Chapter 2

Sleep was rather elusive following my mother’s call. Fortunately the neighbors had finished up for the night. I thought I smelled cigarette smoke, but wasn't sure. I knew what I needed to do and what I wanted to do, but they were in a serious conflict.

I'd rather have lit matches stuck under my toenails than return to Heavener, the small town in southeastern Oklahoma where I was raised and spent a good deal of my life trying to escape.

The only times I go home now were at holidays. I don't even want to go then, but it was one of those irritating traditions a person must follow. I know very little would have changed in Heavener since my last visit.

Some businesses would have come and gone and a few of the oldtimers would be pushing up the daisies, but that was about it. The only real changes since I moved away was the arrival of a chicken processing plant and the influx of the Mexicans to work in it since most of the whites believed the work was below them and the work was too hard when they could make almost as much courtesy of Uncle Sam.

I keep up with what is happening in Heavener thanks to my father, who is the owner and publisher of the Langford Review, a weekly newspaper that has been in the family for close to eighty years. He sends me a copy every week and I glance through it, sickened to see the lack of journalistic standards.

I work at a newspaper in Tulsa and can't express how happy I am that we don't run some of the crap that is in the Review. Stories like the Waldron Nursing Home News and Aunt Flo visiting her cousin in Texas undergoing treatment for a severe case of inflamed buttock boils is way too much for me to handle.

Okay, that was stretching it a little bit. My father and buttock boils would never come together in speech, or certainly not in his beloved Review. His loyal bluehaired readers who read every word from cover to cover would not be pleased to see something like that in the paper.

I knew I would have to go to Heavener. My last trip was at Christmas, almost eight months ago. The drive is only a little over two hours from Tulsa, thanks to the Muskogee Turnpike and I-40 before venturing off to the two-land highways that make travel in many parts of the state such an adventure. But the drive always seems much longer, mainly because of how bad I hate to go to Heavener.

Since I couldn’t sleep, I gave up trying and got out of bed. I walked into the family room of my apartment and sat in the dark, wondering if my father was really sick. It was like a person crying wolf repeatedly. After a while, nobody believed them when the wolf actually came calling.

I always figured the old geezer would live forever, terrorizing me the same way he always had. I could never please him and gave up trying a long time ago.

While my father always treated Manny with kid gloves and allowed my brother to do whatever he wanted, that was certainly not the way I was treated.

He expected me to be the perfect child, work constantly with little play, and make straight “A’s” at school. If I wasn’t doing homework, I was supposed to help my mother or get my little tush down to the newspaper and help my dad.

Cleaning and mowing beat helping my dad. Whenever I was helping at the Review, he was always on me like a fly on fresh poop. If somebody failed to pay their bill, it was my fault. Or if Dad was constipated and couldn’t float a log, I was to blame.

No horse has ever been rode as hard as I was by the old man. As I got older, my responsibilities increased. I had to write stories, take pictures and compose the ads. I did get to cover the football, basketball and baseball games for Heavener, but would have rather been playing in them.

All my friends and the coaches always thought I would have been a good athlete, but I never got the chance to prove it as my father thought playing sports was a waste of time. I know he didn’t really want to cover the sports, but he found out the more coverage there was of sports, the more papers and ads were sold.

That how I got the opportunity to cover my friends and classmates as they grappled on the gridiron or dueled on the diamond.

I didn’t mind covering the games or writing the stories, it was the handing the stories in to my father that was difficult. I could have turned in a story plagarized from Ernest Hemingway and gotten torn to pieces.

Dad made me rewrite the story several times until he decided it was decent enough to be included in the Review. Poor grammar was a cardinal sin. But if I misspelled a word, Dad made the character Jack Nicholson played in The Shining look like a altar boy.

“You just don’t do that in a newspaper!” he would start off yelling, gradually working himself into a tizzy. The blood vessels in his forehead would pop out so much I expected one to bust and splatter blood everywhere.

The only thing that saved me was if a customer came in to buy a paper or an ad. Dad did his Jekyl and Hyde impersonation and transformed from the angry maniac to a normal person.

I put up with this until I graduated from high school. By then, I knew things had to change or a visit to the loony bin in Vinita would be on the agenda.

My grades and score on the ACT were good enough to get a scholarship from every college in the state. Since Dad had always been so big on me getting good grades, I expected to go off to college.

That was wrong. He wanted me to stay in Heavener and work at the newspaper. If I was going to go to college, he wanted me to go to Carl Albert Junior College in Poteau. Dad never went to college, he argued, and did okay. Why would I want to go hang out with a bunch of liberal nuts just to get a piece of paper to put up on the wall?

A lot of it was to get away from him. We argued most of the summer after I graduated. He continued to try and dominate me while I finally held my ground.

That was the first time I stood up to him and that bothered him more than my leaving to go off to school. By the time August rolled around, I packed up my bags and caught a ride off to college, leaving and hoping to never come back.

All those memories of growing up were weighing heavily upon me as I sat in my recliner, staring at the blank screen of the television. The longer I thought about it, the more my stomach got upset, a reminder of the ulcer the old man helped me get back in my younger days.

I knew there was no getting out of going to Heavener, but I certainly didn’t plan on staying long.

Or expect what would happen when I got there.



Chapter 3