The reflex is a lonely child

My dad was a sensitive little kid growing up outside of Tulsa, OK in the fifties. His parents were divorced. His mother was 1/4 Cherokee and my dad saw her through the special prism little boys use to see their mothers. His mother lived in Sparks, NV and worked as a blackjack dealer. Family lore describes her with long straight black hair and bright, flashing eyes: a "wild" girl. She was 19 when she had my father and had been married before she met my dad's father. He was a charismatic bully who would drink and yell and get violent. They weren't married long. Shortly after my dad was born and his father left Tulsa, dad's mother met another man and had my dad's half sister. Then his mother left for Sparks, leaving the kids in the care of her mother.

My dad and his half sister were best friends and they both loved their grandmother. When my dad would cry for his mother, both his half sister and grandmother would comfort him. A few times a year, his mother would send for him, and my five year-old father would ride the train across the plains and into the mountains to see her. And back again to his grandmother and half sister.

His father resettled in California, and sent a demand back to his mother-in-law. My dad was to live in California with the new family, a step-mother, two older step-brothers, and a baby half brother. To live permanently in California. So my dad boarded the train in Tulsa for the last time and never saw his grandmother again. It would be 20 years before he saw his half sister again.

His mother died from blood poisoning caused by an illegal abortion when my dad was six. It's unclear if there was a funeral. Family lore describes this as the moment when my dad turned off his heart. On his bedroll in the garage, with the smell of lawnmower gasoline, oil dripped from a sedan, and windowsill cobwebs he would cry into the pillow he stuffed into his mouth. There was only room in the house for the family, so my dad should take what he was offered. What was left.

During the school year, he lived off the coast of his father's arrangements. Freed from the watchful eye of the truant officer, my dad would take off for the Russian River and live for three months of the year. In my imagination, I see my dad like Huckleberry Finn: catching frogs for dinner, meeting up with unsavory characters, scavenging out of the garbage cans of vacationers. He described laying still in empty fields for hours, waiting for the buzzards to begin circling. The black birds would spiral closer and land near my dad, hopping closer, and when he felt one nibble at his clothes he'd jump up and try to throw his arms around it. I also place him in the hollows of trees, surrounded by cold night, huddling in the damp without a blanket, afraid and in mourning for his life. By the dates on newspapers, and the ebb of daytrippers, he would know to begin the 30-mile journey back to his father's house.

Skip to dad at 18--in love with the long-haired exotic girl from high school who'd been living in Santiago, Chile with her parents, writing letters to the girl from infantry base camps in Vietnam. Dad had found a way to keep safe, from his volatile sergeant and fellow grunts whose aim and judgment he mistrusted, by working as a forward scout. This is apparently the riskiest job a soldier can accept, and that he decided it was the best way to keep safe speaks to my dad's ability to perceive the ultraviolet spectrum of potential dangers. He had undertaken an advanced course in solitude and foraging as a child, an excellent preparation for tracking the Khmer Rouge through the mountains of Cambodia. He was able to perform this task for two tours and keep from getting shot--though the magazine clip of his rifle caught a slug two inches from his heart in the first moments of a firefight.

Between his tours, he married the exotic dark haired girl with the sparking eyes. He had his pay back to his father for safekeeping in a bank account. Returning home, he discovered that the money had been spent on his father's family--the old man having no regrets or shame in stealing his son's salary. And so my dad went to work for his father drilling wells, work he swore he would never do when he enlisted in the army.

And so he would come home, pass me in my high chair with alphabet soup letters cooling in broth puddles on the silvery tray, and within moments angry words would come down the hall chilling me further. In my little mind a tiny logic sequence ran:

The big man makes mom cry.
I love mom.
I choose mom over the big man.
I choose mom over the big man in me.
The big man always puts mom in danger.
Therefore, when things get scary, and mom starts to cry, I will kill the big man--even if the big man in me is the only big man I can kill.