Mother.
My body stood, with the help of her hand lifting it by my shirt collar. My eyes looked around, adjusting to the brighter light of this outside world. Sally was hugging Mrs. Bakken over by the hickory trees, pressing her face into her mother's chest, and now the sound of Sally's wild crying reached my ears, drowning out the meadowlark's song.
"What's going on here, young man?" Mother asked my body, her voice a wedge of ice driven into my ears.
"Here?" my voice said, the strange muscles in my throat vibrating. Where was “here”? I thought I was in the Bone House.
"He made me, Mommy," Sally shrieked. "He made me do bad things."
Bad things? What bad things? Oh.
Those.
Sally squealed, her wet whimpers carrying across the apartment's backyard and into the night. My eyes saw lights blinking on across the back wall of the apartment building, my ears heard windows sliding open, my nose smelled cigarette smoke as heads stuck out to see if what was going on outside was better than their television shows.
"He made me go in there, then he made me kiss him. I tried to get away, but he kept grabbing me," Sally said. "And he wouldn't let me go."
She wailed like an air-raid siren, and was as well-rehearsed. Mother looked into my eyes as if she knew who I was and shook my shoulders. "Richard, what do you have to say for yourself?"
Richard? Yes, that was me. Yet not me. My head nodded, flopping up and down like a wet mop’s. Just the way my friend made it.
Mrs. Bakken stroked the top of Sally's head as if she were petting a rabbit. "There, there, honey, it will be okay. Did he hurt you?" Mrs. Bakken said, looking over at Mother and my borrowed flesh.
"N-no, Mommy." Sally sniffled extra loudly in case someone in the apartment windows hadn't heard the first time. "But he tried to. He tried to lift up my dress and was talking crazy things like putting his pee-pee in me and making me bleed. And I was so scared."
She mixed the last word with a half-moan that yawned out through the trees and across the junkyard. My body was standing on legs that felt like wobbly stacks of tin cans.
"I'm so sorry," Mother said to Sally. "I swear, I don't know where he gets his meanness from."
Then, to me, "Lord, wait till your father hears about this." Then, to Sally, "You sure you're okay, honey?"
Sally nodded, bouncing her pigtails for emphasis, and wiped her eyes on her mother's shirt. "I've got a hole in my stocking, Mommy.”
"It's not your fault,” Mrs. Bakken said, and she looked all the way through my little friend into the dark place where I was hiding. Now I knew where Sally had learned to cut with invisible knives. It ran in the family.
And she’d learned the lesson we all get to eventually: it’s not whether you’re right or wrong, good or bad, true or false—it’s whether you have someone to blame.
I looked back down the long dark hall at Mrs. Bakken's face, cheeks paler than moonlight, her skin stretched as tight as panty hose over the steep bone of her head. Her eyes were as black as crow's wings, eyes that shot secrets out of the sky. And she saw that I saw.
"While the cat's away, the mice will splay," my little friend said to Mrs. Bakken, using my voice.
"What are you talking about?" Mrs. Bakken’s voice was a pitch-perfect imitation of her screeching daughter's. "Anne, he's gone crazy, that boy has."
"Tell us about Father and the bedsprings," I heard my voice say.
"What's this foolishness, Richard? I've never heard the like in all my days," Mother said.
"Did Father's babymaker hurt you?" my imaginary friend said, using my mouth. The words were nails, hammered into the coffin of the night.
"That's the kind of crazy things he was saying to me, Mommy," Sally said, finding fresh tears and straining to squeeze them into rivers. "All this stuff about babymakers and how I had to love him or he would hurt me. But he said if he loved me, then he'd have to hurt me with his babymaker, whatever that is."
Mother's hand struck my cheek, sparking a red burst of fire and pain. But the pain was brief, flickering and dying in an instant. My friend and I knew how to douse the flames of pain. This Bone House would never burn.
"Did it hurt you? Or did you like Father's babymaker?" we said.
Mrs. Bakken's eyes searched the trees, sneaking into the night sky, seeking escape. Mother let go of my shirt collar, her face blank beneath her curly mass of brown hair.
"You must have liked it, the way the two of you made the bedsprings squeak over and over and over, Mrs. Bakken,” we said. "Just like people who love each other. Just like married people."
"What's he talking about, Rita?" Mother asked Mrs. Bakken.
Mrs. Bakken's shiny China face cracked as she joined Sally in tears.
"Richard, what are you talking about?" Mother asked my body when she realized Mrs. Bakken was not going to answer.
"You'll have to ask Sally. She's the one who got the dollar's worth of candy," we said. "She's the one who knows all about love."
Sally and her mother huddled together, crying in the night, as two dozen prying eyes watched from the windows and a dozen tongues started wagging.
I went to bed that night without supper, my body tucking itself in, my mouth offering no prayers to Jesus. I was safely under the blankets when my little friend let me have my flesh back, then I was swimming toward the dark waters of sleep. Just as I dozed off, as bright colors flashed and tried to form dreams, I heard Mother and Father in the living room.
They were speaking to each other without yelling. I couldn't hear the words, but I could tell by the tone of their voices that they were saying important, weighty things. Grown-up things.
Then I was asleep and I was in the land where no garage men laughed and no boots danced and no babymakers turned into monsters.
I awoke early the next day and dressed quietly. The walls were still standing, and no sound came from my parents' bedroom. The night had not been broken by blows or bedsprings.
I went outside, onto the porch that we shared with the Bakkens, and down the cracked wooden steps that slanted to the driveway. There, on the porch, was Angel Baby. Sally's one true love.
I picked it up by the yellow yarn of its hair and looked into its glass eyes. Its eyes that never cried. Its eyes that had seen everything. I didn't like the secrets in them.
I carried the doll into the kitchen and laid it on the chipped kitchen table, its arms and legs twisted under its cloth belly. I eased open the kitchen drawer and pulled out a rusty butcher knife.
I plunged the blunt knife into Angel Baby's belly and the tip of the blade thunked into the table. The fabric ripped and white chunks of foam rubber spilled out onto the floor. I sawed the knife back and forth, throwing a frenzied snow into the air. I chopped at the brittle plastic limbs, those selfish arms that demanded hugs and those chubby legs that bled air. I hammered the blade down on those pouting lips and I hacked off the cute button nose and I popped the glass eyes from their round sockets and I claimed a scalp of yellow yarn.
I carried the pieces outside and left them at the Bakkens’s door.
To this day, I’m still not sure whether I was mad at Sally because she loved me or because she’s the one who got a dollar’s worth of candy.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mr. Bakken pounded on our door, yelling, "Come out, you goddamn cuckold."
I was in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal full of unfortunate marshmallow charms. Father opened the door and looked out, scratching inside the sleeve of his gray T-shirt. Mr. Bakken reached through the hole in the screen and grabbed at Father's throat. Father stepped back and kicked the handle off the storm door so that it swung open. Then he stepped out onto the porch, a crooked smile on his chapped lips like the one he'd worn at Granddad's funeral.
"Let's do it up right, Mac," he said, with rare cheer.
Mr. Bakken punched Father in the side of the head. Father became a wolverine, a blur of ferocity, an International Harvester of pain and rage. He brought his sharp fists into M
r. Bakken's beefy red face again and again, until I couldn't see Mr. Bakken's freckles for the blood. When Mr. Bakken fell down, crumpled like a sack of feed corn in the dirt by the driveway, Father's dancing boots gave a rare daylight performance.
The police came and took Father away and the crackling radio in one of the police cars said something about a domestic dispute and then a bunch of numbers that started with ten.
“I have to go bail him out,” Mother said.
“Why?” I failed to understand why she wanted to shatter the peace that had descended in our home like the sudden silence in a forest after a hunter’s shotgun blast.
“I have to,” she said. “I married him.”
Father returned like a conquering hero, the cock of the block, strutting around preening his feathers. At least the attention kept his anger off me and Mother. Looking back, I believe it was the closest I ever came to admiring him. Then again, how could I know what I was thinking? That sounds like something my invisible friend would dream up, or one of the headmates who claim to be my co-writers. Admire that bastard? Never.
The Bakkens moved a week later. We watched them pack. Mother stood on the porch biting her white lips, a glass of brown liquid in her hand. Liquor from one of Father's bottles.
The Bakkens filled up their blue station wagon, piled the stuff of their life on top until I thought the roof might cave in. Mr. Bakken's face was bandaged like a mummy's. Only his burning eyes showed, looking around like he wished he could set fire to the apartment building, the woods, the checkerboard landscape, and the entire world, but mostly like he wanted to set fire to the past. If only our life stories were paper pages instead of real things.
I watched from the kitchen window as Mr. Bakken stomped the tailgate of the wagon shut and walked back into their apartment. Sally came outside, her pigtails gone, her dull bronze hair wilting under the August sun. She carried an armful of dolls, squeezing them against her chest as if afraid that someone might snatch them away, pieces of Angel Baby tangled among them. She climbed into the open door into the backseat without looking around.
She hadn't given me a good-bye kiss.
So much for love and its eternal promise.
Then Mrs. Bakken came out, even paler than usual. She had blue bruises under her eyes and her face was puffy. She gnawed at the tip of her pinky like an animal trying to free itself from a steel trap. She stared at her feet as she walked to the car. The invisible knives of her glare had been packed away with the spatulas, blankets, and towels.
Mr. Bakken brought up the rear of the miserable parade. He went down the stairs and turned to Mother.
"At least we get to leave. You have to stay," he said, his words muffled by his swollen lips. "I guess everybody gets what they deserve."
Then he closed the car doors and got behind the wheel and started the engine. Mother went inside. As the station wagon pulled out of the driveway, its tires crunching on asphalt crumbs, I caught a glimpse of the back of Sally's head and wondered what her next boyfriend would be like and if she would French him.
Mostly I wondered what sort of candy she’d bought with that dollar—chocolate or caramel.
And as the sun shone down on me like the light of heaven, there on the porch, I felt unfamiliar muscles stretch across my face. I was smiling.
"All's well that ends swell," said Mister Milktoast inside my head. “Or swollen.”
"Who said it's the end?" I answered, not moving my lips, my own personal ventriloquist’s dummy.
"I promise I won't leave you again, ever, Richard."
"Cross your heart and hope to die?"
"Cross our heart, my friend," Mister Milktoast said.
"Where did you ever come up with the name 'Mister Milktoast'?"
"I thought you named me," he said.
"Gee, I hope this doesn't mean I'm crazy. You know, talking to the little person in my head."
"It's not you that's crazy. Blame me. What do you think I'm here for?"
I couldn’t argue with that, but probably other people could. "I guess I better keep you secret, anyway."
"Might be a good idea. People wouldn't understand. And some secrets are better if you don't share them."
"Okay. Since you promise not to leave me again, I promise not to tell."
"Deal."
The sun was bright and warm on my face. I felt a strange joy, knowing that I would never again be alone. This was better than a first kiss. This relationship had potential.
Father didn't go to work anymore, just sat on the couch watching TV with the lights off and drinking straight from his bottles. I hid in my room or in the woods up the street. Now that the nest was no longer secret, it had lost all its magic. Plus Sally had poisoned it forever with her love.
When school started I was able to escape Father for half a day at a time. I still wasn't "associating well with others," but it was safe to read there. By the time I got home in the afternoon, Father was usually snoring on the couch or drinking across town in the Moose Lodge. Mother got a job at the Ottaqua Five and Ten, back in the days when “dollar stores” seemed like a great value, and she worked most nights.
I was by myself, but not lonely. I had Mister Milktoast. I had books. The people in books were much better friends than the people in real life. The people in books never walked off the pages to love me or kick me. I could close books.
Days mixed together like playing cards shuffled into a deck of months. Father was rotting, his breath an open sewer and his face a red rash of cracked veins. Mother had started drinking, too, but they drank silently, joylessly, and with grim determination, in separate rooms.
My body was becoming a stranger's. A knot had grown on the front of my neck at the part where I swallowed and my voice started cracking and squeaking when I talked. Mysterious hair sprouted over my lip and on my chin and even between my legs. Most horrible of all, my pee-pee was beginning to redden and swell, turning into an alien monster.
In the midst of this physiological turmoil, Father returned to his raging old self, as if the years spent in a drunken, pacific stupor were merely a refreshing vacation from his true life's work. The walls were apt to bend more often than not, and Mother was a more willing sparring partner now. Our living room was a clutter of shattered monuments to marital discord: the coffee table, propped up on one corner by an old set of encyclopedias; Mother's big ceramic Siamese cat curled up by the front door, its ears chipped off; the Jesus plate on the shelf, two strips of duct tape crossed on its back to hold it together; a glass-speared wedding photograph; and other assorted war relics.
Why they never divorced, once I came to see the possible escape it offered them, was beyond me. Mutual desperation strengthened their union, as if being needed only as a punching bag was better than not being needed at all. Occasionally in the night the bedsprings still squeaked, though they sounded awkward and rusty. And even less occasionally, laughter filled the apartment, usually inspired by the television shows that I refused to watch.
Perhaps this was a normal life. Perhaps we could have gone on this way for years, until I went away to college and studied literature and learned how to write a best-selling novel by offering witty autobiographical insights. Then I could have bought my parents a cottage on the Massachusetts seashore, one with an extra guest room to serve as a liquor cabinet. They could sip their golden years away in dark rooms until their tired blood gave out and the sun rose one morning over the Atlantic to shine in on their waxen corpses.
Then I could come up and carry the boxes of everything they were into the light. I could air out their photo albums and the yellowing wedding lace and the aviator mask collection. I could dig through the stained love letters and the cat postcards and the wrinkled brown bag of buffalo nickels. Then I would reach the bottom and find that it all added up to nothing. I would gather the scraps of their lives and dump them in the gray rubbish can at the corner of the driveway, put up a "For Sale" sign on their memories, and continue on up the stairs to my own atti
c and its dusty boxes.
But such an easy decay would have been anticlimactic, right? It would have violated our unwritten contract, our symbiotic relationship, our mutual understanding that we are both creating this adventure with every word and each sentence and every acceptance of a lie. We're equally complicit, and equally guilty.
I'm not very good at keeping secrets, and you're not very good at minding your own business. Because this is as close as you'll ever get to being inside my head, and you want more. And I need you because otherwise I will never know I was me.
We're in this together, all of us. All the way.
You probably won’t believe what happened next, but I may as well tell you anyway, since we’ve come this far.
Plus it involves sex and violence.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I killed the son of a bitch.
Father was on the fiery edge of a binge, scorching the night like a garlic dragon. His boots were itching to dance. He was Fred Astaire on angel dust, Jekyll's Hyde masquerading as Gene Kelly, a Saturday-night-feverish John Travolta channeling Hitler’s goose-stepping storm troopers.
Mother caught the brunt of his wrath on her bony shoulders, so incapacitated herself that she couldn't lift a flaccid arm in her own defense. His blows rained down on her, a blistering storm, a torrent of fists and feet. I listened from my bedroom, tingling from the electric tension of his thunder.
His slaps rang though the air like a whip flogging a dented piece of sheet metal. Mother moaned and whimpered, too dehydrated to cry. I ran into the living room and saw her on the floor, leaning against the couch, a thick trickle of pink saliva running from one corner of her mouth, her dark hair greasy with sweat like the mane of a horse that had been ridden too hard.
Father stood over her, his fists quivering. They were clenched so tightly he could have squeezed blood from a concrete block. He brought his boot down and Mother collapsed like a wet shoebox. He began stamping tattoos on her mealy flesh, urging fresh vintages from the juice of her veins. He danced as if the devil himself were calling the tune.
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