I asked him about it. I was 14, him 18, and I said, “Bobby. Bobby, Bobby, Bobby. What the hell, man?”
We were drinking beer on the back porch. Mom lay in the living room, passed out on the couch, while Kate studied at the dining room table. I didn’t know where Dad had gone. The hospital, I assumed. In my memories of childhood, my father is always something of an extra; he made so few appearances, and they were of such short duration. But he had evidently made a trip to the store at some point, because we’d found beer in the fridge.
I remember Bobby shrugging in the fickle glow of the Tiki Torch we had planted in the grass and lit. In early May, the mosquitoes had yet to arrive in force, but we couldn’t wait for full-fledged summer. We wore denim shorts and our Guns & Roses tee shirts. But for the difference in height, we matched.
“I want to serve my country,” he said. “No big deal. You ought to consider it, too, when you get old enough.”
“Yeah, but…the Marines?”
“The few. The proud.”
“You always said the Army,” I protested. “You always said you’d join the Army so you could get stationed at Bragg and be closer to Kate for her last year of school. The nearest Marine base is clear over on the ass end of the state!”
I didn’t relish the idea of him leaving. On mornings when he slept in and Kate and I ended up in the kitchen at the same time, a silence always came over us as we munched our cereal or ate whatever Kate had cooked up in the skillet. We understood that soon, Bobby would leave. And it would always be like this—silent, something missing. We had comforted ourselves by saying he wouldn’t go far, but we understood now that yes, he would. A five-hour drive to Camp Lejeune was the best we could hope for.
“The Marines look sharp,” he said. “Those uniforms are bodacious; I mean, have you seen those dress blues? And Marines are bad ass. The Russians are scared shitless of Marines, man. Everybody’s scared of Marines.”
“What’s wrong with the Army?”
He shrugged again and took a drink. I had noticed that when I asked Bobby something uncomfortable, he always raised his bottle to his mouth. Whatever he was drinking at any given time, he had to pour something down the hatch before he could answer.
“Nothing,” he said. “I just wanted to join the Marines, that’s all. Why are you suddenly so gung-ho about the Army? Hell, man, it’s not like they could promise me Fort Bragg. They have bases all over the world. For all you know, they could send me to Korea.”
“It’s just…weird.”
“No it’s not.”
Silence. Drink, drink, drink, two boys too young to be holding beers but big, fat doing it anyway.
“Does it have anything to do with Ruby?” I asked.
“Who’s Ruby?”
“That lady at the flea market in October. You know.”
“The one that ran us out of her trailer? The one that smelled like an ashtray?”
“Yeah.”
Before he responded, he took another drink.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “You’ve got to be crazy.”
And maybe so. But the idea that Bobby put stock in something that someone like Ruby said stuck in my mind and wouldn’t leave me alone. She had spooked me when we consulted her, because of the things she’d said, the way she’d acted. Out of one side of his mouth, Bobby told me she was dumbass trailer trash, probably so hung over from her acid trips in the ’60s that she could hardly see straight. I shouldn’t worry about anything she said, dumbass trailer trash like that. Let’s go eat.
And then he joined the Marines instead of the Army. This bugged the hell out of me and so the Saturday immediately following our beer-drenched exchange on the deck, I grabbed Mom’s keys and hopped in the Cadillac. I didn’t have a license then, but that hadn’t seemed to deter Bobby when he was my age, and so I wouldn’t let it deter me, either. I fired up the motor and pointed the bumper in the direction of the flea market.
I found Ruby there tending her table. Her husband—Chet, Chester, Chuck, something that started with a “ch” sound—was gone. Lying in a hospital somewhere with a machine breathing for him, probably, the end of a road paved with cigarettes. Ruby sat in a chair alone, but when she saw me approaching, she flicked her cigarette on the ground, stamped it out and abruptly retreated into the trailer. I marched right up there and knocked on the storm door. She didn’t answer.
“It’s Kevin Swanson,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”
“Go on! You get on out of here!”
“Not until I talk to you.”
“You go on or I’m calling the police! You’re trespassing!”
I snorted. “You don’t have a phone in there! And anyway, I’m a customer! I want to get my palm read!”
“I ain’t reading your palm, boy.”
“I got a hundred dollars.”
Pause. I thought that got her attention, and the inner door opened. Ruby, old and wizened and looking like Yoda with dyed-blond hair, looked down at me through the Plexiglass.
“I wouldn’t read your palm again if you had a thousand.”
I blinked at her.
“Why’d you tell my brother not to join the Army?”
“Because he’ll die. Get himself blown away.”
She had given Bobby his money back. Our encounter had produced absolutely no profit for her whatsoever. And now she stood on the other side of the storm door, regarding me as one would a copperhead coiled up on his stoop. I was fourteen years old. And short for my age.
“What about me?”
“What about you?”
“You dropped my hand. You told me to never get married, you told me to always live alone. Why?”
Her face tightened. I didn’t think it possible for her thin and wrinkled lips to compress any more than they already had, but they did. She pressed them into a little raisin so small and compact that the bottom half of her face disappeared into it.
“What can you see about me?” I asked.
Her eyes filled with tears.
“What can you see about me?” I asked again.
“You’re bad,” she said. “You’re very, very bad. So bad.”
“Why am I bad? What do I do that makes me bad? Do I beat up my wife? Get drunk and run over one of my own kids, what?”
“You failed,” she said. Her voice had lowered to a whisper raspy and dry, like newspaper left in the desert sun. “You make me sick. You’re not a good person, boy. You’re not good at all.”
I felt slapped, kicked. Assaulted. I remained, in many ways, a child. Modern American children weren’t used to adults telling them they’re not good people, that they’re dark. So while her words didn’t reduce me to tears, I felt my cheeks growing red. Who did she get off saying I wasn’t a good person? Who was she to pass judgment on my character?
“You don’t know shit about me,” I growled, hands clenching into fists.
“I know more than you do,” she snapped. “And you ought to do the world a favor and go kill yourself. So go on. And don’t you never come back here.”
“This isn’t your property. It’s the flea market’s. I can go wherever I want.”
“Go. On!”
The venom in her voice drove me backwards.
“I don’t want to see your face!” She spoke in a strangled cry, like her voice had to blow something in her throat out of the way before she could say anything. “Don’t you darken my door again! Get gone!”
My eyes widened. Further away, a group of people at another table watched us. I felt their eyes all over my shoulders, the back of my head.
And Ruby’s voice rose to a scream.
“Get out of here, you lousy piece of shit!”
I stepped back. I hit Chester’s chair—Chester, I thought, his name was Chester—and knocked it into the table. A stack of Betamax tapes tumbled and fell.
Skin prickling from the stares of all those around me, I turned and ran.
40.
“I never saw her again,” I told
Dr. Koenig. “I wasn’t going back after something like that. I told myself, she’s crazy. Like Bobby said: crazy-ass, Yoda-ass, fucked-up-ass bitch. But she freaked me out.”
I shuddered at the memory.
“Four years later, I met Allie. Within…I don’t know, our first few encounters, I said, this is the one. I didn’t think about Ruby at all. Not for one second.”
“Kevin,” he said, “I need you to concentrate.”
“I am concentrating. What are you talking about?”
“You’re not answering the question. What happened? Tell me what happened. I need to know what you saw.”
He had rolled his shirtsleeves almost to the elbows and loosened his tie. He looked like he’d been working forever, like he hadn’t taken so much as an hour’s break since completing his doctoral thesis on stone tablets and turning it in to a faculty who could only read cuneiform. The bags under his eyes spoke of nights awake and gave the windows to his soul a sunken quality. I blinked at him, and I thought, he looks like I feel.
“I am telling you what happened,” I said. “This is all part of it.”
What is he talking about? I asked inside. My inner voice had taken on a shrill quality that made me feel like it belonged to someone else. My stomach lurched. My hands, clutching Southern Rifleman like a child might have clutched a beloved toy in a moment of high anxiety, shook.
“Kevin, we need to cut the baloney, okay? We need to cut it right now. I need you to open up that head of yours and I need you to tell me what happened.”
My stomach lurched again. I tried to stand, but my legs felt like rubber bands and so I abandoned the effort before they could dump me on the coffee table. I didn’t want that, because I hated the coffee table; I hated it every time I came in here, I hated to look at it, hated setting things on it. I hated it because that thing was bullshit on four legs. Sheets of what was essentially plastic painted to look like wood stretched over slabs of solidified fiberboard—the vomit of sawmills. Chinese factory workers shaking their heads and laughing as they packaged it. Stupid Americans. They think this is wood. Such a shallow people. Such a stupid people.
I looked at Dr. Koenig. His briefcase sat open beside him
briefcase, briefcase, briefcase why does he always get stuff out of a briefcase in his own office
with an array of papers poking out of it in a disheveled mess. Like their owner. His trouser leg had caught on the top of his black polyester sock, revealing a swatch of white flesh.
“I don’t feel good,” I said. “Something’s wrong. I need to go home.”
“Do you feel like you’re going to be sick?”
I nodded. He grabbed a wastebasket and plopped it in front of me. Then he sat down again, leaning forward across the coffee table with that vulpine intensity.
“Tell me,” he said.
“This is so fucked up,” I said. My stomach flip-flopped again and then did nothing more. But I still couldn’t stand up. “What’s wrong with me? Did you slip me something? What the hell did you give me?”
“Tell me about the Bald Man.” If he leaned in any farther, we’d be kissing. “Tell me what he did.”
41.
“When you first discovered this whole idea of sliding,” I asked Brandon Cross, “what was it like the first time?”
We’d had this conversation a month ago, maybe two. I’d gone to see him so many times, all of our meetings blended together even though they’d taken place across the course of both winter and spring. On this occasion, we sat in the lounge again, alone.
“Scary,” he said.
“Scary why?” I asked.
“Just scary.”
“Because you didn’t understand what was going on?”
He nodded.
“It was a surprise to you.”
He nodded again.
“Was it in a dream? Were you in bed when it happened?”
“No,” he replied. “I was awake.”
I woke up on the couch in my basement man-cave. How I’d ever managed to fall asleep with all the doors and windows unlocked upstairs I didn’t know; at some point, I’d learned sheer exhaustion overpowers the mind and just shuts a man down. But I woke up now to a dormant television—it must have overheated and cut itself off—and the soft glow of the lights over my bar.
And the creaking of floorboards upstairs. My eyes rose to the ceiling.
There’s somebody here, I thought.
Game on, motherfucker! Bobby said. He sounded almost gleeful. It’s on! Here he comes!
I took the AK-47 by the pistol grip and thumbed off the safety. The enemy had penetrated my perimeter. This time, though, no problem. I’d unlocked the doors. I’d let him in. This wasn’t a home invasion, not tonight. This was an ambush.
I got up off the couch and crept over to the stairs leading up to the kitchen, covering the door with my rifle. By the sounds of it, he stood in my living room. Probably heading for the stairs, thinking he’d find Allie and Abby up there. In just a moment, he’d reach the staircase to the second floor and begin climbing it.
Get into position in the living room, Bobby said. He’s going to have to come back downstairs to leave the house. When he reaches the foyer, engage.
“Good to go,” I whispered. Above me, the floorboards creaked beneath his weight and suddenly dissipated, becoming almost imperceptible above the rush of blood in my ears. He had reached the staircase. Going upstairs now.
I grinned. I couldn’t see my own face, but I felt it, and what I felt scared me. And thrilled me. This right here felt good. Game on felt good.
Okay, Bobby said, slowly. Get into position.
I reached one foot out for the bottom step and
Suddenly I was somewhere else.
The light coming through the window of Dr. Koenig’s office spoke of mid-afternoon. Shadows of the dogwoods, flowerless now, reached across the hardwood floor for my feet. I wore work shoes, the brown pair of Eccos. I stared at the shoes, I stared at the shadows and I felt the ice crystals slicing the insides of my veins and arteries as my blood began to freeze.
What the fuck?
I looked up at Dr. Koenig. The last thought to run through my mind displayed in bright confusion on his face. His eyebrows had raised in surprise so profound it looked almost like fear. I had succeeded in blowing his mind.
How did I get here?
Of course I blew his mind. I had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. I slid.
My slack jaw dangled from the rest of my face. My index finger curled around an invisible trigger guard; my hands were confused, too, wanting to know where the AK-47 had gone.
My next words emerged in a choked squeak, but I got them out. “What in God’s name just happened?”
He stared at me. This must have been how Kenny stared at Brandon Cross when the latter left every night to go back to his wife and his kid and his Navy. He turned his head to one side and then the other in the slowest of shakes.
“How did I get here?”
He swallowed.
“Where are you supposed to be?”
“In my basement! There’s somebody…that son of a bitch is in my house, and I was on my way up the stairs to hose his ass and put a lid on this once and for all! What the fuck, Doc, why am I in your office?”
“Go back,” he said. “Tell me what happens.”
I closed my eyes.
42.
I stood on my basement stairs, the muzzle of the AK-47 covering the door. Slender bars of light around the edges glowed from the lamp over the stove. My trigger finger ached with the desire to open fire on something.
Easy, Bobby said. Make every round count. Make sure it hits home. You need to take a head shot first thing, and it needs to be a home run.
I took a step. Then another. The door grew larger in my field of vision.
What about the Mozambique drill? I asked. Chest-chest-head?
We don’t know what we’re dealing with, here. Bullets might not even work. But if they do, only a he
ad shot’s going to do it; most of the bad shit in this world exists in the head. So blow his off.
I reached the door. I couldn’t see on the other side of it, and I couldn’t hear the bald man anymore. For all I knew, he stood right in the middle of my kitchen, waiting for me. With his leering face.
I thought of that face, and that did it for me. I took a deep ki breath and
Found myself at Magnolia Plantation.
Brandon stared at me from across the coffee table. Every muscle in my body jerked in a sudden spasm that made the boy jump back, like I’d tried to hit him.
I glanced all around. The posters in the conference room didn’t look familiar, but on second glance, yes they did. These were the ones hanging in here this winter, when I first started coming.
I patted my chest and looked down. Trench coat. Black gloves shoved in the pockets. Yes. Winter time.
Brandon spoke, but I couldn’t understand him. I looked back and found him staring at me intensely.
“What did you just say?” I asked.
“Other world real,” he said, pronouncing that last word wheel. “This a nightmare.”
My jaw trembled. “I need you to help me, man,” I pleaded with him. “I’m in the shit right now, I can’t be doing this, I need to stay there and handle this!”
He opened his mouth to speak and
“Keep going,” Dr. Koenig said. “Go back. You can do it.”
“I was just on my basement stairs,” I said. “About to open the door to the kitchen. Then, all of a sudden I’m at Magnolia Plantation. What’s happening?”
He leaned forward. “Go back. It’s almost over. Go there and come back to me. I’m not going anywhere. Go!”
“How?”
“Just do it!”
So I closed my eyes and I did it.
I pushed the basement door open carefully, knowing it would squeal on its hinges if I moved it too quickly—it squealed anyway, and I winced. I had meant to oil that. I had meant to oil all the interior doors in the house once upon a time, but this hadn’t ranked highly on my list of priorities as of late, so I’d let it go. The mundane, I had learned, were slippery things. They tended to escape a man.
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