by Julie Odell

Originally published in The Intentional. The journal has since ceased publication. The story is reprinted here by the author.
                                                                                                     

 “Billy Jack!” my father shouted from the den. “Lucy, it’s Billy Jack!”

I was in the kitchen grilling sandwiches of sharp cheddar and tomato with a smear of spicy brown mustard, my father’s favorite. I cut them on the diagonal and flipped them onto two plates.

My father leaned back in his recliner. I handed him his plate and sat cross-legged on the couch. “Is this the original?”

“No. The Trial of. But he’s still tough.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He kicks more in the first one.” I bit into my sandwich and the hot mustard flooded my sinuses.

My father ate his sandwich in huge, brutish bites. He wiped his mouth with his napkin, crumbled it in a ball, and dropped it over the side of his chair. The gesture was so predictable. He was a Neanderthal with his food, attacking it like he was starving, gnashing his teeth and leaving the ruins of his meals wherever he wanted. Pig, I wanted to yell at him. Eat like a fucking human. Lately everything he did disgusted me, as though all his bad habits were amplified.

I watched my father watch Billy Jack. His coarseness was all I could see. His arm hung over the edge of the recliner, and he clenched and unclenched his fist. I looked back at the TV. Billy Jack was talking to the cops.

We’d seen this one three times already. I used to think I’d never get sick of Billy Jack, but today the movie just seemed stupid. I watched it with him anyway. We repeated the lines we loved, and I got up halfway through to make us two more sandwiches. As I stood over the stove, spatula in hand, it occurred to me that maybe my father thought Billy Jack was stupid, too; maybe he just liked watching it with me in the same way I liked watching it with him.

But I felt resentful at the idea of him doing things just to please me. I didn’t want to feel close to him. This was his life—wasting a Saturday afternoon in his recliner. He was an overweight, broken-down nobody. What made it worse was that he’d once been a boxer.

“I used to fight,” he’d told me the first time we watched Billy Jack, when I was seven.

I’d felt a thrilling, prickly fear.

“Golden Gloves.”

 I tried to picture him young and lean in boxer shorts, dancing around the ring, glistening with sweat.

At the time, he seemed so much better than anyone else’s father. Sometimes when we were in the car, just the two of us, and another driver sped past us, my dad would grip the steering wheel at ten o’clock and two, and announce, “Citizen’s arrest!” He’d look down at me in the seat beside him. “Hang on tight. I’m going to get this asshole.”

And we were off—weaving through traffic, speeding just as much as the lawbreaker we were pursuing, my vigilante father in pursuit of justice. I never questioned what would happen if we ever actually caught someone—we didn’t—or whether a citizen’s arrest would actually stick. I just knew that my father was out of the ordinary, and he took whatever freedoms he could. He was every bit a hero as Billy Jack.

But I wasn’t seven anymore. “The ending of this movie is so lame,” I said as the credits rolled, collecting our plates to take them into the kitchen. You are lame, I was really saying. You and this movie both.

“I thought you loved it,” he looked straight at me, his blue eyes wide with surprise. “It used to make you cry, and you said it was just so true.”

I was supposed to reassure him, that, yes, the ending was true, that when the National Guard came and shot the Native American students at the Freedom School, that I still felt that delicious swell of passion and sorrow that drove me to tears. I could see that he still wanted me to be his girl.

It would be easy for me to throw him a bone and say that yeah, I still liked the finale, That inside I was still his little sidekick, thrilled by half-Indian outlaws. But I couldn’t do that for him, not completely.

“Yeah, the ending is still true,” I said, “but it’s corny too. Isn’t it? I mean, I get what he was trying to say about student shootings, what, Kent State and whatever. But it’s over the top.”

My father hesitated and looked back at the TV. “But isn’t that the whole point of Billy Jack? He’s larger than life.”

Todd Alstead had started it on the bus. He would sit behind me and chant my name under his breath. “Lucy, Loooseee.” I never turned around.

            He was a junior and a stoner. He smoked pot and wore black Rush t-shirts and tan-colored work boots with the laces open at the ankles. At school he stood in the hallway outside the gym with the other stoners, slouched against the wall with their thumbs hooked in the belt loops of their jeans. With sleepy eyes, they mocked the rest of us, preppies in Kelly green and khaki. I secretly lusted after them, especially Todd with his long, tight thighs. But I was a clean-scrubbed freshman, and he just teased me because he was bored. When we were younger, we’d hung out with the same group of neighborhood kids, inside the half-built new houses at the end of the cul-de-sac. It was mostly only the boys who lit matches and threw them at the walls, but sometimes I did it, too. One time I lit up a whole book of matches and held it, mesmerized by the many-colored flames, until it burned the tip of my fingers. I dropped it and stomped it out. Todd smiled at me, and for a while, I figured that meant he thought I was cool. Now I knew better.

            He began showing up at my bus stop, even though his stop was twenty houses farther. He’d amble up in that slow, lazy way all the stoners walked, kicking his feet in front of him, and flick his cigarette on someone’s lawn at the last minute. Then he’d look me up and down like it was a challenge. Like he was saying yeah, you were a cool girl once, but looked at what a priss you are now. Seriously, a skirt?

            I’d turn my back to him and talk to my friends, but I knew he was watching me. I tried to stand still like a statue, to make myself harder to read.

            When the bus finally came and I walked up the steps, I knew Todd was watching. He always got on last. I’d scurry up quickly and take the first seat I could find. Once, on his way to the very back where all the stoner guys sat, he paused in front of me. He opened his mouth to say something and then just laughed. He was probably already stoned. He looked ahead and nodded toward his friends, and then leaned in and whispered in my face. “I like the way that skirt hugs your ass,” he said, and then kept walking.

            The two girls sitting in front of me whipped around to look at me in shock, but I pretended I didn’t see them and looked out the window. He’d been so close. He smelled like cigarettes, but also something else, male, sweat maybe, intoxicating. I breathed in slowly through my nose to make it linger.

            Todd began to show up at the tennis courts after school where, at my mother’s urging, I played challenge matches day after day for ranking on the girls’ team. He sat in the passenger seat of his friend Scott’s Jeep, way up high on monster truck wheels. He made me sweat large ugly half-moons under the arms of my pink tennis team t-shirt, and I tugged at the back of my shorts.

            Once when I turned to fetch a stray ball, Todd thrust his head out the window. “Wanna party with me, Lucy?” He didn’t yell. He said it in a normal voice like he really meant it.

            I turned around to face him. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said in an awful, shrill voice. I sounded just like my mother.

I hated the challenge matches. I longed to just rally without keeping score. I wanted to hit the ball squarely, feel the solid ping of my racquet up through my arm, vibrating through my torso. But the coach made us compete every day, and I had to pull my seed from 17 to 15 to stay on the team. I was getting headaches at the base of my skull.

Todd sensed my anxiety and he used it to rattle me even more. “Hey, Lucy,” he shouted once in the middle of my serve, “Show me the way, baby.”

I wanted to think he really wanted me, knew my goody-goody clothes were my mother’s choice, not mine, and that inside my bland exterior was a girl who might be wild. But he was too sexy and too old and too dangerous to want me. He just wanted to make me squirm. His type of girl was a stoner like him, boobs bursting from low-cut sweaters, ass set in skintight jeans, long feather earrings blending with her streaked, shagged hair. His attention to me was meant to be ironic, some sort of joke.

I was losing the match. While I searched frantically for a quick comeback, the best I could do was turn to the Jeep and yell, “Get the hell out of my life, Todd Alstead. I hate you!” Todd and Scott laughed, and I felt like a child. The Jeep remained at the courts.

Friday night I sat in the back seat of my father’s car, returning from a concert at the junior high where my little brother played second violin in the orchestra. It had rained while we were out, and as we turned up the driveway and the car’s headlights moved across the wet lawn, I could see that something wasn’t right. The yard was lumpy, dark.

My father backed up and maneuvered the car so the headlights played right on the house. My mother gasped. Large swaths of mud had been flung to the second floor windows. “Somebody spun their tires,” my father said. “Some god-damned son-of-a-bitch backed their vehicle onto the fucking lawn and spun their goddamned tires all over the grass.”

He pulled the car up the driveway and jumped out of the driver’s seat. “Who the hell would do this?” he said, jacked up as he stepped back and forth over the tracks like a detective.

I got out of the car and rushed to his side. “I know!” I offered in a thrilled torrent. “It’s Scott Brubaker’s Jeep. Him and Todd Alstead.”

A ragged, frantic desire for vengeance coursed through me as I told my father about Todd and the tennis courts. I embellished a little and made Todd’s taunts sound more menacing, even threatening. “Dad, he’s such a god-damned shit. I’m going to get kicked off the team if he doesn’t stop.”

I was lying across on my bed doing algebra a few nights later when my father knocked on my door. “Hey, Lucy,” he said. “I’ve been thinking. It’s time to give a little what-for to that asshole Alstead.”

            I sat up. “What do you mean?”

            “Okay,” my father put his hands up, ready to lay it out. “I’m not going to hurt him. I’m going to scare him. I’ll go to his house and get him outside, maybe throw rocks at his window or something. Get him out for a little, you know, a little man-to-man.”

            “Why don’t you just go to the door? Talk to his dad?”

            My father shook his head. “That’s not what I had in mind. I want a private conversation with him.”

            I felt that same loathing I’d felt when we were watching Billy Jack. What the hell kind of crazy scheme had he cooked up out there on the recliner, where he’d spent half his life watching how many vigilante movies? I stared at him, at his bright, sweaty face, eyes ablaze. I wanted to throw my algebra book at his head.

Still, I felt a little jolt of excitement. Why not let him mess with Alstead? He deserved it.

But then I wondered if it really was Todd and Scott who tore up the lawn. I couldn’t be sure. It could have been anyone, really, random vandalism. “Yeah,” I said anyway. “Go ahead, Dad.”

            My father’s face fell a little. “I was thinking maybe you’d like to come with me,” he said.

            “Fine,” I said. His face lit up again. “But I’m staying in the car.” I left my algebra book open and didn’t bother to put on any shoes.

            My mother sat with her book. She was curled neatly in the corner of the couch under the yellow glow of a lamp. “Hey guys,” she said with a smile. “Where are you two headed?”

            “Ice cream,” my father said.

I admired the deftness of his lie. “Want some?” I asked, the ready accomplice.

            My mother shook her head as I knew she would; she rarely ate sweets.

            My father wore a black t-shirt and black sweatpants. He looked fit in the outfit; the black hid his belly and he looked tough. Ready.

            The glowing dash inside the car threw a greenish cast across my father’s face as we drove. Todd’s house was in Greenwood, the next development over, and I wondered if he ever thought about how easy it would be to come to my bedroom window in the night. But that was ridiculous. He wouldn’t be coming to my room or to my house.

            My father cut the engine a few houses away and we coasted to the curb. “Hey, Lucy,” he said, “I’m going to have a little fun with that asshole.” He pulled up a leg of his sweatpants and I saw the handle of a carving knife coming out of his sock.

            “Geez, Dad,” I replied, but I was glad. It gave me enormous pleasure to think of my father with his huge, muscular arm curled around Todd’s skinny neck. I felt my father’s pleasure in pretending he was Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood, a lone vigilante with a long, sharp knife under Todd’s pimply chin.

            But again I began to really doubt Todd and Scott had torn up the lawn. “I don’t think you need the knife, Dad,” I said. “I think if you just threw rocks at his window or whatever, that would be scary enough.”

            “Oh, come on, Lucy—that little shit is messing with you.”

            “Fine,” I said. “Do what you want. But I’m staying in the car.”

            “What do you care what I do to him anyway?” he asked. “Unless you like this punk. Unless this is the sort of attention you go for.”

            I said nothing.

            “Huh, Lucy Goose,” my father was leering at me now across the car seat, leaning into me. “Do you think I’m going too far? Is that it? I thought you knew how to play this game.”

            I could smell his aftershave. I also smelled liquor on his breath, coming off his skin. Why hadn’t I noticed it before?

“Lucy Goose,” I repeated. It was a ridiculous nickname, and my father was a ridiculous man. “Fuck you, Dad.”

            My jaw tightened as I looked up at him. His face was blank, stunned. I felt a thrill as I realized I had startled him.

            I opened the car door and ran. I turned to look back once, and my father was still there, sitting in the driver’s seat. So I kept running until I was around a curve and he couldn’t see me anymore.

            I stood alone in the silent night, and the whole vigilante scheme seemed like a dream. This was probably as far as my father had intended to take it, shake me up a little bit, just pretend he was going after Alstead. But then I’d changed the game.

            Fuck you, Dad. I’d really said it. Jesus. I’d crossed a line, and my father would be enraged.

I realized where he’d gone. This character he’d become, this maniac, had turned his attention away from Alstead and was now focused on me. The knife and the arm around the throat—now they were meant for me. My father didn’t go home. He parked the car somewhere else and now he was after me, silent, stealthy.

            I ran the streets of Greenwood. I knew he was there, hiding in yards, ducking behind cars, following me silently. I felt him everywhere, a giant black leopard. He wore black soft shoes that didn’t make a sound as he sprinted across driveways.

            This was real, more real than my life had ever felt. I was terrified, but also strangely elated. This was better than a movie.

            The houses in Greenwood were ignorant, sweet, set back in their lawns and hugged around by soft shrubs. Lights glowed warmly in their windows, owners tucked inside, safe, nestled on couches, numbed by television. That’s what most people really wanted around here, I thought, to be left in peace to watch their shows. But not me, not my father.

The pavement was wet and rough as I ran in my bare feet. I felt sure that if I kept running, the skin on my toes would scrape and scrape until the blood flowed and my toes were bare bone.

 I stopped at a mailbox. There were no cars on the street, no one walking. But the stillness was a betrayal because I knew my father was out there, and I knew eventually he would catch me. There would be no cars to stop for help. I was so alone.

I could go to Todd’s. I could throw rocks at his window myself. He’d come down and I could tell him about my father out there like a rabid dog. We could get to the Jeep and drive away.

But Todd wouldn’t help me. He’d find my father and they’d join forces. My father would like Todd. They were cut from the same cloth. They could chase after me and laugh when they found me.

I could hear my heart beating hard in my ears, and as I caught my breath, I could feel the sweat soaking my t-shirt, hot, sticky. A dog barked somewhere. I looked around again at the houses, familiar to me as my own bedroom, and it snapped me back into reality. Nothing crazy was happening out here. My father didn’t want to kill me. He just wanted to scare me, rattle my chain for cussing at him, for the casual contempt with which I’d been treating him lately. Any other father would ground me, but that was boring for a father like mine. He was having a blast right now, sneaking around pretending he was a wild rogue avenger, a cinematic hero.

The longer I walked, the more I felt the jagged fear in me drain away, and along with it, the sense of excitement. I could walk slowly now, easing my tender feet. When I got home, my father would be waiting for me. We wouldn’t say a thing to my mother; in fact, we wouldn’t mention it to each other. It would remain unspoken, our secret. Our secret need to have the world a little bit stranger, a little more exciting than it really was.

I rounded the corner of Hillcrest Drive, moving back into our development a different way than my father had driven. I listened to the zap of the Coopers’ bug light as I heard soft thuds on the pavement. It was my father—he was jogging up behind me.

“Lucy, Jesus Christ, I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” His hair was soaked with sweat.

“What do you want?” I asked, a little of the fear coming back.

“I wanted you to help me scare Todd, that’s all.” He bent down and took the knife out of his sock and held it close to his face. His eyes shimmered under the streetlight. He regarded the blade for a moment, and then tossed it into the Gibsons’ yard with a high, graceful arc. The point of the knife stuck.

“Dad,” I said finally, my voice sounding adult in my ears. I’d be the one to take us back down to earth. “I don’t think Todd did it.”

“What?”

“The lawn. I don’t think him and Scott Brubaker tore up the lawn.”

My father looked at me hard. “Do you like this guy or something? Is that what this is about?”

“No,” I said, keeping my voice even. “I don’t. He’s a jerk.”

“He is and he isn’t,” my father replied, pulling a flask out of the pocket of his sweatpants. I’d never seen it before. He unscrewed the lid. “I’ve seen him around. Every snot-nosed asshole his age is a jerk. But he also looks like he can take care of himself.” He held the flask to his mouth and took a long draw.

We stood right there in the street. I wondered if anyone in any of the snug little houses could see us. I hoped so. I wanted people to know who me and my dad really were.

My father stepped in the grass. “Give me a kick,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Come on, throw me a kick like Billy Jack.”

“No,” I said, moving onto the Gibsons’ grass. Then I lurched forward and grabbed the flask from my father and put it to my mouth. The liquor was strong and hot as it went down. I took another long swallow and recapped the flask, dropping it in the grass. Then I spun in a circle and tried to throw my leg in the air, tried to kick my father. He stepped back and my kick missed him.

“Try again.”

I tried a few more kicks, tried to get my leg higher.

Finally I nicked his hip. He grabbed my ankle in the air and pulled, and I landed on the small of my back, hard, knocking the wind out of me.

My father laughed. “Come on, get up. Come on, come on,” he reached behind me and picked up the flask off the grass.

I stayed on the ground. “Get away from me,” I said. The pain was sharp, searing. “Fucker,” I added.

My father ignored it. And then I saw. We were in a new place now, a place where I could cuss and drink his booze. A place where we were the same, fellows in our strangeness, in this stultifying life.

 He leaned over and picked me up from under my arms. “Shake it off,” he said, “shake it off.” His voice was heavy with bourbon.

“I think my tailbone is broken.”

“No, it’s not. You just got the wind knocked out is all.”

I moaned dramatically, even though the pain was lessening. “I hate you, Dad.” I didn’t know why I said it. I didn’t mean it. At that moment, I loved my father as I never had before, disgusting as he was.

My father laughed and rolled his eyes.

“I hate you too, Lucy Goose. Let’s have a hate fest.” He walked a circle around me, arms flapping like a chicken. “Hate fest, hate fest,” he squawked.

“Moron,” I said. I felt as though I’d grown years in the past hour.

“Kick me again,” he said. “Come on, I deserve it. Kick me good.”

I whirled around and got him in the stomach, although not very hard. He stumbled around pretending to be hurt.

“Ooh, Lucy, you got me,” he grabbed my arm as though for support. Suddenly, he got me in a headlock and pulled me down on the ground. I fell into his shoulder.

We lay like that in the grass for a minute, my head resting on his arm. The booze had gone to my head, making the soft lights around me twinkle. I could smell my father’s sweat beneath the alcohol. I knew he was drunk, and so was I.