My stepdad would throw knives at me. It was a like a reflexes thing, catching a fly with chopsticks. Character building, a boy’s first funeral. I learned to write my name with bandaged fingers. That’s how I became a lefty. Rick threw knives like a pitcher throwing long toss. It’s how I got these gnarly callouses on my palms that look like I was trying to catch knives with my bare hands. Because I was. One day I did.
And even if the kids at school believed every evening I was dodging knives, they’d never believe I’d actually caught one. But that’s the truth.
By the time I was nine Knife Lessons were a regular thing after school. I’d come in from the bus. He’d call from the shadows of the kitchen. Get walking. Silently, and without a snack, I’d phantom the length of the kitchen to the back screen door, open it, and step into the back yard where rusty knives dotted the yard like sandpipers.
Position!
I’d take my place against the pinewood fence with my arms and legs splayed out like they make you do when you go through the metal detector at the airport at 18 years old, leaving home for good.
Rick’d done time after he’d gotten out of the army. That’s when he learned to paint oils, in a “creativity for convicts” program for those with good behavior.
He painted pictures of body parts. Anatomically, unsexual, like you’d find in a textbook. It’s how he made peace with what parts of himself had become worn out and injured.
He used our knife lessons as a way to teach me stuff.
Humerus! And he’d whip one overhand at my right bicep.
Tibia! Femur! Clavicle! I broke them all in Desert Storm!
Rick’d struggled to readjust to civilian life until he met my mother. He always told the story of how they met at a funeral. For a mutual friend, not my dad. How seeing my mother had awoken something in him. Like my insides had turned to daisies.
Alright you little shit, catch this one.
It made a sound like WOOOOOOOOSH as it passed my ear.
What was that one called?
Cranium!
The only one who believed me was Lenny but he wouldn’t admit it in front of other people. We weren’t exactly cool. Me with my bandaged hands, Lenny with his obsession for camouflage.
He wore forest green every day and accented it with various browns and grays. He had a future in fashion if he could withstand people constantly making fun of him.
Can you see me? He said as he sunk into the mix of maples behind the school.
Obviously. I said as we walked home.
Tell me again how much you hate him. Lenny sort of waddled behind me. He was obsessed with my family because his was so smothering and perfect.
I hate him like he’s my real father. I hate him like there are parts of him in myself that I am fighting against every day.
That’s some heavy shit man. He’s not even your real dad.
I remembered very little of my real dad but for stories I made up from a roll of film negatives I kept in a shoebox. Me on his shoulder in front of a dry docked boat. Him standing proudly in front of our house. How he wished for us to sail all the oceans together. How I’d come to miss our house from a life at sea instead of hate it like I do now.
More knives. More and more. And when I became a teenager Rick taught me about emotions.
Regret!
Woosh.
Depression!
Sadness!
Abandon!
I felt none of them as my insides calcified.
We often blame the criminal while neglecting the environment that created them.
By senior year I was tan enough from spending my days away from home, mostly in the park or behind the water treatment plant. One day I waited in the back of the kitchen for hours donning a brown sweater the perfect shade of the cabinets, black jeans to match the shadows.
Rick came in whistling cheerily over the sound of the front door slamming, pulled a beer from the fridge and ran his finger over the empty knife block, lingered on it. He still hadn’t seen me but addressed me all the same.
What are you going to do, son? Throw a knife at me?
The word son, when had I last heard that? It came on strong, a memory of riding a red tricycle, pushed by a man’s hand. Was this joy? Was this bonding? But who? And then Rick spoke in the memory. I began to cry and these tears pulled me back into the kitchen now.
I felt like nothing. I felt like the emptiest zero. Never a father to fill me, or was it that I never let him. We’re these knives his way of love? I couldn’t know.
Outside we faced each other like two outlaws. Any sound seemed to sink into the sandy soil. Birds drifted silently across the sky like big ships. The cat clock in the kitchen ticked off each passing moment. Neither of us blinked.
Then I looked at my hand and for some reason I was holding this knife. Black handle clamped in the grips of my palm and curled fingers. I couldn’t believe it. And before I could think any more about it, the knife was already gone.
When it connected with Rick’s breast plate it made a sound like Oomph. I walked over slowly, my toes aware of every blade of grass. The world was eerily silent, the sky a most shocked blue.
Sternum. He whispered. And he did the strangest most unexpected thing. He smiled.
In my stepdad’s eyes were memories we’d never shared. Still-lifes of eating mint chip ice cream cones while leaning against a split rail fence in August heat. My first bike ride without training wheels. College graduation—I’m taller and have my arm wrapped around his shoulder as we stare into the void, smiling. He’s expressing emotions on his face I’ve never seen before like happiness and pride and love. Next––he’s holding his baby granddaughter he’ll never actually hold.
I went to pull the knife out of him, and he grabbed my arm. I understood that somehow the knife was holding everything together while tearing everything apart. He opened his mouth to say something but couldn’t get it out.
What? What was it?
***
Lenny drove me to the airport in his parent’s Buick.
Tell me again how it happened?
But I couldn’t. I didn’t say anything the whole drive, just watched the other cars in traffic trying to make eye contact with each driver, desperate for someone to tell me I’m a good boy.
Did the camo work?
What? No. I mean yes.
I stood in the full body scanner at a large American airport, legs and arms spread out.
A voice said We have to pat you down. And then the sensation of hands, so many hands devouring every inch of me. And then someone asked, where did you get all these scars?