by Ed Gorman
He remembered most of the words to the Our Father; half of them to the Hail Mary. When he stood up, his knees exploded like twigs being snapped.
Several people had quietly entered the room while he was looking at his boy. Three of his aunts, one of his uncles, two boys he’d played varsity baseball with. He’d had a damned serviceable right arm.
He could see that they were getting themselves ready for him. All they would know is that he’d deserted his wife and son after returning from the war, that he kept up the child support he’d been ordered in absentia to pay, and that as far as anyone knew he’d never been back to town till now.
He started walking toward them then decided he just couldn’t face them. He wasn’t ashamed of himself in any way. He just detested awkward social moments and this one would be about as awkward as you could get.
There was a side door and he took it.
The late dusk, the evening sky streaks and swaths of gold and purple and mauve, was cooler than he’d expected.
He had almost reached his rental when Dave pulled up in an elderly brown Volvo.
Dave got out first and came over to him. Other cars were turning into the small paved lot.
Dave said, “Janice wants to talk to you. Alone.”
Donlon sighed. “I don’t see what that would accomplish, Dave? Do you?”
“A part of her still loves you.””
I doubt it.”
“I wish I could cut it out of her. It’s like a cancer. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“She ever tell you that herself?”
“No. But I can tell.”
“I forgot, brother. You know everything.”
People leaving their cars watched the two brothers carefully. Best show in town. Dave had probably never hidden his hatred for his brother from them. Poor, poor Dave; the smart one; the good one; the one who spent half his time running the local Democratic party and handing out do-gooder bumper stickers and pamphlets. Poor, poor Dave. The sonofabitch reveled in the pity, Donlon knew.
Dave walked away quickly, going through a small group as he entered the side door of the funeral parlor.
Donlon recognized some of the people passing by. A few of them nodded reluctantly. Who wanted to be seen nodding to a wife-deserter like Donlon?
Janice finally got out of the car and walked over to him. She’d been crying and understandably. Her only son was dead. She wore a dark blue dress with a shawl that made her look older than necessary. She was still pretty, enough so that he could remember the exact feel, taste and scent of her flesh in the high school years when they’d made love everywhere possible. He had still never had a lover who could satisfy him the quiet way she could.
“I appreciate you coming back with Dave.”
“He was my son, too.”
“I wish you could have known him.” She was going to cry and he was going to get uncomfortable and helpless. But she surprised him, caught her tears in her throat, dispersed them. Then: “You look good, Sully.”
“So do you.”
“Oh, that’s nice of you to say. But you don’t see me in my mirror in the morning light.” She glanced away; cut a sob in half. Looked back at him. “That’s all I do: is cry.”
“You loved him. That’s only natural.”
“It got worse, the paint factory, I mean. They’d always find some way to get out of cleaning up.”
“That’s what Dave said.”
“They killed him, Sully. Our boy. They killed him.”
She gave up fighting her tears. She clung to him, weeping. He held her. People walked by. They looked confused. Shouldn’t it be Dave out here comforting her like this? But they went on inside. They’d talk about this later, of course. Poor, poor Dave. That was what a lot of them would say. He marries her and takes care of her. So what the hell’s she doing in the parking lot of Prescott’s funeral home in the arms of that no good bastard Sully Donlon?
Father Gilliam drove up in his black Ford—he’d driven black Fords since Sully was a boy; the parish folks chipped in every three years and put up half and he put up the other half. The old priest looked over at them, gave a little jerk of shock seeing them together the way they were, then gave them a wave and went on inside.
“I better go in, Sully,” she said, her face a ruin of tears now.
“Yeah, I’ll be at the mass tomorrow morning.”
She put her hand on his arm as he started to turn away. “Dave’s been very good to us, Sully. We couldn’t have made it without it. After you left, he just took over.”
“He always loved you. Ever since grade school.”
“I know, Sully. But he could’ve done better than a woman with a child. He was popular at school.”
He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. Tasted breeze-cooled tears and makeup.
“I wish you could’ve known him, Sully,” she said. “He was such a good kid. Just a good kid. Nothing special I suppose. Just a good kid.”
She went inside, muffling tears into her handkerchief.
He bought a pint of Cutty Sark and went back to his hotel room. There was a Robert Ryan western on TV. He’d always wanted to look like Robert Ryan, those dignified silences, those eyes that saw too much.
After the movie was over, he picked up the phone and called his cabin.
“Is there a beautiful woman there who just happens to be a nurse?”
“I was hoping you’d call. How’s it going there?”
“About what I expected.”
She laughed. “Since I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, is ‘expected’ bad or good?”
“Little bit of both.”
“You’re hopeless. Is there something I can do for you, kind sir?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, there is. I need you to help me learn a few things.”
“If I can. I’m a nurse, not a wizard.”
“Nurse puts you way ahead of me where this stuff is concerned. Way ahead.”
After the burial, after the luncheon at the Knights of Columbus, after the goodbyes, Dave drove Donlon out to the graveyard. Their people were buried here, now including the youngster they both thought of as son.
Sometime during the luncheon, a giant wreath had been set at the boy’s grave. Dave, without warning, became more violent than Donlon had ever seen him. He tore the wreath apart with his hands and then picked up what remained and hurled it down the hill.
“The Mayor’s office,” he said. “He’s blocked every move we’ve made to clean up the toxic waste sites in town. He’s on their payroll. But he always makes sure to send a wreath when one of us dies from all the poisons in the water and the ground.” He choked on his tears. “I told you, that’s what happened to Sam. Pancreatic cancer. Seven kids died of pancreatic cancer here in the last year. The statistics show that that’s just about impossible unless pollution is a huge factor. The old doc, Cooney, he’s the only one who’ll stand up and tell the truth. The other two, the young ones, they’re all buddy-buddy with men who own the factory.”
He then took Donlon around and showed him the gravestones of all those suspected of dying of cancer-caused pollution the past ten years. The stones had small circles of green spray-painted on them.
Thirty-nine gravestones in all, the oldest victim being eighteen.
“And there’ll be a lot more, you can bet on that.”
They started down the hill to the car.
“It ever bother you?”
“Does what ever bother me?” Donlon knew what Dave was asking. He just wanted to make his younger brother say it out loud.
“Killing people.”
“Not the people I kill. I’m doing society a favor.”
“You ever sorry about the bargain you made?”
“Sometimes.”
The bargain had been simple enough. Donlon’s mother had found his suitcase open one morning. He kept newspaper clippings of every hit. Vanity. She asked him about them. Dave came in and when he heard what his mother was
saying, he started asking Donlon, too. The whole family had been suspicious of how he’d supported himself since coming back from the war. Janice had overheard a couple of strange phone calls. When Dave told her about the newspaper clippings, she realized how he was making his money. They gave him a choice—quit taking assignments or leave town immediately, even though Janice was three months pregnant. He’d tried it for a month. But it didn’t work for him. He took a job and did it fast but they still suspected and called him on it. He left town.
Dave drove Donlon back to his car. “You stopping by the house?”
“Guess not.”
“You’re just leaving, huh?”
“Pretty much.”
They sat in the front seat in back of the Knights of Columbus where Donlon had left his rental.
“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t come back.”
“Nothing to worry about there.”
“She told me last night that she still loves you.”
“She loves you, too.”
“Yeah, but not in the way I want.”
“I’m sorry, Dave.”
Dave put his head down and then raised it. “You would’ve liked him. He was a great kid.”
“That’s what Janice said.”
“And nobody’s going to pay for it, for him dying, I mean.”
Donlon pushed his hand out. They shook.
“So long.”
“Yeah, Sully. So long.”
They were out on the water and had been all morning. The sun was hot and merry. Donlon wore his dopey fishing hat. Kay was stretched out on the hammock he’d strung. He didn’t give a damn about news but she did. She was giving her laptop a work out, reading all the papers on-line.
“Wow,” she said, “listen to this.”
Donlon was fishing off the side. “Do I have to?”
“You left your old home town too early.”
“Yeah, how’s that?”
“You were telling me about all the pollution there? Well, the guy who runs that paint plant? Somebody grabbed him when he was coming out of work two nights ago and stabbed him with a syringe. Gave him some kind of injection.”
“The fish can hear you talking. That’s why they’re not biting.”
“They did tests and they found that what he got injected with was some of the spill from one of his toxic waste dumps.” She read a bit more of the story. “He’s really sick but it could take him quite a while to actually die.”
“Yeah,” Donlon said, “too bad he has to suffer like that.” A few minutes later, he got his first bite for the day and it was a damned good one.
SURROGATE
That spring I began following fourteen-year-old David Mallory home from school.
I always borrowed a car from one of the other lawyers in the firm, and I always wore a hat with the brim low over my face.
With all the talk of child molesters in the news, I knew what people would think if I ever got caught trailing him. To make things worse, his father Stephen was my racquetball partner three days a week. We lived on the same upwardly mobile street, attended the same upwardly mobile church, and drove the same kind of upwardly mobile car. Their family BMW was blue; ours was red.
Most days, David went straight home from school, a ten block walk that skirted a shaggy wooded area where the neighborhood kids liked to play.
After a week of tailing him, I was about to give up. Then came the rainy day when he met the tall boy at the south end of the woods and handed him what appeared to be a white number ten business envelope.
I used my binoculars so I could get a better look at the other boy. He was blond, freckled and thin, though it was a sinewy thinness that suggested both strength and speed. He looked to be about fourteen but there was an anger and cunning in his face that you don’t often see in kids, not in our kind of neighborhood anyway.
He opened the envelope, peeked inside and gave David an angry shove. I couldn’t hear their words but I didn’t need to. The tall boy was disappointed by what he’d found inside and was obviously making this clear to David.
He lashed out and grabbed David by the jacket and hoisted him half a foot off the ground. He flung the envelope to the ground and then slapped David twice hard across the mouth.
Then he let David fall in a heap to the ground.
The only sounds were the light rain thrumming on my borrowed car and the faint irregular pulse of an engine badly in need of a tune-up. In the rain and the faint fog, the tall boy stood over fallen David, still cursing him.
He brought a leg up and kicked David in the stomach.
David went backwards, splayed face up on the winter brown grass.
The other boy bent over him, shaking the white envelope in David’s face.
The tall boy left abruptly, with no further words, with no warning of any sort. He turned and ran at a trot into the woods, and then vanished, seeming to be as much a creature of the forest as a fox.
David lay in the rain for a long time. I doubted he was badly hurt. Even the kick couldn’t have done all that much damage. But he was probably embarrassed and afraid, the way I’d always been at his age when bullies had taken their turn with me. Even with nobody around to witness your beating, you still felt humiliated.
Eventually, he struggled to his feet. He was soaked. He took a few tentative steps and then fell into his regular pace. He was all right.
He reached the sidewalk and then finished the rest of the walk home.
In the next three weeks, he met the blond boy three more times. Always on Wednesdays. All three times, David handed over a white number ten business envelope and both times the blond boy quickly peered inside. David had obviously done what the other boy had demanded. The boy accepted the envelope, said a few words I couldn’t hear of course, and then went back into the same dark woods he’d come from.
Who was he? Where did he live? What was in the envelopes David was giving him?
A week later, I got to the site where they met and hid myself in the woods, far to the right of the narrow dirt path the blond boy always used. I got there half an hour early.
He came up from the wide creek that wound through the center of the woods. He moved as usual at a trot, showing no signs of exertion at all. On a sunny spring day like this one, he wore only a T-shirt and a pair of jeans.
He reached the mouth of the woods, stopped, and within a minute or so, David was there, looking nervous as usual, handing over the white envelope as if in appeasement to a dark god who might smite him dead at any moment.
As I hunched down behind the low hanging branches of a jack pine, I saw an American Copper butterfly light on a green bush, and I felt a terrible and sudden melancholy, thinking of what had happened in the past and how my wife still woke up sobbing at night, and what surely lay before us in the days ahead. I wanted the peace and wisdom of the butterfly for my own, to know the succor of sunlight and release from my rage.
But all I could do was follow the boy back into the woods, into the shifting shadows and ripe spring scents in which squirrels and stray kittens and birds slept and romped and luxuriated.
The boy went back into his trot, indifferent to the branches slapping him on face and arms.
He came to a fork and went west, toward the wide muddy creek.
After a few more minutes, I lost him completely. I couldn’t even hear him disturb the undergrowth.
I was just inching my way to the clearing on the bank above the creek when he reappeared.
He climbed without pause to the very top of the railroad truss bridge that lay across the fast-moving creek. He scurried up to the top chord, which rose twenty feet above the tracks below, and stood there gaping at the countryside.
He was king-of-the-hill up there, taking a package of cigarettes from his jeans pocket and lighting up, looking over the world below with his customary sneer.
A train came soon enough, twenty-six swaying rattling box cars pulled by an engine car running hard and fast and invincible.
This was the nightmare shared by every parent in our neighbor-hood—that one of our children (even though strictly forbidden to play anywhere near the bridge) would fall into the path of the pitiless engine and be killed instantly.
The train roared through.
The entire bridge swayed.
But the boy, still enjoying his cigarette, rode the top span of the bridge as if he were aboard a bucking bronc. He stood upright, swaying with the power beneath him, becoming one with its rhythm.
And then the train was gone, taking its furious sounds with it, ‘til all you could hear in the silence after was the incomprehensible chitter and chatter of birds.
From my hiding place, I watched the boy a few more minutes, trying to make some sense of that sullen, angry face and insolent stance. But I could make no sense of him at all.
Soon after, I left.
Next afternoon, it rained again. I parked two blocks down from school.
When I saw David I honked my horn. Today I was in my own car, and without hat, so he recognized me right away.
He came over and opened the door. “
Hi, Mr. Rhodes.”
“Hi, David. Get in and I’ll give you a ride home.”
He looked confused for a moment. What was I doing parked along the street this way? He had to be wondering.
“Really, Mr. Rhodes, I can walk.”
“C’mon, David, get in. It’s going to start raining again any time now.”
He still seemed apprehensive but he reluctantly got in and closed the door.
I pulled away from the curb, out into traffic.
“So how’ve you been, David?”
“Oh, you know, fine, I guess.”
“Your Dad tells me you’re getting good grades.”
“Yeah, well, you know.” He half-smiled, embarrassed.
“Makes me think about Jeff. You know, how he’d be doing these days.”
I looked over at David. I knew he’d get uncomfortable and start squirming. Which is just what he did.
“He’d be doing just great, Jeff would,” David said. “He really would,” David added, as if he needed to convince me of it.