Read Into the Web for Free Online Page B

his boot, demanding that he get up, his eyes whipping back and forth from Archie’s crumpled body to where Wallace Porterfield stood just outside the bars, arms folded over his huge chest, a look of absolute contempt in his eyes.
    “Shaking all over,” my father muttered. His mouth took a cruel twist. “Life ain’t worth it. If I could turn it off, just like that light switch there, I’d do it right now. It don’t mean a thing to me.”
    “It’s different when you’re young. When you have some life left.”
    His eyes slashed over to me. “What do you mean by that?”
    “I mean that Archie wasn’t like you, Dad. He wasn’t ready to die. It’s different when you’re young.”
    “No, it ain’t,” my father snapped. “It ain’t no different at all. It don’t matter, young or old. You’re the same man facing it all the way through. You know why? ’Cause a man don’t never change. Take you, Roy. You ain’t changed one bit since you was a kid. You still got that same look on your face. Looking down your nose. At everything. This here place. Me.”
    “I don’t look down my nose at you, Dad.”
    My father laughed. “Oh, you’re nice about it. You don’t say nothing. But I can see it, Roy. What you really think. That I’m just some old ignorant bastard from the hills. But let me tell you something, they’s things I know that you ain’t got no idea about. Things you believe that I ain’t never believed. Stupid things.”
    “Like what?”
    He started to blurt out something, then held it back.
    “Like what?” I said again.
    “Like no matter how much you got, they ain’t nothing to it if you ain’t got nobody along with you.”
    I had no doubt as to where this was going, another assault upon my failure to produce a family, even one as doomed and miserable as his own.
    “I live alone because I want to,” I said, then got to my feet. I was halfway to the door when he drew me back with a question.
    “What was it, by the way? That thing you got caught up in this afternoon. With Lonnie Porterfield.”
    “I went up to Waylord with him.”
    “Waylord?” The very mention of the place appeared to fill my father with revulsion. “What’d you go up there for? There ain’t nothing up there but bad luck.”
    “Somebody found a body along Jessup Creek. I happened to be over at Lonnie’s when he heard about it. So I went along with him. Just for the ride, you might say.”
    He thumped a cigarette from the pack by his bed. “Whose body was it?”
    “Clayton Spivey.”
    He said nothing, but I could see that he recognized the name.
    “After that we drove up to Lila Cutler’s place,” I added. “You remember Lila, don’t you?”
    “ ’course I remember Lila. She was the only girl you ever brought home.”
    I saw her as she’d come toward him that night, my father rising to greet her, offering his hand, taking hers gently into his, a strange tenderness in his eyes, as if, at that moment, he’d striven to be some other man he’d failed to be.
    “For a while it looked like you was gonna marry Lila,” my father added. “Have kids. Maybe have a normal life. A family.”
    “I’m glad you had such high hopes for me, Dad,” I said.
    “A family,” my father repeated, his eyes on the charred tip of the match. “Not like it turned out.”
    “My life’s really not so bad,” I told him.
    He seemed amazed that I could come to such a conclusion.
    “But you ain’t got nobody, Roy,” he said. “No wife. No kids of your own. You can’t say that’s normal, can you?”
    “It’s the way I want it.”
    “But why would you want that? Living alone. With nobody.”
    “It’s my life. Drop it.”
    “But why would you want a life like that? No family, I mean.”
    I stared him in the eye. “Maybe because of what my life was like when I had a family.”
    My father’s face jerked into a scowl. “Oh shit, you’re not going to start whining about all that again, are you, Roy?”
    “We weren’t