The Book of Joby (105 page)

“That isn’t fair!” she wept, her grief becoming anger in an instant. “I married Sandy so he’d
have
a father! You have no idea what I’ve sacrificed to spare you from—”

“Sacrificed?”
Joby cut her off, leaping up as the horror of it all unfolded in him. “
It wasn’t your sacrifice to make! You took away my chance to be a father—my chance to watch my son grow up—my chance to be there when he needed me.
Do you know what I’ve thought every time Sandy’s name was mentioned? I thought, how could that
abandoning bastard
leave this beautiful boy? But that abandoning bastard was
me
!
You made me an abandoning father!
”

“How dare you!”
Laura snapped. “As if you’d left me any choice! You were a
mess,
Joby Peterson—already half out of your mind with imaginary guilt about Lindwald! What was I supposed to say? Oh, and by the way, I’m pregnant with your child too? What would you have done with
that,
Joby, on top of all the rest?”

“I’d have married you! Ask Ben! He knows!”
Joby cried, forgetting Ben was gone.
“I told him the morning Jamie died! I was on my way to propose to you!”

Laura slid down the sill to sit crying in the doorway. “You were in no shape . . . no shape to be a father, Joby,” she sobbed into her hands. “Ben told me what you were like when he saw you in Berkeley. Couldn’t even leave your damn bed, but you’d have been an
awesome
father, if only
I
had
let
you?”

“If I’d had something in the world to think about besides myself—”

“You—were—in—
no shape
—to be a
father,
” she said more fiercely, wiping at her eyes and standing up again. “Ben saw that as clearly as I did. Give us all at least a little credit before you play the blameless victim.”

“Ben knew too?”
Joby gasped, and all at once remembered, as if he’d just been there, hiding around that corner in the music room at high school, listening to his two most trusted friends discussing what they
mustn’t
tell him. “Was I the only one who
didn’t
get to know that Hawk was mine?”

“Arthur!”
Laura shrilled. “His name is
Arthur
!” She began to cry again in earnest. “It was as close to naming him for you as I could come without making Sandy jealous. Can’t you see anything? I never stopped loving you, Joby. I’d have given anything to have you there raising our son instead of Sandy, but how could you have—”

“And I condemned that man,” Joby groaned, turning from Laura. “Of course he drank! Of course he mistreated you and ran away! There he was, knowing all the while that you were still in love with the man who’d left him holding all my baggage.”

Laura made a strangled noise, then screamed,
“Get out! Get out of here, you
selfish, monstrous ass!”
She whirled around and slammed the door, leaving Joby on the porch alone. From inside the house, he heard her scream again—no words, just pain, followed by a torrent of heart-wrenching sobs.

When Joby didn’t answer, Hawk pounded on his door again. Joby’s car was here, so he figured Joby must be too. He’d already been angry by the time he’d gotten home from his encounter with Rose. Then he’d found his mother, a sodden wreck, on the couch. It seemed there
were
still some things Hawk cared about. His mother’s pain was one of them.

Hawk pounded for a third time, and was drawing breath to yell Joby’s name, when the door finally lurched open. Joby looked not much better than his mother had, though that bothered Hawk not nearly as much.

“I was sleeping,” Joby apologized, looking mournfully at Hawk.

“Pleasant dreams, I hope,” Hawk said coldly. “What did you do to my mother?”

Joby only stared at him in dull surprise.

“You know. The woman you just demolished?” Hawk growled. “When I asked her what was wrong, she said to ask you, so I’m asking. What the hell did you do?”

“She didn’t tell you?” Joby said stupidly.

“She hasn’t been like this since the day my fucking father left,” Hawk snapped. “Answer my question, or I’m going to write you off as fast as I did him, and you can fuck yourself ’til Hell freezes over before I talk to you again—not that you’d care, I guess, now that you’ve got
GB
to kiss your ass.”

“Come in,” Joby said wearily, walking back into his room. “It’s not a conversation to have standing in the doorway.”

Hawk followed Joby in, and said, “Okay, I’m inside. Now you’d better tell me fast what happened to my mom, or I’ll go right back out—for good.”

“Hawk,” Joby sighed, folding wearily into a chair beside his stove, “your mother’s kept a secret from both of us until today. When I found out, we had a pretty nasty argument, and . . .” Joby looked so bleak that Hawk didn’t need him to confirm what he had guessed at first sight of his mother’s condition.

“You’ve broken your engagement.” Hawk shrugged.

“You don’t seem too upset,” Joby murmured sadly.

“Things don’t upset me like they used to,” Hawk replied, though, privately, he felt the blow as yet more evidence of the universe’s enmity toward himself. “So what’s the awful secret?” Hawk asked, careful not to sound as if he cared too much.

Joby stared at him in dismay. “I know you’re angry, Hawk, and I can understand that, but I didn’t want to hurt your mother. I care about her deeply.”

“Huh,” Hawk grunted, sitting on Joby’s bed. “Just yesterday, you
loved
her.”

Joby looked as though he might be going to cry, and Hawk was ambushed by a sudden stab of remorse. Not for the first time, he wondered what was wrong with him, when he’d become so cruel, so eager to wound. But then he thought about his mother’s grief-swollen face, and shoved his sympathy for Joby aside. “It’s now or never,” Hawk said, starting to rise. “I’m leaving Taubolt tonight, like you all want me to. If you won’t tell me why my mother’s in this shape, I’ll wait until she wants to say. Your choice.”

“Tonight?” Joby said, sounding startled. “Why so sudden?”

Hawk just turned and started toward the door, tired of being stalled and jerked around by everyone. He had problems of his own to manage.

“I’m your father, Hawk,” Joby said behind him.

Hawk turned back to stare, his mind still somewhere headed toward the door.

“Not Sandy. Me,” said Joby. “I never knew until today.” He hung his head. “I’m sorry. If there’s some gentler way to tell you that, I don’t know what it is.”

Hawk’s mind finally finished the turn his body had already made. “You can’t be my father,” he whispered. “How could you be my father?”

“Your mother and I were in love,” Joby said without looking up. “We were together just one time, a few months before we graduated from high school.” He looked up at last, his eyes like some Hawk had seen in photographs of concentration camp inmates. “I didn’t know she was pregnant. She never told me.”

Hawk came back and dropped onto the bed again, feeling like a sleepwalker. “So what was Sandy?”

“He was the man your mother married so that you would have a father.” Joby’s face was one big grimace of contrition now, which, Hawk would later surmise, might have been what put the idea in his head that all of this was Joby’s fault. Whatever its genesis, the idea stuck and bloomed like napalm in Hawk’s soul.

“So we spent thirteen years getting yanked around by that fucking, drunken prick because you had a nice one-nighter with my mother and walked away without asking how it all turned out?” Such a surge of anger welled within him that Hawk had to gouge his hands into the bedspread to keep himself from getting up and giving Joby what he’d so often dreamed of giving GB.

“No,” Joby protested urgently. “The next night, someone died. A friend. I felt responsible; everything went to pieces then. Your mother . . . I thought she didn’t want to see me anymore. I thought she’d gone to Ben. It never crossed my mind that—”

“It never crossed your mind!”
Hawk cut him off, enraged. “Well, it sure crossed mine,
Dad
! Every time my father . . . no, that
strange man
you
left
me with, every time he took a whack at me. Every time he raged around the house on some stinking bender. It
crossed my mind
that this was my father! What I got! What I
came from
! My friends had fathers who played ball with them,
Dad
! Their fathers took them camping and came to school on parent night smelling of aftershave, not barley hops. Their dads were
proud
of them. But I got Sandy, and you know what? I figured that there had to be a reason—that someone must have chosen him for me instead of all those other dads because maybe, somehow, he was all that I
deserved
!” The fury was spilling out of Hawk now like some huge volcanic tapeworm. It felt like throwing up a bad meal. He had no desire to stop; for all that he was clearly tearing Joby to pieces. “Do you have any idea how much time I’ve spent working all that out?” Hawk demanded. “And now it turns out, oops! That was all for nothing! He never
was
my father to begin with. My
real
father was the good, the kind, the universally admired, Joby Peterson, who’d have been the best damn father in the whole wide world if only it had
crossed his mind to inquire about my existence
!”

Surging to his feet, Hawk said, “Well, it sure has been a treat to finally meet you,
Dad,
but I’ve got to go now,” he turned and stalked toward the door, “before I beat the fucking crap out of you!”

“Hawk,” Joby pleaded in what rags of voice his tears allowed him, “please wait.”

Hawk turned back once more at the door. “You stay away from my mom,” he rasped. “She’s been hurt enough. You stay away from me too. You did without us all these years. No point in complicating your life now!”

Ignoring Joby’s further pleas, Hawk stormed from the house and slammed himself into his car. Then he drove, far too fast and with no thought of destination, until he slid into a ditch somewhere well north of town. Without pausing to reflect on his condition or that of his car, he shoved his way out from behind the wheel, and began to walk up the hill, then hopped the fence and headed for the woods, always up, along the path of maximum exertion, trying to burn off all the fury that still pounded through him like the flumes of some huge booster rocket. But his supply of anger seemed inexhaustible.
He stopped at last atop a bald grass hill with no “up” left to travel, threw back his head to face the sky, and screamed and screamed and kept on screaming, a solid stream of mindless rage. And somewhere in that timeless span, he found himself aloft, soaring high above the wooded hills, screeching out the angry hunting songs a wounded hawk carries in its heart. Unlocked by rage, he’d finally found the power, after all those years, to change. He was an equal now—as fully of the blood as any of his peers, and he could think of no good reason to come down to earth again.

“Follow him,” Lucifer told Kallaystra as they watched Hawk soar away from Taubolt. “Seeing to his reeducation should be much easier out there. You’ve done sufficiently so far,” he said, turning to pierce her with his eyes, “but remember that I hold you
personally
responsible for
completing
his transformation swiftly. I need that boy ready, and I need it
yesterday
! Fail to keep pace for an instant, and I’ll take him from you and give Basquel his chance while you regain your strength cleaning toilets in Hell.”

“Bright One,” Kallaystra said sullenly, “Basquel is—”