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“Well, you didn’t learn it from me,” He said. He kept tracing the line of the river with his eyes, following it from where it disappeared in the tree line that headed towards downtown, and where it stretched out too far away from him to distinguish. He didn’t know where it went, but he guessed that it went toward Greer. “My friends I guess,” Jack said. He was fidgeting next to him, his feet digging into the earth in small circles. “Running from the cops?” It sounded crass, and painful to his ears, but he couldn’t look at his son to see how it was received. “Running from you,” Jack said coolly. He felt his cheeks flush red, and his face felt old and weathered like eroded marble. He could dish it out pretty well, and he had in the past, only when Jack had gotten out of line. He’d never beaten the boy, but they’d had a few times where things had been lost in translation, and he had to set the boy straight. That was a given portion of parenthood, perhaps the only rule set forth in the parent’s rulebook: help your child become the best that he can be. And that’s what he was doing. He couldn’t allow disobedience because that would foster other things, darker things that would make his son into a monster. And he had grown up with a monster—his own father had turned to the bottle at an early age, hoping to use it as a muse, but instead falling into it’s well hidden trap. His father had spent many nights inebriated by the family fire, watching it flicker and shoot spikes of orange up into the chimney, not moving, only thinking his horrible thoughts with his deranged mind. He had lived with a monster, and he didn’t want to fail as a father and create one of his own. “You being smart, Jacky-boy?” He put his hand on his son’s shoulder, lightly, but with firm fingers. Jack wouldn’t look at him. “No,” he said, distant, not amused, almost like a machine that had suddenly powered down. “So you’re being honest then? Running from me?” He said, wriggling another cigarette from his pack. Jack said nothing. He dug his teeth into his bottom lip, and looked down over the side of the hill. He was watching the gears turn in his son’s head with interested eyes, hoping somehow that his son would say something to bring himself out of this hole he was digging. He didn’t want there to be any more miscommunication. He loved his son dearly, but he didn’t want his son to start crying. Jack had done that before, and never before had he been so angry. He had yelled in his son’s face, their noses almost touching, spit flying from his mouth and making Jack’s eyes wince. The tears came after he received a subpar grade in gym class his freshman year of high school. Sure, he had started in on Jack like a buzzard swooping onto a carcass, but he thought that Jack prepared to cry regardless of the situation. Jack seemed to think that it was his way out of things, that if he could cry enough and make his dad feel worse enough about what he’d done and what he wanted to do, then it would all be absolved. No harm. No foul. “I was being smart,” Jack said. “It’s from baseball.” “You don’t play baseball,” He said. “I do. With my friends and a few kids I don’t know. In Simpsonville Park. We usually play eight on eight because that’s all we have.” “Why are you always smart with me? I ask you a simple question, and you fly off the handle. Like I’m the bad guy. Like I’m the one that’s messing up here.” “Can’t we just forget it? I had fun running with you.” “Men don’t run from their problems, Jack. Men don’t just let things go. We can’t just let this go because it’s bigger than you think, but you’re just too young to understand.
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