by Lee Thompson
I studied the brother. He studied me, his face unflinching, offering nothing. McCoy had dug into his past. He’d found out their names—Jake and Lester—and surprisingly, before today they didn’t have any criminal history. Jake, the brother they’d apprehended, worked odd jobs and drew social security, spending what little money he had on his daughter and an ever growing comic book collection. Lester was known to tramp state to state, working odd jobs as well, at restaurants and the like, and then disappearing again for months before resurfacing, as if always searching out meaning down dirty back roads until he realized, yet again, that he was never going to fit in or be accepted anywhere. Their parents were murdered when they were seven years old. McCoy said there was a lot more to it but it could wait until I found out what Jake had to say, and I saw the itch digging at his patience because he wanted to believe that they could lead us to Nutley and Doug.
I said, “You wanted to talk to me?”
He nodded.
I said, “I don’t have all day.”
“You don’t have long at all.”
“What do you want?”
He shrugged, but his eye grew moist. He leaned back in his chair, shook his head. “You don’t even know what’s going on.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
He laughed. “It’s against the rules.”
“You follow rules?”
He frowned and placed a hand on the table. “It really bothers me that you’re so quick to judge.”
“Who isn’t?”
He glanced at the ceiling. I wondered if he was religious and that was his way of telling me that God wouldn’t judge. My dad was a preacher—not a great one, not even a great man—but I’d read plenty and the god the Bible presented leaned toward judging everyone. I said, “What happened to your eye?”
His hand rose and his fingers stroked the rim of the empty socket.
He smiled, said, “Fishing accident.”
I smiled back, wondering if we were finally warming up to each other now that we set our guns aside. “Hell of an accident.”
“You’re too young to remember,” he said.
“Remember what?”
“A long time ago, there was a terror that roamed the countryside.”
I searched my memory, thought, Well, it wasn’t all that long ago to me.
He said, “I knew a magician once.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yeah, only it wasn’t. He was a monster. He took me into his arms and held me while he guided my hand to cut my brother’s eye free.”
I sat straighter. “Cut your brother’s eye free?”
“He wasn’t Nutley anymore then. He hasn’t been for a long time. He’s something else.” He tapped the table in a sad mock-up of a drum beat.
I shivered.
He said, “Boom Stick.”
I thought of the girl who drew crooked stick figures and hobbled about a dilapidated house on one leg because she didn’t know she was dead.
I said, “He’s the one who murdered your parents.”
“And gave me something I don’t want.”
“What?”
“What the hell do you think?”
I had a million guesses and figured they were all right.
He said, “After we cut each other’s eyes free, he had me hold Les’s eye between my teeth, and had Les do the same, told us that it was his gift to us for what we’d given him.” He shook his head. “I know where my brother is, all the time. I can see what he sees, and right now he can see you.”
Gooseflesh climbed my back. “That’s hard to believe.”
“Lots of things are hard to believe, McDonnell. But there’s some weird, very primal power he possesses.”
“Did he get it from Sonnelion?”
“Not her. The other one.”
“Who?”
“We’ve been watching him for a long time. We’d seen his face, see, and no one else ever had, as far as I know he never let anyone live, not when he got down to business.”
“Don’t you wonder why he let the two of you live?”
“Because this is worse than death. This isn’t living.” He looked around, frowned at the bare walls. He turned back to me, and said, “The sisters came to us, we were in the last orphanage before they threw us out on the streets. They told us we share a common purpose.”
“Which is?”
“Was.”
“Which was what?”
He sighed. “To hunt him down, to make him pay.”
“And did you ever see him again face to face?”
He nodded. “Many times.”
“Where?”
“He went crazy. Crazier, I guess. Admitted himself to a mental hospital. Only they didn’t know what they had on their hands. He didn’t give them anything about himself. I think he was there for a reason. Why, who knows? But he wouldn’t just go into a place like that and trap himself.”
I thought, They’re all handpicked…
He said, “The sisters took us there. They told the doctor we were his sons, the only family he had left.”
I tried imagining that. Seeing the sisters take the boys, men then, maybe eighteen, to see the man who had killed their parents, who had forced them to disfigure each other. I wiped my mouth, said, “How did you not strangle him right there the first time you saw him?”
He smiled. “He started talking.”
“Talking?”
He scratched his arm and leaned back further in the chair. “He talked about how lucky we were that we had each other. And he was right, we were. Everything else shifted, you know? But I could count on Les and he could count on me. You wouldn’t believe how good he was with Melissa, my daughter. No one would ever guess it by looking at him. And she adored him. She teased him sometimes with Mr. Potato Head, offering him the eyes.” He clasped his hands together and leaned forward. “I always wondered why she never asked me but I never had the courage to bring it up.”
“Where were the sisters when you’d pay Nutley a visit?”
“Around. They’re always around.”
“Where’s your brother?”
“He’s hunting Boom Stick. As soon as he finds him I’ll know.”
“And then?”
“Then we can finally get some closure.”
“You think you can kill him?”
“Not a chance. Not if I had an army.” He tapped the table with his index finger. “I want him to kill me.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I’m a marked man for something I never did. My daughter, though I love her, doesn’t mean shit to me, not really. And my granddaughter will grow, and somewhere down the line, ignorant people will tell her that I hurt her very badly when she was a child, and maybe she’ll believe them, and maybe she won’t, but there will be suspicion and she’ll never love me.” He sighed. “And I want to see my parents again. That night Boom Stick murdered them, I saw their souls in his eyes, they lingered there, in the deep darkness of his pupil, and they looked so lost. So cold. I want to tell them that I can see them before he finishes me. That I’ve found them again.”
I let out a long breath and repositioned myself. “What do the sisters want?”
“For someone to stop him.”
“Why?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know?”
“They never told you? What will happen to your daughter if you give yourself over to Nutley?”
“I’ve set her up.”
“How old is she?”
“Thirty-five.”
“What?”
“Thirty-five. Didn’t you read the case file you have on me? You weren’t there because of my daughter. You were there because of my granddaughter.” He studied me and didn’t look impressed. He said, “My daughter’s asshole boyfriend molested their kid. When she had to go to the emergency room, he blamed me, and she sided with him, maybe because of some fucked-up displaced loyalty, or some twisted idea of love, and the cops took me in. Later, she fes
sed up. But her old man had run out, so that was easy. I was all she had left. Yet the damage was done. She labeled me something I wasn’t, and the cops had a bad taste in their mouths, everyone who ever knew me did. People I’d grown up with wouldn’t acknowledge me, yet not a fucking one of them ever asked me if I really did it. I just moved Melissa out of my house today while you were beating up my brother.”
I tried to absorb it all, process it, but couldn’t. “I’m sorry.”
He stood, headed for the door and the cop on the other side, and said, “I’ve been hearing that my whole life.”
My head swam. I blinked. The room spun and a spider in the corner watched me with indifferent eyes…No, I thought. Not again…
I watch too many people for too long not to realize that LaPorte is insane, and I have considered, more than once, that it possibly reaches further, an infection of half-hidden selfishness and niceties that contaminates each new generation of each culture, of every race, every year, worsening with time.
The idea of such a thing sickens and thrills me. This is not an unfamiliar sensation.
I find my mother with her hand in the milkman’s pants in the woods where I go to roam, to be alone, something I enjoy far more than time with people. I find God in the slack-jawed expression surprise plastered to her face. Her hand keeps moving for a moment, as if on its own accord, and the milkman keeps his eyes closed and moans softly, the bristles of his mustache fluttering like rusty butterfly wings.
I say, “Are you having fun?”
My mother jerks her hand into her lap. She stands. The milkman opens his eyes, says, “Shit. What’s this?” He’s confused in his stupor, maybe at first thinking that it is not young Abraham, but his father, judging by his paleness. He stands as well, and steps back.
My chest hitches.
I think, Why? Though I know. She is living two lives. They are connected yet so far apart.
My mother smoothes her dress. She says quietly, “This isn’t what it looks like.”
I shrug. “Why does anyone ever say that? Does it fucking matter? I don’t think Dad gives two shits about you either.”
My mother blushes but I doubt it is from embarrassment, or shame. I wonder if she feels bad, wonder what went through her head as she milked the milkman.
The milkman buttons his white coat. He strokes strays hairs into place and catches his breath, judging his words, deciding what route to take here—fight or flight?—and I know he won’t fight. I stare deep into his eyes and keep staring until the milkman teeters and looks like he might fall over.
I say, “Is this what it’s all about? Are you going to be my new daddy?”
The milkman shakes his head. His face grows red. My mother says, “Get out of here Jim.” The milkman nods, says, Okay. I’ll see you around, then says, I’m sorry, and turns away, his shoulders bunched and his chin near his chest like a chastised pup. I watch him leave. I keep staring at ghosts on the path until my mother approaches and taps me once on the shoulder, then passes, headed home.
I shake my head, laugh, think, Love is such a fucking joke.
NINETEEN
After I left the station, I drove back to Division and stood over Kim while Mike filled duffle bags with headlamps and guns and a combat knife blessed by a Voudon princess years before, in another time, as he learned who he was, what life was about, the limits of his patience and the deep well of his humanity.
I’d come to this room once before, months ago, to see Brandy Miller after she’d been assaulted, and seeing Kim brought it all back—the helplessness that blossoms in our chests as we watch silently while those who matter to us suffer independently, as if in another world though they’re lying there right in front of us. The doctor had bandaged her whole body. I could only see her eyes, which were closed, and her hands. I held one and squeezed gently, hoping it’d be enough to wake her up but it only woke more memories that belonged to someone else…
I’m cruising old back roads in my beat-up Ford pickup. There’s always been something about the night, something intimate that waits for daylight to descend so our wildest fantasies can play out on a starry curtain. The shocks bounce. Trees whip by. My heart is racing because it feels so fucking good to have the hammer down even though I know I’m not going anywhere.
My family dies.
The bog calls.
My mistress is lonely.
A cloud of white crowds the shoulder of the road. I slam on the brakes, thinking, Shit, a deer.
But it’s not a deer, it’s a girl, and her thin gauze gown is plastered to her tight little ass, and her hair is like embers and her eyes like the moon. The air stinks of brakes and rubber and beneath it something earthy. My heart won’t stop beating, I’m too young, too powerful. I back the truck, knowing that to pick up a ghost is about the dumbest thing a guy can do. But part of me wants to hear her story. Part of me wants to see if I know her, because I’m thinking, Are you one of ours?
I pull my boot knife and stop next to her and open the passenger door.
She smiles but doesn’t get in. Her face chills my blood. It makes me want to settle down. She laughs and says, “You ever wonder…”
But I don’t hear the rest because upon meeting her I realize I haven’t wondered, not like this. I thought love was a joke, and love at first sight the biggest one of them all. I’m searching for lust, thinking, Come on, this bitch is all alone out here. She’s yours. Yet I feel guilty for thinking of her as a bitch. I open my mouth to say something but no goddamn words will come. She keeps smiling and for once I feel like I’m the prey.
I want to ask her what she wants, where she’s headed, if she’ll marry me and have three kids so maybe I’ll have something to work for more than the Art, more than sacrifice and transcendence, scared for the first time because I feel like a traitor and I wait for the voice of Sonnelion to rise like a dark tide and swallow this little light, this strange hope that is suddenly burning within me, but her voice lies dormant and I’m alone. Almost.
The girl says, “What are you going to do with that knife?”
Just like that. Matter of fact and in your face. Jesus Christ. She’s not frightened. I wonder if she has a gun. I wonder if she’s killed millions, like Jezebel riding the beast through the wastelands, her hands slick with blood and mouth a vertical gaping wound that never heals because it must always feed.
She tips her head and says, “Get out of the truck. I want to see you.”
And for a second, I think, That’s it. She’s blind. She wants to touch my face, and it scares me. But then I quickly realize that she saw the knife. She can’t be blind.
I say, my voice shaking, “You can see me fine from right there, can’t you?”
TWENTY
We sat in Uncle Red’s apartment above his store—me, Mike, Wylie, Red, the sisters, and a chubby boy with eyes full of hope and pain. Red told us about the boy, Pig, an imaginary friend he’d invented when he was a child, and he told us about an angel they’d dubbed Mr. Blue, and how there are worlds inside the soul that are so dark and so bright that you get lost. That he’d traversed them and fought monsters but those places and adventures took as much as they gave, and one day, when he had an inkling of the unique power he possessed, something primal and selfish in him rose and carried him among the stars and he stared down on Earth, with so much smug satisfaction he wished it’d have choked him to death in hindsight. Because there came a time when a traveler arrived and he picked Amy for a victim, and Red thought he could handle it, he thought he’d torture the man, but it hadn’t played out like that. Amy died in Boom Stick’s arms and Red had run away, a coward wearing the shoes he thought filled by a king.
Wylie nodded at the kid. Pig nodded back. The sisters slithered about us, and I recoiled as they neared me. They were love and pain, I knew that, and what scared me most was choosing sides. It reminded me of Proserpine and her brother, One of Three of Seven. I thought, You’re three, and somehow you’re using us.
Red rubb
ed his chin, said, “It’s insane how quickly the years pile up and how little we still understand of hidden things.”
The sisters played with their toys—with dreams, with rotten wisdom, with life, as they circled us like wraiths or buzzards. Pig watched them nervously. He whispered to Red, “Somehow we’ll tip the scales. Good can win.”
Red looked uncertain.
Wylie glanced at the sisters but he couldn’t hold any of their gazes. “Who are you? What’s your stake in this?”
They knelt in front of him. The one holding sand in her palm said, “I am dream birthing wisdom birthing life…” as the next twin dropped decayed teeth in her hand and the third pulled a crimson thread through the first sister’s hand, the dream-caked teeth attached like a necklace. She presented it to each of us. She said, “Only one of you can wear it. Who is the strongest among you? Who can destroy without destroying himself?”
We looked at each other, Red biting his lips, Wylie nodding toward Mike, Mike staring at me. I said, “Don’t look at me. You’re the badass. There’s not any question.”
He said, “You saved us in the basement.”
Red said, “John’s the one. He can handle the truth without it pulverizing him.”
No, I thought. I can’t. The truth always pulverizes me.
Pig said, “But you know it, and you don’t let it stop you, right?”
I looked at him. April knelt next to me, and for the first time since her death, she placed her hand on me, fingers closing over my knee. She smelled of tears and damp soil.
The sisters said, “Everyone believes in you, except you. There’s strength in that.”
“Strength you can exploit?”
They smirked. “We all feed on something.”
Red said, “We always have to choose a side and hope it’s the right one.”
Pig said, “Man up.”