Cold in July Read Free Page A

was finished in Jordan’s room, I stopped by his bed and put his
teddy bear back under the covers and tucked them around him. I felt like
dragging up a chair and watching him sleep, but I went out to the garage and
got some wire and pliers and rigged a sort of latch on the door Freddy Russel
had broken.
    Then I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of
milk. The house felt strange to me, like it wasn’t mine anymore. It was no
longer sanctuary. It had been invaded. I felt like a rape victim. Violated. Our
house was no longer private, full of our spirits, thoughts, even our arguments.
It was nothing more than a thing of glass, wood and brick that any thug with a
crowbar or a screwdriver could bust open.
    The milk tasted like chalk and rested mercury-heavy in my
stomach. I poured the rest down the drain and went to bed.
    Ann was asleep, and I was grateful for that. I had feared
she would insist on a mercy fuck; sexual first aid. She worked that way
sometimes, and I hated it. She meant well by it, but that didn’t make me like
it. Tonight I would have despised it, no matter how much I loved her or how
enticing she might be.
    I lay there looking at the ceiling, listening to Ann
breathe. My stomach kept churning the milk around and around, and an instant
replay of what had happened earlier was whirling endlessly through my head:
swirls of shadow and muffled sounds, a flashlight, revolver steel, the wind
from a bullet against my ear, the report of my own gun, the lights going on,
the empty eye socket, blood and brains on the landscape painting and the very
wall on which we taped our yearly Christmas cards. It wasn’t until daylight
that I felt like sleeping.

 
    4
     
                
    I could have slept in, but I didn’t. I got up, dressed for
work and went into the kitchen to sit at the table with Ann and Jordan.
    Jordan was playing with his food, as usual. Seldom did a
morning pass without some sort of fight between me and the boy, or between the
boy and his mother. Something to do with the way he ate, or playing at the
table. The kid couldn’t get out of the house until he had spilled his milk. It
was like a morning ritual that had to be observed.
    And there were thousands of little things he did that made
me climb the wall, and it was the same for Ann. She and I went through each day
joyful for him and mad as hell at him, trying to figure if we were overly
demanding of a four-year-old, or if he was a real life Dennis the Menace. Or
worse, some sort of criminal in the making, created by us, seasoned by our
impatience and anger, tempered by his genetics, having acquired all the things
we hated about ourselves, and none of the things we prized.
    I thought too, each night as I went to bed, that no matter
how hard I tried, it wasn’t good enough. I never missed a day yelling at the
little guy, or losing my temper in some way, and I certainly told him no more
often than yes. Though I tried to listen to him describing what the Pink
Panther and Woody Woodpecker and the Pokey Puppy did, there were times when his
little voice was like chalk on a blackboard and I would tune out his
enthusiasms, and I knew he could sense it.
    Then too, there was the other child, the one I thought about
more often than I ever expected. The one Ann had carried inside her for eight
and a half months and I had felt move inside her and had heard gurgling around
in there when I put my ear to her stomach. The same child that filled her with
poison and sent her to the hospital for days and prompted the late-night phone
call in which she told me, “Our baby is dead,” and then began to cry.
    They used drugs to make her deliver, then offered us the
body. A little girl. They said if we didn’t want her they would autopsy the
body for research and dispose of it. Later, I found out if we had asked for her
they would have handed her to us in a black garbage bag.
    At times I thought we should have at least looked at her.
Maybe given her a name