Red, White, and Blood

by Christopher Farnsworth

  He’d tried to explain this method to his son once back in high school. Getting drunk—properly drunk, the kind of drunk that blunts the world’s thorns while brightening the roses—took planning and effort. Like anything else in life, it required practice to get it right.

  But did Zach appreciate this? Of course not. He’d just looked at his father with that snide, know-it-all expression on his face and gone back to his debate briefs or his term paper or whatever he was doing then.

  Franklin Pierce Barrows had tried to help his son out. He really had. He remembered the thrill he felt, looking at the kid through the fish-tank glass where they kept the newborns at the hospital. A boy. His own boy: Zachary Taylor Barrows, continuing the tradition of naming the men in the family after presidents. He swore right there he would teach the kid everything he knew. Take him to football games. Play catch. He’d be the first dad there to cheer when his son won a race or a wrestling match or whatever sport he chose.

  But it didn’t turn out that way. Even as a toddler, Zach looked at balls with the hardened suspicion of an ex-con facing a traffic stop. He was happier reading than watching football. And he was smart. Christ, he was way too smart. Zach began correcting his father on grammar when he was still in grade school. Frank knew it wasn’t intentional, but he couldn’t help feeling like the little shit was making fun of him even then. Like, “I’m a kid and I know this. How are you the grown-up here?”

  He could tell the boy had the important stuff down cold. Frank reluctantly concluded that his son would not need his help with homework or school or pretty much anything that would matter in the long run. This made leaving Zach and his mother a little easier, actually. He suspected he wasn’t necessary in their lives anyway. And the ease with which they both went on living after he was ejected from the family unit only proved it.

  But he could also tell there was an element of social awkwardness to Zach. Frank could help with that if nothing else. He might not have been the role model he wanted to be, but making people like him was always easy.

  Except, as it turned out, with his son. He tried to teach his son what it was like to be popular. You’d think that would come in handy for a kid who said he wanted to go into politics. But no. Every overture was greeted like it was some kind of insult. Zach only got more clenched and snotty with every bit of advice. Frank eventually gave up. Let the kid do it himself, then, he was so damn smart. Probably didn’t get laid until he was twenty-one, but that’s the way he wanted it.

  Frank sighed and looked around his town house. He knew there was a reason for this drunk. He’d buried it carefully under the layers of alcohol. Something that happened in the bar. Frank shuddered involuntarily. He had been humiliated and he knew there was nothing he could do about it.

  He didn’t want to bring that back. He’d blotted out a lot of crappy things in his life. This was just one more of them.

  As if in response, Frank felt the familiar tidal pull from the region of his groin. Women and whiskey. His two great weaknesses. He was a little proud of his physical endurance. Despite the years of abuse he’d forced on his liver and his dick, neither had failed him yet. Science would probably want to study his corpse to figure out how a man pushing sixty could down a quart of booze and still get it up.

  It had been a while since he’d been this drunk, though. He hadn’t been lying to Zach. He really had started to pull himself together. The job with the campaign had given him a steady paycheck and a little self-respect. People listened to him again. He’d even managed to draw attention from the young campaign volunteers. One of them, younger than Zach, came over to his place two or three nights a week.

  Her name was Juliette, and they both knew he was not the kind of guy she really needed. He was not surprised when she went through the inevitable rundown of her family history: divorce, bad stepdads, wicked stepmothers, emotional abandonment, escape to college and grown-up issues like politics.

  It occurred to him that because the men of his age had been such shitty fathers, they’d created a whole generation of young women looking for a male figure to give them the security and love they never got at home. And since these young women would often become the mistresses or second wives of married men, they were helping to perpetuate the cycle of broken families and absent dads. In twenty more years, those daughters would go out and do the same thing. He felt like writing this down for his son so he would remember to be grateful when he started screwing his own damaged twenty-two-year-olds with perfect tits.

  Despite knowing this, Frank was a little stunned at how readily Juliette had started sucking him off in the car on their way home from a late night at the bar. The girls he’d grown up with required weeks of effort before they would so much as remove their bras. Juliette took his cock in her mouth the same way someone else might shake hands. She’d tried to explain it to him once in bed. How oral sex was no big deal. How kids started doing it in junior high now. It made him feel old, and that was not the right time or place for it. So he’d flipped her on her stomach and slid deep into her.

  Just remembering it was getting Frank hard. He picked up the phone and dialed.

  Juliette answered after three or four rings. She sounded confused. When he looked at the clock, he realized why. It was close to 2 a.m. He wondered what had happened to the rest of the night.

  “Frank?” she said, voice foggy with sleep. She shared an apartment with several other young campaign workers. (In his shower, alone, Frank had imagined orgies, flexible young bodies testing new positions and partners in the small hours after long days of envelope stuffing and door knocking.)

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.” Lying.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  She giggled. God, she was young. She still giggled. “Was that all you wanted?”

  He could hear the smile in her voice. “Well…”

  “I’ll be right over,” she said, and hung up.

  Thank Christ for girls with daddy issues, Frank thought.

  She arrived twenty minutes later, still wiping the sleep from her eyes, and planted a warm kiss on his mouth. She looked around the town house. Her eyes opened a little wider.

  “Frank. What’s going on?”

  He looked at the bottles on the kitchen counter. He really was out of practice. He would have hidden them in the past. “Bad week,” he said.

  To his surprise, he found himself telling her about Zach. Not about the reasons for their fight. And certainly not about the weird Secret Service agent, no, thank you, let’s not go there again. She listened. She held his hand.

  “You’re a good dad,” she said. “I wish mine would make that kind of effort.”

  That was almost too much for even Frank to take. Before her words could start him thinking about his long, failed history of fatherhood, he began stroking her back.

  She giggled again. He put aside his annoyance at that, because she also stood up and pulled her sweatshirt over her head.

  She was a little chunkier than he liked his women. Even now, he took pride in the tightness of his abdomen and his muscle tone; he’d never been a fleshy drunk. But she was also twenty-two years old, and that made up for a lot. Her breasts were still high and full and perfect, untouched by gravity or children or age.

  And she could suck the chrome right off a fender.

  Then he got a weird sensation. He looked at the town house window. His reflection looked back. But it was in the wrong position. Its eyes were not level with his eyes. It moved closer to the glass, and that’s when he realized it was not his reflection at all—

  The window shattered and a heavy man wearing a bizarre latex mask shaped like a smiley face leaped inside. Frank and Juliette both screamed. Somewhere in the back of his head, Frank knew this would not help, because his neighbors in the condo association studiously avoided one another. He’d had some real screamers up here before, louder than this, and no one ever said a word. />
  While this ran through his mind, he and Juliette fell to the floor, bleeding from a dozen small cuts from the shards of glass. The smiley-faced man stood above them on the bed.

  Frank tried to protect Juliette. He pushed her toward the door and lunged for his nightstand. Inside was his gun. It wasn’t much, just a .38 snub-nosed Bulldog that he hadn’t even test-fired in years. He honestly thought he’d end up putting the barrel in his mouth one day, but now he knew he had to use it or die.

  As he reached out toward the handle of the drawer, metal sang through the air.

  He looked at the result for a moment, unable to comprehend. He was still reaching for the drawer, but there was nothing he could use to grab it. His hand was gone, along with most of his arm: severed neatly above the elbow.

  The blood pumped out and the pain started. It seemed to take forever. He supposed he must be going into shock.

  Frank looked up. He saw the smiling mask right above him.

  The Boogeyman raised the curved blade. Frank could hear the laughter from under the mask. It sounded like a garbage disposal chewing on a tin can.

  He turned and was surprised to see Juliette was still there, still crawling in an effort to get out of the bedroom. He thought he could buy her life at the cost of his own.

  But he’d failed. He couldn’t stop the killer. Frank couldn’t even slow him down.

  Frank Barrows had made the mistake many times in his life of preferring to believe in his version of events despite all evidence to the contrary. He’d always thought there would be more time. He thought there was always another job, another day, another chance to get it right. He believed, against all evidence, that someday, when he was finished fooling around, his now-dead wife would take him back and his son would embrace him as the father he should have been and always meant to be.

  This was no exception. Despite what Cade had shown him, he refused to accept the idea that anything like that could be real. The world could not include things like Cade. They were horror stories and fairy tales. They couldn’t be real.

  He was wrong. The world did include things like this. They were real. And they could hurt him.

  It was not the first time he’d been wrong. It was, however, the last.

  CURTIS CAMPAIGN PRESS BRIEFING,

  OCTOBER 18, 2012

  JEFF CALLEY, CAMPAIGN SPOKESMAN: There’s the weekend schedule. We have time for a few questions before we go.

  Q: So when does the President plan to speak about the murders of his campaign staffers?

  A: The President believes in allowing local law enforcement to do its job without interference from the White House. He has, of course, already extended his condolences to the families of the victims. But he has faith in the men and women of the local police and sheriff’s departments to deal with these matters.

  Q: So you’re saying he plans to ignore them completely?

  A: Hi, Megan. Nice to see you here. No, that’s not correct. He’s busy doing the job the voters elected him to do, and he’s going to let the police do theirs.

  Q: Oh come on. It’s obvious they’re all connected to one another. The method, the similar nature of each killing—

  A: At this point, it would be irresponsible to speculate on what connection, if any, there is between these horrible, heinous crimes. And I certainly wouldn’t want to increase the pain of the victims’ families by throwing out wild theories. That said, you’re talking about incidents that happened in different states, weeks and months apart, to very different people. I don’t see how you can jump to any conclusions from that.

  Q: Has the FBI been called to assist?

  A: I have no idea. You’d have to ask them.

  Q: Why is the President ignoring clear evidence of a serial killer stalking his campaign?

  A. As I said before, there’s no evidence of that. It sounds like a great movie, though. Can’t wait to see it. (LAUGHTER) And I think we’ve given you enough time, Megan. Let’s move on to someone else.

  Q: Does this violence mean that the President can’t even manage to protect his own people from criminals?

  A: Ah, come on, that’s just sleazy, even for your paper. (LAUGHTER) Look. Violent crime is a terrible, tragic fact of life. But I’d like to remind you all that the national crime rate, and this is for all crimes, including homicides, has in fact declined four years in a row under President Curtis—

  Q: Hey, Jeff, you double-locking your door at night? Worried at all about your own personal safety?

  A: I think the most dangerous part of my day is right here. (LAUGHTER)

  Zach woke with a start on the press bus.

  He checked his watch and realized it was 5:45 a.m. He had fallen asleep only an hour or two before. But nothing quite made sense as he blinked away the sleep. He looked up and saw President Curtis. Only, the reporters weren’t mobbing him or throwing out questions. Instead, they gave him a wide space. Some even looked embarrassed.

  “Zach,” the president said, face somber, “would you come with me, please? I’d like to talk to you alone.”

  It reminded Zach so much of being called to the principal’s office he almost laughed. But he realized what it must be about: someone had spilled the news about him and Candace. God. He’d be lucky if Curtis didn’t order Cade to kill him.

  Only, Candace was standing at the front of the bus, waiting. She didn’t look flustered or humiliated. She only looked at him with deep concern.

  And if the news had broken, then the president would be nowhere near the press. They would have broken into their regular programming, done special graphics and assembled expert panels on what it all meant that a minor-league staffer was banging the president’s daughter. Setting foot on the press bus would have been like wearing a gravy suit in front of a pack of starving poodles.

  Zach followed the president off the bus. Candace came with them.

  They stepped around to the side of the highway, Secret Service watching everything carefully in the predawn gloom. The buses sat chugging exhaust. There was nothing but empty fields in every direction.

  And the president told him what had happened.

  Zach thought idly that he wished all of the bad news in his life had been delivered by Samuel Curtis. He was direct without sacrificing compassion or kindness. He gave an impression of strength even in grief. His hand on Zach’s shoulder was steady and warm.

  Then the actual meaning of the president’s words finally penetrated the thick haze clouding Zach’s brain.

  Candace was there to hold him before he fell.

  THE FUNERAL WAS SMALL and sparsely attended. There was no casket. Frank Barrows’s body was still in a coroner’s locker. Not that there was any question about cause of death, but bureaucracy moved slowly, and Zach had wanted to be done with this ceremony as quickly as possible.

  The wake, at the same bar where he and his father had fought for the last time, was much more crowded. After the sun set, it seemed, Frank’s friends came out and took advantage of his son’s open tab for drinks.

  Zach got very drunk. He would play the part of his father’s son for one night at least. The press, thankfully, stayed away. Frank’s murder was enough of a story on its own. Out of some kind of professional courtesy, they didn’t feel the need to add Zach’s name to it. Zach was grateful for all the favors he’d never cashed with the media during his time back in the real world.

  Everyone had a story, it seemed. They genuinely seemed to love and miss him. The owner of the bar kept the doors open well past closing. He talked about retiring Frank’s regular stool. The others remembered his time on the city council; his ability to charm the pants off almost any woman; his inability to keep himself out of trouble. The women he’d bedded said they felt he truly cared about them. And that he was great in the sack. Everyone laughed. Everyone had a great, funny memory of Frank.

  Everyone but Zach.

  Try as he might, he couldn’t think of a single good time with his dad.

  Someone finally s
houted for him to make a speech. Zach panicked for a moment. Then, like magic, in the time it took him to take another drink of vodka—the top-shelf stuff, served close to freezing—the memory came to him.

  “It was my first debate tournament in high school,” Zach said. “Yeah, I was that much of a geek. I was over at my dad’s that weekend. I was standing there in my jeans and shirt, and he said, ‘You’re not going like that.’ We went to a tailor downtown—the guy opened early, just for Frank—and he suited me up. So I was there in this custom-tailored suit and I realized I didn’t know how to tie a tie. Frank knotted one up for me. He tried to show me, but I was too nervous, I guess. I couldn’t get it right. So he bought five more and knotted them all as well. He said if I never learned, no matter what, he would tie them for me. I’d just have to mail them to him after I moved away, and he’d mail them back, all tied up.”

  There was silence.

  Then someone yelled, “To Frank!” and there was a drunken roar and the sound of broken glass.

  Zach saw Cade then, standing at the door.

  He pushed through the crowd and made his way outside.

  Cade was waiting there. Zach knew it must have been freezing out, but he didn’t feel it. His mind only registered the vapor forming in front of his mouth as he breathed. There was no cloud of vapor over Cade’s head.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Cade said.

  “Right,” Zach said. “You didn’t have anything to do with this, did you?”

  Cade looked disappointed. It must have been crushing for Zach to see it that plainly on his face.

  “I will pretend you didn’t ask me that,” he said.

  “Yeah. Should have known better. After all, nobody tried to drink their blood.”

  Cade said nothing.

  “Hey, help me out with something, Cade. If you were to drink Frank’s blood, would you get drunk? I mean, the guy always had a load on. Does it work like that for you?”