Getting Away With It

Conversations with myself.

“I’ve wanted to actually kill someone once. I mean…to seriously do it. To rid myself of someone else in the most permanent way possible, regardless of the consequences. It was the man my mother married after my father’s death. He was not a nice person. He was a terrible person, and my brother and I wondered why my mother wanted to marry him. She even had to have a few drinks, enough for her speech to get slurred, when she told us she was going to do it. He’d been living with us for several years — all through my childhood, really. Maybe eight years? I don’t recall the actual number. And then she married him and we, my brother and I, couldn’t understand it. In retrospect, she was very lonely and he loved her, probably. But he was an alcoholic, and an angry, violent one. I can remember cowering in my dark bedroom when I heard the garage door open, which signaled that he was home from wherever he had been drinking that night and would likely find something wrong in the house to make him angry and violent. Most times he took it out on the doors in the house, slamming bedroom doors and cupboard doors repeatedly. He was a fan of the belt as a method of discipline. He only used it on me two or three times — once he did it on Thanksgiving in front of my grandmother because I had done something. I think I had disobeyed him, or maybe back-talked him. I was probably twelve years old, and he had downed a six-pack of Coors already that day. It was mid-afternoon, we hadn’t yet eaten, and he chased me outside onto the backyard patio and started hitting me with his belt. I’m sure I cried. I cried a lot as a child. I hated to cry, of course. Men didn’t cry. Another time he went into my older brothers room and sort of folded him in half, waking him from sleeping, grabbing his ankles and shoving my brother’s knees into his own chest. He was drunk, of course, and my mother was screaming at him to stop, so maybe her presence that night prevented him from doing something worse. As I grew up, my hatred for him intensified. I saw nothing positive about his presence or his continued existence at all. And I was lying in my bed one night and heard the garage door open and that dread came over me. My heart was thumping in my chest, waiting to see if he would explode tonight, and what he might do. I could never tell what would set him off. Maybe I had a chore I hadn’t finished that day, or I didn’t do it to his specifications, or I did nothing at all and it was just that I was there in his house that was enough for him to explode. In the darkness, I could hear him getting out of the car — my bedroom was situated next to the garage, on the side of the house — and then the front door opened and the automatic garage door shut and the waiting would begin. Would he slam my door open and demand I get out of bed and go do…whatever it was he wanted me to do? Would it be my brother’s turn instead? And as I was laying there beneath the covers in the darkness, shaking with fear, I began to devise a way to kill him. I would take one of his dumbbells, one of those dark, iron, old-fashioned weights and I would slam it into his head, breaking his skull and shoving it into his brain, killing him. I would swing it over my head to make sure it had enough force to do it in one blow, in case I only injured him or missed completely, driving him into a rage and he would certainly kill me in retaliation. I could picture myself doing it, could feel the weight of the iron in my hand, its coldness against my skin. I could see myself smashing his head in, and all the blood, buckets of blood, gallons of blood, splattering the walls and the carpet. Everyone would agree that it was the best thing for everyone. The best thing for the whole world, really. What good was he? What had he ever done that was good for the world? Even if I ended up in prison forever, even if they killed me for murdering him, it would be worth it, just to escape this dread, this fear, this cold sensation in my chest and the way my body physically shook from being scared of him. I’d kill him and save me and my brother and my mother from him. Because I hated him. I hated him enough to kill him. But that night, I had done nothing wrong. He didn’t come into my room to yell at me, turning on the lights and approaching me in the bed in my underwear and throwing off the blanket and sheets and pulling me off the mattress to go…finish vacuuming the floor or cleaning out the pool filter or changing a lightbulb. I heard his deep voice as he passed my bedroom door on the way to where he and my mother slept, from where I could hear him fucking her, from where I would creep in one night to take up the weapon of his destruction and smash his head in until it was nothing but pulp. And then he closed his bedroom door, and my heart slowed its beat, and I fell asleep until the next day.”