Ike

The only friend I ever heard about was Carl. They played golf on Sundays, out around Wentzville. It happened once, maybe twice a year that Dad would win, and then he’d hurry home and drive me or my mom over to Carl’s office to get our teeth looked at. That was the bet, a free checkup. Almost always, though, Dad would lose and have to follow Carl home and do yard work for a few hours. He’d cut grass, scoop out the gutters, prune hedges, chop wood. One summer, week after week, he was up on a ladder painting Carl’s house.

Fillings were part of the deal too, but it seemed I never needed any. I remember thinking Carl was disappointed. For what felt like a long time he’d be in there scraping, tapping each tooth. Finally he’d lean back, stretch. He’d roll his stool over and freshen his drink – he kept a bottle in the cabinet, in the corner. He’d grab a handful of peanuts from his apron pocket. Slowly he’d shake his head.

“Still no cavities.”

But then when I was down in Memphis I saw another dentist. Mom was gone at this point. I was twenty-four. For two years she’d been dying, almost three years – long enough to feel like maybe everyone was wrong, maybe it wasn’t really happening at all. And then one day it happened, in May, and about a month later I got it in my head that I should be a radio broadcaster, so I signed up for this program down there. For six years, since high school, I’d been working at a plumbing company. All I did was wash the vans, file paperwork, answer the phone. Over and over I heard myself say, “Have you tried a plunger yet?” But this thing in Memphis was just school all over again. Most days I’d end up downtown, kicking bottles and rocks and chicken bones down the sidewalk. I kept circling back to this dentist’s office. A sign on the door said appointments weren’t required. Another one, a block of wood hanging in the window, offered OLD TIME PRICES & OLD TIME ROCK ’N ROLL. Twice I walked in and turned back around. The place looked like a barbershop – the chairs all in a line, a wide mirror down one wall. A plaque over the jukebox said THIS MACHINE PLAYS LITTLE RICHARD ONLY.

“Son,” the dentist said when I finally sat down, “some of these is more hole than tooth.” He kept poking around, mumbling. “One, two, three, four…” The total was eleven cavities. “Son, are you not in pain?”

I laughed. Of course I was in pain. It was pain that brought me through the door. For so long, though, I guess I’d been thinking this is just what it feels like to have teeth.

But Dad wouldn’t hear it when I came home and tried to blame Carl. They’d grown up together, played football in high school. When Dad broke his leg, it was Carl who took off a cleat so he’d have something to bite down on. But then the bone didn’t set properly, so the doctor had to break it again. Then a third time. The pain never really went away, he walked with a limp some days, but I remember Mom telling him he should consider being grateful. If he hadn’t been laid up that way, who knew what might have happened instead? Most of the guys he’d gone to school with, Carl included, wound up fighting in Vietnam. So maybe, Mom reasoned, the broken leg was really a sign of God’s love.

I remember Dad snorting mournfully, somewhat tenderly, at the kitchen table, with his leg propped on a chair, an ice pack strapped at the knee. “Well praise Jesus, then.”

“That’s right,” Mom said.

“Thank you, Lord, for my leg which still hurts.”

Then after Memphis when I brought up Carl, he said, “You will not impugn that man’s character.”

We were standing out in the yard, opening our mouths at each other. He asked if I flossed.

“Of course.”

“Every day?”

I said, “Do you floss every day?”

He questioned the chemical content of Memphis water. He questioned my vitamin intake. “And who was this guy? You found him in an alley?”

“Dad, he was a dentist.”

“Yeah, yeah … so’s Carl.”

“Look at my teeth,” I said, stretching my mouth wide.

“Look at mine!”

*

He was sixty-one, sixty-two, I think, that year I came home. For a while, even before what happened with Mom, he’d said he had no use for doctors. He was insistent. All of his medical questions, his ailments, everything went to Carl.

“Carl was a medic,” he’d remind me. “He knows more than teeth.”

“I remember.”

“Vietnam.”

“Right.”

“He saved lives over there.”

Still, I was surprised a few years later when Dad called and told me he’d had Carl remove a lump from his lower back. “Don’t worry,” he said before I could say anything. “It’s not a tumor. It’s not–”

“How do you know?” I said. “You don’t know that.”

“Carl checked. He put it under that scope he’s got.”

“Dad, Carl’s not a doctor.”

He started to say something else, then broke down coughing. It went on for a while, but the coughing got quiet, and I figured he must have set the phone down and walked away. Then he was back. He cleared his throat. “Come over,” he said. “I made soup.”

“Soup? What time is it?”

But he didn’t answer. He hung up.

I had an apartment over by the old high school, ten minutes away. I let an hour pass before I went to the house. The soup was still in the can, on the counter. Dad was sitting slumped forward with his forehead flat on the table. He groaned when he noticed me standing in the doorway, then sat up straight, wriggling his shirt up over his belly so I could see his back. The stitches looked terrible – uneven, pinched, with red skin bubbled in between.

“You know,” I said, kneeling beside the chair now, “Carl’s not really a doctor.”

“That’s right.” He seemed satisfied with himself. “That’s why it didn’t cost ten grand.”

“But Dad–”

“I think it looks like an oyster,” he said.

I looked over then and saw it, the jar, out on the table, at the center with the salt and pepper, the ketchup, vitamins, everything on a little stained circle of cloth Mom had embroidered with flowers along the edge. “Christ,” I said. “You kept it?”

The jar was for spaghetti sauce, still gummy with adhesive. When he tilted it, the lump slid down the glass. “See?” he said. “If you didn’t know better you’d think it was an oyster.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think I would.”

I watched him adjust his grip on the lid. “Carl went in there with this thing about like an ice-cream scoop, took out the whole zone around it.”

Then Dad reached over to hand me the jar, but I wouldn’t take it. “Here,” he said. “I can’t get the lid off.”

“Good.” I put my hands in my pockets.

He struggled a bit more, wincing. He said Carl had given him a shot, for numbing, but it wore off before they were finished. Then he gave up and brought the jar up close to his face. He shook it so the lump wiggled side to side on the bottom. “It’s got a stink to it,” he said, “but I don’t think that means anything.”

*

A week or so later, the stitches came out. Everything seemed fine, which I found somewhat irritating. In those days, I usually did laundry over at the house. While I waited, we’d either watch TV or I’d leave and come back, leave and come back, until everything was done.

“Your back hurts,” I said to him once.

“No it doesn’t.”

“Then what’s this?” I mimicked the way he kept reaching, stretching an arm around.

“It itches,” he told me. “I have dry skin.”

“You need to see a doctor.”

“What I need is some lotion. But I can’t get my hand back there…”

Then probably two, three months after that, I stopped by one day and found him in the recliner, hunched over. I paused at the door. He had his hands braced on a bucket, arms straight.

I set my laundry bag on the floor and watched. I stayed quiet. He must have just thrown up, I thought, or he was about to, but then after a minute, he looked up with a smile.

“What is it?” I asked. “What happened?”

Without a word, he motioned for me to come closer, then tipped the bucket so I could see – down at the bottom was an iguana, bright green, half-buried in grass clippings.

“All I wanted was a lawnmower blade, but then here’s this lady…” he trailed off, wiggling his fingers down in the bucket. “Her hair, I’m telling you, it had to be six feet long, all done up in these little rubber bands. She had it looped around like a scarf, around and around her neck like that. You ever see anybody do that?”

“Dad, what are you talking about?”

“Out in the parking lot–”

“What parking lot?”

“Pevely,” he said. “The flea market. I told you that.”

“You got a lizard from a woman in a parking lot?”

“Iguana,” he corrected me, then said that Carl got one too. “Carl took the female.”

Nose to tail, the iguana was about a foot long. It looked fat, I thought. Puffy. The feet, though, were like bird feet.

He went on for a while, telling me what all else the lady had stacked in cages and tanks around her van – snakes, ferrets, turtles, white mice, a parrot, a pair of bearded dragons. “You ever hear of a bearded dragon?” He said she had two Rottweiler pups tied to her ankle.

“I don’t get it,” I finally said to him. “You don’t even like animals.”

“There’s nothing to get.” He looked upset. “A man’s allowed to have a pet.”

But then he got excited, before I left, when I wondered aloud how big it would get. He said he had no idea. “Never thought to ask.” He grinned. “I guess we’ll see.”

*

Soon he had an aquarium set up beside the recliner, on a TV tray. He added sticks, gravel, dandelions, a margarine tub for water. Every morning he’d sprinkle in a strip of bacon, finely chopped, until one day he said, “Did you know they’re mainly herbivores?”

“Is that right?”

He said Carl had told him that. “Evidently they get kidney failure.”

Watching TV, he would sit with a hand outstretched, softly knocking a knuckle on the glass. During commercials he’d talk to the thing. He’d coo. He’d make up words and say they were Spanish. I got used to it. I tried not to notice.

Then one afternoon I was in the kitchen – Dad had made chili – and I heard rustling over in the corner. A mouse, I figured. Then the tail flashed out from behind the crockpot.

Back in the living room, I saw the aquarium was empty, the lid was on the floor. I said, “What the hell? He just runs around loose now?”

“Ike?”

“Ike?” I said. “I thought it was–”

“He doesn’t like the tank anymore. He gets claustrophobic.”

“Then get a bigger tank.”

Instead he put the tank out in the garage and built the iguana a nest of crumpled newspaper and dish towels beside the crockpot. He lined up food bowls like a little salad bar. A pie tin for a pool. He re-configured the living room too, moved the recliner over where the wall opened into the kitchen. That way he could sit watching TV and all he had to do was swivel his head and there was the iguana, his nest on the counter, his climbing stick propped in the kitchen window.

*

I brought Leanne over there once. She kept saying she wanted to meet my father, asking what he was like, for maybe a month this was happening, and then one night I drank too much. I said, “Okay. Let’s do it. Saturday.”

Dad thought it was a joke when I called. “Now tell me again,” he said. “Who is this?”

“Leanne. You don’t know her. You’ve never met.”

“No – who is this I’m talking to? Who’s bringing a girl to my house? I know it’s not my son.”

“Ha ha.” I told him she was a school teacher, she didn’t grow up here. She tended to speak very slowly, I added – I didn’t want him to think that was personal. And she was tall. I think I mentioned that too, not wanting Dad to be surprised, though really Leanne and I were the same height, almost exactly, which I’d thought might be good for me, for my posture.

On the way over, I warned her about the iguana.

“Oh yeah?” She said her stepbrother had a snake when they were growing up. “A little black one – a cobra.”

“Really? A cobra?”

“It sat on his shoulder,” she said. “I think it was a cobra.”

We pulled up to the house a bit early, but Dad was ready. He had the door open before I got parked. He had a sweater on. His pants were clean. In the kitchen he had crackers fanned out on a platter.

“Sit,” he said. “Please, sit.”

He offered wine, whiskey, water, coffee. When Leanne asked for wine, I had to help with the corkscrew. Then he brought out these glass bowls I’d never seen before, like squat goblets, and served chili.

“Wait,” he said. “Not yet.” He went to the fridge and came back with a block of cheese. He stood beside the table shredding it over a paper plate. “You like pepper cheese, Leanne? I like pepper cheese…”

“Dad, I think that’s enough. I don’t think we need the whole thing.”

I ate a few bites, then went to the bathroom – I wanted to make sure I got there before Leanne did. But it wasn’t too bad. The towels smelled fine. I wiped down the toilet with a tissue.

When I got back, Leanne was standing by the crockpot. She had her face low to the counter. She said something about the iguana’s eyes, I think, I couldn’t quite hear.

“Thank you,” Dad said, still at the table. “Thank you, Leanne, for noticing that.”

He pointed a thumb over at me as I sat back down. “This one here won’t even go over there.”

“That’s not true.”

“He’ll just sit here and starve if I don’t fill his bowl for him.”

“That’s not true,” I said again.

Later Leanne asked him about his work. She knew he sold cars. I’d told her already how he had retired the year before, but now he was back part-time. Over the years he’d sold other things too – knives, vitamins, fertilizer, floor tile. Leanne asked him wasn’t it stressful, being a salesman? “I don’t think I could handle that kind of pressure,” she said.

Dad took his time chewing, wiping his mouth with a paper towel. “You know, Leanne, I don’t really see myself as a salesman.”

“You don’t?”

He shook his head. “These cars don’t need it.”

“Oh.”

“They pretty well sell themselves.”

I’d heard the next part before, but I’d forgotten.

“The only thing they can’t do,” he said, “is speak English. So that’s what I do, I translate.”

Leanne laughed. Dad smiled back at her, then put a whole cracker in his mouth and kept smiling. I sat there shredding my napkin.

Eventually we went to the living room, Dad with another bottle of wine. He turned the TV on, then off again. He passed around a tin of peppermints. When we got up to leave, he tried sending us out with leftovers.

“I got containers.” He said it several times. “I got containers, lids. I got zipper bags. You’re full now, but you’ll need food for tomorrow. People forget that. Here.”

A few days later, I went back to get my sheets from the dryer and saw the same chili still thickening in the crockpot. Dad was kicked back in the recliner.

I said, “You like that wine?”

He had a bottle open, down on the floor. He shrugged. “I wasn’t sure how much to buy.”

Before I left, he said, “That’s a nice girl you got.” He took a drink. “She reminds me of your aunt Suzanne. That hair.”

I was confused. My aunt had long, light brown hair, down to her shoulders, or even down her back sometimes. Leanne’s hair was dark, short.

He said, “I’d hold onto her if I was you.”

“Okay.”

He raised a hand up and held it out straight, like he was gripping something. “I mean it,” he said. “Hold on tight.”

*

Then one morning a while after that the phone rang. It was early. No hello. Dad was already talking fast when I got the phone to my ear. He mentioned Ike several times.

“He ate it. I know he did.”

“Ate what?” I said. “Ike? Who did?”

But he hadn’t actually seen it happen, he said, because he’d been outside. He’d been asleep out back.

“You were sleeping outside?”

“In the hammock,” he said.

“What hammock? Why are you sleeping outside?”

“It’s got a mosquito net.”

“What’s wrong with the house?”

“Nothing’s wrong with the house – I’m not talking about the house!”

He said he knew for certain that Ike had been in the pantry, up on the top shelf, near the light bulb. Somehow the shelves had fallen, detached from the wall, the top one and the two below. Jars shattered on the floor – pickles, olives, maraschino cherries, green beans Mom had canned who knows when. The iguana appeared to have had a feast.

“Good for him,” I said.

“You’re not hearing me. The lump’s gone. He ate the lump.”

“He ate the lump?”

Dad said he’d looked everywhere, sifted through all the glass, the food, pulled out the fridge.

“The fridge?”

“To see if it slid underneath.”

I said, “Well I guess that’s it then.”

“What?”

“Where else could it be?”

“That’s what I’m saying,” he said. “But…”

I waited. “But what?”

“I don’t like it,” he said after a while.

I didn’t even ask why he still had the thing, or why he’d kept it in the pantry. Of course he did – the lump was in a jar, jars go in the pantry.

*

“Something’s not right,” he said the next time he called. He thought the iguana was acting moody. “I think he’s mad at me.”

A few more days and he said the iguana was following him around the house. From room to room, the iguana would slink along the baseboards. If Dad closed a door, the iguana would hunker down and wait.

“And he won’t shut up.”

“Huh,” I said. “I didn’t know they made noise.”

“They don’t. They’re not supposed to.”

Then he started telling me about a guy Carl had known in Vietnam. A kid from Houston who looked like he was about thirteen, spindly arms, bad skin, always carried his rifle with one hand and kept the other hand down in his pants, cupping himself – for luck, as the kid explained it.

I said, “Why are you telling me this?”

Dad said one day the platoon found an old man, dead, draped over a low tree limb, and the kid from Houston trimmed off an ear and wrapped it in foil for a souvenir. He’d done things like that before – another time, a different body, the kid clipped off two fingers and tried gluing them to his helmet, like horns. But then one night, no one knew why – the kid didn’t say anything – suddenly out comes the foil, he uncrinkles it and swallows the ear whole with a mouthful of Kool-Aid. He laughed about it.

Later that night, though, he snaps awake, scared. Claims he hears screaming.

The other guys tell him no, no, it’s a dream, a nightmare, go back to sleep.

But they were wrong, Dad told me. “It was the ear.” Somehow the kid from Houston was now tuned in to whatever sounds the dead man’s ear had heard. All the screaming, crying. People on fire.

And then he starts doing the screaming himself – these other people’s voices coming through. “Not just soldiers,” Dad said. “He’d do women, children. He talked Vietnamese.”

The story kept going. The guys begged Carl, the medic, to do something, but what could he do? Pills didn’t help. Even in his sleep, the kid would cry out. The guys all started plugging their ears with wet gauze at night. The kid kept wailing, off and on, all the way back to Texas.

Eventually I gathered that this is what Ike was doing. He was like the kid from Houston.

“So you’re hearing voices? You’re hearing people screaming?”

“It’s me,” Dad answered. “I’m hearing myself.”

*

After that the phone calls came in waves. A few days might go by, no contact, but then he would call four, five, six times in one afternoon. The way he described it was that the lump was like a tape recording, and now Ike was playing it back.

“And you’re the only one who can hear it?”

“Who else is here?”

A couple times he spoke of his childhood, his own parents, neighbors, trouble here and there. Mostly, though, all he wanted was to apologize.

“It’s fine,” I’d tell him. “Really.”

He’d make some vague admission, then say he was sorry. For whatever he’d done, plus for bothering me now. “I’m just – I’m sorry, Son.”

After he hung up, I’d wait a few minutes for the phone to ring again.

“Really, Dad, it’s fine.”

He said he had no idea what a worm he’d been. “A lumpy, deadbeat bum,” he called himself. “A skinless, boneless chickenshit.”

Sometimes he wouldn’t even speak – all he did was breathe heavily into the phone, and I would sit waiting, holding these breaths to my ear.

“Your mother should have stabbed me in the groin,” he said one night.

I remember closing my eyes at this. But that was all of it – he was finished. I felt grateful. But then a moment later he was telling me how he would come home late some nights, after work, and he wouldn’t know if Mom was actually asleep or only pretending, how he would stand there whispering, hissing at her in the dark. “I’d get undressed,” he said to me. “I’d get in the bed, under the covers, and scoot over beside her, right in her ear, and–”

I said, “Dad, I don’t think I want to hear this.”

He sighed. “I don’t either.”

*

Another time he wanted to know if I remembered our trip to Table Rock. He said, “You remember what I said to your mother? We were in the car and she–”

I said I had no idea. I said all I could remember was a morning by the lake – I think I was five at the time. These two older boys had reeled in a catfish, and I saw one of them holding it down, carving its back with a pocketknife.

Dad said, “What?”

“What?”

“That’s what you remember?” But he sounded relieved, I thought.

Then maybe an hour later, he called back and said, “Your mother was a good woman.”

“I know.”

“I mean it,” he said. “She was.”

“I never said she wasn’t.”

For about a minute we didn’t say anything else. I thought we were finished, until quietly he said, “I hate him. I’d like to drown him in a barrel. Push him down with a rake, watch his little eyes bug out.” He chuckled. “Ike,” he added.

“I know who you mean.”

He mumbled a little more, kind of back and forth with himself. Then louder, “But I need him.”

“You what?”

“I need him,” he said.

“Why?”

“So I can see!”

*

Leanne was around for some of it. She wound up eventually with a guy who worked at the school, a counselor, I think. I had the feeling I was supposed to put up a fight, be persuasive. Before it happened, she’d let me know that it might happen. I said, “Okay.” Still, there was a stretch when I would find myself parked outside her apartment at night. Probably five or six times I did this. I’d bring food, pick up a six-pack, or a bottle, on the way. I’d just sit there watching the upstairs window. I kept imagining myself going inside – I knew I could do it. If the door was locked, I could punch through the glass. Maybe I’d take my boot off first and put my hand in the boot. I could see it all so clearly. How I could walk in while she was in the shower, or I’d find her in the bedroom, or in the big closet off the hallway with all her clothes on the floor. I imagined wearing a mask, I still have no idea why.

She asked me once, before all that, if I’d been happy as a child.

I thought about it. I said, “I think so.”

“You think so?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say I was unhappy.”

But then around that same time, I was asleep one night, on the couch at my place, when the phone rang. I thought it might be Leanne, but of course it was Dad. He asked if I remembered how I used to scream.

“You’d go so hard at it you’d choke yourself.”

“When?” I felt lost. “Why are you still up?”

“When you were little.” He said I’d start up for no reason at all, and then I wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t be reasoned with. And if Mom wasn’t around, what he’d do is squat down so we were eye-level, close, and scream right back at me.

He said one time I was strapped in my highchair. He said, “I couldn’t figure it out – you just would not shut up.” So he wheeled in the shop vac and left it running there beside me, sucking air, roaring at my feet. He went down to the basement. Then at lunchtime he came back to the kitchen. “You were just this little thing, slumped over, shit all through your britches, up the back, down the leg – do you remember that?”

“Of course not.” I guess I laughed. “I was a baby.”

“Son, it’s not funny.”

“I know,” I said.

“I’m being serious.”

“I know.”

*

It happened slowly. I started letting the phone ring. I’d stare at it for a time, then pick up and right away, before Dad could start, I’d say I was busy.

“With what?”

Or I’d tell him I didn’t feel well.

Eventually I got to where I wouldn’t answer at all. I felt bad about it, but it wasn’t hard. If it kept happening, if he kept calling, I’d step outside where I couldn’t hear. I got some yard work done that way. Or I’d take off on a walk – I had a loop that started down the old highway.

I was actually out trying on shoes one day when it occurred to me that he hadn’t called in a while – a couple weeks, maybe. I kept putting on shoes, having the guy there at the store lace up one pair after another, so I could stand up and take a few steps.

On the way home, I went by the house, but Dad’s car wasn’t there. I tried calling that night. No answer. I tried again the next morning.

*

The following week he was standing out front, outside the garage, when I pulled up. I’d been driving by every morning, then some days again in the afternoon. I sat there now watching him from my car. He had a broom – I thought maybe he was sweeping grass clippings, but I couldn’t see anything on the pavement. His face, when he turned around, had a pink shine, like meat. He looked startled.

He gripped the broom like a walking stick and came limping out to the curb.

When he got close, I said, “You smell like a campfire.”

His forehead wrinkled, his tongue slid out, just barely, like a third lip.

“You go camping?”

But he didn’t answer. He reached in through the open window and began rubbing my shoulder.

“What is this?” I said. “What’s going on?”

*

I had to hear it from Carl. He was over there the next time I stopped by. I hadn’t seen him at first. I was standing in the doorway, staring at Dad in the recliner. Dad had the iguana beside him. He waved, smiled, but didn’t say a word, and then as I turned, I saw Carl on the couch. He had one shoe off, the sock rolled down around the heel, the foot resting on a stack of pillows.

When I went to leave, Carl followed me outside.

“It’s not you,” he said. “He’s just not talking, period.”

“But I didn’t do anything.” I could hear how this came out, like whining.

“He says he’s through with it.”

“With talking? He said that?”

Carl nodded. “That’s right.”

“So he’s talking to you then.”

But Carl said that he’d made the announcement weeks ago.

“Weeks?” I said. “When?”

“I figured you knew.”

Then he opened his mouth, Carl did, but nothing came out. He pressed his lips back together and blew a long breath through his nose. For about three seconds, I stared straight at him, then down at the ground, then back toward the house, the door, then down again. I said, “This yard looks like shit.”

*

A few days later, I left work early, after lunch, and went back over there. Again Carl was on the couch. Dad held up a hand from the recliner and wiggled his fingers. His eyes flashed from me, leaning on the wall, to the TV, back and forth.

“Have you seen this?” Carl asked after a while.

I pretended not to hear.

“This guy keeps seeing things in the mirror,” Carl went on. “It was on yesterday, but we missed this part. It just started again.”

I waited.

At a commercial, Carl yawned and looked around. He leaned over and peeled back the curtain. The room lit up.

Then he asked if I was hungry. “There’s lasagna in there if you want it. We got lasagna, garlic bread, salad…”

Eventually Carl pushed himself up and walked past me, into the kitchen. Dad went on rocking in the chair. He pulled a folded newspaper out from under his leg and started flipping through the pages.

I left.

*

But I couldn’t stay away. Maybe twice a week, I’d stop by, usually after work, but sometimes in the morning, over the weekend. If they weren’t watching TV, they’d be in the kitchen, playing cards, or if the weather was nice, they might sit outside, at a folding table in the yard. Some days, I’d see a golf bag on the porch. One time they were actually playing out back – they had the grass cut low, just in this one wide stripe – where they were knocking a ball back and forth, like playing catch.

I asked Carl once about his own iguana.

“Loretta?”

“She must get lonely,” I said. “Home by herself all day.”

He was at the sink, with his back to me, but he turned his head sideways. “You know,” he said, “she’s not much of a social creature.”

*

“He’s not deaf,” Carl said another time. Dad must have been in the bathroom.

“I know.”

“You should talk to him.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it,” Carl said. “Just talk.”

But I didn’t. I could sit there for an hour without saying a word.

Then one Saturday I didn’t see Carl’s truck outside, so I jumped a little when I found him in the kitchen. There was laundry piled on the table. He was folding towels.

I said, “Is that my shirt?”

Carl was confused. He looked at the pile, then down at himself. He bent forward so I could see the top of his head – his hair was wet. “This?”

The shirt was an old flannel, blue and black. The sleeves were too short for him.

“Was that in my closet?”

“I’ve had this forever,” he said.

I realized then that I was shaking. I went to the living room.

“He’s asleep,” Carl said. He’d followed me in there.

I stood blocking the TV. Dad was in the recliner, awake, I could see. He didn’t move, though. He didn’t lean over to see around me. His face didn’t change in the slightest – he just kept frowning, staring at my chest.

Carl said it again, “He’s asleep,” this time a whisper.

I hadn’t noticed the iguana at first – he was on top of the chair, eyes closed, his tail moving slowly, curling and uncurling over Dad’s shoulder, like a slow-motion whip.

“I don’t care about the iguana,” I said.

“What?” Carl said. “No. I mean your dad.”

I took a few steps toward the chair then, waving a finger at him, moving it side to side. I leaned in close, so our faces were maybe a foot apart.

“I’m telling you,” Carl said, “he’s asleep.”

“But his eyes are open.”

Then Carl turned the TV down and excused himself. I could hear him behind me, in the bathroom. After a minute, I heard the door opening, the floor creaking down the hall. I felt him coming closer, passing through on his way back to the kitchen. I heard him whistling softly as he worked the microwave. All the while I stayed where I was, hunched over with my hands on my knees, staring at my dad’s face. I don’t think I’d ever really looked him in the eye before.

*

Not long after that I moved to Springfield. I knew a guy from there whose uncles owned a construction company. They paid cash. It was slow in cold weather, so I was back and forth, but in the spring I settled in. I found a house I could rent. I came home once in April for furniture. Then a weekend in July. Dad walked me out to the car that Sunday. We hugged goodbye. I felt okay about it, more or less, until his mouth opened – I could see his tongue moving – but he didn’t say anything. I had to drive a hundred miles before I could think straight.

And then in September I got a phone call. Carl said he’d been away for a few days – he had business somewhere. He said he was sorry. “Truly.” He said he found him that morning, out back in the yard. I asked him not to say any more.