This story originally appeared in “Bare Bone #3” edited by Kevin L. Donihe, in 2000.
“They want you to tuck them in. Read a story.”
I tried not to flinch. I swallowed the last of my drink and stood up, wobbling a little.
“Okay.”
Her eyes were on me, disapproving.
“Jesus, Hal, you know I don’t like you drunk around the boys.”
I nodded, my fists clenched. I couldn’t turn to face her. “I know. Don’t worry. I’ll be careful.”
After a few moments of silence, I made myself start walking, through the living room, down the hall to the boys’ room–decorated just five years before with such love and hope. I’d painted the walls and varnished the cribs myself. I didn’t understand how it was that I’d been rewarded with children like these. Now I pushed the door inward reluctantly. Stood framed in the light of the hall for a moment, hearing their little bodies squirming around.
“Daddy’s come,” one of them whispered.
“Under the covers.” I croaked.
I could hear compliance. They were obedient children.
“Daddy’s drunk again,” the other whispered.
Shuffling into the cool, dark room, I was suddenly aware of my liquor fumes, my unshaven beard, the stink of another day on me. Unlocking my fists, I went to one bed, leaned down, and brushed my dry lips against a smooth, calm forehead.
“Good night. Sleep tight.” I cawed into the dark, a rough whisper.
“Good night, Daddy.” came the tiny boy’s voice, followed by giggles. I shivered, but forced myself to turn and leaned down to my other son. I pushed my whiskers into another small cheek, and more soft giggles appeared in the hidden air.
“Daddy,” the second small voice drifted up, hot and close to my ear. “I’m going to kill you, when I get big enough.”
I shut my eyes.
A loud crash brought me up into a cloud of anguish. My head pounded, my eyes were sealed shut with mistakes. An empty bottle of whiskey on the table and Debbie banging breakfast around with an attitude.
I cradled my head in my hands and moaned. My stomach tried to crawl up my throat. I felt her turn to face me. Then a moment of silence.
“I married a drunk.”
I groaned. “Oh for the love of God…”
“Whatever. Just get out of here before the boys come down. I don’t want them to see you like this.”
Fear instead of strength, but I managed to get to my feet. I turned and blinked in the light of the kitchen. And there they were. My boys.
Rodney, dark hair, clear gray eyes, his mother’s upturned nose. Freckles.
Todd, slightly taller, fair hair, almost blonde, dark eyes, almost black. White, white skin.
They giggled, looking at each other. An involuntary shiver went through me. I looked at Debbie; arms akimbo, her eyes were flat and angry. As usual.
“Good morning, Daddy.” the boys giggled, not quite in sync.
“Daddy’s not feeling well this morning.” Debbie said, shooing them into the room. They moved around me and I heard the creak and scrape of the chairs. Her eyes stayed on me, burning. I looked away and made myself move. She watched me, silent.
####
It was a hot day. I didn’t feel it, much. Sweat poured off me and I moved carefully because the engine room was baking hot, and the metal would burn. I liked working down there. I just let my mind go blank, and let my body move through the bilge, soaking it up with a mop, squeezing it into a bucket. The smell of oil in the air. The rig was damaged and we were cleaning it up, and it was good, painful work.
At lunch I emerged into the sun, darkened by filth and permanently damp. The smell clung to me, and no one sat next to me. I had the whole twelve-inch pipe to myself, and my lunch of cigarettes. I squinted through the thick air and pushed air in and out of my lungs and wondered how I had ended up with such children.
“Man, Donneley, you look like shit.”
I squinted up at Oswald, black and glistening, bald, wearing big wraparound sunglasses.
“What they got you doing?”
He sat down next to me, unafraid of the stink. “Man, bullshit, that’s what they got me doing. Why that prick Wayne don’t send some of these people home? Ain’t enough work. But Wayne takes all comers like he desperate.”
I nodded, smoking.
“But hey, I ain’t joking with you, you look like shit.” he said. “Your wife been beating on you?”
“Maybe a little.”
“I was just kiddin with you.”
“I know.”
A pause. “You really do look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
I had no words in me that didn’t begin with my children and end with me crying in front of everyone, the men I worked with and drank with. I kept my mouth shut, breathed smoke. I didn’t think I’d had any oxygen all day, just the smell of dry whisky, oil fumes, and cigarette smoke.
Suddenly, Oswald said “Whatever it is, man, just push through, okay? Ain’t nothin’ a man can’t survive if he’s righteous and strong. So be righteous and say your prayers.”
We sat in embarrassed silence for a moment. Then Oswald, his piece said, hauled himself up and slapped me on the shoulder and walked away.
####
I wasn’t drunk enough, but I was out of money. I stood outside the house feeling suffocated in my dirty work-clothes and oily skin. Sweaty, I couldn’t breathe. Through the windows I could see shadows, my wife moving from room to room, the boys running. I was fairly sure none of them had, as yet, missed me at all.
I looked down at the ground. My shoes were caked with dirt. I could turn, and walk away with ten dollars in my pocket, each step getting easier and easier. Accumulating distance until I was at least ten dollars away from there, and I knew that if I got far enough away, I’d be able to sleep at night. I’d be safe.
The door opened, and Debbie stood outlined in it. “Oh, for god’s sake. What are you doing out there?”
From within the house I could hear the boys shouting “Daddy’s home!” I winced.
“You should be guilty.” Debbie snapped. She took a step down towards me. “For god’s sake, Michael–what happened to you? To us?” She stopped, her face soft and confused but her arms crossed fiercely. “You were a decent man. What happened?”
I couldn’t look at her, so I stared at my filthy boots. I couldn’t tell her the truth, that the boys had happened to me. When I looked up, she was gone.
Slowly, I made my legs work, and climbed back into the house.
####
“Your mother said you wanted to hear a story.”
They peered at me from behind their blankets, two sets of eyes. There was nothing familiar about them, those eyes, no hint of me at all. They watched me in silence as I fumbled my way to the small chair between their beds, and then with the thick book of fairy tales Debbie and I had bought in a used bookstore, in better times.
“No, Daddy,” Rodney said, his voice soft and hidden, “we want to tell you a story. We want to tell you how we’re going to kill you.”
I closed my eyes. “Stop it.”
“But we want to tell you.” His voice was so soft, tiny. I could see his little fingers gripping the blankets, harmless and perfect, untouched as of yet. “We want you to know, because it won’t be for so long, until we’re big enough.”
“It only seems fair.” Todd whispered behind me.
“Shut up, both of you.” I managed, keeping my voice down by hissing it out through clenched teeth.”
“You’ll be drunk.” Rodney said with a giggle. “It’ll be late, so you’ll have had a lot to drink. But you won’t have passed out yet. We’ll be careful.”
I reached out and put my hand over his mouth, to stop him. Could feel him giggling against my dry palm, a small vibration. So I pressed more firmly to still it, and held my hand there. And Todd was screaming, sounding for all the world like a real little boy.
And I stayed that way, until something hit my head, and everything went black.
####
I held the package and it felt warm against my hands, which were sweaty in the August heat. I was still living in the hotel; I hadn’t been able to concentrate on anything like getting a new apartment, a place to live. Debbie hadn’t pressed charges, and had left a note with the concierge saying that if I stayed away she wouldn’t. Just about every night around one in the morning the phone rang, and a woman who I was pretty sure was Debbie’s Mom told me that I was going to hell, and hung up. It got so I couldn’t fall asleep until the phone rang every night, the only time it did. I never even got to tell her that I was already there.
It was a small box, addressed in colored marker, with way too much postage. It was addressed to DADDY, and it made my skin crawl. I put it, gingerly, on top of the beat up old television, and sat staring at it for a while. Then I got up and made some drinks, pouring equal parts bourbon and coke into a smudged jelly glass. I drank until I thought I ought to be drunk, but the sight of the box still made me shake.
It was covered in layers of tape, forming a shell that was hard to tear off. I sat on the edge of the bed that smelled slightly of sweat. I hadn’t dared sleep, but it had still absorbed me, from a distance, I was poisoning the atmosphere, soaking the room in terror. I struggled with the tape and cardboard, tearing the childish letters apart.
Inside the box was a Father’s Day card.
On the outside was a cartoon dog sitting in a typical doghouse, looking sad-eyed and abashed. Written above it in cartoony letters was “You’ll never be in the doghouse…”
I licked my lips, tasting sweat, and opened the card.
Originally the card’s interior showed the same dog, much cheered, dancing with several happy puppies beneath a message which read “Because you’re the best Dad ever!!”
Rodney and Todd had scratched this out with thick strokes of a black crayon and written “Someday we’ll be big enough!” below it. They had drawn crude guns in the hands of the puppies, firing red bullets into the Dad Dog, who spilled red crayon everywhere, an orgy of color.
####
I knew how it looked. I’m not stupid.
I had to get drunk, really drunk. I could not have even gone near the house unless I’d been stinking drunk. As it was I could barely make out the divider lines on the highway, but I wouldn’t have minded hitting a tree, sailing through the night, feeling a thrill of relief surge through me.
I stood outside struggling to balance on two legs and drained the last of the bottle, the house coming to me in waves, thick and unmanageable, but I was used to that too. Crawling, I made it to the front door, which was no problem because I knew the secrets of the house. I knew that the back stairs were rotten and you couldn’t walk on them. I knew that the floorboards in the bedroom closet lifted up to reveal a secret space, in which we had six hundred dollars in cash. I knew that none of the second floor windows locked, and that there was no way to get up to them.
I knew that the spare key to the front door was on top of the lintel, the dumbest place to hide a key. And I knew my wife, I knew that she had forgotten the spare key, which had been hidden there for six years, untouched.
The house was silent. Dark. Asleep. I stood in the foyer amongst winter coats and the cat’s litter box and static crackling in my ears. I could hear myself breathing, seemingly louder than anything I’d ever heard before. I imagined I could hear my joints creak and pop and protest that I was too old, too drunk. I imagined I could hear the alcohol escaping my body.
There were slight changes, I could tell, celebrating the end of my regime. Nothing overt, yet, but it was obvious that Debbie wasn’t missing me much. That hurt. I could never explain Todd and Rodney–I never knew what they were, for they almost certainly weren’t children–not human children, anyway. But Debbie–she had nothing to do with that. She was my wife. She was the same girl–I thought–who I’d known in school, who loved Gummi Bears, who wouldn’t make out with me unless the lights were off, or at my mother’s house, no matter what the lighting situation. She was still Debbie. That she had abandoned me so completely hurt me deeply.
I knew the house. I knew which stairs leading to the second floor squeaked.
The second floor hallway was even darker, and so quiet it absorbed all my noise, every move I made disappeared into the blackness.
I knew the house. I knew how to find my way in the dark. I took three steps to the left and put out my hand, and there was the door to the boys’ room. Rough wood, and of course no lock. The sound of its hinges screamed in my ears, and though blind in the opaque dark, I glanced apprehensively in the direction of Debbie’s–our–bedroom. It reminded me of sneaking into the house drunk, terrified that Debbie would catch me. It had made me learn stealth, all those long months of drinking.
The kids’ bedroom was yawning space in front of me, perceived as slightly more black than the surrounding hallway. I stepped into it and from their respective beds, the positions of which I could still remember and picture in my head, their small voices drifted up.
“It’s Daddy.”
“Hello, Daddy!”
“He’s drunk and come to say goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Daddy!”
I sat down heavily on Rodney’s bed, felt him pull his small legs up into his body, away from me. I shuddered.
“I tried so hard.” I said heavily, and a flood within me broke its dams and came out in a torrent. I told the boys, speaking in low, careful tones, I told them everything. I told them how ashamed I was. How I’d tried to be a good father. How I’d tried to want them, after the fact. I tried to want them.
“Daddy, Daddy,” Todd kept saying. “It’s all right, Daddy. We’re going to have our revenge.”
Whispered, from within the sheets.
“I know,” I said softly. “I can’t let that happen.” I tugged the pillow out from under Todd’s head. I held it up over his head.
“I’m sorry.” I said.
“Don’t be, Daddy.” Rodney whispered behind me. “We wouldn’t be.”
“You’ll have to get Mommy, too.” Todd advised. “She raised us.”
I pushed the pillow down. Gently, at first, then harder.