by Gregory Ashe
Under my fingers, the brass was cold. I tightened my grip. On the phone, Dad had told Lawayne that he was out of town. And Lawayne had believed him probably because very few people lied to Lawayne. But Lawayne didn’t know Bob Eliot the way I knew him. Lawayne hadn’t heard that same pleading, whining, pathetic inflection behind a lifetime of excuses: where had he been for days; what had he been doing; where was all the money; why was he leaving? Lawayne hadn’t heard the lies that came every time. But I had.
And I knew Bob Eliot wasn’t out of town. I knew from the sound of his voice: he was stoned out of his mind. He was home.
For a fraction of a heartbeat, the brass resisted. Locked, part of my brain said. You can just go. You can leave the way you were planning on leaving and not have to do this. But then the knob twisted, and the latch pulled free, and the door lurched a quarter-inch away from the frame. I could leave. I could get in Mr. Spencer’s car and drive. But I’d be running away, and I’d learned a few months ago that once you started running, you never stopped. I pushed open the door; the smell of wet carpet, Kraft Mac & Cheese, and burning plastic puffed out into the night air. I was going to end things with my dad. Tonight. And then I’d leave, but at least I wouldn’t be running away.
My first step inside, though, made my stomach shrivel. I bumped the switch with my elbow, but the lights didn’t click on. The darkness was deep; it swallowed the red flicker from the parking lot and gave nothing back. Now, mixed with the meth-pipe smell that was all too familiar, I noticed something else: shit. I bumped the light switch again, flipping it with my elbow. Still nothing.
A picture was unfolding in my mind: he had gotten high out of his mind. He had knocked over the lamp, broken the bulb, and now he was lying here in the dark. He had shat himself. That was all. It was a simple story. It was an easy story because it had been the same story for so many years.
But I tried the switches again, and still nothing, and a voice in the back of my head warned me that the ambient light from the parking lot was outlining me, and I either needed to close the door or run. That same voice told me to run hard, fast, now.
I shuffled another pace inside the apartment, caught the door, and shut it behind me. The red glow from the Slippers sign outlined the blinds, but otherwise, I stood in darkness. I took a step forward, bringing up one hand, groping the air. The layout of the place I knew just fine: the kitchenette with peeling linoleum on my right, the living room with the vinyl sofa on my left, Dad’s room and the bathroom straight ahead. But I kept my hand up anyway. I was waiting for something to rush at me out of that darkness, and I wanted to grab it when it did.
Another step. The sound of the footfall was different this time, softer. I rocked on my heels, testing my footing, listening again for the subtle change. When I peeled back my toes, the sneaker came away from the carpet with a sticky, ripping sound, like a kid’s sucker that’s been allowed to dry on the carpet. I let my foot back down and tried again. It made the same stiff, tearing noise. A chill ran from my tailbone to my shoulder blades. Behind me, the blinds crinkled metallically, and I spun. I flailed once at the air, a wild, invisible punch, before I got myself under control.
Nothing. And then the blinds crinkled again, the thin metal chiming as it flexed, and something buzzed against the glow filtering between the slats. A fly. My next breath was ragged and wet. Just a damn fly.
I kept moving deeper into the apartment. My right foot made that long, ripping noise every time I pulled away from the carpet, and my mind kept filling in possibilities. Beer, maybe, that had mostly dried and I’d stepped right into it. Or sometimes when he was high, Dad got those Icees, the cherry ones that were bright red. Maybe he’d walked down to the C-Store, bought an Icee, and carried it back. And then he’d stumbled and dropped it. Or he’d balanced it on the back of the sofa and it had fallen. Or he’d just plain forgotten about it, knocked it over when he was stumbling around. My breath was coming faster and faster. I could picture the deep red liquid spreading, shifting, staining. Cherry red. Sure. That’s all, just cherry red Icee.
Rip. My shoe came up again, and I didn’t believe it was anything close to an Icee that I’d stepped in.
My fingers scraped something, and I froze. I moved my hand again. The noise was shrill. Nails on a chalkboard, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek. Under my touch, the door to Dad’s room wasn’t smooth; it was rough, textured. Thin strands of something that had dried. A few sticky spots. I thought of carving pumpkins with Gage, the one time I’d ever done it, and how we’d scraped the guts out onto newspaper, and the fibers had dried in thin strands just like what I was feeling right then. Only it was April, not October. And nobody here had been carving a pumpkin and spreading its guts—oh Christ.
Stomach heaving, I jinked toward the bathroom. My shoulder forced the door open. The corner of the sink caught my hip. I staggered. My knee clipped the toilet, and the blow jostled some of the aches from where Krystal’s vines had clutched at me; my whole leg turned to fire. I hit the towel rack, my fingers knotted in the worn cotton pile, and I grunted. I had to make some kind of noise, and a grunt was better than screaming my damn head off.
The pain helped, though, and took the crest off the nausea. As the throbbing in my leg dwindled, I took a step, and then another, and I found the light switch in the dark. Up. Down. Up. Down. Nothing. And that was bad. My nice little story about Dad shitting himself and breaking a lamp didn’t hold up, not now. Because there wasn’t a lamp in the bathroom. The bathroom had a tiny ceiling fixture with thick, frosted glass, and Dad couldn’t have broken it without climbing on the tank and hammering on the damn thing for half an hour.
Up. Down. One last try. Still just darkness. An even deeper darkness if that was possible. Back here, without even the razor-slices of red fluorescents through the blinds, the darkness was total. The temptation to slip out of my body and into the other side was strong. Really strong. I would have done it just to escape the darkness, but I was still so tired that I couldn’t even open my inner eye.
I took a step back toward Dad’s room. My shoe gummed against the linoleum, and the ripping sound, and the cherry Icee that wasn’t an Icee, and the dried pumpkin guts that weren’t from a pumpkin—I froze. I needed to get out of here. One last showdown with my dad, that wasn’t going to make any difference. One last effort to convince myself I wasn’t a pussy by—what? Punching it out with my old man? Come on. That kind of shit, that didn’t even fly in the movies anymore. So I’d just go. I’d make my way to the front door. I’d walk all the way around the sofa just so I didn’t step in that spilled Icee again, and I’d walk out into the lot, the smell of water and dust and rust and engine oil, and I’d just drive. I could get to Salt Lake tonight, I thought. I wouldn’t even be running, not really. I’d just be keeping people safe.
But I didn’t circle around the sofa. And I didn’t step out into the red wash of the Slippers sign. My fingers rasped along painted wood and found those same thin, dried strands on the door. The latch rattled, and for a moment I thought it was broken, and then I just realized I was shaking so badly that I wasn’t even turning the damn knob. So I yanked on it, and the door sagged inward, and I kicked it the rest of the way. The burnt plastic smell was thicker here, stinging my nose. And the smell of unwashed clothes. And stale air. I raked my arm along the wall, and I caught the switch, and light supernovaed inside the room.
I had to blink and drop my head until my eyes adjusted, but I watched for shadows, movement, anything that would tell me someone was taking advantage of my momentary blindness. There was nothing. After a minute, I glanced up, bracing myself for the worst: blood and gore staining everything, a mutilated body, the signs of torture.
Nothing. The room looked a little emptier than usual—Dad had stripped the sheets, and the mattress showed the stains from bodies where the thin bedding had been oversaturated. The flat cube of pillow was yellow with oil from his hair. No blood. No gore. No severed limbs. My knees sagged
, and I caught myself on the jamb.
But no clothes either; Dad usually had clothes strewn across the floor. His boots were gone. The last time I’d been here, he’d hung a Stetson on the window casing, and that had disappeared too. No dirty socks balled up under the bed. Some of the usual stuff was still there—green and black cans of Monster, Nutrigrain wrappers, the lid from a Western Family cottage cheese container. But that was just trash.
I checked the door. The sticky spots were red and small and had dots with little tails, like they’d struck the wood with force. But there were only a few of those. They could have come from a spilled Icee. They could have. I didn’t know who I was trying to convince, but I was trying hard. And the dried strings I’d touched were just paint drips that had hardened in fine lines—invisible all those times I looked at the door, but revealing themselves when I ran my hand over the wood.
I went back to the front room. With the light behind me, my shadow loomed large on the wall, but I could see what I needed to see. The sofa. The dark red stain on the carpet, and the drying half-prints I had tracked away from it. That didn’t look like spilled Icee no matter how much I tried to tell myself. It wasn’t a very big spot, maybe the size of a silver dollar. You could bleed that much and be just fine. You might bleed that much and not even notice it. But I thought of those red dots with little tails on the door and I thought he’d noticed it, he’d sure as hell noticed it, someone had made sure he was noticing everything.
Taking a deep breath, I moved into the kitchen. The cabinets were open and empty. The table had its usual film of grease and crumbs, but the refrigerator was bare. So. He’d skipped town. Or he’d skipped out on the apartment. He couldn’t make rent. Or his dealer had found him here and knocked him around, and Dad had decided it was smarter to get lost than to get whaled on. So he’d left. He’d forgotten to replace a few lights on the way out, or he’d taken some of the bulbs with him like a real cheapskate, and he’d left. And I’d freaked out because of the dark, just like a little kid. I blew out a breath. I felt jittery and jello-y all at the same time like I might shake myself into a puddle. I took a step toward the door. Good riddance.
But there, tucked to one side of the sofa where I hadn’t been able to see it before, was a duffel. It lay on its side; the loose sole of Dad’s New Balance flopped out. I squatted, pulled the bag open, and saw the shirts, the balled-up socks, a brown plastic bottle that had held my antibiotic prescription with two refills left. Dad had left. He had left. His dealer had shown up, knocked him around, and he’d left.
So why hadn’t he taken the duffel?
A timeline unfolded inside my head: Lawayne called. Dad lied. Then he started packing. He hadn’t been planning on running, otherwise he would have been prepared, and everything about this place looked like the packing had been done in haste. Maybe in a rush of terror. And then what?
That silver dollar of blood. Those red comets on the door. He hadn’t been fast enough. In my mind, I replayed the fight with Krystal. Lawayne had stayed inside. He had, undoubtedly, called for backup because Kyle and Leo and the Crow boy had shown up. But so had Mr. Spencer and Ms. Meehan. And when Ms. Meehan blew the fuck out of Krystal, Kyle and Leo and the Crow boy pulled back. They weren’t expecting resistance, not that level of it.
And they came here. They found Dad as he was trying to clear out.
Did I have proof? No. I couldn’t even open my inner eye to scan for traces of violence. But I knew. In my gut, I knew that was what had happened. Because they wanted Dad to put the hurt on me. They wanted him right where they could get him because they knew a kid like me, a kid who’s had a black hole blown open in the back of his head, that kind of kid just keeps letting Daddy hit him over and over again.
My hands were shaking again, so I hefted the bag. Paper rustled. And Bob Eliot wasn’t a novelist, he wasn’t a poet, he wasn’t a playwright. He wasn’t civic-minded enough to read the newspaper, and he wasn’t literary-minded enough to pick up a book. I’d once heard him telling a neighbor about ripping pages from War and Peace when he’d been squatting in a place on the edge of Cheyenne, no toilet paper, and how bad he’d clogged the toilet. So why did he have paper in the bag?
I carried everything into the bedroom and dumped it on the bed: the floppy-tongued New Balance shoes, the balled-up socks, a baggie of weed—I slipped that into my pocket—a jerk-off mag called Teacher Tits from June 1997, dirty shirts, all of it. And at the bottom, their shape compressed by all the shit that had been piled on top so that they looked like a massive paper airplane, was a stack of documents. I smoothed them out, best I could, on the mattress.
It was my entire life. Copies of official stuff like my birth certificate, school records, vaccinations (a frosted donette had smushed into the stack at this point, smearing chocolate and yellow cake crumbs over the date for my MMR shot), and more serious things, more recent things, like the forms transferring my custody to Dad, the initial Child Protective Services report that Sara’s phone call had instigated, the paperwork putting me in Sara’s care, and the follow-up reports conducted by Ginny, my caseworker, as she continued to visit my dad. The last page was dated the day before, and I wiggled it free from the stack.
Before I could give it my full attention, though, I saw the newspaper. The dramatic part of me wanted to call it yellow, as though it was a hundred years old and crumbling at the edges. It wasn’t. It wasn’t yellow. It wasn’t crumbling. But it had a picture of Mom, and the sight of her, even flattened into black-and-white print, made my heart stop.
I cleared everything off the newspaper. My thumbnail cut a half-moon in the edge of Mom’s picture. She was beautiful. I looked like Dad; Mom always made a point of telling me that. It was just another thing like the vacuum cord. But looking at her from a distance, when she was younger—she couldn’t have been more than twenty in the picture—made me realize I looked like her too. My cheekbones. My eyes. Maybe that was all, but it was so strange that my thumbnail punched right through the old paper.
And it was old. Older than I had first thought. Not yellow with age. Not a hundred years old. But old. I tore my eyes from that picture of Mom—twenty, and beautiful, and hurrying down marble steps with a scarf over her head, very much like an old Hollywood starlet might have run from the press—and found the date. 22 February 1951. Yeah, right. 1951. When Mom was, oh, negative thirty. She hadn’t been born until 1981.
Maybe it was one of those novelty papers. Maybe it was one of those gags people give each other for their birthdays—here’s what happened the day you were born, but a weird variation. Only it wasn’t. The feel of the paper was a dead giveaway. It was authentic. So maybe it was just somebody that looked like Mom. Maybe Dad had stumbled across this paper when he was squatting—on the edge of Cheyenne, maybe, no toilet paper, clogged the damn toilet—and I shook my head and told myself to shut up. Because even if my brain didn’t want to accept it, my heart knew. My gut knew. It was a sick, twisting cramp, but it was confirmation. Whatever I was seeing, it was real. And I had no idea what it meant.
The paper was called the New York Volant, and Dad only had a half sheet of it, torn raggedly along the vertical crease: two pages, one on each side. The front included the masthead, the date, a snappy column about etiquette, a squib lampooning a local politician’s love of cigars, a three-day weather forecast, with each day occupying its own cartoon cell, and three main articles, each about a murder. The back had an ad for Viceroys cigarettes, with a caption by a dentist recommending Viceroys for whiter teeth.
I went back to the murder articles and made myself read slowly.
MURDERESS ESCAPES
WIDOW SLEEPS ON THE STREETS
Miss Lillian Bellis left the courthouse like Aeneas sailing from Troy: she might have escaped, but she left the whole world burning behind her. Miss Bellis didn’t seem to have any concern for what she left behind. When asked about the case, Miss Bellis refused to comment. Miss Bellis came to the attention of good citi
zens everywhere after the brutal stabbing of Mr. Arturo Fabiniani in one of the nightclubs he owned. While today’s case may have decided Miss Bellis’s fate as it regards criminal law, her ill-gotten wealth, bequeathed to her in a will supposedly altered by Mr. Fabiniani hours before his death, remains in hazard. Mrs. Fabiniani has pledged to fight in the courts for her money, but in the meanwhile, she has taken to sleeping on a bench outside the courthouse. Experts agree that—Continued on A3.
Below, the second article.
INSIDE FABINIANI’S DUNGEON
The plebeian mob has raised hue and cry about Miss Lillian Bellis, who has since become an object of great interest. Equally of interest is Mr. Arturo Fabiniani, a nightclub owner and, according to some, a gangster. Interest in Miss Bellis is justified; this reporter has been hard-pressed to uncover anything beyond her arrival in the city two years previous, when she made print in the society pages by appearing on the arm of Bertie Rowan—much to the dismay of eligible young ladies along the Hudson. What is known about Miss Bellis is known everywhere: that she is an accomplished pianist; that she is an exceedingly great beauty; and that her animus toward the press, including any inquiries into her past, has no equal. Beyond those simple facts, the Book of Life is closed with regard to Miss Bellis, even after a flurry of attention following the charge of murder.
Regarding Mr. Fabiniani, however, a great deal has come to light, not the least of which is word of an infamous chamber kept hidden below Mr. Fabiniani’s brownstone, a kind of Amontillado catacomb, rumored to be filled with the victims of Mr. Fabiniani’s legendary temper—and equally legendary cruelty. Having recently managed an exclusive visit to Mr. Fabiniani’s home, this reporter is eager to share his first-hand observations about the dungeon, and that word is not used lightly. Ladies and children should forego the following—Continued A3.
And the third article.