Lineage (7 page)

The sheriff didn’t waver in his inspection of Lance’s face. His eyes roamed up and down and then back and forth, no doubt categorizing each discoloration that had been an ugly bruise several days before.

Finally the sheriff blinked and nodded, the bill of his baseball cap shading his face from view. When he looked up again, there was a painful smile etched onto his whisker-studded face.

“You ever need to tell me something, you just call me, okay, son?” As he said the words, the sheriff handed Lance a light brown business card embossed with a shiny golden badge in the middle. Lance thought it looked like a crown of some sort, the kind a king might wear. Without looking up, Lance bobbed his head and blinked back thick tears that were beginning to form on the surfaces of his eyes.

“Get back inside here now,” Anthony said, and Lance obeyed, stepping up the stairs and edging past his father as he shoved the sheriff’s card deep into his pocket. Rage seemed to boil off Anthony, and Lance imagined he could almost feel it roll over him like heat as he stepped past his father, into the kitchen. Lance was about to sneak off to his room and prepare himself for what was to come when he heard the sheriff speak again.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Metzger, and you listen well, since I’m only going to say it once.” The sheriff paused and Lance wondered if the break in the sentence was for his benefit. Lance made it to his room, shut the door loudly, and began to sneak back toward the kitchen. He knew his ruse had worked when he heard the sheriff’s deep voice again. “I see one mark on that boy ever again, I’ll find you, and I won’t be wearing this badge.”

Lance crouched at the entrance to the kitchen and peered around the corner with one eye as before. The sheriff stood a few inches from his father, with one thick finger poking the other man in the chest. Lance could see his father’s shoulders hunched in anger, and he could picture the snarl that would be curled on his mouth.

“I’ll tell you something, Sheriff. You ever come on my property without that badge, there’ll be a reckoning.” Lance saw the sheriff’s brown eyes darken to black at the words. A small smile, very much unlike the one he had given Lance outside, crept across his lips.

“Oh, you can count on that, Metzger.
A definite reckoning.”

With that, the sheriff pulled his finger back from Anthony’s chest and walked down the stairs, and a moment later Lance heard the door of what he could only assume was a police cruiser slam shut. The sound snapped him out of his trance and he made his way back down the hallway. He waited for the moment when his father slammed the outside door to open the door to his room, and without a sound he slipped inside.

Lance sat on his bed, the springs creaking tiredly, and waited. The wind was picking up again, and even though the morning sunshine was beginning to reach into his room with golden fingers, Lance’s stomach was filling up with dread. He waited; the soft ticking of his clock was a scythe cutting the air, and each swish of that blade of time increased his trepidation. Just when he began to think he might escape, that he might just have lucked out, and the tight coils of fear began to loosen, releasing his body from its hold, he heard what he had been waiting for.

Heavy footsteps were coming down the hall toward his room, and not for the first time, Lance wondered how a man so slender could carry such a heavy tread with each step. His erratic musings were cut short as the door to his room flung open with enough force to bounce off the wall behind it and rebound slightly.

His father stood there in the doorway, his form hunched and his fists balled tight.

“Stand up.” The command was guttural and dripped with hatred. Lance stood and took an uneasy step toward the thin man, who shook with anger. As quick as lightning, Anthony crossed the few feet that separated them and had Lance’s throat grasped in one gnarled, bony hand. He pressed his thumb into the soft skin of his son’s neck and a choked cough racked Lance. Spittle flew from his mouth and his vision dimmed before the hand released its grip somewhat and the world swam back into view. Anthony stood staring down at Lance’s small face, the snarl Lance had imagined earlier now right at home where it normally was. They stood that way for a few moments, the second hand tick-ticking a quiet solo on the wall, before Anthony broke the silence.

“Give it to me.” Lance fumbled at his pocket until his fingers finally brushed the thin edge of the sheriff’s business card. One moment the card was in his hand, and the next it was gone, magically appearing in his father’s fist. Anthony folded the card and deposited it out of sight in his own front pocket. “You ever talk to that fucker again and I’ll kill you, you understand me?” Lance nodded as far as the hand that gripped his neck would allow him,
then
his father continued. “I think he might like little boys like you. I think he’d like to touch you. Maybe you’d like that, you sick little fucker. Just know that I’ll kill him too if you talk to him again. There’s no place you can go that I can’t find you, and there’s nothing that sheriff can do to keep me from you. No matter what you tell them, I’ll get you back here somehow, and when I do, I’ll drown you in the river and let you float away. You’d float all the way to
New Orleans
before they’d find you, you know that?
Fish’d
pick at you, sure, but you’d make it there. Might even float off into the ocean and you’d just disappear.”

Lance began to cry, and the hot tears brought on by fear ran in rivulets down his face, onto his father’s hand. Anthony stared at Lance’s wet face for another moment before snorting in disgust and shoving him backward into the front of his dresser. Lance cried out in pain as a drawer handle bit into his spine, but remained standing. Anthony studied him for several long seconds, turned half away, and stopped. The light from the windows that had been warm minutes before was now gray and lifeless like dead skin. It coated the side of Anthony’s face and gave Lance the impression that his father was already deceased, killed from the poison that flowed through his veins.

“The sweetest thing is
,
you don’t know where she went. I think about that sometimes at night and it’s just poetic. You sit and wonder, while I
know
.” A smile pulled at the corners of Anthony’s mouth. It looked like an upside-down grimace.

Without another word, Anthony left the room and shut the door behind him, leaving Lance in the silence interrupted only by the clock’s heartbeat.

Winter edged its way across the land like an uninvited houseguest. It wedged its foot in the door of November with temperatures that dropped lower and lower, until most everyone wore heavy sweatshirts beneath heavier coats. Snow tested the waters of gray-skinned ponds and coated the fields a bit at a time, until one December night it decided to set in for good and dumped nearly six inches on
Black
Lake
and the surrounding farms. Plows were hooked to the front of trucks, salt began to grow like a white mold on the highways, and dogs were allowed in to sleep on porches at night. Lakes became solid and, in the afternoons, accumulated children who gathered, strapped used ice skates to their feet, and raced one another up and down the bumpy surfaces, hockey sticks in hand as they pursued a jumping black puck. The people in the community settled into a comfortable routine: wait for the snow, complain about the amount when passing one another on the sidewalk or in the bars, and shovel and plow it when it came, only to do it all over again a few days later.

The snow had been light as of late, especially for January, but Lance was glad for the reprieve as he walked in the narrow tire track that ran on the right side of their long driveway. Less snow meant less wading through the drifts that inevitably piled up across the drive, and his feet stayed a little warmer as he waited for the long yellow bus that was now trundling purposefully toward him on the icy road.

Once Lance boarded the bus, he began to gradually sink in upon himself, bit by bit, until he felt as though he could have faded into the gray paint that covered the inside of the large vehicle. As he approached a seat that looked empty, a tenth-grade boy suddenly sat up and stared menacingly at him.

“Keep
movin
’, you
frickin
’ weirdo.” Several kids in nearby seats shouted laughter as Lance steered himself past them to an empty row in the very back of the bus. The other children moved away from him as if he harbored some type of contagious disease.

No one wanted to be associated with the weird kid that rarely spoke and never laughed. He sometimes wondered why he didn’t have even
one
friend within the school he spent so many hours each week. It seemed that in every story he’d read, the main character, no matter how outlandish or ostracized, always had a best friend.
A sidekick.
Someone who saw through the oddity of the main character and decided to stick with them through thick and thin.
Granted, they were sometimes quirky or strange, but they were still a friend. He hoped that one of the other children would eventually reach out to him, as he didn’t know quite how to do it himself. The spastic hustle and bustle of the kids, and at times even the teachers, overwhelmed him to the point that he would gradually shut them out and recede until the words within his head replaced the conversations that he wished he could have. His hope of friendship had been fading over the years, and had nearly dried up altogether like a stream in a drought when his mother had vanished.

There had been questions about his mother.
Hundreds of them, in fact.
His teachers had barraged him with them until he just stared at the floor and gave the same answer each time she was brought up. She had left and he didn’t know where she had gone. Yes, maybe she would come back. Yes, he was all right. Could he go back to class now? It was the same for weeks, until everyone finally realized that they weren’t really getting anywhere and Lance became a backdrop for the classroom again, a fixture that neither existed nor disappeared entirely.

The bus shuddered to a stop outside the squat brick building that children flooded into in lines like ants filing into a hill. The walk to his homeroom was uneventful, and after depositing his tattered book bag onto a brass hook that bore his name in black Sharpie, Lance slouched into his seat and felt his stomach tighten as he noticed the sheriff sitting in a chair a few feet from Mrs. Murphy’s large desk. Their eyes met, the sheriff’s soft brown orbs probing at Lance’s with questions. Without thinking, Lance reached up and furtively buttoned the top of his faded flannel shirt, and he hoped that the collar was high enough to cover the spot where his father had punched him the night before.

A routine had developed over the past few months since Lance’s mother had disappeared. Anthony would be careful as his anger overflowed and he lashed out at his son. He kept his strikes consistently in areas covered by Lance’s clothing. There were days when Lance could barely stand in the morning as he pried himself out of bed, his legs cobbled colors of blue, black, and yellow. Lance would take the punishment silently, each time thinking of his mother, and then limp off to his room to write. His notebook was nearly full; several more short parables and stories had filled up the pages, and he began to wonder what he would do when there was no more room left. The routine wasn’t a comfort, but like all rituals, it held a pattern that Lance had gotten used to. Last night he had turned to ward off the blow of his father’s fist, and in doing so the punch had landed higher than Anthony intended, leaving a dark bruise that licked up the side of Lance’s neck like a tongue of purple flame.

Lance looked down at his desk and became very interested in a groove that had been worn with the pen of a student long since graduated and forgotten.

“Okay, class, we have a treat today! Our very own Sheriff Dodd is going to be talking to you about drug awareness. We all know how terrible drugs can be, so let’s listen closely to what our sheriff has to say!” Mrs. Murphy moved her considerable bulk to the side and unceremoniously sat in her chair, which squeaked its complaint.

“Hi, kids!” the sheriff said as he stood and walked to the center of the blackboard, gazing out over the thirty or so heads that turned in his direction.

“Hello, Sheriff Dodd” came the reply from the students in unison. The sheriff smiled at them, his round face lighting up. The brown eyes that Lance had watched blacken in anger were now warm and twinkled even in the harsh fluorescent light. The sheriff looked at Lance again and hesitated. He blinked once, and then seemed to return to himself.

“I want to tell all of you about a couple of drugs and how they’re just like some poisons that can be found in your homes.”

Lance listened idly, at times glancing up at the man in the front of the classroom, as he imagined mixing up some of the household cleaners that the sheriff was mentioning and then slipping them into his father’s milk at supper. The sheriff was an animated speaker and roamed down the aisles, sometimes stooping over to ask a question or make a joke to one of the students. Laughter resounded in the classroom several times, and from the shine of their eyes and the attention his fellow classmates exuded, Lance could tell the sheriff had done this many times before.

“So in conclusion, kids, don’t let your parents, your friends, or anyone else you know down by trying methamphetamines, marijuana, or any other drugs.” The class clapped, making the room resound with the hollow slap of flesh upon flesh. Lance looked up from the spot on the floor he had been staring at. The sheriff was smiling and nodding, and Mrs. Murphy leaned over to whisper something in his ear. He nodded and grinned at her rotund face before stepping back and letting her assume the speaker’s position.