At a crossroads

Short fiction

My father hadn't the knack for being happy. In his bones dwelled a constant dull resentment at his fate, though it was not a terrible life by any means. Despite a steady if unspectacular job, a home owned free-and-clear, and a family that obeyed his every dictate, discontent hung all over him like a second skin. He felt the need to niggle and tyrannize in his free time, though we had the sense that he would have preferred to be a happier man.

The logical thing would have been to pack up and return to the old country, having succeeded in his aim of amassing a small stock of worldly property, enough to boast of great success at home. He was only at ease among his own folk, and loathed the country where he had married, had raised a family and had paid off his mortgage - a remarkably easy thing to do on a working man's salary in those days. But some inertia, or better said perhaps some hidden craving to be disgruntled, kept him here, where his children ran around speaking in the hated accents of this unwelcoming people.

Mama left us when I was eight and my sister Jacqueline was six. We said left us, but we all knew that she'd taken that cold walk from the beach into the depths of the sea as she'd always said she would do. Strong currents just offshore swept all that would float and all that sank out into the deep ocean, and if you swam but a little distance you'd be in their grasp. My father shrugged and was only a little bit more disgruntled on that day he found she'd gone. He told us to say she'd gone back to the old country and gave us some potatoes to boil.

We went on in silence mostly, he to his job, us to our school. We bathed and cooked for ourselves. On Saturdays he'd sit in silence in the living room and watch TV, or weed the hedgerow in the backyard. We were put to washing the clothes, though we couldn't reach the clothesline to hang the clothes out to dry, and he'd do that for us grudgingly with a glower and an unconvincing slap.

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The only thing that brought the family together was Sunday mass. My father had no belief in God and stated clearly to us that this life was suffering and then you went into the dark alone and in silence. But he'd a habit of attending mass, and this habit was of the old country and it had to be preserved. We sat in the backseat with our hair combed and our rumpled clothes laundered. The front passenger seat was occupied only by the absence of my mother, an emptiness made of loss. We stroked each other's hair and watched as my father drove, staring straight ahead, gaze fixed in the distance.

It may have been that faraway stare which caused the accident. I don't know, as I was whispering in Jacqueline's ear when we felt the impact and we were lurched forward into the space between the seats. There were no seatbelts for backseat passengers in that reckless time. It wasn't such a violent thing, though, this crash. We were uninjured and sat in a tangle. There was silence inside the car. My father had bumped his head slightly and was feeling the swelling apple of his forehead.

Then he cranked down the side window and a music trickled in. It was a rock anthem of freedom, of flying like an eagle or heading out on the highway or something of that nature. My father leaned out the window and shouted something stern at the other driver, though without cursing since it was a Sunday. There was no reply.

Us kids struggled up from the seatwell and back onto the seat, straining our heads to look. Jacqueline started to cry for a moment but curiosity soon made her forget why she was crying and she looked on mutely. By now my father had stepped out of the car and was walking over toward the other vehicle.

We were at a crossroads just out of town, a short-cut to the church that avoided the traffic lights and garbage trucks choking the streets of downtown. It was a lonely place with a set of abandoned fields all around, a crossroads with four STOP signs. Only a horse with all its ribs showing and flanks like razors was there as a forlorn onlooker to this distressful incident.

The other car was a muscular assertion of power, something that went fast if pressed but made no bones about the noise and the violence involved. My father admired and feared these cars, and in earlier days before he remembered his resentment had taken the whole family to drag races out at the disused airfield where rubber smoked and tailpipes flamed.

One time we watched a man burn to death in his wrecked hotrod and he waved his hand to us, we thought in farewell though we did not know him. We waved back at him as he burned, and mama led us away. My father stayed to watch.

Now the same kind of car was backed up just a little from where it had hit our left front wing in the middle of the crossroads. It displayed a personalized license plate: SUX 2BU. The driver was not of the class of man one would associate with a car of such raw power and brash assertion. He was tall and clean-shaven, in a black formal suit with a black tie. A middle-aged man like our father.

My father had started to protest loudly but two things stopped him from going on. One was the awareness that he'd been in the wrong, and he lacked the falsity to go on insisting on his rightness when he knew such a thing. The other was the combination of muscle and authority represented in the car and the man respectively. This threw him for a loop. Had the man been a sober besuited individual in a respectable family car, or an overall-clad hooligan in a souped-up beast, he could have coped. But this mix was unprecedented and disconcerting to his manhood.

So the two men talked reasonably on that corner, so it seemed, for some few minutes, the stranger craning his neck downward to meet my father's look. After a while they both got into the stranger's muscle car, my father in the driver's seat and its owner in the passenger side. The right front wing was dinged a little, but the muscle car seemed to be in fine shape. My father started the car and revved its engine loud. We could see him nodding and smiling.

The stranger got out and ambled over to our car. He opened the driver's side door and poked his head in.

How you doing, kids?

His voice was warm and friendly.

It's Jacqueline, isn't it? Mind if I call you Jackie?

Jacqueline shook her head. I wasn't sure if that meant she did mind or didn't mind, but it wouldn't make any difference either way. What was happening wasn’t dependent on our wills. We were passengers along on this ride.

And the little guy. Pleased to meet you both. I'm Mark, but you can call me Dad.

He got in and sat in the driver's seat, adjusting the mirror and the seat distance for his greater height.

I'm just coming from the funeral home where your late brother John is lying in state. It was his car, that one that your... that he is sitting in now. Your brother John died of an overdose… you know what that is? Doesn't matter, you don't need to know. He just couldn't be happy in this world, and I'm fairly sure you know what that's like.

We both nodded.

My father waved happily at us from the driver's seat of the muscle car and hit the gas. He scorched through the crossroads and away from us, away from the road to church, speeding out on the road leading into the countryside.

So I got another chance to redeem myself and make it up to John, said the man called Mark who was now our Dad. See if I can't teach someone that life can be savored. That there's joy in just being, without always wanting to seek that more more more.

Are we going to church? asked Jackie as he started the car and gently turned it to the left.

No sweetie, we won't be going to church, said Dad. We got a new religion now.

I looked out through the rear window as we cruised off towards our new home. My father was speeding away from the crossroad. Soon the plate SUX 2BU couldn't be read any more. He took a left at the end of the forlorn horse's field and was gone.

=========== [ AT A CROSSROADS / END ] ============

Some other tales of strangeness…