|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
CHAPTER TEN.
That evening the snow deepened. After my father got home we piled in the car and drove though the dusk to bring Grandmother to the house for supper. Once again they asked me to wait for them in the hallway as they huddled inside the hotel room. I listened at the keyhole in the darkened hallway and overheard the same discussion as the night before, except in a new light after my grandmother’s revelations.
Grandpa Raymond–Buck–had a bit of Bogart in him. I remember him as having a Camel dangling from his mouth in all of his waking hours, a black shadow of a bear, a gold tooth lodged in old tobacco yellowed teeth, and on the back of his head he wore a fedora that concealed a thatch of straight black hair pomaded to perfection. It was not until recently that I recognized his image in the ‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre.’ That was when I was aboard the U.S.S. Kennedy. He had been a genuine prospector in Nevada, a drinker and a grifter and a ladies man until the pretty little lady from Pendleton, out of sheer depression and sheer loneliness, went to his bed, and had, according to my father, to lie in it for years. He seldom came to Immigration Valley with Grandma Rada on her visits, having a bar to run.
While I waited, I thought about going downstairs. Maxwell Taylor lived in the hotel with his mother and father in a small rear apartment on the ground floor. I thought of visiting him but knew his mother would have him at his homework and I would be unwelcome. I wanted to go back down to the lobby and watch men smoke, but the conversation inside the room was too interesting. I was just standing upright to rest my back from an eyeball-to-the-keyhole posture when I smelled the blowtorch of alcohol on my neck. Before I could turn I was lifted by the back of my coat by my stepfather, and hurled down the hallway ending up in a heap.
I clearly remember my father’s voice saying, loudly, “The judge down here will give you a divorce no questions asked if I speak to him, Rada. And if he shows up I’ll have the Sheriff on him. I’m sorry, but he’s brought you nothing but heartache. You're best rid of him.”
In his rage, I don’t think Buck recognized me for his step-grandson. He was reeling drunk. How he managed to negotiate his big Road Master Buick the 100 miles from Pocatello to Immigration Valley that night through the keening storm remains a mystery. Buck kicked open the door, the sound of splintering wood tearing like the rip of an artillery shell from a five-inch gun. My mother and father and Rada were so stunned by his appearance they had little time to react.
“By God Rada, you’re coming home!” Buck snarled. He had nursed his rage deeply in his pursuit. “You’re coming home with me now,” he said as I watched through the open door, horrified, speechless. My father was looking at him with a towering dignity, and anger.
“Well, Buck, I don’t think so,” he said. My father had taken off his coat and was wearing a white shirt; his suspender’s worn and loose. He was taller than Buck by a head. At the time he did not know that Buck had assaulted me.
“You stay the hell out of this, Jonathan!” Buck ordered.
“Get out of here,” my father demanded. I saw the four of them in the sallow light of the room. I saw the crazy patchwork quilt of blue-check and gingham on the brass bed, the thread-bare carpet, the sink with a tap that leaked and worn the porcelain down to a patch of black iron shaped like a tear drop.
My mother stepped over to put her arm around Rada protectively.
“Buck, please, let’s talk it over in the morning,” she pled, hysteria stalking her voice.
My grandmother stood rooted in patent leather heels looking helpless, despair smoothing the skin around her eyes. I think she was more embarrassed for him– and us– than she was afraid. She was a women of great dignity, of manners born of the depression that were as fine as any aristocrat. But in the face of her husband’s drunken appearance she became a vulnerable shrinking child reduced to a shivering, eye-darting terror.
It was at that moment that I saw how closely mother and daughter resembled one another. The eyes with flashes of color, the nose and mouth mirrored, and overall my father transformed from a gentleman to a tower of indignation.
“By God I’ll have the Sheriff on you!” my father said. And then he saw me in the doorway, a little blood on my nose from where I’d been pushed into the wall.
To this moment I do not know if my father intended to strike Buck. His large hands were fisted, but at his sides when Buck pulled the pistol from the pocket of his blue suit jacket. My mother’s hand went to her mouth. Rada let out a soft exhalation of sorrow deep as the dark bed of Lake Moroni. Then the pistol was fired point blank between my father’s suspenders, and a bright flower of blood, like thrown paint, appeared.
There were two simultaneous screams of terror and Buck swung to face the two women. I saw his dark eyes snapping with madness as he raised the pistol again and pointed it at my grandmother. Time framed itself into a duality of images, split screens of outcomes. My adolescent voice broke in rage as I rushed at him, leaning a strong shoulder in his side, digging with my legs. When I struck him his balance tipped. I heard a hard exhalation of air from his lungs, a grunt, and then I dug into the carpet pushing and pummeling him in a fury of incomprehensible noises.
When the glass broke, Buck went through the second story window, a lace curtain wrapping him like a shroud. I almost went after him. I heard the thump as his body hit the small section of roof over the hotel’s entrance, and then fell across the neon sign, shunting the electricity and arcing it through his body in a shower of sparks. Then there was a loud bang, as loud as the pistol shot that had killed my father.
Max’s mother and father were the first on the scene. Parley came into the room with a double-barreled shotgun. He saw my father bleeding his life out on the floor, the blank hysteria of my mother, my grandmother’s face in her hands, and Buck’s electrocuted body, having shorted out the neon sign, perhaps pushed by the wind, fell to the sidewalk below and bounced into a snow drift.
“The Brethren” is copyrighted © 2001 by T. O. McCallister. All rights reserved. You may not republish or reproduce this work without the expressed written permission of the author by any means mechanical, electronic, graphic, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems. Permission can be granted by writing the author at alimed42@yahoo.com. He also welcomes your feedback to this story. All violators will be persecuted.
Main Table of
Contents