My Life as a Rat. Joyce Carol Oates

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       The Rescue

      BY CHANCE YOU SAW.

      So much had become chance in your life.

      Headlights turning into the driveway, in the dark. Your father’s car braking in front of the garage.

      By chance you were walking in the upstairs hall. Cast your eyes down, through the filmy curtains seeing the car turn in from the street. Already it was late. He’d missed supper. Past 9:00 P.M. No one asked any longer—Where’s Daddy?

      In the hall beside the window you paused. Your heart was not yet beating unpleasantly hard. You were (merely) waiting for the car lights to be switched off below. Waiting for the motor to be switched off. Waiting for the familiar sound of a car door slammed shut which would mean that your father had gotten out of the car and was approaching the house to enter by the rear door to signal Nothing has changed. We are as we were.

      But this did not seem to be happening. Your father remained in the (darkened) car.

      Still the motor was running. Pale smoke lifted from the tailpipe. You were beginning to smell the exhaust, and to feel faintly nauseated.

      In the hall by the window you stood. Staring down at the driveway, the idling car. Waiting.

       He is not running carbon monoxide into the car. The car is not inside the garage, there is no danger that he will poison himself.

      Yet, gray smoke continued to lift from the rear of the car. Stink of exhaust borne on the cold wet air like ash.

       He is sitting in the car. He is smoking in the car.

       Waiting to get sober. Inside the car.

       That is where he is: in the car.

       He is safe. No one can harm him. You can see—he is in the car.

      You could not actually see your father from where you stood. But there was no doubt in your mind, he was in the car.

      Had Daddy been drinking, was that why he was late returning home, you would not inquire. Each time Daddy entered the house in the evening unsteady on his feet, frowning, his handsome face coarse and flushed, you would want to think it was the first time and it was a surprise and unexpected. You would not want to think—Please no. Not again.

      You would want to retreat quickly before his gaze was flung out, like a grappling hook, to hook his favorite daughter Vi’let Rue.

      It was one of those days in the aftermath of the death of Hadrian Johnson when nothing seemed to have happened. And yet—always there was the expectation that something will happen.

      Your brothers had not been summoned, with O’Hagan, to police headquarters that day. So far as anyone knew, the others—Walt, Don—had not been summoned either.

      No arrests had (yet) been made but your brothers were captive animals. Everyone in the Kerrigan house was a captive animal.

      They’d ceased reading the South Niagara Union Journal. Someone, might’ve been Daddy, tossed the paper quickly away into the recycling bin as soon as it arrived in the early morning,

      For articles about the savage beating, murder of Hadrian Johnson continued to appear on the front page. The photograph of Hadrian Johnson continued to appear. Gat-toothed black boy smiling and gazing upward as if searching for a friendly face.

      You saw the newspaper, in secret. Not each day but some days.

      These people are killing us. Possibly, your mother meant the newspaper people. The TV people.

      You are beginning to feel uneasy, at the window. You are beginning to wonder if indeed your father is actually in the car. And it is wrong of you to spy upon your father as it is wrong to spy upon your mother. Faces sagging like wetted tissue when they believe that no one is watching. Oh, you love them!

      In the car Daddy is (probably) smoking. Maybe he brought a can of ale with him from the tavern. Maybe a bottle.

      The bottles are more serious than the cans. The bottles—whiskey, bourbon—are more recent than the cans.

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