Ancient Highway by Bret Lott

Author:Bret Lott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781588367112
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

Brad

13

The story I want to tell here is about a young man and what could have been a family. I want to tell a story about how they lived and were happy somehow, despite each other and maybe because of each other both. It would be a story about growing up and living and sharing meals and breaking bread and all that, and about vacations to see the grandparents during summers, and about happiness and about happiness and about happiness.

But that’s not a story I know at all, and even saying that will sound like a whine, like the crybaby shit of some twisted sorry stupid fool because nobody, nobody lives like that, and to blame the idea of it on television and Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best and The Andy Griffith Show and all the rest of that rot is to cop a kind of plea, to ignore the fact that family and happiness aren’t the same thing.

But even though I know I’m a crybaby for saying this in the first place, and even though I know that to blame things on others—on television and the movies and, mainly, your mother and the way, while you were growing up, she seemed as far from you as the moon—even though I know that to blame the unhappiness of a life elsewhere is a cop-out that reveals me to be as spineless as the huge jellyfish we’d sometimes spot deep at sea, jellyfish that looked more like oil spills than anything alive but that would kill you soon as you touched them; and even though I know that to blame this life on something else is as stupid as a kid lying awake at night and watching out his window the black silhouette of Squaw Peak rising up into stars, hoping his mother might burst into the room holding the hand of his long lost father, the two of them dancing in the moonlight and laughing for it—even though and even though and even though I know all of this, there is still, I also know, hope, though it is a kind of scuffed up and scarred hope, a kind of hope that’s had an eye gouged out and lost an arm and has only the clothes on its back and no hope for anything other than the hope of itself, because no one out there wants anything to do with it.

I have hope, because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen that intersection between family and happiness. I have.

This:

Evacuees are camped out on the flight deck of the ship, while in the night sky to the west lies a line of clouds lit up orange, the whole of Saigon burning down. We are just off the coast of Vung Tau, the two small mountains at the southern tip of the island vague silhouettes to my right, on one of them a lighthouse that flashes its calm and predictable routine, the light a kind of breathing that helps me breathe myself, after all I have seen.

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