#these're sad boy hours folks

[capricesofchance]

Half the time, I didn’t know what to make of Dad.

Sometimes, I don’t think Mom much did, either. I don’t remember much of her, but I do know she had been torn. I think she hated him-- or, well, that’s too strong a word. I was always told she could have been a damn saint. It just wasn’t in her. To hate. Though, under the angelic disposition and the sense of duty of a wife, she burned with.. something.

I suppose she hated when he wasn’t with us. When he wasn’t home. Because that meant he was at the casino, in the barroom; rolling dice and spinning tables, throwing down the family money... which wasn’t much. But.. he always came home with a little more than he left. So I guess she didn’t think she could complain. He always said us Dents had a history of chance going in our favor. Funny, that.

They called’im Double-Down Dent. All the wiseguys around there treated him like one of them-- they loved him. He was basically a celebrity. And I mean, he was clean. He wasn’t in the life, or anything, but when he was on a streak he’d buy everyone drinks, and two more for himself; and so it was all hail Double-Down Dent.

I’ve met some of the guys that knew him, way back when, through my job. It wasn’t always pleasant, but as soon as they made the connection, some nostalgia would flood their systems like a high, and they’d be shooting off all kinds’a stories about him. Everybody was a friend of his, it seemed like. They said he could walk into a room of old money and blood money and whatever else and just, wrap’em around his finger with a toss of the dice and a round of whiskey on the rocks. It was just the ol’ Double-Down charm.

They’d always tell me he could’a gone into politics. They’d always laugh. Can you imagine, a Dent in office? I didn’t know how to respond so I just shrugged. That’s how Dad was.

I didn’t really know that, though. It was always news to me. He only ever came home with the sloppy consequences.

Well, I mean, don’t get me wrong-- most nights, yeah he stank with the cologne of Bacardi’s and forty proof, but.. he wasn’t out of control or anything. He just went right to bed-- always made sure it was his own-- maybe gave me a pat on the head or a ‘hey there champ’ or whatever. Even when he started losing more than he won, it wasn’t terrible. He had her. She was there to ground him, when the karma came to collect on Double-Down’s luck.

Apparently the scale hadn’t been balanced enough. It wasn’t much past my seventh birthday, when she was gone. It felt like she had just, disappeared overnight-- the cancer was quick, at least.

Dad may have been devastated, but even then he didn’t take it out on me. He tried his damndest to raise me right, raise me strong-- sometimes he went without food, when the money got eaten up by Craps and Roulette, just so I could go to bed with a full stomach. Gotham wouldn’t just chew me up and spit me out if he didn’t, if I didn’t grow up as strong as he could ensure-- it wouldn’t just take a chunk out. It’d take me whole.

He always wanted me to know how things weren’t fair. Even in the casino he loved, odds were stacked against you. That’s just how life was. No God, no justice, no Heaven or Hell-- nothing would ever tip the scales for you.

It wasn’t until one night, the trend started.

I had always loved my law shows, even as a little kid, and he didn’t much mind them. I don’t remember which exactly it had been, but it was the usual plot. The defendant was unfairly accused, the righteous defense attorney gettin’ a gotcha on the big evil D.A., justice gettin’ properly served.. y’know.

And.. I don’t know, I just, it was one of those times where you blurt things out. It had been a few months later, after she died, and I was just a kid that didn’t know any better.

‘I miss Mom.’ 

I caught myself a little too late, because those three, thoughtless little words were already out there, hanging in the open. I was scared as hell, because I didn’t know what Dad was gonna do-- cry? break down? scream and yell? TV didn’t give dads that drank a shining reputation, and I had heard from other kids stories of parents hittin’ their children-- he never laid a hand on me, but, well, I was still young and dumb.

He just kept his eyes on the TV, and took a sip of amber, and said, ‘Me too.’

It was obvious I should’ve left it there. But like I said; young and dumb. I had thought circles around it, over those few, empty months, and I had come to the naive little conclusion that...

‘It isn’t fair.’

I should’ve known better, at that point. With all the lessons dad had ground into me, the unfairness of life was the golden rule. He thought I had taken it to heart by then, I guess. I don’t know. Despite whatever he thought, it was clear I still hadn’t.

So he got up. Took another little draw from his glass. The ice clinked around as he leaned over to shut off the TV. Sat back down, and finally he gave me this funny look I had been expecting. I never knew what it meant, but I knew it he gave it to me when I didn’t understand something important he was trying to tell me.

Apparently I had been feelin’ like a pretty bold little shit, since he hadn’t done much so far, and turning off the TV just let me turn my full, idiot attention onto him. I asked something like why God had taken Mom away (because, despite all his insistence on there being no such thing, I still strongly remembered Mom’s devotion; the big Bible she had always captivated me, though she never forced it on me, and after she died I never let it go, because it was one of the few things I could definitively hold onto about her) and he heaved out this great, deep sigh.

‘He didn’t,’ he told me, ‘because there isn’t any God. You know I loved your mom, so so much, but she was wrong about that, alright? She was wrong. There’s no God, there’s no Devil-- ain’t no paradise above us or damnation under our feet. Just like there’s no Easter Bunny or Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy, no monsters out to get you, hidin’ under the bed, in the closet, and no one to save you from them. Just us.’

I thought about my law shows. About the dashing defense attorney that saved the innocent from the monstrous D.A., and about the scales held by the woman, blind but exact.

‘what about.. justice...?’

‘No, Harvey--’ He had begun to snap, but his eyes shut for a second and he breathed out, slowly. Whatever simmered cooled back down, and he opened up his eyes and looked at me again. ‘--...that’s the point. All there is, is...’

And he paused. Mulled over something in his head.

‘I’ll show you.’ He set down his drink, and began fishing around in his pocket. ‘You like games, right? ‘Cause we’re gonna play a little game.’

And as he said that he pulled his hand out, and I saw between his fingers the glint of metal. He opened his hand and in his broad palm was a coin. An old silver dollar. I remembered it, because it was his good luck charm, of sorts. It always mystified me when he’d flip it-- that kiddish sort of obsession with the things your parents put importance in, y’know?

I just nodded, because I was enthralled, and he chuckled a little. ‘Course, you’re my little man, hm?’ He held the coin away, getting ready to flip it. ‘Now call it, son. Heads or tails.’

I tilted my head, in the way I always did when I considered something. He watched me for a few moments, but clearly I was taking too long for such a simple decision. ‘Call it, son.’

‘Tails.’ and then, ‘What do I get if I win?’

I tilted my head again when he got another funny look on his face, one I didn’t recognize. The same kind of look he’d shoot the pantry, before handing me his plate. Now I’m older, I’d call it some kind of hardened resignation. Because he was about to do something necessary, but something he didn’t want to do.

‘Champ, it ain’t that kind of game.’

His thumb slipped under the coin’s edge, but stayed there, playing at it for a tentative second.

‘It’s just blind luck, Harv. Y’see? Just.. Just luck.’

I tracked the coin as it spun through the air with a tinny little ‘ting’, arcing up and up, before falling gently back into his hand. He slapped it softly onto the wrist of his other hand. I bounced up for a second onto my knees so I could see.

“And then what?” The doctor asked. I blinked at her, breath still hitched in my lungs in a pregnant pause. I rambled more than I thought, was more absorbed than I realized, because the cracks of world beyond the blinds was darker now, and there was the pattering of rain against glass instead of warm sun leaking into the room. The sky rumbled distantly, in one of Gotham’s usual nightly storms. Gently, she prompted again, “Harvey?”

“What happened with your father, Harvey?”

I thought of Dad. The fleeting, little things that was my memory’s shorthand for him. His rumbling laugh, warm and deep in his chest. The clink of ice on glass. Amber liquid mixed with dark carbonation. Late nights waiting up for that sought after pat on my head, that little assurance from him that he still cared. What, to a seven year old, seemed like the hands of a giant; which held me tight when I couldn’t sleep, haunted by pale skin and sunken eyes and the rhythmic beep of my mother’s absent heart; which entrapped the coin one last time in a stolen glimmer.

“Then, he broke my jaw.”