Driving lessons - Short Story

Literary Review, Fall, 2002 by Greg Downs

Every summer my father sent me a present. When I was a little boy, he mailed me biographies--first, Lincoln, then Kennedy, then other great men. They were too hard for me to read, so I looked at the pictures. When I was eleven, he mailed me a photograph that had been taken when I was a baby, when we lived together in Hawaii. In the picture, he stood on a flat white beach, his well-muscled arms raised in the air, his hands opened toward the sky. A few feet above his hands was a little boy in a green bathing suit, kicking his feet in the air. A woman's silhouette shadowed the sand.

"Who's that boy?" I asked my mother. We were driving from the post office, where I had picked up the mail, to the Long John Silver's. At a red light, my mother glanced over at the picture.

"That's you, you silly," she said.

"But where are you?"

"Who do you think took the picture?"

I stared for a while at the photograph. I had seen other photographs of my father, but for some reason I couldn't remember just then what he looked like.

"Did I like it when he threw me like that?" I said.

"You were too young to tell us what you liked." Someone behind us honked a horn, and my mother turned her attention back to the road.

That fall my father flew out to visit me. I held his photograph in front of me during the drive to the Louisville airport."

What if he doesn't recognize us?" I said.

"We're meeting him at his gate," she said. "Stop worrying so much."

Of course my father had no troubling finding us. We arrived late, and as we walked to the gate he was leaning against the ticket agent's counter, chatting with a pilot. He stopped talking when he saw us and picked up his carry-on bag. Then he put it back down. He looked different from the picture; he had grown a beard. I stepped behind my mother, holding on to her sleeves.

"Come on out, Paul." My father had a low, growling voice. "Be reasonable." I didn't move.

"Thanks a lot, Elizabeth," he said. "What did you tell him?"

"I didn't tell him a damn thing," my mother said. I peeked from behind her and saw his hands reaching out to me.

My father stayed with us for a month that summer. While my mother was at work, he drove me through eastern Kentucky, asking me the names of the towns we passed. He played songs on his guitar, pointing at me when it was my turn to provide harmony. I didn't follow these rules; I sang when I wanted to. In the evening they watched television together, not talking much. For a while I tried to get them both talking, but nothing I said worked.

One night all that silence burst into yelling. They were hollering names I had never heard, places I had never been. At first I covered my head with pillows, so I wouldn't hear. When I couldn't take any more, I ran into the kitchen, where my mother was standing in front of the stove, holding a white bowl in her hand. There was another white bowl on the floor in front of her, this one already broken into dozens of pieces. Ceramic shards formed a moat between us. As I looked from my father to his profile reflected in the refrigerator door, I felt I was surrounded by fathers.

"Don't you think people need sleep around here?" I said. I picked up one of the plate shards and tossed it at the cabinet. I picked up another one.

"Hey," he said. The plates crunched under his feet as he stepped forward.

"You touch him and I'll cut your balls off," my mother said.

"I'm not touching anybody, Elizabeth," my father said, holding his hands palm up so she could see them. "I'm standing right here."

The next year, when I was twelve, my father gave me a ticket to visit him in Hawaii. Two days before we left, the radio announcer said there were bomb threats at the San Francisco airport. "First thing we hear about Lihue getting bombed and that's it," my mother said. "You won't be going. So don't get your hopes up too much." I listened to the radio carefully those next few days, but I wasn't that lucky.

I had a room of my own in my father's house. Books--Trollope and Dickens--filled my shelves. On the wall near the closet, my father had hung a photograph of a sweating, aging basketball player.

We jogged together along dirt roads where the smell of sugarcane made me cough. Halfway through our run, I stopped, and my father circled behind and placed his hands on my back, pushing me forward until I had to move to keep from falling. "Run," he said. I zig-zagged away from him and walked again. "Don't you want to be tough," he said. I kept on walking.

That afternoon my father taught me to play guitar. We sat on plastic lawn furniture, and I was supposed to learn by watching him. "Watch me," he said. His fingers slid from string to string, and his guitar slid from chord to chord while he sang cowboy songs. After a while, he passed me the guitar.

"You have to push harder," he said. I tried again. He leaned over and pressed my fingers into the strings.

"Leave me alone," I said. The guitar buzzed when I laid it down.

Mother met me at the airport. "I barely recognized you," she said. "You changed so much." We drove home.