The Pale-Faced Lie

When Query Man knocked loudly on our door, Dad waited a while before answering. Mona was nowhere in sight, knowing to stay away during a Crow revenge session.

“Mr. Crow,” he said, “your boys attacked me and my house with eggs and water balloons tonight. And this afternoon, we received deliveries of all kinds of things we didn’t order. Flowers. Pizza. Fill dirt. A washer and dryer. Lumber. Your boys are responsible for that too.”

From the hallway, Sam, Sally, and I watched Dad’s eyes go wide and his jaw drop as if he couldn’t believe his ears. I had to put my hand over Sam’s mouth to keep him quiet.

“I can’t imagine my boys doing anything like that. Let me query them.”

Dad flashed the world’s fakest smile and gently closed the door. He loved getting to use the word “query” on Query Man. We took turns peering through the peephole to watch the guy squirm on the porch. A few minutes later, Dad winked at us and opened the door.

“My sons said they walked by your house and may have thrown an egg or two, but boys will be boys, as we know.” Dad puffed out his chest. “But they certainly didn’t do anything else, so get your fat ass off my porch and don’t come back.”

The lead psychologist adjusted his wire-rim glasses and cleared his throat. “Mr. Crow, please understand that we’re concerned about your son. We’re here to help him. We don’t believe in corporal punishment. David is showing signs of alienating behavior and needs counseling. We would advise you to choose a therapist and attend a series of sessions together. He also needs substantial tutoring and perhaps should repeat a grade.”

I stared at my lap. My life was over. Dad would finally be angry enough to kill me, like the other assholes he’d told me about, the ones he assumed society was better off without.

I glanced up at him, expecting the worst, and did a double take. His face had gone from pinched fury to amusement. Mostly from relief, I burst out laughing. He started laughing too.

“Alienating behavior,” Dad mocked. “Who wouldn’t be alienated by the likes of you? David wanted to make you look stupid, and he succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. No one else could have assembled this team of idiots. This goddamn meeting is over.”

Silas Marner was a conscientious objector living in England during World War II. Hiding from the military, and life itself, he spent long hours in the public library. It was a safe refuge where he could read stacks of anti-war literature and fantasize about the lovely, full-breasted librarian. Her name was Sarah Saddly, and he wanted to bang her like a loose corral gate in a stampede.

Unbeknownst to Silas, German soldiers had killed Sarah’s husband on the Western Front. She’d been left with two children and poor prospects for remarriage since most of the men were at war and like her husband would never come home.

When returning an overdue book, Silas finally mustered the courage to ask Sarah on a date. Sarah turned out to be eager for male companionship to fill the hole in her heart and bosom, and to provide a father for her sad, Saddly children. She leapt at the chance for new love.

Silas filled Sarah with endless rounds from his throbbing pistol. Due to his love for her, he joined the war effort and became a hero on Sword Beach at D-Day. After the war, they married, he adopted her children, and she knocked out thirteen more kids, making Mrs. Sarah Marner the happiest and best-serviced woman in all of England. Silas was elected mayor of London and helped rebuild the war-torn city. He was a hero and friend to all, including Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

To escape the loneliness and confusion, I turned to running and reading again—as I had in Gallup and Fort Defiance. After school, I ran through the lush neighborhoods along Rock Creek Park just outside our subdivision, often not returning home until dark. Within a couple of weeks, a paper route became available to deliver the Washington Post and the Washington Evening Star.

Every day, I read the entire Post, fascinated with national politics, which was local politics in Washington. I wanted to know all about it. As was my habit, I asked my customers about their days, and they gave me extra change in appreciation for my service. I wanted to be a part of their lives, but fitting in with them didn’t seem possible.

Dad poked me hard in the arm. “You can’t imagine what goes through a man’s mind on the bus ride to prison.” His eyes bugged out, and the vein on his forehead started thumping.

This wasn’t good. How stupid of me—I should have kept my mouth shut. I’d gotten him angry, and we might have twelve hours ahead of us today and more tomorrow. As usual, I didn’t know what he had planned, but for sure, he’d take his anger out on me.

“That might be the toughest part of all,” Dad said, his voice harsh, “the swelling up of the stark reality that this is it. You’re going to wake up in the Big House for untold mornings to come. There’s no escape. By that point, you’ve pushed the fury, or whatever dominated your brain when you committed the crime, so far back so many times that you would swear you didn’t do anything wrong. You even use more passive ways of talking, like turning ‘when I committed the crime’ into ‘when the crime was committed.’ It doesn’t matter—even if what you did was justified.”

“I understand,” he said. “You’ll do whatever it takes to be your own man. I admire that. When I was in the Q and walked into the yard for the first time, a vicious lifer con decided to test me. He wanted to make me his punk. Ugly son of a bitch. He asked me if I was married and where I was from. I was naive—I told him my wife and I were from Texas. In his nastiest voice, he said he’d screwed every woman in Texas and their twats were stretched wider than an ax handle because they were all whores.”

He made a fist and punched the palm of his left hand. “I crunched the guy’s jaw so hard it knocked him down. Then I crawled on top of him and pounded his head into the concrete like a jackhammer. His teeth went flying, and I smashed his nose into a bloody mass.”

“Did you kill him?” I asked quietly.

“Three more seconds, I would have, but two of his buddies pulled me off. One told me to get up slowly and begin moving. Another handed me a handkerchief. Several small groups formed. The cons pushed me from group to group as we steadily walked away until it was impossible to identify me.”

The water had gotten cold, and I pulled the plug with my toe to let the water drain. “Did the guy ever come after you?”

“No. Never. In the code of the cons, I’d been challenged and won. You can’t let anyone push you around in the Big House or they’ll own you. But one of the con’s friends told me that if I ever did something stupid like that again, he’d push me into the center where the armed guards up in the tower would have a clear shot. But I didn’t care. I did what I had to do. I passed the test. I could get smokes from anybody, and no one confronted me again.”