Chapter Text
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There's still time to change the road you're on
Stairway to Heaven, Led Zeppelin
★❀✟♡
Dallas Winston is born November 9, 1947 in the bathtub of a highway motel somewhere in the middle of Arkansas. His mother, sixteen years old and tow-headed, screams louder than she ever has in her life before. The only reason he comes out relatively healthy is because his mother had become obsessed with a televangelist preacher in one of her manic episodes. The obsession had lasted the term of Dallas’s gestation, and she’d sworn off the pills Dallas’s father fed to her like candy because she believed she could quite possibly be carrying the next son of God. She’d had the radio on while she gave birth, tuned to the preacher’s voice so that she could listen to his exclamations of faith describing the crucifixion of Jesus echo off the porcelain tiles as she pushed Dallas’s bloody body out from between her legs.
His father had been in the motel room, and he’d banged on the door as Dallas’s mother wailed louder and louder, trying to get her to shut up. He was always trying to get her to shut up.
Contrary to the belief most people have when they meet him, Dallas is not named for the city in Texas. His mother’s other obsession through the term of her pregnancy had been the brutal murder of Elizabeth Short. She had followed the story obsessively through the papers and on the radio. If she wasn’t giving birth to the son of God, then she was convinced she would give birth to the reincarnation of the Black Dahlia. When Dallas had emerged male, Dahlia had become Dallas.
All this matters little to Dallas later on, though sometimes he wonders if his mother’s obsession with death while she’d been pregnant with him had been some kind of forewarning.
★❀✟♡
Dallas’s childhood is spent moving from state to state, across the middle of America. His father is a ranch hand, and Dallas and his mother follow wherever the work flows.
Dallas’s earliest memories are of a farm in New Mexico, when he’s about four years old. Dallas’s mother brings him to the barn to look at the horses. She speaks to them very softly, pets their noses, and then holds Dallas up so that he can pet their noses too. He likes how soft it feels under his hands, and the way the horse’s ears flicker. He likes the soft noises they make too.
The quiet moment is broken by his father. He’s calling for Dallas’s mother from outside the barn. Dallas feels cold, and his mother lowers him to the ground. Dallas is very afraid of his father, though he’s too young to really understand why. All he knows is that whenever his father is around, Dallas usually gets hurt.
Outside the barn, Dallas’s father grabs his mother by her hair and shakes her. He calls her a stupid bitch. Dallas doesn’t know what the word means, only that his mother always looks down at her feet when his father says it. Except this time his mother looks at his father and says don’t call me that, please, not in front of Dallas. And then his father hits his mother across the face and tells her to shut up. Dallas stares up at him, and his father says she’s a stupid bitch, isn’t she son? and Dallas thinks his father will hit him next, so he says yeah, she is.
Then his mother looks down at her feet and shuts up.
★❀✟♡
When Dallas is six, they stay for a while at a farm in Nebraska. His father has found work at a big farm, making real good money, and they get a small room to stay in as a family. The family who own the farm home-school their children, and they even offer to allow Dallas to sit in on their lessons.
The family has eight children. The two oldest are both boys who work on the farm. The next is a fourteen year old girl, and because she’s the oldest still attending the home-schooling lessons, she becomes the de facto leader. She has fiery red hair, and her name is Mary.
The schooling is Christian-based. Dallas doesn’t know much about God except that his son was nailed to a cross alive. Dallas’s mother liked to tell him that story before he went to sleep, though Dallas tried to get her to stop because it made him have bad dreams.
Dallas likes school. Mary sits down next to him with a paper and pencil, and she teaches him how to hold a pencil, and how to write his name, and how to read too. They have a lot of books at the farm, and Dallas likes to spend time flipping through the picture books. He likes imagining all the places that are different from where he’s been, and all the people that are different too.
But the best part of the farm are the horses. Dallas gets to learn how to ride. And more than reading, more than anything, Dallas loves riding horses.
Mary’s father calls him a natural. The horses like you, boy, he says. They got a good sense of who they can trust.
Dallas learns how to tack and untack a horse, how to groom them, how to click his tongue to call them over. He likes to stand on the wooden beam of the fence and watch the horses graze, and sometimes the horses will wander over and he feeds them slices of apple.
Sometimes his mother joins him. She’s equally as good with the horses. She rides the horses like she was born on horse-back, like it’s a natural extension of her body.
His mother is very attached to one horse in particular, a mare named Daisy. Daisy is such a pale grey, her coat is nearly white. She’s one of the calmest horses on the farm, despite being heavily pregnant. Dallas’s mother grooms her with so much care that Daisy’s coat is perpetually shiny.
Mary’s father invites Dallas to come to the barn when Daisy is set to give birth. He even tells Dallas he can pick out the name for the foal. Maybe something similar to your name? Austin? Houston? Dallas doesn’t tell him that he is named for a flower and for a dead woman his mother never knew.
The night Daisy gives birth starts out normally enough. Mary’s father seems relaxed. Dallas watches Daisy moving around, trying to get comfortable. The closer it gets to the moment of birth, the more agitated Daisy gets. Mary’s father sits up, and then he goes to check on the mare. And suddenly, his shoulders tense and he whips around, barking out for one of the farmhands to call the veterinarian to come as quickly as he can.
It happens too quickly. The foal is in the wrong position, and the birthing of her baby seems to take everything Daisy has to offer. By the time the veterinarian arrives, Daisy is dead and the foal is shivering beside the body of his mother, still wet from the womb.
Dallas stares down at Daisy, at the horse his mother had loved so much, and at the young colt she’d given birth to, who seemed to have taken her life for his own. He decides he hates the new colt, and turns his back on it, leaving the barn to head back to bed.
He doesn’t name the colt, and he later learns that despite their very best efforts to save the newborn, the foal eventually succumbs as well.
★❀✟♡
Sometimes instead of school, the kids will go out on horse-back along the trails that lead out to the forest beyond the farm. Mary leads them on her chestnut mare, her five younger siblings and Dallas following like a herd of ducklings. They pack a picnic lunch, and eat along the river bank. They wade in the water after, and Mary teaches Dallas how to float, how to hold his breath under water, how to kick his feet and paddle with his hands in the cool river stream. She’s really nice, far nicer than anyone Dallas knows, even his own mother. Mary has a deep maternal side to her, even at fourteen, probably because she has to look after five younger siblings. It doesn’t seem to bother her all that much, though. She doesn’t ever seem resentful for having to look after Dallas too. Still, Dallas makes sure he’s extra polite, says his pleases and thank yous, listens to Mary so she doesn’t have to repeat herself.
Where are you from? she asks one day.
Dallas doesn’t know. He’s never known a home besides the interior of his father’s car traveling along dusty highways. All over, he says. I’ve been to a lot of places.
A traveler, Mary calls him. Two days later, she gives him a long silver chain, a pendant swinging at the bottom. St. Christopher, she tells him, the patron saint of travelers. It’ll keep you safe wherever you go next.
Dallas marvels at the chain. It’s long, hanging down almost to his belly button, and he keeps it tucked under his shirt. It’s one of the only things Dallas owns that is only his. His personal belongings consist of a ratty knapsack in which Dallas keeps one extra shirt, a broken Roy Rogers action figure, the remaining stump of a pencil, a box of matches, twenty-seven cents, and a penknife he’d stolen from his father.
The best thing about being around the horses is that Dallas doesn’t have to be around his mother. She’s doing that thing again where she doesn’t leave her bed, and spends all day staring at the wall. Dallas hates it, because he has to bring her food and water, and sometimes she’ll eat and drink but sometimes she doesn’t reply no matter how many times he calls out her name. It scares him, and it scares him worse than anything his father does to him.
So he avoids her as much as he can, spending time with the horses, and with the other children on the farm. He goes with Mary and the other kids to church on Sundays, and he stares at the image of Jesus on the cross. He tries to imagine what it would be like to have nails pounded through his hands and feet. One time his father hit him so hard that his eye swelled up and he couldn’t see out of it. He wonders if it would hurt like that.
Mary continues to teach him how to read, and Dallas gets really good at it. He sneaks one of the books out of the school room and crawls into his mother’s bed, leaning up against the wall and reads out loud to her so that she can see how well he’s doing. And then his mother shifts, moving a little, and her gaze slowly drifts from the wall down to Dallas. He stumbles over his words, because his mother is finally looking at him, can finally see him.
One night Dallas is woken abruptly by his father yanking him out from under the blankets. Dallas sleeps curled up on the couch, and he falls to the floor as his father drags him through the small room and out the door. Dallas is scared, and he tries to pull back, but his father is holding on too tight.
Outside, his mother is already in the passenger seat of the car, and the car is on. Dallas tries to ask what’s going on, where they’re going. He likes this place, he likes the horses and Mary.
There’s a commotion somewhere behind them, shouting and running. Dallas thinks he hears the sound of a shotgun being loaded.
He tries pulling back again, and then his father turns on him and backhands him across the face. His father’s face is tight, his breathing heavy. That stops Dallas, and then his father pushes him towards the car. His father scrambles into the driver’s seat, and as Dallas turns to look back at the farm, he hears the screaming in the distance.
What did you do to my daughter, you son of a bitch?!
★❀✟♡
Dallas’s father starts to teach him how to shoot a gun when he’s seven years old. He takes Dallas out on a drive away from the farm in Tennessee, and to an open field where he sets up a line of bottles.
If there’s one thing you should respect in this world, it’s your rifle, Dallas’s father says on the drive down. It keeps you alive. The guys on the other end of your rifle don’t respect us none. They’ve never respected us. Never respected our way of life. His father slams his hand down on the steering wheel. I’m tired of being goddamn disrespected by your whore mother. She talks back to me, and she ain’t a good mother to you neither. She don’t respect us. He takes a deep breath. This is how you get respect.
Dallas’s father takes out his hunting rifle, and shows Dallas how to dismantle it and put it back together, how to load it, how to check the safety. And then he brings the rifle up and shows Dallas how to shoot. Dallas’s father takes out three bottles in a row, deadly accurate.
He gets Dallas to try too. His father crouches down beside him, lifting Dallas’s elbow, adjusting his stance. There are Japs hiding over there, he murmurs. Like the image of Jesus on the cross for his mother, the Japs were his father’s own horror. His father’s obsession, the boogeymen who lived in the dark shadows.
Dallas isn’t very good, and the kickback of the gun startles him. He thinks his father will hit him for wasting a bullet, but this seems to be the only thing in the world that doesn’t make his father angry with him. Instead, his father’s hand falls to the back of Dallas’s neck, heavy, and he calls Dallas son. His hand feels like a brand, like a noose slowly tightening, slowly strangling. Dallas has to fight not to shrug it off.
He manages to hit one of the bottles, and his father tells him how proud he is. The praise sinks into Dallas, despite how much he tries to resist it. He smiles up at his father. He lifts the gun again.
★❀✟♡
Dallas is eight when they end up at a farm in Kentucky. It reminds him a little of the one in Nebraska. He’s allowed to ride the horses here too, but instead of home-schooling, he’s bused into the town to go to school.
He liked school when he was six, but now at eight Dallas is more ambivalent. He likes that school gets him away from his parents for a few hours every day. He likes learning too. In fact, school is very easy for Dallas. It kind of bores him, most of the time, and Dallas hates being bored. On the farm, boredom never lingered long. There’s always something to do. But at school, his boredom becomes his teacher’s problem.
Dallas reads ahead in his work, and his teacher snaps at him for not keeping pace with the rest of the class. Dallas spends class time staring out the window, and the teacher snaps a ruler down on Dallas’s fingers. Dallas finishes his work faster than any other student, is accused of cheating off another student, and he’s made to stand at the front of the class and endure the paddle.
This, more than anything, is something Dallas cannot stand. The paddle.
Kentucky is the first place Dallas attends real school. Dallas is very familiar with punishment; his father is a firm believer in using his fist to pound lessons into Dallas’s head. But the punishment at school is different. It’s public. His classmates watch, whispering and snickering to each other. Dallas isn’t the only student punished, but it happens to him more frequently than others. At first it’s humiliating. And then a very different feeling starts to form deep in Dallas.
The punishments don’t dissuade Dallas from wrong-doing. If anything, Dallas finds himself seeking out ways to force his teacher’s hand. He puts his feet up on the desk, he pushes other kids out of the line. The other kids in class don’t like Dallas anyway, they never have. He was the weird new kid. At first they would throw his lunch in the trash and steal his gym clothes. Once Dallas starts getting in more trouble, they leave him alone, like they’re scared of him or something. When Dallas walks into class, they all scurry out of his way.
The feeling that wells up in Dallas feels deeper and hotter than anything he’s felt before. It burns through him, nearly unbearable, like it needs to be expelled from his body. It’s a feeling he sometimes gets when his father smacks him across the face because Dallas didn’t move out of his way quick enough. When that happens, a hot feeling consumes Dallas, like the rest of the world disappears and Dallas wishes he was bigger and stronger than his father.
Sometimes Dallas even feels it towards his mother, though he tries not to because he doesn’t think that’s right. But it consumes him anyway, when she forgets that she’s supposed to be cooking something on the stove and it burns in the pan, or when she’s doing laundry and ruins Dallas’s only shirt without any holes in it, or when she looks at Dallas like he doesn’t really exist, like he’s see-through, like she can’t tell the difference between the son she gave birth to and any other child.
But he feels it the most towards his teacher. Dallas wants to take the paddle out of his teacher’s hand and smash it against his face. He wants to keep hitting and hitting his teacher until his teacher learns to never hit Dallas again. And Dallas thinks that’s fair, because hitting is the only way people can learn. It’s the only way to get people to listen to you, to respect you.
He understands his father’s many lessons about respect at the school in Kentucky.
★❀✟♡
The only saving grace at the farm in Kentucky are the horses. Dallas spends as much time as he can with them, setting himself up deep in the barn to do his homework. The family who live on this farm isn’t like the one in Nebraska. Dallas is just another farmhand here, and they don’t talk to him. He doesn’t care though, prefers to be left alone. All he needs are his books and the horses.
His mother sometimes comes into the barn to look at the horses too. She stands next to Dallas and pets over the horse’s flank, murmuring soft praise to the animal. Dallas watches her and tries to remember the last time his mother pet his hair softly like that. Dallas will always ask her if she wants to go for a ride, and usually she says no. But one day she agrees, and they go out riding together. His mother’s smile grows on her face the farther they get from the farm, and Dallas keeps sneaking glances because he almost can’t recognize his mother with the expression on her face.
And then suddenly his mother kicks and the horse takes off, galloping away.
Hey! Dallas calls out, because he can’t go that fast on his horse. He kicks and kicks, tries to catch up, but he can’t. Momma! No matter how much he calls out, she doesn’t stop, doesn’t turn to look at him. All he sees is her curly hair streaming in the wind and the dust kicked up by the hooves.
★❀✟♡
One day at school, a kid in the grade above Dallas trips him in the schoolyard.
It’s not something out of the ordinary. Dallas has been targeted like this before. But this time, that feeling comes. That hot, dark feeling that burns under his skin, driving with a need to get out, to explode.
Dallas scrambles to his feet.
The next five minutes are a blur. Dallas hits the boy, and won’t stop hitting. He feels bone crunching under his fists, blood bursting hot against his face, hears the wailing voice begging him to stop. It takes two teachers to pull him off the kid.
They call Dallas’s father down to the school, and Dallas spends the fifty minute wait alone on a bench outside the office, staring down at his bruised knuckles. There’s blood under his fingernails.
Dallas thinks he’s supposed to be repentant. That’s what the school principal had said, when he’d marched Dallas to this seat with a firm hand on his shoulder. Sit here and think about the consequences of your actions. The consequences of his actions. His father’s fist. The kids in class staring at him with fear streaked across their faces, never to trip him again. It kind of felt as if his father’s fist had moved through Dallas, like a force acting upon him, expelled from him through his own hands.
In the end, Dallas is suspended for the rest of the week and his father leaves him with a black eye, a busted lip, and ribs that feel a touch too sensitive when they get home. His mother, in a rare show of maternal care, cleans the blood from Dallas’s face and brings him ice for his ribs. He thinks he can recall his mother being much more caring when he was younger, but the older Dallas gets, the more his mother seems to retreat from him, as if she could only handle him as a baby and now that he’s growing older she doesn’t know what to do with him. His mother wasn’t a maternal person, not like how Mary was. His mother always cared for him as if she were mimicking something she’d seen someone else do, like she’s an actor in a play and not his real mother at all.
His mother cups his face as she cleans his split lip, and Dallas feels himself go very still like the deer in the forest when they’re listening for danger. Or maybe like the wolf that’s stalking it, silent in the bushes. Either way, Dallas has not had his mother’s gentle touch on him in a long time, and he thinks that if he moves too quickly she might flinch from him the same way she flinches from his father.
★❀✟♡
Dallas’s family isn’t the only family that lives on the farm. There are many more, all scattered around in campers and shacks in a lot on the property. Dallas’s father plays poker with a group of men in the evenings, and sometimes Dallas is invited.
His father is resistant at first, but then he must realize that none of the other men care that Dallas shows up with bruises on his face, not when their own children bear the same marks. They seem to like Dallas well enough, because Dallas is the best with the horses. He knows how to calm them.
They teach Dallas how to play poker, and how to bluff. How to lie. They give him a shot glass of whisky and roar with laughter when Dallas splutters trying to get it down. That’ll put some hair on your chest! they guffaw. They complain about their wives, and they talk about the women they’ve been with, the women they still go to see at a place in town. They don’t censor anything around Dallas, and Dallas pretends it doesn’t make his stomach tie up in knots to hear it, doesn’t make him think of how when those painful noises his mother makes starts up behind the closed bedroom door, he has to climb out his window so that he doesn’t have to hear them.
The men talk about where they’ve lived, where they’ve worked. Dallas’s father is intrigued by one ranch hand who used to live in New York. That’s the place to go to make money, he says. Dallas’s father has a look on his face that Dallas recognizes. They’ll be gone from this place soon.
Dallas goes to the library at school the next day, pulling books off the shelves about New York City. It seems almost like a fantastical place, far bigger than anywhere Dallas has ever been before. It doesn’t have farms. It won’t have horses.
So he retreats back into the barn, spending as much time as he can with the horses. He rides every day, farther and faster. Riding horses feels more natural to him than anything else in the world. They calm down when they’re with him, they trust him. Dallas talks to them when he goes out for rides, lets his words get carried off into the wind. The horses won’t betray him.
He spends so much time in the barn he practically lives in it, does his homework, eats his dinner, sometimes falls asleep in the hay piles. One night, Dallas wakes up to the darkness of midnight and the faint glow of a lamp. His eyes adjust to the dim light, and then he hears a noise he only faintly recognizes. It’s similar to the muffled noises he sometimes hears behind his parents bedroom door before he can make his escape, except this time the noises are sharper and they echo through the barn.
Dallas moves slowly, peering around the side of the stall door.
In the dim lighting, he can see his father’s back. His father’s pants are undone, loose, and he appears to be using his hips to ram someone against the wooden wall over and over again. Upon closer look, Dallas recognizes the girl as the daughter of one of the men who plays poker. She’s in high school, Dallas knows, maybe sixteen or seventeen. She has tears streaming down her cheeks that shimmer in the lamplight, and Dallas’s father has a hand tightly clasped over her mouth.
Dallas’s father is grunting, and Dallas feels his stomach turn over on itself, like he thinks he might be sick even though he doesn’t know if he really understands what’s happening. The girl looks hurt, and Dallas knows his father likes to hurt. Dallas has just never seen him hurt anyone besides Dallas or his mother.
He pulls back from the sight, and as silently as he can, he creeps out from the barn. He knows he’s too young, too weak to stop his father, but he knows he could find someone to help. Except when he leaves the barn he walks straight into his mother.
He’s surprised to see her, at first, and then opens his mouth to tell her what he saw. His mother lifts a finger to her lips. Shhhh.
This confuses Dallas. “In the barn,” he tries to tell her. He points. “She needs help. Daddy’s doing something to her.” His mother grips him by the arm and drags him away. “Momma?”
She brings him all the way back to their room. And then she turns on him. “Be grateful he chose someone else tonight. It’s not you or me on the end of his anger.”
Dallas stares up at her, brows furrowed. “But we can help.”
“So?” his mother says. And then she teaches him the lesson that remains with Dallas for the rest of his life. “You can only watch out for yourself. You hear me, Dallas? Only watch out for yourself. No one else is ever going to help you. So watch out for yourself. If you do that, you don’t get hurt.”
Watch out for yourself. Dallas repeats it like a mantra. It explains everything. It explains his mother, it explains his father.
Watch out for yourself. You don’t get hurt.