By the time that he reaches the dining room, within sight of the kitchen door, Billy is immersed against his will—or is he?—in the cold truths and secret selves of those whom he thought he knew best in the world. He has never imagined that his father could contain such fierce anger as this. Not just the savage volume of the voice but also the lacerating tone and
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the viciousness of the language reveal a long-simmering resentment boiled down to a black tar that provides the ideal fuel for anger. His father accuses his mother of sexual betrayal, of serial adultery. He calls her a whore, calls her worse, graduating from anger to rage. In the dining room, where Billy is immobilized by revelation, his mind reels at the accusations hurled at his mother. His parents have seemed to him to be asexual, attractive but indifferent to such desires.
If he had ever wondered about his conception, he would have attributed it to marital duty and to a desire for family rather than to passion. More shocking than the accusations are his mother’s admission of their truth—and her countercharges, which reveal his father to be both a man and also something less than a man. In language more withering than what is directed at her, she scorns her husband, and mocks him.
Her mockery puts the pedal to his rage and drives him into fury. The slap of flesh on flesh suggests hand to face with force.
She cries out in pain but at once says, “You don’t scare me, you can’t scare me!”
Things shatter, crack, clatter, ricochet—and then comes a more terrible sound, a brutal bludgeoning ferociousness of sound.
She screams in pain, in terror.
Without memory of leaving the dining room, Billy finds himself in the kitchen, shouting at his father to stop, but his father does not appear to hear him or even to recognize his presence.
His father is enthralled by, hypnotized by, possessed by the hideous power of the bludgeon that he wields. It is a long-handled lug wrench. On the floor, Billy’s devastated mother hitches along like a broken bug, no longer able to scream, making tortured noises.
Billy sees other weapons lying on the kitchen island. A hammer. A butcher knife. A revolver.
His father appears to have arranged these murderous instruments to intimidate his mother.
She must not have been intimidated, must have thought that he was a coward, fatuous and ineffectual. A coward he surely is, taking a lug wrench to a defenseless woman, but she has badly misjudged his capacity for evil.
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Seizing the revolver, gripping it with both hands, Billy shouts at his father to stop, for God’s sake stop, and when his warning goes unheeded, he fires a shot into the ceiling.
The unexpected recoil knocks back through his shoulders, and he staggers in surprise.
His father turns to Billy but not in a spirit of submission. The lug wrench is an avatar of darkness that controls the man at least as much as he controls it.
“Whose seed are you?” his father asks. “Whose son have I been feeding all these years, whose little bastard?”
Impossibly, the terror escalates, and when he understands that he must kill or be killed, Billy squeezes the trigger once, squeezes twice, a third time, his arms jumping with the recoil.
Two misses and a chest wound.
His father is jolted, stumbles, falls backward as the bullet pins a boutonniere of blood to his breast.
Dropped, the lug wrench rings against—and cracks—the tile floor, and after it there is no more shouting, no more angry words, just Billy’s breathing and his mother’s muted expressions of misery.
And then she says, “Daddy?” Her voice is slurred, and cracked with pain.
“Daddy Tom?”
Her father, a career Marine, had been killed in action when she was ten. Daddy Tom was her stepfather.
“Help me.” Her voice grows thicker, distressingly changed. “Help me, Daddy Tom.”
Daddy Tom, a juiceless man with hair the color of dust, has eyes the yellow-brown of sandstone. His lips are perpetually parched, and his atrophied laugh rasps any listener’s nerves.
Only in the most extreme circumstances would anyone ask Daddy Tom for help, and no one would expect to receive it.
“Help me, Daddy Tom.”
Besides, the old man lives in Massachusetts, a continent away from Napa County.
The urgency of the situation penetrates Billy’s immobilizing shock, and terrified compassion now moves him toward his mother.
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She seems to be paralyzed, the little finger on her right hand twitching, twitching, but nothing else moving from the neck down.
Like broken pottery poorly repaired, the shape of her skull and the planes of her face are wrong, all wrong.
Her one open eye, now her only eye, focuses on Billy, and she says,
“Daddy Tom.”
