All We Need of Hell by Harry Crews

Author:Harry Crews [Crews, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780060914608
Google: QopaAAAAMAAJ
Amazon: 0060914602
Publisher: Harper & Row
Published: 1987-03-15T07:00:00+00:00

11

When Duffy left his mother’s apartment at Golden House, a misting rain was falling, and it had cooled off. West of Gainesville, off toward the Gulf of Mexico, heat lightning flashed low on the horizon. As Duffy eased through the fog rising out of the steaming streets, his ears were full of the sound of his father’s voice and his eyes swarmed with banking, diving fighter planes. He had not wanted to go into his father’s room, his hangar, but he had and now the planes would not leave him alone, nor would the memory of his father. Duffy did not want to think about the old man’s world because there was no help for any of that, no help for what happened to his father and what he became because of it. But what he wanted to do was beside the point. Duffy would think of him, just as he knew he would drive east on Eighth Avenue to Waldo Road and then north to the airport.

He stopped at a package store and bought a bottle of Wild Turkey, not because he much wanted it but because it was his father’s favorite whiskey. In the parking lot, with the mist still falling, he uncapped the bottle, raised it in a toast and said: “Here’s to you, old man.” He pulled long and hard at the whiskey before lowering the bottle.

“Duffy,” he said to himself, “you are a sentimental asshole, and he would not approve. No, he would not approve.”

He drove out of the parking lot onto Waldo Road and tried to tell himself it was the whiskey causing the tears that blurred his vision. Aw, what the fuck. So he missed his father, so what? He loved the old man, had always loved him, even when he was ashamed of him. In the distance, Duffy saw the blinking lights of a descending plane and heard the roar of the engines, and even though he tried not to, he saw his father’s hands dogfighting one another.

For Duffy, the old man had been a wonderful father because Duffy was an only child and his father had been a perfect playmate. All the rooms and halls of the huge house had echoed with laughter and the sound of planes and gunfire and exploding bombs. It was a two-story gabled Victorian house Duffy’s mother had bought with money her family had settled on her at the time of her marriage, the same money that would later send Duffy through law school. The ceilings of the rooms were high, and in Duffy’s memory a bright flood of light forever poured through the wide windows. It was only after his father’s death that the light was shut out with heavy curtains.

Duffy parked the camper on the shoulder of the road and watched a plane, running lights blinking, make its landing approach. He opened the bottle of Wild Turkey and took another drink as the plane passed low over him with the deep rushing sound of dragging flaps.

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