Free Vintage Ford by Richard Ford

his eyes and opened them wide, as if he was trying to fasten his attention to what we were doing, but did not find it easy. The blind smelled sour but also smelled of his whiskey, and of whatever ointment Renard Junior used on his thick hair. My father had already gotten his black-and-white shoes muddy and scratched, and mud on his tuxedo pants and his pink shirt and even onto his forehead. He was an unusual-looking figure to be where he was. He seemed to have been dropped out of an airplane on the way to a party.
    Renard Junior did not answer back to my father calling him “Grease-Fabrice,” but it was clear he couldn’t have liked a name like that. I wondered why he would even be here to be talked to that way. Though of course there was a reason. Few things in the world are actually mysterious. Most things have disappointing explanations somewhere behind them, no matter how strange they seem at first.
    After a while, Renard produced a package of cigarettes, put one in his mouth, but did not light it—just held it between his damp lips, which were big and sensuous. He was already an odd-looking man, with his star shirt, his head too big for his body—a man who was probably in his forties and had just missed being a dwarf.
    â€œNow there’s the true sign of the
yat
,” my father said. He was leaning on his shotgun, concentrating on Renard Junior. “Notice the unlit cigarette pooched out the front of the too expressive mouth. If you drive the streets of Chalmette, Louisiana, sonny, you’ll see men and women and children who’re all actually blood-related to Mr. Fabrice, standing in their little postage-stamp yards wearing hip boots with unlighted Picayunes in their mouths just like you see now.
Ecce Homo
.”
    Renard Junior unexpectedly opened his mouth with his cigarette somehow stuck to the top of his big ugly purple tongue. He cast an eye at my father, leaning forward against his shotgun, smirking, then flicked the cigarette backward into his mouth and swallowed it without changing his expression. Then he looked at me, sitting between him and my father, and smiled. His teeth were big and brown-stained. It was a lewd act. I didn’t know how it was lewd, but I was sure that it was.
    â€œPay no attention to him,” my father said. “These are people we have to deal with. French acts, carny types, brutes. Now I want you to tell me about yourself, Buck. Are there any impossible situations you find yourself in these days? I’ve become expert in impossible situations lately.” My father shifted his spectator shoes on the muddly floor boards, so that suddenly his shotgun, which was a beautiful Beretta over-under with silver inlays, slipped and fell right across my feet with a loud clatter—the barrels ending up pointed right at Renard Junior’s ankles. My father did not even try to grab the gun as it fell.
    â€œPick that up right now,” he said to me in an angry voice, as if I’d dropped his gun. But I did. I picked the gun up and handed it back to him, and he pinned it to the side of the blind with his knee. Something about this almost violent act of putting his gun where he wanted it reminded me of my father before a year ago. He had always been a man for abrupt moves and changes of attitude, unexpected laughter and strong emotion. I had not always liked it, but I’d decided that was what men did and accepted it.
    â€œDo you ever hope to travel?” my father said, ignoring his other question, looking up at the sky as if he’d just realized he was in a duck blind and for a second at least was involved in the things we were doing. His topcoat had sagged open again, and his tuxedo front was visible, smudged with mud. “You should,” he said before I could answer.
    Renard Junior began to blow on his duck call then, and crouched forward in front of his peach crate. And because he did, I crouched in front of mine, and my