The Life and Times of Innis E. Coxman Read Free

in
raggedy bars, and the occasional knife. (It’s funny—as I sit here with patches
of grey in the beard hiding various facial scars of my own, I’ll be damned if
they aren’t from similar run-ins with the crème de la crème of my generation.)
     
    ***
     
    My
father’s capacity for righting a wrong is notable in the sense that it tends to
scare the living shit out of everyone within spitting distance. One of the most
vivid memories I have from my childhood is when he exhibited this trait in a
monolith department store. For the sake of avoiding a lawsuit, we’ll call the
place Balfart.
    He’d
gotten me a toy for Christmas. I believe it was a fire truck or Tonka truck,
something about eight inches long and metal with wheels. It proved to be unsound,
though I don’t remember exactly how. He went to right this corporate injustice
by returning the item and brought me along. I remember the conversation like it
happened yesterday:
    “Yes,
sir, I got this for my son for Christmas and it’s broken. It came out the box
that way. I’d like to return it, please. I have the receipt right here.”
    “I’m
sorry, sir. This was a sale item and we can’t take returns on sales.”
    “Okay.
Well, can I exchange it for another one, please? I see you have a stack of ‘em
on display over there.” There was a pile of them on a table near the front
door. Marked at the regular price, of course.
    “I’m
sorry, sir. We can’t do an exchange or return on a sale item.”
    “So
there’s nothing you can do? I can’t even exchange this item for one that’s not
a broken piece of shit? I’ll pay you the difference.”
    “No,
sir. I’m sorry. There’s absolutely nothing I can do.” This was the store
manager by the way, so it’s not as if there was a Higher Power to consult.
    I
saw the blood rush to my father’s face, an early indicator that someone was
about to leave through the front door. Whether it was us walking out or the
manager sailing through the glass was still up for debate.
    
    My
father then placed both hands on either side of this metal hunk of defection
and snapped it in two right in front of the manager. Wheels, springs, bits of
plastic, and—I reiterate, metal —flew in all directions, hitting the
manager in the face and falling on the counter that separated him from certain
extinction. My father brushed his hands on his slacks, never breaking eye
contact.
    “There.
Now it’s your problem. Have a good day.” We walked out, got in his truck
and left. He never darkened that store’s doorway again.
    This
was well before the blanket popularity of in-store and outside security
cameras. Anybody who wanted to identify him would be forced to limit their
eyewitness accounts to “the tall guy wearing a white t-shirt speed-walking to
the parking lot with a fat kid running to catch up.” As we were on the main
drag in front of the store, we passed a couple of cops pulling into the lot
with their lights on. Pops smirked and lit a Winston, then turned up Johnny
Cash to provide the soundtrack to his satisfaction.   
     
    ***
     
    Success
for my pops came hard, rough as Russian toilet paper. He literally and
figuratively fought for everything he attained, growing up poor in the woods,
taking shits in an outhouse, with countless nights of
eating nothing but boiled potatoes split between five other siblings. When the
war in Vietnam hit home, he was drafted to serve. The singular ability that
kept him from being shipped overseas was the fact that he knew how to run a
printing press. He was sent to Oklahoma where his skills were put to use,
thereby avoiding obliteration by a fifteen-year old Vietnamese kid who’d been
fighting since the day he was born.
    Think
of that: if it hadn’t been for his mechanical abilities, H. F. Coxman would’ve
been sent to a foreign country with a farewell and a middle finger to fight in
one of the most unpopular wars in modern history. He could’ve died in a jungle,
labeled an MIA