As my mother’s voice tightened, my father’s got softer, more expertly calm and condescendingly tolerant. Having argued for a while about the way I should be, and then about the manner in which they were arguing about the way I should be, they started arguing more broadly about the way they communicated.
“I talk to him a lot, though,” my father was saying.
“You talk, yes you do. You talk,” said my mother. “But you don’t ask him any questions. You just tell him stories. Stories to impress him. Like you want a high five, or a slap on the back. You can do so much better. I know that you can. I know because of how you are with me. You and I converse. We listen to each other. There’s back-and-forth. Mutual curiosity.”
“But you’re my wife,” he said. “Billy’s my son. We can’t talk to him the same way we—”
“Belt’s our son, Clyde. Yours and mine. But you assume he’s just like you. That he wants the same things, admires the same things. Maybe he isn’t. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe if you didn’t—” My mother started saying, but a match she’d struck to get her Quill lit snapped, and she cut herself off, shut her eyes tightly.
My father produced a Zippo from his pocket. He sparked it and cooed to her, “Maybe’s just the sound second thoughts make, honey.”
Then it was she who was pummeling inans. First my father’s beer stein via openhanded blow, an act that seemed, weirdly, to be inadvertent, even borderline comical, until she sent, in the opposite direction, my salad bowl sailing at the door of the fridge, and I saw her chin trembling, her bitten lower lip. I’d always been aware that my mother was gentle—ducks and squirrels seemed to gather around any bench she sat on, the children of strangers approached her at playgrounds, told her their names, pointed at clouds—but until then, I’d never considered her delicate. She stood, raised her plate, and smashed it on the floor. She launched the clay ashtray at the sooty oven window. I don’t remember what sounds she was making—weeping ones, or shouting ones, or no sounds at all—nor whether my father tried talking her down. I distinctly remember thinking she was dying, which, on one hand, doesn’t seem strange at all: I’d imagine most children, upon witnessing their mother breaking down so violently, would jump to dark, irrational conclusions, especially if they’d never seen it happen before. But then on the other hand it was exceptionally strange, for this breakdown was, as far as I can recall, the first symptom she’d shown of the tumors in her brain, and yet none of us had any idea she was ill yet.
I found myself standing, saying, “Please don’t.” She didn’t seem to notice. She hurled another plate—mine—to the floor. I took a step back. I said, “Please.” She said, “No.” Maybe to me. Maybe to my father, who’d begun his approach. She was reaching for the vase in the middle of the table, when he wrapped her in his arms, pushed her cheek to his neck, turned ninety degrees so I was out of her sightlines, and, over his shoulder, gave me this look like, “See what you’ve done to this beautiful woman? You see what you’ve done to my wife?”
He took her away, then, into the living room.
I found the broom and started to sweep.
The policemen arrived a couple minutes later. I was the one who answered the door, and I thought, for just a second, that a neighbor must have called them; a neighbor must have heard all the smashing, I thought, must have figured my dad had at last flipped his lid, started killing his family. Then one of them asked me if I was Belt Magnet, and I felt it all pressing up out of my chest, the bumbling retractions, the ill-timed confessions.
I swallowed and swallowed.
* * *
When, earlier that summer, upon returning from a visit to his mother’s in Phoenix, Regis Piper discovered his swingset murdered (that was murder #3), he didn’t really bother to pay it much mind. The thing had been a hazard of rust and sharp edges for at least a few years, his children were adults, and his overgrown, dandelion-blanketed yard hardly looked any worse for the wear. His wife, Melinda, had expressed some worry that the mutilated swingset stood for bigger, more frightening things, and between the Sunday sermons at their Pentecostal church, and the daytime talk shows’ recent focus on the pull toward Satan, sodomy, drug abuse, and suicide that backward-spun hard rock and heavy metal records subliminally exerted on bored, but otherwise well-reared children from clean, suburban, God-fearing families, Melinda’s point of view didn’t seem exactly unreasonable to Regis—not exactly—yet still he found it hard to take too serious. Boys being boys is what he figured. Kids having some new kind of weird, kid fun. Nothing criminal there. Just some innocent horseplay. If anything the vandalization of the swingset argued for the perpetrators’ ultimate harmlessness. The house had been empty, after all, for two weeks, and instead of breaking in to steal the TV, they’d elected to deform a pile of junk in the yard.
But on encountering mention of the Strumms’ murdered swingset in the media coverage of that Nazi biker, Regis started thinking that maybe his wife had been right to be afraid. Maybe something frightening was happening in Wheelatine. Something that, if not necessarily demonic, was violent and disorderly, eerily ritualistic, possibly serial. Or maybe not. It was bigger than he’d thought, though. Bigger than him. Speaking up was thusly a civic duty. So he called the law. He filed a report.
* * *
—
At least that’s how Piper explained it to the Herald later that week. The details we got from the cops were much thinner: a couple people had reported murdered swingsets that day, and because I’d been caught red-handed at the Strumms’, I was suspect #1.
They wanted to talk to me down at the station.
I rode with my parents in my father’s truck. By the time we arrived, I’d admitted to everything. The murders, the lies, the inans—all of it. They didn’t entirely believe me at first. Of course they never believed that inans spoke to me; but, initially, they didn’t believe I thought inans spoke to me. They seemed to think I was making it up to cover more shameful motivations for the murders. Later that night, back at the house, I tore from my two most recent journals—I was, for a while, in junior high, quite the graphomaniacal autobiographer—a number of pages containing transcriptions of conversations I’d had with swingsets, as well as the pages from the previous Friday in which I described the tantrum I’d faked when the seatbelt spoke up in my mother’s car. I brought these pages to my mother at her vanity, sat on the floor, and waited while she read them. She asked if I’d ever thought of hurting myself, and I told her I hadn’t, that I didn’t like pain, and my answer made her chuckle until she choked up. She really didn’t know what to do with me, she said, and she was sorry to have doubted me, but as long as I continued to tell her the truth she was certain we’d be able to figure something out.