The Old Man and Sonny – Jack Timko

February 4, 2025

​Hunched over a table saw in the garage, his brittle body sculpted from yellow fingernail, leathered appendages trembling, the ashtray swimming with wood splinters and the regal lions of Pall Mall’s unfiltered coat of arms, he sat cursing everything within range of his spit.
        ​A German Shepherd named after Sonny Barger prowled the old man’s property, a redneck alarm system that mangled old dirt bike tires and allegedly responded to attack commands in at least three languages. When home run balls cleared our fence, we had no option but to knock on his door with hats in hand and ask to retrieve them. After Tommy Boy hit a dinger that smashed his second story window into glittering fragments I was coerced into apologizing at my mother’s behest and hardballs were henceforth off limits. We kept our word and used tennis balls with the occasional wiffle ball – Tommy Boy brought over a can of his mom’s racquetballs once and they soared, made us feel like real power hitters – but the old man never accepted payment from my mother for the broken window, nor did he ever fix it, instead rigging what looked from the outside like some combination of trash bag, cardboard, and electrical tape.
​       When one of you little shits makes the Majors, he’d say, you’ll have to sign one of these balls for me. Every time he’d say it.
        ​His home smelled like the church basement, a scent evocative of the public library but much more desperate. He showed us his rifle collection. He gave us coins and pulled stumbles out of his trick knee – Abracadabra. He’d tell us how Mussolini stored Nazi gold in the Vatican and, after the war, the Catholics let the Nazis escape to South America dressed as priests on jets.
​       We were too skinny, he’d tell us – all elbows and teeth. I’m gonna lock you two in a room and I won’t open the door ‘til one of you eats the other one, he’d say.
        We won’t eat each other, we’ll just wind up getting skinnier, I’d tell him, and what good would that do? Logic, you see. He would chuckle and say something like We’ll see if you still feel that way on day seven.
        When Sonny died he buried the dog in his backyard and erected a monument atop his grave in which he carved Proverbs 12:10: A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast. The old man died the following year, but the week before he joined the choir invisible he gifted me a pack of nudie playing cards and an M3 fighting knife.
        Don’t tell your mom, kid. She’ll cut your pecker off.
        His cedar fence was our outfield wall.