“‘Standard procedure,’” he muttered. “‘Don’t take it personally, Frank. It’s just standard op.’ ”
He pushed back from the table and got up to pace back and forth, his too-full glass in his hand. The whiskey sloshed out of it as he moved, spilling onto the hardwood floor.
“Standard operating procedure,” he said. “Fucking spic. I don’t want you
“Yes, Frank.” His mother’s voice was so soft and trembling so badly, it was hard to hear.
“What?” His father cupped a hand to his ear, sloshing more whiskey onto the floor. “I can’t hear you, you stupid fucking cow. Answer me so I can hear you!”
“Yes, Frank!”
“That little bastard is going to try to pin that murder on me. You wait and see,” he said. “Do you think I’m murderer?”
“No!” she said on a gasp, her eyes going round as she stared down at her plate.
“Look at me and say it,” he ordered. “Do you think I’m a murderer? Huh? ANSWER ME!”
She looked at him, shaking and afraid, tears streaming down her cheeks. “No!”
There must have been something about her face that wasn’t right, because Dennis’s father cursed and went to backhand her. He took a step toward her, stepping in the whiskey he had spilled. His foot slid out from under him, and he went down hard on the floor, banging his elbow and his head. His glass crashed and shattered.
“FUCK! FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!” he raged.
As he lifted his head, he looked straight into the kitchen—right at Dennis—and saw him plain as anything.
“What are doing in there?” his father snapped, struggling awkwardly to get to his hands and knees. He never took his laser gaze off Dennis. Dennis seemed frozen to the spot.
“What the fuck are you doing in there?”
“N-n-n-nothing.”
“Are you spying on us?”
“N-n-n-no!”
Dennis was shaking his head so fast he felt like the bobblehead doll he got the time he went to the Dodgers game with his cousins. He was scared now. He knew that look in his father’s eyes when they got dark and flat and cold, like a shark’s eyes.
His father got to his feet and came toward him.
“Don’t lie to me, you rotten little shit. You’re standing in here listening. What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“I-I-I don’t know,” Dennis stammered, tears running down his face. He wanted to turn and run, but he was afraid to. Maybe if he stood very still, his father would calm down. Maybe if he ran, his father would chase him down and beat him to within an inch of his life.
“You good-for-nothing little smartass brat. I try to set you straight, and you take the finger off a dead woman. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Dennis didn’t answer him fast enough. Or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. His father was past calming down. The rage was in him now. There was no stopping him.
“I asked you a question!” he shouted. “Answer me!”
But he didn’t let Dennis even try to answer. He slapped him across the face so hard it knocked Dennis off his feet, then kicked him once, twice, the toe of his boot like a sledgehammer against Dennis’s back and buttocks.
“Frank! Stop it!” Dennis’s mother yelled. “He’s just a little boy!”
His father spun around, redirecting his fury.
Dennis scrambled to his feet and ran out the back door. He was trying to run faster than his legs could go, and he tripped himself and went sprawling down the concrete back steps.
From inside the house he heard his mother cry out and the sound of plates crashing off the dining room table to the floor.
Dennis didn’t move for a minute. He lay there in the damp grass, thinking he would start to cry. But it was like something had broken inside of him, and he couldn’t feel anything. He got to his feet and limped around the side of the house to the oak tree.
It was harder to get up into the tree than it was to get down. He tried three times to jump up and catch hold of the lowest branch, finally getting hold of it with his fingertips. Groaning and twisting he struggled to get a better grip and pull himself up. If his father came out of the house now he would be dead.
Fear helped launch him up to where he could get his leg over the limb. Then he was in the tree and climbing. It didn’t matter that it was dark. He knew every branch.
He needed to disappear. He needed to go to a place his father couldn’t find him. He would go to his safe place and wait out the storm.
He had to stretch out over space to get hold of the windowsill into his bedroom. If he slipped and fell he would probably die. He didn’t know if he cared.
Flopping through the open window like a seal, he fell to his bedroom floor with a thud. The sounds of a beating came up through the floor. His father yelling, his mother crying.
Dennis scraped himself up and went into his closet. In the ceiling was a trapdoor with a pull-down ladder leading up into a section of attic. He climbed up the ladder and pulled it up behind him, closing the trapdoor. From the attic he could go out a dormer window onto the roof.
Finally he made it to his hiding place. He could sit behind the old brick chimney, tucked up against the slope of the roof, and no one could see him from below. His father would never think to look there. At least he never had before.
Dennis sat there for a long, long time, cold and shaking. He had wet his pants when his father hit him. His lip was split and his chin was bleeding, but he didn’t care. He didn’t think about anything. He didn’t think about what was going on inside the house below him. He just stared at the moonlit speckles in the shingles on the slope of the roof.
After a long while he heard the back door, then heard his father in the backyard, calling for him and cursing at him. Then his father went back inside the house, and a few minutes later Dennis heard him moving around in his bedroom, still cursing.
Dennis could hear the thumps and crashing as his father searched through his room, tipping over furniture, breaking things, screaming at him to come out. But Dennis never moved, and he never made a sound. He never thought, and he never felt. He never wondered why his mother didn’t come looking for him.
The noise in his bedroom died down. Time passed. He heard the back door slam and, a moment later, a car start in the driveway. His mother’s minivan. The engine sounded like a toy compared with his father’s cruiser. Maybe she was leaving and would never come back. What would it matter to him? Nothing.
When the car had gone, and silence fell and everything was still at last, Dennis climbed a little higher to the ridge of the roof where he could see as far as he could see, and wish himself just as far away.
The world was a pretty place at night and from far away. You couldn’t see bad things happen. You couldn’t see what was ugly. When you looked in people’s windows at night every family looked happy, and every child loved.
If only . . .
51
Saturday, October 12, 1985
