turned to look back, a bloat of rage bulging inside my ribs.
“You creep!” I yelled. “You senile, pathetic old drunk!”
“You punk!” he screamed, charging down the steps toward me. “You better show a little respect.”
I thought of standing my ground, even of belting him, but none of it made sense, especially my anger, and I quickly walked away. Over my shoulder I saw him pick up a beer can from the gutter and throw it at me. The can clattered harmlessly past my feet, and that made me laugh again. I continued down the street toward town. My mind clicked into gear: I was leaving that goddamn town. In three or four hours I would be under the covers in my own bed, four hundred miles away, listening to the sigh of the surf, and all of this bad dream would be forgotten. Straight down Pleasant Street I walked to Lincoln, then right on Lincoln to the bus depot.
In the alley the Sacramento bus was breathing hard as it took on a handful of passengers. I bought a ticket and walked back to the bus, but I did not get aboard. I had lost the power to make a decision. The longer I lingered—the driver waiting, watching me through the door—the more momentous the choice became as fear set in, the fear of delivering a fatal blow to my aged parents, the fear of regretting it the rest of my life. I had to stay. Not from choice but duty. And so I turned away and walked home, searching myself for a burst of Christian exhilaration for having done the right thing, building up my reward in heaven.
The Datsun was gone when I reached the house and so were Zarlingo and Cavallaro. In the bedroom my mother sat beside the old man, who lay undressed beneath a sheet in the hot, small room.
“Where’d you go?” my mother said. “I was so worried.”
“About what?”
“You’re a writer. This town’s no place for you at night.”
I thought I heard my father sob and moved closer to him. In his sleep he wept, tears spilling from his closed eyes. She blotted his wet lashes with the hem of the sheet.
“Why is he crying?”
“He’s dreaming. He wants his mother.”
His mother. Dead sixty years.
I choked up and fled to the kitchen, craving wine. I was into the second glass when Mama appeared.
“I changed the sheets, Henry. You sleep in my bed.”
8
I WAS TOO TIRED to care. Like all the rooms in that old house, my mother’s bedroom was small. The bed was still warm from the heat of the day as I slipped naked beneath a sheet and down into a cradle in the mattress that measured the contours of my mother’s body. It was very black down there when I snapped off the bedside lamp. In the pillow my nostrils drew the sweet, earthy odor of my mother’s hair, pulling me back to other times, when I was not yet twenty and sought to run away.
Yes, I got away. I made it when I was not yet twenty. The writers drew me away. London, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Silone, Hamsun, Steinbeck. Trapped and barricaded against the darkness and the loneliness of the valley, I used to sit with library books piled on the kitchen table, desolate, listening to the call of the voices in the books, hungering for other towns.
I had come to the limits of shooting pool, playing poker and bullshitting over beers, of driving off with other guys and broads into lonely orchards, clawing clumsily at skirts and panties, clawing in vain. Women were fine but demanding, you hurt easily at nineteen; you thought women were sweet and submissive but find them alley cats; you find comfort in whores who are less deceitful, and if you are lucky you learn to read.
My old man, the son of a bitch, lurching home with a snoutful of vino, yelling turn off the lights, get to bed, what the hell’s come over you, for books were a drug and my addiction was alarming, and I was hardly his son at all anymore. Get a job, he demanded, do something with your life. He was right. He must have been. Everybody agreed with him. Even the guys at the
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