Reasonable doubt, p.33
Reasonable Doubt, page 33
part #5 of Hazard and Somerset Series
“How about an ice cream?”
“I’m not twelve.”
“You always liked double fudge ripple.”
“Do I look like I eat fucking double fudge ripple?” But Hazard had to fight the urge to look at the fridge and that damn cake.
“A beer, then.”
“Maybe I don’t drink.”
“For hell’s sake, son, you won’t even look at me unless you’ve got a beer in hand. Let me buy you a drink on your birthday.”
“I don’t want a drink. I don’t want dinner. I don’t want double fudge ripple or whatever other shitbrain details you’ve dredged up. Whatever you want, I’m not giving it to you, Dad. If you think you’re here to be buddies, you’re wrong. If you think getting a drink with your son will fix everything, too bad. If you’re after amends or peace or resolution or closure, if this is some AA bullshit or something a therapist or a court order is making you do, you can pack it home. Take it back to your family. You made it damn clear who that is.”
The hum of automobiles, filtered by the brick, had died down now, and the refrigerator buzzed like seven-year cicadas, so loud that the sound was inside Hazard’s head, in the nasal cavity, in his teeth, shaking his skull apart.
Frank Hazard suddenly seemed aware of the shredded cigarette, and he turned it in his fingers, and more of the tobacco sifted across those big hands. The cigarette rolled down into the hollow of his palm, and Hazard’s father clamped his hand shut, crushing loose tobacco and cheap paper, the gesture oddly particular, as though he were now worried about making a mess.
“I’ve got cancer. Your mother thought you had a right to know.” And with his hand still awkwardly folded around his ruined cigarette, he left.
HAZARD TOOK THE ELEVATOR. He was waiting in the lobby when his father reached the bottom of the stairs, and now he saw everything he had missed before: Frank Hazard’s shiny pallor, like machine grease over bone, and the way his face had thinned, and the curve to his shoulders, and now, when he took in a breath, the hollow rush of it, as though the cancer had eaten out his bones and left them bird-like. And the soup, Hazard thought with a pang. The goddamn soup. His father had never in his life ordered soup at The Real Beef. Not one goddamn time.
“A beer.”
Frank Hazard nodded.
They walked the blocks to Saint Taffy’s, the cop bar on Market Street. Inside, amber tinged the darkness, and the low-wattage bulbs leaked like a river across the polished granite floor. Behind the bar hung a massive 4K TV that opened a hyperpixelated window onto a basketball court in some other, brighter part of the world. They found seats in back behind the pool table, and a pimply-faced boy brought Guinness and Bud Lite, and on his second trip he brought a bowl of peanuts.
Hazard’s father crunched peanuts, and between mouthfuls he drank deeply and thirstily. His eyes locked onto the basketball game, jagging left and right with the ball.
“How bad is it?”
His father grunted.
Hooking the bowl of peanuts, Hazard dragged it over and helped himself to a handful. Frank Hazard dragged it back. His eyes jagged again.
“Are we talking about a timeline?” Hazard asked
On the 4K TV, a basket drained through the hoop, and cheers went up in the crowd.
“A year? Six months? Is there a clock running?”
“There’s a clock running on every motherfucker out there.”
Another of the tall, ropey basketball players sank a shot, and cheers went up again. Transmitted across thousands of miles, converted into digital pulses, reconstructed inside a framework of wires and plastic housing, the cheers sounded as real as if Hazard had been there himself. That was a miracle, he thought. A miracle of communication. Translated into binary, into zeros and ones, and then reformed into sound. Intelligible sound. Sound that Hazard could understand. And in contrast to all of that, sitting next to him munching peanuts, was Frank Hazard.
“It was your mother’s idea.” The words were flecked with wet, papery peanut husks.
“What?”
“Coming here.”
“Jesus Christ.”
For the first time in the conversation, Frank Hazard’s brows stitched together, although his gaze kept tracking the 4K basketball.
“You drove, what, a hundred miles, and that’s what you want to say? That Mom made you come here to tell me you’re dying. And then you’re going to sit here, staring at that fucking game like it’s the only thing that matters in the whole world, like you have your whole life.”
Hazard’s father drained his beer and motioned for the pimply teenager—barely twenty-one, and probably trying to make it through college—and the boy brought over another Bud Lite. Frank Hazard took the beer without comment and drank again.
This time, Hazard waited. He was always the one who spoke first. Coming out, telling his parents, he’d had to speak first. He’d had to break the silence every time. It was like living in a desert, and the only water lay under the sand, and every time he wanted a drink, every goddamn time, he had to dig a fresh hole, and as soon as he slacked, the sand poured back down, and he had to start all over again. Well, that was kid’s stuff. That was childhood shit. He was done with all that, and he wasn’t going to be the one who spoke first. But he did order another Guinness.
Frank Hazard drank his beer. He emptied the bowl of peanuts, and he drank another beer, and he emptied the peanuts again. As the Guinness settled, heavy and full-bodied in Hazard’s bloodstream, he watched his father’s eyes more and more closely, and he found himself thinking of the time, as a boy, he had gone to Hollace Walker’s place, and Hollace’s mother had bought him a Nintendo, the original 8-bit, and they’d played a game with a red-and-grey gun and a chunky, honking duck that zigged and zagged across the screen. And it was like that, watching his father’s eyes as they zigged and zagged, and Hazard felt himself mentally lining up the old red-and-grey plastic, felt the drag of the cord connecting it to the Nintendo, ready for the shot as the duck honked and honked and honked. Bam. God, Hazard thought. He was getting drunk, getting maudlin, getting stupid. It was just a dumb game. And anyway, this was his dad, wasn’t it?
“You didn’t know your grandfather.” The words came out in Frank Hazard’s normal voice, but he had both hands wrapped around the Bud Lite, and now he was waiting for Hazard to say something.
“No. Not your father.”
“He combed his hair left to right in a real stiff part. Used a fine-tooth comb every day of his life. In the morning before work, he’d stand in the hall and run that comb through his hair and give it a little twist at the end. I did it just like him, too. As soon as I was old enough. All through high school, and for a long time after, I’d comb my hair one last time before I left the house and give it that little twist at the end. His hair was like mine. You could use it to scour a fry pan and do a damn good job. You got your mother’s hair.”
Again, he stopped, and the silence ticked past like a time bomb. “You don’t like how I comb my hair? Why? Too long? Too much like a hippie’s? Like a girl’s? Because I don’t do a little twist at the end like you and your dad?”
“I’m just telling you how I did it. And how he did it. And it wasn’t until I was a grown man that I started to ask myself why he did it. For the love of Christ, he worked as a teamster, never made much money, smelled like horseshit more days than not. But I was past thirty before I ever thought much about the comb. What the hell did it matter, I started to wonder, what his hair looked like? The other teamsters didn’t care. The men he worked for, they didn’t care. The horses sure as hell didn’t either. He was like that, I guess. That was all I could ever make of it. He liked his hair just so. And somehow, that made its way into me.”
“You think he was, what, some kind of fag too? You think that’s why I am the way I am?”
“Would you pull your head out of your goddamn ass for a minute?”
A timer buzzed on the television, and cheers and catcalls erupted. The final score flashed. It was late, now, and dark had settled firmly over the city, and everything inside Saint Taffy’s was glossy, reflective, dim but also too bright because of the drink. Somers might be asleep. He might be wondering where Hazard was. He might be—
—home, with his family—
—Hazard pushed himself up, and his body weighed more than he remembered, and he had to steady himself on the table.
“Sit down.”
Hazard shook his head.
“Will you sit down, please? I’m not done. Christ, I’m not even started.”
It was the tone more than the words that made Hazard sink back into his chair.
“I was still just a kid, really, when I had this dream. In high school, sure, but you’re still a kid then. I loved my father. For fuck’s sake, here I am, close to sixty, and I still part my hair like him. But I dreamed he was dead, and inside that dream, I’d never been so goddamn happy in my life.” He tilted the Bud Lite, peering into the eye of brown glass, thumbing condensation along the neck. “Now that’s some fucked up shit, isn’t it? I loved him. I still love him. But in that dream, I was so happy I could have burst.”
“Is that what you want? You want to know if I’ll be happy when you’re dead? Jesus, Dad. I’m not a monster.”
“I’ve done a lot of wrong by you, Em. I know that. Your mother knows it too, God bless her for never saying it to my face. If you hate me, you hate me, and that’s just the way it is. I’d change it if I could.” He paused, still considering the bottle’s opening as though divining some truth hidden in the beer. “When my father died, I was a grown man with a son of my own, and I bawled for three days. I never forgave myself for that dream. Never understood it, either, but I never forgave myself.”
Through the haze of Guinness, Hazard thought he understood part of it. He could understand the terrible mixture of emotion that was tied up in the deepest, most intimate relationships. He could recognize in himself the secret alchemy of love and hatred towards the man who sat next to him, the inextricable love for the man who raised him buried under the years of disappointment and hurt. With John-Henry, too, although there the reverse was true: the old lust and hate and fear, ossified and skeletal now, but still there, the bones above which new, young love grew. He thought of Clyde, of the shine in his eyes when he spoke of the day he met John Oscar Walden, and he tried to reconcile it with the boy who had murdered Walden and killed Britney Cowper. Walden’s death, at least in part, Hazard could rationalize. Clyde had been tortured and beaten and brainwashed into believing that it was his purpose, his identity, his mission to betray Walden. He had been a tool for the greed and ambition and malice of Kelley Jane and Brother Jesse. But why had he killed Britney Cowper? Why would a lonely, wounded boy kill a girl who had only ever been nice to him?
“It’s in my stomach.” Frank Hazard spoke to the bottle instead of his son. “I’ve smoked every day since I was sixteen, and the cancer’s in my stomach. That’s something.”
“How bad is it?”
“Bad enough.”
“I never dreamed you were dead.”
“I didn’t think you had.”
“But that’s what this is all about. This is all about you. All about fixing me, the way you always wanted to fix me. The only difference is now you want to fix things so you don’t have to feel bad anymore.”
The Bud Lite clanked back onto the table. Frank Hazard’s big shoulders pulled up.
“Why the fuck did you send me to that place? You could have done anything else in the whole fucking world, and instead, you sent me there. The Valley of Elah Conversion Center. You know what? You should have fucking shot me. Put a bullet through my head. That’s what you should have done. Anything but send me to that shithole. Anything but tell me you’re taking the family on vacation and—” Hazard’s throat seized, and the rest of the words came out high and thin and empty-sounding. “—and leaving me in the nightmare.” He cleared his throat. “That’s what you should have done. Jesus Christ, why am I even talking to you?”
“I don’t know.”
Hazard froze on the edge of his seat.
“I don’t know why you talk to me. I sure as hell wouldn’t if I were you. And I don’t know why I sent you there. It was a lot of things, I guess. When I was born, it was a different world. Simpler in some ways. Meaner in a lot of ways. And some of that world, it’s always going to be with me.”
“That’s a tired song: I’m too old to change.”
“I’m not saying that. But I’m saying even if you want to change, you can’t leave your past behind. It’s still with you. Bred in the bone, that’s what my dad would have said. And that’s part of it, part of why I sent you to that place. And part of it was that I was scared. Scared for my boy, who was different when being different meant horrible things. And scared for myself too. Goddamn terrified for myself.” He peeled his fingers from the bottle deliberately, and he eased his chair back from the table, and his eyes moved to Hazard’s face. Those eyes were the color of fire burning past the horizon. “But some of it I still don’t know. I heard about that place, and it was like everything finally shifted into first gear, like I could finally get moving again. Sometimes that’s life. Sometimes the decision, it not a moment. It’s a hundred different little things all at once, things you can’t ever shine a light on.”
“That’s bullshit. That’s a coward’s answer.”
“Is it? Then let me ask you something: why are you shacked up with a boy that cut on you, beat you, pushed you down a flight of stairs?”
“You want to know about Somers? You want me to tell you why I like fucking guys?”
“I taught you a lot of things, but I didn’t teach you to talk sideways. You know what I asked you, and you’re trying to throw up a lot of dust to scare me off. If you can answer the question, do it.”
“I don’t have to tell you shit. I don’t owe you any kind of explanation.”
“You talked about the other ones. You talked about the one in college. Alec. You talked about Billy. Your mother met him; I know you think I didn’t know that, but it’s hard keeping secrets in a family.”
Hazard stared at his father. He was right. Hazard had thought his father didn’t know that in a Starbucks on a bright October afternoon, his mother had met his former boyfriend. And Billy had bitched about that, hadn’t he? Bitched about meeting in Starbucks instead of going to Frank and Aileen Hazard’s house in southern Missouri, as though the priss ever wanted to drive twenty miles past the city limits. Hell, for that matter, Hazard had thought his father had never even known the names of the men he had dated. Hazard had thought his father hadn’t wanted to know.
“You talked about them, but not this one. You think you have an answer for everything. Let me hear your answer. Why are you living with the man who made your life hell?”
“Fuck you.”
Frank Hazard shook his head. “You’re scared.”
“I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want you coming around me again, bothering me.”
To Hazard’s surprise, his father laughed. “Son, in three months the only person I’ll be bothering is Judas, and that’ll be in hell.”
Grabbing his jacket from the chair, Hazard pulled it on.
“You can’t tell me why,” Frank Hazard said, and one of his big hands gripped Hazard’s arm like iron. “Not any more than I can tell you. But I’ve seen the two of you together. I’m old. I’m an ignorant man. In my own way, I’m a fairly stupid man. But I’m not so stupid that I can’t recognize love when I see it. If you love that boy, you take him home to meet your mother. You can wait until I’m dead if that makes you happy. But take him home. Don’t make him meet her in a Starbucks. Show him that much respect, at least.”
“Respect?” Hazard tried to laugh, and his throat worked soundlessly, and his jaw clicked shut. “Get out of town. Go back home. You should be with your family.”
And with that, Hazard left. When he got home, the apartment was dark. Hazard fumbled off his shoes and jacket, and he let his keys crash to the floor and then swore and stopped, listening to the silence. After a minute, he padded towards the bedroom, stripping off his shirts, his trousers, trailing articles of clothing behind him. Flushed from the Guinness, he was only distantly aware of the chill in the apartment, of the stiffening of his nipples, of the ache between his legs. It wasn’t arousal, not exactly. But it could be. It very fucking well could be. If Somers were still a little angry, if he were still a little pouty, Hazard would make things up to him. Hazard would kiss him on the neck, let the day’s stubble rasp across the tender skin, scrape his teeth over the fine golden skin on Somers’s collarbone. He knew how to make him feel good. He knew how to make things right between them.
But in the gray wash of city light, their bed was empty, and there was a note on the pillow. Hazard turned the note into the light, and the buzzing gray skated across the page, picking out the paper’s texture and the deep lines left by the pen and the puncture hole in the apostrophe where the tip had pierced the page. He’d been angry when he wrote it. Pissed to high heaven. And there were just four words on the page. Four words, that’s all it took for an apocalypse.
At Cora’s. Family stuff.
HAZARD DIDN'T SLEEP. Not in any real sense, at least. He floated in the gray, decaying light from the sodium vapor lamps. The light had a vibrating, buzzing quality, an almost infinitesimal trembling, as though subatomic chaos were made manifest in the light. He watched the light rattle against the far wall, and he lost track of time. He lost track of everything except the light. He would drift, and then he would see those words again: family stuff, and his eyes would snap open, and the light had remained the same. Everything was the same. Everything shuddering in that gray citylight, and he began to think that it was significant, that light. Part of his brain knew that the light only appeared to be trembling, that it was the result of tall lamp posts shifting slightly in the night air. But the rational part of his brain was exhausted, and the trembling light seemed significant now. It was a sign. Not a religious sign. Not a divine sign. But still a sign. It was a sign that Hazard lived in a shit universe, where everything was falling apart. Nothing could hold together. Not a screwed-up cult like John Oscar Walden’s. Not Hazard’s family. Not even him and Somers.
