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could leave at night, get to Saddle Rock, sleep there till morning, then go on to Kingdom City, hop a train from there -so that I’d finally convinced him to join me in the effort.
    That dream of escape was the one hope I’d realized from my boyhood. And so, for the last twenty years I’d lived in a small town in northern California, where I taught English at a little boarding school that rested, jewellike, by the sea. In that idyllic world I taught Chaucer and Shakespeare to the state’s most privileged sons and daughters, “snot-nosed rich kids” according to my father, but whom I labored to invest with the refinements my own childhood had so sorely lacked.
    I’d visited my father only rarely since moving to California, usually around Christmas, when my own loneliness overwhelmed me and any family connection seemed better than none. Once we’d actually erected a scrawny Christmas tree, strung it with a few colored lights and wads of tinsel. It had still been standing, dry and brown, when I’d returned the following spring. That was when I’d realized how desperately my father was waiting to die.
    The sense of welcomed death curled all around him now, a white mist that seemed to boil up from the smoldering center of all that had gone wrong, the wife he’d never loved, the son who’d died, and me.
    It was in order to flee that mist that I often left the house and drove into Cantwell, the tiny hamlet close to our house. It was little more than a few dilapidated stores set on a rural crossroads, but a place where I could linger for a time, if only on the pretext of buying supplies. “I have to pick up a few things, Dad,” I’d say, then rush out the door, returning later with a cabbage or a box of cereal, ready to hear my father’s usual rebuke, You went all the way into Cantwell for no more’n that?
    But on that particular afternoon—the one that changed everything—I made no excuse for leaving my father.
    I popped my head just inside his room, sniffed the Vicks VapoRub he habitually smeared across his chest and shoulders, and said simply, “I’m going out, Dad.”
    He gave no indication that he’d heard me, but merely sat, motionless as a granite headstone before the flickering light of the television.
    He’d thrown open the room’s unwashed curtains, and beyond the window a blinding summer light fell over a parched yard where bedraggled clumps of crabgrass withered in the heat.
    “You need anything before I go?” I asked.
    He continued to stare at the television I’d lugged into his room a few days before, watching as one wrestler slammed another to the mat.
    “It’s all fake, you know,” I said.
    “What ain’t?” my father replied with a wave of his hand. “Stay gone as long as you want, Roy. I don’t need you.”
    Never had and never would, he meant.
    “I’ll be back in an hour or so,” I told him.
    Once outside, I drew a deep restorative breath, let my face bake in the gleaming sunlight as if light and heat might be sufficient to burn away the toxic residue left by my father, along with the memory of those final sullen evenings when we’d sat in stony silence, Archie dead, my mother curled up in her bed, me set to leave for a California college in only a few days, certain that once I’d left I would miss no one but my mountain girl, return to Kingdom County only to marry her, then take both of us out of it again, out of it forever without so much as a backward glance.
    Inside the house I could hear the drone of the television, the thud of heavy muscular bodies hitting the mat, the high, hysterical voice of the announcer calling out the holds, the blows.
    When I reached the car, I looked back toward the house. A gray light flickered in the old man’s room, faintas whatever dream of happiness he might once have had. As for me, I had only one dream left. To be through with this last remnant of my family, and with him the bloody act with which our name had so long been joined.

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