“Maybe. It’s more reason for me to hate him. I just don’t want to see him.”
He looked at his watch.
“There’s a good chance he ain’t home. I know how to get into my house without going through the front door. I just want to get my piggy bank and get out. Want to help?”
“What can I do?”
“You just stay in the truck and be the lookout,” he said. “If a car drives into the driveway, you sound the horn. Do it at least five, six times, and I’ll know to get out of there fast. No tellin‘ what would happen otherwise. He’d kill me or I’d somehow kill him. Okay?” he asked.
“Okay,” I said, but my heart was thumping like an old-fashioned steam-engine train pounding the tracks.
“Good,” he said. “It won’t take long. Don’t worry.”
He turned the truck around and headed back toward the downtown area, but before getting there, turned again and wove his way through residential streets until we came to a house that looked hidden from the road behind sprawling old oak trees and untrimmed bushes. With the moonlight peeking through clouds, I could see the lawn was spotted with dry and bare patches. The house was completely dark.
“Usually there’s a light on somewhere,” he said after we pulled to the curb. He sat there, looking worried.
“Can’t you tell any other way if there’s someone home or not?”
“He’s not home. He doesn’t park his truck in the garage. It’s full of tools, his work bench, and a table saw. Okay,” he said. “The window in my room has a broken lock. I’m going in that way. Get behind the wheel here and hit the horn if a truck pulls in.”
“Be careful, Keefer.”
How strange, I thought, to have to break into your own house.
He got out slowly, hesitating as if he expected his father to pop out from behind a tree or something, and then he hurried over the lawn and around the right corner of the house. A few minutes later, a light went on. I could see the glow of it on the bushes at the side of the house.
When a pair of headlights appeared ahead of me, I held my breath and placed my hand on the horn. It turned out to be a car, which passed by quickly. Once again, the street was dark. I looked toward the house. Why was he taking so long? Surely, he knew where his piggy bank was. Another set of headlights appeared, and again it was only a car going by. After it had, I looked toward the house and saw the light was out.
I spotted Keefer. This time he wasn’t hurrying along. He was walking very slowly, his head up, his hands clutching something. I wished he would hurry. He came around the truck and I opened the door. He just stood there in the street looking in at me.
“What is it?” I asked.
He extended his hands. In them were the broken pieces of what I supposed was his piggy bank. I shook my head.
“I don’t understand.”
“He took my money. He took my savings, my birthday savings.”
“Oh, no,” I said.
Keefer spun on his heels and heaved the pieces at the driveway.
“That’s not all,” he said, moving to get in. I slid over on the bench seat.
“What else?”
“My mother wasn’t there. I went looking for her to see if she was in bed, asleep.”
“Maybe she was out with him.”
“I doubt that.” He started the engine. “The lamp beside her bed was on the floor. I put it upright, and then I turned it on, and there, on the floor in the bathroom, was…”
“What?” I asked, hardly able to breathe.
“Blood” he said. “Lots of blood.”
“Blood?” I gasped.
He drove away. I felt like I had stopped breathing and I was leaving my body. That was how numb I had become.
We drove to the apartment complex, and Keefer came up with me.
“If something terrible happened, wouldn’t someone tell you?” I asked him.
“It looked to me like whatever happened wasn’t all that long ago,” he said.
I stared at him. What could have happened? His eyes were filled with all the horrible possibilities, and my mind began to roam through Horror Hotel. Could his father have done something terrible to his mother and then taken her body off somewhere?
“Should we call the police?”
He thought for a moment. Then, he nodded and walked to the phone like someone who wanted desperately not to use it. I watched as he punched in 911 and then told the dispatcher his address and what he had found.
“I’m her son,” he said.
“She’s transferring me to someone who might know something.”
I nodded and waited, embracing myself. Before I could say anything, he raised his hand.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’m her son. I was just at the house and…” He listened and as he did, his face lost color. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
He hung up and stared at the phone a moment. Then he sucked in his breath and turned to me.
“She tried to commit suicide. She’s in the hospital,” he said.
“Oh, Keefer, I’m sorry.”
“I’m gonna go.”
“Should I go with you?”
He thought a moment, and then he nodded.
“Sure, that’d be great.”
Mother darling wanted me home, of course. She might have already checked to see if I had listened to her, but that didn’t matter to me now. None of that mattered to me, and maybe, it never had.
Besides, I thought as we charged down the stairs and to the truck, I’m sure Kathy Ann is watching and could tell Mother darling everything anyway.
After we parked at the hospital, we went to an information desk and found out where Keefer’s mother was located. It turned out she was still in what they called an intensive care unit. Only the immediate family could go in, and only for a little while. I waited outside. I was very nervous because we didn’t know if his father was in there already, and what sort of a scene he would make as soon as he set eyes on Keefer.
Fortunately, he wasn’t. Keefer came out after ten minutes.
“She’s still alive,” he said, “but she’s lost so much blood, she’s in a coma. All the nurse would say is, ‘We’ll see.’ ”
He sat, and I held his hand.
“She looked so small in there. It was like she had shrunk or somethin‘ from losin’ all that blood. I tried talkin‘ to her, but her eyelids didn’t even twitch. It was like talkin’ to a corpse.”
“Oh, don’t say that, Keefer. She can get better.”
He nodded and looked around.
“I wonder where the hell he is. It doesn’t surprise me that he’s not here.”
“What do you want to do?”
“In an hour I can go back in again. You mind waitin‘?”
“No, of course not,” I said.
He leaned back against the sofa.
“You want a soda or somethin‘?”
“No, I’m fine,” I said. He nodded and closed his eyes.
I couldn’t help wondering how I would feel if that was Mother darling in there instead of Keefer’s mother. Would I be worrying about her or about myself? She was all I had now, all the family jn the world to me. Most of my life, she did her best to pretend I wasn’t there. Sometimes I thought that was what bothered her the most when Grandpa complained about me: he reminded her I was her daughter and her responsibility.
I supposed I had never made things easier for her. Not only didn’t I think I should, but I resented her placing herself at the top of the list of who was important and what was important. Her career was the end-all. If it meant sacrificing my advantages, my time, my opportunities, that was all right. The excuse was always that she was doing it for both of us. All I could think was, if she ever did make it in the music business, I would fall even further down the list until I did what she wanted: disappeared.
And yet, imagining her in there like Keefer’s mother with Death standing at the foot of her bed looking covetously at her thin grip on life, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her and sad. The few good times we had together returned to memory. I recalled once when she had sung successfully at a county fair and she had me dressed in a cowgirl outfit. She brought me on the stage with her and I sang a chorus. Everyone thought it was cute and she hugged me. Afterward, we had a good time on the rides. We ate cotton candy and had hot dogs and she won a stuffed puppy on the wheel of fortune game.
I left that back at the farm.
It was part of a dream now, something unreal.
“You got a helluva nerve bein‘ here,” I heard, and opened my eyes to see a stocky, six-foot-three-inch man with the shoulders and arms of a logger standing before us. His black hair looked like it was in revolt, the untrimmed strands going every which way, some stuck on his sweaty forehead and looking like streaks of ink. He had big facial features, but I could see Keefer’s jaw and eyes.
He wore a faded plaid shirt, the sleeves rolled over his thick forearms, back to his elbows, and a pair of greasy, stained jeans and black shoe boots.
“You’re the reason she’s in there,” he said, pointing his thick forefinger down at Keefer. The rest of his hand was clutched in a fist, making it look like a pistol.
I looked at Keefer. He didn’t move, but he didn’t flinch or look frightened either.
“Me?” he said. “You got that backwards. You’re the reason she’s in there. What happened? What did you do to her to make her do this?” he fired up at him.
His father’s face ripened like an apple in an instant.
“You ungrateful little bastard,” he said, and reached down to seize Keefer, who pushed his hand away and shifted to his right.
I couldn’t help it. I screamed. It seemed to snap his father out of his monomaniacal drive. He turned and looked at me.
“Who’s this little tramp?” he asked.
“Shut your mouth,” Keefer said. He moved farther to the right and stood up.
Now they were facing each other, and the one-sidedness of the pending battle was clearly evident. It looked like David against Goliath.
“Keefer, no!” I cried. “Don’t get into any fights here!”
“You’d better listen to her and get out. Crawl back to whatever hole you’re livin‘ in.”
“I’m not the one who should be crawlin‘,” Keefer said. “You stole my money. You went and broke my piggy bank and took my money.”
His father smiled coldly.
“Ain’t nothin‘ in that house belongs to you, boy. You were livin’ under my roof, and you owed me for all the things that got broke throwin‘ you out.”
“You’re just a common thief and a pervert,” Keefer accused.
The rage rose like steam in his father’s face, but before he could act, a nurse emerged from the intensive care unit and asked for Mr. Dawson.
They both turned to her.
“Yeah, that’s me,” Keefer’s father said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Your wife’s heart just gave out. The doctor did everything he could.”
The words hung in the air a moment, and then Keefer made a terrifying animal scream and charged at his father like a football tackier, hitting him in the right side with his shoulder and driving him back and onto his rear end. The nurse gasped and I screamed. Keefer looked at me and then charged down the hallway.
“Little bastard,” his father said, getting to his feet.
“You can come in now,” the nurse told him, her eyes still wide and her face still a bit white.
He looked in Keefer’s direction, nodded, and followed her into the intensive care unit.
I went hurrying after Keefer. At first I didn’t see him. He wasn’t by the truck. Then I spotted him at the end of the parking lot, walking in a small circle and raving, his arms flying up. Slowly I approached.
“I’m sorry, Keefer,” I said. He continued to circle and then stopped and looked at me.
“He killed her, you know. He should be arrested and tried for murder. He as good as did it himself.”
“I know,” I said.
“Someday…” His threat trailed off into the night.
I went to him and embraced him. I could feel his rage cooling down, and finally he held me and started to sob. He realized it and pulled back.
“I gotta get outta here,” he said, marching toward the truck.
I ran after him.
“What are you going to do?”
“Just go back to my hole and maybe drink myself to sleep,” he said. “C’mon. I’ll take you home first.”
I thought a moment.
“No,” I said.
“What?”
“I want to be with you.” He stared for a moment. “Are you sure?”
“Positive,” I said, and I got into the truck before he did.
Most of the night, I was just a good listener. Keefer sat drinking hard liquor instead of beer. Izzy kept a bottle of bourbon in his office, and Keefer brought it back to his one-room apartment. I sat on the sofa bed, and he sat on the floor and talked about his early life, the happier days when he was too young to realize how bad things were for both his mother and his older sister.
“It wasn’t until I was about nine,” he continued, lying back on the floor and looking up at the cracked and pealed ceiling, “that I understood how horrible it was for Sally Jean. I came into her bedroom one night because I heard her sobbin‘. My mother drank with my father often those days, and they were both sunk in a stupor. Only before he had collapsed, he had gone into Sally Jean’s bedroom to tell her one of his bedtime stories. That’s what she said he pretended to be doin’.”
Keefer formed a wry smile.
“It began with that ‘Three Little Pigs,’ ” he said. “You know, where he would run his fingers up her side to tickle her.”
“Oh, Keefer,” I said. It not only frightened me to hear such a sick story, it made me nauseated.
“He was still tellin‘ her the same story, only the pigs…”
“Keefer, stop!” I pleaded.
He looked at me.
“Yeah, it’s better not to hear about it. No one wants to hear about it. I bet my mother put her fingers in her ears half the time. Well, she don’t hafta do that anymore, huh? She’s better off.”
“No one’s better off dead, Keefer.”
“Right,” he said, and took another long drink of the bourbon.
“Why don’t you lie down here for a while,” I suggested. “Get some sleep.”
“Sleep,” he said, as if it was an impossibility.
“C’mon,” I said. “I’ll hold you.”
He looked up at me and then he rose slowly, put the bottle on the floor on his side of the sofa bed, pulled off his shirt, dropped his pants, and crawled under the blanket. I stroked his hair, kissed his cheek, and got undressed to lie beside him.