Michael Neal Morris

Smoke

I remember my father's laugh as something real, something that drew you in. I would say something, and smoke would come out of his nose as if he had just taken a drag from his cigarette and the punch line had come too suddenly. Kind of like a spit take.

But it was only like that in physical, technical sense. The smoke would come suddenly, his face in a tight grin as he laughed through his nose. What was different was that this laugh, as I remember it, seemed the most natural thing of all. Maybe something mechanics do. Like drinking coffee with greasy hands, a greasy, tired face dipping into warm liquid.

His black rimmed glasses moved slightly down his nose because the laugh tipped him forward a moment, then tilted him back. The Lucky Strike came up to his lips and he drew as he listened. Always he was listening.

My story is perhaps another version of the plot he may have heard from someone else in the family. It is probably about someone he knows. Maybe the tale is about the time I tried to talk Bryan out of jumping from the top bunk of one bed to the bottom bunk of another on the other side of the room. Maybe the time I kicked John's ankle so it would swell when we were looking for an excuse to be late getting back from a movie we weren't supposed to see. Maybe a story about threatening one of my sister's boyfriends. Something. Probably a kind of catch up story. The kind of thing he would have known about first hand had he lived with us, except had he and Mom not divorced, these stories would not likely have occurred.

I never told him that I wished he'd quit smoking; not the way I thought he knew how I felt about his drinking. (Did I know how I felt?) But the picture in my mind is of him after the drinking stopped, when he had become a "tea man," though he was often drinking black coffee as strong as a vice. He, sober, watching my face as I imitated my brother, his eyes following my eyes, not my hands, as I gestured wildly. His own hands were steady, his face alight. His face was a fireplace, his eyes the burning wood that makes storytelling come easy. And natural. All of the bad in the world, even the painful parts behind the story that were understood and unsaid, became part of our breathing.

But then I'd listen to his stories. And I had to breathe in the nasty fumes from a face buried in engines. This pollution was still part of my father. It would have killed him had the medical profession not gotten to him first. But I was more than a little glad to endure the thick air of these Lucky Strikes. We were connected by the smoke of the earth and the laughter that was like church bells. I was a listener. I was a storyteller too. I was my father and my father was my friend.

And when I told a funny story, he laughed at all the right moments. When I listened to him, his eyes revealed delight in my laughter. Since he’s been gone, laughter itself is changed. It is thin like wisps one cannot hold.