was her messed-up ear, and she only did that because she couldn’t hide it. So you don’t get a say in what I believe or what she believed, and if I want to say Jesus this and Jesus that all night long, then you’re just going to have to live with it or get back in your truck. I dare you. You know what you were to us? You were nothing. Just like you are to everyone in this shitty town. Nothing—the Garbageman.”
Outside the cabin, limbs flogged themselves softly with leaves. Crickets expressed their eternal agitation. My father, his head cocked as if hearing words in this nature, lifted himself from his chair and took the three steps to the door. Instead of leaving he reached up and locked us in. My eyes shifted to the drawer where, among utensils, there were knives.
With eerie languor, he maneuvered around obstacles until he was at the bedroom door. His face was scary with resignation. “The Garbageman,” he murmured. “That is exactly who I am.”
The door closed behind him. Barely audible were the thuds of his boots; later, the muted chimes of fingers fanning across bottles. I didn’t want to hear it. I turned to the kitchen counter and interpreted the miniature cityscape of food: Marina City, Trump Tower, Hancock, Sears. Cresting from the imagined Lake Michigan was a bag of pretzels. My hunger had abated, but I snatched the bag and tore it open. I fished out a pretzel, placed it in my mouth, and leaned back against the sink, lacking the energy to chew. I reminded myself that I had faced Ken Harnett on his own turf and won. It was a victory, something uncommon for me in Bloughton, and yet I felt only further loss.
15.
ONE WEEK LATER I gave him my conclusion. “You’re going to kill me,” I said. It at least felt true. He did not respond, instead turning upon me the vicious emptiness I had grown to expect. There was murder in that hopeless countenance—this I had finally decided—and perhaps it was only a matter of time before he dispatched the son he had mistakenly created.
Chained to Bloughton by Simmons’s threat, he paced the woods near the cabin. Most days when I returned home from school I saw him a hundred yards away perched on the riverbank, hands in pockets, watching the water. Other days he and his truck were gone when I got home, only to return in the early evening, gray sacks jostling, clothes scored with dirt. On these occasions, he dove without a word into the shower, where the next morning I would find a perimeter of mud. We ate separately and the sleeping arrangements did not change. At least I finally had my textbooks—he stripped them from a stack one morning and tossed them in the middle of the floor.
“When are you going to do it?” I asked him one day as he shoved peanut butter across torn bread.
I did not expect an answer, but I got one. He was gazing at the setting sun through the windows above the sink. “At dawn,” he whispered. The news, while interesting, did not compel me to ask which dawn. I did not want to pry.
So I expected my demise each morning as I dressed for class. The school days during these weeks passed with increasing quickness; only snared within some moment’s torment did time decelerate to an agonized crawl. Gottschalk did not renege on his sentence. Our first unit was on skin and the endocrine system, and almost every day I was called to the front of the class to be used as a real-life model. He had a telescoping metal pointer and sometimes struck my arm or neck or face hard enough to make me flinch. “Notice the damage to multiple layers of epithelial tissues,” he said, prodding a patch of pimples. “The sebaceous gland that surrounds each shaft produces sebum, made up of lipids—that’s fat to you. Outer layers of the epidermis flake away and the dead skin becomes glued together by this sebum, causing a blockage that can produce quite unpleasant results—as seen on Mr. Crouch here. The silver lining for Mr. Crouch is that sebum itself is odorless. This is not the case, however, for Propionibacterium acnes, a bacterium that sebum harbors. Based on the smell coming off Mr. Crouch on a daily basis, I’ll wager that his skin is swimming in the stuff. Ten-to-one odds. Who’s in?”