Only Once

Only once it happened, only the one time, that once upon a time, the only memory I have left that inspires anything for the man but disgust.

And even so, it wasn’t love I was feeling that day, but a sort of plain pity and cruel fascination, but, Jesus, it was a great moment, almost like something from Shakespeare, if Shakespeare is as great as everyone says he is.

And that day is one thing that can make me look back, into that sad, lost territory of forever gone, where the only family I ever had still lives.

We were never a clan that had a very generous interpretation of the whole concept of a family.

My dad had a brother (this also I guess I remember), and one night the two of them stood in the shadows of the entryway to our house, arguing as they often did, and I heard the brother say something about blood, maybe “blood is thicker than water,” and the old man hissed, “That doesn’t mean shit to me,” and that was the last time I ever saw that particular uncle.

Yet whatever else you can find to say about my father, he loved my mother in apparently the only way he knew how. She was a nervous, harried woman, a dramatic smoker who could get loud in a hurry and make spectacular messes, and I suppose I can say this now: I don’t believe I was ever inspired to really love either of them.

This one time, though, I was young, but already at an age where I could see my way out, or imagine it, and was thinking pretty obsessively of someplace beyond all that then.

My mother had left us, gone a few towns over to live with her sister, and I can tell you now that it was permanent and had, I think, something to do with poverty.

This was after the war, and my father had not gone (asthma), but had stayed home and did what I cannot honestly tell you, but we had never owned anything. After my mother left, my father went through this long stretch where he saved every penny he could get his hands on, and after moving down a long post-war waiting list he had finally taken possession of a gleaming black Impala –or something that looked kind of like an Impala– and that day, I remember, he came home actually trembling with excitement and laughing in a strange and almost nervous way, and he said, “C’mon, kid, let’s go say hello to your ma and just see what she says now.”

So off we went and it was rough country and the old man was taking the long way so as to avoid gravel.

I can still see it all clearly even now: the black clouds boiling and moving fast, almost like time-lapse photography, this swift, spectacular production of weather, what weather can do when it’s in a hurry and it’s July and humid in the middle of the country.

The windows were open and you could smell the wind, the way it is before a big storm moves in, wet, suddenly cool, and sweeping along with it all the smells of the country.

The old man was really rocketing along in that Impala, leaning and squinting over the steering wheel, muttering something not yet angry, but more pleading: Go, go, go, you sonofabitch, go.

The rain came hard when it came, chopping rain, and the wind rose up and drove the rain across the road in rippling sheets, and there was hail right behind it, hail growing right before our eyes until it was the biggest hail I’d ever seen. Hail that was loud, deafening, banging off the roof of the Impala and richocheting off the hood and careening at wicked angles into the ditches.

The place he finally found was closed, a truckstop long since vacant, with a big, empty parking lot. The old man beached the Impala there, beneath a pump shelter that was cluttered with trash.

And there we stood, the old man hunched and incredulous, his face gray and screwed into a squint of absolute disbelief, his bottom lip clamped in his front teeth, a cigarette burning in his trembling and stained fingers.

That one time I think I saw tears.

I’m sure I did.

He tossed his cigarette out into the rain and clenched his fists and he cried. Then he seemed to be leaning, almost like he was going to pitch over, and rocking on his heels, and cursing under his breath as he stared at his new car, which was gleaming even then, even as hailstones were still puddled and melting in the rooftop dents.