Outside the gusty winter blustered away, and I knew it would soak my pant cuffs and add to my torment. I opted to wear double socks in my clumpy overheated boots. Mom had packed us both snacks. A riot of colors lay blurred in the twisted plastic bag cocoon.

“Share these with your father,” Mom said. “I need to lie down, and this cold is killing me.”

“Just take it easy, don’t throw out my room,” I said, adding, “I’m serious.”

Mom had this consistent habit of throwing things out of my room in sporadic bouts of amnesia or some weird game where I had to guess which memento she had sacrificed to indifference.

Don’t throw out my room was my latest jingle in a series of catch phrases I was coining. After I conducted weekly inventory, it was usually revealed that some minor object or trinket had gone missing, banished, and snatched up into an ethereal nothing and now floated in the home in sad purgatory.

We drove in silence with sparse radio traffic reports and one coffee stop. “What time are we supposed to be there?”
“Half past five,” Dad said.

—

Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Tom’s house was blanketed in predictable snow, resembling a structure you’d see in a sketch on gift shop greeting card. The snow had subsided and now for the first time that day, the sun emerged bright and real.

Dinner was still a few minutes away, my Aunt Rebecca informed us. It was our first time at her new house, which was located in a remote wilderness, miles from the highway in Kingston.

After the cold snakes of scarves and hats, coughs and galoshes were removed, I detected the bright harsh tones of my Aunt’s middle-of-nowhere country home. The hallway walls were filled up with family photographs. They might as well have been portraits of aliens: I had no idea who most of these people were.

The dining room table was set, all crisp and angelic, long and empty, awaiting clutter and population. In the living room my Grandparents were sitting on a couch. A small bevy of snacks had been put out on a small table. The way Dad said “veggies” drove me nuts, I found it degrading to them somehow. The house was filling with gravy scents, high octane red wines and the pithy scent of cranberry sauce minced alchemic with my ghastly cologne, borrowed from Dada’s bureau that morning.

“So how was the drive up Dave?”

“Fine.”

The three-hour drive with peppered traffic was slow at times so I put in the only tape that Dad ever seemed to tolerate, which was the Barenaked Ladies . He would expunge little half-syllables of what I believed was approval that would ping-pong in the car; his effort to loosen perhaps, an emotional muscle. He had the same type of half-cocked interest when I started listen to the Beatles ten years earlier.

Dad sat down and leaned in for a piece of celery, while his sister, my Aunt Rebecca, brought him a glass of wine, calling him Dave over and over again and speaking in a tight, loud pitch as she entered the room with her five-foot frame.

I had a miniscule glass of ginger ale with ice and watched Dad take the first sip of his adult beverage, as more relatives appeared in the living room – some still coming, some in the washroom, some still in mid-greeting.

“There you are my son,” Grandfather said beaming, grinning all Holy and slow as a Vampire, shifting on the couch looking a bit uncomfortable in his sweater and priest collar; restricted to the standard the threadbare he’d worn for sixty years.

“And school? How is school? University now?”

“School is fine.” I didn’t know what to say. “And your sister? Mom?”

“Mom is sick, has the flu,” I said. That much was certain.

And then, just like that just like history does, like a flagpole exploring soil, Dad was deep in the conquering.

“If Diane wants the house, if she tries to take it from me, I’ll tie her up in court for years,” Dad began to say, shifting his weight, half a cracker awkwardly juggling in and out of his jaw.

The vegetables and roast’s steam coaxed things; sleeves, sweater collars, rims of eyewear. We had only been in the house for a short while before things got messy; before I balled up into a myriad of clammy symptoms, hands hurting, dry throat, nauseous stomach, thick salty tears aborting, and the swell of a panicked, bull-like breathing pattern.

“I’m in control; she’s not going to get the house, I’ll keep her tied up in court for years; if she wants to leave me, she’ll get nothing,” Dad concluded, legs crossed like a talk show guest, and now awkwardly stuffing that final bit of cracker and cheese into his mouth, again the piece of food seemed almost afraid to enter. He spoke as though he had something to prove.

I began to tear uncontrollably. A sickness flamed up in my stomach and dried out my heart. I wanted to kill him.

My embarrassing tears pulled me up from the couch and told me to leave the house, to cry in the snow and in the afternoon, and so I put on my jacket and boots and went to the car to smoke a cigarette.

I shuffled in the passenger’s seat, smoking sickly, jarred at his callous words. I stared blankly at the scenic house; white and blue tones, simple stone brick base and smoked and panicked. Things would change they would sure change the storyline would swerve and change.

That second that little Moment that time trickle: Dad was all Real Estate, sip of drink, cracker and cheese cough.

My heart was on fire when I saw Dad opening the front door. He was walking toward the car. What the fuck?! He opened the driver’s side seat and slide in… I could smell Dad; the worst stink known to mankind. I felt sick with rage; the cigarette not enough, his words still barbed and bleeding in my throat.

“Thought I’d join you,” Dad said, sitting beside me in the car. Was he just going to sit down? I’ll never know because his presence spurned me to leap from the passenger’s seat and, like I’d seen so many times on police dramas, they’d race around to the driver’s seat and open the door…

“How could you say that shit about Mom!” I said with a gusty shout, and pulled him out by his winter coat collar. “Asshole!” I threw him down on the ground. “You fucking piece of shit!” As he tried to get up, I kicked him twice hard in the stomach; bits of snow exploded around each leg thrust.

 The words would get erased. Just me kicking him. That’s it.

—

“YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!” I blasted with hateful fangs.

The gargantuan winds had subsided. All that remained was a cold and brutal afternoon; the fake sun hanging benign.

I was dead and could no longer breathe. I went back into the house, smelling of half a cigarette and smarting with hate and frosted skin. Dad entered shortly after, I was still taking off my shoes and putting my coat on a hook. He motioned to Aunt Rebecca, coughing, holding his ribs, “I need to lie down.” And so he did, on a couch in a spare room.

“It can be difficult with family sometimes,” grandmother offered in a soft, unspooling murmur, unaware of what went down outside; the wintry, abject unravel. I felt sick.

The three-hour drive home loomed ahead. What would Mom think? What would we tell her? And Holly…

Why did I agree to drive out here with him?

I was still fuming in silence as I clenched my teeth, sucking up the remaining ginger ale and ice.

“Smells great Rebecca,” Tom offered.

“Tom, why don’t you finish setting the table!” Aunt Rebecca shouted. Tom looked at us with an impish smirk, rising from the couch to assist his wife.

Dinner was swelling now. It was time to eat.

To this day I knew I was right, that I had done the right thing, that Dad had started on a venting rant and that I was right there, watching him monster it up, talking over everyone in his chalky voice, represented virtue.

Dad eventually made it to the dinner table. I said nothing, save for the necessary table responses like, “That’s fine,” as I watched the dense mashed potatoes cascade from the serving spoon to my plate. My uncle returned the large silver spoon to the hot white mound, and then pulled out a fresh snowball-sized clump of carbohydrates for the next plate.

Dad and I avoided eye contact. Grandfather said grace.

“Amen” everyone repeated. I ate fast.

No one else knew the real, I thought. No one cared about the meaning of things; the way it felt. I just wanted it to be over.

—

We drove in silence, nearly three hours, back to Toronto. The road was imperfect; cuts and nicks, bumps and snow swells. Reverse. Acceleration.

Besides the cold wind that trickled in and the intense empty highway’s infinite darkness, the drive home was put on mute, permanent, save for the sound of lighting and extinguishing cigarettes in the culpable dark.

—

Nathaniel G. Moore is the author of Wrong Bar. This excerpt is from his forthcoming novel Savage 1986-2011 forthcoming with Vancouver’s Anvil Press in the fall of 2013. Visit his website at http://savageanovel.tumblr.com