Jack stood in the pale, white light of the garage, holding a hammer. A ballpen hammer. It was morning and everyone was still asleep, but he had been lying awake in bed all night. He awoke at four a.m., startled by a bad dream, but that was nothing new. He had been plagued by nightmares his entire life, yet, if he were to count them on his fingers, his right hand would probably not even be involved. He had never had very many, but the ones that did enter his dreaming mind had stuck with him like sap on a lumberjack’s palm.
The one he had that morning was about the day his father had held the ballpen hammer in his own hand. That was a year ago, right around this time of the month in fact. Jack was sixteen, his father was forty-two, and that day had been a bad day. A very ugly one.
One year ago, Jack's father had just set out to walk murphy, their five year old Rat Terrier. He was cleaning out the roof gutters when his dad trudged up the steep driveway, holding the leash, with Murphy trailing behind him. He was humming something by Janis Joplin. Less than a minute later Jack heard the distinctive sound of a car coming down the loop.
The loop is a circle, with houses erected and lining the roads, albeit separated from them; pushed back into the forest proper, usually by a generous length of gravel driveway. The loop joined one of the many disjointed, rambling roads that crept and wound their way from the forest, into Olympia. If you were to look at the loop from above, it would make you think of a discombobulated lollipop.
In any case, a car coming down the loop would, inexorably, be traveling very fast, despite the driver’s experience behind the wheel and familiarity with the brake pedal.
Jack had pondered on this inexplicable suction of gravity and compared it to something he once saw in the movie, Armageddon. Somehow, the characters used the gravity of the moon–or something, he didn’t understand it too well–to rocket the ship with enough speed and then "dock" on an asteroid which was hurtling fatally–or, fatefully–towards Earth.
That day, just such a piece of debris hurtled towards his home.
His chilly hands had just grabbed a whopper of sludge that was clogging the drain when he heard his dad holler, "Murphy...murphy, Christ murphy!"
His voice rang out, carrying first annoyance, then alarm, and then outright panic.
Jack looked back, startled, wobbling on the second-to-last rung of the ladder just as his ears were assaulted by the scream of brakes, his father cursing, murphy barking wildly, and then the thoughtless hum of sudden acceleration.
He never heard the sound of it being hit....
Already in his mind he pictured the sight of his father holding his sobbing mother, while he heaved a patch of soggy mud into a hole three feet deep. The sound of the mud slapping onto the burlap sack would haunt him for weeks, he knew.
Jumping from the ladder, running up the driveway, his father hidden from view by the cluster of birch trees that spotted the sloping ground between the road and their house, he began to sob and pray she was only clipped.
He heaved himself up the slope of the driveway and, on the road, found murphy in his father’s arms, both trembling some thirty feet away, dark skidmarks on the ground that stank of burnt rubber, and a deer hobbling across the road, its right front paw dangling grotesquely just above its mangled kneecap.
He saw, but wished he hadn’t seen, that the leg was still connected to the thigh by a thin, scarlet line of sinew that looked like yarn after its been dipped in red paint. Bone and gristle gleamed at him and he felt his stomach flip upside down. Bile rose in his throat and he lurched forward, moaning.
His hand found his kneecap unconsciously and he rubbed it. He then glared, transfixed by the sight of Those two red eyes blinking stupidly at him from the distance. Rotten fuck. Hope you hit a brick wall doing eighty next time, he thought with a mind poisoned by hate. He didn’t care about the loop and how it seemed to make your car go faster no matter how hard you slammed on the brakes. He didn’t care, not one bit. He hopped that person had been drunk, so he could hate him–or her–even more.
His father approached him, seething, passed the hobbled deer, and nearly slammed murphy into his chest. He rushed over to the deer, which was too dazed and shell-shocked to stop him, and then he picked it up gently and carried it down the driveway and into the garage. Stunned, Jack followed him and once they were both inside he said slowly and deliberately, "Put murphy in the house."
Jack opened the door that lead to the hallway and dining room and shoved murphy inside. Before he shut it, he saw his mother coming down the hallway towards him, a look of concern spanning across her face; etching age where the wasn’t before. He stopped her, wanting to spare her the sight of that deer with a chunk of itself hanging off by a thin, meaty thread.
He told her to stay inside and also yelled the same to his aunt, who was also coming to investigate. He then slammed the door, turned around, and saw his father walking slowly towards the deer with a ballpen hammer. His hands were shaking and Jack was so afraid his dad would drop it and the sound would frighten the poor creature. He wasn’t thinking clearly. He was so used to seeing deer healthy and spry, able to spring away at a moments notice, so it didn’t compute that even if the deer was scared of the sound, it couldn’t have bounded gracefully away. Not with a mutilated appendage.
"What are you going to do?" Jack asked, shocked and horrified as the answer was already as blunt and obvious as the hammer itself.
"Its in pain need to stop her from being in pain!" He blurted out in a hoarse, shaky voice. Jack noticed his father’s hands were whiter than normal; porcelain almost; a mannequin’s hands, and the streaks of blood on them screamed for attention like red wine spilled on white sheets. The veins on his skin stood out like blue roadmaps on a wrinkled, uncharted map. The cords of muscle in his arms were prominent in a way that Jack had never seen them, as though his father was holding an anchor to a drowning ship and he was desperately trying to prevent its descent into the abyss.
Before he could say no, or stop, or wait, his father raised the hammer above his head and started to swing.
As the hammer fell, he sang out in a crisp military drone; the kind you hear on war movies; the ones dealing with a soldier’s beginnings and how, in boot camp, marches would be marched on dreary, rainy mornings, while the company rattles on about Eskimo pussy and their affair with the cold, sweet siren they kept well oiled and ready beneath their pillows. Something to keep your mind busy while you broke your muscles and joints into a thousand little pieces.
This is what he sang:
Blue in the sky, hay in the eye,
witchum and rye in the bed that I lie
And over and over like that as he struck the skull of the deer. For what seemed like years Jack heard that snippet of militarily composed rhyme, and each time the hammer cracked against the deer’s skull, his father punctuated the sound of metal on flesh and fur, by putting stress on the "I" sounding parts...
witchum and rye in the bed that I lie
phump phump phump phump
on and on and on and on...
It almost sounded like an old radiator they used to have; one that would cough and splutter, producing little more than annoyance in wattage. They had placed a thick mat between it and the wall to muffle the noise of it banging against the wallpaper, but somehow those dull phump phumps were almost worse. Jack thought once, that’s the sound you would hear if you hit a man in the head with something hard and heavy. It would make that exact sound.
He could hear his mom and aunt, both crying, both pounding on the door and trying to open it. To this day he still doesn’t understand how he was able to keep them from coming into the garage. He was never a big kid, but somehow he was able to keep the door stuck as firmly to the frame as if it were melded shut.
Finally, after minutes that seemed like hours, his father raised the ballpen one last time, Jack turned away, heard a thick cracking sound, and then proceeded to heave his guts out on the ground, where it lay foul and steaming. He still held the door firmly shut. God, how?
The deer never screamed.
He heard a voice speaking close by after he had finished puking, but it seemed distant and warbled. His hands ached from holding the doorknob, but he still held fast to it. His eyes were shut tightly, painfully, and at first he thought the sound was just air being modeled after a human voice. Hollow, afflicted, and alternate...like wind rushing across the mouths of empty coke bottles. Not his father’s voice at all.
"It’s done. Was shaking s’bad I was hitting its jaw more’n its noggin, but it’s done"
Jack tried to speak, but his voice seemed tucked away inside his still quivering stomach, and he thought even the act of speaking might bring more past suppers up into his throat. All that he managed was a soft mewl that came from his nasal passage.
"Go inside with them, I’ll see her down to the..." His father seemed to lose his train of thought and Jack looked up, opening his eyes which stung with fresh tears, and staring into his father’s face. A face that seemed chiseled from granite, but when something made him smile, it turned to those harsh shadows and valleys into something angelic and untamed. Something worthy of being painted or wrote about.
But what he saw made him cringe away and he focused instead on the busted 4x4 they kept in the garage, like a hibernating beast.
His father’s face was expressionless. Those eyes you could find yourself drowning in when he was smiling were glassy and lost, yet wild. Ancient with something like remembrance or finding a hobby you had lost interest in, but for reasons unknown, you had rediscovered. He instantly despised, pitied, and loved his father then. That look made him feel a rush of emotions and textures that he could almost taste, smell, and touch.
He could imagine soldiers returning from the frontlines having that look and thinking, Just shot a man and heard him beg for his life, but it’s all right now, because there’ll be coffee and runny minestrone soup and decks of cards. It’ll all be all right once I can lay my gun down. It’ll be all right.
"...See her down to the forest again. Tell em everything is all right."
"Huh?" Jack said, fighting the urge to look at the brown crumbled thing in the corner of the garage with the ballpen hammer stuck in its skull.
"I said, go inside and tell those yelping girls in there that everything is all right." His father replied, somewhat coldly.
Tears streamed silently down Jack’s cheeks. His father put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently. Jack took his eyes off the 4x4 and glanced down at his shoulder as his father removed the hand. There was a splotch of blood on his sweatshirt now and the scent of copper fish-hooked itself inside his nostrils and he swore up and down for a week–yet never in front of his mother or aunt–that he could still smell the blood.
"Everything is all right, ok?" His dad said again slowly, his eyes still wild and somehow...somehow uncaring, even though they were beginning to well with tears.
Jack had to hold both hands even tighter on the doorknob, but not because his mother and aunt were still pounding and wrenching on the handle. He held it tighter because right then he felt an almost overwhelming urge to slap his father.
"Everything is all right"....
Forget about "Your mom is dead" or, "I’m afraid it’s cancer"...those four words telling you something is ok when you know it isn’t, well, that is a bald faced fucking lie.
Those are the worst four words you can hear. Everything is all right...Or maybe, I held the door...my mom was crying...blue in the sky...hay in the eye...phump...phump...phump...phump.
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