Mari Pack / Dead Daddies

Dead Daddies

Mari Pack

Seems like everybody’s got a dead daddy. And a dead daddy is twice as important as a live one because every daddy is a John Lennon. My daddy’s got a dead daddy. He used to smoke a pipe. Rebecca’s daddy died in a dessert a million miles away. Dema’s daddy lived inside a war for six year s in Korea, eating puppies for protein and tumbling tiger’s eye on the weekends. I don’t think he ever even killed anyone—well, except the puppies.

Dema’s daddy died in a plane. Not a fighter jet with the sharp engines, but a big, massive Boeing that they fly across the pacific like a double-decker bus with wings. Fly it to Australia. Fly it to Hawai’i. Dying in transition. There can’t be anything worse.

I pray every day to the Great Spirit, thanking him for making Dema look like his daddy. Dema’s daddy, who has only one shrine on the top floor of the house he lived in with Dema’s mama. In her room with too many trinkets. A quiet shrine, like all proper shrines. Just one word: Imagine encircled in a park across the street from Yoko’s house.

Dema tries to make this last photograph of his daddy mean something to him, but it is not the daddy he knew: young and thin and wholly lacking, lacking in memories of his son, Dema. They used to let the cat’s come in the house with Dema’s mama was at work. Used to bring home puppies from the pound that nobody else wanted. Used to mix two or three kinds of chemicals just to see who got knocked unconscious. They kept each other’s secrets. What good is this picture, when he doesn’t know a single secret?

But this photograph has a pointy chin on ‘em. When my daddy met Dema, he asked “where’d ya get that pointy chin ah yers?” I wanted to show him the shrine. Not just to show him Dema’s daddy and his pointy chin, but to promise him that if he died, we’d make him a shrine too. A proper shrine with a picture of him as a young man that my brother and I can resent. You have to have a picture of your daddy as a young man. Because when daddies go to heaven, God makes sure to rewind their ages. Daddies in heaven live for eternity in the bodies of themselves as young men, the exact ages of their son’s and daughter’s where when they died. It is a gift from God, and a curse.

When Julian Lennon’s daddy died, Yoko gave him a white guitar with no meaning that needed getting rid of anyway. Brand new and shinny and mocking, mocking him with no fingerprints and no soul. Julian wanted another guitar that he had seen his daddy sing songs on. Yoko told him he

couldn’t have it. Then she told him to leave.

Dema’s still got one more daddy, his granddaddy. Papa is a big man from the hills of Tennessee. He’s got most of his hair but none of his teeth. He drinks too much soda and eats too much meat. He’s got one leg and half a stump. He lives half a mile away in a house he built himself on land he paid for practically a hundred years ago with eight thousand dollars. He is part Native American, but that part his been graded down by the love of Jesus. Papa loves Jesus more than he loves working, and he loves working a lot.

Dema’s daddy didn’t like work, he liked play. But when Dema’s first daddy died, he got to liking work real well so that his granddaddy would love him too.

I don’t love Papa. Maybe it’s because I don’t got the love of Jesus in me that shows me how to love a great sonofabitch like him, who thinks that he knows twice as good as anyone else even though he only ever reads one book. But Dema loves his Papa and I love Dema.

But when I got a big city job writing stories about little city folks, I called up Papa and asked him if we could talk about Jesus and Heaven. And how his loss of leg contributed to his love of Jesus. I told him I just wanted to hear the words.

But I needed a tape recorder to follow Papa’s drawl through all its windy turns. Dema’s mama said she had one in the basement for me. The four of us, Dema, his sister Mary and their mama, Sherrie all trooped downstairs. Their basement is so dirty, full of old stuff, useless stuff that nobody will ever need again. But that’s not why Sherrie collects it. Nobody needs much of anything.

When Dema’s daddy died, he was in an airplane. It was his second heart attack. You can’t tell from his picture, but he was a big, fat man who liked to eat two steaks for dinner. I think Dema got his skinny soul. Dema’s daddy ate so bad that his arteries started wrapping themselves too tight around his heart. I guess they just loved him too much.

Mary found her daddy’s half-broken tape recorder under his old computer with no gigabytes and no RAM and no memories at all. Dema’s mama pressed ‘play’ just to hear it out. Crinkle, crinkle. The voice was so crinkly that almost none of us could make out the words. But then Dema’s mama said “Wait a minute, I think that’s him.”

Mary looked at her mama with pity, like a mama to a child. “Mom, it’s not him.”

Dema joined in. “It’s probably one if his professor’s, from when he took classes.”

We were all staring at her. Urging her to make a decision. To let go of something. To take something out of that basement.

She started to hand me the recorder, and her eyes said please don’t, please, please—I think it’s still him. He’s still in there somewhere, just waiting to be heard. But she kept her mouth shut and I took that half-broken recorder like the dirty sonofabitch I am. I snatched it right out of her hands.

I wanted to erase Dema’s daddy to betray his granddaddy. I wanted it so bad. I wanted to write a story about how Jesus was stupid and how none of us went to heaven and how old silly farmers like Papa are so backwards and twisted that they can’t even see the light of truth. Do you know where daddies go when their hearts stop? They go into the dirt with all the other bodies and all the last John Lennon’s.

I know the truth because I’ve seen Jesus’ face. Jesus was a son too. He got to go to heaven to be with his daddy. And that was the best damn story anybody ever wrote. Better than any of mine. Jesus was our daddy too, it says. That’s why them dirty Jews like me killed Jesus, because we knew that a dead daddy is twice as important as a live one. And all the best stories, the ones that people read more than once, have got at least one dead daddy.