Chapter One

When you hit someone in the head with a metal baseball bat, it’s not like the movies.

In the movies, you hear a thud, and the person falls to the ground out cold. A few minutes later, they’re fine. If it’s a semi realistic movie, they might have a bruise on their head. They press a palm against their temple, sit up aghast, and slowly get back on their feet. “Tylenol,” they say, and the scene moves on.

In real life, when you hit someone in the head with a baseball bat, you hear a cracking. Time slows in a moment like this. And the sound, the cracking, is muffled, like stepping on freshly fallen snow, or on a large spider, every piece of exoskeleton breaking one agonizing piece after another. The ping of the metal rings in your ears and mixes with the cracking, like a tuning fork. You feel the reverberation in your hands as the bat vibrates. The adrenaline makes your heart thump against your ribs, and you look down to see what you’ve done.

The first thing I noticed about my father was his teeth. His lips were pulled back and his mouth was open, his neck locked in a veiny grimace. His eyes were clenched shut. He looked like he was trying to yell, but no sound came out. Then the blood pooled in the concave of his skull, dark and thick. The front of his head had gone inward, like the bowl of a serving spoon. The smell of iron mixed with the cigarette smoke and the wine, and a single stream of blood ran terrifyingly fast down his forehead and into one eye.

Holding the bat, I just looked at him.

Had I done this?

In the moment after, time speeds up.

Screaming filled the room. My mother, my aunt Barbara, my little brother Michael, I couldn’t tell you who. All of them. Somewhere under it, the dog was barking.

“Buford!” my mother screamed.

Which one? I thought. My father and I share a name. For a second I honestly didn’t know which of us she meant.

My father opened his eyes. Unfocused, they rolled up into his head, and he began to shake. The seizure took him. It straightened his legs with a thrust, and he fell over.

People were grabbing at me now, struggling to get the bat out of my hands. I don’t remember who. I pulled it free and rolled it under the couch, away from everyone, away from me. It was the old aluminum bat my parents had played softball with back when we were all sane. The rubber grip had worn off years ago and somebody had wrapped the handle in a whole roll of duct tape. The word Slugger had faded into almost nothing.

I was limping. There was a dull pain in my hip. Why was that? I didn’t know, and I didn’t have time to wonder.

My aunt had the phone. “I don’t know the directions,” she was saying. “I don’t know where we are.”

I took the phone out of her hand.

“North Boulevard,” I told the operator. “On the corner of Second and Boulevard. Across the street from the district eight houses. Red porch.” Edmond had exactly one set of houses built for poor people, and everyone in town knew where they were. That’s how you gave directions to my house. You told people it was across from the poor houses. “Please send an ambulance. Please hurry.”

My father had stopped shaking. He got up somehow, stumbled forward, went down on his knees, and vomited on the carpet. I turned away. I wanted to vomit myself.

My friend Tim had been standing just inside the front door the whole time, waiting for me to change my shirt. Now he was outside, standing beside his car with the driver’s door open and a look on his face that I’d never seen on anyone. I don’t remember him leaving the room. I don’t think he does either.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “You should probably get going.”

Tim didn’t move. “Oh man,” he said. “Oh man. Oh man.”

Somewhere in the distance, the sirens started to wail.

I sat down on the red porch to wait.

My hands were covered in blood. So were my clothes. Inside the house the screaming kept going, but it wasn’t angry screaming anymore. It was the other kind, the kind people make when they’re watching someone they love shake on the floor with a hole in his head.

I felt for the asthma inhaler in my pocket. It was still there. I don’t know why that mattered, but it did.

And here is the part I have never known what to do with. Sitting on that porch, I didn’t feel hatred. I didn’t feel sorrow. I didn’t feel much of anything, except, God help me, relief. It came over me slowly, like the warmth of a sunrise. I hadn’t wanted to kill him. I’d wanted it to be over. All of it. The years of it. And for a few minutes on that porch, in the worst possible way, it was.

I sat on the red porch, waiting for my father to die, and for the police to take me away.

I was eighteen.

The police arrived, five or six of them, guns in their hands, and they ran up the yard toward me.

“Where is he?” one of them demanded.

I raised my hand and pointed, one bloody finger, through the open door at the man on the floor.

The officer hesitated. I watched the confusion move across his face. “No,” he said. “Where is the boy with the bat?”

My throat was dried mud. “Ah,” I croaked. “That’d be me.”

The next thing I knew, I was face-down in the wet grass with my cheek smashed into a muddy spot, a boot on my back and the barrel of a shotgun pressed to the back of my head while they cuffed me. For a second, a stupid, insane second, I wondered if I could get them to shoot me. If I moved the wrong way. If I reached for something. But I lay still, shivering and afraid. Maybe I was too much of a coward to try. Maybe I was just tired. I was so tired.

Ambulance and police lights flashed all around me, painting the dark in reds and blues. A fire truck sat in the middle of the street, blocking it off, as if the house might catch fire too.

They pulled me up onto my feet and walked me to a police car, and I leaned against it while people hurried in and out of my house. Somewhere in my mind I noted that my hip was throbbing now. The paramedics carried my father out. The last thing I saw of him that night was a man on a stretcher, covered in his own blood and vomit.

Tim was on the porch, wide-eyed, talking to an officer and no doubt trying to explain something there was no explaining. My mother was shrieking somewhere in the house. And my aunt kept saying the same thing over and over to anyone inside who would listen.

“He just ran in and hit him! They weren’t fighting or nothing! He just ran in and hit him!”

An officer appeared beside me, out of nowhere. He looked at me the way you’d look at a decent kid who had just done something there was no coming back from, and was only now starting to understand it.

“You better hope he lives,” he said. “Either way, you just ruined your life.”

❦