She’s Nadine the African Queen.
The man told him this. The man with the cigar.
Mike says, “Sean. Sean.”
He takes another step. And another. And—
HE DOESN’T really know how he became so angry.
Wait.
That’s a lie.
He knows how he became so angry. He just doesn’t know how he let it happen.
He’s angry because that’s how he was raised to be.
Sure, he had his mama, and she was a good woman, a hardworking woman, a woman who life saw fit to beat down as much as it could, knowing she would drag herself right back up and keep on trucking. “It’s what we do, bucko,” she said to him more than once, her fingers sometimes taped together or her lip split in two different places. “It’s the only thing we can do.”
He’s not angry because of her. He loved her as much as a boy could love a strong woman who chooses to stay in a house such as this. She shielded him from the worst of it, took the beatings in his place. As he grew older, he resented her sometimes, that she hadn’t just taken him and run as far as she could. They might not have made it very far, but at least it would have been something. At least he would have known there was the steel in her spine like he sometimes saw in her eyes.
No, he’s not angry because of her.
His father, though.
His father is another matter entirely.
His father was a big man, bigger than any man he’d ever seen before. Maybe it was just the fact that he was his father, and all boys see their fathers as larger-than-life. But maybe it was also because his father was six foot something and had hands the size of the canned hams they had at Christmas. And it wasn’t just his size. His father filled any room he was in, his loud, raucous laugh, the way he bellowed when he was telling stories. He’d clap his meaty hands on your back and you’d feel like you’d been thunderstruck the way it rolled through you, the vibrations causing your teeth to clank together.
His father was not a nice man.
Sure, he could be nice, when he wanted to be.
There’d be times they’d go to ball games together, or they’d go to the movies and prop their feet up on the seatbacks in front of them, shoveling popcorn and Junior Mints into their mouths because they tasted better together than separate. His father would talk through the previews, whispering things like “Oh, that one looks good, we’ll have to go see it when it comes out” or “Nah, that looks stupid, bucko, why would we waste money on that?”
He was nice sometimes.
But that didn’t make him a nice man.
Because he wasn’t a nice man. They’d go to ball games, sure, and they’d go to the movies (where his father would become a minute-long movie critic during the previews), but he also made his meaty hands into meaty fists, and he’d stumble in at one o’clock in the morning smelling like he’d bathed in booze, and he’d be shouting, and his mother would tell him to be quiet, be quiet, you’ll wake up bucko. He’d hear them from down the hall in his bedroom in their shitty fucking trailer, his scratchy blanket pulled up and over his head, trying to block out the sounds as best he could.
It never did a very good job.
He learned very early on what a meaty fist hitting soft skin sounded like.
It went on for years and years.
He worked hard, knowing it would be the only thing that would get him out.
His father rarely raised a hand to him, mostly because his mother was there, standing between the two of them, taking his lumps as well as hers.
He hated her sometimes, hated the way her eyes were dulled. He wanted to scream at her to just run, even knowing that his father would follow them.
She knew, too. She knew that he resented her every now and then, and she’d whisper fiercely in his ear, “You make sure you get out of this. You make sure you get a better life than this. Don’t you ever become like he is.”
And he did.
He graduated just as the century turned, and there was a bright and shiny scholarship waiting for him with open arms, promising him a future that his mother would never have. And his parents stood at his graduation, his mother with tears in her eyes and his father with his arms crossed over his considerable chest. His name was called and he crossed the stage, taking his diploma, shaking hands with people he’d soon forget, and there was the briefest of moments when he caught his father’s eye. His father nodded at him, and he thought, I am better than you. I won’t be like you. I will never be like you.