Inheritance: A Novel Part 41

He walked inside, glanced up the flight of stairs toward his old room, then continued on into the living room. Paul stood in the doorway, lost in a sort of nostalgia-induced sadness. The floors felt spongy beneath his boots. The hole in the ceiling was considerable. Trash was everywhere, beer bottles and soda cans and empty bags of chips and papers and even a few condom wrappers.

Kids from the high school, he thought. He couldn't blame them, not really. He probably would have done it too back in his day if he'd had a place like this to party.

He turned and went down the short hallway that led to the front of the house. There were two rooms here, one on either side of the front door. The one off to his left had been intended as a sitting room, but over the years had become a receptacle for all the machine parts his father had acc.u.mulated. The room to his right was a small bedroom, and the sight of it raised the gooseflesh on his arms. This was the room where his mother had spent most the years of Paul's youth. It was completely empty, save for a metal framed bed bolted to the floor. The mattress was still on it, though the moths and the mice and the racc.o.o.ns had chewed it to pieces. He saw a pair of metal rings bolted into the wall, one on either side of the bed. The wood around the rings was gouged and scratched. He turned and saw the yellow wall. His father had painted this wall just before his mother got sick and started her rapid slide into depression, and even then Paul had hated the color. It was a sick-looking yellow, the color of bile, broken only by a strange, looping pattern of gray lines that curved around each other and chased each other into dead ends or trailed off into nothingness. There was a worn, blackened area that went the length of the wall near shoulder level, and as he stared at it, Paul remembered the long hours his mother had spent pacing back and forth in front of that wall, dragging her hand along it.

He walked toward the wall and reached out to touch one of the gray lines, wondering if he could trace its path through the yellow field and if it might somehow tell him something about the many secret and powerful things his father knew. There was still so much to learn, so many things he didn't understand. Every connection he could make with his father now was a possible bridge to the knowledge he needed if he was ever going to be able to keep his charge.

But as he grew nearer, he began to see something moving in the yellow field behind the gray lines. At first it was too vague to make out. A shadow moving across the wall? But that wasn't what it was at all. He could tell that now. It was taking shape. He barely had time to draw a breath before the shadow finished resolving itself into the form of his mother, wild-eyed and dirty, her face warped with anger. She grabbed the gray curling lines painted on the yellow field of the wall like they were prison bars and she began to shake them with a lunatic fury that left him too stunned to move.

She screamed his name, over and over and over again, only there was no sound. The house was quiet as a country field.

"Paul!" she shouted, and shook the bars so furiously the whole house should have collapsed around them. He took a step back, slowly shaking his head, denying her. "Paul!"

And then something seemed to give. She exploded outwards with a crash that was like a mountain of gla.s.s shattering. She reached for him, her hands gnarled and filthy, and grasped his shoulders. He screamed and fell over backwards to get away, hitting his back on one of the bed's foot posts. The impact knocked the wind from his lungs, and for a moment, before it all slipped into darkness, he saw the room changing.

He stood in a room he had never seen before. It was the same room in the same house, but it had never looked like this-at least, not in his memory. There was a small loveseat in one corner, an end table next to that. His mother, young, pretty, healthy-looking, but sad, sat reading a book by somebody named Philip Larkin, her legs tucked up under her the same way Paul had seen Rachel do a million times. The room was filled with sunlight. It felt warm and comfortable. The faintest trace of a smile creased the corner of his mouth.

He heard something topple over and crash in the living room. Paul looked from the doorway to his mother. She lowered the book and frowned. Then she closed the book and set it on the end table and walked out of the room. Paul followed her, amazed at the woman's grace, at the easy feminine way she moved. How long ago was this? Where was the frail, drugged-looking woman who seemed like she was constantly about to fall over and hurt herself?

He rounded the corner behind her and saw her rus.h.i.+ng toward his father. Martin Henninger was crumpled on the floor in front of one of his stick lattices. Even at a distance, Paul could feel the power coming off the lattice.

"Martin?" his mother said, kneeling at his father's side. "Martin, are you okay?"

Paul could hear his father breathing. It was the sound of man pulling himself together, dragging himself up from a depth.

"I'm fine," he said. "Let me be."

He got to his feet. He straightened the black Stetson on his head. His white, long sleeve s.h.i.+rt was sopping wet with sweat. His face was milky pale.

"What happened?" she asked.

"Go into that room up there and clear it all out," he said. He was out of breath, but he managed to get that under control. "Everything goes. Pictures off the wall. Your books out of there. Everything."

"Clear it out? But why?"

Paul watched his father's face. He saw the man clenching his teeth. He could see the muscles twitching along the ridge of his jaw.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it, Carol. Go clear out that room. I want all your junk out of there. Go, now!"

Almost by instinct, Paul took a step back. He knew that look. Growing up, he had become an expert at reading his father's moods, at studying the s.h.i.+fting emotional weather inside the house. He knew there was a point, a sort of middle ground between his father's wide ranging plains of calm indifference and his sudden, mountainous peaks of inexplicable and uncontrollable rage. That middle ground came and went with the suddenness of a spark off a flint rock. Failure to catch that spark and back away in time meant you were gonna get hurt.

He wondered what was wrong with his mother, why she couldn't see it.

And then it was too late for her. Martin Henninger shoved her into the wall. Slapped her face hard enough to send an echo ringing through the house.

Her head hit the wall and her knees buckled. She slid down the wall.

"Do it now!"

When she still didn't move fast enough for him, he grabbed her by the armpit and dragged her into the break room. He threw her onto the floor in the middle of the room.

"All of this c.r.a.p goes," he said. "Get it cleaned out."

His mother held her bruised cheek in silence, not daring to look at him. He recognized the look on her face. Paul had seen the look plenty of times while out on patrol handling domestic violence calls. It was the look of a woman who's been hit before. But it had been a long time since he'd seen it on his mother's face, and it made something unpleasant move in his gut.

"Move!" his father shouted.

Martin Henninger crossed the room to the far wall and grabbed a framed photograph off the wall and threw it at his wife.

"Get this c.r.a.p out of here! All of it."

He began to dismantle the room, tearing everything off the walls, throwing books out into hall.

"Martin, stop!" his mother cried. But it did no good. The man was possessed by rage. He was like a ferocious and terribly strong two year old in the middle of a fit. He didn't hear anything. You couldn't reason with him. His world had turned red.

"Do it now!" he shouted, and took a small picture from the end table and slammed it down on the floor. The gla.s.s over the picture shattered, and Carol Henninger turned her face away from the spray of gla.s.s shards.

"Pick it up," his father said. "Get it out of this room."

Paul watched her scramble toward the busted picture frame. He saw her face as she picked up the picture and separated it from the wreckage. He saw the picture. It was him as a baby, sitting in the gra.s.s, his mother kneeling forward to touch the tip of his nose with her finger.

"I'm gonna be gone for about an hour. Make sure this room is empty by the time I get back. You hear me?"

Paul felt a mixture of love and fear and pain as he watched his mother tuck the picture up into the folds of her skirt.

"You hear me?" Martin Henninger roared.

She nodded.

"Then say the G.o.dd.a.m.n words."

"Yes," she said. "I hear you, Martin."

"Better," he said, and stormed out of the house, the screen door slamming behind him.

The view s.h.i.+fted again, and this time Paul found himself on the opposite side of the room. Everything was bare save for the metal framed bed bolted to the floor. His father stood near the far wall, a paintbrush in his hand, a bucket of gray paint at his feet. He was working steadily, drawing the strangely curling gray lines onto the yellow field he had just finished painting.

His mother stood in the doorway, crying quietly to herself.

"Why are you doing this, Martin?"

His father didn't answer, didn't even look at her, but Paul knew the answer. At least a part of it. He had felt it when he stared at the stick lattice his father had been working on shortly before he forced his mother to empty out the room. He had seen a flash of what his father had planned.

"Martin, what's happening to you?"

Nothing.

Just then Paul heard footsteps in the hallway. His mother turned. Paul was there. Paul as he had been at three or maybe four years old.

"I taked out the feed like you said, Momma."

She made a furtive glance towards Paul's father, then back to the boy.

She said, "That's good, baby. Why don't you go outside and play for a little, okay?"

"I don't wanna."

"Please, baby. Just do as I ask."

But Paul walked past her and stared into the room. He stared at the sickly yellow and the gray lines his father was painting and he said, "That looks yucky."

"Baby, please," his mother said, and grabbed him by the shoulder and guided him back to the hallway. "There's some peach baskets out in the yard, Paul. Can you go gather them up for Momma and put them in the barn, please?"

"Ah, Momma, I don't wanna."

"Go, Paul. Do what Momma says."

The boy ran off. She watched him run, then turned back to her husband, who was still painting the gray lines onto the yellow wall.

"It's Paul, isn't it?" she said.

Martin Henninger went on painting.

"What have you got planned for him? What kind of twisted s.h.i.+t are you planning to drop on our son?"

Martin Henninger didn't answer. Never even looked away from the wall. But he didn't have to. Paul knew the answer to that question, too.

A power drill went off behind him. Paul turned and saw his father tightening down the screws on one of the metal rings on the wall next to the bed. His mother sat on the edge of the bed. She had lost weight. Her hair was unwashed and straggly, and in the dusty shaft of sunlight that came through the window Paul could see that it was starting to turn gray.

His mother was staring at the rings on the wall with a sick look on her face. "What are those for?" she said. "You don't need those."

Paul looked away. The yellow wall was already starting to show black scuff marks where his mother had rubbed it with her hands while pacing back and forth. He sensed that the wall was like a movie screen, showing his mother visions of her future. Something his father had created as a constant reminder of his power over her. Paul knew that she had spent long hours in this room, and the images she had seen in that wall had left her shaken. It was the gateway to her depression. She had seen herself sapped of vitality, of life, estranged from her child, bled dry by depression. She had seen so much that it had become her reality.

"You don't need those things," she said again to Paul's father. Paul turned back to the two of them. "I'm not going anywhere, Martin. You know that. I can't."

He finished mounting the ring and put away his drill and got up and crossed to the doorway, leaving her on the side of the bed without looking back.

"I don't understand you, Martin. Why are you doing this to me? Why are you taking our son away from me? Why don't you just kill me and be done with it? I don't fight you anymore."

And then the four-year-old version of Paul came running down the hallway and stopped in the doorway. He tried to enter the room, but his father put a hand on his chest and held him back.

The child version of Paul looked at his mother sitting on the edge of the bed and said, "Momma, I'm hungry."

But Carol Henninger didn't look up. She was staring down at her hands in her lap. She sagged into herself like she was drugged, a limp sh.e.l.l, empty on the inside. But the adult Paul knew better. He could feel what his father was doing to her, holding her down, forcing her to be silent with the strength of his mind. Paul winced. All this had been going on, would continue to go on, for years, and he would live in the same house with this and never suspect a thing. How could he have been so blind to it?

Martin Henninger pushed his child back into the hallway. "Go outside for a bit," he said.

"What's wrong with Momma?" the boy said.

"Momma ain't feeling good, Paul. Go on now. Get yourself outside for a while."

The boy looked from his father to his mother and then back to his father, his expression uncertain. "Yes sir," he said, and gave his mother another worried glance before walking away.

Paul felt dizzy. He put a hand to his head and blinked, and when the feeling left him, the phone was ringing. He was still in the old house, still in the vision, but things had changed. The house was dirty, the floors littered with machine parts. It was dark, too. Heavy drapes hung over the windows, and the air was thick and musty with the taint of a protracted sickness.

Paul walked out of the room with the yellow wall, down the hallway to the living room, and saw his mother curled up on the couch. Twelve year old Paul was standing in the kitchen next to the screen door in his football gear, waiting on Steve's father to pick him up.

His mother said if the phone was for her to tell them she wasn't feeling up to talking.

His father was outside, yelling at him to answer the G.o.dd.a.m.n phone.

The boy answered, and Paul remembered it all again as he watched the boy try to make sense of the Spanish Magdalena Chavarria was firing at him.

And then his father was standing in the doorway, demanding to know who it was.

Paul watched his father take up the phone and fire back in Spanish, speaking it like a native. He watched his father lean back against the wall.

He heard him say, "Si, te oi. Yo tengo que guardar un cargo," and the words shot a chill down his spine.

I have a charge to keep.

And then his father hung up the phone. The twelve year old Paul said, "Daddy, I didn't know you could talk Mexican."

"Go outside, Paul."

"Huh?

Martin Henninger's eyes flashed. "I said, go outside! You're waiting on Steve. Go do it in the driveway."

Even from across the kitchen, the older Paul could hear his father's teeth grinding.

The twelve-year-old Paul just looked confused, and a little sad now that he knew they weren't going to talk about how his father knew Spanish.

He hung his head and said, "Yes sir."

When the boy was gone, Martin Henninger stepped into the living room and stared at his wife on the couch.

"Get up."

His mother stirred. Paul watched her move. She was so sluggish, like her body was stiff and achy. Every move seemed to bring her pain. He watched her, and he realized something. She had been reduced to a puppet. Her body had been broken. Her thoughts were not private. Her will was almost completely gone. His father controlled her absolutely. She was basically a faucet that he could turn on and shut down whenever he needed something from her. Clean the house. Cook for the child. Feed the child. Put the child to bed. Dress it, care for it, maintain it for the greatness it will one day inherit. She was a slave to her husband's will, and in that horrible moment Paul realized that his father had been keeping her around solely to care for him, and the knowledge made him want to vomit.