Your Father Liked to Take Me Dancing

Your father liked

To take me dancing

I’d say ‘Where we going tonight?’

He’d say, ‘Just you wait’

So I’d wait

That place out past Letvax

That’s where we’d go

And the band there

Was this old bunch of geezers

Who liked to play so loud

You’d come home

With your ears buzzing

If you came home

Every so often

Your father would leave me there

Make me walk back home

Not because he was mad at me

You understand

Just because he wanted to see

If I could do it

Girls and women went missing all the time

On the road back from Letvax

Not even always at night

Sometimes in broad daylight

Sometimes you’d see them

And a car would pass by

And they’d be gone

People started thinking

It was supernaturally inclined

Because it happened so many times

And nobody seemed to know

What was going on

Between here and Letvax

There aren’t many people

And everybody knows everybody

So nobody could believe

That this one’s father could abduct

This one’s daughter

Or this one’s cousin

Could abduct that one’s mother

We thought maybe it was a monster

Sheltered somewhere in the woods

Jumping out and snatching the innocent

When your father first warned me

About walking about at night

On the road

I told him I wasn’t afraid of whatever it was

Snatching those girls

He laughed at me

Thinking I was speaking foolish

But I told him

It was as true as anything

I didn’t have no fear

For nothing at all

Not with the father I had

And the brothers

And the man a mile down from us

Who we entertained on holidays

And who taught me

What staying on your toes is

Your mother’s a peculiar sort of person

Because she’s not scared

Of what she doesn’t know

She’s known too much

To be scared

Of the unknown

And your father liked to test me

See if I was telling truths

So he would take me out dancing

And when it got so late

And we were both so cocked

We could barely recall

Our own names

He would get in the car

And drive off

And I’d start to walking

It might take me all night

To get back sometimes

Strolling in just in time

To make you kids breakfast

And your father still passed out in bed

Figuring he’d be a widower

When he woke up

But no, there I was

Holding out his coffee to him

Shit-eating grin on my face

Because proving a man stupid

Is the greatest joy

Any woman’ll ever know

Pretty soon he started taking me

To bars far past Letvax

To other towns

Strange towns

Places I didn’t know

That I didn’t know the way home from

And every time

I’d find my way

Somehow or other
I would

Those later times

When I’d walk through the door

He’d be waiting for me

And I’d say--

‘Shall we go dancing again tonight?’

And oh, he’d be mad

He’d be so mad

He wouldn’t know

What to do