by Joe McKinney
Paul’s smile fell away. The bright glowing segment of kindness he had seen in her was gone, a cold blue-steel hardness in its place. When she entered the kitchen she walked right past him to the pantry. She pulled down a glass bottle of meat tenderizer and poured it into a small bowl. She added some water and made a muddy red paste of the spices.
“Come here,” she said, and nodded at the counter. “Put your hand there.”
Paul came forward. He put his injured hand on the counter where she told him to and watched her.
“Momma?”
She ignored him. She scooped out a small handful of the paste with her fingers and spread it over his swollen hand.
It hurt, but Paul bit his lip and didn’t cry out. He watched her working.
“Momma?”
She kept working on his hand, working the meat tenderizer into the folds between his fingers and over the humps of his knuckles. She was using the ball of her thumb to really press the paste into him, digging into the skin. Paul’s tears came again, though he refused to make a sound.
“My God,” she said under her breath, almost hissing it as she dug still deeper into the back of his hand, “what is wrong with you, you stupid boy?”
“Momma?”
“Don’t you know that man is a mean, evil bastard?”
She was talking about his father, of course. Paul grew very scared, both for her and because of her. If the old man heard her talking like that, he’d like as not beat the crap out of her. He had seen him do it once, a few years earlier when she refused to do something he asked. He didn’t know now what it was they had fought over. He only remembered his father knocking her down with a backhanded slap to the face, kicking her in the hips and thighs as she tried, at first, to claw at him, and then merely tried to bat away the boot that kept coming at her.
But he was also scared of her now. She was looking at him with wide-eyed fury, white spittle on her lips. This was a creature that wasn’t supposed to be capable of this kind of rage. Where was it coming from? Was she testing him?
That must be it, he thought. Hadn’t his father said he would be called upon to take on certain responsibilities, that he best not fail when the time came? He said, “Daddy told me he’s gonna teach me what he knows about the world. He said I got a lot to learn. Momma, I want to learn it.” Paul said this earnestly, both because he believed it was what she wanted to here, and, on some level at least, because it was true. But what happened afterwards caught him by complete surprise, for he knew as soon as the words left his mouth that he had badly misjudged his mother’s fury.
Her mouth fell open.
Then she closed it and clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle the gasp forming there. Her eyes shone with an emotion that even Paul at twelve recognized as betrayal. He started to speak, but never got a chance to get it all out. Her hand went to the counter, to the rolling pin there. “You little bastard,” she said. “You want to be like him? Do you?” She scooped up the rolling pin and brought it back. Paul somehow managed to duck out of the way before she brought it down on the spot where he had just been. The rolling pin hit the counter and sent up a cloud of flour dust. Plates clanked in the cabinets. A Mason jar turned on its side and rolled off the counter and onto the floor, where it shattered at Paul’s feet. His mother swung the rolling pin again. She was screaming now. “You little bastard! You fucking little bastard! Burn in hell, you stupid, you stupid, you stupid little bastard!” She swung again. Paul managed to spin past her, reached the screen door, and tumbled outside. He fell on the cement steps and landed face first into the grass. Carol Henninger emerged from the doorway behind him. She still had a death grip on the rolling pin and there was a crazed look on her face that chilled Paul more than anything else he’d ever seen. “You little...” she said, trailing off in her rage, her lips trembling.
Paul got to his feet and ran. He ran as hard as he had ever run in his life, going full tilt for the oak covered hills out beyond the barn. He ran until he could no longer breathe, and there he stopped. Looking behind him, towards the house, he waited and listened. Nothing. He was alone.
He rolled over onto his back and closed his eyes and cried.
***
It was dark when Paul awoke, and there was a slow, even pounding in his head. The pounding reminded him of the steady rhythm of a hammer, or the sound a metal door makes as it’s blown open and closed by the wind. And then he remembered where he was and what he was doing here and he jumped to his feet and spun around in terror.
He was alone.
Moonlight filled the trees.
He heard an owl hooting off in the distance. A crumbling limestone outcropping a hundred-fifty feet high rose above him, and he knew exactly where he was. He hadn’t come as far as he thought he had, for there was a road a few hundred yards to the west of him, and he knew it was only a short distance to his house on that road.
What are you gonna do? he asked himself. Ain’t got nowhere to go. Ain’t got nobody to take you in.
And that’s when he realized that there was really only one place he could go. Never one to lose himself in a book, he had never bothered to read stories of kids running away from home on big adventures, but he nonetheless understood the concept. He got it. He saw the attraction in it, and if there was ever a time in his young life when that attraction seemed at all tempting, it was right now. But he was too practical even at that early age to believe he could survive on his own. There was, really, only one choice he could make.
He walked to the road, pointed himself towards his house, sighed, and started the walk back home.
***
His parents were yelling at each other in the living room. Actually, his father was doing most of the yelling. He listened at the screen door, standing there with his hand on the rusted handle, trying to work up the nerve to walk inside.
“It ain’t your choice to make,” his father yelled.
“It is, too,” his mother yelled back. “He’s my boy.”
There, in the shadows of the living room, Paul could see his father standing with his back to him, his mother on the couch before him. Paul saw the man’s head tilt forward, and he had to strain to hear what his father said to that.
“He’s mine, Carol. And don’t you ever forget that.”
“I will stop this,” she said, and stood up. “I’m stopping it now. I will not let him turn into something I detest.”
“Sit down, Carol.”
“Go to hell.”
“Sit down, woman, before you piss me off.”
She tried to push her way past him, but he threw her back. She slapped him. Paul heard the echo of it ring through the house. He saw her standing there, hand still raised in a posture that suggested she was finishing a salute, her eyes narrowed on her husband’s.
Martin Henninger punched her then. His fist cracked into her jawbone with a boxer’s speed and power. It sent her sprawling backwards onto the couch. She was very still after that, like a pile of clothes somebody had thrown there and forgotten about.
Martin Henninger turned and looked right at Paul. Paul looked back at him and at that moment there was no doubt whatsoever in his mind that his father knew exactly what he was thinking.
His father came to the door and pushed it open. He stepped to one side and let Paul come in.
“Go on upstairs,” he said.
“Why is she acting this way, Daddy?”
“Don’t you worry about it,” Martin Henninger said. “Just go to sleep. You got school in the morning.”
***
His mother’s screams filled the house. Paul lay awake in bed, listening to her rant, listening as she tore around downstairs like she’d gone rabid. What she said didn’t make any sense to him. She was confused, screaming about Mexico and sticks and iron and Paul all in one breath. There were too many threads for Paul to follow, too many thoughts breaking down mid-sentence, changing into something else before the meaning could be made clear.
The fight spil
led over into the kitchen. Paul could hear his parents down at the foot of the stairs. He heard his mother scream, “You stay away from me! I swear to God I’ll cut your fucking balls off!”
And then there were footsteps on the stairs, coming up fast.
Paul rolled out of bed, got down on his back, and scooted underneath the bed. He lay there, listening, his fingers clutching the metal webbing that held up the mattress. He looked out on his room. He could see the black metal ghost of an old trash heater that had been in this room since before he was born. He could see the legs of his writing desk and his chair, still and serene. His eyes followed the uneven wave in the floorboards. For a moment, everything was quiet.
And then his door burst open and his parents were inside his room. He watched their feet as they moved across the floor. They might have been dancing they were so close. His father was probably holding his mother in a bear hug. His mother was grunting as she struggled to break free. He saw her kick his father’s shins. He heard the sound of something swishing through the air as his father jumped backwards.
His mother screamed, and one of her knees buckled. Paul heard the sound of a fist or maybe the blade of a hand striking her body. Once, twice, two more times after that. Paul saw a flash of white, and only realized what it was a moment later. His father’s hunting knife, a big five and a half inch long blade with a hooked tip, landed point-down into the floorboard beside his face. His eyes widened on it, absorbing the sight of it. He saw it vibrating.
He tried to cram himself into the far corner of the bed, but his fear had cut off his brain’s communication with the rest of his body as surely as that knife would have sliced his life away. As it was, all he could do was stare at it.
His mother sagged to the floor. She landed with her own face near the knife. Her mouth was bleeding, and one side of her face was puffy and red, the beginnings of a bruise forming along her jawline. Her eyes were closed, and for that Paul was thankful.
His father’s hands scooped up the body and hoisted her into the air. Paul watched his father’s feet as the man turned towards the door and then disappeared down the stairs. He told himself to move, but he might as well have been asking stones to speak.
***
Sunlight was coming in through his window before he finally found the courage to move—though he couldn’t bring himself to go anywhere near the knife. He slid out from under the bed and looked around. Two of his trophies had been knocked down during his parents’ fight and he righted them. He looked around the room then and ran a hand through his hair. So much had happened. He didn’t understand any of it.
He walked down the stairs as quietly as he could. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and listened. Nothing. He went into the kitchen and that’s when he saw the destruction. The house was a wreck, so many things broken, so many things not where they were supposed to be.
Have they gone? he wondered.
He looked around and figured they probably had. The house seemed to be deserted.
Paul made an effort to clean up here and there, mostly by throwing the broken stuff in the trash. There was a broom in the pantry and he used it to sweep up the broken glass from the Mason jar.
When he was done he still had ten minutes to go up to the road and catch his bus for school. He went back upstairs and changed his clothes, then went downstairs and ran some water through his hair at the sink. He stood at the screen door and looked in on his house. It felt like there was something he needed to do, but he was only twelve, and for the life of him he didn’t know what, so he turned and ran up to the road to catch his bus. He would only find out later that his mother was already hanging by a rope from the rafters out in the barn, and that within hours of his leaving for school, the wild hogs would find their way to the body.
***
After telling Rachel all of that, Paul told her about the crash between the Escalade and the fire truck, about seeing his mother in that dead seventeen-year-old kid’s eyes. Then he told her about the boxcar, about the dead goat and the dead kid and his father leaning over the body, elbow-deep in gore. He told her what his father said, that he had a charge to keep, and he told her about the mark on his forehead and where he thought that really came from.
Rachel listened to all of it without speaking. He couldn’t see anything in her reaction. Outside it was getting dark, and she turned towards the windows along the south wall of their apartment and muttered something about closing the drapes.
“Rachel?”
Paul had been working himself up to telling her this, and he was uncertain how she would take it. He figured she would say something about how crazy it all sounded. Maybe she would try to rationalize what he said, make the square pegs go into the round holes. He thought maybe she would try to convince him he was wrong, tell him he was under stress, but she would help.
But Rachel didn’t say anything to him at all. Instead, she crossed the room and closed the ugly avocado-colored drapes and then went to the kitchen to make their dinner. He sat on the bed and watched her. He watched her go through the motions, like a robot.
When she put the dinner on the table he took his place next to her and they ate in silence. Paul hardly touched his, hardly tasted what he did eat. He spent most of the meal looking at the tablecloth between them, figuring she would say something, eventually.
But dinner came and went, the plates went into the sink, got cleaned, and got put away, and still she said nothing to him.
He was unable to wait any longer. He said, “Rachel, will you talk to me, please?”
“I want to read for a while,” she said. “I’ll probably go to bed after that.”
“Okay,” he said, scared to go further with what had happened between them, and put his hand over hers.
She pulled her hand away.
“I want to go read for a while,” she said, and got up and got a book and went outside on the patio.
***
Rachel woke up soaking wet. Her skin felt hot. Her clothes were drenched in sweat. The air in the apartment felt hot and close and smelled stale. She threw back the covers and tried to catch her breath.
She was dressed in white pajama shorts and a pink tank top that read, “Tinkerbelle” across her breasts. Paul, in his boxers next to her, was sleeping on his side, facing away from her.
Just as well, she thought, and right away hated herself for thinking it. She hated Paul at that moment, too, because he had made her think it, but that was something else.
She got out of bed and went to the thermostat on the wall. It was almost ninety degrees in the apartment. The air conditioner had stopped working again at some point after they went to bed.
She hit it with the flat of her palm, and when that didn’t do anything, she said, “Come on, dammit,” and hit it again.
Still nothing.
She stood there listening to the apartment around her. She could hear the wind blowing up against the corners of the house. It made the walls creak with a plaintiff moan. She could hear the floorboards beneath her as she walked. Outside, she could hear traffic going by, tires slapping the pavement, an occasional loud exhaust or the high revving drone of a motorcycle accelerating away into the night.
There was a shabbiness about this place that bothered her in a way the little house on Huisache never had. In that house, she had felt a sense of belonging, a sense that she was exactly where she needed to be for that point in her life. But now, in this place, she didn’t feel that way. There were waves of anger and regret and confusion and love all going through her in a rush that was too tangled to pull apart. She couldn’t pick one thing to isolate and think about. Her mind felt scattered.
Paul rolled over onto his back and groaned in his sleep. She watched him sleeping, then moved to her boxes of paperbacks and picked one out at random, a collection of Terry Bison’s short stories entitled Bears Discover Fire. But as she stood there, peering into the box, a thought went through her head like the single crack of a gun across a quiet field.
This is what heartache feels like.
It was Paul, of course. His story had done this to her. He had knocked her off balance, and she hated him for it.
And she loved him in spite of it.
This is what heartache feels like.
“Damn it,” she said, and got up and went out on the patio to read.
Though it was the same temperature outside as inside, it felt better to be outside, because of the breeze. She dropped into a chair and pushed her sweat-soaked bangs out of her eyes. She sighed and opened her book and began to read.
But she found her mind wandering off the page. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling though. She was thinking about the trip to Corpus Christi she and Paul had taken right before the end of their junior year to visit her parents. She remembered the look on her dad’s face when he saw how big Paul was. Her dad was a comfortable looking man with a slight paunch and incipient jowls and a gray donut of hair around the back of his balding head. He was a kind man, a gentle man. And now he was meeting a giant who appeared to have been carved from solid rock.
Her mother’s reaction had been even more telling. She had peeked around Paul’s back and mouthed the word wow to Rachel, then laughed at the shocked look on her daughter’s face.
The whole family, cousins and all, had joined them later that day, and the boys went out on the lawn for a pickup football game. Rachel and the girls watched from the sideline, drinking iced tea and talking about the boys. Her younger brother flubbed a pass to Paul, throwing it a few feet behind him. But then Paul did something amazing. Without breaking stride he reached behind him with one hand, spun, caught the football with his fingertips, and came down in the end zone. He moved like a tiger playing with house cats, so effortlessly graceful, and yet so powerful.
The men on the field just gawked. Rachel and her mother stood and cheered.
That had been a great weekend for them. She remembered the two of them floating on rafts in her parents’ pool, Paul in his Hawaiian print shorts and Rachel in a yellow bikini that she hoped her dad wouldn’t freak out over. Rachel had turned to him and said, “Paul, what do you want to do?”
