‘Did you see your mom?’ Ivan asked.
Reggie didn’t say anything. This question wasn’t right. He knew it wasn’t right, and he didn’t like it.
‘Did you see your dad?’
His heart beat even faster. His head was a storm of thoughts. He wanted to charge the man across from him and punch him like he’d punched Witte. He wanted to deny what the man said, yet couldn’t.
‘Your dad left you, and you’re angry,’ said Ivan. His voice was soft, yet not exactly gentle. It wasn’t hard either. He was simply stating facts for which he knew there was no denial. ‘Your mom hit you because she doesn’t understand your pain.’
Inside, the emotions shifted. From anger to resignation to sorrow of a kind deep and raw and heavy. They shifted tectonically like continents realigning.
‘Your mom has her pain,’ Ivan said, ‘and expects yours to be the same. She thinks she knows what you feel, though she never could. Your dad left you, when he was supposed to be around for a long time.’
A tear had come to his eye unbidden, surprising Reggie, and he wiped it away to no effect. Others followed, and soon he was shaking with the release of them.
‘When you held the gun,’ the killer said, ‘all that changed. The world no longer happened around you. You were happening to the world. You made the calls. It was up to you what happened next.
‘In your mind’s eye were those who’d wronged you. The bullet could end any of them. Or you could spare them. It was your choice and yours alone. The gun was an extension of your mind, and in so being it was really you that was the weapon, and not the gun.
‘When you kill someone,’ the killer continued, ‘you’re making a statement to the universe. To all of creation you’re declaring yourself the one in charge. You say how things will turn out. It’s all up to you.’
Reggie took all this in as the sobs ran their course. By the time Ivan had finished, Reggie had better control of himself. The odd sob still wracked him – he sniffed and rubbed his eyes – but it was dwindling, that sudden pain. Lowering itself back down from where it’d arisen.
‘Come here,’ Ivan said, waving him over.
Reggie didn’t know what to do. This was his side, and over there was Ivan’s. They’d been talking on and off since last night and almost all day today. But it was just that – talking. They’d kept their distance, and Reggie was fine with that.
But now the killer motioned him closer, and Reggie found he was fine with that also. He stood and crossed the space between them.
He sat beside the killer.
The man put an arm around him and held him close. The man was large and present and warm. Like a mountain sheltering refugees.
‘It’ll be okay, son,’ the killer said, and Reggie believed him.
CHAPTER FIVE
1.
That night they watched the stars together. The vast blackness of the expanse above was impressed upon both of them. The feeling was palpable in the air between them. They lay with their heads near the edge where the ladder was, looking up between the branches swaying above.
‘What did you want to be when you were a kid?’ Reggie asked.
‘I almost don’t remember that life,’ Ivan said. ‘It was so long ago.’
At first the killer said nothing else, and Reggie almost dropped the subject. Then he thought about what Ivan had asked about firing the gun, and his mom and dad, and he continued. There wouldn’t be barriers between them, Reggie realized. Nothing would be off limits.
Somehow, he knew that it was important for things to be that way.
‘But you do remember,’ Reggie said. ‘What was it? What did you want to be?’
Still, Ivan didn’t answer immediately. Reggie wanted to turn his head to look at the man lying beside him, but fought the urge. It felt wrong at that moment to look at him, like an invasion of privacy. Beneath the long, black sky, that seemed something important also. That each of them speak in turn, answer all questions, but on their own terms, in their own time.
‘I wanted to be a writer,’ Ivan said.
‘Like Stephen King or Ray Bradbury?’ Reggie asked, genuinely interested. That was the kind of stuff he read, and to think he was next to someone who could have been like them was almost as exciting as being next to a killer.
‘Like Mark Twain or Hemingway,’ Ivan said. ‘I wanted to write things to challenge the country. I wanted people to see the beauty and the ugliness of it.’
‘What happened?’ Reggie asked. ‘Why didn’t you write?’
‘Oh, I wrote,’ said Ivan. ‘I wrote for hours on end in my room. With the door closed and the world shut out I wrote like crazy.
‘But then one day my father walked in without knocking. I usually pretended to be doing homework when I was writing, but he came in too quickly for me to hide my stories and pick up a textbook.
‘“What is this?” he said and picked up a notebook with some of my stories in it. He flipped through it, reading some, flipping ahead, reading more. He looked from me to the notebook and back again. “What is this shit?” he said and threw my notebook across the room.
‘He searched my room for more of my stories,’ Ivan said. ‘He tore through the drawers of my desk. He dug through the piles of stuff in my closet. He reached under my bed and pulled out what he found.
‘All in all there must have been a dozen notebooks,’ Ivan said. ‘He bundled them in his arms and took them to the living room. He threw them in the fireplace and squirted lighter fluid on them, struck a match, and as I watched, horrified, he set them on fire.’
‘That sucks,’ Reggie said.
‘All my dreams,’ Ivan continued, hardly missing a beat, as if Reggie hadn’t spoken at all, ‘up in smoke. Years of ideas gone in a flash, just like that,’ he said and punctuated it with a snap of his fingers.
‘I never tried writing again after that,’ he said. ‘I never bought another notebook for any purpose but school notes. It was hard at first, but I eventually learned not to even think my stories in my head. I realized that I wasn’t meant for writing. Not in this life, not in this world.’
Neither of them said anything for a time after that. Crickets and cicadas made their ticking and clicking music, and somewhere far away a night bird warbled. High above in the great black sky a shooting star streaked by in an arc, and Reggie thought maybe it carried with it the long-gone dreams of a boy turned killer.
‘But it’s quite all right,’ said the killer. ‘I eventually found something that suited me better.’
2.
Reggie crept thief-like into the house and up the stairs to his room. Again the house seemed to accommodate his movements so that he reached his destination without sound or disturbance. With the door shut and locked he started to peel his clothes off.
He didn’t stop with his jeans and shirt, though. As he’d done only a time or two before, he stripped completely naked and slid the window open an inch before climbing into bed.
The feel of the sheets and the night breeze against his bare body did something strange. The tingling caress of sensations calmed him. It made him hyper aware when so often in months prior he’d felt numb.
When his mind haunted him, turning even his dreams against him, the calming of his body often helped still the rest of him. His troubled thoughts slowly quieted like the serene waters of the ocean after a great storm.
And in this sudden tranquillity it was as if things made sense. As if things had a purpose. What it was, this meaning, he couldn’t exactly interpret or understand. It was as of something just out of reach, no matter how he stretched for it.
At these times he thought if he could just get things quiet enough, and just listen hard enough, he might hear something. Someone talking maybe, or words without a voice, but a message, nonetheless. In these fathomless words would be something he needed to hear. Something he desperately needed to know.
But he never heard it.
Eventually sleep would come. Sometimes there would be dre
ams and sometimes there wouldn’t. And, for a time, that was all there was.
3.
The distant baying of hounds woke Reggie up early. The digital clock on the stand near his bed read 6:14 a.m. Then he thought of Ivan telling him he had to find out if he could get around. Reggie had known the implication of those words – the killer had to know if he was physically capable of making a quick escape.
He got up, dressed quickly, and opening his bedroom door slowly, started downstairs. His mom was at the kitchen table, nursing a steaming cup of coffee. She was still in her bathrobe. She greeted him with a weak smile. She seemed subdued, and though this made Reggie a little sad, it made him a little happy too.
That he had beaten her down for a change. And, unlike his mom, he hadn’t had to slap anyone. Reggie recalled Ivan’s words about emotional suffering being as bad as physical or worse, and just like that his mom’s demeanour didn’t seem like such a triumph after all.
‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ she said.
He had no choice but to stop and acknowledge her. The hounds sounded again, far away but for some reason more urgent in their distance.
‘Me too,’ he said, stepping up to her, leaning over and giving her a hug.
‘Want breakfast?’ she asked, patting his arm.
‘I’m not hungry right now,’ he said, noting the tone of hope in her voice. She really was sorry, and wanted to fix things. ‘I’m going outside for a bit. I’ll eat later.’
‘Okay,’ was all she said – no arguing, no questioning – and then Reggie was moving away from her and to the door.
Opening the door, stepping outside, he had the brief urge to turn around and ask for breakfast after all. He thought of sitting at the table with her, the two of them eating and talking. Maybe they’d even find a reason to smile.
Then he was out in the yard, and the door shut behind him.
4.
Ivan was coming down the ladder even as Reggie came jogging up.
‘You hear that?’ he asked, and Reggie nodded.
The dogs were still a ways off, their barks and yelps distant. But still too close.
The killer still wore only his jacket and pants, bare chest and bandage showing. But he carried his bloodied shirt under one arm. He handed it over to Reggie. Reggie saw that it was wet with fresh blood and suppurated discharge.
‘It was only a matter of time,’ the killer said. ‘But I have a plan.’
Reggie looked down at the bloodied shirt. He tried holding it by the clean areas, but two fingers of his right hand were touching the fabric in sticky places. The wetness was warm and thick.
‘You go on west with that,’ the killer said. ‘Smear it on trees and the ground every so often. Take it about a mile or so away from your house,’ he said, buttoning up his jacket as he spoke. ‘I’ll go east, also about a mile. I saw a campground out that way and a stream. I’ll try to lose my scent there. I’ll clean myself up, get fresh clothes.’
Reggie was nodding, even as a heavy feeling settled in his stomach.
He didn’t want Ivan to go.
‘Will I see you again?’ he asked, not liking the whiny note in his voice.
People know you’re weak.
He didn’t want to be weak around Ivan.
Ivan looked down at him. His blue eyes seemed afire.
‘I’m not well enough to be on my own,’ the killer said. ‘I shouldn’t even be doing this, but we’ve got to try. Now bloodhounds aren’t as easy to fool as they make it seem in movies. All we’re doing is giving them three trails to follow, instead of one.’
Ivan pointed out into the woods in the general direction of where Reggie had found him just two days ago.
‘Where I came from, leading here,’ he said. ‘Where you’re going,’ he said, pointing west into the woods. ‘And where I’m going,’ he said, now pointing east. ‘I’m hoping that a small town like Payne doesn’t have a lot of manpower. I’m hoping that the dogs take the freshest track, either mine or yours, and not the original leading them here.’
He turned back to Reggie. He smiled, but his face was solemn.
Though flushed red in the cheeks by adrenaline and action, beneath the eyes his flesh was pale. He seemed a ghost; not fully there.
‘It might work,’ he said. ‘It might not.’
He kneeled down so that he was eye level with Reggie. He groaned with the effort.
‘If it does,’ he said, ‘I’ll be back.’
He held out his hand. Reggie took it. They shook on it as if sealing another deal between them; one, two, three pumps up and down.
‘We’re friends,’ Ivan said.
‘Friends,’ Reggie echoed.
And then he was nudging Reggie west, standing, groaning again, holding his side, and walking steady and fast eastward. Reggie watched him move into the distance, weaving among the trees. In moments, the man was lost from sight through the foliage wall.
Reggie turned westward, holding the bloody shirt.
The hounds bayed in the distance, far, but not far enough.
Reggie started running.
***
The world flew past him, like a rolling stage backdrop giving the illusion of speed. His feet only tapped the earth in brief and tentative touches, as if at any moment he’d leave it altogether and lift off in flight.
Here and there he skidded to a stop to rub the bloody shirt on a fir or on a boulder or a fallen branch or the ground itself. Pine needles and leaves and bits of grit stuck to the red stained shirt like bugs to fly strips.
He charged uphill and downhill, leaping over stones and stumps. He ducked low-hanging limbs and weaved between thick trunks like a receiver on the field, in zone in sight.
The hounds were faint and then gradually louder, coming closer. He tried moving opposite the direction he thought they were coming from. He spotted a rocky cliff face maybe fifty feet high and steered towards it.
There was a natural indentation in the face about halfway up, not quite a cave but deep enough to hide a man. The climb was steep but manageable. Reggie boosted himself up the first stone and started up. Little avalanches fell beneath his heels.
It took him five minutes to reach the alcove. He smeared the shirt on the rocks on his way up. He crawled into the niche as far as he could go. Pushing the shirt into a corner, he used his hands as shovels and scooped dirt on top of it.
Then he started back down, once sliding and banging his right knee smartly. He jumped the last five feet, landing hard. He backed up and looked up again at the recess where he’d put the shirt.
It was just high enough that you couldn’t see all the way into it. The police would have to climb up there to see inside.
Proud of his work, Reggie turned and ran home. The hounds grew louder behind him, then quieted. He’d done all he could, and hoped it was enough.
He wanted to see his friend again.
5.
Time passed slowly that day. As if the laws of nature had changed and there were temporal ramifications. Astral realignments shifted the very nature of space and time and stretched the minutes into little eternities.
Reggie sat on the porch pretending to read, but really sitting as a spectator in an audience waiting to see what would happen. He waited to see police cars turning and screeching into their driveway. Ivan would be handcuffed in the back seat of one, and the officers would rush up to arrest Reggie too. They’d drag him to the station and interrogate him. Slap him around and tell him to confess.
In the bright lights of the interrogation room he’d break, cry, and beg for mercy. Instead, he’d get a ten to twenty stretch with a big black cellmate that would make Reggie his little white bitch.
Or Ivan would come limping out of the woods and the two of them would think that they’d done it. They’d fooled the police and their dogs. But then they’d come out of the woods behind Ivan – or come screeching up the drive in SWAT vans – and there’d be a big shoot-out, bullets flying everywhere. Whizzing through the ai
r and shattering glass and walls and flesh and bone, leaving Ivan bullet-riddled on the ground, dying. Maybe Reggie or his mom or both of them would be hit too, caught in the crossfire, their blood pouring into the dirt of the earth also.
All three of them dying and bleeding out into the dirt.
Or Ivan would come running out and he really had fooled the trackers. And he’d stop at the porch and ask Reggie to come with him. They’d go and find another place. Reggie would be sad to leave home but Ivan would tell him they’d find another. Off into the world they’d run to disappear and start again.
He’d learn the ways of Ivan’s trade.
He’d learn to fire other guns. He’d learn how to fight. He’d go to far-off places and learn new things. He’d start a new life and the old one would fade away. So that, like Ivan, he would one day look back and wonder at the boy he had been and doubt if the memories were real.
But an hour passed and that was long enough of the pretending to read and the daydreaming. He had to get up and move. Reggie went back in the house, sat on the sofa, and turned the television on. His mom wasn’t in sight but he could hear her roaming about upstairs in her room.
He switched to the local Tucson news station. He sat through stories of flu outbreaks and sports scores and a mayor’s sex scandal, waiting to see Ivan’s face on the screen, or his own. Because somehow the police had found out he’d been harbouring the fugitive and now they were coming after him, alerting the country, slapping his fourteen-year-old face on every screen across the nation.
Nothing.
It was as if it wasn’t happening. Or as if it was happening in a subworld, an offshoot of reality that didn’t quite matter, passing under the radar of everyday concern.
Then his mom came downstairs and walked into the room, setting down a cardboard box on the table in front of him. The flaps were shut and he couldn’t see what was in it. She was dressed, finally, in jeans and a blouse.
Are You Afraid of the Dark? Page 7