by Joe McKinney
None of it had made any sense to Paul at the time. It had just been a confused jumble of foreign words, the sense of them overwhelmed by the realization that his father could speak them. But he had some Spanish in college. He had some survival Spanish in the police academy. And he had picked some up while he was working the largely Hispanic neighborhoods west of downtown that the officers on Central Patrol not so lovingly referred to as Little Mexico. That last phrase, Yo tengo que guardar un cargo, he knew what that meant.
I have a charge to keep.
He thought about that now, about the memory suddenly laid bare like that, how a key piece of a sprawling puzzle seemed to have fallen into place, and he thought, Yes, that phone call, and what happened afterwards, makes a whole hell of a lot more sense now.
***
“Now you make sure it’s all right with your folks, you hear?”
“Yes sir, Mr. Sullivan,” Paul said. He turned and beamed a smile at Steve. They were twelve, sitting side by side in Steve’s dad’s truck. It was the same truck—minus the oversized off-road tires and the aftermarket sound system that Steve would get for his own six years later—Steve would use to cart them back and forth to school. But for now it was your standard issue farm truck, plain as the day is long, idling quietly on the side of the road in front of Paul’s house.
The two boys jumped down from the truck, reached into the bed to grab Paul’s shoulder pads and helmet, and ran for the screen door on the side of the house. Paul’s mother was there in the kitchen, washing dishes in the sink.
Paul stopped when he saw her, surprised to see her on her feet.
He said, “Hi, Mom.”
“Hey, baby,” she said. Her voice sounded weak, but not like it usually did. Normally, she sounded like she was speaking from inside a fog bank. She looked from Paul to Steve, the two boys covered head to foot in dust and grass stains and sweat. “Hello, Steve,” she said.
“Hi, Mrs. Henninger.”
The two boys looked at each other, Steve nudging Paul with one elbow.
“Go on, ask her,” he said.
“Okay, okay,” Paul said. He turned to Carol Henninger. “Hey, Momma, Steve’s dad’s outside. He said if I wanted to I could eat at their place tonight. Can I, Momma? Please?”
Carol Henninger picked up a dishtowel and dried her hands. She took a quick look over her shoulder, back towards the darkened living room, then looked back at Paul.
“I don’t see why not,” she said. “That might actually be a real good idea, Paul. Go on now. Get yourself upstairs and get changed. Be quiet, though.”
Even at twelve, Paul wasn’t deaf to the caution in her voice. He looked past her, into the living room, and saw his father’s lattice-like stick sculptures all over the floor. His heart sank. As many of them as there were in there, his father had to have been at them all day. Even after making one or two, his father’s moods were unpredictable, though they usually veered towards violence. After making the number Paul could see from the kitchen (he counted four, five), there was no telling what was in store for the rest of the night.
A silent understanding passed between mother and son. “Hurry it up,” she said.
He turned without another word, ready to sprint quietly up the stairs, when his father appeared in the doorway. Martin Henninger was dressed in his usual, starched-white shirt buttoned at the neck, black slacks, worn black Stetson hat, though he didn’t seem to be put together as well as usual. A quick glance told Paul that. His underarms were soaked with sweat. His fingers were shaking.
Paul met his father’s eyes and had to look away again almost immediately. They were nested in a web of wrinkles, and he saw a crazy intensity there that was like that of a man who has just won a fist fight, but expects to get jumped from both sides at any moment.
“Where you going, boy?”
“Daddy, I...”
Martin Henninger looked down at his son. Then he looked past Paul to Steve, said nothing, didn’t even show signs of recognizing the boy.
He turned back to Paul.
“I asked you a question.”
“Daddy, I—Steve asked if it was all right for me to eat at their place tonight. His dad’s outside.”
“What’s wrong with eating here?”
“Nothing, Daddy. I just thought it’d be fun is all.”
Martin Henninger pushed the bill of the Stetson up his forehead and scratched his hairline.
“No,” he said. “I want you here tonight.”
“But, Daddy—”
Martin Henninger gave Paul a look that stopped him cold, mid-sentence.
He said, “I want you here with your family tonight. Now go on upstairs and get that shit off and get changed. You need to go feed the goats.”
Paul looked away.
“Yes sir,” he said. He turned to Steve and said, “I gotta go, Steve.”
Steve looked like he wanted nothing more than to get gone himself. “Sure,” he said. He turned to Carol Henninger and offered a little wave. “Bye, Mrs. Henninger. Bye, Mr. Henninger.”
“Bye, Steve,” Paul’s mom said.
Paul watched Steve slip out the screen door and kept watching him until he turned the corner at the front of the house and was gone from sight.
Then he turned back to his parents, head down.
“Go on,” his father said again. “Get out of that shit and get changed. There’s something I want to show you.”
“Yes sir,” Paul said, and sprinted up the stairs.
***
He was back downstairs in less than two minutes. His mother was standing off in one corner of the kitchen, her arms crossed over her chest, eyes down on the floor. Paul looked at her and realized how small she had become, how frail. Her face, though she rarely went out into the sun anymore, was dark, and there were wrinkles at the corners of her mouth. She isn’t that old, he thought. But she looks ancient, like this house and the land and that man out there in the yard have sapped her of everything she needs to feel alive.
“Hurry up, Paul.”
Paul glanced through the screen door and saw his father out in the yard, standing with his face to the sun, a corona of light dancing around his silhouette.
“I’m coming, sir,” he said, and sprinted through the door and out into the yard.
He trotted up next to his father and waited. Paul knew that when it came to this man, it was best to just stand there and wait to be told what to do. Guessing, if you were wrong and ended up doing the opposite of what he wanted, only made him angry, and the man had a very short temper when it came to that sort of thing.
“Come with me,” his father said, and walked off towards the barn.
Paul followed him.
The big sliding door was open, and enough light filtered through the gaps between the boards that Paul could see one of his father’s stick lattices in the middle of the floor. A rush of anxiety made his face feel hot. He had seen his father make the lattices many times since that night when he was five and came down the stairs to spy on the man and saw him so horribly changed, and he had learned to keep his distance.
“Daddy, what...?”
His father stared at the lattice. He had his hands in his pockets, a bit of hay in his teeth. He said, “You know what that thing is?”
Paul answered quickly. He said, “Momma told me to leave your stuff alone, Daddy. I ain’t done nothing to it, I swear.”
“Hush,” his father said. “I know you ain’t done nothing to it. I’m asking if you know what it is.”
“No sir.”
“I don’t think they have a name. At least they ain’t got none I ever heard. This woman I used to know taught me how to make ’em years ago. Don’t really know how it happens either. I just start to feel this sort of red haze in my mind and I know it’s time to go gathering wood. Lot of times that’s the last thing I remember about making them. I’ll snap out of it a few hours later, hungry with this feeling like every part of me is starving. Not just my belly, but every p
art of me. And then I’ll look at what I’ve done and I’ll see one of these things.”
Martin Henninger trailed off into his own thoughts, and Paul waited. The waiting grew uncomfortable, and Paul said, “But what are they for? What do you do with them?”
“Sometimes I don’t do nothing with them. Just throw them away. Those I think must be duds. You know what a dud is, Paul?”
Paul thought of the Wiley E. Coyote cartoons, the coyote staggering around punch drunk from having a giant rock dropped on his head, a hammer in his hand, some sort of artillery shell next to him. The coyote starts banging on the shell, once, twice, and then boooom! the thing explodes in his face.
He said, “A dud’s like sometimes when one of them Black Cat fireworks won’t explode when all the others around it do.”
Martin Henninger looked at his son and almost smiled. “Yeah, that’s right.”
Paul looked at the stick lattice in the barn. “Is that one a dud?”
“No,” his father said. “Not that one.”
“So what’s it supposed to do?”
“Well, that’s the thing, Paul. It ain’t so much what it’s supposed to do, as what I’m supposed to do. You see, that thing over there, what it does is act like a magnifying glass. You ever held a magnifying glass up to the sun and burned up ants with it?”
Paul said he hadn’t, but he had seen kids at school do it.
“Well it’s the same thing,” Martin Henninger said. “Same idea anyway. The only difference is the kind of power that’s being channeled.” He paused there and smiled to himself. “It’s funny though. Now that I think about it, the results can be the same. If that power gets channeled into the wrong man, it’ll burn him up sure as the sun burns up an ant.” He turned to Paul and tapped the side of the boy’s head. “But if it goes to the right man, that man can use that power to do great things.”
Paul didn’t understand. He looked from his father to the stick lattice in the center of the barn and just didn’t get it. His father had said he could use the power that thing gave off to do great things, but when he looked at the lattice, he just saw a pile of sticks cobbled together at random. He couldn’t feel any great power emanating from it. And as for great things, well, they didn’t exactly have it easy around this place. They scraped an existence out of a mangy herd of Angora goats and picked peaches in the summer and repaired tractors in the winter and, for all the work, could barely afford to eat fried chicken but once a week. Where was the great power in that?
Paul’s father smiled then, and it caught Paul by surprise. He smiled back, and only then did he realize that his father wasn’t smiling at him, but because he knew exactly what Paul was thinking.
His father said, “It ain’t that kind of power I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is spiritual power, and spiritual power will feed a man’s body and soul. It won’t pay the rent, but—well, that’s a hard lesson to learn. Took me a long time to figure out that power and wealth ain’t the same thing. Not true power, anyway.”
Paul nodded, though he had no idea why.
“Come here,” his father said. “I want to show you something.”
He walked out of the barn and over by where the goats were feeding in the grass.
“Grab that big old son of a bitch right there. The one with the black on his ears.”
The goat he pointed out was Oscar’s great great grandfather. Paul stepped into the yard and grabbed the animal by the scruff of his neck and pulled him over to his father. He was dusty, head to foot, a rheumy glaze in his eyes.
His father said, “What did I tell you about fleas?”
Paul thought for a minute, not wanting to say the wrong thing and spoil his father’s relatively good mood. But the only thing he could think of was an old quip his father tossed out every once in a while as they were shearing the goats.
Cautiously, he said, “You said where there’s one there’s gonna be a thousand.”
“That’s right. Here, watch this.”
Martin Henninger put his palm on the animal’s head and ran his hand down the length of its back. As he did so, one black speck after another leapt onto his hand. By the time he had reached the tail, his hand was covered with a swirling black mass of fleas.
Paul had been kneeling next to his father, but he was on his feet now, scrambling backwards.
“It’s all right,” Martin said. “Come here.”
Paul hesitated.
“I said get over here. Now.”
Paul came forward, Adam’s apple pumping up and down in his throat like a piston.
“Put your hand right here next to mine.”
“Sir?”
“Do it.” He hadn’t raised his voice yet, but he wasn’t far from doing so, Paul knew. “Put it here next to mine. Hurry it up.”
With his skin crawling, Paul did as he was told. Instantly the fleas jumped from his father’s hand to Paul’s, swarming it, enveloping it.
But he wasn’t getting bit.
Paul turned his hand over, looking at the insects so thick there that he could only see his skin in a few places.
“How come they’re not—”
“I want you to remember something, Paul.”
Paul looked at him.
“I want you to remember that it took me a long time to learn what I know about the world. It took me a lot of heartache, too. One day you’ll understand that. And one day I’m gonna come to you and I’m gonna teach you these things that I’ve learned. You are gonna be called upon to take certain responsibilities upon yourself. Do not fail me when I call upon you.”
Paul sensed right away the ominous tones in his father’s voice, though little of what he said made sense. He started to ask his dad why he thought he might fail him, when suddenly his hand began to burn.
He let out a whine.
Looking down at his hand, he saw the swarm attacking him. He felt them biting him, felt the searing pain, like his hand had been pressed into a hot cast iron skillet and held there. He screamed and swatted at the swarm on his hand, batting the insects away with his left hand even as he beat the right one against the thigh of his jeans.
By the time he had them all off, his hand was covered with red whelps and the fingers had already started to swell slightly.
Holding his wrist, he looked at his father, his expression asking why, why did every lesson have to hurt so badly.
“Go wash that off,” his father said. “Then feed the goats. And I want the barn cleaned up before you go to bed tonight, you hear?”
“Yes sir,” Paul managed to say.
He turned and headed for the water trough on the side of the barn, still holding his wrist. The pain was getting worse, and tears were coming freely down his face. He dunked his hand into the water that filled the trough and the coolness of it felt good. His breathing began to slow back down to normal, but the fingers were so stiff and swollen that he could barely flex them. He tried, and nearly screamed from the pain.
Then, glancing up towards the house, he saw his mother watching him from the shadows of the kitchen doorway. Her face was stern, almost like she was accusing Paul of doing something nasty. She looked away and retreated back into the darkness.
***
Paul went into the barn and took down the feed buckets from the wall, where they hung from a pair of old railroad spikes that his grandfather had driven into one of the wall studs. The swelling in his right hand had gone from bad to worse. It was an unnatural, angry shade of red now, and the pain was intense. He couldn’t even close his fingers over the feed bucket’s handle. When he tried, a pain shot through the injured hand and up the length of his arm. He let out a gasp and dropped the empty bucket onto the dirt floor.
“How’s your hand?” his mother said from the doorway.
“It hurts,” he said. He didn’t want her to see him crying, but there was no helping that. His eyes were welling up, and he could feel a few runners going down his cheeks.
“Here, let me see it.�
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She came closer, and he held out his hand for her to look at. She grabbed it and turned it over, looking at it front and back.
He let out another gasp at the rough handling. “Momma, that hurts.”
If she heard him, she made no sign of it.
“Momma, stop.”
He tried to pull his hand back.
She tightened her grip and pulled his hand back to where she could look at it. Her strength was surprising for such a small, frail woman.
“Stop, Momma. Please.”
“Hurts, don’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, it serves you right for being so stupid.”
“But, Momma, I didn’t do it on purpose. I was just doing what—”
“Stop whining,” she snapped.
She let his hand drop, then looked out into the yard. It was getting late, and sunlight was settling down through the oak trees. The goats were moving around restlessly on the dirt road that led down to the horse pasture, bleating for their dinner.
“Go into the kitchen,” she said. “I’m gonna put some meat tenderizer on that. Works on scorpion and wasp stings, should work fine on whatever you got yourself into.”
“It was fleas, Momma.”
She stared at him, and for just a moment, there was a change. The hard shell seemed to fall away from her, and Paul saw the woman he had always known. But that’s not right, he thought, because the woman he saw just then wasn’t the same woman he had always known. Not quite. This woman was alert, her eyes clear and focused, yet kind.
“Go on,” she said. “Get inside. I’ll be there directly.”
He ran for the house.
***
Paul waited for her inside the screen door of the kitchen. Her thin, crudely cut brown hair was down, and a sluggish breeze caught it and lifted it off her shoulders. Her body was thin, ill-looking, though she was moving with a purpose now. Her head was down, watching the ground in front of her, her shoulders set forward like a person walking into a strong wind. He glanced at her hands. The fingers curled into fists. Opened again. Curled again.
