The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(62)

Damon’s mom stood up, crossed her arms. “Hey. Cut it out, you two.”

Damon’s dad said, “How much money have I wasted already, trying to set you straight?”

“What are you even talking about?” Damon said. What was money? It came, it went. It always came again. “Who gives a shit?”

“Okay, smartass.” Damon’s dad waved his glass around the great room—plush leather furniture, huge stone fireplace, giant-sized windows with fancy silk curtains—as if Damon gave a shit about any of it. “You like your life? How bout that Xbox? Those ridiculous clothes?” His eyes moved over Damon’s oversized baby-blue T-shirt, his jeans sagging over his crotch, his coordinating blue and green Adidas. “For Chrissake, why don’t you pull your pants up for once. The world doesn’t need to see your ass hanging out twenty-four/seven.”

Damon glanced at his mom, but she ducked her head, studied her fingernails like she’d just now noticed they were there.

“Why, so I could look like you? Fuckin’ fatass.”

His dad’s face flared red. His mom stuck her palms up, like I surrender. She went into the kitchen and the next sound was water blasting in the sink.

His dad went and clattered his glass on the marble-topped bar; the ice cubes cracked and smacked together. He came back. Stepped to Damon to show how he was still the bigger man. “You will not talk to me that way. Not in my house.”

“Your house is a prison cell with curtains,” Damon said, getting in his face. “I can’t wait to get out of here. Fuck, you ever wonder why Max hasn’t been back here once since graduation? Not one time? You think that’s fuckin’ normal?”

For an awful moment Damon’s dad just stared. Then he laughed, hard, mirthless. “You think high school is so hard?” he said. “See what it’s like out there for one day, you little shit. One fucking day.”

It was evening, and out the window the palominos grazed Horse Hill against a wide and purpling sky. Their necks, silhouetted, stretched for grass, and there were the beautiful swirls of their tails as they flicked the air.

“Anytime, asshole,” Damon said, and pulled his face into the fuck-you grin he knew his dad couldn’t stand.

That was all it took. His dad threw a punch and Damon jerked back. The fist flew past his face, sloppy. Then his dad checked his balance and bobbed back, fists up. He bent his knees, hunching his shoulders like this shit was official. Damon’s muscles twitched to squeeze his hands to fists, but he held them still.

“Get your fists up,” his dad said, “what’s wrong with you?”

Damon ground his teeth. Blood throbbed at his temples. He stretched one hand and closed it. With the other he thumbed the cool edge of the knife in his pocket. And it took all his energy to hold himself still in that moment. To pay attention. He knew there was only one way out of this. Like that dumb song they made him memorize in preschool—Can’t go over it, can’t go under it, gotta go through it. Why was he thinking of that now?

He put up his fists.

His dad smiled and swung. Damon wasn’t fast enough this time. His dad’s knuckles cracked on his jaw. A flash of pain. Blood rushed up his neck, into his cheeks and his ears. Before he could think, he ran at his dad, bear-hugged him, and threw him on the couch. Damon landed on top, and him and his dad grappled on the leather cushions, his dad struggling beneath, Damon slamming him against the couch, exhaling, “Fuckin’ asshole. Motherfucker.” Damon’s dad grunted and struggled as Damon pummeled him, searching for soft spots, hitting whatever he could reach, neck, ribs, kidneys.

“Fuckin’. Asshole. Mother. Fucker.”

But his dad had stopped resisting. Breathing heavy.

Damon stopped. Pulled back. His dad was sprawled across the leather cushions, pants twisted under the slick black belt, shirt untucked to show a triangle of fleshy belly. His eyes were closed, his forehead damp. Across his cheeks a ragged flush like sunburn, and a fault line of blood on his lip. He opened his eyes. They were this round, watery blue like Damon’s, and there was a thin pink skin over the whites. It was how you looked when you were wasted, but also when you cried.

Holy shit, Damon thought. What just happened? Like, what did I just do?

Then his dad broke. Fell back laughing. “Your face,” he said.

“Fuck you.” Damon got up and shook out his fist. His jaw hurt but he wouldn’t touch it.

Damon’s mom was standing in the doorway of the kitchen with her hand over her mouth like after all this time this shit still had the ability to shock.

Then she ran up to touch his dad’s cheek.

Damon turned, and got out the front door.

He walked to the end of the driveway and to the end of the street, then hiked up Horse Hill where no one would find him. Since he was a kid he’d loved those horses, and whenever his dad was done doing his thing, Damon would go up to tell them about it. He sat down in the grass and pulled a blunt from his sock and blazed it. He could text Ryan and Nick to come swoop him but didn’t feel like it yet. The horses were busy chomping yellow-green grass and he knew they couldn’t talk back, but he felt like they got him anyway. They kinda shuddered their flanks when he told them, and when he reached out to touch them they didn’t even spook, just whipped their coarse mane hair against his hand, like they knew exactly who he was. Like they wanted to tell him that he’d be okay in the end, that there would be an end to this.