Homeland Elegies(96)
“We don’t want any trouble,” I said, stepping forward to pay. I dropped a twenty on the counter and indicated I didn’t want change.
The blond man snickered loudly: “No trouble? So let me ask you, is that your car out there?”
The clerk interjected wearily: “Chuck, these folks are just trying to buy some stuff. You want to leave it alone?”
“I leave it alone when they fucking learn how to drive in this country.”
“What country? Hmm—?” Father snapped. “What country is that?”
“Dad. Let’s go—” I said, grabbing the beer from the counter with one hand and Father’s elbow with the other.
“This fucking country, you monkey. This is not some zoo. We got rules here. Rules of fucking law. Learn how to park your fucking car in the United States of America.”
“Monkey!? Monkey?!” Father shouted back as I snatched him to the door and pulled him through it.
Outside, I saw my offense: an admittedly blithe parking job that had the front end of our car pushing into an adjacent spot. Two spots over, a Ford pickup was gurgling, with no one in the front seat. Mounted to the grille was a cracked buck’s skull and an uneven coil of bony antlers protruding from it. Behind us, Chuck emerged outside just in time to hear me urge Father to get in the car.
“Yeah, that’s right, Dad. Get in the car. Monkey say, monkey do.”
Father turned toward him, screaming. “Will you shut up!!!”
“Dad. Stop it. Get inside,” I said, pushing him into the passenger’s side, my blood racing.
“Can’t wait ’til we build that wall to keep you fucking apes out.”
“You’re the fucking ape!” Father shouted. As ever, that most natural of American imprecations sounded decidedly unnatural on his lips: “Fucking ignorant! Don’t want to work and don’t want anyone else to!”
“Why don’t you fuck..ck..ck..ing learn to speak-a-English—”
“—We speak it just fine,” I spit back at him.
“Oh, nice. So the monkey boy’s got some lip on him, too.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I added as I pulled at the driver’s-side handle. My reflexive glance to note his reaction revealed something I’d missed until now: a strap led down one side of his torso to a leather bulge on his flank.
He saw me notice his gun, and he smiled: “Can’t wait when we build that wall to keep you critters out.” What I felt in that moment was brief, but I won’t ever forget it. The sight of the gun, the visceral threat and primal fear it triggered, the elemental urge to protect myself, the asymmetry of our power in that moment—all of it combined to set something ablaze inside me I’d never experienced before. I wanted to kill him. But the immediate awareness of just how powerless I was to do so threw me back onto myself in a way that eats at me to this day, almost two years later.
Father was saying my name, trying to get my attention. I finally found his eyes. “Let’s go.” His measured tone was filled with alarm.
Chuck began to say something about the wall again, but I didn’t hear most of it. He stepped forward as I started the engine. His hand found its way to his piece as I reversed. Behind him, in the doorway glass, I saw the clerk standing and watching as she munched on chips. I put the car into drive, accelerated onto Main Street, past the library, and out of town.
6.
For the better part of Trump’s first year in office, Father and I mostly avoided the subject of our president. I didn’t bring up the man, and if Father did—usually to complain that we weren’t giving him a chance to succeed—it was never with much conviction. When he mentioned Trump, I didn’t push back. I wouldn’t soon forget the dissension the 2016 election had caused between us. I didn’t want to go back there again.
There was another reason I kept silent: I felt him coming around.
Early in May, Time magazine reported that the president served himself two scoops of ice cream at White House dinners while serving his guests only one; Father read that on the same day that Trump fired FBI director James Comey, an unlikely twinning that provoked a curt, uncharacteristically irritated comment about his sometime acquaintance, now leader of the free world.
“Why is he so petty?” he asked over the phone that night.
By mid-August, after the torchlit white supremacist rally in Charlottesville—and after the president refused to condemn the perpetrators three days later—Father’s loyalty seemed to have been affected. The daily cascade of insults and untruths, silly grudges, ceaseless attention seeking—all this was no longer amusing. Before, Father had been inclined to read into this dysfunction an estimable defiance, a fighter’s pluck. But now, as Trump defended the “good people on both sides” in Charlottesville, Father couldn’t hide his disbelief. A week later, when Steve Bannon lost his job over the fracas, Father said simply, “That was a good thing. Maybe now, Donald can finally get to work.”
But in September, during a trip home for the weekend, as I watched a news summary showing snippets of the president’s address that day in Alabama—where he promised an unruly, cheering crowd he would build for them a “great big beautiful wall”—Father, marinating a steak in the kitchen within earshot, turned to me during the commercial break and said: “I wish he would stop talking about that wall.” I nodded, but I didn’t say anything. He went on: “I mean, what’s the point? A wall won’t keep anybody out. You just dig under it. That’s what we did when we were children.”