Cherry Read Free Page B

and stares as if by looking away from you like this, he could, after a minute, look back to find the girl in pigtails you once were and whose plate he still composes with piles of black-eyed peas and cornbread slathered with oleo.
    He finally says to the TV screen, You want me to make you some breakfast?
    He asks you every morning. And every morning you say you’re not hungry.
    From the far juncture, you’ll imagine you can see inside his heart better. Your daddy is tired with a generalized alcohol-soaked heaviness that has nothing to do with any body. Later, you’ll hear he has a mistress much younger than he is, a waitress, whose husband—once he discovers this betrayal—will put a bullet first through her skull, then his own. This will cause your daddy to weep like a child and curse at anyone who tries to hold him and flail out as if to strike you, which you know he would never do.
    You will also someday realize the impossibility of your daddy’s dilemma with regard to you. Sure, by not forbidding you to go, he silently endorses an insane plan whereby you leave home with little more than a hundred dollars for an unknown region with this gaggle of boys whose chief recommendation is that they’ve all so far managed to evade—despite the cops’ best efforts—serious jail time. In fact, your older sister, Lecia, likes to say, If the law don’t want them, why should Mary? If, however, your daddy had forbidden you to go, you may well have damned him for that. The truth is, for whatever reasons, you’ve become strange to each other. He stormed the beach at Normandy, drives a truck, hangs out at the American Legion or the VFW with other men in work clothes. You’re embracing the skittery surface of surfing and psychedelia. The atmosphere between you has gone muddy. You are a mere scarecrow in his telescope lens, and he in yours.
    Maybe it’s only after your daddy’s been dead fifteen years that you create this longing of yours for him and his denial of it, because it’s easier to bear the notion that he rejected you than vice versa.
    Goddamn lying bastards, your daddy finally says. And you see he’sfixated on the TV. Then he says, You don’t need to go to California. His reasoning for this judgment is so ancient he doesn’t even bother repeating it. Like all his advice, it’s endured in the same form for seventeen years. The grooves it’s worn in your young head have been played too often. They produce only static: His parents rented him out to Kansas sharecroppers for field work when he was just a boy. He never wants you to feel turned out that way, and since the only bona fide reason for going anywhere is (as he sees it) either a war they make you fight or a financial flamethrower on your butt, you don’t need to go.
    He says, You need to stay right here at forty-nine-oh-one Garfield. California’s ass.
    For him that’s the end of it. The television starts the chirpy music from
Dialing for Dollars,
a show he used to watch with reverence, shushing all talk and waving off phone calls while he waited each day for the phone to ring. Not long ago, he noticed that the chopped up phone books they drew numbers from weren’t just Leechfield but included other towns, even other counties.
    Hell that’s not local, he said the first time he noticed that they were calling Beaumont.
    Lecia was teasing her platinum hair for a date. The can of Aqua Net she fanned around made your eyes burn. She said it was local to the broadcast area. You know for a stone fact that she tells people your parents aren’t her parents because she’d rather be an orphan raised among distant-cousin-type lunatics than someone who shared up-close your family’s tainted genetic material.
    Your cheeks are cool from the tears. You’re shocked again by how little room you take up in this house. You turn to the small blue screen, where this year’s Oil Queen is slipping her small hand into the chicken-wire barrel of sliced up phone books. Her