Dark Song

by Gail Giles

  So… Dad’s stealing wasn’t a one-time desperate act. But look at what he had lived with. I didn’t know how to feel. The chili disagreed with me.

  We finished in silence. Not even Chrissy knew what to say.

  After grabbing our pillows, we hauled to a Home Depot for industrial-strength cleaner/disinfectant and an assortment of other cleaning supplies. We were going to do battle. I didn’t give us a chance of winning. That house needed a blowtorch, not Lysol and a few trash bags.

  When Dad turned off the motor at Brokedown Palace, Mom turned on him. “You told me your parents abused you emotionally and used you as free labor. You didn’t mention you stole from them.”

  Dad said nothing.

  “I might have understood. That wasn’t enough. You had to make yourself a hero. You never worked for a year waiting tables and saving tips and eating leftovers from the restaurant to get your first semester’s fees. What a sob story. You’re pathetic.”

  For the first time, I agreed with Mom. I didn’t know my own father. All the times he had been WonderDad, it hadn’t been to please us. It had been to make him look good.

  “I need a beer,” Dad muttered.

  Mom sorted through our purchases. She handed Dad rubber gloves, a couple of trash bags, and a dustpan. “The rat, the syringes, and the piles of shit are yours. When you’re done with those, the girls and I will come in and start cleaning.”

  Dad sighed, but he took the stuff without a word.

  Chrissy broke the silence. “I don’t want to clean,” she whined. “I’m too little.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “If I have to clean, you do, too.”

  “You don’t have to clean, Chrissy,” Mom said. “You are too little. You can bring me the broom or the mop or a trash bag when I need it. How’s that?”

  Terrific. I officially hated everyone.

  While Dad was in the house, a car drove up and parked, three boys tumbled out dressed in old shorts, ragged tees, and sneakers. Two stood to one side, while one reached into the car and pulled out a box, checked the label, and strode toward our car.

  “Excuse me, would one of you be Chrissy Ford?”

  Chrissy’s head lowered and she slid her eyes for a sideways look. She was waiting for something bad to happen. I knew the feeling.

  “My name is Thomas Caldwell. I think you might know Emily Keifer?” He balanced the box on one jutted hip and scratched behind his ear with his other hand.

  “My bears!” Chrissy squealed right in my ear. Deaf in one ear might not be so bad if it meant that I would only hear half the crap I’d been hearing.

  Chrissy bailed out of the car and practically ran up Thomas Caldwell like a squirrel runs up an oak. He put the box on the curb and Chrissy ripped the tape.

  “Em’s my best friend,” I told the guy.

  “Hi, you must be Ames,” he said. “Em and I know each other from Facebook. When she found out you were moving to Texas she sent out an SOS to see if anyone lived near Foley. None of her friends did, but one of her friends is a friend of mine, and, well, you know how that works.”

  I did.

  “My friend Brad hooked me up with Em — wirelessly, not, you know, biblically — and she told me you’d be needing a friend and that she wanted special care delivery for this package. She also told me that your house was going to need some work. I drove by a couple of days ago. It’s going to need more than ‘some’ work, I think. So, Ames, Mrs. Ford, if you don’t mind, I lassoed some friends to welcome you to Texas and help out a little.”

  Oh, kill me now. Em had paid these guys to help us shovel our hovel.

  He pointed back to the boys standing by his car. They now held rakes, shovels, and heavy lawn bags. “Those aren’t for landscaping. I walked through the inside. I didn’t think brooms or mops should touch the first few layers. Of course, you’ll be the boss. In the South, women always are. Southern men are smart enough to understand and accept that.”

  Mom smiled. Smiled. Had she lost her mind? She was falling for this chicken-fried bullshit.

  Tom introduced Devon and Marc. Marc didn’t look exactly thrilled to be here, but he did give me a half smile that seemed to communicate he knew that I wasn’t thrilled to be here, either. That singled him out as the one least likely to be the boy scout. The one Dad would like the least. The one Mom didn’t smile at. That made him interesting. He wasn’t an obvious hungry-like-a-wolf bad boy, but he was not a cute, big-eyed pup either. He was the one I wanted to know.

  Dad came out with a bag and plopped it on the curb. The introductions and explanations made the rounds again. “Em has her networks, doesn’t she?”

  Mom turned to Chrissy, who was counting and studying her bears. “Sweetie, there’s no reason for you to step inside this filthy house now that we have more helpers. Stay in the shade of this big oak and play with your bears. I can see you from the windows and door. Okay?” Mom retrieved a blanket for the little princess and Chrissy moved her bears to her new, clean castle with the fresh outdoor scent.

  Mom handed me rubber gloves and disinfectant. “While the boys do the floors, you can take care of the kitchen counters. I’m getting rid of all those filthy curtains and washing the windows.”

  I went in to survey the damage. Rotten food. Pizza boxes squirming with maggots, liquids turned to stone on the countertops and the sink, a cesspool of things I didn’t want to imagine. While the worst she got was window grime she would clean with Windex and paper towels? Thanks, Mom. I wanted to chew stones and spit gravel at her.

  While I stared at the mess, Marc came over. “Here, use this.” He handed me a scraperlike thing with a wide blade, then inserted one black lawn bag into another. “Double bag, always double bag. You don’t want a leak and any of that stuff splashing on your skin.”

  He crinkled his nose in disgust at the mess and made a wry bit of a smile. It was a little lopsided because one tooth kind of lapped over another just the tiniest bit. It made me want to ruffle his shaggy hair.

  “Do not touch anything with your bare hands. Shove everything with this scraper into the bags. Scrape until the counter is clean, then call me to help with that sink. Okay?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Promise?” he urged.

  “Scout’s honor,” I said, and set to work. I glanced back and he was still looking at me. I blushed and he grinned. He tilted his head almost imperceptibly and raised his eyebrows. “Busted,” he whispered.

  Marc went back to the dutiful duo and their raking and shoveling. The guys made quick work and had moved on to industrial brooms to shove the smaller stuff into piles, then used a regular broom to push that stuff into bags. Marc pulled off a silver piece of duct tape and wrapped it around the broom handle. “That’s the contaminated broom. Best not to use it on clean floors.”

  Dad leaned on the industrial broom. “You really know how to do this right. Have you cleaned out old houses before?”

  Marc hesitated, then shrugged. “We live in one of your parents’ houses. That’s why Tom thought of me to come help. Ours wasn’t this bad, but it did need work.”

  “Are you handy with a hammer and nails and paintbrushes?”

  “Yup, done it all. Can even replace that windowpane.”

  “Looking for a little after school work?”

  “I’m home-schooled. My schedule is pretty flexible,” Marc said.

  “Home-schooled?”

  Devon butted in. “His dad is a Fundamentalist. He thinks the high school is a den of evil or a bed of inequity.”

  “That’s a den of iniquity, moron.” Marc sighed. “Most of my church is home-schooled, sir. It’s just the way my dad wants it.”

  “Nothing wrong with keeping temptation out of your path,” Dad said.

  Well, that’s the only way Dad would avoid it. I needed to watch this more. I think Dad was seeing a lot of himself in Marc. Smart, capable, from crappy circumstances. He liked him. Then again, he saw a lot of himself in Marc, and look how he turned out. Five-min
ute psychology is essentially useless, but first impressions… like I said. I wanted to watch this more. Marc was certainly watchable.

  Marc turned to me. “Ready for the sink?”

  “Nobody’s ready for that sink.”

  He got a bucket and what looked like a thing you use to scoop fish from an aquarium. “Stand back, I’m going in.”

  He dunked the net into the murky water and scooped out a clog. The water drained.

  “My advice is to pour Clorox in there and spray it down before you touch anything. Even if you have rubber gloves. I’ll put this”— he indicated the mess in the net — “in the barrel that goes to the dump. Don’t touch any part of yourself with those gloves. Okay?”

  I smiled. “Got it.” I almost saluted, but that would mean touching my forehead. Marc was cool. He acted like he honestly cared if I lived or died. Mom and Dad had given me the nastiest job in the house. Chrissy was outside so she didn’t even have to sniff a few fumes. Mom was washing windows with the other two boys after they shoveled the floors. She was laughing and practically flirting with them.

  I considered this odd trio of males as I uncapped the Clorox. They had separated into the two and one dynamic immediately. They knew Marc, but I’d bet money they didn’t roll with him. They were all dressed like vagrants, but the teeth and hair gave it away. Tom and Declan/Duncan/whatever-his-name-was were orthodontic perfection. Nature didn’t make teeth that straight or that shade of white. My parents had the old bills from our dentist to prove it. The dentally delightful duo with the lazy swagger/shoulder rolls also had short, expensive hairstyles.

  Marc’s hair was longer and rumpled. Stoner hair. Bangs down to his brows. The overlap on his front teeth that made him look like an appealing first grader but cut him from the high roller herd. Home-schooled? Fundamentalist? Lives in this neighborhood? He was kind of a mystery. I liked that.

  Marc came back in, checked my progress, and looked through his bag of tricks. He returned with another kind of plastic scraper that made quick work of the dried gunk that my scraper or the sponge were no match for. “You’re so good at this, you kind of scare me. A little too Becky Home-Ec-y, you know.”

  “I had a good teacher,” I said.

  His smile was slow, soft. “You’re just all brand-new, aren’t you?” He winked at me. “You don’t belong here.” He jutted his chin, indicating the house. “The other guys came because your friend —”

  “Paid them,” I said.

  “She got totally unobtainable concert tickets. The girl must be connected. These guys totally agree that you are smokin’ hot but think you’re too young —”

  “That means ‘flat-chested.’ Excuse me, I have to go somewhere and die of embarrassment.”

  Marc smiled the lopsided smile. “Let me finish. Like I said, I think you’re brand-new. None of that ‘oh my god!’ and ‘is this fingernail polish to die for?’ stuff.”

  “No, I’m not that girl,” I said.

  “You and your parents — you, especially — don’t fit here. I know how that is. Not to fit.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t fit because I keep getting tossed out of the boat.” I shot a poison-arrow glance at my mother.

  Marc’s face softened. His bottom lip did this little twitch thing that made him, I don’t know, look like a child lost in a crowded mall. So vulnerable.

  “Tossed out of the boat. That’s a great way to put it.” He turned to scrub the other side of the sink so our conversation would become inconspicuous. “Yeah, I’m familiar with the feeling. It’s how I knew.”

  “Knew what?” I whispered the words, but it didn’t matter because the rest of the world had fallen away. There was a cocoon wrapped around Marc and me. His eyes were gentle and understanding.

  “I know your family betrayed you.”

  I gasped, and a tear leaked out from my left eye.

  “I’d wipe that away, but my hands are wet and they would see. You need to wipe it off. Don’t ever let them see that you have a soft place.”

  I hunched my shoulder and wiped my cheek against it. I wasn’t stupid. I knew he had just divided the group into “them” and “us,” but he had seen into me. The other two bozos were over there flashing their teeth to my mom.

  I regained composure and scraped the counter. “Do you always psychoanalyze everyone you meet?” The sentence was clipped and a little cold.

  “Nope. I know the signs because I’ve been through it. I see how you protect yourself when you talk to them. Me, I started collecting…” He paused, leaned in, and whispered, “Guns.”

  Guns?

  I froze in mid-scrub. Something in his tone told me he wasn’t talking about hunting rifles. Deer, elk, squirrel. Why be so secretive about that? I was in Texas… I looked around me to see if we had caught anyone’s attention. No.

  His voice dropped and he moved even closer to my ear. “Does that scare you?” His voice dropped even lower. “I can protect you if you want.”

  I pulled back and stared at him. I don’t know what my expression was. Something in his voice or the way he watched my face told me I was being tested. I was chilled, but I was on fire. At the same time. My heart raced, but my breathing stopped. All of me was still.

  This was… strange.

  Marc knew what he was doing. He was cutting me off from the herd. He was telling me he had secrets. Dark ones. He knew I’d be either repulsed and afraid — or fascinated. Seeing an offer of shared power. I could accept him or reject him now.

  We locked eyes and made an unspoken promise. I wasn’t going to tell about his guns, and he… he was going to be on my side.

  It happened that quickly. I was hot and tired and sore and pissed off. I had been the good girl and gotten a lap full of betrayal. I wanted to be dangerous, and danger winked and told me I could.

  I accepted.

  After we’d shoveled, swept, re-swept, vacuumed, de-cobwebbed, mopped, and disinfected, I was ready to be hospitalized. Tom and the other shoveler, Kevin or Delwin or whatever, decided they had done their cheerful duty and bailed. Marc, however, told Dad that if he wanted to put some plastic over the window and board over the door for the night, he’d help do that in exchange for a ride home.

  While they hammered and boarded and sealed, we brought in sleeping bags, pillows, changes of clothes, and toiletries, and then Mom — using the only cell phone, of which she had total and unrelinquished control — ordered pizza. She insisted Marc stay. A mantra ran through my head. Guns, Mom. Mad Marc. I had to hold back a bit, make my parents think I wasn’t interested so they would push me right toward what they would hate most.

  Em would love this.

  “Marc,” Mom said, “it’s got to be eighty degrees. Is this normal for spring?”

  “April is a good month. Early in the month it’s always between seventy-five and eighty-five degrees. It’ll have some ninety-plus days by the end of April. May will jump around in the high eighties and low nineties, and all of July and August run high nineties and up into the hundreds.”

  Chrissy didn’t react because she didn’t understand what that meant. The rest of us did. If it was this hot and it was only eighty degrees…

  “Randal, didn’t you tell me that there’s no air-conditioning?”

  Dad didn’t answer.

  “We will all die,” I said. I turned to Marc. “Will we roast from the outside, like in an oven, or inside out like a microwave?”

  He didn’t lose a beat. “Neither. You’ll sweat into a puddle like the Wicked Witch of the West.”

  Dad didn’t laugh. He guffawed. Seriously. That was the sound. Then he started talking to Marc about how often and when he could work. Blah, blah. Chrissy focused on eating the cheese strings that trailed from her pizza slice. I ate mine like a zombie, still calculating heat and no air-conditioning.

  “Ames, can you clean this up when everyone’s done?” Mom called out to me. She smiled and looked at me, then at Marc. “I’m done in. I’m taking a shower and climbing
into the sleeping bag.”

  “Let me help you with that,” Marc said to me. Okay, now I got it. Mom was setting us up. Not so quick, Mommy Dearest.

  “Nah, I can handle a couple of boxes and soda cans. Dad, don’t you need to run Marc home? I’m sure he’s beat.”

  Marc jerked his head toward me and his jaw hardened. I looked down, then sort of up through my lashes at him like I’d seen Em do a million times. The set of his mouth relaxed as he snapped to the game.

  I turned my back on Marc and gathered the trash. Dad groaned as he hoisted himself from the floor.

  Mom and Dad, you’re about to find out how much betrayal hurts.

  LEARNING TO ADJUST

  I woke up in my new bedroom with paralysis. Parts of me could move, but it hurt so bad that I didn’t want to risk it after the first effort. My arms and shoulders were like one large bruise that someone was knuckling. I had no idea how many times I had squatted yesterday, but my butt and my quads were announcing that it had been too many.

  I was on my back and the view of the mildew on the ceiling wasn’t helping my mood. I didn’t think I could turn my head, so I slid my eyes as far to the right as I could. There was Chrissy, snoring like a little cat purrs, dewed with sweat, sprawled on top of her sleeping bag, surrounded by her bears. If she woke up smiling and chirping as she usually did, I would be forced to drown her. No way, I thought. In my condition, she could take me easily.

  I heard groaning from the other room. Mom and Dad had awakened to hit the same hard wall I had. Dad let out a string of curse words that would curl a preacher’s hair and that a sailor would admire. Mom didn’t bother to admonish him.

  There were more groans then more shuffling. Three raps on our door and it swung open. Dad looked like he slept in the washer on the spin cycle. “I don’t know what’s worse — the heat or the pain. You sore?”

  “I’m paralyzed. I think there was some hideous new germ in all that gunk I touched.” I whimpered. “I have a fever and I’m dying.”

  “Die later. You have to paint today.” He shambled away.