I am sitting in my car parked across the street from my father’s apartment complex. I’ve left it in gear, the engine running. My hands on the wheel at 10 and 2 like I’m a calm, collected getaway driver patiently waiting for my accomplices to complete their heist.
The lot is sparsely filled with cars older than I am. Cutlass Supremes, Buick Regals, a two-toned brown and cream Suburban that looks like it has enough miles on it to span to the moon and back. It rests on cinderblocks, a back window emptied of glass that’s been rudimentarily patched with duct tape and a blue tarp that pulses like an overworked lung in the wind. It’s 3:39a.m., cloudless with a full moon beaming blue-gray. The horizon is starting to push purple against the sleek sheet of black.
I should be asleep.
I’m here because after finishing a swing shift at the hospital, I checked my phone and still had nothing from my father. My father calls and texts frequently. Daily. There is always something he wants or needs. Money, mostly. Sometimes it’s ride to the Ray’s in North Albany where I wait in the car while he fills his basket with frozen pot pies and macaroni and cheese. I’ve taken him to Monteith Park where he claims to stroll its winding paved walkways along the confluence of the Willamette and Calapooia Rivers. He does not care much about personal health. I know what goes on off the paths, in the thicket, near the shore. It’s stupid, but I chauffer him there because at least I know he gets to a dangerous place safely. How’s that for mental gymnastics? Once, I picked him up hours later after he’d stumbled through brambles, winded, covered in thousands of tiny cuts, three sheets to the wind and maybe, I thought, a little high. He asked to bum a cigarette. I don’t smoke.
Last week he called with a new request, wanting to borrow my vacuum. In hindsight, it was stupid of me to lend it. I’m one hundred percent sure I’ll never see it again. This could also be related to his radio silence. It’s a top-of-the-line vacuum. A Dyson. Brand new. So powerful it can deflate a hot air balloon in seconds. At the right pawnshop you could hock it for two- maybe three-hundred bucks. About a fifth of its retail value, in dealer-speak.
When my father calls I’m never sure which version I’ll get. A coin toss between the sobbing, apologetic, pathetic fuck-up or the acerbic, infallible, patriarchal maniac who blames his hardships on me or the mother that he drove away with such brutality thirty-five years ago she wanted a complete separation from the life she had mistakenly built with him. This included me. I was nine. I remember the argument well. I remember all of them. In a broken home there is no such thing as privacy.
It’s why each of his calls and texts still fills me with the icy panic that consumed me as a child, the hairs on the back of my neck stiffening to bristles. Somehow, I turned out all right. But it’s no surprise there are times when I ignore these texts. There are plenty of instances when I stare at the screen with his number rolling across it, waiting for the voicemail to catch. My father doesn’t leave voicemails. He calls back until I answer. He knows I will. I always do. Because I’ve convinced myself that the time I don’t will be the time I regret. The record is twenty-seven calls.
But it has been seven or eight days since I’ve heard from him. I’ve been the one calling and texting. I’ve left terse, impersonal voicemails. It’s Bryan. Just checking in. And, Seeing if you caught the Blazer’s game. The texts read like transcriptions of the voicemails. Everything good?
“Let’s get this over with,” I say to the car, shoving the gearshift into park before killing the engine.
My white coat hangs from a hanger that’s hanging from the grab handle above the back passenger seat. I think about slipping it on before going out. It’s November and cold; the time of year where leaves have become brittle as the pages of ancient texts and skip across the concrete while pine needles brown into toothpicks and dislodged themselves from the boughs of fir trees.
I think, Screw it, and leave the coat. My father lives in a first-floor unit. I can see the door from here. It’s less than thirty feet away. He’ll answer or he won’t. Either way, I won’t be long.
The wind cuts through my thin dress shirt and khakis, lifting and pulling my tie, where it flaps like a windsock until it is laid to rest over my shoulder. I’m shivering. The only parts of my body that aren’t cold are my feet. They are encased in wool socks and snuggly sheathed in a pair of black leather loafers. As I trot across the parking lot, the echo of my heels sounds like distant clapping of gunfire.
The door to my father’s apartment is open a crack and suddenly I am bathed in warm anxiety. I raise my fist to knock, though leave it hanging in the air.
I wonder if this time is going to be different? The last and worst of all of these house calls that I have ever made. I think to call out, Pop? but the consideration only makes it as far as that.
I am being morbidly selfish. I’d like not to remember my father as an unstable alcoholic who has a propensity for unhinged acts of violence; a man who projects his anger and woes onto anything and anyone rather than himself. But—I’ll take that. I’ll take my last hard memory of him. My father sobbing his histrionic gratitude between pulls off a bottle of HRD, like I had liberated him from the clutches of some sinister regime and not, in fact, just dropped off a fucking vacuum. I’ll take that any day over waltzing into his apartment to find him recumbent in bed or on the floor, stiff as roadkill, having asphyxiated on his own vomit.
Removing the keys from my pants, I press the “unlock” button on the fob.
I am close enough to my car to hear the faint metallic whir of the locks.
But I drop the keys back into my pocket and step into my father’s apartment. The air is choked with the heavy, urine-like smell of stale beer mixed with the sour stench of the cheapest cigarettes you can buy in Oregon—Leroux Golds, $3.49 a pack. His boots are near the doorway. A sock hanging from one like the parch tongue of a large, dead animal. Crushed Hamm’s cans lay in a heap next to the couch, resembling a pile of tiny, metal accordions. A couple more steps in and over the back of the couch comes into view a collection of greasy fast-food wrappers, dried now, and spread out over the surface of a lopsided coffee table like old maps that have been folded and refolded about a million times. Beyond this a television flickers with an old sitcom on the screen. The volume is low. I hear the actors’ voices but not what they’re saying. The laugh track sounds like running water.
The kitchen is dim and somehow smells worse than the other room. Trash overflows from the can like foam from a torn barstool. The sink is piled with dishes clear up to the spout and the water they soak in is brown and scummy as the contents of a forgotten, fetid fish tank.
How can anyone live like this?
My father is at the stove. An empty bottle of peppermint schnapps balances on a burner; the burner is on, hissing a blue corona of flame that curls around the bottom of the bottle, which is beginning to char.
I rap the wall with my knuckles. “Pop?” I say.
My father turns. He looks half-awake. Meaning: he is fully drunk. He languidly licks his lips, leaving too much saliva on them and raises his chin in recognition that he has a visitor. Whether he’s lucid enough to know it’s his own son is another thing.
He goes back to scrutinizing the bottle.
His wirelike hair is tied in a ponytail that’s threaded through the back of a Mariner’s cap. It’s in need of a cut, shoulder-length, and frayed like the end of a rope that’s been hacked by dull blade. His undershirt is pit-stained, pocked with holes, coming loose at the hems, and his gut tests the structural integrity of the fabric that has been worn to the dusty, papery thinness of moth wings.
“It’s crystallized at the bottom,” my father says more to the bottle than me. “I can get another shot or two out of it.”
“I think maybe call it a night.”
“I fought in Vietnam.”
My father reaches a wobbly hand toward the bottle, lifting it to examine its sugary bottom beneath the weak cooktop lights fixed to the underside of the microwave mounted above the stove. He turns it upside-down, right-side again, mutters a string of blunt curses. It is here I imagine the sluggish, boozy obstacle course his nociceptors have to traverse in order to deliver the message to his neuron-depleted brain that his hand must feel like it’s been dipped into a deep fryer.
Interesting fact: when human skin is exposed to high temperatures, the smell strangely resembles burning plastic.
I catch a whiff of this as my father screams and drops the bottle, which pings off the stove handle and spirals to the floor where it explodes into hundreds of pieces. My father blows on his hand with the crackly breaths of a lifetime smoker and rushes to the sink.
“Don’t do that,” I say, “unless you want to risk a nasty infection.” I move toward him but stop because of the sparkling mess on the ground. Still, I am close enough that if I wanted to touch him, I could. Instead, I begin to move glass shards around with the toe of shoe. “I’m clearing a path. Let’s get you cleaned that up in the bathroom.”
Apart from his ratty undershirt and equally ratty sweatpants, he only has on a single sock.
“Not in my house,” he says.
“Your house?”
This isn’t the time or place to argue semantics. But I really want to say, It’s an apartment. One for which I pay the rent. And I find myself shifting from concerned to pissed off faster than I care to admit. How is it I am able to put up with patients who call me “baby killer” when I talk about vaccines? Or let roll off my back so easily addicts who’ve lunged for my throat? It’s okay. Their sick. They need help. Why can’t I apply this same equanimous approach to my own father?
“Just stay where you are.”
He takes a step toward me. “You’re in my way,” he says.
I know what’s going to happen before it does. A glass shard will spear into his foot, likely close to the heel. It’ll be one of many scattered from the bottom of the bottle, burnt black, easy to spot against his pale, white skin; the gushing bright red blood.
The sound my father gives off is like a yelp from an injured Chihuahua. It is abrupt, ear-splitting, and warrants more annoyance than compassion. He lifts his right—the unsocked— foot, and not surprisingly, falls backward.
What is surprising is how the whole apartment seems to shake beneath his weight. The windows rattle. The elements on the stove clatter. Something topples over in other room. My father is six-two but there’s a difference between being big and tall. If I had to guess, he weighs no more than 135 pounds.
Now, the apartment is still and quiet. Quiet aside from the burner hissing, which I snap off. My father’s gravelly breaths rattle in his chest. He looks at me, or maybe through me, with this thousand-yard stare.
I lift my hands and move them back and forth like I’m shaking an imaginary present, trying to deduce its contents. “For once in your life, would it kill you to listen?” I say.
He snaps out of it. And for a split second when he says, “I can take care of myself,” he seems sober.
Have I mentioned my father used to be a successful banker? Savvy with stocks and bonds. A man with sense enough to know when to hold, buy, sell. Now look at him.
“Clearly,” I say.
My father lifts his foot. “How bad will it be if I pull this thing out?”
I wasn’t too far off the mark with my earlier attempt at clairvoyance. There is a thin river of blood running down the sole of his foot, dribbling from his heel. But the shard isn’t burnt. It’s clear with a small section of the label adhered to it and it’s stuck in the meatier section above his heel. Smackdab in the middle of his anterior longitudinal sulcus.
“Can you wiggle your toes?”
He can. He does, though he winces.
“Probably no tendon damage,” I say. “That’s good. But leave it in there for now. How’s the hand?”
“It’s fine.”
“Show me.”
“I doesn’t hurt.”
“It will.”
Reluctantly, he flashes his palm. It’s deep ink and already bloating with fluid. Easily second-degree.
“Stay put.”
“I’m your father,” he says.
I am in the bathroom. I’m not sure why, but I am surprised not find anything useful. I shouldn’t have come here, I think, as I grip the edge of the counter with both hands and look myself over in the smudgy mirror. I’m tired. I look it. My green eyes are running out of battery. They look browner. My goatee has grown out to where I no longer can make out the deep cleft in the middle of my chin. My father has the same, deep canyon. And what can I say now about my father that you don’t already know? He’s the guy when you see pacing the Clay Street bus stop near the Heritage Mall with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, makes you double-check that your doors are locked. The man you pull your children in close when passing in the aisles of Ma’s Dairy Farm. The man whose very sight makes you think, Now that is what rock-fucking-bottom looks like.
Like before, my father hasn’t listened. I’ve just reentered the kitchen to find him smiling like a lunatic, the shard of glass pinched between his fingers. It is the size and shape of a guitar pick. And once he’s sure I’ve had a good look, he drops it to the floor next to a pear-shaped pool of blood.
“Yanked the fucker out,” he says.
“You don’t say.”
I have to say in a strange way I’m impressed. My father somehow has accomplished, I assume, with the use of only the one, good hand, improvised a torniquet with his sock. Good thing, too. The cut is deeper than I thought. Blood has already started to soak through.
Glass crunches beneath my steps. I finish clearing a path.
“Let’s get you up,” I say, holding out my hand.
My father reaches.
“Your other one.”
“I said it doesn’t hurt.”
I get him up onto his foot and take his good hand and wrap it around my shoulder, tightly holding it by the wrist. His other leg is bent like a flamingo’s.
“Where’s my vacuum?”
“Vacuum?” he says.
“Forget it.”
Fifteen minutes later I am pulling into my reserved parking spot at Good Samaritan. The closest one to the facility. The light streaming out from the lobby windows stretches to my tires. My father is in the passenger seat and has been teeter-tottering in and out of consciousness the whole way here.
“I’ll be five minutes,” I say.
In an attempt to open his eyes, all he manages to do is move his hairline father back and his ears lift.
“Where are we?”
“Hospital.”
He says, “Are you okay?” in an uncharacteristically kind voice and my chest tightens.
“I am not okay,” I say, but he’s already snoring.
Inside, I slalom around the legs of waiting patients and loved ones or friends who have brought them here. A sixteen-year-old kid sides sideways in a chair, resting a swollen ankle on the seat next to him. There’s a man my age, a young girl by his side with puffy, red eyes whose wrist, I see even below the sagging pack of defrosting green beans draped over her arm, isn’t supposed to bend that way. A nearby women in jeans and a TOOL hoodie glances up at me while I pass and stops rubbing her breast. She looks mortified. She can’t be more than nineteen. I want to tell her, I bet more than anything it’s a benign cyst, but keep moving.
I am pushing through the doors that lead to the examination rooms when someone yells, “Excuse me, sir? Sir! The bathrooms are at the other end of the hallway.”
One of the ICU nurses I like is rushing toward me. Her name is Hutton. She’s from Georgia. I like the way she pronounces certain words like she has a piece of hard candy lodged beneath her tongue. She’s in black scrubs and bright purple tennis shoes that squeak when she stops in front of me.
“Dr. Kennedy?” she says.
“Just can’t stay away, I guess.”
“I didn’t realize it was you.”
“Taking off the coat has a Superman-like effect, I’m told.”
“Wallet?” she says.
“How’s Mrs. Chambers in 381?”
“Did you forget your phone?”
I don’t expect Hutton to follow me into one of the open rooms, but she does. She says nothing while I grab burn ointment, which comes in packets like fast-food condiments; a bottle of povidone-iodine solution, a syringe, vial of lidocaine—all the other necessary implements I need to clean my father up and give him anywhere from seven to ten stitches.
Approaching Hutton, who stands in the doorway, she looks at my haul.
“I’ve seen too many movies,” she says.
“It isn’t for any of the reasons that would make a good movie,” I say. “Just trust me when I tell you I can’t bring him in.”
If I could have dumped my father off at the VA, I would have. But he’s been banned for threatening to cut off a nurses balls and jam them down his throat.
I can’t tell if Hutton is glaring or if she is giving me a chiseled look of concern.
“Bryan,” she says.
“Dr. Kennedy.”
“No one calls Clark Kent Superman when he isn’t wearing the cape.”
I carefully shoulder past her, careful not to drop anything.
I am basically jogging through the lobby now and against the tile behind me, Hutton’s shoes sound like a furious racquetball match.
Then we are outside. Under any other circumstances, I’d say it’s a beautiful start to the morning. There are still stars scattered across the sky like salt against a dark tablecloth, tough now there are slashes of pink and orange at the horizon. The air smells like those dried pine needles I mentioned earlier, and dirt. Except suddenly, I detect the faint tinge of cigarette smoke.
This drifts over from my car, which Hutton has already fixed her gaze on. My father is sat awkwardly in the seat to allow for his left arm to hang out of the passenger window. The cigarette is tucked between two fingers. After a few, agonizingly quiet moments, he lethargically brings it to his lips and takes a deep drag that transforms his cheek into a porcelain bowl.
“I get it,” Hutton says. “Helping people is in your blood.”
“Trust me when I say it isn’t.”
She looks confused. “Then why else pick up an unhoused guy off the street. You don’t seem worried he’ll mess up your fancy Land Rover while you zip into GS to steal a bunch of medical supplies.”
“It’s not stealing.”
“What do you call taking something that isn’t yours that you can’t return after you use it?”
“What makes you think he’s unhoused?” I say. I realize in this moment this is a stupid question.
“That’s your Land Rover, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not trying to denigrate unhouse people. Or claim all of them are dangerous. But he could be. What I’m asking you is do you really think it’s worth the risk? Gambling with your life just to take care this guy?”
She looks upset. Her bottom lip tucked completely beneath her top one. To set her at ease I say, “He needs stitches, that’s all. When I’m through, I’ll dump him off and that’ll be it.” And I say this with such conviction that I almost believe it myself.
Nicholas Claro holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Wichita State University and reads fiction for Write or Die Magazine. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in journals such as JMWW, Identity Theory, Cleaver Magazine, Necessary Fiction, XRAY Lit Mag, Write or Die Magazine, and others. His debut collection of stories This Is Where You Are is forthcoming from Roadside Press in the fall of 2025. He lives in Wichita, Kansas.
