Gravel crunched and crackled under the SUV’s heavy rubber treads. Even after hours on the winding country roads the sound was oddly pleasant. The sun was low in the sky and had begun to cast a warm golden light over the grasses and trees passing by the sides of the road. We were some thirty-odd minutes from our destination, still deep in the patchwork of sprawling countryside and small towns that dominate the American South.
I didn’t usually enjoy driving, but on this occasion it was quite nice. Feeling the movements of the large, sturdy vehicle respond to the motions of my hand on the wheel was oddly empowering. I owned this machine. I was steering it where I wanted to go. I had all the time in the world to get where I was going. I didn’t have to go there at all if I didn’t want to.
It was a good feeling. Control, strength and self-determination. The master of my own life.
We were headed to a small town where we had once lived. Me, and my sister, Alice, in the seat next to me. Going to see a man neither of us had laid eyes on in some years. Our father.
He was less than a role model. To most observers, saying he was anything beyond a fast talking con man and short-tempered alcoholic would have been generous. To those small few who really knew him, however, he was something else entirely.
The sun dipped lower in the sky and the miles ground away. My eyes were fixed ahead in a blank stare as I reflected on the events of the past few weeks. At the urging of a close friend, I had decided to end several years of partial estrangement from our father. I contacted the relevant parties and, after a round of discussion, it was decided that my sister and I would pay him a visit over the upcoming holiday. She would fly to my university, after which we would drive the remaining nine-hour journey to the small town where my father lived.
I didn’t know what to expect when we arrived. My father had always possessed the extraordinary ability to coat himself in a shiny and beguiling veneer when he needed to impress. Demonstrating to his two estranged children that visiting him was a safe and worthwhile endeavor might qualify as one such situation.
Unfortunately, his mental state had deteriorated over the past several years; diminishing his ability to construct the masks that allowed him to engage in society. Those once dazzling veneers had begun to chip away, leaving his true face peering ominously through the cracks.
These thoughts rolled and floated through my mind as trees and fields gave way to small residences and businesses. They were old, cheap, wooden and tin structures. There were new, cheap, plaster and concrete structures. Half of the local economy seemed to be based around used car lots and liquor stores. We had arrived.
★ ★ ★ ★
The SUV lurched over the curb into the hotel parking lot. It wasn’t really surprising that he was living here. The transient nature of hotel life suited him better than any fixed accommodation could.
My sister spotted him standing in one corner of the parking lot smiling at us. I pulled the vehicle to a stop in the space next to him.
A wave of unease had made its way up from the pit of my stomach on seeing his face. The smile was forced and disingenuous, pulled wide across his teeth as if someone had stapled the skin at both of his dimples. The cracks in the mask were obvious, the paint on the plaster peeling and flaking away.
I killed the engine and stepped out of the car, meeting his smile with one of my own. Two masks facing each other. Mine was prettier, beautifully wrought in intricate detail with a coat of shiny new paint. Not that it would matter to him. Even in his current state, he would see past it as though it were a paper cut-out, scribbled in crayon by a toddler. No one knew masks better than him.
Alice walked around the corner of the car and fixed our father with a somewhat more genuine smile. He threw open his arms and stepped forward to wrap both of us in a sweeping embrace. As he leaned close I could smell the alcohol on his breath. His skin was covered in deep creases and scars, tinted a burnt red. He looked like an old shotgun casing that had been fired and reloaded again and again until the plastic was worn and brittle.
He stepped back and, with more artificial greetings and smiles, motioned us toward the hotel. We unloaded our bags and made our way toward the room. As we walked I examined his appearance. His hair and beard were messier than usual, consistent with the slightly wrinkled state of his Hawaiian-print button up. From his appearance and the cadence of his voice, I could tell that he was more than a bit drunk. Unsurprising, but still disappointing given that it was not yet 7:00 p.m. and we had just traveled nine hours to see him.
The hotel room was much larger than I had expected, but otherwise unremarkable. The entry opened into a short hallway lined with three small bedrooms, leading to a combination kitchen and sitting room. At the end of the room a set of sliding glass doors looked out on a small deck.We dropped off our belongings and headed out for dinner.
We settled on a cheap diner near the hotel. Our meal there set the scene for the remainder of the next days’ exchanges. Alice grew irritable and indignant as it became painfully clear how drunk our father was. The atmosphere grew increasingly tense, pulling the cracks in our father’s mask wider. The meal stopped short of devolving into a full-fledged altercation.
★ ★ ★ ★
So followed the next several days of painfully forced “family activities.” It was a familiar pattern. We would pile into a vehicle, which my father’s presence made stiflingly small, and go to some unimaginative, low-effort venue, such as a cheap buffet or dingy theater. Each activity was vetted to ensure we would be back to the hotel by 5:00 p.m. so our father could begin drinking. The thick tension was pervasive throughout the day. In the traditional pattern, there would almost always be a bitter fight over some inconsequential topic.
By the evening of the second day, Alice had all but given up attempting to communicate with our father. She had arrived with more earnest hopes and expectations than I had, and so was somewhat more bitter about the course this trip had taken. I had had few preconceptions that our father would be any different than the creature we both remembered. His behavior was slightly disappointing, but not surprising.
At his request, I made the attempt to sit with him on the hotel porch while he drank. The atmosphere quickly became unpleasant. He began to aggressively assert a series of delusions about what sort of ignorant and ungrateful creatures my sister, my mother, and I were. I could feel the still air begin to ring as his face twisted and he sank deeper and deeper into his diluted fantasies. The mask was falling away. The indescribable ominous aura that preluded a descent into violent insanity began to seep through the air. I made a quick excuse to leave and head to my room for the night. His eyes followed me as I rose and passed through the sliding door. Black pinprick pupils centered in bloodshot, icy blue eyes. Luckily I heard no more from him that night.
The following day passed much the same as the previous few had. We ate an uncomfortably large breakfast, watched a movie at a nearby theater, and picked up groceries and booze. The fight of the day centered on Alice’s choice of food at the grocery store, which my father disapproved of, and which my sister required on principle.
Alice immediately locked herself in her room upon our return to the hotel. My father tried to convince me to join him on the porch for his nightly drunk, but I firmly declined. I was not interested in a repeat of the previous night’s events. An hour or so of browsing the internet in my room sounded much more appealing than risking another encounter with the creature behind my father’s cracking mask.
★ ★ ★ ★
A series of muffled thumps and bangs woke me from a light sleep. Looking at the clock I could see it was just past 9:30 p.m. I lay there awake for some time, waiting for the muffled sounds to stop. They did not. By 10:00 p.m. I realized that whatever was happening could go on all night. As much as I didn’t want to interact with whatever was making the noises, I decided I needed to put a stop to it to keep my sanity.
I got out of bed, opened the door, and walked down the hallway to kitchen. The thumping and banging got louder as I approached. I stepped into the kitchen with a word half-formed in my mouth.
“Wha…” The word stopped abruptly on my tongue.
My brain set to processing the scene in front of me. In a fraction of an instant that seemed like an hour, I pieced the shapes into an image.
There was a man in the kitchen. Completely naked, covered in blood. It was my father.
Upon hearing me, his head jerked around and fixed its pinprick pupils in my direction. I say “in my direction,” because his eyes were glazed over in a way that prevented him from focusing on any one particular object. Despite this, they somehow held an intense focus on something invisible either inside me or behind me. I recognized the look. To someone who has never looked into the eyes of someone violent and insane, the closest thing I can compare it to is a predatory animal. It sees prey, it attacks, it kills. There is nothing else.
There was a knife in his hand.
Slowly and wordlessly I began to back out of the kitchen. He grunted something unintelligible and took two lumbering steps forward. There was something unsettling in the way he moved, jerking and sharp, with powerful purpose in each movement. As I stepped back out of the kitchen, he lunged forward. I spun around and ran down the hallway, diving into my room and throwing the door shut behind me. I threw my full weight into the door and turned the lock.
I remained frozen, wedged against the door, sure that both the weight of my body and the full strength of my legs would be at my disposal when they were needed. And they would be needed. It was the only thing I was certain of.
I could hear the thing’s heavy footfalls outside the door. It grabbed the handle and shook violently. My hand was already firmly on my end of the handle. I knew that it was more than capable of breaking the cheap lock on the hotel door. Even my hand bracing with all of my strength would only buy me some additional time until the metal gave way.
“OPEN THIS DOOR!!!!!” — garbled rumbling gave way to the guttural bark. In as measured of a voice as I could muster, I asked the creature to please leave. We could discuss anything it had to say in the morning.
SLAM!
The door bent inward as the thing on the other side rammed into it. Despite my solid position, I was nearly thrown off the door by the sudden force of the impact. I re-positioned myself in a fraction of a second and braced for more.
SLAM! SLAM! SLAM!
They came as I had expected.
“YOU’VE GOTTA FACE THIS BOY!!!” The voice vomited up the words like some kind of hellish prophecy. I replied again, imploring the voice to go away and wait until the next day to discuss whatever it had to say. More guttural rumbling and vomiting of orders to open the door came in response. The slamming of the door alternated with violent jerking and hammering on the handle. My even-toned pleas gradually progressed to loud commands, then to swearing and threats to call the police yelled as loud as I could manage. The slamming and hammering only got stronger. The edges of the door began to creak and snap and the metal of the handle grew looser. I knew my time was running out. It was literally destroying the door.
My eyes flew around the room as I considered what would happen when it came through the door. The only viable weapon in sight was a small table lamp. A vivid image of confronting the thing flashed through my mind. The odds were not good. It would likely shrug off even a solid blow to the head. I would not be so quick to recover from a well placed knife strike.
Mentally preparing myself for whatever was about to happen, I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialed 911.
“911. What is your emergency?” The normal human voice sounded out of place under the current circumstances. I relayed the situation as clearly and loudly as I could. The dispatcher informed me they would be sending the first available officers.
I noticed that the slamming and hammering had stopped about a minute into the call. I kept myself braced against another attack, but it didn’t come. Things were suddenly very quiet. I stood listening for an indeterminate amount of time.
CRACK!
A sharp noise came from across the room. The window. It was outside the window.
CRACK!
Its fist slammed into the window opposite me. There was nothing I could do. I could not hold a broken window shut.
CRACK!
I looked back at the table lamp and realized that this cheap appliance was about to be my weapon in a fight to the death. Two people would not walk out of this room.
Flash.
Blue and red lights. The outline of the figure disappeared from the window.
I stood there staring in disbelief. A pair of footsteps walked past the window and to the front door. I could hear it open and several pairs of feet move inside. There were voices. I picked out one commanding someone to get in and sit down. The footsteps moved past my door.
“Hello?” I heard a male voice call out. It was not my father.
I replied to the voice, who, after a tense minute of dialogue, managed to convince me it belonged to a police officer. I exited the room. A medium-sized man with close cropped hair was waiting outside the door. After confirming that I was uninjured, the officer asked me to recount the events that had led to our current situation. I gave him as concise and accurate of a summary as I could manage. Apparently satisfied, the officer asked me to follow him down the hallway.
The scene in the kitchen was nothing short of bizarre. There was a second, larger officer near the entrance to the room. He was noticeably tall and well muscled with a semi-tensed body-posture. His eyes were carefully trained at the man across the room. Some two meters away my father was standing, still naked, covered in blood with the same glazed focus in his eyes. He appeared oddly out of place hovering inactive in his deranged state. Like a hungry wolf standing motionless among a flock of sheep, restrained by some invisible force.
The officer with the short-cropped hair began discussing plans to take my father to jail and details on what was to follow. I almost laughed when he asked if there was anyone who would come to the police station later to discuss the logistics of my father’s release. My reply made it clear that I didn’t particularly care if there was ever a release.
The conversation was cut short by a jerky lurch from the naked thing across the room. The taller officer tensed even further and took a half-step forward. In his unsettlingly rapid and convulsive fashion, my father had crossed to the refrigerator. There was a hiss and a crack from something in his hand.
A can of cheap malt liquor. Standing naked, covered in blood and under arrest, my father had decided that the logical next step was to down another can of his favorite piss- water.
“That’s the last thing you need right now” the tall officer said dryly.
★ ★ ★ ★
The rest of the night melted into a numb blur. The officers miraculously managed to talk my father into wrapping himself in a discarded bathrobe from the kitchen floor. They directed him out the door and towards their waiting cruiser. I seriously doubted they would get him loaded into the vehicle without incident, but by this point I didn’t care. As long as he was out of sight and the threat of imminent attack was gone, I was content to focus on the task at hand.
Alice was exceedingly difficult to shake awake. Even after several minutes she was only semi-coherent and still appeared unable to process anything beyond simple commands. I realized she must have downed a number of sleeping pills a few hours before. She was prone to anxiety and insomnia, and often turned to various drug cocktails to get through rough patches. After the friction with our father, she’d likely decided that a handful of Ambien was the only way she was going to get any sleep. That explained how she had managed to stay unconscious throughout the whole night’s ordeal.
I condensed my message to Alice into two simple parts:
Step 1 — Pack.
Step 2 — Get in the car.
Within fifteen minutes we were in the SUV, listening to the gravel crunch as we pulled out of the parking lot. By this point it was quite late and the rural streets and lanes were almost entirely empty. In front of me was a tunnel of identical trees, partially illuminated by the yellow headlights. Alice quickly lapsed back into unconsciousness. I didn’t try to wake her. I was too exhausted to think about anything but the road ahead.
★ ★ ★ ★
Long hours passed in the darkness. It felt like being stuck in some purgatory of endlessly dark and lonely back roads. By the time the sun finally emerged, it felt like waking up from a nightmare. I began to recognize familiar landmarks passing by.
I was so relieved to see light and an end to this ordeal that I immediately celebrated with a nap. My blissful ten seconds of sleep was cut short by the harsh grinding of the highway rumble strip. I jerked the wheel sharply away from the oncoming ditch and back towards the road. The SUV rocked jarringly back and forth as I aligned it to the lane.
I turned the radio volume to an offensively loud level. The words of a particularly obnoxious political commentator blared out of the speakers as I struggled to keep my eyes open. The final thirty minute stretch was an all out battle of wills to remain conscious. When I finally pressed on the brakes and put the SUV in park, the world was hazy and spinning.
Silence.
I looked left. My front door.
It felt as if a screeching hurricane, which had been peeling away all of existence only moments before, had suddenly stopped. The silence was deafening.
I gave Alice a rough shake. I didn’t wait to see how long it would take her stretching and mumbling to turn into questions. My feet stumbled out the door and up the walkway to my house. Cramming the key in the door and forcing it forward felt like opening an ancient treasure chest. An eternal paradise of sleep awaited me. I stood staring for a moment at the carpeted stairs in front of me. It was a long climb up them to my bed.
I collapsed on the third step. This spot would do just fine.
End
James B. Cutchin 