Past The Patch

down there, all dark, and there’s all kinds of weird twists and turns.”

“For fuck sake,” Brenda said. She got up, crossed the hall to the basement door, and fired a single shot down into the darkness. She shouted, her voice rolling like thunder. “If you kids aren’t up here and in the kitchen in five minutes I am going to shoot your daddy dead!” Lomax opened his mouth to tell the children to stay hidden. Marisa was ready for him. She had a rag from the kitchen sink in one hand, and she stuffed it in his mouth.

Before the five minutes were up Claire, Lyle, Annie, Shae and Gary came into the kitchen. Gary and Claire were crying. Lyle was quiet and clearly angry. Annie was white with fear. Shae hugged Gary to her.

“Geez,” Brenda said, gesturing with the gun toward Shae and Annie.

“Those two are getting ripe. You poking them, Lomax?”

“Shut your filthy mouth,” Shae said. Marisa slapped the girl so hard she fell to one knee. Gary started crying.

“Fucking Christ, I need a drink,” Brenda said. She got up and started opening cupboard doors. At the back of a high shelf she found a bottle of bourbon. She took a deep swallow as if it were water and then sat by Lomax again. “You kids, sit on the floor. Now! ” They did as they were told.

Brenda looked them over. “Christ, Lomax, you got girls, boys, a couple of whites, a half-breed with a big mouth,” that was directed at Shae,

“and a nigger and a chink.” Brenda didn’t see Marisa and Liz frowning at this. “It’s a hell of a collection. Is this everyone?” Gary looked toward the kitchen window.

“Who’s missing?”

No one said a thing.

Brenda leaned close to Lomax. She unzipped his fly and reached into his pants. “I’ll tear your daddy’s pee-pee off and eat it if you don’t tell me who isn’t here,” Brenda said.

Lomax’s face burned red with shame and he bellowed, “You psychotic bitch!”

“Eddy,” Gary said. “He’th my big brother. He’th ten and when he theeth you he’th going to be really mad!” Then he started crying again. Shae hugged him and tried to calm him down.

“Well,” Brenda said, zipping up Lomax’s fly and taking another drink. “Eddy.” She looked at Mrs. Mears and grinned. “He got hard when I had my hand on him.”

“Bullshit,” Mrs. Mears said with utter contempt. “I know what it is to arouse a man. One look at you tells me you do not.” The older kids, who understood what Mrs. Mears was saying, gaped in astonishment.

“You’re gonna get yours,” Brenda said to Mrs. Mears. Then she smiled at the children, and her smile was mean. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. Each one of my friends here is gonna tell your daddy how mean he was to them, and you’re all going to listen. I’m gonna give him a piece of my mind too. When we’re done, we’ll decide if he should live, or die.” She looked at Mrs. Mears. “And I’m personally gonna fuck up that pretty face and that big mouth.”

The children started crying again, even Lyle, who had tried to act like a grown-up.

One by one the women stood before Lomax and railed at him, detailing his offenses against them and the legal system.

It was just past six in the evening when they finished. The sun had set outside, and a cool wind was blowing around the house.

Brenda had been the last, screaming at Lomax and blaming him, and men like him, for everything that had gone wrong in her life. When she was done she straddled her chair again and spoke softly.

“Do you have anything to say, Lomax?”

“Yes,” he said. He looked at Brenda with pity, and regret. “It’s dark outside. It’s dinner time. And Eddy is coming home.” There were five things Eddy loved. In truth there were more than five, but when he tried to count beyond that number things grew hazy, and became just one more vast and hazy thing he loved.

Eddy loved running. He ran for countless hours in every season, ranging to the far limits of the Big Sky Estate. In the spring he chased thunderstorms and in the summer he ran with the horses. In the fall he chased the wind, and in the winter he chased rabbits and deer. In the summer he often took a break in the heat of the day, sleeping under the porch in the spot Father had cleared for him while Father sat in his chair overhead, reading a book or just watching the big sky or the shadows of clouds moving across the world. Sometimes Father read aloud from his books, and sometimes Eddy understood the words, but usually he just napped, with Father watching over him.

Eddy loved hunting. Father had told Eddy not to take down any big animals. No deer or wolves or horses. He chased them anyway, pretending to hunt, and when he hunted for real, giving in to the urges that drove him, he would hunt prairie dogs and other small creatures. He always left them on the back porch for Father.

Eddy loved family. It took him a very long time to accept the scents of Father and Mrs. Mears and his brothers and sisters, but now they were a part of him. Father smelled strong and Mrs. Mears smelled warm and the children smelled of chocolate and chalk and grass stains and Kool Aid, and they all had their own special smells too, like Gary, who smelled of his little writing sticks. He loved them all.

Eddy loved home. Home was the smells of the kitchen and the soap Mrs. Mears used to scrub him down in the big bathtub every night while saying, “Honestly, I don’t know how one little boy can get so filthy in one day.” Home was his bedroom, which he rarely used, but it was his, all that space was his, and home was his favorite spot under the back porch. Home was the place Eddy protected, his den, his safe place, his pack.

Most of all Eddy loved Father. His old life was receding to a blur now, but sometimes he remembered it and those memories made him love Father even more. He remembered how he’d been beaten and kept in a basement, as long as the checks keep comin, a man who smelled like whiskey and cigarettes used to say. He remembered chains on his legs and being hit with a broom handle. He remembered seeing Father for the first time and feeling a big warm hand on his face and hearing why he’s just a little boy and you need a bath, young man, and room to run and then Father had taken him home. He remembered the Rules of Father; don’t take down any big animals, don’t go beyond the far fences because people wouldn’t understand you, love your family, protect your brothers and sisters, be a good boy.

The things Eddy loved went through his mind in a flash as he stood on the grassy veldt Lomax called the back field. He stood and breathed deeply of scents carried on the rising wind; fear, from his family, especially his brothers and sisters, and anger, from strangers. Strangers in his home.

Strangers making his family feel afraid.

He could smell blood. Father was bleeding.

Eddy looked up at the silver sliver of moon high in the sky and shook his shaggy head. Then he broke into a loping, easy run for home.

Brenda knew there was a big back porch on Lomax’s home because they had all circled the house once before coming up the front stairs. They were looking for dogs, which Brenda would have shot dead if she saw them.

There wasn’t much in life that intimidated her, but dogs, big dogs, scared her.

“Patty,” she said, “Go to the back door and see if anyone is coming.

Liz, you check the front. You don’t have to stand outside and freeze your tits off, just keep an eye out the window.”

Liz and Patty left the kitchen.

“You adopted six kids, Lomax? Trying to make up for all the bad shit you did?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Lomax replied. “But I do not count my treatment of your quartet of reprobates among my sins.” Brenda didn’t do a slow burn this time. That dull red brick color filled her face instantly. She pressed the barrel of the gun against Lomax’s left shoulder and pulled the trigger.

The sound of the shot was muffled and before the children started screaming Lomax heard splinters from the back of his chair and his own bone fragments striking the floor and the wall behind him. If the punches to the gut and getting pistol whipped were trips to the second or third floor of a house of pain, the gunshot that shattered his shoulder was jet-propelled trip up to the observation deck of a skyscraper. The pain was immense, and it rolled over him like a black tsunami.