by Jon Bassoff
CHAPTER 19
The old man kneeled down and he had a big sideways grin on his face, and he opened the cages, and for a few moments nothing happened—the rats must have been suspicious of being granted freedom, thought it was too good to be true—but Dad nudged a couple of them, and pretty soon they started marching in unison, the Rats Liberation Army, and their noses were twitching, and then they left their posts and began scurrying up toward the altar, attracted maybe to the familiar odor of Mother’s rotted flesh. For a long while there was no reaction from the congregation—it must have taken a few moments for all the synapses to connect, for people to make sense of what was happening—then there were a few gasps and a few murmurs and finally a blood-curdling scream from Donna Gallegos, that ugly hag with the wart-infested cheek, and that was the start of holy pandemonium, the likes of which I had not seen for some time.
Rats! Rats! they all screamed and pretty soon everybody was out of their seats tap-dancing and hollering, acting like this was Eleventh Plague of Egypt, and the pastor kept right on preaching, saying what a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear, what a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer, but nobody was listening, they were pushing and shoving, trying to escape the century-old church, and pretty soon there were people on the ground, children, the elderly, and they were being trampled over, and my old man was laughing and slapping his thigh in delight, and then he motioned to me and said: March onward, Christian soldier! but my ligaments and tendons were all ruptured so I couldn’t move even an inch. In frustration, he moved next to me, grabbed my arm, squeezing tight, and started pulling. C’mon, boy, he said, it’s time for phase two!
And everybody was going one way and we were going the other way and only Pastor Rucker and a few other stalwarts remained to protect the corpse and possibly the bodily resurrection of my mother, a woman who never prayed, a woman who enjoyed sin as much as grace, and my father said, okay boy you take one end and I’ll take the other, and everything was a blur, but soon we were carrying the coffin, thieves in the House of the Lord, and it was heavier than you might think, and then a couple of men were grabbing at Dad, and a couple more were grabbing at me, and the coffin fell to the ground, and it opened, and Mom was still dead, still rotting, still hideous, and they took Dad away, took Dad far away, walking with him slowly down the corridor, arm-in-arm-in-arm, shoving him into a white padded room with only a mattress and a Bible and a flickering fluorescent light and the rats scampered through the pipes, and Dad’s eyes were empty, and he rocked back and forth, yanked out clumps of hair, scratched at the floors, bit through his lip, screamed at the top of his lungs, gibberish all, swatted at imaginary flies, laughed the laughter of a lunatic, and he was in the Castle.
* * *
I was still a year away from being able to live on my own, so they placed me with Uncle Horace and Aunt Rose and for a long time I wouldn’t talk to them, I would just sit in my bedroom and read about the Soldier and bite the skin off my knuckles. Uncle Horace did his best, sitting me down and saying, this is your home now. I know you’ve been through a lot, but you’re safe here with Aunt Rose and me. And after a while I started talking again, but I never talked about Dad or Mom and soon it was like they’d never been here at all.
Things were sure different at my uncle and aunt’s house. We said grace before meals and couldn’t wear hats inside the house, and they wanted me to pray and accept Jesus into my heart and I told them that I would, I told them that I believed that Jesus was the Savior and that he would save me from my sins and both Uncle Horace and Aunt Rose were so happy, Aunt Rose even cried good long tears, and I was thankful to have a nice house to live in, and there were no rats and no odors.
Due to my aunt’s nagging, I went back to school some of the time and throughout all of these ups and downs I didn’t hardly think about Constance the Waitress at all, but then I saw her walking out in the mountains by herself, wearing blue jeans and a flannel jacket, her red hair falling to her waist. She was an Angel of Mercy, a Liberator of Souls, a Messiah of the Heart, and I figured that redemption was a possibility.
I didn’t want to scare her and I didn’t want to hurt her, but I followed her tracks, the snow crunching beneath my feet. She didn’t turn back, deep in thought, maybe. She marched up the mountain path, lodgepoles towering, and I stayed back a ways, careful as always. And Constance continued hiking upward, and the air was getting cooler, and there were rows of boulders and log walls, and there were collapsed mines scattered across the floor like pickup sticks, rotted by centuries of storms.
And after another twenty minutes or more, she stopped, stood there for a few moments, then took to resting on a rock. She pulled out a bottle of water and placed it to her lips, and I stood there hidden in the shadows, watching her, and I got to thinking how the mountain was full of death and snow and ghosts and how I sure would like get off the mountain someday, and how maybe Constance would go with me, how we were both as lonely as any of these abandoned mines dotting the mountainside.
And then I was humming “Teddy Bear” by Red Sovine and walking toward where Constance was sitting, and I never meant to frighten her, but I was standing right behind her, and she thought she was alone, and when she looked back, she gasped and rose to her feet. I said, don’t worry, it’s just me, Benton Faulk from the diner, and she still looked scared and said, what are you doing here?
Just taking a hike, I said, I hike this way sometimes when I want to clear my head. And she just nodded, but her face was pale and her eyes were wild like a wounded mule deer, and I was angry with myself for sneaking up on her like that, especially here high in the mountains where nobody could hear her scream.
I said, did you hear about the latest with my mother, nasty situation, and she nodded and said that yes she’d heard. My father didn’t hurt her, I said, he was trying to save her, and he almost succeeded with the Christ Rat, but then the Christ Rat died, and nobody else cared if she lived or died, they all thought that she was mountain trash, but she wasn’t, her great-grandfather made a fortune in silver, owned a dozen or more mines. And once Mom and me walked together to the top of Pewter Hill and the night was cold, and the snow was falling, and the world was quiet, and she took hold of my hand and pointed all around us and said, this is heaven, Benton, don’t you ever forget it, and we stood there for a long time, me and my mother, just watching and touching and feeling. And those memories are mine…
And then I was out of words and Constance said that she’d better start heading back down the mountain, and I said, wait a minute, do you want me to show you something, an old abandoned mining cabin, I use it as my hideaway, and nobody else knows about it, but I’ll show you, and she said no, that she really needed to be making her way back. So I nodded and told her to be alert, that there were mountain lions and collapsed mines out this way and you had to be careful of such things, that life could end at any moment, a bullet to the heart, a knife to the throat, a club to the head.
I stood in the shadows of the swaying trees and watched her walk back down the path, and she was walking much quicker now, and she looked back a few times, and she didn’t smile, and her eyes were still scared, and the snow started falling, and I knew my aunt and uncle would be wondering where I was, but I decided to go to the mining cabin and read about the Soldier and think about my plans for the near future.
CHAPTER 20
Sitting at the dinner table, eating elk stew, Aunt Rose eyeing me suspiciously, Uncle Horace slurping loudly. I didn’t speak much when I was with them because there was nothing I could possibly say to them and when they asked me questions, I could always nod my head or shake my head or not respond at all. But I could tell that Rose had something on her mind because she hadn’t touched her stew and usually she had three or four portions at least, which went a long ways to explaining her chubby cheeks and enormous bottom. Well, it wasn’t until I was getting up, ready to bring my dish to the kitchen sink that she said go on and sit down, Benton, and it t
ook me a few moments because I didn’t like the tone of her voice, but then I sat down and waited to hear what she had to say.
Her voice was all full of anxiety and disappointment. She told me that a woman had stopped by just this morning asking to see me, and when she’d asked what this was all about, the woman said that I’d been making her feel uncomfortable, what with the way I’d been talking to her and watching her and so forth. Do you know who this Constance Durban is, Aunt Rose asked. No, ma’am, I said and started to get up because I didn’t like where this conversation was headed and I just wanted to read the latest edition of Fight to the Finish where the Soldier is caught between a rock and a hard place. But Rose wouldn’t let me be. This woman, she said, seemed awfully serious. And she’s prepared to call the proper authorities if you keep bothering her. You sure you don’t know who Constance Durban is?
Well, I didn’t answer that question because it was manipulative and sadistic. Instead I threw my bowl on the ground and it shattered and you could tell that my aunt and uncle were surprised about that, elk stew and china all over the place, and I went into my room and read for a while and then I drank some brandy and chewed some tobacco, growing vices both.
What’s this all about, I asked Constance, and her eyes were bloodshot and her handkerchief was trembling next to her face. Why’d you come to my house saying all of those terrible things? And I was as mad as could be and I could tell that Constance was plenty frightened. It’s my ex-husband, she said. He’d been gone for a long time, but now he’s returned to the mountain. And he’s possessive. He won’t let me go. No matter what I say. No matter what I do. He saw the two of us and he got jealous and now he’s making threats, saying, you stop foolin’ around with that little boy or I’ll skin you like a stuck hog! I didn’t want to tell your aunt those things, but I was scared. You’re the only one I love, Benton! You’re the only one I need!
* * *
Back in the Skull Shack I read about the Soldier and how he hid in a rabbit hole for four days and four nights while the Taliban searched for him with crocodile sheers and flaying knives and Spanish ticklers, and the sweat poured from his face, but he never panicked, not for a moment, because he had more mental strength than all the towel heads put together. And then I looked around the cabin and realized that I wasn’t safe here, that they could find me and torture me, so I decided right then and there that I needed some sort of a hideout within my hideout and I had a pretty good idea how to make one, but I’d need some tools.
Kyle Weaver was crazy and he was blind too, and he worked with an anvil and a forge fire in a little mountain shack overlooking the river. He’d always liked me, I always put a smile on his face, so when I said I needed a sharpened crosscut saw and a mattock and a shovel, he said, well that’s no problem at all AND how are you, I heard you’ve been through a lot. That’s the thing about people. They always meddle when they shouldn’t, and that was another good reason to make the root cellar, to keep the meddlers away.
And the work wasn’t easy, but I sawed for hours at a time, and I sure am worried about Benton, I could hear Aunt Rose saying, he’s acting mighty strange, I haven’t heard him say a word in days, and Uncle Horace said, for Christ’s sake he’s lost his mother and father in the most excruciating way possible, give the boy some time, give the boy some space.
And sometimes I’d go to school, just to keep them off my back, and sometimes I’d hide behind Constance’s house, waiting for her old man, but he didn’t dare show his face, and some of the time I’d work on my project at the shack. The sawing was done, I’d completed a near-perfect square, and now I was using the mattock and the round-point shovel, and my hands were covered with blisters, I didn’t use gloves, and I sang until my voice was hoarse:
I’m lonesome since I crossed the hill,
And o’er the moorland sedgy
Such heavy thoughts my heart do fill,
Since parting with my Betsey
I seek for one as fair and gay,
But find none to remind me
How sweet the hours I passed away,
With the girl I left behind me.
I guess it took me a month or more, but I got it all dug out, and there was a wooden ladder and the walls were tarred cement blocks and there was a hatch and a padlock and nobody could hear me when I was down there, not even when I shouted and screamed and pounded on the wooden hatch, and nobody could hear my father either, trapped in that white room of madness, nobody could hear him even though he screamed until the veins in his neck bulged, and I’d made a whispered promise to get him out of the Castle just as soon as I could, and I aimed to keep that promise, yes I did.
* * *
In spite of everything, I was thinking that maybe salvation was in reach after all, even considering the naysayers and cynics who had condemned me, who had given up on me (a lad of only sixteen years!). And as far as the man who’d made the threats to my Constance, well, I wasn’t going to let him bully her, and I certainly wasn’t going to let him bully me. Think about what the Soldier would do, he certainly wouldn’t let a beautiful woman like Constance be brutalized. I would have to find some way to stop it.
And so I waited until she was gone, until they were both gone, and I went to the rear of her cabin and smashed the window with a crowbar and climbed in, and there was shattered glass everywhere and my hands and body got all bloody, but I laughed at pain, always had.
Well, it was strange and more than a little exciting to be inside Constance’s home, and I explored for a while, spending quite some time in each room. Kitchen: kerosene stove, white porcelain sink with dirty dishes piled high, small black metal table and black metal chairs, linoleum rug, Kelvinator refrigerator, nearly empty. Bathroom: pull-chain toilet, claw-foot bathtub, medicine cabinet filled with toothbrush, Paxil, Buspirone, skin cream, Luvox. Living room: fireplace, floral couch, Persian rug, television, CD player with sad Beethoven inside.
No signs of the psychotic ex-husband, but he’d been around, he’d made his presence known, poisoning her mind with lies, and inside the bedroom it was all filled with melancholy and depression, the blankets pulled into a heap at the bottom of the bed, clothes strewn all over the place, romance novels on the nightstand. And the most surprising thing, in the corner of the room, a crib, blankets neatly made, a mobile dangling, and that was who she’d lost, her baby, her boy, her Benton, a picture in a locket, no wonder she was so sad, no wonder her eyes had been crying forever.
I lay in bed and drank some of the gin I’d taken from the kitchen and I had my Browning knife and I just waited and waited and I was the Soldier and I was wearing a gas mask, and they’d made Constance wear a mask, and they were doing terrible things to her, taking their turns on her, and there were plenty of guards with primitive AK-47s, and everybody told me that it was too dangerous, that these guards would take care of me, but I sneaked up behind them and slit their throats and there was blood everywhere, and I grabbed Constance and her legs didn’t work, so I slung her over my shoulder and we disappeared into the mountains and into the caves and eventually we were at the Skull Shack, and I nursed her to health and she gave herself to me, and now her bed was filled with holes that I’d made with my Browning knife.
And then I heard a sound at the door and I panicked and then the front door opened and she was humming a song I’d never heard. I guess you could say adrenaline set in, and I was the Soldier again. Well, I tried yanking the bedroom window open, but it wouldn’t budge, and I could hear her whistling in the living room. Then I pulled again and this time it opened, but not all the way, and it also made a creaking sound, and I heard Constance say, hello? Is anyone there? And there I was, halfway in and halfway out, and I must have looked ridiculous, and panic rose through my body, and I pushed and pushed, and eventually I tumbled to the ground below. And not ten seconds later, Constance opened the bedroom door and walked toward the window, but I was pressed against the wall where she couldn’t see me, and she stood there for a long time, and I’ll b
et she was just as scared as could be, and then after a while I heard her voice again, only now she was on the phone with the police saying there’s somebody been in my house, and I felt just like Goldilocks, only I wouldn’t escape scot-free, no way José, they knew it was me, they knew it was me the whole time, and they gave me probation, and I was thankful for that, and they gave me a restraining order, and I was mad as hell about that, because it wasn’t Constance who wanted it, it was that possessive ex-husband of hers, and I decided right then and there that I would have to rescue her from him and take her to a place where she couldn’t be tortured anymore, and I had the perfect place, and you know where that is.
CHAPTER 21
Oh, those next few weeks were cold, colder than a silver miner’s ass as they say, and it was snowy too, with sheets and sheets falling over the mountain until everything looked like a massive heap of marshmallows, and my uncle and aunt were so angry with me about what had happened with Constance, about the breaking and entering and the meeting with the judge and all the rest, but they only knew one side of the story and it pained me not to be able to tell them the TRUTH about her controlling ex-husband, and the TRUTH about her dead baby, and the TRUTH about her passion for me, but you always worry about people’s reactions, so I kept my mouth shut.
And once I made the mistake of asking them about my father and whether I could go visit him in the Castle. Oh, it will be a long time before you see him again, they said, and you could just tell they were enjoying it, and then a thought came to me, maybe they benefitted from his incarceration, maybe they got all the money that he had hidden under the floorboards, well, there was certainly a lot of that!