The Lock Artist (42 page)

As I looked at the house, I knew it was empty. I knew it had been empty for ten years. Nobody would buy this house. Nobody would live inside these walls. Never mind the air or the industrial blight across the street. You wouldn’t go into this house for one second if you knew what had happened here.

And everybody knew. Everybody.

The whole street looked abandoned. I opened up one of my luggage bags and grabbed a flashlight. Then I took Amelia by the hand and led her up the two front steps to the door. I tried the knob. It didn’t turn. I got out my tools and started in on the lock.

“What are you doing?”

It didn’t take long. Less than a minute. I turned the knob and pushed the door in. I took her hand again and led her inside.

The first thing that hit me was how cold it was. Even after a warm September day, the unnatural chill in this place . . . the lights from the plant came streaming in through every window, so it wasn’t that dark, but still I felt myself wanting to reach for a light switch. To fill the place with a warmer light than this pale glow that made everything look like it was underwater.

Amelia didn’t say anything. She followed me as I walked through the living room, our footsteps creaking on the wooden floors. There was no carpet. I remembered that. Other things coming back to me, like where the
television was. Where the couch was that my mother would sit on while I was on the floor, watching cartoons.

We went into the kitchen. The tile had curled up in places. The old appliances were still in place.

“Why is this house still here?” she said. “Why haven’t they torn it down?”

Yes, I thought. Tear it down. Burn the lumber and everything else that will burn. Take the ashes and bury them in the ground.

I led her back out, through the living room to the hallway, where it got much darker. She gripped my hand tighter, and I took her past the bathroom, past the master bedroom, past my own bedroom from way back when. To the extra room at the very back of the house.

This door was closed. I pushed it open.

It was empty. There was still a roller blind on the window. I went to open it and the whole thing fell off the window with a crash.

“Okay, I’m getting a little nervous in here.” Her voice was small in the middle of this emptiness.

I looked along the floor for the faint indentations in the wood. Four of them. They were centered against the back wall.

I took out my pad of paper and my pen. I started to write, holding the pad up to the dim moonlight that came in through the window. Then I put the pad back in my pocket. There was no way I could do this and make her understand what it felt like. This whole trip was a horrible mistake.

“So show me,” she said. “I want to see what happened.”

I shook my head.

“There’s a reason we’re here. Show me.”

I took out the pad again. I started to draw a picture. But I didn’t have room on the pad. How could I do this on a stupid little pad of paper? I ended up throwing it against the wall.

That’s when I got the idea.

It was plaster, with a simple coat of off-white paint. It had always been that way. No bright colors for this house. No wallpaper.

I turned on the flashlight. I went to the wall, and I started drawing with my pen. Amelia came over to me and watched over my shoulder. I drew a picture of a little boy reading a comic book in a living room. I drew a woman smoking a cigarette and watching television. My mother. On the couch next to her . . . this was the tricky part. A man with a drink in his hand. But not the father. How do you make that clear? This man is not the father.

“Michael, do you have stuff out on your bike? Pens? Pencils?”

I nodded.

“I’ll be right back.”

What? You’re going to leave me here?

“It’ll only take a second. You keep doing what you’re doing.”

She left the room. I heard her footsteps, and I felt the air shift as she opened the front door. It was just me and the ghosts for a long minute or two. I fought off the feeling that I was trapped here forever now. That the door was locked and she’d never come back.

Then the door opened again, and she reappeared in the room. She was carrying my wooden art box. Everything I’d need to do this for real.

Especially if she helped me.

When I finished the first panel, she came behind me and started filling in some of the details. The second panel went a lot faster. I just sketched in the general idea, and then she finished it while I went on to the third.

That’s how we did it. That’s how I finally told her this story. On this one September night, in this half-dark empty room, me and Amelia together again, filling up the walls.

June 17, 1990. Father’s Day. This is the day that happened then and is still happening. This is the day that lives outside of time.

I am sitting on the floor of the living room, reading a comic book. My mother is on the couch, smoking a cigarette. The man I call Mr. X is sitting on the couch next to her. He is not my father, but even though it is Father’s Day, there he is on the couch with my mother.

His last name really does start with the letter
X
, but it’s a name I can never quite remember. Xeno? Xenus? Something like that. Anyway, that’s why he is Mr. X.

He’s been coming around a lot lately. I don’t mind too much because for the most part he treats me okay. He brings me lots of comic books, for one thing. The very comic book I am reading on this day had come from him. From the little suitcase that he brings with him sometimes. He buys the comic books and he gives them to me and then sometimes he goes into the bedroom with my mother while I am reading them.

I am eight years old, but I am not a dummy. I know the comic books are a way to keep me occupied. I play along because, hey, what can I do to stop them? They’re going to do what they’re going to do, and at least this way I’m getting comic books!

I remember I used to see my father on weekends sometimes. Back when I was five or six years old. We’d go to Tiger games and movies, and I believe one time we went on a big steamboat on the Detroit River even though it rained all day. Then he disappeared for what seemed like forever to me. Even when he was away, my mother would still get phone calls from him. She’d send me out of the room while she talked to him. Then she’d go outside and sit on the steps and smoke a cigarette.

She works at one of the plants down the river. Mr. X is actually her boss, I believe. The first time he came over, they went out and I got stuck with a babysitter all night, but then after that he started coming to the house and staying longer and longer. That’s when he started bringing the comic books.

So Father’s Day. Here we are, all sitting there in the room, when we all hear a noise at the front door. My mother gets up and looks out the little window, but she doesn’t see anybody. Before she comes back to the couch, she hooks that little chain on the door. That little chain with the knob that fits into that little slidey hole thing. No matter how old I am, I realize that a little chain like that is not going to stop somebody if that somebody really wants to get into the house. Not that anyone would want to. But if.

There is a back door in the kitchen, leading out into the tiny yard with the wooden fence around it. So there are two doors plus seven windows, which I know because I have counted them, plus the one tiny door on the side of the house from a long time ago when the milkman used to come. That was before I was born, but we did use that door the one time we got locked out of the house. I was just small enough back then to fit through it.

But that back door. That’s the door my father came in. Who I haven’t seen in two years. All of a sudden, it isn’t just my mother and Mr. X on the couch watching television while I sit on the floor reading my comic book. It’s my mother and Mr. X on the couch watching television while I sit on the floor reading my comic book and my father standing there in the doorway like it’s the most perfectly natural thing in the world, leaning against one wall with his feet crossed and saying, “So what are we all watching, huh?”

Mr. X gets up first and my father hits him across the face with something. It’s a rolling pin, which he’s picked up from the kitchen. Mr. X bends over with his hands on his head, and my father kicks him right in the face with his boot. My mother is screaming now and trying to get off the couch and getting tangled up with the legs of the coffee table while I keep sitting there the whole time watching everything happen. My father hits Mr. X in
the head again, and then he goes after my mother, who is trying to get the front door open now except she can’t because of that stupid little chain.

Then he spins her around a few times like they’re dancing, and my father asks her if she missed him. She’s trying to hit him and she’s screaming and finally she claws him right in the face. He pushes her down right next to me. Mr. X is trying to get up now, so my father picks up the rolling pin and hits him in the head again. And again and again and again and again. The sound of that wooden rolling pin hitting his head makes me think of one thing, which is the sound of a bat hitting a baseball.

My mother is screaming at him to stop, so he throws the rolling pin at the television. It hits the screen and knocks out one half of it while the other half goes black. Then while my mother is trying to crawl away, my father gets down on his knees and he comes over to me finally.

My mother is begging him to leave me alone, but all my father does is he takes my comic book from me and he looks at it.

“I’m not going to hurt our son,” he says. “How could you even think that?”

Then he hits her across the face with the back of his hand.

“Go in the bedroom,” he says to me, his voice dropping into a gentle tone. “Go ahead. It’ll be all right. I promise.”

I don’t want to move for one simple reason, and that is because I have pissed all over myself and I don’t want him to see the puddle on the floor.

“Go ahead,” he says. “Go. Right now.”

So I finally get up, puddle or no puddle. I go to the bedroom, and when I look back my father is taking his shirt off and my mother is crying and trying to get away. I go into my room and I try to open up my window, one of the seven windows in the house, but it has this lock on the top that is jammed tight and I can’t move it one little bit. My pants are all wet and I want to change but I can’t remember which drawer my pants are in and it doesn’t even occur to me that I could just start opening them until I find the right one. I can’t think straight at all. Not with those sounds coming from the living room.

There is a pile of comic books in my room and a desk with a pad on it where I had been trying to draw pictures of superheroes and a single bookshelf with my books on it, plus a trophy on top of that from T-ball, which I pick up now, thinking this might be something I could use because it would really hurt if it hit you on the head.

I open up the door to my bedroom, cracking it open the way I do at night
when I’m supposed to be in bed but I want to see what’s on television. But of course now the television is half gone and all I can see is what my father is doing to my mother in the living room. I could draw an exact picture but it still wouldn’t make any sense, the way she’s bent over the coffee table with her hair hanging to the floor and the way my father is behind her with his pants off, moving his hips against the back of her again and again.

He doesn’t see me coming out of the room with my T-ball trophy in my right hand, getting closer and closer until I can see what he has done to Mr. X’s body. How he’s taken Mr. X’s pants off just like he’s taken his own pants off except there’s blood all over Mr. X’s legs because he has cut off or pulled off or whatever else he has done to Mr. X’s private areas, as my mother calls it when I’m in the bathtub.

I run back down the hallway except this time I go into the spare bedroom where we keep my old bed I’ve grown out of, plus the old gun safe that used to be my father’s but was too heavy to get out of the house.

I am not allowed to open that safe or even touch it under any circumstances, my mother has said more than once. There’s something about the bolts in the door that are extra dangerous. Because they have springs in them that automatically lock when you close the door. But today seems like good circumstances to me all of a sudden after what I’ve just seen, and I don’t want my father to do to me what he’s done to Mr. X, so I pull the safe door open and I get inside. It’s empty now, of course, because my father doesn’t live here and he doesn’t have any guns or anything else to put in it, so I have just enough room if I sit cross-legged. Then I pull the door closed.

That’s when I realize that there is no handle on the inside. I can’t get back out even if I want to. Not without somebody on the outside spinning the right combination. I start to wonder if I really will suffocate or how I’ll even know if I am. I remember all those times when I’d be under my blanket and the air would get heavy until I stuck my nose out and the air would be so cool and delicious. It starts to feel like that, the heavy part I mean, but then I notice that there’s a thin line of light on the side of the door where the hinges are and if I put my nose up to it I can almost smell the fresh air.

So I stay in there with my legs crossed and my nose up against the side of the door. I can’t hear what’s going on outside the safe very well, but I know one thing for sure. As much as I’ve ever known anything in my whole life. I have to be quiet.