Boys Life

little easier for the son.
    When I got nearer, he saw me coming. He didn’t wave. He lowered his head, and I knew he, too, had run out of words.
    I stood ten feet away from him on the boulder, which at one time had been part of the lip of Saxon’s Quarry. He sat with his head bowed and his eyes closed, and beside him was a plastic jug half-full of grape juice. I realized he had gone shopping at Big Paul’s Pantry.
    The wind shrilled around me and made the trees’ bare branches clatter. “You all right?” I asked.
    “No,” he said.
    “Mom told me.”
    “Figured.”
    I dug my hands into the pockets of my fleece-lined denim jacket, and I gazed out over the dark, dark water. Dad didn’t say anything for a long time, and neither did I. Then he cleared his throat. “Want some grape juice?”
    “No sir.”
    “Got plenty left.”
    “No sir, I’m not thirsty.”
    He lifted his face to me. In the hard, cold light he looked terribly old. I thought I could see his skull beneath the thin flesh, and this sight frightened me. It was like looking at someone you loved very much, slowly dying. His emotions had already been balanced on the raw edge. I remembered his desperately scribbled questions in the middle of the night, and his unspoken fears that he was about to suffer a breakdown. I saw all too clearly that my father-not a mythic hero, not a superman, but just a good man-was a solitary traveler in the wilderness of anguish.
    “I did everythin’ they asked me to,” he said. “Worked a double route. Picked up the slack when it needed pickin’ up. Got there early and stayed late doin’ stock work. I did whatever they wanted.” He looked up, trying to find the sun, but the clouds were plates of iron. “They said, Tom, you have to understand how it is.’ They said, ‘We’ve got to cut to the bone to keep Green Meadows afloat.’ And you know what else they said, Cory?”
    “No sir.”
    “They said home milk delivery is as dead as the dinosaurs. They said there’s no room for it in all those shelves of plastic jugs. They said the future is gonna be easy come and easy go, and that’s what people want.” He laced his fingers together, a muscle in his gaunt jaw working. “That’s not what I want.”
    “We’ll be all right,” I said.
    “Oh, yeah.” He nodded. “Yes, we will be. I’ll find somethin’ else. I went by the hardware store before I came here and wrote up an application. Mr. Vandercamp Junior might need a truck driver. Heck, I’d work behind a cash register. But I really did think that in three more years I’d be an assistant foreman on the loadin’ dock. I really did. Dumb, huh?”
    “You didn’t know.”
    “I never know,” he said. “That’s my trouble.”
    The water rippled as the wind swept across it, kicking up little wavelets. In the woods beyond, unseen crows cawed. “It’s cold, Dad,” I said. “We ought to go home.”
    “I can’t wait for your granddad to find out about this.” He was talking about the Jaybird. “Won’t he have a fine old laugh?”
    “Mom and me won’t be laughin’,” I said. “Neither will anybody else.”
    He picked up the grape juice jug and took another long swig. “Went by Big Paul’s Pantry, too. I walked in there and saw all that milk. A white sea of it.” He looked at me again. His lips were blue. “I want things to stay the way they are. I don’t want a gum-chewin’ girl who doesn’t know my name to take my money and not even smile when I ask her how she’s doin’. I don’t want supermarkets open until eight o’clock at night and full of lights that hurt your eyes. Families ought to be home together at eight o’clock at night, not out at the supermarket buyin’ stuff that the big banners hangin’ from the ceilin’ say you ought to buy. I mean… if it goes so far, even in the little ways, we can’t ever go back. And someday somebody’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s so fine we can go to the supermarket after dark and we can pick and choose from shelves of stuff we’ve never even heard of before, but whatever happened to those milkmen, or those fellas used to sell watermelons out of the back of their trucks, or that woman who sold fresh vegetables right out of her garden and smiled like the sun when you said good mornin’?’ Somebody’ll say, ‘Oh, they sell all those things at the supermarket now, and you don’t have to go hither and yon to buy what you need, it’s all under one roof. And why don’t they do that to