His whole back seizes. He does undo. In Mom. And, riding him myself, I feel those rhythms spill. I ride his surge. It plays out like some shark taking the whole hook to the blackest corner of our ocean floor. Cold. I am now staring past a strong man’s leather shoulder, I can look direct into my mother’s hollering mouth.

  One time at school? I saw a dog? do what this one’s doing to my Momma? but to another, lower shorter yellower dog? And, they got snagged? So the principal had to turn a garden hose on them and everybody laughed except our prissy teacher screaming for “Absolute Silence!” Could a big dog do it to a little cat? Could a … ? I am looking right in at my mother’s silver dental spots, her wide mouth screaming, “No! There’s not a way this’s possibly hap-ning. Don’t let it see him, Doc.” He collapses, then I do. She too then. Down go Mom’s knees, drawbridge, tickling my either arm.

  Next, from this place on the man’s mattress of a back, over the kitchen’s reflecting linoleum, through the blue gauze of our torn screen door, out in April’s gold-green light, I spy my Daddy, my ugly, decent Christian father. “Toadface,” “Liverlips,” “Dick beak,” neighbors call his grade of homely. This, of the kindest person who ever probably breathed.

  He tiptoes nearer our house. Then—too good a man to maybe live real long—Dad backs off toward fencing. His face looks opened like a tin can split end-wise by some ax.

  I yell toward the one who pays to feed a lady that’d let some horse doctor ride her. “Don’t see this, Dad! Go on home away from it. They’re just talkin. I found nothing, okay, Dad? But just stay out the house a minute more, umkay? Cause we’re in here getting things nice. For you.”

  Then I understand: Where is more home base for Dad than Mom? For Dad, I’m pretty much the Home.

  …

  Through screen door, I watch Pop’s busted arm flap out to keep him standing. The broken one, all white, is plastered fat. He half-falls anyway, supported by our neighbors’ chain-link fence. Dad keeps beating the back of his head against that metal upright. Fencing shakes, tense steel mesh ringing, two hands cup beside the mouth. It keeps calling my name. He knows I have already seen everything our town’s been saying. Everything Dad has never let himself quite know. At last I understand what “do it” means. My own mom nicely showed me first.

  Dad waits, bent out there, still struggling to light a Camel with his one unbroken hand. Needing it that bad, using fence to steady the latest match shaking out, he can’t even smoke. It’s then my dad starts hollering straight up, “Why’d my baby have to catch them? You were gonna save him, remember? Ain’t I been being good enough? Why us, God?”

  The rest is mainly blackness. First I feel the naked man beneath me turn. By now, I am so weak I’ve stretched across him like some soup-noodle starfish. I have pounded his whole back with all of my five points, head included. But I’ve stopped nothing. The stranger scoots over, spills me, stands. With the strong impersonal hands of a Large-Animal Vet, Doc easily palms me off into the other room.

  He takes me from the sight of Mother’s half-remembered breasts. Each one a white clown-face, its snout a red-gold maple drawer-pull. Below, one browny-yellow yarn pompom; her two middle fingers hide dead-center. “Son, why?” Her voice so flat. “Why today?”

  Mom’s worst hurter totes me to a room not mine. He lays me with real care facedown across my folks’ chenille. I look over at his naked front. There is a confusion of amounts. Do doctors catch contagions off large beasts? Did being too near bulls make him go big? He’s saying, “Ever hear of knockin, kid?”

  And louder, to her still moaning on our couch, “You went and whelped yourself a biter, Grace. Hate the biters. Don’t worry, I’ll be back. But for now I’m outta here. I can take a friggin hint.” After he’s hopped around the other room to pull his pants up over it, I hear him kiss her then dodge free. His huge Pontiac leaves us in a fuss of gravel, it squalls off, shortwave antennas whipping.

  Silver-blue fumes settle.

  Such silence clamps down.

  Finally, for city blocks, there are just two noises—one bird singing its routine song, as if trying to cover for a grown man’s backyard sobbing. And Dad. Who sounds like something almost-monster perfectly newborn. There’s coughing in it. It’s somewhat a cow, a hurt one.

  Sheeps go, “Baaaa.”

  Cows go, “Moooooo.”

  Birds’ll mostly “Tweet” on you.

  But my Poppa, the salesman, the joke man, the joke, the giver-away of God’s free word, the ugliest white man alive in Falls, is out there now alone, face-first into our fencepost.

  Poppas they must often go, “Noooo.” Mine sure does.

  I find a waiting darkness black as Bible. I walk between its cast-iron covers; they clank jail-shut behind me.

  When I wake, it’s breakfast, everybody acting like nothing ever happened. “Want toast?” But I see the screen door torn open down its center like lightning permanently let in. Some kids have little brothers or sisters that live with them. I have a li’l lightning bolt I invited in this house forever. I brought the world home. All of us must now live so unzipped into drying public sunlight.

  I know I saw what I did not understand but will, ahead. I’ve saved each second, every shift of it. I know I slowed it once. But now things feel way worse. Thanks to me, things have only broken open even more. I guess from my parents’ faces that what I stopped one time, it has not ended.

  And when, passing butter, she looks disgusted right my way, when he stares tender, checking how things are with me, I receive a four-ton load of all I am too young to know yet.

  I see that I have ended them.

  In trying to save my Dad from Mom, I have already killed them both.

  II. Exodus “Our Motel Bible Route”

  And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac…. And I have … established my covenant … to give them … Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage, wherein they were strangers…. And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God…. And I will bring you in unto the land.

  Exodus 6:3–8

  Owners of second-rank motels need time-consuming hobbies. Your last customer’s car leaves. You go in and change the nasty sheets. Nothing else will happen this whole afternoon. So far into countryside, everything is lazy but the flies. If you’ve ever felt one itch toward suicide, hot hours in a cinder-block lobby will clambake all such urges to your surface.

  Why not take up jigsaw puzzles? Learning to make mosaic coasters might be nice. “VACANCY”? Well, accept Jesus as your personal Saviour. Then, especially at your time of worst despair around 3:16 p.m., reread your Bible. John 3:16. Unique ideas and handicrafts do help time pass. Start such projects. Pronto.

  My father, a believer and a cuckold, belonged to the club that places Bibles in transients’ rooms worldwide. Sundays, Dad delivered. And so, so did I. As his only kid and son, as someone Mother preferred not to see during leisure afternoons spent with mysterious headaches that kept her sick in the bed each Sabbath, I became Dad’s “Bible Special’s B-52 copilot.”

  My father sold flashy shirts and haberdashery novelties along a three-state route. This made motels Clyde’s weeknight home. His name was Clyde Melvin Delman, Sr. He wore two different kinds of cufflinks he called “m’ demonstrators.” Dad, exactly as gentle as ugly, could make any chore go adventure for a boy. He let me reset the odometer, clocking exact distances between oncoming Guernsey cows. Clyde let me keep my best arrowheads in the glove box, just in case. I “drove” on his lap. I was salaried thirty cents per Sabbath. Dad encouraged me to spend it all on nonessentials.

  We considered his brand-new 1954 Packard 165 HP Clipper Sedan our Third Musketeer. Father, Son, and Holy Coach. A really good car is a Godly benefit. Thirty cubic feet of usable trunk more than housed our weekly Bibles. Still in my possession, the hardbound Owner’s Manual. It remains an epic poem to that age, and to Clyde’s own sweet 8-cylinder faith:

  Few homes are as tastefully and lavishly furnished, few private clubs so richly appointed as our colorful Packard interiors for 1954. Faultless tailoring … an almost unlimited selection of supple textured fabrics (from our new Nylon matelasse to traditional flannel broadcloth) … the gleam of chrome … the hush of sound-proofed bodies … all contribute to a feeling of luxury matched by no other car on the road.

  For one of the last times in American public relations, all this was absolutely true. And my father was the kindest man alive.

  Dad’s plainness seemed to release others toward cautionary pity then noisier good times. His funeral would prove Standing Room Only, almost as many black people as white. The chapel soon grew monkey-house loud with adult (Caucasian) sobs. “Never in my career …,” our town mortician told me later.

  But turns out it’s a mixed blessing, sainthood. Goodness can make your daddy be too public, gullible. I spent a lot of my time guarding him, guarding for him—and with an overzealousness at which I have already somewhat hinted.

  No one but this guy’s loving son can tell you simply enough: Clyde M. Delman, Sr., was truly nothing to look at. Some fellows’ ugliness renders them Untouchables, clock- and conversation-stoppers. Not Clyde’s. I still marvel how his rubber face seemed to limber up others, unleashing first their pity then their fondest wit. In the English language, no single noun describes this effect. German offers a near miss. There should really be a word!

  At the PTA open house, Dad’s curdled buttermilky features, his “rust” houndstooth jacket, the racehorse tie-clasp with real chain bridles, made even my antique third-grade teacher (“Absolute Silence!”) smile then flirt. I sat amazed. With powdery half-vampish glamour, one broken-down flapper suddenly opened laterally, like some drying newborn moth. She batted lashes, touched one side of her calamined neck, she grinned four pointy yellowed teeth Dad’s way.

  No one ever wanted Clyde M. Delman, Sr., to leave the room. (Except maybe Mom.) Me least of all.

  Poor Dad’s separate features began life as factory thirds, then really botched the arrangement! Eyes set this close threatened to become unanimous, cycloptic. Forehead low, skin more “manila” than pink, ears attached like opened armoire doors, wide-wale nostrils on too short a nose nubbed above a mouth like some gift-shop nutcracker’s. It was the facial equivalent of scrambled eggs.

  People divorce each other for “mental cruelty.” And my mother could’ve made her court case with four simple mug shots—sides, the head’s front, its gourdy back. For “cruel and unusual ugliness,” Grace Delman might have received major alimony. Instead she seemed to have settled for a platinum veterinarian every Sunday.

  Mom had a way of making nothing much seem fun. At least nothing she ever planned showing us. Carnivals were loud and “cheap.” Christmas just meant further work. “Hanging doodads up can be nice, but taking them down just kills me. The sadness of their going back in dusty boxes for another year.” Then came a sigh the size of a soup bowl.

  My overeducated mother was a thin, stark woman with ideal breasts and a big undirected intelligence that seemed, like her chest, fastened to her by mistake. Snobbish, sickly, “intellectual,” she lived at the uneasy mercy of a rustic, watchful little town.

  Maybe if she’d gone to church? If only Grace volunteered to read aloud for chain-smoking bomb-blinded soldier boys out at the VA. What if she’d kept our yard way nicer? Could anything have made Mom popular? She had no womenfriends: always a terrible sign. Nobody came near her, nobody but Dad and me, and maybe one more.

  Newly married, she’d read every book in the town’s public library, even electrical-engineering texts; then Grace Meadows Delman began to buy new novels by mail order, at retail. Soon this expense nearly outstripped our family’s meal budget. Three novels a day, Mom speedread without much training and very little retention. She claimed she read to escape—but I noticed: it didn’t make returning any happier.

  Her costly book-habit seemed to keep my dad a traveling salesman. In this, I now see, there might have been a plan. Mother’s unhappiness was “catching,” like the flu. So was her desire.

  Mom’s sexual indifference to my father drove him half-insane. Come sundown, the itchingness grew palpable in a tract house small as ours. His longing for her soon drove me crazy. Clyde cringed with needing her; he would be smoking midnight Camels, patrolling one room; I’d rest wide awake, wearing blue footed pajamas, uneasily erect in another; and we’d both listen to her, their bedroom door half open, Yes? No?

  She’d be pacing in her sea-green nightie, mumbling names of people she probably knew only out of books, “Ramona told Gregor told Buck told Philip IV told Mona …” Sometimes she’d half-hum place names: “In Casablanca, Verona, Boca Raton, or Antibes. In Seattle, maybe Glasgow, then, of course, in old Bombay.” You know, she never mentioned North Carolina? Not a single town along Dad’s Bible route and mine.—Finally, the bedroom door creaked shut. Uh-oh, a “no” answer. Dad scuffed outdoors to his beautiful Packard. He sat for hours in the dark, just the red tip of a cigarette to mark him there.

  Clyde joshed about his own appearance; poor guy had little choice. Standing six feet one prevented hiding all that much of it. Nervous people laughed when he walked into the room—with or without his mismatched cufflinks, orange bow tie, and forty free Bibles. I once heard a lady desk clerk (who created Last Supper “scenes” from numberless glued seeds) call Clyde—to his face—the Human Basset Hound.

  “You mind, Clyde? Your face makes people happy but in reverse, like. Probably just glad it ain’t them. People swear you’re so plain you’re almost cute. You mind much?”

  Shy, he shrugged, “Heck, Verna, that’s a step up. Most folks say I’m so ugly, I’m just real ugly…. Yeah, when the Lord was passing out looks, I thought He said ‘books’ and asked for somethin’ funny.” She folded double, laughing as if this were new to her.

  Only once did Mother join us on our motel jaunt. She took a wry and girlish interest. I saw the legendary charm. Her family had been rich, at least compared with us. As a child, she’d owned a pony all her own named Lucky. Given Dad’s unmentioned dirt-poor history, he considered her folks regular Rockefeller runners-up. The Sunday she came along, Dad was so glad for Mom’s company he nearly wrecked us, staring her way too much. If Clyde looked at her long, irrational grins—actual tears—would form.

  Mom pronounced our pals—the hobbyist innkeepers—“stitches.” After riding a hundred miles, she decided they were “basically pretty eccentric.” By next morning, our friends had sunk to “loner nut cases.”

  Mother’s migraine blinders deserved a Sunday-school-perfect attendance pin. We lived in “Falls, pop. 2100, bird sanct.” Low-grade rumors circulated—about how Mom spent those ailing Sunday afternoons as we toted God’s word from Manteo to Mount Mitchell (North Carolina). Someday I planned to prove to Dad such gossip was untrue.

  2.

  Once we’d endured church service, after Pop placed cool white terry-cloth to her forehead, soon as he shut their bedroom’s Venetian blinds as tight as gills, we regained permission to leave her.

  We emptied Clyde’s black Clipper of its spring-tension chromium crossbar; this supported half a store’s worth of sharkskin suits, iridescent shirts. Into our front-hall closet we loaded outfits that no self-respecting church-affiliated Christian of any race would wear. These threads were intended for handsome disintegrating men with gambling probs. The designer had laid odds that four colors on one shirt would snag the snake-eyes bookmaking interest of some railroad-hotel Romeo who preferred to always work the angles.

  Soon as our Old and New Testaments (printed in one handy twin-pak) got spirited into the trunk of a highly waxed Bible-colored Packard, off we set.

  Three miles into countryside, we began feeling relieved to be alone together and merely male. Dad and I were admittedly far simpler for that. Whatever Owner’s Manual had awarded each of us a stick shift seemed the Good Book, too. I’d sometimes say, “Man, I wouldn’t be a girl, not for a million buckaroos.” As if all women were my mopey sexy young mother. And, of course, to me, at six, they were.

  Dad and I hit the far-flung motor courts of either Carolina. En route, we fought to overcome Mom’s higher-grade intelligence. We left it beneath a washcloth in their dark room; we’d abandoned her to the bedspread’s white chenille that cut Braille messages into Mom’s pretty pinkish neck. And once we sped six miles from town, Pop and I commenced to simplify and strip ourselves. Her moods always left upon our skins a sweetish smell; her sighs were clinging Persian cat hair you must shuck off all your darkest things. Each trip meant our efficient male jailbreak from her impossible female need to escape.

  We soon grew wild with plain male speed. “Into the aiiiir, Junior Birdmen, Into the air upside dow-wnn,” we sang dumb songs I’ve not heard since.

  We couldn’t really carry a tune, either of us. But that just made us louder and more male. Equally loud if hopelessly monotone, miles from her, we began to forgive each other.

  Before front desks of many a motel, we did our Laurel-and-Hardy routines. I’d puff out my rosy cheeks, fluteplaying the air before my chest to mime Ollie’s fussed-with necktie. Clyde, a beanpole with huge hands and that bungled masklike head, became my immense overqualified Stan. He’d tug upward at his topknot of coarse hair; he’d give off dim Stanley’s weepy little pipings. And clerks dropped, laughing, literally dropped, behind their plywood check-in desks.

  I now understand, the simple sight of us must’ve caused more merriment than our conscientious acting skills.—We never knew, until the end, just how we looked together.

  Clyde took public pride in my blond blue-eyed memory. He encouraged me to quote aloud the titles of all the books of the Bible. These Incan-sounding tin-can syllables meant nothing to me. Doing them ever faster seemed any smart boy’s logical goal. Driving, Clyde would time my “GenesisExodusLeviticusNumb …” I, drowsy, counting cows, sat crackling holy syllables. Dad checked his Bulova, “Second best. But that doggone Ezekiel tripped you again. Break it down, four units. It’s ‘Easy-ki-el.’ Now, think, son.”