Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation Read Online Free Page B

Booker remarked, his attention span justifiably on the wane.
    “No, the gun was a Daisy,” my father clarified.
    “Yeah, ol’ Daisy did the jump and run,” Booker responded, still on autopilot.
    “No, the name of the gun, the outfit that made it, was Daisy.”
    “Daisy say, ‘I’m gonna find me a tree and set there.’ Heh-heh.”
    “Well, again, Daisy wasn’t the name of the cat. I’m speaking purely of the BB gun.”
    I detected a hint of irritability in my father’s voice. Mike and I exchanged worried glances, imagining where this might be headed:
    Merv: “For the last fucking time, Daisy was not the name ofthe fucking cat! It was the company that made the gun. Are we clear now, Booker?”
    Booker: “Oh, we clear. We certainly clear, ’cept on one thing: Why you keep callin’ me Booker, motherfucker?”
    Thankfully, such an exchange never took place. Merv continued to display an incredible reserve of patience with our guest, something he would not have afforded me in a similar conversation. It kind of pissed me off. As they went back and forth with their little vaudeville routine (likely known as “The Daisy Bit” on the circuit), I could take no more.
    “Jeez, Dad, forget about the gun!” I blurted out. “What was the name of your cat?”
    “What the fuck difference does it make?” Merv snapped. “I called him Red. He didn’t have a name!”
    “If you called him Red, then he
did
have a name.”
    “Are you being a wiseass? ’Cause I’ll put this fucking car in the river right now.”
    I detected a fatigued sigh from Booker. If he had cracked opened a fortune cookie at that moment, it would’ve read
Be wary of rides from strangers
.
    Roadwork slowed us to a crawl for the next mile or two, and the car grew quiet. My dad had talked himself out, and Booker’s head was leaning against the window. In the reflection I could see he was resting his eyes. Every now and then,Merv would glance over at him like a mother checking on her newborn.
    I gazed into the ashen waters of the comatose Susquehanna, and I found myself meditating on my relationship with my father. If only, I thought, it could be more like the one he enjoyed with the stranger in the front seat whom he’d known for less than half an hour. I tried desperately to identify the elusive qualities the man possessed, hoping perhaps I could emulate them, but all I could come up with was:
He was pleasant.
He was colored.
He’d been walking alongside the road.
    Clearly there was no cracking it.
    The congestion finally let up, and we were flagged into a detour lane. Naturally, Merv saw this as an opportunity to jump on the gas, because only a schmuck would do something like ease back into traffic. The Olds made a head-snapping lurch, startling Booker from his catnap. His eyes shot open and he appeared disoriented and anxious, as if he were stuck in the middle of a bad dream.
    “This is where I’m going,” he said in a panicked voice.“I’m getting out right here!” His hand gripped the door handle, and for a moment it looked like he might jump from the moving car. My father gently took hold of his arm.
    “We’re almost at the hospital, Booker. Hold on, pal,” he said calmly.
    “It’s okay, Booker,” I heard myself say, addressing him by his appointed alias. “We’re almost there.”
    Booker collected himself and allowed the cobwebs to clear. He kept looking back and forth between my father and the passing street signs that brought him closer to his destination. Then he seemed to relax.
    “Almos’ there,” he said with a long exhale. “We almos’ there.”
    A sort of calmness came over the car. Even Mike and I started to breathe easy for the first time. You could almost hear the soothing whistle of an aimless wind, as if we were high on a Tibetan mountain.
    Then a Chevy El Camino passed us and my father’s back noticeably stiffened. “Did you see that, Booker?” he asked. “That thing that looks like it’s half car, half