To the outside world, I know the answer was no. Here we were trucking down the highway in a Mercedes, a couple of expensive fishing rods bent like hooks in the backseat, an ice chest I could hear sloshing around in the trunk. He wore a nice collared shirt, some khaki shorts, and a pair of tan leather boat shoes with the laces tied up in the beehive fashion I’d tried so hard to master without him. So here was a man who balanced his checkbook. A man who knew which fork to use when. He told jokes and shook hands and sold homes for hundreds of thousands of dollars, all evidence of a person with an active and working brain.
But to me it wasn’t so simple.
And in order to stick to the facts, I’ll try not to dwell.
All you need is the one, he’d said to me, his own son, a child of divorce.
What was I left to think? Was this a man who didn’t understand irony? Was this a man so devoid of perspective, so unaware of the craters he’d left in his wake, so oblivious to the fact that I knew, that my sisters knew, that everyone knew what he’d done, that he thought a comment like this was acceptable? Really? I’d wanted to ask him. All a man needs is the one?
Or was the truth of it more depressing than that?
Was he a man neither smart nor stupid, but merely unremarkable? Was he the most inconsequential kind of man, the one who just says something because it pops into his mind? A man who attaches no meaning to his thoughts, to his voice, or to his present situation, all so that he can seem quick-witted and steady? Was he the type who, time after time, has trouble recalling the most important things he’s said to you, things he promised you, because he was actually somewhere else when he said them? When he took you by the shoulders and said, Listen here, son. I’m not going to leave you. I’m not going to hurt you. Nothing’s going to change. Was he a man who was already gone?
I knew the answer even then.
So, the facts.
I smelled that good cologne in the car. I saw my chin in his profile.
He asked me how my sisters were doing, a common refrain when we spoke.
“Tell them,” he said. “Tell them I’ve been meaning to call.”
And because of moments like this, because of the way I often imagined a better version of him lurking quiet and remorseful beneath the surface, all my spite toward my dad would turn to pity one day. A day we’ll get to soon enough.
As for this day, we drove to a place called Cocodrie, a fishing village near the Gulf of Mexico. We passed rows of wooden camps built on pilings and finally cruised into a parking lot paved in oyster shells. We parked by a dock.
We had a good time, I guess, for an hour or so, casting artificial baits toward the grasses opposite the old dock, yet we caught nothing. And after a while, a carload of young men pulled into the parking lot. These were guys in their mid-twenties who reminded me of Robert, Alexi’s old boyfriend, in that they wore LSU baseball caps and T-shirts with the names of various campus bars like The Chimes and Murphy’s on them. And since I had recently posited myself as a rebel of sorts, a troublemaker at school, these fellows looked like clichés to me now. They were good old boys with similar sunglasses and haircuts, everything that Lindy’s music raged against.
“Hey, fellas,” my father said to them, and they returned to us the same, unloading ice chests and fishing poles out of their trunk. One of these guys pulled out a portable radio that was playing Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way,” which I liked at the time but wouldn’t admit. He walked up next to me and threw a line out into the water.
“Anything?” he asked me.
“Nothing,” I said, and glanced back to see my father talking to a few of these guys and laughing, leaning on the hood of their car and drinking a beer. I rolled my eyes at him, embarrassed that he would assume some camaraderie with people half his age.
And then, as is often the case when fishing, my lack of concentration earned me a strike and a redfish turned over the top of my bait. I saw the black spot of his tail fin rise from the water and, like a novice, I yanked my line right out of his mouth. The bait shot back toward the dock and hooked itself into my jeans.
The guys had a good laugh at this, my father included, and mimicked my panicked reaction. “Take it easy, sport!” my dad said, and raised his beer at me.
I turned back to the water.
“You take it easy,” I said, and the guy standing next to me heard.
“Hey, little man,” he said. “He doesn’t mean any harm.”
I shot this guy a ferocious look. “You don’t get it,” I told him. “That idiot’s my dad.”
The guy laughed.
“I know who he is,” he said. “He hangs out at my apartment, like, every day.”
14.
Laura showed up shortly after.
She wore a faded Tri-Delta sorority T-shirt over a green bikini top and stepped out of the backseat of a car with two other girls just as sun-kissed and heart-crushing. They sported pink cotton shorts with dolphins on them, flip-flops that exposed their painted toes. They had just conquered and finished up college, you could tell, and the world was in front of them. And in the moment before I recognized Laura, the second or two it took, I had already bent her in every pleasurable shape imaginable to me. I was a pubescent boy at the time, remember, my mind a brothel, and nothing more. And now that I’ve had the years to think on it, I wonder if part of my initial attraction to these sorority girls was that they fit the shape I’d once imagined Lindy would grow to. Back when she was ponytailed and athletic, when she was bright and popular, I’d envisioned the two of us one day lying naked and spent in my disheveled mess of a dorm room. I’d forecast us some glowing and all-American future.
But due to the crime against her and the enormous guilt I’d felt about it, the way I’d followed her into this thrift-store posture of suburban rebellion, I knew that I was already cut off from these twenty-something debs in their blossom. And, therefore, when I saw them arch their backs from the car ride and wave their half-empty wine coolers at the boys who had met up with my father, I realized how ugly I must already look to them, and I wanted them all the more for it. So I will spare you the many nights that followed this, when I fantasized mightily about my father as some quivering cuckold to me and his college-age sweetheart.
Instead, I merely watched as he and Laura greeted each other, hugging nervously, and I acted as if I couldn’t care less. I turned my back to the whole scene and eventually heard them approaching behind me, their steps amplified on the oyster-shell parking lot.
“Are you sure it’s okay?” I heard Laura whisper. “Glen, are you sure?”
“It’s fine,” he told her. “Hey, son,” he asked me. “You remember Laura.”
I looked back at them, my hair hanging over my eyes.
My father had his hand on Laura’s back, up near the shoulders, like she could be some friend of the family, some aunt I hadn’t seen in years, someone he cared for.
“Hi,” Laura said to me, gently. “It’s been a long time. It’s good to see you again.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a real Kodak moment.”
And then, in one of the few times something lucky happened to me in those days, that redfish gave my bait another strike. I looked back to see my line moving away in the water.
“Oh, Glen,” she said.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “He’s just got a fish.”
The two of them walked up to the dock and stood beside me.
“Bring her in, son,” my father said. “Don’t lose her.”
Then, as if there was nothing else to say, they watched me fight it.
You should know:
Louisiana is the Sportsman’s Paradise.
This is our state slogan.
We have it on our license plates here, our billboards. And though I’d normally felt separate from this as a child, though I’d been the type to stay silent as people talked about shooting a deer or blasting baited ducks from the sky, I felt I understood it all then. Because when I was engaged with that redfish in Cocodrie, the rest of my world fell away.
The fish tugged at the line with an urgency I’d not expected. It was a heavy thing, dashing around for its life down there, and it cared nothing about my awkward situation on the dock. It would happily pull me in the water and leave me for dead if it could. It would drag me beneath some ancient and salt-bleached stump. I had no other choice but to fight it. Don’t you understand? Life is complicated.
It’s a form of joy to have no other choice.
So, I set the hook. I dug in. The span of our fight would be a respite, I knew, from the people standing behind me, from my worries, from every place I did not want to be. As long as that fish wanted to get away, and as long as I was unwilling to let it, we would have each other.
I could therefore imagine people with big problems seeing this type of sport as a paradise. A wife sick at home, perhaps, a paralyzed child. I could see why these husbands and fathers would venture out in cold mornings to drink coffee in a duck blind, why they would revel in being single-minded. Why they would designate entire days to this pursuit and how these days could turn easily into seasons. I began to feel Louisiana itself making sense to me, in a way it hadn’t before, and yet finally landing that redfish, the first trophy I’d ever captured, felt like an ending rather than a beginning.
The fish was a beauty and I was congratulated. Water dripped from its skin.
Then it was weighed and gutted.
After this, the sun fell and my father’s friends did not leave.
It turned out we were all staying at the same camp that night, and the details of how this came to be were never mentioned. I had several ways to interpret their presence, of course, but none of them mattered. All I knew was that my father, when given the opportunity to be with me, to set me straight in life, had chosen to sacrifice nothing. He had altered no plans, nor did he consider the wild impropriety of this situation from my point of view. Rather, when told by my mother that I was in trouble, that I needed his help, he chose to simply endure me for an evening.