Читать книгу Winged Shoes and a Shield - Don Bajema - Страница 11

My father’s hands were still shaking, his lips moved in silent sentences, his red eyes blurred with the tears of his stolen youth. His language was obscured in the mirthless sound of his gut laugh, and slurred with another Pabst Blue Ribbon. His eyes squinted behind the smoke of another Lucky Strike, his mouth softening from a hard snarl to a weak broken smile in the moments he thought I wasn’t looking. I was looking. I saw a heartbroken boy who walked like a man.

Snatched off his father’s farm by the events of history, he marched willingly under the rumbling thunderheads and into the sunset slash of brutality. My father allowed himself to be trained like a dog to kill, and in that process lost more than he could afford to lose. My father emerged from the nightmare fractured, his soul in pieces.

My father returned to us hollow-eyed, death in a shell of skin, obscured by the ill-fitting uniform. My father lived in a junkyard of human wreckage and tried to make the best of it. My father tore his neck raw against the invisible chain of manhood twisted too tightly, cutting off his inspiration. My father was a dog of war.