{"id":77,"date":"2015-09-01T15:09:25","date_gmt":"2015-09-01T15:09:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adammarton.com\/robertmarton\/?p=77"},"modified":"2015-09-01T19:48:05","modified_gmt":"2015-09-01T19:48:05","slug":"a-metal-plate-in-his-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.robertmarton.com\/?p=77","title":{"rendered":"A Metal Plate in His Head"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Metal Plate in His Head<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Robert J. Marton<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0Gloria didn\u2019t remember her father or mother.\u00a0 They disappeared from her life when she was two years old.\u00a0 She was raised by her grandmother: a joyless and unhappy childhood.<\/p>\n

She didn\u2019t remember them, but she had heard their story many times.<\/p>\n

Jack Haskell, her father, returned from World War II with a metal plate in his head.<\/p>\n

His bald head was misshapen \u2013 the left side smashed in and scarred.<\/p>\n

He had been shot in the head by the Japs, which even in the 1960\u2019s we still called our WWII foes.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until we started driving their cars and buying their televisions that we began to refer to them as Japanese.<\/p>\n

Almost everyone in Mayefield talked about Jack Haskell and the metal plate in his head. The mean kids \u2013and sometimes the not so mean ones\u2014teased him and called him names.\u00a0 Jack quickly lost his temper and would run at the kids, chasing them down the street.\u00a0 But the plate in his head must have slowed him down because he never caught any of them.\u00a0 Which was a good thing, because Jack was a big man with huge hands that could easily crush a kid.<\/p>\n

Jack had a violent temper even before he went off to war.\u00a0 He had been a schoolyard bully as a boy, with a fondness for picking out the most vulnerable of classmates and pushing them to the point of tears.\u00a0 Once his victims cried, Jack lost interest in them and moved on to bully someone else.\u00a0 In high school, he was a star football player \u2013 a bruising fullback who punished would-be defenders before and after they tackled him.\u00a0 He was suspended from the team in both his junior and senior years for fighting with members of opposing teams on the field and pursuing them in the locker room after games.<\/p>\n

Jack couldn\u2019t keep a job after he returned from the war.\u00a0 He resumed his prewar job at Cole\u2019s Hardware Store, but threw a tantrum one day and destroyed hundreds of dollars in merchandise, so Mr. Cole had to let him go.\u00a0 He ran the projector at the movie theater for a few months, but occasionally he went into some kind of trance and forgot to change the reel on time, allowing the screen to go black and causing the theater patrons to yell and throw popcorn tubs and drink cups at the ushers.<\/p>\n

Eventually his father-in-law took him on as a partner in the family liquor store.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t an ideal situation.\u00a0 He dropped bottles, some he smashed in anger.\u00a0 The register was often short \u2013 was he stealing or just charging customers wrong amounts?\u00a0 Several times a week, kids would open the front door; yell something unkind to Jack (something as innocuous as \u201cMetal head! Metal head!\u201d) and he would run after them, leaving the store unattended.\u00a0 He argued with customers, with salesmen, with beer delivery guys, with co-workers, and with his father-in-law.\u00a0 But it was a family business, and he was family, and you don\u2019t fire family.<\/p>\n

Jack had married Marian, his high school girlfriend, in the year between graduation and being drafted.\u00a0 They would have gotten married anyway, they believed, but Marion\u2019s pregnancy moved things along.\u00a0 They lived in a two-room apartment above Cole\u2019s Hardware, which they got rent-free as a result of Jack\u2019s employment there.\u00a0 They had a happy year together before Jack went away.\u00a0 As violent as he could be with other people, he was almost meek with Marian.\u00a0 Everyone agreed she was a good influence on him.<\/p>\n

While Jack was in the army, Marian had their baby, Gloria, and moved back into her parent\u2019s house on Maple Street, which is where they continued to live after Jack returned.<\/p>\n

Even Marian\u2019s reprieve from his hostility dissolved when he returned with the metal plate in his head.\u00a0 His temper was short; his moods gloomy and persistent.\u00a0 He yelled, then sulked, then screamed loudly, seemingly at the world in general<\/p>\n

When he hit Marian for the first time and she screamed in pain, her father roared up the stairs to their bedroom, burst in the room, and confronted Jack with a baseball bat. He had barely raised the bat to swing at his son-in-law when Jack shot him in the face with a war souvenir revolver.<\/p>\n

Marian screamed.<\/p>\n

Jack screamed.<\/p>\n

Her father didn\u2019t scream, just silently fell dead.<\/p>\n

Baby Gloria didn\u2019t scream either.\u00a0 She just stared curiously at all the commotion and noise around her.<\/p>\n

Jack turned toward Marian and shot her dead.<\/p>\n

Then Gloria screamed.<\/p>\n

Jack pointed the gun at his own head and fired.\u00a0 Something, maybe the metal plate, stopped the bullet before it penetrated his brain.\u00a0 Instead of dying, he sat down, stared at his bloody bride, his bloody hands, and his crying baby, and waited for the police to arrive.<\/p>\n

Jack Haskell spent the remainder of his life in a veterans hospital, along with other men who returned from World War II, some with metal plates in their heads.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

(Robert J. Marton)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Metal Plate in His Head By Robert J. Marton \u00a0Gloria didn\u2019t remember her father or mother.\u00a0 They disappeared from her life when she was two years old.\u00a0 She was raised by her grandmother: a joyless and unhappy childhood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":193,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions\/193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}