ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brandon Webb grew up in Virginia, where, he writes, “everything smelled like diesel fuel and cotton candy. I now live in San Diego. Here, the weather dries my skin, but makes literature much more enjoyable.”

Translation

By Brandon Webb


My father was a con man. Deception began as a dull interest when he was a little boy, convincing his parents to buy him toys he did not need and could not afford, and it grew into a compulsion. He called it a confidence trick, because, as he so often elaborated to me, manipulating someone is playing God. If they believe you, they believe in you, and you can get them to do whatever you want. He took pride in being able to cajole his prey. His genre of conning had nothing to do with duping the government. Money was immaterial. But it had everything to do with control, exploitation, and influence. I believe he is most proud of tricking Olga Evans, my mother, into marrying him. It was difficult at first, he once told me in secret. My mother was half Native American, half Hungarian, spoke no English, and was as stubborn as chickenpox. She believed God had put men on this Earth to screw with her head, and she may have been right. She would have nothing to do with my father, Benjamin, a man with dreadlocks who always carried pot and a bible in his right leather jacket. To her, he was a devil in pretty clothes, and she would go out of her way to ignore him, going so far as to spit on him or call him, in heavily accented English, “fuck face” in front of his friends. My father did not relent. When they went on their first date, he lied about a class he took. The class, he fibbed, explained that women needed security and would do better with a man. When they lived together, he persuaded her to stay home, that something might happen to her out there, and not to be mad, he was simply looking out for her best interests, as any concerned boyfriend would do. At their wedding, my father performed his vows like an actor who knows he is pretending.

In the world of subterfuge and simulation, he was an artist. In much the same way that scientists can map the trajectory of syphilis or the flu, my father understood the human heart and became a master at reading the body. An eyelash flicker contained a syntax and grammar, a language, that most people were deaf to. It was in this way that my father earned my confidence from the day I was born, conned me into believing I was male, and reminded me everyday through his actions, his body language, that I should be proud of my anatomy, if not for the simple reason that the alternative was so inferior.

It was early in the morning, that time when night and day breed to create a potpourri of daffodil- and plum-colored light in the sky—a time for my father and me to drive to an empty diamond of a field, to toss a baseball around using mitts his grandfather once wore. I was twelve, a seventh grader, and I had kissed a boy a day earlier. My father sat up high in his four-wheel-drive Chevy pick-up, the mitts nestled between his strong legs. He steered with one hand. The other seized the gear shaft. I knew from his pinched mouth and taut jaw that he was contemplating something dangerous and foreign, and that my presence didn’t help. Rusted farm silos whizzed by the truck as my father sped down an old country road bound by sycamores and azaleas. He took his hand, as thick as a sirloin steak, and pointed a finger at the glove box. He grunted and told me to open it. The cross-breeze through our cracked windows smelled like musty barbeque chicken and freshly cut grass. Inside was a mud stained baseball, lonely and forgotten like a dead animal.

I panicked that morning when he woke me up. He stormed into my room at five-thirty, clapping his hands as though he were my drill instructor, informing me that we would be playing ball and to throw something on. “Something you plan on getting dirty,” he told me. Then he marched into the kitchen to cook scrambled eggs and bacon. I ate the breakfast as one might chew glass, with a scowl and an increasing fear that something sharp and awful was about to tear me up. My father had never hit me, aside from spankings or slaps in the mouth, but something about his behavior made me think he just might. I reached into the glove box grabbed the ball, desperately squeezing it. My tongue felt like a stone in my mouth.

I wondered if my father knew about the boy I’d kissed. His name was Randy, an eighth grader who liked playing Xbox and spitting on insects, and who came over the day before to do just that. After drowning a whole gang of red ants in saliva, we ended up at my back porch sucking on freeze pops, letting the coolness of the ice soothe our dry throats. It was a humid Virginia summer, and sweat stains had formed under our armpits. We both smelled like damp socks and wet earth. Randy was a whole grade ahead of me and rumor had it that he was gay. The boys in my seventh grade classes often talked about him as though he were a circus freak, someone they could simultaneously pity and hate for his supposed aberration. At lunch some days they would taunt him, throwing balled-up napkins or spare French fries at the table where he sat. They’d call him queer, homo, or cupcake, whatever went best with their chocolate milk and government-issued reheated pizza.

Randy sank down in his chair, let his legs spread wide, and pulled at his shirt. It had grown as wet and rumpled as a soaked dishtowel. He fanned his face, hung his head back, and made a spit bubble. I examined his body as one examines jewelry for defects. I was far too preoccupied with women to be gay. For example, I hated my short, fade haircut, and I wanted long, wispy blonde hair like Alicia Silverstone's. I had posters of Silverstone all over my room, and every night I pretended that my hair was twice the length of my whole body, that I could wrap it around my throat, brush it, use it to tickle my chest. I imagined boys wrapping their arms around me, kissing me, and staring at me, and in my head I was Alicia. I would have it no other way. My father caught me staring at the poster one night as I thought about this. He snuck up behind me, grabbed my shoulders with his bear-like grip, and whispered in my ear, “Damn,” before pointing up at Silverstone, who had her hands on her curvy hips and her mouth curved down into a pout.

Randy’s hair came to his shoulders, but it was stringy, clumpy hair, like a blonde Brillo pad, not at all soft or delicate like a girl’s. He finished his freeze pop and let out a burp that smelled like sugar and Kool-Aid. A pair of old leather-looking birds glitched across the tree-tipped sky. Randy painted wide circles with his fingers, pretending to lasso the birds. He wrenched them from flight and fake-pulled them into his lap. I wondered what it would be like to kiss him, his lips red as if he’d dunked them in a blood puddle. I’d been thinking of kissing boys, though in the fantasies, I was never a boy, but a girl. Thick, strong hands would tug my body and stretch me in different directions like Play-Doh begging to be crushed and manipulated.

On the crevice between his skull and ear, my father wore a single clove cigarette. He had forgotten it that day but kept a spare pack in the glove box. Beneath the baseball sat a pack of Marlboros smeared in car grease. After I handed it to him, he told me to steer, so I sat on the baseball, reached over, and steadied the truck as he managed a cigarette out of the pack. He lit up, like he did every day, and the aroma of tobacco smoke caused my eyes to water and reminded me of how early it was.

“Do you like driving?” he asked me, chewing his bottom lip. The cigarette he held in his hand resembled a sixth finger. My father taught me that everyone has an ulterior motive behind asking questions. Questions were the keys to unlocking the secrets of the mind and body. As long as there were locks, there would be keys—as long as there were bodies, there would be secrets.

“I guess,” I said. He told me to turn the truck into the parking lot of the baseball field. With my father controlling the speed, my hands navigated the Chevy around a pothole, across a puddle of mud and twigs that made the truck jump, and through a series of speed bumps. The steering wheel was hot and slippery from my father’s large hands. I used my fingernails to widen a tiny hole in the wheel, digging out its foamy guts while I anxiously pulled the truck into a parking spot. I was amazed that he would let me drive his truck, even if it was only half driving. He flashed me a grin. He turned the car off, his shoulders slumped as if a weight had been released. and let out a long sigh. Empty McDonald’s bags peppered the gravel lot along with flattened orange soda cans and bent straws, water bottle caps and blackened socks. He placed his hand on my back as we sat and gently stroked my shoulder blade. I stopped feeling so anxious, my heartbeat slowed, and I watched my father’s eyes squint up as he sucked on his cigarette. He grabbed his grandfather’s mitt, told me to get the baseball, and he said, “Let’s go, Matt. Let’s go toss that ball around for a while.”



Published October 2009