Lineage(26)

The simplicity of the answer to his wondering stopped him in his snowy tracks. The sheriff had been here. He had known it all afternoon, deep inside where truth is the only thing that speaks. Why had he thought anything different? Why had he even hoped that his mother had come back? It was a foolish thought, and one he wouldn’t allow himself again. She was gone. Now his mind turned to what truly awaited him at the top of the hill, and the stone inside him that was his constant companion dropped lower and became hot.

When he neared the rear of his father’s truck, a smell began to permeate his nostrils. It was an acrid odor, a mixture of several things burning at once. He could pick out paper, plastic, and the charred smell of overdone food—his father was burning garbage.

Lance walked past the Chevy and hauled himself over a large drift that had formed between the small garage and the house. Another set of footprints led the way, their deep recesses already beginning to fill in as the storm opened the doors overhead and released larger flakes among the ice crystals that pelted down. Lance rounded the garage carefully, not wanting to walk headlong into his father and suffer a worse fate than was already in store.

He stopped when he saw his father standing several yards away, tending to the garbage that burned voraciously in the half barrel before him. Anthony’s back was to Lance, his work coat hung across his shoulders as if a coat-hanger supported it instead of bones and muscle. The flames leapt and sputtered out of the barrel and outlined his father in a strange halo of fragmented colors, the fumes of the plastic and cardboard containers fanning out in a strangely beautiful pattern. Just as Lance was about to retrace his steps back to the house and disappear into his room, his father turned his head to the right, almost as if he knew Lance had been there the whole time. When Anthony’s head twisted enough for his eye to stare into his son’s face, the air left Lance’s lungs in a hollow keening sound that mixed with the howling wind and was torn away.

Anthony’s lower lip was split so severely that Lance could make out several teeth through the red flap of skin. Blood was still running from the wound and had pooled near his chin, giving the impression in the dying light that he wore a dark goatee. Another abrasion the size of a baseball circled his right eye, and Lance couldn’t be sure, but it looked as though his father’s nose was sitting at a wrong angle, but it could have been the failing light. When his father reached beneath his coat, Lance completely forgot about the mess that had once been his father’s face. With dawning horror, he saw what his father drew out from the inside of the old work jacket and into the flickering light of the fire.

Lance’s notebook was there, clutched in one bony hand that had smeared blood over the plastic cover. For a moment Lance hoped he was dreaming. He hoped he would awake in his bed, perhaps from another trauma-induced coma at any moment. And he would gladly sigh relief, the injuries he would have to deal with be damned. He would take them over this. His stories, all his ideas and feelings, were there in those pages that now flapped like a wounded bird in his father’s hand. He felt a cry coming from deep inside him, and although every cell in his body told him to still it before it left his mouth, he could not.

“No!” The anguish in his yell startled him. It was as though someone else beside him had cried out. The maniacal smile that bloomed across Anthony’s face widened, and Lance saw the gory V of his father’s lip split even further, making the grin go vertical as well as horizontal. The crooked hands that held the notebook were now flipping lightly through its pages, as if his father were an interested teacher skimming the work of an especially gifted student.

“Oh, this is nasty stuff, my boy. Nasty stuff indeed.” Anthony’s voice floated over to Lance on the gusting wind. “Scarring your brain, boy. I told your momma that you shouldn’t read those books. And look at what we have here. A testament to how right I was.”

Lance gritted his teeth as he saw several drops of blood plummet down from his father’s injuries and splash onto the white pages. “Give it back!” Lance yelled. This time his voice had taken on an edge that he didn’t know he possessed. It held anger and hatred so deep that his father had no choice but to look up at him through the swollen lids of his eyes.

“That sounded like a command, boy, and I really don’t like being told what to do. You know that.”

Without looking behind him, Anthony whipped the hand holding Lance’s notebook in a short arc, and let go. The pages flapped once and the cover opened a bit as if to wave goodbye, and then it dropped out of sight into the flames licking hungrily out of the barrel.