Touchdown

Fucking figures.

The one day that I actually care about being on time for something, my dad finally finishes that ridiculous, room sized steel angel he's been working on for the last 2 months. Not to sound like a brat, but it's not like whichever geezers that were eagerly awaiting the new art installation outside of their retirement home would be around to complain if he was late. But if there's one thing that my dad prides himself on more than (sorta) holding his liquor, it's his illustrious career as the most prominent community artist on the bad side of Northwest Elm.

And today, he saw fit to hold himself to the highest standards on both fronts. Which meant that he was almost too wasted to help me load his 500 lb interpretive dance of salvaged car-wreck parts into the back of his pickup. We dropped the goddamn thing enough times for us to finally discuss regrouting our driveway for the first time since before I was born, and in one of the falls it almost took my right foot with it.

So you could say I'm a little bit steamed.

Inconvenienced, even, as I'm sweating up a storm in the nicest outfit I've worn since my parents’ second marriage and subsequent same-day divorce. To double my fortune, my fraying phone charger finally snapped last night. And with the car radio still busted from the time we tried pilfering a fallen tree from the nearby national park, all I can do is rap my fingers on the steering wheel in tune to blaring car horns and soft, drunken snores.

The guy in front of me cuts me off, and I punch the trumpets.

“You son of a bitch!” I hear, like a pixie whisper from the car behind me.

Since when did Northwest Elm have a goddamn traffic problem? There’s like barely fifty-thousand people in the whole city. My dad murmurs something, and I hear the signature ka-thlunk of him slumping over.

“Dad…” I mumble, as I reach over to prop him back up again.

My eyes linger on him for longer than I’d care to admit, made possible by the fact that our truck hadn’t moved in the last three minutes.

He’s a good guy at heart. Beneath that egg-shell smooth head and brooding, cliffside brow. One time he told me that you lose a hair for every time you get into a fight. And well, I guess it always made a strange kind of sense, considering the woman he ended up marrying (twice). My dad has that kind of folksy charm to him, as if he’s simultaneously lived a dozen lives and yet never left the shade of the rock he lives under.

Damn.

No matter how much I complain, I can’t help but feel a little comforted by his presence. It’s like having a big, fat dog, like a St. Bernard or something, napping in the corner of the room while you work from home. Besides, seeing him snoozing safely beside me sure lubes up the bitter pill of having to do the driving.

I still remember the days where he’d stumble in through the door reeking like a distillery just after midnight, after all.

Dad likes to joke about the fact that the only six pack he has is a beer belly, but I can still see traces of the bodybuilder he used to be in his past life. His shoulders are the kind of stocky you only see in star football players and bawdy tavern dwarves. And I’m pretty sure the only reason why he can work twelve hour days without back pain is because he used to be able to squat-lift this very truck. In a past life, he could have been a mountaineer or a bear-wrestler, or even goddamn Paul Bunyan himself. But Dad’s too humble. He likes to say that you can tell a lot about a man’s life by his hands, and yet always hides his own in gloves. Looking at him now, I’m almost unfamiliar with their nakedness.

I always thought it was a little strange that he still wore his wedding band after all these years. But only now does it click that I don’t think he could remove it if he tried. Between the electronics, stitch-seaming, shoemaking and so on, there isn’t a square inch of his skin that isn’t touched by a scar, pock-mark, or bandage in some way. Mom once said she was sickened by his touch—like he was a lizard man or something. She was drunk, sure. But a man’s hands do seem to grow thicker and more gnarled every year. His oaky flesh had expanded around the gold-platinum ring, bony joints sealing it in like a cage of gnarled roots. And much like a big, strong tree, this man’s been the one constant in my stupid, embarrassing life.

“I love you dad,” I whisper, “You fucking idiot.”

He stirs to life like a mummy sitting up in its sarcophagus, bearing this inexplicable expression of bewilderment.

“Where am I?” he asks, the whisky adding that signature ‘Gandalf’ creak to his voice.

“We’re doing the Happy Hill job, dad. Here, you’re dehydrated.”

I hand him a condensed-looking water bottle that I’m pretty sure has been sitting in the car door for a month. But it makes no difference to him. He hands me back an empty, crumpled husk of plastic like three seconds later with an action hero’s wink.

“Thanks for the ride, kid.”

“Gotta pay rent somehow,” I reply, finally seeing the invisible thread that binds this traffic jam together.

A four-car pileup, with all four cars actually piled up. One of them is a dinky red pickup just like ours. I involuntarily shiver.

“Don’t worry about dumb shit like that,” my dad says, “Like I told you, all you have to worry about is enjoying that youth of yours.”

I frown, and prepare to bat his cloying optimism away with my usual plaintive armory. But for what feels like the first time, I don’t feel like complaining.
“You’re right,” I say.

My mind retraces the wild week I’ve had. I’ve met two new friends. I’ve been through two sorta-dates, one real date, and there’s another one coming right up—plus, whatever that was with Brian. And to top it all off, some good old quality time with my pops.

“Hwat?” Dad asks.

“You’re right, I said. Want me to put that down in writing?”

He laughs like he’s laughing for the first time in his life. Like a free-spirited kid. Like he always does.
“You know I’m bad with that sorta stuff,” he says. “Just ask Barbs.”

I wince at the familiarity in his voice when he says that.

“I don’t think it’s the best idea to ask mom about you.”

“Unreliable narrator?”

“Reliable as chicken wire in a twister.”

“Come now, don’t be that harsh on the old gal.”

She emptied your goddamn 401k to buy a BMW, I want to say. But I don’t.

“Say,” he starts, “That getup looks spendy. Thought you were saving up your birthday money?”

“It was a gift,” I reply, remembering Brian’s puppy-dog eyes as Mr. Robertson coaxed the bag of clothes into my hands, “Sort of.”

“You didn’t steal it now, didya?”

“Not any more than the Packers stole it from the Steelers back in ‘11.”

“That field goal should’ve been a touchdown,” he says, with a sigh. “I miss those days. Good games. Better beer.”

“I think you’ve had enough beer.”

“I’ll say.” He pats his stomach, with surprising accuracy to the tenderness of a woman two weeks from delivery.

“Sorry.”

“What? I know I’m round like a roly-poly. But if you’re really sorry, you’d at least tell me what those clothes are for, son.”

I hesitate for a second, and I almost sort of understand why Anne-Marie wanted to keep different parts of her lives separate. But I can’t keep a secret from this man. Not when we share an underwear-only policy on stay-at-home weekends. Not when I say nothing about his German mail-order porn and he says nothing about my internet history. And especially not when he’s never been anything less than direct with me—Even if it did mean him admitting some really traumatizing shit about his and mom’s sex life when he was drunk.

I squeeze the steering wheel and admit, “I’m going out with a girl. And she’s really something special.”

“Can’t wait to build the cradles for the grandkids,” he says, in that familiar blunt manner that is more truth than joke.

“I’m not letting my kids anywhere near you,” I say, knowing full well that he’d make a better granddad than I ever would a father.

“Drat. And here I was hoping I’d teach them how to carve mallards out of maples. You remember wood-ducks, Ogden?”

“Yes I remember wood-ducks. The scars on my thumbs won’t let me forget.”

“But it was so much fun.”

I smile. “Yeah. It was.”

“This girl. How long?”

“Just yesterday. Well, semi-officially, anyways. But I’ve known her for like two weeks now, so-”

“That special, huh?” He gives me these earnest, loving eyes. The kind that resurrects those days when I used to play with toy trains in his lap while he stroked my head.

I can only blush in reply.
Dad nods, more to himself than to me. “You know, when I met Barbs, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into.”

“I’d say,” I remark.

But he steamrolls me with sheer heart. “All I can remember is that fire in her eyes the day we met. Like she was going to make the entire world hers. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing with my life at the time. But I knew I wanted to be there to see it happen.”

I’m reminded of my uncomfortable revelation about the empress Wu Zetian, and I figure that my dad just has a type. Which, unfortunately, means that his bony Irish nose isn’t the only thing I’ve inherited from him.

“This girl’s sorta like that,” I say, “But less hellfire and more bonfire.”

“Is her mom single?” he asks, once again sincerely and bluntly.

I burst out laughing. And once the rippling chuckles die down, I reply, “You’re a salacious cad.”

“I might be a salad-alicious whatever, but I’m the one who wears a longhorn-hide around my hips. You’d do well to remember that.”

His dumb grin reminds me of that time he tried to kill a pair of flies with that precious belt of his. It was shortly after the house became just the two of us. He was so certain that the wicker kitchen chair could hold his weight. But his surprise attack on the bug nest in the lamp went about as well as expected for someone who’d left enough empty beer cans for me to trip over as I came home. No sooner than I had arrived in the doorway, he came crashing through the kitchen table with the whole debacle, lamp shards and maggots and all. ‘We’ll get it sorted’, he said. And we did, that day and every day since.

And I speak, thinking I want to try and kill two flies with my own belt:

“Say, what did you do that made her fall for you?”

“I don’t think it was any one thing,” he replies. “We met when I was called to clean her pipes. One thing led to another, and I very much did-”

“Eugh, gross,” I say, more unwilling than unable to read through his bluntness.

“Very much did think she was into me,” he continues, this time with a goofy smirk. “But I couldn’t really tell until it was too late. And by that point, she’d already been calling me her boyfriend behind my back for four months.”

I think about how long four months feels. All the homework, all the exams. The half a dozen classes a day times twenty weekdays times four. I realize there’s only four months until the end of this droll vortex known as high school. And I’m suddenly very proud that I didn’t wait that long, even if things don’t work out.

“The point is,” Dad says. “It’s impossible to always do the smart thing in life. Heck, it’s hard enough to do the right thing. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that sometimes you just need to do the wrong thing to be happy. So don’t be afraid to do something crazy and live to tell the tale.”

I can’t tell if it’s a heart-stopping life lesson or a roundabout metaphor for a ‘doing your mom’ joke. I can never tell. And honestly, I don’t need to. Because I feel those words reach that sickly part of me that I’d locked away until Anne-Marie and I’s shared outburst at the convention hall.

I pull up in front of the depressing concrete nursing home that is our destination. And I look over at his ugly mug—the worst present he ever gave me. My dad might be the second-worst person in the whole stupid world behind my mom. Yeah I’m sure of it now, more than ever. Sure that he’s the opposite of perfect-

But he’s the best goddamn father I could’ve asked for.