Inheritance

by Joe McKinney

  He caught a flash of movement and saw a man’s legs sticking out from under the generator, black slacks and black Red Wing boots. A black Stetson leaned against the man’s narrow hips.

  “Daddy,” Paul said.

  There was no fear. Not this time. He knew the man couldn’t see him, couldn’t hear him. Whatever was about to happen was for his benefit, but he was not an active player in the show. He was a ghost in a theater.

  Martin Henninger worked on the generator with calm, steady determination. Paul knelt by his father’s hat and watched him work the wrench onto a bolt and dog it down, and he could almost hear the man’s mantra of You do one thing at a time and you do it until it’s done; you try to do more than one thing at a time, nothing gets done in every swing of his elbow. Growing up, his father had worked that philosophy into him with the same relentless single-mindedness with which he did everything in his life. It didn’t matter if he was eating fried chicken or reseating a cylinder. It was always the same. How do you eat an elephant? You take it one bite at a time.

  Now Paul sat watching him, remembering the things he told him, and he wondered why it had taken him so long to appreciate the man’s ability to focus, his gift of being able to immerse himself in a problem for as long as it took to reason it out. He was a man to whom distraction was a cardinal sin, willpower a religion.

  But then Martin Henninger’s concentration broke. Paul saw it happen, and for a moment he was terrified. His father’s gaze left the tool in his hand and seemed to lock with his own. His expression turned hard, almost violent. He grabbed a bar above his head and pulled himself out from under the generator, still looking right at Paul.

  No, not right at me. Through me.

  Paul rocked back on his heels and then rose to his feet. He backed away hurriedly as his father got to his feet. Martin Henninger stepped into the space where Paul had just been standing and stopped. He looked one way and then the other. The Steve Miller Band faded out and Janice Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” started up. Martin Henninger reached over to the radio and turned it down.

  “What is that?” he said, and turned to face the ground behind Paul.

  Paul spun around. Skeins of dust were moving over the chamber floor, curling around one another like fine silk scarves caught in the wind. Paul watched the dust take shape, saw it settle onto the floor and form an unmistakable image. It was his own face he saw, but his face as he had been twenty years earlier, a boy of four.

  His father stepped past him, eyes fixed on the image.

  “Paul,” he said.

  Paul looked at his father, and he saw the man’s eyes had rolled up into his head. His hands fell to his side and the wrench he held slipped from his fingertips and clattered to the metal floor.

  “What does this mean?” Paul asked.

  At first there was no sound but the breeze through the superstructure, the distant, muted voices of men working. But then Martin Henninger began to mutter, and Paul turned to face him.

  He was rocking on the balls of his feet, his upper body moving in a circular sway. His lips moved, but the sounds weren’t in English. They weren’t Spanish either. He continued to sway, and soon he was moving in such large circles that Paul couldn’t stop himself. He reached for his father and grabbed his shoulder.

  The feeling was like putting his finger into a light socket—so much power, so much energy concentrated in one blast. He felt his body go numb and his bowels nearly let go, but somehow he kept his feet.

  He staggered backwards. His eyelids fluttered. He looked at his father. And then his father turned and looked at him.

  “Paul?” his father said.

  “Daddy? You can see me?”

  His father nodded.

  “It’s me,” Paul said. “I saw it, there in the sand. It’s not you...it’s me. I’m the one that’s supposed to...”

  “Yes,” Martin Henninger said. “You see it.”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t understand when she first told me, all those years ago in Mexico. I was vain. I thought I was the one. But it was always you. I was meant to keep the power burning. But you are the one who is meant to wield it. Do you know what that means, Paul?”

  Paul shook his head. He was too stunned to speak.

  “You’ll be able to see into men’s souls. You will know their fears and desires like they were written on their face. No one will ever be able to hide the truth from you. Men will be drawn to you like a lodestar. I spent my life trying to see what lies beyond the doors to perception. But I was never meant to see that country. It was meant for you.”

  “My inheritance,” Paul said, his voice barely a whisper.

  “And your charge. You’ll make a kingdom of this world.”

  Paul looked at him intently, and it was like he was seeing the man for the first time. “You knew, Daddy. You knew about this the night that I...that I...” He swallowed. “Daddy, why? Why did it have to be this way?”

  Martin Henninger touched his chest where the aerator’s spikes had pierced him and black soot poured from his fingertips.

  “Do you see this soot, Paul? Every time I appear to you, a little more of me burns away. I can’t hold the gates open for long.”

  “Just tell me why, Daddy. Why did you have to die?”

  “I can’t tell you everything, Paul. I had to learn it on my own. You do, too.”

  “I don’t understand, Daddy. I want you back.”

  “I could tell you what I know, but you wouldn’t understand it. That’s the whole point, Paul. Knowledge without experience is impossible. Do you understand that? Paul, you’re meant to do some great things, but you won’t be able to get any of it done if you don’t learn how the power works. There’s only one way to do that, and that’s the hard way. The way I learned it.”

  “Daddy...”

  But there was nothing else. The world melted away in a flash of daylight…

  ***

  …and became the living room of the family ranch house in Smithson Valley. His parents were standing just inside the doorway that led to the kitchen, and Paul could tell by their faces that they had been arguing.

  “And what are we supposed to do for money while you’re hanging around the house all day?” his mother said. She was staring at his father with wide, unblinking eyes. Her mouth was set in a stern thin line, and there was a forcefulness to her that shocked Paul. He had never seen her like this, so solid, so totally unafraid, not a trace of fragility. “Huh? Did you think about that?”

  “Money ain’t gonna be a problem,” his father said. “The land’s all paid for. We ain’t got nothing but the county taxes, and that ain’t nothing with our agricultural exemption. We can make it work on what we get from the peach crop during the summer.”

  “And food? Electricity? We got bills to pay, Martin. You didn’t think about that when you quit your job, did you? How are we gonna put food on the table?”

  “We ain’t gonna starve, Carol.”

  His mother waited, her hands balled into fists and resting on her hips.

  “That’s it?” she said. “We ain’t gonna starve. That’s the best you got? Martin, you aren’t a bachelor any more. You got me. You got that boy out there.”

  “It’s for him that I’m doing it, Carol.”

  “For him? What the hell does that mean? This home and this land, they’re his birthright. You’re gonna risk losing his birthright for him? You tell me if that makes sense to you. Huh, does it?”

  “I made my decision, Carol. This is the way it’s gonna be.”

  “Oh, okay. That’s great, Martin. Fuckin’ fantastic.”

  She reached behind her back and untied the apron she wore. She pulled it off and folded it and put it in a cupboard next to the stove. Then she fell back against the wall and ran her hands over her face.

  Martin Henninger walked through the kitchen and leaned against the doorway that led outside. Paul walked up beside him and looked out the doorway. What he saw there took his bre
ath away. It was him. It was Paul at four, playing in the cheatgrass that came up to the middle of his thighs. He had a stick in one hand and he was using it to slash at the tops of the grass like it was a pirate’s cutlass.

  “So much depends on that boy,” he said to himself.

  Carol Henninger looked at her husband, made a disgusted noise, and turned away.

  Paul watched her, still shocked at the obvious strength in the woman. He reached back into his memories but couldn’t think of a time she had looked so well put together. In his mind, she was always the frail little stick of a woman who lived in the shadows of their home, too fragile to step into the light. What happened to her? he wondered. Why did she change?

  His father stiffened beside him. Paul turned around and looked at him, then turned to where he was looking, at his younger self playing in the grass.

  “Paul, get over here! Now!”

  Martin Henninger jumped down the concrete steps onto the grass and ran for his son, yelling his name the whole way.

  Paul followed him, though he couldn’t see what had excited the man so much. His father was sprinting at full speed now. Behind him, Paul saw his mother coming down the steps. Her expression was stricken with panic.

  He heard his younger self let out a high-pitched yelp, and then he was tripping over his feet and screaming as he tried to dodge something on the ground at his feet. Watching the scene, Paul felt his gut tighten. He knew what this was. He remembered now. He remembered the snake, the way it kept coming after him, the dusky gray of its body in a constant state of unfolding. He remembered the milky pink of its open mouth.

  And with the memory he felt himself back there in that time, moving like a dancer to get his feet away from the charging snake. He felt his father’s iron grip on his shoulder. He felt—not remembered, but felt—his father lift him off the ground and move him out of the way. Paul watched the man from the boy’s eyes, watched his father put himself between the child and the snake. He looked into his father’s eyes and saw fear and anger and love all in one hard glare.

  “Goddamn it, boy!” Martin Henninger shouted. “Damn it. Get your ass inside. Move!”

  Paul staggered backwards, and as he did, he watched his father reach down into the grass and come up with the snake. He held the limp animal by its middle, doubled over like it was a rope. The thing had to be six feet in length and as thick around as Paul’s thigh, but in his father’s fist it was docile.

  His father turned to him, the snake hanging from his fist. “I told you to get inside, boy. Move your ass.”

  “But Daddy...”

  “Move!”

  The boy turned and ran to his mother. He ran into the house at full speed and threw his hands around her. She put an arm down across his back and stroked his shoulder while she watched her husband walking down the white dirt road that led out to the horse pasture.

  “Come on inside,” his mother said. “I’ll make you some dinner.”

  She led him inside and he followed her without another word. Paul stood near the back door, watching them, watching his mother as she moved through the kitchen, gathering up flour and salt and an egg and a big, ancient-looking chef’s knife. They had had chicken fried steak that night. He remembered that clear as a bell. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did.

  His father was coming back up the road now, and he was carrying sticks. Lots of them. Paul watched him come on to the house, watched him carry the sticks inside. There was a skein of baling wire wrapped around his fist.

  “What are you making for dinner?” he asked.

  “Chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes.”

  “How long’s that gonna take.”

  “I don’t know. Forty-five minutes maybe.”

  Martin Henninger grunted, then walked into the living room, where he dropped the sticks and the baling on the floor. He came back to the kitchen then and said, “Paul, you hurry up with your dinner. I want you in bed early tonight. You hear me?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  He grunted again, then went back outside for more sticks.

  Paul watched the man walk away, the bill of his Stetson like a black halo in the fading evening sunlight, and he realized that he remembered what came next. This was the night his mother had told him it was best to steer clear of Daddy when he got this way. That it was best for everybody if he didn’t bother his Daddy while he assembled his stick lattices. This was the night Paul stayed awake in anticipation, the night he came down in the middle of the night to see what the fuss was all about and saw the man with his eyes rolled back up into his head, an unknown language on his murmuring lips.

  ***

  Darkness fell around him. He was standing on the bottom stair of the house in Smithson Valley. The kitchen was dark. So too was the flight of stairs leading up to his room. From around the corner, in the living room, he heard the sound of his father mumbling, the faint clatter of oak sticks fitted together and tied with baling wire.

  He heard the stairs creaking above him. He turned and saw himself at four, a bright, mischievous glint in his eyes as he quietly walked down the stairs. The adult Paul stepped into the kitchen. Off to his left he could see his father working on the lattice, rocking back and forth in the dark, mumbling to himself. Even in the dark he could see the man’s eyes were turned up into his skull, his hands working independently, as though they were on remote control. The murmuring stopped. His mouth stayed open in an O.

  Four-year-old Paul stepped into the kitchen. He was barefoot, wearing a t-shirt and his underwear. He stepped into the kitchen and stopped.

  “Daddy?” he said, and Paul thought, Freaked out, definitely freaked out.

  Martin Henninger turned to face the boy, and the boy started to scream loud enough to fill the whole house with his fear. Paul watched the boy scramble up the stairs to his room, ass over elbows, just like he remembered. He would be up there for the rest of the night, hugging his knees and shaking.

  But it was the adult Paul that got the real shock. His father was standing inches from his shoulder, eyes still turned up into his skull, and there was a humming noise coming from somewhere deep down in his throat. Paul gasped and fell back, and for a second he was unable to catch his breath.

  He said, “Daddy, holy—”

  But the shock faded fast. What took its place was a vaguely familiar giddiness, like the thrill he used to feel just before he took the field back when he was playing football. He was nervous, but not scared.

  He recognized the word struggling to take shape in his father’s humming. The word was build.

  Build it, Paul. You know how.

  And he did know how. He knew exactly what to do.

  ***

  Paul went down to his truck and got some baling wire from the cab. He wrapped the baling wire around his fist and went into the yard and gathered together a bundle of sticks.

  Upstairs, he put the sticks in a pile on the floor between the bed and Rachel’s boxes of paperbacks and sat down Indian-style in front of them. For a moment he was confused, unfocused, but then he realized that he was trying too hard to make something happen. He stopped, took a deep breath, and let that part of his mind go. He put his hands down into his lap and thought about breathing.

  In and out, in and out. Just let it come.

  And it did come. His head rolled back on his shoulders and his mouth fell open and his hands started to move on their own.

  A hot breeze touched his face and he opened his eyes. He tasted dust. He was standing on a limestone outcropping, looking down over a vast desert plain of caramel-colored sand and scraggly vegetation. The ground shook beneath him. In the distance, a wall of static energy rushed towards him, eating up the desert and the sky at a speed almost too fast for his mind to absorb. Miles of desert disappeared in seconds. The entire summit of the sky melted into a roaring, frenetic static. The wall stopped just beyond his reach, and he stood like a primitive man at the foot of an advancing glacier, looking up at the ice walls of
its world-destroying face.

  He stepped forward and put a hand into the wall. Light and energy slipped through his fingers like sand. He turned his hand over and stared at the grains of light pooling in his palm and all at once he saw the pieces of the puzzle coming together, the big picture forming into a coherent whole. He saw his father unable to cross over, unable to hold the door open between his world and Paul’s. He saw Magdalena Chavarria in her home, small and alone before a force she had never truly understood. She was scared, confused, terrified by the things Paul’s father had made her do. She was working against him, doing everything she could to keep the doors between the worlds closed.

  And Paul could also see into the years ahead. He could see himself as his father had described him, a lodestar to men, a light to shine into the corners of even the darkest minds. He saw himself as a latter day Jeremiah, a prophet turning a hard eye on the destruction of one world and the birth of a new one.

  He was aroused by the destruction. But he was not without love for what was lost.

  All things in balance.

  ***

  When Rachel walked in the door to the apartment she was aware of three things more or less at the same time. The first was the unbearable heat of the place. It was like stepping into an oven. As soon as she opened the door she got a blast of it in her face and she thought, The air conditioner’s out again. Goddamn this place.

  The second thing she noticed was the curious stick lattice next to her bed. It was a beach ball-sized collection of oak twigs lashed together into a shape that seemed to defy any readily discernible purpose. They jutted away from each other in odd directions, like an erector set put together by a brilliant, but insane, child. Had she encountered it in a museum, she might have thought it a weak example of modern art, some vaguely humorous attempt to merge the abstract sculptures of Charles O. Perry and Bathsheba Grossman. But here, in her apartment, it seemed grotesque. And a little frightening.

  But the third thing she noticed was really the thing that tilted her over the edge. It was Paul, in his jeans and a loose t-shirt, his hair all over the place as though air dried after a shower. He was shining. There was no other word for it than that. Looking at him, she could see a glow coming off his skin. She thought of Claire Danes in the movie version of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, light emanating from her skin. Though unlike Danes, it was not beauty that caused him to shine. He was shining from love and joy and pride, but it from violence, and the end of things. The apocalypse shining forth from the face of a man.