“All right.”
I opened the door and made a quick survey of the room. Clothes and shoes were everywhere. What did he even have a closet for? Then I thought of the sound of the typewriter keys coming, it had seemed, from behind its door. I looked at Amanda Baskin. A pretty face peeking out from under the covers, her hair fanned out on the pillow, the scent of sex and rejection heavy in the air.
“Well hello,” she said, trying to sound sexy, and succeeding too. Then, as I moved closer into the light of the room, “My goodness, what happened to you?”
“I was fighting, Mrs. Baskin.”
“Amanda, please,” then, “Southern boy, you don't look like a fighter to me.”
“Well actually, I just got punched in the face. Someone else did the fighting.”
“Well come here then, come here. Come here and let your mother take a look at that.”
I knelt down beside the bed and let my cavalcade of emotions fight it out for supremacy. Which one would win out? Disgust? Pity? Sexual arousal? Sexual arousal started to pull away. She touched my eye gently and I could smell the booze on her breath. Booze and my dad's ass? Disgust took the lead.
“Oooh, that's quite a lump,” she said, then paused, shifted gears, and spoke again. “Do you think I'm pretty?”
“Yes ma'am.” No hesitation in my answer.
“Call me Amanda.”
“Okay.”
“Tell me I'm pretty.”
“Right now?”
“Sure, right now, southern boy, tell me how pretty you think I am.”
I hesitated, and somehow realized I was being assigned the rather fragile task of ego repair. Pity made a charge for the lead now, although sexual arousal was hanging tough in the stretch.
“Amanda, you sure are pretty.”
“Do you think I'm beautiful?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do.” And at that moment she was.
“Tell me I'm beautiful.”
I didn't know it then, but she was essentially playing a far more subtle version of Tietam Brown's “Tell me what I'm doing to you” game. Planting her ideas in my head, trying to pass them off as my own.
“You are beautiful, Mrs. Baskin.”
“Amanda, please . . . Amanda.”
“I think you're beautiful, Amanda.”
Pity dropped way back, and disgust had pulled up lame and had to be shot. Sexual arousal was now all alone and heading for home.
“Southern boy, your father doesn't think I'm beautiful, does he?”
“I don't know, Amanda.” Now pity was back, sexual arousal having slowed down considerably when the word “father” was said.
“My husband doesn't think I'm beautiful either.”
“I'm sorry about that, MrsâAmanda.”
“Did you like listening to me the other night . . . with your little glass up to the wall?”
Arousal sped up. Way up. “Um, uh, yeah, I did like it,” I said, my voice cracking just a little.
“Did you like the words I used . . . those bad words . . . did you like hearing them?”
“Yes.” I was still kneeling by the bed, and her mouth was only inches from mine. For a moment, I thought she would lean forward and kiss me, and to tell you the truth, I think I would have let her. Instead she turned away. Turned away and said, “I liked saying them too, liked knowing you were listening. Liked turning you on. But you know what I really like?”
“No, what?” I could only whisper, having been momentarily shocked by Mrs. Baskin's admission.
“I like to be held.” I nodded. She paused and continued. “My husband hasn't held me in years. Ignores me. Your father, he doesn't ignore, but he doesn't hold me either. That other stuff's nice, and your father, he does it real well, but at the end of the night, I just want to be held, and your father . . . well, that's just not his thing.”
“No, I guess not.”
“Andy,” she said, the first time she had used my real name.
“Yes . . . Amanda.”
“Would you hold me right now?”
I didn't say yes, and I didn't say no. I think I went into shock, and the next thing I knew, she was lifting back the sheets, exposing her breasts, saying, “Lie down with me, southern boy, it's warm next to me.”
I think that I would have, had it not been for her breasts. A beautiful pair they were, too, round and real firm, maybe too firm, as if they were made of more than just flesh. And that's what ruined it. Unfortunately for Mrs. Baskin, she had to compete with Terriâ whose breasts, I had decided during the course of my split-second encounter, were definitely real. Mrs. Baskin possessed the second most beautiful breasts that I'd ever seen (which I guess also means they were the ugliest by process of elimination).
“Do you like them?” she asked.
“Yes ma'am, I do.”
“Tell me you like them, southern boy.”
“I better not.”
“Oh why?” she said, her sexy, hoarse voice betraying a little girl's plea.
“I just better not.” I started to get up.
“Southern boy.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know my son?”
“Yes ma'am, I do.”
“Do you like him?”
“No ma'am, I don't.”
“Did he do that to you,” she said, pointing to my eye.
“No.”
“But he's not a good boy, is he, he's not good like you?”
I thought of myself only days earlier, pleasuring myself to the thought of her, and wondered how good I really was. “No, I guess not,” I said.
“But you won't tell him about this, will you? About any of this?”
“No ma'am, I won't.”
“Do you promise.”
“Yes ma'am, I do.”
“Call me Amanda.”
“I promise, Amanda.” A promise that would cause me great pain to keep.
“Andy.”
“Yes.”
“Stay sweet.”
“Thank you.”
“And Andy.”
“Yes ma'am . . . Amanda.”
“Can I ask you for one favor . . . a little one.”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Let me give you a kiss . . . just one, I promise.”
I was scared half to death. Scared that she'd jump me, and scared that I couldn't say no. Scared that I'd lie down and hold her and say and do whatever she bid me. I wanted to hold her too. Wanted to hold her and maybe magically transfer a little of my meager supply of self-esteem, because, sadly, Mrs. Baskin had none of her own.
I knelt down again and pursed my lips just slightly, but she took hold of my face and turned it, gently, ever so gently, kissing my swollen eye. Then, with her lips still on my skin, she said, “Tell me again . . . tell me I'm beautiful.”
I turned to look at her, my face still in her hands. A tear, I could see, had dropped from her eye.
“Amanda.”
“Yes, southern boy.”
“You are . . . beautiful.”
And with that I heard a car's engine, and I looked out the window, expecting Tietam Brown's Fairmont but seeing instead a late-model Lincoln slowly cruising past our house.
She left minutes later, and for a while I lay in my little bed wondering if I should have accepted her offer and kidding myself that I would have done it just for her instead of myself. I thought of her kiss, and her requests, and her breasts, and of the late-model Lincoln pulling away, looking out of place in the night on our quiet little street.
She was, I thought, the saddest woman I'd ever seen, and I had a strange thought about her breastsâthat if I had breasts like hers, I'd be happy all the time. Then I thought of her blond hair, splayed out on the pillow, and her question about beauty, and I felt a strange sense that I'd just played a scene straight out of
Of Mice And Men.
Then I heard Burgess Meredith say something about “what happened in Weed,” and a quick Meredith retrospective ran through my mind. Quack-quacking as the Penguin, then yelling “Down, stay down” at Rocky, then putting poor Lenny out of his misery.
Then I thought about my day and how out of all the eventsâa first kiss, a first feel, a first punch from a teacher, not to mention Amandaâthe one that seemed oddest was my father's report. The clicking of the typewriter keys from inside his closet. Why in the closet? So I rose up and for the second time in my life, as well as the second time in an hour, entered my father's room.
Tietam Brown's closet was a library. Literally. A U-shaped walk-in closet that had been reconstructed into a genuine floor-to-ceiling library. Books were crammed into every available shelf, and large stacks grew like stalactites from the floor for the overflow of volumes the shelves could not contain.
A reading table sat in the middle of the closet with a typewriter, books on Lincoln, slavery, and the Civil War strewn about. I sat down in his chair and looked around, feeling, I imagined, the same way the detective who discovered the bodies in John Wayne Gacy's crawl space had felt upon making that grisly find.
No light reading for Tietam Brown, either. Not a novel to be found. Instead the shelves housed books on subjects beyond my scope of understanding. American history, world history, psychology, physiology, religion, politics, and seventeen different titles concerning Japan. I wondered if just maybe this library had been left behind when Tietam moved in. Part of me hoped so. For considering the alternative meant opening my mind to the very distinct possibility that there was a whole lot more to Antietam Brown IV than met the eye, or met the glass held up to the wall next door.
I stood up from the writing desk and opened a few random volumes. A musty old book on human kinesiology, its margins filled with handwritten notes on almost every page.
The Art of War,
its cover falling off. A King James Bible. Passages were highlighted, pages were dog-eared. Stuck in the Book of Luke I saw a black-and-white photo of a much younger Tietam shaking hands with a man whose face I had seen before. Where had I seen it? The muscular arm answered my question. This was the guy who was feeding the poor. Eddie Edwards. The two of them smiling. I wondered why. And wondered how my father ever hung out with somebody like this man, who was so obviously decent. Or to look at it from a different perspective, why would a guy like him want to hang out with Tietam?
My father had thrown a wrench into the workings of our father-son relationship. A relationship that previously had been so simple. He exercised nude and talked about polished knobs, bareback riding, and the art of the deal. I dismissed him as a man with the emotional depth of a meat-loaf sandwich. Now he'd caused me to question all of this.
And speaking of questions, what had Terri meant with her diary brainteaser? Giving me a special gift while taking away something I'd had my whole life? Then it hit me. As if standing in my dad's library had passed on a secret power of understanding by osmosis. Terri wanted something, all right, but it wasn't Nat King Cole. She wanted
me
.
The thought lit an instant fire in my loins, but the sound of Tietam Brown's '79 Fairmont extinguished it in record time. I turned out the light and raced from his room, then looked out my window at a sorrowful sight.
He emerged from the car a beaten man. Limping, pausing every few agonizing steps to cough up a thick glob of blood. Part of me wanted to race down the stairs and embrace him, to help him. But part of me thought of his pride, the calm look in his eye when he'd walked out the door. Walked out to help me, and returned a beaten man. I lay down instead.
Lay down instead and heard the man who usually bounded up the stairs crawl and paw his way up. Lay down while the man who made his bedsprings bounce and his headboard bang simply lay down with a groan. Lay down while my father paid the price for his love.
Love. A word not usually meant for deadbeat dads. But what else could it be? What could it possibly be, if not love?
Like a sleepless child who counts his sheep, I chronicled the labored gasps and groans of Tietam Brown's breathing, but found no rest. Just a whole lot of questions and a great deal of concern. The concern hadn't waned, and the questions were alive and well, when the sun warmed my face with its first rays of morning.
My dad, I could hear, was sleeping, his loud snores a welcome relief from the sounds of anguish that had earlier seeped through my walls. I entered his room with great caution.
His face was so bad as if to seem somehow fake, as if a Holly-wood makeup artist had splashed black-and-blue latex on top of his features. His nose was splattered to the right, the blood that had run out having formed a congealed mass that clung to his chin. His eyes were grotesque in their swelling, the twin softball-like lumps giving him the appearance of some strange insect or alien life-form. Swelling that put mine to shame. Swelling that caused me to fear for his sight, for his brain, not to mention his pride, which may well have been the most serious casualty of all. He lay tangled in his sheets, the same sheets that only hours earlier had been lifted to reveal Mrs. Baskin's body to me. Sheets that were now a canvas to a gruesome smattering of splatters, drips, and stains. A canvas that served to only partially obscure a series of body bruises that made every breath a task.
Antietam Brown IV, I knew, was in this shape because of me. Because of some bizarre sense of honor he felt toward a son he barely knew. But maybe my dad had seen a bigger picture. Maybe the name of all the Browns had been dishonored with Hanrahan's blow. As if the coach had been among the boars tearing my ancestor's dead body to pieces on that Maryland field so many years ago.
I stared again at the carnage and had a sudden flash. A vision, I guess. A vision of Tietam Brown standing toe-to-toe with the monstrous Hanrahan, slugging it out, giving as good as he got. I looked at his hands and realized that my vision was not one of the truth. Tietam Brown lay battered almost literally from head to toe. Almost. But his hands, I saw, were without a scratch. My father had gone down to defeat without landing a blow.