Hostile Witness

“What do you want?” my father said when he opened the door and saw his son standing behind the screen with a sickly smile on his face.

I lifted the six-pack of Rolling Rock beer I had brought. “You watching the game?”

He turned from me without opening the screen door and shambled back to his seat. “No. There’s golf on Cha

In case you missed it, that was my father’s idea of a joke.

I think to understand my father you had to have understood my mother, all that she wanted, all that she felt she missed out on in her life because of marrying my father, the reasons that she left us for a trailer in Arizona. Unfortunately I had never understood anything about my mother beyond the fact that she was committably crazy and so my father remained something of a mystery too. He was a big man, bristly white hair, thick fingers, a quiet, hardworking, unambitious man with a bitterness cultivated by his ten years with my mother, a bitterness that had now bloomed into an ugly overripe flower he wore pi

I sat down on the sofa and twisted off the top of a Rock. He was in the easy chair, a can of Iron City in his hand. You could buy Iron City in the deli for $1.72 a six-pack. My father always had a taste for the finer things.

“How are they doing?” I asked.

“They’re bums.”

“The Eagles or the Jets?”

“They’re all bums.” He coughed, a loud hacking cough that brought up something. He spit into a paper towel on the table beside the chair and didn’t look at it. “And the money they make. These bums couldn’t hold the jockstraps of players like Bednarik and Gifford.”

“Then why do you watch every week?”

“To have my judgment confirmed.”

“I haven’t seen you in a while. You look pretty good.”

He coughed again. “The doctors all tell me I should be dead by now.”

“Yeah, but what do they know, right?”

“That’s what I always say.”

“Is that so?”

“Now you’re being a smartass.”

“One of my inherited traits.”

“From your mother.”

“No. From you.”

His face grayed and he hacked out something else for the paper towel. “Ah, what do you know?”

“What’s the score?” I asked.

“Fourteen-seven, Eagles.”

“They’re not playing like bums today.”

“This is the Jets. Let’s see them play the Cowboys. In their hearts they’s bums.”

We watched the game in near silence, throwing out charming bons mots as the play progressed, things like “He’s got hands like feet,” when a receiver dropped a ball, and “He couldn’t tackle his sister,” when a ru

“You should clean out your fridge sometime,” I said when I sat back down.

“Why?”

Why indeed? Stumped again, I thought. Stumped again by my father.

“What about that five thousand you owe me?” he asked after the game, when the only thing on was the golf tournament on Cha

“That was what I came about,” I said. “Or something like it.”

“Well, do you got it or not?”

“Do you need it?”

“I could use it, sure,” he said.

“I could get it if you need it.”

“I didn’t say I needed it.”

“You said you could use it.”

“It’s not the same thing. Everyone could use it. Donald Trump could use it, but he don’t need it.”

“Bad example,” I said.

“Yeah, well, maybe.”

“Do you need it?”

“No.”

“Good,” I said. “Because I don’t have it.”

The tournament leader pulled a five-footer past the hole.

“That’s not to mean I couldn’t use it,” he said.

“I’ll get it for you, then.”

“Look at that putt he missed,” my father said, waving disgustedly at the screen. “Bums. For fifth place they get fifty thou. Who the hell cares about wi

So we watched golf for a bit, seduced into somnolence by the rhythm of the game, the setup, the waggle, the step back, the waggle, the swing, ball disappearing into the screen only to reappear as a tiny speck spi

“Who? What?” he stammered.

“Norman just made a putt.”

“There’s a bum. You want to know how to become a great golfer? Play Norman in a playoff.”

“The trick is getting to the playoff in the first place.”

“There’s always a trick,” he said. “I’m just telling you how is all.”

“Tell me about Grandpop,” I said and that quieted him for a moment.

“What about him?”

“I met someone who knew him from the shul in Logan. Someone who used to buy shoes from him.”

“Yeah, well, he went to shul and sold shoes,” said my father. “What else is there?”

“And sing, right?”

“Sure, he used to sing all the time. He had a voice, but it still drove me crazy.”

“How come you stopped going to shul?” I asked.

“Old men singing sad songs in a dead language. Prayers in Aramaic. You know what is Aramaic?”

“No.”

“Nothing in the world is deader than Aramaic,” he said.

“What happened when you stopped? Didn’t Grandpop try to make you go?”

“What was he going to do? I outweighed him when I was twelve. He didn’t have much control over me. I was a bad kid.”

“Did you love him?” I asked.

“What kind of question is that?”

“I’m just asking.”

“He was my father. What do you think?”

A few holes went by on the television, a few drives, a six iron to the green, a sand shot, a putt from three feet that missed, a twenty-footer that found the cup.

“When did we stop going to synagogue?” I asked.

“All of a sudden you care?”

“I’m just asking.”

“It was your mother who kept that stuff going. She wanted to belong to the fancy place with all the rich dressers. She thought belonging there would give her class. She could have married the Queen of England she still wouldn’t have had no class, and believe me, I ain’t the Queen of England. The dues were killing us but that’s what she wanted so that’s what we did. When she left I didn’t see any point.”

“I should have been bar mitzvahed,” I said, and I don’t know why I said it because I had never thought it before in my entire life.

“And I should have been rich. So what’s life but regrets.”

“If Grandpop had still been alive, he would have made sure I got bar mitzvahed,” I said. My voice seemed to fill with a great bitterness whenever I came home and it did again just then.

“You always were a whiner, you know that,” said my father. “It was always ‘I hate this’ and ‘I hate that,’ I just wanted to smack you all the time. Two people in the world knew how to get at me and they got to be my wife and kid. Well, quit being such a little whining snotnose already and grow up. Everything doesn’t got to be done for you, you can do it yourself if you want. There ain’t no age limit. Do it, I don’t care, just quit whining about it. Look, I did it and believe me, you didn’t miss nothing.”