The Night Listener : A Novel

hell out of him.”
    This clearly rang no bells for Sondra, but she was gracious enough not to ask what I’d written. She gave me a friendly, knowing look as she plumped the old man’s pillow. “He’s a pistol, isn’t he?”
    “More like an Uzi.”
    “Lemme ask you this,” said my father. “Why do folks always talk about me like I ain’t here?”
    “Wishful thinking, I guess.”
    Sondra looked a little horrified at my wisecrack. “Now don’t be talking about your daddy that way.”
    “That’s right,” said the old man. “You tell him, Sondra. He’s got no respect for his elders.”
    “I’m outa here,” she said, heading for the door. “Too many roosters in this barnyard.”
    My father winked at me as soon as she was gone, as if our sparring exhibition had been staged for Sondra’s benefit alone. “She’s a sweet little gal,” he said. “And I’ll tell you something else: she’s a damn sight more efficient than the white ones.” It always touched me when he tried this hard to prove he wasn’t a racist. “She does seem nice,” I said.
    An awkward silence followed. My father looked nervous, fiddling with his sheet, glancing toward the window and back again. “You don’t have to stay, boy. The gals’ll be back in a little while.”
    “I’d like to stay.”
    “You gotta have some friends you wanna visit.”
    “Nope,” I said, smiling.
    A longer silence followed. There was nothing left to save us, nothing to muffle the taunts of things left unsaid. Then my father noticed the scab on the palm of my hand. “What the hell did you do to yourself?”
    “Oh…” I shrugged. “Just a roadside mishap.”
    “Does it hurt?”
    “Little bit.”
    “Least you can feel something. Lookee here.” His hand popped up from the sheets, as if he were about to recite the Boy Scout Pledge.
    “What is it?”
    “Damnedest thing. It’s all numb down one side.”
    “Was this from the stroke?”
    He grunted yes.
    “I thought it just affected your face.”
    “Well, I had another little one last night.”
    “Jesus, Pap.”
    “It wasn’t a big one.”
    “Does your doctor know?”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    “Did you tell Darlie and Josie?”
    “Hell, they don’t need to know everything. They just get hysterical.”
    I gaped at him in amazement. “I’m gonna get that way myself in a minute.”
    “It’s nothing, I tell ya.”
    “So why tell me at all?”
    No answer.
    “Talk to me, Pap.”
    “I’m talking, goddammit. I talk all the time.”
    “Yeah. About stuff that doesn’t matter—communists and liberals and scenery. But you never talk about your feelings. If you’re scared, why don’t you just say so? I’d really like it if you could.” He grunted. “You’ve been out there way too long.”
    “No, Pap, this has been going on forever. I’ve accommodated your embarrassment for so long that I actually feel it myself. And that makes me crazy, because you’re the only person on earth I do this with.”
    “Embarrassment? What the hell are you talking about?”
    “Maybe that’s not the word, I don’t know. There’s just this stiffness that happens. This dance of avoidance we do. You’re not comfortable with me. I used to think it was because I was a sissy and you knew it.”
    “That’s not true at all. Ask your mama…”
    “She’s dead, Pap.”
    “Well, she’d be glad to tell you if she was here.”
    “I want you to tell me. Were you afraid I’d just be a bigger sissy if you held me from time to time?”
    “Held you?”
    “Yeah. Held me.” How pathetic it felt to be having this over-wrought East of Eden conversation so late in both our lives.
    “I held you all the time, goddammit.”
    “When I was a baby, maybe. When you were posing for pictures.
    But I’ve never had so much as a hug from you that didn’t feel like an uncomfortable duty. I just waited for the moment when you’d have to pull away.”
    “That’s a damn lie.”
    “No, Pap. It always got to be too much for you.”
    “Well, I’m sorry if it seemed that way.”
    “It was that way. It is that way.”
    “Well, case closed. I guess I’m just a sorry bastard.”
    “No. Nobody thinks that. Why do you always do that?” (Jess did this too, I realized, retreating in a cloud of righteous anger whenever we swerved too close to the tender heart of things.) “Can’t you just say that it’s hard for you to be intimate?”
    “Well, that’s a fascinating theory, but—”
    “You wanna hear the rest of