Free Mortal Fear by Mortal Fear

quilts, and old suitcases. The day I met him, I compulsively bought two of his pieces and in the after-sale chatter learned that he was originally from Mississippi. I don’t know why his work affects me so strongly, but I don’t question it. Things actually worth buying are rare.
     My father’s taste in clothes was exceptionally bad as a rule—mostly synthetic fabrics in loud colors—but he bought this jacket while serving as an army doctor in Germany in 1960, the year I was born. All I can figure is that the store was out of electric plaids, leaving him no choice but to buy this jewel for warmth. Twenty years later, he gave it to me after I remarked on its quality, and I wore it often. Ten years after that—a year after he died—I carefully boxed it up and sent it UPS to Tampa, Florida, where Smith kept it four months, then shipped both the jacket and the sculpture back to me with a bill for fifteen thousand dollars.
     It was worth every cent.
     Why, I don’t know. Maybe because the jacket says something to me about the permanence of the apparently transitory. For what is that jacket but an articulated memory? As surely as the jacket is here with me, my father is here with me. And for all his failings, which were many, he was a man of principle when it came to the big things. And I know, as I sit here worrying about the consequences of my recent actions, that I am doing only and exactly what my father would have done—the consequences be damned.
     Maybe that’s Miles’s problem. He had no such anchor. Miles’s father left him and his mother to fend for themselves when Miles was five. People said Miles was his spitting image, but since Mrs. Turner kept no pictures of “that no-count SOB” in the house, we could never confirm or deny this. He certainly didn’t look like his mother, a petite, harried woman. He was tall even as a child, all bones and tendons, which in a small town usually leads to school sports. But Miles was apathy personified. When one coach tried to talk him into playing basketball, he just stared until the man walked away. That was a common adult reaction. Miles’s eyes are grayish blue, and you can’t see anything in them if he doesn’t want you to. They’re like background pieces in a stained-glass window. Nothing there but space. Yet, like the sky, they can come alive with everything from thunderheads to blazing blue light.
     According to local legend, Miles’s father was a mean drunk and a gifted engineer who helped the Army Corps of Engineers figure out how to stop a bad sand boil in the levee west of Mayersville in 1973. Because of that, people said Miles got his brains from his father. Miles hated them for that. He hated anybody who ever said it. I think he took it as some sort of insult to his mother, who was no rocket scientist, to be fair to the gossips. Yet Annie Turner was clever in her own way. She never remarried (or even divorced, for all the town knew) but she did manage to become involved with certain solvent gentlemen (railroad men, for example) who happened to be passing through Rain during times of financial distress.
     Miles never talked about any of those men. When they were around, we knew to stay away from his house from noontime on. Once, shooting squirrels out of season, we ran into the Turner kitchen to grab some .22 bullets from the drawer and saw a man standing in the kitchen with his shirt off, drinking milk from a half-gallon carton. He looked old as the hills to us (at twelve) and had milk dribbling down his chin. When we got outside and Miles fumbled the bullets into the .22, his eyes sort of glazed over and he took a couple of steps back toward the house and before I could spit he put two bullets through the top pane of the kitchen window. When I crashed into his back and pulled him down, I felt his shoulders shaking like the flanks of a horse run almost to death. I had to hit him in the face to get the gun away, and then we ran like hell until we