Lineage (6 page)

On that particular day he had stripped off his outside clothes, hanging them up to dry near the door before walking into the kitchen. There was nothing on the table to signify that his mother hadn’t forgotten him and when he listened he heard no sound within the house but for the creaking of the rafters and floorboards as a particularly strong February wind buffeted the house from the west.

He had gone silently across the kitchen and placed his hand upon the cold doorknob of his parents’ room and twisted it. The door had opened only an inch before a sight that stopped his breath also stayed his hand.

His father stood motionless several feet in front of the bedroom door, his back to Lance. He was shirtless and barefoot but still wore a soiled pair of jeans that hung off of his stick-like frame as if he were more scarecrow than man. Lance’s mother was huddled beneath the blankets of the bed that ate up most of the small room, her bare shoulders hunched in fear, a line of blood running freely from the right side of her torn lip. Lance only glanced at his mother before returning his gaze to what had stopped him dead from opening the door in the first place.

A blanketed patchwork of scars so dense and thick that it looked as if his father were wearing a pink and puckered cape ran down the entire length of his back. They began gradually just below where the neckline of a shirt would ride and spread out in a sweeping swath that covered Anthony’s thin
lats
and disappeared, as if they had been tucked in to his pants line. Some of the scars were narrow and delicate like someone had done calligraphy there with razor, while others were wide and deep like the paths of ancient rivers, running seemingly without end from an inexhaustible source. 

 Lance gazed upon his father’s ruined flesh and wondered how a person could have survived after enduring something as such. Without realizing it, he drew his breath in sharply, partially in fear and partially in revulsion, and the wind passing his teeth made a small hissing sound.

Without pause, Anthony had spun and pulled the door fully open, exposing Lance in the doorway bigger and brighter than the sun in a cloudless August sky. There was no hesitation. There was no restraint. The blows that rained down on Lance came from all directions at once. His face was punched, his stomach kicked, his shins raked, until he no longer stood but lay folded against the opposite wall of the narrow hallway, trying in vain to fend off the strikes even as he squeezed his eyes shut so tight he saw glowing orbs of gold behind the darkened lids.

He learned later that his father’s truck had broken down at a job near town. Anthony’s employer had delivered him home early, unbeknownst to Lance. At the time Lance hadn’t understood what had been unfolding in his parents’ bedroom. Much later he realized it must have been what passed for sex between the elder
Metzgers
. His father first striking his mother and then moving on to perhaps more sinister tortures Lance preferred not to imagine.

These memories ran through Lance’s mind as his hand rested on the knob once again. This time he knew his father was somewhere nearby, he had seen the outline of the Chevy sitting blackly in the driveway, and he was older.

The first time he had been seven.

The doorknob turned once again, and Lance was struck by déjà vu so profoundly he imagined he could see the pink scars of his father’s back as soon as the door cracked open enough to reveal the room beyond. The door swung wider and light from the kitchen crept across the furniture and other objects, which looked like crouching beasts in the darkness. Lance let the door touch the wall before releasing the breath he was holding. The room was empty.

Lance pulled the bedroom door shut and ventured back out to the porch. He stood on his tiptoes as he looked out the darkened window, straining his eyes to see if the faint shape of his mother’s car was still parked on the far side of the Chevy. He couldn’t tell from where he stood. Lance turned to his left and made to look out of the window set in the middle of the front door, when he noticed shadows moving in front of the house. They were solidifying and shifting from side to side. Too late, he realized the shadows were the thin outline of his father hurrying up the last few steps to the door.

Lance stumbled back, a cry of fright caught in his throat, as the screen door was thrown back and the inner door thrust open to reveal the bony form of the man beyond. Anthony stepped into the entry, a thick woolen shirt buttoned around stooped shoulders, his unshaven face an oblong shape without emotion. He shut the inner door without turning from his son, who stood on the threshold of the kitchen, light sketching the boy’s outline and throwing his face into darkness.

“What’re you
doin
’?”

Lance stood stock-still, every muscle locked in place as if he had been encased in concrete and left to cure. A hundred phrases and questions ran through his mind as his father stepped closer and squinted into the light from the kitchen to read his features. He could smell the older man—a mixture of sweat and clothes worn too many times without washing. 

“You still knocked silly?” Anthony asked as he stopped a few feet from Lance and glared down at him, the scowl pulling his angular face into a rough point. Lance found the strength to shake his head, but no more.

“Well get the fuck out of my way then.”

Lance stood fast. His feet weighed a thousand pounds apiece, and he felt his fists clenching in on themselves. Not for the first time he felt as if he
were
watching his own life transpire from the sidelines. He watched from the bleachers of his mind as heat swelled within his own chest and his heart began pumping double time. Just before his father was about to sweep him aside like refuse from the garage apron after a storm, he spoke. “Where’s my mom?”

His father stopped before he had taken a step, and stared at Lance with almost a newfound realization.
The boy can talk. He can think on his own. Well, isn’t that something?

“She ran off. Now get out of my way.”

The first words were flat and without emotion, and as Lance heard them, he knew that they were anything but true. The last were full of menace and poison, like a ripe hornet sting. His mind screamed at him to step aside and let the older man pass, but something deep in his chest kept his legs at bay. That something was solid and whole, like a slab of granite. It was sound and resolute, and it would not let him move.

Anthony needed no further prompting. His right hand shot out and grasped Lance’s upper arm with five bands of cold steel. Anthony was a skinny man, but years of working on the farm and manual labor had left him sinuous and strong. The grip on Lance’s arm was familiar, if nothing else, and because of that, when his father’s knee came up to meet his chin in a graceful collision, he wasn’t in the least surprised.  

 Lance heard, more than felt, his jaw break as his aching head rocked back on his neck. It reminded him of when he had seen a boy light a firecracker beneath a tin can last Fourth of July. He wanted to fall then, as the pain began to flood the right side of his jaw. He wanted to lie on the stained and pitted linoleum floor and let the night melt away into dreams where his father couldn’t follow him. He wanted to fall, but the bands around his arm wouldn’t let him.

Anthony snapped a short punch at his son’s face and blood began to flow from Lance’s lower lip. Another punch opened a slight cut over his right eye, and after that, Lance lost the will to keep track of the injuries. Before his vision became too red to see through, he noticed the glint of light that kept flashing off his father’s wedding ring and wondered where his mother really was.

Finally, the blows began to taper off, like a heavy rain receding with a passing storm. The hand released its iron-like hold on his upper arm and allowed him to collapse. As he fell gracelessly to the floor, Lance noted that he hadn’t made a sound throughout the assault, and somewhere amidst the swelling sea of agony, he believed his mother would be proud. The pain was all-
encompassing,
a writhing mask that crawled across his ruined face and crept down into his neck. Blood pooled in a dark corona around his small head, and when he tried to open his mouth, his jaw moved barely an inch,
then
stopped.

Without thinking, Lance began to try to stand in an attempt to make it to his room, where he could at least lie on his bed. He had barely gathered his hands beneath him when a hard-soled boot skipped off of his temple, and for the second time in twenty-four hours, Lance dropped into the unfathomable depths of unconsciousness.

Chapter 2

“There is always room for coincidence.”

—Alva
Noto

The next week was a surreal passing of time that Lance faded in and out of. At times he would awake to the pitch blackness of his room in the middle of the night, his desk and chair strange shapes beside him that seemed to move and undulate in the darkness. At other times he would open his blood-encrusted eyes to a blindingly white day that made him turn to the shelter of the wall and wonder if the world was made entirely of razor-shafted light. His dreams became reality, as one trailed into another like a looping reel of movies played constantly on the backdrop of his mind. Creatures reached out to touch and prod him as he crossed burnt landscapes of piled corpses. Hands grasped at his pant legs as he stepped on the rotting dead, and he knew he shouldn’t look down, couldn’t look down. And at last, when he could resist no more, he gazed at the body gripping tightly to the cuff of his jeans, and his mother’s bloated face stared up at him with pleading in her filmy eyes. He had come hurtling out of the dream as if flung by the hand of God himself, and nearly ruptured a vocal cord as the hoarse scream tore out of his throat with talons of glass. No one had come to see if he was all right, not that he truly expected a visitor. In reflection, he was glad that no one had checked on him, considering his father was the only human being close enough to hear him cry out.

Sometimes there were bits of food and glasses of water on the chair near his bed, most times not. Time ceased to have meaning as the days passed for him in his pain-induced coma, and it was only when his father finally shook him awake one afternoon
  that
Lance realized how long he had actually spent in his room, alone with his wounds and deep dreams.

“You’ve been
shittin
’ the bed for a week, get
yer
ass up and get on the pot from now on if you have to go.” Anthony stood staring down at him from his bedside, his thin arms planted on narrow hips.

Lance slowly sat up and tried to focus his eyes, which didn’t want to center on anything in particular. His muscles felt new and weak as he levered himself out of the bed and began to stand. His jaw hurt immensely. He tried to work it down and up, down and up. He imagined a rusty bucket on a backhoe articulating after a winter of being stored in muddy water. After gingerly moving it up and down a few more times, he rose from his bed and wobbled across his room, his father following a few steps behind. Lance could feel his pants sticking to him uncomfortably, both on the back and front, and realized the smell that had been assaulting his nose was emanating from
himself
.

When he made it to the bathroom, Anthony walked past the doorway, leaving him in relative solitude. Lance leaned against the sink and looked at his gaunt reflection in the mirror. His face was drawn and stark white. His hair looked that much darker because of his paleness. A bluish-purple half-moon had formed around the right side of his jaw just below his ear. He touched it and winced when the slight pressure set off aftershocks of pain that radiated out into the rest of his face.

When Lance stripped off his soiled clothes, he was appalled by what he saw. His bowels seemed to have been working on their own accord over the last week, as his father had so eloquently put it, and he realized now that yes, he had been
shittin
’
himself.
The smell was so overwhelming that he wondered if he might pass out from it, and he put one hand on the back of the toilet to steady himself. When the bout of dizziness had passed, he started a bath and waited until the water had filled to nearly halfway before stepping into the hot water.

Sitting in the water felt glorious. The heat boiled into him and his coiled muscles began to relax. The water soon took on a dingy brown color, and became even more so when he applied a lather to his skin with a sliver of bar soap that had been sitting abandoned on the bathtub’s shelf.

Lance’s thoughts soon became sharpened as the water began to cool, and turned to the subject he had been trying to avoid: his mother. She was gone. Lance had gathered that much, his father had said so. He had said she had run off. That had been a lie and Lance knew it. There was no way his mother would have left him to his father’s rage, no matter the beating she received. She wouldn’t have abandoned him. That left only one option. His father had finally stepped over the line he had been treading on for as long as Lance could remember. He had finally let his anger pull him over the precipice of violence he had never allowed it to before.

His father had killed his mother.

The truth of the idea shocked Lance as he sat huddled in the dirty bathwater, surrounded by his own liquefied filth. It rocked him backward like a physical push, and he rested his wet head against the wall behind him and wept. He wept for his mother and the absence of her newfound strength and caring for him. He wept for the injuries he had sustained a week before that still throbbed, the healing only just beginning. And he wept for the final realization that made his tears course even more quickly down his battered cheeks: the comprehension beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was now truly alone.

Lance sat in the squalid water, crying silent tears of hopelessness as the wind began to pick up in the frigid October afternoon, and gray-shielded clouds rolled across the sun, which closed its eye to everything below.

The loud rapping sound from the front door woke Lance from a troubled sleep. He had drifted off in the early hours of the morning at his desk, pouring words out into his thick notebook as fast as they came to his mind. He was writing a story. Until his mother had disappeared he had only written his poems in the notebook. They had been short and simple at times, but nearly always dark and devastating as if they were diseased parts of himself that he removed with a pen instead of a scalpel.  

The story that now graced a dozen pages of the notebook was different than anything he had ever written before. It was a fairy tale of sorts. The main character was a boy of his own age who lived in a time forgotten. His family was poor, and his father, having gambled all of their money away, had vanished without repaying his debts, leaving his wife, his infant daughter, and his son to fend for themselves. One day, months after the disappearance of the father, an old peddler came to the cottage selling his wares. The boy had explained to the merchant that they had no money to pay for such things, but he had seemed unperturbed. He told the young boy that if he gave up his right hand for a time, the peddler would give, in return, a bag that contained anything that the boy truly wanted. The boy’s mother had run the merchant away from their cottage, with his objects in tow, and warned him never to return, but the boy was intrigued. He sought the peddler out that night while his family slept. The old man promised he would bring the boy’s hand back after one week, and in return the boy could have anything he desired from the burlap bag that the peddler had offered. Without another thought, the boy agreed and the merchant cut the boy’s hand off at the wrist with an ax. Bloodied and woozy, the boy stumbled home with the bag in his grasp, and as he reached the door to his cottage, he collapsed from loss of blood. His mother found him there shortly after, but it was too late to save him from his injuries and he died only minutes later. When she looked into the bag, she found a rotted hand with only a few strands of flesh clinging to the bones. On the third finger she recognized her husband’s wedding band, and clasped in its palm was a note that read,
All
debts are repaid.

Lance was fairly proud of the story, and each time he looked at the scrawls of his handwriting, he felt his anger lessen somewhat and the world dulled a little, as though a bulb had burnt out somewhere nearby. At times, when he wrote, he forgot the life around him—his father, his mother’s absence. He cherished the escapes, and the night before had been no exception. He had fallen asleep with his pen still grasped in his hand, a letter
L
wildly elongated across the page as sleep had pulled him away from writing.

The loud knocking came again, and he heard his father stumble out of his bedroom down the hall with several utterances against the person who would wake someone so early in the day. Lance was still rubbing feeling back into his numb right arm when he heard another voice murmuring at the front of the house. His father’s voice rose and fell as if caught in a high wind. The lower voice remained level, but there was something about the muffled words that piqued Lance’s curiosity. Was it one of his teachers checking in on him? He had now been absent from school for nearly two weeks, his father naming mononucleosis as the culprit that had kept Lance home for so long. The bruises had faded over the last few days, a testament to the healing power of his young body, but his jaw still felt strange. It felt uneven and his front teeth fit differently than before. The pain had faded to a twinge here and there and he was thankful for that much.

As he opened the door to his room, his father’s words suddenly became clear and he could hear the anger mingled within them.

“Like I told you the last time we spoke, Sheriff, she ran off. We had a disagreement, she said she didn’t love me or the boy anymore, and in the morning she was gone. There’s nothing else to tell.”

Lance crept down the hall and
peeked
one eye around the corner of the kitchen to peer into the entryway. His father’s thin form blocked part of the doorway as pale gray light streamed in around him. A man stood on their front stoop, dressed in a faded leather jacket with fur surrounding the collar that once might have been white but was now closer to dull beige. The man’s black baseball cap was pulled down tight over a rounded face, but Lance could still make out a set of shining eyes beneath the brim along with thick lips that were now pressed together, draining them of any color. The sheriff’s right hand was pushed deeply into the pocket of his leather jacket, but the other rested on the butt of an automatic pistol that hung from his duty belt. He was looking at Lance’s father like a person studying a snake that they had almost stepped on, considering its fate.

“I find that very hard to believe, Tony,” the sheriff said with a voice that sounded like rocks sliding down a rusty chute. Lance’s father stood still within the doorway. Both men stared at each other for a moment that stretched, and stretched, until Lance almost felt it snap when the sheriff’s eyes shifted over to his own. Lance froze as the sheriff stared at him and then raised his chin in his direction.

“Lance, isn’t it?”

Lance’s father turned and threw a glance down the hallway that would have killed. Without thinking, Lance stepped free of his hiding place and stood where both men could see him and nodded.

“Come here a moment, will you, son?” the sheriff said, as he motioned vaguely with the hand that wasn’t on the butt of the gun. Lance hesitated as his eyes met the blazing circles within his father’s skull, but he willed his feet to move one after the other across the linoleum of the kitchen until he was even with the doorway. He broke the fiery gaze with his father and turned it instead to the sheriff, who stood in the cold air of the October morning.

“Put your shoes on and step outside with me a minute, will you, son?” The sheriff’s voice was now softer and calm.

“Sheriff, I don’t want him outside. He’s been sick with mono and I don’t want him getting worse again.”

The sheriff’s eyes flitted back to Anthony’s and he squinted, as if the other man had become hard to see.

“I’m
gonna
have a talk with the young man, if he doesn’t object. Do you mind talking with me, son?” The sheriff’s eyes never left Anthony’s, but nonetheless, he stepped back to let Lance pass as the young boy slipped on his shoes and stepped outside.

Lance shivered in the crisp pre-Halloween air, but moved away from the warmth of the house in spite of his shaking flesh. The sheriff looked at Lance’s father for just a moment longer, and then turned from the doorway and followed Lance down the few steps onto the hard-packed drive.

When the older man knelt before him, Lance realized that the sheriff’s eyes were a soft shade of brown, which clashed with the rough features that adorned the rest of his face. Lance looked back into the sheriff’s eyes and waited. The older man studied him, pinning Lance to the spot under his scrutiny. At last, when Lance thought that
all the
sheriff was going to do was stare at him to glean information from his mind, he spoke in a low voice.

“Lance, do you know who I am?”

Lance nodded but didn’t break eye contact with the sheriff.

“So, you know that you’re safe telling me whatever you want, right?”

Uncertainty rose within Lance. Words longed to spill free of his mouth.
Words that his father would kill him for.
Words that were crawling up his vocal cords; they sat at the front of his mouth, dangling from his tongue like a troupe of obscene monkeys. Lance swallowed and nodded.

“Do you know where your mom is?”

Lance didn’t move. The moment for bravery had come.
The bravery that his mother had lacked for so many years.
He swallowed once and shook his head from side to side, the whole while his peripheral vision outlining the shape of his father standing motionless in the doorway.