"Jammed" Part 2 of 3

When he came home the army doctors wouldn’t clear him psychiatrically to be a commercial pilot or enter police academy.  He turned to ranching cattle in the panhandle of Texas, which took him far away from anyone or anything.  My mother was a woman he met at a bar.  He never expected to see her again, but there I was.  She couldn’t take care of me, she didn’t want to have me, but he swore to take care of me if she would let him.  But when he did, all he was qualified to do was work dead-end jobs as a security officer at the cheap hotels where we lived.  Having a child tied him down and suffocated him with lost opportunities—even ranching was out of the question anymore.  He would spend the next decade either locked in a office watching security camera footage or screaming at crack heads or finding more than one baby abandoned in a dumpster.  He gained weight, lost his strength, became a diabetic.  When he looked too long at himself in the mirror, the hundreds of pounds of fat on his bones smothered the memory of his ignorant, inexperienced teenage self, who seemed more man to him than what stood before him.

I don’t remember when he stopped talking to his friends from high school.  I knew countless stories of high school brethren Michael, who worked long after his shifts at the local stable ended to avoid dealing with his drunk, deadbeat father; and Tony, a star tennis player who, instead of going pro, tore his knee apart on a college team to avoid the draft and ended up unsuitable for both sport and service.  The three of them used to get together ever so often and recount their glory days, which included many nights at the drive-ins with pretty girls and trips in Tony’s van across to the Gulf Coast the first week of every summer.  I heard those stories so many times I grew up remembering them as if they were my own.  And being the only child—the only woman they were able to keep around between the three of them—Michael and Tony treated me as if I were their own baby girl to love and to woo, courting me with stuffed animals for Christmas and boxes of chocolates for my birthday.  But by the time I turned eight or nine, we started to see them less and less.  When Tony got married, my father told him to make Michael his best man because he couldn’t afford to take off work for the ceremony.  And when Michael slid off his motorcycle in a sudden storm and fell into a coma, my father, who had waited at his bedside for seventeen straight hours for him to come to consciousness, left the moment Michael fell back asleep after he came to.

One time I asked why we didn’t see Uncle Mike and Tony anymore.  He told me, “Better we remember each other like we used to be.”

Ever so often I would sit at the base of the closed bathroom door, listening to my father on the other side, screaming at himself for never having done anything with his life, for being a fat, disgusting sack of shit.

“You’re a disappointment.  You’re an absolute fucking disappointment.”

I learned it wasn’t a good idea to approach him when he was in that state.  I told myself it was some kind of demon or monster that would hit me, not my father.  So I learned to stay away, until he started crying.  Big, heaving cries out to God and his dead mother to take care of him.  To take care of me.  That’s when I would knock on the door and convince him to lay down on the bed so I could lay down beside him and hold him as tightly as my little body could muster.

I had a hard time learning how to read and write, so I spent a lot of time keeping quiet in school, afraid to be called on when I didn’t have the right answer.  Or any answer at all.  My teachers gave me special attention, which only made the heckling from other students worse.  I spent a lot of time with the maids at the hotels where we lived, eventually making extra money scrubbing bathroom floors and washing bed sheets soaked in sweat and other fluids.  The hotels weren’t the kind of hotels tourists would stay in, but to say the only residents were junkies and prostitutes would discount myself and a few other families there who had too many children to raise them any other way.

I thought it was my fault that my father was stuck in hotel security offices surrounded by cheap women and drug addicts.  That if he didn’t have to take care of me, he would have had the time to get into the police academy or fly airplanes.  I didn’t understand what it meant when his doctors said he was bipolar.  That there was nothing I could have done. I had spent years watching him sit on his bed, carefully cleaning the barrel, the gauge, and watching those shiny, brass beads slide in and out of the magazine clip.  In order to feel comfortable in such close proximity to a deadly weapon, I imagined the gun was nothing more than a Lego house he would assemble and disassemble, something innocuous compared to the weapons he wielded in the jungle.  But as we drove out onto the highway that morning, my father became intensely energetic.  He drilled me countless times on the rules of handling the gun, and I repeated with answers I had echoed hundreds of times before: never turn the safety off until you are ready to shoot the gun, never place your finger on the trigger until you are ready to shoot the gun, never aim the gun at something until you are ready to shoot the gun.  Never point the gun at something you do not want to shoot.

They were all questions he had asked before, but this time it was different.  His intensity made me feel uneasy.  But it was what he wanted.  At the end of the week we would have to pack up what few belongings we had between the two of us and find another seed motel to call home.  Going shooting would let him escape that reality, if only in a few moments.

We drove off the highway and onto an empty stretch of land that was walled off by a low mountainside in the distance, cutting a dark, jagged line across the sky.  We went on for so long I thought we were lost, but suddenly he stopped and we stepped out of the car.  The dirt ground was covered by thousands of bullet casings cemented together by time and dust.

“When I was younger, this used to be a shooting range,” I stood back as he pulled the black case out of the trunk and prepared the gun.   His hands worked a full magazine clip into the base of the gun.  I kept looking over my shoulder to the empty highway, afraid that someone might catch us.

“I’m so excited…I’ve waited so long to show you this,” he said again and again.

He grabbed the gun and squared off with the mountain before us.  At the tips of the mountain range there was a lush, cold forest where it would snow every winter.  He took a breath and I took a breath.  And then he shot the mountain.