Salamander

Chapter Five: Crazy He Calls Me

 NOTE: Play the song on the right-hand side when the music on the "Steamophone" starts to play.

The house was cooler than the heat of the mid-day sun. It wasn’t a day for hot tea, but I knew that Mrs. Falker was just looking for an excuse to enter my home while I changed into my formal attire. The living room before us was rather dim, and it wasn’t until my eyes adjusted to the change in light before I could finally see everything with more vividness.

            My father was seated at the white, dusty couch next to the window that let in little light through the mesh curtains. Before him was the brown, wooden coffee table, already set with small pastries and cookies ready for Mrs. Falker and her daughters. I was steered towards the ebony piano that was so out of tune that it was almost rendered unplayable. My father stared at my chair with surprise, and I could see his neck ripple with a gulp of saliva. “A wheelchair,” he said. He peered at me as if he was unaware of what had caused my injuries. “Why would you need one of those?”

            I rubbed my sweaty palms against my brown, cotton trousers. “Because,” I said with a surprisingly smooth voice. “I fell down the cobblestone pathway while I was running away.” It was obviously a lie, and he knew it. He knew that it was because of the whipping to my legs that had taken place only three days before.

            “Did you go see Bale?” His mouth was a thin line, and it was nearly impossible to tell what he was thinking when he was maintaining a fairly good poker-face.

            So I decided to tell the truth, not knowing if that was what he wanted to hear. “Yes, I did. He said the injuries on my legs hadn’t healed completely, and with the added fact that I now have injuries on my torso, he thought it would be best to stay in a wheelchair until they healed.”

            “For how long?” he asked as if he was actually concerned for my well-being.

            I bit my lip, seeing in my father the man he could’ve been. A nice, caring man, one who didn’t beat his son. It was a bit comforting, even though I knew that his mind betrayed his actions. If he could pretend to be a good father, was the potential to be one still there? “A couple days.”

            He nodded. “Well, at least you can attend the festival, right?” He tapped his foot against the ground. “I didn’t know that your leg injuries were so extensive before today. The same would’ve gone for your upper body if you hadn’t gone to Bale.” I was now wondering if he was thinking about the possibility that I had been seeing Bale ever since his beatings first started. And if he was, I was just hoping that he wasn’t thinking about the other possibility that Bale had found out about his abuse.

            Mrs. Falker shifted uncomfortably. She hated my father just as much as I did, and the fact that I wasn’t the only one aware about his lies made me feel a little bit stronger. “Well, where’s the tea?” she asked, clearly changing the subject.

            He glanced to the open doorway at the opposite side of the room. “My wife’s making it as we speak.” He continued to stare at me with his light green eyes. He hated me just as much as I hated him – I was sure of it, especially in the way he looked at me. If his actions didn’t show it, his attitude surely did. “Why don’t we listen to some music?” He turned away from me and sat up in his chair, reaching over to the small table next to the sofa. On top of it was the Steamophone, the small music machine my family rarely used. The only Steamorecord we had was already placed in the machine, and all my father had to do was flip the switch on the side of the contraption and place the scrubber on the disc. A group of violins began to ring throughout the room, followed by the soft, familiar voice of Billie Holiday, singing one of my favorite tunes: He Calls Me Crazy.

            I felt my head begin to rock back in forth to the steady beat of the drum and the periodic outburst of the trumpets, clarinets and saxophones. I closed my eyes and allowed the music to wash over me. Other than the recorders, sitars and drums that would always play the same tune every day at the marketplace, I rarely ever heard music with numerous instruments so drastically different somehow meshing together into a whole. It was harmonious, and it was a shame that an artist like Billie Holiday had to be listened to by such tainted minds like my father’s. I wondered if the man she was singing about was someone much like my father, someone who didn’t care about her, someone who thought she was worthless.

            I say I’ll move the mountains, and I’ll move the mountains . . .

            Was one of those mountains the mountain that my house was built on?

            If he wants them out of the way . . .

            Did my father want me out of the way?

            Crazy he calls me, sure I’m crazy . . .

            I thought back to all of those nasty things my father had been yelling at me as I ran away from home that morning. Billie Holiday must have believed what the man she was singing about said about her being crazy. Did I believe my father when he called me an asshole, an idiot, and pretty much every hurtful word he had labeled me by? I paused, my head caught in between a mid-rock. I realized that my self-worth wasn’t all that great. I had become so accustomed to the whips and the beatings that I didn’t really care anymore if I got hurt – I was used to the pain. But the mental pain was much worse. There was a reason why I had wanted Bale to cure that as well, though I knew that that would be something impossible to do.

            The point is that my mind had been hurting ever since I was six years of age, and the question was, did I really care about myself anymore? And then I realized that I didn’t, at least not as much as I should have. I believed what my father said about me, I believed that I was an asshole, an idiot, and to be frank, it never stopped hurting. The physical pain went away, but the mental pain healed as a scar, if one would consider that “healing”.

            And that marked the moment that I knew that I had almost no self-worth, and that if I stayed around my father much longer, that I would diminish my self-worth until there was nothing left. Until there was no life left, with only a dead body to leave behind as my legacy.