These Amber Waves of Grain
by Stephen Graham Jones

Martin liked to stay drunk around his son. As a lesson, an example of what not to do, how not to be. So, the more excessive or irresponsible or plain old criminal his behavior, the better it was for his son. The only real problem with this, aside from fines and health and all that, was that nobody realized what a good parent Martin was, what a sacrifice he was making—not just his liver, but his soul.

Give them time, though, he told himself. In a few years, all his neighbor’s kids were going to be in pre-AA mode, their eyes furtive over every Thanksgiving turkey. Martin’s son’s eyes would be different, then, he knew. More focused, less seething with vague resentment against all adults, brimming over instead with promises not to be an embarrassment like a specific adult. Not to be anything like him at all.

Martin had no doubt it would work, either. After all, the way he’d learned not to yell was by growing up in a loud house, mad people always storming up and down the halls, throwing brushes and ashtrays and, once, the cat, who screamed the whole way through the air too, adding to the din. His son was lucky, really, lucky that Martin’s own father had been a strict teetotaler, so that alcohol had an almost mystic, mythic quality for Martin at twelve, at thirteen, and on until the day they finally put his father in the ground, unpickled, twenty years later.

And of course the person who least understood all of this, it wasn’t Martin’s wife, the boy’s mother. Her father had been a conglomerate of five or six different live-in boyfriends. Needless to say, then, her expectations were low--actually, she seemed to be more satisfied with Martin the less he surprised her. Like his behavior just confirmed her suspicions of the world, hardened them into certainties.

No, the person who understood the least, the person who was the least grateful of anybody, that was Martin’s son himself. The fights they had in the living room could draw sirens from all over town, which, for Martin, was always a chance for another lesson: you don’t want to resist arrest, son, or run from the authorities, either, or smart off, or throw things (the cat), or try to take any of the neighbors hostage with one of those garden hoses with the spray attachment.

Not only will the police not negotiate with you, but, after they’ve tackled you, they’ll sometimes turn your weapon of choice back on you, to sober you up.

These were lessons of irony. During them, Martin would stare at his son, trying to make them take. When it was all said and done, though, the weekend over, the footage passed around to all the interested parties, another arraignment burning in effigy in the back of Martin’s mind, then his son would show him the only affection they both understood: walking up the long concrete hall to sign Martin out again, his footsteps falling for all the world not like a boy’s at all, but like the boy’s grandfather’s. Whose own father must have been a drinking man, if Martin knew anything at all about the true nature of things.