Dad's Choresfeeding the horseswith full buckets of grain between the electric fence he threw his back out hurt, he raised up grasped his tailbone groaned oh, shit then scratched his beard, Well, help me, damn it. I piggybacked him towards the back door bearing his weight dutiful knees - a wobbling under that musty flannel and black and blue collar his breath and whiskers scratching and tickling the back of my neck goosebumps and my legs the men of the house Field JacketIt was '80 and I was going into the eighth grade, 10 years after my father's enlistment, and I just wanted to wear his camouflaged field jacket to one party, just one--at Coulter's house. I didn't understand the big deal. He hardly ever wore it."Come on, please." "No." "It looks cool on me, dad." "Don't care." "Please." "No! That jacket…," he stopped. He knew better to waste that speech on a thirteen-year-old. I learned long ago from a vanity belt that two "NOs" were the limit to bugging my father. I shut my mouth and splashed an excessive amount of Stetson on my neck and peacock chest. My father watched, thinking of eighth grade. "Mary gonna be there?" "Mmhhmm." Before I left the house for the party, my father winced as he handed me the field jacket, then again when I slipped it on. "Don't fuck it up." "I won't." "And it better work." "It will." And it did. I walked into that party, inside bulletproof fatigues, with my father's name stitched across my right shoulder and a head on for action. And Mary noticed, too. We wore the jacket, my father and I: He in the bush--humping a captured AK-47, a picture of me as a baby, and mosquito netting, and me in Coulter's basement--groping Mary Abell's left breast and dry hunching her right thigh. Bound in camouflage. Memory SelectionI don't remember standing in my father's cowboy boots, no more than three-years-old, trying to walk, powder white legs with curled toes barley able to budgeI don't remember the heavy long leather, like steel chaps--and taking a small step, two or three inches maximum, but still a step, towards the coffee table corner I don't remember that Armstrong-like stride, and him releasing his bottle to pet mother's knuckles with chilled fingertips, and her fetching another beer afterwards I do remember the 15 stitches behind my left ear and the thumb-size lump, not to mention the Dr.'s needle twisting and grinding, draining the fluid from the swelling Old ManI started calling my father, Old Man, the day I received my driver's license. It used to piss him off something fierce, especially in the mornings when I'd belch, "Wake up, Old man!," after drinking a hot Coke and before asking for the truck keys and my sister's lunch money.Or a "No sir, Old Man," when rebelling to take out the trash the day I thought I could take him. In the span of a second, though, he flipped me over his hip and cracked my back on the couch arm and rammed his elbow into my neck gland to prove a point--and for a little fun, too. But he came around to its sincerity, its ranking in our two-rung helix. To the fact that it was something only we shared. Something beyond a name. I was the young fuck up, the black sheep everyone loved, and he was Old Man. "Old Man, ah? Huh, I guess I am your Old Man," he told me the day I moved out. Now, he expects it as a poke-in-the-side greeting whenever visiting or at family functions. Curt Jones' FatherCurt Jones swung at the first pitchleading off, down one run in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded, and his dad beat his ass in the parking lot afterwards- for that and smarting off. Damn, I'm lucky, I thought, leaving the dugout, my father didn't even show. |