Nocturnal

Fathers and Sons

Bryan pulled up to Mike Clauser’s house to find his dad sitting on the front steps, Bud Light in hand. Five more bottles sat in a sixer at his feet. He was shirtless, wearing beat-up jeans and black socks with no shoes.

He was waiting. That meant Pookie had called ahead. Fucking Pookie.

Bryan shut off the Buick’s engine. His hands squeezed the steering wheel.

If Erickson was sixty years old or more, and he was Bryan’s half-brother, then Bryan’s real mother would have to be seventy-five or probably even older. Mike Clauser and Starla Hutchon had gone to high school together. Bryan had seen their yearbooks, their class pictures, other pictures of them from their childhoods and their grade-school days. They had been born the same year — Mike had turned fifty-eight a few months back.

Mike, who the genetic test said was not Bryan’s father.

And Starla, who was younger than Jebediah Erickson — which meant that the woman Bryan had always known as his mother was anything but.

All his life, Bryan had been lied to. He felt that rage swelling up, the same rage he’d felt when Zou had threatened him with jail.

He stepped out of the Buick. Mike stood and reached for the front door, to open it as if to invite Bryan in.

“Don’t bother,” Bryan said.

His father stopped and turned. “Pookie texted that you had something important to talk about. Come in, we’ll talk.”

“I don’t want to go inside,” Bryan said. “What I want is to know who my real parents are.”

Mike Clauser stared for a moment. He slowly lowered himself to the front step and sat. He stared at the ground. “You’re my son.”

“Bullshit.”

Mike looked up, his expression caught between the anger that solved most of his problems and a gut-wrenching pain from hurting his boy. “I don’t care about biology. I wiped your ass and changed your diapers. I cleaned up your puke. When you got a fever, I felt like someone was chopping up my heart with a goddamn cleaver. You’d just cough and the sound scared me worse than any fight I’ve ever been in.”

To think Bryan had loved this man, this liar. “Are you finished?”

“I took you to school,” Mike said. “I hauled you to soccer practice. I watched every wrestling match you ever had, and when someone put you on your back, I had to grab the damn bleachers because it was all I could do not to come out on the mat and kick the other kid in the head. I’m the one who taught you right from wrong.”

Quite a show of concern. But then again, Mike had a lifetime of practice — Bryan’s lifetime. “And in all those years, it never crossed your mind to tell me the goddamn truth?”

“The truth is that you are my boy.” Mike’s lower lip quivered, just for a moment, then he seemed to force his emotions under control. “You will always be my son.”

Bryan shook his head slowly. “I’m not. I’m just a kid that you lied to.”

Mike pulled an unopened bottle out of the Bud Light sixer. He held it between his palms, slowly rolling it back and forth. “I don’t know how you found out, but you can forget the guilt trips because I wouldn’t change a thing.”

What had Bryan been hoping for? Maybe a little remorse? Maybe a gosh, I’m so sorry? Mike wasn’t apologizing. At least his character was consistent in that regard.

“Who are my parents? You owe me that, so start talking.”

Mike set the bottle on the step next to his feet. He looked … weak. The expression on his face, the sagging posture, Bryan had seen those things only once before — when his mother had died.

“There was this homeless guy in our neighborhood,” Mike said. “Eric. Never knew his last name. He was a combat vet. Marines. The neighborhood kind of watched out for him. We’d give him food, clothes. One day, Eric just wasn’t there. When he showed up a week later, he had a baby with him.”

Bryan’s hands flexed into fists, relaxed, flexed into fists. “Are you telling me that Eric the Homeless Vet is my father?”

Mike shook his head. “He wasn’t your father. Your mother didn’t think so, anyway.”

“That bitch wasn’t my mother.”

Mike grabbed and threw the beer bottle in one snap-motion, a line drive of tumbling brown glass. Bryan stepped aside. The bottle smashed against Pookie’s driver’s-side window in an explosion of glass and beer.

Mike Clauser stood up. He didn’t look sad anymore. “Boy,” he said in a low voice, “you’re my son, but she was my wife. You blaspheme her name again, and I’m going to string your ass out all over this street.”

Bryan felt his father’s neck in his hands before he even realized he’d rushed in. Mike’s eyes went wide in shock.

Bryan pulled him close and screamed in his face. “You threaten me again and I’ll kill you!”

He felt Mike’s pulse hammering against his fingers. Just a squeeze …

What the hell was he doing? Bryan released his grip, then took four slow steps back.

Mike rubbed his throat with his free hand. He looked at Bryan more with confusion than fear.

“You’ve always been so calm,” Mike said. “You’ve never … never yelled at me before.”

Hadn’t yelled, and certainly had never put his hands on his father in anger. This intensity, these highs and lows — all of it was new. He’d had emotions before, of course he had, but nothing this pure, this overwhelming.

What was happening to him?

“Just finish your story, old man.”

Mike stopped rubbing his throat. He sat down heavily, opened another bottle and took a long drink. “We didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I mean, what could we do? Eric brought the baby to us. He said he had to give the baby to us because he knew we’d make good parents. We watched out for Eric, but he was crazy and homeless. A baby in his hands? That was dangerous. So we took you from him, just to make sure Eric didn’t do something bad.”

“And you didn’t call the cops? You had an infant, probably kidnapped, and you didn’t try to find the parents?”

Mike sniffed, slid a hand across his nose. He sniffed again. “We thought we’d try and figure out where you came from, talk to Eric and get some information before we had to call the cops. For God’s sake, Bryan, Eric went crazy killing for our country, watching his buddies die all around him. We had to at least try and help him out of a jam.”

Bryan breathed slowly. He fought to control the heartbreak and rage swirling inside. This was the man he’d looked up to his entire life? A man who would take another’s child?

“I belonged to someone else,” Bryan said. “Are you actually going to look me in the eye and say you did it to save some insane homeless guy from a well-deserved felony rap? What, were you hoping he’d bring another so you’d have a matched set?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Mike said quickly. “Eric was terrified, Bryan. I’ve never seen anyone that scared. He said he had to find the baby a safe, loving home, or he’d get into a lot of trouble. He knew your mother couldn’t have kids, so he brought you to us.”

This just kept getting better. “Eric the Homeless Guy knew you guys couldn’t have children?”

“Everyone in the neighborhood knew. That’s what God had chosen for us. We didn’t broadcast it, but when people asked if we were going to have kids, we told them we couldn’t. We’d thought of adopting, sure, but hadn’t really focused on it. When Eric brought you to us, we couldn’t help but think that maybe … maybe it was a miracle.”

Bryan’s throat pinched. Sadness roared up to swirl side-by-side with the anger. How could they have done this to him?

“A miracle? Are you shitting me?”

Mike tilted his head a little, an expression that said come on, think about it and you’ll see. “Two people are totally in love but can’t have kids, then a baby shows up on their doorstep? What more proof of a miracle do you need?”

Bryan’s words came out as a cracked yell. “How about making Mom able to have kids in the first place? Isn’t that a more logical miracle than sending a homeless man with a kidnapped baby?”

“I don’t question the Lord’s ways.”

“That doesn’t make you pious, that makes you stupid. What happened then? You just walked out and told everyone you’d suddenly had an immaculate conception and delivery?”

Mike again looked to the ground. “We kept it very quiet. The night Eric dropped you off, I tried to talk to him but he just kept babbling about what they would do to him if he failed.”

“And who were they?”

“He wouldn’t say. The next night, I tracked him down.” Mike paused. He took a sip of his beer. “Eric was dead, Bryan. I think he ODed on something. We didn’t know what to do about you. Your mother and I read the papers, watched the news, waited for any story about a kidnapped baby. There was nothing.”

This was the man who raised him: a liar, a coward who only thought of himself.

“And still you didn’t go to the cops. The kidnapper was dead, someone had lost their goddamn child, and you didn’t do anything?”

Mike looked away. “After the second day, your mother and I were already so in love with you we would have risked everything to keep you. If we’d known who the parents were, that would have been different, but there was no news at all. We told everyone we knew that your mother was already four months’ pregnant. I sent her away to a cabin in Yosemite — we told everyone she was staying at your grandmother’s until the baby came.”

Bryan wanted to remind Mike that the women he was talking about were neither his mother nor his grandmother, but he kept quiet.

Mike drained the beer in one long pull, then set it down with a glass-on-brick clink. “You mother came home with a baby. Simple as that. The neighbors bought it hook, line and sinker. Everyone commented on how big you were for a newborn. We just laughed and said you were going to play for the ’Niners someday and make us rich.”

Mike opened another beer. He tossed the cap away.

Because of this man, Bryan would probably never know who his real parents were. For the first time in his life, Bryan felt tears welling up in his eyes. He blinked rapidly, tried to hold them back.

“What about my birth certificate?”

“Flash enough money around Chinatown, you’ll find a doctor who’ll play ball. Your birth certificate just says you were born in this house, not a hospital.”

“You kept a kidnapped infant and you bribed a doctor. What upstanding citizens. What happened next?”

Mike shrugged again. “That’s it. We loved you. You were the center of our lives. God delivered you to us and we spent every day trying to show God that we were worthy.”

Bryan couldn’t stop the tears anymore. “Thou shalt not lie. You ever hear of that one?”

The pain returned to Mike’s eyes. His body sagged. He had never looked so old.

“We knew it was wrong,” he said. “After a little while, we were able to just block it out. We didn’t think about it. You were our son.”

Mike Clauser had been a rock: unflappable, reliable, always looking for the positive in all things. Now, he seemed defeated — deflated, perhaps, as if someone had stabbed him in the back and let his soul drain away.

Bryan felt torn in two directions; part of him hated this man with every fiber of his being, while the other half saw Mike’s pain, remembered all the love given during a wonderful childhood. He wanted to hit him. He also wanted to hug him — but he would never do that, never again.

“You’re not my father,” Bryan said. “You never were. Don’t visit. Don’t call. You’re dead to me.”

Mike’s head dropped. His big body shook a little bit as he started to cry.

Bryan wiped his own tears as he turned away. The Buick smelled like beer. He got in and drove away. Fuck Mike Clauser. The man could burn in hell for all Bryan cared. Mike didn’t have the answers Bryan needed.

There was one place left that Bryan might be able to get those answers. But not right now. Not today. He’d had enough … he’d just had enough.