House of Sighs

by Aaron Dries

  Sixty-Three

  Wes already knew what it was like to feel fear. At least he thought so.

  Before age had forced him off the field, he had played for a local football team. He had been good, front-page-of-the-Bugle material. Everyone came to watch the games. He was proud his family was with him.

  One winter, six-year-old Jed taught his father about fear. Wes had not been playing that day, a recurring knee injury having pulled him off the field. He cheered in the stands with the others. If there was something else Wes was learning about, it was patience. More than anything else he wanted to be out there playing, to smell the churned grass and sweat.

  Reggie held his shoulder. It was her way of comforting. He knew she pitied him and he loved her for it. Loved her too for her loyalty to the team. Football sparked something in her. When she got angry or excited as someone scored, or a referee made a wrong call, it reminded him of the girl he had married and prized.

  His children paid little attention to the game. They would wander with friends. But they knew that by the time the final siren wailed they had to be waiting by the food stands, ready to be collected. If they were not there, then there would be trouble. Wes was tough but fair. And on that day, when the game drew to a close, when the siren echoed across the field, Jed was nowhere to be seen.

  Reggie asked Liz if she had seen her brother.

  “Nup.”

  Wes went to look for him, dragging his bad leg behind him, already rehearsing what he was going to say.

  If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times.

  Jed, get your behind over here now.

  You had me and your mother worried sick.

  Next to the field there was a children’s playground. At the sandpit, he found the open belly of the jam sandwich Reggie had made Jed that morning. This sight didn’t scare him, just made him angrier. Kid never stays put when I tell him to, he thought, chewing on his lower lip. He kicked sand over the remains, buried sport for the cats.

  Ten minutes passed. Irritation turned to worry. Images of men in cars holding bouquets of two-cent candy out to his son filled his head.

  Wes walked through a small thicket of trees and saw his son’s bare back.

  Jed’s soiled shirt was thrown over the arm of a collapsed tree. He stood on a mound of upraised dirt: the spout of an ant nest. The hive was alive, swarming with black and yellow pinpricks. Wes called to his son. Jed slowly turned. His arms were lathered in jam, smeared over his cheeks. His pale skin was covered in a frenzy of ants. Thousands of them. On his lips, through his hair.

  This was Wes’s lesson in fear.

  It was as though the ants were crawling over his own skin, each having the potential to bite and blaze.

  Jed’s mouth moved but there was no sound.

  My son is going to die, Wes now understood. He will die if I stand here and do nothing. Move your feet now, old man! You’re as useless as tits on a bull if you just stay put.

  He rushed forward and tackled his son to the ground, rolled him around in the grass until the insects were gone. Jed was in his arms, unbitten and safe.

  That was what Wes thought it was to fear, but he was wrong.

  Fear was the sound of a gunshot and realizing that the person who pulled the trigger was your boy.

  Wes blinked. The smell of fear: jam and dirt.

  He couldn’t understand why the bus was in his front yard, or who the people were aboard. He stopped in his tracks—behind him Reggie stepped out of the house and screamed. She had seen what he had seen: a dead boy on their front yard, a bloodied fountain shooting red into the sky.

  Wes knew fear was seeing your children guilty and lost. And to have never seen it coming. This was fear.

  He watched the gun fall from Jed’s hand. His gaze shot to the bus and saw the passengers running its length. Cowering. He could see the bus door. It was a slit into darkness.

  Reggie’s bare feet hit the dirt. She yelled to her daughter who now writhed on the ground. Dazed, Wes reached for her. Their fingertips almost touched.

  No, he said to himself. Get the gun.

  Sixty-Two

  Jed’s world had slowed to a crawl. Hollow wind over his ears, gun smoke burning his nostrils.

  Reggie collapsed onto Liz, pulling at her. “Get up,” she yelled. “Into the house now!” Her thick fingers around Liz’s sweaty arms. Jed watched them fall over each other and thought of The Three Stooges. In his mind he heard kazoos and a crackling laugh track. His face was impassive as he watched, not moving to help his mother or sister.

  Wes picked up the gun.

  Something in him snapped. Something in the dark.

  The weapon was his.

  Wes was never one to theorize about fate. He didn’t believe in all that astro-hoo-ha-tabloid bullshit. But there was something inside him that believed in retribution. What could he have possibly done to deserve this? His own private answer lay in the question itself.

  Movement on the bus broke his daze; the door slammed shut from the inside with the ferocity of a bear trap. Wes only became aware of the numbness in his body once he started to shake it off, when he realized that the gun was gone from his hands.

  They were trespassers. They had no right to be on his property any more than they had the right to bring harm to his family. Wes felt the realization settle upon him, the weight of it crushing him. Get off your high horse, you fucking hypocrite, he told himself. After everything you’ve done? You’re a monster. Go back to your garden, you fucking joke.

  Wes ground his false teeth together.

  No. No I won’t.

  Regret and shame had softened him, but he smiled now. He had been waiting for this moment to come, waiting for a reason to become a man again. A man defended what was his. His family were failures…but they were his failures. Nobody had the right to touch them but him.

  Nobody.

  His anger ignited. It was a familiar flame; one he thought had gone out forever. He felt himself growing strong, as though the years were peeling away to reveal a harder man, devoid of mercy.

  Wes looked up and watched his son moving away from him. He saw the great tattooed eagle through Jed’s wife-beater and saw the gun he had been holding just a moment ago in Jed’s hand.

  “Nobody,” Wes said.

  Jed shot at the bus, holes punched into its side. One wayward bullet blew out the front left tire—it hissed as it deflated. Wes ran towards his son and threw his arms around him, pulling him towards the house by the midsection. The final bullet before the click-click of empty chambers went wide and landed in the dirt.

  “Don’t fight me, Jed.”

  “Let me go, Dad! Jesus-fuckin’-Christ, let me go!”

  Jed wormed his way free, stumbling towards the bus with the empty gun in his hand. Wes followed, bolts of pain in his knee, reaching out and grabbing Jed’s arm. Jed turned and thumped the gun against the side of his father’s face. Instant pain flared in Wes’s forehead, warmth ran down his cheek.

  Wes looked at Jed and saw his frightened expression. He had seen it on a hundred television newscasts: the face of the captured assassinator as he screamed, “They made me do it!”

  He punched his son in the chest.

  Winded, Jed fell to the ground and looked up. Wes towered above him. Jed scrambled, the gun forgotten now. Another blow stopped him. He felt himself being dragged in huge lunges towards the house. Wes had him by the waist of his jeans.

  Meanwhile, Reggie pulled her daughter’s thin frame up the stairs and onto the porch. Her face was flushed red, hair sticking to her oily skin. She no longer recognized herself as the woman who moments before had put a chicken in the refrigerator to marinate.

  Jed looked up at his father. You’re not a man, he thought. How can you not feel the anger I feel now? These people have done something to our Liz. They have done something to me. They’ve made a murderer of me. Dizzy from the punches, he whispered aloud, “I did the right thing.”

  To his surprise
his father put out his hand and helped him up. “I know you did, son. But we got to be careful, move slow. Those people on the bus, they’re…” Wes searched for the right word, his eyes closed. “…Animals.”

  Sixty-One

  The passengers were on the floor, huddled behind seats. They breathed into the crooks of their arms. Sarah was the first to move. She knew she had to stay out of sight, that the smarter option was to remain where she sat and dummy up, but she could not deny that the situation had to be assessed. Now. Every second counted.

  “Get down,” came a voice. She couldn’t tell from whom. A man. Jack. He was the one who ran forward and closed the bus doors after the teenager had been shot. She knew he was scared, his confidence impotent in the face of chaos. There could be no more heroes or escapees. Together she and Jack had searched the driver’s hub for the keys.

  “Are they there?” she asked.

  Jack’s face was blanched. The driver must have put them into her pocket before stepping outside. Sarah watched him scramble with the radio, bang on it in frustration. Nothing. It was then that the bullets had come, tearing holes in the side of the bus and sending tufts of upholstery into the air.

  “I need to see,” she told the voice as she peered through the window.

  The sisters looked up, still clinging to each other. Everyone was in the rear of the bus, huddled close. Jack grabbed Michael by the arm as he eased up in his seat, pulling him close with a violent tug. “Stay the fuck down.”

  Julia realized she was beyond thirsty. She couldn’t swallow. A headache began to throb. “What are they doing?” she asked the old woman. She could hear the sounds of a scuffle and then muffled yells.

  “They’re fighting,” Sarah told them. “The old guy and the one who shot at us.”

  “Fighting?” Michael pulled his arm from Jack’s grip. It was a small defensive move on his part and he regretted it straight away. Jack stared at him. Don’t screw with me, the look said. Michael averted the burning eyes, intimidated.

  Sarah cupped her hand against the window and struggled to see through the grime. She watched the younger man push the older man away and understood: father and son. The dynamic was clear as day; the way the son now stood, chest puffed out and arms wide, spoke of bottled-up defiance. His father knocked him down.

  Her husband had always been fond of nature documentaries. Once they had watched territorial stags lock horns until one claimed the land as his. Watching the two men in the yard was like that. Then the father helped the son to his feet—some sort of agreement had been reached. What, she couldn’t even guess at. They ran side by side to the woman standing at the threshold of the house, who beckoned in loud, insane hoots. At the door they forced her into the house. The door closed.

  Sarah bit her lip, leaving blood on her teeth. Her eyes moved back to the son. It was as though she had tunnel vision, or was looking through a pair of binoculars. Her focal point was the size of a thumbprint.

  Blur. Dust. Blood.

  Him.

  The son. Standing on the porch. Looking straight at her.

  Sixty

  Sarah cried out and fell back into her seat. Michael and Julia flinched. “Stay down,” she said to them.

  “What is—” Julia began. Sarah silenced her. She heard footsteps outside. Slow and deliberate. Wind blew across the bullet holes, whistling as if blowing across the mouths of Coke bottles.

  Michael heard the footsteps too. He saw himself running away, out the door and into the trees, and before he even knew what was happening, he was standing up and turning towards the front of the bus. Jack threw him to the ground. Michael’s head banged hard against the floor. He looked up at his attacker, Jack’s fist raised and ready to punch. It hovered above him. Michael’s eyes fluttered, waiting for it to fall. Jack exhaled, his mind caught up with his actions. He unclenched his fist. Someone was touching his calf.

  Julia looked at him. Please don’t, she mouthed.

  He watched her face grow dark.

  A shadow had fallen over her.

  Julia screamed.

  The son looked in at them through the window, a dark silhouette with burning, murderous eyes. The bus rocked towards him. He must be standing on the wheel, Jack thought, rolling off the faggot underneath him until he could see the man outside. He had never seen eyes so crazy.

  Diana put her hand over Julia’s mouth. She watched the man move away from the window, his arms outstretched as though crucified against the glass. She saw his muscles, the matted hair of his armpits.

  Then silence.

  The son banged his forehead against the window. A blister of blood popped on his face. The bus rocked.

  Sarah thought of the documentary again, this time of monkeys wrestling with the bars of their cage. She could feel Bill’s hand holding her own, his whisper in her ear: “One day we should just get up and go see this stuff, what you think, baby-luv?”

  Jed roared at them. His voice was fire; it crackled and seemed to darken the glass. He spat on the window and disappeared.

  Fifty-Nine

  I’ve seen you. I’ve seen all your faces, you little fucks. I’ve seen your sharp teeth. You’ve all got ants for eyes.

  Half of his world was red. Jed wiped the blood off his brow.

  Look what you did to me. You cut me.

  He saw his scarlet fingers. They were the hands of someone who had shot and murdered and—

  Liz looked terrified. He had never seen somebody so scared in all his life. He wanted to get wet, to take a drag and dull the reality of the situation. But he knew this shouldn’t be diluted. A busload of strangers had turned his sister into a wreck. He had never felt more alert. He looked across the lawn to the dead teenager sprawled near last year’s Christmas cut-outs.

  “Oh God,” he muttered.

  Who are you? Why would you run if you’d done nothing wrong? I did the right thing. You ran because you were guilty, because you had been the ringleader in Liz’s torture. The others had sat back and laughed. And look where it got you? You first, them next. I’m going to rip out their teeth and shove them into their eyes. Stick them in deep until they scream apologies. Until they beg.

  “No.”

  I’m not a murderer. He stood and the world spun.

  Yes. Yes you are. You killed that boy.

  He ran towards the corpse and stopped short, swaying.

  “Get up,” he told the body. “Get up, I said.”

  It did not move, so he kicked it. Again and again.

  “No,” he said. Calmer. “It wasn’t me. I-I-I didn’t do it.”

  No you didn’t.

  “That’s right, I didn’t.” He smiled, relieved.

  They did it.

  Jed turned towards the bus. His eyes peered out from the bloodied caves in his face. “Yeah. It was them.” He stepped forward and could just make out their giggles.

  They’re laughing. Can you hear that?

  “Yeah, I can hear it. Jesus.”

  They’re laughing at you. At Sis.

  He took another step closer and craned his head forward. They were still laughing. Mincing little girl noises. He closed his eyes.

  “Yes.”

  Jed ran at the silver monolith on the dead grass. His mouth was open but no sound came out. He slammed against its side. Within, laughter turned to screams. He lurched to the door and looked through. A small face peered out at him. Lifeless white skin, hair falling from its scalp. Its eyes were hives full of ants and running jam.

  Frightened, he stumbled.

  “You won’t beat me,” he said to the creature.

  Jed launched himself at the door. His fingers struggled to find a grip. There were no edges with which to rip it wide and lunge at the beast that now turned to its allies and yelled: “Help me! Get over here now!”

  Fifty-Eight

  “Help me! Get over here now!” Jack screamed to the others.

  Michael couldn’t move. It was as though all the weight he had lost was back on his bones
, pinning him to the floor. He couldn’t speak.

  Jack had a firm hold on the door. The accordion opened inwards and he now had his knee propped against its vertical hinge. Every muscle in his body screamed. On the other side the young man threw punches.

  Sarah crouched in the aisle, unsure if she should help. Jack was afraid of the man getting in but also angry with Michael for refusing to come and help. Pussy. The girls had been reduced to hysterical blobs, so it was just the men against the outside threat. The kid might be a chicken shit faggot but he’s still got responsibilities here. At the moment only a thin, shaking door separated Jack and madness.

  Michael knew what Jack was thinking. He was being challenged. Stop it, he told himself. That’s ridiculous. This isn’t a test. Get off your ass and help.

  As he stood, the man stopped banging against the door and stepped away from the bus.

  The door was freckled with grime, saliva and blood smears, so Jack couldn’t see clearly but he could make out a presence on the veranda of the house. The parents calling their son.

  Thank God. Go to the house. Then mom and dad will call the police.

  Don’t think so, Jack-o.

  His mind connected the dots. It was the family they were dealing with now. The driver had run home to her parents. Jack watched the house. There was an open door, swinging in the wind. The son walked towards the house and stopped at the bottom step.

  He turned back towards the bus.

  He fumbled with his pockets and pulled out a set of keys.

  Jack followed his movements, trying to predict the next. He’s got the bus keys. How? When? He’s going to come and open the door. No. Wait! YES! That’s good. We want him to come and open the door. We can take him, hell I could take him alone. We take him and grab the keys and get the fuck out of here.

  The son walked towards them.

  There was a buzzing near Jack’s ear. The fly. But I killed it, I know I did.

  No you didn’t, said the other voice. He looked around for the fly and the stranger muttering in his ear.