Hart Vetter: SLAPPED • Cleaver Magazine

Hart Vetter
SLAPPED

“Just let it rise,” said Aaron. He’d had it.

My son and I had schlepped over two dozen filled buckets out the basement up the steps to the front door and dumped them down the driveway, mercifully slanted downhill toward the lone, pathetically outmaneuvered gully on my side of the street. The roadway had become a river again, as it was prone to during torrential events. But nothing too bad, if you didn’t need to drive it. It never rose to near my doorstep. “And then what?” I asked.

“Wait it out,” he said, “and get a bigger sump pump before next time.” We were both exhausted. Without him here, I’d have probably downed an Ambien by now, 10 mg, and called it a night. Après moi, le déluge.

The Nor’easter zapped Aaron’s power right away so he came over to his old man’s to stay warm. Here, the lights just flickered a few times, enough to have me reset the digital clocks for the various stationary devices. But that became tedious, so I let it be. Just like, now, let the water rise. Some steps were going to be futile, that was all there was to it, when being in control was a lost cause against a muffled soundtrack of fierce winds.

We got the flashlights out, candles in place, in case the power caved. Blankets, beanies, gloves, nothing cozy but no foreseeable hardship. The freezer food would stay solid for two, three days. Enough Cheerios to last us a week.

“What if it reaches the first floor?” I said.

“Naw,” he brushed off, “I bet it won’t. We’re lucky this didn’t come down as snow.”

Staring at the tireless, sloshing, blackish groundwater seeping in with a distinct earthy algae smell, luck wasn’t what I felt. Shutting the basement door made things easier to ignore, were it not for the still-audible lapping, squishing evidence of a persistent, creepy home invasion.

“If we have to, we can always prop up your sofa and the TV,” he said, half-heartedly.

“Yeah,” I nodded, without a clue how.

At three twelve, I was rattled by an earsplitting thud. Fuck! What the fuck! The phone was still charging, the power still on. I grabbed it, hopped up on fright and adrenaline, heart pounding by the door, heard Aaron. “A tree!” he shouted. “I bet that fucking oak I asked you to have chopped!”

He tore open the door to the guest bath. Lights. The ceiling, we saw, ripped to pieces by a massive, callous branch of coniferous origin, but I didn’t need to be right. I shone the phone up through a wide crack into the attic. The spruce had torn a gaping black hole in the roof, rain was whipping diagonally. “There’s blue tarp in the garage, maybe we can…” I heard it myself, I sounded whiny.

“Dad, no,” Aaron said. “Nothing we can do tonight.”

Water onslaught from up, down and sideways. The barreling wind sounded more ominous, inspiring doubt if the windows would hold. I felt like hugging my son, which wasn’t our thing, but he allowed it for seconds. I had to work actively to steer my breathing.

“It’s okay,” he said, one big hand nestling on top of my head as if to calm a spooked toddler or soothe a brooding German Shepherd. “All’s okay, Dad.”

We both knew it wasn’t. It wasn’t to be like this, son in his upper twenties, toughened and protective of his father, well past sixty.

A minute later I popped an Ambien.

The outrageous white-yellow morning sun hit me like a stinging slap on a wet cheek, as I stood outside to take in the offensively glistening, debris-strewn lake-scape. What an audacity of brilliance on the heels of a hellish night. I should have worn sunglasses. It was utterly blinding, infuriating. For no reason I felt reminded of elementary school. Teachers were allowed to slap unruly kids where I grew up. Our humorless math teacher was Dr. Hairbrain because of three strands of hair that he had curated right above his crinkled forehead on his otherwise barren skull. After some inane infraction that for the life of me I can’t remember, he randomly picked me out of a handful of loudmouths for his corporal sadism. He’d call you to the front of the class, would calmly ask you which side you preferred. I picked the left. He’d begin by twisting your left earlobe with two fingers until you were ready to scream and then smack your cheek, quick, strategic, stunning, even though you knew it was coming. The cheek would glow in a deep red through the period.

I was upset, embarrassed, and for the rest of the grade did my best impression of a model pupil. A humiliating injustice to remember for a lifetime. Why was I thinking of this now? I was randomly, unjustly picked for punishment, was that it? My earlobe got twisted just enough to make me squirm, while it could have been some other poor slob’s for whom I’d feel sincerely sorry before moving on my way.

Aaron appeared in the front door. “Here you are,” he said, phone in hand, throwing me a puzzled look.

“What are we gonna do?” I whined, stumbling a little, unsure on my feet.

He gently pulled me near by my arm, to stabilize. “I left a message for the insurance,” he said. “We better take pictures. Your main floor carpet, it’s a goner.”

“It’s gonna get worse,” I stammered. “We need to always remember… this.”

He shrugged. “Well, yeah, for sure.” Then, with a sly grin, “Things worth remembering don’t have to hit you over the head, though.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant.

“The good news is, we rode through it,” he continued. “A bit messed up, but nothing we can’t handle.”

“And that’s the end of the good news,” I said solemnly, for it was how I felt.

His hand cupped mine. He looked in my squinting eyes. With a calming tenderness, he said, “Hey, Dad, so far so good.”

Like we’d taught him resilience along the way. Like we’d deal with things somehow. I was a mess, but so far so good.

Hart Vetter is a picture taker, green thinker, and avid dog walker in Nyack, NY. Recent work appeared in Across The Margin, Halfway Down The Stairs, Discretionary Love, BULL Men’s Fiction, Workers Write Journal, Literary Heist, and elsewhere.