Bygones – Chapter Fourteen
Looking back on it all later, it was clear to Tim the domino placement that knocked each event into the next and ended up with him jumping out of a plane at Airborne School some weeks after his father's funeral. Heights were never a problem for him and he kept his eyes open and watched the ground as it rushed up to meet him, left it a little longer than ordered to pull the 'chute and got an earful later from the Sergeant. His future had rushed up to meet him in quite the same way, uncontrollable, inevitable once past a certain point. He just hoped the landing wouldn't be too hard.
He only had two exams left to write and then he could have graduated high school cleanly, worked for the summer and done an apprenticeship with a car mechanic as planned. But Christine knocked on his door when he was studying. She wasn't the first domino, not by a long stack, but she was certainly one of the last, and she was pregnant.
Tim offered to marry her, since he, the asshole, wouldn't. It was a stupid and chivalrous thing to do and she wisely and heartlessly turned him down because she couldn't marry him, he was a friend, and besides he didn't have an income. She laughed at the idea when he suggested he could join the army. It was the first time the thought of enlisting had ever crossed his mind, a recall of a glimpse through the window into a recruiting office in Lexington, just another domino, just a few back from Christine's domino.
She left after a good cry. Chewing on a nail and shrugging, she said sadly, "It's as good a day as any to grow up," and the next time he saw her was just before he left for Basic – a beach ball for a stomach and still pretty.
The next domino, after Christine's, fell only a few hours past her visit, just before lunch. A Deputy US Marshal, accompanied by Sheriff Henley, came to ask Tim if he knew the whereabouts of Andy Slater, car thief, miraculous survivor of a high speed chase on the freeways of Los Angeles that left two police officers and Andy's accomplice dead. Tim had nothing to offer except Maine, Washington State or maybe Canada, that and the make and model of his beautiful Harley, a 1990 Fat Boy, and likely not even his.
He didn't feel much like studying that afternoon, after that Marshal had driven back down the road. Tim shuffled listlessly from his bed to his desk to his window, staring at Frank's car parked in the yard up the road, waiting for him to leave so he could get his rifle and go up into the hills and practice his Zen art of shooting the shit out of stuff.
Frank was pretty much the last domino, arguably. And he was the first, too, if Tim cared to think back that far. He hated to give the man so much credit for shaping his life but he had to appreciate the circular nature of the influences. There was something Zen about it.
When Frank, uncharacteristically, hadn't left to go to the pool hall by 3pm, Tim decided to get the rifle anyway, concluding that Frank was likely sleeping off a late one and it wouldn't be a problem if Tim were quiet.
Tim was quiet; Frank was sitting on the couch feeling lazy, smoking, as surprised to see Tim walk in from the kitchen as Tim was to see Frank out of bed.
"What the fuck are you doing in my house?" Frank sputtered.
Tim figured he had used up his ration of emotions for the day with Christine and Andy, he replied with a flat tone and no fear. "Give me the rifle from under the couch. I'm going shooting."
"Like hell I will."
Frank was up and moving. Tim ducked around the table and past the threat and into the living room. He dropped to his knees and reached for the rifle but it wasn't there. He was surprised by a bit of anger left and he picked at it when it started itching.
"Where did you put it?" he demanded.
Frank kept coming and Tim backed away from him and out the front door and down the steps into the yard, finally feeling a little frustration to go with that bit of anger.
"This is still as much my house as yours and I want that rifle, you asshole. Just for once could you do something for me? For fuck's sake, you're my father."
"For all I know, you're not even mine."
Frank spat the words out intending an insult but Tim just tilted his head, blinked at the absurdity and shrugged. "Is that the best you can do? You know, I think I'd be happier than you to find out that was true. You are such a fucking loser."
"You step in my house again and you will be sorry."
"No more sorry than I am now."
Tim's calm anger was fuel on the fire and Frank let out a roar that tripped itself up toward the end, catching itself on the phlegm and the hardened walls of his lungs and throat and sputtering unthreateningly into another fit of coughing. He turned and staggered back into the house, not bothering even to attempt a chase.
Tim watched him go and felt something slip away with him, and the void left in the wake of Frank's malice didn't fill up with disappointment like it usually did but stayed empty. Tim didn't even feel a tug when the line broke and his anger, the bait he'd tied time and again to a hook and cast into his father's path for him to bite on and fight and eventually spit out, the bait that he'd then reel back in for another day, was lost to him, pulled away with the retreating figure. The sudden stillness caught Tim unprepared. He felt almost bereft and turned in a circle looking for something, wondering what came next. He finished the tour of his world and stood lost, staring at the porch, stuck firmly by the sudden apathy.
Then Frank came back out through the door in a cold fury loading the rifle. He lifted it to his shoulder, aimed at his son and pulled the trigger.
The rifle misfired. Tim heard the click of the firing mechanism and looked at his father's face in disbelief. Frank stomped his foot and ejected the shell and tried another, lifted, aimed, fired. Tim started backing up finally, took a step and another. The cold truth that he was witness to crept up his legs like he was wading into a fast river in winter, and still he watched, and Frank tried again, lifted, aimed, fired. Tim's mouth slowly dropped open, his eyes pinned to Frank's face. There was no hope of unseeing now. There might have been a time before this moment when it could have been salvaged into something, when the void might have been filled with pity if nothing else, but not now. It was too late. There was no forgetting and no fixing and no forgiving. Tim had hooked the truth today and he got a good look at it as it broke the surface.
Lift, aim, fire. Drawing his hands up to hide from it, Tim rubbed at his eyes, wiped at the image. Then he turned and walked down the road, the image following. And years from now when he needed to steel himself to do something he didn't think he could do, he'd recall that image and remember that there wasn't anything a man wasn't capable of. Like Christine said, it was as good a day as any to grow up.
His legs took him down the hill and he turned right and walked through town. He reached the parkway and stuck out his thumb and eventually someone stopped. He hitched a ride west.
It took Tim two days to get back from Lexington. By then school was out for the summer but he'd learned something new outside of the classroom, choked on the irony – you had to have a parent's signature to enlist if you were seventeen. Also, they wouldn't consider you without a high school diploma. One thing about growing up, it taught you just how stupid you were.
He was walking in front of the shop under Miss Hall's apartment just as she came out her door.
"Timothy," she snapped, took the shell-shocked boy by the arm and pulled him in. "Where have you been?"
He sat at her kitchen table, despondent, in the same chair he always sat in. She slid a plate across with a sandwich and he methodically ate. She listened to his sometimes incoherent ramblings as he described his last three days, more talking than she'd ever heard from him. And for once, she was sympathetic, not offering advice or chastising or smacking him on the head with a challenge.
"What are you going to do now?" she asked kindly.
"I don't know." Three words never sounded so dull.
Miss Hall took charge. "Well, let's get you credit for those two exams you missed. Heaven knows you've done the work. Then you can get a diploma and you can decide what to do after that. You have a summer job, right?"
He nodded.
"When you turn eighteen in the fall you can go back and enlist if that's what you really want to do."
He nodded again and she was rewarded with a brief smile.
"Now, what do you want to do about Frank?"
"Nothing."
"Timothy, he tried to shoot you."
"I ain't afraid of him."
"Maybe you should be."
Tim shrugged.
He walked up the hill, thinking about an apology for Steve and Millie, but he had another stop to make first. Cautiously he approached his house, the car was gone and he was relieved – he didn't want to see Frank anytime soon. He went in the back door and searched everywhere for the rifle. Defeated he walked back out the front leaving both doors wide open.
It was lying on the ground beside the porch, discarded. Frank had tossed it away in anger that day and there it sat. Tim jumped the steps and picked it up, carried it back to the trailer and hid it behind his desk then went to make amends with the people he cared about more than anything else.
After dinner, he cleaned the rifle carefully, took the firing pin out of the drawer in his desk where he kept it always and replaced it. He would go shooting tomorrow. He had an entire box of ammo weighing heavily in his hand and the day off.
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