Corrosion (14 page)

Well, I didn’t answer
that
question because it was manipulative and sadistic. Instead I threw my bowl on the ground and it shattered and you could tell that my aunt and uncle were surprised about that, elk stew and china all over the place, and I went into my room and read for a while and then I drank some brandy and chewed some tobacco, growing vices both.

What’s this all about, I asked Constance, and her eyes were bloodshot and her handkerchief was trembling next to her face. Why’d you come to my house saying all of those terrible things? And I was as mad as could be and I could tell that Constance was plenty frightened. It’s my ex-husband, she said. He’d been gone for a long time, but now he’s returned to the mountain. And he’s possessive. He won’t let me go. No matter what I say. No matter what I do. He saw the two of us and he got jealous and now he’s making threats, saying, you stop foolin’ around with that little boy or I’ll skin you like a stuck hog! I didn’t want to tell your aunt those things, but I was scared. You’re the only one I love, Benton! You’re the only one I need!

* * *

Back in the Skull Shack I read about the Soldier and how he hid in a rabbit hole for four days and four nights while the Taliban searched for him with crocodile sheers and flaying knives and Spanish ticklers, and the sweat poured from his face, but he never panicked, not for a moment, because he had more mental strength than all the towel heads put together. And then I looked around the cabin and realized that I wasn’t safe here, that they could find me and torture me, so I decided right then and there that I needed some sort of a hideout within my hideout and I had a pretty good idea how to make one, but I’d need some tools.

Kyle Weaver was crazy and he was blind too, and he worked with an anvil and a forge fire in a little mountain shack overlooking the river. He’d always liked me, I always put a smile on his face, so when I said I needed a sharpened crosscut saw and a mattock and a shovel, he said, well that’s no problem at all AND how are you, I heard you’ve been through a lot. That’s the thing about people. They always meddle when they shouldn’t, and that was another good reason to make the root cellar, to keep the meddlers away.

And the work wasn’t easy, but I sawed for hours at a time, and I sure am worried about Benton, I could hear Aunt Rose saying, he’s acting mighty strange, I haven’t heard him say a word in days, and Uncle Horace said, for Christ’s sake he’s lost his mother and father in the most excruciating way possible, give the boy some time, give the boy some space.

And sometimes I’d go to school, just to keep them off my back, and sometimes I’d hide behind Constance’s house, waiting for her old man, but he didn’t dare show his face, and some of the time I’d work on my project at the shack. The sawing was done, I’d completed a near-perfect square, and now I was using the mattock and the round-point shovel, and my hands were covered with blisters, I didn’t use gloves, and I sang until my voice was hoarse:

I’m lonesome since I crossed the hill,

And o’er the moorland sedgy

Such heavy thoughts my heart do fill,

Since parting with my Betsey

I seek for one as fair and gay,

But find none to remind me

How sweet the hours I passed away,

With the girl I left behind me.

I guess it took me a month or more, but I got it all dug out, and there was a wooden ladder and the walls were tarred cement blocks and there was a hatch and a padlock and nobody could hear me when I was down there, not even when I shouted and screamed and pounded on the wooden hatch, and nobody could hear my father either, trapped in that white room of madness, nobody could hear him even though he screamed until the veins in his neck bulged, and I’d made a whispered promise to get him out of the Castle just as soon as I could, and I aimed to keep that promise, yes I did.

* * *

In spite of everything, I was thinking that maybe salvation was in reach after all, even considering the naysayers and cynics who had condemned me, who had given up on me (a lad of only sixteen years!). And as far as the man who’d made the threats to my Constance, well, I wasn’t going to let him bully her, and I certainly wasn’t going to let him bully me. Think about what the Soldier would do, he certainly wouldn’t let a beautiful woman like Constance be brutalized. I would have to find some way to stop it.

And so I waited until she was gone, until they were both gone, and I went to the rear of her cabin and smashed the window with a crowbar and climbed in, and there was shattered glass everywhere and my hands and body got all bloody, but I laughed at pain, always had.

Well, it was strange and more than a little exciting to be inside Constance’s home, and I explored for a while, spending quite some time in each room. Kitchen: kerosene stove, white porcelain sink with dirty dishes piled high, small black metal table and black metal chairs, linoleum rug, Kelvinator refrigerator, nearly empty. Bathroom: pull-chain toilet, claw-foot bathtub, medicine cabinet filled with toothbrush, Paxil, Buspirone, skin cream, Luvox. Living room: fireplace, floral couch, Persian rug, television, CD player with sad Beethoven inside.

No signs of the psychotic ex-husband, but he’d been around, he’d made his presence known, poisoning her mind with lies, and inside the bedroom it was all filled with melancholy and depression, the blankets pulled into a heap at the bottom of the bed, clothes strewn all over the place, romance novels on the nightstand. And the most surprising thing, in the corner of the room, a crib, blankets neatly made, a mobile dangling, and that was who she’d lost, her baby, her boy, her Benton, a picture in a locket, no wonder she was so sad, no wonder her eyes had been crying forever.

I lay in bed and drank some of the gin I’d taken from the kitchen and I had my Browning knife and I just waited and waited and I was the Soldier and I was wearing a gas mask, and they’d made Constance wear a mask, and they were doing terrible things to her, taking their turns on her, and there were plenty of guards with primitive AK-47s, and everybody told me that it was too dangerous, that these guards would take care of me, but I sneaked up behind them and slit their throats and there was blood everywhere, and I grabbed Constance and her legs didn’t work, so I slung her over my shoulder and we disappeared into the mountains and into the caves and eventually we were at the Skull Shack, and I nursed her to health and she gave herself to me, and now her bed was filled with holes that I’d made with my Browning knife.

And then I heard a sound at the door and I panicked and then the front door opened and she was humming a song I’d never heard. I guess you could say adrenaline set in, and I was the Soldier again. Well, I tried yanking the bedroom window open, but it wouldn’t budge, and I could hear her whistling in the living room. Then I pulled again and this time it opened, but not all the way, and it also made a creaking sound, and I heard Constance say, hello? Is anyone there? And there I was, halfway in and halfway out, and I must have looked ridiculous, and panic rose through my body, and I pushed and pushed, and eventually I tumbled to the ground below. And not ten seconds later, Constance opened the bedroom door and walked toward the window, but I was pressed against the wall where she couldn’t see me, and she stood there for a long time, and I’ll bet she was just as scared as could be, and then after a while I heard her voice again, only now she was on the phone with the police saying there’s somebody been in my house, and I felt just like Goldilocks, only I wouldn’t escape scot-free, no way José, they knew it was me, they knew it was me the whole time, and they gave me probation, and I was thankful for that, and they gave me a restraining order, and I was mad as hell about that, because it wasn’t Constance who wanted it, it was that possessive ex-husband of hers, and I decided right then and there that I would have to rescue her from him and take her to a place where she couldn’t be tortured anymore, and I had the perfect place, and you know where that is.

CHAPTER 21

Oh, those next few weeks were cold, colder than a silver miner’s ass as they say, and it was snowy too, with sheets and sheets falling over the mountain until everything looked like a massive heap of marshmallows, and my uncle and aunt were so angry with me about what had happened with Constance, about the breaking and entering and the meeting with the judge and all the rest, but they only knew one side of the story and it pained me not to be able to tell them the TRUTH about her controlling ex-husband, and the TRUTH about her dead baby, and the TRUTH about her passion for me, but you always worry about people’s reactions, so I kept my mouth shut.

And once I made the mistake of asking them about my father and whether I could go visit him in the Castle. Oh, it will be a long time before you see him again, they said, and you could just tell they were enjoying it, and then a thought came to me, maybe they benefitted from his incarceration, maybe they got all the money that he had hidden under the floorboards, well, there was certainly a lot of that!

So one morning when my thoughts were clear, and the voices in my skull were only whispers, I decided that I wouldn’t be following their rules anymore, in fact, I wouldn’t be following anybody’s rules anymore, because I’d spent my whole life following rules, and look at where it had gotten me. And maybe the rule-makers could prevent me from seeing Constance, but they couldn’t prevent me from seeing my own father now could they? So I made some plans…

* * *

Some days later: me trudging through the snow wearing an orange pom-pom hat, a ragged jacket and worn-out boots, my ears and nose and fingers and toes numb, the Castle far away. I can tell you that I never wished for a car more than on this particular afternoon, a good car with a hemi and studded tires and heat blasting through the vents. You never get used to the cold, and I was discouraged and sobbing quietly. But whenever I felt like giving up and turning around, I thought about the Soldier and the way he would have responded, and he wouldn’t have let a little snow and cold get in his way, so I marched on.

A couple of miles down the road, God said hey Benton let me give you a break, poor guy, and he got a semi to stop before the snow started dumping again. The driver was a friendly little guy with slicked-back straw hair, a Fu Manchu mustache, and glasses that got lighter and darker and lighter again. Where are you heading, he asked me, and I told him Denver, and then I told him the story of how they’d dragged my father away against his will when he hadn’t done anything wrong except for love his wife, and Fu Manchu raised his eyebrows and said, that’s some heavy shit, son, and I couldn’t argue with him on that count.

This is interesting: I’d never been off the Mountain in my whole life. Well, my father used to say Silverville is a little piece of heaven here on Earth, a place of natural beauty where people mind their own business. You leave the Mountain and that’s when people start asking questions, that’s when people start pushing you around and dragging you down. That’s where they judge you by your clothes and your friends and your skin. Not on the Mountain, he said. People leave you alone there.

But Father was wrong as you can clearly see.

Fu Manchu drove fast, down, down, down, and soon we were off the Mountain. And then rumbling down the highway toward the buildings, the noise, the world; the knee-high snow now a memory with no meaning.

And my driver had taken me just as far as he could take me, and I didn’t know where the Castle was, not exactly, so he dropped me off on a street lined with bail bonds and liquor stores and crumbling buildings and black people, said good luck, son, hope you find your father, son, hope you find some peace, son.

I wandered down the street, looking up and down and all around, and strange-looking creatures gnawed at my heels and asked me for money, asked me what I wanted, asked me what I was doing here. I had twenty-four dollars that I’d borrowed from Aunt Rose’s purse, and I was feeling some pangs of hunger, so I stopped in a little Chinese restaurant, and they shouted at me in English, but it wasn’t an English I had ever heard before, and the menu was a plastic book and I pointed at words that I recognized and five minutes later a Chinaman slid a plate of chicken and rice in front of me.

I scarfed that food down lickety-split; then I paid and asked the Chinaman how to get to the Castle and he spoke to me in that strange English again, and he sure seemed mad at me, so I left and started walking down Colfax Avenue and I saw a tattoo parlor and I figured that it sure would be something to get a tattoo, maybe of the Soldier aiming his rifle, but I didn’t have enough money so instead I went inside and asked a man with tattoos crawling up his neck if he knew where the Castle was, that my father was a patient there, and he looked at me like I was crazy, said he’d never heard of it, so I left there too and kept walking and talking and walking some more.

I wandered the streets for hours on end, searching for the Castle, asking around, getting no leads. And then finally when I’d just about given up all hope, when I’d resigned myself to never seeing my flesh and blood again, I saw this old black man rubbing his hands over a trash can bonfire, and I had a feeling about him, and sure enough he knew exactly what I was talking about. Sure I know the Castle, he said. My only daughter spent some time there. Only it’s called Colorado Psychiatric Hospital now. It ain’t too far from here…