Wink

W
ink

Eric Trant

WiDō Publishing • Salt Lake City

WiD
ō
Publishing
Salt Lake City, Utah
www.widopublishing.com

Copyright © 2013 by Eric Trant

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Cover Design by Steven Novak
Book Design by Marny K. Parkin

Print ISBN: 978-1-937178-34-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013934184

Printed in the United States of America

For my family, as always,
Amanda, Brianna, Connor, and Dastan.
We miss you, Daz.

Chapter 
1
  Running with Knives

It could have been something he imagined, one of those pipe dreams kids come up with late at night, under the covers with a friend and a flashlight. It did not seem real, but after a year of searching through piles of heaped scrap metal, busted refrigerators, and other junk like himself thrown away and forgotten, here he was, holding a knife as big as his arm. The blade alone reached from his elbow to his wrist. Marty Jameson turned it over in his hand and fought back a sudden urge to kiss the blade.

The summer heat throbbed off the piled garbage around him, entering through his feet and grasping the back of his neck. The stench and rot of the place dug into his nose. Marty sniffed it away and swiped his index finger across his nostrils. Something had died close-by. Something always seemed to have died close-by.

“Hey, Sugar, what you got?” Gus asked. He had come up behind Marty as he leaned over his find.

Marty stuffed the knife under his shirt. The blade was rusty and it didn’t look sharp. He’d take care of that later. “Nothing,” Marty answered. “I ain’t got nothing.”

“Liar,” Gus said. “I saw you put something under your shirt, Sugar-boy, let’s see!”

“I ain’t got nothing,” Marty said. He turned and ran despite the danger of having a blade so close to his heart.

Marty was faster than all the other boys, except for Luke. He sprinted around a stack of old tires, between two stripped-out Volkswagons, and ducked beneath a tower of burnt-out oil drums. He clambered inside one of the barrels before Luke rounded the corner behind him. The rest followed, all running past Marty. Silent, Marty waited until he heard Gus scream, “He went over to the crane!” before climbing out of his hole.

Marty drew the knife from his shirt. The blade was wide and long and heavy with an eagle-claw point, a true Jim Bowie knife, with a busted fake-ivory handle that had broken halfway down the length of the grip. Marty tucked the knife into his belt so that it both looked and felt like a sword on his hip. He raced home, stopping only once to lift a piece of corrugated tin and claim a beat-up wire grinder brush he spotted. He could use that to clean the blade.

The next day it rained, huge drops that fell straight down without wind and without thunder. Marty sat in the attic next to the window as if beneath a waterfall, hidden behind clear sheets of water as the rain rolled over the eaves.

He sat in a toddler’s chair, one he found crammed into the corner of the attic when he moved in two years ago, after Gerald got hurt. The wicker seat was chewed-through, and the sharp corners of the broken straws sometimes poked him, but its legs were strong enough that Marty could lean back as he worked. The overhead light had long ago burned out and never been replaced, and so Marty sat where he could see in the darkness. The cascading rain somehow amplified the light here. It was a magical, peaceful respite from the otherwise bleak quietude of the black space around him.

Marty’s fingers bled from where the wire brush stabbed him. The wild-haired brush wasn’t meant to be held. It was designed to spin on a grinder. He had taken off his blue jeans and used the fabric to pad his hands. It worked well, and during the past few hours, Marty had scraped most of the rust from the blade and saved the rest of his fingers.

According to his mom’s scale, the one she kept hidden beneath the bathroom towels, the knife weighed just under a pound. It sat heavy in Marty’s lap, a sharp reminder of the weight in his heart and his mind, and no less sinister. In his pocket was another weight, this one a few ounces he’d lifted from the knife-drawer in the kitchen: a battered and chipped whetstone.

Marty held the knife up in the shimmering light. “You’re almost clean,” he said. “Then I’ll put an edge on you that’ll cut through glass.”

He worked through the day and by the time the rain let up, the sun was setting over Houston. That’s how Marty always thought about the sunrise and sunset. The sun rose up from Beaumont, hovered over Cypress Knee, and after a while dropped into Houston and the Galveston Bay. The sun followed the course of I-10 and the screaming diesel trucks and endless stream of cars flowing westward in front of Marty’s house. The eastbound traffic, which to Marty always seemed backward, was on the far side of the freeway, mostly hidden from view by a high median wall of concrete and black tarp.

Marty moved from the east window to the west to stay with the light, and now the shadows crept in behind him, tacked to the legs of his wicker chair, stretching long and orange across the battered attic floor. A tall live oak with its thumbnail leaves filtered out a good deal of the western light, and Marty twisted the knife closer to his eyes and rubbed at the hilt with the wire brush wrapped in his blue jeans.

Marty heard his mother yell for him from the back yard. He was lost in the repetitious act of sharpening and his hand slipped, and he gashed out a wound in his right thumb.

“Marty,” she hollered. “Sugar, you get on home, now. Where the hell are you?”

Marty ripped off a piece of his shirt and wrapped his bleeding thumb. His mom banged around the shed, and then slammed the tin door and yelled into the yard.

Marty set the knife and whetstone on the floor beneath the toddler chair. His mother never seemed to look up, preferring to watch her feet as she walked, her eyes always scanning for snakes. She had no idea about his spot in the attic, and Marty meant to keep it that way.

He moved across the floor in practiced silence, avoiding the creaky boards and the attic access point in his bedroom, following the floored-in stretch beneath the main pique of the house. Three rusted air vents ground out an unsteady squeal in the ceiling.

His mom was on the north side of the house, in the back yard still poking around the shed and the carport and Uncle Cooper’s old Ford truck. She couldn’t see him as he stepped onto the windowsill and held the storm shutter and balanced on the outside lip. He lowered the window until nothing more than his fingers could get beneath it. Only his toes and fingers held him clinging to the face of the house.

Marty stood balanced, with the shutter keeping him from falling into the bushes and the air-conditioner unit directly below him. Despite being a single-story house, the ceilings inside the house were high, and since the house itself was raised a few feet, Marty hung about fifteen feet above the ground. He grabbed the top of the storm shutter and monkey-swung away from the windowsill, across the open space, and flopped onto the narrow length of shingled roof above Gerald’s bedroom.

Marty didn’t worry that Gerald might hear him when he hit the roof. Gerald didn’t hear much of anything anymore.

Marty crouched under the eave while his thumb throbbed, waiting for it to stop bleeding. After it subsided, he wedged the bloody rag into the crevice formed between the eave and the house slats, and wrapped the shutter rope around a nail hammered just this side of the roof drop-off. Sometimes the wind blew the shutter closed and Marty had to sneak into the attic from inside the house. He solved that little problem by tying a piece of bailing twine to the shutter corner and hitching it to a nail in the side of the house. In some way, it seemed to him that he was hitching his horse to the post for the next day’s chase and escape.

Marty shimmied onto the main roof and looked out into back yard to find his mother. She wasn’t down there and he couldn’t hear her, but if she had been, all she had to do was look up and she would see him crab-crawling along the roof toward the carport. He crossed the north side of the house and lowered himself onto the tin roof of the carport and skirted along the top, keeping his feet on the nail heads where there would be cross-beams beneath. He grabbed a limb and swung to the ground beneath the mimosa tree he used to gain access to the rooftop.

The carport was walled in except for the entrance, and when Marty put his feet on the crushed oyster shells that filled the driveway, his heart skipped into his throat. “Oh shit,” he said, and his thumb began to throb.

Where the carport had been empty this morning, his father’s truck now sat parked. The heat of the road clasped around it like an enormous, invisible fist.

Daddy was home.

Chapter 2
  Daddy’s Home

“Hello the house and hullabaloo, someone fetch a frosty brew!”

That was Marty’s dad, lying half-naked in his recliner with his hand thrust above his head, fingers squeezing the empty air, nothing but his brownish-white boxer briefs to contain his man parts. Smoke drifted up from the top of his chair. Something played on the television and it didn’t matter what it was, not to Marty and not to his father. Neither of them were watching it.

“Get him a beer, Sugar,” Marty’s mom said. She had the remote control in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She drew the cigarette in and out of her mouth in a rapid nervous twitch, and with the other hand jabbed the remote channel past show after show on the television.

Marty jumped up from the table where he had been eating his dinner—tonight was half-cooked fish sticks still frozen in the middle, and a spoonful of macaroni and cheese from last weekend’s gallon-sized batch his mother had made. He ate with a plastic fork and a Styrofoam plate because all the good forks and plates were dirty and piled high in the kitchen sink like fallen warriors.

Marty jogged to the fridge and grabbed his father a Miller Lite. When he handed it to his father, the man gripped Marty’s wrist and said, “You didn’t shake it, did you boy?”

“No, sir,” Marty said.

“Better not, or I’ll beat your ass. I’ll beat his ass, Betsy.”

“Shut up, Ike,” Marty’s mother said. “Let him go before I call child protection.” She flicked the remote and didn’t look up at Marty. She tugged her cigarette. The last time CPS came out, they had put Marty into foster care with a couple who lived in Channelview, just outside of Houston. The foster family’s house smelled like dog shit because they let their terriers mess the carpet.

“Don’t go ovulating on me, woman. We don’t need that sort of trouble.” Ike sat up in his easy chair and cracked open the beer. When it didn’t spew, he said, “Good. I knew you’d grow up someday, boy.”

He twisted Marty’s hand and pried open his fist, inspecting Marty’s fingers and palm. “What happened to your hand, boy? What are all those scratches about?”

“Nothing,” Marty said.

His father squeezed. “Don’t you nothing me, boy. What have you been into? You ain’t been in that shed, have you?”

His mother looked over at him and rolled her eyes. “He’s a goddamn boy, Ike. He gets scratched up. If you were here you’d know that. I bet I go through a dozen Band-Aids a week with him, don’t I, Sugar?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Marty said. His father squeezed Marty’s palm and gripped his thumb like a snake-head, twisting it and squeezing beneath the thumbnail until blood began to bubble out of the knife-cut. Marty’s fingerprint would show a smooth line across his thumb.

“Hell’s bells, boy, you need to keep yourself better. We can’t afford no more doctor bills. God knows we can’t afford no more doctor bills, ain’t that right, Betsy?”

“He don’t need a doctor,” Marty’s mom answered. “I’ll get him a Band-Aid. He’ll be fine. Come here, Sugar, let me see.”

Marty’s mom waved her cigarette hand at him, and Marty crossed the living room in front of his father’s feet and sat on the coffee table. His mother inspected the cut on his thumb and the berry-patch of prickly scratches he had suffered at the hand of the wire grinder brush. The flicking of the television screen stopped and settled on a news station where Diane Sawyer was discussing floods in the Midwest.

“He’s alright,” his mother said to Ike, and then to Marty. “You’re alright, Sugar. Go finish eating.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Diane Sawyer disappeared, and random faces with snips of mid-sentence conversations played on the television as his mother resumed her spastic run through the channels.

Marty’s father kicked him when he walked by. “We can’t afford no more doctor bills, boy. You stay good.” He pointed with his Miller Lite at Gerald’s room. “You done enough already. Eat your dinner and quit costing me and your momma the goddamned farm.”

“Shut up, Ike,” his mother said. Someone on the television discussed whether bigfoot existed, and then disappeared and was replaced by an ocean scene, a chef, a reality show with bleeping conversations, a pissed-off blonde throwing a vase of flowers, and a science-fiction movie in Spanish.

Marty sat at the dinner table and leaned over his plate. Magazines and half-filled boxes littered the table, but for the open niche he carved to eat dinner. It was a picnic style table with a bench on each side, one solid piece, that he and his Uncle Cooper had built out of yellow pine and stained a light amber. Marty had helped sand and finish it, and his uncle had even let him use the router to round the table edges. His mom had threatened to burn the table but then decided to bury it alive with her boxes of junk and knick-knacks.

Somewhere on the bottom of the table, Marty had written his name next to Cooper Ray Babineaux, Jr.

He ate and left his mother to her channel-hopping and his father to his drinking, and made his way past Gerald’s room, down the hallway and around the boxes thrown there, and into his bedroom at the front of the house. It was quiet in here with the door shut. The hum of the cars on the freeway rose up through the ground and floorboards of the house, and he fell asleep dreaming of the knife, and how it would feel in his hand once he cut a handle for it.

Marty woke in the middle of the night when he heard tapping on his bedroom window. He heard a voice, a hushed whisper-scream full of desperate breath. “Marty, boy, wake up. Wake up.”

At first Marty didn’t move. The voice terrified him more than the snakes they found throughout the house, the long black thin ones that stretched themselves along the floorboards, so still you thought they were dead until you whacked it with a broom and threw it over the fence into the pasture.

Marty slept under nothing more than a sheet with a ceiling fan clicking above him. Cobwebs roped down from the spackled ceiling to the fan motor, and when he turned off the fan during the winter, the dust along the blades was stacked fluffy and gray as polluted city fog.

“Open the goddamned window, boy,” the voice said. Knuckles tapped the glass.

“Daddy?” Marty asked, recognizing the voice and speaking more to himself than to the voice. He sat up on his elbows and looked through the torn aluminum blinds that served no more purpose for keeping out light than would a hand of splayed fingers.

His father’s face was there, ghosted behind the windowpane, and his mouth moved.

“Open it up, boy. Your mom done locked me out.”

“Okay,” Marty said. He checked that the floor was free of snakes, and then swung his legs onto the wooden planks.

A stack of boxes blocked the window, full of needle-works and old pictures, and a pair of leather cowboy boots that Marty’s mother said belonged to his grandfather. Marty moved the boxes to the side.

“Hurry up, boy,” his father said. His chin just cleared the bottom of the windowsill, and Marty guessed he must be uncomfortable. There were bushes outside almost as tall as Marty, and a wasp nest overhead that got bigger each spring.

After he cleared a path in the piled-up junk, Marty drew up the blinds and lifted the pane.

His father’s hands shot through the opening and grabbed for him. Marty instinctively backed up until his father said, “Boy, help me up. I ain’t got nothing to stand on. Hoist me in.”

“Why don’t I go unlock the door?”

“Your mom’s having one of her episodes, boy. Now hoist me up.”

That was all he needed to say.
Episode
was the code word they had developed for his mother’s rages. Several times the police had come out at her behest, and twice Marty’s father had left in handcuffs. His mother always refused to press charges, but the threat remained that after she attacked the two of them, she could haul his father away as a repeat domestic offender, and ship Marty to a foster home.

Marty grabbed his father’s hands and helped him through. His father was genetically and nutritionally thin, and Marty was surprised how light he felt coming in through the window. His father slinked in, flopped onto the floor, and rolled to his feet. He brushed his legs, arms and chest, still wearing the bruised-looking boxer briefs and nothing more. He turned and closed the window, and on his back was the giant spider-web with the red-dotted black widow between the shoulder blades, hugging the spine with all eight legs. The web stretched from shoulder to shoulder, neck to hip like a gossamer cape.

“Shh,” his father said, turning back to Marty and leaning down close. Even in the dark room Marty saw the red haze in his eyes, that familiar puffiness brought on by too much alcohol. His father drank so much that beer was his odor, that if a dog were to be fooled Marty could pour a can of it and match his father’s scent.

“Go see where she is,” his father said. “She won’t hurt you none. She got it out for me, though.”

“Why, Daddy?”

“Tell her to unlock the damn door, boy, or open it if you can get to it. She’s in it full-on. Had her goddamned sewing needles. Look where she stuck me.” Marty’s father turned his forearms over and showed him several dotted wounds that would have matched his mother’s crochet needles. “She’d have got my eyes if I hadn’t had my arms up. Keep your arms up, boy, like this.” His father positioned Marty’s arms in front of his face with the palms outward, and then shoved him into the hallway and closed the bedroom door behind him.

To the right was the bathroom and the tub that didn’t work. Marty had been washing in the sink for about six months, since winter when the pipes burst. He walked into the bathroom on his quiet feet and drew back the shower curtain. His mother sometimes crawled into the tub and cried there.

She wasn’t in the shower, and Marty went back into the hallway. There weren’t any lights on this side of the house, and he had to be careful to navigate the boxes piled in the hallway so that he didn’t knock them over. The carpet padded his steps such that he could sneak through the maze of junk and wind into Gerald’s bedroom.

Still holding his hands in front of his face, Marty slunk into his brother’s room that was the old woodshop, and he looked around for his mother. She usually came to see Gerald during her episodes. She would stand over Gerald and look down at him like one of those zombies in the movies, mouth open, hands by her side, her hair mussed from where she had been tearing at it.

Tonight she wasn’t in Gerald’s room. The only one in there was Gerald and the old band saw with a block of half-cut oak sitting on the cutting deck. Chisels and hammers and other tools lined the walls. A heavy dust hung in the air as if something had just been cut. In stark contrast to the steely cutting tools, Gerald’s sheets and breathing machine were unearthly foreign things dropped from space into a world they did not belong. The breathing machine chuffed and relaxed, chuffed and relaxed.

Marty walked to his brother’s bed, lowered his hands, and touched his brother’s chest. Gerald was naked but for a plastic diaper his mother changed once a day. He had wasted away to this skeletal thing lying almost-alive in a lonesome bed. His skin felt pasty, and Marty thought that if he rubbed hard enough it would peel off like well-cooked chicken from the bone. Gerald had been so strong before, tall and dark-skinned, able to lift Marty above his head with one arm.

When he turned back to the hallway, Marty’s mother was there in the doorway, her hair wild and her crochet needles held like swords in each of her hands. She was a pasty white ghost of a woman in the shadowed darkness of the unlit woodshop bedroom.

Without a sound, she launched at Marty and jabbed at him with the crochet needles. They weren’t particularly
dangerous, or at least Marty didn’t think they would be, not crochet needles with their hooked and dulled endpoints, but she stabbed at him with such force and determination that Marty thought she would run him through if she ever hit.

Marty dove behind the hospital bed and wound his way behind the band saw, and ape-crawled along the floor with his mother jabbing the needles into his kidneys and rear. He made the door and turned left, grabbing boxes in the hallway and leaving them tumbling behind him in an avalanche of junk that began near the ceiling and ended with a tumultuous crash in the hallway.

His father waved him in and they slammed the door. His father motioned to the dresser. “Get that end.”

Marty tended the far end of the dresser and they barricaded the doorway. They leaned against it as if that might help, which it wouldn’t. His mother in her episodes could break doors. His parent’s bedroom door was plenty proof of that.

“Guess you found her, boy,” his father said. “You tell her to unlock the door?” He laughed, but Marty’s heart raced too hard to find any humor in the remark. His father belched, blinked red-eyed, and said, “Did she get you?”

“Yeah,” Marty said. “It hurts.”

His father slapped the side of Marty’s head. “You’re tough. Shake it off, boy.”

“Yes, sir.”

His father shushed him and they both tilted their ears toward the door, listening for Marty’s mother to make her presence known. There was neither creak nor groan, nor any other sound outside the door. All he heard was his father’s nasal breathing and the tick-tick of the ceiling fan.

Something slammed against the bedroom door. It wasn’t his mother, but must have been something she threw. It sounded like a pot or some such, because it rattled metallic when it hit the door, and then clanged into the junk on the floor.

A few breaths of silence followed the crash, and then Marty’s mother issued forth a bloody scream that sounded as if she were trying to rip out her own vocal cords.

It was quiet after that, and Marty wondered if his mother had moved to the couch, or maybe crawled into the bathtub, or was still standing in the hallway looking into Gerald’s room with eyes that seemed to see only the color black. His father stepped away from the dresser and sat on the bedsprings.

“Hell, boy. Guess I’m stuck with your sorry ass tonight, ’less I want to bust down the back door. And I ain’t ruining another jamb. I’m beat.” His father lay back and took the bed and the sheet for himself. “You kick like a man on fire. Sleep down there, boy, on the floor. I got to work tomorrow and I need my rest. All you got to do is fart around and break stuff.”

Marty used a pair of old jeans for a pillow, and a shirt for a blanket. It was hot, but he felt he should have something to put his head under if the time came. After a while, he heard his mother through the floorboards, pacing the hallway, thumping the wall.

The junk in the hallway slid around, sounded like a landslide of debris, and Marty sat up. The dresser against the door shook, and things fell off the top and clattered to the floor. A thin crack formed in the doorway. Fingers slid through the crack, wiggled, got no farther than the palm, and were withdrawn. There was a deep grunt from the other side of the door, followed by a shove, and when the door refused to open any wider, it was pulled closed with such force that it sounded like it might tear through the door jamb.