Fiction from The Literary Review

Driving Lessons

GREG DOWNS

E very summer my father sent me a present. When I was a little boy, he mailed me biographies—first, Lincoln, then Kennedy, then other great men. They were too hard for me to read, so I looked at the pictures. When I was 11, he mailed me a photograph that had been taken when I was a baby, when we lived together in Hawaii. In the picture, he stood on a flat white beach, his well-muscled arms raised in the air, his hands opened toward the sky. A few feet above his hands was a little boy in a green bathing suit, kicking his feet in the air. A woman's silhouette shadowed the sand.
     “Who's that boy?” I asked my mother. We were driving from the post office, where I had picked up the mail, to the Long John Silvers. At a red light, my mother glanced over at the picture.
     “That's you, you silly,” she said.
     “But where are you?”
     “Who do you think took the picture?”
     I stared for a while at the photograph. I had seen other photographs of my father, but for some reason I couldn't remember just then what he looked like. “Did I like it when he threw me like that?” I said.
     “You were too young to tell us what you liked.” Someone behind us honked a horn, and my mother turned her attention back to the road.
     That fall my father flew out to visit me. I held his photograph in front of me during the drive to the Louisville airport.
     “What if he doesn't recognize us?” I said.
     “We're meeting him at his gate,” she said. “Stop worrying so much.”
     Of course my father had no troubling finding us. We arrived late, and as we walked to the gate he was leaning against the ticket agent's counter, chatting with a pilot. He stopped talking when he saw us and picked up his carry-on bag. Then he put it back down. He looked different from the picture; he had grown a beard. I stepped behind my mother, holding on to her sleeves.
     “Come on out, Paul.” My father had a low, growling voice. “Be reasonable.” I didn't move. “Thanks a lot, Elizabeth,” he said. “What did you tell him?” “I didn't tell him a damn thing,” my mother said. I peeked from behind her and saw his hands reaching out to me. My father stayed with us for a month that summer. While my mother was at work, he drove me through eastern Kentucky, asking me the names of the towns we passed. He played songs on his guitar, pointing at me when it was my turn to provide harmony. I didn't follow these rules; I sang when I wanted to. In the evening they watched television together, not talking much. For a while I tried to get them both talking, but nothing I said worked.
     One night all that silence burst into yelling. They were hollering names I had never heard, places I had never been. At first I covered my head with pillows, so I wouldn't hear. When I couldn't take any more, I ran into the kitchen, where my mother was standing in front of the stove, holding a white bowl in her hand. There was another white bowl on the floor in front of her, this one already broken into dozens of pieces. Ceramic shards formed a moat between us. As I looked from my father to his profile reflected in the refrigerator door, I felt I was surrounded by fathers.
     “Don't you think people need sleep around here?” I said. I picked up one of the plate shards and tossed it at the cabinet. I picked up another one.
     “Hey,” he said. The plates crunched under his feet as he stepped forward.
     “You touch him and I'll cut your balls off,” my mother said.
     “I'm not touching anybody, Elizabeth,” my father said, holding his hands palm up so she could see them. “I'm standing right here.”
     The next year, when I was 12, my father gave me a ticket to visit him in Hawaii. Two days before we left, the radio announcer said there were bomb threats at the San Francisco airport. “First thing we hear about Lihue getting bombed and that's it,” my mother said. “You won't be going. So don't get your hopes up too much.” I listened to the radio carefully those next few days, but I wasn't that lucky.
     I had a room of my own in my father's house. Books—Trollope and Dickens—filled my shelves. On the wall near the closet, my father had hung a photograph of a sweating, aging basketball player. We jogged together along dirt roads where the smell of sugar cane made me cough. Halfway through our run, I stopped, and my father circled behind and placed his hands on my back, pushing me forward until I had to move to keep from falling. “Run,” he said. I zig-zagged away from him and walked again. “Don't you want to be tough,” he said. I kept on walking.
     That afternoon my father taught me to play guitar. We sat on plastic lawn furniture, and I was supposed to learn by watching him. “Watch me,” he said. His fingers slid from string to string, and his guitar slid from chord to chord while he sang cowboy songs. After a while, he passed me the guitar.
     “You have to push harder,” he said. I tried again. He leaned over and pressed my fingers into the strings.
     “Leave me alone,” I said. The guitar buzzed when I laid it down.
     Mother met me at the airport. “I barely recognized you,” she said. “You changed so much.” We drove home. When I went to school that fall the boys treated me differently. For the first time ever, they were jealous. They told me I was lucky to go to Hawaii. They didn't know that Hawaii is just like anywhere else, except people don't wear shoes indoors. My father and I hardly even went to the beach.
     After the novelty of my vacation wore off, only one boy in school still talked to me: Edwin Michaelson, who lived a block away with his father. We shot baskets together after school, and he told me that I was lucky to see my father, because his mother was dead from a car crash and could never fly back to see him.
     When Edwin and I played basketball at his house, his father would come outside and watch us. If the ball bounced his way, Mr. Michaelson shot it instead of passing it back. Like his father, Edwin was a very good shot, but he couldn't beat me one-on-one. When I had the ball, I out-muscled him, backing him down to the basket and bulling past him for a lay-up.
     “Nice shot, Paul,” Mr. Michaelson said. “Way to work.”
     “He's not even playing fair,” Edwin said. “He's playing like a bully.”
     “Looked fair to me,” his father said.
     
     The next summer, for my thirteenth birthday, my father mailed me a guitar. I was supposed to go see him again in Hawaii, but in the spring my mother talked me out of it. I sat at the foot of her bed and peeled my fingernails as she explained to me that I should go to basketball camps in town so that I could improve. Mr. Michaelson told her I had potential, she said. And all I had to do was tell my father I didn't want to go. So I told him. When he answered, his voice was soft. “Okay, if that's what you want,” he said. “But it's not what I want. Remember that.”
     So instead of a trip to Hawaii, I got a guitar. It arrived a month before my birthday and sat unopened in the living room, near the sliding glass door. The day after the guitar arrived, my mother stacked her presents for me on the other side of the living room, near the fireplace. On my birthday, I opened the guitar first. I was about to open my mother's presents when the phone rang. “Hold on,” my mother said. “I want to watch you open them.” A few minutes later she came back in the room, scowling. “It's your father,” she said. When I finally finished talking to my father, I heard the strangest sound from the living room, the sound of my mother smashing the guitar with a hammer. The guitar was bleating back at her.
     I grabbed the guitar from her and strummed its twisted strings and felt my father's fingers pushing down on my own. Then I began to yell.
     “This is mine,” I said. “You have no right.” I walked over to the presents she had stacked for me near the fireplace. “I don't want your stupid presents.”
     “That's good. I don't want you to have them. I want you to play that guitar from morning until night.”
     The next morning, a guitar sat outside my bedroom door. There was no note attached. It was paler and smaller than my father's present and it sounded hollow, but if I wanted to learn to play, it would serve just as well.
     The next time I talked to my father, I tried to sound happy. “I'm playing the guitar right now,” I said. “It's great.” My mother stood at the other end of the kitchen, pretending to chop carrots for dinner. After saying goodbye, I walked the guitar over to her and strummed it loudly. Then I stashed it in my closet.
     Edwin's father was watching us play basketball. As I faked a shot, Mr. Michaelson walked over to us.
     “That's traveling,” he said. “To drive by the man, you've got to do this.” Mr. Michaelson pivoted toward the middle and threw his head and shoulders in a fake to the basket. Then he stepped across the imaginary defender with his right foot and laid the ball in with his left hand. I stumbled the first time I tried it. Mr. Michaelson stood behind me and placed his hands on my waist.
     “Turn to the middle,” he said. He nudged me gently until I faced him.
     “Now fake,” he said. I nodded my head toward the basket.
     When Mr. Michaelson walked back to the house, Edwin tried to copy me. He was having trouble with his footwork. “Turn to the middle, stupid,” he said. “What?” I said. “I wasn't talking to you,” he said.
     When I was 14, I went to see my father. He wrote to tell me he had a special present. At the airport, my father jingled the car keys. He was going to teach me to drive.
     The next morning, I jogged with my father step by step down his normal route. The running Edwin and I had done paid off; I matched my father step for step. When we returned, I popped off 50 pushups. “You're getting to be a big boy,” he said.
     That afternoon, we drove to the high school football stadium. Two boys in green shorts were running the stairs. My father handed me the keys, and we switched seats.
     “Easy on the clutch,” he said.
     The first time I tried to shift into first the car shuddered and stalled. And the second time. And the third.
     “Will you listen to me, or would you rather keep making the same mistake?”
     “I'll do it right,” I said. “If you just stop yelling.”
     There were a few more bad moments in the parking lot, but I did improve. After a while, I could get into first without any trouble, and then the other gears were easy.
     “Treat the clutch like it's a girl,” he said. “You're easy on her, but you're always ready for trouble.” I watched the boys running the stadium steps.
     An eight-foot chain-link fence separated the lot from the stadium. I was pulling into a parking spot near the fence, confident after a good run of shifting, when I forgot how to brake. I was pressing my foot hard as I could against the brake, but we were going too fast. The fence was getting bigger and bigger.
     “Shit,” my father said.
     And then I remembered the clutch. I stomped on it, and the car slowed, lipping over the cement barrier, tapping the fence. My father whistled. I turned off the ignition.
     “I was already thinking how much it was going to cost,” my father said.
     “A lot,” I said.
     Then he started to laugh, and I did too.
     My father and I ran the stadium steps, which helped me relax. Running, lifting weights, hurting myself, these were things I could do without thinking. These were things I could do well. When we were done, we drank cold water from the fountain. Then my father handed me the keys.
     “On the highway?” I said.
     “It's not exactly I-65,” he said.
     We stopped at a Quik-E-Mart where my father bought a small coffee in a Styrofoam cup, which he sipped from while I drove. We passed through Lihue and Wailua without any problems, but in Kapaa I needed to take a left across traffic, through a busy intersection. I was drumming my fingers on the steering wheel.
     “You could drive a tractor-trailer through that gap,” my father said. “You've got to have some balls.”
     When the next break came, I pressed the accelerator and had let the clutch halfway up when my calf muscle cramped, drawing my foot off the pedal. The car shuddered into the lane of oncoming cars and died. Drivers were honking at me from both directions. When I tried to restart the car, I forgot to put the stick in neutral. We stalled again.
     “Jesus Christmas,” my father said. There were coffee stains on his shorts and his T-shirt. He grabbed my hand and with it forced the stick into neutral. I pushed him away. He grabbed my hand again. I pushed him away again.
     “People are honking at you,” he said.
     “I'm not driving until you stop yelling,” I said.
     “Jesus.” He threw the coffee cup onto the floor mat. I unbuckled my seat belt. “Drive yourself.” I dropped the key on the driver's seat.
     My father was yelling, but I walked across the intersection and waited in a convenience store until I saw his Dodge head up the hill toward his house.
     I started walking toward his house, then jogging, then running fast. I wasn't in a hurry to get there; I was just tired of moving slowly.
     When I returned home, my mother would not let me drive. I was too young, she said. My father asked me about it on the phone.
     “She won't let me do anything. She thinks I'm a baby.”
     “Well, she should. Let you, I mean. You're a good driver.”
     I stared at my door mirror. My father didn't say anything. After a while he asked me about basketball.
     I finally got my chance to drive a few weeks later, when Mr. Michaelson, while taking Edwin and me to the movies, asked about my trip to Hawaii. I told him about the driving, then Edwin and I went back to talking about the freshman-sophomore team, which would start practice in a few weeks.
     “We're a little early,” Mr. Michaelson said when we pulled into the theater parking lot. “Why not show me what you can do?”
     “In the parking lot?” I said.
     “Unless you'd rather wait for the Indy 500.” He handed me the keys. In the back seat Edwin was locking and unlocking his door. “It's illegal,” Edwin said. “He's too young to drive.”
     “I'll give you your turn,” Mr. Michaelson said. “After Paul.” “I don't want a turn.” Edwin jumped out of the car and ran across the parking lot toward the movie theater. He had change in his pocket, quarters for the video games, and they spilled onto the asphalt as he ran. “Sometimes I think I can understand a Chinaman better than I understand my own son,” Mr. Michaelson said. “I'm sorry. I don't know what to say.” “Have you let him drive?” Mr. Michaelson shook his head. I handed the keys back to him. He took them. “He's not going to be mad at you for long,” he said. “I know,” I said. I walked around the car's trunk and closed Edwin's door.
     When I was 15, my father told me I would have a surprise waiting for me when I arrived in Hawaii. Of course, I dreaded the trip. At the airport I searched the backseat of his car for some tell-tale sign, but all I could see were some old nuts and bolts. When my father climbed into the passenger seat, I reluctantly took the wheel.
     “It won't be just the two of us at the house,” my father said. “I'm not married or anything, but a woman, Norma, has moved in with me.” At the stoplight, he reached over and felt my muscles. “You're getting to be a big boy,” he said.
     The light changed, so I gave the car gas and let out slowly on the clutch. “She's also got a son,” he said. “He's not my son. But I try to be good to him.”
     After dinner, Norma kept me in the kitchen and asked me earnest questions. Did I know how much I looked like my father? Was I aware how many fathers never saw their sons? Did I know I was lucky? Yes, I said, I did know.
     Norma and I walked into the living room where my father played with her boy. My father threw the boy in the air, where the boy rose and then fell, kicking his legs the whole time. He giggled as my father set him down on the floor. Then my father looked up at me. There was a moment of understanding between us. He put his hands in his pockets.
     Norma stood behind me. “Your father, he's really good with kids.” “It's like the goddamned Waltons around here,” I said. I walked out of the room.
     Later that night my father brought his guitar up to my room. He sat on a wooden chair and played Roy Acuff songs while I read my summer reading book, All The King's Men. I turned toward the wall, so I could not see him.
     “Do you still practice guitar?” he said. I turned the page of my book. He asked me the same question; again I didn't answer. I heard him put the guitar back in its case. “I guess we really don't get along,” he said. “That happens sometimes. It doesn't mean either one of us is a bad guy. At work, there's somebody who whistles every time he says something that he thinks is smart. It irritates me. I don't like being around him. Maybe that's what you think about me.” “I don't think about you at all,” I said. “And that's a possibility, too,” he said. “But I doubt it.”
     When I returned, my mother fixed dinner for Edwin and me. “To celebrate the start of school,” she said. All day, I smelled slow-cooking green beans and bacon and egg-battered pork chops. Edwin was a good eater. He ate a slice of sweet potato pie for dessert and then he filled up his plate for a second run at dinner. “I love a boy who eats,” my mother said. She herself was not eating. She was folding her white napkin and watching us. “I'm full,” I said when she tried to ladle some more mashed potatoes onto my plate. She dropped them there anyway. I mushed them around with my fork. “He's got a girlfriend now,” I said. “A girlfriend?” my mother said.
     “Who?” Edwin asked.
     “My father,” I said. “And she's got a son.”
     “Did you lift with him?” he asked.
     “He's just a boy.”
     “Oh.”
     “He's supposed to spend time with you,” my mother said. “Not some bimbo.” When Edwin was finished eating, my mother walked him to the door. I stayed at the sink and washed the dishes.
     “I wish you'd eat more,” she said when she returned. “Did you see how much Edwin ate?”
     “I know. If I could just be more like Edwin.”
     My mother turned off the water.
     “You can be anything you want to be, Paul,” she said, “as long as you're not like your father.”
     When I was 16, my father flew out to see me. During my basketball games, he sat silently next to my mother. Each time one of my teammates had the ball, my mother yelled, “Don't shoot. Pass the ball to Paul.”
     In some mysterious way—for we never spoke of it—Edwin had become a much better basketball player than I was, although we worked out together every day and practiced exactly the same moves. Like my father, Mr. Michaelson was silent during games, sitting by himself on the visitors' side of the gymnasium. At the end of one particular game, two plays helped us win. With about a minute left and the game tied, the other team's best player drove in for a lay-up, and I flattened him. He lay on the floor for a few seconds, holding his shoulder. When they helped him up, he missed his free throws. Down at the other end of the court, as the seconds ticked off, Edwin hit a 15-foot jumper. I could have had the shot myself. I was open. But our team's point guard looked at me, then passed the ball to Edwin. That was the game.
     The referees ran up to the locker room, and the fans ran onto the court, congratulating us. My mother sat in the stands, pretending to look through her purse. I knew she was mad that I didn't get the last shot. It didn't matter if she liked Edwin. I was her son. My father reached me first.
     “Lawrence Taylor would have liked that hit,” my father said. Then he looked over at the mass of people around Edwin. “Let me go congratulate the hero before he leaves.”
     Edwin's father was the next person to reach me. “Games are won when people aren't looking,” Mr. Michaelson said. “Even if no one else knows that, you know that.”
     I looked down at the gym floor. When I looked up, my father was talking to Edwin. Edwin was looking at me, at his father. I looked back at the floor.
     After the game, my parents and I walked through the rain to my car. My father held the back door open for my mother, with a deference that she did not acknowledge, then he sat in the passenger seat. It had been years since my parents had spoken.
     My mother glared at the restaurants that we drove by. “You would have made that shot,” she said.
     “Paul did his job,” my father said. “Can't you be happy about that?”
     “I don't enjoy anything when my son is left out,” she said. We drove past the drooping light poles and the empty trees. It was raining a little harder.
     “Take this,” my father said. “It's for you.” He handed me a photograph of Norma's son. In the picture the boy held a basketball between his pudgy hands. “He talks about you all the time. I've been teaching him to shoot.” “Where were you when Paul was learning to shoot?” my mother said.
     “In the past,” he said. “That's where I was. Now I'm living in the present.”
     “The past,” my mother said. “You say it like it's over or something.” My father didn't answer.
     Our street was dark when I made that last turn, and our house looked small and flat. Inside the kitchen light showed the empty table and the two chairs where my mother and I usually sat.
     “Get out,” I said. My own voice surprised me. It was louder and lower than I could remember. Without arguing my mother clutched her purse to her side and stepped from the car. As she passed my window, she reached in and tapped me on the shoulder. Her hand was moist with rainwater. “Honor, you were the best player tonight,” she said.
     My father and I watched her walk up the steps and into the house. “She's some case, isn't she?” my father said. “She never lets up.”
     “Get out.”
     “Really?” he said. I didn't answer. After a minute, he opened the door. My father walked over to the porch and sat down on a plastic chair, behind a sheet of rain that rolled off the roof's edge. My mother was standing inside the house, staring out the window at me, at the night. I shifted the car into reverse. I watched them get smaller as I pulled out of the driveway, then I watched them in my rearview mirror until I could not see them, or the house, or the street on which I lived. I turned my eyes back toward the road in front of me and sped into the smothering winter night.