Outside, nothing much seemed to be going on. The last town police car had arrived, and, just as I had expected, they were handing out coffee-and. Story time chilluns.
“My parents,” I said:
CHAPTER 14
My parents met at a wedding reception, and although it may have nothing to do with anything-unless you believe in omens-the bride that day was burned to death less than a year later. Her name was Jessie Decker Hannaford. As Jessie Decker, she had been my mom’s roommate at the University of Maine, where they were both majoring in political science. The thing that seemed to have happened was this: Jessie’s husband went out to a special town meeting, and Jessie went into the bathroom to take a shower. She fell down and hit her head and knocked herself unconscious. In the kitchen, a dish towel fell on a hot stove burner. The house went up like a rocket. Wasn’t it a mercy she didn’t suffer.
So the only good that came of that wedding was my mother’s meeting with Jessie Decker Hannaford’s brother. He was an ensign in the Navy. After the reception, he asked my mother if she would like to go dancing. She said yes. They courted for six months, and then they were married. I came along about fourteen months after the nuptials, and I’ve done the math again and again. As near as I can figure, I was conceived on one of the nights just before or just after my father’s sister was being broiled alive in her shower cap. She was my mom’s bridesmaid. I’ve looked at all the wedding pictures, and no matter how often I’ve looked, it always gives me a weird feeling. There is Jessie holding my mother’s bridal train. Jessie and her husband, Brian Hannaford, smiling in the background as my mom and dad cut the wedding cake. Jessie dancing with the minister. And in all the pictures she is only five months away from the shower and the dishrag on the hot stove burner. You wish you could step into one of those Kodachromes and approach her, say: “You’re never going to be my aunt Jessie unless you stay out of the shower when your husband is away. Be careful, Aunt Jessie.” But you can’t go back. For want of a shoe the horse was lost, and all that.
But it happened, which is another way of saying I happened, and that’s it. I was an only child; my mother never wanted another. She’s very intellectual, my mother. Reads English mysteries, but never by Agatha Christie. Victor Canning and Hammond Innes were always more her cup of tea. Also magazines like The Manchester Guardian and Monocle and The New York Review of Books. My father, who made a career of the Navy and ended up as a recruiter, was more the all-American type. He likes the Detroit Tigers and the Detroit Redwings and wore a black armband the day Vince Lombardi died. No shit. And he reads those Richard Stark novels about Parker, the thief. That always amused the hell out of my mother. She finally broke down and told him that Richard Stark was really Donald Westlake, who writes sort of funny mysteries under his real name. My father tried one and hated it. After that he always acted like Westlake/Stark was his private lapdog who turned against him one night and tried to bite his throat.
My earliest memory is of waking up in the dark and thinking I was dead until I saw the shadows moving on the walls and the ceiling-there was a big old elm outside my window, and the wind would move the branches. This particular night-the first night I remember anything-there must have been a full moon (hunter’s moon, do they call it?), because the walls were very bright and the shadows were very dark. The branch shadows looked like great moving fingers. Now when I think of it, they seem like corpse fingers. But I couldn’t have thought that then, could I? I was only three. A kid that little doesn’t even know what a corpse is.
But there was something coming. I could hear it, down the hall. Something terrible was coming. Coming for me through the darkness. I could hear it, creaking and creaking and creaking.
I couldn’t move. Maybe I didn’t even want to move. I don’t remember about that. I just lay and watched the tree fingers move on the wall and ceiling, and waited for the Creaking Thing to get down to my room and throw open the door.
After a long time-it might have been an hour, or it might only have been seconds-I realized the Creaking Thing wasn’t after me at all. Or at least, not yet. It was after Mom and Dad down the hall. The Creaking Thing was in Mom and Dad’s room.
I lay there, watching the tree fingers, and listened. Now the whole thing seems so dreamy and far away, like a city must look from a mountaintop where the air is rare, but very real just the same. I can remember the wind shuffling back and forth against the glass of my bedroom window. I can remember wetting myself-it was warm and somehow comforting. And I can remember the Creaking Thing.
After a long, long, long time, I can remember my mother’s voice, out of breath and irritable, and a little afraid: “Stop now, Carl.” Again the creaking, furtive. “Stop it!”
A mutter from my father.
From my mother: “I don’t care! I don’t care if you didn’t! Stop it and let me sleep!”
So I knew. I went to sleep, but I knew. The Creaking Thing was my father.
CHAPTER 15
Nobody said anything. Some of them hadn’t got the point, if there was one; I wasn’t sure. They were still looking at me expectantly, as if awaiting the punch line of a rather good joke.
Others were studying their hands, obviously embarrassed. But Susan Brooks looked altogether radiant and vindicated. It was a very nice thing to see. I felt like a farmer, spreading shit and growing corn.
Still nobody said anything. The clock buzzed away with a vague kind of determination. I looked down at Mrs. Underwood. Her eyes were half-open, glazed, gummy. She looked no more important than a woodchuck I had once blown away with my father’s four-ten. A fly was unctuously washing its paws on her forearm. Feeling a little disgusted, I waved it away.
Outside, four more police cars had arrived. Other cars were parked along the shoulder of the highway for as far as I could see beyond the roadblock. Quite a crowd was gathering. I sat back, dry-scrubbed the side of my face with my hand, and looked at Ted. He held up his fists to shoulder height, smiled, and popped up the middle fingers on each one.
He didn’t speak, but his lips moved, and I read it easily: Shit.
Nobody knew it had been passed but him and me. He looked ready to speak aloud, but I wanted to just keep it between us for a little while. I said:
CHAPTER 16
My dad has hated me for as long as I can remember.
That’s a pretty sweeping statement, and I know how phony it sounds. It sounds petulant and really fantastic-the kind of weapon kids always use when the old man won’t come across with the car for your heavy date at the drive-in with Peggy Sue or when he tells you that if you flunk world history the second time through he’s going to beat the living hell out of you. In this bright day and age when everybody thinks psychology is God’s gift to the poor old anally fixated human race and even the president of the United States pops a trank before dinner, it’s really a good way to get rid of those Old Testament guilts that keep creeping up our throats like the aftertaste of a bad meal we overate. If you say your father hated you as a kid, you can go out and flash the neighborhood, commit rape, or burn down the Knights of Pythias bingo parlor and still cop a plea.
But it also means that no one will believe you if it’s true. You’re the little boy that cried wolf. And for me it is true. Oh, nothing really stunning until after the Carlson thing. I don’t think Dad himself really knew it until then. Even if you could dig to the very bottom of his motives, he’d probably say-at the most-that he was hating me for my own good.