The Long Road Home Is Covered in Limpid Roses
When your father is a legendary scoundrel and your own origin story is a punchline, what does redemption look like? Daniel Wallace answers, with his signature blend of dark humor and Southern surrealism.
Big Fish Daniel Wallace | Southern father-son fiction | contemporary southern short stories
My father—old, alone, penniless, six or seven warrants out for his arrest—came to stay with me for what turned out to be the rest of his life. He’d lived under a dozen aliases in his seventy-one years, but his real name was the one people thought he’d made up: Teddy Sandwich.“Like the Earl,” he was fond of saying, right before he stole your watch. He hadn’t changed much since the last time I saw him a decade ago: worn and grizzled as an interstate-exit hobo, shoes that looked like socks, and a twitch he’d had since licking an electrical outlet on a bet.
He flopped on the couch, lit a cigarette after I asked him not to, and apologized.
“I’m sorry, kid,” he said. “You really don’t deserve this, and by this of course I mean me.” And what could I say? He was right. I’d lived a good life. I was a middle-school science teacher, track coach, advisor to the school paper, The Plucky Lion. I didn’t date much because no woman could live up to my impossibly high standards. I was lonely in a virtuous way. Then he narrowed his eyes. “But I guess this is what you get for killing your twin.”
“Killing my—? Dad, please. Jesus.” He made this kind of shit up all the time, just to put you back on your heels. “What a terrible thing to say.”
“In the womb,” he said. “You killed him in the womb.”
“For God’s sake. Enough.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. Bottom line is, you’re all I got.” And then, under his breath: “Murderer.”
My father was the worst, frankly, maybe even the worst of the worst. I knew him some because my mother made me stay with him a couple of summers while she pursued a modeling career in Japan. She was on billboards for Suntory whiskey from Nagoya to Niigata. I hated every minute of being with him. My whole life since then I’d ask myself, “What would my father do?” and then I’d do exactly the opposite. Sporting his vices like a new silk jacket, he bilked old ladies out of minor fortunes, sold nonexistent beachfront real estate, and smoked like a California wildfire, like he got paid per cigarette: one always hung from the side of his mouth like a malignant appendage, or smoldered on a dinner plate, on the television set—whatever was handy. As if water were too rare and precious a commodity to be used for mere vanity, he rarely bathed. He slept whenever he had a notion to: sometimes from noon to four, or three in the morning to five, up before dawn. And he sleepwalked, wandering around the house muttering words he’d never use awake. Subterfuge. Elegant fornicators. The long road home is covered in limpid roses. He had a scary charm. My mother said people gave him money just so he wouldn’t wreck their lives, which he could do with a phone call. You could tell this was something he would be good at. He brought home stray dogs, one a week or so, and some dogs who were not strays at all, dogs whose collars he’d remove and toss into the gutter. He loved dogs more than me and he’d be the first to admit it.
I was once bitten by a vicious basset hound he nicked from a schoolyard and my father rushed to its aid licketysplit.
“Are you okay, buddy boy?”
“It bit me, Dad,” I said as I bandaged my hand with a sock I found under the coffee table. “I was just going to pet him.”
“I wondered what it was you did,” he hissed. “And don’t look at me that way.” He rubbed the basset’s head with a tenderness I never once experienced. “If it’s a crime to love dogs then lock me up!”
He talked shit about my mother. They’d been married for less than a year when she left him, and he never failed to stick a knife in her memory.
Big Fish Daniel Wallace | Southern father-son fiction | contemporary southern short stories
He was locked up on several occasions but not for loving dogs.
His penis (those words perhaps the most difficult I have ever written) was big, bigger than mine by a lot, something I wish I didn’t know but something that, clearly, he wanted me to, the way he Donald-Ducked it around the house until he had his first cup of coffee.
He talked shit about my mother. They’d been married for less than a year when she left him, and he never failed to stick a knife in her memory.
“She asked for a lot, your mom,” he liked to say. “She wanted to eat my soul!”
Always up to something, Dad was. One day he took a folding chair to the end of the driveway, wearing light blue boxers and an undershirt and a top hat from his circus days, and told the fortunes of everyone who passed, whether they wanted one told or not.
“Hey, lady! You’re going to find love in the strangest of places. Like a parking lot or a public restroom.” To a man in a nice suit: “You, my friend, are going to lose your hair—in a horrific way.” And to a dog, walking on a leather leash by the old lady who gave apples for treats on Halloween: “You’re going to be rich one day, my friend. Your owner has more money than sin and not a friend in the world. She’s leaving it all to you.”
He once let his head fall face-first into a bowl of spaghetti and tomato sauce and he stayed that way for over a minute. That’s a long time to have your face in a bowl of spaghetti.
All I have are stories like this about my father, this guy who woke up every morning of his life wondering if he was dead and, discovering he wasn’t, just did whatever the fuck he wanted to, because why not? He was alive and life was a thing to be lived, not pussied around with, not wasted following rules you don’t know who invented them and what their angle was in the making of. “If I teach you any god damn thing,” he said to me one day, “the god damn thing I would teach you is not to learn any god damn thing. It’s all just mind control, in one form or another.”
“The same way exercise is body control,” I said, exercise being another thing he didn’t believe in. He was skinny as a stick. I couldn’t see a muscle anywhere on his body, just skin and ribs, a pathetic, flaccid meat sack.
There were no rules in his world, no certainties, not even taxes (which he never paid), just the one thing, death. But that wasn’t happening to him either, because here he was in my guest room, lively as hell.
“How did you find me?” I said. “Mom wouldn’t tell you.” “Internet at the library. You’re the only Theodore Sandwich Jr. in existence, believe it or not.” He tried to light a cigarette, but the match died due to his violently shaking hand. Took him three tries. “Parkinson’s,” he said. “A couple of years and I’ll be as wooden as a cigar store Indian.”
Mother and I went out to dinner after and celebrated. She was a retired billboard model by then. Still beautiful, just the older kind. We talked about what a terrible man my father was.
Big Fish Daniel Wallace | Southern father-son fiction | contemporary southern short stories
“Native American,” I said. “A cigar store Native American.”
Long story short: he was right. Eventually he just froze up. Two years later all he could do was blink. A year later he died from ossification of the heart. My mother came all the way from Atlanta to see him at the morgue, just to make sure he was dead. (He’d often pretended to die, mostly to escape the Feds.)
Mother and I went out to dinner after and celebrated. She was a retired billboard model by then. Still beautiful, just the older kind. We talked about what a terrible man my father was, and how neither of us were sorry that he was dead, not in the least. After living with him for three years and doing everything I had to do for him, my heart had ossified too.
I paid for dinner and I walked her to her car. Then I asked her something that had been on my mind for a long, long time.
“So, Mom, weird question. Did I—did I have a twin? In the womb I mean? Dad said.”
She gave me a poisonous look.
“He told you that. I can’t believe he told you that.”
“I know. He said I had a twin and that I ‘killed him in the womb.’ It’s ridiculous. And just like him to say something like that, right?”
I sort of laughed to get her to look at me. But she wouldn’t.
“Well, thing is, you did kill him,” she said. “I never wanted you to know and made him promise not to tell you. But you did it. We could see it happening on the ultrasound. The stealthy approach from behind, your little hands around his little neck. The doctor said you were the strongest fetus he had ever seen, that your brother never had a chance. He was smaller than you were, you know, the sensitive one. Really sad and awful.”
“I did that? Oh my God, that’s terrible.”
“Your father thought it was hilarious, of course.”
“Hilarious?”
“Yeah. He always said, ‘One little Sandwich is enough.’ When we’d go out to lunch, he’d always make the same joke, saying he was thinking about getting a big sandwich, but then he would say, ‘But maybe one little sandwich is enough,’ and laugh. He was always making jokes about the brother you killed in the womb and that’s really why I left him.” She had her hand on the door handle, her eyes focused on nothing, just thinking, as if she were reviewing the years between then and now. She shrugged, and looked at me, I thought, with a mixture of love and pity. It was the way she had looked at me all my life. Now I knew why. “All things considered you turned out better than I thought you would. Much better.”
She may have said something else but my head was all static by then. She kissed me on the cheek and drove away. The Miata backfired as she rounded the corner and disappeared, and somehow I knew I’d never see her again. Spoiler alert: I didn’t.
I’d never been so low, not in all of my years on this planet. And then I stopped in my tracks. Because something came to me, a revelation like the holy men have. And it was this: I was free. There was nothing I couldn’t do now.
Big Fish Daniel Wallace | Southern father-son fiction | contemporary southern short stories
The restaurant was just a few blocks from my place, so I walked home. I was in a daze, felt like she’d bricked me across the temple, so I went the long way, through the nicer neighborhoods, and I took it slow. I had a lot to think about. I was a murderer now, after all. I’d always been one, I guess, but knowing it changed things. It changed everything. I felt like me, but different—a different me. Like me, in many ways identical to me, but being taken over by something strange and foreign.
Night had fallen. Light spilled from the windows of the fancy brownstones. Beyond the windows, mothers were putting their children to bed, fathers were putting the dishes away. Happy fucking families. I kind of watched myself watching them—as if I were hovering in the air above me, looking down. And looking down at me I saw who I was, just this guy, this lonely nobody with nothing, this murderer, walking down the sidewalk, alone.
I’d never been so low, not in all of my years on this planet.
And then I stopped in my tracks. Because something came to me, a revelation like the holy men have. And it was this: I was free. There was nothing I couldn’t do now. Nothing. I had already done the worst thing a person could do, and so whatever I did from here on out, no matter how bad it was, how crazy, how stupid, how pointless and selfish and destructive, would pale in comparison. I was free, and true freedom is like a superpower. I know that now. It’s like being invisible. No one could see me, but oh, I could see myself. I knew who I was. I followed my fate like it was a siren, and from that day forward I lived and lived and lived, and I watched the incidental damage my life produced pile up in the rearview mirror. I was a Sandwich, after all—Theodore Sandwich Jr., the only one in the world.
Big Fish Daniel Wallace | Southern father-son fiction | contemporary southern short stories
Read “The Hero Who Wanted to Die,” Chuck Reece's 2023 interview with Daniel Wallace.
Big Fish Daniel Wallace | Southern father-son fiction | contemporary southern short stories
Daniel Wallace is the author of six novels, including Big Fish, which was adapted and released as a movie and a Broadway musical. His novels have been translated into over three dozen languages. His essays and interviews have been published in Garden & Gun, Poets & Writers and Our State magazine, where he was, for a short time, the barbecue critic. His short stories have appeared in over fifty magazines and periodicals. He was awarded the Harper Lee Award, given to a nationally recognized Alabama writer who has made a significant lifelong contribution to Alabama letters. He was inducted into the Alabama Literary Hall of Fame in 2022. He is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Hey Chuck,
Daniel is my favorite Southern writer!
Daniel,
Thanks for doing what you do!
Hugh