by Max Wilde
“Party favors, Holly.”
Holly untied one of the balloons, her palsied fingers clumsy, and poured black tar heroin powder onto the paper bag. Drum stepped out of the trailer, hovering in the doorway, and fired up a cheroot to rid his nose of the stink, watching Holly at work.
She ignored him as she went about the business of prepared her fix, the paraphernalia appearing from the shadows: the bent and blackened spoon, the knife, the cotton pellet, a bottle of water, a rubber tourniquet and, finally, the hypodermic.
She cooked the heroin in the spoon over the candle flame until it bubbled, mixing in a little water, the acrid smell of La Negra burning Drum’s nostrils. Then she set the spoon down, and lay the cotton pellet in the mixture, drawing the heroin into the syringe through the makeshift filter.
She pulled up her sleeve, revealing the festered arm of a long time user, the skin a sad tale of scars and scabs and lesions. Holly tied off the tourniquet, pumped her arm and found a useable vein. Gave the hypodermic a tap and sent the needle to the vein, pushing down the piston.
The effect was almost instantaneous. She relaxed. She sighed. She smiled, and beauty’s ghost flickered across her face.
“Why don’t you come in and sit, Dellbert?”
“No, I can’t stay, Holly.”
“There’s a big old bed through there,” she said, waving a skeletal arm toward the bedroom. “Almost big enough for you.”
Whatever charms she once had were long gone and Drum just grinned and shook his head. Anyway she was nodding now, her chin slumping to her chest. He’d known her a long time, since she appeared out of the heat haze with Tincup and his little caravan, the preacher driven ever farther south by outraged authorities, until he and Drum struck a deal advantageous to them both.
Back in those days, the late nineties, Holly had been a big boned blonde with the ass of a cheerleader and the tits of a Playboy centerfold. She and Drum had pleasured one another regularly, Tincup too occupied with his harem to care.
The sex had come to an end as Holly’s habit took hold, a habit fed by Drum, keeping her on his string. She was his eyes and ears inside Tincup’s court. Or had been until her bad behavior exhausted Tincup's patience and he sent her out here to fester. A scorned woman, no longer the number one wife.
She was from the city, Drum knew. Still connected up there, he was prepared to guess. A scorned woman vindictive and desperate enough to swap information for money and drugs. She’d been the homing beacon that had drawn that old Dodge down here.
Drum stooped into the trailer and gently slapped her face. Her head lolled to the side, a slug-trail of drool tracing her cheek and chin.
Drum grunted and went to work, copying what she had done. Cooking three more spoons of heroin, the sickly sweet, cloying smell sending him to the door for air between batches, and injecting three more syringes into Holly’s wasted arms.
After the second shot her breathing was labored. After the final injection she loosened her bladder and bowels and died with a sad little whisper. Drum put a sausage-sized finger to her throat. Nothing.
Surrendering to a moment of sentimentality, he leaned forward and brushed her cold forehead with his lips. Then he found the phone in her pocket and transferred it to his own. Drum used a handkerchief to wipe his prints from her equipment, left the trailer and settled himself into the Ford, setting course for the road.
As he drove he sang the old Hank Williams song about a cheating heart, the flickering yellow star fizzing and dying in his rearview mirror.
6
Skye lay in bed, in the dark, listening for Gene’s car. He’d called the house not long after she’d finished showering, asking if she and Timmy were okay. When she told him they were just fine, convinced that he could hear the tremor in her voice, he said he had a situation, and he didn’t know what time he’d be home.
Now it was after three a.m. and sleep was impossible, knowing he was out there dealing with the aftermath of what she had done. Wondering if he would lie about it like he had about what happened all those years ago when they were orphaned, inventing a fiction that quickly assumed the weight of fact: nameless, faceless drifters had appeared out of the night and shot their mama dead and beat Gene senseless before ripping apart and cannibalizing their father.
The truth lay buried along with their parents, emerging for Skye only in the nightmares that had dogged her since childhood, serving up blurred fragments that were either shards of memory, or—as a succession of counselors had insisted—the by-product of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Skye, over the years, had assembled an imperfect mosaic of these memories, the timeline broken and incomplete, as she’d watched her brother grow into the haunted man he was now, molded by the events of that night. A good man, but dour. Humorless. Obsessive. Driven by a furious belief in the law. As if that belief would keep the demons at bay. God knew, what had happened to his wife and child was proof enough it wouldn’t.
Whenever Skye tried to speak to Gene about that night when she was two years old, he would shake his head, and repeat that she had stayed hidden in her bedroom, unseen by the killers, until he had come to check on her after phoning their uncle, the sheriff. That whatever she remembered was an embellishment of the carnage she had glimpsed when Milt Lavender had carried her to his patrol car, shielding her face from the living room with its blood stained walls.
But Skye had always believed—without knowing why, exactly—that there were no drifters. That it was she who had killed their father. That the strength had come from something dark within herself, a rage that echoed in her whenever she felt anger or fear.
So Skye withdrew, and the real world became as blurred as those fragments of memory, as she insulated herself from emotion. She’d seen a photograph once of a hemophiliac Romanov princeling, swaddled in a suit made from layers of cotton wool to prevent the Tsarevich falling and bleeding to death as he played in the gardens of the royal palace. She had done the same, but the insulation was internal.
Skye had made herself timid. Never rising to insult or challenge. Never allowing herself the luxury of anger when crossed or grief when a favorite pet died. She had been late to mature and her first period, coming when she was nearly fifteen, sitting on the toilet watching the blood flow out between her legs and turn the bowl red, had nearly undone her, and she’d felt the thing rise within and only a force of will that had left the dents of her fingernails deep in the flesh of her thighs, had driven the darkness back and allowed her to continue in her state of self-lobotomy.
Her recall of the events in the desert earlier were imperfect, but they had unlocked more memories of what had happened in this house fifteen years ago. And Skye knew now to a bone certainty that what she had believed all these years was not some survivor guilt. She had slaughtered her father the way she had slaughtered those men tonight.
She just didn’t know why.
Or how, exactly.
Or who had killed her mother.
She heard the moan of a rig on the interstate leading north to the distant city and knew that she should flee, grab whatever money she could scratch together and get her sickness far away from the people she loved.
The bloom of headlights on the curtains and the low murmur of Gene’s patrol car put an end to those thoughts, and she heard the engine dying, the soft squeak of the suspension and the slap of the car door closing.
Then the front door of the house opened and clicked shut and she heard the measured tread of her brother’s boots on the stairs.
Gene checked on his boy first, fear gripping his gut as he pushed open the bedroom door. He relaxed when he saw the comforter rising and falling with his child’s breath, but still Gene lifted the covers away from Timmy’s face, the boy muttering in his sleep.
Gene edged out and went to Skye’s room, the door standing ajar. He hesitated, then pushed the door open, light from the corridor inching across the rug and up onto the bed and he was sure he saw his sister’s eyes open and
close just as the light touched her face. But she lay still, snoring softly, and he retreated.
Gene walked into the bathroom and looked at his gaunt face in the mirror, his suntanned skin jaundiced in the sickly light. His hands gripped the basin hard enough to wrench it from the wall, and he forced himself to relax. Breathed.
There was no connection between tonight and that night long ago.
But she’d walked home. Right past where the old car was parked. That could not be denied.
He pushed away from the basin and drew the curtain back from the shower, droplets beading the blue plastic, the rings whispering on the curtain rod. Water puddled around the plughole recessed into the brown tiles. A lawman’s instinct made him kneel and explore the plughole with his fingers. He lifted out a strand of Skye’s long, damp hair, the blonde coil dark with moisture. And something else. Something tacky to the touch. He turned and wiped his finger on the roll of toilet paper hanging from the holder, leaving a dark smear. Was it blood? He didn’t know and suddenly he didn’t want to know.
Pure dread drove Gene to his feet and he tore off the square of paper and flushed it along with the hair. He went through to his bedroom, pulled off his boots and sat on the bed in the dark until memories bleeding out of the shadows made him switch on the lamp. Marybeth, radiant, heavily pregnant, smiled up at him from the framed photograph he was unable to remove from his beside.
Another memory, locked deep, blindsided him. His wife sprawled naked on the sand, her belly ripped open, umbilical cord and innards coiling out onto the dirt. The baby stolen from inside her.
Panic seized Gene and he found himself walking down the stairs in his stockinged feet, heading for the living room, where he clicked on the light, opened the liquor cabinet and poured a finger of bourbon into a shot glass and sipped at it, feeling the burn on his lips and his tongue. He couldn’t help but wince.
Gene stood by the window and looked out at the first blue of dawn, not seeing the windmill silhouetted against the lightening sky, seeing instead the torn pulp that had once been men, and the memories were coming hard now, a torrent he couldn’t stop and he was fifteen years old, in this very room, blood washing the old flocked wallpaper that was long gone.
The room gave way to an arid brown landscape flying past him, the land burned bare by the drought, Gene driving in the battered Jeep with his father way out on the desert perimeter of the ranch, looking for missing cattle, his father drinking whisky straight from the bottle, alcohol fumes rising hot and cloying from his skin.
Just after Gene’s tenth birthday his father had enlisted in the Marines, his mother left to tend the failed farm. He’d rarely been home until he took his discharge a few months before, and was still a stranger to Gene. A tall man who said little and was given to beating Gene’s mother when he was liquored up.
When they saw a man walking, leading a limping horse through the catclaw bush, his father aimed the Jeep at him and drew the rifle from its mount beneath the dash.
The man waved, speaking Spanish, asking for water.
Gene reached for the water bottle. His father stopped him. “Don’t give him no water. Ask him what he’s doin’ on my land.”
Gene spoke to the man in halting Spanish, and the man answered.
“Says he’s lost. Says his horse’s leg is broke.”
His father stood out of the Jeep, carrying the rifle, not quite pointing it at the man.
“Take a look at that horse’s leg,” he said to Gene.
Gene squatted. Checked the leg, then stood. “It’s broke, okay.”
“Tell him to step away from the horse.”
Gene spoke and the man moved away. His father shot the horse in the forehead. It was a clean shot and the animal sighed and folded, sending up dust as it hit the ground with a smack of meat.
“Now tell him to sit his ass down on the sand.”
The man listened to Gene and squatted beside the dead horse.
“Ask him if he’s been stealin’ my cattle.”
Gene asked the question and the man shook his head. Gene’s father racked another round into the chamber and threw the rifle to his son, who caught it, arms dragged low by the sudden heft. In the last months they’d hunted rabbit and pronghorn antelope, but he’d never enjoyed the feel of this weapon.
“Tell him you’re gonna shoot him if he don’t admit to it.” Gene stared up at his father, trying to read the eyes hidden in the shadow of his hat. “Tell him.”
The boy told the man, who started to plead in Spanish, putting his hands together in prayer. Gene looked up at his father again. “Man says he ain’t no rustler.”
“Shoot him then.” Gene just stared. “Do it.”
Gene sighted down the barrel, saw the fear in the man’s eyes. Saw the dust in the grooves in his skin. He felt the metal of the trigger, cool beneath his finger. Squeezed it, nudging the barrel upward at the last moment and shot the man’s fedora right off his head, his hair thick and black and still bearing the imprint of the hat.
Gene’s father was staring down at him. “Boy, I tole you to shoot him. Now you better goddam do it.”
Gene started to cry, silently, tears tracing a path through the dust on his face and the rifle barrel sagged to the sand. His father snatched the weapon, sighted and shot the man, causing most of the side of his head to fly off. He crumpled to the dirt beside his dead horse.
Gene’s father bent down and collected the three cartridge casings and put them in the pocket of his jeans.
“I’ll deal with you later,” he said and threw the rifle into the Jeep.
He drove away, leaving Gene to walk two hours through the heat and it was night by the time he got home, the raised voices of his parents coming to him from the living room. As he crept closer he heard shouting and breaking glass.
Through the window he saw his drunken father punch his mother, sending her falling, blood on her cheek. She got to her knees, groggy, bleeding, saying “hah, hah, hah.”
His father was over to her and kicked her in the face and Gene heard the sound of bone snapping and he sprinted through the front door and tackled the older man, tipping him onto the sofa.
His father stank of liquor and sweat and madness and was up and punched Gene and he grabbed the rifle from where it leaned against the wall and as Gene came at him again he smashed the stock against Gene’s head, tumbling him back, barely conscious.
Fighting not to pass out Gene heard a round being ratcheted into the chamber and the boom of the weapon and blood sprayed from what was left of his mother’s head onto Gene and through his blurred eyes he saw the barrel pointing his way, and knew this was it.
“No fuckin’ balls, boy. Soft like your mother. No son of mine.”
His father’s finger on the trigger as Gene tried to lift himself, the room spinning and blurring. Gene saw Skye in the doorway, in her pjs, her blonde hair standing like a halo from her head.
“No, Daddy,” she said.
But his father didn’t hear her and his finger was tightening on the trigger when something flew across the room, something that was and wasn’t Skye, something frenzied and wild, that took him by the throat, ripping at him with its teeth, tearing his head free of its shoulders, savaging him, entrails spilling, blood spraying the walls and the ceiling. Gene watching through half-conscious eyes as his father was torn and consumed.
He blacked out and when he came round the room was a slaughter house, body parts spread across the carpet. Skye was stroking his face, and he saw her hair was thick with blood and her milk teeth stained with gore. She was singing a nursery rhyme.
Gene carried Skye up to the bathroom and stripped her and washed her, washed the blood and flesh from her body and her hair. Made sure the tub was clean and her bloody clothes were hidden before he phoned his uncle.
He sat with Skye as the wail of sirens got closer and told her as much as himself that drifters came to the house, wild men with long matted hair and tattoos and they took away their father’s gu
n and shot their mother and beat Gene and did whatever they did to his father when Gene was unconscious. Said that Skye had hid in the bedroom, terrified, and they didn’t even know she was there. She nodded, blue eyes wide and empty of recall.
And that’s what they told the sheriff and Deputy Drum and if there were doubts nobody voiced them. A useless manhunt was mounted and all they found was the dead man and his dead horse, which lent credence to Gene’s story, even though his uncle looked at him long and hard, like he knew something.
But he never asked a question.
Ever.
Lavender took his niece and nephew to his childless house and his barren wife did her best with them, the quiet boy and the sweet, smiling girl who lived in a world where her dreams merged with reality.
A scream brought Gene back to the present. Timmy. The glass dropped from his fingers and rolled unbroken on the rug, the liquid splashing, and he was on the stairs flying upward and throwing open the door and hitting the light switch, Timmy sitting up in bed, gasping for air like he was drowning, his mop of gingery hair—Marybeth’s hair—dark with sweat. Gene went to him and held him.
“What is it, son? What is it?”
“A thing. There was a thing.”
“What thing?”
Timmy looked over Gene’s shoulder and he turned and saw his sister in the doorway, silent in her bare feet, wearing a T-shirt reaching almost to her knees, blinking at them.
“Ask Skye,” Timmy said.
“Ask her what?”
“About the monster thing.”
Gene, still holding the boy, said, “What’s he talking about?”
“Dunno.” She shrugged, but just for a moment he caught something in her eyes, something furtive, a shadow that slipped away. “Maybe it was the movie that Maria was watching.”