Mr. Was (7 page)

• • •

Different families handle things in different ways. Dad slept straight through until morning. Breakfast was quiet. It was obvious he was hurting, but we all pretended nothing was wrong. When he left for work, Mom started bawling like I'd never seen before.

We never discussed that night. Without ever talking about it, we somehow agreed to act as if it had never happened. For a couple of months, it seemed to be working. Dad kept right on going to his AA meetings, and after a few suspenseful days Mom lost her haunted, twitchy look and got things more or less back to normal.

Or so we thought.

I couldn't tell you the exact day it began again, because this time he started out slow. What I noticed first was that he had trouble getting himself up and out of the house in the morning. Instead of talking about how he was going to get a promotion, he talked about how he ought to just quit his job. All the people he worked with were jerks, he said. For a while I believed him. But of course, it was my father who was the real jerk.

Mom must've known before I did, because she was sleeping with him. She must've been able to smell it. I didn't get it until I found a couple bottles of peppermint schnapps hidden in the garage.

Before long he was drinking openly and they were fighting again.

Those days are still blurry in my memory, which is just as well. I spent a lot of nights staying at friends' houses. Dad got fired from his job, of course, and somehow he made it like it was Mom's and my fault.

Things got really bad when he got back on the subject of Boggs's End.

“We had any money I could take my time, find a good job, 'steada living hand t' fist tryin' a make rent every damn month, f'Chrissakes. But no, you gotta be payin' out a fortune on a fallin' down old house in Boondocks, Minne-snow-ta.” He kicked one of the kitchen chairs, sent it crashing into the refrigerator.

Mom turtled, pulling inside of herself like a scared snapper. He might as well have been yelling at a rock, which made him even madder.

I was sitting on the living room sofa trying to watch TV, but I could see them through the kitchen doorway, Mom sitting at the table with her shoulders scrunched up, Dad pacing back and forth in his T-shirt and boxer shorts screaming at her. She wouldn't say a word, wouldn't look at him. I figured he would get tired of yelling and go down in the basement where he had his stereo and drink some more and listen to his old Rolling Stones tapes until he passed out. But instead he hit her, his fist ricocheting off the top of her skull. I heard the sound—
tok!
—like a rock hit with a baseball bat, and then a high-pitched moan from my mother.

“Hardheaded bitch,” he said, holding his fist, his face contorted with anger and pain.

Mom had her head tucked way down, her arms floating in the air between them, wrists thin and pale, her hands a shapeless and ineffective shield. I held my breath, willing him to turn and walk away.

He grabbed her finger with one hand, bent it back. I heard a snap. He hit her again with his other fist.

I was running at him, shouting. I saw him look up, his eyes red and glittering, and then I was lifted into the air, his hard fist buried deep in my belly, coming up under my rib cage. I landed hard, coughing, barfing my guts out on the linoleum floor. I heard my mother screaming at him. I'll never forget the pattern of those tiles. I heard him grunt with effort, the sound of a blow, then another. Triangles and squares, red and brown, covered with puke. Silence. My father's shoes, walking away. Silence. I turned my head, saw my mother under the table, hugging her knees like a fetus, silent and shaking, red blood spilling from her nose onto her green dress.

Come to think of it, maybe
that
was the worst day of my life. So far.

O
ne of the neighbors must've called the cops because they came and took Mom to the hospital and my father to jail. Mom had a broken nose and a cut on her forehead and a broken finger. She needed stitches, something like twenty-seven. Except for being a little tender in the belly and not having much appetite, I was okay. I stayed with Mom in the hospital that night. In the morning, the doctor told her she could go home. He told her to take it easy for a few days, but as soon as we got home she started packing. She told me to start packing, too.

“What for?”

“We're going to Memory.”

“No way! How come we can't stay here? He's in jail now.”

She shook her head. “He'll get out.”

It was pitiful watching her try to wrap her knickknacks in newspaper with only one good hand.

“You aren't even going to press charges like the cops said, are you?” I said. “You're going to let him get away with it.”

“I just want us to be far away,” she said. “Your father has to work out his problem on his own. I can't be a part of it anymore.”

I argued some more, but within twenty-four hours I was hauling boxes from a rented U-Haul van through the tall double doors of Boggs's End.

The day we moved was right at the end of July, a few days before my sixteenth birthday.

I did not want to be there.

I did not want to live in that house.

My mother didn't care. All she cared about was getting away from Dad and finding a job. It was a bad time for me, but I think it must have been a worse time for her. Even though she'd grown up there, she didn't really have any friends in Memory. Her friends from school had mostly moved to the city, or to other parts of the country.

Since Mom had refused to press charges, I assumed that my father had been released from jail, but we hadn't heard from him. He must've known where we were. Where else would we go? But he never called. I was both hurt by that, and relieved.

The only good thing was, since there was practically nothing to do in Memory—not a single kid my age—I got to know my mother a little better. At the time, it was no great thrill, but in light of what was to happen, I'm glad we spent that time together.

According to her, Memory hadn't been too much different when she was growing up. More people had lived there then, but the town had been slowly dying ever since the end of World War II. All the kids she'd grown up with in Memory had moved on.

“Daddy was rich,” she said, “so all the kids wanted to be friends with me. Only none of them have stayed in touch.”

“How'd he get rich?” I asked.

“The stock market. He always seemed to know which companies were going to do well, and he invested in them. As far back as I can remember, he never had to work a day in his life. The people around here, they didn't understand that. I think they thought he was some sort of a criminal. But people liked my mother.”

“What was she like?” I asked not because I wanted to know, but because I could see she wanted to talk about it.

Mom let her eyes go out of focus and smiled.

“Feisty,” she said after a few seconds. “Nobody pushed her around. You know, Jack, your grandfather could be cruel at times. Mostly he was just mean in the things he'd say, but he would hit you, too, if he was mad about something and you got too close.”

“You mean like when he tried to choke me?”

“That was different. He was delirious. But he hit me a few times, I can tell you.”

“Like Dad hit you.”

She shook her head. “No, not like that. But I saw him go after Mama once. You know what she did? She broke a chair over his head.” She laughed. “She was tough. Daddy tried to push her around, but she just wouldn't have it.” She paused. “I should have been more like her.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

“I don't know. Those later years, after I married your father and we moved to Skokie, I think those were hard years for her. I think she might have just plain run off. I think she must have died somehow, because why else would I never hear from her? The last time I talked to her, we talked about you. You know what the last thing she told me was? She said, 'I'd like to see that boy grow up, Betty dear, I truly would.' That was the very last thing she said to me. But she never did see you grow up. You weren't even two years old. I think if she was alive, she'd have come to see you.”

You're probably wondering how come I haven't mentioned the door in the closet.

It wasn't that I didn't think about it. Sometimes I would wake up at night with the sweet taste of stolen apple in my mouth. But I tried to push the memories away. The fact is, I was scared. I was scared that it had been real, and I was scared that maybe it had not.

One night I dreamed I had a dog that could talk. It was no big deal, just a funny dream that I happened to remember, so I mentioned it at breakfast as I was filling the pits in my waffle with maple syrup.

“What did the dog say?” Mom asked.

“I don't know. I think it was some other language. Dog talk. The only word I could understand was 'bubble gum.'”

“Bubble gum?”

“Yeah, isn't that weird?”

She thought it was funny. I liked it when we could start the day off laughing. I was helping her with the breakfast dishes when she asked me if I'd ever dreamed about doors.

I could feel all the little hairs on my neck go straight up.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Oh, I don't know . . . it's just . . . I used to have dreams about doors when I was your age.”

My whole body went tense. I said, “I never dream about doors.” Sometimes lies just pop out before I have a chance to think. I didn't want to talk about doors. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears.

“I remember one dream, it was so vivid I thought it was real. You're probably going to think this is funny, Jack. One summer, I was about eight years old, I dreamed that I went through a door in one of the closets upstairs, and I went down a staircase to another door, and I went outside, and it was winter. The air smelled so fresh and clean. It was winter, and everything looked different—the trees, the buildings, everything. I made a snowball and brought it back inside and showed it to Daddy and told him what happened. He took my snowball and threw it in the sink and ran hot water over it until it was gone. He told me I had been dreaming, and I'm sure he was right, but at the time I didn't think so. He finally got me to say I'd only been dreaming, but you know
something? I still thought it was real. A few days later, Daddy made me show him the door I'd gone through. I took him to the closet and we looked in and there was no door where I remembered. There was nothing but a wall.”

My thumping heart was trying to crawl up my throat. “So you were dreaming?” I asked. My voice cracked, but she didn't seem to notice.

“I suppose I was. The only thing is, I don't remember falling asleep or waking up. Maybe I'm still dreaming. What do you think, Jack? Are you just a part of my dream?”

I shook my head. “I'm real,” I said.

But a part of me wondered whether that was true.

That afternoon Mom drove into Lake City to look for a job. I made myself a peanut butter sandwich. We were out of plastic bags, so I wrapped it in a piece of newspaper and stuck it in the side pocket of my jean jacket. I put a can of Coke in my other pocket, then climbed the stairs to the third floor, feeling a little foolish, still half convinced that the door had been nothing but a dream.

I
buried my hands in my pockets and faced the wind whipping up the face of the bluff. Below, the town looked like a map, the houses laid out in a grid of gray streets, fading green lawns spotted with red and yellow leaves. Blue smoke corkscrewed up from the chimneys, flavoring the air with the smell of burning wood. The cornfields at the edge of town had gone golden brown, the trees on the skirt of the bluff had lost nearly all their leaves, the sun shone cold and brilliant against a clear blue sky.

I wasn't in August anymore.

Tiny people and black cars moved about the streets. Even from the bluff I could see that all the cars were old-fashioned, like from the thirties. Turning away from the bluff, I rested my eyes on the abandoned hulk of Boggs's End. It, at least, presented a familiar shape.

I had a pretty good idea where I was, but I wasn't quite ready to believe it.

I decided to walk into town. On my way down the winding dirt road I saw only one car. I recognized it as a Model A, just like in
An Illustrated History of the American Automobile,
only this one had been painted bright yellow, and the driver's side door had
been lettered in black paint: F. S. D
ELIVERY
. The car slowed and the driver, a blond kid about my age, gaped at me. Another car, an Oldsmobile, came up behind him. The driver beeped his horn. The kid looked back, shifted gears, and continued up the hill.

I was becoming a believer.

The sign at the edge of town pretty much clinched it.

W
ELCOME
T
O
MEMORY
POP
. 880

Either the town's population had grown by over eight hundred people, or I had been propelled into the past. The closer I got to the center of town, the more certain I became. The streets were paved with smooth brick. Cars and trucks sat casually parked on either side. Most of the vehicles had seen better days. The newest one I saw was a two-tone Buick, brown on gray, probably about a 1940 model.

People stared at me as I walked by. Apparently they didn't get many strangers in town. I walked down to River Street, feeling distinctly self-conscious. The hotel, which had been an abandoned three-story hulk the last time I'd seen it, now sported a fresh coat of white paint. The sign above the lobby door read,
NO VACANCY
. I looked through the window. Four men sat smoking cigars, staring at a polished wooden cabinet. What were they doing? One of the men reached out
and adjusted a knob on the front of the cabinet.