You Don't Say

When I was a kid, maybe 7, 8, 9 years old or so, my father told me he had killed someone. He told me one evening when we were sitting together in the kitchen and neither my mother or my sister were in the room. He said it like he was confessing a deep, dark secret to an old drinking buddy.

All I could do was sit there and listen. I loved him a lot then. He said that he had shot somebody in another state but that I could never tell anyone because he was afraid that someone would come and hurt us. He intimated mob connections.

Some time later, I went to my mother and told her that my father had told me this. She just gave me a rather mean look, but she didn't seem to know what to say. Then, jealously, or maybe disbelievingly, "He's never told me that." She finally went on to aver that he shouldn't be saying things like that to me, and that was that as far as she was concerned. She didn't want to deal with shit like protecting her kids from being told these horrible things.

After a year or two passed, he told me a different version of the story, or perhaps it was a completely different story. Because I was used to his word being law, I never mentioned anything to him about his prior version. To question him was unheard of because then I would be awful, a terrible little girl to whom he would say, apparently devastated, "Don't you believe your Daddy?"

This new version had him as a truck driver in another, vague, state. A man crawled up on his truck when he was in a parking lot and opened the door and said to him, "You know what I want." My father told me he shot him in the head and he fell off the truck into a ditch, and then apparently my father left the scene. I could never tell anyone because, "Daddy would get in lots of trouble."

As time went on, about three decades down the road, I came to the realization that my father was a pathological liar. The bastard would lie for sheer sport. For most of my life, I believed he had done these terrible things. Perhaps he did. He never gave me any indication of where these things had allegedly taken place. I have come to believe that probably these things he told me were lies like the rest of his lies, and I questioned why a grown man would put any child, let alone the little girl he pretended to love, through the belief of and worry about such information.

Maybe if I had any sort of concrete information, any sort of time frame or whereabouts, I could contact law enforcement to let them know what he had told me. But, what, I go to them and say, "My father, who is now dead, told me something 25 years ago about something bad he did. I'm not really sure it's true. No, I don't know where. No, I don't know who he did it to. He lied alot, almost daily, really. Do you feel like a wild goose chase?" But without information law enforcement would need, I am powerless. What if that fucker really did do those things? If that information could go toward serving a greater purpose, like solving something as yet unsolved, I would love to try, to contact law enforcement, to, if nothing else, prove to myself yet again what a miserable liar he was, and that would be the best case scenario.

By the bye, reading Q1605's blog helped me purge, vomit this information into this venue. It is a sickness I need to rid myself of, this fucking memory that I am helpless to use to any positive purpose. Thanks Q.