The Guilt We Carry

by Samuel W. Gailey

  Alice smiled. “Great. So, I’m kinda like a tomato plant, and you’re waiting for me to die?”

  Elton thought about this for a moment. “Yeah. Maybe that wasn’t the best analogy in the world.”

  “You don’t have any kids, do you?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Kinda. Parents don’t usually like to wait for answers and explanations.”

  “Good to know. If I ever decide to have kids one day.”

  Alice watched him reel in his line, then recast once again. She inspected his profile, his soft chin and bulbous nose, his balding head, the way he kept wetting his lips—he looked like a cartoon character. She thought that Elton was probably around her grandfather’s age, maybe a few years younger, but there was something just a little different about the man.

  “Who’s that man in all your pictures? Your brother?”

  Elton refrained from smiling the best he could. Shook his head a few times. “In some ways he was like a brother, but he was much more than that. Ben was my very best friend.”

  Alice looked away. A little uncomfortable as she slowly realized what Elton was implying. “Oh.”

  Elton laughed. Patted her knee.

  “He looks nice.”

  “He was. Tamed the hellfire out of me.”

  “He’s gone?”

  “Yep. Well before his time.”

  Something across the river spooked the crows and they all took flight in unison. They screeched and flapped right over the heads of the both of them.

  “Did Ben like to fish?” Alice asked.

  “He did. Taught me the joy of fishing. Also taught me that it wasn’t necessarily what you caught or how many you reeled in. It was really about being in the moment, alone with your thoughts, enjoying the time you were in. You and the river. Nothing else mattering. Took me a good, long while before I got it, but when I did, I understood what Ben meant.”

  Alice stared over at the empty pail, noticeably absent of a single fish. “Was he a better fisherman than you?”

  Elton glanced down at his empty pail as well. “Hell. That and just about everything else.”

  “What happened to him?”

  He patted her again. “For someone that doesn’t really take a shine to answering questions, you sure ask a lot of them.”

  “It’s called deflection.”

  “Ah. Deflection. You’re pretty damn good at it.”

  “It’s a coping mechanism.”

  “Too many fancy words. I’m not even gonna ask.”

  She played with the seam of her pajamas. “You miss him?”

  “You miss your folks, or whoever you left behind?”

  Alice nodded without thinking about it. “Yeah.”

  “Well, at least you got the choice if you want to see them again.”

  She grinned over at the old man—she knew what he was trying to do. “So that’s why you fish?”

  He gave her a wink. “So that’s why I fish.”

  A solid gust of wind swept up off the river and tugged at Alice’s hair, sending it to and fro. Elton turned his attention up to the sky and noticed that the clouds were growing darker and inching their way closer.

  “Looks like round two’s headed this way. Pack it up here pretty shortly.”

  They both watched the clouds churn and fold in amongst themselves for a minute or so, then a flash of lightning cracked the sky, and few seconds after that, a low boom shook their seats.

  “Is it okay if I stay here? For a few days. Until I can figure some stuff out?” Alice asked.

  Elton kept his eyes cast toward the sky. Thought about it for a moment. “Well, if I said no, would you take off running again into the wild blue yonder?”

  “I wouldn’t have much of a choice.”

  “Figured as much.” Elton wet his lips. Fingered his fishing line. “A few days then. I sure wish you’d call your folks though, but I’m guessing you won’t.” He set his empty coffee mug down on the deck.

  “Get you another cup?” Alice asked.

  “That’d be fine.”

  Alice stood and grabbed his mug. “I don’t know how exactly to thank you.”

  “I do. If you’re gonna stay on here with me for a while, you gotta earn your keep. After you fetch me a cup of coffee, go on and get yourself dressed. We’ve got work to do. Your clothes are washed and folded on the sofa in the living room.”

  “I have to help you kill rats?”

  “In my profession, we prefer to say exterminate.”

  “Do they end up dead?”

  “That they do.”

  Alice smiled, then held out his coffee mug. “Cream and sugar?”

  “Yep. Three scoops of sugar. And a big splash of cream.”

  “Three scoops?”

  “Three big scoops. Don’t be stingy.”

  “That’s not good for you, you know.”

  “Either is tampering with a man’s cup of coffee.”

  Alice watched him reel back in his fishing line, then went into the kitchen to fetch the old man a fresh mug of coffee.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  FEBRUARY 2011

  THE ONLY REASON that Delilah had gotten off the bus in the first place was because she wanted to get rid of the stupid gun. Throw it away and never see it again. It was bad luck. She probably should have tossed it sooner, but she had been too scared, too frantic, too confused to think straight.

  After she got off the bus, she considered stashing the gun in a trash can in the women’s public bathroom, but that seemed like an obvious place for it to be discovered. A janitor would probably find it and turn it over to the police with her fingerprints all over the gun. So she walked out of the bus terminal and kept searching for a place to ditch it.

  The gun belonged to Leon. He liked guns. He had a bunch of them. One in his truck, one under the bed, another in his toolbox. She hadn’t known he kept one in the front closet. She had been looking for a pack of cigarettes in one of his jacket pockets yesterday morning but found the 9-millimeter pistol instead. Leon was sprawled out on the couch, all messed up. He’d been drinking rum the entire night, passed out for a few hours, then started up again right after sunrise. He was all drunk and nasty, and when he leered at her, Delilah knew what he had in mind. He had raped her a few times before. The first time, six months ago. Snuck into her bedroom late one night, put his hand over her mouth, and whispered that he would kill her if she screamed. He ripped her panties right off and forced himself inside. She’d never experienced pain like that before. It was her first time. But she stayed quiet. She knew he would do as he said he would do. He’d kill her. Especially when he was all messed up.

  He didn’t touch her for a few weeks after that. Wouldn’t even look at her. Delilah thought that maybe he didn’t remember what he did. Then it happened again when she was in the shower. He yanked her out of the tub, bent her over the toilet, and took her, grunting like some kind of wild animal. Delilah got back in the shower that was still running after he finished, curled up into a ball, and cried until her mama banged on the door, yelling at her to get her ass out of there and cook something for breakfast.

  It happened more often after that. A half-dozen times at least. And somehow, Leon always caught her by surprise. The last time, she knew that her mama was in the next room, drunk but not drunk enough to be oblivious. Her mama sat right at the kitchen table smoking her Newports, drinking her wine, and listening to her oldest baby get raped by the man she couldn’t satisfy anymore.

  So, as soon as Delilah found the pistol, she knew she was going to use it on Leon.

  An alley ran along the backside of the Greyhound station, and it had three dumpsters filled with cardboard boxes and bags of trash from a Chinese restaurant and a pizza place. Delilah opened a black trash bag filled with chicken fat, moldy noodles, and dozens of cigarette butts, and stuck the gun into the bag. She tried to let it go. Tried to let it fall from her hand, but she couldn’t. The 9-millimeter pistol wouldn’t drop out of he
r hand yet. Still part of her. Its use perhaps not yet complete.

  She stood there for another few moments, hand still shoved in the pile of trash. Then she made her decision. Stuffed the gun back into her purse and moved in the opposite direction of the bus station. Down the alleyway and onto a street that ran through downtown Goldsboro.

  Delilah knew the bus driver said fifteen minutes, and he looked like the kind of guy that took pride in being punctual. The bus would be gone by now. Probably better off that way.

  Alice didn’t want her around anymore. She made that pretty clear. And why should she? Why should she take on someone else’s problem?

  Delilah started thinking about poor little Dwayne. Who would take care of him now? Not her mama, that much was for sure. If Dwayne got taken in by the State and placed in a decent foster home, he’d be better off. Three meals a day. A real bed to sleep in. Medicine if he got sick.

  She walked by a sprawling park. More grass than she had ever seen, with baseball fields, swings and slides, and a box of sand for kids to dig and run around in. A group of girls played soccer. They looked like they were twelve or thirteen, all wearing nice uniforms with matching sneakers. Their hair pulled back into perfect little ponytails. Golden hair. Delilah had never seen so many white kids.

  Along the sideline of the soccer field, parents sat in lawn chairs with coolers at their feet, drinking sodas and snacking on homemade sandwiches. Moms and dads talked and laughed under the midday sun. Little brothers and sisters ran around, screaming, playing tag and rolling around in the fresh-cut grass.

  Everybody seemed so damn happy. So damn normal. Delilah had never played a team sport. She always had to come home after school to help take care of Dwayne. She couldn’t remember her mama ever taking her and her brothers to a park, either.

  Delilah sat down on the soft green grass in the park and watched the white girls kicking the ball around, making it look so easy. She didn’t understand all the rules of soccer, but knew you were supposed to try and kick the ball into the net. Seemed kind of boring to her, really. But watching all the soccer girls running around made her sad that all these kids got to go home every night to a real house, with real parents that worked jobs, and that cared enough to come out to a park and watch them play a stupid game of soccer. She would never be able to finish school now. Never be able to make something of herself and be everything her mama wasn’t.

  “What the hell?”

  Delilah looked up and saw Alice standing over her. She looked all pissed off, and sweaty around the face. Her neck looked terrible, all red and swollen.

  Alice glared down at her and dropped her duffel bag onto the ground. “Bus is gone, thank you very much. We’re stuck here.”

  Delilah simply nodded, then turned her attention back toward the field and continued to watch the girls play soccer for another minute. “I’d like to learn how to play one day. Bet I’d be pretty good at it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  SINCLAIR STARED OVER at Phillip—the big man squeezed in behind the wheel of the Grand Marquis looking as if a crowbar would be required to extract him. The top of Phillip’s head grazed the roof of the car, his knees pressed up under the steering wheel with no space to spare, his left shoulder smashed against the tinted window. If they were to have a head-on collision and the airbags deployed, there would be little room for them to inflate.

  Then, he glanced down at Phillip’s feet, so easily in command of the gas and brake pedals, and his massive hands gripping the wheel with ease. Driving a motor vehicle was nothing more than a tedious task that most adults performed on a daily basis. After the age of sixteen, normal people sat behind the wheel of an automobile for hours on end, driving to and from work, embarking on family vacations, going wherever and whenever they saw fit to do so. Driving a vehicle was as automatic as taking a shower in the morning—simply something that needed to be done. But Sinclair had never sat behind the wheel of an automobile with the exception of a motorized cart—a ride for small children—at Knoebels Amusement Resort in Elysburg, Pennsylvania. Sure, cars could easily be retrofitted with pedal extensions and modified seats installed that would allow someone short of stature the ability to operate an automobile safely. Expense wasn’t an issue. Not at all. The real cost came in the form of humiliation. He felt as if he would resemble the ten-year-old child he had been when he drove the motorized car at Knoebels Amusement Resort.

  After the age of thirteen or fourteen, Sinclair came to accept his condition—nothing could be done about his circumstance at that point. Too late for that. Despite the playground taunts he endured for many years as a child, it only made him stronger and more determined. Whereas the other children around him grew bigger and taller every month, Sinclair focused on his mounting intelligence. As his classmates sprouted, blossoming into normal heights, Sinclair nurtured his mind, consuming books and information as if they were water and air.

  The derivation for his stunted stature was an endocrine disorder, a rare disease in children that results in little or no growth hormone if not treated proactively. His pituitary gland did not produce the necessary hormone that would have enabled him to grow at an average rate. At the age of twelve years old, he merely stopped growing. His parents waited for nature to take its course—assumed that he would catch up to other children—but a growth spurt never happened. They waited too long. Perhaps if his parents had taken him in for treatment, doctors would have been able to stimulate the growth hormone or prescribe replacement therapy. But, for whatever reason, they did not.

  His parents were psychologists—both at the top of their field and well respected by their peers. They didn’t seem like the type of people who would want to start a family in the first place, since children would interfere with their professional pursuits. But they had conceived him, late in life, in their forties. He was an only child, and Sinclair always assumed that his birth was a mistake.

  When the doctors informed them that their son had stopped growing, his parents took this information in stride. If anything, both his mother and father were fascinated by their son’s limited size. Their education, their profession, their passion, was the study of the human mind. His parents were far more interested in analyzing the brain than the machinations of the body. They seemed to accept, even embrace, their son’s physical limitations, focusing instead on his intellectual potential, which they believed would be greater than average due to his bodily deficits. They treated him like a human case study, pushing him to challenge himself, forcing him to compensate for his growth retardation, and all the while observing him like a guinea pig. He was not allowed to participate in frivolous activities like organized team sports or general rough-housing or playing outdoors. They rarely let him watch television. Silly board games that did not promote intellectual growth were prohibited. Instead, discussions of substance became a daily activity. His parents were relentless. Demanding. Their son had the benefit of their psychological skills and influence, and they knew he was destined for greatness. Sinclair hated them for what they did and didn’t do.

  He knew that if his parents were still living today, they would be mortified by the occupation he chose. They would wonder how their only son—educated in an Ivy League school and groomed to accomplish anything—could turn his back to become someone important and a valuable member of society. A doctor. A scientist. Maybe even a politician. But Sinclair knew that even if he dedicated himself to work in one of those fields, he would never be truly respected or accepted. He would be marginalized due to his size and it would be the very first thing his peers would see and judge—a small man. Additionally, all those professions lacked one specific thing that he had come to crave—danger. Sinclair embraced and thrived on living in the element of danger. It was what fed his soul. His parents would never understand that. Most people could not.

  He glanced out the window, watching the blur of trees whip past on both sides of the I-95. Phillip guided the Grand Marquis along the freeway, maintaining a speed of
seventy miles per hour.

  “Rather remote, are we not?” Sinclair observed.

  “Uh-huh,” Phillip answered.

  Sinclair pointed to an approaching exit sign. “This should do fine. Pull off here, please.”

  Phillip activated the blinker, and after taking the next off-ramp, they drove east for some time, delving deeper and deeper into the rolling countryside. Occasionally, they passed a random farmhouse or trailer set right off the road.

  Sinclair lit a cigarette and kept his eyes cast out the windshield. “Always been a curiosity to me.” He pointed to yet another trailer set up on cinderblocks just thirty feet off the country road. “If one chooses to live out here, in the absolute middle of nowhere, why would you want to live right next to the road? I would think if I decided to reside away from the city, far from the hustle and bustle, and I had all this countryside to live in, that I would build a home with a view of my surroundings. When I look out the window, I would want to see birds and trees and the mountainside. Instead, people like that decide to live in a tin box, mere feet from the road, with a view that leaves much to be desired. Why do you think that they would do that, Phillip?”

  The big man shrugged.

  “I’m sure you must have some thoughts on the matter. Humor me.”

  Phillip stared into the rearview mirror, scrutinizing the shrinking trailer behind them before they turned a corner and were surrounded on both sides by nothing more than trees and high-standing kudzu. “Dunno. Maybe they like it. To live close to the road.”

  “So you think it’s a matter of choice? Is that it?”

  Again, the big man shrugged, but then followed up with a thought. “Maybe they don’t care about a view. Or maybe it’s all they can afford and they don’t have any other choice. Some people don’t have choices. They get what they get.”

  Sinclair stared over at Phillip, quietly amused by the big man’s observations. Generally, his sentences were restricted to two or three one-syllable words. “I guess I never considered putting it into those kinds of terms.” He gestured out the window with his cigarette. “What about you? Would you live out here? In the middle of nowhere?”