Ben hated the disloyalty of the thought. In thinking it, he was doing what he vowed he would never do: repeat the past. You’re following your effing prong, boy! had been his father’s words, intoned with variation only in the emotion that underscored them: from sadness to fury to derision to contempt. Santo had done much the same, and Ben didn’t want to think what lay behind his son’s proclivity for sexual dalliance or where such a proclivity might have taken him.
Before he could avoid any longer, he picked up the phone on his desk. He punched in the numbers. He had little doubt his father would still be up and about the ramshackle house. Like Ben, Eddie Kerne was an insomniac. He’d be awake for hours yet, doing whatever it was one did at night when committed to a green lifestyle, as his father long had been. Eddie Kerne and his family had had electricity only if he could produce it from the wind or from water; they had water only if he could divert it from a stream or bring it up in a well. They had heat when solar panels produced it, they grew or raised what they needed for their food, and their house had been a derelict farm building, bought for a bargain and rescued from destruction by Eddie Kerne and his sons: granite stone by granite stone, whitewashed, roofed, and windowed so inexpertly that the winter wind hissed through the spaces between the frames and the walls.
His father answered in his usual way, with the barked greeting, “Speaking.” When Ben didn’t say anything at once, his father went on with, “If you’re there, start yapping. If not, get off the line.”
“It’s Ben,” Ben said.
“Ben who?”
“Benesek. I didn’t wake you, did I?”
After a brief pause, “And what if you did? You caring for anyone ’sides yourself these days?”
Like father, like son, Ben wanted to reply. I had a very good teacher. Instead he said, “Santo’s been killed. It happened yesterday. I thought you’d want to know, as he was fond of you and I thought perhaps the feeling was mutual.”
Another pause. This one was longer. And then, “Bastard,” his father said. His voice was so tight that Ben thought it might break. “Bastard. You don’t effing change, do you?”
“Do you want to know what happened to Santo?”
“What’d you let him get up to?”
“What did I do this time, you mean?”
“What happened, damn you. What God damn happened?”
Ben told him as briefly as possible. In the end he added the fact of murder. He didn’t call it murder. He used homicide instead. “Someone damaged his climbing kit,” he told his father.
“God damn.” Eddie Kerne’s voice had altered, from anger to shock. But he shifted back to anger quickly. “And what the hell were you doing while he was climbing some bloody cliff? Watching him? Egging him on? Or having it off with her?”
“He was climbing alone. I didn’t know he’d gone. I don’t know why he went.” The last was a lie, but he couldn’t bear to give his father any additional ammunition. “They thought at first it was an accident. But when they looked at his equipment, they saw it had been tampered with.”
“By who?”
“Well, they don’t know that, Dad. If they knew, they’d make an arrest and matters would be settled.”
“Settled? That’s how you talk about the death of your son? Of your flesh and blood? Of the means of carrying on your name? Settled? Matters get settled and you just go on? That it, Benesek? You and whatsername just stroll into the future and put the past behind you? But then, you’re good at doing that, aren’t you? So is she. She’s bleeding brilliant at doing that, ’f I recall right. How’s she taking all this? Getting in the way of her lifestyle, is it?”
Ben had forgotten the nasty emphases in his father’s speech, loaded words and pointed questions, all designed to carve away one’s fragile sense of self. No one was meant to be an individual in Eddie Kerne’s world. Family meant adherence to a single belief and a single way of life. Like father, like son, he thought abruptly. What a cock-up he’d made of the rough form of paternity he’d actually been granted.
Ben said, “There’s no funeral planned yet. The police haven’t released the body. I’ve not seen him, even.”
“Then how the hell d’you know it’s Santo?”