The shakes start after I’ve decided I’m moving out.

“Look.”

I turn from my phone. Dad lifts his limp hand like a marionette. It pulses, shakes. I try to imagine who he’ll blame for this.

“Kinda strange, right?”

“Maybe it’s the drinking, Dad.”

He scoffs, cracks the twist cap of the second four-dollar bottle of pinot gris, my input as empty as the first. Dad kills two bottles of white wine a night, one bottle a ritual of the past.

“Seriously, it could be from the drinking.”

“It ain’t the drinking, son.”

It’s never the drinking. Always something else. He works too hard. He didn’t eat enough for dinner. Bad sleep. The complaints pile nicely atop the elephant in the room; a great, avoided beast that has no place in this house, no space for how much it requires of others.

“So? What is it then?” I ask while scanning apartment listings in the city sixty miles away. 450 square feet. Community laundry. Tacky carpet. Vacation getaways compared to our farm. No animals allowed? Sounds like a dream.

“Had to fix that fence the cows ‘bout broke down yesterday. Think I strained something.” He rubs his hand while it shakes, then stops.

Shakes, stops, shakes, shakes, stops.

A pattern? A signal his body is trying to relay? An SOS? But who’d save him? He won’t even save himself.

“You’ve fixed fences hundreds of times. This is something else.” I try to sound concerned, but I’ve been here before, paraded this elephant through its circus. Once you’ve seen one show, you’ve seen them all.

“I’m getting old, Charlie. Gonna need more help around the farm.”

Age. The age-old excuse. Elephants live for a long time too.

“All these excuses, and the obvious answer – ”

“I’m telling you, it ain’t the drinkin!”

He bursts into a barrage of slurring curses, stomps his big elephant’s feet, trumpets his wrinkly elephant’s trunk. A wine bottle shatters. A chair topples over. The hallways bulge. An ivory tusk punches through the ceiling as foundation cracks under the elephant’s weight. The house is too small, and I don’t want to step in elephant shit. I pack a bag and leave the farm. I drive along winding mountain darkness until city lights spill across the night sky.

When the drinking was manageable, Mom and I used to ignore or shrug at his words when they stank of wine or beer. Dad worked his ass off from sunup till sundown bailing hay, bushhogging, posting fences, back breaking work, so can’t a man kick up his feet at the end of the day and enjoy a cold beer? Two? Five? How about a bottle of wine to top things off? What’s hard work without the reward?

But as his drinking worsened, so did his actions. He never hit us, but words can break the parts of you fists can’t reach. Mom wrangled that elephant first, and when it rumbled and roared night after night, she eventually left him for another man who didn’t have four tons of baggage. But she also left behind a sixteen-year-old kid. I grew closer to dad in the aftermath, comforting the wild beast instead of trying to tame it.

Teenagers aren’t equipped for either. The day I turned eighteen I started looking for a way out, taking extra shifts at a chicken farm up the road every weekend, bought a rusted truck on life support, sought places not designed for elephants to roam free.

Took less than a year.

I spend the next week viewing cramped downtown apartments, stacked on one another like bales of concrete hay. One catches my eye. Busy streets shuddering its paper walls. Windows don’t shut flush. No sprinkler system. I smile at the greasy landlord.

“I’ll take it.”

My phone rings the next morning. It’s Dad. He hasn’t called since I left.

“I need your help.”

The words are a foreign language.

“What?”

“The shakes. They’ve gotten worse.”  His voice shakes too, but with fear, the heavy, elephant-sized reality of his nightly rituals. I want to say I told you so.

“What do you want to do about it?”

“I want to see a doctor.”

His voice is so small.

Can elephants whisper?

I pick him up the morning of his appointment. He wasn’t lying. The shakes have migrated up his arm, claimed new territory in his shoulder. He doesn’t speak the entire car ride. He keeps his eyes down, away from what he thinks will be judgement or pity. I’ve yet to meet a farmer who can handle either.

This, he is ashamed of. Not the hot, beastly breath from another ritualistic night. The shame is in his shaking, its puzzling progression, its vigilant siege. All mammals fear the unknown.

It takes a battery of tests and two specialists to confirm it isn’t shaking. They’re called tremors.

Parkinson’s Disease.

His brain was sending signals, misfired. Not an SOS exactly but scrambled messages forming a chaotic warning sign.

Brain Damaged. Low Dopamine. Beware.

The long drive home is silent save for the truck’s rusty rattle. Georgia pines wash by in endless blurs of green. We eventually tumble down the farm’s unpaved driveway. Cows gather along the fence, shiny doll eyes tuned to our arrival.

“Doctors say I’ve had it in me for a long time. Long, long time.” He echoes the words. “Changed my brain. That’s why I said those things to your mother.”

An apology? An excuse? Maybe both.

“Sorry, Dad.” I pat his weak, tremoring hand, throw the truck in park and cut the engine. The double-wide sits against familiar green pastures framed in evening horizon. I’ll have to drive back to the city, get my things, and stay with Dad for a while. He takes a long breath before speaking.

“I told you it wasn’t the drinking, son.”

Elephants don’t forget.

Raised on both a farm in north Georgia and the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Raymond J. Brash currently resides in Colorado with his wife, and rescue pittie, Bessie. He enjoys reading and writing speculative fiction, noir, and genre mashups. Raymond has stories published or forthcoming in On Fire And Under Water: A Climate Change Crime Fiction Anthology, Stolen: A Horror Anthology, BULL, Please See Me, Shotgun Honey, Rock and a Hard Place Press, and others, and has been nominated for a Best of the Net Award.