His Father's Son

by Bentley Little

  Only . . .

  Only that wasn’t the real reason he was thinking along these lines, was it? The truth was that no one was after him, no one was suspicious, no one was on his trail. So he didn’t actually have to worry about being caught, did he?

  No.

  He just wanted to do it again.

  He looked down at his hands. They were clenched into fists, and he forced himself to open them. He glanced toward the doorway of the bedroom, as black and forbidding as a tomb. Within the closet there, clean and shiny, was the machete, as well as his father’s other weapons. The weapons were the only things that were not explained in this new narrative. Why had his dad bought the blades to begin with, and why had he kept them all those years? It was a question that would never be answered. They could have been nothing more than souvenirs . . . or he could have had them in his possession because he secretly wished to do exactly what his son had done.

  Steve closed his eyes so tightly they hurt. He had to stop thinking this way. He needed to put all that behind him. He had gotten offtrack. He had made . . . mistakes. But the past was the past, and while he couldn’t change what had already happened, he could change what would happen in the days and months and years to come. The future was open, and it was up to him to make sure that he acted differently from here on in.

  The killing was over.

  Forever.

  It had to be.

  It had to be.

  Thirty-six

  I Am God

  I am God. I am sitting here in the back of the classroom, pretending to be a sixth-grade student, pretending to listen to Mrs. Keefe’s boring lecture on Christopher Columbus. Every so often, Mrs. Keefe will stare at me because I pretended to miss a question about Columbus when she asked me, and now she thinks I didn’t read the chapter in the book.

  She doesn’t realize that I am God.

  No one realizes that I am God. I have been here only a few moments, but I have created memories of Steve Blye, the boy I am pretending to be, in everyone’s minds. Jason Bevans, sitting next to me, thinks that I am his best friend. He thinks we grew up together. He thinks that I live three houses away from him and that I have always lived three houses away from him. He thinks my sister is going out with his brother. He thinks our dads carpool to work each morning.

  But I have planted all of this in his brain. I have no sister. I have no dad. I do not live three houses down from him and never have.

  I like making up these kinds of stories. It gets boring being God. I have to amuse myself somehow. So I create these lives and make everyone believe I am a normal person. When I am through, when I get bored, when I have had my fun, I erase these memories and no one ever knows that I have been there.

  Now Mrs. Keefe is calling on me. She is picking on me because I pretended not to know the last question. She could have called on anyone else in the class, any of the other thirty-one students, but instead she has chosen to call on me.

  That is why I am pretending to be dumb. I want to see how people treat those less fortunate than themselves.

  She is staring at me, waiting for me to answer. I will pretend that I was not paying attention.

  “What?” I ask.

  The class laughs.

  Mrs. Keefe silences them with a look. “Which was the first of Columbus’s ships to return to Spain?” she asks.

  I look at her blankly.

  “You don’t know, do you, Steven?”

  I shake my head.

  “For that, you will—”

  I do not let her finish the sentence. With one quick bolt of my almighty power, I fry her on the spot. Her body is instantly burned to a crisp. Her arm, pointed toward me, is whittled down to a blackened stick and falls onto the floor. Nothing is left of her but a charred skeleton, and as the class watches, I turn the skeleton into a life-sized Gumby doll.

  Most of the class is amazed. They stare, not sure how to react. Then they start clapping. I am their hero. No longer will they have to obey her rules. Now I am the boss. My first rule? No math. Math is abolished. And no history. History is boring and stupid.

  Now the students are putting me on their shoulders and parading me around the room. They still do not know that I am God, but they know I have powers beyond their wildest imaginings. I can do whatever I want.

  But not all of the kids are happy.

  Will Nichols is staring at me with jealous hatred. I have planted the memory in his mind that I broke his thermos last year and that he beat me up for it and that I told my dad and my dad called the principal and Will had to stay after school for two weeks. He thinks he has hated me ever since, even though none of those things ever happened. Now he is jealous of what I did to Mrs. Keefe.

  I look at him, and I make his clothes disappear. He is standing in the middle of the class naked, and now all the girls are staring at him and laughing. He tries to run away, but I make sure he cannot move his legs. He tries to cover himself with his hands, but his hands will not work. He has to stand there and take it while everyone points and stares and laughs at him.

  But not everyone is laughing. Will’s friend Lyman McColl is watching me. He wants to help Will, but he is afraid to do so. He is afraid of me. He does not know the extent of my powers, though. He does not know that I can read his mind, that I know exactly what he is thinking.

  I turn him into a cherry Popsicle, and he melts into a sticky red puddle on the floor.

  I turn his friend Dennis Merrick into a fly that gets caught in the puddle and drowns.

  Now they really feel my wrath. The wrath of God! They are running in fear, trying to get out the door, but I am mowing them down. Jessica Harrison’s feet get stuck to the floor, and as she sprints toward the door, her legs are jerked from their sockets. Her feet and legs remain cemented to the tile, and her body flies forward, a bloody stump. Gina Suzuki, who thinks I like her and thinks she is too good for me, is stripped naked and starts floating into the air. She is screaming, and I turn her over slowly so that everyone can see her from every angle.

  I make the twins strangle each other.

  Little Joey Lynne, the crippled feeb who was in an accident when he was a baby and has limped ever since, tries to get everyone to calm down, but I make Don and Geoff and Roland kill him, pounding on him with their fists until his weak little heart stops. Then they pull apart his body and start eating.

  But I am beginning to tire of all this. It is becoming too much. I look up at the clock in the front of the room, above Gumby’s unmoving form. Ten minutes have passed since I burned up Mrs. Keefe. That’s enough. I’ve had my fun.

  I turn back time. Instantly, everything is back the way it was. No one will ever know what really happened. I time everything so perfectly that Mrs. Keefe finishes her sentence exactly where she left off.

  “—answer twelve questions instead of six at the end of the chapter tonight.”

  I smile at her, nodding, and she does not understand why I am smiling. She thinks I am crazy.

  She does not realize that I am a kind God, a benevolent God. I could have allowed her to remember what it felt like to be burned alive. I could have turned her into a slug and dissolved her with salt. I could have made her run down the highway and not stop until the muscles snapped in her legs. I could have gone back and given her an unhappy childhood. I could have made sure she was never born. I could have killed her at age ten.

  But I am kind. I have done none of these things.

  Life is short. Eternity is long. Maybe I will continue to be Steve Blye for a lifetime. Maybe I will create a mother and father for myself, a family. As I grow older, I can plant memories of myself in all kinds of people. Why not? It will be fun. What is sixty years to me? I will live here on earth as Steve Blye. Perhaps I will change my name. Perhaps I will become a teacher myself. Who knows? There are millions of things I can do.

  I am God.

  Thirty-seven

  Steve finished editing the booklet and directory for Entertainment Opportunities’
Clown College, and did so without incident, relieved to discover that he no longer seemed to be scared of clowns.

  Jerry Tortaglia was demoted back to his old position after an outside candidate, Milton Hauser, was hired as department head.

  Another short story was accepted by another magazine.

  All was right with the world.

  Deciding that it was finally time to clean out his parents’ house, Steve brought Sherry with him on the next Saturday she had off. He had been going there every other week in order to give the lawn a cursory mowing, but had refrained from going inside, afraid to do so, though he was not sure exactly why. Now the two of them went inside.

  The smell had lessened. Chemical disinfectant was still noticeable, as was a deeper, darker, more fetid scent—

  death

  —but the dominant odor was the mustiness of a long-closed house, and once he and Sherry opened the windows, letting in fresh air, a lot of that dissipated.

  Steve finished opening the kitchen window and looked around. In his mind, the official account of his mother’s death now seemed like the real one. He knew the truth, of course, but that knowledge seemed old and faded, like an opinion he had heard once and immediately discarded. It was her suicide that seemed more authentic, and he could easily see her standing before the sink, swallowing pill after pill, washing them down with water and finally collapsing on the floor.

  He felt a soft hand on his shoulder. Sherry. “Are you okay?” she asked gently.

  He patted her hand and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. He turned. “Let’s start sorting through boxes, see what we can donate.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to have a garage sale first?” she asked him. “You could probably make a couple hundred dollars.”

  “I’m sure,” he told her.

  They went from room to room before finally deciding to start at the back of the house and move forward. Most of the work was done already. His mother had been preparing for her move, and nearly all of her belongings were boxed up. They just needed to sort through the boxes and determine what went where.

  Steve opened the flaps of a carton that had been pushed next to the television.

  “What’s in there?” Sherry asked.

  “Some of my old toys, it looks like.” He was surprised. “I didn’t know she’d kept any of them.”

  “Maybe she was more sentimental than you thought.”

  “Maybe,” he agreed.

  His mother, sentimental? The thought, for some reason, made him sad. He and his mother had never been close, and he wondered now whether that had been his fault rather than hers.

  Sherry reached around him into the box and pulled out a stuffed animal, a yellow Big Bird. “Do you remember this one?”

  “Not really,” he admitted.

  “What about this?” She withdrew a plastic train engine.

  “Yeah.” He took it from her, smiling wistfully. “That was my favorite toy when I was in kindergarten.” He turned the object over in his hands, examining it, then put it back into the box along with the Big Bird. He folded the cardboard flaps beneath one another to seal the carton. He didn’t want to take a trip down memory lane right now. It was just too depressing.

  “You know, until a few months ago, I still had my favorite stuffed animal, a little puppy I named Boo. I kept him in a box in my closet, but I found that he’d started to get moldy for some reason. I guess moisture had gotten in there somehow.”

  Steve’s antennae went up. He knew where this was going. “So you threw him away,” he said, thinking about the puppy in the wastepaper basket and the collar in the suitcase with the tag that said, “Boo.”

  She nodded. “I had to.”

  He tried to recall what he’d seen in her bathroom trash can. A small brown animal with an awkwardly cocked head and an upturned ear. He’d just assumed it was real—but he knew now that it hadn’t been. Sherry had never killed any dog. How could he possibly have thought she would do such a thing? That, too, had been a misinterpretation, a misreading of the facts based on his own skewed perception.

  It was him. It was all him.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, putting a hand on his arm.

  He nodded. “Let’s sort through these boxes.”

  It was all him.

  Yes. It was all him. What did that mean, though? Was that automatically bad? Did it make his actions any less valid because he had done something his father had not? He’d been thinking about that quite a bit lately. He’d originally felt good about what he had done—

  the people he had killed

  —because he’d believed he was doing what his father would have wanted. He’d thought that his old man would probably have been proud of him. But the truth was that he didn’t need anyone’s approval. His father had been a small man, a weak man, and Steve could not imagine why he had ever cared what his dad thought, why he had ever let the opinions and put-downs of that worthless prick get to him. His father had probably wished he were half the man Steve really was, and just because his actions had no outside support didn’t mean they weren’t valid. The people he had killed deserved to be killed. He had done the right thing, whether anyone else realized it or not.

  No.

  Murder was never the right thing. It was always wrong.

  His head hurt. He concentrated on the job in front of him, and he and Sherry finished sorting through the first pile of boxes. “These are all donation items,” he said.

  “Even your toys?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t—”

  “No.”

  They started carrying boxes out to the car. A little Hispanic boy stood on the sidewalk behind the vehicle, staring dumbly at them. “Scoot over, kid,” Steve told him.

  The boy spit at him. “Pendejo!” he yelled. “Pendejo!”

  Steve smiled to himself as he unlocked and opened the trunk, pushing his box to the back. The little fucker didn’t realize how lucky he was that Sherry was here right now. Because if she hadn’t been, he would have grabbed that little shit’s neck and snapped it like a twig. He could have dispatched the boy in less time than it took to take Sherry’s box from her hands and push it next to his own.

  But he wasn’t going to do that. He was through; he was done; he was out. And it wasn’t going to be hard; it was going to be easy. He didn’t even want to kill anyone anymore, so he would have no problem controlling himself. And probably, after a while, he wouldn’t even think about it. It would be a faint memory from the dim and distant past, kind of like it had been for his father after—

  Steve shook his head to clear it. No. His father had never done anything like this. That was all a . . . a . . . a misunderstanding, a misreading of the situation.

  He needed to remember that.

  “Let’s go get the rest of those,” he said. “I think we can probably fit a few more into the backseat, so if you want to start looking through some of those boxes in the bedroom while I carry the other ones out . . .”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” she said. “I probably shouldn’t be lifting too much.”

  Steve looked at her. “Why?”

  “Because I’m pregnant,” she announced.

  She was nervous as she said it, but excited, happy, and he could tell from the expression on her face that she was unsure whether this was the right time or the right way to tell him. Reassuringly, he smiled. “That’s great!” he said, though he was not really sure if it was. “I guess we should probably start figuring out a wedding date, huh?”

  “Oh, Steve!” She hugged him tightly, leaned up to kiss him. When she looked at him, there were tears in her eyes.

  He put a finger to her lips. “I know this was an accident, but . . . this is what you want, right?”

  “I didn’t know it was, but it is,” Sherry said. “In fact, I’d like to have two children. A boy and a girl.”

  “That would be nice,” he agreed.

  She hugged him again, squeezing hard. “Wou
ldn’t it!”

  Steve nodded. For some reason, he could not help thinking of the girl in Flagstaff, the girl on the swing whose neck had snapped so easily. He realized that his hands were clenched into fists, and he opened them.

  “I love you so much,” Sherry said.

  “I love you too,” he told her. “I love you too.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Born in Arizona shortly after his mother attended the world premiere of Psycho, Bentley Little is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of numerous previous novels and The Collection, a book of short stories. He has worked as a technical writer, reporter/photographer, library assistant, salesclerk, phone book deliveryman, video arcade attendant, newspaper deliveryman, furniture mover and rodeo gatekeeper. The son of a Russian artist and an American educator, he and his Chinese wife were married by the justice of the peace in Tombstone, Arizona.

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  One

  Two - Leaving New Mexico

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine - The Hand of God

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen - After the Date

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen - The Promise

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two - Friends

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven - Writing Habits

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one - Philip Glass Is the Lord of the Flies

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six - I Am God

  Thirty-seven

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR