Fiction: Bugaboo by D.W. Davis

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I stopped by my father’s bungalow on my way home from work. I’d called him the prior evening and asked if I could borrow his lawnmower. Mine was on the fritz and I couldn’t afford a new one yet, and wasn’t sure anyone repaired lawnmowers anymore, or ever for that matter. I also planned on calling him after I was done and suggesting I hold onto it. He had a small yard and a bad back and I could mow it for him. Would be happy to on the weekends. Better than him paying some kid or company to do it.

         It was a little after five and he sat at the dinner table that took up the main room of the house, living room bleeding into dining area, with a wall separating the kitchen. A bedroom and a bathroom off the main one. A small laundry room jutting out the rear like a forgotten thing. He could have afforded more but didn’t need it, and he didn’t do much except sit at that table and sip whiskey and watch TV. Sometimes he would read a book. Sometimes, he told me, he fell asleep right there, even though the chair was uncomfortable. There were six chairs around the table. They had never all been occupied at the same time.

         I sat down to his left and stared at the TV. Some old black and white show that he had known as a boy. I rubbed my jaw absently as he hefted the bottle of Jim Beam. I shook my head.

         “Don’t drink anymore.”

         He sniffed and poured whiskey over the ice in his glass. “Since when?”

         “February.”

         “Well, at least something good came out of it. You hear from her much?”

         “Her lawyers.”

         “More’n one?”

         “Yeah.”

         He nodded. “Your mom and I shared a lawyer. Amicable. You remember.”

         “Vaguely.” I’d been seven. I remembered bright colors, the names of various dinosaurs, the curve of Catwoman’s bosom that lingered in my youthful brain in ways I wouldn’t understand for years. I remembered crying, too, but who knows what about. Kids are always crying. My son hadn’t stopped crying until the fifth grade.

         “Want a Coke? I got some juice.”

         “No thanks.”

         “Toothache?”

         “Yeah. Or gums, maybe.”

         “Could be infected.”

         “Maybe.” He didn’t know. But then, neither did I.

         I scanned the wooden tabletop. Various magazines I wasn’t sure he read. An old Tom Clancy paperback, half worn-through. The bottle, the glass, various rings from other bottles and glasses. I’d bought him a set of nice coasters two Christmases ago, somehow knowing he would never use them, but needing to make the gesture anyways, for my own peace of mind.

         “Anything going on?” I said.

         He grunted. “Someone’s been stealing my paper.”

         “What?”

         “The newspaper. Someone’s been stealing it. Every few days, it isn’t there when I check, and it never shows up later, either.”

         “Maybe the boy forgets.”

         “It’s a girl, and I saw her last week and asked her about it, and she said she never forgets. Maybe she’s late sometimes, but she says she never forgets.”

         I pointed to the Dell desktop set up in the corner on a three-tiered desk I’d helped him put together. “You can get it on there. I could help you set up an account. Won’t cost you any more.”

         “Then they’d just steal my identity, too. I want to read my paper in the morning. That’s all.”

         “I could get you one of those doorbell cameras. Everybody has them now. We had one, too.”

         He waved a hand and gave me a look. “I’d never figure it out. I’ll find out who’s doing it sooner or later.”

         We watched the TV for a bit. I could smell his whiskey and wanted a sip. I wanted one pretty much all the time, to tell the truth. That part of it hadn’t surprised me, of course, and yet it still unsettled me. I could drink anytime I wanted. I lived on the other side of town now, no one to scream at me, and it’s not like I saw my boy all that often. But if I drank then I’d lose. I’m not sure what, and I sure as shit wasn’t winning anything, either, but the idea stayed with me and kept my lips off the bottle. Smelling it didn’t help, though. Smelling it was like being thrown a life preserver that was reserved for someone else. A small dash of cruelty on top of the drowning.

         The house had slowly grown into disrepair over the eight years he’d been here. My father had never been one for cleanliness; my ex-wife had cleaned for him for a while, before she finally said she didn’t clean for her own parents, and wouldn’t anymore for mine. Hard to argue with that. It was callous but also sensical. Besides, my father’s house never was, nor ever would be, a roach den. It wasn’t filthy. It just wasn’t clean. It looked messy but wasn’t. It looked like it wasn’t cared for. But how much damage could one old man do? He ignored certain things, like dusting, for months at a time. I did the same. I just had the rental now, smaller than this. I wasn’t old, not yet, but age is just a number, and the numbers don’t always add up the way you think they should.

         He’d been a car salesman, back when a man chose a profession and stuck with it. School, Army, car sales. Hid beneath a desk back when bomb scares were of the nuclear variety, sweated in an Asian jungle, and sold foreign cars to working class American families. Didn’t sound like much, and maybe it hadn’t added up to much, looking back, but it had been a living during a time when a living was all that mattered. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what mattered now. Money, success, but also something else, an intangible desire to be more than oneself. I couldn’t understand it and didn’t try. I hoped my boy did. Maybe he’d explain it to me when he was older and had found it in himself to forgive me.

         The TV switched to commercials, a long infomercial about senior citizens purchasing gold. I rubbed my jaw.

         “Like I can afford gold,” my father said. “Like anyone can, this economy.”

         “Economy’s doing better. Gas is down fifteen cents.”

         “Wouldn’t know. No paper to read about it.” He smiled to let me know he wasn’t complaining, not entirely. “And I haven’t filled up in a couple weeks.”

         “You need to get out more. Go to Indianapolis or something. Brown County.”

         “What the hell would I do in Indianapolis? And Brown County? Ain’t nothing there but trees. We got trees here.”

         “Just think you need a vacation is all. Deserve one, I mean.”

         “Right.” He took a drink. “Get that checked out, would you?”

         “What?”

         “You know what.”

         I took my hand away from my jaw. “Yeah, I guess I will.”

         “You’re making it worse.”

         “Maybe.”

         “Need money?”

         “No.” I shook my head. Eyed his whiskey and looked away.

         He set the glass down. “What?”

         I shrugged.

         “Tell me.”

         I sighed. My jaw throbbed. Probably I was making it worse. I wasn’t helping it.

         “I just think,” I said. “I don’t know. That maybe this is, like, a penance or something. Like I brought this on myself. Been bothering me for a couple months now. Like, I guess, this is payback of some kind. Like karma, you know, or maybe just stress, but either way, I just think sometimes this has to do with everything.”

         “Penance.”

         “Yeah. Or something.”

         “For that casino girl?”

         “Jesus, Dad.”

         “What?”

         I wiped my forehead and looked at the ceiling. “You make her sound like an escort. A call girl.”

         “Whatever. You know what I mean.” He finished the whiskey and poured more. “I always knew that casino was bad news. Gambling never leads to anything good. Now you see gambling places all over the damn place. Every gas station has one. The goddamn gas stations. Where next, the banks? Make a withdrawal and put it right into one of those machines?”

         Once, years before, my father had bought a lottery ticket twice a week every week. He had never won. I didn’t know when he’d stopped buying them.

         “I wasn’t gambling. It was the office Christmas party. Some of us just got drinks after, that’s all.”

         “Have office Christmas parties at the office.”

         “I’ll make sure to tell Dave that.”

         “It’s just a toothache,” my father said. “Or maybe an infection. It’s not penance.”

         “How do you know?”

         “Life is penance. Every day we’re trying to make up for something. Don’t need anything extra for that. It’s just a toothache.”

         His TV show resumed. Cowboys and Indians before the days of political correctness. I imagined myself sitting there, watching this show, others like it, all day. Nothing else, just the TV, and whiskey, and occasionally a newspaper. I tried to find some comfort in that, something that would make me feel better. I found nothing. I was used to it.

         The lawnmower was in the detached garage. I told my father I could get it myself and load it in my truck. He nodded and waved a hand to let me know this was understood, his house, my house, even though it wasn’t. I told him I loved him and he said it back and I went outside and opened the garage. Loaded the mower in the back of my truck. It was old and dirty; I would have to clean it to make sure it ran smoothly. Maybe find a way to sharpen the blades, though I already knew I would consider this for about thirty minutes before deciding not to. I’d have to fill it up as well; I listened for the sloshing of gas in the tank but heard nothing.

         I slammed the tailgate of my truck and turned around. It was a quarter to six and the evening sky had started to dim, the first whisps of night visible above the trees and houses. I craved a cigarette just then. I hadn’t smoked since college, but I felt the urge to light up, to inhale the tar and tobacco, to have the sting of smoke in my nostrils. There was nothing stopping me from doing this, either. And it wouldn’t feel like such a loss. Would it?

         As I turned to get into the truck, I glanced at the house across the street. A young man sat in a chair on the front porch, a newspaper opened before him. Instead of reading it, he was looking at me. Watching me. His face was blank. He stared at me and I stared back at him for a second or two longer than felt necessary. I felt like he’d been watching me since I’d walked out of the house. I looked at the newspaper, then his face. He said nothing. He did nothing. For all I knew, he thought and felt nothing.

         I got into the truck and backed out of the drive. When I got to the end of the block, I glanced in the rearview mirror. The man was reading the paper again. Look out the window, I thought to my father. Then, No, don’t. He had his TV and his magazines and his table and his whiskey. Anything more might be too much. I thought having too much might be worse than having too little. But perhaps that was wishful thinking on my part. Perhaps that was rationalization. I rubbed my jaw and turned the corner and thought about it the rest of the way home.

 D.W. Davis (he/him) is a native of rural Illinois. His work has appeared in various online and print journals. You can find him at Facebook.com/DanielDavis05, @dan_davis86 on Twitter, and @dwdavis.bsky.social.