Borderlands 3

by Thomas F. Monteleone (Ed. )

  Then we were at the tunnel, climbing the bank, passing the round stone arch, leaving the sunlight, and it was too late. While the boy quivered in sudden fear and wonder, unable to run away, I was sickly chanting one of those hymns, until it became a high, obscene wail, and my hands were running all over his smooth warm skin. I did kiss him then, sucking at his hot breath, tugging at the waistband of his bathing trunks. And when I freed my penis, the look of revulsion in his big eyes told me it could be only one way.

  There were rocks strewn on the floor of the dark, wet tunnel, and one of them found my right hand. For a moment it almost slid away, but I tightened my grip and raised it over my head. By this time the boy's body was crouched and cowering, as if asking for what I was envisioning, the love and the pain. Then my hand was coming down, once, twice, three times, and I was—oh, God—joining with him like that, until everything was sticky and wet.

  Until the blood covered his face, the red spurts matching my white ones, and he lay still.

  I'd just wanted to enter that tunnel, to express what had grown in my body that hot August day. And I'd just wanted to walk close with someone like Jesus, and be a good boy like my mother said.

  After I'd caught my breath, I buried the boy under some big rocks I was able to roll over. There was some blood left on the dirt floor of the tunnel, but I used my hands to rub it away. Then I came out into the sunlight again, and went down to the stream and washed myself clean, as in some useless baptism. River Road, the woods looked the same, but the air tasted clearer. Though it was with a clearness, I think, like that after an awful storm.

  It wasn't until the next morning, as I sang in church, that I thought, sickly, of Christ's tomb. But I didn't think the little boy would rise again.

  And he didn't. Though I went through hell during the next few months, and shivered in my room as the newspapers followed the disappearance, no policeman ever came to our door. If I'd been a Catholic, my crime might have poured out in the confessional, but I wasn't. And at twelve, no matter how horrible you feel, suicide just doesn't enter your mind.

  I did stop singing in the church choir, though, which was the first of many unconscious steps to overcome my mother and her warped religion. I got closer to my father, made more friends, including girls, and became more of a normal boy for my age. Then, when I was eighteen, I made the right kind of love to a woman for the first time, appropriately enough in a woods, in nature, and found that I could. And a few years later I got married, and started my job in the department store.

  The vision of what happened in that wet, dark tunnel did flash across my mind from time to time, like a searing streak of red. Even my experiences in World War II were nothing compared to it. But life goes on, especially when you're growing, and even guilt becomes irrelevant. Though the evidence says otherwise, your crime does become like something someone else did, a young, twisted boy.

  The evidence...

  Last week I walked River Road once more. The stone tunnel was still there, because no one had a need to disturb it, but this time it beckoned. It was a hot August day again, and though the fire in my body had long since cooled, and the fullness had turned to shriveled flesh, I knew I had to go back. So I left the road for the first time since, and climbed the cursed bank again.

  There was a rusty anchor fence over the entrance now, but I was able to crawl underneath. There were rats scurrying in the dampness, but I kicked them off. The big rocks I'd rolled onto the... little boy's body were still in place, but like some misbegotten angel at a horrid tomb, I was able to push them away. I drew back, heaving, peering into the darkness...

  And there were the bones, the sixty-year-old bones—simple really, so painfully small, strewn on the dirt. But there would be no resurrection here. The boy was, had been for a long time, as I soon would be. So I put the rocks back, and left.

  Still I walk River Road, alone. My daily routine, the city above the woods and the stream, and the things I did in it, now seem unreal next to that one, buried place. I walk the road, losing myself in the rhythm of the walk, until I meet my judge. Maybe then, when I walk with the real Jesus, he'll help me find my peace.

  The Banshee by Thomas Tessier

  Certain writers spend their years quietly building up a body of work that upon retrospect is not only imposing or formidable but is actually brilliant. Although he's far from finished adding to his corpus, Tom Tessier is one of those writers. Underrated doesn't really apply here, because he is respected and he does get the well-deserved good reviews, but high-rolling success has so far escaped him. Upcoming books include White Gods, a new novel, and The Crossing and Other Tales of Panic, a collection of his short fiction that can't be less than spectacular. His "Evelyn Grace" was one of the true gems in Borderlands 1, and I have waited almost two years to coax another story out of him. When I received the subtle, graceful, emotionally charged piece that follows, I smiled. Tessier was home again.

  He didn't mean to hit her—hard. But she went down like a toy made out of flimsy sticks, and she began crying in a loud and piercing screech. Even then she didn't stop talking. Bubbles of compressed words burst forth intermittently between heaving gasps of breath. Her features were distorted with anger and pain, her face corkscrewing tightly into itself.

  "For the love of Jesus," Dermot muttered, turning away in a state of barely controlled rage. This is how murder happens. He finished the whiskey in his glass, poured a little more. She was still lying on the chipped lino, making noise. "I'm warning you, stop that racket."

  "You hurt me."

  "It was just a shove. You didn't have to fall down, you did that on purpose. Besides, if you don't shut up my flatmates will throw me out of here. And if that happens, I swear I'll fuckin' kill you."

  "They're not here," she pointed out infuriatingly.

  "It's the neighbors," Dermot told her. "They'll complain to the lads again, and I'll be in trouble. They're fed up with this sort of carry-on. You can't keep doing this to me."

  The noise diminished slightly. That was so typical of her, and so annoying. If he was reasonable, if he was willing to talk to her about it, then she quieted down. But there was nothing to talk about anymore. There never had been. So much trouble, and he'd never even been inside her drawers.

  "Come on, now."

  "No." Resentful. She made a disgustingly liquid sniffling sound. "I don't want to go yet."

  "Well, I want you out of here. Now."

  "Dermot, please."

  "I told you," he said. "It's pointless."

  "Dermot..."

  She began to cry again. He never should have let her in his door. Not the first time, not ever. But what could he do? Call the police? That'd be funny. And if he had to argue with her it seemed better to do it in the relative privacy of his room rather than out in the hallway. You couldn't ignore her. She would put her finger on the bell and hold it until you answered. Sometimes she would pound the door with her other fist at the same time.

  It wasn't his fault. True, he had smiled at her and chatted freely that first night she appeared at Dolan's, but that was all part of the job. True, when she began coming around almost every night he could see that she was developing a special interest in him, and he did nothing to discourage it, but they saw each other only at the bar and they never actually did anything together, so it all seemed quite harmless. You liked it when she told you you were the best barman in the best bar in Southie, didn't you? You silly great eejit. And yes, it was true that the time came when he invited her back to his place for a nightcap, but he didn't so much as touch her knee.

  By then he knew something was wrong. She drank a little too much and spoke a little too forcefully. Her cheerfulness had the sharp edge of desperation, and he began to realize that she was a person with a problem. She was lonely. No crime in that, but it had apparently reached the point where it affected her mind. She would say something every now and then that was—wrong. And it made you think you were in the presence of a sick person.

/>   Dermot instinctively sympathized with her. He sometimes had his own bouts of loneliness and he often felt painfully homesick. But he decided not to get involved, perhaps sensing that he could never fill the emptiness in her life. Probably no one could. It had gone on too long now, and was rooted in her.

  Besides, she didn't really attract him, so he had no desire even to try. In the face of fearful odds, Dermot had managed to get to America. He had a job. He had a room. He had plans. He was there to make money, not collect problem souls.

  By then, however, it was too late. They talked for a while that first night and then she left. But she came back to Dolan's night after night. She usually stayed until closing time so that the two of them could walk home together. Like Dermot, she lived in the neighborhood. The rear exit of Dolan's led to a dead end alley, so he couldn't easily avoid her. He made excuses—going for a plate of spaghetti with the lads, a poker game—but there were too many times when he had to put up with her chatty company over the few blocks to home.

  What kind of life did she have that she could stay out until three almost every morning? She claimed she worked in an office. More than that, Dermot didn't care to know: she might mistake his idle curiosity for significant interest. He occasionally walked her to her door; she always invited him in and he always declined politely. Most of the time he went straight to his place and she tagged along. The last twenty feet were the trickiest, from the sidewalk to the door. It required finesse or rudeness for him to get inside without her. He didn't always succeed, but a glass of whiskey and another forty minutes of forgettable talk usually did the job. If you satisfied her craving for company and attention, then you could ease her out.

  The funny thing was, she never made a move on him either. A flash of leg was invariably accidental; the chair slid. When she bumped into him, breasts against his arm, it was the result of an innocent tipsiness. At first Dermot saw these minor incidents as erotic overtures, but he soon realized that they weren't. It was the hour, the booze, nothing more. She was happy just to be with him, to have his company. In his more charitable moments, Dermot thought of her as an eccentric.

  "Get up, you stupid cow."

  "I don't want to go."

  "If you don't shift yourself, I'll drag you by the scruff of your neck and toss you in the gutter."

  "Dermot!" A shriek from the back of beyond.

  "I mean it. Come along now."

  She didn't stir. Whimpering, huddled to herself. Dear God, how did it get to this point? It was actually worse than if they were lovers, because lovers do split up and vow never to see each other again. The clean break. Dermot's mistake had been to let this situation develop to the point where it was a friendship, at least in her mind, and that kind of thing was somehow harder to terminate neatly.

  He had underestimated her every step of the way. How had he deluded himself into believing that he was in control? The alarm bells didn't start ringing until the first time she came visiting on one of his nights off. She had finagled his work schedule out of someone at Dolan's. The line was truly crossed. Dermot began calling her names, yelling at her, anything to drive the wretched woman away.

  But his insults and verbal abuse didn't seem to matter. It was possible that she found some perverse pleasure in it, taking it as a form of attention. No matter what he did, he only seemed to implicate himself more in this imaginary relationship. Dermot felt helpless and trapped, and that made him angrier. If it took physical force to get rid of her, so be it.

  "Come along," he said firmly, grabbing her by the shoulders. "Time to push off."

  "You promised me a drink," she protested.

  "I did no such thing."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I don't want to give you a drink," he said, hauling her to her feet. "I want you to go home and leave me alone. I'm tired and I have to write a letter to my father back in Ireland. He's not very well, and—"

  "What about your mother?" she asked quickly, grasping at the slim conversational opening.

  "She's fine, thanks. Come on now."

  "My mother's dead."

  "Ah, you'll be seeing her again soon enough if you don't get out of here in a flash, you drunken old sow."

  She smiled at him. "Oh, Dermot..."

  He opened the apartment door and gently started to steer her toward the hallway. She resisted, tilting in his direction. She had never really fought him before. Dermot regarded this gesture as an escalation on her part, a clear attempt to move things to a new level. It had to be squelched immediately. He yelled at her as he gave her a stiff-arm to the shoulder. She fell back, tried to steady herself, and pulled a picture off the wall. It crashed to the floor as she landed on a plain wooden chair—the back of it popped loose. Somehow, she straightened up on her feet as the chair cracked to pieces beneath her.

  The picture was just a cheap print in a cheap frame, and the chair was worthless tag-sale junk. But they weren't his. Now he would have to replace them. Dermot gazed at the broken glass and wood on the floor. Enough is enough, he thought dimly.

  She was about to say something, but he wouldn't let her. He grabbed her by the hair and yanked her out of the flat, through the front door and down the walk. She was screaming now. Dermot swung her by the hair and sent her reeling across the sidewalk. She banged into a car parked at the curb, and sank to the ground. The cries of pain continued, but the volume was down.

  "And stay away, you stupid old slag."

  Dermot turned and marched back inside. Mr. and Mrs. Thwaite glared down at him from the upper landing. He would apologize to them, but it was useless. They were the kind of people who would tell a leper it was his own fault when his lips fell off. Dermot knew they would complain to the lads, maybe even to the landlord. But he might survive—if that woman never came back.

  He topped up his glass of whiskey and tried to calm himself. He sat down at the desk in his room and took out a sheet of lined paper. Dear Dad, he began. The old man wasn't well, that was an honest fact. Dermot hadn't written home in ages. No excuses, he just hadn't done it. There were times when his head felt like an anvil of guilt. He would fail again tonight. He was too jangled and distracted to concentrate.

  If only he could ring them up on the telephone. Impossible. Dermot's home was on the outskirts of a small village a few miles from Kilkelly, itself no metropolis, in the bleak heart of County Mayo. There were still some places where the lines didn't reach, or the people couldn't be bothered to hook on. If you absolutely had to use a phone, you went to a pub in town. In all the years of his growing up, Dermot could remember about half a dozen such telephone expeditions.

  Yes, it was a bleak corner of the world, but he did miss it. He missed the folks, his sister Naimh. He missed the grim beauty of the stark countryside. It was all so—empty. While here in Boston, everybody lived like matchsticks in a box. All he wanted was a few years here to raise enough money so that he could buy a decent pub back home. Then he'd be away like a shot. Of course, Dermot knew there was many an Irishman who said as much, and then never returned. They went to America and stayed. But he—

  "Dermot. Derrrmmmmot..."

  The voice was so close he jumped. She was in the side yard, outside his window. Not even six feet away from him, across the desk and on the other side of the wall. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. He couldn't move. His body shook. He saw a splash of whiskey on the barren page. Thank God the shade was drawn. Her voice rose, becoming a scream, and she hammered the wall of the house, but he didn't move. It soon got worse, much worse. If I move I'll kill her, Dermot realized, this time I'll fuckin' murder her.

  The next thing he knew, the police were at the door. He let them in, catching a glimpse of the Thwaites outside. Trouble. A couple of cops had been scratched and bitten as they subdued her. She'd gone round the twist. The police knew her, it seemed. The one who talked to Dermot was quite sympathetic, and after a while it occurred to him that he was in pretty good shape after all. A statement would be required. Fair enough.

/>   It got better in the weeks that followed. She had abraded a cornea, detached a retina and chomped a hole in a cheek. Not the kind of thing the police are quick to forgive. She got her licks in, give her that. She had no real job, she was a welfare cheat. When it came to psychiatric testing, she made a poor impression. They found a place for her, and Dermot was told that she wouldn't be turned loose for some little while.

  It was the best thing, really. She was lonely, desperate, a disturbed person. She needed care and attention, and now she was going to get it. Perhaps not in the circumstances she would have desired, but it was care all the same. It was far better for her to be where she was, than to continue along the way she had been going until something worse happened.

  When the machinery of the state took over, Dermot discovered that he didn't even have a walk-on role. It was surprising, but a relief. Events occurred on the strength of their own momentum. She was the only issue, who she was and what she'd done. Dermot had to remind himself that he had in fact once been involved. He wouldn't have been surprised to get a letter from her, or a bunch of them—lonely, impassioned, repentant, pleading, reflecting a new knowledge of her past weaknesses, some such approach. But he never heard from her again.

  The lads seemed to think it was all good crack, and even the Thwaites acknowledged that he was not entirely to blame—he got a civil nod from them, at any rate. Dermot drew pints at Dolan's and gathered his tips, dispensing equal measures of genuine Irish nostalgia and nationalism to boozy Yanks who'd never been east of Revere. So it went until the morning the telegram arrived.

  FATHER DYING / NIAMH / TOBERCURRY / EIRE

  The back of beyond. He expected things to look different in some ways, and they did. But still, he was shocked. He had been in America for less than a year, and already home seemed so dark, chilly and cramped. His perspective had changed forever. But it was great to see his mother again. She was in fine form, as was Naimh, a lovely young woman of nineteen. And the kitchen was the same warm and cozy room Dermot remembered, the heart of the house where the fire never went out.