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Man Alive. Thomas Page McBee
Читать онлайн.Название Man Alive
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781786890894
Автор произведения Thomas Page McBee
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
He turned back to me, his mouth moving in slow motion. My heartbeat grew sluggish, I could hear it ca-thunk, ca-thunk.
I felt warm, full of energy and particles. It was almost spiritual, but for the familiar haze, the awareness that I was splitting, abandoning myself to a gun and a mumbling man.
Come back, I thought.
He kneeled down beside me. I focused on the whites of his eyes, his teeth. I smelled dog shit, exhaust, dirty clothes. I wiggled my toes dully. Nothing.
The air was electric with his strange frustration, the waving gun. I handed him my wallet and he threw it to the ground. I looked for Parker but all I saw was her crouching shadow.
I couldn’t move and I couldn’t even think, except to note, dully, that I was immobilized, a bystander to my own story.
6
Pittsburgh
1990 ♦ 10 years old
“Crocodile tears,” Mom said the day after Dad apologized. I didn’t know what that meant, but it made me picture him slithering toward me, so I shut my eyes.
“I could just cut his brakes,” she said, nodding toward his sedan in the airless garage. We were in the van beside it, underneath a swinging light cord. I stared at his car like it might rear up to defend itself.
Here’s a story I don’t remember: in the bathroom, I told my red hairbrush about Dad. Had I wanted someone to hear? Sometimes we are mysteries, even to ourselves. My live-in babysitter walked by, pressed her ear to the door. She’d held me like a big, gangly baby and asked careful questions in her honey voice.
“Try to forgive him,” she’d said on the last day I ever saw her, holding my hand and fingering the cross around her neck.
“She must have felt guilty,” Mom sighed when Susan left in the middle of the night, speeding off in her sporty Mazda. A loneliness settled in my chest. I was an astronaut, floating farther and farther away.
The truth was, I kind of wanted Mom to kill him. I watched her in the half-light, knowing she wouldn’t. I thought that no one could really ever forgive anyone, and I looked at her face: unfamiliar, trembling, clenched. I worried the hole in the knee of my jeans. What would a normal kid say?
“Maybe you’d get in trouble?” I offered. She looked at me, her face crumpling.
“Hey,” she said, pulling my hand away from the fraying fabric. “You’re safe now.” We were quiet for a minute, but I thought about the scramble of words: how if you repeat something enough times, the meaning disappears.
Safe, I thought. Safesafesafesafesafesafesafesafesafesafe.
7
Oakland
April 2010 ♦ 29 years old
The way the mugger looked through me, I knew he was gripped by that same zombie energy that had made my father’s eyes go vacant, and that’s what tipped me to the fact that I could die. People die every day for less.
The part of me still present, the part that wanted to move, saw another truth: everyone still had a chance. Parker could run, Vader could let us go, Dad could be a different man, I could live.
Down on 40th, a car honked an irritated staccato, breaking the spell. Vader grabbed my bag and skittered a few feet off, clutching it to his chest.
Wake up wake up wake up. I felt the pain radiating waves from my knees, the bruises forming.
Several blocks away, headlights began to make their dull way toward us through the fog. Vader studied the car’s approach with agitation, turned toward it and then away. “Don’t move,” he warned, backing away with the gun trained on me, not Parker.
The headlights grew brighter. Suddenly he was back, a blast of stale-smelling clothes. He grabbed my collar, dragged me from the sidewalk into the bushes of the side street, under the broken lamp. I could finally see Parker, just a couple of feet away. Her eyes, blue and green, met mine. The fear in them was disorienting.
That’s not a real gun, I tried to tell her without words.
“Stay,” he said. He crossed the street just as the car approached, and then ducked behind a parked truck.
We should run, I thought dreamily.
The car slowed, the tires sticky on the damp pavement. Vader had miscalculated the scope of its headlights and I found myself illuminated, hallelujah, on my knees on a residential street, blinking into the light.
I held my breath and shook out a little wave. The car lingered for a minute, mid-intersection. I gestured one more time, the ache of my knees surfacing again into my consciousness, my back pulsing, my body thawing back into place.
I listened for Vader as I’d learned to do with my father, but all was still beneath the sound of the Volvo’s rough engine.
I closed my eyes and the car squealed off, a spooked horse.
No one will rescue you, I told myself. Somewhere far away, a siren screamed into the night.
8
Pittsburgh
1990 ♦ 10 years old
“The police chief’s here to talk to you,” Mom said. I was alone in my room, still trying to build the model engine Dad bought me, but it was way harder without his help. For a brief moment I imagined she’d actually killed him while I slept, but I could hear the distant sound of the riding mower and smell the cut grass through my window.
The police chief reeked of Old Spice, Dad’s aftershave, and I disliked him immediately. Anyone could be a molester, I knew: Mom had grown increasingly suspicious of friends’ fathers, even relatives.
Every man could turn, like sour milk.
I was obedient, keeping track of who to tell what, how to behave. But I hadn’t been briefed on a police chief, on what sort of truth he might require. I looked at Mom, but she just gave me the same sad expression he did.
He sat at our dining room table, sleeves rolled up, a half-smile under his mustache. A recorder sat like an insect between us on the table in front of me. I didn’t like the way his hair crowned his head, didn’t like his straight teeth or his scruff.
“Your mom wanted you to tell us what happened—” he seemed unsure of how to go on, and I didn’t like that, either. The worst thing in the world was a nervous adult.
“That’s right,” Mom said, providing no further clues. I kept my eyes down as he launched into questions, my cheeks reddening with each one. I knew the recorder trapped me in this stupid story, this truth.
How often, he asked. What would Dad say about telling Mom? Where were Ellie and Scott? Where did he touch you?
Then it was finally done, the words stamped on tape, no time to sculpt something less bleak. The house was full of ghosts. But wait.
“I need to ask you one more thing: something very important,” he paused, and my stomach dropped in excitement, anxiety. No one asked me important anything. “And think about it carefully, because it’s a big decision.”
Mom looked at him expectantly. I flexed my bicep, felt the muscle under the cotton of my shirt.
“You can say whatever you want, no one will be mad, okay?” He leaned toward me, the smell of him a five-alarm mix of sweat and cologne. I moved back, nauseous. Maybe that’s the reflex that spun the story in another direction: fear as propellant, the foreign smell of a man’s hot breath on my face.
“Do you want your dad to go to prison?”
Everything