Oil & Steel

My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum, watching a portable black-and-white television, reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which he preferred to Modern Fiction. One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease, except the one that guarded his corpse found holding a tumbler of Bushmills. "Dead is dead," he would say, an antipreacher. I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet and some motor oil—my inheritance. Once I saw him weep in a courtroom— neglected, needing nursing—this man who never showed me much affection but gave me a knack for solitude, which has been mostly useful.