And here she cut in, as if she was on his father’s side now, as if she and his father were some sort of tag team and everything he’d done with her, from one-upping the Animal Control idiots to drinking Two-Buck Chuck to fucking in the dark didn’t count for a thing. “It was self-defense.”
He’d been clear, or a little clear anyway, but he wasn’t clear anymore, a sudden buzz of noise in his ears and then the dreadlock dog started barking and the trees took it up, all the Sitka spruce and Doug firs and bishop pines and new-growth redwoods running up into the hills and barking in chorus. He needed a hit of something, pot, hash, opium, acid, and where was the canteen, what had he done with the canteen?
“Adam, it’s all right,” his father said in his hollowed-out reptile’s rasp of a voice, the voice that was meant to be comforting and copacetic but was really nothing more than a hiss, and his father took a step toward him, the gloves swelling his hands till they were King Kong hands, black and rubbery and made to crush things. “We’re okay here, there’s no rush, and we’re going to find you a new place to live, believe me, we will—”
“My name’s not Adam,” he heard himself say, and there was somebody else speaking for him now, Colter, Colter speaking, “because Adam was the original man and I’m not the original anything.”
Sara was right there, right there between them, leading with her midriff—that was the term, her midriff, her bare midriff—and she said, “Adam’s been helping me. He’s great. He’s been a great help. What we need is a place to keep the dog—Kutya?—for a couple of days. Because my landlord? She’s being a bitch about having a pet. And I was wondering if, well, Adam said he’d help me out—if it’s okay with his grandma, that is. And you, you of course.”
So his father was taking this in and the trees were barking and his father knew it was all a lie and his son had been fucking her, though he didn’t want to admit it to himself, and the three of them were standing there outside the wall just jawing away as if they were in one of the plays they’d put on in the auditorium in high school.
“Well, good, good,” his father was saying. “I’m glad he could help, and as far as his grandmother’s concerned, well, she passed on six months ago now, so that won’t be a problem. Right, Adam?” A look for him now, drilled full of holes and every hole a question mark punctured with little barbs. “Happy to accommodate you—I mean, if it’s okay with Adam it’s okay with me.”
Everything was so nice, everything so perfect, his father on his best behavior because of her, going out of his way to be reasonable and understanding, just like he always was in his office at school with his big arms laid on the desk in the short-sleeved button-down shirt he wore without fail, winter and summer. As reasonable as the guidance counselor and the parade of shrinks marching through his life as long as he could remember. And what was it the last one said, Dr. Rob Robertson, Robert’s son, just call me Rob, the head-thumping diagnosis that was supposed to end it all and stop the wheel and make everybody happy? A problem of adjustment to adulthood. Yeah, sure. In spades. And then he was an adult, eighteen and out of school, and that was the end of the shrinks. He had acid instead, he had alcohol, pot. And here he was, adjusting to adulthood, right here, right now.
“Big hero,” he heard himself say in the most sarcastic voice he could dredge up, and he was looking at the ground, at the dreadlock dog, at the pile of busted-up cinder block. “John Colter would have killed them all—I would have killed them all.”
They just looked at each other, the two of them, as if he’d been speaking Chinese.
The urge he had, right then, was to take them by surprise, dash through the new doorway, circle round back of the house and go right up over the wall and out into the woods, just to get a little peace for a minute, and was that too much to ask? And he was going to, he was going to do that, just as soon as he wrapped up this conversation or dialogue or trialogue or whatever it was, and so he squared himself up so he was his father’s height—Straighten up, straighten your shoulders and stand up straight, be a man, that was what his father was always telling him, had been telling him, harping on it as long as he could remember, from elementary school to junior high to senior year and the half semester at Humboldt, which was about all he could stand—and he was fed up with it and he did something he never did, looked him dead in the eye and said, “And one more thing, in case you’re wondering—I fucked her. Isn’t that right, Sara? Isn’t that right? Didn’t I fuck you?”
11.