The Ones That Got Away

by Stephen Graham Jones

  At night my sheets, they were starting to feel furred, velvety, so that I’d have to turn my lights on to be sure they weren’t, then turn them off again, in case my dad pulled up, saw my window glowing, wasting electricity, trying to light the whole neighborhood.

  By the time summer was halfway over, I’d convinced myself it was all made-up, that I was scaring myself, and even managed to sleep with my back to the door a time or two, but then I heard the humming again. The song. And it wasn’t coming from me.

  Nicholas. In his sleep.

  I shook him until he cried, never really waking up, then I was secretly relieved when my mom came to sit by his cot until he went to sleep again. She made it safe enough to close my eyes. Her feet swished on the carpet as she left.

  Except, when I opened my eyes, she was still there, her head on Nicholas’s cot, her breath regular.

  Meaning that those footsteps—

  I shook my head no, no, and the days started to blur into the nights, the breakfasts into the dinners, my days and nights upside-down now too, and some afternoons I even stood right there on the edge of the doorway to Jamison’s room, and watched the skeleton faces watch me back.

  What I was doing was willing myself to grow up.

  But that was coming.

  And my mom was right, probably: it would have all passed, been over with the summer, or at least with Jamison moving on to his next big scheme.

  Except one night, the smell of urine rising from my bed again, me breathing harder than I should have been, I heard the footsteps again, that bone smoothness across the carpet.

  It was Nicholas, groggy.

  “I’m telling dad,” he said, and I reached out, grabbed his arm.

  He looked down to it, up along it to me.

  “No,” I told him, and then felt it for the first time: the breeze, the wind, the pull.

  It was crossing me, moving towards Jamison’s room.

  I breathed in, breathed out. Shook my head no but could still feel it.

  “What?” Nicholas said, trying to pull away, and I closed my eyes, said it to him, what I never should have: “Just get me the extra sheets, okay?”

  Our linen closet, it was the second closet in Jamison’s room. The far door.

  To seal the deal, I promised him a little car I didn’t play with anymore, the one I always caught him playing with, had to hide.

  “The red one?” he said, falling asleep again just standing there.

  “The red one,” I nodded, and then he slouched away, stepped across the hall into the velvet darkness, and, moments later the air stopped crossing my bed, and the next thing I knew, my mom was shaking me, then my dad was, until he felt the stickiness on my skin, pulled back in disgust.

  “Where is he?” my mom was saying, insisting.

  My dad just looked at me, waiting.

  I sat up, pushed back into the corner, and nodded across the hall, to Jamison’s room, and in two strides my dad was over there, turning it over, ripping it down, until Jamison got back, stood there, and that’s when my dad did what he did to Jamison, that the cops had to come stop, finally, and Jamison’s paramedic Robbie had to clean up even though it wasn’t his shift anymore.

  And then all of us forgot how to sleep.

  Me and my mom sat in the living room watching nothing on television, her crying in her chest every few minutes—her son gone with no explanation, her brother in a coma, her husband in jail for the weekend, her other son a bedwetter, a fraidy cat, a traitor.

  Every light in the house was on.

  Three nights later my dad knocked on his own front door, waited for my mom to open it back for him.

  We went to see Jamison together, as a family.

  His face was a mummy face, plastic tubes taped all over him, his life reduced to an electric green beep on a monitor.

  “They shaved his beard,” my mom finally said.

  It had been one of my dad’s complaints.

  And as far as Nicholas, the police had nothing. They were waiting for Jamison to wake up, explain it all somehow, but were ready to write it off as another runaway too.

  On the way back to the house we stopped at Nicholas’s favorite place, the hamburger joint that used to be the concession stand for the drive-in, when there’d been a drive-in.

  We chewed the food and swallowed the food and never tasted any of it.

  Halfway home, my mom motioned my dad to stop so she could throw up. He reached across, held her hair up for her, and in that moment it was good between them again. Good enough.

  That night they ushered me back to my room in a way that I didn’t take to mean that my brother was gone, but that I’d lost him. That I’d traded him. And I had. Then my mom squeezed my hand goodnight, my dad patted my headboard, and they closed their bedroom door, chocked the chair under the knob like they did. I knew the sound, what it meant: another ritual. For Nicholas.

  Before, when they’d start—but this time was going to be quiet, I knew, both of them probably crying the whole time—I’d cross into Nicholas’s room, wrench the dial on the air conditioner over, to drown them out.

  This time, though, it was already on, already blowing.

  For maybe five minutes I made myself stand at the door, feeling that coolness wash past, staring into the wreck of Jamison’s stuff, but I still couldn’t cross over.

  Instead, I got the wooden bat from my closet, held it backwards to hook the butt of the handle on the edge of the door, and pulled it shut. Told Nicholas I was sorry sorry sorry. Prayed at first that he could hear me, and then a more guilty prayer: that he couldn’t.

  Before going to my bed, I stood over the toilet until I finally peed a trickle, like that was the trade I was offering.

  It didn’t work.

  Because my parents still had their door shut, I shut mine too, laid a pair of pants down along the bottom to hide the light I was leaving on.

  I had to sleep, I mean.

  Already there were fuzzy, moving things at the edge of the tunnels I was looking down. The tunnels that were getting skinnier and skinnier, turning more into straws, pinholes, the world farther and farther away. Or maybe it was me who was backing away.

  When the sounds started from my parent’s room finally, I rolled over on my bed, wound the sheets tight and pressed my pillow over my head, and somewhere in there, for the first time in I didn’t know how long, I fell asleep.

  I didn’t know it, of course, or, only knew it in the past tense, when I woke up all at once staring not at the wall like I’d meant, like I thought was safe, but at my door.

  What?

  It was still shut, there was nothing wrong.

  But there was.

  I felt the yellow warmth pooling under me: the pair of jeans I’d stuffed along the bottom of the door, they were gone.

  And the cold air I’d felt washing past me before, it was going the other way now. Again. Pulling.

  And there was the humming, the song.

  It was coming from me, I was making it without meaning to, but it was larger too. I was singing with the song that was already happening.

  I shook my head no, pushed as far into the back wall as I could.

  The light in the hall was on too. Or, worse, light was spilling from Jamison’s room.

  “Mom,” I creaked, hardly even a whisper, and immediately wished I hadn’t.

  There were two shadows on the other side of the door. Feet.

  “Mom?” I said again, shaking my head no, my bladder emptier than it had ever been.

  It was like I was at the old drive-in before they tore it down. Like I was watching the close-up of some doorknob starting to twist, everybody in their cars holding their breath, only watching through their fingers.

  But there were no bugs dying in the cone of projected light here, and nobody was about to honk, kill the moment.

  It was really happening.

  “Dad,” I finally whispered, my last, lastmost resort.

  It wasn’t him either, thou
gh.

  When this door opened, it was Jamison standing there. Jamison with his shaggy beard, his too-long jeans like always, but different too. His skin loose on him somehow, and crackly, like paper that’s been rained on then dried in the sun. His eyes already falling back into his sockets.

  In his arms, sleeping, Nicholas.

  I stood from my wet bed, faced him and shied away both at once. Wanted to hug him and scream at the same time.

  Behind his beard, Jamison was mouthing the words of the song.

  I nodded, understood somehow, hummed my part, filling the empty shapes he was making, the shapes he was leaving out there in the air for me to color in with my voice.

  It was a kind of magic, I think.

  The only way it could be.

  “Tell Sissy, tell her—” he said, grinning that same grin from the day he’d first shown up, and then just held Nicholas across the threshold, like there was some rule about that too, that he could come no farther, that I was the one who was going to have to finish this.

  I shook my head no, that I couldn’t, that I wasn’t stro—that Nicholas was too heavy.

  But then he was my brother, too.

  I crossed the room on robot legs, took him from my uncle’s arms, and only staggered under the weight a little at first, like I could do this impossible thing, but then it was too much, just all at once.

  I turned for a place to lay him down, knew it couldn’t be my wet bed, knew his cot had all my little cars on it already, in offering, and I fell. First to one knee, then forward, trying to cradle Nicholas as best I could. Like a brother should.

  It worked.

  When he hit the carpet he came awake, looked up at me and then behind me.

  I looked too but Jamison was already gone, the door across the hall sucking shut harder than should have been possible.

  The next morning my dad found Nicholas and me sleeping back to front again, on the floor, and kept his boots on and laid down beside us, held us both so tight, nodding something to himself I think, wiping his face maybe, and at some point the phone started ringing.

  My dad still didn’t let us go. The three of us listened to my mom’s footsteps crossing the kitchen, the phone cutting off mid-ring, the murmur of her saying okay to the hospital, of her thanking them for the call, for telling her this news that was probably for the best, and then we cringed from the sound of her hundred pounds falling into the stove, clattering down with the pans, not getting back up from that sheet of curled-at-the-edges linoleum.

  “Jamison,” I said.

  “Jamison,” Nicholas said too, but different than I had.

  My dad just shook his head, pressed his closed eyes into my back, and did he start playing pool that next year, staying out later and later until he finally just stayed gone one night, and did Nicholas try twice to kill himself four years later, each time in the closet of his bedroom? Did my mom ever get up from the kitchen floor, let one of us pick the pans up for her? Years later, burning a pile of posters, would I think I saw Jamison, just hunched over real small in the velvet, walking away?

  It doesn’t matter.

  All that matters is right then, that morning, having Nicholas back, our dad with his arms around us like it should have been, and that my mom was right: after that summer, I never wet the bed even once, even when I wake in my own house with that hum in my chest some nights and feel my way to the sink, fumble the light on—always the light—and find there in the soap tray, or balanced on the lip of the medicine cabinet, a little red car that wasn’t there before.

  Because they don’t know. Because they think that can still work.

  You can hide them in boxes, though, if you want, the little cars, and then put those boxes in the attic or the basement, and not tell anybody, just walk through your life with a song in your head, one that scares you, but you can’t stop singing it either, because if you ever do—

  Most nights, after fumbling the light over the sink on, I make it to the toilet, I mean, don’t have to explain anything to my wife.

  For those other nights, though, I’ve tiled the bathroom floor, and in front of the sink, and when I finally make myself lie back down, I’m always sure to have left the closet door behind me open, so that if Jamison wants to stand there, keep me safe for one more night, he can. Please.

  The Sons of Billy Clay

  Because it was still his first week, Walter made Sandro bring the burgers. Because Sandro probably still believed the stories—that Walter had once left another guard down at the other end of C Block, alone, in population—Sandro clocked out like you had to when leaving the complex, went through all the security checks, then drove the six miles to the only place with decent burgers at three in the morning.

  “Get lost, kimo?” Walter said. He’d been in the break room twenty minutes already.

  Sandro set the $14.72 of burgers down, made no eye contact.

  “Don’t be a baby now,” Walter said, unrolling the bag.

  There were four burgers. He took three, slid the other one across the table for Sandro.

  “What the hell?” Sandro said.

  “I’m older,” Walter said, “need the calories.”

  Sandro pushed the bag back across the table.

  “Have it your way,” Walter said, tearing into the first burger. “More for me, yeah?”

  Three bites in, though, a glob of ketchup splattered onto the front of Walter’s uniform shirt.

  He stared at it, his teeth bared, nostrils flaring.

  “That my fault too?” Sandro said.

  “You watch it, kid.”

  Walter stood, peeled his shirt off and twisted the stain up to a point, let it soak in the sink.

  “Go ahead,” he said, his back still turned. “Eat one. Long time till sun-up.”

  “It going to stain?” Sandro asked.

  Walter came back in his undershirt, killed the burger in two bites he had to close his eyes to get swallowed all the way down.

  “Thought I told you it was the place with the yellow sign?”

  “I went to the place with the yellow sign.”

  Walter unwrapped the next burger like he was a detective.

  “Got that glass front, just south of the oil change place?”

  “You don’t have to eat them,” Sandro said.

  “Like I said,” Walter said, biting in again, “long time till sun-up.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What?”

  Walter’s shoulder. Sandro was pointing with his chin.

  Walter snorted a laugh out. “Used to be a guy, a lifer. I got him infirmary duty and he did the ink. Took five weeks, all told.”

  “But what is it?”

  “You blind?”

  Walter pulled the strap of his shirt to the side. It was a rodeo bull, kicking its hind legs at the sky, like used to be on beer cans.

  “You rode?” Sandro said, smiling with disbelief.

  Walter closed his eyes in disgust, finished the burger and offered the third one to Sandro. Sandro crossed his arms, set his teeth.

  “Fine by me,” Walter said, and peeled the wrapper.

  He’d never eaten four at once before, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t about to.

  “So what?” Sandro said. “You’re some ex-cowboy or something? Yee-haw, all that?”

  Walter chewed, swallowed.

  Probably Sandro had spit on the burgers, that’s what it was.

  “You and me,” he said, “you know what they used to call us, forty years ago?”

  “Stupid? Degenerates?”

  “Bulls. Gun bulls. What the prisoners used to call the guards.”

  “So you never really rode?”

  “Not this one,” Walter said, tapping his shoulder, “not him. Nobody did. Ever. That’s the thing.”

  Sandro looked over to the shirt in the sink, Walter was pretty sure.

  Walter huffed a bit of a laugh out his nose. His eyes weren’t smiling though.

  “Billy Clay,” he sa
id, almost at a whisper. Like reverence.

  Sandro came back to him.

  Walter tapped the tattoo again.

  Sandro shook his head, said, “What time’s break over?”

  “It didn’t start until you just got back,” Walter said around a bite.

  Sandro leaned forward, his elbows on the table now.

  “But you tried, right?” he said. “To ride that one?”

  “Billy Clay? Notice how I’m still alive, sitting here?”

  Sandro shrugged.

  “It’s how you can tell,” Walter said. “Nobody ever sat Billy Clay for eight full seconds.”

  Sandro stared at him, his eyes flat like you used when laying down the law to the prisoners just off the bus. “Billy Clay,” he said. “That’s not any bull name.”

  “Exactly,” Walter said.

  The fourth burger actually hurt, going down, but Walter didn’t show it.

  “Hot water’ll set it,” Sandro said across the break room.

  Walter was at the sink, working on the stain. “Thanks, Grandma,” he said. “Hungry yet? I know a boy over in C Block’s that’s usually up about now, he could probably feed you something.”

  Sandro straightened his leg under the table, sent a chair clattering into the counter.

  Walter smiled, kept rubbing the stain.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll figure things out soon enough.”

  “Turn into you, right?”

  “If you’re lucky.”

  “Get pictures drawn on my body of things I never did.”

  Walter set his teeth together, scrubbed harder.

  “I rode,” he said. “Just not him.”

  “Like putting a notch in your bedpost for girls you’ve never—”

  Walter turned around, the shirt still twisted in his hands.

  “Nobody rode Billy Clay. They kicked him off the circuit, had him destroyed before he could even get any stud fees.”

  “Because he was so good?”

  “Because he was . . . ”