Redemption Road(3)

Gideon thought it was pitiful, the helplessness and tears, the shaking, dirty fingers. Holding still was the hardest part, not because his mother was dead and had no answer, but because Gideon knew that if he moved at all, his father might ask if he was awake or sad or equally lost. Then Gideon would have to tell the truth, not that he was any of those things, but that he was more lonesome inside than any boy his age should be. But his father didn’t speak again. He ran fingers through his son’s hair and stood perfectly still as if whatever strength he sought might magically find him. Gideon knew that would never happen. He’d seen pictures of his father before and had a few dim memories of a man who laughed and smiled and didn’t drink most every hour of every day. For years he’d thought that man might return, that it could still happen. But Gideon’s father wore his days like a faded suit, an empty man whose only passion rose from thoughts of his long-dead wife. He seemed alive enough then, but what use were flickers or hints?

The man touched his son’s hair a final time, then crossed the room and pulled the door shut. Gideon waited a minute before rolling out of bed, fully dressed. He was running on caffeine and adrenaline, trying hard to remember the last time he’d slept or dreamed or thought of anything else besides what it would take to kill a man.

Swallowing hard, he cracked the door, trying to ignore that his arms were skinny-white and his heart was running fast as a rabbit’s. He told himself that fourteen years was man enough, and that he didn’t need to be any older to pull a trigger. God wanted boys to become men, after all, and Gideon was only doing what his father would do if his father were man enough to do it. That meant killing and dying were part of God’s plan, too, and Gideon said as much in the dark of his mind, trying hard to convince the parts of him that shook and sweated and wanted to throw up.

Thirteen years had passed since his mother’s murder, then three weeks since Gideon had found his father’s small, black gun, and ten more days since he’d figured out a 2:00 a.m. train would carry him to the gray, square prison on the far side of the county. Gideon knew kids who’d hopped trains before. The key, they said, was to run fast and not think on how sharp and heavy those big, shiny wheels truly were. But Gideon worried he’d jump and miss and go under. He had nightmares about it every night, a flash of light and dark, then pain so true he woke with an ache in the bones of his legs. It was an awful image, even awake, so he pushed it down and cracked the door wide enough to see his father slumped in an old brown chair, a pillow squeezed to his chest as he stared at the broken television where Gideon had hidden the gun after he stole it from his father’s dresser drawer two nights ago. He realized now that he should have kept the gun in his room, but there was no better hiding place, he’d thought, than the dried-out guts of a busted-up television that hadn’t worked since he was five.

But how to get to the gun when his father sat right in front of it?

Gideon should have done it differently, but his thoughts ran crooked sometimes. He didn’t mean to be difficult. It just worked out that way, so that even the kind teachers suggested he think more about woodshop and metalworking than about the fancy words in all those great, heavy books. Standing in the dark, he thought maybe those teachers were right, after all, because without the gun he couldn’t shoot or protect himself or show God he had the will to do necessary things.

After a minute, he closed the door, thinking, Two o’clock train …

But the clock already said 1:21.

Then 1:30.

*

Checking the door again, he watched a bottle go up and down until his father slumped and the bottle slipped from his fingers. Gideon waited five more minutes, then crept to the living room and stepped over engine parts and other bottles, tripping once as a car rumbled past and splashed light through a gap in the curtains. When it was dark again, he knelt behind the television, slipped off the back, and pulled out a gun that was black and slick and heavier than he remembered. He cracked the cylinder, checked the bullets.

“Son?”

It was the small voice, the small man. Gideon stood and saw that his father was awake—a man-shaped hole in a stretch of stained upholstery. He seemed uncertain and afraid, and for a moment Gideon wanted to go back under the sheets. He could call everything off; pretend none of this had ever happened. It would be nice, he thought, not to kill a man. He could put the gun down and go back to bed. But he saw the halo of flowers in his father’s hands. They were dry and brittle now, but his mother, on her wedding day, had worn them like a crown in her hair. He looked at them, again—baby’s breath and white roses, all of it pale and brittle—then imagined how the room would look if a stranger were looking down from above: the man with dead flowers, the boy with the gun. Gideon wanted to explain the power of that image—to make his father understand that the boy had to do what the father would not. Instead he turned and ran. He heard his name again, but was already through the door, half falling as he leapt off the porch and hit the ground running, the gun warm now in his hand, the impact from hard concrete slamming up his shins as he ran half a block, then ducked through an old man’s yard and into thick woods that ran east with the creek, then up a big hill to where chain-link sagged and factories were rusted shut.

He fell against the fence as his father, far behind him, called his name over and over, his voice so loud it broke and cracked and finally failed. For a second, Gideon hesitated, but when a train whistled in the west, he pushed the gun under the fence and scrambled over the top, tearing skin as he did and banging both knees when he landed wrong in the overgrown parking lot on the other side.