by Joe McKinney
***
And when she opened her eyes, there was nothing there.
***
When Paul came home he found Rachel sitting in the passenger seat of her truck. She was staring out across the backyard, looking at nothing.
He tried the door, but it was locked.
He tapped a knuckle on the window.
“Hey, Rachel?”
No response.
He used his keys to unlock her door. She turned to look at him, and the sickened expression he saw in her eyes startled him. He noticed what she was wearing, a damp sleep shirt and blue panties. Nothing else.
“Rachel, are you okay?”
She shook her head slowly back and forth.
“What’s wrong?”
“I...” she began, but trailed off with the rest of it unsaid.
He touched her shoulder and she flinched away from him.
“Whoa!” he said. “Rachel, what the hell?”
She blinked rapidly, and some of the fear and confusion seemed to go out of her eyes. She touched her tongue to her lips and took a deep breath.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded.
“Need a hand?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
He stepped back from the truck and let her climb out. He offered her a hand up the stairs to their apartment, but she shook her head and climbed up without his help. She was unsteady on her feet at first, her legs wobbly beneath her, but by the time they reached the top of the wooden staircase, she appeared to be walking normally.
He did notice her pause with her hand on the doorknob, almost as if she was steeling herself to go inside, but he didn’t say anything to her. He let her take her time. Once they were inside she went to the bed and sat on the end of it, her hands folded in her lap, her face ashen. Paul glanced at her over his shoulder as he emptied his pockets onto the bedside table next to his side of the bed. He unsnapped his belt keepers and removed his gun belt and dropped it onto the floor beside the bed. Then he untucked his uniform jersey and unzipped it.
Rachel still hadn’t moved.
“Rachel, what happened to you?”
She didn’t look up, but she said, “Paul, what the hell is going on?”
“What do you mean?” he asked. “Rachel, did something happen?”
She laughed. “Did something happen? Yeah, Paul, something happened. Things are pretty screwed up, actually. Your family is screwed up.”
Paul’s expression hardened. “What happened, Rachel? Tell me.” But she was getting up now, not looking at him, holding up the palm of her hand towards him as she walked away.
“Rachel! Wait, damn it. Tell me. What the hell’s wrong with you?”
He went after her. He grabbed her by the shoulder and turned her around to face him.
“Don’t touch me!” she screamed. Her eyes were wild with fear now. She had her hands up, her fingernails poised like claws, a cornered animal. “Don’t you touch me!”
“Rachel? Rachel, I’m not gonna hurt you.”
But she was backing away.
He stopped where he was and let his hands fall to his side.
“Rachel, I—”
“Get out.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Get out, Paul. Leave. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t take you with all this...this...I don’t know...with all this shit you’ve brought into our home. I can’t take your father and your mother and the whole damn thing. It’s too much, Paul. It’s too much.”
“Rachel, what are you talking—”
“Just leave. Please. Go.”
“Rachel, let’s talk about this. Come on. Tell me what happened.”
But she exploded on him instead. She pushed him towards the door, screaming at him to leave, just leave damn it. And he let her push him out the door. He was too stunned by her ferocity, too cowed by his confusion and her rage to do anything but step out the door and down the first few stairs.
He turned back towards her. “Rachel, I—”
“Leave!” she screamed.
She slammed the door in his face. Paul stood there for a moment, wondering what in the hell just happened, when suddenly the door flew open again.
Rachel had his gun belt in her hands. The thing weighed twenty pounds and she handled it like a heavy coil of garden hose. With a great effort she heaved it over the stair railing.
“Hey,” he said, and ran down the stairs to pick it up. The screen door flew open again and he looked up at her, his gun belt hanging from his fist, in time to see her toss a huge arm load of his clothes over the side. Shirts and t-shirts and jeans and socks came raining down on top of him.
“Jesus, Rachel. Stop!”
She disappeared inside. He stood looking at the clothes all around him. The old man in the backyard next door was watching him, a dog bowl in his hands, a wide-eyed look of surprise on his face at seeing a half-dressed San Antonio Police Officer getting tossed out of his own home.
“Shit,” Paul muttered.
Rachel appeared above him. He started to call out to her, but she wouldn’t have it. She tossed another armful of his laundry over the railing and he had to jump out of the way to avoid being hit by one of his boots.
“Rachel!” He screamed it at the top of his lungs. “Rachel!”
“Go away!” she shouted back from behind the screen door. “Leave me alone.”
“Goddamn it, Rachel. What the—”
“I’m calling the cops!” she screamed. “Leave me alone. Go away!”
Paul was stunned into silence. He heard a window slide open. Rachel was there, watching him, her face an inscrutable mask.
Then she turned and walked away.
He looked down at his clothes. He looked at the old man watching him from the next yard over. He shook his head and said, “Shit,” and then bent over and started picking up his clothes.
***
Inside the apartment, Rachel was trembling. She could feel her heart beating so hard in her chest that it scared her. For a moment she’d wanted to run down there and throw her arms around Paul and tell him to make it all go away. Then the anger overtook her again and she wanted to slap his face. She didn’t know what to think. She felt like something inside her had been knocked out of gear, and now she didn’t know how to put herself back the way she had been.
So she turned away from the window and walked back to their bed and stared at the rumpled covers and tried to think.
She noticed Paul’s Barber fifty cent piece on the bedside table. Rachel ran to it and scooped it up. She almost ran back to the screen door at that point and yelled down for him to come back up.
Almost.
Instead she sat down on the bed and looked at his empty recliner and the box of photos on the ground and the emptiness of the apartment all around her, and she began to cry.
Chapter 20
Somewhere, a horn was blaring.
Paul looked up and for a moment was blinded by the sunshine. He was in his truck, still wearing his white t-shirt and uniform pants. He was drenched in sweat. His right foot had fallen asleep but was still on the brake pedal. His mouth was dry, and he could taste metal shavings on his tongue. He wasn’t quite sure where he was.
The horn sounded again.
He looked into the mirror and saw a guy in a blue Honda making an angry gesture at him. Get your ass movin’.
“Alright, alright,” Paul said. He blinked at the green light in front of him. He was at the intersection of West Avenue and Alhambra. West Avenue was a major street. He knew that one. The other one though, the one he was on, was unfamiliar.
How in the hell did I get here?
He took his foot of the brake and carefully accelerated onto West Avenue. The guy in the Honda shot past him, honking and shouting something indistinct out the window as he flew by.
Paul let him get away.
He was tired beyond belief. He had slept maybe a total of five hours in the last four days, and it was taking its toll on him
. A curious sensation, like he was floating, had settled over him, and as he drove on he couldn’t make himself focus on anything in particular. Not Rachel. Not his father. Not even the charge he had to keep. The things that had happened at Magdalena’s house, both before and after her death, kept getting in the way and scattering his thoughts.
He turned onto the freeway and drove for a long time. He headed away from town, barely noticing as the hive-like congestion of the city gave way to oak forests and rocky hillsides and the occasional hillside cow pasture. He turned off the highway and onto the rolling two lane country road that led to the house where he was raised. He was heading home. The impulse to head there to the old house had been vague at first, like a smell he couldn’t quite place, but it got stronger the closer he got to the Hill Country. There were no businesses out here, and very few homes. Massive oaks formed a green tunnel over his head. Sunlight pierced the canopy and made checkerboards of light and shadow that blinked on the windshield and lulled him even further into a blissful sort of stupor that was like drifting. For the first time since his troubles began two weeks earlier he had a sense of being without apprehension. It wasn’t that he felt at ease, or even comfortable. Far from it. There was so much hanging over his head, so very much. But for the time being, driving down this country road, with its slow, rolling hills and gentle curves and hazy morning sunlight that gave everything it touched a sodden, dreamlike quality, it was as if a weight had been pulled off him.
And then, just like that, he was slowing to a crawl in front of his old family home, turning into the driveway, hearing the familiar muffled pops of loose rock beneath his tires.
Paul Henninger was home.
***
He climbed down from his truck and closed the door. After his father’s death, there had seemed nothing worth keeping about this place, and so he had sold it. At the time, Paul hadn’t thought he’d ever come back. There wasn’t any reason to. Everything about it was a bad memory. Plus, he needed the money to live on. The scholarship would only go so far, and he had the rest of his life ahead of him. Better, as Steve Miller so eloquently put it, to just take the money and run.
So he sold the land and the house for a pittance, maybe sixty cents on the dollar for what it was worth, and at the time it seemed like a good idea.
Now he was not so sure.
The man who bought the property had never been very specific about his plans for it. Only that he planned to divide it and sell it to the neighboring ranches to allow them access to County Road 131, which would shave a good twenty minutes or more off their route when it came time to transport their livestock to the Comal Stockyards.
At eighteen, Paul hadn’t quite understood this plan, but he did know that the neighboring ranchers were living off their daily sweat and their nightly prayers, and that it would be a frosty day in hell before they scraped up enough hard cash to buy more land.
Now, looking at the land as a twenty-four year old who had felt more like a man than a son for a very long time, he was overcome by an unfocused restlessness that made him want to punch somebody in the face. The old house, which had never been much to look at anyway, was now nothing but a derelict almost completely swallowed up by the vegetation around it. The roof was rusted and coming apart. The wooden walls were weathered to a mealy gray. Quite a few boards had fallen away, so that from where he stood he could look into the darkness inside the house. Almost every single window was broken out. The front door was hanging by its bottom hinge. Machine parts and the battered remains of furniture littered the yard. Everywhere he looked the cheatgrass had grown tall. The yard swarmed with crickets and butterflies. Ball moss hung thick from every tree. At one time, there had been a path that led from the driveway to the screen door that opened onto the kitchen. That path was gone now, grown over.
Well what did you expect to happen? It’s not yours anymore.
But it was his. He didn’t own it, not legally anyway, but he still had more of a claim to it than anybody else. Even more of a claim than the man who’d bought it. After all, this was his past, his memory. This was the part of him that was supposed to be inviolate. And it was just sitting here, forgotten, rotting.
But he hadn’t seen the worst of it.
Two enormous oaks flanked the backyard. When Paul was growing up, they had shaded the yard where the goats roamed at feeding time. He and his father had spent a great deal of time keeping those trees trimmed up so that they wouldn’t damage the roof of the house or the barn. Walking the property in the morning after hard winter freezes, Paul had often heard the ice-laden oak limbs snapping and cracking beneath the weight of the ice. And once, down in the horse pasture, Paul had seen a sixty foot high oak split completely in half by the weight of the ice. He could only guess that something like that had happened to the oak nearest him, for a large limb that had grown over the eaves of the house had broken away from the tree and crashed through the roof and into the living room.
From the screen door at the edge of the kitchen he could see the dead limb on the living room floor. It had broken through the ceiling just behind the wall that separated the kitchen and the living room, and it had hit with enough force to knock all the cabinetry on that wall forward, so that the doors and the drawers yawned open.
He walked inside, glanced up the flight of stairs toward his old room, then continued on into the living room. Paul stood in the doorway, lost in a sort of nostalgia-induced sadness. The floors felt spongy beneath his boots. The hole in the ceiling was considerable. Trash was everywhere, beer bottles and soda cans and empty bags of chips and papers and even a few condom wrappers.
Kids from the high school, he thought. He couldn’t blame them, not really. He probably would have done it too back in his day if he’d had a place like this to party.
He turned and went down the short hallway that led to the front of the house. There were two rooms here, one on either side of the front door. The one off to his left had been intended as a sitting room, but over the years had become a receptacle for all the machine parts his father had accumulated. The room to his right was a small bedroom, and the sight of it raised the gooseflesh on his arms. This was the room where his mother had spent most the years of Paul’s youth. It was completely empty, save for a metal framed bed bolted to the floor. The mattress was still on it, though the moths and the mice and the raccoons had chewed it to pieces. He saw a pair of metal rings bolted into the wall, one on either side of the bed. The wood around the rings was gouged and scratched. He turned and saw the yellow wall. His father had painted this wall just before his mother got sick and started her rapid slide into depression, and even then Paul had hated the color. It was a sick-looking yellow, the color of bile, broken only by a strange, looping pattern of gray lines that curved around each other and chased each other into dead ends or trailed off into nothingness. There was a worn, blackened area that went the length of the wall near shoulder level, and as he stared at it, Paul remembered the long hours his mother had spent pacing back and forth in front of that wall, dragging her hand along it.
He walked toward the wall and reached out to touch one of the gray lines, wondering if he could trace its path through the yellow field and if it might somehow tell him something about the many secret and powerful things his father knew. There was still so much to learn, so many things he didn’t understand. Every connection he could make with his father now was a possible bridge to the knowledge he needed if he was ever going to be able to keep his charge.
But as he grew nearer, he began to see something moving in the yellow field behind the gray lines. At first it was too vague to make out. A shadow moving across the wall? But that wasn’t what it was at all. He could tell that now. It was taking shape. He barely had time to draw a breath before the shadow finished resolving itself into the form of his mother, wild-eyed and dirty, her face warped with anger. She grabbed the gray curling lines painted on the yellow field of the wall like they were prison bars and she began to shake them with a l
unatic fury that left him too stunned to move.
She screamed his name, over and over and over again, only there was no sound. The house was quiet as a country field.
“Paul!” she shouted, and shook the bars so furiously the whole house should have collapsed around them. He took a step back, slowly shaking his head, denying her. “Paul!”
And then something seemed to give. She exploded outwards with a crash that was like a mountain of glass shattering. She reached for him, her hands gnarled and filthy, and grasped his shoulders. He screamed and fell over backwards to get away, hitting his back on one of the bed’s foot posts. The impact knocked the wind from his lungs, and for a moment, before it all slipped into darkness, he saw the room changing.
***
He stood in a room he had never seen before. It was the same room in the same house, but it had never looked like this—at least, not in his memory. There was a small loveseat in one corner, an end table next to that. His mother, young, pretty, healthy-looking, but sad, sat reading a book by somebody named Philip Larkin, her legs tucked up under her the same way Paul had seen Rachel do a million times. The room was filled with sunlight. It felt warm and comfortable. The faintest trace of a smile creased the corner of his mouth.
He heard something topple over and crash in the living room. Paul looked from the doorway to his mother. She lowered the book and frowned. Then she closed the book and set it on the end table and walked out of the room. Paul followed her, amazed at the woman’s grace, at the easy feminine way she moved. How long ago was this? Where was the frail, drugged-looking woman who seemed like she was constantly about to fall over and hurt herself?
He rounded the corner behind her and saw her rushing toward his father. Martin Henninger was crumpled on the floor in front of one of his stick lattices. Even at a distance, Paul could feel the power coming off the lattice.
“Martin?” his mother said, kneeling at his father’s side. “Martin, are you okay?”
