Swing Me Till Summer
/Casey DW Jones
That April afternoon, atop the slide in the backyard at Sandy’s daycare, Brady and I plucked fresh leaves from the maple tree and collected them in a plastic beach bucket. Brady dared me to eat one, and I did. It got stuck halfway down my throat, but I gulped it down. I dared him to eat one, too, and he did, and then he dared me to eat another one. In the end, I ate fourteen leaves, and Brady ate thirteen. While trying to take down number fourteen, he threw up on his denim overalls, so Sandy took him inside to clean him up.
I lay alone, back flat on the grass, watching the leaves tremble and the clouds drift, until Sandy yelled out the back window that my dad was there. He didn’t normally pick me up, but Carl was out of town for work and Mommy was studying. He trudged down the steps as I ran toward him with excitement. He crouched down and I wrapped my arms around his prickly, stubbled neck.
“Daddy! Daddy! I want a piggyback?” I said.
“I don’t think so, Ethan,” he said and pried my fingers from his shoulders. “Daddy’s had a long day.”
As we walked to the red pickup, I told him how many leaves I ate and that my stomach felt achy. He said eating leaves was stupid and if I was going to puke, I should puke before I got in the truck, which might not start anyway.
He popped the hood and pulled out the hammer stashed under the driver’s seat. He banged the solenoid and darted back to thrust his arm through the window and wiggled the yellow-handled screwdriver jammed into the ignition.
Nothing happened.
“Shit, piss, and fuck. Just my fucking luck,” he said.
“Can I try, Daddy?” I asked.
He took his Winston out of his mouth and flicked it to the sidewalk. He arched his chin up toward the sky and smoothed out his ponytail. “Let me give it one more go, buddy.”
Still nothing.
“Goddamn it all to hell,” he said and struck the door panel with the hammer. Daddy wobbled from the curb into the gutter from the impact, and his sunglasses slipped sideways. He pushed them back up onto his head, gritted his teeth, and regripped the hammer. He gave the truck another long stare before he spun around and thrashed at the trunk of an oak tree on the boulevard, punctuating each strike with a different swear word. Shards of bark popped and whizzed into the lawn and street. A couple kids on bikes slowed down, but quickly sped off when Daddy told them to mind their fucking business.
“Well, partner,” he said. “Let’s see what you got.”
He hoisted me up on the front bumper and showed me where to tap. I already knew, though, because this always happened anytime he tried to take us anywhere, but he had a hard time remembering things, like our birthdays, so I figured he just forgot I knew that. He sat behind the wheel and counted to three. I gave it a couple gentle kisses with the hammer, and the starter clicked and the engine whirred and sputtered and settled into a deep hum.
Daddy scratched his head and snorted. “Maybe luck does run in this family after all!”
*
Cooper stood on the steps of the elementary school in his camouflage jacket, tossing a wad of paper in the air to himself. The principal, wearing a beige cardigan and bow tie, pointed at his watch when he saw us pull up in the truck. He disappeared around the side of the school building and Coop ran over to us. I opened the door for him, and he barked at me to scoot over and punched me in the arm until I was straddling the hump.
“Settle down, now, Coop,” Daddy said.
“Bite me,” Coop said, and slammed the door shut. With that the engine cut out.
“You little turd,” Daddy said. “Goddamn it. I don’t know why I even try with you two.”
“Mom says you don’t,” Cooper said.
“Well, I’m officially done trying with this truck today,” Daddy said. “Out.”
We walked to the bait shop and Daddy used the payphone to leave a message at our Mom’s house. Then we went to the park across the street. The squirrels chased each other through the grass and twisted up the maples, and pools of black ants congregated in the patches of dirt where the grass wasn’t sprouting yet. The breeze picked up and the chill blast gave me goosebumps. I had forgotten my jacket at Sandy’s, but Daddy said it was my job to remember those things and I’d have to get it back tomorrow.
I ran for the swing set as soon I clocked it, while Cooper made for the giant slide shaped like a shoe. Daddy sat on the empty merry-go-round and put his hands in his pockets before laying down. Cooper ran down the slide standing up, even though Mom had told him not to a thousand times. He picked up a big stick and pretended it was a machine gun and sprayed us with imaginary bullets.
“Daddy, can I have a push?” I said.
“You’re getting too big for a that, aren’t you,” he said, drifting, and dragging his feet in a slow arc in the dirt. “Five-year-olds shouldn’t need help.”
“Hey! I am not five until August. I want to go really high, and I can’t get that high on my own. Please.”
Daddy sighed and walked over. He grunted and pushed me so high the chains popped, and it felt like my stomach shot out through my feet, so I screamed at him. He corralled me to a stop and said he was sorry. As soon as my heartbeat settled, I asked to do it all over again.
“OK, but this time while you’re up there, grab a piece of those fluffy cotton candy clouds for me,” Daddy said. “They look yummy.”
I clawed at the blobby clouds in the sky and pretended to eat the sweet tufts of clouds, occasionally throwing one behind me for Daddy to eat. We giggled together for a few minutes, until Daddy needed a breather. He took a seat in the swing next to me. Some meadowlarks whistled, and we even heard an owl, even though it was the middle of the day. But we didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, he crouched down in front of me and said he had something important to tell me.
“I just want you to know that, even though you’re moving away, I’m still going to be your daddy, and I’m gonna miss you. A bushel and a peck.”
“What? We’re not moving!”
“Your mom didn’t tell you?” He stood up and kicked the dirt and twirled around. “Well, goddamn it all to hell, I’m sorry. Yes, you all are moving with your Mom and Carl out west, to where his people are.”
“And you’re not?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I have to stay here and look after the farm.”
“But you hate the farm. You stay it’s a curse, and that always say you’d rather be playing music.”
“That’s just stuff I say when I’m mad. The farm’s been part of our family forever. I can’t just leave it.”
“Aren’t you part of our family?” Daddy lit a cigarette. The wind picked up and swept my curls across my face. I raked my shoes through the dirt under the swing, spit into it, and raked some more. “I take that as a no.”
“The situation is...complicated,” he said. “I asked your mom to let you visit in the summertime. And at spring break and Christmas.”
“Does Coop know?”
“Oh, yeah. He knows all right. Hey, don’t look so sad. You like Carl, right? I mean, even I think he’s a pretty solid dude.”
“I don’t know,” I said. Carl moved into our Mom’s apartment last month. He bought us some Star Wars action figures and ordered pizza for us when Mom was at night class. But he also said weird things when Mom wasn’t around. A few days earlier, I broke one of his whiskey glasses when I threw a fork in the sink and he told me to sleep with one eye open that night.
“You should be excited,” Daddy said. “You’re gonna have a good life out there. Big house. Big yard. Bicycles and toys galore. A minivan. Maybe even a Nintendo. I can’t compete with that. But you will always be my son, you hear me?”
He patted my shoulder and turned my chin toward him. I forced a smile. Three geese wobbled toward us, honking and pecking at the ground. Cooper leapt from the top of the slide and yelled, “Take no prisoners!” before he army-rolled into the flock of geese, who squawked away.
From across the park, a melody warbled toward us, B-I-N-G-O. A rusting white van splotched with peeling stickers of frozen treats pulled up to the curb alongside the park.
Cooper sprinted to the ice cream van, ignoring Daddy, who yelled at him to wait. Coop took a crumpled dollar bill out of his tube sock and bought a Bomb Pop.
“I want a Bomb Pop too. Can I have one? Please.”
Daddy opened his wallet. A gum wrapper and some receipts fluttered to the ground. “Sorry, I don’t have any. I even used my last quarter to call your mom.”
“Coop, will you buy me a Bomb Pop?” I yelled. “I’ll pay you back.”
“Even if I had another dollar, I wouldn’t give you one, dork wad.”
“It’s not fair,” I said, and crossed my arms. Helplessness washed over me, and I fought back tears.
“I have an idea,” Daddy said to me. “Why don’t you grab some more of that cotton candy out of the sky.”
“I don’t want an imaginary treat,” I said. “I want a popsicle.”
“I’m sure Carl will buy you all the popsicles you want later,” Daddy said. “But right now, there’s a sky full of cotton candy up there, all puffy and ripe for the pickings.”
“But that’s not the same,” I said.
“Well,” Daddy said. “Sometimes, you have to make do with what you got.”
“Oh, shut up,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me, Webdon. Just shut up.” I’d never called him by his first name before, and I never called him Daddy again after that day.
Webdon looked at me the way he had looked at the truck and the tree on the boulevard earlier that day. But he didn’t strike me, even though a big part of me wanted him to. That would have made the rest of my life a lot easier. Instead, he pulled me backwards in the swing and flung me into the sky.
I closed my eyes, and little flashes of us spiraled out of my body: Webdon gripping a bullhead while I worked a treble hook out of its mouth under the creek-side cottonwood shade; Webdon steering the tractor through the brome with me bumping on his lap; watching the lightning fork over the pasture below, while we listened to a Led Zeppelin cassette in his truck; Webdon starting a fire from dried cow chips, to warm me up after I’d fallen in the pond.
To this day, I still see him, sometimes, when I close my eyes, plucking his guitar on the front porch under the oaks at his farm, which has long been sold. I can smell his wood-burning stove, his Winstons, the fish guts wiped on his jeans. I can see the rips in his gown at the VA. Hear his screaming nonsense echoing through the hospital hallways the last time I saw him.
Webdon planted his hands firmly into my back, before he pushed me away from him, as hard as he could.
Author’s note: This piece is somewhat autobiographical in nature. One of my earliest memories that I have is of eating leaves on top of a slide in the backyard of somebody's in-home daycare. My family also had several vehicles that didn't operate under normal circumstances, so tapping the solenoid was something I became familiar with, and even one of our vans had a screwdriver wedged into the ignition. I wanted to try to capture what it's like for a child to, for the first time, understand that one of his parents isn't perhaps who they want them to be, and that they never may be ... I moved away from my biological father at an early age, much like the young protagonist, so a lot of the emotions running through this piece are ones that I sat with and came to know intimately from a very early age. Disappointment. Anger. Grief. And a whole lot of things above the head of a four-year-old but still there in the veins.
Casey DW Jones grew up in the high desert plains of Southwestern Kansas. He holds an MFA from Hamline University, where he served on the Water~Stone Review fiction board. His short stories have recently appeared in Stoneboat Literary Journal, New Limestone Review, Peatsmoke Literary Journal, and Sundog Lit. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize in fiction. Casey is the founding editor of Casino Literary Magazine. He currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
