Kill the Next One

by Federico Axat

  “Those guys seemed a little crazy,” remarked Maria, still reeling with fear.

  “A little,” Ted agreed.

  Half an hour later Ted managed to get rid of Maria. There was still no sign of Justin and Tessa, and he began to weigh the idea of taking off without his friend. For the time being, however, Dan and company still occupied the middle of the living room, so it seemed impossible to leave without their noticing. Ted thought about walking around the house, but a quick glance showed that wouldn’t work: a fence completely surrounded the backyard, and the only gate was padlocked. Some guys were peeing by the fence. He didn’t hesitate to join them. As the stream splashed against the wooden boards, he decided that if the only way out was to walk past Dan and friends, then he should wait until the coast was a little more clear.

  The wait seemed endless. At last he gave in to the temptation to have another beer. He sat on one of the porch steps and drank alone. The dizziness returned, but now it brought a pleasant sensation of weightlessness and light-headedness that induced him to keep drinking. At some point he stuck his hand in the cooler and fished through ten inches of ice water without finding a single can. They were all gone and nobody had bothered to refill the cooler. He stood up. His movements were clumsy, spasmodic. Completely forgetting about Dan, he went inside. He’d be sure to find more beer at one of the tables, he sluggishly reasoned. He had never drunk more than a couple of beers before, yet now all he could think about was putting more of the stuff into his body.

  The living room was packed and everyone seemed intent on bumping into him. Hands holding drinks jumped into the air to avoid collisions. He went over to a table where two girls were pouring some green liquid. Ted randomly grabbed a cup off the table and held it out to them. The girls must have thought he was hilarious, because they started laughing while one of them poured him a quarter of a cup. Ted took a sip and scrunched his face. It was the most god-awful stuff he’d ever tasted, but what the hell?

  He wandered aimlessly around the room. The music hit his head like a jackhammer, and in a sudden fit of lucidity he wondered what he was doing there, why he didn’t leave, why he was drinking that nauseating beverage…But the moment passed, and he drank more and more of the green liquid. At one point he doubled over, feeling a need to retch. Everyone passing by gave him a wide berth, but he didn’t vomit. He slowly stood up again and smiled at no one in particular.

  “McKay!”

  He turned around. The shout had been so loud he’d been able to hear it over the pounding music. Dan was by his side, with Tim and another guy behind him, in perfect formation.

  “Hey!” said Ted, and he tried slapping Dan on the shoulder but missed. His hand continued the circle and ended up on his own knee. He tried again and barely grazed Dan’s T-shirt.

  “Enjoying the party?”

  Ted nodded.

  “Why’s he so serious?” Ted asked, pointing at Tim.

  “Listen, McKay.” Dan’s voice was slurred, but only slightly. Ted’s attention wandered to the cleavage of a girl dancing near him. “McKay! Up here, eyes on me. Me and the boys are gonna go play a couple games. You’re coming.”

  Ted found the idea hilarious. He started laughing uproariously.

  “Poker?” he asked half a dozen times, as if the word itself were a joke.

  “Right: poker. You owe me. Let’s go.” Dan grabbed him under one arm and Tim seized the other. The two of them lifted Ted off the floor and carried him upstairs. Ted didn’t feel as though this were a hostile action at all.

  “Thanks, guys. I can take it from here.”

  But the fact was, he couldn’t. A few more joined the group, so now there were six, including Ted, making their way up the stairs. How many people were there?

  “Hey, we’re a choo-choo train!” Ted said, laughing at his own joke.

  They looked at him as if he were a survivor of some natural disaster being rescued by a bunch of firefighters. Ted was starting to feel more and more lost.

  The second floor was as crowded as the first. When they got to the third floor, the sudden calm came as a shock.

  “You owe me this one, McKay,” Dan said. Now his voice was slow and perfectly audible. The music had been reduced to a distant, guttural groan. They went to the far end of the corridor. Tim unlocked a door and Dan shoved Ted inside. The other three crowded in behind them.

  There was no poker table in the room.

  Ted took a terrific blow to the ribs and fell to the floor. Then the kicks rained down.

  64

  1994

  A merciful fraternity brother drove Ted back to the Box. Ted remembered snippets: coming out of the house, being loaded into the tiny red car. He remembered nothing about the drive itself. He woke up in bed as if by magic, fully dressed and aching all over.

  Justin, for his part, decided to leave the party when the possibility of his throwing up on Tessa began to feel more like a certainty. She made him promise they’d get together again soon (Justin was happy to give his word on this), and in an outbreak of drunken sincerity he told her that he’d never had such a good time with a woman before, which was the truth. Before he left, he searched high and low for Ted, unaware that his friend was getting beaten up at that very moment by five brothers of the prestigious Delta Tau fraternity. Justin assumed that Ted had already walked back to the Box by himself. He vomited once along the way and again when he reached the dorm. His roommate wasn’t in bed, but that didn’t worry him.

  When Justin woke up and saw Ted lying on the bed next to his, he did get worried. At first he thought Ted was dead. His face was red, swollen, and covered with blood. Once he was sure Ted was breathing, he calmed down a little.

  Ted refused to go to the infirmary. He remained shut up in the dorm room for three days, hardly leaving his bed. During that time most of the swelling in his face went down, and with the help of a pair of mirrored sunglasses he was able to return to his studies. The slight limp he was left with wore off over time. Nobody but his roommate (and, of course, the five cowards who beat him up) ever found out what had happened that night on the third floor of Delta Tau.

  65

  1994

  The beating led to a series of dreadful events, some of them direct consequences, others indirect. Ted gradually became less communicative and more apathetic than before. This change affected his luck at the gambling tables, where charisma and manipulation were essential weapons. The change also damaged Ted’s relationship with Georgia, from whom he slowly began to distance himself. Neither of them did anything to try to make things better. Justin was perceptive enough to know better than to torture him with questions; he had begun to know Ted’s moods, which meant knowing when it was better not to pester him with pointless interrogations.

  The worst came five days later, when he got a call from his aunt Audrey, his father’s sister. She was the only one on his father’s side of the family with whom Ted kept up a sporadic relationship, and even so, she had never called him on campus. When he heard her voice on the other end of the line, his first thought was that something must have happened to his father. And the fact was that Ted couldn’t help feeling happy about this; he hadn’t seen his father in five years, and it wouldn’t bother him if they never saw each other again. But it turned out that Frank McKay hadn’t died or been injured in a gruesome accident; he simply wanted to speak to Ted, so he had turned to Audrey. Over the past decade Frank had become a prosperous farm equipment salesman, and he was apparently back to his pathetic efforts at making contact with his son.

  For some stupid reason Ted called him.

  It turned out that his father was going to be in the area for a convention and he had every intention of coming to campus and paying Ted a visit. Ted refused categorically, of course, and told his father he’d go see him at his motel. The very idea of seeing his father on campus turned his stomach. He’d go find him and put an end, once and for all, to these pitiful attempts to remake himself as Father of the Year.

&nb
sp; He parked his car in front of the modest Lonesome Pine Motel and didn’t bother going to the office. He recognized his father’s silhouette against the curtains of room 108, moving back and forth with packages he was piling up somewhere. Ted stood facing the window for a while, the twitter of starlings at dusk a prelude to the mistake he was about to make. The door suddenly swung open.

  “Ted! Son! Great to see you.”

  “Hey.”

  His father’s hair was gray—not entirely, but much grayer than the last time Ted had seen him. Even so, he looked a good ten years younger than his age. His features were still sharp, and he hadn’t put on an ounce of fat. His skin was as tanned as in his door-to-door salesman days. But beyond his physical appearance, Ted paid special attention to his eyes, because if there was anything he had learned as a teenager, it was that no matter what his father said or did, those two tiny, brilliant blue irises were the only part of him that told the truth. And right now, what they were telling him was very simple: I’m smarter than you.

  Frank walked over, clearly intending to give Ted a hug. Ted held up a hand to stop him and took a step back.

  “Please, Dad.”

  He put up his hands in surrender and silently gave up.

  “Come in.”

  Ted was planning to make this a short visit.

  The room was small. What Ted had seen through the window was his father unpacking his suitcase, which lay almost empty in the center of the bed. Under the TV set attached to the wall there was a tiny table and two chairs. Frank sat on one and gestured to his son to take the other.

  “Come on, Ted. We’ve got to talk sometime.”

  That at least was true.

  Ted stood looking at a horrid painting.

  “I don’t want you coming to campus to look for me. Ever.”

  Frank didn’t respond right away.

  “If you don’t want me to come, I won’t come.”

  “Perfect.”

  Another uncomfortable silence settled on them. Ted didn’t want to ask his father what he wanted to tell him; he wanted him to talk on his own initiative. It drove him crazy to feel that every word coming out of his mouth was a kind of competition. But it was.

  “What happened to your face? Fistfight with some college boys?”

  Ted instinctively raised his hand to his cheek. No sign of the beating remained on his face other than an almost imperceptible bruise on his left cheek. He tried to remember if he had mentioned the incident to his aunt Audrey, but he didn’t think so.

  “No fights,” Ted replied drily.

  “Aunt Audrey told me your grades are very good. She also showed me a photo of your girlfriend, Georgia…”

  Frank stopped talking when he saw Ted’s reaction. He tried another approach.

  “I’m your father. Naturally I want to—”

  “If you keep asking my aunt about me, the only thing you’re going to accomplish is that I’ll never talk to her again.”

  Frank sighed in resignation.

  “What happened to us, Ted?” he said, leaning slightly forward. His hand reached out and stopped, halfway to Ted’s. “We were a team, remember?”

  Ted felt like laughing in his face. He shook his head.

  “Remember when we used to go around to those chess tourna—”

  “That’s enough. I refuse to talk about the past with you. I know perfectly well what was going on and what you’ve done. And I’m not talking about your cheating on Mom with that woman. Even though that was what broke her heart in the end, I think you did us a favor.”

  “I think we do have to talk about the past, because otherwise we won’t be able to piece together the present.”

  “Great. Did you get that from a fortune cookie? There is no ‘present’ for us to piece together. There’s only one thing that you and I need to clear up: that we’re never going to talk to each other again. Is that clear?”

  Frank bowed his head.

  “You have to leave the past behind someday,” he said, staring at the floor. “You’re grown-up now. I’m not going to try giving you advice. But I know what I’m talking about.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? It isn’t a question of whether I’ll forgive you or not. What do you want me to forgive you for? How you beat Mommy, or how you beat me? Which of those two should I forgive you for?”

  “Don’t say it like that.”

  “There’s no other way to say it. So it isn’t a matter of forgiving you. It’s just that I don’t fucking feel like seeing the guy who used to beat my mother for spilling the salt in the kitchen or for putting her shoes in the refrigerator when her illness made it so she didn’t know what she was doing.”

  “You know it was a lot more than that,” Frank muttered, looking up. There was a mixture of pleading and suppressed rage in his eyes.

  “Well, of course there was a lot more. She was ill!”

  Frank bit his lips. He raised his hand to his mouth and started biting his nail.

  “I asked you to forgive me for that. That’s all I can do. She was ill, and I…I didn’t know how to handle her. Obviously I did a terrible job. That’s what things were like when I was growing up, and that’s what I learned at home. I didn’t know any other way to fix the situation.”

  Ted shook his head. His father always tried to put himself in the victim’s role.

  “Dad, I don’t care why things happened the way they did. I also don’t care about your side of things. I was the one who had to live with Mom all those years, watching her getting worse and worse, day after day, while you were off running around somewhere. And if you want to believe that abandoning her didn’t affect her, you’re wrong: it did. And if you want to believe that every time you hit her and every time you yelled at her it didn’t make her worse, I’m sorry, but that’s not how it was.”

  Frank swallowed.

  “No doubt you’re right.”

  “No doubt at all.”

  A glimmer of hope appeared in Frank’s eyes.

  “But with you…with you, I always tried…”

  “I was seven years old the first time I heard you beating her!” Ted exploded. “You know something? I never told you this, but maybe it’s good for you to know.” He pointed an accusing finger at his father. “Maybe it’ll help if I tell you all the good you did me. If I tell you that after you left home, I could hardly sleep because of the nightmares. Nightmares I still get now. You want to know what happens in them?”

  “Ted, please. I don’t think this will help to—”

  “Of course it helps. Of course it helps!”

  Frank was watching him now with the pitiless gaze that Ted had come to know so well as a child. Because deep down, Frank McKay hated to be contradicted. He could wrap himself in sheep’s clothing for a while and beg forgiveness, but nothing bothered him so much as when things weren’t done his way, when he wasn’t the one dictating what should be done and what shouldn’t.

  “When I get these nightmares, there you are, sitting like you’re sitting now, and you’re calmly smoking a cigarette. And you’re telling me I should go to your red Mustang. Remember that car?”

  Something shifted in Frank’s face.

  “Of course I remember my red Mustang.”

  “I don’t want to get near the trunk because I know what I’ll find in there. But you insist and insist that I have to see. And finally I go over, and before I get there, the trunk opens like magic. And there’s Mommy, with her wrists tied and her face disfigured, covered with insects.”

  “Ted,” Frank muttered.

  “In my dreams, I can’t pull my eyes away from the corpse until I wake up. And what I hear in the background is you laughing, because you’re getting a kick out of it.”

  Ted spoke without taking his eyes off Frank for one second. As soon as he finished he felt worn down from having told it all. He’d never spoken about this to anyone, and could never have imagined telling his father, yet now he felt much better—not only relieved of a heavy burden but s
atisfied, because his son of a bitch father deserved to learn how he had made his little son suffer.

  “Sometimes the woman isn’t Mom but some girl I like, or a woman I happen to know. They lie there, scrunched up inside the trunk, and suddenly they come back to life and grab me by the arm, staring at me with their eyes pleading, like they want to tell me something. The rest is always the same: the red Mustang, you smoking and laughing. Always the same.”

  Ted stood up abruptly, kicked the chair aside, and swore under his breath.

  “I can’t look at a woman without thinking about what you did to Mom,” he said, near tears. “Now can you understand why I don’t want you in my life?”

  Frank looked unflappable. He didn’t seem inclined to continue arguing. He went to the nightstand and picked up a book with a photo sticking out of it. He took out the photo and set it on the table.

  Ted was still standing; he had to come closer to see what the photo showed: a boy, maybe twelve years old. The features, which he recognized from his own face, plus the tiny blue eyes told him everything.

  “That’s your brother,” Frank said. Not a trace remained of his earlier pleading tone.

  Ted looked up and stared at Frank with a wild expression. Then he turned back to study the boy, handsome and smiling. Ted was speechless.

  “That’s your brother,” Frank repeated. “Edward. He’s got his mother’s last name: Blaine. It doesn’t matter what you think of me. You ought to get to know him. That’s why I wanted to see you today.”

  Ted never met Blaine, but years later he recognized his face on the news when he was accused of killing his girlfriend, Amanda Herdman.

  66

  Present day

  Ted stood in silence at the entrance to the footpath, like a gunman about to fight a duel. Laura and Lee were behind him.

  “I’ve walked this path many times,” he said in a low voice.

  Lee kept a couple of yards back. The doctor had assured him that McKay wasn’t dangerous, but Lee knew he’d left a man in a coma, and though he’d been having a nervous breakdown or some such at the time, Lee didn’t care. If it happened once, it could happen again, right? The prisoner was his responsibility as long as he was outside the hospital, and Lee wasn’t about to trust the guy. If he tried to attack Dr. Hill, Lee would just have to run forward a couple of yards and Tase him. If instead he tried to make a run for it, that would be even easier, because he wouldn’t get far with those chains on his legs.