Friendly Fire

by John Gilstrap

  “Old man, my ass,” he mumbled as he headed back to the street.

  Chapter Twenty

  Ethan gingerly fingered his swollen lower lip while his tongue explored the wound inside his cheek, which had begun to ulcerate, adding a new layer of discomfort to the general body ache that had settled over him since his fight in the jail. He didn’t actually remember a lot of it. Just the first couple of punches, and then waking up on the floor with a mouthful of blood.

  According to the deputies who had managed his travel over here to the police station—to the holding cells, as he had been told—the psychiatrist lady, Wendy, had engineered his transfer because she was afraid he wouldn’t survive the environment of the jail.

  “Looks like you’ve got her in your court,” the deputy had said. “Seems silly to me. Our little Adult Detention Center is nothing compared to the state penitentiary, so why not give you some experience to toughen you up a little?” The deputy laughed at his own joke.

  Ethan didn’t. He thought the guy made a good point, although it was moot. Ethan had no intention of going to the state penitentiary. If it came to that, he’d figure out a way to off himself. He’d come close before.

  The interview rooms were nicer in the police station than they were in the detention center. Padded chairs that moved made life easier. And the security was way less paranoid. They didn’t make him wear the leg irons or the waist chain, and they cuffed his hands in the front, eliminating the agony of the nose itches that always tormented him as soon as he lost access to his hands.

  Dr. Adams sat across from him, her legs crossed, with her chair turned sideways so she could rest her notepad on the table. She looked a lot more comfortable in here, too. They’d already plowed through the introduction niceties. He thanked her for her role in his transfer, and he assured her that while still sore, he was recovering from his beating.

  They’d been meeting like this every other day for about an hour, and Ethan was beginning to feel that maybe she truly was in his corner—that she was one of the handful of people on the planet who weren’t working some kind of angle against him.

  “Today, I want you to talk about the aftermath of the assault against you,” she said. “Not this one, but the one when you were eleven.” Ethan noted that he was no longer the victim of kidnapping and rape, but rather the victim of an assault. He wondered if that was to make him feel more comfortable or if it was for her benefit. Some things, he supposed, were hard for even psychiatrists to talk about.

  “What about it?”

  “You tell me. I know about what they did to you in that basement, and you’ve told me details about your rescue. I know about your life before the incident happened, and now I want you to talk about the aftermath.”

  Ethan scowled. “It’s been eleven years,” he said. He wasn’t being difficult. He just didn’t know what she was looking for.

  “Let’s talk about the day you got home,” she said. “What was that like?”

  “It was happy,” he said.

  She gave him an impatient look. “Can you go a little deeper, please?”

  “Okay, it was very happy.” He smiled, and was pleased to see that she got his joke. “Actually, it was weird,” he explained. “After something like that, you expect a big deal. I don’t know, maybe a cake and reporters and family and stuff, but there was none of that. My dad met me and the priest guy in a parking lot of some shopping center. He hugged me and he thanked the priest, and then we drove home.”

  “What time of day was it?”

  Ethan shrugged. “I have no idea. It wasn’t dark yet, but it was getting there. And I remember feeling cold.”

  “Is that significant?”

  “What, the cold? I don’t know. You’re the doctor. Is it?”

  “Go on,” she said. “I shouldn’t have interrupted.”

  * * *

  Ethan’s mind took him back to territory he hadn’t explored in a very, very long time. When he was finally alone in the car with his dad, the atmosphere felt thick. Dad was on the verge of tears—something Ethan had never seen before—and when they were finally rolling toward home, he said, “Did they hurt you, son?”

  Ethan remembered taking his time answering. What was he supposed to say? He didn’t want anyone to know what had been done to him. That was gay stuff, and he didn’t want anyone to know that he’d done that. He didn’t want to think back on it himself, and he sure didn’t want anyone else to think of him that way. God, what if the kids at school found out? They couldn’t know. No one could ever know.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  Silence then dominated for what must have been two or three miles of driving. “What I mean to ask, Ethan, is, did they . . . Were you . . .”

  See? No one could even say the words. And what’s the point of saying them anyway? It couldn’t be undone. Nothing that had happened to him could un-happen, so what difference did talking about it make? Why make everyone uncomfortable?

  “I don’t want to talk about it now,” he said. “I’m tired.”

  “That’s fine,” Dad said. And he looked relieved. “In your own time.” They didn’t say another word as they drove back to the house. It was a long drive, too. Probably a couple of hours. Ethan slept some, but the images in his head wouldn’t go away. The sounds of the gunfire, and pictures of the dead bodies. The smell of the blood.

  The smell of the shit and piss from the bucket, the taste of his own blood, the taste of awfulness, of fear, of shame. The disgust.

  He watched in silence as they finally drove through territory that he recognized, hoping that Dad would think he was asleep. When they finally pulled into the driveway, Dad reached over and jostled Ethan’s leg to wake him up. Ethan reflexively jumped and pulled away. He saw that he’d hurt his dad’s feelings and he said he was sorry.

  “You have nothing to apologize for,” Dad said. “I just wanted you to know that we’re home. Your mom will be thrilled to see you.”

  Ethan knew that probably wasn’t true. It wasn’t that she wouldn’t be happy to see him, but rather that she probably wouldn’t be awake. It was way too long after dark for her to be up. Come sundown, Mom was all about taking her “medicine,” and within a few hours after that, there wasn’t much communication to be had. Ethan had known for years that the medicine was actually booze—and he was pretty sure she knew that he knew—but it made her more comfortable to call it medicine. What difference did it make?

  He was surprised, then—shocked, really—when the front door opened even before he was out of the car and his mom came running out to meet him. She was a little unsteady on her feet, and she was wearing her pajamas and robe, but she was there. She gathered him into her arms and hugged him hard, swinging him back and forth in an oscillating embrace.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “I am so happy to see you. Ethan, Ethan, Ethan, I love you so much. Welcome home. Are you okay?”

  Ethan hugged her back and tried to ignore the musky smell of the medicine. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m really fine.”

  Mom let go of him, and then held him out at arm’s length, her hands still on his shoulders. “Are you sure?”

  “Hey, Marian,” Dad said. “I think we should take this inside. No sense stirring up the neighbors.”

  Ethan didn’t know at the time how long he’d been gone—it turned out to be a little over eight days—but it felt like it had been forever, and as he stepped across the threshold into the foyer, he was struck by how little anything had changed. It was as if time had stopped for Mom and Dad, while it moved with the speed of a tornado for him. So much had happened.

  “He said he doesn’t want to talk about anything right now,” Dad said. “He said he’s tired and I think he should go to bed.”

  “But I want to hear what happened. My God, Porter, he was kidnapped! God only knows what—”

  Dad put his hand on her shoulder and gently shook his head. A silent warning about something that shouldn’t be said. At first, Mom looked
confused, but then she seemed to get it. “It’s okay if you need to go to bed,” she said. “We can always talk later.”

  That was code, he realized over time, for not talking at all.

  “Would you like to take a bath first?” Mom asked.

  He hugged himself without knowing it until after he’d done it. “No,” he said. “That’s okay.” He was afraid of what bright light and a mirror might show.

  Instead, he went straight to his room. He closed the door, and paused, hovering near it for a good thirty seconds. Then he locked it. It was a long-standing rule in Falk household that doors remained unlocked all the time. He supposed it had something to do with his parents being able to check in on him at night after he was asleep, but on that night, the one guarantee he craved more than any other was that no one would come into his room. Ever. He climbed under his covers still fully clothed in the secondhand rags he’d been given in the car as Scorpion and Big Guy had driven him away from the hell house. As far as he could remember, he fell asleep immediately.

  The next morning—okay, it could have been several mornings later, but within the same sleeve of time—when he was getting ready to go back to school, his parents sat him down at the kitchen table. They looked serious, sad.

  “Ethan, we have something very important to talk to you about,” Dad said. It was about seven in the morning, close to the time when the school bus would be arriving, and a good half hour past the time when Dad normally went to work. Nothing about this was right. “What I’m about to tell you is entirely unfair, and I want to apologize to you for it right up front.”

  Ethan remembered his heartbeat racing at those words. He anticipated something about somebody having cancer, or some horrible thing that was going to hurt him even deeper than he’d already been hurt. The words made him feel light-headed, but he hung in there. He said nothing, choosing instead to let them fill the silence.

  “This stuff that happened to you,” Dad said. “You can’t tell anyone about it. Not any of it. Not about being taken, not about how . . . you were treated, and certainly not about how you were rescued.”

  “Why?” Not that he was straining at the leash to share his ravaging with the rest of the world, but it was an odd order, delivered in an even odder way.

  “It’s complicated,” Mom said. She looked like hell, like she hadn’t slept all night. He wondered if they’d been up around the clock talking about him.

  “Ethan,” Dad said, “the truth is that I’d rather not go into all the details. We did some things that we’re not very proud of. We broke the law, in fact, but we broke it for the sole purpose of getting you back.”

  “We didn’t know that people would be killed,” Mom said.

  Dad clarified, “Well, we knew it was a possibility, but we sort of talked ourselves into believing that it would go another way.”

  Ethan was lost in the conversation. He remembered looking at them, confused, wondering what the hell they were talking about.

  “During your rescue,” Dad explained. “We didn’t know that people would be killed. That’s the part that’s against the law. If word of that got out, then your mom and I could go to jail.”

  “For rescuing me?” Ethan couldn’t believe he was hearing the words. “How is that against the law?”

  Mom reached out a hand, just sort of into the air, more or less in his direction. “That’s where it gets complicated.”

  “I was happy to see them killed,” Ethan said, his voice rising in both pitch and volume.

  “You don’t mean that,” Dad said.

  “Yes, I do! I prayed that someone would kill them. You don’t know what they did.”

  “We have a good idea,” Dad said. “I fear that I have a very good idea, but that’s not the way the law works. You can’t just kill bad people.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” Ethan said. Suddenly, he felt that he was on the wrong side, that they were angry with him.

  “No, we know you didn’t, honey,” Mom said.

  “But Scorpion did,” Dad said. “And his friend.”

  “Big Guy,” Ethan explained. “The police.”

  Mom and Dad exchanged another significant look. A lot of those going around now. “I don’t want to confuse you,” Dad said. “And I don’t want to load you down with details you don’t need to know, but those men were not police officers.”

  But Ethan had seen them. He’d seen their clothes and their guns and the way they operated. “Sure they were,” he said.

  Dad shook his head. “No. We couldn’t involve the police,” he said. “Our instructions were very specific. Those men were people we hired to rescue you. They’re not police, and what they did was against the law.”

  “How can that be?” Ethan asked.

  “Just trust me on this, son,” Dad said. “That’s the way it is. And because I was the one who hired them, I broke the law by doing so.”

  “But they saved my life.”

  Mom and Dad held each other’s hands. “Yes, they did,” Dad said. No one held Ethan’s hand. He wasn’t sure he wanted them to, but it was a detail he remembered. “And we will always be grateful to them for doing that. But that doesn’t change the facts. If you talk to anyone about this—ever—you will be exposing your mom and me to legal action. To jail. I don’t think you want that to happen, do you?”

  Ethan’s memory of the conversation was that he just stared, but he must have nodded, because they both looked relieved by whatever they saw.

  “Okay, then,” Dad said. “Do I have a cross-your-heart pinky swear on that?”

  Ethan crossed his heart. But the pinky swear was baby, so he didn’t do that.

  “There’s one other thing,” Dad said. He looked really uncomfortable. “I know you don’t want to talk about what happened, but I need to know one thing.”

  Ethan felt tears pressing behind his eyes. There was nothing about any of that that he wanted to share.

  “I need to know if you’re bruised,” he said.

  Ethan didn’t understand the question.

  “I need to know if there are marks on your body.”

  * * *

  Even today, Ethan felt the press of the tears. “They were worried about the cosmetics,” he said to Wendy. “After all the shit I went through, after all the violation, they were worried that if I went to gym class and somebody saw bruises on me, that they would call social services or something.”

  “Were there?” Wendy asked. “Bruises, I mean.”

  “Jesus Christ, of course there were bruises! How could there not be bruises? And you know what? They wrote me an open-ended excuse not to go to gym class. I don’t know what they put on the excuse, but it was good for two, three, four weeks. However long it took for all the colors to go away.”

  Wendy said, “I’m sure—”

  “No,” Ethan said, cutting her off. “No, before you say anything, do you want to know the one thing they never did?”

  She waited.

  “They never took me to a goddamn doctor. Christ, looking back, I could have been bleeding to death on the inside, but they were so embarrassed about what had happened, that they were willing to roll the dice on that one.”

  “I’m sure that’s not what they were thinking.”

  “Oh, yeah? Then what’s your theory?”

  “I think it’s probably just exactly what they told you. They were worried about going to prison as accessories to murder. Once that door is opened, it’s not an easy one to close. They cared enough to send someone after you, Ethan. Did they ever tell you why they didn’t just call the police and let them handle it?”

  Ethan shook his head. “No,” he said. “But I’m not sure I ever asked.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because they didn’t want to talk about it. Hell, I didn’t want to talk about, either. Nobody did. Everybody wanted it just to go away so we could pretend that none of it ever happened. If you didn’t think about it, it couldn’t hurt anymore.”

&nbs
p; “It doesn’t work that way,” Wendy said. Her tone was much softer.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Ethan said. “You know we’re talking in a jail, right?”

  Wendy took her time paging through her notes. Finally, she said, “Your parents got divorced shortly after that.”

  He blinked, unsure whether his voice was trustworthy.

  “Can you tell me about that?”

  * * *

  The cliché is that children always blame themselves in part for the separation of their parents. Ethan had read a few articles on it, and he’d seen the oh-so-earnest doctors talk about it on television. The emphasis there was that children needed to cut themselves a break. Mommies and daddies just fall out of love sometimes, and it’s possible for parents who don’t like each other anymore to still love their children equally.

  The doctors and article writers should have spoken to Ethan before they went out on such a narrow limb. Because Ethan was, in fact, the reason why his parents’ marriage fell apart. He was the one who decided to break the rules and go on that stupid bike ride. He was the one who ignored the clanging warning bells of stranger danger and allowed the perv to shove him into that car. And then, while he was stuffed down in that dank, stinky basement, he was the one who allowed the violations. He could have fought harder. He could have gouged their eyes or he could have bitten, he could have done something other than simply let himself be frightened into allowing them to do that.

  While the nightmares of the specific violations, the replaying of the pain and the images had decreased over time, other nightmares had intensified. It was the faces of the other boys that had shared his prison basement, though for such short periods. Even after over a decade, Ethan felt shame for the elation he’d felt when the others were chosen for selection and he was not. He remembered the terror in their eyes and he wondered what came of them. As he got older, and he read more and more about human trafficking and sexual slavery, he knew that he was reading about those other kids. He hoped they got away, and if they didn’t, he hoped they died quickly.