Monday, September 22, 2008

Chapter 7: Derrel's World

Its 10:30 pm on Tuesday and Derrel can hear the crashing of glass as he strides up the gravel driveway. He strides purposefully onto a worn path in the overgrown grass of the front yard, past a broken down 1987 Yamaha motorcycle engine, past a kiddie pool filled with a culture of green algae, and towards the frayed Astroturf covered steps leading to the aluminum door of his family’s double wide trailer outside of Roy, Washington.

He’s not scared. He’s pissed. He had the perfect night up till this point. Out deep in the woods on the outskirts of town his girlfriend Nadene held him close as they lay on the hood of her red F-150 pick smoking a joint and staring at the stars through the limbs of cascade evergreens. Underneath an afghan blanket Nadene, a sophomore twirled Derrel’s chest hair underneath his Carhart hooded sweatshirt and they talked about the teachers they hated, and the car he wanted to buy if he could only save the money from his after school job at the mill. Derrel loves the way Nadene’s sandy blonde hair smells like Suave raspberry conditioner. Derrel wants to marry Nadene just to prove to himself that life isn’t just another sad disappointment.
But now as he slams open the flimsy door to his home all that serenity rips itself from his mind and his fists tighten. Tonight Derrel, only seventeen, has had enough. Tonight Derrel will make a stand.

Even in this moment of pure anger, as he steps up into the hall, he still recognizes the smell of Winston cigarettes and TV dinner, the smell of his home. He walks into the living room to see his mother weeping in the corner, hair matted to her face from tears, a large smear of blood across her cheek. Derrel’s father, Karl, is pacing back and forth in kitchen with a can Schlitz frantically smoking a cigarette.

“Oh GREAT! Derrel the perfect son is home.” Karl spats through his graying mustache and hollow sunken eye sockets.

“Fuck you tweaker mother fucker.” Derrel quickly fires back, as he walks directly toward his father.

Up to this point in his life he had taken lickings from his father. Fathers possess the kind of strength that would lose in any fight except against their sons. A father’s strength comes from years of mental maturity and knowledge held over their sons. And, inevitably, the point comes in every father son relationship where a passing of the guard takes place. It could be physical, it could be mental, it could be financial, but in every father son relationship the moment comes where the son becomes the alpha male. Tonight Derrel has reached his limit.

Karl has been on crystal meth for about six months. Before that it was whiskey and speedballs, before that it beer and crank. Before that it was just straight beer, and lots of it. Karl lost his job driving a cement truck the year before and the family had been making ends meet on welfare and not much else. Karl has always been an asshole and a loser in every sense of the white trash cliché. And he is about to become a dead asshole.