holding it until he caught sight of it. What was the use of drinking it if you didn’t even know you were doing it?
“Git yourself a beer,” his father said, and Lester Ray crossed over to the ice box and pulled out a Pabst. He popped the top and sat down, taking a long sip. The beer was ice cold.
“You didn’t tell me where you been,” his father said.
“Like it’s any of your business,” Lester Ray said.
“I’m your daddy, boy,” he said.
“You ain’t nothin but a fuckin drunk,” Lester Ray said.
“No, I’m a fuckin drunk and your daddy,” his father said.
“You think that makes any difference?”
“Not a whole lot, no.”
He didn’t know how old his father was, but he looked like a very old man. He was losing his hair, the bald spot spreading outward from his crown, and he only had a few teeth left, one on the bottom in the front, so that his cheeks caved in and his lips formed a single narrow line above his chin. He was so thin he looked like a skeleton. “Git me another one, will you?” he said, and Lester Ray went back over to the ice box and pulled out another Pabst and opened it. He handed it to his father.
“Where you been?” Lester Ray asked.
“Down to Panama City,” his father said, “had me a job cuttin grass on a golf course.”
“And you got fired for drinkin on the job.”
“Story of my life, ain’t it?” his father said. He leaned back and drained about half the beer. Then he looked at Lester Ray. “I’m headin over to Crestview when I sleep this here off,” he said. “Know a feller over there.”
“Well, I might not be here when you get back,” Lester Ray said. “This time.”
His father laughed. It was a low chuckle, deep down in his throat, and he seemed to choke on it, losing his breath. When he righted himself he hacked and coughed up a wad of phlegm, which he spit onto the floor. “Still think you’re goin lookin for your mama, huh? Boy, you better just give that up.”
“Never,” Lester Ray said.
“I’ve done told you, she was a whore, hooked up with a bunch of gypsies come through, ain’t no tellin where in the hell she’s at now. She had road dust in her veins. Couldn’t set still. She’s halfway round the world, far as I know.”
“I don’t care,” Lester Ray said. “If you’d just tell me her name . . .”
“She didn’t have no name. She was . . . what you say? . . . unusual. She was unusual. She wasn’t born outta no woman, I’ll tell you that.”
“You’re full of shit,” Lester Ray said.
“Naw, now, she was . . . peculiar. Is all I’m sayin.”
“You been tellin me this shit since I was old enough to understand what you were sayin,” Lester Ray said. “You’re so full of shit you need a bucket to tote it around in.”
“That ain’t no way to talk to your daddy, son,” his father said.
“Fuck you,” Lester Ray said.
His father shrugged. He drank down the rest of the beer. “Listen here,” he said, “you got any money?”
“No,” Lester Ray said. He unrolled his pack of Camels and shook one out. He stuck it between his lips and lit it with his Zippo. There was no way he would ever let himself get like his father, he thought. His father was like a piece of driftwood that had washed up behind a dam and was just bobbing there. His life had no direction at all, never had, as far as Lester Ray knew. Lester Ray wondered if that was why his mother had left him, or if he had gotten that way because she left him.
“I thought you said you didn’t have no cigarettes,” his father said.
“I did say that,” he said. He tossed the pack onto the table, and his father took one. Lester Ray lit it for him. He watched his father suck the smoke deeply into his lungs. He stood there watching his father smoke.
Lester Ray was antsy, anxious. He could feel the days of his youth piling up, like blown leaves up against a fence. He didn’t want to get as old and worn down as his father before he found his mother. He had thought of just going, sticking his thumb out, taking off in whatever direction the first ride took him. He was not frightened of being off on his own, not knowing where he was nor where he was going nor what he would eat when he got hungry. In a way it would be a comfort, a new kind of freedom. Except that he knew he would never find her if he just took off, with no plan, no idea whatsoever where she might be. He kept thinking that sooner or later he was going to get a handle on it, that his father would slip up and tell him something that would help him find her.
All he knew was that she had just left one day, without a word to his father, when Lester Ray was almost a year old. He had only the vaguest memory of her: her hands, soft, smelling of Jergens lotion. Maybe it wasn’t a memory at all, just a sense of her that had lodged itself inside his mind and stayed there. His father told him that a Gypsy caravan came through Piper, on the way to one of their burying places down near Fort Myers, camping outside town out in a field behind Saddler’s Lounge, and his father figured she had gone with them. “She was a Gypsy anyhow, that’s where she come from,” Earl has said.
“How do you know that?” Lester Ray had asked, “you don’t know that. Tell me. How you know she was a Gypsy?”
“I just know,” his father said.
“Did she look like a Gypsy?”
“I don’t know,” his father said, “look in a mirror and see.” His father, even though he stayed drunk for a solid year—and had been drunk most every day since—and cried in the night and moaned about how much he missed her, had never tried to find out where she’d gone. Or at least to Lester Ray’s knowledge he hadn’t. Lester Ray could not understand that; he would have followed her and brought her back, even if he’d had to hogtie her.
He had known, when he got six or seven, that his father knew a lot more than he was telling, though how he knew it Lester Ray didn’t know. He suspected that his father knew exactly where his mother was. It was maddening to him. He had searched through everything his father had: an old coming-apart cardboard suitcase that contained a few old yellowed bills that had never been paid, two or three pieces of hard candy in the bottom; his clothes, a few pairs of pants and shirts, most of them torn and put up dirty, underwear with the elastic stretched out of them. One day he had hit the jackpot, or as close to a jackpot, he had decided, as he was likely to hit: he had found a picture of his mother, in an old Bible with an imitation leather cover that was cracked and peeling. Or a picture of a woman that he was sure was his mother, even though his father swore that it wasn’t. It was a black and white photograph, faded, with a checked border around it. The woman was sitting on the fender of a dark automobile, her elbow on her knee and her chin propped on her fist. She had on a light colored dress, maybe white, and her skirt draped around her legs. She was looking straight into the camera and smiling. Her dark hair was long and straight, parted in the middle of her forehead. It was impossible to tell from the picture whether she was a Gypsy, but she was beautiful. Her eyes were squinted, as though the sunlight was high and bright.
“That’s my sister,” Earl had said when Lester Ray showed it to him. “Where’d you get that?”
“In the Bible, where you ain’t looked in twenty years,” Lester Ray said. “Nor me either, ever.”
“My sister,” his father said again.
“What’s her name?”
Earl, drunk, hesitated just long enough for Lester Ray to know for sure he was lying and said, “Daisy. She died of the polio.”
“You’re lyin. That’s my mama, I know it is.”
“No