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He had nowhere to be. Crow said that the store would be closed for the rest of the day while he got Val settled in, and Mike didn’t have to be home for hours. He was free, the time was his, but he still felt like an escaped prisoner trying to outrun…
Outrun what?
He had snapped out of the fugue in Terry Wolfe’s room over an hour ago, and much of what he had seen—
Seen
Dreamed
Imagined
—was still with him. Mike did not know how to think about what had happened there in that room; there in his head. Mr. Morse was as real to him as someone he’d actually met. He could smell the earthy stink of dirt on the man’s clothes, could smell his sweat. In his head the crystal purity of Morse’s silvery guitar notes played over and over again with such precise clarity that Mike was sure that if he had a guitar of his own he could pick out the opening of that song.
Cold wet air abraded his cheeks, making them burn both cold and hot. Despite the chill there was a trickle of warm sweat wriggling down his spine and gathering between his buttocks as his legs pumped and pumped.
What Mr. Morse had said was impossible. More than impossible. Terry Wolfe was the mayor of Pine Deep. He was Crow’s friend.
John Sweeney was Mike’s father. He knew that; everyone knew that. Big John Sweeney, who was a stand-up guy. Every time Mike ran into one of his dad’s old buddies, that’s what they said. Big John was a stand-up guy. You knew where you were with him. When the moment broke and you needed someone at your back, Big John was always there. One of the good guys.
Boy, it breaks my heart to break your heart, but Big John, good man as he was, he wasn’t never your daddy.
Those words put iron in Mike’s legs and stoked the fires that made his feet blur as he pumped up and down on the pedals.
The second after the fugue had snapped Mike realized he had been holding two fingers of Terry Wolfe’s hand, and had snatched his own hand away like he’d been holding a hot coal. For five whole minutes he just stood there, staring at the bruised facing of the battered mayor, searching for any hint of truth in what Mr. Morse had told him.
Big John didn’t know it but another mule been kicking in his stall.
Mr. Morse didn’t have to translate what that meant, and Mike didn’t have to ask if Morse meant that Vic had been fooling around with Mike’s mom. It wasn’t Vic. It was never Vic.
Mike had turned and lurched into the bathroom in Terry’s room and spent at least as many minutes staring into the mirror. The curly red hair. Terry’s was red-brown. Mike’s would be. In time. The same blue eyes. The same cheekbones and jaw. Mike’s was softer, younger, but it would change.
There was a little of Mike’s mom in his features, just enough so that Mike did not look like a clone of Terry Wolfe—and it was thirty years since Terry had been a boy—but there was too much of Terry’s face in his own. Way too much.
Big John wasn’t never your daddy.
That might have been okay. If it was just a case of Terry Wolfe being his real father, it might have been okay. As Mike rode on past the fields of dying grass he knew that it might have been okay. Awkward, sure. A little weird, definitely…but in the end it would have been okay. A Hallmark moment come next Christmas, maybe.
Mike’s life had never been filled with many Hallmark moments and this wasn’t going to start a new tradition. This wasn’t an After School Special, either. This was late-night scary-movie double-feature stuff. It was damn near Star Wars, and as he rode Mike thought about that, trying to find a splinter of fun in it; but it was like looking at the welling blood from a skinned knee and trying to glean from it the fun of bright colors.
Morse had gone on to say, Boy, I want you to listen to me for your own soul’s sake, even though what I’m going to tell you might take away some of the little love for this world you got.
Yeah , Mike thought, you got that shit right . A car came out of a side road and instead of braking Mike poured on more speed and shot across the mouth of the road inches ahead of the bumper, the horn shrieking at him as the driver stamped down on the brakes.
There was precious little in the world Mike loved. His mom, maybe, but in light of the things Mr. Morse had told him that was even more confused and polluted than ever. Mom belonged to Vic, and Vic belonged to…
Believe me when I tell you that I mean you no harm. Morse had said that, and Mike believed him—then and now—but it didn’t change a thing. Big John Sweeney was no longer his father. At most he was a guy who was around for a bit when Mike was born, and died before Mike had ever gotten a chance to form a clear image of him. Anything Mike had ever believed about how Big John’s strength and dignity, his honor and good nature had all been passed down to Mike, filtered perhaps through Mom’s gin-soaked genes, was all for shit. Big John wasn’t never your daddy.
Terry Wolfe was. And at the same time, he wasn’t.
Mike raced on, trying to outrun the insanity of it all, the sheer unscalable impossibility of it all, but it chased him down the road, running like a hellhound, never tiring, as focused on Mike as he was on the road ahead, as dauntless as truths often are.
Terry Wolfe? Sure, he was Mike’s father, but only in the strictest sense of empty biology. Mike was a realist, he could accept—however much it hurt—that Terry Wolfe had slept with his mother. In the scheme of things, so what? Shit happens, and it happened a long time ago. So, that was just the first incision. The really deep cut, the one that had marked him, the one that hurt in so many ways that Mike did not know how to react, did not know how to feel the pain of it, was knowing that Terry Wolfe was not his only father.
Yeah, that was a total bitch.
The afternoon sky above him was darkening as the high winds pulled sheets of gray clouds over the mountains toward the town.
What was the word Mr. Morse had used to describe Terry? A vessel. Another person—Mike’s other father—had come sneaking in like a mist through Terry’s pores, sinking deep into the flesh, and as Terry sank into drunken stupor, this other presence just simply took over. Like stealing a car. Going for a joyride. With Mike’s mom.
