11. Predators

Shafto had three stepdaughters with his ex-wife, one of whom, Natalie, was my age. She had the reputation around school of being somewhat of a slut. I doubted there was any truth to that rumor, but there was another rumor, the veracity of which I didn’t question. Natalie’s mother had divorced Shafto upon discovering that he had drilled a hole through the wall into the bathroom and caught him watching one of Natalie’s sisters taking a shower. I never talked with Natalie about Shafto—or anything else for that matter. She was popular and pretty while I was a rebellious loser known for never living up to my potential and committing acts so notoriously subversive that I was revered throughout the entire school district by the disaffected. However, I did hear her one day proudly telling a friend that she had finally been adopted by her new stepfather and would no longer have to bear Shafto’s last name. Once word got around that my mother had married Shafto, rather than giving me her usual look of disdain when we passed in the hallways, something in her attitude toward me softened and her expression took on a note of sympathy.

I didn’t have much contact with Shafto’s family. I had only met his mother a handful of times. Once at the wedding and then the few times she came over to our house. I never participated in any of his family events or holiday gatherings. As far as I knew, the only members of Shafto’s family who were even aware of my existence were the niece and nephew with whom I went to school, his daughter, who came over to stay on some weekends and his mother who had the rare opportunity to spot me outside my room a few times and who dumped her disturbingly ugly dog on us whenever she left town for extended periods.

One evening, I got home from work at the gas station and went into the living room to visit with my mother and Sung before Shafto got home from work. As I entered the room, I saw my mother sitting in her chair with a coffee cup full of ice cream. She was laughing so hard, she had tears streaming from her eyes. I looked around the room to see what she found so profoundly amusing. I was horrified to discover what I considered to be the ugliest animal to have ever cursed my eyes. The Boston Terrier was shaking violently and whimpering, its eyes bulging from its rotund forehead. Then I noticed Sung crouched down in attack position, growling menacingly at her prey.

“What in the fuck is that thing?”

My mother could barely control her laughter enough to respond, “Mary’s dog, Chipper. She’s leaving him here for the week while she’s on vacation in Oklahoma.”

My mother’s voice started to crack from laughter, “Sung’s been stalking him all day. I wish you could have seen it. I can’t stop laughing.”

There’s no animal quite like a Siamese cat. They are more loyal to their families than any dog I have ever known. Once, when I was a child, my mother had a Siamese cat named Tabitha. Tabitha would let me drag her around the house by the tail. One evening, my mother had a babysitter come over so she and my dad could go out. When the babysitter came inside, she walked over to me and reached down to pick me up. Tabitha immediately lunged from the chair where she was curled up and clawed her way up the babysitter’s back. She clung to the woman’s back growling and hissing, making it quite clear she was not to lay a hand on me. My mother carefully extracted Tabitha from the babysitter and she spent the rest of the evening locked in the bedroom.

My disgust at the horrible vision of that wretched dog dissolved away as I took a seat on the couch and watched as Sung, growling and hissing, inched closer and closer to Chipper, who was twice her size. I was delighted. Chipper yelped and urinated on the hardwood floor before running to hide behind a table. Slowly and precisely, Sung continued to stalk him. I sat and watched with pride as she bullied that pathetic animal for over an hour. For my mother and me, this wasn’t just some comical event to pass the time. It was an expression of our dislike of Shafto. Sung was doing to Chipper what we both wanted to do to Shafto.

Then the headlights appeared in the window. My delight turned to despair and my mother’s laughter turned to regret. I quietly went to my room, shut the door and put in my Black Sabbath cassette. I sent a stream of morphine coursing through my veins and sat on the edge of the bed, hunched over with my feet on the floor, my arms resting on my legs and my head lowered. As the song “Iron Man” swirled in the air, I rode the waves of the opiate oceans to another place.

The searing orange sky had no clouds. A red giant star on its deathbed? The burlap-textured ground was flat with the exception of small, smooth mounds and crevices. The trees were like clay and melted lazily in the extreme heat. Fallen trunks lay everywhere and created indentations in the burlap ground.

I sat on a fallen trunk, in the same position as on my bed back in the world of gray. My body was made of metal now and gleamed in the giant red sun, My limbs were joined by rivets of steel. My head—front and rear plates attached at the center with eyes vertically aligned to one side. No other features adorned my face, yet the blankness still betrayed my melancholy.

Something resembling birds created electronic whirs by their very existence and when they sounded, glowing diamonds appeared in the blank orange sky. Streams of paint-like color flowed through the sky – the result of sounds throughout the land. Here, images were heard, sounds were seen and emotions were killed.

I felt as though I had been here an eternity trapped in a metal body that couldn’t be killed, longing in agony for the naked sun to melt me into nothingness.

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