Night Letter by Sterling Watson

Author:Sterling Watson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Books

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“What you want, boy?”

The man comes around the side of the house fast in a half crouch, holding an ax handle in both hands and looking like he means to use it. He must have been out in the woods behind the house. I’m standing on his front porch now with one hand raised to knock. He must have heard me drive up in the Plymouth. I look around for something to use to block that ax handle if he rushes me. If he decides to split my head open.

We stand this way for a while, both of us leaning, him forward, me back, both of us half finished with something and not knowing what to do next. At least I hope he doesn’t know.

I say, “I’m just here to see Dawnell. She’s a friend of mine.”

His face is covered with a two-day beard that looks like dirt, like he’s just pulled his snout from a trough. He’s wearing some kind of faded-green canvas coveralls that zip from the crotch to the neck, but the zipper stops just above his navel, and I can see one amber nipple set in a hairless chest as white as the belly of a catfish. He closes one eye like he’s aiming a rifle and says, “Dawnell don’t have no friends. She’s too young to have friends.” The way he leans on the word, we both know he thinks I’m here to carry his daughter off and grow her up fast. But for all her small years, that’s the way she’s always seemed to me, far more experienced than I am.

I hear feet scrape inside the house, and Dawnell’s face appears in the dim beyond the rusty screen. A white oval framed in honey hair with a slash of cherry red that is her painted lips. She comes out cautiously and sees what I’m seeing, the man with the ax handle. She says, “Daddy, don’t hurt the boy.”

It’s hard to tell what’s in her voice or what the man is hearing. Some women can command men. Delia could always tell Grandpa Hollister what to do in one way or another because he loved her so much. Too much, I finally learned. This father, if that’s what he is, doesn’t act like he loves too much. He does a lot of too much, and by the look of his red eyes and blue-swollen nose, some of it is drinking, but tender love for a daughter doesn’t seem to be in him.

He says, “Dawnie-ell, get on back in the house and leave this to me.” He takes a step toward me. I look again for something, anything, to pick up, a thing I can use to defend myself. And now I see him better. He’s lean and sinewy, and the hands that are white around the ax handle aren’t shaking, but he’s also about my size, and I’m less than half his age. Something I don’t like and like very

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