I lean here against this polished wooden surface, while the drums pound and the smoke blows around, and my mind feels like a wild thing, completely out of control. For days I’ve hardly slept, dreading the dreams that have come back… eyes in the sky and a fiery mountainside.

Even as I stand here, this damned day keeps throwing memories at me, like soggy rags dragged out of a pile of old discarded clothes—things I thought I’d buried away for good.

Right now, for instance, I can’t help remembering how weird I thought my old man was, when I was a kid.

Oh, he was a pip, he was. Whenever he caught me in a lie, he would beat me twice.

The first thing he’d do was he’d take me into the house and lecture me really reasonable-like about how it was immoral to tell lies, how a real man would face the truth, and all that stuff. Then he’d make me bend over and take my licking like a man. That part was okay, I guess. I didn’t like the lecture, but he didn’t hit very hard.

It was later in the day he’d scare me half to death. And all the time in between I’d be so frightened I couldn’t hardly breathe. I think, now that you get right down to it, he punished me three times each time he found out I’d lied… a spanking indoors for being unethical, a Chinese water torture of a wait, and then a terrific pasting out next to the garage for getting caught.

I think the wait was so I could think about how I could have talked my way out of it without lying… or come up with a better lie, one without holes in it.

When he knocked me around outside he kept telling me how stupid it was to waste an untruth—how a man’s credibility was as important to his survival as his wind, his stamina, or his ability to make friends.

My lather was like that. Indoors he talked as if he were trying to teach me how to be moral and upright. Outside, in the twilight, he acted as if tomorrow I was going to be dumped into the Amazon, or Devil’s Island, or deepest darkest Wall Street, and it was his job to see to it I could make it in a jungle.