Catch

by Ray Nayler

I had a father for six months.

I met him when I was seven years old. There was a knock on the door of our prefab house, and my mother, who had been in the kitchen throwing cut vegetables into a bubbling pot of Ragu, smiled down at me and said “Who could that be? Why don’t you go and see, baby?”

She knew who it was, of course.

It was June 5, 1976 and my father had just been released from prison for burglary. I knew none of this. My father had taken a Greyhound Bus from Folsom to Albuquerque, New Mexico. He had been on the bus nearly two days. He had spent his time playing Go Fish with a couple of kids about my age, whose mother wanted nothing to do with them. She had a headache.

I knew none of this.

My mother never had a headache.

I threw the door open.

The man was tall and very thin and a bit pale. He had a bunch of daisies in his hand, wrapped in cheap green cellophane and with the price-tag still on them. He looked around a hundred years old to me, but I was seven and anybody over thirteen was over the hill. He had a red baseball cap on, the kind that’s sized, not the cheap plastic-backed kind with the adjusting tabs in back. He had a baseball glove in his other hand, which he had stolen from a kid’s backpack at the Greyhound station in Phoenix, Arizona, while the kid was in the bathroom taking a leak. He had a big stupid grin screwed to his face, and there was a tooth missing on one side. A bicuspid, knocked out by a prison guard who caught him smoking in the laundry room, instead of folding.

He said, “Hey, buddy.”

He said, “How’s it going?”

I turned around and yelled: “It’s some guy selling flowers!”

He said “I guess you don’t remember me.”

I was confused because he wasn’t a Mexican like the other guys who wandered around selling “Cheapo Flores” in Albuquerque.

“Better let him in, honey. It’s hot out there.”

My mom must be nuts, I thought. I’m not letting some jerk in our house.

Some Jerk said: “I’m your Dad. But you don’t have to call me that, just yet. I guess I’ll have to earn that.”

My mom came up behind me, wiping her hands clean on her yellow half-apron, and they stared at each other. I don’t know how long. I was in my room with the door slammed shut, face-down on my bed. It could have been hours.

It was a big shock for me, seeing my father for the first time. My father who had been “away” since before I could remember. Just “away,” and somehow I had known never to ask questions. I had seen pictures of him, but pictures are just shapes on paper and this was a man. The glove he gave me helped me get over the shock. You can buy kids off easy.

That evening we played catch in the flat white light of the motion sensor lamp mounted over our front door. He would be still for a moment, and it would go dark. He would move to throw, and the lamp switched on, and there was the ball, already halfway to my mitt, coming out of nowhere. I would catch it most times, or miss it and it would bounce away, out of the light, a dull whitish spot under the half-grown bushes that framed our property. If I caught it he said “Great catch, buddy!” in a way that made me want to cry and throw myself at him, burrow right into him and stay there loving him, hugging him so he would never go “away.” And if I missed it he would say “Don’t worry about it,” in a voice that made me want to kill myself because didn’t he know I was a failure, a scabby little brat with an upcoming F in math that I hadn’t told my mother about?

Everything was love and death.

When he stopped moving the light went out with a click and he was gone.

When he moved he was there again. Like a magic trick. I scrambled to catch the ball.

He had no glove but caught the ball bare-handed and didn’t even wince. Because he was magic. Because he was my dad already, even though it would take me a month to say it to his face.

Even though I couldn’t stand it when he touched my mother.

We lived way out on the West Side of Albuquerque, where it starts petering out into the desert again. We lived a stone’s throw from route 66. There were plenty of lumpy vacant lots to go BMXing in with the other kids, but that was about it. The ice-cream man didn’t make it out that way much, but there was a market where you could buy pop-ups and orangesickles. I sped around on my BMX, new that Christmas, jumping off the dirt mounds, spectacularly happy because it was summer, because it was Saturday and because I had a dad. My friend Jimmy said “hey, who’s that guy sitting out fronta your place?” and I said “That’s my dad, you dumb bastard.”

My dad.

Not just Some Jerk.

A man who could catch a baseball bare-handed.

A man who knew how to break glass quietly by taping it, and then pulling it away in a single piece.

A man who had spent five years in prison sharing a cell with Harley Madson. He called himself Harley, but my dad said his real name was Kimberley. His parents had wanted a girl.

My dad said a lot of things.

In prison you end up owing people. My dad owed Harley, for reasons I would never know. For reasons he didn’t talk about. So when Harley showed up at our doorstep and needed a place to stay the night, he stayed.

The two weeks before Harley came were the best fourteen days of my life. My new dad was gone all day looking for work. He had been a mechanic, and he had been a janitor, and a pump jockey, and a barback and a dishie and a short order cook. But he had also been a felon, and that was what people saw. Like an angry red scar down the side of his face. Like a missing eye. Felon. Jailbird. Thief. Liar. Dirt.

In the evening we played catch. He fixed the chain on my bike and showed me how to patch a tire. He sat in a lawn chair on the doorstep, and my mother sat in a lawn chair next to him, and between them their hands were linked. They didn’t talk much, but sometimes my mother’s eyes glittered, and sometimes my father would lean over to her and whisper something, and then they would go inside. I would hit the jumps on my BMX and fly up into the hot red desert air and come down easy. I would fall and not wince. I tried not to think of him touching her. I could never get used to that. Holding hands was okay, but inside they did something else. Something you turned the lights out and locked the door for, and I didn’t like it.

It was the price I paid for having a dad.

That was the way I saw it. It was like dues.

My mother had hair the color of postcard sand, and brown-gold eyes. Like whiskey in the bottle, with the sun coming through it. When Harley came my dad got the door, and in the kitchen my mother, who was straining macaroni noodles, closed her whiskey eyes and put her hand to her forehead, like she had a fever. I was standing in the middle of the kitchen saying “mommommommom.” Because my inside clock had gone off and I had to make sure dinner was coming in say the next five minutes or so. In the front room my dad’s voice said:

“Honey — is there enough for a fourth?”

A new voice said: “Don’t worry about me, David. I don’t . . .”

“Honey?”

My mom opened her eyes again and said “Of course there is!” In a sweet voice that didn’t match the empty, awful look in her eyes. She blinked like someone trying to wake up.

I wanted to go in the other room to see who it was, but somehow I was scared. I didn’t like the way my mother was acting, and I didn’t like the way my dad’s voice sounded. Weak. Like a kid’s voice.

“Honey, come on in here and meet Harley Madson. We shared a cell in Folsom.”

We sat around the table and ate macaroni and cheese and drank Pepsis. Harley did most of the talking. He was a big man with an even bigger voice, and a tattoo of a carp swimming down his right arm — splashing out at the elbow and darting toward his wrist. My new dad laughed at all of Harley’s jokes, which mostly went over my head, being about women or prison, two things in which I was inexperienced. My mother laughed, but her laugh was polite and stiff. Harley kept looking at her in a way that made me want to stab him with my fork. Her cheeks were red.

“Time for bed, champ.” My dad winked at me. I didn’t want to leave. I felt somehow like I needed to stay. To keep an eye on things. But I had never made my dad angry. I didn’t know him angry, and I was afraid (with that instinct of a child) of what I might see.

I lay in the dark and listened to Harley’s big laugh, my father’s little laugh, and the polite titter of my mother. Harley had been nice to me. He’d winked at me and told my mom how big I was and how strong I looked. If anyone else had done those things, I would have liked them. But I could not like Harley. There was something about him. Something that then I could not put into words, but now I can. Every expression Harley made was a different mask. His face was not his own. His expressions were exact, and the emotions they conveyed went no deeper than the muscles he had trained to take their shape. His eyes watched from behind. Flat blue eyes the color of faded denim. His eyes were murderous, even crinkled at the edges in a smile. Anyone should have seen he meant no-one in this wide world any good.

My mother saw it.

My dad, for some reason, could not.

If he could, everything would have been different.

Harley spent the night, but was gone before I got up in the morning. He had a job at a warehouse all set up by some of his other prison buddies, but he hadn’t gotten a place in Albuquerque just yet. He found an old Airstream trailer for sale and parked it in the parking lot of the warehouse. He got my dad a job at the warehouse as well. I thought it would make my mother happy, my dad getting a job and becoming a “citizen” again. “A productive citizen. That’s my goal,” my dad would say. “I don’t want to do anything fancy. Just make enough for bread and take care of you and buddy there.”

My mother kept working at the laundry, like always. She said she would quit as soon as they were sure the job at the warehouse would hold. She squinted her whiskey eyes when she talked about “The Job,” as if it were not a real job. Even though he came home tired and sweaty from unloading trucks. It seemed real enough to me.

Sometimes, he didn’t come home until late. Sometimes, until after midnight. There was a strangeness to him then. His voice was growly and slurry, and his eyes would coast over me, not really seeing me. He smiled different. And he stank.

I understood that these times he had been out with Harley. That they had “tied one on.”

On those nights my mother was very quiet. She sat at the table in the kitchen turning the pages of a book or a magazine while the blue light of the television flashed in the living room. I would sit on the kitchen floor shoving my Hotwheels around their orange track and watching her out of the corner of my eye. Had she gotten smaller? Was she shrinking? Sometimes my heart pounded. I was scared without knowing why. I loved her more than I loved myself.

Those nights I did not like my dad. I peeked in on him, slumped in the battered armchair in front of the TV, smiling that new stupid smile, nodding along with the voices on the TV until his head stopped coming up and he was asleep. I wanted to kick him, to punch him.

Other nights it was all right. He bought himself a glove and a bat and we played ball out in the lumpy vacant lot. High pop-flies lost in the evening sky. The chirping of crickets that fell silent when you came too close. His skinny arm lofting the ball and the crack of the bat.

“Great catch, buddy.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Love and death.

Harley came by sometimes. Those were the worst nights. Sitting around the table and listening to his stories. Listening to my mother try to laugh. And watching him watch her. Was my father getting smaller as well? Were both of my parents shrinking? Harley was huge, his belly sagging over his belt, his carp-arm swimming over the table to shovel more food onto his plate. After dinner they sat in the living room emptying a bottle of Jack.

My mother would walk with me on those nights, down to the liquor store. The evenings were warm. The ground kept the day’s heat inside itself. The ground pulsed with heat like skin. You could feel the earth breathe. We went the long way and under the street lamps I stared at her. The filament glow of her sand-colored hair, her crooked front tooth when she smiled down at me.

Sitting on the curb in front of the liquor store, sucking on my creamsickle, I asked her the question.

“Is Harley a good man?”

She looked at me like she’d never seen me before.

“I don’t know. . . I guess he is. What do you think?”

She was always asking me that. And she always meant it.

“I think he’s a fat dumb lying bastard. And his stories suck.”

She put her hand on my head. I loved it when she did that. I knew it meant that I’d done something right.

The bad nights came around more often. The weather started to change. School started, and the high desert winter came, the cold cutting wind sweeping off the mountains, the dirty scum of snow and black ice at the curb. My dad would drop me off at school. In the warming car he wanted to talk. Sometimes I would talk to him. Sometimes — after a bad night — I would just stare out the window. He never got angry at me. Even though I wanted him to. I wanted him to shake me and yell at me and ask me what was wrong with me. Then I would have told him how much I hated Harley. How Harley was eating them up. How they were getting smaller, and I could see it.

He never got angry.

Even when Harley grabbed my mother’s butt while she was getting up to refill their drinks.

“She’s really something, pal. You got lucky.”

My dad’s laugh was a small thing. A cricket ready to stop the moment something came too close.

I was trying to decide whether to stab Harley with my knife or my fork when my mother looked at me and mouthed the word: “No.”

I bunched my fists under the table. Angry. Hurt.

My dad never got angry. He just got smaller.

And then he was gone.

I was up because my mother had been up. Because she had been sitting in the kitchen, not crouched over Vogue or over a book as sometimes she was. Not simply sitting as sometimes she did. Sitting with a bottle of Jack, as my father and Harley sometimes did. Sitting and pouring this liquid the color of her eyes from bottle to small glass to mouth. Sitting there and not seeing me crouched on the floor. Playing with my Hotwheels but not playing. Moving the Hotwheels on the floor because if I stopped moving them, if I stopped making engine-noises and pushing the little chunks of metal and plastic across the floor she would think that something was wrong. And absolutely she could not think that anything was wrong with me. Absolutely not. I made myself invisible through movement and play. I acted out the motions of an unconcerned child. On the digital clock over the stove the blue numbers read 1:20. She got up. She staggered, leaned against the wall. Full of Jack, her voice swimming in it.

“Going bed now baby you too ‘kay.”

“Night mom.” I would not look at her.

Pushing my cars. Not seeing her hip whack into the door frame. Not hearing her fall in the hallway, or her crying. Push the cars. Push the cars around the orange track and make engine noises. Push them and do not hear. Hear maybe but do not listen. She was going into her room now. She was crawling. Push the cars. Make engine noises. Vroom. Brrrrrr. Sobbing and then silence and then a heavy breathing from the bedroom. Asleep now.

Like a zombie I began doing things I had been told never to do. I made myself a bowl of cereal, climbing up on the counter to get at the high cabinets. I took it into the living room, where I switched on the television and stared at it, shoveling Cocoa Puffs into my mouth. Yes, I was Cuckoo for them. I could not begin to tell you what was on the television, besides bright movement that dulled whatever anger and hate were in my mind. Besides voices, like my own moving the cars in the kitchen that made things invisible.

I heard the screen door pulled open, the hand fumbling with the doorknob. I did not move.

The door was flung open with a bang, and filled with a dark shape, a pale and sweating face. Harley. He stumbled into the room. He’d “tied one on,” I guessed. But where was my dad? I got up and ran into the kitchen. From the drawer next to the sink I got the largest kitchen knife we had.

“Hey boy! Boy!”

I peeked around the corner.

“Where’s your mother?”

“Not here.”

Harley’s face was pale and wrong. His mask had slipped off. His eyes rolled in the naked flesh. He tried to assemble the mask. Smiled.

“She aint gone, is she boy? She wouldn’t leave you here. Pretty woman like that . . . leaveyoualone.”

I got the half-empty bottle of Jack and brought it in to him. Slapped it down on the TV tray.

“She’ll be back. Went to the store. Here. Drink this.”

His eyes rolled. He picked the bottle up. Hands shaky. Brought it to his mouth and made half of it go away.

“Got to have her . . .”

Have her? I was tight, a little coil of wires. Have her.

“Got to have her drive me.”

In the bedroom my mother’s breathing was loud, but he didn’t hear it. Would he hear it? Go in there? Have her? I would stab him. I would kill him.

“She be back?”

“She just went to the store. Where’s my dad?”

Harley shrugged. The sweat poured down his face. He smelled of something awful. Stink. Human waste. Maybe metal in there somewhere. Sweat.

“Dumb son-of-a-gun. Should’ve known better . . .”

He was trying to get up. Couldn’t somehow. In the flickering light of the television his face was a round whitish ball, a fat floating ball with eyes painted on it. The television laughed at him. It was funny. This big man who could not stand up.

“She better get back soon.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Soon.”

He picked the bottle up again. His eyes closed and I came at him with the knife. I brought it down and it clanked off the bottle, just then lowered. His eyes widened. He grabbed my wrist.

“What’s the big idea, kid?”

He squeezed and the knife dropped to the floor.

“I won’t let you,” I said.

“Wh . . . what?”

“Have her.”

He smiled sloppily. His face ran with whiskey and water. The smell of him made me gag.

“That’s funny. Have her. I just . . .”

He had let go of my hand. He was doubled over, now. Breathing hard.

“You let me know when she gets back, kid.”

“Where’s my dad?”

“Ha. Where’s yer mom?” He said into his knees.

He stayed that way. Doubled over. I picked the knife up and sat, Indian style, in the hallway. Watching him. This man who had made my parents small. This man who had come to HAVE my mother. I would not let him! But he did not move. He stayed doubled over a while. Finally he slid out of the chair and lay on the floor, a big curled up lump with a fat belly. I did not see the blood beneath his jacket. I did not know it when he stopped breathing and died there, shot through the gut, bleeding to death in our living room.

I waited for dad to come home. This would make dad angry. This man coming in the middle of night to have mom. I imagined my dad coming through the door. Big again. Hard baseball catching hands. Hard no-wince face.

He would set things right.

Now he would be angry.

My dad was dead.

He’d broken into a rich man’s house, up in the Northern foothills. He and Harley. Half drunk, doped up on cocaine. The owner, a retired Albuquerque sheriff, a man who wore cowboy hats and wide turquoise-studded belts, woke up to the sound of the two of them crashing around down there. Descending the stairs calmly, in darkness, with his Colt Peacemaker he saw two shadowy men, carrying his television set out through the door. They were laughing, and one of them was saying “Shh. Shh. Cut it out.”

The man fired two shots.

The first hit my dad in the back of the head, killing him instantly and knocking the sized red baseball cap into the air with a small round hole in its wool front, just above the brim.

The second hit Harley in the back, just to the left of his spine. He ran screaming out of the house. He drove his car swerving through downtown Albuquerque, losing blood, vacating his bowels on the seats. Half a block from our doublewide he drove the car into a ditch. He left a clear trail of blood from the car to our house, where he expired a few hours later, under my watchful eye. Waiting for my mother to come home, so that she could drive him to the hospital.

The warehouse where my dad worked was a front. They shipped stolen property out to points all over the country. Some of it was burgled from houses, but most was stolen from other warehouses and off the backs of trucks. It was a lucrative business, but it was shut down after the police found Harley dead on our indoor-outdoor carpet, and discovered where he and my father worked.

I knew none of this.

I kept expecting dad to come through the door and put an end to my vigil. But it was the cops who came, early in the blue desert morning. I was surprised but it was all right because I liked cops. They were big men who talked loud and who always, always seemed angry. They tousled my hair and told me what a good, brave kid I was. They gave me a small plastic badge to replace my dead dad.

I still have it.

Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash