Читать книгу The Lyncher In Me - Warren Read - Страница 10

CHAPTER 2

I crouched behind the bushes; spines of holly leaves scratched the sides of my face. A wild throw and both my ten-year-old son Dylan and I were digging through the one spot in the garden I’d hoped not to have to search for a baseball. Still I smiled confidently, knowing that if nothing else, my son wasn’t afraid to be where he was, by my side, seeking to correct a less-than-perfect effort on his part.

On a night not too long ago in the relative realm of generational time, when I was just a few years older than my son is now, a holly bush of this size would play a completely different role for me. Its invasive scratch on my skin would be a strange comfort, dancing ever so lightly against the flesh. The holly bush then was an irritating reassurance of camouflage, safety from him, a man whose life would have been much less complicated with me, his wife’s burdensome young son, out of the picture. I scraped the dirt aside as my son asked again if I’d found the ball. I told him no, we’d keep looking, while in my private thoughts I remembered how, twenty-five years earlier, in the cover of the thorny brush, the Rolodex of escape routes had spun wildly in my mind, each card coming up frustratingly empty. What the hell could I have done then? Run away? To where? Even today, I try to reach back to reassure a scared adolescent who has long since grown to adulthood that there was nothing else he could have done but hide and wait. My lip had begun to swell; a taste of iron, blood leaking from my mouth. Mom can’t ignore this, I’d thought, not this time.

It had been a school night for me, another work night for my stepfather Lenny; he’d gone to the Kozy, or maybe the Townhouse, again. Most times he’d stumble in after last call, lurching right past my room, and pay me no notice, no reason to stop by the bedroom just off the living room. On this night, he didn’t go on up to bed with my mother. He came back for me.

“Get up and get out here.”

I stood in my underwear, squinting from the backlight of the kitchen ceiling fixture that hovered over his bobbing head like a dingy halo. His raggedy body swayed and the noxious fumes of rum and Coke clouded the space around us. I hadn’t flushed the toilet, or so he said. Yellow water. I said I thought I had, but if I hadn’t, I was sorry. I was tired, I had a test in Washington state history the next day, and could I go to bed?

“Do you think it’s funny?” he slurred. A fist—surprisingly fast, considering the difficulty he’d been having just standing upright—shot from his side and into my face, sending me twirling, spinning to the floor. It might have been a beautifully acrobatic maneuver, slightly funny if it hadn’t hurt so badly. With everything to run from and nowhere to run to, I hid behind the holly bush that shielded our dining-room window from that of the Perkins’s next door.

* * *

“I think I see it, Papa.” My son pushed past me and crawled deeper into the underbrush. Scraping away the layer of dead leaves that was the thorny carpet beneath us, he uncovered an egg-shaped rock. “Darn,” he said. “I thought it was a baseball.”

“It’s all right,” I told him. “It’s in here somewhere; we’ll find it.”

* * *

“Warren?” My mother’s voice had called, shaky and pleading. “Are you there? It’s okay to come in.” Lenny had gone to bed, done with all of it. My mother met me at the door, her cheek puffed and darkening, an empty space where a front tooth should have been. “It’s going to be fine.”

He was gone for a couple days after that, sent away by Mom. No man was going to hit her; she’d said this many times before and I believed her. But Lenny was like a tenacious rat, chased out but somehow squeezing his bedraggled body back into the house, and this time was no different. My mother and he had worked something out, had some private conversation of which I was to be no part. As far as anyone else was concerned, my mother had been in a car accident. I’d gotten hit in the mouth by a baseball, a wild overthrow during an otherwise innocent game of catch. Clearly, nothing had happened.

In this family, I was reminded, nothing ever happens.