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Acresville, May 9
2:25 p.m.
The slamming of a door intrudes upon a dream.
The little boy’s eyes snapped open. He was alone in his bed, rigid and frightened, scarcely able to breathe. He lifted his head off the pillow, waited, and listened. Though he heard nothing but the rapid thump of his heart, he still had the instinctive awareness of the presence of another.
Slowly, his hand clutched the blanket to his chin. Maybe only in his dreaming mind he had imagined the slamming door. He didn’t know the time, but it was late. His bedroom was in shadows. Moonlight spilled through the window, stretching weakly to the walls. He heard the furnace switch on, felt the register near his bed release a current of warm air.
The boy laid his head back on the pillow. He turned over, staring up at the ceiling.
After a brief moment, it came again, as clearly as the catch in his throat—the heavy stomp of a footstep on the staircase. The house picked up the sound, gave it resonance. A second step followed, a third, a fourth, all awkward, all irregular. Then came the sound of stumbling, a pause for balance, a grunt of obscenity. A brief instant later, the footsteps resumed.
He was coming. And he was drunk.
Desperate, the boy’s gaze darted around the room, looking for escape. His breaths came in quick, shallow gasps. He tossed the blanket aside and lunged off the bed. He knew the window wouldn’t open. It took the strength of his father to do that. The frame was wedged tight against the jambs.
Despite this, the boy ran to it. As he stared out, his breath condensed on the pane. It was deep winter, and its white cloak made the landscape out back indistinguishable. A northwest gust kicked up a swirl of snow. The open sky was stippled with a profusion of stars, their brilliance diminished only by an overpowering full moon.
Outside the bedroom door, the footsteps were almost to the top of the stairs now.
Near panic, the little boy pushed up on the window, but it wouldn’t budge. He tried again, arms shaking.
A crack, nothing more.
He turned, looking around his dark room. The closet. He ran to it. His face brushed suspended shirts and pants as he pushed his way through to the wall. Empty hangers clanged together, and he winced at their sound. He knelt and swept shoes aside so he could sit down. When he pulled the door shut, the darkness became absolute. Beneath him the floor felt hard, cold. The boy curled his knees to his chest and closed his eyes.
He began to pray.
“God Most High, have pity on me. Have mercy. I run to you for safety. In the shadows of your wings, I seek protection...”
Abruptly, the boy’s eyes snapped open. There came the creak of a loose floorboard in the hallway, the groan of the bedroom door as it opened.
Fear crawled over the boy’s skin. He drew a shuddering breath. The air became close and humid. In the confinement of the closet, he felt trapped, suffocated. A bead of perspiration rolled down the side of his face.
When the bedroom light flicked on, the boy pressed a hand to his mouth, stifling a gasp.
Someone stepped inside. Under the door, a shadow moved to the middle of the room.
From the silence came a man’s intoxicated drawl. “Where are you?”
It was his father, returning from Gary’s Tavern. Many nights had begun like this. The boy imagined the man hanging off the bar, drinking glass after glass of his favorite whiskey. Afterward, he would somehow drive home and then stumble into the house, his mind poisoned, his rage stoked to the point of bursting.
“Answer me,” the voice spoke again, angry now. “Morceau de merde.”
Footsteps moved toward the closet. The shadow changed shapes and then separated into two.
The doorknob rattled.
The boy pressed his back into the corner of the wall. His heart pounded in his ears.
A sudden rush of light flooded the closet as the door flung open. The boy blinked up at his father, terror swelling inside him. The man’s face was flushed with liquor and temper. His mouth was an angry slash, his dark, soulless eyes sharp with malevolence. Behind his head, the bedroom light was like a nimbus.
He was a big man with a thick neck and arms like tree trunks. He wore a checkered flannel jacket that carried the odor of cigarettes.
“You hiding from me, you little shit?”
The boy’s mouth worked at words that wouldn’t come. He tried desperately not to cry.
The man clutched the front of his son’s pajama top and yanked the little boy up toward him with a sudden tug. Faces inches apart, the boy could feel the heat of his father’s breath, the reeking stench of whiskey. That was how he knew to be afraid. At any moment, he thought he was going to vomit.
His father sneered. “Why do you make me crazy, huh?”
The boy didn’t understand. Too afraid to move or speak, he could only wait.
“You disgust me. Fucking little weakling.”
Without warning, the father wrenched his son from the closet and threw him across the bedroom as though he were weightless.
He collided with the night table, knocking over a lamp. The bulb shattered, flinging shards of glass everywhere. With a short cry, the boy toppled to the floor. He winced at the throbbing ache in his back where it had struck the table. His eyes began to water. When he raised his head, his father was a blurred image starting toward him.
“Look at the mess you made,” the man said.
The open doorway. If the boy could reach it, he could escape this. Desperately, he scrambled to his feet. In spite of his drunkenness, the man was fast. His powerful hand grabbed hold of his son’s collar and pulled him back into the room. Glaring down, the man’s eyes took on a feral glint, more animal than human.
“Morceau de merde,” he spat.
As if by reflex, the boy’s arms came up around his head to protect himself.
He cried, “No, Daddy. No.”
The man raised his hand, and the boy cringed.
“Herbert.”
The man paused at the voice and looked up. The boy twisted his head to see. In the doorway stood his mother, the man’s wife. She was a slender woman in her early forties. Her shoulder-length flip-up hair was disheveled. Her green eyes looked wary, tired. Without makeup, her face was pale, older somehow. She wore a robe overtop a nightgown.
“Laisse le garçon tranquille,” she said.
The man lowered his hand. “You just never mind.”
Slowly, almost tentatively, she stepped into the room.
“He hasn’t done anything,” she said.
The man released his grip on his son. A tense silence fell upon the room. The boy felt time stop. He backed away to his bed, watching his father’s face.
Standing between them, the man seemed mollified. Under the bedroom light his forehead glistened with sweat. His gaze shifted from his wife to his son to his wife again. Then the whiskey seemed to kick-start him.
“You baby him too much,” he said. “How’s he ever gonna be a man?”
“Il est un bébé.” The woman took another step forward, eyes never leaving her husband. “Il a seulement six ans.”
The man fixed his son with an icy stare. Gazing back at him, the boy swallowed. Tears rolled down his cheeks.
With a soft voice, his mother said, “Come to bed, Herbert.” She reached out a hand to her husband now. “Come.”
The man looked at her with a kind of wonder. He took her hand and allowed himself to be led from the room. The boy’s mother stopped in the doorway and turned back to her frightened son.
“Go back to bed.” She flashed a quick smile of reassurance. “Everything will be all right.”
Her hand moved to the wall and flicked off the light. When she closed the door, the boy expelled a long sigh. The silence that followed was a comfort.
He crawled back under the covers. The ache in his back still throbbed, and his heart still thumped wildly. After a time, both seemed to ease. He gazed up at the ceiling with his hands behind his head.
Lower in the sky now, the moon lit up the room in starker detail.
The boy rolled to his side, unable to sleep. He was thankful tomorrow was not a school day. Shutting his eyes, he tried to drive away the thoughts of his father’s drunken fit.
Minutes passed. He felt himself drifting off.
Then another sound pulled him back from the twilight between sleep and consciousness. Not a bang this time, but a sound like a cry. Faint. Somewhat distant.
The boy sat up, listening. He wiped the scratchiness from his eyes with a knuckle.
It came again.
The cry came from his mother. He could also hear his father’s voice, saying something he couldn’t make out. He flinched at the sound of a slap, followed by the deep moan from his mother.
At once, he pictured his father beating her. Pictured his mother with cuts and bruises and a swollen lip.
The boy felt sick to his stomach.
He didn’t know what he could do, only that he had to stop this. What his father would do to him didn’t matter; he must save his mother.
He leapt off the bed, mindful of the scattered pieces of light bulb still on the floor. His hand closed over the doorknob, yet he couldn’t bring himself to turn it.
His arm trembled; his mouth was dry.
From his parents’ room came another slap, another cry.
By a sheer act of will, the boy opened the door, slowly to minimize the squeak of hinges.
The hallway was dark. But the boy knew the house by touch. On tiptoes, he approached his parents’ bedroom, unsure of what he would find, unsure of what would happen. His heartbeat was fast and heavy.
The door was ajar. Peeking inside, the boy saw them. Their profiles were silhouetted against the window. His mother was bent over the footboard, hands reaching toward the head of the bed. Her nightgown was raised above her waist. Wearing only a T-shirt now, his father stood behind his wife, his hips pumping wildly. With each thrust, the boy’s mother emitted a soft moan.
The boy watched them, unable to turn away. His father raised his open hand and brought it down on his wife’s ass. The smack made the boy flinch again. He backed away from the door, not understanding what he was seeing. He crept back down the hallway, footsteps soft so his parents wouldn’t hear. He climbed into his bed and pulled the covers to his chin.
He wouldn’t sleep for the rest of the night.
At the breakfast table the next morning, it was like nothing had even happened. To the boy, the events of the night before seemed like a jumble of fragments, half-real, half-imagined.
His mother set down plates of eggs, bacon, and toast. His father sipped coffee, not looking at or speaking to anyone. He seemed engrossed in the newspaper he had folded on one corner of the table.
Sitting at her place, the boy’s mother asked him, “Will you say grace for us?”
“Yes, Maman.” He folded his hands by his plate and bowed his head. “Bless us, O, Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
As he finished, he heard only his mother repeat the “Amen.” His father was uncharacteristically quiet. The boy looked up and found the man glowering at him from the other side of the table.
The boy put his head down once more. He ate his breakfast quickly. After he finished, he quietly excused himself from the table. His father did the same, following his son through the living room to the staircase. The boy felt a large hand grab hold of his arm with a viselike grip. His father spun him around and pressed his face close to his.
“You were there last night,” he said. “I know it.”
Eyes wide, the boy felt his heart beating faster. He winced at the pain sinking into the flesh of his arm. The man paused, glancing back over his shoulder. From the kitchen came the sounds of dishes clattering in the sink, of running water. The man turned back to his son, his eyes narrowed to slits.
Venom dripped from his voice. “Enjoy the show? Morceau de merde.”
Hoss awoke with a start. His muscles were flexed, his hair damp with sweat. It felt as though he had a hangover—headache, dry mouth, nausea in his stomach. The bed was a mess, the sheets and blankets kicked to the floor.
The room around him was shadowed and quiet. Faint light from the hallway dimly illuminated his surroundings. Looking around, he made out vague shapes as a dresser, a night table, a wind-up clock whose hands read 2:30. Sunlight cut through around the edges of the drawn blinds.
Slowly, the understanding of who and where he was came back to him—not a little boy, but a grown man of thirty-six years, alone in his bedroom. He was still dressed in the clothes he had worn last night.
Trying to sift through the wreckage of his memory, he encountered flashes of lucidity, blackouts of obscurity.
Sudden images. A woman swathed in black water. Her desperate flail to keep from drowning. Her frantic cry for help.
Hoss winced. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. On the floor by his feet lay an empty whiskey bottle.
He stared at it. Everything began to make sense. He’d hit the bottle as soon as he came home last night. Got drunk out of his mind.
He lowered his forehead onto clasped hands. The nightmare had come again. Third night in a row.
More and more lately, his thoughts seemed to drift back into a past he wished to forget.
He stood up and felt the shakiness in his legs, the queasiness in his stomach. He went to the window and yanked the cord to raise the blinds, squinting against the sudden rush of bright sun. Only a ridge of cotton-like clouds over the mountains threatened to pilfer the rich blue from the sky.
Hoss walked out to the hallway for the bathroom. His footsteps became leaden as he approached his parents’ bedroom. A chill worked through him like an electric current, the residue of the nightmare still fresh on his mind.
The door was closed. Behind it he knew the room lay untouched since the death of his father over eighteen years ago. Not since then had Hoss gone in there. Now, with fear and foreboding, he turned the knob and pushed on the door. It yawned open with a heavy protest.
Hoss stood on the threshold, looking inside. The room was as he remembered it. Hardwood floor. Felt wallpaper. The only differences were the signs of dormancy—the stale air, the thick layers of dust covering everything, the festoons of cobwebs hanging from the ceiling.
In the far corner was a dressing table with a large oval mirror. Hoss imagined his mother sitting there in her blue Sunday dress and faux pearls, applying makeup as she prepared for morning mass. Her perfume bottles, powder boxes, and Victorian hand mirror were still there, remnants of what was once life.
On the wall above the bed hung a framed print of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. The bed itself was unmade, the covers thrown back by his father just hours before he died.
Hoss shut his eyes. Painful memories began to squeeze their way out of his brain like pus.
He hurried to the bathroom and splashed handfuls of cold water on his face. As he lifted his face to the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet, he saw a haunting image of his father lying in a heap with the handle of a knife sticking out of his belly.
“I was your father.” He spit blood on the parlor floor. “Your flesh and blood.”
Hoss gripped the edge of the sink, sneering into the mirror. You’re dead. Stay that way.
