Vindauga

Everything below is how the story originally appeared on the now defunct catoptric. Text in italics are my comments from the initial posts.

This is a little story I have been working on and trying to get gclark to proofread. It is either not finished, or this is the first installment; I’ll tell you all later.

“Have I ever told you the story about the night you were born?” my father asks me.

I paused for a moment, considering the possibility that he had some rare form of Alzheimer’s where he could not remember stories or jokes he had told. Rather than directly answering the question, not that I think he would care if I admitted to having already heard the story, I said, “let’s hear it.”

The sad thing is, my wife has probably already heard this story nearly half as many times as I have, and we have only been together six years. I think this is one of the stories he did not start telling until later in life, or after my little sister came along. My little sister is actually my half-sister from my father’s second wife; she was born when I was twelve. I guess it is a cliche to say having a little girl will change you, but something changed my dad after she came along. He mellowed out, started trying to spin some things that had happened in the past, and if he couldn’t put a better angle on them, he just claimed he couldn’t remember it. This approach made him in to a great guy who, according to his version of things, had always been that way. But this is not to say he was a born-again saint; there were even things you could notice, or at least I could notice, about these newly remembered stories that weren’t quite right.

“So I take your mother to the Navy hospital on Camp LeJeune, and after I get her checked in they tell me they need her file from this other medical office on the base. Allan, do you remember where the Navy hospital was at Camp Lejeune? We saw it that time we’s up there.”

I have absolutely no idea where this hospital is. My father took me to visit the marine base, Camp Lejeune, as summer vacation when I was about ten. A twelve-hour drive across the southeast in the middle of the summer to visit a marine base is not a ten-year-old boy’s idea of a vacation, at least for me it wasn’t. The only salient memories I have of the “vacation” are of the pawnshops around the base, and this female marine my father kept hitting on, which didn’t seem to bother my stepmother. Accepting the idea that it is a good idea to take a child to his birthplace still doesn’t justify the obscene amount of pawnshops we went to, but I was able to buy some throwing knives at one of them. The knives were the highlight of the trip for me; unfortunately, I was not allowed to throw them inside the van.

“Yeah, I think I remember it,” I say.

“Well I ask the officer where I needed to go to get the records and he tells me it’s straight across that field, and to just ask the secretary for my wife’s file. Well, I light out running without even askin’ him how far it is. So I’m hoofing it across this field, and it’s the middle of the night and there aren’t no lights around, so I can’t hardly see anything. And all of the sudden, whoosh! I run right off in to this twenty-foot deep drainage ditch in the middle of this field. Well I scramble and climb up the other side and I take off running again. Well finally, after about two miles, I come to a road and there is this medical office on the other side. Now by the time I got there, I was already pretty tired, and sweating like you wouldn’t believe, but as soon as I get the files I turn around and let out running for the hospital. This time I was expecting the ditch, so it wasn’t so bad. I get back to the hospital, go running in and hand the files to the doctor. He looks at me and is like, ‘You didn’t run all the way there, did you?’ And I catch my breathe a little, stand at attention, and say ‘Sir, Yes sir. You didn’t say how far it was, sir.’”

Now that my father has finished the story we all laugh, and my stepmother makes some comment about what a marine he is, which my father takes as a compliment verging on a come-on and smiles. All I can do is think how contrary to my father’s description, this story has very little to do with me being born or even the lady who had me. The only time he even acknowledges he was married to my mother is in tales of other people referring to her as “his wife.” I don’t guess my mother is much better though, but she at least refers to the fact that they were married.

I’ve never really heard much about my actual birth. I assume it was at night or early in the morning based off my father’s ditch story, but I have my doubts about the accuracy of his story details. My bizarre military hospital birth certificate does not list the time, just the day. Two days after Christmas on the bicentennial, you would think it would have been cold in that field. The details of everything up until I can remember it myself are all a bit fuzzy. Over time, different relatives have filled me in on some details I would never have gotten from either of my parents, and I have even gotten my mother to confirm some of the more interesting details.

One such detail my aunt provided me when I was seventeen. It seems that my parents attempted to elope in Georgia because my mother was too young to be legally married without parental consent in Alabama (seems hard to believe to me). After they both left notes to their respective parents and drove to Georgia, they found out you had to have proof of residence in Georgia to get a marriage license. They decided to just fake it for a year until my mother turned eighteen. Once they were back home in Alabama, they acted as if they were married and moved in together.

Here in the story I hit a blur of mixed information from both parents. I know my father worked at a car dealership, and at some point decided to join the military. Previously my mother has insinuated that my father was given the option of “join the military or else,” but I haven’t heard her say that in years, so I doubt it was true. My father used to claim he joined so he could go to Vietnam, but they would not let him because of his other brothers’ being stationed there. Part of this story I know is true because when I was fourteen I found out I had an aunt and uncle on my father’s side of the family that I had never heard about before. The uncle committed suicide in front of his wife and children, after coming home from Vietnam. This event preceded the fifteen-year hiatus of ever mentioning his or his families’ name, by my father’s side of the family. Somehow, my mother just never thought to mention it. The aunt on the other hand was simply excommunicated from the family.

Two years after my father joins the Marine Corps I am born. When his tour was over my parents and I moved back to Alabama. For a while, my parents live in the bustling metropolis of Huntsville, Alabama. According to my father, while living here my mother became pregnant by another man and had an abortion. Naturally, my mother denies that this ever happened. Honestly, I have my doubts that it ever happened too, but not because of the virtues of my mother. I just have trouble believing my father would have stayed married to her if it really did happen. Either way, they soon moved back to Birmingham. Into a little apartment in Ensley, next door to Mrs. Brown.

Ensley was in the late 70’s on the verge of totally succumbing to white flight. This factor is what probably made the apartment affordable to my parents. Mrs. Brown was a widow who had spent the majority of her life in the house next door to my parents’ apartment with her husband Judge Brown. She adamantly refused to move or stop driving. When I was older and my mother and I would come back to the neighborhood to visit Mrs. Brown, she would insist on driving me to Burger King to get me a Whopper, which I still to this day don’t really care for. Mrs. Brown loved Burger King, but it wasn’t a proper place for a lady to go, it was for children. I still have this grotesque yet oddly amusing memory of her dentures coming dislodged while attempting to get her mouth around a hamburger.

My parents didn’t take long to make the flight from Ensley too. They purchased what was constructed as a fishing cabin, in Howton’s Camp, a small ill-planned fishing camp. The two-bedroom cinder block house had a fireplace, and no air conditioning or central heat. The kitchen, living room and dining room, were actually one semi-large multi-purpose room. Nevertheless, to me, the backyard was expansive and wonderful, and the only thing that mattered. Amazingly, that small place has turned into the weirdly cluttered block my wife and I now refer to as The Compound. Here I sit in what used to be the multipurpose kitchen many remodels ago, listening to my father’s jokes and stories, and wishing the holiday was over.

This is the second installment; if you didn’t read part one, you should scroll down and read it first.

I don’t really know how things were when my parents first moved into that little house in the fishing camp. It was the end of the 70’s, my father was painting cars at the Pontiac dealership and my mother was a stay at home mom. I do remember my mother having male friends who would visit, and it was a small enough community that I know my father was aware of the visitors. There was this little gas station my mother and I would go hang out at, called Rabbits, owned by Rusty, one of my mother’s friends. All of the guys she was friends with seemed to live there, sitting outside drinking beer out of cans covered with these fake labels to make them look like coke cans. I was easily duped into my first taste of beer by one of those fake labels. I wasn’t aware enough to realize there was anything wrong with hanging out at a gas station with your toddler in tow, and maybe when it comes down to it there isn’t anything wrong with it per se, but with the things that go along with it. The guys from Rabbits were always entertaining to me; Jim, who worked at the coal mines doing demolition when not drinking beer in front of the station, would blow things up for fun. I remember seeing a tree lift straight up out of the ground before tumbling over as it collided with the earth, which I’ve since learned is a tricky thing to do with explosives.

I normally claim to only have one real memory of my parents together before their divorce, but that isn’t entirely true. I have these amalgams of fights I can remember, one of which I know was about one of the guys coming to visit while my dad was at work. In my mind, the fight was about Dynamite Jim, but I don’t know for sure. I used to worry that I had been the one to tip my father off, in that way that small children have no concept of what they can discuss with whom. My favorite spot was in front of the fireplace in my Spiderman sleeping bag. I had hunched down into the bottom of the bag so I could barely see out the sleeping bag tunnel I had created. When I saw my dad hit my mother I pulled the sleeping bag down tight and hoped no one would know I had seen. Many years later my mother had surgery to correct problems from her jaw never being properly set after it was broken.

I want to think of something else. “Whatever happened to Calvin? Why did he sell the house to you after Armon died?” I ask. Calvin was the next-door neighbor; his family had owned the house as long as I could remember.

“Well, after Armon died he let a bunch of punks move in with him.” Punk is my father’s word for anyone he dislikes. “They was takin’ advantage of him, an doin drugs, and lord knows what.”

“Poor Calvin,” my stepmother chimes in.

“So I went and had a little talk with Calvin and told him they needed to go. He says ‘Aw now Mr. Steven they’re just some friends of mine.’ And I said ‘Calvin, either you kick ‘em out or I’ll kick ‘em out, you got till next week.’” My stepmother nods and makes a confirming and empathetic noise.

“Well, next week comes and all those punks are still over there; so I go over and clean house, I tossed three of them out and put all their crap on the street.”

My stepmother interrupts with, “Aw honey, you didn’t really toss them out, you just ask them to leave.”

My father gives me a look that at once dismisses my stepmother’s comment, and conveys some southern stereotype of female frailty, then continues with his story as if he didn’t notice the interruption. “I told ‘em what would happen if they came back, and we ain’t seen ‘em since.”

“So why did Calvin sell the house to you?” I ask.

“Well after I kicked all them punks out, he realized the house was too much for him to handle, and so I offered to buy it from him. And he sold it.” It really is not a big house, and since it was paid for and the area has an amazingly low tax rate, I cannot imagine it being hard to handle, but I have long ago learned the futility of questioning things like this.

“So where is Calvin now?” I ask.

“You know, I’m not really sure,” my father says with a tone of puzzlement that seems to ask why he never considered this before.

Before the time of the compound, the back yard was separated from the neighbors’ yards by a chain link fence. On one side was a nice older couple, and on the other side was Calvin, a kid my age, who had been adopted by a couple old enough to be his grandparents. For some reason my mother and I went along to pick him up when he was adopted. I remember thinking the house we picked him up from looked bad, and considering the neighborhood we came from, it must have been awful. Calvin and I used to play through the fence in our back yard, where most of the games dealt more with who had to be Ponch this time rather than anything else. I was playing through the fence with Calvin one evening when my father came to get me. He carried me inside and set me down on the bathroom counter. This counter was the place he took me when I was in trouble. I was scared, my mother was crying and my dad looked like he was about to start crying. They both explained to me that they were getting a divorce.

I was the only kid in four-year-old kindergarten whose parents were divorced. A lady ran kindergarten who I would swear had no level of educational certification whatsoever. It was more of a mass daycare, hell maybe it was just daycare and my mother has been telling me it was kindergarten all these years. Well kindergarten/daycare let out for the summer, and my mother and I had moved into a duplex in Pleasant Grove. I found this a vast improvement, since there was a public pool two blocks away, not to mention a park with a playground. Soon my mother found work with the Buffalo Rock Bottling Company, a local Pepsi bottler.

When the summer was over it had been decided that I would start first grade, without any consideration being given to the fact that I was four years old, but no one except the school seemed to mind. I now realize that in order for my mother to pull off the single mom thing she had to find a cheaper alternative to daycare, and luckily I was a bright enough four year old to pull it off.

“Did I tell you about this car I got out in the garage?” My father asks me. I know this is the point in our ritual of social gatherings where I will now have to leave my wife’s side to go examine my father’s latest side job, and abandon my wife to my stepmother. Luckily, as my little sister has progressed into the teenage years, my wife has not minded me leaving to go to the garage nearly as much. And to be honest, I have a personal affinity for all things mechanical.

“Let’s go take a look at it,” I respond.

I survey the yard that was three separate lots and homes in my childhood, thinking about what was there and keeping an eye peeled for any new contraption of my father’s that could be hiding in the tall grass. My father actually has two separate garages, but I know he is referring to the larger of the two, because as far as I know the other garage has been totally filled with junk, to the point you haven’t been able to even walk inside for the last decade.

“How is the land bridge coming?” I ask, as we reach the mid-point between the house and the six-car garage. My father stops and looks out toward the Warrior River that used to run through his backyard.

“I haven’t had much to put out there this year, just some yard trash, and a couple o’ trees I had to cut down.”

About twenty years ago, a boat launch a quarter mile upstream from my father’s house decided to put in a larger parking lot, so they filled into the river to expand their property. The water behind everyone’s homes for a little over a half mile downstream became stagnant. Where the Warrior River once bounded the back of my father’s property, it became marsh and cattails. For several years, many of the homeowners would dredge out the area behind their houses so they could use their piers and boathouses, but eventually the cattails won out. A couple of years after my father tore down his boathouse and pier he had an epiphany; his property deed specified that his land went to the edge of the water. Rather than just fill in the back edge to make the backyard larger, he decided to build a land bridge over half a mile out into the Warrior River, thereby passing all the stagnate water and reaching a small island in what used to be the center of the river. So far, he is almost half way to the island, with a strip of land exactly wide enough to drive a dump truck down.

The third epic installment.

If anyone has any suggestions on how long these “parts” should be, please let me know.

As we enter the garage I look to see if any work has been done on my father’s 1964 Studebaker GT Hawk. I am not surprised to see it in exactly the same spot as last year.

My father notices me checking out the Studebaker, and asks, “Did I ever tell you about the way I had the exhaust rigged on that thing?”

“You mean the butterfly valves that would let you swap from normal exhaust to side pipes with no mufflers?” I instantly feel guilty for depriving him of an opportunity to reminisce.

“Man, you should have heard that thing when you got on it. That’s a good soundin’ little car.

“You know what else had a good sound, that Roadrunner I had,” he added.
Due to financial problems, my father parted with a nice collection of muscle cars in the 80’s.

My father asks, “Do you remember that Roadrunner?”

“Bright yellow, six foot tall rear spoiler with a roadrunner on it? Yeah, how could I forget it? Isn’t that the car you and Ronnie figured out how to drive with the doors?”

This question lights up my father’s eyes, which I knew it would. Me fishing for stories is perhaps the only true act of benevolence I ever make towards my father.

He begins his story with the excitement of a small child: “We’d get it up about 70 and then we’d both unlatch the doors, and as we came on a turn, the person on the side you wanted to turn to would open his door all the way. And that Roadrunner had huge heavy doors, so sometimes to make a really sharp corner you’d have to use your legs to shove it all the way open.” My dad mimics bracing his feet against the car door. “But sometimes you’d over steer, and then real quick the other guy’d have to open his door. Me an’ Ronnie got so good at it that we’d make it all the way form Head’s Grocery to Howton’s without ever touchin’ the wheel.”

The distance from Head’s Grocery (which is actually a gas station) to Howton’s Camp is about five miles, and is a very curvy road, requiring two ninety-degree turns. I would probably have trouble believing this story, if not for the fact that they demonstrated their skill, with me in the car, when I was about five. Not surprisingly, my father seems to have no recollection of my involvement in this event.

“Ronnie and his wife came up to visit before the holidays,” my father says, while still looking lost in his own recollections.

“How are they doing?” I ask out of habit.

I don’t have anything against Ronnie or his wife, who I think are my second cousins, but I’m honestly not that concerned either. The last time I saw them for more than a polite hello, was right after they moved out of the house where the garage we are in now stands. Back then, which is now over twenty years ago, their house was the last one on the block with one house in between theirs and ours. I was always fond of their children, who were both a few years older than I was, because of the amount of time they spent entertaining me. Although I’m sure they had few other options for diversion in this neighborhood.

After they moved out, the family that purchased their house quickly built a bad reputation in the community. Aside from their lack of hygiene (which should have made them fit in even better), I never heard the atrocities for which they were so loathed by all the neighbors. Perhaps, if I had been a few years older, I would know all the sordid details. As it is, I only remember the night their cinder block house burnt until nothing remained.

As soon as we realized there was a fire my father and I ran down to the end of the street where people were starting to gather. Most of the neighbors I had never seen before were in attendance, when Bill, then the owner of the bait shop and boat launch, arrived with a shotgun in his only hand.

Bill, known as Dynamite Bill, (one of two people from my childhood who was commonly referred to with dynamite as a prefix for their name) earned this moniker when he blew off his arm dynamiting fish. The really bad thing about blowing off your arm while dynamiting fish, according to Bill, is having to drive the boat back to the dock.

As Bill walked up, he racked the pump action on his shotgun to get everyone’s attention. He then preceded to explain his intention of shooting anyone who tried to call the fire department. Luckily for all of us in attendance, we had come to check out the fire before placing any calls. Random yard and debris fires were so common in the area, that most people assumed it was nothing to worry about until they saw or heard different. And anyone who came to see got to enjoy the fire with Bill, his shotgun, and the rest of us until the fire burned so hot that the cinder blocks began to explode, and Bill decided there was no chance of the fire department putting it out before it was totally gone.

One would have thought Dynamite Bill owned the property and wanted the insurance, or was at least interested in the property, but neither of these were true. He simply hated the family that lived there and wanted them out of the neighborhood. My father was actually the only person interested in the property, and the remains of that house were bulldozed into the river to begin my father’s land bridge.

“Yeah, Ronnie and his family are doin’ fine,” my father trails off and stares at me. “What are you lost in thought about?”

“I was just remembering old Dynamite Bill,” I say.

“Remember that dog that used to ride around on top of his ole station wagon. That beat up station wagon had a suicide knob on the steering wheel so he could drive with one hand. You know, those things are illegal.”

“Only for people with two arms.”

This one probably needs editing a bit more than the previous ones. Like always, any suggestions are welcome.

I stood there in my father’s obscene monstrosity of a garage, smelling the ever-present odor of paint, fondly remembering watching a one-armed man drive through the fishing camp with a dog lying on the roof of his beat-up station wagon. It struck me as odd suddenly how time can make even memories of hateful people seem pleasant.

My father is laughing as he walks toward the paint booth to show me the car he is currently repairing.

“This one, well actually it started out as two; a front-end wreck, and another one with a totaled rear-end. I took the front-end clip off and set it on the one with the good rear-end, and then straightened out a few kinks on the frame machine.”

“Who do you have helping you?” I ask.

“A couple of my students work for me occasionally.”

“Isn’t that a slight conflict of interest?” I ask, without thinking.

“What do you mean, ‘a conflict of interest?’”

“Well, it just seems like it might be inappropriate for you as a teacher to have students who work for you.” I say, with a dread of where this conversation might lead.

“Well I give ‘em better grades if they work for me, to make it fair.”

I pause as I struggle to come up with a way of not continuing down the road this conversation is leading us on. “That guy Rich sure was a good body man, why doesn’t he still work for you?”

“Aw, several reasons I guess. Well after his house burnt he bought some property way out past Pelham, and put ‘em a single-wide on it. You remember when his house burnt, right?”

Rich’s house was located between the empty lot at the end of the street, which was the former residence of my second cousin Ronnie, and my father’s original house. Shockingly it too burnt to the ground, and my father then purchased it as well, and bulldozed the remains into the river as part of the land bridge.

“Yeah, I remember when it burnt, almost caught yours on fire too.” I answer.

“Yep, the fire department showed up just in time to keep our house form catchin’ too.

“Ole Rich has ‘em a couple of kids now, and he’s workin’ for a body shop in Pelham, but heck after I started teachin’ I didn’t take nearly as much work and I couldn’t use ‘em all the time.”

“Kids? I didn’t know he was married.”

“I’m not sure if him and that gal ever got married or not.

“Hey, you remember that time me, you, and Rich pulled that body off that Blazer and put it on that Jimmy frame?” my father asked.

“Yeah, we had so much trouble trying to figure out how to lift the body of without damaging it.”

“Yep, ended up having to take a bend out of the roof.”

I don’t really have fond memories of working with my dad on cars; it has actually been a cause for several fall outs between my father and me. For instance, my high school car was a ‘81 Trans Am, which I naturally proceeded to wreck. But in order to fix the totaled front end I had to buy another car as a parts car. My father thought the parts car idea was a horrible one, and logically it was, but that car was pure sentiment for me. The sentiment is the reason I still own it, although I drive a Civic on a daily basis. The Trans Am was purchased brand new in 1980, by my parents. My parents divorced a month later, but because of the terms of the divorce, my father continued to make payments on it until it was paid off. My father never drove it. He hates it, and probably justifiably so, but the car to me represents everything I thought was cool as a child.

The parts car had a 403 Oldsmobile engine in it, and since I was a teenager, I wanted to put that engine in my car. My father said we would rebuild the engine together, and put it in my car. For two years he said this. Finally, my cousin and I rebuilt it and put it in without any help from my father. My dad did not speak to either of us for several months. I keep thinking that as I get older I will understand his anger over that better, but I think it all is just sentimentality. A year later, my father illegally sold (without title) what was left of my parts car and pocketed the money, while I was away at college. He also did not bother to let me know he sold it; a friend from home heard about it and called me at school to let me know.

“Yeah that Jimmy was still runnin’ good when I sold it,” my father says.

“You held on to that one for a while,” I reply.

“Almost ten years.”

“Well, you want to walk back over and see what the ladies are up to?”

“Yeah let’s head back over,” my father says as he scans the garage, almost like he is looking for something else to show me.

I decide to take the lead and head out the door before he finds something else. He always has several random things laying around that he has traded someone for, even though he has no specific use for them. He tried to give me some prefabricated particleboard cabinets, which he had accepted as payment for work on a car, when my wife and I remodeled our kitchen. However, his random collection of things sometimes comes in handy at the most unexpected times.

When I was nine, I was spending the weekend with my father and stepmother at my stepmother’s old house in Centerpoint, and in the middle of the night, a horrible screeching followed by a crash awakes us all. My father and I go running outside to find a car wrapped around a tree across the street. The paramedics, and fire department arrive and begin trying to cut the passenger out of the mangled car. As my father and I are standing helplessly by, we hear a fireman saying that the med-evac helicopter can’t land in a nearby field because the grass is too high and it is too dark to make out the ground level. My father quickly runs over to the fireman and tells him to tell the “copter to circle” and he’ll “make it so he can land.” He turns and grabs my arm, and instructs me to follow him, as we take off running for the basement of my stepmother’s house. An assortment of army green and camouflage items begin to fly through the air as my father digs through his crazy collection of things. Suddenly, he has found what he was looking for, and he tells me to grab a handle on what looks to me like the greyhound bus of duffle bags. We run, carrying this bag that feels like it weighs as much as my dad and me put together, down the street to the field the helicopter is circling. After we reach the center of the field, my father flings the bag down, and opens it up. He searches through what appear to be folds of canvas until he finds two nylon loops; he takes one and gives me the other, and instructs me to run to the corner of the field. In moments, we have unpacked a highly reflective Marine Corp emergency helicopter-landing pad. The helicopter landed safely and quickly departed with the crash victim. Despite my nine-year-old curiosity, I was never able to ascertain why my father possessed such an item.

I came to the realization that I must name all my characters after re-reading this post. Next part - more names, less pronouns. And possibly a guest appearance . . . pending approval.

As my father and I walk back into the house, I hear my stepmother say, “You know, it was a rough way to grow up, but I always tell him that with all the stuff that has happened he could write a book.”

I can tell by looking at my wife that her patience is almost exhausted, and I know exactly what my stepmother has been talking to her about from the moment I opened the door. I have personally heard my stepmother comment on the book-worthiness of my childhood several times, always following a defense of her and my father’s methods for dealing with all the custody issues, which arose after my parents’ divorce. Evidently, “letting a dead dog lie” is the only colloquialism not present in her vocabulary.

I always wonder, but am afraid to ask, exactly what part of my life she feels is worthy of being put down in print. If I had to guess I would say it was something to do with the twelve times I testified in court before age thirteen.

Even though I know it is not what she means, there is one story that always pops into my mind when she discusses the value of my life story as literature. My mother and I were leaving the parking deck of the Jefferson County courthouse after another wonderful custody case, when as we rounded the corner in the Trans Am, there were my stepmother and father. Apparently, my father had no doubts about how crazy my mother was, because he continued moving toward their car. My stepmother decided there were a few things she needed to discuss with my mother, and in order to facilitate this conversation taking place, she decided to step out in the center of the lane. My mother has always liked driving fast. She saw my stepmother and immediately hit the brake, coming to a complete stop over half the length of the parking garage from where my stepmother stood yelling. My mother continued to hold down the brake as she applied the accelerator until both rear tires began to smoke. And then she let off the brake. I saw my stepmother lean over the hood, and then roll up and off the windshield. I quickly turned around to look back, but my mother never let off the gas until we rounded the next corner.

“Oh! I’m glad y’all are back inside, I realized we had a present for you we forgot,” my stepmother says as she realizes my father and I have returned.

“You guys didn’t have to get me anything else,” I say, trying to hide the honesty of this statement.

“Yeah, I don’t know how we could have forgotten that one,” my dad says.

My stepmother reaches into the kitchen cabinet and pulls out a velvet Christmas bag intended for bottles of alcohol. Since neither my father or stepmother drinks, and they also disapprove of my drinking, I am honestly confused about what it might be. I untie the drawstring and expose a bottle of small batch single barrel bourbon. They both take turns explaining how when they were in Tennessee they saw the distillery and decided they needed to stop and buy me a bottle. I am crushed by the guilt of my expectations; this is probably one of the most thoughtful gifts they have given me, and I feel horrible for not expecting it out of them.

I seldom make an effort to understand them anymore. They grew and matured while I went through adolescence. There are many decisions my parents made that I find harder to justify than others, but in each I can normally find some basis for understanding if I try hard enough. I decided when I was ten that I didn’t want to see my father anymore. That has to be a hard decision to deal with as a father.

It was my spring break, and I was staying with my grandmother, who lived next door to my mother and me. It was my mother’s turn to have custody of me during spring break, but my father had found out I was staying with my grandmother during the day and therefore thought I should come stay with him. My mother asked me if I wanted to stay with him, and I said no. She then told my father that since she had custody this spring break I couldn’t stay with him.

The second or third day of break my father showed up at my grandmother’s door. He had a history of being violent and destructive, so according to the court he wasn’t allowed to come to my mother’s house. We had neutral meeting points for when he would pick me up for the weekends. My grandmother got scared and told me to go into the other room while she answered the door. When I heard my grandmother yelling I came back into the room; then my father shoved past her and picked me up. I started yelling, and he started calling me all the names he used when he was angry with me. I kicked and screamed. He threw me in his truck from the driver’s side. As soon as I hit against the passenger door I pulled the handle and ran. I remember my father yelling after me, “Just be a little girl, go back and live with those two old bitches!” He stopped yelling at me when my grandmother began hitting him across the back with a broom handle. As a result, my father later took my grandmother to court on assault charges.

“Well are you gonna try the bourbon?” my father asks me.

“Sure, you want some?”

This question is more than rhetorical. My father almost spit bourbon on some of my wife’s family at our rehearsal dinner, after I instinctively handed him my glass when he asked what I was drinking. I should have known better than to give someone that doesn’t drink a glass of straight bourbon.

Our rehearsal dinner was also the site of his now infamous wedding advice. He called me and my wife aside and while being very grave told us, “I know you been getting a lot of advice lately, but I just have one very important thing to tell y’all before you start your life together.” My wife nervously cut her eyes to me looking for some insight into what was coming next, and I had no idea. “Don’t fry bacon naked.”

I pour some bourbon into a Dixie cup with ice, and take a sip.

Before I have swallowed my father asks, “How is it?”

“It’s really good.” I’m sure I have had better bourbon, but at that moment it was one of the best I had ever tasted.

“Oh, I’m so glad you like it.” My stepmother says, with almost a lilt.

My little sister, who always pays attention, but seems taciturn at times, says, “I told them you would think it was cool.”

We all sit and talk and listen to more stories for a while, and the conversation takes its traditional late-night turn.

“So are y’all stayin down here tonight?”

Before we arrived–hell, before we even left on the trip–my wife and I had decided we would make the sacrifice of spending the night at my father’s house. There is nothing wrong with the idea of spending the night there, and my father always seems to want us to, but whenever we do, no matter when it is, they are not prepared for it.

“Yeah, we thought we would if it is okay with you guys,” I reply.

“I meant to get that extra bedroom cleaned out before the holidays this year, but with all the shoppin’ and everything I just didn’t get to it,” my stepmother says.

The extra bedroom is a bedroom in name only; I haven’t seen the bed in a decade.

My father stands up as he says, “Well let me make up the couch for y’all, or would you rather sleep on the floor?”

“Couch is fine,” I say.

I am having more trouble coming up with an intro than I have actually writing the story.

This week: the long anticipated guest appearance!

The next morning I awake to find my father in the kitchen cooking breakfast. Pancakes. Silver dollar pancakes to be exact. Sometime between my parents divorcing and my father marrying my stepmother, my father took me to Gulf Shores for vacation. We drove down in his ‘66 convertible Thunderbird, with the top down the whole way. The Holiday Inn we stayed at had a little restaurant in it that served breakfast, and the first morning we were in GUlf Shores, that is where my father took me. This restaurant served these tiny pancakes, which they billed as silver dollar pancakes. I absolutely loved them, wanted to eat them every morning we were there, and my dad let me.

I’m smiling as I enter the kitchen. “Pancakes, huh?”

“Yeah, I still make these things occasionally,” my father says.

“I was just thinking about that trip to Gulf Shores,” I say.

“You got me in some hot water on that trip,” my father says while laughing.

“I didn’t know any better. I was just a little kid. But it sure was funny.”

My wife walks into the kitchen and asks, “What are you guys talking about?”

This question is my father’s cue, and he assumes his story telling tone. “This time me an Allan was down in Gulf Shores, and I was gonna meet up with Beck, but this is back when we was still datin’ an me and Allan got there a couple o’ days before she was gonna be able to make it down.”

I interrupt at this point. “The short version is he hooked up with some girl before my future stepmother made it to town.”

“Now that’s not true. I just happened to meet a nice young lady on the beach, who decided to come to dinner with us. And the next day when Becky got there I forgot to mention it, but Allan sure as heck didn’t.”

“Becky asked me if I had been having fun, and I simply said, ‘I really liked the pretty girl we walked on the beach and went out to eat with.’”

“She got so dern mad, that she turned around and drove right back to Birmingham. Took me all the next week to get her to forgive me.”

My stepmother announces her presence in the room by saying, “Aw honey, you’re such a sweet talker that I took you back in half a week.”

We finish breakfast and get our things together to go to my mother’s house. I try and convince my father to leave early this evening to make it to the family dinner on time for once, but it is the same conversation we have had since I was old enough to drive.

As soon as we are in the car my wife and I light cigarettes. For the benefit of my sister, neither of us smokes around her, but nothing makes me want a cigarette more than a family visit. The drive out of Howton’s Camp is a relaxing mix of nicotine, memories, and relief.

Rather than head straight for my mother’s house, we reward ourselves with a stop to see a friend of ours, Neil, whose family lives between my parents’ homes. He is out the door to the carport before my Civic has stopped in the driveway.

“Hey sweetheart!” He says, as he hugs my wife like he hasn’t seen her in years.

I notice the rubber bands on his wrist, and I am reminded of a time in college when rubber bands were a constant fashion accessory for him. At that time, you could be standing in a group of people talking and having a good time, when Neil would suddenly stretch the rubber bands back to the point they were about to break, and then let them snap back against the underside of his wrist. Initially, everyone would look at him a little odd, but everyone got used to it after a while. I never definitively found out why he did it, but I have a solid suspicion that it was his own adaptation of aversion therapy. My theory is that every time he thought of his ex-girlfriend June, he would snap the rubber bands against his wrist. However, my hypothesis is just that because he kept hooking up with June.

We go inside and wish his family happy holidays, and sit and talk with Neil’s dad for a while. He asks about my father, and I tell him my dad is doing well. I am tempted to ask him about some of the stories from when he and my dad hung out as teenagers, but I don’t. Neil’s father is at one time so much like my father, and so very different.

Neil asks what I don’t: “Did you guys ever get into any trouble for any of the crazy things y’all did as teenagers?”

Neil’s dad laughs and says, “Oh, we got into plenty of trouble.” He begins to laugh as he finishes speaking, with this deep noise emanating from his chest, which is best described as the laugh Errol Flynn wished he had.

I chime in and say, “More specifically, did anyone ever get caught doing the golf ball out the window trick?”

“Your dad told you about the golf ball trick? Aww. Now I never had anything to do with that.” He laughs again.

Neil’s eyes show the excitement of a story he has not heard before. “What is the golf ball trick?”

His dad has a huge grin on his face as he begins to explain. “Now you see, this was a highly complex anti-tailgating maneuver; what you’d do is, when someone is riding too close, wait until you’re coming up on a good passing spot and somebody leans out one of your driver side windows, and throws a golf ball straight ahead in the right lane.” He mimics leaning over and throwing side-armed as he continues, “But you got to make sure you throw it level so it doesn’t bounce much higher than a car. So now you got this golf ball on a low trajectory, traveling about fifty miles per hour in the right lane, and slowing quickly.” He pauses and looks at each of the three of us. “Then you just hit the brakes to make the person tail-gating pass you. Normally about the time they got a little ahead of you, they’d catch up to that golf ball. Sometimes it would hit the grill, or bumper, but a lot of times they’d catch it right in the windshield.”

My wife looks shocked, and Neil and I are both laughing, me through my nose and Neil with his Errol-apprentice, chesty laugh.

I think of Neil’s dad as a perfect example of the “Southern man,” but not in that Hank Williams Jr. hunting and fishing kind of way. He has this hard-working toughness, mixed with this unheard of respect for women devoid of almost any trace of misogyny. Once while we were in college he came up to visit Neil, and brought along his girlfriend, who was to become his second wife. Neil’s dad introduced her to several of us and we were all talking, and at some point in the conversation, I said “shit.” As the word left my lips, his hand shot up from his waist and hit my cheek; I fully understood what had just happened, and I immediately apologized to his date.

This is the first part of the story that I haven’t sat on and thought about and changed for a week. I wrote this tonight; my postings have finally caught up with my motivation to write.

This week . . . lots of animal slaying and boring legal stuff.

Eventually, my wife and I succumb to the fact that we must continue on to my mother’s house. I never dread the visits with her nearly as much as the ones with my father, but not necessarily because they go that much better. Rather, there is a much more level dialogue that makes conversations less stressful.

As we pull into the driveway, I see that my stepfather, Emit, has a new carrier in the back of his truck for his hunting dog. Regardless of the pitiful hunting ability of his five thousand dollar purebred squirrel dog, the new box seems silly; my stepfather has not seriously hunted in four years.

About this same season four years ago, he was hunting by himself. He wounded a deer and proceeded to track it about six miles into the forest. When he finally saw the deer collapsed on the ground, he experienced a sharp shooting pain in his chest. He dropped his rifle, and staggered over to where the deer lay. Emit then sat down and smoked his last cigarette, and when he had finished he decided the quickest way back was to swim and wade through a swamp between him and his truck. Once he made his way into his truck, he then stopped on his way out of the hunting camp five seperate times, four times in order to close four access gates, signifying he had left the area, and the fifth to sign out at the main entrance. A half of an hour later he arrives at the nearest hospital. He walks into the emergency room, tells someone he has had a heart attack, and his heart stops.

I personally did not need a massive coronary to convince me to quit hunting. In my family hunting should be genetic, but thankfully it is not. My uncle was a game warden, and he is such a good shot he has an insane amount of Police Olympics gold medals. All of my other male relatives just like guns, shooting at things, and decorating with dead animals so much that they just have to hunt. I started making the four a.m. pilgrimmage to the “woods” with manly relatives when I was about ten years old. When I was thirteen I had the horrible luck of hitting a living animal with a shot I fired. I ran up to where the deer lay dying on the ground, although still very alive, with my father right behind me.

“You gotta finish it,” my father said as he handed me the pistol stuffed in his pants.

Later, I carried the deer out of the woods. I cleaned it and butchered it. And I ate dear meat until it was all gone. I have never hunted again.

We get out of the car and walk around to the trunk to get our bag, as my mother, Shelby, comes out of the side door with a glass of sweet tea in her hand.

“How was the visit with your dad?” My mother asks with a pronounced note of sarcasm. “How’s your sister?” She asks sincerely.

“She’s doing well,” I reply.

“Good.” She has her arms around my neck, and I am forced to drop our bag to reciprocate. “Jan, how is your family?” She asks my wife before letting go of me.

“They are all doing well–my father wanted me to tell you happy holidays,” my wife says.

“Tell him the same from me; I’ve got a present for your family that I need y’all to deliver for me inside. Do y’all want anything to drink?”

“No thanks, I’m fine,” I say.

“I would love some of your sweet tea,” Jan says.

Some people marry someone exactly like one of their parents, but I just happened to fall in love with someone who has the same addiction to sugary iced tea as my mother.

“Where is Emit?” I ask as we walk into the kitchen from outside.

“He is on a shut-down up near Fayette, but he should be home tonight.”

My stepfather owns a company that specializes in repairing rotary kilns. Since he guarantees repair times, he sometimes has to work through the night.

“Have you been up to Fayette lately, Mom?”

“That is where your family is from?” Jan asks in that tone that only requires confirmation.

I nod and my mother answers my question. “Not in about a year. I drove past Mammaw and Pappaw’s farm the last time I was, and it was so run down it made me cry.”

My grandparents were both raised as farmers, and my mother spent the beginning of her life on their farm in Fayette County Alabama. My mother was to be given the farm and the land according to my grandparents will, but her brother convinced my grandmother to sign over power of attorney to him. He then had her declared mentally unstable, and before long the will was revoked. Shortly after getting rid of the will, my grandmother passed away, while living in a nursing home. My uncle was probably right about part of it; my grandmother was going crazy, but the will was written long before her mind started to go. My grandmother had given my mother the house we lived in while I was in high school as well, and somehow he managed to take it too.

A friend of mine, Greg, and I were in Birmingham for the Christmas break from school, and my uncle came to have her evicted on Christmas day. Greg was a year or two older than me and outweighed me by forty or fifty pounds; he had a Rollins-esque build. I vividly remember him lifting my uncle up by his collar and saying, “I don’t give a shit what belongs to whom, she’s a nice lady and if I see you again around here I’ll beat the living shit out of you.” The next visit was with the county sheriff. After we got my mother squared away, we both left town for New Year’s in New Orleans. It was my family and it was more than I could handle. Time away makes the dramatic even harder to deal with.