Tuesday, October 25, 2011

circle, maiden, circle

    I am ten years old and sitting cross-legged on crummy, shredded carpet the color of a dying turtle, watching television and praying that my dad will never come home.
    But, he will. He comes home every night at six with his tiny igloo cooler and the newspaper crooked under his arm. His face, though freshly shaven in the morning, follows him home grizzled, and the eyes buried in it are usually faded.
    Oh, but they'll be burning tonight. The school called him at work because my mom was out shopping and I had left cat shit in my teacher's desk, and since we didn't have an answering machine, you can guess who they called.
    I can just see him too. Up on a roof - bent down on one knee like some shirtless bear, pounding nail after nail with all the precision of a doomed, mechanical ghost,
blasting down with his tomahawk of a hammer - set to haunt the tops of unfinished houses forever.
    Then his foreman (whose name is Jim, or Tim, or something like that), hands him a cellular phone. In my imagination, my dad is looking up at him like he is crazy, which is the expression my father always gives to anyone presenting him with something unexpected.
    Sitting there in front of the tube, with mindless eyes and a vibrant cortex, I can see the old man getting more and more pissed off as he listens into the large brick of old school cellphone. I'm sure his boss will offer to let him knock off early to come home and deal with me. He is a nice enough guy it seems, always lending my dad money whenever he needs it, but there is no way in hell my dad would leave work early.       

    We needed the money. 
    This should have been his epitaph.
    I look up to the clock on the wall. The fact that it is a clock appears to be coincidental, it being a ghastly placard of varnished pine with a ceramic eagle diving from its face. The actual clock itself is small and alien-looking on this piece of truck-stop art.
    It tells me that I have two hours to go.
    I hear the back door open and I keep staring at the screen that is so old, everything looks to be playing out just below the surface of the sea.
My mother's reflection in the television stops at the kitchen table of our small dining room as she sets down her purse. I hear the keys to her beat to shit Chevelle clamor onto the tabletop and she gazes in my direction, staring for a minute.
    "Hi, baby." she calls. I watch her from my mirror-view, she is superimposed over the Tweety bird making Sylvester lose his cool.
    "Hi, mama."
    "How was school?" she asks, sitting down and riffling through the mail. When I don't answer, she looks up and I see what I already know. She is a very sad woman. Her eyes have that far-off look of a jungle animal, which in that moment reminds me of the one and only time we went to the zoo as a family. Yes, all these animals were there in their pens, with us looking at them and them looking at us. And yes, in their heads they were hundreds of thousands of miles away.
    Even then, I could tell they were back on the plains or roaming in trees and when I turn my head to meet my mother's eyes, I wonder where she really is.
She wasn't always like this though.
    It was four years before I was sitting on the carpet looking up into her heavily mascarad eyes, which would have made me six. That would have made her twenty-five and my dad would have been gone on the road, driving long haul. He was going to miss Christmas yet again because the holidays were his cash cow. He would frame houses in the summer and drive trucks through all the other seasons.
    We needed the money.
    He had been at the wheel of a big rig and strutting on rooftops long before I was ever considered. So I was used to the tradition of opening a couple of presents from her on Christmas morning followed by a chicken dinner. Then we would have a real Christmas once dad's gigantic semi finally puffed and chortled into the drive like an elastic dragon on wheels. I would run up to it yelling and ecstatic every time, and he would slowly climb down out of the cab, like a cowboy from one of the movies he loved so much. I couldn't have been happier if it were Santa Claus himself. Mom would be in the doorway tugging at a long brown bang, smiling.  

    A Rockwell painting of 1985.
    That particular Christmas Eve, I lay curled in a wrap by the tree, mom was on the couch passed out beside me. I had snuck a candy cane from my stocking and drifted off with it in my mouth, while the ornament lights washed over us both.
    I woke a couple of hours later to a crash from the bathroom. With candy matted in my hair and sand in my eyes, I checked the t.v dinner stand where the milk and cookies were to discover them still there. I could only conclude that Santa was in there using our toilet. Careful not to spill, I balanced the milk on the plate with the cookies and slowly made my way down the hall.
    I waited outside the door for a couple minutes only to realize that I had to pee too. I gave a quick, brittle knock and was answered by a soft growl/moan from beneath the door. I will never forget that it came from under the door like a thing escaping, or perhaps
reaching out, but it definitely did not come through the door. I slowly pushed it open into the darkened bathroom, which was barely lit by a chipped Smurf nightlight. In the tiny blue glow I could make out the shape of my mother on the floor. One hand teetered the plate while the other reached for the light switch.
    As yellow light poured from the bare bulb, I could see she was sprawled with one leg in the tub, on her back and on the floor. Blood still seeped thickly from the ragged cuts on her arms into a purplish black mess that coated most of the linoleum.
    My first reaction was that Santa had crept into our home and murdered my mother.
    She had the eyes of a corpse.
    Molted, and open.
    One was fluttering
    like an injured moth.
    The plate and glass dropped from my hands and the milk mixed with her blood as I staggered carefully to her. I knelt beside her and pulled her arms around me, feeling my pajamas become sticky and warm.
    I didn't know what else to do.
    Her chest heaved slightly and I started to think again. No, I started to panic. My little mind raced and recoiled. I knew what I was supposed to do. Slipping first, I ran down the hall and called 911. The woman on the other end wasn't making any sense at all, so I dropped the phone and ran back to where I had left her.
    I plopped down next to her like a sinner in the presence of god and prayed.  I just kept praying and for how long I don't remember. It was the pounding of the front door that caused my head to snap up and at first it seemed somehow less real than the situation I was in. Still, I jumped up to answer it and slid once more in the milk and blood. This time, I crashed hard against the toilet, managing to break both my right forearm and the seat. It was too much then. When the police busted open the front door and came down the hall, they found us both broken on the bathroom floor.
    In the hospital waiting room I sat restlessly in a fresh cast and awkwardly spoke with the officer who found us.

    
    You were very brave today.
    
    Thank you.

    Are you a boy scout?

    No, never.

    Ahhh, they teach you in boy scouts to apply pressure to a wound with a cloth. Yeah. Well, you did the right thing. Your mom is going to be just fine. Do you have anyone we can call?

    My dad.

    Ah, well we can't seem to get a hold of him right now.

    I don't know then.

    Any relatives? Like a grandma or an aunt and uncle?

    I don't know.

    That's ok. Your mom is going to hang out here for a couple of days so the doctors can run some tests. We'll find you a place to stay until we can get a hold of your dad. Do you think you can keep being brave?

    I guess so.

    That's a good boy.




circle, maiden, circle© 2011  blue christian winterhawk


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