My father found it amusing. "You know what that little shit did?" he slurred as he swayed on his drunken feet balancing a whiskey in one hand while pointing at me with the other. "He charged all his friends to skate in his garage. Whole goddamn neighborhood line up and paid him a dime each to skate indoors."
"Smart little bastard," Hap said grinning wryly. They laughed as I propped three fingers on the smooth green felt and circled the stick with my thumb and forefinger. The cue ball clicked the purple four into the corner pocket just as the Rangely BPOE Lodge door buzzed in Jr Hume. "Jr. you son of a bitch! Ask Young what his kid did with that sunken garage of his." Hap accosted him as Junior slid his key card back into his wallet. Jr. was amused, and I listened to the story repeated to everyone on a bar stool as I played 8 ball with myself in the adjoining pool room.
The story was only half-true. I never charged anyone anything. I skated in my garage by myself most of the time but once in a while a couple of friends joined me. It was only a single garage so there wasn't enough room to do too much, but it was fun skating back and forth from one wall to the other and slam into the garage door like a hockey player. We would line up, race to the door, slam into it and fall down like a handful of jacks. It was an odd kind of game kids enjoy.
Another one of my odd pleasures was building dams wherever I found running water. I built a damn once in the ditch by Rangely Elementary School that backed up for three days. When I finally broke the pile of rocks and boards that held it, the water roared into a flash flood over the ditch bank and covered our play ground about 4 inches deep. The power of that water was thrilling and dam building became an addiction.
One day in early spring t the water coursed down our street from the snow melt and threatened our garage. To save the garage from sinking further, my father, raised a farmer and no stranger to a shovel, dug a ditch to channel the water away. He was pleased with his work as all the water running down from the street was swept past the garage into the alley where it would harm no buildings.
I was pleased too. As a dam builder it was a dream to have this stream of water running through my own yard. I drug out all of our scrap wood and secured it in place with some big rocks and scrap cinder blocks. I made the water back up all the way into our driveway until it was a lake and finally flanked the higher ground, went around the ditch my father dug and flooded our garage. I had had my fun and was getting ready to break the damn when mud sloshed behind my back.
His big meat hook of a hand jerked my shoulder around to his furious face. "You little son of a bitch," he said gritting his teeth, "I spent my whole lunch hour digging that ditch! Don't you ever pull a stupid stunt like this again you little bastard!" He pushed me and started to turn away before his anger flooded it's banks and the meat hook whirled around and clubbed my face. "Asshole!" I heard through the ringing black stars.
Freezing mud engulfed me. I laid in it stunned as he sloshed angrily into the house and slammed the door. He'd verbally abused me before, thrown things at me and even kicked my ass hard enough to knock me down. At 6'2" 240 lbs, he was dangerous when angered, but I still loved my father. Not this day, though, I hated him. I drug myself up from the mud, wiped the dripping blood from my nose and vowed to myself I'd never be like him.
