His whole back seizes. He does undo. In Mom. And, riding him myself, I feel those rhythms spill. I ride his surge. It plays out like some shark taking the whole hook to the blackest corner of our ocean floor. Cold. I am now staring past a strong man’s leather shoulder, I can look direct into my mother’s hollering mouth.

One time at school? I saw a dog? do what this one’s doing to my Momma? but to another, lower shorter yellower dog? And, they got snagged? So the principal had to turn a garden hose on them and everybody laughed except our prissy teacher screaming for “Absolute Silence!” Could a big dog do it to a little cat? Could a … ? I am looking right in at my mother’s silver dental spots, her wide mouth screaming, “No! There’s not a way this’s possibly hap-ning. Don’t let it see him, Doc.” He collapses, then I do. She too then. Down go Mom’s knees, drawbridge, tickling my either arm.

Next, from this place on the man’s mattress of a back, over the kitchen’s reflecting linoleum, through the blue gauze of our torn screen door, out in April’s gold-green light, I spy my Daddy, my ugly, decent Christian father. “Toadface,” “Liverlips,” “Dick beak,” neighbors call his grade of homely. This, of the kindest person who ever probably breathed.

He tiptoes nearer our house. Then—too good a man to maybe live real long—Dad backs off toward fencing. His face looks opened like a tin can split end-wise by some ax.

I yell toward the one who pays to feed a lady that’d let some horse doctor ride her. “Don’t see this, Dad! Go on home away from it. They’re just talkin. I found nothing, okay, Dad? But just stay out the house a minute more, umkay? Cause we’re in here getting things nice. For you.”

Then I understand: Where is more home base for Dad than Mom? For Dad, I’m pretty much the Home.

…

Through screen door, I watch Pop’s busted arm flap out to keep him standing. The broken one, all white, is plastered fat. He half-falls anyway, supported by our neighbors’ chain-link fence. Dad keeps beating the back of his head against that metal upright. Fencing shakes, tense steel mesh ringing, two hands cup beside the mouth. It keeps calling my name. He knows I have already seen everything our town’s been saying. Everything Dad has never let himself quite know. At last I understand what “do it” means. My own mom nicely showed me first.