Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala Read online

  “An iron frog,” Mark said, his voice as flat as a distant echo. “I think it’s, like, an image I made up for pop, you know? Maybe I always thought, even while I was growing up so scared of him because he hurt me so many times, that underneath it all, he still loved me somehow. He was probably quite vulnerable too, you know? Like he was this soft squishy thing—a frog—inside a hard, protective shell that he had to put on to protect himself.”

  “Hmm … Could be,” his mother said, nodding, “but I remember that we used to have an iron frog.”

  “We what?”

  Mark shoved himself away from the table so violently his chair almost tipped over backwards. His foot kicked against one of the table legs, knocking his empty beer bottle onto the floor where it shattered.

  “You don’t remember?,” his mother said in a light, detached sounding voice as if she hadn’t even noticed his reaction. “You gave it to me as a gift many years ago … for Mother’s Day.”

  Mark stood up and started pacing back and forth, shaking his head as he muttered, “An iron frog … an iron frog.”

  “You must remember it. It was the cutest little thing in a creepy kind of way. Actually, it was quite large. A big, cast-iron bullfrog about—yay big.” She held her hands two feet apart. “You said you got it for me to put in my flower garden.”

  “Oh, my God!” Mark said, his hands raking through his hair. “Oh, Jesus! No!”

  Whimpering softly, he kept pacing back and forth across the kitchen floor, all the while slapping his fist into the flat of his hand, making wet smacking sounds. His breath came in short, burning gulps. Even before his mother had finished speaking, something he hadn’t remembered in years had come rushing back to him all at once, so fast it hit him with the irresistible surge of a tidal wave.

  “Yeah,” he whispered in a raw, gasping voice. “I think I do remember it!”

  His mother looked at him and laughed lightly.

  “That was so like you, to pick out the nicest things for me. You were always such a kind boy. Caring. You were only—I think maybe ten or eleven years old when you bought it for me? I couldn’t imagine how you could have afforded such a thing.”

  “I couldn’t afford it,” Mark said flatly, lowering his head and licking his lips. “I didn’t buy it … I stole it.”

  The memory swept over him like a whirlpool of oily black water. His face and hands had gone suddenly cold. With every step as he paced back and forth, he felt as though his legs were going to fold up under him.

  “You didn’t? Why, Mark! I’m surprised that you would ever steal anything!”

  “Oh yeah, I did. I stole it from Old Lady Warren’s lawn.”

  “Elsie Warren?”

  “Uh-huh,, but you want to know what’s really funny? I never really planned to give it to you.”

  Squinting as she looked up at him, his mother shook her head as though absolutely confused.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I was planning to use it to ... to kill him!” Mark said as the long buried emotions got clearer. “I wanted to kill that miserable son of a bitch!”

  He took a deep breath in an effort to calm himself, but it did no good. He was swept up in a maelstrom of emotion.

  “I was on my way home from school when I stole the iron frog. It was a Friday afternoon, I remember. It was sometime in May. I knew when I got home that pop would be on the couch in the living room—as usual—either watching TV or out cold. I was going to sneak up on him while he was asleep on the couch and … and— God. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I was going to smash his head in for all the nasty things he’d done to me!”

  Hot, burning panic raged inside Mark. He had no idea what his mother’s reaction would be. She sat perfectly still, leaning forward, her elbows on the edge of the table, her wrinkled hands covering the lower half of her face. Her shoulders were shaking, but he couldn’t tell if she was crying or if it was the tremors of old age.

  Oh, God! He thought. I should have kept my mouth shut. She can’t believe that her son would even conceive of such a thing, much less say it!

  But when his mother looked up at him, he saw a sparkling glint of genuine amusement in her eyes. Only when she took her hands away from her mouth did Mark realize she was laughing. Low, sniffing chuckles gradually built up into a gale of rippling laughter as she leaned back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling.

  Mark stopped his pacing and stared at her, dumbfounded.

  “What the—? What’s so damned funny?”

  “What’s so damned funny?” his mother echoed, choking with laughter. Pressing both of her hands to her temples and cupping her face, she shook her head from side to side. Her body rocked back and forth with uncontained merriment.

  “What’s so damned funny?” she repeated. “Why—what’s so damned funny is that’s exactly what I did!”

  “You … what?”

  “The iron frog you gave me … I used it to kill your father.”

  She was shaking with such uncontrollable laughter now Mark was genuinely concerned for her mental and physical health. He watched as tears streamed down her cheeks. She sniffed and wiped them away with the flats of her hands, but more came along with rising peals of insane laughter.

  “Mom ... Please,” Mark said, moving toward her but not quite daring to get too near. “You’re kinda freaking me out here.”

  “I couldn’t stand his abuse either, you know? And I’d finally had enough,” she said between vain attempts to catch her breath. “And after all those years—once you had moved out and not come home, I finally couldn’t take it anymore. So one day I whacked him a good one on the side of the head with that iron frog. Dropped dead on the spot. Once he was dead, I dragged his body over to the stairway, and then I called the ambulance.”

  She looked at Mark, and making eye contact appeared to calm her down, at least a little. Taking a deep, sputtering breath, she managed to gain a measure of control.

  “The cops came. And the ambulance. I told ‘em that I’d been out shopping, and he must’ve been drinking as usual and fallen down the stairs and banged his damned fool head on the steps. No one questioned my version of what happened.”

  “Not even … Did anyone ever find the … the iron frog?”

  “Late that night, way past midnight, once the police left, I went outside and dropped your iron frog down into the old well. The mouth was stained with blood, like it had this big, bloody grin, and there was some skin and hair still stuck to it that I couldn’t get off. I didn’t even try to clean it off ‘cause I didn’t want any evidence to catch in the sink or something if the cops decided to investigate.”

  “This can’t be happening … I don’t believe this,” Mark whispered.

  “My guess is, that frog’s still down there at the bottom of the well.” His mother looked at him and shrugged her shoulders as though it was all so easy to dismiss the thought that she had actually killed her husband.

  “Your iron frog.”

  Mark righted his chair and sat back down at the table, leaning forward and supporting his head in his hands. He was drained of all strength. Closing his eyes, he pressed the palms of his hands hard against his eyes until bright spirals of lights exploded across his vision. From somewhere far away, he heard a high, sniffing sound.

  Is she still laughing? …. Or is she crying now?

  He wanted to say or do something, but he was helpless, paralyzed with fear. The mental image of the iron frog was growing steadily sharper in his mind, and after a heart-stopping moment, it started to blend gradually into a human face. Stunned, Mark saw—and recognized—his father’s face staring at him with a cold, dead light in his wide, frog-like eyes.

  You son of a bitch! Mark thought, sobbing so hard it hurt his chest. You lousy ,mean, rotten bastard! You hurt me, and you hurt her, and you never gave a shit, but it happened—God damn you! You finally got what you deserved!

  The image of his father’s face twitched into a grimace of p
ain as it vibrated with bright, shimmering colors. Then it began to fade, dissolving gradually into the pulsating darkness behind Mark’s eyes. He realized that his mother was speaking to him, but her voice was muffled and distant. At first he couldn’t make out anything she was saying, but finally, something cut through to his awareness … like the soft, sad hiss of the sea breeze blowing over the beach.

  “I’ve been wanting to confess this to someone for a long time,” she said. “And I’m glad it was you I finally told. But do you want to know something else?”

  It took effort for Mark to open his eyes and look at her. His throat was bone dry, and when he opened his mouth to speak, all he could manage was a strangled groan that sounded like a frog, croaking.

  “That iron frog,” his mother said smiling at him with an expression of love and deep satisfaction. “I’d have to say it was the best damned Mother’s Day present you ever gave me.”

  The Call

  I’ve been working on this journal for close to thirty years. Ever since I was twelve years old. You’d think I would have finished it by now and gone on to write something else, but I have to keep writing and rewriting it if only to make sure the memories and the fear stay fresh in my mind.

  I want to remember.

  I have to remember because I don’t want to have what happened to my father happen to me. So at least four or five times a year—sometime a lot more often—I take down the old leather-bound journal and read it straight through, and then I write ... and I revise ... and I remember.

  I have no idea when it started for my father. It had to have been long before I was born, back when he was a kid, growing up in Hilton, Maine. I do remember that, at some point, the dreams got so bad for him he told me one morning at breakfast that there were times when he actually couldn’t distinguish between waking and sleeping.

  That idea bothered me a lot.

  I was just a kid at the time, remember. Couldn’t have been more than five or six years old, but I’ll never forget that particular morning. My dad and I were sitting across from each other in the breakfast nook, in our usual places, eating what we always had for breakfast cereal, usually Cheerios, and orange juice for me, scrambled eggs, wheat toast, OJ, and coffee for my dad.

  My mom died when I was three years old, so I don’t have any memories of her that aren’t colored by the old, fading photographs I’ve seen of her and how my father described her. But memories of my dad—and that morning and what happened afterwards—are still sharp and clear.

  I work at keeping them that way.

  My father was a good man ... a good father. I don’t remember him as anything other than patient and understanding, even when I screwed up royally. Now that I’m older, and married, and have a son of my own—he’s named Matt, after my father—I think I understand a little better why my father was the way he was. At the time, though, especially that morning, all I knew was that I was worried sick that he was going to die soon, that I was going to lose him like I’d lost my mom.

  That morning ...

  It was spring, had to have been March or early April. I remember the angle of sun shining warmly through the kitchen window, but the view of our backyard out the kitchen bay window was of a brown, dead world. The little bit of snow left on the ground was in the shadows under the pine trees that bordered our property, and I remember a swarm of brown sparrows fluttering around the feeder my dad and I had built the summer before. I could hear them chirping even through the closed window.

  I also remember being confused and frightened by what my father had said, and then he told me a story that confused and frightened me even more. He said it was something called a Zen koan. I don’t remember exactly how it went, but it was something to do with a man who was upset because the night before he’d dreamed he was a butterfly. His teacher or something asked him how he could be sure, right then, that he wasn’t a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

  I’m still not sure I get it.

  But then my dad proceeded to tell me how for the last several nights, when he was dreaming—when he was in his dreams—they were so vivid he felt as though he had been awake all night. When he woke up in the morning, he said he felt so tired he might just as well not have slept at all.

  He didn’t look so good, either.

  I remember thinking that he must be ill. His eyes had puffy dark bags under them, and his face was pale and drawn, really pasty-white. To my little kid’s eyes, he sure looked like someone who might be living two complete lives instead of one … with no time left over for any real sleep.

  My dad worked at Martindale’s Rope and Twine Factory, in Biddeford, Maine. It wasn’t a glamorous job, by any stretch of the imagination, but he worked hard, and we got by. I don’t remember ever going without food or clothes, although—like any kid, I suppose—there were toys and things I wanted that I didn’t get, even on my birthday or for Christmas.

  It wasn’t until a little later, once I was in junior high school, that my father died, and that’s what this is an account of, as best as I can recollect. Of course, there are lots of things—especially what my father was thinking and feeling at the time—that I can only guess at.

  But I was there when it happened, and I saw what I saw, no matter how unbelievable it might seem … even to me.

  Even today, thinking about it, I get a chill deep in my gut. No matter how much over the years it feels more and more like it had to have been a dream … or a nightmare, I know it really happened.

  I know because it killed my father.

  But even if it didn’t happen the way I remember it ... even if it was just a dream, I know dreams and nightmares, no matter how intense, fade over time ... like memories, and I have to remember this one. I have to keep it fresh in my mind so I don’t end up convincing myself that it didn’t really happen, and then fall into the same trap my father fell into.

  The whole time I was growing up, I remember thinking how my father didn’t look very healthy. He was always on the thin side, even in his wedding photos; but by the time I was in seventh grade, I remember lying awake many nights worried sick that my dad had cancer or a bad heart, like what had killed my mother, and that he was going to die soon and leave me all alone in the world.

  And that’s exactly what happened.

  He died, and from the seventh grade on, my aunt and uncle, Pauline and Mike, raised me, but my father didn’t die of cancer ... not unless there’s such a thing as cancer of the universe.

  Now there’s a concept for you.

  Cancer of the Universe.

  Every now and then, especially in the months before he died, my dad talked to me about his dreams. I remember many mornings when he looked haggard and tired, and he would ask me over breakfast what I had dreamed the night before. He taught me early on to pay attention to my dreams, but I’m sure now that it wasn’t just out of interest or curiosity. He was checking on me ... making sure I was okay ... not being threatened. No matter how casual he tried to be about it, I always felt like there was an undercurrent of danger when he asked me about my dreams, as if he didn’t quite trust his own dreams and was afraid that mine would get to be as bad as his.

  He never told me any of the details of his dreams, at least not that I recall, but he seemed to move through life with a dark cloud hanging over his head, shading his face even on the sunniest days. That’s the only way I can describe it.

  Anyway, it was a bright, sunny morning in spring when I was in seventh grade that my father looked particularly worn when we sat down at the table for our usual breakfast. By then, I was convinced he was wasting away from some dread disease he didn’t know about. Either that or he did know about it and didn’t have the heart yet to discuss it with me. So I got really nervous when he told me he wasn’t going to work that day, that he was going to call school and tell them I wasn’t coming today, and we were going for a drive.

  I protested.

  Not that I wanted to go to school or anything. I never really liked school. But there wa
s something about the way he said it that I could tell something was really wrong. All I could think was, he’s going to take me to the doctor’s office or he’s going to check into the hospital where the doctor would break the news to me that he had only a few weeks—or days—to live.

  “Hey. What’s the matter, Sport?” he asked, scruffing my hair. He called me “Sport” a lot. “You got something against missing school and spending the day with your old man?”

  “It’s not that,” I said, and I remember that I was burning inside, dying to ask him if he was okay, or if he was going to die. Instead, all I could manage was a feeble, “So what are we gonna do?”

  “I was thinking about taking a drive up north,” he said with a thin smile. The circles under his eyes looked like smears of black shoe polish.

  “You mean to Hilton?” I asked, and he nodded.

  I remember thinking how his smile looked forced ... not at all natural or normal. And I remember that all I did was nod in agreement and focus as hard as I could on the cereal floating in the milk remaining in my bowl, all the while thinking, He’s going to die! … He’s sick, and he’s going back home to die!

  Crazy thought for a little kid, don’t you think?

  Anyway, we finished breakfast, cleaned up the dishes, and got into the car. As we backed out of the driveway, I wanted desperately to ask him why he wanted to drive to Hilton, especially today, but I couldn’t because I was still tingling with the dreadful anticipation that he was going to admit something horrible once we were on the road ... something I didn’t want to hear.

  The drive north went okay. I’ve never been much for long car trips, even now. After two or three hours in a car, I start getting a little twitchy. But this particular day, I remember, was mild and sunny. The grass was turning green, and leaves were bursting out all over the place. As we drove, my dad told me he wanted to take the long way and see some of the scenery while we were at it.