Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

don’t you worry.”
    Ben smiled impishly. “Did you strip for her or something?”
    “Oh Lord, honey,” Patreese replied. “She wishes.”

    That evening Lenore fixed dinner for us at the house. Sumter was there as well, still buzzing from a puppet show with his grandmother at a Christian academy in Pine Castle. It was a pleasant enough gathering, since we stayed off the hard stuff—by which I mean politics, religion, and sexuality—and my brother, touchingly, worked hard to support the illusion of a cozy family reunion. While Lenore was stacking the dishes and Sumter was watching American Idol with Ben, Irwin pulled me aside with a wink.
    “Come sit in the boat with me.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “Nah…c’mon…it’s a nice night. The kids are watching TV.”
    This was another cradle-robbing crack, but I let it go with a curdled smile.
    “C’mon,” said Irwin, shoving me toward the latter-day ark parked in his driveway.
    We mounted the trailer and sat side by side in the padded seats, staring out at a sprinkling of stars and the brutal halogen streetlight across the cul-de-sac. Irwin looked furtively from side to side, then toward the living room window, before taking a flask from under the seat and holding it out to me. “Not a goddamn word,” he said.
    “What is it?”
    “Glenfiddich.”
    To me, drinking scotch is reminiscent of sucking on pennies, but Irwin had just risked hellfire two times over—drinking and cussing—in the name of brotherly bonding. The least I could do was recognize the gesture, so I took a swig from the flask and made an appreciative hissing noise. Irwin took a bigger swig, then put the flask away.
    We sat for a while in silence while a dog barked sporadically in the distance.
    “Too bad Papa’s not here,” said Irwin.
    “Is it?”
    “C’mon, bro.”
    I tried to find a way to sound less harsh. Like a lot of straight guys, Irwin had concocted myths of his father’s greatness out of pure animal need and one too many viewings of Field of Dreams . “I think we experienced him differently,” I said.
    “Remember when we were little, though? That summer he taught us to do sailor knots?”
    “I remember how much he yelled when we got them wrong.”
    “I know he could be an ornery old cuss.”
    “Ornery?” I turned to face him. “Walter Brennan was ornery. Papa was flat-out mean. Papa was…Dick Fucking Cheney.”
    Irwin gaped at me. “Who’s Walter Brennan?”
    “You know…on The Real McCoys …Grandpappy Amos.” I sang some of the theme song for him. “‘From West Virginny they came to stay, in sunny Cali-For-Nye-Ay.’”
    “Oh, yeah. The old guy with the limp.”
    “He was probably our age then,” I said darkly. “The age we are now.”
    “Nah.” Irwin considered that for a moment. “You think?”
    “A few years older maybe. Not much.”
    “Jesus.”
    The word hung there between us like a mist. Poor ol’ Irwin was probably wondering if he’d blown his monthly allowance of blasphemies.
    “I know it couldna been easy for you,” he said at last. “With your lifestyle and all. Papa could be hard sometimes.”
    “He was hard on you, too.” I remember well how the old man had screamed and yelled and threatened permanent disownment during Irwin’s bad-boy days.
    “Maybe a little,” said my brother.
    “He was even harder on Mama. She tried to leave him twice.”
    Irwin turned and blinked at me. “When?”
    “The first time…when you and I were at Camp Hemlock. She holed up at the Baptist retreat. And she was on the verge of leaving him just before he died.”
    Irwin’s mouth was hanging wide open. “How do you know this?”
    I shrugged. “She told me herself. This morning.”
    “This is nuts.”
    Another shrug. To me it was the sanest thing Mama had ever done.
    “No,” said Irwin. “I mean, she woulda said something to Lenore. We were livin’ across the road when Papa died. Mama and Lenore were really tight.”
    That’s true, I thought. They were praying for Mama’s queer son, who was dying of a biblical plague out there in sunny Cali-For-Nye-Ay.
    “I’m just telling you what she said,” I murmured.
    “Anyway…why would she just up and leave him? He had cancer.”
    “Yeah…but he’d had the operation a while back…and everybody thought he was getting better. Even Papa said he was back in fighting form.”
    Irwin frowned. “But why would she…? Do you think something happened ?”
    “A wasted lifetime, I’d say.