by A. J. Lape
“You ain’t sittin’ at my table. You smell like a polecat that took a shower in cat piss. Hit the stairs.”
Murphy’s Kentuckyisms always came out when he was angry. Plus, he used the dreaded p-word. I wasn’t even allowed to utter that word lest I be threatened with a dunking in the nearest baptismal.
Stubbornly, I tromped over to the refrigerator, threw the door wide, and squirted some canned Reddi-wip whipped cream in my mouth. I’m not sure why I was being confrontational—I didn’t have a leg to stand on—yet, I found myself giving Murphy a dose of his own medicine. As he grumbled and opened the bag of squirrel feed, I slammed the door shut, stomped loudly across the hardwood, and even louder up the stairs.
After I took a volcanic shower—hoping to kill the dumpster breeding ground—I begrudgingly came back downstairs. In the kitchen, Murphy was getting his Kentucky on, dipping fried chicken out of a cast iron skillet onto a paper towel covered platter. Sliding his reading glasses onto his nose, he measured out buttermilk for a quick batch of gravy.
The Walkers were simple folk when it came to mealtime. Murphy cooked Southern meals like barbeque, fried chicken, and macaroni and cheese, but six nights out of seven it was on paper plates accompanied with red plastic cups from Costco.
My little sister was tooling around town with our Nanny, Claudia. Honestly, that should be against the law. Claudia was Puerto Rican and spoke Spanglish. She barely understood the road signs.
As I sat the table for two, I slid back into my chair and remoted on the television. Murphy angrily snatched the controller from my hand, sat his grumbling body in a seat, and shut it down with the force of a Neanderthal. He may have broken it, but I decided not to comment.
After I piled my plate full of chicken, mashed potatoes, and macaroni, I took a swig of grape Kool-Aid waiting for him to grunt, speak, or heck, disembowel me with his fork.
I heard the Jeopardy theme in my head.
Murphy could be the silent type. After he licked some gravy from his spoon, he wiped his mouth with a napkin, praying, “Dear God in Heaven on the Great White Throne.”
Not the opener I was hoping for, but I tried to capitalize on the conversation nonetheless. “So how is God these days?” He looked at his plate, giving me nothing. “Well, how about insurance class?”
“Power down, kid,” he said. Murphy always talked in terms of electronics when he felt people needed a rewiring. Unfortunately, that was 90 percent of our conversations.
Murphy’s stare finally bore into mine—I wasn’t sure what he was thinking. Maybe he rued the day he became a single father or the day I was even born, but when nothing came out of his mouth, I erroneously thought we were going to leave it as one of those things best left unsaid.
I took two more bites of macaroni, thinking I was safe. But then he spat, “Okay, if you’re not going to say anything then I will. The Valley of the Shadow of Death called today, and I understand you happened across a dead body.”
Murphy called Valley High the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Not literal death, of course. Maybe the death of innocence and ability of your parent’s to cope. Funny that today that nickname should be taken literally.
I swallowed. “Mind blowing, isn’t it.”
Murphy gave me a surprised, almost painful blink. “Jesus Christ,” he prayed. His eyes bugged out briefly, and he paused to breathe deep. I’m guessing he was holding out hope it was only rumor. “Why are you always in trouble, kid?” he finally muttered. “Do you know how I felt when I got a call from the principal and the police?” Some air left my lungs. “Yeah,” he sneered, “it was a courtesy call, I guess, because they told me they wanted to question you. Be glad I couldn’t make it. I was up to my ears in flood damage, but I told them to drown you in their own version if they so desired.”
I didn’t know what to say and found silence as the best response. Murphy bit off a piece of chicken when I had a feeling he wanted it to be my head. There was some mumbling I couldn’t make out, some shifting in his seat then finally, “Good God, save me from her, from myself, and from the horned bandit that’s always after me.”
Murphy was Protestant...as in Southern Baptist. When Southern Baptists got rattled, they talked to God like He was sitting in the room with them. Asking His opinion, begging for a sign, promising they’d do as He directed if He’d have mercy on their souls and answer the prayer on their terms.
“Let’s start this conversation over, kid. Tell me why you felt the urge to go outside.”
Most of the world had no creativity; they just didn’t get it. I tried to summon some remorse, but frankly I wasn’t sorry. I settled on some idiotic, sheepish smile that resembled indigestion.
“Your answer?” he pushed.
I blinked then scratched my arms. Murphy had two rules: try your hardest and tell the truth. The first was hit or miss; the second was accomplished by fluke. I was a horrible liar. Teenagers could normally fire off a lie at will. My giggle in the middle was a dead giveaway.
I had to admit; sometimes I did tiptoe around the damning details.
I couldn’t tell him about Jinx, I just couldn’t. I felt it irrelevant, plus he wouldn’t understand. “Would you believe it was only because I could?”
Murphy gave me one of those looks that defy logic. “You can’t unring a bell, kid. You’re making quite the name for yourself at that school. Need I remind you that you’re currently grounded?”
Oh that…
I’d done a naughty thing, like sneaking out of the house at midnight to spy on a neighbor digging holes in his backyard. First of all, the guy looked like a troll, and second of all, who did that crap anyway? I couldn’t decide if his behavior was creepy, spectacular, or somewhere in between, but Murphy interrupted before I could make a firm deduction. Thing was, I broke the rules with such relish; I wasn’t sure what that said about the state of my conscience.
Murphy took an even larger bite of mashed potatoes. “This is nothing but Murphy’s Law. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong at the worst possible time. No matter how hard I try, I can’t undo what was bred in you.”
Maybe he had a point. God knew Murphy had enough bad genes, and the name he’d given me was undeniably and unerringly symbolic. As my name suggested, I was a “Dark Walker.” Sometimes I was flying blind and decisions weren’t thought out; other times they were minutely orchestrated but ridiculously blasphemous to the sane mind.
I wiped my mouth, neatly laying my napkin in my lap, trying to act overly courteous to get back in his good graces. “So, I held hands with a dead man, Murphy. So what? I didn’t kill him. I didn’t assist anyone in killing him. I merely found him in the dumpster. I know it sounds strange, but that’s what happened.”
Murphy raised a brow one fraction. “Well, why don’t you leave the body-finding to the body-finding people, and you just go to stupid class. Now, there’s a novel idea if I ever heard one.”
Now, I raised a brow. “So, you think finding a man that was missing and hopefully giving his family some peace of mind was stupid?”
He narrowed his eyes. “I think it was stupid. Grade A stupid.”
Stupid’s my favorite word. It could be a noun, an adjective, or an adverb dependent upon the way you phrased it in a sentence. Murphy revered the word even more than me. Problem was, he’d upgraded my behavior to Grade A. In the egg world that was good; in Darcy’s world, it was the baddest of all bad. He coined that phrase last week when Justice and I got a henna tattoo when we were bored. Mine was angel wings in the spot that every parent hates—the tramp stamp—right above the booty. Trouble was, no one explained how long it took for henna to wear off.
I thought it was funny...Murphy didn’t.
I placed my right hand over my heart manufacturing a sentence that sounded legal. “I promise to the best of my abilities and faculties will allow, to cut my stupid behavior in half.” I paused, “So, help me God.”
“Well, now, we’re screwed,” Murphy grumbled to himself. He cramme
d some macaroni in his mouth, back to looking at the ceiling. I zeroed in on Murphy’s face. It was pretty much flawless except for the nose. It was slightly off-center, deviated to the right from a bar fight when he was nineteen years old. I briefly wondered where he hid the body.
“Do you want to know what I found?” I asked.
“No.”
“Do you want to know what the police said?”
“No.”
“Do you want to know about the severed hand?”
“No.”
“Did you know I was running off to get married with Vinnie Vecchione?” Murphy’s fork stopped in midair. Everyone knew Vinnie, and he wasn’t always spoken of in veneration. In fact, he had the morals of an alley cat. “Okay,” I laughed. “That part isn’t true, but I don’t know what’s worse, Murphy. The fact that I uncovered a shockingly brutal murder, or the fact that I’m fifteen years old and wouldn’t know what to do if a boy landed on top of my lips.”
He put down his fork and swallowed down what I think was a regurgitated portion of his meal. No matter how hard I tried to have “that talk” with Murphy, he’d bury his head in the sand every, single time.
“Let’s table that part of the discussion for now,” he mumbled.
“Maybe I need that discussion, Murphy. Maybe there are things in my life that necessitate that conversation be now rather than later.”
“What things?!” he snapped.
I shrugged, honest-to-God not knowing how I was maintaining a straight face. “You know,” I winked, “the shama lama, ding-dong things.”
For all those naughty words I didn’t know the meaning of, in the words of Otis Day, I assigned the term shama lama, ding-dong. There was A LOT of shama lama, ding-dong in my life, since I understood very little about the ways of the world.
At first, Murphy looked confused, then he quickly deducted it was Darcyspeak for the off-color. “Kid, you have the worst potty mouth.”
I had an immortal case of potty mouth, but would he rather me curse like a sailor or try to organize my thoughts in a more creative and appropriate manner?
“Of course I’m joking, Murphy. If there was anything going on in my life it would be immaculate, and we both know God wouldn’t be choosing me for the Divine.”
We both stopped to stare into air. I guess I’d proven my point.
“Anything else?” he finally mumbled.
“I hurt my foot.” Murphy removed his readers, rubbing his eyes with his palms. I scooted my chair out and placed my foot in his lap. He flipped it over, twisting it right then left, and when he saw not even a scratch, he gave me his suck-it-up face.
But it hurt, people, and so did my rear end. The Bug barely made it over 30, and I’m pretty sure I now had a seat coil permanently stamped into my behind. Maybe that was karma because even though Murphy and I had a wonderful relationship, right now he might best be described as the burr that was soon to be up my a-s-s. (If I spelled it, that didn’t count...right?)
I lowered my foot, crossing my fingers that I hadn’t contracted some sort of flesh-eating bacteria. Trust me, it was highly possible.
My body had more injuries than a prized fighter with arthritic joints of a one hundred-year-old centenarian. At age eight, I fractured my left ulna in two places. At ten, I broke my cheekbone when I splattered face first on the monkey bars. Then I crumpled my finger in a car door at age eleven, and broke my wrist freshman year when I wrecked on a dirt bike. And finally, I fractured my ankle at fifteen when I fell out of my uncle’s Mercedes all-terrain vehicle and got my four-inch heel stuck in a metal grate. I wanted out; the gutter gods wanted me below.
Out of the blue, Murphy reached over to hold my hand, his large palm gripping mine tightly like it alone was his lifeline. He finished off his chicken with one hand, ending with a swig of Diet Coke.
“I love you, kid,” he said.
I gave him my best shot at a smile then squeezed his hand, struck with a case of guilt that would suffocate someone that had three mouths. The smell of crispy chicken and herbs and spices filled the kitchen air. Comfort food, I sighed. Why was it I felt so empty and alone?
After I read my little sister a bedtime story, it was close to ten o’clock. I crawled into a pair of holey gray sweats and an inside-out navy t-shirt and fell into bed. My wrought iron bed was painted white with a matching down comforter surrounded by gray mist walls. As close to girly décor as I could get without pastels. I’m not sure why I didn’t like them. I think it went back to some childhood memory where I was forced to wear a pink lacy dress. I was covered in hives for weeks.
Other than my aversion to pastels, I was a minimalist in my decorating scheme. I had one nightstand that housed a cell phone charger, telephone, and lamp. On the other side of my bed stood a chair and a floor lamp. In front of me were a painted white desk and a flatscreen television. Running around all four walls was shelving to house the books I’d stockpiled over the years.
Very neat, very organized, very perfect for the OCD-side of Darcy.
The thing of it was, most of the time my “verys” were angry at one another. That might account for the week’s worth of laundry that was piled over every surface in sight. I didn’t say I wasn’t organized, I said I had trouble following through.
To calm my mind, I slept with a sound machine set on “white noise.” Some preferred the absence of noise while they were sleeping—not me—noise reminded me I wasn’t alone. After I clicked it on medium, I punched on my VIZIO flipping through a few channels feeling like time was a dog nipping at my heels.
In what had become a regular occurrence, I was battling my nightly bout with insomnia. I’m not sure why I was an insomniac. At most, I probably needed some sort of medicinal help; at least, some regular exercise to wear me out.
My iPhone was lying beside my bed. Picking it up, I checked to see if there were any missed texts or calls. Murphy’s idea of a cell phone was a piece of plastic that had numbers on it. In other words, the free ones your plan offered. In teenagerland, the free ones were throwbacks to the Dinosaur Age and an insult to the forward thinking human. Plus, free ones didn’t always accommodate a data package when the majority of my friends had all but forgotten how to dial. Murphy thought teenagers today were too indulged. Maybe some, but I certainly didn’t fall into that category. Like my TV, I worked and saved to purchase the iPhone all on my own. Let’s just say that’s the first time I truly understood why it was depressing to give so much of your hard-earned cash to taxes. Every bit of headway I made, Uncle Sam took another big bite.
After a few goodnight texts to Justice and Rudi, I moved onto the television to alleviate the boredom. When I couldn’t find an interesting show, I clicked if off and rolled to my side. The shades weren’t closed all the way, and a small fraction of an inch was blinding me with moonlight that seemed overly fierce. Too lazy to get up and shut them altogether, I stared at the stars outside. Sometimes, I’d lie in bed and gaze out the window—wondering what was going on in other universes—hoping my travels held a lifetime of smiles and adventures, crossing my fingers I didn’t somehow mess things up. Suffice it to say that was a huge possibility. I did believe in Destiny, but I had a preternatural knack of screwing up all things Divine.
Across the hall, Murphy was snoring like a buzzsaw...I had a pang of guilt. By no means was it easy being a single father, and by no means was it easy to parent me. Oftentimes, he reminded me of Atlas with the weight of the world on his shoulders. For years he’d longed for something dear to him to return—someone to help him shoulder the burdens—but longing didn’t always bring something to pass. Some things were absurdly irrevocable.
Most days, we both swung between grief and hysteria. A part of me longed to think on that fateful day—the devastating reason for the loneliness—but the horror was too great. Like Murphy’s Law, sometimes things happened at the worst possible time, and it wasn’t even close to fair. With that thought, the veils of my memory blasted me with thoughts that were too unbea
rable. I closed my eyes tightly, willing away the grief, and called to mind the dumpster man—Dumpster Dude I’d decided to call him. Now, he knew a heckuvalot about unfair...or he used to.
5 MOB TIES
I AWOKE WITH a jump.
At last count I was at 331 sheep. I’m not sure what happened to 332. Maybe the wolf ate him; maybe he ran off with a half-sheared, hussy sheep. Either way, my head was pounding from sleep deprivation, and I’m pretty sure my nerves were shot to the mouth of Hades.
It took me awhile to figure out what had wakened me, but when I heard the low buzz of my iPhone, I realized someone was dumb enough to call me at 2:20AM on a school night. I reached over and grabbed my iPhone from my nightstand, squinted my eyes, and saw it was ringing with an unknown caller ID.
Clicking it on, I expected to hear Dylan’s soothing murmur—something flirty and inappropriate that left me blushing—but I didn’t. In fact, there was nothing but heavy breathing, and the sense that something was disturbingly off. The more I repeated, “Hello, is anyone there?” the more my gut screamed this had nothing to do with a misdialed number and everything to do with the murder at school.
Before I went to sleep, I reminded myself that Jinx and the unidentified guy with him looked inside the dumpster as if they were verifying something. I knew they saw the body. My word, they had to have smelled it and looked out of sheer curiosity. Whether that made them guilty or not, they sure as heck acted guilty of something. Their reactions weren’t typical, and to the best of my knowledge, they didn’t go back inside the building and “cry foul.”
Bracing myself on the mattress, I sat up and cleared my throat, realizing what I was going to do next was undeniably stupid—but it was in my opinion—nothing ventured, nothing gained. Taking a deep breath, I dumbly opened my mouth.