The Source of All Things

by Tracy Ross

  7

  Bull’s Eye

  When I was twelve my dad said I needed to start thinking about carrying my own gun. He signed me up for a hunter’s safety class at his buddy Al Bolish’s house. Every Wednesday evening for six weeks, we made ourselves peanut butter sandwiches and headed to the farm town of Filer, which smelled like the inside of a cow’s stomach where milk was curdling into cottage cheese. The class filled up in one afternoon with a dozen kids who’d rather sit inside and watch first-aid videos than shovel hay for their dads. I was one of the few girls in attendance and nervous the first day of instruction. But my dad knew my aptitude for survival; he promised me I’d shoot better than anyone else. All kinds of common sense goes into handling a weapon, and Dad wanted me to know it, mainly so I wouldn’t accidentally ping him in the ass.

  At Al’s we learned how to hold a rifle while crossing under a barbed-wire fence. We turned on the safety and checked the chamber for bullets before aiming. Then we practiced loading and unloading our ammo, making sure to always leave our gun chambers empty when we were finished, “because stupid people stand a fifty percent greater chance of shooting themselves in the foot,” Al said.

  On the last Saturday of class, we took a paper test, which I aced, finishing a good five minutes before my runner-up. I walked my booklet to the front of Al’s living room and accepted a hug from Dad. Al smiled through chew-flecked teeth and threw a fatherly arm around my low back. He and Dad winked at each other when it was time to head outside for our shooting test.

  Dad grinned proudly as I slouched past all the farm kids to a line etched in the dirt, dutifully pointing the tip of my .22 single-shot Winchester at the ground. I didn’t arch my back and puff my lungs like the other hunters when I hoisted the rifle to my chest. I steadied it on my shoulder, put my finger on the trigger, and pretended to be Annie Oakley as I glared down the sight.

  I would have lined that target up all by myself. Probably tore the bull’s-eye apart. But then Dad took it upon himself to give me a little help. He walked up, put his hands on my shoulders, and pressed himself into my back. “Look for the target in the center of the V,” he said. “Hold your breath. And squeeze.”

  Leaning into Dad, I felt uneasy. He was solid and strong, but stuck out in places I didn’t necessarily like. Since the sex-education talk, something about him had changed, and I didn’t think it was for the better. He seemed to spend more time looking at me, letting his eyes pour over my body. He studied me, from my feathered bilevel haircut to my size 6, brown-and-tan Nikes. Sometimes, when I was in the bathtub singing, he’d barge in, pretending he didn’t know I was there. I had no idea how other dads reacted to seeing their daughters naked, but mine seemed to spend too much time apologizing, stammering about how he needed a lightbulb or a bar of Ivory, while his eyes continued to bug out of his face. Little did I know, I was walking the tightrope of ambiguity. Did Dad stumble into the bathroom while I was bathing “accidentally,” or was it on purpose? My dad had always gazed at me with affection. But now his gazes made me want to crawl inside my own skin.

  Out on the shooting range, I could feel Dad pressing against my back, as he held me to demonstrate how to aim. His breath—a nauseating mixture of maple bars and Folgers—was hot on my ear. When our cheeks touched, I felt the odd texture of his facial skin, which he prided himself on shaving “smooth as a baby’s butt.” The sensation made my teeth bite the sides of my cheeks. But with Al and the other kids watching, I had to be brave. I couldn’t turn around and tell my dad to give me some space. Instead, I steeled myself against him, clenching the back of my body into one big muscle.

  Dad either didn’t notice or chose not to say anything. He braced himself against me, squeezing his arms against the outside of my biceps. “Atta girl, sis,” he whispered. “Keep it up. You’re doing great.” The next time I shrugged my shoulders, he seemed to get the hint.

  Freed from his grasp, I lowered the gun and stamped my boots in the dirt. I resteadied the rifle and stared down the sight. Waiting until I was sure everyone in the class was watching, I pulled the trigger. The bullet tore a hole through the tiny black dot in the center of the target.

  The next time my dad asked me to go to the gun club with him, I didn’t race outside to the jeep. By my thirteenth birthday, I had begun to feel nervous and worried in his presence. Every time I turned around, it seemed his eyes were glued to my breastbone. He told me jokes—out of earshot of my mom or Chris—that made me hate my own body. I’d come out of the shower and he’d be standing in the hallway, waiting. I’d look for my mom, hoping she was noticing the same thing I did. But Dad chose his opportunities carefully. Mom was usually out of earshot; if she wasn’t out shopping, she was cleaning the living room or parked in front of Knots Landing.

  A few months into my thirteenth year, I stood in Mom’s bathroom asking her to shave my armpits. The next day, my swim team, the Magic Valley Dolphins, had a meet, and the last thing I wanted was to show up at the swimming pool with hairy pits. The trouble was, every time I tried to shave I ended up cutting myself.

  “Why don’t you ask your dad to do it?” Mom said.

  “I don’t want him to do it. Why can’t you do it?”

  Over the past year, my body had continued to quicken, hips spreading and breasts rising out of supple, sun-freckled skin. Now I caught Dad watching me as I pushed out my chest and looked at my reflection in the microwave door. Sometimes I could feel him peering through the hole he’d smashed in the wall of Chris’s room during a remodeling project. He would stand as still as a statue on the other side of the three-inch-wide wall. But I could hear him breathing, and that made me want to turn into a caterpillar that had wrapped itself inside a cocoon.

  Dad had also liberated himself from merely watching. Now he was coming into my room when I was on the verge of sleeping, asking if I was feeling okay, offering to tickle my back. From the time I was little I had been a bad sleeper, so even though I was thirteen, I still liked it when either of my parents came in to soothe me as I settled in to bed. But lately, I had begun waking up in the morning with cotton in my mouth and a cobweb of bad feelings in my head. I couldn’t put my finger on the origin of the feeling, but I sensed that it had something to do with Dad.

  “You know I always mess it up,” said Mom, lifting her head out from under the bathroom sink. “Have your dad do it. His razors are sharper. You’ll get a closer shave.”

  “But, Mom …”

  She stuck her head out the door and shouted through her bedroom down the hall.

  “Don! Can you help us in here?”

  “Mom. Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out.”

  “What’s the matter? You should let him help you. It’ll make him feel needed and that’d be good for him right now.”

  Mom was always dying her hair different colors, from strawberry blond to dark brown to Joan-Jett black. She was studying her roots in the mirror when Dad walked in, so she didn’t see the horror on my face as I stood frozen next to the shower door, waiting for my dad to shave me.

  “Tracy needs her armpits shaved for the meet tomorrow,” said Mom, plugging her blow-comb into a wall socket. “Can you do it? I always mess it up.”

  Dad looked from me to my mom in a way that made the hairs on my arms stand up like the quills on a porcupine. My whole body tensed, which had the negative effect of making my nipples poke out. I was ashamed, and tried to make myself smaller, folding away again like a piece of origami. But folding only made the towel slip.

  “I think I can handle that,” said Dad. “Let’s have a look-see, Trace.”

  Dad turned on the faucet, filling the sink with hot water to warm his can of Old Spice. He took a razor from his shaving kit, attached a shiny new blade, and dunked a washcloth in the water. He liked to heat the washcloth up, he said, because it would make the follicles soften. From that point forward, every time I’d hear the word “follicles” my stomach would clench.

  With the washcloth steaming, Dad knelt in f
ront of the toilet, taking my arm in his hand and raising it over my head. He laid the cloth in the hollow of my armpit, then sprayed a wad of cream into the center of his palm. The dollop was as big as a popover and pointed at the apex like meringue. Dad was humming as he smeared the cream across my prickly flesh, moving slower than a snail in a heat wave.

  “How’s that feel?” he asked my left breast.

  Don’t land on me, don’t land on me, don’t land on me! No!

  Ten of my schoolmates and I watched the green bottle spinning on the concrete floor of Maureen Neville’s garden shed. One bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling; the ground below it buzzed with flies. The bottle slowed, teetering on the concrete pebbles. When it came to a stop it was pointing at me.

  Bart Vies looked up and cracked a smile through beer-can braces. He walked to the door and I followed him, stifling a laugh. The wind kicked up, blowing small pieces of garbage through the azaleas in the yard. A metal trash can clanged onto the patio.

  “So,” said Bart, once we were outside the shed. “Are we like obligated to kiss?”

  “You and me? Hell no. No way,” I laughed.

  “I mean, we probably should, because those are the rules,” said Bart. “But I don’t know. I’m not feeling it. Not right now. At least not with you.”

  That last part stung just a little bit, but I let it float away. I wasn’t Bart Vies’s kind of girl, and he wasn’t my kind of guy. He was smart, and popular, but he was also a suck-up and naturally tanned. I could deal with the suck-up-ness; it got you scholarships to college and things. But I couldn’t stand the tan part. Outside of Mexicans and Mormon ranchers, tan people signified an elite. They tanned so effortlessly; they were never forced, like I was, to drench themselves in Wesson oil and lie out in the driveway on a sheet of tinfoil while the dog tried to lick their arms. But the main reason I didn’t like those who tanned was because they included my dad.

  By 1984, he and I were growing apart. An eighth-grade cheerleader of the most self-absorbed order, I was too cool to go hunting, which made him feel hurt and mad. New friends and boyfriends competed for my attention, along with drama class, poetry contests, and track. When Dad heard me say “I love you” on the phone to one of my girlfriends, he flew off the handle, muttering, “Why do you tell people that? You sound like an idiot.”

  I did have one secret that I’d been able to keep from Dad. Earlier that summer, I met a new boy named Reed at a Christ on Parade concert at the Odd Fellows Hall in Twin Falls. We met through a haze of beer fumes and cigarette smoke—and an introduction from my friend Stacy’s brother, Darren. Reed had red-blond hair, yellow-green eyes, and eyeteeth that looked as sharp as a vampire’s. He belonged to a nonviolent gang called The Antichrists. The second I saw him, standing in a corner smiling through his fangs, I knew we were doomed to love.

  I can’t remember who approached whom, but we left the concert and went for a walk. The air outside was warm and fragrant. He asked me about my family, and I lied, telling him my dad was a cop. The impromptu lie sprung up from an unknown inspiration. Was it wishful thinking or the reverse?

  In the humid summer, which evolved into the worst season of my life, Reed was a heady, heart-throbbing distraction. We exchanged phone numbers, showed up at the same downtown outdoor dance parties, and clung to our separate groups of friends (mine: girls in thick black eyeliner and black nylons with holes ripped in the knees; his: the chain-smoking, forty-ouncer drinking, skateboard ollie-ing Antichrists). We shared glares and the occasional slam dance.

  I think Reed liked me because, even at thirteen, I knew what “the establishment” was and already hated it. Reed was the opposite of normal: he seemed raw in a way no one I had ever met was brave enough to be. From the first time we met, I saw him as both someone I could once-over and someone who deserved to know the darkest, most complicated parts of me. He didn’t know it, but he was about to become central to my survival, because he gave me something positive to focus on.

  The same couldn’t be said for Dad, who had recently begun openly preying on me. Even as he felt me pulling away from him, he pried open the blinds of my bedroom and stood in the backyard barely hiding the fact that he was watching me undress. I tried sleeping in my street clothes, but he insisted that I change out of them at night. Though it had been a year since I’d stopped asking him to tickle my back, he came into my room while I was on the verge of sleeping, and staying until after I had dozed off. Sometimes I would wake up and see him hovering over me, like he was on his way to lying down or had already done so and was just getting up. Seeing the wide, staring whites of my eyes, he’d quickly pull up the covers, saying “You’re okay, sis. I’m here. You called out for me in your sleep.”

  I wanted to tell my mom that something terrible was happening, but I always backed off just short of speaking. Dad’s threatening looks would stop me in my tracks. Not only that, no matter how hard I squeezed my brain muscle to remember, I couldn’t conjure up a clear picture of exactly what Dad was doing to my body all those nights. It would be years before I discovered how far he was going to molest me without repercussion. But at nearly fourteen, I knew only one thing for certain: now he also wanted to fondle me in broad daylight.

  He had started a new job at Intermountain Gas Company, selling natural gas to developers as an alternative to propane, and it allowed him to come home in the middle of the day. During the summer, when I was home from school, he’d slip in the front door, silent, as if he were trying to sneak up on me. With Mom working full-time, Dad had ample opportunity to coax me onto the living room floor and make me tickle his back.

  In a sense, this was nothing new, and perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised by it. As a four- and five-year-old, I had loved grooming Dad. He had always been a willing model, for eye shadow, lipstick, and bright red barrettes. I’d take off his shirt and dress him in my fake feather boas or wrap a sequined cape around his back. I’d brush his hair, then style it with a working blow dryer from my plastic beautician’s kit. Sometimes his dark skin charred, despite the teaspoon of Cherokee Indian in his blood, and he’d ask me to sit on his lower back and scratch the peeling skin on his shoulders. I’d responded willingly, happy to be the one who could relieve him of the discomfort even better than Bactine. I’d rake my fingers across the black patches, looking for a scab or loose corner of skin. When I found one strong enough to lift up, I would peel the epidermis back, gently coaxing it from the raw underflesh until I had harvested a transluscent, two-by-two-inch sheet. But I was a baby back then. Now, a few months shy of my fourteenth birthday, I knew I was much too old to be grooming my dad.

  “You’re so good to me, sis,” he said one afternoon. He was lying on the living room carpet with the curtains pulled shut. Dad had always wanted the curtains closed, ever since we moved into our new house. He said it was a way of helping our insulation do its job: keep the sun out during the summer and trap the heat inside when it got cold. But the unnatural dark of our house heightened my sense of some impending danger.

  On that searing day in June, the sun outside our windows blazed white-hot and blinding. Walking barefoot on the sidewalk meant risking the bottoms of your feet. Thanks to Dad’s advice, lots of people on Parkway Drive kept their curtains closed during the hottest part of the day. But right now I could think of nothing I wanted more than to throw the curtains wide open, so that the world could save me from him.

  Dad slid his Ralph Lauren button-down off his ropy brown arms, and then spread out on the carpet, stomach down. I stood next to the piano, in a pale pink summer-weight nightgown. I often spent all day in my pajamas, unless I was going somewhere like softball practice or to my friend, Valkyrie’s. I suddenly wished I was going to the North Pole, where I would have to wear three layers of long underwear and a floor-length goose-down parka.

  Dad patted his lower back, motioning for me to sit on top of him. I stared at the back of his head, fought the tears I could feel coming. I knew I had no choice but to do what he
told me, and without raising a fuss. It was unspoken knowledge that if I told my mom about the abuse, like I’d done in the trailer, I would blow up our entire family. I walked over, sat down, and tickled. But I was ten feet under water in my favorite fishing hole at the bottom of the Snake River Canyon. I held my breath and wished the same thing I had been wishing for more than half my life: that I could bust through the walls of our living room, fly to the edge of the river, and let the rapids drag me under.

  “Did I ever tell you how pretty you are?” Dad said, interrupting my wish.

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “You believe me, right?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “You know I love you, right?”

  No answer.

  “Now let me tickle you.”

  8

  Run!

  Through it all, I wrote poetry. In both 1984 and ’85, I won the Idaho Young Poets contest for ten stanzas scratched on notebook paper the night before submissions were due. When my category—Fifteen and Under: Dramatic Poem—came up, I knew before they announced the finalists that I had won the gold medal. I’d guessed that sad or violent poems would beat out happy poems, so that’s what I wrote. And besides, sad and violent was how I felt.

  I can still remember the look on my mom’s face when I handed her a poem I’d written one morning after I’d woken up with Dad shining a flashlight up my legs. I’d bucked away and snarled at him like a wolverine caught in a trap. He spit back, saying, “If you don’t want people to do things to you, don’t lay on your back with your leg bent up.”