Steve Hamilton - The Lock Artist

I remember I used to see my father on weekends sometimes. Back when I was five or six years old. We’d go to Tiger games and movies, and I believe one time we went on a big steamboat on the Detroit River even though it rained all day. Then he disappeared for what seemed like forever to me. Even when he was away, my mother would still get phone calls from him. She’d send me out of the room while she talked to him. Then she’d go outside and sit on the steps and smoke a cigarette.

She works at one of the plants down the river. Mr. X is actually her boss, I believe. The first time he came over, they went out and I got stuck with a babysitter all night, but then after that he started coming to the house and staying longer and longer. That’s when he started bringing the comic books.

So Father’s Day. Here we are, all sitting there in the room, when we all hear a noise at the front door. My mother gets up and looks out the little window, but she doesn’t see anybody. Before she comes back to the couch, she hooks that little chain on the door. That little chain with the knob that fits into that little slidey hole thing. No matter how old I am, I realize that a little chain like that is not going to stop somebody if that somebody really wants to get into the house. Not that anyone would want to. But if.

There is a back door in the kitchen, leading out into the tiny yard with the wooden fence around it. So there are two doors plus seven windows, which I know because I have counted them, plus the one tiny door on the side of the house from a long time ago when the milkman used to come. That was before I was born, but we did use that door the one time we got locked out of the house. I was just small enough back then to fit through it.

But that back door. That’s the door my father came in. Who I haven’t seen in two years. All of a sudden, it isn’t just my mother and Mr. X on the couch watching television while I sit on the floor reading my comic book. It’s my mother and Mr. X on the couch watching television while I sit on the floor reading my comic book and my father standing there in the doorway like it’s the most perfectly natural thing in the world, leaning against one wall with his feet crossed and saying, “So what are we all watching, huh?”

Mr. X gets up first and my father hits him across the face with something. It’s a rolling pin, which he’s picked up from the kitchen. Mr. X bends over with his hands on his head, and my father kicks him right in the face with his boot. My mother is screaming now and trying to get off the couch and getting tangled up with the legs of the coffee table while I keep sitting there the whole time watching everything happen. My father hits Mr. X in the head again, and then he goes after my mother, who is trying to get the front door open now except she can’t because of that stupid little chain.

Then he spins her around a few times like they’re dancing, and my father asks her if she missed him. She’s trying to hit him and she’s screaming and finally she claws him right in the face. He pushes her down right next to me. Mr. X is trying to get up now, so my father picks up the rolling pin and hits him in the head again. And again and again and again and again. The sound of that wooden rolling pin hitting his head makes me think of one thing, which is the sound of a bat hitting a baseball.

My mother is screaming at him to stop, so he throws the rolling pin at the television. It hits the screen and knocks out one half of it while the other half goes black. Then while my mother is trying to crawl away, my father gets down on his knees and he comes over to me finally.

My mother is begging him to leave me alone, but all my father does is he takes my comic book from me and he looks at it.

“I’m not going to hurt our son,” he says. “How could you even think that?”

Then he hits her across the face with the back of his hand.

“Go in the bedroom,” he says to me, his voice dropping into a gentle tone. “Go ahead. It’ll be all right. I promise.”

I don’t want to move for one simple reason, and that is because I have pissed all over myself and I don’t want him to see the puddle on the floor.

“Go ahead,” he says. “Go. Right now.”

So I finally get up, puddle or no puddle. I go to the bedroom, and when I look back my father is taking his shirt off and my mother is crying and trying to get away. I go into my room and I try to open up my window, one of the seven windows in the house, but it has this lock on the top that is jammed tight and I can’t move it one little bit. My pants are all wet and I want to change but I can’t remember which drawer my pants are in and it doesn’t even occur to me that I could just start opening them until I find the right one. I can’t think straight at all. Not with those sounds coming from the living room.

There is a pile of comic books in my room and a desk with a pad on it where I had been trying to draw pictures of superheroes and a single bookshelf with my books on it, plus a trophy on top of that from T-ball, which I pick up now, thinking this might be something I could use because it would really hurt if it hit you on the head.

I open up the door to my bedroom, cracking it open the way I do at night when I’m supposed to be in bed but I want to see what’s on television. But of course now the television is half gone and all I can see is what my father is doing to my mother in the living room. I could draw an exact picture but it still wouldn’t make any sense, the way she’s bent over the coffee table with her hair hanging to the floor and the way my father is behind her with his pants off, moving his hips against the back of her again and again.

He doesn’t see me coming out of the room with my T-ball trophy in my right hand, getting closer and closer until I can see what he has done to Mr. X’s body. How he’s taken Mr. X’s pants off just like he’s taken his own pants off except there’s blood all over Mr. X’s legs because he has cut off or pulled off or whatever else he has done to Mr. X’s private areas, as my mother calls it when I’m in the bathtub.

I run back down the hallway except this time I go into the spare bedroom where we keep my old bed I’ve grown out of, plus the old gun safe that used to be my father’s but was too heavy to get out of the house.

I am not allowed to open that safe or even touch it under any circumstances, my mother has said more than once. There’s something about the bolts in the door that are extra dangerous. Because they have springs in them that automatically lock when you close the door. But today seems like good circumstances to me all of a sudden after what I’ve just seen, and I don’t want my father to do to me what he’s done to Mr. X, so I pull the safe door open and I get inside. It’s empty now, of course, because my father doesn’t live here and he doesn’t have any guns or anything else to put in it, so I have just enough room if I sit cross-legged. Then I pull the door closed.

That’s when I realize that there is no handle on the inside. I can’t get back out even if I want to. Not without somebody on the outside spinning the right combination. I start to wonder if I really will suffocate or how I’ll even know if I am. I remember all those times when I’d be under my blanket and the air would get heavy until I stuck my nose out and the air would be so cool and delicious. It starts to feel like that, the heavy part I mean, but then I notice that there’s a thin line of light on the side of the door where the hinges are and if I put my nose up to it I can almost smell the fresh air.

So I stay in there with my legs crossed and my nose up against the side of the door. I can’t hear what’s going on outside the safe very well, but I know one thing for sure. As much as I’ve ever known anything in my whole life. I have to be quiet.