After The Flesh

by Colin Gallant

  But there was one occasion that involved him – not that Maggie knew about it. It was near Christmas of the tenth grade. This would put it about a month after the incident in the kitchen. Freddy was woken up in the middle of the night after a dream of his parents fighting. I don’t think this was too uncommon at the time. They weren’t nightmares but rather sleeping fantasies where he would wake up and stop them, beating them, killing John again each time. In his dreams his parents were absurdly small, like children. In his dreams he was the adult.

  This particular dream was different. In it, John was beating Maggie, cursing her, swearing in his slurred, drunken voice. Maggie was whimpering, not really crying – she never cried in front of John. The cursing, the whimpering, the hitting – these were all common enough. But this time when he woke up Freddy could still hear it.

  He lay awake in his bed, the only light the street light outside illuminating a pale, yellow rectangle on his curtains. Freddy could hear it, his mother’s whimpers. But that wasn’t exactly right. She wasn’t whimpering – more like moaning. It was a sound he had never heard her make.

  Dressed only in his pajama bottoms Freddy rose. He padded silently to his door and opened it with caution. The upper hinges would creak alarmingly, but years ago he had discovered if he swung the door wide open quickly it made no sound at all. Thus, being cautious, he flung the door wide and stepped out into the darkened hall.

  It was definitely a moan he heard, a soft choked sound, stifled even. Maggie’s bedroom door was opened a crack – just wide enough for a slim line of flickering blue-white light to carve its knife edge across the hall. Her television was on but the sound was muted. His heart thumping in his chest, Freddy crept down the hall. Years of John’s heavy steps had not been kind to the floor but Freddy was well accustomed to sneaking out and in. He knew where every creak and groan lay.

  As a child Freddy discovered he could stand there, peering through the crack in his parents unclosed door and not be seen – particularly when the television was the only light in the room. The light shone in their eyes and blinded them to the deepened shadows in the corner of the room where the door stood. He watched them fight. He watched them sleep. He had on occasion watched them make what passed for love between them. Through the crack in the door Freddy had watched her struggle to undress his drunken father. Now he pressed his eye to the crack again, feeling as exposed as ever and peered in. An instant later he bit his lip to keep from gasping.

  Maggie was not crying. She was not weeping. She was not in any state of distress at all. His mother was moaning but her moans were not caused by anything remotely sorrowful. She lay on the bed she had shared with her husband for sixteen years, splayed on the crumpled sheets as naked as could be.

  She was masturbating – Jilling off, as Carrie would have put it. Her eyes flicked up and down, making a circuit between the television, the bedroom door and herself – to what she was doing to herself. Their eyes met a dozen times in less than a minute. Each time Freddy was positive she had seen him but each time her eyes lingered only for a second before lowering to her body again to complete the circuit.

  His heart thudded. Unbidden, his erection blossomed, throbbing a counterpoint a half beat behind his heart. Freddy was achingly curious to find out what was on the television. He was also curious what would happen if she saw him. He considered pushing open the door. Freddy was sure there would be a shriek while she scrambled to get under the covers. A moment of embarrassment would follow. Then again, he thought, perhaps…

  Likely there was a reason she had left the door slightly ajar. Each time her eyes flicked over to that tiniest of cracks – a seam not quite wide enough to slip through a finger – he knew she was waiting for him to see her. She wanted to be seen.

  Freddy slipped his pajama bottoms to mid-thigh. Instead of the doorknob, he grasped himself. He masturbated evenly, matching his mother’s pace stroke for stroke, imagining his fist was her. Quickly, nearly in moments, Freddy reached his orgasm. His mother, as frantic as she was, was some distance away. He came, dropping his semen on the hallway carpet and retreated to his bedroom. Freddy lay awake most of the night in both shock and awe at what he had just witnessed. She was his mother but he was only realizing that was what she was and what that meant. To him it was all very confusing.

  It was nearly spring of that year – still grade ten – before Freddy told me what he saw and what he had done. A Chinook had rolled in. Over the howl of the west wind and the rush of melt water in the gutters and drains he told me.

  “Is it wrong?” He asked me in a child’s voice.

  I told him it was but no more wrong than anything else he had done. This met with a confused look. Two people –at least two that I could confirm – were dead at his hand. He had also tortured and killed animals as well as other deeds nearly as heinous. Still he did not understand.

  I chose another tack. With all the girls at school vying for his attention why should he be interested in Maggie? Freddy answered honestly – too honestly, I thought at the time. Now I understand. Freddy always claimed to love his mother. I just never realized he needed her as well.

  “It’s not that simple,” Freddy told me. “I like the girls. I like what they can do for me. But they’re just flesh. Mom is different. We share a pain.”

  -

  Snow had fallen. It was either the late fall of grade eleven or about the same time in grade twelve – this would be ‘92 or ‘93. Some things I remember in exquisite detail while others grow vague, distant, like a half-remembered dream upon waking. But I suppose that is the way with memories for all of us.

  That year, whichever one it was, Freddy came within inches of killing. He did not plan it. He did not think about it in advance. He just acted on impulse. I was with him, less of a rarity during those years. We were out cruising. Just driving.

  Freddy enjoyed the open road and the empty night. His little world would shrink into the small space ahead. It would fit into the narrow swath illuminated by his headlights. It was peaceful and it was serene. He would cruise for hours once the sun went down – just pick a direction and go. When the chrome-bezelled fuel gauge had dropped to something just over half, he would turn around and head for home. It was innocent enough. It gave him time to think, a time when his focus grew as tight as the path cut by the Impala’s old-school incandescent high-beams and yet as broad and untroubled as the distant black line of the horizon.

  On occasion I went with him, as I did on this particular night. But I did not stop him from killing that woman. If he had chosen to, I would have done nothing. He would have killed her with me standing over his shoulder. I would have watched him do it and helped him clean up the mess afterwards.

  We saw the amber glow of her hazard lights in the darkness below the crest of the next rise. They were still most of a mile away. Overhead the sky was a crystal clear blue-black bathed nearly iridescent white by the light of about ten billion stars you can only see on the prairies. In the dark of night, the horizon becomes a clean line between sky and land, black on black and nearly ruler straight. Her car lay in a hollow place; a broad, shallow valley cut into the windswept landscape where eons of spring melt had carved its way out of the west towards the Old Man River.

  The steady, deep drone of Maybelline’s big inch motor fell back as Freddy eased his foot off the throttle. As the RPM’s declined, my heartbeat sped up. I glanced at Freddy, his face in profile garishly splashed with the instrument cluster’s pale light. A thoughtful look had come over his face. One hand was on the wheel. The other had strayed to his eye. He snorted a sardonic kind of laugh and was silent again.

  I watched him, not speaking, barely breathing. That night he had spoken only rarely, hardly a few sentences. Now he did not need to. I knew what he was thinking as plainly as if he muttered his thoughts aloud.

  “If it’s someone alone we’ll stop,” Freddy decided. “It’s like I knew!” He laughed again.

  I thought of Liza Harding, a woman s
afe from his wrath. Whoever lay ahead on the roadside would become her – if just for the few moments he required. Freddy would see her in the features of whatever unlucky individual happened to have the misfortune of breaking down this night. Afterwards there would be a contented grin on his face. He would tell me it was Liza Harding he had killed. For him she would be dead. That was all that mattered.

  Already I knew I would agree with him.

  The highway unwound beneath the Impala’s fat T/A’s. Freddy blipped the throttle, dropping a gear with an effortless precision I often envied. Like a pair of winking orange eyes, the hazard lights began to draw nearer. A shape emerged from the darkness, an aging Malibu wagon that would, in the years to come, become prime hot rod material. Then, in the early nineties, it was just another beat, old broke-down car – prime lawn-ornament material in other words.

  Freddy slowed, clutch in and braking. He stirred the shifter down into first gear and let the clutch out. The motor flashed and began falling again. “Be alone,” he muttered. The thoughtful look on his face slid into one of near childlike longing. “Be … alone.”

  He had his prayer. I had mine. I envisioned four big men – good ol’ boys – half-cut from Dyson’s back in town and itching for some action.

  Freddy reached through the hoop of the steering wheel and clicked on the four-ways. He was stopping. The hopeful look slipped, exploding into a wide grin. The old Chevy was less than a hundred yards down the road now and well within the nimbus of Maybelline’s antiquated low-beams. My heart dropped. Through the rear window I could clearly see a single silhouette hunched over the wheel. The moment was at hand. I watched him kill John. I watched Carrie die. Whoever this was I knew I was about to bear witness once more.

  Briefly I entertained a fantasy of my own. I turned to Freddy. I saw the look of glee still plastered to his face and found my strength. It could have been Eisenhower or Patton. It could have been Sun-Tzu or Churchill or even Nixon. Hell, it could have been Audie Murphy or John Wayne for all I know. Whoever it was once said: ‘Courage isn’t the lack of being scared – but rather being scared to death and carrying on anyway.’

  In my fantasy I found my courage. While Maybelline was still idling up the road, four-ways on, two wheels in the lane and two off on the shoulder I found my courage. Freddy was enthralled with the approaching vehicle and did not see me. I lifted my left foot over the transmission hump and planted it firmly on the gas pedal. At the same time, I grabbed the wheel and spun it hard right.

  Rubber boiled as the engine shrieked to life. Maybelline spun a tight circle, careening into the ditch at full throttle. The embankment was steep. Up became down and back again as the car went over. I tasted blood but I didn’t care. Glass shattered. The shock of cold, night air on my skin was sudden and welcome. I heard a thump, Freddy’s head striking the roof, the crunch of bones. Darkness.

  But I did not find my courage. I never could. The car slowed. Freddy slipped the shifter into neutral and eased to a halt just aft of the wagon’s rear bumper. He set the break and killed the motor.

  “Have you ever heard the expression, ‘What happens on the road stays on the road’?” Freddy asked me. His eyes never left the car in front of us.

  I nodded mutely. He would get caught. This was so stupid. Freddy was completely unprepared. For someone craving control he was exercising an extreme lack of it. But he was also completely calm. He had not let the monster slip. That would come soon enough.

  For all his rants of power, for all his claims to this gift of his, Freddy was only living in his fantasies back then. He dwelled on the cusp between the real world and that place the mind drifts to in sleep, in absence and in earthly bliss. Freddy was no god as he was coming to believe. He was a dreamer of the worst kind, the kind who never knew when it was time to wake up – or didn’t know when he already had.

  His lack of divinity, his playing at godhood, his frustration that his fantasies were just that would all come to a head. He would be a god. He would hold sway over the small creatures around him. He would in time. But only because I did not intervene.

  Freddy drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. I watched him, waiting for a sign. He was difficult to read at the best of times and all but impossible otherwise – even for me. Typically, the face the world saw was the face he wanted to be seen. At this moment the look he was going for was both excited and reserved, a kind of, I’m ten now and I don’t really believe in Santa Claus anymore, but still….

  I caught a brief glimpse through the mask, just the tiniest peek, and I saw indecision. I believe I also saw something I can only describe in the broadest sense. I saw anxiety.

  “Why don’t you just stay in the car?” He suggested.

  I nodded and sat motionless as he got out. Freddy approached the wagon and bent down to speak to the driver. In the glow of the Impala’s headlights I could see the pleasant smile on his face and the casual lean to his body. Freddy was flirting.

  After a few minutes Freddy strolled back, that pleasant smile still on his face. He got in and started the car. “She’s got a cellular phone,” he told me. “Her boyfriend’s on the way.” The smile lingered on his face, very thin and very strained. “And no, she doesn’t want us to wait with her. She’s just fine.” He pulled back out onto the road, idling past the Chevy with its hazards blinking in the night.

  I caught a brief glimpse of the woman behind the wheel, her big Motorola flip jammed to her ear. She looked right passed me and only saw Freddy. There was fear in her eyes – fear and recognition. She had seen the monster lurking within the guise of the Good Samaritan. I saw that recognition and I’m sure Freddy saw it as well.

  “God knows how much that dumb bitch paid for that phone,” Freddy muttered. “You’d think she would spend the money to fix her car.”

  I was silent for the rest of the trip. Freddy muttered to himself for a while, his voice barely a murmur over the rumble of exhaust. He would have killed her if not for the cell phone. Nowadays one assumes anyone driving alone at night would have one. But back then they were still quite rare.

  Freddy never took me along with him again after that night. When he cruised, he cruised alone. If he did kill, I never heard. If he lived his fantasies, he never told me. I might have had my suspicions but the papers never spoke of them. It was like he said, what happens on the road stays on the road.

  -

  High school is a finite time in our lives. Thank God, some would say. Others might disagree, wishing it could go on forever. Some outright mourn its passing. Whatever the case, few of us are prepared for what follows. Our little worlds are torn asunder, split and fractured as everything we’ve come to know and trust is changed with the passing of a single season. Life goes on. But the fears and the tentative first steps into tomorrow are remembered for a very long time. Friends, long time acquaintances, those people and those things that are familiar drift, change, return or are forgotten. The new friends, the new faces that come with our new lives are never quite the same.

  The bell rings its final dismissal and we become adults. No longer can someone dictate our days, our nights or challenge our work ethic in that ever so superior, condescending tone of parent or teacher. We become our own creatures at last and it is truly terrifying, though few realize or recall.

  In our senior year, Josh got his girlfriend pregnant and skipped town. He dropped out two months before graduating. I don’t know what became of him. As for Dave and Jeff – I think they still live in Prince William Falls. Likely they’re working down at Clausson’s or at the fertilizer plant. They both graduated, much to my surprise.

  Others who came and went during our three years at Prince William Falls High really do not deserve any special mention. They all, with only a few exceptions, graduated and amounted to varying degrees of success. There were a handful of doctors and lawyers in our class and one man who reached the rank of Captain in the Canadian military before a roadside bomb took his life in Afghanistan. There are a couple of
writers, a group who made big money in the Dot-Com business and a young woman whom I read may someday soon go into space. There is an actor who has become marginally famous and even a politician who is growing increasingly infamous.

  But there was only one Freddy – already one too many. He played football and he studied. His grades gave him a choice of schools and his proficiency on the field insured he would not have to scrub too many dishes to get there. Maggie was beside herself. Her son was going to university – something she had missed out on. I actually think she was more excited than Freddy was about it. But then again Freddy only got excited about certain things. Everything else just happened.

  In the end he chose the University of Calgary. He chose that school because of its strong sociology department, a major he was interested in. This was how he put it. Sociology was a major he was interested in. He said it with the same conviction one used to proclaim a preference to Hawaiian pizza rather than Meat Lover’s. To him it was just the next thing to do.