Resurrection of the Unholy by Hardy Jones                                       

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            Two weeks before my tenth birthday, Dad had his first heart attack. He was sixty-five, the year was 1982, and I was not surprised.

            My lack of surprise, I know, is shocking. But one of my earliest memories of Dad is him saying: “I won’t live to see you finish high school,” and after nine years of hearing that dark prediction, I wasn’t surprised when he faced death.

            Dad was a retired truck driver and needed to work to feel like a man again, and ironically he got that most stereotypical boyish of jobs: a paper route. Mom, his seventh and eighth wife, had recently taken a job at the mall up from our house, where she was the leading salesperson in a department store, and Dad’s World War II era upbringing and male pride could not allow him to let his wife be the bread-winner.

            True to his lifetime of driving trucks cross-country, Dad bought a five-speed Mazda pick-up with a diesel engine for his paper route. Every morning at four, he and Mom woke, had coffee in the dark kitchen, then met their papers at the nearby convenience store, where they folded the papers and on rainy mornings, like that  December day in 1982, they folded and stuffed the papers into plastic bags.

            Their route covered five sections of town, giving Dad the largest route of any paper deliverer in the city of Pensacola , and he always worked his way back to the house, ending with a rent-controlled apartment complex five blocks from our house. The apartment complex was two-story, and usually Dad took the top floor, climbing the stairs and walking along the outdoor terrace dropping papers in front of the doors.

            “Your coffee gave me indigestion,” Dad said, stopping in front of the complex.    

            “I’m fine,” Mom said. “You just don’t want to walk in the rain.”

            “It’s not the damn rain. It’s my stomach, and my left arm aches too.”

            Mom looked at this old, proud man, and she knew he was telling the truth. Without another word, she took the bundle of papers in their plastic bags, and with her short legs – Dad’s pet name for her was Bench-leg gal – she climbed eight sets of rusty, slippery stairs, delivering the papers, and then hurrying to Dad. When she made it back to the truck, Dad’s face was pale as flour, and he lay across the seat. The rain falling on her head, Mom’s greatest fear of marrying an older man had come true: he’d died and left her by herself to raise me. She walked to the driver’s side door and opened it, which roused Dad, who, in a muffled voice said: “You’re gonna have to drive.”

            “You know I can’t drive a stick.”

            “You’re gonna have to because I feel too damn bad.”

            Breathing heavily and bouncing on her toes, Mom told herself: It’s only a few blocks to the house and the morning traffic isn’t out yet. Seeing how pale Dad was, she thought he should go to the hospital. But she knew Dad believed a hospital was only a dumping point before the cemetery, and if she suggested they go to the hospital it’d only start a fight.

            “You’re gonna have to move over so I can get behind the wheel,” Mom said. She pulled Dad up by his left arm, and he wailed in pain and gritted his teeth, but despite the pain and commotion, he sat up. She reached inside the truck and lifted his right leg over the gearshift, then did the same for his left leg. Dad breathed shallowly in short bursts. Mom was thankful the truck was already started, and all she had to do was put it in Reverse and turn around, which was going to be hard enough by itself. Grrrrr-eee. She missed Reverse. “Work the stick-shift for me,” she said.

            Having spent over half his life changing gears in eighteen-wheelers, Dad blindly dropped it in Reverse. Mom, who hadn’t worked a clutch since she was a little girl on her daddy’s farm, eased off the clutch, and the truck lurched backwards, shaking, bobbing, and dying. Mom mashed the clutch to the floorboard and turned the key; the engine, smooth and quiet, started.

            “This time give it some gas so you don’t shake me to death and make me puke.” 

            She gave it more gas; the back tires squealed, and the truck shot back; she hit the brakes, squealing the tires again before they hit the privacy fence that separated the apartment complex from the mall where she worked.

            “You trying to tear up my truck or kill me?”

            “I’m trying to get us both home. Now be quiet and shift into First for me.”

            Dad did, and Mom cut the steering wheel hard, determined to turn and head out of the narrow parking lot without having to back up again. She missed the full dumpster by inches, and she was glad Dad’s eyes were shut, and he didn’t see how close she had come to scraping it with the front fender. She stayed in First gear in the parking lot, turned right and immediately had to stop for a red light. At the light, after seeing that no one was coming, she made a right turn, and headed home, glad she only had two more turns to make.

            The engine roared and strained and Dad said: “Press in the clutch and I’ll put her in Second.” And with the familiarity that comes from being married more than a decade, in unison they did their parts and effortlessly shifted the truck into Second gear, which was where the truck stayed until Mom made a left turn on to our street. Our house was first on the street, merely fifty yards after the turn, and Mom navigated the truck smoothly through the open gate and parked it in front of the side door, the door that entered the kitchen.

            I always woke after I heard my parents leave in the morning and used the time to lie in their king-size bed and watch TV. Mom knew I’d be there, and she called for me to get out of their bed. “Your dad doesn’t feel good and needs to lay down immediately.”

            Even in the dim light of the rainy morning, I saw how pallor Dad was.

            “What’s wrong?” I asked.

            “Your mama’s coffee gave me indigestion,” Dad said, taking off his shirt and letting his trousers drop to the floor, and then he fell into the very spot I had just vacated. “Get ready for school, and you get ready for your precious job.”

            “You need to go to the hospital,” Mom said.

            “Not for indigestion. Now go on,” Dad said.

            We left him for a moment, but I was unaccustomed to seeing Dad show any weakness, so I went back to his room. “How do you feel?”

            “Like a Peterbilt is parked on my chest. But it’ll pass. Don’t worry about your old man.”

            Old man. That phrase stuck in my head because that was what Dad was, and I knew Dad was, but up to that point only in an abstract way. When kids at school bragged about their fathers having fought in Vietnam, I shut them up by saying that my dad had been in World War II on Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, places in old war movies and in our history textbooks. But seeing Dad hurting and out of sorts in front of me made Dad old in a real way. A way I didn’t want to have to face.

            Dad shut his eyes, breathed deeply, and motioned for me to leave the room, so I went to the bathroom to clean up for school.             

            Dad lay in bed and thought of his father who had died of a heart attack in 1955, and Dad wondered if that was what he was experiencing. Fifty-two years of smoking and a lifetime of red meat – a rare steak with a bloody center was his favorite – had they caught up to him? My boy never met his grandfather, Dad thought, and I’ll never see him finish high school. These thoughts along with the pain in his chest resonated in him and made him feel like vomiting. That’ll be good, Dad thought; it will get all this nastiness out.

            Dad gingerly placed his feet on the floor and sat up. His head swam and the bedroom spun in front of him and then went black. Dad shook his head and shut his eyes; his mouth watered, and he feared he wouldn’t make it to the bathroom in time. He clamped his mouth shut, stood blind to his surroundings, and made his way as quickly as he could to the bathroom. He bumped into me as I stood over the toilet poised to pee, and he spit a hot clear liquid into the toilet.

            “You all right, Dad?”

            “Just an upset stomach.” Dad didn’t want to tell me what he feared: that he was dying, dying like his father had, perhaps dying as his son might in another five decades. All the Jones men died due to their hearts, and that was a fact of our existence that Dad was not prepared to pass on to his son.

            Dad wretched again and more hot clear liquid spewed from his mouth, only this time the act dropped him to his knees.

            “Mom! Dad’s passed out.”

            Mom, in the kitchen preparing oatmeal and toast for breakfast, turned off the stove top and ran the short distance to the bathroom. In front of the toilet on his knees was her husband, who had claimed he only had indigestion. She knew and feared it was more than indigestion. She hoped now Dad would see that for himself.

            “Help me get him up,” she said. “We’ll take him to the bedroom and you dress him and I’ll run start the car.”

            “You’re not taking me to the hospital,” Dad said, his head hanging down and rolling like a rag doll’s.

            “You’re sick, Dad. And you need to see a doctor.”

            “They’ll just take our money and tell me it’s indigestion,” Dad said.

            We sat him on the bed, propped him against the headboard, and Mom, paying no mind to Dad’s request, got her purse from the closet, extracted her keys and ran out of the house. I wanted to do what Mom had told me, but I didn’t know how to go about it and simultaneously go against Dad’s wishes. For what seemed hours, I stood in front of Dad, who sat there, his face pale and his eyes closed, waiting for something to happen.