As I Die Lying (2 page)

My friend was clever but I usually came up
with a comeback, because in your own autobiography you don’t want
anybody to think you’re playing second fiddle or fifth harmonica or
ninth penny whistle. "But how can she love me and the midnight man
at the same time?"

"Maybe she only loves the midnight man when
his boots are off. Maybe they’re sole mates. Get it, s-o-l-e?"

"Funny, ha ha. Love shouldn't go on and off
like that. I love you all the time. And I don't want to die like
Jesus had to before He could get people to love Him," I said to the
person in my head. Throwing in the Jesus bit was a little
melodramatic, seeing as how we’d only been to church three times,
and only one of them didn’t involve food. You can sure get the best
coconut cakes at church.

"I love you, Richard,” he said. “I'll never
leave you. I won't let you get hurt."

I tucked Wee under my bruised arm. Wads of
cotton spilled from the rips in its neck and leg. The midnight man
had done that, but Wee didn’t have an invisible friend to hide him,
and I wasn’t sharing mine. "It's not so bad hiding. Inside, where
it’s dark. I wish we could stay there all the time."

“
We can't both go into the
Bone House."

"Why not?"

"Who would watch Wee? Wee can never be
alone."

My friend loved double meanings and playing
with words. It helped pass the time when he was stuck in the Bone
House. And maybe he wanted to be a writer when he grew up, just
like everybody else. But first he’d have to live long enough to
grow up.

Thump
thump
.

Our eyes opened, our shared heart boomed like
the storm rolling down the hallway, but only one of us got to flee
for the hidden room inside my skull.

Me first. Always me.

"Up the stairs, away, away, away," whispered
my friend. "Sounds like someone’s putting his foot down."

And off I’d go.

CHAPTER TWO

Later I learned that the midnight man was
only my father. The boots visited less often as I got older, and
the friend inside my head didn't come out much. Rather, I didn’t go
inside the Bone House to see him.

I found other playmates at school, ones you
could see and who talked with real voices. I learned the world was
much bigger than the nightmares trapped between the walls of my
bedroom. Life smelled of chalk and Hope Hill’s perfume and burning
leaves and strawberry milkshake. My childish fears seemed silly out
under the sunshine, where boys and girls played kick ball and pain
was farther away than Jesus or the clouds in the blue sky or other
insubstantial, amorphous objects.

Father preserved his boot leather but
discovered other ways to torture. He attacked with words, and maybe
that’s where I get my literary talent. Not that I want to give that
bastard any credit at all for this book, since the byline is up for
debate. But he could really pour it on.

He invented a dozen fresh insults, doused
acid on my psyche, and dubbed me “Dumbbell.” This seemed to give
him more pleasure than the physical abuse. Mother had begun her
descent from youth into old age without slowing down for the middle
years. She was weary from lifting her forearms to fend off the
blows, beaten down by the sight of her own emaciated and battered
flesh, worn from clinging to the spidery threads of black hope.
Father, however, seemed to grow younger, as if he’d tapped a
perverted fountain of youth, Narcissus at a whiskey vat.

Father worked at the John Deere plant, spot
welding harrow joints and tractor wheels. He helped make the
machines for the slaves of the soil, those who turned the dark
drift and loess of the Iowa tableland. He was chained to the dirt
without even the pleasure of holding it in his hand, kicking at it
with his scuffed boots, or checking the sky for portents. He had
wanted to be a crop duster, but never had the time and money to get
his pilot's license.

Perhaps the air could have stolen his anger.
Perhaps his frustration was in being earthbound, because he was
particularly venomous after returning from weekend air shows in
Cedar Falls or Des Moines. On the Christmas I was nine, he gave me
a model kit for a Northrop P-61 Black Widow fighter, and we spent
the snowy afternoon carefully putting it together. He let me glue
the fuselage myself and guided my hands as I joined the propeller
and engine parts.

His mouth watered as he concentrated on the
more tedious attachments, and he sucked in his drool with a
whistling sound before it could dribble down his chin. He had not
even been drinking that day, or at least his breath didn't smell
like vinegar and shoe polish yet. He made engine noises with his
mouth, as if he were imagining a scale model of himself at the
controls. We applied the decals just as Mother pulled the steaming
golden turkey from the oven.

Never had so much laughter filled that
usually sullen apartment. My stocking was bloated with peppermints,
walnuts, and lemon drops, and I shared the bounty with my parents.
We huddled around the skeleton of the turkey, its alabaster bones a
silent centerpiece to the gathering. We even sang "White Christmas"
together, at least the few lines we knew. Father sang in a bassy
parody of Bing Crosby, Mother bleated half-heartedly, and I croaked
in an atonal barrage of sound that was more percussion than
harmony.

The model plane crash-landed under the heel
of Father's boot two days later, after his first day back at the
plant. It was my fault, I admit. I just didn’t hide it good enough.
Christmas was over, and none of us were making any resolutions for
the new year. Father renewed his verbal assaults, calling me
"Little bastard" and "Fuckwit," stringing together seventeen dirty
words in fits of misplaced poetic genius, but his pet name for me
was "Shit For Brains."

One day I brought home my report card, and he
looked down the neat rows of A’s until he found my C in
citizenship.

"Hey, Shit For Brains, what's this C for?" he
bellowed, spittle and bourbon mist spraying out of his mouth. The
cruel muscles of his forearms bulged under the rolled-up sleeves of
his flannel shirt, the toes of his boots flexing. "Your teacher
says here, 'Richard doesn't get along well with the other students.
He fails to participate in class activities.' Now what kind of
horseshit is that?"

I mumbled something, afraid to meet his fiery
eyes. I didn’t know he could read that well. I’d never heard him
use the word “participate.” He was clearly far more dangerous than
I’d ever considered. I sensed my friend fluttering uneasily in the
Bone House like a bat at an Alaskan sundown.

"It figures I'd turn out a problem child. A
fucking bad seed. Your asshole Granddad can rest in peace now that
the Coldiron curse has been safely passed on to the next
generation."

My only memory of Granddad had been seeing
him laid out in that coffin the year before. I had taken my place
in line and walked past him, the way Mother told me. She held my
hand. I didn't know what I was supposed to do, but my friend in the
Bone House said I should pretend to be sad.

I recognized Granddad's face from some of the
blurry photographs that had fallen out of one of Father's airplane
books. He had mean eyes, like he was mad at the camera, but his
skin was smooth. He was wearing a blue uniform with medals pinned
on his chest. But in the coffin he was all wrinkled and his skin
was as dull as wax fruit and, of course, his eyes were closed. The
cloth on the inside of the coffin was purple, the color of a king's
robe. He smelled like chemicals and bad bacon.

Mother said, "Doesn't he
look so
good
? Like
he’s sleeping and he could just sit up and talk."

I didn't want that to happen. I stared at the
little wires of white hair that stuck out of his ear. Some people
in the back of the room were crying, and I looked at Father's face.
It was red, maybe because his necktie was choking him. That was the
only time I ever saw him wear a tie, at least until he was in a
coffin himself.

Father looked a little like the man in the
coffin. They both had the same sharp nose and round chin, just like
me. But unlike Granddad, Father was smiling a little bit, a tiny
smile that barely turned up at the corners of his mouth, the kind
you get when you're doing something fun that you know is wrong. The
man in the coffin, his mouth had fallen in a little, as if he had
swallowed his teeth. He didn't look like a man who carried secret
curses, at least not anymore. Unless they were in one of his
pockets that I couldn’t see. You know how people get when they’re
hiding something good.

I wondered what kind of curse Granddad had
passed down. I had heard about the Mummy's Curse from peeking into
the living room at late-night movies. I pictured Granddad coming
back wrapped in rotted rags, reaching out with hands like mittens
to get Father, to squeeze that little smile off his face. Was it
hope or fear that rattled in my chest at the thought, and why did
laughter echo from the Bone House?

Maybe that's why Father was so angry, because
he couldn't escape the curse, and it would someday track him down.
But then, Father didn't need an excuse to be angry. A barking dog
could set him off, or a flat tire in the rain, or that time the
blow torch didn’t get hot enough. But I don’t like to remember any
of that, so let’s get back to the report card.

"Get out of my sight, you sorry sack of
shit," he said, ripping up the report card and throwing the four
pieces into the air. I went to my room and hid in the closet until
Mother called me to dinner. I tiptoed into the living room. Father
was asleep on the couch, his boots propped up on a ragged pillow. I
eased around the boots and gathered the pieces of the report card,
taped them back together, and forged Father’s signature, pressing
extra hard with the tip of the pen.

School wasn't bad. It was peaceful there. No
one ever hit me at school or called me Shit For Brains. The other
kids were mostly just a murmur in the background to me, white noise
to be ignored. The worst thing was sitting behind Hope Hill, whose
honey-blond hair smelled like the sun and made me ache inside.

I buried my nose in a book, even when I was
supposed to be learning things like why the Earth circled around
the sun without flying off into space. I didn't need to know why.
If they said it did, that was good enough for me, and it’s not like
I could do anything about it anyway. I’d already learned that there
were facts and the truth, and then there was the real stuff of this
world, the Bone House, the lies, the secret curses, stuff that
mattered.

When Mother started letting me go outside by
myself, I found new games. I explored the neighborhood and prowled
in the junk cars that were scattered behind the garage next door. I
pretended I was Huck Finn, hiding away on Jackson Island. I made a
nest in an old dog pen, hidden from the world by vines and weeds.
There was a hole in the wire where the dogs used to get out, and I
used it as a tunnel. The doghouse was tall enough for me to sit up.
Enough room for a boy and his dreams, plus all the turds were
dry.

I liked to read there, books checked out from
the school library, borrowed from Mother's shelves, or sometimes a
comic bought at the corner store for a quarter. A few boards were
missing in the doghouse roof, and the late afternoon sun streamed
through the gap, flooding my hideaway with light and bringing the
words on the pages to life. I read of fellow castaways like
Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson, I went around and
under the world in the books of Jules Verne and Edgar Rice
Burroughs, I went to other worlds that had been given mantle by the
mind of H.G. Wells and J.R.R. Tolkien. Don’t tell anybody, but I
also liked Nancy Drew.

I could stay there until nightfall, unless
Mother called to see where I was. Then I would slither out of the
tunnel of foliage and walk out of the nearby cedar trees to make
her think I had been playing in the woods like a normal boy. I
thought it was important to have a secret place that wasn’t the
Bone House. My belly tingled when I was hiding alone, knowing no
one could find me. I felt sneaky and safe, and once in a while my
invisible friend joined me even though he didn’t need to listen for
boots.

When the sun started sinking below the flat
horizon, it was time to go home for dinner. I waited for the
shadows to grow long, then flitted from one to the next, pretending
to be a spy. Most of the time, Father would already be asleep when
I crept through the door, with his hand dangling down to the dirty
rug, his mouth open and snoring, his lidless bottle sitting on the
coffee table beside him. Mother and I would eat silently at the
little Formica kitchen table, usually pigs in a poke, Vienna
sausages rolled in canned biscuits, pinto beans, macaroni, a dinner
that cost less than a dollar. Above us hung a collector’s plate of
Jesus, gilded with foil and perched on a brass wire. She didn’t
make me pray, just let me eat in peace and silence. Then I could
slip off to bed before she woke up Father.

I didn't hate Father for
wearing the boots. I was supposed to love him, the same way I was
supposed to love Jesus. Just
because
. But even if I had to love
him, that didn't mean that I couldn't do it while hiding in the
dark. Locked doors were useless. His boots liked to smash doors
almost as much as they liked skindancing, though he never found the
door to the Bone House.

And sometimes, in the sunlight, he was nice.
On Saturday mornings, he would already be awake and sitting on the
couch watching cartoons when I shuffled into the living room in my
Speed Racer pajamas. I’d rub my sleepy eyes and crawl up next to
him, dragging my dreams. He smelled like coffee and aftershave, and
he’d put his arm around me. His stubble scratched my cheek as he
hugged me and my teddy bear, and no anger burned in the red corners
of his eyes. He never called me “Shit For Brains” on Saturday
mornings, just the occasional affectionate “Dumbbell.”