The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

WRONG TURN

The thing is, they really weigh on you. That’s why digging up the dead is so tough.

And my father was a real backbreaker. I’m speaking figuratively, of course. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I held a shovel in my hands, and I’m not a dirt-under-the-fingernails kind of guy. I’ve never played things that way. I’ve always liked to think that I used my head.

Not that I’ve gotten much of anywhere in thirty-five years. The trust fund my mother set up after she remarried has kept me afloat, but I think my monthly stipend equals the average take an inventive person can snag with welfare and food stamps. I’m certainly not one of those rich sons of privilege who motor around Maui with a windsurfing rig when they’re not busy hitting the slopes in Aspen or Vail.

Dad’s name hasn’t hurt me, though. There are still plenty of people who remember it. It’s funny — people forget directors and writers and producers, but get your face up there on the screen and you’ll be remembered for a long time, even if your claim to fame is portraying a long string of heavies and sad-eyed losers in poverty row quickies. I’ve made more than a few dollars by being the son of a movie star, even if Dad was a star in a lesser constellation.

Then again, most people remember Dad for the things he did when there weren’t any cameras in sight. That’s what puts the old shine in their eyes.

Tom Cassady — my old man. Me — Tom Cassady, Junior. I guess Dad wasn’t the most inventive guy in the world. He actually had a dog named Rover.

But Dad did leave me the name and all the baggage that goes with it. That, and his face. Hard little eyes and pouting lips on a face that is otherwise completely boyish, even when I skip shaving for a day or two. Give Kurt Russell a bad attitude and you’ve got me. I don’t have Dad’s signature broken nose, of course — remember, I use my head. And I doubt that I’ll ever acquire the puffy, dissipated look he had after he got out of prison, the look that made him a primo heavy in his second run at Hollywood, because I don’t drink much.

But like I said, I’ve made some money with Dad’s face. It’s a handsome face, and I take care of what’s under it. I pump iron, keep my tan just a shade this side of narcissistic, get my hair styled every other week and my back waxed at the same interval. You’ve probably seen me on TV. Lathering my manly chest with Irish Spring. Whipping a bottle of Sharpshooter barbecue sauce from a holster while I wear a squint that would have pleased Sergio Leone. Big hands with manicured nails dishing Happy Chow for some generic Rover. You’ve probably seen me, or at least significant portions of my anatomy.

But you didn’t know who I was.

I didn’t know either. That’s why I dug Dad up. I wanted to find out.

I wrote the book. It was my idea. Cassady: a Life on the Edge. After I sold it, the publisher brought in a pro to rewrite it, a guy who’d ghosted books for several bulimic actresses, a gay running back, and a hamster that spent four years in the White House — in a cage, not in the oval office. The ghost spent a week with me, and I didn’t shut up the whole time. I learned more about myself in that week than I’ve learned in thirty-five years of living. Even now, I think of the ghost’s quiet questions, questions that had always been in my head but had never escaped, and my tongue gets dry.

The ghost tried to interview my sister, but Jo wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Anyway, he rewrote the book. Just a few minor adjustments. Punched up the prose. Punched up the title. That’s publishing talk. Changed the title to Killer Cassady.

As it turned out, I didn’t write what was in that book, but it all came out of my mouth. I’ll admit that. And even with everything down in black and white, it came out of my mouth over and over. I toured twenty cities in fourteen days, and my mouth was dry in every one. Then I spent a week under the lights with the syndicated television mud-slingers. And everywhere I ran in those three weeks— lips flapping, sucking air and trying not to sweat as much as I tried to smile — my dead father rode me piggyback.

The book tour climaxed on the day before Father’s Day. That was the publisher’s plan — as if people were really going to chose a book like mine as the ideal gift for dad. I took my last round of questions in a Chicago studio. Sitting there with a guy who wore too much Jovan Musk and a gaggle of housewives who seemed fascinated and repulsed in equal parts.

Mr. Jovan Musk worked up to it, lobbing a volley of soft questions my way. And then he asked me, “Do you think your father exploited the fact that he was a convicted murderer to further his career?”

I didn’t even blink. I took it just the way Dad would have in one of his movies. I answered in a solid, studied whisper, equal portions of sorrow and shame in my voice.

And then Mr. Jovan Musk hit me with the follow-up question, the one that surprised me.

I took that question Dad’s way, too.

The next time I saw him, on television that afternoon as I passed through O’Hare, the talk show host was wearing a couple of Popsicle sticks on his nose. The sticks were held in place by a generous smattering of gummy white tape. He looked kind of like Lon Chaney, Junior as the Mummy.

And then I got off of a plane in Reno and it was all over. Or it should have been. I drove to Lake Tahoe, stopping only for gas and a quick bite. I had to use folding money because my credit card had expired while I was on tour. That’s the great thing about expense accounts. Live on one long enough and you lose track of your own money.

I awoke the next morning in the A-frame cabin I’ve owned for ten years, only to find the red light on my answering machine flashing wildly. I hit the play button and listened to the first three messages. Two local TV shows and a radio call-in show in Sacramento, all wanting me to keep on talking.

I cut the messages short. It was Father’s Day, but somehow I didn’t want anything to do with my father. Three weeks carrying him on my back, a year digging him up while I wrote the book. I didn’t even want to look in the mirror, because I didn’t want to see his eyes staring back at me.

So I climbed out of bed and went downstairs.

And my father was sitting there on my couch, watching me, his hard little eyes peering over a copy of Killer Cassady.

His pouting lips twisted into that signature grin that always spelled trouble in his films. Wounded, hateful, proud — all at the same time.

“At least you spelled my name right,” he said, rising from the couch. He straightened his jacket — very shiny sharkskin, the color of a hammerhead — and loosened his skinny black tie, and the way he moved he might as well have said I’m ready to get down to business.

I hadn’t said a word, but my throat was dry. I didn’t know what to say, but my mouth came open.

And then I realized that his voice was all wrong.

“Who are you?” I asked.

He dropped the book as if he’d suddenly discovered that he was holding a poisonous snake. He grinned. “Sorry to give you a scare. I couldn’t resist it. I’m not I ghost. I’m your brother.” I didn’t say anything, so he kept on. ‘Yeah. It kind of surprises me, too, reading this book. I mean, you’ve done a lot of research. I don’t know how you could have missed me.”

I fished around for something to say. “Dad never mentioned — ”

“Damn right, he didn’t. Christ, would you go around rubbing your kid’s nose in your dirty laundry?” He laughed high and nutty, more like Richard Widmark than Dad. “But maybe the old man told you that kind of stuff. Maybe he bragged about the little actress he knocked up in ’58. Maybe you just forgot to put that in the book. If that’s the deal, it’s a shame, because you make the dirty stuff sing. Like that part where Dad kills your mother’s boyfriend? Smashes the little Frenchman’s head against the kitchen counter until the tiles crack? Man, I felt like I was there.” He cracked his knuckles. “Man, I could almost taste it.”

“I did a lot of research,” I said. “Court transcripts. Crime scene photos. Things people hadn’t taken time to examine.”

“Yeah. Sure. I get that.” He glanced at the book. “But you’re in there, too. I mean, I’m a slow reader. I’m only a hundred pages or so into it. But the old man has already smacked you around a good dozen times. That part where he puts on the gloves and says he’s going to teach you how to box? That was brutal. And Dad did throw a mean left hook. Remember the way he took out that pretty boy in Wrong Turn?” He stopped, looked at me kind of funny. “Amazing how you’ve still got that cute little nose after the beatings the old man dished out.”

“Look,” I said, knowing I had to change direction. “What do you want?”

He didn’t answer. In the bedroom, the phone rang. We listened as the answering machine picked up, heard the tinny voice of a producer leaving an eager message. The producer had been after me for weeks, following my book tour trail. He wanted to remake Dad’s best-remembered movie, Wrong Turn, and he wanted me to star.

When the producer finished, the man who claimed to be my half-brother pointed a thumb in the direction of the phone. “I guess I just want in on the action. I mean, we’re family. We ought to look out for each other. Maybe you don’t want to make that movie. Maybe you could put in a good word for me. You got the book out of Dad. It seems like I should be due for something.”

I stood on the stairs, and my hands became fists, and I couldn’t stop shaking. He was pressing my buttons, just dancing over them lightly, pressing just hard enough. The way people used to press Dad’s buttons in the movies, bip bip bip, time after time until he finally smiled his little smile and exploded.

The way they pressed Dad’s buttons in Wrong Turn.

“I think you’d better go,” I said.

He was smirking, staring at my fists as if they were no more dangerous than feather dusters. He cracked his knuckles again. Thick ridges of scar tissue the color of spoiled meat seemed to swell before my eyes. “You’d better slow down.” He rubbed his nose, which was flatter than Dad’s, mocking me, and for the first time I noticed the net of bone-colored scars under his thinning eyebrows. “See, I’ve followed in the old man’s footsteps, too. Oh, I haven’t been in front of any cameras, unless you count cameras that shoot mug shots. I haven’t made any dog food commercials, like you have. I’ve followed the other path. I’ve bashed heads against kitchen counters. But just like you, I haven’t quite lived up to the old man’s example. You haven’t made a movie; I haven’t cracked any tile.”

I couldn’t help it. His battered nose and scarred knuckles suddenly didn’t matter. I started toward him, wearing Dad’s smile.

And I was surprised by how quickly he moved away and opened the door. “You think about it,” he said. “I don’t need an answer today. You think about family.”

“I don’t need to think about anything.”

“Oh yeah you do.” His gaze found the book. “Because there’s more to this than you and me. There’s our darling sister, too.” He shook his head. “Remember the things Dad used to do to bad girls in the movies? Remember how he’d get them to do the things he wanted? Remember what he did to that two-faced piece in Wrong Turn? And our sister… what you wrote about her… oh, man, she’s one bad girl.”

He had finally pushed the button that stopped me cold. The best I could do was whisper, “You leave Jo out of this.”

“Now Tommy m’lad, you didn’t leave Jo out of this, so why should I?” He stopped in the doorway for a moment, completely confident, not sparing me a backward glance. “Anyway, you think about what I said. You get in touch with that producer. I’ll give you today to get it done, and I’ll call you tomorrow. And then you’d better tell me what I want to hear, or else I’ll be driving down to San Francisco. I don’t like long drives, and I’ll be thinking of our darling sister the whole time.” He laughed. “And thanks for the free roost. This has been a relaxing three weeks.” He started across the pine porch. “Your mail’s on the kitchen table. There’s beer in the fridge.”

I just stood there. Dad pressed down on me. Whispered in my ear. Told me what to do.

But I didn’t do anything.

My brother was gone.

There was another phone in the kitchen. I had to look up Jo’s number in San Francisco. We weren’t on the best of terms. Hell, that was sugar-coating it. We hadn’t talked in five years, not since Jo got into trouble for smacking around her live-in lover. The incident made the papers, and the woman took her revenge in the courts. Lesbian battery case. The bastions of political correctness in S. F. seemed shocked by the very idea — like gay couples were immune to that kind of trouble.

Jo came to me then expecting a sympathetic ear, and all I could do was make smart remarks. “Like father, like daughter.” The girlfriend hit Jo for a good bit of cash, and Jo got off with probation and counseling. The last I’d heard she was involved with one of San Francisco’s gay theatre companies, both acting and directing.

That was pretty much it with us. Until now. I dialed her number and was rewarded with an unfamiliar voice which informed me that Jo and Gabrielle weren’t at home; I could leave a message at the sound of the deafening applause.

Theatre people. Tres cute. But this wasn’t something to do on tape, no matter how anxious I was. Who knew what Jo would do if I came at her out of the blue with a sixty-second warning? She’d most certainly seen Killer Cassady. By now, she’d probably read the chapter where I connected her propensity to violence to the old man. If that were the case, I figured that my sister would be ready to eat me for breakfast.

I told myself that Jo was tough. She was indeed like the old man. She could take care of herself.

I cradled the handset. I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know just what. I looked across the room to the place my brother had stood. Just doing that scared me. I made my way to the door, cautiously, as if I expected him to jump out at me. I closed it, locked it, remembering the steel in his eyes and his scars.

Maybe he wasn’t my brother. Half-brother, I should say. Maybe he was just a nut. But even as the idea took hold, I knew it wasn’t true. He had the look, all right. He had the genes. And I had twenty-four hours to figure out how much he knew, and what he could do with that knowledge.

I opened the fridge. The six-pack he’d left me was waiting. I popped a brew and sat down at the table. The key to the drawer I rented at the post office lay on the unfinished pine, along with a large stack of mail.

The bastard hadn’t been kidding. He had picked up my mail.

And, looking at the envelopes, I could tell that he’d opened it.

Three weeks worth of mail. Not much for someone who lives as quietly as I do. I don’t go in for magazines and catalogs, mainly because my work involves travel. With the drawer, which is fairly large, I can miss a couple of weeks and still not have to notify the P. O. and everyone who works there that I’m out of town and my place is ripe for burglary.

Go ahead, call me paranoid.

Hurriedly, I flipped through the mail. Mostly bills, junk. But there was a letter from the producer which had been forwarded by my agent, and a quick once-over told me that two things were missing from the large package — a contract and a script for the Wrong Turn remake.

That set me to thinking. Maybe my half-brother hadn’t known about the movie. Maybe he had come here with a simple shake-down in mind. I cursed myself for leaving the key to the post office box where someone could find it. My mistake had probably given the idiot ideas.

I sorted through the rest of the mail and found nothing else of interest, but I wasn’t finished. I wanted to be thorough. I dumped the garbage can in the sink and sifted through the trash.

Hamburger wrappers. Beer cans. Crumpled cigarette packages. And, finally, another envelope.

It bore no return address. I sifted through more junk and found a torn chunk of a letter from my credit card company. I remembered my drive from the airport, the clerk at the gas station informing me that my card had expired.

The torn letter promised that “my new card was enclosed.”

But the card wasn’t in the garbage.

I knew where it was — in the wallet of a guy who thought that he was one step ahead of me.

So, my credit card had been stolen.

I breathed a sigh of relief. My half-brother was that stupid. He had fallen victim to the old man’s genes, all right. Punch your way out of problems. Snatch the easy opportunity. Don’t think ahead.

That was the propensity that always got Dad into trouble. He’d snatch the fast answer because he couldn’t think ahead, and then he’d end up sinking deeper into trouble. It happened to him in Wrong Turn. In that movie, he kept the dead guy’s wallet because he was afraid of a murder rap. And then the shrewish hitchhiker entered the picture and tried to force him into assuming the guy’s identity so they could make a fast buck. Dad couldn’t think at all after she came into it. Just like that night in the kitchen when he caught my mother with that French dandy who specialized in playing the smartass kind of guy Dad loathed. He couldn’t think at all, seeing that guy with his wife. He could only react.

That’s what my half-brother was doing. He was reacting, running the Wrong Turn playbook, but he wasn’t thinking.

I was thinking, and fast. I called the credit card company’s 800 number and asked for a rundown of my latest charges. Several local restaurants turned up. Soule Domaine at Crystal Bay. Bobby’s Uptown Cafe at Incline. Better joints than I figured my doppelganger for.

He was staying at the Cal-Neva Lodge on the north shore, the place Sinatra had owned before he made the mistake of inviting Sam Giancana to be his guest. It was a nice place, a tourist place. That didn’t seem to fit my half-brother, either.

He’d had a room at the Lodge for two weeks.

I hung up the phone. I had more questions.

And the answers were just eight miles away.

I stood in the lobby of the Cal-Neva, staring at the stuffed bobcat on the big granite fireplace, wondering if the big cat’s last memory was sticking his nose somewhere that it didn’t belong.

I wandered over to the main desk. An old man was trying to weasel a couple of comp rooms out of the desk clerk. The old man’s young squeeze was busily tapping her toe. The trouble threw me off. I didn’t want to deal with a surly clerk.

“Mr. Cassady?” A young woman stepped behind the desk. “Tom Cassady?”

“Yes,” I smiled, playing it simple.

“I just want to say… ” She blushed. “I think it was great what you did to that ass on television. I’ve been waiting for something like that to happen since the first time I saw him.”

I kept the smile. “I just thought it was the right thing to do.”

She nodded. “Well, it’s great to have you as a guest. If you need anything, my name’s Cheryl. You just ask for me.”

I explained that I was picking up the tab for some relatives who were staying at the hotel. They were registered under my name, and I’d forgotten their room number. One fumbling description of terminal absent-mindedness later, I had a key. Obviously, Cheryl hadn’t run into my brother during the two weeks he had been registered. I began to wonder if he was really staying at the Cal- Neva, or if he had indeed stayed at my cabin, as he had claimed.

I detoured past the bar — a round room paneled with rich wood. Mirrors above reflected the room’s harsh artificial glow and a stained glass dome high in the ceiling filtered the early afternoon sunshine, so that the bar was a strange mixture of hard and soft light. I heard a high-pitched Richard Widmark laugh rise over a chorus of clinking glasses. Saw the blushing cocktail waitress a second before I spotted the man in the hammerhead-colored suit circling her, his hard little eyes trained on her ample breasts, a long-neck beer bottle with a well-peeled label clutched in his right hand.

I turned on my heel and didn’t stop moving until I hit the elevator button.

I was about to slip the key into the lock when the door to Room 602 swung open.

She was wearing a white robe and holding an ice bucket. A smile almost crossed her face, but she spotted my nose before it could take.

“How did you figure it?” she asked.

“It wasn’t hard. The Cal-Neva seems a bit toney for our friend. And the bills he rang up at Soule Domaine and Bobby’s Uptown were pretty extravagant for a guy who seems to subsist on hamburgers and cheap beer when he’s practicing his home invasion skills. It looked to me like he’d had some serious help with the wine list. Just domestic, or did someone named Gabrielle lend her expertise?”

My sister took a step backwards. “You’re still a smartass.” She turned away. “Gabrielle didn’t work out, if you want to know. Just like the smart little Frenchman didn’t work out with mom. I mean, after a while all that quick wit shit just wears one down, y’know?” She shook her head, and a strand of dusky blond hair fell over her eyes, confident eyes that betrayed not one ounce of surprise. “I guess that was one thing you got right about me in your weighty tome. No one ever quite lives up to my expectations. I outgrow people. I outgrow habits. I move on to other things.” She slipped a slim tie from a lampshade, curled it between her fingers as if it were an exotic snake. “I like to push the envelope.”

I followed her into the room and slammed the door. “I think you’ve got some explaining to do.”

Jo laughed. “Me?” She pointed at a copy of Killer Cassady which lay open on the nightstand. “I’ve got some explaining to do?”

I wasn’t going to let her pull me off course. “I want my movie contract. And the script. I want my credit card.” I sucked a deep breath. “I’ve made some money lately. Sure. I’m not ashamed of it. I’ll pick up the credit card tab. We’ll call it square. You and Mr. Wrong Turn won’t have to worry about wasting any time in court.” Jo looked at me, Dad’s lips twisting on her pretty face, Dad’s eyes hard and unamused beneath her carefully plucked brows. “Did you really think you could get away with it, Tommy? Did you really just think I’d let it be?”

“You’d better,” I said.

She laughed at that. Her laughter was just like Dad’s, a hissing bray that branded me the most pathetically stupid thing on two legs. “I’ll tell you how it’s going to be,” Jo said. “Because we had it all set up, Tom and me. That’s his name, too, you know.”

I let it go. Best to let her get everything out of her system.

“I was the one who hooked the producer,” Jo said. “I met the guy at a party in San Francisco — he’s gay, but discreetly so. Anyway, I convinced him to remake Wrong Turn with my half-brother in the lead. I’d play the hitchhiker, because that would really push the envelope. A little taste of incest couldn’t hurt the box office. He thought that was real sweet.”

“And then my book was published.”

She nodded. “Right. And suddenly my little incest angle was very five-minutes-ago?” She ran a rough finger along my nose. “Maybe the producer thinks your nose is cuter than my Tom’s.” She reached for the phone. “But you’re going to change his mind; aren’t you, Tommy?”

I stared at the phone, at my sister. Jo’s pouting lips twisted into that signature grin that always spelled trouble in Dad’s films, the same expression my half-brother had worn when he rose from my living room couch with a copy of Killer Cassady in his hands.

I hated that look, even when I saw it in a mirror.

“Do you know the number, Tommy?” My name hung there in the quiet room, dripping with sarcasm. “Or do you need me to dial it for you?” I didn’t move, and Jo lifted the handset. “And you thought you were so smart. Thought you’d come up here and set what’s left of your family straight, buy them off for the price of a couple dinners.” It was dark in the room, but her eyes were shining laser-bright.

“Hey now… let’s think about this,” she said suddenly, replacing the handset. “Did you ever think of becoming a producer, Tommy? Just how much money did you make from that book, anyway?”

Jo’s eyes burned with confidence. She was trying to cut me down to nothing. My hands were shaking. I smelled my own sweat.

And then my world went black and white. I entered the world of Wrong Turn. I entered Dad’s world. I was in some cheap whore’s apartment, and I was beginning to understand that a complete idiot had outsmarted me once again. Jo’s eyes were slicing me to ribbons while her laughter marked me a sucker.

And then Jo wasn’t laughing anymore. My fingers locked around the phone. The cord bit into her neck, and I tugged on the phone like a fisherman playing a big one on a whispering reel. A tight smile bloomed on my lips as I tried to cut off my father’s hissing laughter. The phone was hard and reassuring in my hands and I couldn’t wait for the cord to do its work because then I was going to smash the whole thing against my sister’s face, my father’s smile.

Her eyes weren’t shining now. They were almost empty, nearly colorless. And she wasn’t laughing anymore. She couldn’t laugh; she couldn’t even scream.

And then the door to Room 602 swung open.

There — live, in living color — stood my father.

Even in that moment I knew the man was my half-bother. The hammerhead-colored suit told me that. But it was startling to see his face twisted just like Dad’s had been during the climax of Wrong Turn, a mask of violent desperation. And I froze up seeing him so close. He wasn’t a man in black & white on a television screen, but a man with a face red from alcohol and hurt and hate and pride, a man with knuckles the color of spoiled meat.

He was the same man who stepped into his kitchen one night and found a charming Frenchman fawning over his wife.

He wasn’t thinking straight, that man.

He wasn’t thinking smart.

And I realized with complete clarity that I hadn’t been smart in coming here.

I had barely dropped the phone when he laid into me. I should have known it would be a left hook. I should have seen it coming, because I’d seen it coming in all those movies. But I didn’t see it and it dropped me.

He wasn’t finished, of course. He took me into the bathroom, where it seemed there was an acre of gleaming tile.

I remember the sound of a human skull used as a hammer.

I remember my sister’s screams as she pulled Mr. Wrong Turn off of me. I remember her yelling something about a goose and a golden egg. And then I remember the hatred in her eyes. “You take this as a warning,” she said. “You stay out of our way. Maybe, if you do that, we’ll stay out of yours.”

The man with my father’s face nodded solemnly, cracking his knuckles and grinning the way a man grins after a satisfying meal. “Well,” he said by way of conclusion, “it looks like Dad finally gave you a beating, after all.”

I passed out for a while. Then I stumbled to the bed and curled up in the bedspread. Somewhere in the middle of the night I made it into the bathtub and cleaned up. I soaked in the steaming water for a long time, eyes closed — the right one swollen shut — and when I opened my eye the bath water was pink with blood.

At the end of Wrong Turn, Tom Cassady is driving. But he’s got no place to go. All his life, Tom Cassady had nowhere to go. His road was one straight line. He killed a man with his fists and did time for it, but that didn’t change him. He lost his wife and family, but that didn’t change him. He got another wife, and he was the same way with her that he was with my mother, but wife number two was afraid to do anything about it. And he went back to work in the movies, where he pretended to lose his grip, pretended to hit people, shoot them, hurt them in a dozen inventive ways.

It wasn’t much of a stretch.

One day Tom Cassady didn’t wake up, and the thing that had burned so hot inside him was dead. But it wasn’t gone, nor was it forgotten. I remembered it. So did Jo. We remembered it every time someone discovered who our father was. We remembered how that simple knowledge could make a person’s eyes shine, the way the desk clerk’s eyes had shined in the lobby of the Cal-Neva when she recognized me.

We all want to do that. Put the shine in someone’s eyes, I mean. Sometimes, what we’ll do for that particular thrill amazes me.

I guess that’s why I wrote the book.

I was five when Dad went to San Quentin. Jo was seven. As far as I know, he never laid a hand on me. Never touched Jo, either. I don’t remember the man, to tell the truth. He never visited us after his release, never even sent a birthday card. Most of the time I spent with him, he was on a television or movie screen and I was eating popcorn.

The book was a lie. That’s what Jo and my half-brother had been able to hold over my head. I didn’t know my father. But the book was something else, too. It was the little piece of Dad that I had carried inside me for thirty-five years. It was the shadow of anger that always churned in my gut when I tried to assure myself that I was a thinker. Every key I pushed on that computer keyboard was a little jab. Every word I spoke on that book tour was a little knife. And when I cold-cocked that talk show host, I was thinking that I was going to make a million eyes shine all at once, all across America.

Because the talk show guy had pushed my button. He’d asked about Dad exploiting his crime in order to boost his career. And then he’d held up a copy of Killer Cassady, and he’d said, “Like father, like son?”

I couldn’t answer, because the thing that had burned so hot in Dad took hold of me then. I could only react, and for a short instant everything felt so very right. It was the way I felt when I wrapped the telephone cord around Jo’s neck. The way Jo felt when she saw our half-brother standing there in the doorway. The way he felt when he tore into me.

I don’t know why I thought I could steer clear of Jo and get away with the whole thing. But I took the chance. I dug Dad up. I brought him back.

But I knew, soaking in the bathtub in Room 602, that it was time to bury him. After thirty-five years, it was time to get off Dad’s road.

I had to make sure that I was off it for good. I got out of the tub. My wallet was on the floor and I picked it up. A few other credit cards were now missing, but they hadn’t touched my cash. I took the money, dropped the wallet on the floor.

I managed to get dressed. My face didn’t look too bad, if you could ignore the shut eye and the gash above it. My lips were puffy and kind of purple, but my nose looked in pretty good shape. Overall, the swelling almost had an odd symmetry. I didn’t feel very hot, but seeing that my brother hadn’t managed to crack any tile with my head made me feel a little better.

I didn’t drain the pink water from the tub. I didn’t wipe the blood off the tile. I didn’t hide the bloodstained bedspread. My wallet lay on the floor, stuffed with I. D. that bore the name my father had given me, and I didn’t pick it up. Maybe somebody would make something of it. Maybe they wouldn’t, but I had a hard time believing that. The California-Nevada state line bisected the Cal- Neva. Maybe it bisected Room 602. If that were the case, the FBI might enter the picture.

It was late. I didn’t want to think about it.

I passed the desk, showing my left profile. My right hand covered my swollen eye while I pretended to take care of an itch on my forehead. It didn’t matter. No one noticed me. I got to my car without attracting any attention.

I pictured my half-brother and my sister driving down Dad’s road, running south toward Hollywood, wearing Dad’s signature grin on their faces.

I knew they were heading for a wrong turn.

I drove north.