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Summary
176. This Time – 211. And Like Old Times
The elevator is still filled with smoke when the next person gets on. This time, Will recognizes immediately that it’s his father, Mikey Holloman. Will says he’s been waiting for his father since he was 3 years old. He calls him “my pop.” They hug and Will calls it “a lifetime’s worth of squeeze.” He imagines that the hug peels back the raw and irritated parts, the parts of him that bleed. Will’s father greets Uncle Mark, his brother. Will reflects that he doesn’t have any memories of his father, though he wishes often that he did. His brother Shawn used to tell him about his father moonwalking in the same elevator they are on now. Shawn said that Will laughed so hard he passed gas and peed himself. Will thinks that his father’s voice is how his brother’s voice would’ve been if he’d been able to grow up. He wonders how to talk to his father when the language of “dad” is so foreign to him. He struggles to talk to his father with the audience of ghosts. His father says he knows about Shawn, and Will says he doesn’t know what to do. Will says he has to follow the Rules, and Uncle Mark asks if Will knows his father’s story.
Will thought his father died of a broken heart. But really, he was shot in a phone booth. Buck was sixteen when Will and Shawn’s father died, and that’s when Buck started looking after Shawn. It was Buck who told Shawn the story of his father’s death. But their father and Uncle Mark tell Will that the story is wrong.
His father describes how devastated he was by his brother’s death. He said it was hard to be a father and a husband when he couldn’t be a brother. He didn’t cry, though, he followed the Rules. He shot the boy that he thought killed his brother four times and then took off running. He went home and took a shower. He couldn’t kiss his wife or kids, and he just lay in the bath to keep the nightmares away. Will says The Rules are The Rules, though. Then his father admits to Will that he killed the wrong person. The boy he killed just worked for the man who actually killed Mark. He said he’d been so sure that the boy was the killer, “had to be.”
Will is disappointed that his father killed the wrong person. He wonders if his father is disappointed in him, too. He remembers children playing a game with their fathers on the playground, where they stand on their father’s feet and the fathers walk around like zombies. The kids have to trust their fathers because the kids can’t see where their fathers are going.
Will’s father gives him a big hug. In the hug, there are all the confused emotions of the moment. Will feels that he doesn’t know what to do. He buries himself in the hug.
Then, Will’s father pulls the gun from Will’s waistband and points it at Will’s head. Will’s father has a single tear moving down his cheek. Will is terrified. The gun being cocked sounds like a door closing. Will feels like it’s only the two of them in the elevator. It’s the first time Will has been so close to death. He thinks about how, even though his father is dead, the bullets in the gun are real, how there are fifteen of them, one for each year of his life. Will pees himself in fear. Then his father uncocks the gun, hugs him again, and puts the gun back in his waistband. Will screams, furious and humiliated. Uncle Mark comes forward and gives his father a cigarette. Buck lights it. The elevator comes to a stop.
Analysis
This section explores the theme of the cyclical trap of violence, evoking the heartbreaking way violence begets violence throughout the novel, costing many lives. Pops’ story is, in many ways, the beginning of the end of Shawn’s life and foreshadows the decision that Will faces in the novel. Shawn died because he followed in his father’s footsteps, seeking revenge for the murder of the person who assumed a mentoring role for him, Buck. Will also follows in his father’s footsteps, not only in his plot for revenge but in the suggestion that Will is pursuing the wrong suspect. The fact that Pops killed the wrong person is a great disappointment to Will, who sees it as a failure on his father’s part that reflects poorly on him. However, Will doesn’t yet see that the failure is not entirely in choosing the wrong target but in thinking that vengeance has the power to correct the uncorrectable losses he and his family have suffered. His father tries to tell him that murdering someone took him away from Will, Shawn, and their mother, suggesting that the rule for revenge does nothing but continue and increase pain and grief.
This section also explores the theme of the conflict between free will and duty, and how Will and his father grapple with the immense weight of cultural expectations. As Pops describes his emotions after his brother died, he paints the picture of someone who is overcome with grief. He says he doesn’t know how to interact with his kids or his wife because he can’t be a brother any longer, which suggests that he lost a fundamental part of himself when he lost his brother. To cope with that incomprehensible loss, Pops turns immediately to The Rules, mentioning that they were taught to him by his own father, which reveals The Rules as a form of generational trauma. It’s almost as though the code of his community and his family takes the place of his own will in this confusing moment. In the same way, Will doesn’t think for himself or take a beat to sit with the bewilderment and chaos of his brother’s death. He doesn’t, in fact, consider what he might want to do at all nor the consequences for his own life. Instead, almost as though he's on autopilot, he turns to The Rules and organizes his entire response to his brother’s death around them, just as his father did before him.
This section also explores the theme of the pain of toxic masculinity and how repressed emotions come out sideways as violence. Will and his father struggle to communicate with each other. Will notes that attempting to talk to his father feels like having an extra tongue and extra lip, suggesting that language is so difficult between the two of them that it makes Will’s body feel foreign and encumbered. Pops also struggles to articulate what he wants for Will. Even in death, Pops still turns to violence to guide his son. Instead of telling Will that he’s going in the wrong direction, that he doesn’t need to follow The Rules, that the path he is on is futile and ends only in disaster, Pops pulls the gun on Will. This act of violence and terror is intended to humiliate Will, and though it does show him that he likely does not have what it takes to kill someone as well as make him mindful of his own mortality, it does so at the expense of Will’s dignity and his trust of his father. Even in death, Pops is unable to find a new path forward, one that doesn’t rely on the language of violence.
