The Knife

The John Birch Society must've promoted my old man. We left the trailer park for Lafayette, IN, a college town about 70 miles to the southeast. My old man had rented us a house and I remember my brother and I chasing one another through the somber empty rooms. It was a shotgun house with a big cement porch and buckled hardwood floors with the bedrooms tacked along right side like an afterthought, three boxes connected by a narrow hallway. You entered the basement at the back of the house through a door in the pantry, down a cramped set of slippery stairs, past the cobwebs and the indignant spiders into darkness that was sweet with mildew. My brother and I helped carry the old man's metal boxes of weapons into the basement and then we helped carry the emergency foodstuffs and the radios and the other survival equipment. He'd picked this house specially for the basement which, due to a lack of windows and five feet of earth above its ceiling, was a perfect bomb shelter.

"It will see us through a long bad time," he'd say.
"If it comes," my mother would say.
"It's only a question of when."

I was doubtful that we could survive long in that cold cramped little room and at night I dreamed of white-hot mushroom clouds and of rustling stealthy spiders plotting to liquefy our organs, leaving behind our dessicated and web-swaying skins.

The old man felt good about the new house and the new town; he began to make the occasional grim joke about our nightmare at the trailer park. After a month he got us another German Shepherd. We named her "Madchen." He kept her in the backyard where she began systematically leaving, in glazed cups of snow, little piles of candied excrement. One Saturday my brother dared me to pick up one of these little logs and hurl it at him, but I was afraid to do so because I imagined that beyond the shellacked surface lay a warm and loamy center and that it would crumble apart in my hands. My brother, tiring of this game, went inside to finish his Alistair MacLean novel and I, drawn irresistibly as all boys are, drifted toward the street at the front of our house.

The old man's green Vega was parked at the curb, his body wedged at an uncomfortable angle, his feet projecting into a snowdrift. I did not like my old man and in fact to be near him made my stomach hurt but the dazzling emergence of the sun and the those comical protruding legs allayed my fears and I moved close enough to peer into the darkness of the car.

He was lying there with one hand clutching a pair of bright unruly wires below the dash. The stereo and CB were lying on the floorboards. Protruding from his side, just above his waist, was the handle of the short knife which he ordinarily kept in a leather pouch on his belt. The old man made rhythmic animal groaning sounds as his right hand clenched and unclenched around the handle of his short knife. I could see now that the black upholstery sparkled in the sunlight where his blood had soaked it through.

"You okay?" I said.
"Hi. Hi." He spoke in the peaceful voice of some past or future self. "Go get your mother. I've had an accident."
"What's wrong?"
He was very calm and patient. He waited until his groaning stopped although his hand continued to clench and unclench around the handle of the knife. "Go get your mother I've had an accident."
"Are you okay?"
"Go get your mother I've had an accident."

Later when they wheeled him out of the emergency room I admired him for his handsomeness and the crease along his temple where he'd been shot in the head in Vietnam and for his coolness when the knife was stuck in his side. He was wearing a shirt my mother had brought from home and one could see the bulky gauze pad below the thin fabric. My mother cried at intervals as the doctors explained the particulars of caring for the wound.

"You could have died."
"But I didn't."
"He saved your life." My mother was referring to me.
The car was quiet. My mother cranked the starter and the engine coughed to life. Madchen, wedged in the backseat between my brother and myself, flattened her ears.
"He wasn't obedient," The old man said. "I had to ask him three times."
"You can't whip him, you're full of stitches," my mother said.
"I appreciate what you did but I had to ask you three times did I not?"
I waited a long time to answer. I could feel the warm blood singing in my ears and I imagined that I was outside the car, running fast, leaping mailboxes and ditches to keep pace.
"Did I not?"
My brother punched me in the shoulder and frowned.
"Yes, sir," I said.

He gave what seemed to me a deep and contented groan. As we rolled along the frozen streets I came to realize that I'd lost a chance that would never come again and I cursed myself for walking toward the street when I could've picked up one of Madchen's segmented candies instead. My stomach began to hurt. The bare branches of oaks and maples flashed over our little car, an endless parade of switches with which little boys could be and would be whipped.