Dad waits, bent out there, still struggling to light a Camel with his one unbroken hand. Needing it that bad, using fence to steady the latest match shaking out, he can’t even smoke. It’s then my dad starts hollering straight up, “Why’d my baby have to catch them? You were gonna save him, remember? Ain’t I been being good enough? Why us, God?”

The rest is mainly blackness. First I feel the naked man beneath me turn. By now, I am so weak I’ve stretched across him like some soup-noodle starfish. I have pounded his whole back with all of my five points, head included. But I’ve stopped nothing. The stranger scoots over, spills me, stands. With the strong impersonal hands of a Large-Animal Vet, Doc easily palms me off into the other room.

He takes me from the sight of Mother’s half-remembered breasts. Each one a white clown-face, its snout a red-gold maple drawer-pull. Below, one browny-yellow yarn pompom; her two middle fingers hide dead-center. “Son, why?” Her voice so flat. “Why today?”

Mom’s worst hurter totes me to a room not mine. He lays me with real care facedown across my folks’ chenille. I look over at his naked front. There is a confusion of amounts. Do doctors catch contagions off large beasts? Did being too near bulls make him go big? He’s saying, “Ever hear of knockin, kid?”

And louder, to her still moaning on our couch, “You went and whelped yourself a biter, Grace. Hate the biters. Don’t worry, I’ll be back. But for now I’m outta here. I can take a friggin hint.” After he’s hopped around the other room to pull his pants up over it, I hear him kiss her then dodge free. His huge Pontiac leaves us in a fuss of gravel, it squalls off, shortwave antennas whipping.

Silver-blue fumes settle.

Such silence clamps down.

Finally, for city blocks, there are just two noises—one bird singing its routine song, as if trying to cover for a grown man’s backyard sobbing. And Dad. Who sounds like something almost-monster perfectly newborn. There’s coughing in it. It’s somewhat a cow, a hurt one.

Sheeps go, “Baaaa.”

Cows go, “Moooooo.”

Birds’ll mostly “Tweet” on you.

But my Poppa, the salesman, the joke man, the joke, the giver-away of God’s free word, the ugliest white man alive in Falls, is out there now alone, face-first into our fencepost.

Poppas they must often go, “Noooo.” Mine sure does.

I find a waiting darkness black as Bible. I walk between its cast-iron covers; they clank jail-shut behind me.