Weepers

You can see the buttes and mesas easily—see them from the road. But to see them in all their glory, you have to walk a ways off the asphalt. That’s true for the rest of it as well: the dried riverbeds, gullies, hoodoos, and hogbacks. The sky you can see from anywhere, but go farther into the land and it becomes bluer, deeper, and the whole shebang becomes just stupidly scenic, like something a cartoon roadrunner would paint to outwit a cartoon coyote.

Meaning death might lurk behind every vista.

My father and I used to go out there together. The “together” being a concession to my mother, a concession granted bitterly and retributed upon me in various ways. He would hunt. Desert mule deer, mostly. He didn’t say much to me on those trips. No life lessons. It was mostly us tramping around, him shooting, animals dropping, me bearing dumb witness.

Out among arroyos, beneath the steepled skies …

That line came to me once on such a trip.

On that particular outing, Dad had been worse off than usual, and when our car wove into the lot and stuttered into park, he listed over, hat falling. I listened to the dash beep for a full minute before I turned the key from the passenger side. The engine pinged a while. And when it was clear that he wasn’t waking up anytime soon, I got out and walked off into the scrub alone.

I walked and walked. The buttes came into focus. Up closer, they were ribbed, like a bunch of lady-giants gathering in their skirts (and I thought of that line, about “the giants” and their “skirts,” then too).

Anyway, back on that hike of mine, I was intent—as I often was as a teenager—on trying to write something, in this case about the sanctity of the landscape I was then toiling through. And by the time the sun was all the way up, I was sitting on a rock in the shadow of one of those behemoth formations, still trying to tie together those themes. I couldn’t make the poem work.

Yet that day, on my own, without my dad’s oppressive squint, and without the silence-splintering gunshots, the world opened itself up before me, and though I couldn’t wrangle that poem into anything usable, I was just full of metaphor.

As the sun moved, I moved with it, and I came eventually all the way up to touch that great butte, where I plopped down again. Ate my lunch. Drank most of the powdered tea. Saw clouds complete a full passage across the sky. The shadow receded. I kept having to move to stay inside it.

I wrote some more.

After a while, out in the scree, it occurred to me that if Dad hadn’t woken up, he’d be frying in the car, maybe dead. So I put my notebook away, gathered myself up, and went back. I was panting and half dead myself by the time I got to the lot.

Car was gone.

I walked home beside the highway—took the whole rest of the day, into evening, to get there—tee tied above my charred brow, canteen empty, head swimming, hot metal shrieking past.

That night I had to sleep in a full tub, and the pain of those burns didn’t subside for a long while.

After my father lost the ranch, he took whatever job he could find, landing finally on insurance, meaning he sold it. Sold policies to dry cleaners, quick-service food operations, down-market rodeos, strip clubs, pool-maintenance firms, bowling alleys, lube joints, moving companies, wrecking crews, pawnshops, lumberyards, sewage-removal units, taxidermists, pest-control outfits, massage parlors, go-cart tracks, gas stations, brick-facers, laser-tag arenas, drive-ins, that place that sells local shit on Interstate 23 (meteorites, Native memorabilia, petrified wood), the Motel El Rancho, the barbers and the ladies’-hairdo spots, spirit vendors, pet groomers, general contractors, karate dojos—that is, whatever small-business interests managed to stick it out through the long drought and downturn, the same one that forced him off his land.

He did not love his new life, it’s safe to say, as it is safe to say that risk assessment and liability were not the subjects of his childhood dreams. Horses and cattle were, and the thwarting of those dreams—the daily defeat of unattainable desires—accounted for much of the serious mean he had on him (the drink accounted for the rest), and by the time I was 10, he could be red-faced and despicable all the way from breakfast through bed. We never saw him for dinner, but sometimes after, when I was already tucked in, I’d hear that stammering tread, and wince. His unpleasantness was rank, a herd in the parlor, trampling and snorting, squeezing the rest of us into tight spaces, or straight out of the room.

Then the next drought. And the next slump. Everything blighted, including those local concerns, and so too the selling of insurance. Money, always a hardship for us, became a desperate need, and notices began appearing—first in the mail and then on the door—at the new place we rented in town. Then came the death of my mother’s sister back East from cancer in her uterus, with her parents following not long after. And next, one result of the mounting losses, came my mother’s discovery of Christ.

This was completely out of nowhere, and calamitous. Calamitous for two reasons, one of which was that it drove a wedge between her and me, as though she had newly birthed—and then favored—a whole other son. Soon after, she ceased reading books, once her daily bread: gave up reading them to herself, and reading them to me, her (true) son, just as she gave up all of those wonderful and various words she tendered to me for my benefit. Impassive. Wan. Burnish. Epitaph. Susurration. Cumulative. Staccato. All language, that is, that wasn’t dictated by the Lord in his book.

She also ceased using that sweet, teaching voice of hers, and spoke to me instead with a disappointed-sounding voice, as if I was beyond hope.

When had I got beyond hope? I thought.

I had already begun to recognize that when she spoke to me in that new delivery of hers, she was not in fact speaking to me at all, but to those, generally, who had not seen, and never would see, the holy light (a company of the condemned, which also included the squirrels, the detergent, the porch, the desert, the sky, the dead).

The second calamity was that her newfound path antagonized my father, who had always stored up and slung his trademarked nastihoods at the faithful, taking their ways and manners as a personal affront, as if they were leveling accusations. And so he would spout off about those who would collude in mockery of him:

—Hell’s better than church.

Just as Mom became “raised up,” his degradation metastasized into true hate, and he became even more “lowered down.” Barely seemed possible then, though by now, at my age, I’ve seen that there’s always room in a body for more poison to drink.

He started to appear in all kinds of places where he had no business being. He was found in the town dump. He was found asleep in a parked bus he had broken into. Once, inside the car wash, the one with the colorful, riffling little flags. They were about to turn the machines on—the hard, hot bristles; that steaming rubber octopus—when someone saw him lying down there.

Several times he passed out in a public park and quite a few times ended in lockup.

On some of these occasions, we were the ones who found him. Those were the lucky times.

Mom always cleaned him up after, her expression strangely more satisfied than ever—a look of blushing fulfillment as she scoured him from top to bottom in the tub.

And so we maintained. Maintained through that whole year, until the new minister took over at the church on Holland, a church that my mother was then just beginning to attend. That’s what finally did it for us. Or started to, anyway.

We found out about the new minister on a day Dad and I had come home early from hunting. My father had expended all his rounds into the dirt and air, having missed every living thing, missed because the sun was too fierce, Dad too unsteady. He was already in a dark state on the drive home, and I was treated to short bursts of well-rehearsed invective about who exactly should be blamed for his ill fortune, his conclusions on this matter having nothing to do with himself, but rather focused on a blurry band of cutthroats, teat-suckers, and layabouts who fully intended to rob him blind of everything he loved, owned, and, most importantly, was owed—him being owed everything from his rifle to his undershorts, his commemorative-coin collection, his bolo, his brown liquors, his slurs and spurs, his Tiparillos, his gasoline, his hamburger sandwiches, his lawn chair, his pomade, the hitch in his stride, the music that sprang up in his Pontiac mid-twang as soon as he turned the key, his drawl, his self-reliance, that famous mustache of his, his pocket change, his confetti of lottery tickets, the deed on the old ranch.

At heart, this “owed to him” was mostly (what he saw as) his position at the top of the pile, this bit coming in direct contravention of another lecture of his, concerning the importance of initiative, an initiative he never showed a lick of himself (a lecture I would entitle “Get-Off-Your-Ass,” or, often, “Where’s-My-Fucking-Beer?”), and why anyone as train-wrecked and delinquent as my dad should be owed a single cent for his lousiness was hard to square. But of course I never said anything as he went on and on and on until we pulled in the driveway. And as we entered the house on that day, I heard the muted cadence of pleasant conversation, a thing as strange to hear—as out of place in my home—as the sound of an ocean suddenly lapping gently at the front yard.

The minister was sitting down to a soda with my mother in our kitchen.

Or rather, he was rising quickly as we entered—in the manner in which polite men might, when caught out alone with a woman. Pushing his chair away, backing up a tick. He even stuck his hands up and pumped his palms, smiling, as if to say, Whoa there.

—I’m Reverend Monroe. I was just telling Eileen about our new ministry.

I thought to wonder if I’d ever seen a Black man in our house before, but looking at one standing there, I became damned sure I had not.

Dad looked perplexed, truly taken aback. The world took a breath.

—Come join us, my mother said, patting the seat beside her.

But my father’s look had shifted. And he was suddenly, dangerously amused.

He gave a dry laugh and said:

—It’s so kind of you to look in after my wife.

—James was just telling me about his work overseas, said my mother, overly quick.

—James? said my dad, eyes of slits.

I felt then the release of something bitter and cold, a hazardous vapor—like the liquid nitrogen from a coolant truck.

I spun around without anyone even noticing. Went out the front door, and the wind closed it behind me such that I involuntarily jumped over the three steps down to the pavement. I started off east.

I found myself at my best friend Dill’s. We spent our afternoons out in the culvert those days, living on jerky, throwing rocks at other, bigger rocks. Clinging to railway trestles and feeling that thunder above. Dill and I ended up going to the mini-mart for bottle rockets and snappers and then went to the parking lot to expend our ordnance. I wasn’t home again until the evening. When I did get there, I headed upstairs.

My father’s voice cannoned out at me from the living room.

—Where is your ma? it said, and I knew this as demand, not question.

I searched the house, and then went back into the darkening streets and visited the neighbors, but she wasn’t anywhere. I came home—empty-handed—and luckily Dad was asleep on the couch, his back hunched away from the entrance. I took off my shoes and finally got to my room.

The next day, I learned that Mom had been at the clinic in town. Dad was, as usual, God knows where. But there was Mom, back in the kitchen, humming something and wiping down a counter. She turned and I saw.

A week later, she returned to that church on Holland. This was willfully unwise. But it was an expression of hope, and at least someone in that disfigured family of mine was drawn to consecrated places.

Of course there was an aftermath. Another one. A bigger one. And I have decided to let that all happen offstage and I certainly don’t intend to continue making a big federal-style case out of it. Except for one aspect of the smacking-around (Mom’s, mine), which is this: the overdeveloped sympathy that I feel for Dad, a prime example of my ability (or need) to inhabit the shoes of another, even the shoes of the antagonist, though such shoe-borrowing can be kleptomania, a disease.

Now, I’m not saying I forgive. No. I am sure I do not. But anger and resentment do not prohibit my exploring my father’s corroded heart and finding in myself, if not love, then some understanding of the hateful engine that drove him.

And so, despite the unseemliness I feel around it all (which, given that I am a card-carrying commiserative, must seem odd, but believe me when I say I do worry that these stories of my youth are too maudlin, even for me, a very duke of mawkishness), I will tell some more (if only a little).

Only one more instance, and this was when Dad hit me in front of Mom, and because of Mom, and I did not hit back, and how that—as it were—set a tone.

I was slightly older then—must have been around 17. I had been spending an increasing amount of time out of the house, for the usual reasons, those being Dad, and one day had been invited out by my teen associate Marvin Grosvenor, whose cousin had a car we could borrow to drive with Dill to the dog track over in Coolidge.

We did that.

Spent the day at the dogs, lost some money, won some, and lost it again, and after, we went to the culvert to shoot our mouths off and shotgun beers.

I came home pretty late, which wasn’t a thing as Dad was out and Mom had choir practice. But the following morning, the phone rang, and I could hear through the floorboards the indistinct sound of my mother’s voice, and as the pauses between her speaking became longer, and the pitch dropped to something lower and more serious, I began to fret. When I came downstairs, she told me that Marvin’s mother had called. Turned out the car we’d taken had not belonged to Marvin’s cousin, but had been Mrs. Grosvenor’s own—that it had not been so much borrowed as hijacked, and that Marvin, when confronted with evidence of his crimes, had spilled the beans on me and Dill, not just for the joyride but also for the gambling, the beers. The total rat. And as I stood there under the kitchen’s exceedingly bright lights, captive to a litany of my transgressions, I considered the notion that I’d rather be slapped around than see my mother so dispirited.

—Shame on you, is what she said.

And I felt it.

That hot shroud of shame.

Still, I found myself saying then, as fatigue and hangover began to encroach upon reason, as if someone else had got hold of my vocal cords (and shame-heat being so proximate to anger-heat):

—It’s none of your business, Mom.

(Shame: redoubled.)

At that moment, Dad walked in.

—What’d you just say to your mother?

—Nothing.

—Wasn’t nothing.

—Didn’t mean it.

My mother made some small noise.

—Fuck no, he said to her, and she did not say or do a thing.

Then, turning toward me and stepping up closer, he whispered:

—What you got, boy?

I looked at the floor, saying, quietly as I could:

—…

And the fist hit me on the right cheek.

When I got to my feet again, the thing of it was—not pain but—the feeling I had experienced of skin on skin. What I mean to say here is that the punch was shattering, yes, like all the others—I don’t think he ever touched me except to hit me—but shattering because of how intimate this one was. I had smelled his breath and seen the individual bristles on his chin, the marbling of his eyes, the birthmark on his brow. It felt (I am embarrassed to say it) almost romance-like. A shared secret.

Skin on skin. The rough, hairy ridge of that man’s knuckles meeting my smooth cheek.

He swung again, but I had put my arm up by then, and so it was more of a glancing thing, and then a grapple, which increased our congress to an unbearable level as I could feel the ambient warmth coming off him, his scent and sweat, hear his heavy snorts (and I wonder now if he felt what I felt in that moment: that beneath his fury were the dim traces of other, kinder embraces. I doubt it, but I know now that such belligerence-judo is always a kissing cousin to a tenderness-judo, and so it is with some men, and so it has always been, and so it always will be, and anyhow).

I pushed away and stood up fully.

—You want more? he said, but gasping.

I realized at that moment—with the fast and fierce intelligence of a cornered animal—that if I were to punch back, I would score a few hits of my own, more than a few, and good ones, as I was by then big and strong enough, which I think he, in that wild moment, clocked as well, because he looked even angrier then, squared up as if he could have well and truly killed me. And I believe he could have (and maybe would go so far as to say definitely would have) had there been something to swing at me then, anything at all instead of his bare hands. And I don’t mean the extension cord or that belt he favored, but if he had:

… a coffee mug or a beer bottle or a pipe or the bronze statue on our mantel of the man riding the bucking horse, a regional insurance award that he had won—way back somehow and against all reason—or one of the two table lamps, or a claw hammer, or a chair, or a leg from a chair, or the TV remote, or one of his two guns, or a kettle, or the fire poker, or the phone receiver, or a loose doorknob, or a tire iron, a paperweight, a letter opener, a kitchen knife, a bowling ball, a rake, that old rail spike he kept as a memento of a prelapsarian age, a rolling pin, a crowbar, a baseball bat, a broom handle, a can of soup …

That is: I used to do such an inventory of the house, tracking items in it according to their potential use as weaponry. But though I could see him look around quick (milk carton, dish towel, cigarette pack), he had nothing at hand, and so I was able to duck and slip around him and be out of the kitchen before anything more could happen, him shouting hellfire after me, though I know now that I ran not because I didn’t think I could take him, but because I could have, and I needed that whole sick, combative closeness to end.

I ran, landing back up among the buttes and mesas.

So that was grievous and lousy, seriously so, and I do not forget how grievous and lousy it was. And it was several years later when I received that automated message on my machine that went:

To this day I do not know how exactly it went down for him, as I had not cared to inquire.

But now I do wonder. And I imagine a hard end for Dad there, given the setting, and I think about how, in my nightmares, the eyes of my father became the frantic ones of those destroyed deer, and I feel bad, but then again, he earned his end—all of us are our own arsonists of the world—and so with regard to him, I rarely reproach myself for those moments of ill will and nasty thinking.

But still, still: It should also be said that I am, occasionally, reminded of the way back—when the suit and tie were still new to my father. Memories of kindnesses, strewn like a scant handful of seed. Memories of the view from his shoulders. A sing-along. Before life roughed him up. When he still dressed for the office. Those moments actually happened.

They stopped, of course, but at first he would teeter between the loving and the violent, and even exhibited the two overlapping, in that he might cry as he pulled out that extension cord and called for me. I still don’t know who his tears were supposed to be on behalf of, but I think of them as a prime example of the thin boundaries between feelings, how they can come together, like anger and shame, and feed on one another.

That day of (what was to be) his final attempt on me, I heard my mother’s voice as I ran from the house, and I looked over my shoulder, and caught through the diminishing doorway a momentary sight of him, red-faced but also: wet-eyed … and these eyes have become almost like an emblem of the whole event, a sign for it, the thing it strangely comes wrapped in. That is, when I think back on it all, wincing, I dwell upon his wet eyes.

Those wet eyes, though, I’ll think. Those wet eyes.

This story has been excerpted from Peter Mendelsund’s third novel, Weepers. It appears in the July 2025 print edition.