59
The Motel 8 is the shittiest place you could ever drum up.
With a decaying roof, and stained gray paneling lining orange brick, it looks grotesque.
Truly rundown with no business, the place is essentially deserted.
Imagine the folks that wind up here when just ten miles up and off the highway there are far better spots.
The owner of this motel is an old crank named Mel who I’ve never had a meaningful conversation with.
He comes through Jimmy’s Place every blue moon, dirty and snaggled out mean for the most part.
Still, like all these hardened jackals, I have a suspicion there’s a human somewhere underneath.
Could anyone take the time to find out? Maybe one day.
As the wheels of my Saturn turn over the gravel, I find my father outside the motel.
He’s leaning up against his truck having a cigarette.
Marlboro Red.
I didn’t need a closer look to know that.
I park and walk towards him.
He has a small smirk playing across his face, happy to see me.
“What’s the point in stopping now, eh?” I say.
“My thoughts exactly.”
“How you doin?”
“Worst mornin on record.”
“That bad?
“That bad.” He lets out a breath of smoke and shakes his weary head. He rubs his eyes. He’s wearing the same set of clothes as the day before.
“You sleep any?” I ask.
“Nah. What are you doing here so early, son?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“You like the spot?”
“Place is cut from hell.”
“That it is.” He laughs.
“That it is. We get what we deserve.”
“Wanna take a drive?”
“I could use a drive.”
“Alright, then.” I nod for him to follow.
The man would benefit from the aid of a cane, though he’d never be caught dead with one.
Neither foot makes much height as he limps.
A few steps in, he leans over to grasp the bed of his truck for balance.
He lets out a violent phlegm cough to extricate the black from his lungs.
His heavy life has eaten him inside out.
There isn’t even tar to be spit.
Eventually, the attack relents, and he attempts to continue.
Before I know what I’m doing, I walk to him and offer my help.
In one look there are a thousand words, and his painful blue eyes say it all.
His exhaustion helps him surrender and he grabs onto me.
His calloused, purple, spotted veiny hand takes root in my shoulder and we walk slowly together in silence.
It’s probably the nicest moment of my whole life.
A slow journey.
We reach my car.
and he says.
“You still have her, huh.”
“Oh, yeah.”
We get ourselves into the silver bullet.
We drive.
His jacket smells like my memories, drenched in cigarette smoke.
All the car rides of my youth were accented with ash in the air.
It calms me now.
I wonder when he last bought some new clothes.
I can’t help but notice how dim the light in his eyes has become.
With every cough I fear he loses just a little more ground.
“I missed these fields,” he says softly as he stares longingly out to the late fall Johnston landscape, once so familiar to him.
“They’re the best. Even this time of year,” I say.
“Yes, they are.”
So many questions fly through my mind that I become non-committal to each. Why did the silence feel more healing? And it is true that the answers are here, in this very car. They are written all over our faces and hang on our breath.
“Still haven’t been around town yet, yeah?” I ask.
“Haven’t made it there, no, not yet.”
“You want to?”
“Sure.”
“Nothing’s changed.”
“Oh, I doubt that.”
He knows as well as I that a great deal has changed, little by little. Still, I couldn’t help but try to make him feel better about not missing out on all of it. He looks downright awful enough without me adding to it any. He’s fidgeting while he sits, in a nagging discomfort.
“Cash. Tell me somethin ’bout your life.”
I can just about see Johnston out in the mile ahead and I find it most poetic, the timing.
As we begin to approach his old stomping grounds, I can see his chest rise and fall with a heavy sadness. He smiles at some of the sights, and I tell him what I can. I tell him about Rose, and the guys, and the odd jobs and such, my painting, my trip to Cambridge.
“Is that right?” He keeps saying.
“Is that right?”
Yeah, Dad.
“That’s right.”
When I speak about Rose, he is the lightest.
“You can meet her. If you want.”
His blue eyes turn themselves toward me, and the little red rivers which run through them seem to dissipate, just a bit. He is nothing more than a tired, sick man.
“I’d like that.”
Truth is, I can’t access any of the resentment I’ve harbored for so long. I simply cannot bring myself to that doorstep. Dad looks at the grocery store and at Sal’s. As we pass he says.
“that’s one place I oughta stop by.”
“Yeah, he still brings you up, every time.”
He laughs.
“Is that right?”
Yeah, Dad.
“That’s right.”
I’ve given him the simple run through of all I had going on in my life. I figure we can get down into the finer details in further conversations. For now, I’m giving him plenty of time to smell the old scent of Johnston and grow fond again. I know he loved the place more than the rest of us, deep down.
As we pass by Mario’s, he has another vicious coughing attack set on by nothing in particular.
“You okay,” I ask, and feel sort of helpless saying it.
“I’m okay.” His lungs must be so thick with darkness.
“I’m alright, I’m alright. Don’t look at me like that. I don’t deserve it.”
Whatever spirit came down and filled my father’s chest has taught him something about gentleness. He continues his paused train of thought after wiping his lips with his sleeve.
“I don’t deserve much of anything.”
And those words hang in the air, slowly sinking. Everything that comes from him flows with finality.
So, I say nothing and drive. I drive through the blocks of the town and let him remember the paths.
“What do you think?” I ask. He grunts a small laugh and says.
“The whole thing’s the same.”
And that makes me smile quite wide.
He starts up again, serious and says.
“Son. It’s unforgivable what I did. Unforgivable. And I ain’t gone a day, not one, without thinkin of you and your mother”—he hacks himself into his arm and continues—“I know that ain’t really worth nothin much. Or nothin at all. But it’s true. And I want you to know that.”
I feel water trying to rush to the surface of my eyes and find myself biting the inside of my left cheek.
“We don’t gotta get into all that now.”
“I just want you to believe that.”
“Okay.”
“It’s true.”
“Alright, Dad.”
“You believe me?”
He’s staring into me now. Soft, desperate eyes of regret. An entire life of sorrow and love in a look.
“I believe you.”
That’s the last we say for a minute. I never imagined I’d hear him confess something like that. I keep the car rolling and he smiles as he figures out where we’re heading. I take a left off Main and turn into the gravel parking lot with my father in the passenger seat. I feel we’ve ascended into another story. Jimmy’s Place, in all its glory.
“There she is,” he says, and I pull into the same spot that I’ve kept safe and sound for him for years. After all this time, even now.
“Wanna go in?”
“Someone’s around?”
“You bet. That’s Rose’s Jeep right there. She does some of the books early.”
“Is that so. Well, what the hell.”
I laugh.
I just love the look on his face.
There’s something boyish about it.
And I can’t tell you how good it feels to be in this place with my father, to have momentarily forgotten all the nightmares, to release their hold on my heart.
I get out of the car and walk around to help him move.
The sun has come up, but it’s completely swallowed by the clouds.
It’s a dark, dark morning and windy again.
He uses most of his strength to lift himself up and out of the car seat and grabs my shoulder once more.
He has a little smirk while he does it.
“Thank you, son.”
It’s simple but true, in this moment I have only one thought.
My Dad loves me .
We walk around the front of the car, and I’m reminded again that poor Saul oughta pave this damn parking lot.
There are so many stones in the dust.
Dad has to stop and put a hand on the front of the Saturn.
He’s coughing violently into his left shoulder, and like the other fits, we wait it out.
It’s long but it eventually stops.
“God,” he says, and he chuckles in admission of sorts.
We take a few more steps and he’s breathing ragged and terrible.
He breathes in some air, and it catches again.
His right hand grips my shoulder tightly as he convulses through the tar.
Another extended session.
It’s fucking painful seeing your father in such a decaying state.
Maybe I can get him a beer inside, and it’ll help some.
He catches his breath again, but he’s wheezing now.
It doesn’t sound quite right.
We’re about to move but I ask.
“You sure you’re okay, Dad?”
“Yeah, I’m alright.
Thank you, son.” He takes one more step but then stops again.
He’s staring at the gravel trying to find his air.
He looks up to me.
The son, taller than the father.
His blue eyes are iced out and in unfathomable torment.
And in this moment those eyes move straight through my own and into my wavering soul, etching themselves there forever.
I feel my father is far closer to me than ever before.
It shocks me, the feeling.
It’s the most intimate moment of my life.
He gets ready to speak.
He says.
“Cash,” and then takes a breath to finish.
But the breath catches in his lungs, and I hear it again.
This is different.
One quick cough releases into the next and a momentum starts to build.
His fingers are sinking deep into my shoulder as he grows weaker by the second.
He’s moving to fall but I reach around and grab him by the waist.
He’s thinner than I thought.
I hold him amid the acceleration.
He’s coughing deeper and more frantic this time.
“I got you, I got you, Dad, I got you,” I say, and he’s barely standing, convulsing horribly into my chest and his other hand.
He grabs onto my shirt and jacket.
His jacket.
But the coughing doesn’t stop.
His legs give out and all his weight crumples into my arms.
To the gravel he falls with me aiding the descent.
He is seizing and hacking for air.
His face is beat red and purple with pressure.
I feel a warm sensation spreading across the front of my body.
I look down at myself and it all becomes clear.
My father’s blood is coated across my chest.
A deep searing red.
“Dad,” I gasp, and I hold him as he shakes on the gravel, desperate and viciously coughing.
Blood is spewing from his mouth.
Gone is any kind of thought.
I stand and sprint through the entrance of the bar.
The dark atmosphere makes it nearly impossible to see.
I find myself screaming.
Shouting to call 911.
And I see Rose behind the bar in a shocked panic.
She rushes to the phone, and she dials.
I run back out to the world and my father is lying in the fetal position like a baby, still coughing.
The blood is coming out in bursts and it’s mixing with the dust.
I kneel down to his side and pull him up, thinking maybe if he sits, it will help him, someway.
I lean him back against the Saturn and he’s curling in on himself.
He has this terrifying panic in his eyes, and he reaches out to my body. One bloody hand grabs ahold of my shirt and the other the side of my face. I have nothing.
He’s looking at me and he knows it. I can tell that he knows it. He has run it red to the bone. He looks at me but can’t speak. His throat and lungs are drowning, collapsing, giving in.
The panic leaves his eyes and relents. And for the briefest of moments there’s peace. In the blue there is peace.
“No. Dad.” The words leave my mouth without thought. And his life, like a settling wave, comes to rest in his eyes.
“Dad.”
And I’ve left my own body.
I hear myself saying the word.
Dad.
Over and over and over.
I repeat only that word.
I can say nothing else.
I know nothing else.
I’m crying out to something unknown.
To God and the void as he goes.
The world becomes black as I bury my head in the blood on his neck.
I try to crawl into his arms.
I wrap myself around his chest.
I feel Rose behind me, but it’s all gone now.
It’s all finished.
The blood is hot on my face.
It’s wetting my hair.
And still I’m saying that word.
Dad Dad Dad Dad Dad Dad Dad.
Something in me is shattered.
I am the malfunctioning clock, stuck in one place.
Rose is crying I think, screaming.
Her hands reach to pull me from death.
But I understand now.
The way forward is clear.
I will be buried with my father.
I will follow him wherever he’s gone.