Free The Late Bloomer by Ken Baker Page A

dangerous.
The police suggest that my mother take me, Kyle and Kris to a safe place where we can hide out until they find the suicidal gunman that my father suddenly has become.
    Mom picks us up from school and drives us straight to Gramma’s house in Silver Creek. She cries the whole ride as we listen to the all-news radio station, anxiously expecting to hear breaking news about a mad gunman on the loose.
    Mom parks the car behind a thicket of bushes in Gramma’s backyard, so that our gun-toting Dad won’t know we are there if he comes looking. We close the curtains and turn off all the lights. As we have always done at Gramma’s, my brothers and I play war with plastic toy soldiers. The whole time I chew my nails while envisioning the carnage that will happen when he barges through the front door waving his pistol like Al Pacino in
Dog Day Afternoon.
    Kris doesn’t understand why we have to hide from our own dad. I just tell Kris, who is seven, that we are only playing a game, sort of like hide-and-seek, only with Dad. I take him to the back bedroom, shut the door and place a flashlight on the carpet. We play war in the shadows until he falls asleep.
    Later that night, “the game” ends. The cops call to inform my mother that they have found him sitting alone in his car by the lake. He hasn’t shot himself; he is alive.
    Dad spends the night detained in the county jail, under observation and heavy medication. The next day, a psychiatrist evaluates him. Being the bullshitter that he is, Dad probably convinces them itwas all just a big misunderstanding, that his wife, in order to get him arrested, made up the whole story.
    Dad is renting an apartment and I don’t see him for a couple of weeks, although we talk on the phone almost every day. He never mentions the incident. Neither do I. I’m afraid that the most important man in my life may say something unbecoming of the most important man in my life. And we leave it at that.
    â€”
    My father once told me, “The best thing about marrying your mother was that Lyndon Johnson couldn’t draft me into Vietnam.” Apparently, Kevin didn’t get the message, because when he was twenty-one he impregnated his fifteen-year-old girlfriend. A few months later, I attended the young couple’s wedding ceremony in the Hamburg village hall, Kevin’s teen bride packing a beach ball under a maternity blouse almost as loose-fitting as the judge’s robe.
    Not too long after, Kevin, who by then had snake-and-dagger tattoos etched up and down his thick arms, found God in a Pentecostal church.
    Kevin may be a born-again Christian, but apparently free baby-sitting doesn’t come with eternal life in heaven. Whenever his young wife isn’t around and Kevin’s away working for minimal wage as an aide at a home for the developmentally disabled, I take care of the baby, Josh. I am only fourteen and I spent the last few years as a sort of father figure to Kris, but I really don’t know what I have gotten myself into until it is too late.
    I quickly learn how to breathe through my mouth while changing a diaper. Forcing a fourteen-year-old boy to scrub his little nephew’s butt crack with Baby Wipes is an effective, if underused, form of birth control. By the time I am sixteen and in a relationship with my first serious girlfriend, Jenny, I am fully fearful of equally fucking up my life by becoming a young daddy, like my brother Kevin, like my father.Changing dirty diapers provides just another reason for me to train even harder in hockey so I won’t end up stuck in Buffalo the rest of my life.
    Hockey continues to be my escape. And my success not only belies my unathletic body, it comes in spite of—and probably in reaction to—the mess that my family life becomes when my parents finally put themselves and all of us kids out of their married misery and split.
    The day my parents split for good, on a cold