Into the Web Read Free

merest glance into my childhood bedroom, the sight of Archie’s battered guitar still propped up in the corner, could instantly evoke the sound of gunfire, clouds of blue smoke.
    My brother and I had shared that tiny room from earliest boyhood until his last night at home. We had crammed it with big plans, usually of escape, first to Kingdom City and from there to parts unknown. It was in that room I’d first determined to go to college, then later filled out the necessary application. I’d read the letter of acceptance, one that had been accompanied by the offer of a scholarship, in a kind of wild reverie, leaping onto the bed and jumping up and down while Archie looked on silently.
    It was also in that room that Archie had first mentioned Gloria, and where, sometime later, he’d told me that he was in love with her. Later still, he’d mused about how the two of them would one day get married, move to Nashville, find an apartment, attend the Grand Ole Opry every Saturday night. The little metal box he’d used as a bank still rested on the small wooden table by the window. I could hear the soft tinkle of coins as he counted out his savings each night, trying to calculate, in that confused and uncertain way of his, just how much money they would need to get to Nashville and survive there until he made it as a country singer.
    But for all the big talk, the plan had remained fuzzy, the money scant, so that I’d never taken it seriously, nor felt any real alarm. And yet, in the end, he’d done it, or at least tried to do it, trudging from the house on a snowy December night, prowling the roads for hours, relentlessly screwing up his courage before finally pulling up beside the tall, dark hedge at 1411 County Road. Even when I imagined all that had happened after that, I made sure to keep it at a distance, like something seen from a great height. Only the mailbox returned to me as it had actually appeared that night, decked with plastic holly, green leaves, and small red berries, snow still half obscuring the family name that had been painted so ornately on its black metal side.
    As for Archie, I most often saw him as a boy, eternally clothed in jeans and a white T-shirt, strumming his guitar and crooning country songs. In memory, he was everywhere. Sitting on the steps of the porch or at the kitchen table. Sometimes I glimpsed him on his bed, sitting in his underwear, idly flipping through a comic book. At other times I recalled him at seventeen, standing at the rear door, peering out into our littered backyard, his hands sunk into the pockets of his jeans, thinking no doubt of Gloria, love like a whip snapping in his mind.
    I saw my dead mother in the old house too, but always as a figure crouched beside her bed, bare knees on the bare floor, hands clasped before tightly closed eyes, dreaming of a cup that could be passed, sins that could be forgiven, the salvation of good thieves.
    But now, in the house where my mother died, I saw only reminders of what could not be undone. The littledrawer where my father had kept his pistol. The cheap plastic frame that had once held Gloria’s picture. Archie’s baseball bat propped up against my father’s bed. Scooter’s collar nestled among the clutter at the bottom of the closet. Everything bore the mark of our family’s affliction, all we’d run from, spread, the things we’d suffered and the suffering we’d caused.
    And so, even during these last days of my father’s life, I found myself fleeing him and the house he’d hated but never left, darting from it at every opportunity just as I had when I was a boy.
    That boy seemed even further from me now than my mother or Archie. I never envisioned him in my old room, never saw him sitting reading a book on the orange sofa, dreaming of college, of moving “up north” or “out west,” becoming a teacher, having a wife and children, finding a simple happiness. If I thought of him at all, it was as the ten-year-old child