Work Text:
December 1963
My brother Dan was supposed to pick me up at three, but ever since he started dating Kathleen Bishop last spring, he's been too wrapped up in her to remember anyone else exists, least of all me. Maybe I should tell him that at our Fourth of July cookout, with a couple beers in her, she cornered me in the bathroom and started mouthing at my neck, but as it stands— I'm too old to be swinging my legs as I sit on the bench outside my father's office, like a kid waiting for the principal to get a hold of him, and still I'm bored enough to do it.
(That's not the most accurate metaphor I've ever used in my life. Principal and my old man have an agreement— so long as he gets those new bleachers and the football equipment he wants, I run that school like my own personal fiefdom. I never showed up to homeroom on time all of last year, and I'm not doing so hot on that front this semester, either.)
Dad shuffles around inside— I don't pay much attention at first, to whatever the hell he's doing in there with whatever constituent's bothering him now. Prancing, strutting his stuff, quick with some joke or inquiry about a sick wife— he never brings any of that charisma home, not that he ever makes more than brief appearances there anymore. He has a duplex in his district, keeps me and Dan in public school there too, to maintain his everyman image. "Look, I know what you've been goin' through right now, with this eviction bill." He rustles through one of his drawers, slams something that sloshes like a bottle down on his desk. "Buncha fuckin' beatniks are showin' up here all the time to tell me about 'tenants' rights', tellin' me landlords don't deserve any compensation for services— but I'm just not sure I can risk it, I'm up for re-election this year."
It's the first time I've heard him say 'fucking'. The other man rifles around in his pocket, then there's the crisp sound of two pieces of leather being pulled apart. "I mean... do they even understand, if they ain't payin' rent, I can't pay the mortgages?" he asks, trying to keep his voice low but not really trying at all. "I ain't the Salvation Army here, can't they sell somethin', like those color TV's they all seem to have?"
My father can no sooner understand struggling to pay a mortgage than struggling to pay a rent, but he chuckles with him all the same, and I'm frozen stiff to the bench, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out what's happening in there. "You know what, my poll numbers ain't so bad I can't take a little risk."
The door swings open; I don't register how long it takes, maybe a few minutes, maybe an hour, for them to shake on it. "Pete, this is my son, Bob, I thought his brother would've picked him up by now," Dad says as he clocks me on the bench. For some reason he doesn't seem surprised that I'm here, though. Pete is halfway through his glass of whiskey and looks like he's about to pour himself another one. "He's in tenth grade at Will Rogers."
That's about all he knows about me. Pete sticks his hand out for me to shake, his palm slick with sweat, his oily smile a grimace up close. I've had a camera trained on me my whole life, I remember the right expression to slap on my face in return. "I've met Dan a few times before, at football games— that's a young man who's going places, he was so polite, too, not like some kids these days. He's applyin' to college this year, right?" he aims back at my father. "Think he'll end up at the old alma mater?"
"He's real bright," Dad says, happy to take the conversation out of uncharted waters, "you know, he might have a shot at one of those schools back east, Princeton or Harvard." He's lying to gas himself up; he's already all but bought Dan a seat at TU, including one at his old frat, Kappa Alpha. If Dan has any opinions of his own about it, he'll never let them slip. "Definitely wants to major in poli sci, though, he got that much from his old man."
"You fixin' to take after the Kennedys, then?" Pete's laugh sounds like food being crushed in a garbage disposal. "Make your own dynasty now?"
"Maybe." Dad grins, the star of a toothpaste commercial, nine out of ten doctors recommend. "Hope we'll have better luck, though, between you and me."
Judging by how tight Pete's jaw is clenched, watching Dad's head get blown to bits would make his entire year, but of course he says the appropriate pleasantries as he makes his exit, leaving me alone with—
My father, the criminal. The same kind he stands in front of the city council condemning, talking about how the hoodlums and the hippies and the communists are ruining Tulsa. Putting the bottle of whiskey back inside the drawer, alongside the two Benjamins Pete just pulled out of his wallet. They told us at school that this kind of thing happened in Cuba.
"... You take bribes."
He really looks at me for the first time since I walked through the door. His desk is carefully curated, the gold plaque with his name engraved on it, the papers arranged in leather binders, and at the very edge, like an afterthought, a black and white family photo. Mother's eyes are still clear and alert; she has one hand on my shoulder and the other on Dan's, beaming at the camera. In five years, she'll only smile to save face at PTA meetings; in another five, she'll be pouring vodka into her orange juice every morning— I'm surprised she hasn't been replaced by a newer model yet, some vivacious girl who just left Vassar or Barnard. Dad's almost out of the frame, like he just remembered a meeting he's late for. "Just doin' business. You've got to pay to play, what have I always told you? Pete knew that before he stepped in here."
He brought me here for a reason, I realize with a sick, dizzying twist in the pit of my stomach, like someone grabbed my intestines and squeezed. He brought me here, and parked me outside his office, and left the door just enough ajar that I could hear every word he was saying. "Does Dan know?" I manage to get past numb lips. He's the biggest brown-noser I've ever met, makes his own bed and picks up his clothes 'to save the housekeeper the trouble', got beat up by the varsity quarterback once because he snitched that he'd cheated on a history test. I can't imagine—
"Of course he knows, he's grown." Dad waves his hand around like he's swiping at some annoying small insect, his already-thin lips growing even narrower; this isn't going how he planned. "I didn't think you'd be so naive about this, how'd you imagine the world works? How anything gets done in this state?" He taps his fingers on the metal band of his Rolex. "How we have so much damn money?"
"Yeah, maybe I'll tell someone." The threat comes out before I can mull it over, but it's far too delicious to take back, and when Dad's eyes flash with angry hellfire, endorphins race through my blood. That's all I ever wanted, really, to make him get properly fucking pissed at me the way every father's been at their teenage son— yell, pull his belt out of its loops, try to make me sorry. When I got so drunk last summer I needed my stomach pumped, I woke up to my parents hollering at each other, shifting the blame for who had driven me to it. Mother said it was because Dad was never around. Dad said it was because she was always at home, getting sloshed. The hospital staff almost called social services when it came time to discharge me, because neither one of them bothered to pick up the phone for twelve hours. I had to call Randy's old man to come get me.
It fades as quick as it appears, though, he doesn't care enough about anything I do to be able to maintain that anger. He steeples his fingers and looks anywhere but at me. "Okay, Robert." I hate when he calls me Robert— he's about the only person who does. My mother still calls me Bobby, like one day she'll open her eyes and I'll be five again, and she'll be made whole. "You think you're so wise, huh, let's play a little game. Let's suppose you tell someone. You wanna call the cops?"
I swallow— the swallow stops somewhere halfway down my throat and never goes further. "I could," I say, and realize my fatal mistake in showing my hand. Dan says I never think anything through longer than a second ahead. "You know I could."
"Okay," he says, still all calm. "You could leave them a tip, and let's suppose they believe you, and they investigate the whole city council, and it's the biggest scandal Tulsa's seen since the race riots. I'd probably do time, maybe five years, maybe ten. And then what?"
I hadn't thought that far in advance— he knows it too, lights a cigarette like none of this has the slightest application to him whatsoever. "You'd go under, that's what."
"What do you think's going to happen to you?" He smiles at me in the empty way he smiles at his constituents. "The state of Oklahoma will seize my assets, you don't just get to keep the money. So now you're flat broke— you can say goodbye to the maids, and the housekeeper, and our Jaguar, and the summer home in El Paso, everything you're used to. Hell, by the time the feds are done with us, Dan's gonna have to scrub floors to put himself through college. Won't he just love you for that?"
"Mother—" I say it in a desperate, childish exhale, not as something I expect to have any bearing on reality. He knows that, too. He knows the likelihood of her getting a job to support herself is like a man landing on the moon.
"Your mother's going to have a nervous breakdown, that's what'll happen." He looks as satisfied as a cat with a bowl of cream, even talking about that. "She can't get up in the morning without Valium, and the most stressful thing she does all day is tell the maid to push her dirt around. You wanna imagine how she's gonna handle something like this?"
I'm not that stupid. I know about her pills— know Dad takes her to a crooked shrink, that no regular one would keep prescribing her bottle after bottle, watch her grow more and more lost. For some reason, I remember a line from this Greek poem we had to read in English class last year, the Odyssey— it slipped through my hands, like a shadow, like a dream, as Odysseus tries to reach for his dead mother. The harder I try to grasp at her, the more she fades away.
I love her. Hate her sometimes too, for choosing to live in her own dream world instead of changing her real one, but that's just what all love is like— and he knows he's got me there. I don't want to wake up one morning and find her dangling from the ceiling fan, have that weigh on my conscience.
"I thought you'd reconsider. There's no room for idealism in politics." He's pretending to be tender now, conscientious, as he puts his hand on my shoulder— I want to screw my eyes shut and turn away. We never touch. "Everything I do, honey—" he never refers to me that way, either, I imagine him calling one of his mistresses that and fight the urge to vomit all over this sterile office. "Everything I do is for my kids, you know. So y'all can have a better life. I just want to give the two of you the world served up on a silver platter—" and now his grip is tight enough to bruise— "so keep your mouth shut, and don't fuck this up for me."
What kind of people do I come from? The urge to vomit doesn't leave me, the abject disgust, that my own father— Jesus, all the money I've ever handled is his blood money. He made it all off of exploiting every poor sucker to come through this office, desperate enough to pad his pockets. And I'm—
Too weak to say anything. Which he knew all along. I've never had a principle in my life strong enough to stand on.
"What kind of car do you want for your birthday?" he asks, letting go of me. "I was thinking about gettin' you a convertible, something like Dan's."
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I'm almost ashamed for him, that he thinks I can be so easily bought. I'm more ashamed of myself, when I say, "I want a new Mustang. Leather interior, with all the add-ons."