The next morning and it seemed that the sun itself was just getting up, and my father nudging me awake quietly so Amy could sleep on.
“Get on up, boy. Breakfast is served.” He handed me a beer, which I took. He already had one. We went back out to the porch.
Even Hound Dog wasn’t up yet. We were.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked him after we’d been seated. The look I gave him advised the truth, and he obliged.
“Twenty five years, boy. Twenty-five years I’ve been doing my part. Playing the father to your son. And now we’re done with that. After this, that is. This is the last father/son thing I’ll ask of you. Maybe the first.” He looked at me as he said the next part. “Now you’re a man, and it’s time for something else. After this we’re just two guys who’ve met. I hope we’ll be friends.” He finished his beer and just threw it to the ground. It bounced off the porch and into the yard.
“Well this is a good start.” I told him. He looked at me for a while trying to decide if I was kidding.
Hound Dog nudged open the door just ahead of my wife, and they both sat down next to us. I expected my father to ask her to leave, but he didn’t.
“What I have to say involves you too, Amy, even if to a lesser extent.” He told her.
“Now hold on old man,” that’s what I called him when I was upset, “what involves me involves her equally.” Amy silently agreed with this.
“I figured. And so here we all are, and here it is.” He leaned back in his chair. “I want you to go on a trip with me. If you will. ‘If the accident will.’”
“Hell, I didn’t even know you knew how to read.” I told him.
“I thought the same of you. Never expected you to get that.” He said. “See how much we have to learn?”
I laughed like hell again.

The next day we were packing our suitcases in the car and it finally occurred to me to ask him where we were going.
“Everywhere.” He smiled and slammed the trunk shut. “Get in.”
We waved goodbye to Amy and Hound Dog as they watched us leave from the front porch, smiling and waving back.

He made me drive; telling me he still had a little hangover to sleep off. He hadn’t stopped drinking since he arrived. I’m not even sure if he’d slept.
The only directions he gave me were ‘west, boy’. Fine by me.

He woke up a few hours later and took off his seatbelt.
“Ain’t you gonna need that, man?”
“Nope. Now I can see ‘em coming. A life without risks is no life at all. Skydiving’s no fun with a backup chute.” He unhooked my belt too and I sped the car up. “There you go!” He told me.
He’d actually taken me skydiving once, and now I had a sick feeling in my stomach wondering if I’d had a backup chute at the time.

“So your wife seems nice.”
“Yea, she’s something else.” He was driving now, and I was trying to sleep a little. I still had no idea how far we were going.
He jabbed me with his elbow and passed me a flask of whiskey. I sat up and had a hit. Of course the seatbelt came right off.
“How’d you two meet, anyway?” He took the flask back and tipped it up.
“When I was in the Army. I was in Germany and so was she.”
“You were in the Army?” He really didn’t remember. Maybe he never knew. I don’t recall if I’d told him.
“Yep. Wasted a few years there. I thought it might make me a man.”
“Did it work?” He passed me back the flask.
“I might be a man now, but it wasn’t the Army that made me one.”
“What did?”
“Time, same as everyone else. Men, anyway.”
He laughed about this for a while. “Good answer.” A few more minutes passed before he spoke again. I didn’t have any questions for him. The same thing that made me a man would answer the only question I had.
“She doesn’t speak with an accent.”
“Sure she does, couldn’t you hear it? That southern twang?”
“I meant a German accent.”
“Oh, well of course not, she’s from Georgia.” She’d been on vacation when we meet. I’d told her that I was too, and had also promised to call her when I got back home. It was a year and a half before I called, when I got out of the Army. She wasn’t even pissed. That’s when I fell in love with her, almost on the spot. She just said that I must be wonderfully relaxed after such a long vacation. I told her that I was getting there.
I married her one year later.

A few more miles went by before he got curious again.
“When were you in the Army?” The flask was empty and he was trying to pour more booze into it from a bottle, spilled some on his lap, and gave up. He threw the flask into the back seat and hit the bottle directly.
“Right after high school. What, did you think I went to college?”
“Yea, I guess I did.” He was probably telling the truth.
“You never wondered why you never got a bill?”
“No. I figured you got a scholarship or something. You were always reading those books.” It was a widely misunderstood untruth that people who didn’t read held that anyone who read was smart. That was ridiculous. It didn’t matter if you read, it mattered what you read. And also if you paid attention. You can read all the John Grisham books you want, but at the end of the day you’ll probably just end up dumber than before. No offense to him personally.
Of course my father did read, so he must have not been paying too much attention.

“You ever kill anyone?”
I looked at him for a minute before I answered. I guess I’d never talked to him about too much of anything before, certainly nothing personal, so I told him. “Yep, I suppose I have.”
“How was that?”
I shrugged my shoulders and told him, “Didn’t bother me much.” Nothing bothered me too much, but that was when I first knew. Realizing that it didn’t bother me too much didn’t even bother me too much.
“I never killed anybody before. I never did to much of anything before.” It didn’t look like it bothered him too much. Maybe it ran in the family.

He pulled over so I could drive. He handed me the bottle once I took off again. “Bottle’s for the driver.” He told me. It was half gone. I supposed it would be his turn to drive again when the bottle was empty, and when we stopped it would probably be near a liquor store.
“You know, I’m not a very big liquor drinker.” I wasn’t. Mostly beer and wine for me, and if I did drink the hard stuff it was usually mixed with something and I never drank it all night or anything. Just a few and then back to the beer. I could have gone for a beer right then just to chase it down. I could drive on beer all night.
Thank God we were in the middle of the desert and there was no one else around. It was flat land everywhere for miles, otherwise I’d have killed us. Well, at least three people if I’d hit someone else instead of just driving into a ditch- me, my father, and the driver of the other car. I was really tooling it, man. And of course no seat belts for us.
“I’m gonna kill us if I keep this up, man.” He just shrugged his shoulders and turned up the radio. I guess it didn’t bother him too much. Skynard was on.
Who was this guy? I guess that’s what I was there to find out. It was looking like the answer was ‘drunken maniac’.

We finally stopped about two days later, both of us drunk and hung over at the same time and still drinking, at a motel somewhere in northern California.
“It’s just another hour’s drive ‘till we’re there, but I want to get there in the morning so we can see everything better.” He told me as we stopped.
I still didn’t know where we were going and hadn’t asked.

In the morning we didn’t even eat breakfast. Both of us were too hung over for any of that, but we did get another bottle. I didn’t know how this man was doing it. I could only keep going by sheer force of will alone. He would not beat me.
Thank God he drove. It was all I could do to just sit upright.

He was right about the hour. We were there before I knew it. Off the highway and down a one-lane road that turned into a dirt road a few miles out. He was still hauling ass, even around the corners. I was almost too sick to be terrified but not quite. Thank God for the bottle. I drank even harder around the curves. At least if we crashed our bodies would be burned beyond recognition by our insanely high blood alcohol levels. Maybe they’d never know it was us. Amy could think I died in a decent manner.

“How the hell are you doing this, man?” I finally asked him.
“What, the driving?” he asked me as he took another hard right, almost without looking. “Or the drinking?”
“Both! Fucking any of it! What the hell, man!” I was almost out of my damned mind.
“Only scientists care about how. You should be a little more philosophical about it. The why is the real question. About anything at all.” He looked me in the eyes the whole time he was talking, still taking insane curves and all. He just smiled and laughed.
“Man, pull over, I got to piss.”
“Hold it for just a little bit longer.” He told me.
Finally he slammed on the brakes as we stopped about an inch from an iron gate, which I got out and opened.
“A cemetery?”
“Yep.”
“Who died.”
He looked at me for a minute before driving on. “My father.” He told me.

I’d never met my grandfather.

He drove at a respectable graveyard pace through the cemetery. Saying nothing, looking straight ahead. When we finally stopped he just got out and started walking. I followed a few steps behind.
He stopped in front of a marker about halfway down a row, standard in every sense but for the name. The last name. Same as mine. First name too. My father must have realized I’d noticed.
“I named you after him. For a while I hated you as much as him.” He looked me in the eyes for the next part. “I was wrong about that. Hating you, I mean.”
After a few more minutes of silence I asked him, “When did he die?”
“Last week. 72 years old. Don’t know how he made it past 50, with the drink.” He took a pull from the bottle he’d brought and handed it to me.
“Why did I never meet him? Why bring me here now?” I held the bottle without taking a drink.
“Still got to piss?” he asked me.
“Yea. Pretty bad.”
“Good, me too.” He unzipped his fly and started to piss. I looked at him for a second before he gave me the ‘go ahead’ look, so I did.
When we were finished we zipped up and passed the bottle back and forth, standing over my grandfathers freshly dug and freshly pissed on grave.
“I’ve been waiting to do that for fifty years.” He finally said. “I’m glad you could be here with me.” The bottle went back and forth. “I’m glad you were here for it.”
He did a little dance on it before we left.