As I Die Lying Read online

  "Hey, Shit For Brains, what's this C for?" he bellowed, spittle and bourbon mist spraying out of his mouth. The cruel muscles of his forearms bulged under the rolled-up sleeves of his flannel shirt, the toes of his boots flexing. "Your teacher says here, 'Richard doesn't get along well with the other students. He fails to participate in class activities.' Now what kind of horseshit is that?"

  I mumbled something, afraid to meet his fiery eyes. I didn’t know he could read that well. I’d never heard him use the word “participate.” He was clearly far more dangerous than I’d ever considered. I sensed my friend fluttering uneasily in the Bone House like a bat at an Alaskan sundown.

  "It figures I'd turn out a problem child. A fucking bad seed. Your asshole Granddad can rest in peace now that the Coldiron curse has been safely passed on to the next generation."

  My only memory of Granddad had been seeing him laid out in that coffin the year before. I had taken my place in line and walked past him, the way Mother told me. She held my hand. I didn't know what I was supposed to do, but my friend in the Bone House said I should pretend to be sad.

  I recognized Granddad's face from some of the blurry photographs that had fallen out of one of Father's airplane books. He had mean eyes, like he was mad at the camera, but his skin was smooth. He was wearing a blue uniform with medals pinned on his chest. But in the coffin he was all wrinkled and his skin was as dull as wax fruit and, of course, his eyes were closed. The cloth on the inside of the coffin was purple, the color of a king's robe. He smelled like chemicals and bad bacon.

  Mother said, "Doesn't he look so good? Like he’s sleeping and he could just sit up and talk."

  I didn't want that to happen. I stared at the little wires of white hair that stuck out of his ear. Some people in the back of the room were crying, and I looked at Father's face. It was red, maybe because his necktie was choking him. That was the only time I ever saw him wear a tie, at least until he was in a coffin himself.

  Father looked a little like the man in the coffin. They both had the same sharp nose and round chin, just like me. But unlike Granddad, Father was smiling a little bit, a tiny smile that barely turned up at the corners of his mouth, the kind you get when you're doing something fun that you know is wrong. The man in the coffin, his mouth had fallen in a little, as if he had swallowed his teeth. He didn't look like a man who carried secret curses, at least not anymore. Unless they were in one of his pockets that I couldn’t see. You know how people get when they’re hiding something good.

  I wondered what kind of curse Granddad had passed down. I had heard about the Mummy's Curse from peeking into the living room at late-night movies. I pictured Granddad coming back wrapped in rotted rags, reaching out with hands like mittens to get Father, to squeeze that little smile off his face. Was it hope or fear that rattled in my chest at the thought, and why did laughter echo from the Bone House?

  Maybe that's why Father was so angry, because he couldn't escape the curse, and it would someday track him down. But then, Father didn't need an excuse to be angry. A barking dog could set him off, or a flat tire in the rain, or that time the blow torch didn’t get hot enough. But I don’t like to remember any of that, so let’s get back to the report card.

  "Get out of my sight, you sorry sack of shit," he said, ripping up the report card and throwing the four pieces into the air. I went to my room and hid in the closet until Mother called me to dinner. I tiptoed into the living room. Father was asleep on the couch, his boots propped up on a ragged pillow. I eased around the boots and gathered the pieces of the report card, taped them back together, and forged Father’s signature, pressing extra hard with the tip of the pen.

  School wasn't bad. It was peaceful there. No one ever hit me at school or called me Shit For Brains. The other kids were mostly just a murmur in the background to me, white noise to be ignored. The worst thing was sitting behind Hope Hill, whose honey-blond hair smelled like the sun and made me ache inside.

  I buried my nose in a book, even when I was supposed to be learning things like why the Earth circled around the sun without flying off into space. I didn't need to know why. If they said it did, that was good enough for me, and it’s not like I could do anything about it anyway. I’d already learned that there were facts and the truth, and then there was the real stuff of this world, the Bone House, the lies, the secret curses, stuff that mattered.

  When Mother started letting me go outside by myself, I found new games. I explored the neighborhood and prowled in the junk cars that were scattered behind the garage next door. I pretended I was Huck Finn, hiding away on Jackson Island. I made a nest in an old dog pen, hidden from the world by vines and weeds. There was a hole in the wire where the dogs used to get out, and I used it as a tunnel. The doghouse was tall enough for me to sit up. Enough room for a boy and his dreams, plus all the turds were dry.

  I liked to read there, books checked out from the school library, borrowed from Mother's shelves, or sometimes a comic bought at the corner store for a quarter. A few boards were missing in the doghouse roof, and the late afternoon sun streamed through the gap, flooding my hideaway with light and bringing the words on the pages to life. I read of fellow castaways like Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson, I went around and under the world in the books of Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, I went to other worlds that had been given mantle by the mind of H.G. Wells and J.R.R. Tolkien. Don’t tell anybody, but I also liked Nancy Drew.

  I could stay there until nightfall, unless Mother called to see where I was. Then I would slither out of the tunnel of foliage and walk out of the nearby cedar trees to make her think I had been playing in the woods like a normal boy. I thought it was important to have a secret place that wasn’t the Bone House. My belly tingled when I was hiding alone, knowing no one could find me. I felt sneaky and safe, and once in a while my invisible friend joined me even though he didn’t need to listen for boots.

  When the sun started sinking below the flat horizon, it was time to go home for dinner. I waited for the shadows to grow long, then flitted from one to the next, pretending to be a spy. Most of the time, Father would already be asleep when I crept through the door, with his hand dangling down to the dirty rug, his mouth open and snoring, his lidless bottle sitting on the coffee table beside him. Mother and I would eat silently at the little Formica kitchen table, usually pigs in a poke, Vienna sausages rolled in canned biscuits, pinto beans, macaroni, a dinner that cost less than a dollar. Above us hung a collector’s plate of Jesus, gilded with foil and perched on a brass wire. She didn’t make me pray, just let me eat in peace and silence. Then I could slip off to bed before she woke up Father.

  I didn't hate Father for wearing the boots. I was supposed to love him, the same way I was supposed to love Jesus. Just because. But even if I had to love him, that didn't mean that I couldn't do it while hiding in the dark. Locked doors were useless. His boots liked to smash doors almost as much as they liked skindancing, though he never found the door to the Bone House.

  And sometimes, in the sunlight, he was nice. On Saturday mornings, he would already be awake and sitting on the couch watching cartoons when I shuffled into the living room in my Speed Racer pajamas. I’d rub my sleepy eyes and crawl up next to him, dragging my dreams. He smelled like coffee and aftershave, and he’d put his arm around me. His stubble scratched my cheek as he hugged me and my teddy bear, and no anger burned in the red corners of his eyes. He never called me “Shit For Brains” on Saturday mornings, just the occasional affectionate “Dumbbell.”

  On one of those mornings, while we were snuggling on the couch, I asked him about Granddad. His muscles stiffened a little under a shirt that smelled of rust and sweat.

  "Why do you want to know?" His words were quiet, cautious, like thunder on the horizon that wasn’t sure of its direction.

  "I never got to see him, except when he died. The other kids at school talk about going to their grandparents' house all the time."

  "Well, he live
d a long way away."

  We had taken a plane to the funeral. I had looked out the windows at the clouds and, far below, saw the little squares that I thought made up the world, patches that were sewn together like on the quilt Mother brought out of my closet every winter. I wondered if that was how Jesus saw everything. If it was, I wondered how He could see little boys kneeling beside their beds in the dark. And I was pretty sure Jesus couldn’t see what went on in the Bone House.

  "The preacher called him a hero," I said.

  "He was in the war. Bomber pilot."

  I thought of war movies I had seen, of planes flying in the air with balls of fire puffing up all around, of planes falling to the earth with black trails of smoke streaming out behind them.

  "He must have been brave," I said.

  "He wasn't afraid of dying. But he was scared of everything else."

  "Did you love him?"

  "You have to love your father, no matter what.”

  So I was doing the right thing after all, even if it hurt. "But you were happy when he died."

  "Because I got to fly in a plane."

  "Oh." Then, "Father, what's the Coldiron Curse?"

  His lips tightened and grew white. His sewage-green eyes narrowed to bright slits. On the television screen, a mouse was hitting a cat on the head with a fat hammer.

  Father said between clenched teeth, "It's what's fucking with you from the inside."

  With no warning, he swung out a fist, knocking over the coffee table and a floor lamp that didn't have a shade. The bare bulb shattered on the wooden floor. Mother murmured from the bedroom, shaken from sleep.

  He stomped the table, snapping off one of its legs. “Fucking with you.”

  I was scared. I tried to find the Bone House, but the rage was so sudden, I was confused and lost.

  He flung the lamp against the wall, nearly knocking Mother’s Jesus plate from its wire perch.

  “From the inside,” he roared.

  Mother yelled from the bedroom, but I guess she kept the door locked. I don’t blame her.

  Father didn't answer. He looked at me, through me, as if I were invisible, and went into the kitchen. The refrigerator door opened then ice cubes rattled in a glass, followed by the gurgling of liquid. I looked at the television. The cartoon cat had a stick of dynamite in its mouth, the burning fuse growing shorter.

  It was time to change my clothes and go to the Bone House.

  Nest, I mean. Nest.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Spring turned into summer and brought black-eyed Susans and black-eyed Mother.

  A family moved into the apartment next door, the Bakkens from Pittsburgh. Even though they turned out to be minor characters, I remember them more vividly than I do my parents. Mister Bakken had a thick neck and fat slouching jowls that looked like they were trying to slide off his face. A bulbous clown nose, freckled like his cheeks, dangled like a fruit above his lips. Bumblebee eyes peered out from under the avalanche of his eyebrows. His hair and dustbroom mustache were bronze red.

  His wife was thin and sharp-faced. She had the air of a weasel, furtive and bloodthirsty. Her skin was pasty and nearly translucent, as if mayonnaise had been swabbed over a skeleton, then shrink-wrapped and given life. She bit at her nails constantly, and when they were down to the quick, she gnawed at the red ends of her fingers. She wore knee-length cotton dresses, and her legs stuck out below them like birch branches, white and slender, as if they would fray instead of snap if you tried to break them.

  They had a daughter named Sally. She was just a little older than me, which she found out the first day we met and seemed happy about. She had her father's freckled, red-headed features and her mother's nervous mannerisms. Her hair was in pigtails tied by rubber bands, and they bounced when she ran. A mouthful of braces turned her smile into a Frankenstein-monster flash of pink gums and silver wires.

  She was never without her doll, a round-headed baby girl with yellow yarn for hair and perfect circles of blush painted on plastic cheeks. Its hard lips curled up in a permanent pout. Sally called it “Angel Baby.”

  Father got Mr. Bakken a job at the John Deere plant, and they rode to work together in Father's ragged pickup truck. Sometimes they didn't come home until after dark, and from my bed I would hear Mother yelling at Father and feel the floor shake as the furniture rattled in the living room. Then I would hear the stinging slap of flesh on flesh, followed by a cry, or more breaking glass. I would shrink even deeper into the dark under the blankets, trying to crawl far away from the world where things broke. Far enough that I could meet my invisible friend in the Bone House if necessary.

  One night Mother yelled "Did you go to that damned bar again?"

  "I work to put food on this table, I'll do as I damn well please, bitch."

  He also called her Puke-face and Fuckwit, every name he could think of except Shit For Brains. He saved that one. He must have had a special place in his heart for me.

  Once Mother said something about "You and your whores." This was followed by a cold, long silence during which even the wind seemed afraid to breathe. Then Father's words parted the stillness like the jagged edge of a glacier in a dark sea or a frozen knife in a rotten cantaloupe or an ice cream headache during a prayer.

  “You’re the best whore I know.”

  Then the walls bent and the clock shattered and the blood flowed and the night fell in upon itself as the boots danced.

  The day after that, Mother slept until noon and her face was puffy when she woke up. I was glad she didn't make me give her a good-morning hug because I didn't want to touch her watery skin. She must not have had an invisible friend to warn her about the boots. I sneaked away to my nest while she was taking a shower to steam away her soreness. Father didn't come home at all that evening.

  Sometimes Mother and Mrs. Bakken sat at our kitchen table, talking about what they called the "menfolk." They would cradle cups of coffee and tap cigarettes, sitting there in house robes with dusty slippers on their feet. Mrs. Bakken looked even more like a skeleton when her hair was pinned back away from her face by curlers, making her taut forehead shine like a China plate. Sometimes she, like Mother, had a dark circle around one eye, but she seemed almost happy then. She smiled as if showing off a hard-won trophy.

  They would lower their voices and say things like "Before he started drinking so much" and "He used to be so handsome when he was young" and “Before the devil got him.” Right there under the Jesus plate. Or "They're no good at all except for that thing between their legs," followed by girlish giggles.

  I wondered if people loved each other because they were afraid to not love, if being alone was worse than being hurt all the time. Or maybe it was just the things between people's legs that made them love. I'd seen Mother naked in the bathroom, accidentally of course, but I always had to look twice to make sure it had been an accident the first time.

  Even though the Bakkens seemed to cause a lot of problems between my parents, and the other way around, they spent lots of time together. Once in a while, they would all go out together on Friday night, leaving me alone with the television set for a babysitter. I didn't know what Sally did. I was afraid to knock on the Bakkens's door, afraid it would swing open and she would stand there in her little dress and pigtails, cradling Angel Baby in her freckled arms. I was afraid she might invite me in.

  When our parents visited each other, Sally and I had to play together, and I suppose we became friends out of mutual desperation. While the grownups talked and drank in the living room, or grilled hot dogs on the scraggly patch of dirt out back, Sally and I pretended to be pirates or space explorers or cowboys. She was usually the leader and grew angry when I tried to change her made-up rules. We played dolls one time, in her crisp, neat room.

  She had a crowd of dolls, and they all had names that I never bothered to memorize. She arranged them as if they were adults at a party and made up different voices for them so they could carry on conversations. I chose a large
stuffed animal, a big green rabbit that had an upside-down straw basket on its head. I pretended it was an evil rabbit come to get bad grown-ups, hopping in and knocking over Sally's carefully seated dolls.

  "Take that, Shit For Brains," I said, as Sally squealed and the dolls fell in a jumble of plastic arms and legs.

  "No, grownups play nice." She propped the dolls up again. "And no bad words, either, or I'll tell."

  Whether she was going to tell my parents or the other dolls, I didn't ask. I sat there with the golden light of sunset peering through her blue curtains, our parents' voices rising over the rock music in the living room, one of them occasionally breaking into rough laughter. I wondered if this was how other kids lived, playing on a clean floor with dolls that didn't bleed. I wondered if other kids had to hide in their closets, dreading the sound of footsteps in the hall, talking to themselves. I was suddenly lonely and afraid, even with an invisible friend right there waiting in the Bone House, even with a dozen dolls around.

  "You want to know a secret?" I asked Sally.

  "Like a secret spy code?"

  "Better than that. A secret place I know about."

  "If you know, it's not a secret." She hugged Angel Baby to her chest.

  "But I'm the only one who knows where it is."

  "Why are you telling me?"

  "Because I was thinking we could be friends."

  "But we're already friends. We play all the time." She fussed with Angel Baby's dress because the fabric was wrinkled.

  "But I mean friends who talk to each other. Who tell each other stuff."

  "We already talk."

  "But not about secret stuff."

  "You mean boy-and-girl stuff, like grownups do?"

  I gulped, thinking about the Bone House. "Yeah, and other things, things you can't tell grownups about."

  "Things you can only talk about in secret places?" Her voice had fallen to a whisper. I nodded.

  "Then you have to be my boyfriend."