Free Vengeance by Eric Prochaska

shrugged off any blow he dealt and stared him down to let him know it had better be the last time he pursued that misguided path. I may even have responded in kind, the force of my blow nowhere near as devastating as the shock he would feel at knowing his reticent offspring could turn the tables.
    Luckily, we didn’t need to find out what would happen. He put his elbow up on the padded top of the door panel, a little crowded against the rolled-up window, and leaned his cheek into his palm. His eyes blankly scanned the passing houses on his side.
    At the next light, I asked for directions again. “Head out toward the mall,” he said. When he saw me turn on the right blinker, he said, “No, not Lindale. Westdale.”
    We were only a few miles from Lindale Mall, so I had assumed that was where he meant. Westdale Mall was twenty minutes away, back near my motel.
    The tension didn’t ease any during the drive. So I was glad when he turned on the radio, even if the station he chose wasn’t to my liking. It kept his mind occupied and saved us from feeling the need to fill the time with pain-staking conversation.
    As we drew near the mall, all I could see were used car lots, the mini-golf course, and self-storage businesses on either side of the divided road. He could tell I was about to drive right past the bar, so he extended his arm at a diagonal to point out my corner of the windshield. “Right there,” he said.
    I had to swerve into the turn lane and brake abruptly to avoid having to go up to the next crossing and make a U-turn. But there was a gap in oncoming traffic, so our momentum kept us sailing across the oncoming lanes until we crunched into the gravel lot. I’d raised a cloud of dust that overtook the front of the car as we parked next to a cargo van with heavily oxidized paint.
    “Jesus. I’m glad I took my fucking heart pills.”
    “Sorry.”
    “You should have pulled around back. No one parks out front.”
    “I didn’t know.”
    I listened to myself apologizing, getting caught off guard by the old man, and winced internally. He opened his door and lifted his legs, one at a time, under the knee and set his feet on solid ground. As he did, I looked over the wall of corrugated tin in front of us. Whenever I had passed by before, I had thought it was a warehouse where one of the adjacent businesses housed junkyard dogs or shelved surplus inventory. The vertically mounted panels of metal sported a galvanized finish that revealed some surface tarnish and rust around the fasteners that held the panels to the structure. There was a single window cut about five feet high near the steel door. The window was maybe two and a half feet wide and about one and a half feet high. The glass was so thickly black it could have been a pane of obsidian stone polished to mimic a window. The only evidence that it was translucent was the faint glow from a neon sign that filled its dimensions and read “Andys” in cursive, and lacked an apostrophe.
    I got out and made it to the bar’s door as my dad was swinging his car door shut behind him. I locked the car with the remote and turned to open the door to the bar. The handle was a gate pull, attached to the door’s sheet metal face with heavy scars of welding beads. Surface rust as fine as powder came loose in my hand. The door didn’t budge as I pulled. I gave it a stronger yank, but just strained my shoulder in the effort.
    “You sure they’re open?” I said.
    “Put your weight into it. Like you’ve got some balls.”
    I hated when he said that to me. When other men said it to each other, it was with an air of humorous derision. But my father meant it with malice. He had always been ashamed of me for not being more like him. And he liked to remind me of it.
    I braced myself, spread my stance for leverage, and grasped the handle with no slack in my grip. One sustained effort brought the door away from the iron jam with a shriek from the parched hinges. The door moved