by Hart, Joe
When he made it to the bathroom, Anthony walked past the doorway, leaving him in relative solitude. Lance leaned against the sink and looked at his gaunt reflection in the mirror. His face was drawn and stark white. His hair looked that much darker because of his paleness. A bluish-purple half-moon had formed around the right side of his jaw just below his ear. He touched it and winced when the slight pressure set off aftershocks of pain that radiated out into the rest of his face.
When Lance stripped off his soiled clothes, he was appalled by what he saw. His bowels seemed to have been working on their own accord over the last week, as his father had so eloquently put it, and he realized now that yes, he had been shittin’ himself. The smell was so overwhelming that he wondered if he might pass out from it, and he put one hand on the back of the toilet to steady himself. When the bout of dizziness had passed, he started a bath and waited until the water had filled to nearly halfway before stepping into the hot water.
Sitting in the water felt glorious. The heat boiled into him and his coiled muscles began to relax. The water soon took on a dingy brown color, and became even more so when he applied a lather to his skin with a sliver of bar soap that had been sitting abandoned on the bathtub’s shelf.
Lance’s thoughts soon became sharpened as the water began to cool, and turned to the subject he had been trying to avoid: his mother. She was gone. Lance had gathered that much, his father had said so. He had said she had run off. That had been a lie and Lance knew it. There was no way his mother would have left him to his father’s rage, no matter the beating she received. She wouldn’t have abandoned him. That left only one option. His father had finally stepped over the line he had been treading on for as long as Lance could remember. He had finally let his anger pull him over the precipice of violence he had never allowed it to before.
His father had killed his mother.
The truth of the idea shocked Lance as he sat huddled in the dirty bathwater, surrounded by his own liquefied filth. It rocked him backward like a physical push, and he rested his wet head against the wall behind him and wept. He wept for his mother and the absence of her newfound strength and caring for him. He wept for the injuries he had sustained a week before that still throbbed, the healing only just beginning. And he wept for the final realization that made his tears course even more quickly down his battered cheeks: the comprehension beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was now truly alone.
Lance sat in the squalid water, crying silent tears of hopelessness as the wind began to pick up in the frigid October afternoon, and gray-shielded clouds rolled across the sun, which closed its eye to everything below.
The loud rapping sound from the front door woke Lance from a troubled sleep. He had drifted off in the early hours of the morning at his desk, pouring words out into his thick notebook as fast as they came to his mind. He was writing a story. Until his mother had disappeared he had only written his poems in the notebook. They had been short and simple at times, but nearly always dark and devastating as if they were diseased parts of himself that he removed with a pen instead of a scalpel.
The story that now graced a dozen pages of the notebook was different than anything he had ever written before. It was a fairy tale of sorts. The main character was a boy of his own age who lived in a time forgotten. His family was poor, and his father, having gambled all of their money away, had vanished without repaying his debts, leaving his wife, his infant daughter, and his son to fend for themselves. One day, months after the disappearance of the father, an old peddler came to the cottage selling his wares. The boy had explained to the merchant that they had no money to pay for such things, but he had seemed unperturbed. He told the young boy that if he gave up his right hand for a time, the peddler would give, in return, a bag that contained anything that the boy truly wanted. The boy’s mother had run the merchant away from their cottage, with his objects in tow, and warned him never to return, but the boy was intrigued. He sought the peddler out that night while his family slept. The old man promised he would bring the boy’s hand back after one week, and in return the boy could have anything he desired from the burlap bag that the peddler had offered. Without another thought, the boy agreed and the merchant cut the boy’s hand off at the wrist with an ax. Bloodied and woozy, the boy stumbled home with the bag in his grasp, and as he reached the door to his cottage, he collapsed from loss of blood. His mother found him there shortly after, but it was too late to save him from his injuries and he died only minutes later. When she looked into the bag, she found a rotted hand with only a few strands of flesh clinging to the bones. On the third finger she recognized her husband’s wedding band, and clasped in its palm was a note that read, All debts are repaid.
Lance was fairly proud of the story, and each time he looked at the scrawls of his handwriting, he felt his anger lessen somewhat and the world dulled a little, as though a bulb had burnt out somewhere nearby. At times, when he wrote, he forgot the life around him—his father, his mother’s absence. He cherished the escapes, and the night before had been no exception. He had fallen asleep with his pen still grasped in his hand, a letter L wildly elongated across the page as sleep had pulled him away from writing.
The loud knocking came again, and he heard his father stumble out of his bedroom down the hall with several utterances against the person who would wake someone so early in the day. Lance was still rubbing feeling back into his numb right arm when he heard another voice murmuring at the front of the house. His father’s voice rose and fell as if caught in a high wind. The lower voice remained level, but there was something about the muffled words that piqued Lance’s curiosity. Was it one of his teachers checking in on him? He had now been absent from school for nearly two weeks, his father naming mononucleosis as the culprit that had kept Lance home for so long. The bruises had faded over the last few days, a testament to the healing power of his young body, but his jaw still felt strange. It felt uneven and his front teeth fit differently than before. The pain had faded to a twinge here and there and he was thankful for that much.
As he opened the door to his room, his father’s words suddenly became clear and he could hear the anger mingled within them.
“Like I told you the last time we spoke, Sheriff, she ran off. We had a disagreement, she said she didn’t love me or the boy anymore, and in the morning she was gone. There’s nothing else to tell.”
Lance crept down the hall and peeked one eye around the corner of the kitchen to peer into the entryway. His father’s thin form blocked part of the doorway as pale gray light streamed in around him. A man stood on their front stoop, dressed in a faded leather jacket with fur surrounding the collar that once might have been white but was now closer to dull beige. The man’s black baseball cap was pulled down tight over a rounded face, but Lance could still make out a set of shining eyes beneath the brim along with thick lips that were now pressed together, draining them of any color. The sheriff’s right hand was pushed deeply into the pocket of his leather jacket, but the other rested on the butt of an automatic pistol that hung from his duty belt. He was looking at Lance’s father like a person studying a snake that they had almost stepped on, considering its fate.
“I find that very hard to believe, Tony,” the sheriff said with a voice that sounded like rocks sliding down a rusty chute. Lance’s father stood still within the doorway. Both men stared at each other for a moment that stretched, and stretched, until Lance almost felt it snap when the sheriff’s eyes shifted over to his own. Lance froze as the sheriff stared at him and then raised his chin in his direction.
“Lance, isn’t it?”
Lance’s father turned and threw a glance down the hallway that would have killed. Without thinking, Lance stepped free of his hiding place and stood where both men could see him and nodded.
“Come here a moment, will you, son?” the sheriff said, as he motioned vaguely with the hand that wasn’t on the butt of the gun. Lance hesitated as his eyes met the blazing circles within his father’
s skull, but he willed his feet to move one after the other across the linoleum of the kitchen until he was even with the doorway. He broke the fiery gaze with his father and turned it instead to the sheriff, who stood in the cold air of the October morning.
“Put your shoes on and step outside with me a minute, will you, son?” The sheriff’s voice was now softer and calm.
“Sheriff, I don’t want him outside. He’s been sick with mono and I don’t want him getting worse again.”
The sheriff’s eyes flitted back to Anthony’s and he squinted, as if the other man had become hard to see.
“I’m gonna have a talk with the young man, if he doesn’t object. Do you mind talking with me, son?” The sheriff’s eyes never left Anthony’s, but nonetheless, he stepped back to let Lance pass as the young boy slipped on his shoes and stepped outside.
Lance shivered in the crisp pre-Halloween air, but moved away from the warmth of the house in spite of his shaking flesh. The sheriff looked at Lance’s father for just a moment longer, and then turned from the doorway and followed Lance down the few steps onto the hard-packed drive.
When the older man knelt before him, Lance realized that the sheriff’s eyes were a soft shade of brown, which clashed with the rough features that adorned the rest of his face. Lance looked back into the sheriff’s eyes and waited. The older man studied him, pinning Lance to the spot under his scrutiny. At last, when Lance thought that all the sheriff was going to do was stare at him to glean information from his mind, he spoke in a low voice.
“Lance, do you know who I am?”
Lance nodded but didn’t break eye contact with the sheriff.
“So, you know that you’re safe telling me whatever you want, right?”
Uncertainty rose within Lance. Words longed to spill free of his mouth. Words that his father would kill him for. Words that were crawling up his vocal cords; they sat at the front of his mouth, dangling from his tongue like a troupe of obscene monkeys. Lance swallowed and nodded.
“Do you know where your mom is?”
Lance didn’t move. The moment for bravery had come. The bravery that his mother had lacked for so many years. He swallowed once and shook his head from side to side, the whole while his peripheral vision outlining the shape of his father standing motionless in the doorway.
The sheriff didn’t waver in his inspection of Lance’s face. His eyes roamed up and down and then back and forth, no doubt categorizing each discoloration that had been an ugly bruise several days before.
Finally the sheriff blinked and nodded, the bill of his baseball cap shading his face from view. When he looked up again, there was a painful smile etched onto his whisker-studded face.
“You ever need to tell me something, you just call me, okay, son?” As he said the words, the sheriff handed Lance a light brown business card embossed with a shiny golden badge in the middle. Lance thought it looked like a crown of some sort, the kind a king might wear. Without looking up, Lance bobbed his head and blinked back thick tears that were beginning to form on the surfaces of his eyes.
“Get back inside here now,” Anthony said, and Lance obeyed, stepping up the stairs and edging past his father as he shoved the sheriff’s card deep into his pocket. Rage seemed to boil off Anthony, and Lance imagined he could almost feel it roll over him like heat as he stepped past his father, into the kitchen. Lance was about to sneak off to his room and prepare himself for what was to come when he heard the sheriff speak again.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Metzger, and you listen well, since I’m only going to say it once.” The sheriff paused and Lance wondered if the break in the sentence was for his benefit. Lance made it to his room, shut the door loudly, and began to sneak back toward the kitchen. He knew his ruse had worked when he heard the sheriff’s deep voice again. “I see one mark on that boy ever again, I’ll find you, and I won’t be wearing this badge.”
Lance crouched at the entrance to the kitchen and peered around the corner with one eye as before. The sheriff stood a few inches from his father, with one thick finger poking the other man in the chest. Lance could see his father’s shoulders hunched in anger, and he could picture the snarl that would be curled on his mouth.
“I’ll tell you something, Sheriff. You ever come on my property without that badge, there’ll be a reckoning.” Lance saw the sheriff’s brown eyes darken to black at the words. A small smile, very much unlike the one he had given Lance outside, crept across his lips.
“Oh, you can count on that, Metzger. A definite reckoning.”
With that, the sheriff pulled his finger back from Anthony’s chest and walked down the stairs, and a moment later Lance heard the door of what he could only assume was a police cruiser slam shut. The sound snapped him out of his trance and he made his way back down the hallway. He waited for the moment when his father slammed the outside door to open the door to his room, and without a sound he slipped inside.
Lance sat on his bed, the springs creaking tiredly, and waited. The wind was picking up again, and even though the morning sunshine was beginning to reach into his room with golden fingers, Lance’s stomach was filling up with dread. He waited; the soft ticking of his clock was a scythe cutting the air, and each swish of that blade of time increased his trepidation. Just when he began to think he might escape, that he might just have lucked out, and the tight coils of fear began to loosen, releasing his body from its hold, he heard what he had been waiting for.
Heavy footsteps were coming down the hall toward his room, and not for the first time, Lance wondered how a man so slender could carry such a heavy tread with each step. His erratic musings were cut short as the door to his room flung open with enough force to bounce off the wall behind it and rebound slightly.
His father stood there in the doorway, his form hunched and his fists balled tight.
“Stand up.” The command was guttural and dripped with hatred. Lance stood and took an uneasy step toward the thin man, who shook with anger. As quick as lightning, Anthony crossed the few feet that separated them and had Lance’s throat grasped in one gnarled, bony hand. He pressed his thumb into the soft skin of his son’s neck and a choked cough racked Lance. Spittle flew from his mouth and his vision dimmed before the hand released its grip somewhat and the world swam back into view. Anthony stood staring down at Lance’s small face, the snarl Lance had imagined earlier now right at home where it normally was. They stood that way for a few moments, the second hand tick-ticking a quiet solo on the wall, before Anthony broke the silence.
“Give it to me.” Lance fumbled at his pocket until his fingers finally brushed the thin edge of the sheriff’s business card. One moment the card was in his hand, and the next it was gone, magically appearing in his father’s fist. Anthony folded the card and deposited it out of sight in his own front pocket. “You ever talk to that fucker again and I’ll kill you, you understand me?” Lance nodded as far as the hand that gripped his neck would allow him, then his father continued. “I think he might like little boys like you. I think he’d like to touch you. Maybe you’d like that, you sick little fucker. Just know that I’ll kill him too if you talk to him again. There’s no place you can go that I can’t find you, and there’s nothing that sheriff can do to keep me from you. No matter what you tell them, I’ll get you back here somehow, and when I do, I’ll drown you in the river and let you float away. You’d float all the way to New Orleans before they’d find you, you know that? Fish’d pick at you, sure, but you’d make it there. Might even float off into the ocean and you’d just disappear.”
Lance began to cry, and the hot tears brought on by fear ran in rivulets down his face, onto his father’s hand. Anthony stared at Lance’s wet face for another moment before snorting in disgust and shoving him backward into the front of his dresser. Lance cried out in pain as a drawer handle bit into his spine, but remained standing. Anthony studied him for several long seconds, turned half away, and stopped. The light from the windows that had been warm minutes be
fore was now gray and lifeless like dead skin. It coated the side of Anthony’s face and gave Lance the impression that his father was already deceased, killed from the poison that flowed through his veins.
“The sweetest thing is, you don’t know where she went. I think about that sometimes at night and it’s just poetic. You sit and wonder, while I know.” A smile pulled at the corners of Anthony’s mouth. It looked like an upside-down grimace.
Without another word, Anthony left the room and shut the door behind him, leaving Lance in the silence interrupted only by the clock’s heartbeat.
Winter edged its way across the land like an uninvited houseguest. It wedged its foot in the door of November with temperatures that dropped lower and lower, until most everyone wore heavy sweatshirts beneath heavier coats. Snow tested the waters of gray-skinned ponds and coated the fields a bit at a time, until one December night it decided to set in for good and dumped nearly six inches on Black Lake and the surrounding farms. Plows were hooked to the front of trucks, salt began to grow like a white mold on the highways, and dogs were allowed in to sleep on porches at night. Lakes became solid and, in the afternoons, accumulated children who gathered, strapped used ice skates to their feet, and raced one another up and down the bumpy surfaces, hockey sticks in hand as they pursued a jumping black puck. The people in the community settled into a comfortable routine: wait for the snow, complain about the amount when passing one another on the sidewalk or in the bars, and shovel and plow it when it came, only to do it all over again a few days later.
