Still driving, Clyde now turned and looked at me. I can say it was the first full moment of my adult life: he greeted me as a naked man greets another bare grown man in Hell’s own locker room, no secrets possible now. First time ever, I saw what others meant when they called him Almost Monster. Now Dad’s face was so unsmiling, inert. His eyes lacked a light forever present there before—some dancy will to see the best in me. And I knew now, oh yeah, he truly was ugly. Ugly as the big boys claimed. I felt ashamed of suddenly so much. I had tricked Clyde into letting me see him complete. Because I had stunned his love for me completely shut for just one second. It seemed like some protective current that had wrapped the two of us forever, stopped. And no Utility Company on earth could ever “resume service” fast enough. All interior clocks would need resetting. Everything must be renegotiated now, invented as if for the first time. And I was only eight.

I am still trying to forgive myself. To know where I found the foolish courage to blurt all that aloud. Blame trust. Blame how tougher boys just taunted me at school. I hated fights. Even more than being hit, the hitting back sickened me. That in itself seemed proof that I was this man’s here. I believed that Dad could now hand me some one fact unassailable—a sentence that’d stop the bullies, proof to end such local savagery, which must always be a mistake, right?

…

Across my father’s face—and head and throat and upper chest—I saw a scalding pain born. That sudden. Two forehead veins bucked forth. He tried appearing in control, but I heard Dad’s breathing now rush out through his mouth. He no longer appeared jaunty; he seemed stripped of all the hope of comedy. He’d lost even the lingo of Salvation.

A guy, some odd arbitrary fish-mouthed atheist guy, sat looking at me. But he also seemed shrunken down to boyhood, backed raw into a corner. I now rode alongside another kid, too visible, somebody the worst boys love to torment daily.—“Fish Face,” I remembered now. As in a radio echo-chamber, I regathered all the taunts Clyde had ever endured, now and at my age and younger. As his whole life had flashed before his own eyes the moment Jesus penetrated his heart, Clyde Delman’s diorama of nicknames entered my life just as he was leaving it.

“Fish Face.” “Scrambled-Egg Lips.” “Dick Snout.” “Dufus.” “Nigger-nose.” “Bottom Feeder.” “Almost Monster.”