As I Die Lying (7 page)

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 Mr. 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 attic
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.

I went to the kitchen and drew out the rusty
blade that fit my palm like a lover's slender hand. It was the same
knife that had dealt with Angel Baby. I was fourteen now, not a kid
anymore. I was as strong as a weed, as wiry as an oak, as
unforgiving as the January wind.

I moved through the wreckage of the living
room. With each step, I left Richard Allen Coldiron behind. The
closer I got to the man who had given me life, the farther I was
from son he had made. By the time I'd crossed the living room, the
new thing wearing my flesh had completely sloughed off the
inhibitions of Richard Coldiron, packed that weakness away in
hidden closets, booked me a room in the Bone House with a window to
the world.