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Dad's Table
by Lawrence Weill Dad sat at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette. It wasn’t dinner time; he just sat there in order to smoke. The ashtray was overflowing with crumpled butts and ashes were sprayed around the table from his haphazard flipping. I sat there with him, talking about his days in the war, his trips into Paris or into small villages to trade rations for cheese, eggs, wine, whatever the people had. Because he had chocolate, he said, he could eat like a king. And there were the misadventures of his compatriots, and the befriending of the little French boy they called Smoky because at the age of eight, he was already begging for cigarettes. The stories were often even told in the same order. A bead of sweat ran under my shirt. Dad was evidently comfortable, sitting back in his chair, his mind’s eye focused on a jeep he and his buddy had “borrowed” to drive to Berlin, although the Americans were still very much in France. Like the other tales, I had heard that one any number of times, but I let him tell it again, in case there was some new detail that might emerge, although there usually wasn’t, and just to let him talk. It was as if he had memorized the words of his story sometimes. Other times, it seemed to frustrate him. I wanted to hear the stories, but there was no telling how it might end up. It was a gamble. Several flies had come in through the gaps in the wood-frame screen door, which hung anniegogglin’, as Dad said, the hook pretty much keeping the door from falling off completely. The flies took turns buzzing us. Dad pushed up his glasses. “Harry and I put a new alternator on the jeep outside the officers’ club and headed for Berlin. We wanted to have a word or two with Adolph.” He chuckled as he shook his head. “That was how they tried to keep people from stealing their jeep, by taking the alternator in with them, but all you had to do was bring your own, so that’s what we did. Course, if we’d been caught we would’ve been in trouble, but it was kind of a musical chairs arrangement anyway. The only reason we had the alternator was because someone had taken our jeep when we had gone into Reims for supplies. Still, it was an officer’s jeep, and we were just sergeants, so we would’ve been in trouble. But only if we got caught.” He gave me the same wink he always gave me at that point in the story. I would have been disappointed if he had not done it, I realized. He sat back in the kitchen chair, his arms crossed, the smoke from the Winston in his right hand drifting back from his left shoulder, encasing him like a fog. He paused, looking through the screen door at the mimosa tree in the back yard and I wondered if he had lost his train of thought. The house smelled of stale smoke and apples kept too long in the basket by the sink. The dishes were clean in the drying rack, but cobwebs hung in every corner. “Is that when you drove across the field and when you got to the other side, you saw the signs in German saying it was a minefield?” I prodded. “No, no, that was another time when we got a hare-brained idea to go to Paris to find some girls. And we figured after we found some girls, we might just go on over to Nancy, where my father was born, look up some cousins or something and say hello. Hell, Harry didn’t care. He’d go anywhere.” Dad took another drag on his cigarette. “We had no idea what we were getting into. We knew we wanted out of Camp Lucky Strike, though. That we did know.” He blew the smoke out with his words and took another draw and closed his eyes to the sting of the smoke. His arms were thin now, not the sinewy limbs he had used to set up communications over sixty years before, and now they were mottled with liver spots. His hair, once red and wavy, was wispy, white. He retold his stories, as if they needed to be said one last time. “We drove across the field just as happy as we could be, swapping lies about the women we’d been with and all, and then we get to the other side, and here’s this big sign in German saying ‘Achtung Minen!’ We just sat there, not knowing what to do. If we went back, we’d’ve probably been blown to bits, but we had no idea where we were or how to get home. That was crazy.” Dad waved with his cigarette. “Another time, when we were near Compainville, I think it was, I decided to go fishing. I was always looking for something to do and I was sick of the rations and I decided I would go over to the farm next door where they had this big pond and catch some fish. The farmer came out waving at me, yelling, ‘Poisson! Poisson!’ so I gathered up my tackle and went home. I sure didn’t want any poison.” Dad grinned. “I had no idea he was telling me it was okay to fish.” White stubble was still on his chin. He didn’t shave on Sunday. He had on his knit slacks and a short-sleeve button down, also knit, that we had bought him so he wouldn’t have to iron any more, since he had nearly burned down the house a few weeks before after leaving the iron on. “Did you ever get over to Nancy, where our folks are from?” Again, I knew the answer, but wanted to keep him talking. A fly brushed my sweaty temple and I waved it away. “No, no. Closest I got was Verdun, but by the time I saw it, it was nothing but rubble, hardly a building left standing. Still, the folks were glad to see us, real glad.” He leaned forward and flicked the ashes in the general direction of the ashtray, without concern whether he hit his target. He didn’t. “Harry and I did go to Paris later, though. After that first time we tried.” I had interrupted the pattern and he brought it back. “It was the prettiest place I ever saw. It had just been liberated and folks were all out in the streets, but nobody had any money, so they were eager to, shall we say, trade?” Dad smiled to one side, a wry twist to his face, the same wry twist he used at this point in the story each time. “Girls would come up to us and say, ‘Voulez-vous?’ and we’d say, ‘Let’s see what you got,’ and they’d yank up their dresses and show us everything.” Dad’s eyes grew practiced wide. “We’d say, ‘Nah,’ and walk on down the street.” I imagined him, trying to be suave in Paris, this raw young football star from a small Midwestern town who had never even ridden a train before the war broke out. “So, you never took them up on it?” My tone was purposefully suspicious. “Well, now, I didn’t say that.” Dad raised his eyebrows and his thick glasses slipped down his nose and he pushed them back up. He clucked his tongue. “One thing is they told us to stay away from the Bois de Boulogne, said it was dangerous, so, what d’you think Harry and I did?” “Went to the Bois de Boulogne?” I knew my cue. “Damn straight. We weren’t afraid of a bunch of Frenchies.” He made his usual pause. “Scaredest I’ve been in my whole life.” He raised his face to look seriously through his glasses at me. “We went into this little bar and there were the roughest bunch of fellows you ever saw in there, and they would’ve cut our throats for nothing, just for walking in the place. We went up to the bar, tried to act all brave, but my knees were knocking. We each ordered a beer and stood there back-to-back and drank them down as fast as we could. We sauntered out like we owned the place then ran like hell.” “What happened?” “We ran down the street and ducked down an alleyway and pretty soon this group of guys from the bar come running past us, so we let them go and ran back up, and ran all the way back up to the arch. I really thought we were done for.” A fly landed on the table and I watched it rubbing its legs together. “But we had some good times in Paris, some real good times.” Dad let the mysterious tone say what he would not say to me overtly. “So, you won an all-expenses paid trip to Europe, huh? Courtesy of Uncle Sam.” My eye wandered to the dusty shelves. “The way I see it, you may owe the government some money for all the fringe benefits.” “I paid my share, don’t you worry about that.” He shooed the fly away from the table. “And you know, it wasn’t all fun and games over there. There were these guys called Germans over there who were trying to kill us. Not that you would know anything about that kind of danger.” He dismissed me with his hand. I also knew this part, the part where he wasn’t real sure I measured up, what with my college education and my refusal to volunteer during the war in Viet Nam. “There were plenty of tough times, kiddo, damned scary times, times when we might’ve been killed. I remember coming to this one old farmhouse near Soissons and finding the place completely dark, but warm, warm enough for people to be there. It didn’t feel right. We had to be careful of the Werewolves, you know. It wasn’t a place for the squeamish.” He gave me that look that said he meant me. I refused to bite. “So, what did you do? Blow up the house? Kill everyone in the place?” I knew it would tick him off, but I also hoped that would take him off the tack he had started. “Blow up the house?” Dad sat back, his eyes widened. “Now, why would I want to do that? If it was okay, it’d be a great place to set up the radio. Glad I didn’t, too.” He waved at a fly that buzzed in front of him. “Now, I was scared, make no mistake. I was shaking I was so scared.” He pulled the cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, shook the pack and gripped the open end so the smokes that jumped up were held there. He placed the pack to his lips and used his mouth to pull out a single cigarette, then lit it with the battered Zippo that lay next to the ashtray. “Harry was with me, of course, and he went around back in case someone ran out the back door. I went up the front steps and kicked in the door. I could hear someone breathing, and I almost started shooting, but then I heard the little boy start crying.” Dad shook his head. “I almost shot that boy, and his momma too, for that matter, if I hadn’t taken a moment, and that moment was hard, damned hard, because in that moment, I could’ve been killed.” He pointed at me with his cigarette. “And you would never have come into this world.” I wasn’t sure if he meant that would have been a bad thing or a good thing. “You kids don’t have a clue.” “Yeah, I know. We’ve had it easy.” I sat back in my chair. The heat in the room was stifling. The flies circled around the room in a faint buzz. “Damn straight, you’ve had it easy. You don’t know how easy you’ve had it.” His head was almost hidden by the cloud of cigarette smoke around him. I stood up now from the table. I had hoped the conversation would not end up here. I walked over to his round-front fridge he had had forever and pulled it open and leaned in to see what was there. “You got anything in here to eat? I’m hungry.” The refrigerator was full of margarine tubs and cottage cheese cartons reused for leftovers. I wasn’t tempted to open any of them. There was no telling how long they had been in there. He no longer cooked much, but I could still imagine his wonderful spaghetti and meat sauce. “Ha!” Dad turned in his chair to give me a look. “You haven’t been hungry a day in your life!” He pointed at me with his cigarette. “You kids have had everything given to you. You don’t know what it means to be hungry. During the depression, we found out what hard times really meant.” I straightened and closed the refrigerator and resisted the urge to make up some excuse and simply leave. Dad didn’t intend to be mean, I knew; he just sort of fell into it at times. I went back to the table and sat down. “Can I smoke one of those?” I pointed. Dad raised his eyebrows again. He knew I didn’t smoke. "Sure, kiddo.” He handed me the pack and watched me with a bemused smirk on his face. I took one out and lit it up. I had never been much of a smoker and had been told back in school that I didn’t look at all natural holding a cigarette, so I tried hard to look like I knew what I was doing. I leaned back in the chair and the smoke drifted into my eyes and I had to blink away the stinging. Dad gave a chuckle. “A little strong for you?” He raised one eyebrow, then shook his head slowly. “Glad you didn’t ever start on these.” He held up his nearly spent cigarette. “You kids are smarter’n we were.” He dragged a last draw and snuffed out the butt. “But you’re not braver.” I felt a vague headache starting somewhere in the back of my head. A fly landed on the table next to his hand. He kept his eyes glued on me, then snatched the fly off the table with a flick of his hand. He stood up quickly, marched over to the sink, and slammed the fly down the drain, running water to complete the flush. He washed his hands, then came over to the table and sat down, rather smugly I thought. “And I’m not dead yet.” He looked at the barely smoked cigarette I had crushed into the ashtray when he had gotten up and frowned. “They’re not free, you know.” “Yeah, I know. I’ll buy you a pack when we go out for lunch.” “You want to go out? I’ve got plenty of food here. No need to spend all that money when I’ve got lots of stuff here.” I considered a lunch of Spam and creamed corn in a hot kitchen filled with cigarette smoke and flies and decided against it. “No, I’d like to take you out for lunch, Dad. Where do you want to go?” "I hate for you to spend money when we’ve got food.” “I insist.” I leaned up in the chair. A fly buzzed past my head and I snatched it out of the air without looking. The fly buzzed in my hand. Dad’s eyes widened and he watched me as I marched over to the sink and slammed the fly down, flushed it, and washed my hands in impersonation of his movements. It was a lucky grab, but I wasn't about to let it pass. Dad gave me a grin. “I like Ponderosa,” he offered. “Works for me.” I reached into my pocket for my keys. Dad stood, shook his head, and gave me a strong pat on the back as we headed for the door. |
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