ALL too quickly our short time together was over and Bill had to leave to go home. He never talked much about home, and whenever I asked questions his answers were minimal. I didn’t think much about it at the time since I was distracted by his presence. Who wouldn’t be? He was one of the hottest things on two feet.
Monday came again, faster than seemed possible, and it was back to the weekday grind. I didn’t spot Bill in the morning, and when I saw him in calculus he looked—well, something looked wrong. He kept his head down and seemed withdrawn, wrapped up in himself, almost like he was trying to curl up into a fetal position while sitting at a desk in class. Something was definitely wrong. He wasn’t looking up. He wasn’t paying attention. Something was very wrong. It took just about every ounce of focus and concentration I had to not simply get up and walk across the room to find out what had happened. Usually I was on guard to keep myself from staring at him for fear that someone might see. Today, though, I forgot and kept staring.
After what felt like a lifetime, class finished and people started to leave, some quickly and others more slowly. Bill started to close his notebook. I had noticed that he hadn’t written anything in that notebook anytime during class. Nothing. Usually he wrote nearly constantly, trying to get everything to be able to go over it later. Today, nothing.
He stood when about half the class had left. Caution be damned, I walked right up toward him. And he ignored me. He walked away, or rather he tried to. I wanted to see his face. Why wouldn’t he look at me? What the hell was going on? When he tried to slip around me without looking at me, I grabbed his arm. He shook my hand loose without looking and left the classroom.
If he thought that was going to stop me, he was sadly mistaken. In the hallway I moved in front of him and stopped directly in his path. “What the hell, dude?” I said, choosing my wording very carefully to use words I’d heard others use.
He quickly looked up at me for a split second—and I gasped. “Jesus! Bill! What happened to you?”
“Nothing. Get out of my way and leave me alone.”
“Bullshit! What happened?”
“Mind your own goddamned business!” he said more at me than to me.
I was shocked. His beautiful face was a mess. His right eye was black and blue and swollen. His upper lip was split and had clearly been bleeding.
“Who did this to you?” I said in my most threatening, demanding voice. “I’ll kill the son of a bitch!” I shouted.
But I was getting nowhere with him. He was shut down and was retreating more inside himself with each second. He pushed past me and shoved me aside. I stood there with a dumbfounded look on my face. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to hug him, I wanted to comfort him, I wanted to know who the hell had beat the crap out of him. Where had any of this come from? Why hadn’t I seen any evidence of what he was enduring before this? Was I totally blind to anything beyond the end of my dick?
“Damn!” I swore aloud, but mostly to myself.
Some girl I had seen around but didn’t know had a locker pretty much where our “conversation” had taken place. She had been at her locker while Bill and I “talked.” Like mine, her code seemed to be keep your head down, pretend you’re a turtle, and pull inside your shell. She looked at me. Without intending to, I looked at her. Apparently the look on my face was a mix of horror, uncertainty, concern, fury, and a whole bunch of other stuff as well—pretty much everything I was feeling on the inside. And she spoke to me. “It pisses me off—the way he’s treated.”
I looked at her. “Who did that to him?” I said, since she seemed to know more than I did.
“His dad,” she said. “He’s a miserable, sorry excuse for a human being. Can you believe anybody that would treat their own child like that? It makes me so mad when this happens.”
“This has happened before?” I said in disbelief. She had to be making this up.
“Not all the time. And this time is worse than usual—a lot worse.”
“How do you know this stuff?” I asked.
“I live just one farm over from where his family lives. I really wish something would happen to that miserable SOB,” she said as she slammed her locker closed and walked away. I was so stunned, shocked, speechless. I simply stood there in the hallway not even noticing when everybody else drifted away to wherever they were supposed to be.
The next thing I knew, I was standing alone in the hallway in the exact same position. Damn! What the hell should I do? I had to do something? I wanted a gun. I’d never fired a gun in my life. I’d never held a gun in my life. But I wanted one now. A very big one. I didn’t know what Bill’s father’s name was or even what he looked like, but I wanted to find him and make him suffer unspeakable pain and humiliation.
There was no way that I could focus on anything other than Bill, so I pulled out my cell phone and pressed one of my pre-set numbers. When the phone was answered, our conversation was briefer than brief. I said one word, “Help!” Apparently my tone of voice in that one word conveyed more than a thousand words ever could. I couldn’t have said anymore anyway because I found myself quietly fighting tears that seemed to be winning.
Ten minutes later my mom pulled up in front of the school and I jumped in her car. The tears I had been fighting to hold back broke loose and cascaded down my face. “Drive! Please!” I begged. “Get me out of here!”
She took off and we headed home. She kept asking me what was wrong, but I couldn’t cry and talk at the same time. She got me inside the house and tried to simply comfort me. She was good at that. I was surprised when the basement door flew open and my dad came running into the house.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, out of breath.
She shook her head to say, “I don’t know.”
“Baby? Can you tell us what’s wrong?”
I tried to pull myself together. “Bill’s dad beat the crap out of him. He’s a mess. Black eye. Split lip. And apparently this isn’t the first time this has happened. Apparently his dad beats him on a regular basis. How could he do that? Bill’s a good guy! Why would somebody punch him with their fists and cause him such pain? Why?” I practically screamed.
They tried to comfort me some more before asking me to step into my room for a few minutes while they conferred. When I returned to the living room five minutes later they were both on the telephone, him on his cell phone and her on the house phone. It didn’t sound like they were making official calls of any sort—I had momentarily been worried that they were calling the police or something like that. All I caught from the last call was “Eight o’clock. Tonight. Spread the word. I need everybody. Thanks. See you then.”
When they hung up their calls I asked what was happening. My mom had tears in her eyes as well, which surprised the hell out of me. We all sat down at the dining room table. After looking at one another, my father nodded at her and she started to speak to me. “Mark, baby, there’s something you don’t know. It’s something I decided a long time ago that I wanted to keep from you. Your father didn’t totally agree, but he honored my decision and I thank him for that.”
What the hell was happening, I wondered. I had enough crap to deal with today. I didn’t need some big revelation from my parents on top of everything else.
“My dad was a good man,” she said. “He worked hard. He provided for all eight of us. I loved him.” She took a deep breath and then continued. “But he also was an alcoholic. And when he drank he wasn’t a good dad anymore. When he drank he became mean, nasty, and a completely different man.”
I said nothing but simply sat there looking back and forth from her face to my dad’s face. “He beat us, Mark,” she said simply. “He beat us.” She started to cry, obviously reliving some painful memories.
My dad held her hand and took over the story. “When your mom’s dad had been drinking, he’d come home and take his belt or his hand or his fist—once, even a chair—and beat his wife and his children. They’d be asleep in bed. They hadn’t done anything to him or to anyone else other than love him and be home in bed.
“It was bad, son. It was really bad. He’d pull them out of their beds and throw them out the door to stand in the cold and the snow. Then he would lock the door and not let them back in. When they tried to get back in, he’d get madder and beat them again. It was so bad, son. Your mom didn’t want you to know about this, and I can see why. It’s painful for her to relive, and it makes everyone think less of her father. But he was a good man—except for when he drank. Then he became a monster. He couldn’t control himself when he started to drink.
“It wasn’t just his own family he beat. He’d pick fights with random guys in the bar. I can’t tell you the number of times he was sent to the hospital all broken up and beaten up. He couldn’t remember where he’d parked his car. Your grandmother didn’t drive and didn’t have another car so she’d have to find somebody to drive them all around the city looking for his car. He’d been thrown out of so many bars and told never to return that you could never tell where he’d gone drinking.
“So, sadly, we have firsthand experience with fathers doing vile, disgusting things to their children. When you told us about Bill, you asked ‘Why?’ There are many ‘reasons’ for why men do horrible things. We’ve told you about one.”
“But Bill’s never said anything about this. Nothing at all.”
“People don’t like to talk about things like this,” my dad explained. “It’s awful. It’s embarrassing. It’s frustrating. How do you tell somebody that the man who gave you life beat the crap out of you? People might think you deserved it, that you had done something really horrible and deserved such punishment. People don’t like to talk about such things, and I can’t fault them for that.”
“How did you learn about Mom?” I asked.
“When we were dating, I went to their house one night to pick her up for dinner. I found all of the kids and her mom sitting out on the porch. I could tell with just one look that something was wrong. It took a bit of pushing, but they finally told me that their dad had been drinking and had locked them all out of the house again.
“I couldn’t believe such a thing. It seemed so contrary to everything I thought I had seen. But then I heard the man slamming around inside the house, throwing things. I heard glass breaking, and I heard him yelling something. The blood in my veins turned cold in an instant. I was furious. I was outraged at the man. Before they could stop me, I opened a window on the side of the house and climbed inside.
“I found the man sitting at the kitchen table with absolute and utter destruction all around him. He’d simply been out of control. I opened the doors so his family could come back inside. And I stayed there, glued to his side. There was no way on God’s green earth that I was gonna see him do something like that again. Your mom and I didn’t go out to dinner that night. No. I sat at their kitchen table and poured as much black coffee into her dad as I could possibly get him to drink. I put him in an ice cold shower to shock him back to reality. I did everything I knew to do. It took hours. He wanted to go to sleep, but I wouldn’t let him. No. I insisted that he clean up the mess he’d made throughout the house. He wasn’t gonna do it, but I wouldn’t back down. I grabbed a broom and threw it at him. I grabbed a dustpan and a garbage can and we set to work trying to clean up the stuff he’d thrown around. None of his kids could have done that to him or with him. They were all too close to the situation and had lived it so long that it had become built into them as an automatic fact of life.
“But that day I vowed that I would never see that man do something like that again. I slept there at the house that night. I got friends and relatives lined up and we intervened in his life, because it wasn’t just his life. His actions affected dozens of other lives, not just the eight people in his household, but all the coworkers that he let down when he failed to drive people to work as he’d promised, all the employers when he’d show up to work so hungover that he couldn’t even walk a straight line. His behavior had a broad impact.
“So from that day forward we tried to get rid of that habit of his, that curse, that addiction that had such tight hold of him. We worked hard. It wasn’t always perfect. Not by a long shot. He’d slip and fall back into his old ways. But I’d be right back in his face and not give him an inch.
“Things got a little better after we got married, because he got sick. You can’t drink so much, fight so much, and not do a little damage along the way. After you were born he held you so proudly. You were his first grandson, and he was so proud of you. Whenever we’d go to visit him, he would insist on holding you for the entire visit. When you were old enough to walk, he’d take you outside to walk to the little store that was next to his house—he wanted to show you off to all of his buddies.”
“I don’t remember him,” I said, the first thing I’d contributed to this conversation in quite a while.
“We’ll show you pictures and tell you stories,” Dad said. “But before we do that, we have something else we have to do.”
“What?”
“We’re going to go into the lion’s den and confront the lion.”
“What?” I asked, baffled.
My mom picked up the conversation. “You and I are going to Bill’s house to check on what’s been happening there. I went to school with his mother. I know her, or at least I knew her. If she’s in trouble, then it’s my duty to do something to help her. We know that Bill’s in trouble and needs our help. I just have to find out how widespread the problem is.”
“And I’ll be outside with a few relatives and friends—a rather large group, actually—and we’ll be ready to move in once you and your mom get Bill and his mom out of the house. We’ll be listening to everything and will know that we have to move in earlier if necessary. I won’t let anything happen to you two. Can you do this with us?”
Vigorously nodding my head I said, “Yes! Absolutely! Let’s go!”
“Not just yet. We need to give him time to get home. We need to give Bill time to get home. And we need a little while to spread the word and get all of the guys together for our intervention. Let’s eat something, and then we’ll leave here a little after seven. How does that sound?”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to eat anything,” I said quite honestly.
“I know,” my dad agreed. “We’ll eat something, but I don’t want much either until we get this over with and get them out of there.”
We nibbled on something—I don’t have a clue what it was or if it tasted good since it was purely background. I kept watching the clock, checking the time. I wanted to go rescue Bill. I was terrified that the longer we waited the greater the risk that his dad would beat him again.