“Ashley!” he cried out. “Where the hell are you?”
From his seat in the living room, his father shouted, “You ain’t going to find nothing and nobody. But you keep on looking, if that’s gonna make you feel better.” Then he laughed, a false, phony laugh, provoking even more rage.
Michael O’Connell gritted his teeth and threw open the bathroom door. He pulled aside a shower curtain that was grimy with mildew and mold. A vial of pills perched on the sink corner suddenly tumbled to the floor, spreading tablets across the tile. He bent down and picked up the plastic bottle, saw that it was heart medication, and laughed.
“So, the old ticker giving you some troubles, huh?” he said loudly.
“You leave my things alone,” the father shouted in reply.
“Screw you,” Michael O’Connell whispered to himself. “I hope whatever is wrong hurts like hell before it kills you.”
He tossed the vial back down on the floor, crushed it and all the scattered pills beneath his foot, and left the bathroom. He walked into the other bedroom.
The queen-size bed was unmade, its sheets filthy. The room smelled of cigarettes, beer, and soiled clothing. A plastic laundry basket in one corner was overflowing with sweatshirts and underwear. The bedside table was cluttered with more pill canisters, half-filled liquor bottles, and a broken alarm clock. He emptied all the pills into his hand and stuffed them into his pocket, tossing the canisters back on the bed. That will be a surprise when you need them, he thought.
Michael O’Connell walked to the closet and jerked open the double doors. Half the closet-the half that had once held his mother’s things-was empty. The rest was occupied by his father’s clothing-all the slacks and dress shirts and sports coats and ties that he never wore.
He left the doors open and went to the sliding glass door that led out to the backyard. He pulled on it, but it was locked. He pressed his face up against the glass, peering into the darkness. He unlocked the door and stepped outside, ignoring the cry from his father behind him: “What the hell you doing now?”
Michael O’Connell peered right and left. No place back there to hide, he thought.
He turned and went back inside. “I’m going to look in the basement,” he shouted. “You want to save me some trouble, tell me where she is, old man? Or maybe I’m going to have to ask you the hard way.”
“Go ahead. Check the basement. And you know what? You don’t scare me much now. You never did.”
We’ll see about that, Michael O’Connell said to himself.
He went over to the single hallway door that led to the basement. It was a dark, closed-in place, filled with spiderwebs and dust. Once, when he was nine, his father had forced him down there and locked the door. His mother had been out and he’d done something to anger the old man. After whacking him on the side of the head, he’d thrust the child down the stairs and left him in the dark for an hour. Michael O’Connell stood at the top of the stairs and thought that what he’d hated the most about his father and his mother was that no matter how many times they had shouted and screamed and traded punches, it only seemed to link them more tightly. Everything that should have driven them apart had actually cemented their relationship.
“Ashley!” he shouted. “You down there?”
A single overhead bulb threw a little light in the corners. He peered through each shadow, searching for her.
The room was empty.
He could feel anger building in his chest, like heat racing down his arms into clenched fists. He turned and went back to the small living room, where his father waited for him.
“She was here, wasn’t she?” Michael O’Connell asked. “Earlier. To talk to you. I just didn’t get here in time, and then she told you to lie to me, right?”
The older man shrugged. “You still not making any sense.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“I am telling you the truth. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“If you don’t tell me what happened, what she told you when she got here, where she went, I will hurt you, old man. I am not joking about this. I can do it and I will do it, and trust me, I will deliver a world of pain, and I won’t give a damn about you any more than I ever have. So, tell me, when she called on you, what did you tell her?”
“You’re either crazier than I remember or stupider. Right now, I can’t tell which.” The old man lifted his bottle to his lips and leaned back in his seat.
Michael O’Connell stepped forward and in a single violent swipe knocked the beer bottle from his father’s hand. It slammed against the wall, breaking into pieces. The father barely reacted, although his eyes lingered on the broken bottle, before he turned back and stared at his son.
“It was always a question, wasn’t it? Which one of us was gonna grow up meaner?”
“Screw you, old man. Tell me what I want to know.”
“Get me another beer first.”
Michael O’Connell reached down and grasped his father by the shirt, half-pulling him out of his seat. In the same moment, the father’s right hand shot out and seized the son around the collar, twisting his sweater so that it choked him. Their faces were only inches apart, their eyes locked together. Then O’Connell thrust his father back, and the old man released his son.
Michael O’Connell walked over to the television set. He stared at it for an instant.
“This how you spend your nights? Getting drunk and watching the tube?”
The father didn’t answer.
“Too much of the old idiot box is bad for you. Didn’t you know that?”
Michael O’Connell waited for a second, so that the mocking words would settle in, then he drew back his foot and delivered a karate-style kick to the television, sending it crashing down, the screen shattering.
“Bastard. You’re gonna pay for that.”
“Am I? What else do I have to break to get you to tell me what happened when she called you? How long was she here? What did she promise you? What did you tell her you would do?”
Before his father could reply, he walked over to a bookcase and swept a shelf of knickknacks and photographs to the floor.
“That was just some of your mother’s leftovers. Don’t mean nothing to me.”
“You want me to look around until I find something that does? What did she tell you?”
“Kid,” the old man said through tightly pursed lips, “whatever it is this bit of tail is to you, I don’t know. And what she’s got you into, I don’t know either. You in some kind of trouble? Money trouble?”
Michael O’Connell looked at his father. “What are you talking about?”
“Who’s looking for you, kid? Because I think they’re gonna find you just about any minute, and when they do, they aren’t gonna be nice about it. But maybe you know that already.”
“All right,” Michael O’Connell said slowly. “Last chance before I come over there and start to pay you back for all the times you beat me when I was a kid. Did a girl named Ashley call you today? Did she say she wanted your help in breaking up with me? Did she say she was on her way to talk to you?”
The older man continued to eye his son through narrow, rage-filled eyes. But through the sheet of fury that seemed to be just a second or two away from breaking free, he managed to clench his lips and spit out, “No. No, God damn it. No Ashley. No girl. No nothing like what you just said. And that’s the goddamn truth, whether you want to believe it or not.”
“You’re lying. You old bastard, you’re lying.”
The old man shook his head and laughed, which infuriated Michael O’Connell even more. He felt as if he were on a ledge, trying to keep his balance. What he wanted, more than anything else, was to feel his fists smashing against the old man’s face. But he took a deep breath and told himself that he still needed to know what was happening, because there was some reason he’d been called here. He just couldn’t see what it was.