by Dale Peck
The boy figures out what’s going on just as the shorter policeman grabs the old man by the lapels and pulls him into a sitting position. They have dragged him home and roughed him up before, threatened to lock him up if they find him sleeping in the Barrens or on someone’s front lawn one more time, and in the past his mother has screamed at them to stop. But tonight, the boy realizes, tonight his mother has asked them not to stop but to wait. Wait until she could get the old man’s eldest son out of bed. Not so they could arrest him for beating up his own father, but so he could watch the policemen do it too.
Still holding him by the lapels, the shorter policeman administers a couple of slaps to the old man’s face.
How many times, Lloyd? How many times are we gonna have to go through this? This routine’s getting old, Lloyd, how many times are we gonna have to go through it?
The old man makes a face and twists his head back and forth like a baby refusing food. His eyes and mouth are pinched tightly shut.
The shorter policeman smacks him again. Huh, Lloyd? Answer me, how many times are we gonna have to drag your ass in off the streets?
Sleepy, the old man says then, still trying to twist his face away from the shorter policeman’s blows without opening his eyes. Just lemme sleep.
That’s what I’m saying, Lloyd. Why can’t you sleep in your own bed instead of making us pick you up off the streets and drag your sorry ass back here week after week? We’re tired of it, Lloyd. We got better things to do with our time. Open your goddamn eyes when I’m talking to you, Lloyd!
The shorter policeman administers a particularly vicious smack and the old man’s eyes open. He stares up into the face of the shorter policeman with wide uncomprehending eyes. On the couch, the boy’s mother sits back and pulls one of the cushions into her lap. She is staring at the boy and it seems to him that she is fighting to keep a smile off her face.
What’s this? the shorter policeman is saying now. Looks like you got a bit of a shiner coming on here. Looks like someone got to you before we did. Huh, Lloyd, someone get to you before we did?
The old man blinks, swallows, but doesn’t say anything.
What’s that, Lloyd? the shorter policeman says. I didn’t catch that. Got in a brawl with one-a your bar buddies? Or maybe someone dished out a bit of street justice, Lloyd? Someone else as sick of your drunk bullshit as we are? Huh, Lloyd? When the old man still doesn’t say anything the shorter policeman shakes him by the lapels. Answer me, Lloyd. He presses his finger into the swelling around the old man’s eye. He pushes his finger right into the bruise as though it were a rotten apple. Huh?
Mercy! the old man screams then. Mercy, please, have mercy! He flails out of the shorter policeman’s grip and crawls away from him along the wall. Mercy, please! I beg of you!
For a moment it looks as if the shorter policeman is going to let him go. The old man crawls a few feet and the policeman watches him go with his hands on his hips. But then, almost casually, he begins walking along behind him.
Mercy, Lloyd? the shorter policeman says. We’ll show you some mercy. As soon as you start acting like a man. When are you gonna start acting like a man, Lloyd?
The shorter policeman ambles along beside the old man as though he were out for a Sunday stroll. When, occasionally, he kicks the old man in the hip or ribs, it is as if he is returning a stray soccer ball to boys on a field.
Huh, Lloyd? When are you gonna start acting like a man? Take care of your wife, set a good example for your children? Huh, Lloyd, how long do they have to wait?
When he kicks the old man, the old man bounces off the wall and keeps on crawling. His jacket, split along its back middle seam, falls open around his torso like a pair of broken wings. His left shoe is missing, and a dirty gray sock hangs off his foot like a half-shed skin. Mercy, he says, but quietly, quietly. Have mercy, please.
And of course the room is an eight-sided circle: the old man crawls along, the shorter policeman kicking him occasionally, his head hanging below his shoulders, and when he bumps into a corner he turns to the right and keeps on crawling back to where he started. The boy is in the center of the room, and he turns slowly, following the old man’s progress with his whole body. Around the kitchen table, behind the bed, and so on to the front door, where he bumps into the motionless legs of the taller policeman. For a moment he seems almost to be sniffing at them like a dog, and then he sits back on his heels and stretches his arms up toward the taller policeman’s face.
Mercy, my good sir! I beg of you, show a poor man some mercy!
The taller policeman takes a step back from the old man, then stares down at him with his lips parted in a grimace, his head shaking back and forth. The old man’s arms waver asynchronously, like the antennas of a grasshopper, and even as he sits there with his hands upraised a dark stain spreads out over his crotch and down the legs of his pants.
Mercy, sir, he pleads quietly. I beg of you.
The taller policeman licks his lips as though he has eaten something foul. Inside his pockets his hands are clenching and unclenching. The old man’s urine trickles to the floor audibly.
Aw, Jesus Christ, the taller policeman says. C’mon, Sal, let’s get the hell outta here before I throw up.
My own boy, the old man says as the taller policeman steps back and pulls open the door. His hands are still upraised, his urine a blotchy-winged butterfly staining the legs of his pants. My only boy. Thank you for your mercy.
The shorter policeman steps around the old man and heads out the door. Before he goes he says, Next time it’ll be the lockup Lloyd. But his heart’s gone out of it. He nods goodnight to the boy’s mother and pulls the door closed behind him when he leaves.
The old man sits on his haunches for a moment, and then all at once he folds over, his torso on his knees and his arms stretched forward as if he is prostrating himself before his god. His face is in the puddle of his own urine, and his voice emerges wet and muffled beneath his flesh.
My own, my one and only boy.
The boy just stares at him. He does not know what he feels. He is so overwhelmed by emotions he feels numb, but then suddenly one thought emerges clearly:
He wishes he had never left the farm.
Isn’t it funny, he thinks, how when he was on the farm he missed Long Island, and now that he’s on Long Island he misses the farm? Isn’t it funny?
The first blow is hot and wet. As if she has sprayed lighter fluid on him and lit it at the same time. The next catches him in the palm of his hand when he turns to ward off the blow. The metal coupling at the end of the hose bites deeply into the palm, and, despite himself, he screams. He turns then, protecting as much of his soft parts as possible, offering up instead the broad plain of his back.
Good for nothing sonofabitch. Goddamn worthless piece of Upstate trash. I never should-a married you! I should-a lived on the streets and raised my three orphans in the gutter rather than subject them to you! Goddamn you Lloyd! Goddamn you for ever and ever!
She is beating at him with one hand and ripping at his undershirt with the other, and because she is so close to him she can only catch him with the root of the hose and so it doesn’t really hurt. But then her fingernails dig so deeply into the fabric of the shirt that they rip right through, and she pulls it up and over his head. When the white fabric covers his face the boy suddenly screams.
I’m sorry Dad! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!
The hose whistles through the air, comes down on his back again and again.
You’ll pay, you goddamn sonofabitch, you’ll pay for what you’ve done to me and my children!
I’m sorry Dad. I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry!
Again and again the hose comes down on his back. Again and again the boy calls out, begging for forgiveness.
I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!
Then, all at once, it stops.
The boy remains bent over his knees for a moment, then lets himself fall over to one side. His arms are still uprai
sed, the undershirt still over his face. Through the opening at what should be the bottom of the shirt he can see his father, asleep on his side. Then a shadow darkens the shirt.
Take a good look, she says. Take a good long look at your future.
He doesn’t move until the lights go out and he hears her settling into bed, and then all he does is pull the shirt off his face. He waits until his mother’s snores penetrate the thin screen of quilts before standing slowly, his back so sore that he cannot straighten completely. He stands there for a moment, his back hunched, fighting back a wave of nausea. His mouth stretches open as dry heaves seize his body, nearly knocking him over, and the old man lies on the floor in front of him with his hands pressed between his wet thighs, looking for all the world like something the boy has retched up.
When the nausea passes the boy eases outside. The ocean air is wet and cold on his stomach, but his back is burning, burning with a heat so intense he wants to cry out. But the heat is also familiar somehow. It is the heat of the cow he killed, the boy thinks, come back to remind him of all the reasons he couldn’t stay on the farm.
He looks around for a moment, wondering where to go, then heads toward the garage. He has to duck under the fallen elm to get to the side door. His father had built the garage in an industrious week five years ago. He had avoided his cough syrup and limited himself to occasional shots of whiskey in coffee throughout the process, working every morning after he got home from work and keeping at it well into the night. On the night he finished though, he had gone out to celebrate, and when he got home in the wee hours of the morning he announced his presence with an axe. The family had awakened to the sound of the old man chopping down the elm tree that grew in the front yard. One by one they had stumbled out to see what was going on. It was a precautionary measure, the old man said, to keep it from falling on the garage. His mother was afraid it was going to fall on the house, but what can you say to a drunken man with an axe? Duke was the only one of them who might have been big enough to do anything, and Duke just laughed and laughed. The rest of them had stood there and watched the old man chop until, with a crack like a thunderbolt, the tree had gone down. For a drunk the old man had pretty good aim: one branch took out a window, another knocked a hole the size of a man’s fist in the roof, but that was the extent of the damage. The tree fell directly in front of the garage door, and there it stayed. Forever.
Inside the garage, the only light comes through the solid and broken panes of glass in the door. It takes a while until the boy’s eyes adjust to the gloom, and then he walks to the car that has been trapped in the garage ever since it was built. He cracks open the driver’s side door and leans across the seat and pulls from the glove compartment one of the three bottles of the old man’s cough syrup he hid there when he got back from the farm. He uses the bottle as the old man had used the axe, except the boy breaks out the remaining panes of glass in the garage door. There are eight left. As many children as there are in the family, if you still count Duke. The boy smashes the panes one by one, pausing until the echoes of one pane of glass falling to the ground have faded before going on to the next, half expecting someone to come out and stop him, or for the bottle in his hand to break. But no one comes and the bottle doesn’t break and after he has knocked out the eight panes of glass he throws the bottle on the earthen floor of the garage, but it only bounces a couple of times and rolls against the wall opposite the garage door.
The boy stares at it a moment. It gleams in the light, as benign as a tiny spool of wire. But the boy knows what even one piece of wire can do, so he walks over and picks the bottle up. It only takes a moment for his hand to remember what his brain has forgotten. The shape of it, the heft. The warmth against his palm. The bottle is wet in his hands and at first he thinks it has come open but then he realizes it’s his blood. His hand is bleeding, though whether it was cut by his mother’s hose or by one of the panes of glass he doesn’t know.
It’s the blood he’s after, at first. His own blood. He licks it first from his hand and then from the bottle itself, and as he licks it he cannot stop himself from thinking again that the bottle is like an udder in his fingers, eager, insistent, desperate to be drained. Even before he unscrews the lid he is aware that it is milking time. Dawn’s early light glimmers through the broken panes of the garage door as his hands do what they have been trained to do at this hour, twisting open the bottle and bringing it to his lips and holding it there until it is drained. The boy burps when he finishes. His breath comes out of his mouth in a ball of fire, and finally, finally burns away the world.
PART 2
SOMETHING ABOUT SNAKES
In the garden.
Garden snakes? No. No, but they were green.
She could almost see them in front of her, their pointed heads poking a few inches out of the earth. Snakes as green as grass, dozens of them, scores, hundreds, their green heads sprouting from the ground in a grid as neat as an orchard grove.
Sprouting? Grass? Grove? Something about planting, growing. Planting snakes, growing them—what? She can see them in front of her, practically hear them calling her. Gloria … We’re waiting …
And then it hits her: the asparagus. The asparagus would be ready today. Should be ready. Finally.
The shock of her old room after a month at Justin’s: when the girl opens her eyes the sloped ceiling seems practically pressed to her nose, the tattered map of the heavens stretching out on either side beyond her peripheral vision. Of course, without her contacts it’s a little blurry, a field of midnight black and blue. But she culled the map from a National Geographic when she was twelve—the same eight pieces of tape have been holding it up for a decade—and she doesn’t need to see it to know what it depicts. The hemispheres, the relative size of the planets, the faint spatter from an exploding Diet Coke like an extra constellation between Sagittarius and Scorpio.
July 19, 2001. Sun in Cancer, cusp of Leo. By rights the first crop of asparagus should have been on the table last month, but spring was late this year, late and dry and cold, and she hadn’t even cut back the feathery bushes until two weeks ago. In the time since then the stems seem to have grown thicker rather than taller, and even if they haven’t pushed through their protective straw matting she’s going to have to harvest them in the next day or two, or they’ll end up tough as the pit-trap stakes they resemble. Or snakes. Pale green snakes, hiding just beneath the straw. But tasty snakes. She’s been wanting to try a recipe Justin’s mom gave her for barbecued asparagus all summer, but at this rate her crop is going to end up in the fire rather than on it.
It’s hot enough today, though, especially up under the eaves. The sun beats against the checked blue curtains, which seem to fade visibly beneath its onslaught. Too hot to sleep, too hot to stay in bed. The girl sits up languidly, pulls on yesterday’s cutoffs, exchanges Justin’s old T-shirt for the white halter top with the blue embroidery on the sides, the one he calls her hippie halter top but loves anyway, she knows—knows from the way he comes up behind her and wraps his arms around her, folding them one over the other on the slice of bare skin between the halter top and her shorts. Hey, hippie chick, he says whenever he does that, how’s about giving me some-a that free love?
She sorts through the jumble of brushes and combs and picks and products on top of her dresser, the endless bottles and tubes of mousses and gels and sprays that seem to proliferate like buildings in a crowded city—and this is just the stuff she left behind when she moved out. Sort of moved out. Whatever she did. At any rate all she wants is a hair tie, but though she finds loose coiled hairs in plenty there’s no sign of a rubberband amid the skyline of beauty products. How can one person have so much hair? she thinks, looking at her unruly blonde spirals in the mirror. She pulls it back off her face with one hand, wonders yet again if she should cut it all off. Oh, but Justin loves it, she thinks. Loves the halter top, loves the hair. Well, what boy doesn’t love long curly blond hair? Yes, but Justin loves it.
Something catches when she goes to pull her hand away, and she feels yet another strand detach itself from the million or so remaining on her head. Her engagement ring. Oh yes, that’s right. She’s engaged. Even though she’s alone in the room, she blushes.
She holds the ring up, examines for the thousandth time and the first time the pale square-cut stone and the diamond-flecked loop that binds it to her hand. It seems like a particularly elegant hand for so early in the morning—hard to believe she’ll be waking up with that hand for the rest of her life. She looks now at the translucent filament hanging from it. It’s not the first time her hair’s gotten caught in her jewelry, won’t be the last either. She’s always liked rings, and always had problems with them—in high school her friends joked she had more hair on her palms than a Catholic choirboy. But the engagement ring with its quarter-carat pronged setting is particularly lethal. She could make a voodoo doll with the hairs it’s pulled from her scalp. By now she’s used to it though, not just rings, but bracelets and necklaces. Her mother’s pearls—double stranded, with an ornate gold clasp. She wore them to the prom with that black dress she lost five pounds to get into, and it was practically a sadomasochistic experience when Justin pressed her to his chest during the slow songs. An auger would have done less damage to her head. But even as she thinks that she suddenly remembers: she didn’t go to the prom with Justin, but with Billy Atwater, and, a little guiltily, she untangles the hair from the ring and lets it drop to the dresser. She slips a few thin silver bangles on her wrist—three, to hear them jingle. She jingles them, then lets her hand fall to the dresser.
Billy Atwater. She can hardly bring his face to mind—when she tries all she gets is Justin’s. Is that what married life will be like? The filling in of all those murky faces in your memory by your spouse’s? Or is the replacement simpler? She looks around her old room again. God, it’s so true what they say. It really does seem smaller since she moved out.
