October Tomatoes
By Robert Pettus
“What the hell were you thinking?” said my dad after he put down the phone receiver. He’d just finished talking to Coach Sherman.
I was busted. My friends and I, late the previous Friday night – after the conclusive, triumphant victory of our local high school football team, the Abry Egrets, over our alleged arch rivals, the Bardstown Tigers – had decided to prank Coach. We wrapped his house in a nice layer of toilet paper, and left him a friendly note. Coach didn’t consider the note friendly – he found it threatening. He was considering pressing charges against us. He was a real bastard, that guy.
“I just…” continued my father, “I don’t understand what in the hell could have possibly gotten into you. You know what this makes you look like? Street trash. It makes you look like a damn future criminal. This is the type of thing you expect from some kid who… who everyone knows isn’t going anywhere in life. Now, clearly I don’t think that’s the case with you, but that’s what it looks like, from the outside. You need to understand that. What you need to understand more than that, though, is that by doing this – this one, incredibly boneheaded thing – you have potentially destroyed a family’s feeling of safety, if not with Coach Sherman himself, with his wife! This was just completely misguided -- anyway you spin it, whether in terms of morality, intelligence, or common fucking decency… I just don’t know, right now, Ed.”
I stood silently as my father gave me his aggressive opinion of what I’d done. He was mostly right, I was well aware of that unfortunate fact. It was an idiotic thing to do. I’m not saying I regretted it, or anything like that – I didn’t. Coach Sherman needed to be knocked down a few pegs, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a stupid thing to do. It obviously was. I didn’t have any intention of arguing with my dad about anything he was saying.
“So,” he continued, “We’re going over to Coach Sherman’s house, right now. You’re going to apologize to him for this, straight to his face.”
That got my blood boiling -- as if instantly heated by the tense room-temperature. I didn’t mind my dad telling me how stupid I was, but by no means did I have any interest in going over to Sherman’s house to apologize. That asshole – regardless of the degree of stupidity of my own actions, or the actions of my friends – was still a bastard, and deserved no apology.
“What!” I began, “No way! That dude is a bastard! I can’t go apologize to him!”
It was, from my perspective, a perfectly sound argument. My dad, however, didn’t seem to agree, as it only pissed him off even more. His face, which, though clearly angry, had until that point maintained its standard hue. Now, however, it was shifting more visibly crimson.
“Go outside and get in the damn truck,” he said through his teeth. He had angry eyes; he was fuming. I didn’t blame him.
Coach Sherman lived on the same street as my parents, so the drive over to his house only took about 20 seconds. On the way over, we didn’t do any talking. The only sound was the ringing voice of Bob Marley, singing Three Little Birds, which erupted from the speakers of my dad’s old Dodge truck immediately after he turned the keys in the ignition. I guess he’d been jamming earlier and hadn’t turned the volume down before he left the truck. It was a bit of a funny song to suddenly hear at full blast, especially considering the situation, but he didn’t seem to think so. It just pissed him off even more. He aggressively turned the volume knob and stared steaming mad ahead at the road. The problem, though, was that the volume knob in his old Dodge truck was a bit dysfunctional. It wouldn’t work if you turned it too quickly – you had to turn it gently – that was the only way it would work. Upon remembering this unfortunate fact, my dad once again turned the knob, this time much more slowly – his hand shaking with anger and frustration. It worked this time though. Bob’s peaceful voice – at first so loud – faded into nothingness. Don’t worry about a thing, he reassured me. I tried to take in his apathetic wisdom.
When we pulled up to Coach Sherman’s house – a white shuttered, eggshell example of the ever rarer, middle-class American dream – my dad immediately wrenched open the creaking door and sprung out from the truck. I was a bit hesitant, but once I realized that I really had no other option, I too opened the door and stepped out. Walking up the wooden, white-painted steps – his homey porch swing hanging off to the left hand – I imagined where the paraphernalia from our previous crime had perhaps landed. I couldn’t see where my drunken friends had thrown all the shit, since I’d been in our trusted, khaki 1990 Volvo – the getaway driver – while they were competing the mission, but I could still imagine.
Coach Sherman answered the door about 10 seconds after the first ring of the bell, which rang out – with apparently no awareness of the severity of the situation – in high-pitched excitement:
“Evening, Sullivan. Evening, Eddie,” said Coach Sherman in a tone of feigned politeness.
“Hello, Coach. My son here has something he’d like to say to you.”
After a prolonged couple of seconds in which I really weighed my options about what I could do in this situation, I spoke up:
“Um… I don’t have anything I want to say to him.”
My dad’s face, which had already been reddening progressively, now darkened to the shade of an overripe, bruised tomato. He looked bound to burst.
“…What?” he said. “You have something you want to say to Coach, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Tell the Coach you’re sorry. Tell him exactly what you did, and which of your friends helped you do it, and then apologize.”
“I can’t, dad,” I continued. “I’m sorry to you, for making you go through all of this stuff tonight, but I’m not sorry to Coach Sherman, so I can’t pretend like I am.”
My dad stared at me in disbelief. I’d never seen him look so angry – at least not that I could remember. Finally, he averted his gaze from me and addressed Coach Sherman:
“Well, coach,” he said, “I apologize for my son. What he did was completely disrespectful, and entirely out-of-line, and the fact that he’s not being man enough to own up to his mistakes now only makes it all the worse. I’m sorry... Genuinely.”
“I understand, Sully,” Coach Sherman began. “Kids will be kids. You two have yourselves a good evening.”
“We will, Coach. Thanks.”
Coach Sherman shut the door on us abruptly. He had called my dad Sully. My dad hated when people called him that – he considered it belittling. I agreed with him; it sounded as if Coach was talking down to him.
As we walked down the steps of the front porch and back toward the truck, my dad looked at me, the anger yet to subside from his glare:
“You’re walking home. I’ll see you back at the house.”
He got into the truck, started it (this time no Bob Marley rang out), and drove sputtering down the road, his truck kicking up fallen October leaves into a swirl behind it, like a festive tail of colorful streamers.
It wasn’t surprising that I had to walk, and I guess I deserved it, too. My dad didn’t know that I truly enjoyed walking, though. I always went out of my way to look for excuses to walk around town. It was relaxing to me, especially if I had my iPod. Then I could just stare at the trees and the sky while listening to music – spinning the wheel as I scrolled through the endless, black and white playlists I had painstakingly compiled over time. I didn’t have my iPod that evening, though; but it was still a nice night for a walk. It was a clear autumn night. October in central Kentucky, as is well documented, is one of the best months of the year, and I mean that in the global sense. There aren’t many months, in many places, that can stand up to October in Kentucky. In terms of the weather, at least. By October, the lingering heat and mugginess of the summer has finally worn off and the autumn air is just crisp enough for you to feel it, but not so much for it to be uncomfortable. Skies tend to be clear and – though it does sometimes rain – it’s often a welcome, comfortable, drizzling rain. The trees put on their bright, burnt clothes, which they then later throw off – those thrown leaves cascading, crumbling to the ground, leaving the formerly thick foliage now naked. Those leaves fell around me as I walked home – in the middle of the alit street – from Coach Sherman’s house. On top of this near-perfect weather, the street my parent’s lived on was nearly always soundless. Sometimes things would happen, I guess -- like when my friend’s and I had decided to vandalize Coach Sherman’s porch – but on most nights, there wasn’t a peep. That made the walking even better.
As I was walking, I began thinking about who exactly the bad guy was in all of this. Coach Sherman was obviously a total dick, and deserved every bit of whatever he had coming to him, but did that justify what we did? Regardless of the type of person Coach was – which was definitely a very shitty one – he was right in mentioning that he still had a wife and a kid in there. Maybe our late-night prank really did scare the shit out of them. If that was the case, did that make us bad people, too? What we did was certainly immature – we all knew that – but was it an objectively bad thing to do? We rationalized it by telling ourselves that we were getting back at Coach Sherman, or whatever, and I guess to some extent we were. But did the potential fear his wife and kid felt negate whatever sense of retribution the group of us got from this small form of payback to Sherman? It was difficult to decide. I was never good at determining the utilitarian value of things, anyway. My youth pastor, at church – which I was forced to attend – had spoken about utilitarianism during one of his lectures on different philosophical worldviews. He said it didn’t make any sense; it was illogical and impersonal. I agreed with him. It couldn’t account for human unpredictability. That didn’t change the fact, though, that what we did by vandalizing Coach’s house was likely an objectively bad thing to do, or at the very least an objectively pointless thing to do, from both a utilitarian perspective and just from a “don’t be a fuckin’ idiot” perspective. We were all worse than Judas Iscariot, that classic Christian villain – that’s for sure. Everyone at church acted like he was such as bad guy; at least that dude didn’t really have much of a choice in the whole thing, he was just doing the dirty job somebody had to do – that he was predestined to do – for the good of humanity. The positives of his actions outweighed the negatives. With us though…we were just a bunch of fuckin’ idiots.
That undoubtable truth made the rest of my walk back to my parents’ house a little less calm and a lot more anxiety inducing. I deserved a walk of shame. The narrow street leading to my parent’s house became instead the path leading to the site of my execution (which probably wouldn’t be too far from reality if my dad hadn’t yet cooled off). The red, orange, and yellow colors above me, previously beautiful autumnal leaves, were now instead accusatory tomatoes reigning down in punishment upon my dumbass little teenage head. The sounds of the evening, instead of crickets calmly chirping, were now a torrent of shrieking boooooooos invading my psyche. The normally casual, breezy walk down the street became abruptly much longer, and much more anxiety ridden, than it normally was. It made me nervous, knowing that I was a complete fuckin’ idiot. It made me wonder what other things I’d done in life that were just as stupid as vandalizing of Coach Sherman’s house, and whether or not I’d even realized how fuckin’ stupid those things were. Maybe my entire life up to that point had been a series of dumb fuckin’ decisions. Decisions that I didn’t think were dumb, but that everyone else around me absolutely knew were completely moronic. What if my dad had to deal with this kind of shit all the time? That thought made me feel weak; that realization nearly caused within me a panic attack. I gripped my pants and further widened my now bulging eyes, as if to suppress my terror – as if to lock it back in its cage – back within my panting, heaving lungs.
As I walked through the unlocked, swinging storm door my parents’ house – the front porch light, as usual, was left on for me – it felt less like home than it ever had. It felt like a foreign place. From the look of it, my dad had already gone to sleep. I turned the corner into my bedroom intent on trying to do the same. I couldn’t. I didn’t need to apologize to Coach Sherman – I didn’t give a single shit about him – but I did need to apologize to my dad. He was just trying to help out a dumbass like me, his son.
I needed to grow up, that much was clear.
End
About the Creator
Robert Pettus
Robert writes mostly horror shorts. His first novel, titled Abry, was recently published:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/abry-robert-pettus/1143236422;jsessionid=8F9E5C32CDD6AFB54D5BC65CD01A4EA2.prodny_store01-atgap06?ean=9781950464333
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