Into the Web by Thomas H. Cook Read Free Book Online Page A

words like small exploding shells.
    “Well, she didn’t,” I said. “And after her I never tried again. End of story.”
    And with that I slammed out of the room, rushed down the corridor and out into the yard, and drew in a long, cleansing breath. I knew at that moment that if I could have willed my father dead, simply flipped that mythical switch, I would have done it.
    But it’s a hard thing to wish your father dead. And so, with night steadily falling around me, I found myself listening as he dragged himself about his room, attentive to any sign of distress, any sign that he needed me. I knew I owed him nothing and yet I couldn’t stop myself from stealing a look through the window, a glimpse of his emaciated form, the right shoulder hunched, his arm bare in the sleeveless T-shirt, skin loose and flabby now, with nothing left of those rippling muscles that had dug coal and cut wood for over fifty years.
    Such was the fate of sons, I thought as I continued to wait out the night, listening to the frail chirp of the crickets and katydids, the air cooling now as I tried to cool, watching mutely as the moon retraced its iron circuit, as tightly controlled as I strove to be, solitary and duty-bound, the man Lila Cutler had not made.

Chapter Five
    A windblown summer rain swept in the next morning. I made coffee in my mother’s battered tin percolator. I remembered her at the stove in the early morning, her hair gathered in a bun behind her head, already an old woman, it seemed to me, though she’d not yet reached forty.
    Even now, solitary though my life had been, I couldn’t imagine the cold depths of my mother’s loneliness, the deep isolation of living with a man who did not love her, and never had. I couldn’t imagine their courtship, my father as a young blade strutting before her, she the object of his pursuit, though I knew that there must have been such a moment in their lives. In fact, it seemed proof enough of a dry and loveless marriage that I could not imagine that earlier time, but only the spoiled residue of it, swollen and malodorous, a blackened fruit.
    By the time I was eight, my father had seemed hardly a husband at all. He often took his evening meal in silence, then strode directly to the living room and sat chain-smoking through the night.
    Mornings, he lingered in his bedroom as long as possible, opening and closing drawers like someone who couldn’t decide what to wear, though his wardrobe, if it could be called that, had never consisted of more than a few shirts and three or four pairs of work pants.
    He’d never taken breakfast with the rest of us, but only grabbed a mug of coffee as he trudged past the kitchen table, then on through the front door, banging the screen behind him, and out to his pickup.
    The groan of its engine, the scratch of the tires as he pulled away, had always been followed by a flood of relief that he was gone, taking the weight of his unhappiness with him like a heavy bag.
    I had always been the most fully relieved at my father’s departure. More than our mother, and far more than Archie, I’d sensed the explosive charge buried deep within him. Perhaps what I’d felt was the sheer, horrific potential of my father for some sudden, annihilating violence, the fact that each day, each hour, seemed to exhaust him in the containment of it. Even in his silence, perhaps most of all in his silence, I sensed a dreadful peril, so that I often felt a wave of relief wash over me when he finally spoke, especially if his words were harsh. When he called me a sissy if I complained about some chore, marveled that I didn’t have to “set down” when I peed, or barked “Get off the rag, Roy” to shut me up, at all those times, no matter how stingingthe rebuke, his words always came to me like a stay of execution.
    But it wasn’t my father’s long anger that returned to me most vividly as I resumed my boyhood chores that rainy morning. It was Archie, who had always been so much