Cigarette Burns
“Danielle, I can’t do it anymore. He has gone too far. He is pretending to be someone he isn’t. I went through his car this morning. I found the obvious stash of cocaine, but this time he went too far. In a little baggie there was heroine and meth. I need to know what else he is lying about.” Vinny was panicking, biting his nails to a nub; sweat was dripping from his temple. He was losing the phone from his hands due to the amount of moisture being released from his palms.
“Vinny how did you know it was heroin and meth. You cannot simply tell what type of drugs they are by looking at them. I think you are over reacting and trying to find a reason to hate him.” Danielle, the more logic of the couple, was trying to reason with her boyfriend. She talked to Vinny while she was getting her pedicure.
“I ain’t stupid Danielle. I know what drugs look like. That and they were labeled.”
“Maybe you should talk to you mom about this Vin. She seems to always know the right things to say, along with some answers. You only get mad at me.” Vinny agreed. They exchanged their “I love you’s” and ended their conversation. And with another swipe of his phone, Vinny was on the phone with his mother.
“Hi mom, I need to know something. I need to know the truth, I can handle it now and I am ready to hear it from you.”
“What is it Vin?” his mothers tone grew worried and froggish.
“Dad. Tell me the truth about him, and why you guys got divorced. None of that bullshit about you guys losing interest in each other. I want to know the truth.”
“Alright Vinny. Well it started about five years before Haylie was born, when the economy began to get bad and our business began to plummet, so about ten years ago your dad began to drink, excessively. He was a great guy Vinny, but when he drank he was different man. He was angry and mean. He was full of hate. And he had no one to take that hate out on, but he found someone to take it out on. Me. He would beat on me so bad, I look back and I don’t know how I survived and I don’t know how he didn’t kill me.” Vinny said nothing but his breathing grew heavy; you could hear sniffles every so often and hear him trying to choke back the tears. His mother continued,
“He would burn me with cigarettes until they were completely put out and the smell of flesh went throughout the house. One day, I was walking in the house and one of our male neighbors stopped me to ask me a simple question. When we were finished talking I walked into the house, and when I did I found your father in the bathroom with a red sharpie marker. He was writing all over the walls, terrible things about me. Things you do not need to know or here. He saw me talking to the guy, and short circuited. The beating I got when he turned around and saw me watching him write on the walls was the worst and last one. I woke up in the hospital and that was the end of it. I tried to stay with him for the sake of our family; I even though getting pregnant with Hailey would make him come back to reality. But it didn’t. Once he finally moved out, he began doing drugs. And when he was on drugs, he was the nicest man I’ve ever met. That is the truth Vin, and the entire story.”
“Why didn’t I ever know any of this, or remember?”
“You’d be surprised how much you can shield from a ten year old.”
Vinny hung up the phone in awe. His image of his father had been ruined. He gathered himself together enough to go pay his father a visit and confront him about the drugs and his past with his mother.
He walked in the cold homeless house. There was no love, no joy, and no laughter in the peeling wall paper. He heard a little girl screaming and crying. Vinny started running, following the noise, and when he finally found the source he stopped dead in his tracks. The color flushed from his face, his once mended jaw dropped and his eyes began to flutter with wet anger.
“Go Haylie, go down stairs.” Vinny stuttered. Haylie sobbing, choking on her spit, her face red and wet from tears she stumbled down the stairs screaming.
Vinny stood in the doorway of the room. The wall paper was peeling off like an orange. There were plates with leftover food that were infested with mold. There was dog feces’s covering portion of the stained brown carpet. The ceiling of room was missing pieces and caving in from the amount of black mold that enveloped it. The window was closes and the off white browning blinds were falling apart full of dust and neglect. There wasn’t much to the room. Only a mattress of a bed was lying in the middle of the room, a small reclining chair in the corner overlooking the entire room, a long in length dresser next to the bed next to the opposite wall, and a small, longer in width dresser stood in front of the bed with a small older television with no cable box. The TV was on, but was only playing static. It was nearly unbearable to stand in the house let alone the room that started all of the problems.
“What the f*** is wrong with you? Your five year old daughter is home. You can’t keep the needle out of your arm for one f*ing day. You’re a piece of s***, you don’t mean nothing.” Vinny started to walk closer to the unconscious man on the floor. Knocking the empty beer bottles off the tall dresser on the body. The body, stiff on the ground with the color of death. The man’s mouth was open with convolution stains. Dried vomit lay beside the man’s body. The corpse was cold and anemic; it was lying next to the unmade bed in the unclean, filthy room. The odor of the body was nauseating, rotting flesh was over powering. Though, it seemed the man had been lying there for days, it had only been on the floor for a few minutes. Vinny had called and spoke to his dad a short time before he arrived at the house.
He kicked the man’s rib, violently looking for a response. Nothing. He lifted the man’s arm up, the rubber barn still tied tight and the needle falling out of the vein, and tired to feel a pulse.
“You dumb f***, you finally did it.” Vinny almost chuckled as he picked up his phone to call the police for the overdosed scumbag on the flood. Vinny stopped; he put his phone back in his pocket and moved toward the door. He shut the hole infested door, locking it. He sat there in the corner of the dark room on a reclining chair with his legs crossed and both hands perfectly in sink, touching his lips. The only noise was produced from a rusty mobile fan and the sounds of Vinny’s pounding heart. The silence was broken.
“What am I going to do with you? Do you really deserve to be alive? You’ll probably just overdose again if I get you help.” Vinny began to bite his finger nails down to small bloody stubs. He got up, unlocked the door and left the room. He went down stairs to confide the little girl.
“What’s wrong with him Vinny?” Her hair wet and tangled like a rats nest from her tears. Vinny didn’t have the heart to tell her what happen to her hero. His facial expression fell sad, his eye brows lowered and his lips quivered.
“He is sick Haylie.”
“You couldn’t help him? What about the hospital people? They fixed me when I was sick.”
“Hay, he is a different kind of sick. No one can help him, except himself. He got himself sick.” Haylie was in a frenzy, her red eyes filled with a new stream of salt water.
“He, he,” She started dry heaving, “He won’t get, get, better for even me?” Vinny didn’t know what to say, all the anger he had, was now such pity and sadness for this poor little girl.
“It will be ok Haylie, I promise. You didn’t need him. He was a bad guy.”
“Why didn’t he love me Vinny?” Vinny was heartbroken. He began to get really red; he grabbed Haylie, wrapped his arms around the innocent betrayed little girl and held her tight. He began to quietly cry. He didn’t want to let go of her. So he held her securely with love. She sobbed and hugged him back, tears and boogers all over her face and his sweater.
“Hay?”
“Yes Vin?”
“I’m going to make sure he’ll never hurt you again.” Hailey didn’t want to let go of Vinny, ever. But Vinny had to go back to the monster upstairs and make sure he was still breathing.
“Oh and Haylie, one more thing. I love you, no matter what happens, I love you.” Starting to collect herself as much as a broken hearted five year old could,
“I love you more Vinny.” Vinny left the room and started walking up the stairs. On his travel to the room, he pulled out his phone
“9-1-1, what is your emergency?”
“My father is overdosed on the floor of his room. Please come quick, my eight year old sister is here in the house also.”
“Sir, stay calm and I am sending dispatchers and an ambulance out to your house. Can you please tell me your-.” Vinny hung up the phone. He opened the door to his father’s room. Again, Vinny found a seat on the chair in the corner.
“You idiot. You ruined everything! Why couldn’t you have just left us and never come back!” Vinny began to breakdown crying again
. “How could I hate someone one as much as you. My dad, you should have been my hero and my role model. You don’t deserve to have the title of a father or a role model.” Vinny snapped. He couldn’t take it anymore. He got up and left the room. He stopped in the door way, full of final relief.
“I guess beating my mom for 10 years wasn’t good enough for you, huh? Not enough joy or adrenaline? Beating a helpless women, and the mother of you own kids!” He slammed the door for the last time and walked outside to the stoop, and took a seat. Not much before the police and ambulance flooded in and poured in the house. They took Vinny’s father out in a body bag. Haylie was in the arms of one of the officers, again in complete hysteria; her face was red and wet again. Another officer taking a police report if the incident.
“Cause of death?”
“Homicide. He was shot point blank to the front lobe. I wouldn’t be able to tell you the type of gun until I get him back for an autopsy.” The medic replied to the police officer.
Finding the murder wasn’t hard. The officered turned around to face the front of the house. His eyes narrowed and dropped with a sigh of disbelief and sadness. There was a tall, skinny young man sitting on the steps. He was an attractive kid with a confident body, but a guilty yet relived look on his face. Placed on the step below him was a 9 millimeter, black and silver hand gun with the smell of death fuming from the muzzle. Vinny.