“What if I do?”
“My old man worries when baloney goes up ten cents a pound. Your old man thinks it’s noble to burn your own house down while the band plays ‘Dixie.’ Gee, who’s about to get it without grease?”
Chapter
11
MY MOTHER DIDN’T allow my father to keep liquor in the house. In order to drink, he went to the icehouse or the bowling alley or the garage, where he kept a bottle under the spare tire in the trunk of the car. It was a shameful way for him to live, and a shameful way for my mother to behave, but it was the only way they knew.
After supper I sat at the redwood table in the backyard and played my Gibson. By chance I once heard Lightnin’ Hopkins playing in front of a bar on Dowling Street, in the heart of Houston’s black district. He was singing “Down by the Riverside.” It was the saddest and most beautiful blues rendition I had ever heard. I did not know the song’s origin, but I understood its content, and when I would feel one of my spells coming on, I would get out my Gibson and sing it:
Gonna lay down my sword and shield,
Down by the riverside,
I ain’t gonna study war no more,
Down by the riverside,
Ain’t gonna study war no more.
Somehow I knew he was not singing about war but about something even worse, perhaps the destruction of the spirit or the mortgaging of one’s soul. I wondered how anyone could prevail over the unhappiness that had been imposed on Lightning and his people. I wondered if the Texas prison he had served time in was worse than the prison I had constructed for myself.
I heard my father open the screen door and head for the garage. “Daddy?”
He looked at me, startled.
“I’ve got to tell you something,” I said.
He looked at the garage door. “I might have a low tire. Can it wait a few minutes?”
“Yes, sir.”
I heard him scrape the door back on the concrete, then pause and push the door in place without going inside. He walked across the grass toward me, fishing in his pocket for his Lucky Strikes. He had left them in the house.
“Go get a smoke if you want one,” I said.
“It’s all right. I’m trying to cut down. What’s on your mind?”
Saint Augustine said not to use the truth to injure. I don’t think he used those words lightly. My father tried to remain impassive as I described the events at the Copacabana and in Herman Park, but his expression was like that of a man walking barefoot on a rocky road. There was a tremble in his right hand, the fingertips vibrating slightly on the tabletop, a blue vein pulsing in his temple.
When I finished, he cleared his throat and looked at my mother’s silhouette in the kitchen window, where she was washing dishes. “You and I are supposed to be doing that.”
“I’ll go help her.”
“No, she’ll understand. The boy is going to lose his eye?”
“He’s not a boy.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, sir, that’s what the detective said.”
“And Saber wants to keep quiet about it?”
“He’s scared. His father just got fired.”
“Fired? When?”