Sins Of The Father
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Danny’s six year old son Luke sat up tall in the passenger’s seat. “Dad!” He pointed to a sign for a trailer park that was squeezed between the original town-site along the river, and the newer industrial area that served the remnants of the oil and sulphur fields. “You have to turn here for grandma’s place.” Danny was always surprised by his son’s alertness and awareness. Like his father, Luke wasn’t very talkative but he didn’t miss much. He was at an age of difficult questions. “Are we rich or poor?” or “Are you going to die?“ Danny could see himself at the same age, earnest, intelligent, looking for reassurance and support. It was too bad that now that he had built a strong bond with his son it was time to give him up.
He had heard plenty of female voices complain about how difficult it was to be a single parent and work full time but when he tried to do it himself, he had to grudgingly admit they were right. Shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry, and driving to babysitters, hardly allowed time for work and sleep. Snatching a few beers on his way home was the extent of his social life. He thought about asking his own mother for help but they were barely on speaking terms because Danny had abandoned his first child, his daughter Z, twenty years before. And taking his son Luke back to M’s farm was out of the question. She was still angry that he had left and taken Luke with him.
Danny and Luke had been living with M for a few years when Danny had discovered that K, an old girlfriend, was living in the next town. He called her to say hello and she asked him to stop by on his way back to his weekday workplace. It soon became a Friday and Sunday habit to stop for a quickie on his way past. Unfortunately M found out about these unauthorized detours and showed him the door. He took Luke and showed up on K’s doorstep but she made it clear she had no intention of raising another child.
Danny and K had lived together years before. Even then she had three children, none of them his, who were now independent teenagers. During the first cohabitation Danny had adopted K’s eldest daughter even though she wasn’t in favour of it. “We don’t need you around to complicate our lives,” she had told him.
“I don’t think you’re old enough to decide for yourself young lady,” he replied and it was done.
This time he hadn’t been staying at K’s place any longer than a weekend before her daughter stormed out of the house in an argument Danny had with her about staying out late. She told her mother she wouldn’t come back if he was there. This left K siding with her daughter and telling him it was better if he packed his back and found another arrangement. That was when he took Luke to live in a rented apartment close to the mill where he worked.
Although it was a struggle to stay ahead of his child raising responsibilities, Danny was proud to be his son’s comfort, his mentor, and teacher. Sometimes he was too strict and demanding, a mistake he had made with his first child, but Luke was a different character and if he felt like his father was pushing too hard he would say, “Dad, I’m just a boy.”
Years earlier, when Luke’s biological mother G found out that she was pregnant, she left Fort McMurray for Okotoks to stay with her mother and have the baby. At the same time Danny left his work in the oilfields to start a job at a mill in a small town north of Calgary. He hadn’t wanted another child, and wasn’t around for the birth, but later heard that he had a son who had been named Luke.
Through a work colleague at the mill, Danny met M, a cowgirl and a divorced mother a few years younger than him, with pale skin and long blonde hair like the mane of a buckskin horse. She lived with her bulimic adolescent daughter and a couple of ponies on a rented farm.
Danny hadn’t seen his son for a year after his birth, but when he heard that G was spending all of her evenings out partying and leaving Luke with her unreliable alcoholic mother, he was not pleased.
“Why don’t you apply for custody?” M suggested.
“I don’t need a baby under my feet,” he said. “I’ve done my time.”
Things changed when he got a call from the boy’s grandmother to say that G had been arrested for trafficking and would spend the next couple of years locked up.
“I don’t want no kids,”the grandmother said. “It’s you or social services.”
Like his father, Danny harboured a fantasy of living in a house with a white picket fence and 2.5 children. Though his new arrangement with M wasn’t perfect, he had the pleasure when he was home, of watching his son grow from a toddler into a boy. It would soon be time to teach him the essential skills like fishing, riding, and hunting. Though country life suited Danny, domestic life made him restless. He was only home on weekends and when he asked M what she wanted to do, she’d make an excuse to go shopping. “Luke needs new shoes,” was a reason to window shop her way through the new Calgary malls. He would have preferred to stay in bed with her, or go out hunting deer to put food in the freezer.
The last time Danny had been hunting was in Fort McMurray, a boom town that was once a dirt track between a couple of two-story clapboard emporia. When the price of crude oil went sky high and it became profitable to coax tar out of sand, big money was spent on bulldozing the quiet boreal forest to get at the bitumen beneath. Men and women from all over pitched up looking for good wages.
Danny and G were two of these migrants. She served powdered eggs and fatty bacon to grubby truck drivers and was quick with the spicy remarks that made it clear she liked to party when her shift was done. As in any boom-town where the men outnumber women, she had her choice of escorts, but turned her headlights on Danny. Accommodation in town was scarce so when she found out he was living in an expensive hotel, she invited him to sleep on her sofa for a modest fee. He paid the rent but he never did sleep on the sofa. It didn’t take long to find out that she often did crystal meth when she wanted to party.
“Everyone does,” she shrugged it off.
“She’s been using a bit too often,” her roommate reported in what could have been a sideways move to lure him away for herself. He had heard G call work a few times to say she was sick, when he knew that she was still too high to hide it. Thanks to a chronic shortage of workers she didn’t get fired. Then one morning on the way to work she fell asleep and drove her car into a light pole. When Danny picked her up from the hospital she was on crutches. She had broken her ankle, but they had also informed her that she was pregnant.
“I hope it's not mine,” he said.
“Sorry babe,” She looked only slightly apologetic.
“Get rid of it,” Danny said. “You don’t want a kid and I don’t want one either.” No matter what arguments she used to convince him, he had no intention of setting up a family with her, but he agreed to load her bed, suitcases, and crutches, into his truck and drop her off at her mother’s trailer in Okotoks.
He had originally arrived in Fort McMurray because the Tar Sands were a place he could earn money fast. Oil companies were desperate for workers and though he didn’t have oil field experience, his military background got him hired as a security guard. When the company searched his records they found out about not only his dishonourable discharge, for which they accepted his explanation, but also that he owed child support. As a condition of employment he arranged to make a payment, but stopped after just one when he found out his ex-wife S, was living with another man.
The mechanic pushed his cap back on his sweaty forehead. “Y’all not goin’ much farther in this here thang.” On the interstate outside Houston, the car had made a loud bang and chuffed out a trail of white smoke before it stopped altogether. Danny had been driving the vehicle hard in a hurry to put an untouchable distance between himself and Canada.
“What’s it going to cost me?” Danny asked.
“Mowr then the thang’s wurf boy,” the mechanic lifted his chin as if expecting a challenge. “And it's a farn model. Twhaace as hard to git thim parts.”
“Would you maybe buy it from me?” Something was better than nothing.
“I’ll tell ya what buddy,” the mechanic drawled. “You give this baby over’t me, and you kin leave it raaht hiyar. Y’ain’t got much chawce. Y’all cain’t saell the thang ‘n y’all cain’t move it. Mays ‘ell cutcher losses and saan it over t’ me.”
Danny had planned on driving to Mexico, but if he couldn’t get there he would find something different, maybe something better. He didn't have a particular destination in Mexico but the country represented escape. If he couldn’t get there at least he was far enough away that he could stop for a while. Since he was near the Gulf of Mexico, he bought a bus ticket to Galveston. At the very minimum he could get his bare feet onto the white sand and turquoise water of the Caribbean, somewhere tropical enough to be truly away from his past.
On Galveston Island he found work as a handyman at a hotel. “I’m Canadian,” he said to justify his lack of American documents. He gave the hotel a false name so he passed under the radar like his Mexican colleagues doing the same thing. Working for minimum wage meant he was always short of money but he managed to keep himself solvent, free of entanglements and attachments long enough to hang onto his job through the summer. His hours were cut in winter as people holidayed further south. When he was down to his last few dollars he reluctantly made the decision to borrow money from the one person who was least likely to judge his choices, his father.
“Where the hell are you?” his father asked.
“I’d rather not say,” Danny answered.
“Then how am I supposed to send you money?”
Danny sighed. He knew that any contact with his family would be complicated. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said, knowing that his father probably wouldn’t keep his word. Work picked up again in the spring but in September the Texas coast was hit by Hurricane Ike.
The hotel where Danny worked jutted out into the Gulf of Mexico on the Galveston Pier. The management knew the hurricane was coming but downplayed the risk as they had survived rough weather before. Danny’s department was assigned to ride out the storm in the banquet room with a few optimistic guests.
The wind screamed through the hallways and smashed windows, slabs blew off the building and shattered on the pier, the taps and toilets were sucked dry of water and low pressure pulled air through the pipes so they howled like the sirens of war. Danny’s optimistic nature and military training kept him calm but when it was over he knew that he never wanted to go through another hurricane. It was as bad as the eerie quiet and popping guns of night raids in Bosnia.
The hotel shut down after the storm so Danny took the Greyhound going west, with stops at the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas and San Francisco, just to say he had been there. He needed to stay outside of Canada for a few more months until his two year AWOL and desertion period had lapsed. When he crossed the international border between Montana and Alberta he surrendered to the authorities who sent him to Edmonton for de-briefing. He was surprised when they let him go with a dishonourable discharge after a week of questions and psychiatric counselling. He heard that the oil fields were hiring so made his way to Fort McMurray.
When he had abandoned his military post and ended up in Galveston, he had left behind his girlfriend K and her children on the military base. She was a self assured, matter-of-fact woman, that he had briefly known as a teenager but when they met again in Edmonton and began living together, she was a single mother of three children. He moved in with them.
One night in bed, naked under the covers, rolling back and forth over each other, intent on having sex, heated up and ready to get serious, Danny stopped and gently pushed her away.
“What’s the matter?” She already knew that he blew hot and cold and could rarely give reasons for his moods.
“Are you on the pill?” he asked.
“Why?” Her inconclusive response made him pull away. They had already had sex quite a few times and he was under the impression that she didn’t want another child, but he was suddenly unsure.
“Yes,of course,” she said. “Why?.”
“I just never asked. I had this idea that you might be playing me.” He had already told her that his ex-wife S had tricked him into being a father before he was ready. K assured him that she had enough children, that they weren’t his responsibility, but reminded him that he had financial responsibilities if he wanted to live with her. Under pressure he reluctantly found a job pumping gas, the kind of work he had done as an adolescent. One day on the Edmonton ring road he noticed a sign for his old regiment, the Princess Patricia’s. As if the car drove by itself, he soon found himself entering the officer’s mess not imagining that he might sign up again for the military. K was horrified.
“It’s all organized,” he said. “We can move into base housing.”
“It’s too far away from my work,” she protested.
“It’s free,” he said. “And anyway, I don’t even know where they’ll send me. We could be a trailer park family in Afghanistan.”
“It’s not funny. I never know whether I‘m coming or going with you. What were you thinking?”
The argument was put aside when Danny was offered a posting in Kingston to train for a year as a communication systems technician. K decided that her family could use a new start so they would go with him. But because they weren’t married or related, Danny adopted K’s eldest daughter to qualify for family housing on the Kingston base.
The training was technical, hard on his eyes and sent him home with a headache every night. There was pressure to be the best in class, something that Danny took on himself to prove. The closer he got to the end of the course the more he was short tempered at home, paranoid in crowds and startled by loud noises. K’s children had noticed his jumpiness and took advantage of the house rules that he wasn’t allowed to discipline them, by jumping out from behind doors in the dark to see his reaction. He wasn’t at all entertained and by instinct lashed out with his hands and feet. “We’ll have Child Services down our necks if they go to school with bruises like these.” K was furious, acting like it was all his fault.
The closer he got to finishing his course the more dark thoughts closed in on him. What had once been occasional nightmares, became daytime flashbacks of things he didn’t want to remember. He could have asked for help but didn’t want to admit to anyone that he was having difficulty. He was a star student and admitting weakness wasn’t in his nature. He just needed to put one foot in front of the other and everything would be fine.
One weekday morning after he had dropped K’s children off at their respective schools, he drove to the American border at Thousand Islands and crossed into the United States. In a blur of day and night, country and city, he ticked off the cities on the way south; Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Nashville and New Orleans. Every mile lifted more weight from his heart as the car sailed along the Gulf, making a beeline for Mexico.
K was sure he had been kidnapped or murdered but the military soon let her know that they had found footage of him crossing the border, looking healthy and well. He was declared AWOL and after thirty days a warrant was issued declaring him a deserter. K would be required to surrender her base housing and would probably go back to Edmonton but those were details he didn’t want to think about. He was in the moment, free of responsibility, able to breathe again. The past didn’t matter; only his imagination could limit his future.
The unwelcome nightmares, flashbacks, and agoraphobia that had plagued him before he left Kingston invaded his thoughts less often, but there were still triggers. A whiff of burning garbage would precipitate a vision of his hand reaching down to a pile of rags on an oil stained and blasted roadside. He could usually pull himself out of the memory before he caught sight of the smashed head that could hardly be identified as human, but pulling away wasn’t always possible in dreams.
When Danny had lived with his first wife and their baby daughter, bad dreams often kept him awake. Many nights he sat up on the couch, smoking cigarettes until first light. S's nagging to get him back to bed only made him more anxious. He should have been in bed with her but he couldn’t. He would doze off when his daughter Z woke up and S got ready for work. He was short tempered and S told him that he was behaving like a child. “I’ve already got one,” she said. “I don’t need two.”
One Saturday when S was doing the laundry, Danny took the car to go shopping and didn’t come back. S reported his disappearance to the police and after a few days, word filtered through that he had turned up at his father’s house in a different city.
“I’m not ready,” he told his father but within six months he was back to living with S asking her to marry him to give the child his name.
“He’s sure this time,” S said.”He realizes now what is important.”
As baby Z grew into a bright toddler, Danny was of the opinion that there were things she needed to learn sooner rather than later. When she was barely on her feet and using the sofa for support, he would talk her into walking across the living room toward him. If she fell he didn’t pick her up but let her fight her way back to her feet before continuing her progress. “Unless I push her,” he said, “she’ll never learn.” While S was at work he taught his daughter how to wrap her chubby fingers around a spoon and how to find her mouth. Sometimes these learning lunches degenerated into a contest of wills. He would lose his patience and raise his voice, which made her cry. When she cried, he would pick her up, walk her around, shushing her until she was quiet, and then start the lessons all over again. S once caught him doing his independent walking lessons and when a tired Z had landed on her diapered bottom for the tenth time, S lectured him for being so hard on the child. He reminded that he had seen her fly into fits of rage if Z spilled her cereal, so she had no right to talk.
“I hope your mum is here.” Danny parked outside a grey mobile home that was identical to its neighbours. Luke was silent. He had already assured his father that he was happy to stay with his mother for a change. Everyone hoped it would be a stable long term arrangement and not another temporary patch.
“Will I have to change my last name?” Luke asked.
“I don’t care what your mother says.” Danny unbuckled his son’s seat-belt. “She registered me as the father so that’s what your name is.” At the tailgate of the Jeep, Danny pulled out a suitcase and a couple of black plastic bags with Luke’s favourite pillow and blanket. “Let’s get your stuff in there.”
“What about yours, dad?” His son tugged at the handle of his father’s case.
“No, no, leave it,” Danny put his hand over his son’s. “Not this time little man. I need to get back to work.”
“Dad please.” His son looked up at him.
“I’m coming in,” Danny said, “but I’m not staying.”
After his tour of duty in Bosnia, Danny left the military. As a reservist he had done his duty and wanted nothing more than a discharge so he could come back to catch up with his drinking buddies. His good looks, intelligence, and military past meant that he could have any woman he turned his attention on. One who lasted longer than most, was a tall Dutch girl with blonde hair, long legs and a practical nature, who was already independent, working, and paying her own way. When they decided to live together she rented a house for them because she preferred to live close to the ground and not four floors in the air. Danny was slotted into her schedule. She went to work every day while he invited his friends over to play video games, smoked weed, and drink beer.
On a rare summer evening when he had volunteered to cook dinner, S came out to the deck after a hurried trip to the bathroom. “Sorry,” she said. “The smell of steak turned my stomach.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it.” Danny lifted the slab of meat off the barbecue.
“Don’t,” she said and backed away from him. “I’m not all that hungry.”
“I’m cooking them anyway,” Danny closed the lid of the grill. She retreated to the kitchen. “Nobody’s forcing you to eat!” he called after her. When the meat was done and the smoke had cleared, she ventured outside again to sit at the picnic table and eat a bowl of pasta salad while Danny sawed through his steak.
“I think I’m pregnant,” she said.
“What? Fuck!” Danny dropped his knife and fork that clattered on his plate. “How the hell did that happen?”
“You know how it happens.”
“I thought you were on the pill.”
“I was.”
“Fuck!” he said louder this time, and stood up, swiped his plate and steak onto the deck, and stomped out onto the back lawn. “Fucking bitch!” he called back.
A girl was born. They named her Z, and Danny did his part of holding her for photos and trying to feed her with a bottle. He could pretend for the camera but he was uncomfortable with the infant in his arms and Z often cried when he held her.
“I'm sick of my damn job,” he announced one evening a few months after he became a father.
“Well you’re sticking it out for the moment no matter what you feel like,” S said. “We need the money.” She was still off work on maternity leave.
“Too late for that. I got fired,” he said.
S cut short her leave to become the breadwinner again and left Danny at home to take care of Z. He hated being trapped all day and as soon as S came home from work, he’d go out drinking with his buddies for the rest of the evening. Some of his friends were married and they were allowed out in the evening, so he didn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t be too. “She’s not the boss of me,” he’d say. “She wanted a kid and I gave her one,” he’d tell his friends. “Anything else is extra.”
Although he wanted his world to be like a television happy family, the reality didn’t come close to what he had in mind. He asked himself if his life before S was better, but found little proof of that. Before he met her, he had officially signed up for the military and had been shipped off to Edmonton for basic training. As soon as that was done his unit was sent to Bosnia.
He had been nineteen years old, no longer a virgin and had been getting drunk since he first entered his teens. His divorced parents were happy to see him go into the military and talked about their once delinquent son with a certain patriotic pride, though patriotism had been the last of Danny’s reasons for signing on. In Bosnia things happened that he only ever spoke about with others in his unit and nobody else. It wasn’t polite at the dinner table to talk about black markets in teenage sex, the pervasive smell decomposing bodies, dogs used for target practice, or about spending a week in the brig because he tossed a television out the barracks window during a drunken party. Because he had grown up with the belief that everything would be fine in the end, he tried to think of the Bosnian memories as accidental slips off stepping stones in a foreign steam that was best forgotten.
It hadn’t been so long ago that he was a back-talking teenager with his hair shaved off on one side and shoulder length on the other. He hadn’t realized that his parents were having marriage difficulties until his father announced at dinner one night that he had fallen in love with a woman at work.
When his parents separated, life with his newly single mother was easy at first because she was always working. He would go to school in the morning, but at the earliest opportunity would skip classes with a few like minded lads to take joy rides in stolen cars. His mother declared him out of control and a habitual liar, so sent him to live with his father in another town. “You want me out of the way so your new boyfriend can move in,.” Danny said, slamming the front door behind him before his mother could throw something.
He shuttled between his father’s small town on weekdays and his mother’s place on weekends, enduring five hour bus rides each way. His father was the more lenient parent, but was so disengaged that Danny wondered if they were related. His father shrugged his shoulders at everything and punished bad behaviour with half-hearted threats, and only then if the offence was serious enough to involve the police. With an intelligence that was beyond most of his classmates, Danny nevertheless struggled in high school. He was simply not interested in what they wanted to teach him, hated the adolescent social scene, and resented anyone telling him what to do. From being a promising young student when he entered, his grades had gone downhill since he had learned that he only needed to do the minimum to get by. Prizes, praise and awards didn’t motivate him because he didn’t have any respect for those who were giving them. A favourite phrase of “You can lead a horse to water,” followed him into the high school yearbook.
When he visited his mother on weekends, he connected with his old truant friends to drink and try whatever drugs they could get their hands on. To finance their parties they robbed a few convenience stores, speeding away in clouds of laughter and greedy plans about how to spend their loot. A theft from a gas station with a surveillance camera was their downfall. Danny was sent to juvenile detention where he served a two month sentence before returning to his father’s care to finish high school.
While he was in youth custody, he met a counsellor who had the wisdom to see through his contrary adolescent attitude. The counsellor suggested that Danny confront the thing he disliked most, authority, and consider joining the military. Dismissive at first, Danny signed up for cadets and was surprised that the order and discipline appealed to him enough to make him show up regularly for every event that was organized. He was proud of his uniform and achievements, always aiming to be better than the others. His recently acquired military focus earned him respect from his former drinking buddies because he had already participated in war games. No more joyrides for him or he would be stripped of his uniform.
In spite of his best efforts to sabotage his education, he limped over the finish line of graduation. Once free from school he went straight to work at a gas station and proceeded to get drunk every night for as long as his paycheque lasted. He was soon fired after not showing up too many days in a row. Subsequent jobs at a muffler shop and roofing company fell under the same circumstances. Broke and unemployed for the third time in as many months, Danny figured he had nothing to lose, so enlisted as a full time member of the armed forces.
Luke had already moved so many times for such a young boy that his concept of home was wherever he was sleeping that night. Danny assumed his own childhood had been more stable than his son’s, but when he thought about it, things back then hadn't exactly been textbook. When he was six years old he ended up in hospital because he had a series of unexplained seizures. “He was a different boy when he came home,” his mother said. “He lies all the time. If I ask him a simple question he lies instead of telling the truth. Even if there is nothing harmful in telling the truth about something, he automatically lies.”
He didn’t remember much about the hospital except for being alone and frightened and kept awake by men groaning and coughing all night. There was one man who never wore pyjama pants and had huge hanging testicles who was strapped to a bed during visiting hours to stop him from roaming the hallways and shocking the ladies. When the doctors and nurses asked Danny how he was, he never knew what to say. He was not all right but they wanted to hear he was fine, so he told them what they wanted to hear. It was easier that way. People didn’t ask any more questions.
Danny had heard rumours that Luke’s mother G, had kept herself off drugs and alcohol for an entire year, and had put the word out that she was ready to have her son back. Having tried every configuration of child rearing he could think of, Danny had to admit that there was only one path open to give his son some hope of a stable home, one he had been reluctant to take, but it was the only way out.
G was clear headed and friendly when they met to hand the boy over and even hinted that Danny could stay the night, something he had no intention of doing. He spent an hour saying goodbye, putting on a positive face, reassuring Luke that they would see each other again soon, but not knowing exactly when it would happen. He wanted to be friends with his son, something he had never been with his father, to laugh, to hang out like they recently had, to take trips together and learn from each other. He had missed Z’s childhood and it was looking like he would miss Luke’s. He promised the boy that they would see each other when he was near Okotoks next time, and when the boy was on school holidays.
“When you’re older we can live together again.” He held his son against his legs. Neither wanted to let go. The boy would probably be a teenager before this could happen and flashes of father and son disagreements crossed his mind. The time he had spent with his son was the closest he had come to experiencing intangible moments of joy in his adult life. If he wanted more, it would be up to him to bridge the distance between them. If his son spoke up against him, he would need to be the one to keep his heat down, not to let his anger run away as it had so often in the past.
Alone in the car, he pulled out onto the highway going west back to his job and maybe even to K, now that he no longer had Luke in tow. Once up to speed in traffic he thought again about how things would probably turn out all right for Luke, but that depended on his mother’s behaviour. He banged both hands on the steering wheel and shouted “Fuck, fuck fuck!” As he fought to keep tears from impeding his driving vision he was sure he heard his son speak in a quiet voice. “Dad, I’m just a boy.”
He checked the rear view mirror expecting to see his son’s missing front tooth smile, but he was alone. He took a few deep breaths, held the wheel steady and drove on. “I’m sorry son,” he said. “Everything will be fine.” and he looked over his shoulder again to see if his son believed him.
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