Bixby Had to Go

 

Bixby had to go. I couldn’t tolerate his presence any more.  An annoying boy to begin with, he was growing into a self-indulged, conceited, deeply flawed young man.  As his father, I supposed I owed him some desultory level of love, perhaps even unconditional, but this is not a world without conditions.  I never understood this allusion to a basic, natural instinct to love our offspring.  I watched the nature channel enough to know that lions, prairie dogs and honey bees weed out the weakest, or even the strongest, of their brood.  Jettisoned from the arc.  If not outright killed by the parent, they are neglected and, in so doing, offered up to our not-so-friendly neighbors in the food chain.  It wasn’t my fault that nature’s mutation created a species with no other predators to take us out, besides ourselves.  I was his father; I was his only predator.  

Problem was, Bixby held in a safe deposit box the will that bequeathed him the family estate, bestowed upon him not by his father but by his father before him, by good ol’ granddad.  Maybe my father was trying to take me out of the lineup.  Perhaps this was his final fuck-you in face of these past ten or so years, when I finally gained the upper hand during his infirmity.  Or had gained the upper hand, until now.  It irks me that my destiny can be thwarted by a  simple piece of paper, the weakest element in nature, subject to conflagration by the smallest spark, able to be rendered in half by the hands of a child, even crumpled up and popped in my mouth like a truffle, chewed up, swallowed, digested, and shitted out into the bowl of my toilet.  

But I didn’t have the will. Bixby had it.  Bixby had to go.

Bixby came over at 6:15.  He was supposed to be over at 5:30, but whatever.  His mother fawned over him in the foyer, took has coat and shoved all others aside in my closet to hang it on the good hanger, then flittered off to the kitchen.  By this time I was retired to my office with a gin martini, straight up, two olives.  It was fall and I could smell the dry rot of autumn.  The leaves in my yard were not my leaves, as I cut down my trees years ago.  These came from Mrs. Sutterby next door.  She’s too old and too broke to get her leaves raked up; just lets them rot where they lie from season to season.  I might have arrived at a charitable idea of raking them for her, but Bixby came in and interrupted.

“Hi Dad, how’re you doing?”

“Great son, great!  Been sitting hear listening to the birds, smelling the leaves.  Can you believe how quickly Summer passed this year?”

What?  If there’s one thing I’ve learned, there’s the inside you and the outside you, and never the twain shall meet.  Appearances are everything, and if performed artfully, give you the upper hand until the right moment, and oh how satisfying it can be when you pull the trigger.  But today, this mockery of a Sunday roast with family, was merely a positioning of pawns.