Maybe I Deserved It

After the red lights stopped alternating in their warning dance and the bus shrugged off empty, I shuffled up the gravel driveway to my house. Soon after, I heard the metallic gag of the transmission as the bus turned around at the town line and headed back down my road. I felt the cool insanity of being twelve years old fill my being. I quickly scanned my surroundings and zoomed in on an egg sized rock two feet to my left. I took a step and scooped it up with my right hand. My thumb instinctively rubbed the dirt away so it could angle tightly around the back edge.
I waited until the nose of the bus passed my mailbox and then rotated my arm forward. The egg sized rock bee lined from my hand and shattered the window three seats from the back.
I felt cool for less than a second and then the screeching tires panicked me into a run. All rational thought left me and intelligence just stood off to the side laughing. I thought I could get away by scurrying under my front deck, past a missing piece of lattice.
I low crawled between the damp earth and pressurized wood and tried to make myself small against the foundation of my house. The cold cement didn’t yield to my scared hot skin trying to melt safely into the basement and I was frozen in my fear.
I heard the bus driver wheezing and cussing her way up the gravel to my house.
Then hell broke loose.
I heard the side door open and the heavy footsteps of my dad pounded down on the boards above me. I gagged with fear and tried to make myself smaller.
I looked out through the diamond holes of the lattice and saw my bus driver with her hands on her knees and gasping for breath.
She looked up and said to my dad “Your fucking piece of shit kid just threw a rock through my window and I’m going to kill him!”
Well, my dad might not have been the best of fathers, and he may have thought that I was a piece of shit, but damn if someone was going to talk shit about his kids. He started spewing out hatred and insults that whittled that 300 lbs bus driver into a sniveling toothpick.
He took a few angry steps in her direction. She found herself in my world and I saw the fear knock her over.
Stumbling to her feet, she retreated down the gravel and drove her bus off.
My sense of relief was short lived.
Moments after the diesel growl of the bus signaled its departure, a shadow filled the space in the lattice and five fingers cuffed each of my ankles. I was jerked out, face down, and then flipped over so I could see the anger.
I was afraid.
But….
I wasn’t impressed.
I had seen it before and it was getting a little old.
I closed my eyes and watched the bright lights. They flickered every time fist found flesh and the light show somehow made me numb to the pain.
It wasn’t easy to know when it was over, but there was this moment when I noticed the silence. I stood up and ran up the steps, past the door and straight up to my room.
I couldn’t lock the doors to my room, so I tried to disappear in the space between the left side of my dresser and the wall.
I wasn’t afraid, but I shivered as the stairs warned me that he was coming.
His presence pushed on the paper thin walls of my room.
I waited for the bust in.
I waited.
I could hear him breathing.
Then I heard the stairs creak with his retreat.
I didn’t believe it and stayed right where I was for at least twenty minutes. I couldn’t believe that was all I was going to get.
But it was.
I even thought I deserved more.
It would be another six months until my father beat me again and that time was for the last time.
Not like I didn't deserve it.
I got suspended from school for fighting. I was always the new kid and I was always fighting. He slapped me upside the head and managed to pop my ear drum. I crashed down the stairs and grabbed my head, failing to hold back the tears I knew would just piss him off more. Something inside of him clicked at that moment. He stared down at me, paused in a contorted torture I will never forget and he promised to never hit me again.
The way he was looking at me and the way he said it, I knew he meant it.
He never has