"Great."
"Hey now," Elizabeth said. "Where do you think your good looks come from?"
Jake once overheard Sergeant Dan say his mother was a 'stone-cold knockout.' Jake was nine at the time. He had no idea what the sergeant meant, but the phrase stuck with him and he grew to understand it was true. Elizabeth Duke was what virtually all men would consider beautiful, and with a body to match. A small part of Jake felt relief at having spent his teenage years at the institution, not having to endure high school buddies ribbing him about how his mom was a MILF. In any case, Jake had assumed any of his good qualities, as far as looks, came from his mother, while he'd somehow avoided the rough-hewn landscape that was Sergeant Dan's mug.
"You have your father's nose," she said, "and his chin. You definitely have his eyes."
"Why don't I have his name?"
"He had wild, beautiful eyes," Elizabeth said, "and horrible little toes." She smiled at the memory.
"Why don't I have his name?"
"You laugh like he does, you know that?"
"Why don't I have his name?"
"And you have his voice."
They rode in silence for a moment, Jake holding her in his gaze.
"You asked if those were his initials," Elizabeth said. "V.K.?"
"Yes."
"I don't know," she said. "I never asked his name."
Still facing backward in the passenger seat, Jake returned his eyes to the rain-soaked window. Green fields whizzed past, as did the gray backs of highway signs on metal posts. Farmhouses in the distance. He imagined people inside, eating together as a family, kids running out back to play on swings, screen doors banging. Everything was broken apart by the drops on the glass. He tried to keep his eyes away from his new horizon, but it surrounded him.
"He wasn’t just a magician," Jake said. "He was a genie, right? A djinni, if you prefer. Which makes me half of whatever he was, or is."
He checked with his mother. She kept her eyes on the road.
"Whatever this is," Jake said, "whatever I am, it's not a gift, but a curse. Think about it. Every comic book hero—or villain, for that matter—that's ever been bitten by a spider, came from another planet, or whose mother was raped by a vampire has come away with special abilities. They may live tortured secret lives, or they may be bound to some moral code, but at least they have the ability to leap tall buildings or shoot lasers from their eyes. Me? I got all the disadvantages with none of the gifts. I'm bound to wishes, but I have no special powers to grant them. I've never met a full-on djinni, so I can’t say, but from what little information I can find about my father I'm guessing he had powers. Wish for a million dollars? He might snap his fingers and poof; the money is there. Ask me for a million dollars? I'll either be off robbing a bank or six days later you’re dead."
"I didn’t know," Elizabeth said, still facing forward. "I didn’t know what he was at the time." She glanced at him. "I just knew he … that he could help me."
"Help you what?"
"Help me find a purpose, Jacob."
Jake grew angry. "Your fucking job?"
"You," Elizabeth said. "He gave me you."
Jake turned back to the window. He closed his eyes and imagined the sound the raindrops made against the glass, but as always, he heard nothing.
10
Darnell Collins sat at his kitchen table eating a bowl of Apple Jacks in whole milk. The overhead light was an exposed soft white bulb hanging from a wire with a dog-tag chain dangling down, the bell-shaped metal handle grimy to the touch. The kitchen wallpaper was a repeating pattern of salt-and-pepper shakers. It was peeling down at the corners, exposing brown glue and dingy drywall behind. The sink was piled with dishes—cups with rings of milk at the bottom, plates smeared with canned spaghetti sauce, dehydrated hot dog ends floating in bowls of sludge. Fruit flies did lazy figure eights around the table and around Darnell's head. He swatted at them while he tried to finish his breakfast.
Beauty appeared at the hallway threshold. "You still here?"
Darnell looked up from his food. She was leaning against the jamb, her arms crossed over her chest. He glanced at her left eye. It looked bad. Still swollen closed and purple. He felt stomach pain about having hit her. His cheeks grew hot and he dropped his chin. He hadn't wanted to do it, Christ no, but goddammit she wouldn't hear him. When she did that—when she refused to listen—she grew stiff as a mannequin and equally as useless. The only way to get her to move was to... well.
"You weren't thinking," Beauty said, "were you, Darnell?" She pointed at her damaged eye. "You think I'm going to stick around for this kinda shit? I got suitors, you know? I got-"
His stare stopped her words. He knew it would. Momma had told him about his eyes. "The eyes are the windows to the soul, Darnit," she'd said. It always brought him secret joy to recall the nickname Momma given him—short for Darnell and long for how he made her feel all the time. "But your soul is off somewhere else, boy. Ain't no one home in those eyes of yours. Anytime I look straight into them, good lord, I get the willies something fierce."
By the look on her face, Beauty was currently getting the willies something fierce.
"I don't think I care for your tone," Darnell said.
Beauty checked her cuticles. "Where were you the other night?"
Darnell returned to his meal, was able to get in a few spoonfuls while she remained silent. It didn't last.
"My daddy hit me," Beauty said. "Just like his daddy hit him and his daddy before that. It was supposed to end with me, D, all this hitting. I tried other boys, tried to make a life for myself outside abuse, but I only found the same damn thing, over and over." She shook her head in distaste.
"Just keep that runt out of my room," Darnell said, his deep voice filling up the small kitchen. "And there won’t be any more problems."
"He’s just a boy," Beauty said. "He don’t mean nothing by it."
She had Momma's defiance, Darnell thought. That same stupid defiance. "No one ever means nothing by anything," he said. "And yet people are always going through other people's things."
"He's not people!" Beauty said. "He's..." She let the argument drop, popped off the wall and went to the fridge. She pulled the door open to examine its contents, which was mostly condiments threatening their expiration dates. Not much for items on which the condiments might be used.
Darnell picked up the newspaper next to his cereal bowl. The front-page headline read, 'Crash Survivor Murdered in Home.' Underneath that was the subtitle, 'Ghost Mother Strikes Again?' The rest of the article detailed the death of Jana Davidovich, discovered by her husband Dimitri after he'd returned home with groceries. The press was beating up the guy for having left his wife alone in the first place. Served him right.
Darnell hated the nickname they'd given him. Ghost Mother. He'd hoped not to be linked to any name at all but given his druthers he would have chosen something better. After all, his mission was mercy. The thought made him smile. Mother Mercy. Yeah. That had a ring. Of course it did.
"Whatcha reading that garbage for, anyway?" Beauty said. "You need to get to work, D." She'd given up on finding food in the fridge and started slapping a pack of Virginia Slims against her open palm.
Darnell stood up from the table, nearly knocking it over with his size. He walked out of the kitchen and down the hall, taking his newspaper with him. The house's spongy floorboards flexed beneath his feet—the moisture from the clay below having nearly eaten through the plywood beneath the indoor/outdoor carpeting that served as a hallway runner. The door to Frankie's room at the end of the hall had a piece of notebook paper taped to it. The paper displayed a crude drawing of a green monster dressed as a school safety and holding a stop sign. In red crayon beneath the monster it read:
Frankie's Room! Stop!!!
Before he reached Frankie's room, Darnell turned into a short hallway that led to the back of the house. The door, which was originally designed to open up to the outside, opened into a lean-to
shed that'd been attached to the siding with screws and caulk. It was Darnell's special room. He'd made no monster sign to ward off intruders, but simply told Beauty and Frankie to stay out. This warning should have been enough. Yesterday it wasn't. Maybe today it would be again.
Darnell stepped inside the shed and closed the door behind him. He clicked on a lamp and sat down on a stool. The shed was set up like a woodworker's space. Now and then he dabbled in the occasional whittling or turning oak on a lathe to make special items for his mercy missions, but the tools and benches went generally unused. The only thing he operated with any regularity was the wood-burning stove in the corner, and that was only in the cold months. He set down the newspaper and used a key from his pants pocket to unlock a drawer beneath the bench. Inside the drawer there was a pair of scissors and a bundle of tanned leather tied up with twine like a package of meat.
Darnell checked the door behind him before he brought out the bundle, set it on the bench, and untied the string.
Inside the bundle was a collection of newspaper clippings and computer printouts. Darnell removed the papers to reveal that the tanned leather was a stretch of a human facial skin. There were two eyeholes—the lids cut out of the skin like a Halloween mask—plus a nose, a mouth, cheeks, and a chin were apparent in the flattened hide. The mask ended just short of the ears and hairline of a middle-aged man.
Darnell had been a shy boy when he started his paper collection, the same shy boy written about in the first clipping he ever cut. He found that old, yellow clipping now and read the headline.
Local Boy Braves House Fire Trying to Save Mother.
At the time of the fire, mother and son lived alone in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century farmhouse in Wixom, not far from where Darnell lived now. It was the kind of home with steep, narrow staircases, plaster walls, and a damp smell that wafted up from the basement with the rising groundwater of springtime. Darnell's parents, Grant and Mercy Collins, had been poor sharecroppers working the land for Augustus Johnson, a wealthy magnate that owned more than half the real estate encompassing the town. The Collins's were paid for their hard work in the form of boarding in that old house, plus a little extra for food and supplies. Grant Collins generally referred that little extra as 'tolerance money' as he most often used it to buy enough whiskey to tolerate living with Mercy.
The newspaper article detailed Darnell's heroic attempt to save his invalid mother from the fire that took her life. Subsequent articles followed up on Darnell's story. His recovery from so many second- and third-degree burns, how the small town rallied around the brave boy who'd looked after his mother after the accident that broke her back, and how the disappearance of the boy's alcoholic father had suddenly become a mystery. Darnell had clipped and kept them all.
The cause of the fire was a cigarette butt, the police had said, likely flicked from a car cruising the backcountry road on which the home was situated. The butt had been blown under the wraparound porch where it ignited the dry leaves that'd been collecting there for years. The house's old wood had gone up like tinder and fire quickly surrounded the home.
"Those goddamn hot-rodding kids," Darnell now said aloud, his voice like that of an old woman, "tossing their trash out the windows of their souped up shitboxes, like the world is their own personal dump yard."
Darnell hadn't been one of those hot-rodding kids, but a good boy, a nice young man whose mother was his best friend and that was as fine as fine could be. He became Mercy's caretaker, as well, once the two found themselves on their own.
"I broke my back for your goddamn father in every sense of the word," Darnell said, repeating what she told her eleven-year-old son the morning after daddy's disappearance and two days after she returned home from the hospital, having broken her back in a fall from a tractor. "Soon as I got laid up he followed his pecker right out the door, bug juice in hand, no doubt."
Young Darnell had nodded in agreement as he fluffed and arranged Momma's pillows, but he knew his father had followed his pecker nowhere. Darnell buried the man in a field of rippling wheat on Augustus Johnson's land just the night before when he found him face down in a pool of his own vomit in the barn. Darnell followed his father's instructions to get rid of his corpse if he ever found him like that. "I won't have that wicked bitch or any of her preachers speaking her words over me after I'm gone," Grant Collins said. "You just bury me, boy. Bury me and say you never saw me."
Grant Collins couldn't have known that his odd and quiet son, before burying him, would use an X-Acto knife to remove his father's skin from his face. He couldn't have known his eyelids would be cut off, his facial skin would be tanned, and his head would one day serve as a wrapper for his son's newspaper clippings and printouts.
"Your momma loves you, Darnit. All other love is dirty and meaningless. A girl is nothing more than useless meat and bones around a cunt. And boys are no better, walking around with their nightsticks full of blood. Hounds borne from the dirt between the devil's legs. You just stay by momma and keep your nose in this here book." She laid a hand on the Bible at her bedside. "You'll be all right."
Darnell was asleep in the basement when the fire started. It was the only place in the house where he couldn't hear her nightly wailings. Bring me my oatmeal! Change these sheets! Empty this bedpan, Darnit! He'd taken to hiding down there in the evenings, knowing she'd eventually fall asleep and leave him be. The fire melted the kitchen's linoleum floor. The liquified plastic dropped in flaming dollops through the floorboards into the basement. A blue-hot dollop landed on Darnell's head, shocking him awake as it spread over his skin like napalm.
Momma.
Darnell jumped up and broke for the stairs with his heart in his throat. Pounding and cracking noises came from above—firemen chopping their way through the front door. He made it to the living room where he skirted the flames and crawled beneath the billowing black smoke to the staircase. Up he went. The flames had come around to the back of the house and entered through the upstairs windows. Darnell kicked in the master bedroom door. His mother lay as he'd last seen her—tucked in tight, only now she was shrouded in licking fire and smoke. He scooped her into his arms and ran back out into the hall, but the smoke had since filled the space and left him disoriented. His throat burned and his lungs were ready to burst. The back of his head felt like a meteor had struck him there and was melting through his skull. He staggered blindly down the hall, carrying his mother like a bride, and stepped right off the landing through a bannister weakened by flame. After a twelve-foot drop, he and his mother crash-landed on the living room floor.
The firemen busted through the front door, creating a draft that pulled smoke out of the room. Though his eyes burned and tears welled over his vision, Darnell watched his mother's dead face—her mouth agape, her gaze a visage of a fearful, choking death.
Darnell lost consciousness when the pain of the flames melting his skin became too much to bear.
Today, Darnell's skin often recalled the pain of that fire—the burning of his back and head, the melting of his hands. Each time he read his articles, each time he opened his father's head and read through its contents, he felt that fire as though it were still at his back. He wondered now, as he did time and again, had momma been calling for him when she died?
"Darnit," he whispered.
He picked up the scissors and this morning's newspaper, clipped the front-page headline and article before skipping to the Metro section. There had been a shooting in Detroit the night before. He'd seen it on the evening news. One survivor—a police officer who'd taken multiple gunshots—was in critical condition at an unnamed area hospital. Father of a young girl. Darnell read more details of the event, including how the gunman had barricaded himself in his home to stand off against the police. He'd shot and killed another officer as well as his own wife and sister-in-law before succumbing to the SWAT team that'd busted in. The gunman lost his life in a chaos of bullets and smoke grenades.
Darnell added the front-p
age clipping to the pile inside his father's head. He wrapped up the bundle, tied it closed, and locked it away his special drawer in his special room. He left the room, went back into the house, and primped himself in front of a mirror before he left for work. The name-tag stitched to the gray coveralls above his left breast read, 'Darnell,' and on the back, 'New Center Staff.'
11
Mother and son sat across from each other at the granite countertop in Elizabeth’s Duke’s kitchen, steam rising from each of their coffee mugs. Jake lifted his cup and sipped. Elizabeth’s request for him to bring his water pitcher back to her house still hung between them.
"Thank you for the offer," Jake said, setting down his coffee. "But I like it where it is. It’s safe, and if things get tight it will be where I’m supposed to be."
"But you’ll be alone," Elizabeth said.
Jake nearly laughed in her face, but he was years past that sort of response. She’d practically left him alone since he was twelve years old and sentenced to Dover. At first she came to visit each weekend, then it became once a month, and then five or six times a year, tops. Work was her most common excuse. He hardly noticed her absence, though, as it wasn't much different from the years before he was locked away. Growing up she'd been as distant as any mother could be, allowing a DVD collection and a series of nannies and babysitters to raise her child while she dug herself deeper into her career.
Now she was concerned he’d be alone? Sure.
"I like it where it is," he said. "I’m fine on my own."
"And yet," she said, a sarcastic smirk coming to her face, "here you are, asking for my help."
Jake offered no reply.
"What is it you need, a license plate?"
He nodded.
"Damn you, Jacob. You know I hate to encourage him."
"A boy's life is at stake."
She picked up their coffee mugs and walked them over to the sink where she poured them out. She came back across the kitchen heading for the doorway that led into the hall. When she reached the threshold, she stopped and looked back so her deaf son could read her lips. "I'll call him in the morning, but this is the last time."
The Stonefly Series, Book 1 Page 6