38. Shane
38
Shane
B loody knuckles obstruct my already blurred vision as I brake the old pickup truck, parking along the side of the road.
Wheeter would kill me if he knew I took it, considering this truck is about as reliable as the person I’m visiting, but I’m not stable enough to risk riding my bike. I’m fucked up and know I shouldn’t be driving home, but coming out here required some sort of numbing intervention. As I sit here waiting, I finish the rest of the Maker’s Mark bottle, swallowing down the remaining liquor and quickly lighting up a cigarette.
I shouldn’t be here.
After last night with Montana and the Macrae Mansion, something dark came over me. Something snapped. My emotions were twisted and intertwined with my resentment, but fuck if I couldn’t deny they were still there. She gave me a new woman to love. Montana Rowe was slowly but surely undoing every bit of hatred I'd developed for vEn0mX. She was winning me over with her submissive cries, her sweet kisses, and the vulnerability I’d always needed from her. She was letting me take out my past transgressions on her flesh, needing me to heal.
The uncomfortable feelings had me doing what I'd always wanted to do—resorting to unnecessary violence. Which brings me to my father’s door.
I'd driven all over this town a couple of weeks ago hoping to see him, but finally lucked out when Josiah pulled an address last Wednesday by tracing some of his whereabouts online. The fucker is using an entirely different name now. It made it difficult to locate where he lives, but now here I sit, waiting outside the gorgeous two-story home with Home Is Wherever Our Family Is printed on the doormat.
I assess my wounds, noting the split and bleeding knuckles from pounding my fist into the back of the Piggly Wiggly, the same place that supplied me with the booze. I’d hoped to drink a bit and allow the liquor to cool me off, maybe make me change my mind about what I was about to do. But nothing and everything led me here, sitting wasted in a stolen pickup truck, awaiting the confrontation my reckless soul craved.
I hate that I see him in my reflection. I hate that even if I try to run from it, I’m slowly but surely becoming the man who ruined me.
Another text message comes through, and I avoid it like all the rest, seeing a beat-up Chrysler Neon approaching. Sitting up in my seat, I peer out the passenger window, watching the white, heavily rusted car pull into the driveway.
A man slowly steps out of the vehicle, with long hair, grease-coated coveralls, and a lunch pail in hand. Brittle bones hold him up, and he walks with a limp in his staggered gait. My breath catches, disbelief draping me in a discomforting coat. It’s him.
Thwarting whatever feeling nearly came over me, I open the truck door and stumble out onto the road, catching myself. Approaching the man, I kick the lunch pail from his weak grasp, sending the contents flying across the perfectly weed-whipped driveway. His shoulders raise, and he cowers away, but I grip his dirty coveralls, throwing him against the shitty car.
“Please, n-no,” he pleads, not even looking me in the eye. “I have money. Please don’t hurt me.”
My eyes rake over his fragile build, his body appearing smaller than I ever remember beneath his uniform. A bald patch on top of his head is on full display as the rest of his greasy hair remains tied back into a low, frail ponytail. Splotchy patches of hair fill in what should be a full beard, and the dark circles beneath his eyes are deeper than I’ve ever seen.
This isn’t the man I remember. The big, terrifying man who used fear and intimidation to rule me. The one who punched me in the eye for spilling a bag of raisins on the kitchen floor when I was six. This isn’t the guy who stood over me, laughing as I curled into myself while he rearranged my intestines with his steel-toed boots. This definitely isn’t the man who took that pack of cigarettes, lighting each one for every charge I’d received that year, sizzling out their flames into the flesh of my arm to teach me a lesson.
This isn’t the man who left his family for a better life when everything went down in flames.
No, this isn’t him at all.
Holding the blue coveralls in my bloody fists, I wait until he finally meets my eyes, and the shock of the recognition hits. His eyes round, even more than before, when he thought some stranger was mugging him.
“Shane?”
I slam his bony back into the car, and a gust of air leaves his lungs.
“Finally recognized your only boy, yeah?” I seethe. “Thought maybe I’d need to show you the scars to prove it.”
I thrust the scars of my inner forearm in his face, and he winces with repulsion.
“Son, let go of me. I can explain—”
I interrupt him, throwing him back against the car again before landing my fist into his cheekbone. But one punch is not enough. I need to see him beneath me, weak, broken, destroyed. All of what he made me.
Kicking out his legs, his back slams to the concrete with a crack, a weak cry leaving his chest. I throw another punch and blood spurts from his mouth.
“I’m sorry. What was that?” I pant. “I couldn’t hear you over the blasphemy.” I land another hit, sending his head in the other direction. His face contorts in pain, hands pulling at my shirt over my chest in an attempt to stop me.
“What the hell is going on here?” a man yells from the porch.
I look up at the porch, seeing a man in his late forties, with his horrified wife and two daughters standing behind him. The shock on their faces has me assessing the situation. I stare at my father, then peer at the white Neon again. Chrystal’s Cleaners. This isn’t his home.
“Call the police—”
“It’s fine!” my father interrupts, getting out from under me. He scoots toward the car until his back is leaning against it, his hands raised. Pulling a rag out of the pocket of his coveralls, he blots his mouth, holding it on the bleeding wound. “It’s fine,” he mutters, panting as he attempts to catch his breath. “No need to call them. He’s my son.”
That word again.
The man on the porch ushers his family back into the house, promptly locking the door behind them as I take a seat on the concrete beside him, catching my breath.
“I’m not thanking you for that. I’d rather have gone to the station for the night than allow you to play hero. Fuck you.”
He sighs, then shakes his head. Silence sits between us like a warped tension cord. The unsaid words and overabundance of knowledge of situations past linger like static, rebuilding for another breakdown.
“Will you at least drive me back home?” he asks, his left eye already swelling shut.
“Fuck no, drive yourself.”
“If I crash the car, I’ll lose the job. I can’t lose this job. It took weeks for me to find a place that would take me on—”
“Fuck you and your job.” I spit out, pushing off the ground to stand.
But his hand grabs my wrist, stalling me.
“Please,” he begs, “I’m so sorry, Shane. I’m so sorry for what I did to you.”
I rip my wrist away from him and begin walking toward the truck, but his voice follows me, making my skin crawl.
“You need to know! I wasn’t right back then. I was a drunk! An awful drunk who let fantasies rip my family apart. I’m completely sober now. It was never your fault. I’m a changed man.”
I turn to face him.
“And you’ll have to die with that, just as I’ll have to die with my mistakes.”
The wrinkles beside his eyes deepen as he pinches the bridge of his nose. His shoulders slump, and he looks more defeated than I’ve ever seen him. I can live with this being my final image of him. Turning again, I take another step toward the truck.
“She left me, you know?”
I stop in place, my lungs feeling as if they are clashing together. My molars grind, and it takes nearly everything in me not to pummel his lifeless body into the dirt where he belongs.
“She promised me we’d start a family, that our future was everything she was looking forward to. But after I left you all, she left me. She disappeared. I just thought you should know.”
I know the fucking feeling. It’s exactly what he did to us. Left his family to fend for themselves. Left me to rot and figure out how to die on my own. He dumped us high and dry on a promise of a new and shiny start, effectively abandoning me in the dirt.
“Doesn’t change shit. I’m glad whoever you were fucking on the side left you. You’re a worthless person who deserves everything he got.”
“Don’t become me, son. Don’t let what I did to you make you this person. I let my addictions rule me, I never paid you any mind, I became someone I didn’t respect―”
“Shut up!” I scream at him, turning to charge him again. “Shut the fuck up!”
I raise my fist, about to strike him again, but just before I do, hands grip my body, pulling me back. Josiah steps in between us, pushing at my chest. Wheeter stands facing my father, ensuring we’re kept apart, both of them breathless.
I never even heard them ride up. The adrenaline, anger, and alcohol dulled my senses.
“Get back in the truck, Croix,” Sigh says calmly, beads of sweat coating his forehead. “You don’t want to do this.”
I push him off of me before punching him in the face. It’s a weak punch, one I’m not entirely proud of, given my condition, but it works enough to get me at my father again. I grip his uniform, attempting to pull him from Wheeter and give him one last fist to the jaw, but Josiah grabs my arms from behind again, forcibly detaining me.
Spitting the dripping blood from my mouth at my father, I reluctantly stumble along with Josiah as he places me in the passenger seat of the car. I wouldn't be so willing, but I can barely feel my hands and face, and the ability to talk is lost on me. I’m fucking wasted, and the echo of sirens grows closer. The sweet song to my negligent life.
I slump into the seat, raking my hands down my face. I want to claw at my flesh, rip the skin off my face, pull out my eyes, and reach into that place that controls me. The burning sensation at the base of my skull, that pit of anger that never leaves. I just want to touch it. Choke it out. I want to eradicate it from my being. I don’t want to be this person anymore—the one who survives off hatred.
My father’s words recycle through my head, over and over again. She left me. Don’t let what I did to you make you this person . Well, guess what pops? I am that person. I’m violent, full of rage, without a care in the world for anyone else around me.
I want my remedy, my marrow back. I want the only thing that ever made him disappear entirely from my presence. The only thing that calmed the throbbing ache in my skull and silenced the voices that screamed. The only one that ever made my torment cease, if only for a moment.
I need her .
And this time, she’s finally within reach.