All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(80)
I nodded.
“Speak when spoken to, baby.”
“I’m listening.”
Dad studied me for a moment. Then he smiled. “Just like his goddamn old man, aren’t you? You can take a licking. You can sit there, hating me like I’m poison. You can talk polite, once somebody’s knock all those chips off your shoulder. Go ahead, you want to hate me, you fuckin’ go on and hate me. I understand. But what you can’t do, just like your old man, what you don’t have the brains to do, is keep old one-eye zipped up for five goddamn minutes. When I was talking to you, trying to talk to you about something real important, you ran out of here so goddamn disrespectful that I ought to take it out of you in strips. Where were you going?”
“Nowhere.”
“You weren’t going nowhere. Nobody goes nowhere, shit-for-brains. Everybody goes somewhere. And now you lied to me, baby, and that’s just not going to stand. You went over to see Deb Miller’s kid. You went over to run old one-eye down the furrow. You went over to give it to your bitch.”
“Don’t talk about him like that.”
“Baby, what in the world are you going to do? I’ll talk about your little bitch however I want.”
Something about the way he talked about Austin, something about the hate in his voice, like acid eating through sheet metal, made things different. That voice lurking in the darkness, just behind my shoulder, was saying, “You want this, you deserve this, and so you’re going to lie down like you always lie down and you’re going to stick your tail between your legs like you always stick it between your legs and you’re—” That voice became a buzz, and then even less than a buzz, like the noise of something dry and dead crunching beneath my heel.
“Don’t talk about him like that.”
“Why? When old one-eye is plowing the field, does he moan your name? Does he say he loves you?”
I heard him, but the words skipped off me the way stones skip off water: defying gravity and logic, impossibly sheer and fast. This time, something was different. No cartoon, swirly eyes. No hypnotism. I blinked, and it felt like I was seeing him for the first time. Big, bigger than me, with ropy muscles from working in the mine. We looked alike. Mom had always said that, with our hair, our faces, our eyes, she’d always said that like she was turning a knife in me, and she was right, because it did turn a knife in me. But we looked different too. He was paunchy. He was old. His teeth had yellowed, his lips and cheeks were covered in sores. That look on his face, that fake look of stern fatherly love, was paper thin. A good breeze, hell, a good fucking fart would rip that mask in two.
I didn’t think I could win, not in a fair fight. I was too hurt, both from Salerno and from the first round with Dad. He still had the advantage, both physically and psychologically. But for the first time in my life, those swirly, wavy cartoon eyes had dropped away. No more hypnotism. No more staring at those headlights and waiting for that final, irreversible smack.
I might not be able to take him in a fair fight, not tonight, not beaten and bruised as I was. But when had this ever been a fair fight? I was a fucking psychic. It was about time I used that to my advantage.
“Now, listen up, baby,” Dad said, leaning in so I could smell the weed lingering on his clothes, and his breath like horseshit. We locked eyes, and I tried what I had tried with Becca. I coiled inside myself, all the frantic energy I had left, and made a psychic leap. For a moment, it felt like it was going to work: that invisible door hung at the edge of my consciousness, trembling, not quite turning. I was going to get inside his head. I was going to drag up every nasty thing he’d done. But that invisible door hung between us, shifting an inch and then blowing closed again, as though an unseen wind were knocking it against the frame.
“Listen real good,” Dad said. “Don’t fucking look at me like that.” Tangling a hand in my hair, he snapped my head to the side and leaned closer, speaking into my ear. “Listen real, real good. I’m going to get my coat, and you’re going to take me to wherever you hid what you took from Lawayne. I tried to be real nice about this. I tried to talk to you about it man to man.” His breath grew hotter and closer on my ear. “I told you, baby, that this wasn’t a question of want. This was a question of high-Christ need, and baby, you got to learn that in the house, you got to put in. You can’t just ride free. You got responsibilities around here. You got to put in. So baby, tonight’s the night you start.”
Lost in that place inside myself, the place where my ability was centered, I heard the words, heard them clicking and splashing and skipping across the surface. But what I felt—what I felt was his touch, his callused fingers twisting my hair into a ragged knot. This was so familiar. This was . . . this was intimate, not sexual, but intimate. It was the closest we ever came to knowing each other. This was the only way we knew to transmit anything of importance: messages that had to be delivered, no matter what. This was the heart and root of it all with my dad, this was the only way he had ever been able to say something true to me. It was, in some perverse way, the only way I had glimpsed in him what might have been love, although that was a dark and dangerous thought, and I dismissed it. That touch, though—that touch made a bridge between us. Yes. Dizziness swept over me, like I was standing a thousand feet in the air, metal swaying beneath my feet as the wind picked up, and below was the river: that river between us, where the words skipped and splashed and sank like stones. Yes, I thought as the dizziness made the room spin and disappear around me. Yes, like a bridge. It wasn’t just a door. It was also a bridge.