Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala (24 page)

“Or who drank like that, I know, but...” Mark took a deep breath before continuing. “There’s something I never told you.”

He couldn’t meet his mother’s gaze, so he focused on his clasped hands in his lap. He wanted another beer but wasn’t sure he could walk straight to get to the refrigerator.

“I told you how, for the last couple of years, I’ve been doing therapy, right?”

She nodded.

“Well, I finally remembered something that happened back when I was a kid—around nine years old—that was really significant.”

His mother’s silence urged him on.

“Remember the summer dad broke his foot, and I went out with him to haul his lobster pots?”

Ellen nodded. “How could I forget? That’s when his drinking started getting worse because he was so depressed about being handicapped. I reminded him it was only temporary, but it really set him back, you know?”

“I know,” Mark said, “but I never told you what he did to me one day when we were out, did I?”

His mother frowned. Sadness shaded her eyes as she shook her head, silently encouraging him to continue. Mark leaned back in his chair and heaved a heavy sigh. He was convinced the fishy smell clung to him, making his stomach churn.

“I always figured, when I grew up, I’d be a lobsterman like pop, you know? Wasn’t really any other choice, it seemed. He was a lobsterman just like grandpa was, and I was a lobsterman’s son. I never doubted that I’d take over his job, setting my traps in the same places he set his.”

Mark picked up the empty beer bottle and began rolling it back and forth between his hands. He winced as the memory of that day grew sharper in his mind.

“One of the first days we were out together, it was right after a storm, I remember, because the sea was running high. Well, one of his lines had gotten fouled up with someone else’s. ‘Willow’ Johnson’s, as I recall. There was a real danger the rope would get tangled up in our propeller. While I was hauling in the line, because the rough sea was tossing the boat around, I had to lean over the side of the boat. I was trying my best to unfoul the ropes while pop held the boat steady, heading into the swells, but I was scared that, with each rising wave, I’d pitch head-over-heels over the side of the boat and into the water.”

“Lobstering’s a dangerous job sometimes, no doubt about that,” Ellen said mildly. “Fact is, I had more ‘n a few arguments with your father about how I thought you might be a little too young to be out there with him, working as hard as that.”

“Umm—yeah. I can bet he said something about ‘making a boy a man,’ right? But you see, by mistake I cut pop’s pot line not ‘
Willow’ Johnson’s, and I lost his trap. Pop went ballistic. He loses traps all the time. Everyone does. Part of the business. But he went ape-shit about losing that particular trap because it was all my fault. He started cussing me out, calling me all kinds of names I’d never even heard before. He slapped me around hard, and then he took me by the scruff of the neck and shoved me headfirst into the bait barrel. Held me there a good, long time, too. So long I thought I was going to die.”

Mark ran his hand over his throat to relieve that steady pressure that was still strangling him.

“God! That stench of raw, rotting fish. I was convinced I was going to die. That he was going to kill me and chuck me overboard.”

Mark paused for a moment and looked at his mother, trying to read her reaction, but her face was absolutely devoid of expression. She didn’t appear to be the least bit surprised by this revelation, as if her thirty-plus years of living with Ernie Stover had made her immune to any surprises about his violence and abuse.

“So, then.” Mark cleared his throat. “You can see why that smell still bothers me, right? How after all these years, I still can’t get it out of my memory? It’s like it’s still clinging to the back of my throat, and no matter what I do, I’ll never be able to get it out of my system. Never! I was so scared, thinking pop was going to kill me, I pissed myself. And all for losing one lousy lobster trap? It was crazy for him to react like that. And that’s why, after all these years, I can finally say I feared … and I
hated
pop more than anyone else in the world.”

There. He’d finally said it out loud. He sat back and squared his shoulders to take a deep, shuddering breath.

“And I hate him for dying before I could tell him how much I hated him, too.”

Mark stared at his mother, shocked and a little embarrassed to see a single tear running down from the corner of her left eye, shimmering like glycerin on the puffy, deeply-pored skin of her face. His stomach twisted up, and his eyes started stinging as though he were about to start crying, too; but after so many years of bottling up his rage and hurt, it was almost too easy to say these things out loud ... at least to his mother.

If only his father were still alive so he could tell
him
.

“And you know what?” he said after taking a moment to compose himself, “I don’t think it could possibly have been a conscious decision at that age, but from then on, I knew that I could never become a lobsterman, that I would do absolutely anything and everything within my power to get away from this godforsaken island just to get away from him! That’s why I studied as hard as I did in high school. I was sure that a college education was my ticket off Glooscap and away from a life that smelled like … dead fish in a bait barrel.”

His mother sighed and then, after a long time, said, “You think I didn’t know that?”

She stopped twisting her fingers together and slid both of her hands across the table toward him. He was surprised by how small and delicate her hands felt as she twined her fingers around his and squeezed. She had always looked so big, so strong to him, but now it was a shock to realize how tiny and fragile she really was.

A sudden, blinding surge of anger filled him. He thought how easy it would be to squeeze his mother’s hands together and grind her knuckles to powder. But after years of therapy, he knew his anger wasn’t directed at her. Although she had never spoken to him about it, and she had never stood up for him against his father, he knew that she had suffered horribly at the hands of her husband … as much if not more than he had. Shortly after his father died, his mother had been hospitalized—for nervous exhaustion, the doctor had told him at the time, but he had recognized the truth.

She’d had a nervous breakdown.

“You wanna know something?” Mark asked, struggling to keep control of his emotions. “That’s the one thing I wish for. I wish pop was still alive so I could tell him to his face how much he hurt me, and how, over the years, I’ve worked hard to forgive him but can’t.”

“I know that,” his mother whispered, giving his hands a tighter squeeze. Her touch was unnaturally dry and rough.

“I try to do it, too, in my heart,” Mark continued. “I try like hell. Just last night, I was wide awake in bed for the longest time, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the steady tick-tock of my old alarm clock. I tried so hard to imagine that he was there in the room with me so I could talk to him ... so I could say what I wanted—what I needed to say. But every time I tried to visualize him, I couldn’t get a clear mental image of what he looked like. Instead, all I could see was this ... this—”

The strong, cold clutching sensation gripping his throat spread a tingling panic through him. Sweat broke out across his forehead, and deep inside his chest, a scream was building and threatening to burst loose at any second.

“You know you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” his mother said mildly. “I know there’s been a lot of pain in your life, and I feel absolutely miserable that I wasn’t able to help you. If there’s anything you can’t forgive me for it’s that I wasn’t able to protect you.”

“Oh, Mom,” Mark said in a shattered voice. “You did the best you could at the time. I realize that. You were just as scared of him as I was. It’s just that last night—”

Again, Mark shivered as the memory of his nightmare rose up. Leaning forward with his elbows in his knees, he squeezed his eyes tightly shut as the mental image came more clearly into focus. He knew he had to face this so he could put it behind him, but shivers wracked his body as he remembered lying in his darkened bedroom trying to conjure up the image of his dead father’s face.

“Do you—?” he said, but tears welled up in his eyes, and his voice choked off abruptly. Gripped by a swell of emotion, he grabbed his mother’s hands again and held them tightly, as if desperate to find in her clasp even a small measure of the strength and reassurance he needed right now.

“Whenever I try to remember what Dad looked like,” Mark said in a high, halting voice. “I know it’s crazy, but all I ever get is this image of a big iron frog.”

He sighed, keeping his eyes closed as he shook his head and wished that the image burned into his brain would dissolve even though he knew it never would.

“I know how weird this sounds,” he said, finally opening his eyes and looking at her through his tears. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “But whenever I try to remember what he looked like, that’s what I see.”

Ever since he had first mentioned this image to his therapist, more than two years ago, he had hoped that just saying this out loud to his mother would give him some measure of relief, but now that the words were out, all they did was make the mental image of the frog resolve all the more clearly in his mind.

Last night!

He wasn’t even sure if he had been asleep or awake. There was no way of knowing if the image was inside his mind or really there in the room with him, hovering in a blue, ghostly glow in the darkness beside his bed. But he had seen the wide, grinning face of a huge frog. Its round, bulging eyes were slitted with golden pupils that stared at him, unblinking, from out of the darkness. The wide face was split by the thick, dark line of a grin, but there was no life, no animation in the features. The frog’s face was immobile, as though it had been cast in metal that was marked with black and rust-red splotches of corrosion. Once or twice, the frog’s mouth appeared to twitch as though the creature were alive and trying to make a sound … or was about to speak.

“An iron frog,” Mark said, his voice as flat as a distant echo. “I think it’s, like, an image I made up for pop, you know? Maybe I always thought, even while I was growing up so scared of him because he hurt me so many times, that underneath it all, he still loved me somehow. He was probably quite vulnerable too, you know? Like he was this soft squishy thing—a frog—inside a hard, protective shell that he had to put on to protect himself.”

“Hmm … Could be,” his mother said, nodding, “but I remember that we used to have an iron frog.”

“We
what?
”

Mark shoved himself away from the table so violently his chair almost tipped over backwards. His foot kicked against one of the table legs, knocking his empty beer bottle onto the floor where it shattered.

“You don’t remember?,” his mother said in a light, detached sounding voice as if she hadn’t even noticed his reaction. “You gave it to me as a gift many years ago … for Mother’s Day.”

Mark stood up and started pacing back and forth, shaking his head as he muttered, “An iron frog … an iron frog.”

“You must remember it. It was the cutest little thing in a creepy kind of way. Actually, it was quite large. A big, cast-iron bullfrog about—yay big.” She held her hands two feet apart. “You said you got it for me to put in my flower garden.”

“Oh, my God!” Mark said, his hands raking through his hair. “Oh, Jesus! No!”

Whimpering softly, he kept pacing back and forth across the kitchen floor, all the while slapping his fist into the flat of his hand, making wet smacking sounds. His breath came in short, burning gulps. Even before his mother had finished speaking, something he hadn’t remembered in years had come rushing back to him all at once, so fast it hit him with the irresistible surge of a tidal wave.

“Yeah,” he whispered in a raw, gasping voice. “I think I
do
remember it!”

His mother looked at him and laughed lightly.

“That was so like you, to pick out the nicest things for me. You were always such a kind boy. Caring. You were only—I think maybe ten or eleven years old when you bought it for me? I couldn’t imagine how you could have afforded such a thing.”

“I couldn’t afford it,” Mark said flatly, lowering his head and licking his lips. “I didn’t buy it … I stole it.”

The memory swept over him like a whirlpool of oily black water. His face and hands had gone suddenly cold. With every step as he paced back and forth, he felt as though his legs were going to fold up under him.

“You didn’t? Why, Mark! I’m surprised that you would ever steal anything!”

“Oh yeah, I did. I stole it from Old Lady Warren’s lawn.”

“Elsie Warren?”

“Uh-huh,, but you want to know what’s really funny? I never really planned to give it to you.”

Squinting as she looked up at him, his mother shook her head as though absolutely confused.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I was planning to use it to ... to kill him!” Mark said as the long buried emotions got clearer. “I wanted to kill that miserable son of a bitch!”

He took a deep breath in an effort to calm himself, but it did no good. He was swept up in a maelstrom of emotion.