“Now Laytham, honey,” Granny said. “You can run from the things you can do, pretend it isn’t real and ignore it. But it won’t ignore you, darlin’. The power doesn’t really care what you want; it’s like water in a flood, looking for a way to flow. Like water, it can be a comfort or it can be destructive. Sooner or later, you will have to deal with it. I’m just trying to help you, sugar. I know it’s difficult, especially to have so much talent and to be so young.”
“I don’t want it, Granny,” I said. “It’s hard. I don’t like it no more.”
Granny sighed, and I waited for the guilt and the sermon. They didn’t come. She smiled at me. “Want to play checkers?” she asked. I hugged her and went back to being a little boy.
She was right. I wished I had listened to her, wished I had taken the time to learn more from her. Not the lessons about focus and projection, no, the real lessons she tried to teach me—about compassion and wisdom, patience and humanity. The ones I really needed were the ones I failed at, still fail at. I didn’t learn them, though, and a few years later, she was gone. Like the old Merle Haggard song says, “Mama tried.”
So there I was with my long-lost babysitter making me feel all kinds of things for the first time, and Momma and Cecil headed out the door to the concert and then some square dancing. Cecil looked and tried to act as much like Richard Petty as he could, he had on the Ray-Bans, the big cowboy hat, and the mustache. A toothpick danced at the corner of his mouth as he spoke.
“We’ll be back by two or three in the mornin’,” Cecil said.
“Your momma knows and that’s okay with you, Kara May, honey?” Mom asked. “Laytham usually goes to sleep watching them monster movies, and that’s fine. He ain’t got no bedtime on the weekends. You leave him be to watch those silly things and he’ll drop off before midnight.”
“I understand, Mrs. Ballard, and it’s okay,” Kara May said, smiling. “Me and Laytham are gonna git along jist fine.”
Momma kissed me, and I hugged her, and then her and Cecil were gone. Kara May went the kitchen and made us popcorn and cracked open one of Mom’s beers.
“Let’s watch some TV, Laytham,” she cooed and plopped down on the couch. It was Saturday evening, so we watched Hee Haw and then Emergency! on WSAZ, and then Mary Tyler Moore on WOWK. It was dark by then.
“Kara,” I said, “I’m hungry. What’s for dinner?”
She finished her beer and nodded toward the half-empty popcorn bowl. “I made yew popcorn, Laven, that’s plenty. Now hush.”
“Laytham,” I muttered under my breath. “It’s Laytham.”
The front door was still open, with the screen door closed. It was July and still hot as hell. Outside, the trailer park was quiet except for the cicadas. Fireflies, like orphan stars, drifted across the field where all the kids who lived here played football and pretended to be Evel Knievel on our bikes.
We had a single oscillating fan pushing warm air back and forth between us on the couch. Kara May was sweating, and I kept looking at her but not wanting her to see me staring, and I honestly didn’t know why I felt so excited and shy all at the same time. I felt something stir in me, around me. I know now it was my Muladhara chakra, my root chakra, opening and acting up.
Kara had knocked back about four or five of Mom’s PBRs by now, and she was laughing and smiling a lot more. Kara’s teeth were crooked and yellow. I didn’t care. For some reason, that just made me think she was prettier. The flaw made the rest stand out more.
We had switched the TV back over to WSAZ to watch the last half of the McCloud mystery movie on NBC. I told Kara I liked Columbo more because of his cool coat and how smart he was. Kara said that McCloud was sexier and began to tell me what she would do to Dennis Weaver if she got the chance. I suddenly really hated McCloud. An empty beer can on the coffee table crunched itself flat at the instant I felt a pang of jealously. I noticed it, but Kara May didn’t, because she was too busy jumping up to answer the banging and shouting at the screen door.
Two teenage boys and another girl came into the trailer. They were loud, clumsy, and smelled of beer and, what I would realize years later, pot. Kara May was really happy to see them and hugged and kissed one of the boys, a skinny guy with black curly hair and wide sideburns. She called him Chip. The other girl looked a lot like Kara May but wasn’t as developed and had black hair. Her name was apparently Jessie, and her boyfriend, Bobby, was wearing a mesh tank top and had long blond hair and a mustache kind of like Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit. They proceeded to help themselves to more of Momma’s beer.
“Y’all, this is Layman. I’m watching him, and it’s his bedtime,” Kara May said, shooing me off the couch so her friends could pile on it.
“Umm, Kara May, it’s Laytham,” I said softly, kind of scared and embarrassed and hurt she didn’t remember my name. “You … you said I could go to sleep on the couch and, um … watch the monster movie after the news.”
The boys hooted at this and Kara May shushed them, then turned to address me. “Well, now I’m telling yew to go to sleep in your bed right now. Come on.” She took my hand and led me down the dark hallway that ran along the length of the trailer and back to my room, Mom’s room, and the bathroom.
Her friends laughed and jeered as she pulled me out of the living room. Jessie burped from the beer. Kara May let go of my hand when I got to the door of my dark room.
“Okay, Lay-tham,” she slurred, “git on to bed now. We’re gonna be havin’ grown-up time.”
“Kara, I’m scared,” I said, and I was. She shook her head, obviously disgusted with me.
“Oh, fer fuck’s sake,” she said. “Yew watch those dumb-ass horror movies. How can yew be scared?”
She flipped on the lamp next to my bed. “See, no booger-man. Now git on in that bed, Laytham.”
“I’m not scared of monsters,” I said, climbing into the bed. “I just … I just miss Momma, and I miss Granny real bad. I’m scared of being alone, Kara. Please sit with me till I go to sleep. I’ll try to go real fast, Kara, please.”
If Kara May Odam had sat at the side of my bed and been a decent human being, hell, done her fucking job for about a half hour, my whole life might have been different. Hers too.
She snapped off the light and shoved me into the bed, under my Spider-Man sheets. “God, yew is such a little sissy-faggot!” her silhouette said. “Reckon it’s on account of your pa being dead—he’s not here to man you up. Go to sleep, Layman.”
She walked out of the room and shut the door. I was in darkness. My eyes adjusted to it. I became acclimated to the shadow. I felt my fear turn into something else, something I would struggle with my whole life—anger.
The fault is ultimately mine. If I had listened to Granny, really listened, I might have had the strength inside to weather her passing, to not feel so alone in a hostile universe. “Mama tried.”
Granny tried to teach me compassion and understanding, tried to show me how beautiful it all was and how we were each part of that beauty, never alone. However, I fear it simply wasn’t in my nature. The universe taught me different lessons—taught me its indifference, its cruelty, and its love of irony. It taught me how alone we truly are in this world, in this skin, in ourselves.
So my response was a cold, angry resolve. A petulant, childish response. If the universe was gonna pick on me, be mean to me, then I’d be mean to the universe right back and hard. I still have that response upon occasion; I am still that angry, frightened child more often than I’d care to admit. Unlike many, though, in an act of ultimate cosmic irony, I was born with a way to strike back, and I did. Granny tried to warn me about that too, but I was just too angry to listen.
I got up out of the bed. I heard laughing and music from the eight-track tape stereo in the living room. It was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man”—maybe one last desperate plea from Granny, from the beyond. I didn’t listen.
I opened my door slowly and darted across to the hall to Mom’s bedroom. The d
oor was open and it was dark in there. I could smell smoke—Kara May and her pals were hitting a bong and were oblivious to me. The music was loud and they were louder.
Under Mom’s bed I found the book. It was Granny’s old scrapbook. It was full of pictures of her and her sisters and brothers and Momma when she was a child and baby pictures of me. I pulled it out from its nest among shoe boxes and dust bunnies. I held it to my chest like a holy book.
Next stop was the bathroom at the very end of the hall, between my room and Mom’s. Momma always kept the light on for me but Kara May or one of her buddies had turned it off. They had pissed all over the toilet seat too.
Granny’s old wooden hairbrush was on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet, and I had to precariously climb the sink to reach it. Momma hadn’t had the heart to throw it out. I held it and memories flooded me. I could feel her, see her—her smile, her brown eyes, her love like the sun on my face. I took a clump of the gray hair from the brush. I took a pair of scissors from the medicine cabinet too.
Back in my room, I shut the door and welcomed the darkness. It whispered to me, nurtured the hot coal in my chest. The universe was unfair and uncaring, Kara May was unfair and uncaring. So I would adopt their methods and get back what had been taken from me. It made perfect sense to an angry little boy with the power of a demigod inside him.
I closed my eyes and moved through the album a page at a time—feeling, not looking. I felt the power move up and down my spine, pulsing in time to my anger, my breath. The power is different when you are calm and when you are angry. There is a different sensation about it. Your perception of yourself is different too. Anger makes you feel powerful; it pumps you up—high on hate. Now, after decades of training and practice, I see that anger, that energy is not sustainable, and therefore is weaker. It’s like a sugar rush, a boost of power, then it’s gone. But as a ten-year-old alone in my dark room, I felt like an angry sun full of power and righteous cause.
I paused; there was a flare of power, of energy, on one of the pages of the book. I opened my eyes, and it was my favorite picture of Granny. She was holding me as a baby in her rocking chair and smiling. I took the photo off the page. I had a cowboy doll—sorry, action figure. I used the scraps of tape on the page to affix the picture and the hair to the doll. The hair still had a vague shiver of energy to it, very faint, but I could feel it. Now I only needed one more thing.
I took the scissors and cut my left palm deep. I still have the scar to this day. My blood welled up as quickly as the pain.
Outside my room I heard Kara May and Chip saying loud, drunken good-byes to the other couple. I heard an engine start and gravel crunch as headlights briefly wiped across my narrow open window. The gravel sounds ended, and the purr of the car’s motor lessened and then faded away. I heard Kara May and Chip moaning and laughing as they staggered down the hallway to Momma’s bedroom. They hit the walls and laughed harder, then they fell into Momma’s room and onto her bed.
I took the doll and held it in my bloody, throbbing hand. I closed my eyes and I reached through the memory of the photo, through the DNA of the hair, through the lens of my love and my loss. I had no idea what I was doing; it was all instinct. I ached, and I missed her, and I would do anything, pay any price, fight any monster to have her in this world again. I felt the tendrils of the energy welling through me, all my chakras pulsing along my spine like stars, I felt the power flow out of me into the tenuous links I had forged to her in space and time. I reach out for Granny and tried to pull her back here, pull her to me. I felt the power throb with my heartbeat, with the gushing of my blood. I could feel something, like the nibble of a fish on your line, so faint but there and close. I needed more power. I simply didn’t have enough myself and the universe was stone silent beyond me, offering no aid, no encouragement. I would have to do this all on my own, and I knew, instinctively, where to garner more power.
I took the scissors in my undamaged right hand and crept, still carrying the doll, to the door to my room. I opened it slowly. Across the hall, I could make out Chip’s skinny naked ass pistoning up and down between Kara May’s open legs in the bed. She was moaning and clawing his back with her nails. I walked across the hall, padding quietly in my bare feet. I stood by the bed.
In my mind, I was still teasing the connection I had felt, working it. I felt the heat coming off Kara May and Chip, and it fanned the power in me. I drew that energy, stole it greedily, carelessly, and I saw the envelope of energy about each of them, joined as one in the passion of their union, rip and tear like gauze as I harvested the power of their sex. I found out years later I had torn their auras in the act, and how horrible a thing that is to do to someone. At the time, I didn’t know. I was a stupid, careless child ripping the wings off butterflies because they were beautiful and I wanted them, killing what I desired in my greed for it.
I drove the scissors deep into Chip’s back. Again and again and again. He screamed and the blood splashed everywhere. A geyser of fiery energy roared out of him, and I was ready, I took in all of it. The connection became stronger, became a hard link, a certainty, and I pulled with all my will, all my might. I called out into the void and something answered, something approached. Granny was coming.
Chip backhanded me, and I flew across the room. The scissors and the doll were out of my hands. Kara May was screaming. Chip was too. He stood and staggered toward me. He punched me in the face. There was a flash of bright light and numbness spiked with pain, and then he punched me in the chest, and I suddenly felt like I was made of jagged, broken glass.
“You little prick!” Chip bellowed. “That fucking hurt!” He hit me again and again. I tasted blood in my mouth, and I pissed myself. It was hard to think, and everything seemed to be immediate and in my face and far removed all at the same time.
Kara May gasped and then shouted, “It’s still in your back, it’s still in your back, oh God, we got to call the rescue squad!”
While Chip shouted at Kara May to pull the scissors out of his back, I crawled to Momma’s closet and hid inside. I had never been so afraid in all my life. Everything took on a sharp, bright, dreamlike quality, like being drugged, as my little brain tried to process so much violence, so much screaming, so much blood and trauma. There was a wet sucking sound and then Chip moaned. The scissors landed a few feet from me, black with his blood, outside the closet’s leveled door.
“I’m going to kill that little faggot,” Chip screamed.
“Baby, yew dun lost a lotta blood,” Kara May cautioned. She was naked and covered with much of the blood Chip had lost. “Lay down! Let’s jist call an ambulance.”
“Call one for this little sumbitch!” Chip said as he tore open the door to the closet, ripping it partly off its hinges. The carpet squished with his blood, and the room reeked of copper, sex, and urine. The only light in the room was from the hallway. Chip was backlit, and his shadowed face didn’t look human. Blood dripped down his back, ass, and legs to splash on the floor. He steadied himself on the doorframe.
“I’m gonna choke you, you little bastard,” he growled, slurring his words. “Wring your neck like a fucking chicken.”
He reached for me, murder in his eyes.
There was a crash in the living room. Everyone froze from the noise. It was the screen door flying open. The crash of furniture being knocked aside in the living room and then the thump, thump, thump of heavy steps down the hall toward the bedroom, toward us. There was a smell—mud mixed with putrefied blood and flesh, something sour, something gone bad, the shit smell of methane, like the smell of swamp—wet and stagnant and peaty.
Kara May saw it first. I couldn’t see her, or it, from my bolt-hole in the closet, but I heard her losing her mind. It sounded like a bird made of pure terror banging into the chimney of her throat and then flying out and away, dragging her tattered reason in its razor-sharp claws. Human beings aren’t made to sustain pure emotion. It burns us out, damages us.
Chip turned toward i
t, and he pissed in fear, like a frightened dog, when he saw it. He stumbled and lunged at it, screaming. I heard Kara May scream in response, but her mind was already gone. It was a parrotlike response to stimulus. There was a wet sound like a plunger creating a vacuum in a toilet, and then Chip stopped screaming. Kara May did as well. I heard her mumble, and then retching sounds. Chip’s body thudded dully to the floor in front of me. His eyes were wide, the blood vessels all around them ruptured. His face was frozen, a rictus of fear.
“Laytham, honey,” the voice said from outside the closet. It sounded like Granny, but her throat was packed with phlegm, and the words bubbled as she spoke. “He ain’t gonna hurt you now, darlin’.”
“Oh, Granny!” I said. “I missed you, I love you.”
“Granny’s here, Granny’s here, Granny’s here…” Kara whispered.
“I know, Laytham, but you did something we are never supposed to do, baby, and there is a consequence to that. The power demands a price,” Granny said.
“A price, a price,” Kara May babbled, “price, price, price…”
I knew I should stand, step out, and see her; I could tell she was standing right by the door to the closet. My instincts screamed no! A clod of putrid dirt fell to the floor. A fat worm squirmed and crawled free of it and began to slither across the carpet.
“I’m sorry, Granny,” I said. “I’m sorry if I did bad. I just missed you and I was so sad.”
“I know, Laytham, and for what it’s worth I’m trying so hard to forgive you—you didn’t know what you were doing, what you cost me.”
“Cost?” I said.
Kara May began giggling. I heard a thumping sound, rhythmic.
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