Wait Until Twilight

by Sang Pak

  “Did you hit your mom?”

  He punches me in the arm with a fist that feels like a baseball bat. “That dummy. She’s a terrible mom. Not smart enough. Sometimes I wonder how I was born out of that thing. Look what done come out of her. Either them babies or me is wrong for this world. It’s either me or them, Samuel. It sure as hell ain’t me,” he says, and pulls over onto the side of the road. “Here,” he says. “Put this over ya.” He takes out the stinking burlap bag.

  “Why?”

  “It’s for your own protection,” he says, bringing his hunting knife from the back of his pants. I take the bag and pull it over my head all the way down to my arms and chest. In the darkened amber haze I can feel the car get back on the road.

  “You drove by that day when I was studying on the porch steps,” I say.

  “Yup. And I saw you at the fair, too. You’re crazy, you know that? Climbing up that thing like that. Remember this?” He screams, “‘Go, you fucking monkey!’ That was me. And then falling back like that, whew. I knew you were insane then. I knew you were capable of anything.”

  “So you were following me?”

  “Who’s following who, you stupid shit?” He pushes my head down hard to my knees. “Duck your head down.” I hear more traffic for a while, which means we were going into town. He pulls into somewhere and then drives around some and finally stops. It’s quiet here and there’s a new bad smell, like garbage coming in through the stench of the bag. Then he jerks me out of the driver’s side with him and starts leading me toward some unknown destination. I’m walking on hard earth and grass and bushes and brambles, and I can hear birds calling and the faint rustle of branches. I can see shadows and faint light through the crosshatch of the bag.

  “How much longer?” I say. He doesn’t answer and pushes me on. Time passes and we’re walking and I’m sweating bullets under that bag. Then I hear animals scurrying about, getting louder and louder until they’re up close. A door creaks open, and I’m pushed inside a room with a wooden floor. He finally pulls the bag from over me, bringing in a fresh batch of cool air. I’m in a dirty little shed about the size of my bedroom, furnished with a small military cot and a worktable covered with dried blood and tools. The walls are covered with little skulls and animal hides: squirrel, opossum, cat, dog, skunk, and more, but I can’t tell all of them. There’s the one door and a few smudged windows, through which I see woods.

  “It’s my huntin’ shed,” he says, and slams the knife down in the table, making it stick straight up. “Sit down.” I sit down on the cot, and he goes out. I look for a way out, maybe I can make a bum’s rush for the door or knife, but he’s already coming right back in holding a wooden pine box the size of a small television. He places the box in front of me. A raccoon’s head struggles to free itself at the top of the box, where there’s a hole cut in it. The box is composed of two parts that are locked together at the base of the hole, trapping the head. Daryl hands me a hammer. “This is practice for a runt like you.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “Ha. You’ll kill a kid but not a raccoon?”

  “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Because I stopped you, you murderer.” He pulls up his britches by the legs and bends his knees like he’s in the middle of a huddle. “Now watch how it’s done.” He cocks the hammer back, and as he brings it down I look away.

  “Ahhhh!” I yell, but it can’t cover the whacking sound the hammer makes on the raccoon’s head.

  “It screams just like a baby!” he says. “Look at it!”

  “Hell no!”

  I feel the hammer come down on my back. “Ahhh!” I raise my arms to protect myself. He kicks me a few times and goes back to finishing off the raccoon, which has stopped screaming.

  “It’s over, faggot! You can look now.”

  I keep my head turned with my hands over my face.

  “Look, goddamnit.” He grabs me and turns me around, jerking my hands away. There’s just the bloody hole at the top of the box. “See, if you do it right, and you beat the head to a pulp, it just slips through the hole and it’s already in its casket. I made a bigger one for when we do those demon freaks. But the same thing. Wait.” He slips out of the door and I make a break for it, but he’s right there waiting for me. He punches me right in the solar plexus and pushes me down. “I said, Wait.”

  I lie on the ground for a while trying to catch my breath. Outside I can hear him manhandling another animal. How can this be happening? I wonder while looking at the blood staining the wooden floors and walls. Then he comes back in with the box and a cat head meowing and squirming about at the top.

  “Here, get up.” He grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me up, sitting me on the cot. “Now do like I did. Spread your legs and bend your knees. The power comes from your legs.” He slaps his thighs. “Got it?” He puts the hammer in my hands, which I let drop to the floor. He walks over to the table and gets the knife. Then he starts cutting himself on the arms like last time.

  “Good!” I say. “More. Cut more. You sick bastard!” He grabs my arm, pulls back the sleeve, and makes a cut in my arm. “Ahh, stop!”

  “Hit it! Just like you would if it were one of those little monsters.”

  “Why? It didn’t do anything to anyone.”

  “No one does anything to anyone. Doesn’t mean they can’t die. There’s no God. We’re all flesh and blood.” He slaps both his arms. “That’s all there is, then we die! Just like your mother.”

  I shake my head.

  “No? If there was a God, you think he’d let your momma die like that? While you’re still a boy who needs his momma? You think he’d put her and you through that kind of pain? Can’t you see? It’s all nothing. We can do what we want. It don’t mean nothing! We’re free! Now hit.”

  “Wait! Give me a minute.” He cuts my arm again. “Ahhhh, shit! Okay, okay! I’ll do it!” I’m crying now, staring at him. I want to kill him, but he’s got the knife.

  “What are you waiting for? Do it.”

  “You do it!”

  “Hell, you already got blood on your hands. You’ve got a destiny to follow.”

  “What?”

  “You killed your momma.”

  “Who told you that?” I say. Using his free hand he pinches the crap out of my side. “Ahhh!”

  “You murdered her,” he says. “It was your fault.”

  “Shut up.” He puts the blade up to my neck. “You want me to do it?” I say.

  “No shit, Sherlock fucking Holmes! C’mon, killer!”

  “Okay, watch this, you son of a bitch!”

  I take the hammer and turn away from him so I’m between him and the box. I start hitting as hard as I can just below the cat’s head, where the lock connecting the two pieces of the box is. I strike again and again. Sparks fly, and wood begins to splinter at the metal hinges. I want to destroy it all.

  “Yeah! That’s more like it!” he says over my shoulder. “Aim better, idgit! You’re too damn low!”

  The entire front of the box collapses, and the box splits open and out from where it connected on the hinges in the back. The cat scampers out.

  “You goddamn idgit!” Daryl gets low, trying to catch the cat, and when he does I smack him straight on top of his head with the hammer. It sounds like a thud. “Ohhh!” He brings his hands to his head. Then I hammer on the hand holding the knife. “Goddamn!” he screams. The knife clatters to the floor. I grab it and start backing to the door. “You little bastard! Do you know who I am?” he screams, holding his wrist. In response, I throw the hammer at his face then run out through the door. Outside there’s a clearing in the middle of the woods bordered by a chain-link fence coming down one side. I start running through the clearing of dirt and weeds and see a light trail through the woods. My hooded walk here seemed almost straight on, so it would make sense that it would be there. I take one look back as Daryl comes staggering out of the door. The shed looks homemade, with a slanted tin roof an
d gray rotted wood built against the side of a dirt ridge. Beside the shed are a few cages, some empty and some containing an assortment of small animals, another raccoon and a rabbit…I don’t look long. Daryl’s coming. I start down the path as fast as I can run, not looking back even once. Running full speed, I get to the end of the path in what seems like a few minutes. God, I hope that cat got away, too. At the end of the trail I find Daryl’s car parked beside three industrial-size trash bins. It’s the small parking lot behind the Kmart. I walk quickly past the big grated doors where the distribution trucks back in to make their deliveries. I slip the knife in the back of my pants. It’s cold on my lower back and ass. I take off my shoes and then my socks, which I use to wipe the blood and then tie around the cuts on my forearm. Luckily the socks are blue, which makes it hard to spot the blood. They just look darker. After I put my shoes back on I run around to the front. The traveling fair is long gone, and the dull Kmart parking lot looks the lonelier for it. The afternoon shoppers are out, some with kids, some pushing red shopping carts coming in and out of those automatic glass doors that go whoosh when I go in. I walk down the air-conditioned aisles of neatly shelved products to the back, where I find a water fountain and bathroom. I call Melody and tell her my car’s in the garage and I got a ride out to Kmart, where I’m now stranded. I try to sound normal, but it’s real hard. It’s like I’m standing outside of my body watching myself talk. I feel like I’m stammering and stuttering, but she seems to understand all right.

  “Give me fifteen minutes,” she says.

  “Remember…park at the front doors,” I say.

  I clean my cuts in the bathroom and rewrap the socks around real tight. I stay in the back until it’s time and then go wait just inside the doors, keeping a sharp lookout for Daryl and his white Charger. When Melody pulls up, I run to her car, pulling out the knife before I sit down so as to not cut off a butt cheek.

  “Jesus, what is that about?” she yells.

  “Ah, I just bought it.”

  “You just bought it? Just like that. No bag or anything, just in your pants.”

  “Yeah, let’s go.”

  She drives out of the parking lot with an eye on the knife. “What’s up with those socks on your arm? Is that blood? Oh my God!”

  “Calm down! It was an accident. I didn’t know how sharp it was.”

  “Let me see.”

  “It’s no big deal.”

  “Do we need to go to the hospital?”

  “No! No hospital. I’m telling you, I’m fine…now…”

  “What do you need a knife like that for, anyway? That’s like the biggest knife I’ve ever seen.”

  “Could you just get me home?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  She takes us on the bypass, cutting through the edge of town toward my house. I’m too busy trying to blot out what just happened to pay attention to Melody. But I stop my racing mind and say, “Thanks for picking me up like this.”

  “What’s going on, Samuel?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “If you don’t want to tell me, it’s okay. But I want you to know, you can tell me anything, Samuel, whether it’s about school or family, anything.”

  “School’s fine.”

  “What about your family? Your dad? Jim?”

  “What about them?”

  “I don’t know, Samuel. I’m just saying maybe it can be hard at times with your mom gone.”

  “My mom? It’s been a year, Melody. One fucking year. We’ve all got to move on, and I have. Maybe you should, too.”

  She doesn’t even pull into my driveway, just stops in the road in front of my house.

  “I’m sorry, Samuel. I won’t bring up your mother again.”

  “I’m sorry. There’s other stuff going on. I shouldn’t have said what I did. Don’t get too angry with me.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “You look angry.”

  She takes a deep breath; her long lashes close and her face changes. The stern face turns into a smile, a smile so loving and disappointed I prefer the frown. “Out,” she says. I get out and watch her drive away. I deserved her anger; that’s what I think. But there’s nothing she can do for me. She wouldn’t understand. Hell, even I don’t. It’s too damn dark. Too evil. After she’s gone I get my bike and go back out to Underwood as fast as I can. Thank God the Charger isn’t there. I throw my bike in my Tempo and get the hell out of there.

  FIRST THING I DO IS slip the knife under my mattress. Then, after a hot shower, I clean up my cuts with rubbing alcohol and Band-Aids. I make sure to put on a long-sleeve shirt before holing up in my room watching my black-and-white television all Friday night and Saturday. Among all the boob-tube fodder I catch a few episodes of The Three Stooges during a rain delay for a baseball game. I can’t believe I never noticed how violent it is. Those three guys beat the crap out of each other. Especially Moe. The eye gouging, head bonking, hair pulling he does to Larry and Curly is ridiculous. When my dad comes in, I pretend to be studying. Saturday night rolls around, and it feels like a normal state of life is getting harder and harder to get back to, and I start to wondering, How much would it take to be lost from it all forever? To shake that awful mood, I go up on the roof to look at the stars and at my dad tinkering on his project some more. He’s digging a small trench out to a spot in the yard where there’s a shallow hole in the ground the width of a car tire. I’m thinking some kind of fountain, but I’m still not really sure. All I know is watching him slowly working and occasionally rubbing his chin in thought makes me feel a little better.

  CHAPTER 10

  I GET UP EXTRA EARLY ON TUESDAY because it’s the morning when students apply for their lockers, parking spaces, and new identification cards for the next year. It’s first come, first serve, starting with the juniors on down to the subfreshmen. The juniors had their chance the previous week. Now it’s the sophomores’ turn for the next two mornings.

  Dad’s gone by the time I head out. It’s still about an hour before school starts, but I know there’ll be a hell of a line to deal with, so I skip the usual cereal and plan on picking up some fast food along the way. The problem starts when my car makes this horrible grinding sound on the road. Telling Melody my car was broken probably jinxed me. I think about turning around, but I’m not too far from the place I know Dad goes to in the morning for breakfast. I decide to try him there. I turn onto Highway 166 and take exit 12, where Roscoe’s Café is. I can see Dad’s big tan Monte Carlo in the parking lot, and then as I pull in I see him standing there talking with this other guy. That grinding sound from my car gets their attention. The friend waves to my dad and goes to his car.

  “When did that start?” Dad asks me after I park.

  “Halfway here. I would’ve gone back home, but I thought I might catch you.”

  “Here, take my car today.” He gives me his keys. “I’ll stop by Bill’s garage. He can give me a ride to work. Come by the store at five. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I get out, and Dad gets in. “Where’d you get that paper?” I ask him.

  “Here, take it. I’m finished anyway. You might want to try the sausage biscuit here.”

  I go in the café and have a look around. Everyone in there’s black except me. I get a sausage biscuit and coffee before heading off to school in Dad’s car. His Monte Carlo’s so wide, compared to my Tempo, I have trouble maneuvering. It’s like driving a boat and the pickup is weak, but once it gets moving, it’s smooth and heavy. I eat my biscuit along the way. Parking in the school parking lot is a pain, too. I never realized the parking spaces were so narrow. Fortunately, it’s still early, so there aren’t any cars around my space. I have to back out and repark three times to get the spacing right. I hurry to the office.

  The line isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, I’m shocked at how short it is. But then I hear, “No breaking, Samuel,” coming from behind me.

  “Breaking? Where’s the end of the line?” I ask.
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br />   The line actually goes out of the office and spills into the hall, all the way down as far as the eye can see. I start walking toward the end of the line then find myself in front of David.

  “How long you been waiting?” I ask.

  “Too long. You think you’re gonna break in line?”

  “Maybe. Why don’t they just make it in alphabetical order?” I ask.

  “What are you talking about? I’d still be in the middle. Mabry with an ‘M.’”

  “Ah, that’s right. But at least you’d know where to go.”

  “You smell like a sausage biscuit from Roscoe’s,” says Carlita, a tall, pretty black girl who giggles a lot. She’s standing in front of David.

  “A sausage biscuit and coffee,” I say, holding up my coffee cup with my newspaper in my armpit. She giggles. Then I realize I might actually get away with breaking in line. It makes me feel like I’m the older guy fooling a bunch of kids. It’s strange, like I’m out of place, like I should be somewhere else, maybe college or maybe at some job. I feel composed and resentful toward all these high school students for bringing me down to their level. They seem stupid and for a minute I hate them. I hate them so much I wish they were gone. This hatred I feel makes me sick to my stomach. Worst of all, I know it’s not really them but me. Standing in that hallway with all those kids in line, I start getting that cold murky feeling. It’s all in my mind. It has to be, because those fluorescent lights are still shining in the hallway, and there’s no reason to feel this way. But I get this image in my head of greasy Daryl with his blue cap running down the hall with that knife in his hand, all in this bluish gloomy light. I know it’s just my imagination, but my heart starts racing.

  “Give me some of your coffee, Samuel,” says Carlita, breaking my inner panic.

  “You can have the rest,” I say. I give her my cup, and she resumes her conversation with some of her girl buddies. “Listen, let’s do this together,” I say to David. “We can do it faster.”