Scott Heim - Mysterious Skin

BLUE

1981, 1983, 1987

BRIAN LACKEY

The summer I was eight years old, five hours disappeared from my life. I cant explain. I remember this: first, sitting on the bench during my Little League teams 7 P.M. game, and second, waking in the crawl space of my house near midnight. Whatever happened during that empty expanse of time remains a blur.

When I came to, I opened my eyes to darkness. I sat with my legs pushed to my chest, my arms wrapped around them, my head sandwiched between my knees. My hands were clasped so tightly they hurt. I unfolded slowly, like a butterfly from its cocoon.

I brushed a sleeve over my glasses, and my eyes adjusted. To my right, I saw diagonal slits of light from a small door. Zillions of dust motes fluttered through the rays. The light stretched ribbons across a cement floor to illuminate my sneakers rubber toe. The room around me seemed to shrink, cramped with shadows, its ceiling less than three feet tall. A network of rusty pipes lined a paint-spattered wall. Cobwebs clogged their upper corners.

My thoughts clarified. I was sitting in the crawl space of our house, that murky crevice beneath the porch. I wore my Little League uniform and cap, my Rawlings glove on my left hand. My stomach ached. The skin on both wrists was rubbed raw. When I breathed, I felt flakes of dried blood inside my nose.

Noises drifted through the house above me. I recognized the lull of my sisters voice as she sang along to the radio. Deborah, I yelled. The musics volume lowered. I heard a doorknob twisting; feet clomping down stairs. The crawl space door slid open.

I squinted at the sudden light that spilled from the adjoining basement. Warm air blew against my skin; with it, the familiar, sobering smell of home. Deborah leaned her head into the square, her hair haloed and silvery. Nice place to hide, Brian, she joked. Then she grimaced and cupped her hand over her nose. Youre bleeding.

I told her to get our mother. She was still at work, Deborah said. Our father, however, lay sleeping in the upstairs bedroom. I dont want him, I said. My throat throbbed when I spoke, as if Id been screaming instead of breathing. Deborah reached farther into the crawl space and gripped my shoulders, shimmying me through the door, pulling me back into the world.

Upstairs, I walked from room to room, switching on lights with my baseball gloves damp leather thumb. The storm outside hammered against the house. I sat on the living room floor with Deborah and watched her lose at solitaire again and again. After she had finished close to twenty games, I heard our mothers car in the driveway as she arrived home from her graveyard shift. Deborah swept the cards under the sofa. She held the door open. A blast of rain rushed in, and my mother followed.

The badges on my mothers uniform glittered under the lights. Her hair dripped rain onto the carpet. I could smell her combination of leather and sweat and smoke, the smell of the prison in Hutchinson where she worked. Why are you two still awake? she asked. Her mouths oval widened. She stared at me as if I wasnt her child, as if some boy with vaguely aberrant features had been deposited on her living room floor. Brian?

My mother took great care to clean me. She sprinkled expensive, jasmine-scented bath oil into a tub of hot water and directed my feet and legs into it. She scrubbed a soapy sponge over my face, delicately fingering the dried blood from each nostril. At eight, I normally would never have allowed my mother to bathe me, but that night I didnt say no. I didnt say much at all, only giving feeble answers to her questions. Did I get hurt on the baseball field? Maybe, I said. Did one of the other moms whose sons played Little League in Hutchinson drive me home? I think so, I answered.

I told your father baseball was a stupid idea, she said. She kissed my eyelids shut. I pinched my nose; took a deep breath. She guided my head under the level of sudsy water.

The following evening I told my parents I wanted to quit Little League. My mother directed a told-you-so smile at my father. Its for the better, she said. Its obvious he got hit in the head with a baseball or something. Those coaches in Hutchinson dont care if the kids on their teams get hurt. They just need to cash their weekly checks.

But my father marshaled the conversation, demanding a reason. In addition to his accounting job, he volunteered as part-time assistant coach for Little Rivers high school football and basketball teams. I knew he wanted me to star on the sports fields, but I couldnt fulfill his wish. Im the youngest kid on the team, I said, and Im the worst. And no one likes me. I expected him to yell, but instead he stared into my eyes until I looked away.

My father strode from the room. He returned dressed in one of his favorite outfits: black coaching shorts and a LITTLE RIVER REDSKINS T-shirt, the mascot Indian preparing to toss a bloodstained tomahawk at a victim. Im leaving, he said. Hutchinson had recently constructed a new softball complex on the citys west end, and my father planned to drive there alone, Since no one else in this family seems to care about the ball games anymore.

After he left, my mother stood at the window until his pickup became a black speck. She turned to Deborah and me. Well, good for him. Now we can make potato soup for dinner. My father hated potato soup. Why dont you two head up to the roof, my mother said, and let me get started.

Our house sat on a small hill, designating our roof as the highest vantage point in town. It offered a view of Little River and its surrounding fields, cemetery, and ponds. The roof served as my fathers sanctuary. He would escape there after fights with my mother, leaning a ladder against the house and lazing in a chair he had nailed to the space beside the chimney where the roof leveled off. The chairs pink cushions leaked fleecy stuffing, and decorative gold tacks trailed up its wooden arms. The chair was scarred with what appeared to be a centurys worth of cat scratches, water stains, and scorched cavities from cigarette burns. I would hear my father above me during his countless insomniac nights, his shoe soles scraping against the shingles. My fathers presence on the roof should have been a comfort, a balm against my fear of the dark. But it wasnt. When his rage became too much to handle, my father would swear and stomp his boot, the booming filling my room and paralyzing me. I felt as though he were watching me through wood and nails and plaster, an obstinate god cataloging my every move.