before supper all week.’ He pulls Billy’s hair. Billy hollers and laughs and kicks him in the shins. ‘Cut it out, now,’ Sam May says, coming into the room. ‘Cut it out you
two. You know how your mother feels about the roughhousing.’ He has pulled his tie
down and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. He’s got a couple -three red hotdogs
on a plate. The hotdogs are wrapped in white bread, and Sam May has put the old
mustard right to them. ‘Where you been, Eddie?’
‘At Jane’s.’
The toilet flushes in the bathroom. Virginia. Chico wonders briefly if Jane has
left any hairs in the sink, or a lipstick, or a bobby pin.
‘You should have come with us to see your Uncle Pete and Aunt Ann,’ his
father says. He eats a frank in three quick bites. ‘You’re getting to be like a stranger around here, Eddie. I don’t like that. Not while we provide the bed and board.’
‘Some bed,’ Chico says. ‘Some board.’
Sam looks up quickly, hurt at first, then angry. When he speaks, Chico sees
that his teeth are yellow with French’s mustard. He feels vaguely nauseated. ‘Your lip.
Your goddam lip. You aren’t too big yet, snotnose.’
Chico shrugs, peels a slice of Wonder Bread off the loaf standing on the TV
tray by his father’s chair, and spreads it with ketchup. ‘In three months I’m going to be gone anyway.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘I’m gonna fix up Johnny’s car and go out to California. Look for work.’
‘Oh yeah. Right.’ He is a big man, big in a shambling way, but Chico thinks
now that he got smaller after he married Virginia, and smaller again after Johnny died.
And in his mind he hears himself saying to Jane: My brother, maybe. Not me. And on the heels of that: Play your didgeridoo, Blue. ‘You ain’t never going to get that car as far as Castle Rock, let alone Canada.’
‘You don’t think so? Just watch my fucking dust.’
For a moment his father only looks at him and then he throws the frank he has
been holding. It hits Chico in the chest, spraying mustard on his sweater and on the
chair. ‘Say that word again and I’ll break your nose for you, smartass.’
Chico picks up the frank and looks at it. Cheap red frank, smeared with
French’s mustard. Spread a little sunshine. He throws it back at his father. Sam gets up, his face the colour of an old brick, the vein in the middle of his forehead pulsing. His thigh connects with the TV tray and it overturns. Billy stands in the kitchen doorway
watching them. He’s gotten himself a plate of franks and beans and the plate has
tipped and bean-juice runs onto the floor. Billy’s eyes are wide, his mouth trembling.
On the TV, Carl Stormer and his Country Buckaroos are tearing through Long Black
Veil at a breakneck pace. ‘You raise them up best you can and they spit on you,’ his
father says thickly. ‘Ayuh. That’s how it goes. He gropes blindly on the seat of his
chair and comes up with the half-eaten hotdog. He holds it in his fist like a severed
phallus. Incredibly, he begins to eat it… at the same time, Chico sees that he has begun to cry. ‘Ayuh, they spit on you, that’s just how it goes.’
‘Well, why in the hell did you have to marry her?’ he bursts out, and then has
to bite down on the rest of it: If you hadn’t married her, Johnny would still be alive.
‘That’s none of your goddam business!’ Sam May roars through his tears. “That’s my business!’
‘Oh?’ Chico shouts back. ‘Is that so? I only have to live with her! Me and Billy,
we have to live with her! Watch her grind you down! And you don’t even know -‘
‘What?’ his father says, and his voice is suddenly low and ominous. The chunk
of hotdog left in his closed fist is like a bloody chunk of bone. ‘What don’t I know?’
‘You don’t know shit from Shinola,’ he says, appalled at what has almost come