Thunderheads, by Eric Scot Tryon
Photo by Frames For Your Heart on Unsplash
On Tuesday, my 4-year-old son came home from school with bite marks—three red, swollen crescent moons trailing up his arm like animal tracks.
When we asked Jacob what happened, he shrugged, said they were just playing around, and ran off to watch Spidey and His Amazing Friends. My wife looked at me and sighed, told me the assistant promised an email. Until then, we waited, wondered, and worried.
That night as I finished reading him The Wonky Donkey, I couldn’t help but trace the raised half circles on his arm, the pad of my index finger running over the small indentations, teeth marks like braille, evidence that someone had tried to hurt my son, had sunk their teeth into his tender flesh. “Does it hurt?” I asked.
“It was just a game,” he said, hiding his arms under the covers. “I’m fine.”
#
“He did it too, you know.” My wife was sitting up in bed, reading the incident report from the school. Meanwhile I turned on the ceiling fan and opened windows, let the warm Phoenix night blow into our sterile, air-conditioned house.
“Did what too?”
“Jacob, he also bit the other kid.”
We moved to Phoenix last year as a compromise. Phoenix was closer to my parents and farther from Los Angeles and that Derek from her office and Dr. Hensley from couples counseling and apologies and forgiveness.
“What? Who’s the other kid?”
“The school won’t say.”
I got in bed next to her, and she turned her laptop to me, two pictures up on the screen. Two scrawny little arms, my son’s and this mystery kid’s, both so new to this world, like blank canvases, now both with a set of matching red bite marks.
“Good lord!”
“Right?” she said.
That night I dreamt of teeth and drowning.
#
On Thursday, Jacob came home with another bite mark and another incident report. This one on his left hand. The teacher wanted to have a sit down. When we were available next week? It was a singular bite, but one tooth had broken the skin and a small scab was already forming. His young body so eager to heal.
That night as I finished reading him the hijinks of Penelope Rex, I touched the mark on his hand and he winced. I was gentle with my questioning. When Stephanie and I became parents, we vowed to observe and listen more than talk and demand, to guide more than push. But I got little more than a name.
#
“Some girl named Olivia,” I said to my wife as she stood in the bathroom, scrubbing her face in quick little circles with a round cotton swab.
She paused and looked at me in the mirror, her face shiny like a new penny. “So it’s a girl?”
“Yep, Olivia. That’s what he told me.”
“Wow,” she said, before returning to her routine.
“Girls can inflict pain too, you know.” I walked away before she could respond to start a routine of my own. The opening of all six windows in our large bedroom. Defrosting our house and letting in the smell of hot asphalt and the buzz of threatening thunderheads.
That night I didn’t dream at all. Didn’t sleep. Couldn’t quiet my mind over the fact that someone was hurting my son. The need to protect him an actual ache in my body. But I couldn’t go scorched earth. Instead, we read neatly filled-out incident reports and scheduled sit-downs.
#
My wife, forever the attorney, had done her research. On Friday, with Jacob sound asleep, and with no new bites, she invited me to join her on the back patio. Said she had a bottle of Malbec and some interesting information.
“Do you know who Vincent Furnier is?” she asked, handing me a full glass.
“Should I?”
“The little girl’s name is Olivia Furnier. Her father is Vincent Furnier.” She said the name slowly, articulating each syllable, reveling in the power that comes with privileged knowledge. I waited for her to continue while the harmony of the cicadas pulsed and filled the air around us.
“Alice Cooper. Olivia’s dad is Alice fucking Cooper!”
We lived on the edge of Paradise Valley, and had already grown accustomed to some of Arizona’s celebrity scene. Stephanie had seen David Spade at Starbucks, had bumped carts with Stevie Nicks at Whole Foods. I once waiting at a red light for Mike Tyson to lumber across the crosswalk, and George Takei shared the same tax guy as us.
“Alice Cooper’s still alive? And has a toddler?” I couldn’t remember the last time I had heard his music or his name. “How old is he?”
“Seventy-six. And his wife isn’t much younger.” Stephanie paused to sip her wine. “If you know what I mean.”
I know all too well what you mean, is what I should have said, but I didn’t. This wasn’t about me or us right now, but about Jacob, for whom the messiness of adulthood wasn’t yet a dot on the horizon.
“So this isn’t Jacob’s fault,” she said, with a sigh of relief. “He’s got some freak’s daughter attacking him!”
“Well we don’t know Alice Cooper is a freak, let alone his probably very sweet four-year-old daughter.”
“Of course he is! Didn’t he bite the heads off bats on stage or something!”
“I’m pretty sure that was Ozzy Osborne.”
“Well, still,” she said and made a concerted effort to look away from me and up to the night sky. The afternoon clouds had already built up, caused concern, and dispersed. She leaned back on her hands and looked up into the patches of black speckled with stars. But I was the one who felt light years away.
#
Stephanie spent the weekend on her laptop, Wikipedia and YouTube, watching videos of Alice Cooper’s outlandish stage performances, reading a watered-down version of his career. She became hellbent on confronting the Coopers themselves. “Or rather, the Furnier’s,” she pointed out. “I guess when you knock up the nanny you go with the lowkey name.”
On Sunday morning, we got in an argument over the lyrics of “Feed My Frankenstein”.
“I’ll blow down your house, and then I’m gonna eat ya!’” Stephanie read, arms out, palms to the ceiling, like how could I not get it. “Stop being so calm about this!”
“Honey, it’s a song about sex, not eating people.”
I could see her eyes scanning the screen as the guitars pushed the limits of her laptop speakers. “Did you hear that?” she asked, “‘Hungry for love and it’s feeding time’!”
I laughed at the absurdity of the conversation, and she shot me that all-too-familiar condescending look. “He said, ‘hungry for love,’ honey. Love. Sex. Remember what that is?”
I spent the night sweating on the couch. I dreamt I was lost in a giant parking lot unable to find my car. All the door handles were teeth that snapped at my hand when I tried to open them.
#
Paradise Valley Montessori was a simple, one-building school—off-white stucco and a clay tile roof the color of dried blood. It was Monday afternoon. There was a buzz in the sky, and when Stephanie and I turned the corner on the way to Room 2, a youngish blonde woman in a purple tracksuit approached. She held the hand of a small girl who we quickly realized was the infamous Olivia. And then there he was. Walking several feet behind them was Alice Cooper. He shuffled along slowly, not ancient but still weathered. His long black hair thin and wispy, his face like a melted candle. I could immediately feel Stephanie’s energy rise, and I quickly grabbed and squeezed her hand. But they passed us without incident, though I doubt her biting her tongue had anything to do with me, but rather she saw it too. The look in Alice Cooper’s eyes. No longer swimming in black eye make-up, they were dry green eyes that carried such resignation. A resignation to exhaustion. It was alarming and sad.
#
Jacob’s teacher, Ms. Howard, was a pleasant-faced brunette who talked about Jacob, and all the children, as though they were fragile birds in the palm of her hand. She was careful with her language, never assigning blame or judgement. She talked of shadow teachers, rules, limits, schedules, routines, screening questionnaires, and even professional assessments. But I could tell her love for Jacob was genuine, which was really the only thing I cared about.
#
Grabbing Jacob from the aftercare room, the three of us walked back to the car in silence. Jacob was a smart boy and could tell something was amiss, and I knew Stephanie was stewing over the mention of a professional assessment and the million different pathways that could send us down. But the meeting gave me a new calmness about our boy; I knew he would be okay. I was thinking more about Alice Cooper, and the blonde in the purple tracksuit, and people like Alice Cooper’s wife and that Derek from the office, and were any of them, us, going to be okay?
Calmness did not equal resolution, however, so after buckling Jacob into his booster seat, I put my hands on his knees, looked into his eyes and asked, “Buddy, we just need to know what you and Olivia were doing. What game were you playing?”
But he only looked down at his hands, fidgeted with a strap on his backpack. In the car, in the parking lot, this was not the place to push, so I closed the door, received a look from my wife that I couldn’t decipher, and made my way around the back of the car. A warm breeze swept across the parking lot, and off in the distance, cumulonimbus clouds gathered and huddled like gossips.
The parking lot was small with just a smattering of cars, and as we approached the exit, there he was again. Alice Cooper. Blue jeans and a black T-shirt, alone, leaning against the driver’s side door of an old black Studebaker, smoking a cigarette. He looked up, and he and I made eye contact. Just for a moment, and then he flashed me the peace sign with his free hand. It was quick and casual and maybe he thought nothing of it, or maybe he meant so much, but I knew it was an image I would contemplate for years.
I clicked on the radio and hit the preset for the classic rock station, half expecting to hear “School’s Out” or “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” but that’s not how the universe works. Instead it was the same old song about a hotel in California, with Don wondering if this could be heaven or this could be hell. And it was here that Jacob finally spoke up.
“We were just playing a game,” he said. Then he paused, and in the rearview mirror, I could see his little mind already navigating the world of action and reaction, honesty and consequence. “We were just playing a game to see how much we could hurt the other person until they couldn’t take it anymore and they said stop.”
My wife gasped, but caught it quickly with her hand. And all I could hear was the crunching of tiny bird bones. Then I turned left and Alice Cooper became a black dot in the rearview mirror as the first heavy drops began to hit the windshield.
Eric Scot Tryon is a writer and editor from San Francisco. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Mid-American Review, Glimmer Train, Ninth Letter, Passages Noth, Los Angeles Review, The Florida Review, and has been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50, and the Best Small Fictions & Best Microfiction anthologies. Eric is represented by Carleen Geisler at ArtHouse Literary Agency. He is also the Founding Editor of Flash Frog. Find more information at www.ericscottryon.com.