Henryby Mark Spencer
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Table of Contents
Part 5 appears in this issue. |
| conclusion |
I stopped and thought about that. “Yeah. Maybe.”
“You look a little frazzled.”
“I didn’t sleep too good.”
“Bad dreams?”
“Weird dreams.”
“Weird is better than bad.”
“Yeah. Weird dreams. Bad life.”
“Come in the living room. Have a seat.”
We went into the living room. The TV was off, and a lamp was on next to the lounge chair. Lying on the chair was a paperback book called Crime and Punishment.
“I was just doing some reading.”
“Really? For your job or something?”
“No. Just for fun.”
“Just for fun?”
“Yeah. For fun.”
“I never met anybody that reads.”
“Oh, well, I grew up back east.”
“Oh.”
“It’s kind of dark in here, I guess. Let’s have some light.”
He went over to the picture window and pulled a cord to open the heavy drapes, and light poured in, and there were millions of dust motes floating around.
“Have a seat.”
I sat in a chair across the room. He sat down in his lounger.
“You can go ahead and read.”
“Rough night, huh?”
“Yeah. Morning, too.”
“Josh says your dad’s a policeman.”
“Yeah.”
“That must be kind of cool. To have a dad who’s a policeman.”
“Not really.”
“No?”
I was staring at my reflection in the blank TV screen while I talked him.
“No. But when I was real little, I thought it was cool. I always bragged to the other kids at school that my dad was a cop. But my mom always hated him being a cop. I remember how she’d be okay in the mornings when he worked the three-to-eleven shift and was home, but then when it got close to time for him to go to work she’d get all moody, and they’d have a big fight just before he had to leave for his shift. She’d scream at him how she hoped he got blown away, and he’d leave without saying anything, and then she had to take a nap, which really meant she had to go in her room and start drinking... Oh, man, I talk too much.”
He just looked at me for a minute. I mean, it felt like he was looking at me, but I was still staring at myself in the TV.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You go on talking. Sounds like your mom was scared.”
“She hated my dad’s guts.”
“Sounds like she loved him a lot and was just scared. People say mean things and do mean things to each other... and themselves just because they’re scared. Your mom was probably terrified that your dad was going to get killed every day he went to work, so she tried to convince herself that she didn’t care.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“People often make no sense.”
“Yeah. I guess so... They’re divorced now.”
“I’m sure that was hard on everybody.”
“Wasn’t hard on my dad. He was banging some girl, and now he’s married to her, and she’s knocked up.”
“Your dad was probably pretty unhappy himself. Think about it. How would you feel if your mom was telling you she hoped you got blown away every day you left for school?”
“He didn’t need to go banging Jenny the Ninny and leave us.”
“Your mom had the booze. Your dad had the girl.”
I shook my head. “Josh was right. You adults are more screwed up than us kids.”
“That’s a good thing for you guys to know. Maybe it will help you forgive us.”
“My mom’s a whore.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Well, I don’t think she’s really a whore. She just acts like one. My sister really is one. I try to take care of them, but they won’t let me.”
“You can’t take care of them if they don’t want to be taken care of... So who’s taking care of you?”
I looked him. He just kept looking back. Then I looked at myself in the TV again. “I can take care of myself.”
“So what’s going to happen to you, you think?”
“I don’t know. But I can take care of myself.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Through the picture window, I saw a cop car pull up to the front of the house.
“Oh, no.” I was bolting.
“What?”
“They found me.”
Josh’s dad looked out the window. My dad was getting out of the car. I was headed for the backdoor.
“Hey, wait.”
“No, I can’t.”
“You look to me like you’ve done a lot of running lately.”
“You sure you want to do some more?”
The doorbell rang.
I moved again toward the backdoor. “It’s my dad.”
Josh’s dad was following me through the kitchen. “Then it’s probably important.”
I had my hand on the doorknob. “Yeah, it is.”
The doorbell rang again.
“You look tired.”
I dropped my hand. Nodded.
We walked together to the front door, and he opened it.
“Officer.”
Dad looked at me standing behind Josh’s dad. “You have to come with me, Henry.”
“I know.”
Then I did this really dumb thing. I puked. Right there in Josh’s front door. Some times I was such a baby. I stayed bent over with my hands on my knees for a minute, and Josh’s dad said, “You feel better?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Kind of. I guess I need to go now.”
“Yeah.”
Dad said to Josh’s dad, “Thank you.”
“No problem.”
I followed my dad down the sidewalk to his police cruiser. A bunch of adults and kids both were in their doorways, at their windows, and standing in their yards, gawking, but they all kept their distance like they might be scared.
Some little girl said to her mom, “Is that boy in trouble?”
“Looks like it. Policeman come and get bad boys and girls.”
Brandon was standing in the yard across the street, grinning like a psycho.
“Fry his freakin’ butt!”
Dad and I were almost to the police car, and I said, “Do I have to get in the back?”
“I guess not. I guess I can let you sit up front. If you promise you won’t decide to run.”
“I’m too tired.”
Dad opened the passenger side door for me, and I got in. Dad walked around the car and got in.
The car windows were down. Dad looked in the rear-view mirror. “Back-up’s coming. Just sit tight.”
Another cop car pulled up behind us. I slumped against the door, feeling pretty tired and achy but kind of relieved that it was kind of over in a way and I could just start my new life in a juvenile detention center. Maybe I would start lifting weights, and when I got buff, it wouldn’t matter so much I was short.
“I’m hungry,” I said without thinking about it.
“You’ll get something. So, Henry, you had quite a night. The night manager at the taco place thinks he can pick you out of a line-up even though you had the panty hose over your head. And you’d have to talk so that he could try to recognize your voice.”
“I didn’t want Mom to—”
“Your mother is going to do what she wants. You can’t stop her. I sure can’t.”
“I know.”
Another cop got out of the cruiser that had pulled up behind us, and he came to Dad’s window.
“I see you found him.”
“Yeah. He was scared and didn’t know what to think, but he’s co-operating now.”
“You want me to take him in? If it was my kid, I—”
“No need, Bill. I’m taking him home.”
“Home?” I said but Dad ignored me.
“Home?” the other cop said.
“Yeah. Henry ran off last night from his mother’s house. That’s true. But I went after him. Mona can verify that. And I found him. He didn’t want to go back to his mother’s house, so I took him to mine. He was with me all last night.”
The other cop was looking Dad straight in the eyes. Then he nodded to Dad. “Okay. I’m glad to hear that.” Then this Bill guy bent down to look into the car at me. “I’m glad to know you were at your dad’s house all night. That’s good.”
Then he walked back to his car and drove away while Dad and I sat there.
“I don’t want to go back to Mom’s.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Where then?”
“How about your house?”
Dad nodded. “Okay. But I’m on duty. I’ve got to work the rest of my shift. You’d have to hang out with Jenny until I get off.”
“Does she have any tattoos?”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Dad started to put the car in gear.
“I didn’t think you would,” I said.
“Would what?”
“You know...”
Dad nodded, and I was glad he didn’t say anything, and we just drove away.
* * *
If my life was some stupid movie, I know how everything would have turned out. Mom would have stopped boozing and started wearing dresses and would have gotten a job as a receptionist in a dentist’s office and then the dentist would have fallen nuts in love with her.
But Mom kept right on sitting on the sofa with Dog, drinking beer and watching Jerry Springer with her stomach bare so that everybody in the world could see the head of that tattooed cat peeking out of her pants.
And Brandi was still a slut. She kept working at Taco Yummy, and I would bet anything Krebs gave her fifties to take off more and more of her clothes, but I was sure Brandi stayed on the other side of his desk. I knew she had her limits.
I started going over to Dad’s a lot, and I might have even gone there to live, but Mom said no because she’d lose the child support and needed it to buy beer. Jenny had her baby, but Dad still paid attention to me, and Jenny made cakes and stuff when she wasn’t changing diapers or serving as a milk jug to the new kid.
Dad bought me a set of weights, and we’d go out to his garage and pump iron in the evenings with the garage door open, and he’d yell at me like a coach to grind out one more repetition — Just one more! — while the sun set.
Copyright © 2007 by Mark Spencer
and Shawn Chiusano
