is your mother?”
“Lydia runs a feminist press in Wyoming.”
He blinked some more. I tried to picture Billy Gaines battering his dick into Lydia, but the image wouldn’t come. I wasn’t angry at this man. I’d expected to feel wrath or revulsion, maybe even honest hatred, but all I felt was sorry to have bothered him.
“If I was you I’d throw out the fish and pack ice around the rest,” I said.
Billy seemed to wake up. He put his glasses back on and turned to look at me. “I suppose you’re right.”
I walked back around the house, past the screened-in porch, and on to the Dart. At the Dart I turned to see Clark, standing behind the screen with his arms crossed over his chest. I couldn’t see his face, but I imagined he was thinking about death.
The Prescott house was this fairly large, white monstrosity loaded with balconies and gables and triangular windows way up on the third floor. If they gave a test measuring tastes of the well-to-do, I guess we’d all fail, but at least I know I have bad tastes and don’t buy anything without the counsel of women. Skip must have designed his house after a tour of Southern train stations.
I went up the steps, rang the doorbell, and waited, watching the automatic sprinkler system drench the lawn; but no footsteps sounded inside. No imposing butler laid open the door. I rang some more, and after a while a severe black woman in a white uniform came out on the second-floor balcony to glare down at me. I asked a couple of questions on the lines of “Is anyone home?” but she wouldn’t speak. Normally when I see a new woman I imagine how she would taste and how she would sound when she came, but this woman had a posture that nipped fiction right in the bud.
The house next door was also Deep South gaudy, but at least the place looked lived in. A volleyball net was stretched across the freshly mowed lawn, and a kid’s Sting-ray bicycle leaned against a flower box with some late violets or pansies or something in it. Purple flowers anyway.
The door was answered by a short person in an Extra Terrestrial costume.
“Get lost,” he said.
“Phone home,” I said. I knew he was E.T. and E.T. said “Phone home” because the last night Wanda and I made love was the night we drove to Carolina Circle Mall and saw
E.T.
, the movie. That was two months before she ran off with the pool man, my 240Z, and Me Maw’s jewelry. I, personally, had been sexually dormant the full two months before and six days after she left. I should have known Wanda couldn’t go that long without a salami.
The boy looked behind me at the Dart. “You’re a Jehovah’s Witness,” he said.
“No, I’m not.”
He yelled “
Mom
,” then ran down a hall and disappeared, leaving me at the open door. Taking this as an invitation, I walked on in and followed down the hall. One door opened on a formal parlor, the kind of room no one enters except to dust once a month. In the Old South, when you died they stuck the open casket up on sawhorses in rooms like this and left you overnight while the women and darkies cried and the men drank whiskey.
The other door opened on two women sitting on a couch, drinking General Foods International instant coffee.
“You’re not a Jehovah’s Witness.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Don’t call us
ma’am
, darlin’,” the other woman said. “If you’re not a Witness, who are you?”
“Sam Callahan.” The women were dressed country club casual—expensive golf shirts, white shorts, and tennis shoes. The one who’d spoken first had red painted fingernails. The little one who’d called me
darlin’
had a big diamond on a chain around her neck and her hair in a ponytail.
She had the challenging steel-gray eyes of a woman who rates herself by her allure. “Are you the mystery boy Billy Gaines telephoned all in a dither about? He described you as much younger.”
“I’m surprised to hear he was in a dither.”
She leaned her compact body toward me. “Billy said not to talk to you until Skip has a go, but Skippy and I live next door, so why come here if you want Skippy?”
She would probably talk through the entire orgasm—
No. Yes. Oh, God. Yes. Yes.
I don’t care much for women who talk and come at the same time.
“You’re Mrs. Prescott?”
“Katrina to you. This is Mimi Saunders.”
Mimi said, “Katrina, I see no call to flirt with the young man.” Mimi had a really long neck and her hair in a bun. I hate to be mean, but she didn’t strike me as a woman who has orgasms.
“I’m not flirting.” Katrina drilled in with the eye contact. “Am I flirting with you?”
“I’m not good at recognizing flirting when it happens.”
“Well, this isn’t flirting. I’ll tell you when I start to flirt.”
Both my hands slid into my pockets. “Thank you.”
“Now sit and tell us why we can’t talk to you until Skippy gets first go.”
Mimi set her coffee cup down with a click. “He didn’t even present his card. If we’re not supposed to talk to him, I don’t think we should.”
“Oh, hogwash, Mimi. If it’s something Billy Gaines doesn’t want us to know, of course we’ve got to find out. It’s our job.”
I sat on an ottoman footrest with my hands still in my pockets. The women watched, relaxed in their upper-crust lives. Mimi wasn’t certain she wanted me rocking the boat, but Katrina was bored silly by the privileged life and dying for anything to happen. You can tell these things if you’ve spent any sober time around men’s wives.
Katrina studied me. “I don’t suppose you’re a Mafia debt collector out to break Skippy’s legs?”
“No.” I stopped myself on the edge of
ma’am
.
“One can only hope.” She looked disappointed and reached for the coffee box on the glass-topped table, through which I could see her legs crossed demurely at the ankles. A lot of time and money had gone into those legs.
She stared at the box. “Must be a dark, disgusting secret from the past then. I always knew Skippy was hiding his shame.”
“Yes.”
Mimi inhaled and raised one hand while Katrina held her breath and lowered both hands. I clarified. “Except I doubt Skippy is hiding the shame from you because I doubt he knows.”
Katrina’s face broke into a smile. “This is great.”
“It is no such thing,” Mimi said. “He’s a shyster, Katrina. Look at that silly grin. Pretty soon he’s going to ask for money.”
“No, I’m not,” I said.
Katrina slid toward me on the couch, which made her shorts ride up. “Tell us the secret this minute or Mimi and I shall take you down on the floor and torture you.”
I decided she was a fireball. Certain somewhat small women are fireballs and they make me nervous. Being tortured by this particular fireball might be interesting—or if she was my stepmother it could spill over into weird—but I didn’t see any reason to keep secrets. I mean, the men raped Lydia. If fallout came from exposure, I sure wasn’t the one to stop it.
I tried to meet her eyes. “Mr. Gaines, Mr. Saunders, and Mr. Prescott were part of five football players who, uh, had group sex with my mother and created me.”
A girl appeared in the doorway that led to a back patio type place. She was tall, big boned, and in her early twenties. I couldn’t tell you how she would sound, but I knew she tasted like lemon meringue pie.
“I’m headed for the pool, Mom,” she said. She had light blond hair, which I don’t normally go for, and wore a white terry-cloth robe open at the middle to show a sky blue one-piece bathing suit.
I turned to see which woman she was calling Mom. The girl looked at Mimi, who had her lips puckered as if she’d eaten something rotten.
“What’s wrong?” the girl asked.
Katrina recovered first. “This boy says he’s your half brother, Gilia.”
“Might be,” I corrected. “The odds are one out of five.”
Gilia studied me with frank, blue eyes. Shannon could pull off that honest yet wanting nothing look. Must be an attitude the new generation of women developed because I don’t remember it from my day.
She said, “I didn’t know Daddy was married before.”
Mimi made a choked sound. “He wasn’t. It’s a scandalous lie. This villain has come to destroy our home.”
I said, “That’s a classic overreaction, Mrs. Saunders. I’m not here to affect your home in any way.”
Her face was awful. The woman had lost all reserve. “How dare you make accusations at Cameron. My husband is an honorable gentleman.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Saunders.”
Katrina suddenly stood up. “Don’t be sorry. Skip has a scandal coming. That pinhead’s been dipping his wick ever since I married him.”
I glanced over at Gilia. She stood uncommitted as a fence post.
“I don’t see any call for scandal,” I said.
Katrina laughed. “I can’t wait to see how Mr. Wheeler-Dealer handles this. First, he’ll offer you money to change the story.” She grabbed my arm. “Don’t take it.”
“I don’t need money.”
“Then he’ll threaten you with hired violence. Skip’s too wimpy to touch you himself.”
Mimi’s voice was up near hysteria. “Cameron does not dip his wick.”
“Oh, he does too,” Katrina said.
“And Cameron does not deserve scandal. You. Leave my house this instant.”
I stood up from the ottoman, but Katrina didn’t release my arm. “I’m sorry to have upset you,” I said.
“Out.”
Katrina’s fingernails dug into my skin. “Don’t make him go. I want all the sick, ugly details of how your Cameron and my Skippy soiled this poor boy’s mother.”
At the word
soiled
, Mimi buried her face in her hands and sobbed. I hadn’t expected to have this effect on people. I hadn’t thought beyond the fathers and me, but now it sank in that others were involved—innocent strangers who’d never raped anybody.
“I better go,” I said.
Gilia looked from her mother to me.
I said, “Nice to have met you.”
Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak.
***
“You ain’t my kid, you’re too scrawny.”
Babe Carnisek was big—big as Billy’s coffin case. Even leaned back in a recliner with his hands curled in his lap he appeared in the upper-six-foot range and near three hundred pounds. He hadn’t gone to fat, either. A well-dinged free-weight set and lift bench filled the gap where the breakfast nook should have been.
“But you did have relations with my mother,” I said.
“I humped her, if that’s what you mean. I was number two behind that bastard Skip, before she got wore out.”
Babe’s wife, Didi, came in from the kitchen, carrying three ice teas on an A&W Root Beer tray. “Who got wore out, honey?”
“His ma. A bunch of us screwed this junior high chick and Pee Wee here says we got her pregnant. Says I might be his dad.” Babe was paying more attention to the Washington-Detroit game on TV than to his wife or me. Washington was up 21-8—not so close a game as should have pulled him away from the possibility of a son.
Didi offered from the tray. “He’s too shrimpy, Babe.” She put a finger on her chin and studied me like a Food Lion steak. “You couldn’t be his father; unless your mama was a midget. Is your mama a midget?”
“No, ma’am. She’s about the same height as you.”
“I wish you was his boy. Babe always wanted a son, but we can’t have any, on account of the steroids.”
“Look at that pussy block,” Babe said. “I can block better’n that, without my knees.”
Didi sat down across from me on the vinyl-covered couch. “Babe had a scholarship to Virginia Tech, until he ruint both knees playing softball.”
The tea had enough sugar to send a horse into diabetic shock. “If you aren’t my father, which one do you think is?”
The Detroit quarterback fumbled the snap. “God almighty,” Babe said, “I hate quarterbacks. Every ratty little one should be horsewhipped.” He looked over at me. “Skip Prescott or the nigger, I imagine. Other than them we’re all linemen.”
“Billy Gaines was an end.”
“Tight end. And high school teams didn’t pass much in the fifties. Guilford County ran a T formation with Billy blocking the left side.”
“Was he any good?”
Babe snorted. “Billy’s blind as a bat. Mostly he stood in people’s way.”
“So you think it’s Skip or Jake.”
“I was you I’d hope for the nigger. I’d rather have a nigger daddy than Skip Prescott any day.”
“You don’t like Mr. Prescott?”
Babe went back to the game, but Didi clucked a couple times and gave the explanation. “Skip hired Babe the first summer out of high school, then said he’d fire him if he didn’t play on the Dixieland Sporting Goods softball team.”
“And Babe blew his knees,” I said.
I looked at Babe, who was pretending to watch the game. But I could tell he was thinking about what might have been.
Didi sipped her tea. She was pretty in a Kmart kind of way. I’ll bet she’d never been gone down on in her life. “Then Skip told Babe if he took these blue pills he’d grow strong and be able to play football again.”
“Steroids,” I said. “I didn’t know steroids existed back then.”
“We didn’t know what they were,” Didi said. She gestured at the game. “Now all those players on TV take steroids and not a one of them will ever have children. Babe says if he sees Skip again, he’ll break his neck.”
“I know where Skip lives.”
I think Babe wanted to change the subject, because when he spoke it was louder than before. “Your mama was a pistol, boy. I have to admit, that girl was a pistol.”
Seemed a weird thing to say about a girl you raped and urinated on. “She runs a feminist press in Wyoming,” I said.
He frowned. “Lesbo?”
“I don’t think so, she has a boyfriend.”
“Lesbos scare me. They was one in Woolworth’s the other day buying shotgun shells. Said she was going to shoot her husband.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” Didi said.
“How did you know she was Lesbian if she had a husband?” I asked.
“Short hair and a fuzzy mustache.”
Didi protested. “Italian girls have mustaches and none of them are Lesbo.”
“Wasn’t no Italian. I can tell Italian women.”
Subject closed. We sat drinking tea and watching the game while the Redskins scored two more touchdowns. Babe didn’t seem to have any more to say about fatherhood. Partway through the third quarter he had Didi fetch his hand squeezer exercise coils so he could watch TV and build up his wrists simultaneously.
“So, you’re sure you aren’t my father?” I said.
He shrugged without looking away from the game. The Lions were finally mounting a drive. “Hell, anything’s possible. Maybe you’re just a runt.”
“I think I’ll be leaving now,” I said.
Babe ignored me. Didi took my glass. “Come back any time,” she said. “We always have plenty of tea. Babe won’t drink beer. Too many former athletes drink beer and let themselves go.”
Babe sat in his recliner, flexing his wrists. Lord knows what he did for a living. What does a person whose life is his body do when the body lets him down?