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Ted Obourn EVERYONE ELSE WAS BLESSED We couldn’t have been going more than a few miles an hour, but the jolt shook us to attention. I was in the back of our Plymouth with my cousin John. He and I were trading punches in the arm, harder each time, each thinking his punch made us even, when my father slammed on the brakes. I looked out and saw that too many cars were trying to squeeze toward the exit of the parking lot at the same time. It had been a great game: Buffalo 38, Denver 21. The Bills were Eastern Division champions for the third consecutive year. A win in two weeks against Kansas City and we would go on to the first Super Bowl ever. “Son of a bitch,” my father said through clenched teeth. “Where the hell does he think he’s going?” “Richard,” said my mother. A man got out of the car that was angled in front of ours. It’s interesting that I remember so little about him. There was no reason to think anything out of the ordinary was about to happen, I guess, and during what transpired I kept my eyes mostly on my father. Besides, I was only eleven. About all I remember is a thin mustache, like two lines drawn on his lip--and a knit cap pulled down over his ears. My father opened his door, as casually as if he were stopping at the store to pick up a loaf of bread, and he shook my mother’s hand off his arm. “I’m just going to talk to him,” he assured her. I hadn’t noticed until then how flushed my father’s face was. He had been drinking beers in the parking lot before the game and had continued drinking into the second half. It wasn’t until the fourth quarter that my mother got him his first coffee. He was still sipping his second cup when the game ended and hundreds of fans rushed the field to tear down the goal posts. The two men faced up to each other--my father’s back was to us--when I heard a sound I had never heard before. It was like a very loud slap, but with something hard and brittle behind it. My father threw his head back and took two awkward steps backward. His arms were raised at his side, parallel to the ground, like some famous singer. I had never seen my father in a fight, but I knew he had been in some. He was pretty big, and I had heard him talk about punching guys out. I had also heard the pride in my mother’s voice, as much as she tried to disguise it, when she said, “Your father,” as if he were something that had to be made the best of, like a rainy day. I knew he wasn’t afraid. I think if he had known what was coming next, he could have at least defended himself. The first blow had stunned him more than hurt him. But I don’t think he had any idea that the guy was going to keep coming. The next blow was the beginning of the end. With it, something went out of my father and something went into the other guy. Just as my father was straightening up, the guy lunged at him. He came right off his feet, throwing his fist in my father’s face, his whole body behind it. It seemed as though the length of his arm telescoped bare and white out of his sleeve. It’s funny. I remember that arm, grub-pale, better than the man’s face. This time my father fell over backwards and bounced out of control off the side of a car with a fleshy, metallic crash. He went down on his hands and knees in the filth of the parking lot. His head hung limp from his neck, and a stream of blood, perfectly straight, connected his nose to the pavement like a red ribbon. “Richard.” My mother whispered his name this time like a secret too horrible for us to hear. The man stepped up and stood over my father for a moment. He said something down at him that I couldn’t hear. Then he took a step back, planted one foot, and kicked my father in the stomach. My father groaned, the air crushed out of him, and rolled up into a ball among the crumpled beer cups and bits of popcorn that littered the pavement. The guy kicked him again, this time in the face, and I heard a sound from my mother like a whimper as she clambered out of the car. At the same moment the guy was hurried away and back to his car by a couple of other men. That was the last we saw of him. My mother knelt down next to my father, and another man stepped out of the crowd that had formed and knelt down too. I remembered just then that my cousin was sitting next to me, and I was suddenly afraid to look at him. My mother and the man with her stood up and stepped aside. I saw my father on his hands and knees on the ground. His stomach heaved a couple of times like a wave and he threw up on the pavement. Steam rose from the puddle into the cold air. He retched a couple of dry heaves and then gasped in a few breaths with a moaning sound. He got slowly to his feet, steadied by my mother on one side and the car he had crashed into on the other. Together, they weaved back toward our car. Her arms encircled his waist, and he had one arm over her shoulders. He shuffled his feet, and as they got close I saw that his eyes were glassy and vacant. When he climbed into the passenger seat, I instinctively slid as far back in my seat as I could. I was sitting behind the driver’s seat, so I could see his profile. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He put his head back on the top of the seat. His left eye was cut and bleeding. Blood had crusted under his nose. His eyes were filled with water. When he blinked, a trickle leaked out and rolled slowly down his temple and into his ear. He was breathing hard between distended lips, but not moaning anymore. He stank of beer and vomit and something else that smelled like metal. “Son of a bitch,” he growled. My mother climbed in behind the wheel as the traffic began to move out of the parking lot again. "Goddam sucker punch,” he said. My mother put the car in gear and we slid ahead. “I told you not to get out of the car,” she said. "Goddam son of a bitch,” he said. No one said anything more as we inched our way toward the parking lot exit. I stared out the window and struggled not to remember every gruesome detail of the attack. When we stopped at the road for a red light, the driver of the car next to us looked over at my father. The stranger’s face registered surprise, and he said something behind the silent glass. Immediately every other face in the car strained to get a look at the guy who got beat up in the parking lot. My father rolled down his window. My heart jumped into my throat. “You got a problem, asshole?” he yelled. His lips were crippled, swollen purple on one side, and he talked like someone just come from the dentist. I prayed my mother would hit the gas pedal, but the driver of the other car turned quickly away, and my father contented himself with throwing him the finger as the light changed and they drove off laughing. In the silence of the car, as we sped along the road, I snuck a look at my cousin. He was looking out his own window. I was relieved not to have to meet his eye, but glad that I had at least tried. This was not the first time violence had erupted in our lives. It had been almost a year. When I woke up that night, and saw my mother leaning over my bed, I didn’t notice anything because her face was in shadow. It didn’t make any sense that she was getting me up in the middle of the night to go to my grandmother’s. But something in her voice told me not to ask why. In the bright light of the kitchen, her tears looked unreal, like something painted on her face. Her lip was swollen and her eye was starting to turn purple. At first, I couldn’t make myself understand what made her face look that way. “Your father has had too much to drink.” That was all she said. I felt ashamed for her. “It’s the middle of the night,” I said. Her old tan suitcase with the leather worn off its handle sat by the door. They had been drinking together earlier in the evening, and they had gotten into an argument. My father had stormed out. This was not a frequent occurrence but it had happened before. The other times, he had come home later when we were in bed and slept on the couch. But this time he went to a bar and kept drinking, then came home to finish the argument. The next day he said he didn’t remember a thing. He was so contrite, I almost felt bad for him. My mother showed no mercy. She took him back on condition that he go for six weeks of self-prostrating therapy. She told everyone we knew what had happened. Not that she could have hidden it. Our deficiencies were written on her face for weeks. And she reminded him of his sinfulness every chance she got. But he never chafed. He apologized formally and painfully to all the relatives, his family and hers. He embraced the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous with a kind of relieved enthusiasm. For months he was dry. Then he began to drink very carefully, always monitored by my mother, and he always did what she said, stopped when she said to stop. In the car, my father had been sitting in the same position since we hit the highway, with his head back on the seat, his mouth open, the evidence of his humiliation turned away toward the gray cloth ceiling. We were about halfway home. The gray sky seemed to loom around us in all directions as we passed through flat, black muck lands of unpicked cabbage. His voice startled me. “I’m glad this happened,” he said suddenly. Except for a veneer of hoarseness, he sounded like himself. He cleared his throat. “There’s a lesson in this for you boys.” “There certainly is,” my mother said. “Never let anybody beat you to the punch,” said my father. My cousin and I looked at each other instinctively, as if on cue. I’m sure I looked as surprised as he did. “Richard, that’s ridiculous.” “Is it? You saw what happened. The goddam son of a bitch sucker-punched me.” “You got your ass kicked, Richard. In front of your son and my sister’s son. That’s what I saw.” “Mom,” I protested. My father lifted his head slowly and turned to look at me. His face was swelling in places, changing shape. The right side was turning a pale violet, like the light at dawn in the woods behind our house. He didn’t look like my father. “You okay?” he said. Suddenly I wanted to cry. I nodded yes and tried not to blink for fear my tears would betray me. He turned back around and stared out at the flat gray road ahead. The tires beneath us thumped rhythmically over the seams in the pavement. “It should never have happened,” he said. “I let down my guard.” He opened the glove compartment and slammed it shut. “Why the hell are there never any goddam Kleenexes in this car?” he said. “There are some in my purse,” my mother said. He grabbed the bag roughly, yanked it open with both hands, and peered over the edge, as if afraid to put his hand in. “How do you ever find anything in here?” he said. “I’ll get it,” I said. I brought the bag in back with me and rummaged through it, comforted by its smell of peppermint gum and perfume and old leather. I felt around among the familiar objects of my mother’s daily life until I found what I was looking for and pulled out a small bundle of tissues turned over on itself like a billfold. “Thanks, buddy,” said my father, taking it from me. He peeled off a layer and blew his nose into it. Blood showed pink and translucent through the soaked paper. He glanced at it and said, “First the guy suckers me, then he runs off. Pull in here,” he commanded, and my mother obeyed. The car swung off the road onto a gravel parking lot. The warm light from the windows of the Varysburg Superette accented the gathering dusk. We had stopped here before. The owner knew my father from the box plant where he worked, and the two men shared a disdain for blue laws. My father opened the car door and climbed out stiffly. He didn’t bother closing the car door behind him, and as he entered the store, I noticed dirt from the stadium parking lot had stained the seat of his pants. We sat silently in the car. My cousin was reading the Official Buffalo Bills Program he had bought at the game with money his parents had given him. It shone glossy and expensive in the fading light. I knew better than to ask my parents for souvenirs. “Why do you want to waste your money on junk?” they would say. “Let me see that,” I said. I tried to grab the program out of his hand but he held on and the cover ripped. “What are you doing?” he complained. My mother whirled in her seat and I braced myself. But she just glared at me as I sat cringing in the near darkness. Realizing I was safe for the moment, I said to my cousin, “I just wanted to look at it. You can read it when you get home.” “That’s coming out of your allowance,” my mother announced. She turned her back on me and faced the front with a purposeful toss of her head, effectively cutting off any appeal. I stole a quick glance at the store and saw my father inside the door with his hands on the counter. “You mean the allowance you never pay me?” I said. But my mother refused the bait, and in the uncomfortable silence that followed, my cousin said, “It’s okay. You can look at it.” “Never mind,” I said. My father came unsteadily out of the store. He held a brown paper bag, still stiff and unwrinkled, cradled in his arm. As he stepped down to the parking lot, he shuffled one foot quickly to the side to correct for balance. Back out on the road, he reached into the starched bag and pulled out a can of Utica Club. From his pocket, he took the “church key” (as he called it) that hung on his key ring and punched two holes in the can. Then, putting it to his swollen lips, he took a long drink. I watched his Adam’s apple bob. Pulling the can away, he exhaled with a sound more of relief than satisfaction and wiped a pale bubble of beer with his knuckle from the corner of his ravaged mouth. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “I’m not.” My father had had a lot of practice holding off shame. When our electricity was shut off for nonpayment, he blamed the “greedy, heartless, sonofabitch power company that would let a family freeze over a few lousy bucks.” When our car insurance lapsed, he blamed our troubles on the “sonofabitch old fart that backed in front of us without looking.” According to my father’s logic, just because the geezer couldn’t drive, DMV suspends his license. My father wasn’t ashamed those times. Why should this be any different? “It’s better to lose a fight than back down,” he sermonized. “You can’t let people think they can push you around. You boys remember that. You have to make the other guy pay the price.” “Yeah,” said my mother. She nodded her head as if in agreement. “I feel sorry for that poor guy in the parking lot.” She looked into the rearview mirror and met my gaze with a conspiratorial smile. “When he gets home, he’s going to have to wipe all that blood off his shoe.” “Shut up,” said my father. But he didn’t sound angry. He threw back his head, finished off his beer with a second pull, and exchanged the empty for a fresh can. We rode the rest of the way in silence, except for the sound of my father drinking. I wanted to curl up on the back seat and dream of being someone else, maybe a guest in sunny Los Angeles at the first-ever Super Bowl, cheering the Bills to victory from my box at the fifty-yard line. But I couldn’t lie down with my cousin there. So I stared out the window at the last of the light behind the bare black trees on the horizon. The Faith Baptist Church signaled the outskirts of town, and my cousin and I began to fidget in anticipation. My family had attended services there for a couple of months when my father’s drinking had topped out. It always made me uncomfortable. Everyone else there was blessed. My mother pulled into her sister’s driveway and turned off the car. “What are you doing?” my father asked. “I have to talk to John’s parents. After what he saw. Where’s my purse?” “Here,” I said and handed it over the seat. My cousin was already out of the car. “What’s the big deal?” asked my father. My mother opened her door and stood up, sweeping the cold winter night air into the car. “I got in a fight,” he continued. “You win some, you lose some.” My mother leaned down and spoke to me through the open door. “Come with me. I want you to stay here with Uncle Adam and Aunt Kate while I take your father to the emergency room.” “I want to go with you guys,” I protested. The thought of facing my aunt and uncle after what had happened terrified me. “If I ever see that guy again, I’ll fucking kill him,” my father said as he put the bag with the empties on the floor between his feet. “I don’t need a goddam doctor.” I noticed that the cut over his eye was open, and deeper than I had realized. It was dark, the oily color of a slug. “You’re pathetic,” my mother said, and she slammed the door shut. “Mom,” I complained again as I got out of the car. “Why can’t I go with you?” “I have enough to deal with,” she said. “One little boy is enough.” She slung her purse over her shoulder like a rifle. “Say goodbye to your father.” I came around by his open window. “Don’t worry about me, bud. I’ll be fine,” he said cheerfully. His face was beginning to set into a new configuration, as though his features had decided by some strange agreement among themselves to exchange their normal proportions. I wondered if he would ever look the same. The look in his eye, though, was all too familiar. I had seen it many times in the last year. It had become a staple since the period of his most intense remorse, the weeks just after he hit my mother. Maybe he learned it at his AA meetings. All he wanted was somebody to agree that everything was okay, that there was nothing to be ashamed of. I looked away. “Just a few scratches,” he said. “It’ll make your mother feel better. Remember what I said.” He spoke as if we were making a sacred pact. “Shut up, Richard,” came my mother’s voice from behind me. I could tell she was just about out of patience. “Can you stay out of trouble if I leave you alone out here for five minutes?” She gave him a look, shook her head, and then headed for the house. My father winked at me and stuck out his cheek. His face was disgusting and he smelled worse than ever. But I gave him a peck in the only spot I could find that looked as though it had been spared. I felt the prickle of his stubble on my lips. “That was a great game, wasn’t it?” he said. “We gotta get tickets for the playoffs. Right? “Sure,” I said. “We’ll take John with us.” My cousin was already inside. “Okay,” I said. I wanted to go inside with my cousin now. It didn’t matter about my aunt and uncle. I didn’t want to look at my father’s beat up face anymore. I wanted him back the way he had been. I wanted that day never to have happened. “They’re gonna kick KC’s butt,” he said, laying his head back on top of his seat. “Kemp’ll bounce back, you’ll see.” He sighed, and I heard the paper bag rustle at his feet. “We’ll go early and tailgate.” My mother called from the door—I saw my Aunt Kate behind her—and I walked away from the car. Inside, the house smelled of chicken soup and wood smoke from the fireplace. My Uncle Adam sat reading in a chair next to the fire. “Come on in,” he said. He marked his place, closed the book, and set it down. I stood dumbly by the door. He stood up and came toward me. A glass of red wine shone on the table by his chair. “Sounds like quite a game,” he said, lowering his head so he could look at me over his half-glasses. “You must be hungry and cold.” My uncle had a small law practice, and he wrote a column for the town weekly in his spare time called “Musings and Manners.” In company, his fingers fluttered constantly beside his legs like tiny wings, and he always seemed to be struggling to think of what to say next. He was the model my father held up whenever I balked at homework. “Don’t make the mistakes I made,” he would say. “You’re going to be smart like your Uncle Adam, and go to college and get a good job. You don’t want to grow up to be dumb like me and work in a factory all your life.” Despite his respect for my Uncle Adam’s achievements, though, my father was usually too busy repairing the car or racking up some time-and-a-half to visit. “Your mother’s in the kitchen with Aunt Kate,” my uncle said. “They’re having one of their secret confabs.” Just then my mother came around the corner. “I heard that,” she said, shaking her head. “You sound like Richard.” “Did you hear about the riot?” my uncle asked. My mother began buttoning her coat. “It was on the radio. The fans tried to tear down the goal posts after the game, but apparently the cops didn’t think that was a good idea. Seven people ended up in the hospital.” “Thanks a lot for taking him,” my mother said. “I hope we won’t be too long.” She looked down to where her hand fumbled near her waist. “I’ve been meaning to sew this on,” she said. The middle button had been missing from her coat since the previous spring. “Take your time,” my uncle said. “Don’t worry. He can stay the night and get on the bus with John in the morning.” He took off his glasses. “Tell Richard to take care of himself. And let us know if there’s anything else we can do.” He squeezed her hand and went out to the kitchen. My mother turned and faced me. “I don’t want to stay overnight,” I pleaded. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything will be fine.” She laid her palm against my cheek. Her skin was rough, but her touch was gentle. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she said. She pulled me close, and I buried my face in the warmth of her old coat. I didn’t feel like crying anymore, but a slight panic at the thought of being left alone burned in my throat. I put my arms around her and hugged her back. She kissed me on top of the head, said “Be good,” and left. I watched her walk to the car. As she opened the door, she turned and waved--that innocent little finger-wave from just off the shoulder. As she backed the car out of the driveway, I could see in the light of the street lamp that my father’s head was still resting on his seat back and his eyes were closed. And I could see that my mother was talking to him.
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