Authors: Joe Hart
Without pausing, he slammed the butt of the gun into the downed soldier’s face, silencing him, smashing his already-broken nose completely flat. As he regained his feet, he heard
a stillness
in the air. For a moment he wondered why this would bother him. Then he realized that there were no more screams filling the air. He breathed in and out as he listened to the footsteps that approached from behind. The seconds stretched into millennia as the boy’s father stared at the far end of the camp where a supply truck sat idling. There was a small patch of paint missing from the truck’s front fender. Edges of rust were beginning to erode the metal, and he could see every intricate layer of the orange disease in minor detail. He could see each individual snowflake as it fell, and he imagined he could discern the pattern the ice crystals formed as the flakes floated to the ground. He heard another footstep fall and he spun, preparing to fire.
The heavy-bladed knife cut through his wrist as easily as a line through water. The officer stood several feet away, crouched and ready to deliver another blow, as the disembodied hand fell to the pallid earth. It landed between the two men, and the fingers curled in on the palm like a dying spider’s legs. The boy’s father tried to bring the machine gun to bear on the blood-spattered SS officer just as he saw silver bloom into life on his right side. The slim blade in the officer’s left hand sliced cleanly into the paltry flesh of the father’s forearm. It carved off a long, slender chunk of tissue, the rigid blade skittering on the bone. The chunk also fell to the ground, causing the nerves in the man’s arm to twitch.
The machine gun shuddered as it spit a dashed line of bullets into the ground and then into his wife’s flesh. The boy heard several hollow thuds and felt something warm splash onto the top of his head. He blinked as whatever was in his hair began to run into his eyes. As he released his mother’s hand to wipe at his face, he heard an anguished scream, full of sorrow and grief. He didn’t know what tore loose inside of him and ached from that sound, but it centered on the scene before him, like the needle of a compass pointing north.
His father stood staring at the sky, one hand limply holding the machine gun. The dull metal fell from his grasp to the white ground. The other arm pumped a jet of blood out of the stump where his hand used to be. The officer stood several feet away, the knives in each hand dripping blood.
The boy’s mother stumbled backward. As she tried to maintain her footing, her eyes roamed wildly in her skull. Soon they met her son’s and held them. They bulged with pain and sadness, and when the boy looked
down,
he saw several large blotches of blood spreading across her abdomen. She blinked once and opened her mouth to say something into the cold air, but without uttering a sound, she fell away and flopped limply into the ditch behind her.
The boy turned just in time to see a blur of motion where his father stood. The officer had leapt toward the other man in a single stride and then lithely stepped off to the side, his left arm swinging down in a graceful curve. The boy watched his father’s frozen face grimace. Then his father’s head tipped at a right angle onto his shoulder, a thin strap of skin and sinew the only things keeping his head from falling off completely. Blood surged from the wound like
floodwater from a broken dam, and his father’s legs unhinged, his lifeless body crumpling in a heap of rags and sharp-angled limbs.
Silence pervaded the grounds and soaked into every surface therein. The pressure that had been building seemed to coalesce into a sharp zenith that pushed the surrounding soldiers down and made several cover their ears, as though a sound were causing the heaviness they felt, though nothing could be heard in the damp air.
The boy stood staring at the officer’s back, which, surprisingly, was free of gore. The officer, in turn, was watching the last of the man’s blood seep away, when he felt the eyes of the boy on him. He turned, and they stood facing each other, their gazes locked. The boy’s jaw clenched and unclenched mechanically, while the officer’s face remained slack and unmoving. The snow fell between them like a lace curtain. An eternity ticked by, and then the officer began to move. He strode across the distance between them, his hands close to his sides.
The boy seemed almost in a trance as his parents’ killer approached with quickening footsteps. His eyes clouded over with delayed shock, and his muscles slackened from their earlier constriction. The officer recognized acceptance in the little boy’s posture, and he readied himself for his last execution of the day—and for all he knew, the war.
When he was within a few feet of the boy, the officer drew back his arm and twisted his body as he slung the blade in his right hand in a viscous sweeping motion. The boy reacted, stepped back, and teetered on the edge of the ditch. His arms automatically came out to balance him as he fell, and the blade flashed brightly in and out of his line of sight while pain bloomed on his left cheek.
The officer watched as his knife missed its mark—the boy’s neck—and cut a deep line in his cheek and across the bridge of his nose instead. The boy tipped back, arms flailing, and fell onto the corpse of his mother in the trench behind him. He struggled there, on his mother’s still-warm body, as he tried to right himself. The officer watched with a degree of amusement while he tried to decide whether to venture in after his quarry or to pull his sidearm and dispatch the boy where he lay. He was still trying to choose when he realized that a high whining sound was invading the relative quiet of the camp around him.
A plane came in fast and low from the bleak western horizon. At first it could have been mistaken for a large black vulture or a bird of prey. But as it neared the camp, the white and black outline of a five-pointed star could be seen on its fuselage. Smoke billowed from both wings and from several places over the engine cowling. A clever artist had drawn a gaping mouth lined with teeth along the front of the aircraft behind the sputtering propeller. The P-40 dropped lower and lower, until the whine of the failing engine became a roar that overrode even the concussive pressure in the soldiers’ heads. A few tried to run, while others simply fell onto the freezing ground.
The officer watched the plane as it dove sharply, directly toward the spot where he stood. With only a split second to spare, he jumped to his left and rolled several times as the sound of the plane’s engine shrieked against altitude and ate up the air around him.
The plane smashed into the ground several feet beyond the edge of the ditch, inside the camp’s fences. Metal rent and chunks of the aircraft flew hundreds of yards in different directions. The heavy three-bladed prop tore free of its anchoring, and as it stuttered hastily across the wet ground, it cut through the
Blockwart’s
body, leaving the two gaping halves, once a man, to tip apart. Flying shrapnel wounded a number of other soldiers, and a fireball erupted as the remaining gas in the plane’s tanks caught fire.
The officer blinked his eyes into the cold mud below the layer of sleet that he was lying on. He pushed his gloved hands into the ground and sat up. His ears rang with the explosion, and his vision titled as he tried to regain his feet. His hat had been lost when he dove, and his light blond hair stuck up at odd angles above his pallid face. He looked around at the grounds and saw many of the soldiers that were assisting him earlier lying in pieces, their insides turned out in a shocking display. Smoking chunks of meat still clung to the burning bones of the plane fifty yards away, and he heard screaming from the injured.
He turned and looked down at the trench before him, at the bodies now covered with a slight layer of dirt and sleet from the impact of the plane.
The boy wasn’t there.
His eyes scanned up and down the tangled limbs in the depression, searching for movement among the dead. He even looked for a body with an unnatural arch to it, just in case the boy had burrowed beneath one of the corpses to hide as he had seen done several times.
When he concluded the boy wasn’t present in the ditch before him, he began to inspect the far bank and the fence beyond. A field merged into a rough forest of bramble and pine. Several yards from the edge of the barbed wire, the woods faded into an inky gloom, even in the full light of day. It was at the border of the trees that the boy stood looking at him.
Blood ran down his white face from the cut on his cheek and nose, so that the left side of his face was encased in a red mask. But other than where the knife had made a path in his flesh, he seemed unharmed.
The officer stood there in the sleet and stared back at the boy. A presence hung between them, as real and palpable as the moisture that fell from the sky. A hatred so deep and strong radiated from the boy’s eyes that the officer imagined it would cut him down where he stood. The pressure that had been building in the air multiplied, until it was almost unbearable for the few remaining soldiers in the vicinity, although the boy and the officer didn’t seem to notice. The intensity in the stare grew and bloated until there was no longer room between them, and the officer felt he might be pushed back because of it.
Without thinking, he drew his pistol from the holster at his side and pointed it across the ditch. His finger squeezed the trigger three times in succession, and smoke from the barrel obscured his vision. The heaviness and pressure in the air lifted with the gunshots, as if the shots had pierced a swollen hide. Nearby soldiers shook their heads to rid themselves of the vacuum left behind.
When the cordite began to clear, the officer saw that the area in which the boy had been standing was empty. He examined the trees and brush beyond for a swinging branch or a patch of flattened shrub. Nothing remained to indicate the boy had ever been there.
He felt an irresistible urge to cross the ditch, climb through the roughly strung wire, and follow the boy into the forest. He needed to, it was imperative to find him now. Just as he began to move in that direction, a panting soldier ran up to him and stopped a respectful distance away.
“Are you injured,
Oberführer
?” the youth nearly yelled, seemingly deafened by the explosion from the plane.
The officer stood staring at the woods beyond the camp, and it was only after the soldier repeated himself that he glanced over and acknowledged the other man. “I am fine.” The officer threw a last fleeting look at the edge of the camp where the boy had disappeared, and then turned back to the soldier that stood before him. “Ready my personal car, we will be leaving momentarily.”
The younger man nodded and ran back the way he had come. The officer turned begrudgingly from the ditch and the unmoving occupants within it. He strode across the expanse of the white-layered camp, past the flaming wreckage of the destroyed plane, and disappeared into the still heavily falling snow.
“Evil is done without
effort,
naturally, it is the working of fate.”
—Charles Baudelaire
Black Lake
,
Minnesota
, October 1990
Darkness was drawing its shade across Lance’s window when he heard his father’s palm strike his mother’s face for the first time that night. The sound made him wince, as though he were the one being slapped.
Not that he couldn’t imagine what it felt like.
All he had to do was rub his face or ribs gently, and he could recall every place that he’d been struck. It was Friday night, so his father had taken the liberty of unleashing some pent-up anger on him earlier in the afternoon since Lance wouldn’t have to return to school until Monday. By the end of the weekend, the split on the corner of his mouth and the dark marks on his abdomen would heal enough to be unnoticeable.
He heard a soft whimper and the sharp intake of breath through clenched teeth, then another flat thud of skin meeting skin. There was a pause, and then he heard the thumping of his mother’s slight frame crumpling to the kitchen floor. Lance closed his eyes and wished again that his father would die.
It wasn’t the normal whimsy of a nine-year-old boy, it was a yearning driven by an engine of cold hatred. Deep in the recesses of his mind, Lance knew that wishes were foolish. When he wished for something like he did now, he felt like he did in church when his mother took him. He would stare at the sculpture of Christ on the cross, one hand nailed solidly by a nine-inch nail and the other torn free, reaching out to his own father for salvation. Lance would look at the upturned face in the grips of the most horrid pain, and when the priest would tell the people in the pews to bow their heads and pray, he would feel foolish. He would ask God to save him. Save him and his mother from his father. He could hear the words echoing in his mind like shouts in an empty cavern. If God was listening, he wasn’t answering. Lance often mused that God wasn’t helping him because the almighty could see what was truly in his heart. He didn’t just want his mother and himself safe from his father’s unending, incorrigible wrath, he wanted his father to die. With hatred like that in your heart, he supposed, how could your prayers be answered? At the age of nine, he had already found his first paradox, without knowing the true meaning of the word.
Lance sat up from his small single bed and listened, his dark hair beginning to encroach over the boundary of his smooth forehead. His eyebrows formed a V shape in the middle of his face, and his wide hazel eyes shifted uneasily. He couldn’t hear anything.
Absolutely no sound wasn’t good.
Not that he wanted to hear bruise after bruise being laid upon his mother, but the silence was worse. If he couldn’t hear what was happening, his imagination had to fill in the blankness of the moment, and his thoughts were usually much worse than reality.
He heard a chair scrape across the rough tile floor at the end of the hall. That would be his father sitting down. Sitting down to look at what he’d done, not in remorse or shame, but almost in reverie. He liked to examine the welts and blackness that formed on the skin; his dark eyes would run over the injuries and catalog them one by one.
Lance’s mother, in turn, would also remain as quiet as possible. For such a petite woman she had
a certain
steel inside her when it came to pain. Perhaps it was the tempering of fifteen years of marriage to the man who now sat over her, studying her misery. Although, from time to time Lance would hear her cry out, and it seemed that when this happened, she would receive double what was average within their household. It was as if Lance’s father was waiting to see weakness, a chink in her armor that she held so tight around her.
A soft sob met Lance’s small ears, and he let out a breath of air that he hadn’t realized he had been holding. A sharp crack announced the opening of one of the cold
Michelobs
from the fridge. This was another morbid wonder that often left Lance perplexed. His father only hit his mother and him while he was stone sober. Once the alcohol broached his system, he became quiet and withdrawn, and at times seemingly unaware of even their presence in the small house they shared. They became specters to him, and the times when he was thoroughly drunk were some of the happiest Lance could remember.
For a moment it was all he could do not to fling his door open wide, barrel down the narrow hallway, and slam his sixty-five-pound frame into his father. He wanted to pummel his father’s angular face with his fists and swing his arms until he could no longer lift them. He wanted to strike him until the hatred had drained from his body, like a torrent of acid, and his father’s head was a pile of mush on the floor. He wanted to save his mother, and himself, with all the fiber of his being; but instead, he moved quietly across his small room to the abraded desk that sat in the far corner near the window.
Now that his father was finally drinking, Lance felt secure enough to write. He pulled out a thick spiral notebook with a flawless blue cover from the drawer beneath the surface of the desk along with a black pen, and began to flip through the pages. He passed nearly fifty pages of roughly lined prose before he found an empty page.
The poems that had begun to flow out of his pens and pencils nearly six months ago were scary. They were dark in ways that he didn’t yet understand, and if asked, couldn’t form into words, but he wrote them. They were his lifeline. The words acted as a safety valve for his anger and hatred, which mortared him solid emotionally.
But they scared him too.
He had made the mistake of jotting down a poem in class one day after stumbling upon his mother’s unconscious form sprawled in the hallway the night before. He was only halfway finished when Mrs. Murphy, his teacher, had walked silently up behind him, as she had an uncanny way of doing, and read what he was writing. That afternoon he had sat next to his mother in the principal’s office, listening to the two adults speak about his poem as though he weren’t present.
Disturbing
and
worrying
were two of the many words that crossed the air between his mother and the principal, who sat leaning over his large desk like a news anchor delivering some especially devastating bulletin. Counseling had also been brought up, but Lance could see from the way his mother’s face drew tight at the thought that it was out of the question. A counselor might ask certain things or glean some sort of insight that might lead to the truth, and the truth was a dangerous thing, especially in their household.
During the car ride home that day, his mother had asked him why he wrote about such scary things, and even then Lance wondered why she needed to ask.
“Because it helps” was all he could respond. She had nodded as she stared over the steering wheel of their 1983 Plymouth
Caravelle
, her auburn hair a deep honey color in the late-spring sunlight. Lance had stared at her then, locking the memory in place, not because it was a happy moment that he would later drag out like a worn book of photos, but because he had never seen her look so pretty before. She wore no bruises on her faintly lined face, and she wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t frowning either. She was real, there next to him in the seat, and at that moment it was the best he could ask for. Later in life he would reflect upon that moment and think that he should have hated her too. Perhaps he should have hated her more than he did his father because she could have done something. She could have called the police or a neighbor, or at least neglected to cover her welts in public in order to draw some sort of attention. But he knew, deep down, she couldn’t have done anything different, no more than his father could have. She fit perfectly into the puzzle of despair that they called their life.
Lance squinted into the deepening night and tried to make out the familiar forms of the small shed that sat several yards from the house and of the deeper shadow of the barn that hovered over its smaller cohort like a monolith. Lance imagined all of the farm equipment sitting in the dark, indifferent to all else except rust and time. He wished he were more like some of the machines, cold and hard and without feeling.
He listened to the sound of a beer can being crushed and then tossed at the trashcan that sat in the corner of the kitchen. As the sound faded, rustling of clothing, which signaled his mother’s rise from the floor, replaced it. Lance began to write.
The dark holds me close
I swing from its arms
It knows my name and kisses my face
If I can’t breathe it’s okay
I don’t want to
My skin is cold and hard
And the dark holds me close
He sat back and looked at the words. They didn’t fit perfectly with what he felt, but they were a start. He took his time with his writing, and several scratched-out words lay among the others like casualties on a battlefield. Sometimes it was hard to write, and other times he couldn’t stanch the flow of words. They poured from the end of his pen onto the page, as if a pressure drove the words from within. He supposed that the pressure, in all actuality, came from somewhere inside him.
Lance looked back toward the yard and saw the passage of time had fully dropped the curtain on the world outside. He glanced up at the clock that hung on his wall and saw that it was well past ten. There would be chores to do early and he would need his rest.
The small farm that they lived on was a meager source of income, and at times a backbreaking one. They sold eggs from about fifty chickens to a small grocery store on the far side of town, and when the few head of cattle that his father owned produced calves, they would peddle these also at a local auction. On top of the animal duties, there were roughly fifty acres of alfalfa that yielded two good crops each summer. Lance could already feel the coarse strings of the bales cutting into his hands as he pulled each one from the baler’s chute, his father’s voice ringing harshly in the air, yelling threats that he would carry out if Lance didn’t keep up with the stream of compacted hay.
Getting up from his desk, he listened, and heard no more sounds from outside his room. His father and mother must have gone to bed some time ago, and the house was silent but for the cool wind outside that shifted its joints from time to time.
Lance made his way to his small bed and undressed, wincing at times as his body reminded him of its injuries. When his small frame was tucked beneath the thin blanket his mother had sewn herself, he finally let himself relax. All of the day’s tension, along with the worry that accompanied him every day like a sack of lead in his stomach, began to flow away. His breathing slowed, and he envisioned himself someday free of this life, traveling to other places that held beauty he had yet to learn, understanding the world without the fear of looking over his shoulder in a constant vigil.
With a final flutter of his eyelids, Lance sunk into a restless sleep, and dreamed of endless hallways and heavy footsteps echoing down them.
“Lance, wake up.”
The whisper trailed down through a whirlwind of sleep and distorted thoughts, and for a moment Lance slept on, thinking that the voice was part of his dream. When he was shaken roughly on his shoulder, he came awake at once, his eyes opening wide and staring into the white face of his mother. She kneeled beside his bed, her hair tied back in a tight ponytail, her lips pushed together so tightly they were just a thin line on her pale face. A bruise so dark and livid that it seemed to pulse in the low light extended from the circle of her eye and stretched down onto her cheek. Moonlight filtered in through his bedroom window, highlighting her hair with its pale beams.
“What’s wrong, Mama?” His voice came out in a hoarse whisper, coated with sleep.
“Nothing, we’re going on a trip, right now. Get up and get dressed as quiet as you can.” She tilted her head forward to impress her words upon him, to see if he understood.
Lance nodded and threw back his covers, the cool air chilling him. His mother stood back and hovered by his door, which was open several inches. No light shone from the hallway, and the house was without sound but for the slight rustle as Lance pulled on his jeans and thrust a worn sweatshirt over his head. Once he was dressed, his mother turned back to him and motioned with her hand for him to follow her. He took two careful steps, avoiding loosened nails in the floorboards, and then stopped. Without thinking, he turned and picked up his notebook from his desk. In a small part of his mind, he realized what this moment was—a bridge of sorts, a crossing from one life to the next. It was what he had dreamed about and wished for since he had the capacity to imagine what could be. He looked around his small room, cataloging each object that he was about to leave forever. He wasn’t surprised in the least when he felt no remorse at the thought of departing.
“Lance, we have to go.” Urgency flooded his mother’s voice now, and it quickened his heartbeat. He turned and followed her out of his room, into the dark hallway. They walked carefully, his mother in the lead, holding his hand behind her back. Her
breath was short and fast, and sweat
like oil coated her palm. Lance watched the door to his parents’ room approach on the left. It was shut and no light came from the space beneath it. Lance felt as if he were Bilbo Baggins, sneaking past the sleeping
Smaug
in
The Hobbit
. Instead of a simple cup, he carried his words on paper; instead of a sword, he held his mother’s hand. But the monster behind the door that was now directly opposite them was no less deadly than the beast in the story. Lance felt sure that if the door suddenly swung open, pulled violently by the skinny arm of his father, there would be no escape except death. He did not doubt for an instant that Anthony Metzger would think twice about killing his wife and child where they stood if he caught them trying to flee the reach of his anger.