At our camp, I ate a powdered donut, and Marty poured me another cup of coffee. I was still a little disoriented from everything, but I could feel myself pulling it together and re-establishing my identity. Marty must have sensed this also, because he stood in front of me at the picnic table and said that he wanted to talk. I didn’t really want to talk right then, but I was reluctant to further an image of my incompetence by looking like a pouting kid.
Marty wanted to talk about our father. Neither of us had seen nor heard from him in twelve years, and whenever someone asked about him, I became somewhat unnerved. I really did not like talking about him. I guess back then I felt rather conflicted about my father. I knew I wanted him around, yet I also knew I hated him for leaving us. So I learned how not to think about it, and like most people I became reasonably good at repression. Marty had the same feelings that I did, only he liked to talk about them, and he never let me get away with remaining silent about the subject. Like two familiar opponents, the strategic dynamics of our conversation was almost intuitively present. Marty, the aggressor, would push: I, the defender, knowing silence to be ineffective in equalizing the onslaught, would say only enough to pacify Marty, to allow him to realize that my defenses were too strong for his attack. The game had been played enough times between us that I knew what I couldn’t get away with, so when he would push me to talk about our father, I would express some smart-ass comment about how the man was a no good son-of-a-bitch or something. And Marty, being as familiar with the dance as I, expected my derogatory comments and usually let it stop there. But this time something was different––Marty’s attack seemed more abstract, more conflicted. “Yeah, I guess he is an asshole. You know though, sometimes I think I can understand what he did. I mean, he was only fifteen when I was born and nineteen when you came. Hell, I couldn’t’ve done it either. I couldn’t even be nobody’s father now. Look at me.” Using the table top as a seat and resting his feet on the seat board, Marty was sitting beside me now. We both looked out into the grove of trees which separated us from the cold water of the lake. The tops of the poplars waved in the breeze from off the water, and the blue sky of the open space over the lake peeked between the boughs and the thin upper branches. Ever since that day, I have always preferred looking at trees when I talk about something important. There is something soothing and safe in sitting beside someone and not looking at them when you talk. Marty wanted to look at me though. I could feel his eyes gazing at me. And even though I know now how desperately he must have wanted me to look at him, I continued looking at the trees. “I mean a guy wants to be somebody or to do something with his life before he gets saddled with kids. We all got to look out for ourselves, don’t we? When a man gets himself stuck, he either has got to find a way out, or he’s as good as dead.”
“I hope the bastard is dead.”
“But maybe he’s got a good family now. Maybe he’s got more kids now, and he really loves them. Maybe he goes to their little baseball games and coaches their mini-basketball teams. Maybe he reads them stories at night and tells them he loves them, and maybe he really does. Maybe he really did want to come back and be with us some day, but as time went on and things happened, it just got to be too big to patch up. You know, at first he probably just couldn’t take it and he took off, but in his mind he always thought he would come back when the time seemed right, only the time never seemed right.”
“The times been right for a long time.”
“But people got to do stuff sometimes. I mean sometimes when your life just ain’t right, and you know it, you got to do something about it or you just collapse.”
I stood up, tossed the dregs from the bottom of my cup onto the smoldering embers of the fire and walked away from Marty and a little ways into the woods. I knew I was conceding defeat, that this desertion was another sign of my immaturity, that I was not ready to be Marty’s fellow man, and even though I wanted none of that to be exposed, I could not remain sitting there listening to Marty’s compassionate lines about a person whom I hated and longed for with such equal passion. Maybe maturity is sitting through things like that. I guess that that was the line drawn between Marty and me.
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