Denton, 1997

Brad rolls down the window of the blue Chevy my father drove and his never owned, and our father, who is neither man, rolls his eyes. Brad is thin and young, his eyes gleaming blue, and I am folded into a space behind the bench seat that exists in Brad’s father’s truck but not the Chevy. I tangle my feet around jumper cables and a yellow and black rope. The cushion on the seat is blue Campbell tartan and itchy and cigarette-burned. The song plays faint on the radio, something Brad’s father would have liked and mine would have disdained.

The moment is tense when the window comes down, and my father, or his, or neither, grips the steering wheel of this truck which is the meeting point between the two men. The radio crackles with Brad’s touch of the dial. His wrist is slim and laden with dirty wristbands. He finds a tune fast, too fast for the desert, and a half-smile touches his mouth.

The fingers of our father’s right hand tighten, relax, tighten again, and he reaches fast into the void of space between them, where I wait, somehow removed. His hand, dark hair on his low knuckles, slaps Brad’s hand away with a vicious adder’s strike, and Brad’s smile fades in the air like an unfinished song while the snake hand of our father reaches, lightning-quick, to land the same blow on Brad’s left cheek.

Injustice tightens my chest and raises the blood of me to make me shake and feel like I can’t be fast enough. Never fucking fast enough to stop it when I see the moment blooming in front of me. His hands tensed, and I should have, now I could, Brad’s eyes tear, but if I knew his hand would, but here I am again where.

Brad looks down, his face red. Our father who is not our father drives silent, through the desert, and the fine tuning of the dream thins to nothing in the early morning.

I wake at 4 am. He’s hard edges and sweat against me, his hair stuck to his face, nearly steaming in the February morning. His eyelids move to belie the racing of his eyes. His lashes are heavy, and they open and focus from nothing, onto me, pupils relating to my proximity, the softly wrinkling bed of them showing he recognizes me.

“Evie,” he chokes. I pet his hair, and the smell of him covers us while my hatred and injustice settles low in my stomach and makes it ache. He smells like sweat and dirty laundry and the bergamot scent of boy. The white of his undershirt is a pale imitation of his skin, soaked close to him and clung tight as my arms in a nest of us. Where are we? I look around. Pressed into the bottom bunk of a bed in the house he built inside me.

“It’s okay,” I tell him, breaking the statement into two pieces, my voice weak. I’m wearing my Chicago 17 jersey with red sleeves and it’s choking me. I pull it off, and wriggle him out of his clothes and the covers. We lay in the cold air of Eden in winter, our skin close. There are no sheets on the bed, and the carpeting is lifting in the corner, gravel-laden and mildewing from a flood. I think, over and over, the phrase, “His body full of nightmares.”

“You want water?” I ask him. Fear crosses his eyes to focus them distant from me, lit with the yellow glow of the light in the hall.

“No,” he says. “I...I don’t want anything. I w. I.”

His tears come fast from under his tongue. He buries his face by turning away. A grown man doesn’t cry over nightmares of his father. I see his ear redden to the same slapped shade I was witness to a moment before, and I tug him back to me.

“It’s gone,” I repeat to him three times, his sobs pushing his face into my collar. I feel his tears run over my skin, pinned to the mess of Brad, while he cries.

Sometimes, I think this nightmare might kill him, and sometimes it's this nightmare which I see light his eyes cold and vengeful.

“Fuck yes, we come from the same place. The SAME PLACE, Evie. Our father is a killer. We come from that. We’re born from that. We have that inside.”

Brad’s father and my father. The men who put our blood in us.

Some nights, Brad rolls down the window of his red car and the radio is lost to static. We stay on the road and beyond us in the dust, the night beasts roll by, swift on their feet, thrumming heartbeats through the ground. We drive, me tucked under his arm, the yellowing and dusty plastic cover of the radio glowing the stations at me, telling me the name of a girl I love.

He lights a cigarette around me, his arm wrapping close to me. He places it between the fingers of his left hand. His right, between shifting, buries itself between the soft denim of my thighs in borrowed jeans. He’s a grown up the way all boys in high school were more grown up than me; he knows more about sex and how to fix cars and he has a job and he can talk to the world and not feel ignorant to it. When we’re threatened, Brad knows to step in front of me and speak in an even tone. I only speak for us when we’re angry with the tight fists of children to our older brothers.

“Watcha thinkin about, Caroline?” he asks me, his voice low and soft. Brad’s voice is deeply boyish and cracking, but soft when he whispers or is talking to his terrified sister. He invokes now a different name between us; one that is teasingly sung and coyly used.

“Clyde,” I say into my lap. His hand squeezes my thigh at the mention of the name of his first love. Convulsive, reflexive. I hear him swallow, too, and he glances at the flats in the desert beyond the scope of his headlights as if the wolf of his brother might hear the summoning of his name in nightmares. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. He glances back and sees the daring in my eyes before he squeezes harder a second time. Don’t, Evie.

I don’t.

We pass in the dark the monument in the desert of his heart that marks the entrance underground to the city of him; a statue of a man’s face that he says is our father’s. Under the worn visage of it, he kissed me for the first time, his mouth hot and open, his tongue spelling a name I’d forgotten into the dark parts of my mouth. He’d been sly there, wanting a sacrilege or desecration under the stone gaze of a disapproving father, to demonstrate to some force within him that we were stronger than anything we might fear.

In a dream. He kissed me for the first time in dreams.

We drive until the light breaks red in him, low at dawn. The beasts are silent and the desert is as still and cold as the gaze of his knife. He pulls the car over and lights another cigarette. He takes gasoline from the trunk, dowses the car, and torches it. We watch it burn to something caked and animal, a charred beetle-shelled thing in the pale sand of morning. He’s silent.

Maybe every nightmare is inherited from our fathers. We walk always through long deserts looking for the sites where we can bury them and leave them forever behind, but the terror fathers inspire in us stays in the sand for generations, for children to unearth by accident or intention. The curious, the haphazard, the innocent wander by and touch the monsters of our humanity disfigured. Sin has no origin, but perpetuates.