Toughing It Read online

  “Sure! He can give us each a thousand dollars, and we can buy our own fishing rods and our own boat.”

  Dillon is tired, too. “Where the hell would he get a thousand dollars?”

  “He’s, uh, he’s a stunt man for the movies. Or, no, he’s a movie star himself.” I have this idea my father is tall and husky and blond, like Schwarzenegger or somebody, real macho, but he would be my friend if somebody reminded him about me.

  “Dream on, Tuff.” Dillon doesn’t want to play the game. “Come on, this is no good.” He leads me up to the snack stand, where at least there’s some shade, and we get down to look for dropped money in the dirt and grass. My stomach is growling and the hot dogs smell like heaven, but we will never find enough money to buy one.

  “We need a metal detector,” Dillon says.

  Sure. That’s at least as impossible as my daydreams.

  “Tuff?”

  I’m not talking.

  “Maybe he’s a stunt man and a movie star,” Dillon says. “Huh, Tuff?” He’s going along with it now, to make me happy.

  “Okay, and he flies a seaplane,” I say. “He’s going to come flying in and land right on the river and call out our names so we can grab a boat and go climb in the plane with him. In just a minute now.”

  “Right, Tuff,” Dillon says. There is no plane and no metal detector; either. The river is slipping by just like it’s been doing for ten thousand years, and we are on our knees in the grass, and we look at each other’s sunburned faces and laugh like loons.

  It was strange, that night I walked to Dam Shame. I sure as hell didn’t have time for stupid daydreams anymore—I mean, face it, why should I have that kind of father? I’m not tall or good looking, and I’m not much of a fighter or much good at sports or hunting or school or anything. I’m nothing special in any way. I knew the score. And Dillon—nothing could make up for losing Dillon. But behind all that, the old dreams were still there, stronger than ever. It was like, since something so bad had happened, now I was expecting a personal miracle just to balance things out.

  There had already been a miracle. After all the years of not knowing, I finally knew. I knew who my father was.

  Somehow he had to make it all better.

  It was real late when I got there. After midnight. Cars with drunks yipping and hollering in them roared past sometimes, but there were no lights in the houses, no people on the street.

  I found number 216, and it was one of those half-assed shacks that call themselves stores and sell a little of everything, including bait. Especially bait—fishing is good below Shame Dam. MEAL WORMS said some signs on the front. NIGHT CRAWLERS. SANDWICHES 79¢. MINNOWS, SHINERS, LEECHES.

  I looked at the house number about five times. The streetlight showed it fine. This was it.

  So much for personal miracles.

  I thought about turning away again—it might be better not knowing. But the tug was too strong. This stupid father thing, it had been like an undercurrent in my whole life, so strong I couldn’t seem to go against it. I had to do it. I knocked on the door.

  I waited. Nobody came.

  I knocked again, pretty loud. According to the phone book, the guy lived here. If he was asleep in the back, I had to knock loud to wake him up.

  Nobody answered.

  It would have made sense to go away, sleep in a boat or something, come back the next day. But why should anything make sense when Dillon was dead? My brother was gone, I finally knew who my father was, and my dream idea of him was going down the drain. I went a little crazy, I was so tired and sad and mad. “Goddammit, let me in!” I yelled, and I started pounding on the door, whamming it with my fists, kicking it.

  Nothing happened. Nobody came. Not even a light came on.

  “Goddammit all to hell!” I aimed a punch at the display window and put my fist through it. Glass fell down with a sound like little bells. I kicked some more glass away until there was a hole big enough to get through if I bent over, and that’s what I did. I went in. I was so gonzo, I had broken in.

  The inside of the store was dark and all cluttered up with shelves full of junk. I stood there panting and shaking a little as I calmed down and started to get scared.

  Dammit, I was an idiot. I needed to get out of there.

  “Don’t move,” said a man’s voice.

  A light went on, and there he was.

  He was a short, chubby guy, bald, in a pair of baggy striped boxer shorts, with a pistol in his hand, pointed at me. I was so bummed I just looked at him a minute, not even afraid of the gun.

  “Pen Leppo?” I asked.

  He kind of nodded, staring back. God, he looked like the Gerber baby, standing there all pudgy and pale. But what the hell did I expect? A guy named Penrose, for God’s sake. Living in a place like Dam Shame.

  “I’m Shawn Lacey,” I told him, flat out. “My mom is Candy Lacey. She says you’re my father.”

  He kept staring. I guess maybe at the broken window and the blood dripping down from my hand. Maybe at my long hair—there was never money for a barber, but mostly I grew it to annoy my mom’s old man. Maybe at my patched-up face. Later on he told me he didn’t really take it in all at once, he was trying to decide whether to call the cops—some longhaired punk kid had broken into his place—or offer me a hankie, because I looked like I needed one.

  I just stared back. Hell, I had all night. It wasn’t like I was going anywhere.

  He looked maybe forty years old, a little older than my mom. Not much chin. Not much chest hair. I wouldn’t have thought she would go for him—he wasn’t her type. Of course, they hadn’t stayed together.

  “What’s your name again?” he asked finally. He still had the gun pointed at me.

  “Shawn Lacey.”

  “You’re Candy Lacey’s kid?”

  I nodded. The reason my last name was the same as hers was not because she had ever married anybody. It was because she had not ever married anybody. I figured he knew that. Most people seemed to know it.

  But he knew more than I thought. “You had a brother Dillon?” he asked, real gentle and quiet. “Got killed today?” He must have heard it on the news.

  I had to close my eyes for a minute, and I guess my face changed. When I looked again he was lowering the gun. He put it in a drawer, locked it, and walked over to me.

  “How’s your mom?” he asked.

  “Fine.” She was probably dead drunk, but I didn’t have to tell that to this Pen Leppo guy.

  “She says I’m your father?”

  I nodded, looking down at his bare feet. His toes were fat. Feet are stupid-looking things. So was his bare soft belly, stupid looking. My throat felt tight, like I couldn’t talk, yet I didn’t want him to hug me or anything. I didn’t want anybody to touch me.

  He didn’t. His hands stayed down by his sides. “Well,” he said softly, “she must have some reason for saying that.”

  I looked from his belly to his face, which didn’t show me much. It was serious, that was all. But at least he wasn’t screaming and calling the cops and kicking my ass the way he had a right to.

  “You can clean up this mess in the morning,” he told me, watching where he stepped because of the broken glass. “Come on in here for now.”

  He took me to a little kitchen in the back. He made me stand at the sink while he ran cold water over my hand to make sure all the glass was out of the cuts. Then he ran a basin full of warm water and dish-soap suds, and he made me stick my hand in there and soak it a couple minutes so it wouldn’t get infected. After all that he wrapped it up in some sort of damn Boy Scout white bandage and motioned me to sit down at the table. “You eat lately?” he asked.

  It was a simple question, but I couldn’t think of the answer.

  Pen Leppo went ahead and put some chicken noodle soup in a bowl and nuked it in his microwave. When it was hot he set it in front of me, and I guess I looked at it like I didn’t know what it was. Not that there was anything wrong with it. His kitc
hen was cleaner than Mom’s. I just couldn’t think what food was good for.

  “Eat it,” he said.

  I picked up the spoon he gave me and ate one mouthful. Then I puked it right back up. I sat there puking and puking into the bowl, even though there was nothing in me to throw up. After I finally quit puking I felt so bad I put my head down on the table and just stayed that way. I didn’t want to move ever again.

  “Shawn,” Pen said.

  He wasn’t much to look at, but his voice was powerful. Quiet, but it made me drag myself up. The mess was gone. Pen was sitting across the table from me, still bare chested, leaning back in his chair.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  I looked at him.

  “Just tell me about it from the start. Tell me everything that happened.”

  It was real late. The night was still and so was he. Something about him made me able to do it. Maybe it was the way he didn’t say too much. Maybe it was the way that soft bare chest of his seemed to soak it all in. I told him the whole thing—about Dillon taking me to town on his dirt bike and teasing me about liking this girl, about the way he died. About Mom being drunk and not caring. About leaving, and going back up the mountain, and somebody shooting at me. Probably the same guy who killed Dillon.

  “I am going to find out who it was and do him the way he did my brother,” I said. “I am going to find him and kill him.”

  “No, you are not,” Pen Leppo said, which was the first time he had tried to tell me what to do. “A lot of good it’ll do Dillon if you go to jail.”

  “I don’t give a shit! Even if the cops get the guy he’ll only get manslaughter, which is what, two years? Five years? Dillon’s dead, and this guy gets his butt smacked? I am going to kill him.”

  “You better just worry about your own butt first,” Pen said quietly. “You better call the cops first thing in the morning and tell them where you are. They’ll be looking at you funny if they think you ran away.”

  It sounded like I was staying with him at least for a while, so maybe I better do some of what he said. I mumbled, “Okay.”

  “You think you can go to sleep now? Let’s find you a place to sleep.”

  Behind the store he had two rooms, with his bed in one and his kitchen and TV and a sofa in the other. He put me on the sofa, and he kept bringing me pillows and covers and things, like he wanted to tuck me in. I kind of wished he would just go away and let me alone, and I kind of wished he would stay and hold my hand or something. No, not my hand. It hurt from smashing my way in.

  “I’m sorry about your window,” I said. It was hard to talk. I felt really tired.

  “Forget it. We’ll fix it.”

  “I’m not usually like that.”

  “You had kind of a bad day,” he said, real dry. “Forget it. Go to sleep. If you need anything, come get me.”

  I had lost my bag of stuff up on the mountain, but I still had my picture of Dillon in my pants pocket, thank God. If there was a God. I didn’t feel like there was.

  After Pen Leppo was gone I got the picture out and looked at it in the dark. I couldn’t see Dillon’s face.

  3

  The church bells made me mad, waking me up the next morning. Dillon was dead and the God pushers wouldn’t even let me sleep. Let somebody drive through with their stereo too loud and it’s terrible, but the churches can bing-bong the whole town whenever they want to. It pissed me off.

  Pen Leppo heard me swearing and came and stood over me. He was dressed already. “I take it you’re not going to church,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Okay, but get up and call the cops.”

  “You call them.”

  “Better if you do it yourself.”

  He kept after me and made me do it, and then he made me take a shower. “Just don’t get your face wet. That splint on your nose will come off.” He found me a package of underwear in that junked-up store of his. Then, after I was clean, he changed my bandages and made me eat. Toast. Cereal with milk. I wasn’t hungry, but I forced the stuff down and it stayed down.

  “We ought to go see your mother,” Pen said, sitting there and watching me eat.

  Some things he couldn’t make me do. I set my spoon down. “No way.”

  “Shawn, she’ll be sober now, she’ll be hurting. I tried to call her and tell her where you were, but—”

  “She don’t have no phone.” What did he think we were, rich like him? He had a car, a beat-up ’65 Dodge—I saw it parked outside under a propped-up piece of rusty roof, next to a row of stinky old bathtubs I guessed he raised his worms in. He had his store, TV, microwave, shower, a coin laundry right down the street to wash his clothes at. I mean, along the river that’s a lot. People living on the river don’t generally have much. Some of us even less than others. Like my mother. I wondered whether having nothing had made her a slut, or if being a slut had made her have nothing. Like most of the things I wondered about, it didn’t matter.

  “She don’t give a shit about me anyway,” I told Pen.

  “I have reason to think she does. Anyway, I give a shit about her. We have to let her know you’re okay.”

  “You go see her if you want to,” I told him. “I don’t ever want to see her again.” I meant it.

  “You’ll have to, at the funeral.”

  “What funeral?” My voice went up so high it broke. “How the hell would we have a funeral? We got no money.” Funerals were for people with enough to pay the undertaker. “The cops get done with Dillon, they’re going to throw him in the garbage!” The thought made me so sick I screamed it.

  “Huh,” Pen said, and his face got real thoughtful.

  “I keep yelling at you,” I said. “I don’t mean to yell at you.” I didn’t want to be that way to my father. I might not want to hug him or anything, but I didn’t have to yell at him. “Excuse me.” I stood up and got out of there to calm down.

  I went and swept up the broken glass in the store, and he let me alone. I found a piece of cardboard that was big enough and taped it over the broken place. While I was working, I thought how I was going to find out who killed Dillon. Being mad all the time was no use. Feeling bad was no use. I had to do something, ask around, ask questions. Go to bars, gun shops, bowling alleys, places where men hang out. Go back up the mountain and ask the people in that cabin if they saw anything. Get moving.

  Pen was on the phone with somebody. When he got done and sat at the table again to drink some more coffee, I went in.

  “Would you take me back to Sid’s Mountain?” I asked, keeping it quiet and polite.

  He looked up at me, still thoughtful. I noticed he looked better in the daylight, with clothes on. He wasn’t a bad-looking father for a guy his age, just a little short, a little bald, a little flabby.

  “I need to talk to some people,” I said.

  “Is your mother one of them?”

  I shook my head.

  “Forget it then, son.” He didn’t say it hard, but he meant it. He kept looking straight at me. “I know what you’re thinking of doing. No way am I going to let you go nosing around and maybe get yourself killed. That’s what we pay cops for.”

  “They already told me they don’t know nothing!”

  “That’s what they have to say.”

  I wasn’t going to start yelling at him again. I picked up the phone instead and called the cop I had talked to before, Detective Mohatt. “Anything yet on who killed Dillon?” I asked him.

  “Shawn, I just told you a couple hours ago, these things take time.” He sounded grouchy because I had phoned him again. Not the real patient sort.

  “I forgot to ask you something,” I said. “Dillon’s bike, are you done with it? Can I have it back?”

  “It’s evidence, son,” he said. “We’re holding it awhile. Nice talking with you.” Before he cut me off I heard him say to somebody in his office, “Christ, his brother’s dead and all he can think about is getting his hands on the goddamn bike.”

&nbs
p; I hung up the phone, shaking mad. I needed the bike to get around on, to find the murderer, not for fun and games. That cop was a prick. For a couple minutes I just stood there breathing hard. Then I turned back to Pen Leppo.

  “Look,” I told him, “I have to do it. If you won’t help me, I’m going to have to do it without you. I’m going to have to run off and sleep in a junked car or something, and I don’t want that. I just found you, for God’s sake.”

  I guess he could tell I meant it. “I don’t want that, either,” he said.

  We stared at each other.

  “Please,” I said. My voice quivered. I didn’t mean to get that way with him. It just happened.

  “Okay, Shawn, you win. But listen.” He stood up. He wasn’t so short, actually—about as tall as me. “You don’t do nothing by yourself. Only if I’m with you every step of the way.”

  We went to see my mother first. “You can sit in the car if that’s what you gotta do,” Pen said, and that’s what I did. I made him park up along the road so the brats wouldn’t come near me.

  When Pen came out he had his lips pressed together. “It’s bad in there,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Your mom’s in bad shape.”

  I knew what he wanted me to do, and no way could I do it. I couldn’t look at her without wanting to kill her. “Start the damn car and get me out of here,” I said.

  He didn’t do it, but he didn’t say any more about Mom, either. He asked, “That boyfriend of hers ever hit you?”

  “Once in a while.” Not bad, not to put me in the hospital or anything. “Mostly he just takes it out on Dillon and me other ways.”

  “‘Takes it out’?”

  “He don’t like us being around.” I couldn’t seem to stop talking like Dillon was still alive. “Because we’re not his. He’s okay with his own kids.” The little brats.

  Pen got that thoughtful look of his. He scowled when he was thinking, but not like he was mad.

  “No, it wasn’t him,” I said. I knew what Pen was thinking, wondering about Mom’s old man. “He doesn’t have the guts.” At least I didn’t think so. The guy drank a lot, and he got mean when he drank, but not that mean. Anyway, I couldn’t see him rigging up that shotgun. Too much like work.