Velocity

her husband, and mocks him.
    Her mockery puts the pedal to his rage and drives him into fury. The slap of flesh on flesh suggests hand to face with force.
    She cries out in pain but at once says, “You don’t scare me, you can’t scare me!”
    Things shatter, crack, clatter, ricochet—and then comes a more terrible sound, a brutal bludgeoning ferociousness of sound.
    She screams in pain, in terror.
    Without memory of leaving the dining room, Billy finds himself in the kitchen, shouting at his father to stop, but his father does not appear to hear him or even to recognize his presence.
    His father is enthralled by, hypnotized by, possessed by the hideous power of the bludgeon that he wields. It is a long-handled lug wrench.
    On the floor, Billy’s devastated mother hitches along like a broken bug, no longer able to scream, making tortured noises.
    Billy sees other weapons lying on the kitchen island. A hammer. A butcher knife. A revolver.
    His father appears to have arranged these murderous instruments to intimidate his mother.
    She must not have been intimidated, must have thought that he was a coward, fatuous and ineffectual. A coward he surely is, taking a lug wrench to a defenseless woman, but she has badly misjudged his capacity for evil.
    Seizing the revolver, gripping it with both hands, Billy shouts at his father to stop, for God’s sake stop, and when his warning goes unheeded, he fires a shot into the ceiling.
    The unexpected recoil knocks back through his shoulders, and he staggers in surprise.
    His father turns to Billy but not in a spirit of submission. The lug wrench is an avatar of darkness that controls the man at least as much as he controls it.
    “Whose seed are you?” his father asks. “Whose son have I been feeding all these years, whose little bastard?”
    Impossibly, the terror escalates, and when he understands that he must kill or be killed, Billy squeezes the trigger once, squeezes twice, a third time, his arms jumping with the recoil.
    Two misses and a chest wound.
    His father is jolted, stumbles, falls backward as the bullet pins a boutonniere of blood to his breast.
    Dropped, the lug wrench rings against—and cracks—the tile floor, and after it there is no more shouting, no more angry words, just Billy’s breathing and his mother’s muted expressions of misery.
    And then she says, “Daddy?” Her voice is slurred, and cracked with pain. “Daddy Tom?”
    Her father, a career Marine, had been killed in action when she was ten. Daddy Tom was her stepfather.
    “Help me.” Her voice grows thicker, distressingly changed. “Help me, Daddy Tom.”
    Daddy Tom, a juiceless man with hair the color of dust, has eyes the yellow-brown of sandstone. His lips are perpetually parched, and his atrophied laugh rasps any listener’s nerves.
    Only in the most extreme circumstances would anyone ask Daddy Tom for help, and no one would expect to receive it.
    “Help me, Daddy Tom.”
    Besides, the old man lives in Massachusetts, a continent away from Napa County.
    The urgency of the situation penetrates Billy’s immobilizing shock, and terrified compassion now moves him toward his mother.
    She seems to be paralyzed, the little finger on her right hand twitching, twitching, but nothing else moving from the neck down.
    Like broken pottery poorly repaired, the shape of her skull and the planes of her face are wrong, all wrong.
    Her one open eye, now her only eye, focuses on Billy, and she says, “Daddy Tom.”
    She does not recognize her son, her only child, and thinks that he is the old man from Massachusetts.
    “Please,” she says, her voice cracking with pain.
    The broken face suggests irreparable brain damage of an extent that wrings from Billy a choking sob.
    Her one-eyed gaze travels from his face to the gun in his hand. “Please, Daddy Tom. Please.”
    He is only fourteen, a mere boy, so recently a child, and there are choices he should not be asked to make. “Please.”
    This is a choice to humble any grown man, and he cannot choose, will not choose. But, oh, her pain. Her fear. Her anguish.
    With a thickening tongue, she pleads, “Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, where is me? Who’s you? Who’s in here crawling, who is that? Who is you in here, scares me? Scares me!”
    Sometimes the heart makes decisions that the mind cannot, and although we know that the heart is deceitful above all things, we also know that at rare moments of stress and profound loss it can be purged pure by