Elbourne jumped to his feet from the floor beside the couch and snapped off the television set. “Okay, okay, for Christ’s sake,” he mumbled in a barely audible voice, and he headed for the stairs. Charlie silently followed.
“We’ll keep it turned down,” Ma said. She sat facing the fading gray image on the screen, one hand buried in the bowl of popcorn on her lap. “Wade,” she said, “turn it back on. Just keep the sound low so your father can sleep.”
Wade unlocked his crossed legs and got up and reached for the knob, and Pop said, “I said shut the fucking thing off. Shut. It. Off.”
Wade thought for a second that Pop sounded like Marshal Dillon in Miss Kitty’s bar daring a drunken gunfighter to reach for his gun. The boy held his hand still, six inches from the knob.
“Go ahead, it’s all right,” Ma said. “Just keep it low so your father can sleep.” She drew several pieces of popcorn from the bowl and pushed them into her mouth and chewed slowly.
Pop took a step into the room and pulled a cigarette from the pack and placed it between his lips, and as he lit it, he said to Wade, “Go ahead, you little prick, don’t do what your father tells you. Do what your mother tells you.” He inhaled deeply and blew the smoke at his feet, as if he were now thinking of something else.
Wade moved his hand a few inches closer to the knob. Where were his brothers? Why had they given up so easily?
Ma, chewing on the popcorn, said to Wade, “Honey, turn on the show, will you?” Wade obeyed, and his mother turned around on the couch and said to his father, “Go on back to sleep, Glenn, we’ll be—” when he passed her by quickly and reached out for the boy with both hands and shoved him hard, away from the television set and back against the couch. Wade let himself fall into a sitting position beside his mother; his father snapped the television off again.
“You little prick!” Pop yelled, his eyes narrowing, and he raised his fist over Wade’s head.
“Don’t!” Ma cried, and the fist came down.
There was no time to hide from the blow, no time to protect himself with his arms or even to turn away. Pop’s huge fist descended and collided with the boy’s cheekbone. Wade felt a terrible slow warmth wash thickly across his face, and then he felt nothing at all. He was lying on his side, his face slammed against the couch, which smelled like cigarette smoke and sour milk, when there came a second blow, this one low on his back, and he heard his mother shout, “Glenn! Stop!” His body was behind him somewhere and felt hot and soft and bright, as if it had burst into flame. There was nothing before his eyes but blackness, and he realized that he was burrowing his face into the couch, showing his father his backside as he dug with his paws like a terrified animal into the earth. He felt his father’s rigid hands reach under his belly like claws and yank him back, flinging him to his feet, and when he opened his eyes he saw the man standing before him with his right hand cocked in a fist, his face twisted in disgust and resignation, as if he were performing a necessary but extremely unpleasant task for a boss.
"Glenn, stop!” Ma cried. “He didn’t do anything.” She was behind Pop, standing now but still holding the bowl of popcorn before her, as if she were his assistant and the bowl contained certain of his awful tools.
Pop held Wade with one hand by the front of his shirt, like Matt Dillon drawing a puny terrified punk up to his broad chest, and he took his left fist, swung it out to the side, opened it and brought it swiftly back, slapping the boy’s face hard, as if with a board, then brought it back the other way, slapping him again and again, harder each time, although each time the boy felt it less, felt only the lava-like flow of heat that each blowleft behind, until he thought he would explode from the heat, would blow up like a bomb, from the face outward.
At last the man stopped slapping him. He tossed the boy aside, onto the couch, like a bag of rags, and said, “You’re just a little prick, remember that."
Wade looked up and saw that Pop was still smoking his cigarette. Ma had her hands on the man’s shoulders and was steering him away from the couch, back toward the bedroom door, saying to him, “Just go on back to bed now, go on, go back to bed,” she said. “You’ve done enough damage for one night. It’s over. It’s over.”
“When I say do something, goddammit, I mean it,” Pop said over his shoulder. His voice was high and thin, almost a whine. “I really mean it. When I say do something, I mean it.”
“I know you do,” she said. “I know.”
Then the man was gone into the darkness of the bedroom, and the door was closed on him, and Ma was able to attend to her son’s bleeding mouth and nose, his swelling cheeks. She reached toward him, to soothe and cool the heated flesh of his face, but he shoved her hands away, wildly, as if they were serpents, and backed wide-eyed from her to the stairs behind him, where he turned and saw his older brothers waiting for him, huddled in gloom on the stairs like gargoyles.
He moved slowly past the two, and a few minutes later, when he had undressed and climbed into his bed, they came along behind him. For a long time, our mother sat on the couch, listening to herself break apart inside, while everyone else in the house, even Wade, let pain be absorbed by sleep— cool gray, hard and dry as pumice stone, sleep.
8
HOME MADE COOKING. Wade passed the sign and drew the grader carefully to the side of the road at the far end of Wickham’s parking lot, where he shut off the engine, clambered down to the ground as if descending from a tree house and started to walk back toward the restaurant. The sign, custom made for Nick Wickham in pink neon by a bearded ponytailed glassblower over in White River Junction, bugged Wade.
Wade knew something was wrong with it, had said so to Nick the first time he saw it, but he had not been able to say what it was. It was only a few weeks before, early one morning stopping in for a cup of coffee before work, that he had first noticed the sign. Today, with the snowstorm, that morning seemed not weeks but an entire season ago, early autumn, with leaves flashing brass-flecked light in his eyes. He had driven his car into the lot and had seen Nick up on a stepladder attaching the new sign to the low roof of the restaurant.
“That don’t look right, ” Wade had said. “It looks like it’s spelled wrong or something.”
Nick had glared down and said, “Fuck. Wade Whitehouse, it’s people like you that keep this fucking town from prospering. You got a perpetual hair across your ass, pardon the expression. No matter what an individual does to improve things around here, you got to find fault with it.”
“I’m not finding fault with it,” Wade had said. “It’s a goddamned good idea, putting up a neon sign and all. Good for you, good for the town. Looks real modern too, like those new restaurants they got down to Concord,” he said. “Probably wasn’t cheap, neither, was it?” he asked. “I mean, them hippie craftsmen, they can cost you an arm and a leg. You think you’re getting a dish or something, you think you’re getting something you can use, something of true value, you think. Only it turns out it’s a goddamn work of art.”
Nick got down to the ground and folded his ladder and stepped back a ways to admire his new sign. He smacked his lips, as if he had just eaten it. “This town,” he said, “sucks.”
Wade said, “Aw, c’mon, I was only just saying that there’s something wrong with ’Home Made Cooking,’ that’s all. The sign’s fine. The sign itself. It’s just what it says that’s wrong.”