Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala Page 17

  Will it hold? ….

  Will it hold?

  That thought kept pounding in her head like the steady hammering that came from the other side of the cellar door.

  If she could hang on just long enough … if she could just keep them down there in the cellar until dawn … Holly knew she might have a chance.

  She might not die.

  But how soon would the sun come up now that the snowstorm was over, and how strong was the door?

  Would it hold them back long enough so, as morning light filled the cellar, they would be driven back into their hole?

  Or had the snow piled up high enough over the cellar windows so it would block out the sunlight, and they wouldn’t be afraid?

  Maybe they would keep beating and tearing at the door until it finally gave way, and then they’d pour into the kitchen?

  By then, would there be enough daylight to scare them back down into the cellar, or would they do to her what they had done to her daddy and her momma and the oilman?

  Holly choked back her tears and squeezed her eyes so tightly shut they hurt as she pressed her full weight against the cellar door, her body jumping with every impact from the other side.

  She had to hold on … at least until daylight.

  She had to be strong and keep these things from getting to her.

  No matter what, she had to do this … She had to be brave so her daddy would be proud of her.

  Iron Frog

  “Frogs at the bottom of the well see only a small part of the sky.”

  —A Chinese proverb

  “I think I might’ve seen pop last night.”

  Mark Stover was sitting at the kitchen table across from his mother. Overhead, a single light bulb cast a dull yellow patina, like a coating of dust, over the well-worn linoleum floor, the faded and chipped countertop, and the frayed, red and white checkered tablecloth. Ellen Stover, Mark’s mother, was sitting silently with her hands folded on the table in front of her. Between her forearms was a cup of tea. Although it was no longer steaming, she hadn’t sipped it yet. The overhead light made the skin on the back of her hands look as cracked and pale as the old ceramic teacup. It was almost translucent. Pencil-thin tendons and twisting blue veins stood out in sharp relief beneath her skin as she twisted and twined her fingers together.

  “What do you mean?” she said, her voice low and tremulous, a faint whisper.

  Mark heaved a sigh as he leaned his chair back on two legs and took a swallow from his beer bottle. His throat made a loud gulping sound that might have been funny except for the sensation he had that unseen hands as cold as ice were gripping him by the throat and slowly squeezing.

  “Well, I—” He paused and took another swig. “You have to realize how tough this is for me, coming back home after all this time.”

  His mother nodded but said nothing. His grip around the beer bottle tightened as he absent-mindedly flicked the edge of the bottle’s label with his thumbnail. His vision went unfocused as he dredged up the memory of the nightmare he’d had the night before. It had been his first night sleeping in his boyhood home in over ten years.

  “I know it wasn’t pop. Not really. But I was thinking about him, you know, and I was trying to—to ...”

  He let his voice fade away because he wasn’t sure how to say what he wanted to say without hurting his mother’s feelings. She smiled reassuringly and sighed and then shifted her gaze away, blinking her eyes as though fighting back tears.

  “Well of course it couldn’t really have been him,” she said. “Your father’s been dead more’n eight years, now.”

  Mark nodded and after a moment said in a low, raspy voice, “I still feel bad about not making it to his funeral.”

  “What’s done is done,” his mother said with a shrug that wasn’t quite as casual as she might have intended. “So where’d you see him?”

  A terrible chill gripped Mark as he allowed the memory of his nightmare to come back. For a moment, he couldn’t take a deep enough breath to speak, but he finally managed to croak out the words, “In my bedroom.”

  “I see.”

  An odd expression crossed his mother’s face. His stomach tightened, and his heart dropped in the cold center of his chest.

  I know exactly what it was! Mark thought, fighting back the chills that skittered up and down his back.

  The bastard’s still here!

  No matter how long he’s been dead ... no matter how deep we bury him ... he will always cast a shadow over this house and both of our lives.

  He wanted to say this—or something very much like it—to his mother, but the sensation of cold hands tightening around his throat grew stronger. To relieve it, he tilted his head back and focused on the ceiling as he took another long swallow of beer.

  After a lengthening moment of awkward silence, he cleared his throat and said, “Do you have any idea how much I hate this place?”

  “Home, you mean?”

  “No, the island.”

  His mother sighed, lowered her gaze as though heartbroken, and said nothing.

  “The whole goddamned place! Goddamned Glooscap Island and the goddamned ocean that surrounds it and everything about it! You know—”

  He caught himself and sniffed with laughter as he narrowed his eyes, lowered his head and shook it as though deeply saddened.

  “It’s funny how every summer this place is overrun with tourists and summer people—”

  “And every year, things get nothing but worse,” his mother added, sounding wistful.

  “What do they come here for?”

  His mother frowned and shrugged.

  “To get away from it all, I guess,” she said. “Away from the crime and overcrowding in the cities, the hustle and bustle. They want to be surrounded by the ocean so they can relax and forget all about their problems back at home—in the city. They want to breathe fresh ocean air and—”

  “Exactly! Fresh air,” Mark said sharply, pointing at her with his beer bottle. “But do you know what this island smells like to me?”

  He paused, but when his mother didn’t say anything, he continued.

  “All it’s ever smelled like to me is dead, rotting fish!”

  His mother considered this for a moment. Then she nodded and stared at him silently. Mark sniffed the air, flaring his nostrils as though testing the wind.

  “Can’t you smell it right now?” He snorted loudly, the faint stench—or the memory of it—clinging to the insides of his nose and throat. “God, ever since I can remember, that’s all this house, this town, this whole goddamned island has ever smelled like—a barrel of dead, rotting, putrid fish.” His voice trailed away as he shook his head slowly and finished, “Like pop’s bait barrel.”

  He took another swallow of beer, draining the bottle, and then, feeling a bit woozy, placed it carefully on the table in front of him.

  “That always was pop’s own special smell, wasn’t it?” He chuckled softly. “It was like his personal cologne or something—a mixture of—what? Dead fish, diesel fumes, cigar smoke—” He swallowed again, noisily, and added, “—and cheap whiskey.”

  “Your father was a lobsterman.” His mom let out a lilting laugh of her own. “It was all part of the job.”

  “Really? You accept that?”

  His mother smiled and said, “I had to. It was my lot in life.”

  “Yeah, but do you realize how embarrassing it was? Jesus, I’d go to high school and had friends on the mainland, but I never wanted to invite any of them to the house. I didn’t dare to because of the smell. I was so embarrassed by the way the stink of him permeated … everything. Everything! You remember that I used to shower sometimes two or three times a day, right? I did it so that god-awful smell wouldn’t cling to me the way it does—the way it did to him.”

  Ellen tilted her head slightly to one side and shrugged.

  “Your father certainly wasn’t the only man on Glooscap Island who smelled like that, I can assure you.”
<
br />   “Or who drank like that, I know, but...” Mark took a deep breath before continuing. “There’s something I never told you.”

  He couldn’t meet his mother’s gaze, so he focused on his clasped hands in his lap. He wanted another beer but wasn’t sure he could walk straight to get to the refrigerator.

  “I told you how, for the last couple of years, I’ve been doing therapy, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, I finally remembered something that happened back when I was a kid—around nine years old—that was really significant.”

  His mother’s silence urged him on.

  “Remember the summer dad broke his foot, and I went out with him to haul his lobster pots?”

  Ellen nodded. “How could I forget? That’s when his drinking started getting worse because he was so depressed about being handicapped. I reminded him it was only temporary, but it really set him back, you know?”

  “I know,” Mark said, “but I never told you what he did to me one day when we were out, did I?”

  His mother frowned. Sadness shaded her eyes as she shook her head, silently encouraging him to continue. Mark leaned back in his chair and heaved a heavy sigh. He was convinced the fishy smell clung to him, making his stomach churn.

  “I always figured, when I grew up, I’d be a lobsterman like pop, you know? Wasn’t really any other choice, it seemed. He was a lobsterman just like grandpa was, and I was a lobsterman’s son. I never doubted that I’d take over his job, setting my traps in the same places he set his.”

  Mark picked up the empty beer bottle and began rolling it back and forth between his hands. He winced as the memory of that day grew sharper in his mind.

  “One of the first days we were out together, it was right after a storm, I remember, because the sea was running high. Well, one of his lines had gotten fouled up with someone else’s. ‘Willow’ Johnson’s, as I recall. There was a real danger the rope would get tangled up in our propeller. While I was hauling in the line, because the rough sea was tossing the boat around, I had to lean over the side of the boat. I was trying my best to unfoul the ropes while pop held the boat steady, heading into the swells, but I was scared that, with each rising wave, I’d pitch head-over-heels over the side of the boat and into the water.”

  “Lobstering’s a dangerous job sometimes, no doubt about that,” Ellen said mildly. “Fact is, I had more ‘n a few arguments with your father about how I thought you might be a little too young to be out there with him, working as hard as that.”

  “Umm—yeah. I can bet he said something about ‘making a boy a man,’ right? But you see, by mistake I cut pop’s pot line not ‘Willow’ Johnson’s, and I lost his trap. Pop went ballistic. He loses traps all the time. Everyone does. Part of the business. But he went ape-shit about losing that particular trap because it was all my fault. He started cussing me out, calling me all kinds of names I’d never even heard before. He slapped me around hard, and then he took me by the scruff of the neck and shoved me headfirst into the bait barrel. Held me there a good, long time, too. So long I thought I was going to die.”

  Mark ran his hand over his throat to relieve that steady pressure that was still strangling him.

  “God! That stench of raw, rotting fish. I was convinced I was going to die. That he was going to kill me and chuck me overboard.”

  Mark paused for a moment and looked at his mother, trying to read her reaction, but her face was absolutely devoid of expression. She didn’t appear to be the least bit surprised by this revelation, as if her thirty-plus years of living with Ernie Stover had made her immune to any surprises about his violence and abuse.

  “So, then.” Mark cleared his throat. “You can see why that smell still bothers me, right? How after all these years, I still can’t get it out of my memory? It’s like it’s still clinging to the back of my throat, and no matter what I do, I’ll never be able to get it out of my system. Never! I was so scared, thinking pop was going to kill me, I pissed myself. And all for losing one lousy lobster trap? It was crazy for him to react like that. And that’s why, after all these years, I can finally say I feared … and I hated pop more than anyone else in the world.”

  There. He’d finally said it out loud. He sat back and squared his shoulders to take a deep, shuddering breath.

  “And I hate him for dying before I could tell him how much I hated him, too.”

  Mark stared at his mother, shocked and a little embarrassed to see a single tear running down from the corner of her left eye, shimmering like glycerin on the puffy, deeply-pored skin of her face. His stomach twisted up, and his eyes started stinging as though he were about to start crying, too; but after so many years of bottling up his rage and hurt, it was almost too easy to say these things out loud ... at least to his mother.

  If only his father were still alive so he could tell him.

  “And you know what?” he said after taking a moment to compose himself, “I don’t think it could possibly have been a conscious decision at that age, but from then on, I knew that I could never become a lobsterman, that I would do absolutely anything and everything within my power to get away from this godforsaken island just to get away from him! That’s why I studied as hard as I did in high school. I was sure that a college education was my ticket off Glooscap and away from a life that smelled like … dead fish in a bait barrel.”

  His mother sighed and then, after a long time, said, “You think I didn’t know that?”

  She stopped twisting her fingers together and slid both of her hands across the table toward him. He was surprised by how small and delicate her hands felt as she twined her fingers around his and squeezed. She had always looked so big, so strong to him, but now it was a shock to realize how tiny and fragile she really was.

  A sudden, blinding surge of anger filled him. He thought how easy it would be to squeeze his mother’s hands together and grind her knuckles to powder. But after years of therapy, he knew his anger wasn’t directed at her. Although she had never spoken to him about it, and she had never stood up for him against his father, he knew that she had suffered horribly at the hands of her husband … as much if not more than he had. Shortly after his father died, his mother had been hospitalized—for nervous exhaustion, the doctor had told him at the time, but he had recognized the truth.

  She’d had a nervous breakdown.

  “You wanna know something?” Mark asked, struggling to keep control of his emotions. “That’s the one thing I wish for. I wish pop was still alive so I could tell him to his face how much he hurt me, and how, over the years, I’ve worked hard to forgive him but can’t.”

  “I know that,” his mother whispered, giving his hands a tighter squeeze. Her touch was unnaturally dry and rough.

  “I try to do it, too, in my heart,” Mark continued. “I try like hell. Just last night, I was wide awake in bed for the longest time, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the steady tick-tock of my old alarm clock. I tried so hard to imagine that he was there in the room with me so I could talk to him ... so I could say what I wanted—what I needed to say. But every time I tried to visualize him, I couldn’t get a clear mental image of what he looked like. Instead, all I could see was this ... this—”

  The strong, cold clutching sensation gripping his throat spread a tingling panic through him. Sweat broke out across his forehead, and deep inside his chest, a scream was building and threatening to burst loose at any second.

  “You know you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” his mother said mildly. “I know there’s been a lot of pain in your life, and I feel absolutely miserable that I wasn’t able to help you. If there’s anything you can’t forgive me for it’s that I wasn’t able to protect you.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Mark said in a shattered voice. “You did the best you could at the time. I realize that. You were just as scared of him as I was. It’s just that last night—”

  Again, Mark shivered as the memory of his nightmare rose up. Leanin
g forward with his elbows in his knees, he squeezed his eyes tightly shut as the mental image came more clearly into focus. He knew he had to face this so he could put it behind him, but shivers wracked his body as he remembered lying in his darkened bedroom trying to conjure up the image of his dead father’s face.

  “Do you—?” he said, but tears welled up in his eyes, and his voice choked off abruptly. Gripped by a swell of emotion, he grabbed his mother’s hands again and held them tightly, as if desperate to find in her clasp even a small measure of the strength and reassurance he needed right now.

  “Whenever I try to remember what Dad looked like,” Mark said in a high, halting voice. “I know it’s crazy, but all I ever get is this image of a big iron frog.”

  He sighed, keeping his eyes closed as he shook his head and wished that the image burned into his brain would dissolve even though he knew it never would.

  “I know how weird this sounds,” he said, finally opening his eyes and looking at her through his tears. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “But whenever I try to remember what he looked like, that’s what I see.”

  Ever since he had first mentioned this image to his therapist, more than two years ago, he had hoped that just saying this out loud to his mother would give him some measure of relief, but now that the words were out, all they did was make the mental image of the frog resolve all the more clearly in his mind.

  Last night!

  He wasn’t even sure if he had been asleep or awake. There was no way of knowing if the image was inside his mind or really there in the room with him, hovering in a blue, ghostly glow in the darkness beside his bed. But he had seen the wide, grinning face of a huge frog. Its round, bulging eyes were slitted with golden pupils that stared at him, unblinking, from out of the darkness. The wide face was split by the thick, dark line of a grin, but there was no life, no animation in the features. The frog’s face was immobile, as though it had been cast in metal that was marked with black and rust-red splotches of corrosion. Once or twice, the frog’s mouth appeared to twitch as though the creature were alive and trying to make a sound … or was about to speak.