Free Hydroplane: Fictions by Susan Steinberg Page B

inside of a rented car.
    And I would say, I don't want it.
    And he would say, You don't know what you want.
    And I would say, I know what I don't want.
    And he would say, You don't know shit.
    And my brother would put his headphones on and turn up the metal and rock his head in a retard way.
    And my father would look at me.
    And the feeling in my gut.
    When my father called England and France he waved us away and mouthed, England, or, France. He said, Go.
    Outside goats ate the parking lot weeds. My brother and I threw sticks to the goats. They were so stupid these island goats. Sometimes they ate the sticks. And sometimes they came running at us like dogs.
    The ladies' husbands pulled into the lot. They waited in their cars in cotton shirts. They smoked cigarettes down to the filters and flicked their filters to the lot. All of the goats would go after the filters. The husbands never laughed at the goats. Their windows were open even in rain. Fast-speed island music played. When the husbands waved we looked at the ground.
    On the low-lit street, the date ran off.
    Sure she ran, my father said. She was scared, he said. She's young.
    He wore a ski cap, he said. Imagine. A coat.
    On an island for God's sake, said my father.
    He said, Who wears a coat on an island.
    Then pow, said my father.
    Sure she ran.
    Brass knuckles, he said.
    Lousy island, he said.
    He pulled my nose.
    Eat your eggs, he said.
    Maryland. Shaped like a gun. The city not far from the trigger. A house in the city. A bedroom in the house. A bed in the bedroom pushed to the wall. Under the blanket. Morning in winter. A streak of light piercing the curtain. Dust forming in the streak of light. A single dot of dust. Its flight across the room.
    On a ride in the sports car, it was me and my father's date in the back.
    The best looking one in the factory, he said. Boy look at that body. Out to here.
    Look at her body boy, said my father. You won't see that in the States.
    My brother sat in the front. He read a comic and listened through headphones.
    The spitting image, said my father slapping his back. A son of a gun.
    This was a Friday. He drove us to a dinner in the city. We took the highway. We were speeding to get there. The lady drivers were the worst said my father. The ladies shouldn't even have a license, he said. Watch this, he said as he cut one off. Watch this.
    They swore in Spanish at my father.
    He said, That'll show them to mess with a genius.
    A man in San Juan grabbed my father's shirt. He punched my father's face. My father fell.
    So this was my father lying in the street. My father with a bloody nose. Blood on his best cotton shirt. My rich white American father, an inventor of something that let people breathe.
    This wasn't your father.
    I wish it had been yours.
    Then I could say the right things to you and we could have a drink and maybe laugh at the thought of your father all fucked up in the street.
    But your father would never have been lying on some low-lit street in San Juan.
    Your father would never have been bleeding like that, like some stupid fucker, just bleeding like that.
    I asked my father about the dust.
    I said, Where does it go.
    He said, It goes in the filter.
    It gets crushed, he said.
    Then what, I said.
    He said, It stays in the filter.
    But what if it gets out, I said.
    He said, It won't get out.
    I said, But what if rats in the landfills chew through the filters.
    He said, Rats cannot chew through the filters.
    I said, Yes they can.
    He said, No they can't.
    I said, Yes they can.
    He said, Do you want to be poor.
    There was a day my brother and I were looking through my father's failed inventions for no good reason other than my mother would die and she wanted the house clean, and we were cleaning the room where he kept his failed inventions, his assembled bits of wire and foam and string and metal, and we laughed pretty hard when my brother picked up some crazy looking object, an object that looked like a robot built by