“Yeah, but,” she whimpered.
“I’m not finished. Okay? I was going to say that Kate can stay there if she wants to. I’m not going to try and tell her what she can and cannot do. Of all of us, I think that she is the one that is going to have the most difficulty dealing with all of this. So, you and your husband don’t need to go out on some rampage against me. I know enough to let a 16 year old take some time to work through things on their own. But, you might respect me as a father and a husband and remember, Karen, that I just lost my wife. How the fuck am I supposed to handle it? In fact, I want to ask you a few questions about things.”
It occurred to me that she might have some knowledge of the affair with Jim.
“Well, I’d rather not, right now, Howard. I’m in the middle of fixing lunch.”
“Just one question, for chrissake.”
The phone was silent again. “Well, okay,” she said with hesitation.
“How long did you know about Donna’s affair with Jim?” I asked.
“With who?”
“Don’t give me that Karen. You and Donna are, were, sisters. You’re telling me that you didn’t know about her affair?”
“Well, yeah, I kind of knew that something was going on, but I didn’t know too many details.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.” I clenched my teeth. “Just forget it. Would you let Kate know that I would like to talk to her and she shouldn’t worry about talking to me about anything? Please? Or do I need to email her so I know she got the message?”
“Sure, Howard. I will.”
I hung up. “You fucking bitch,” I said to myself.
“Sick fucking joke,” I said to the ceiling as I flipped it off.
~
“Fuck, I need a drink,” I said to myself as I was pacing the floor two hours later.
“This has got to be the worst three weeks anyone has ever had in their entire lives, well, since fucking man could use the power of memories,” I thought. “One day, I’m driving home from work. A normal spring evening in Sweetwater Springs, three weeks later, I’m mourning the loss of my son, my wife, and I’m wondering if my daughter will want to live with me ever again.
“If that isn’t enough reason for someone to get shitfaced, what is? Only problem is, I can’t. I can’t sit in my favorite chair, pop on the TV and drink seven and seven until I’m feeling no pain and ready to fall over. Noooooo. If I did, I’d fall asleep and wake up with my daughter dead, too. But, then again, maybe since she’s already starred in one of my dreams, nothing will happen to her, but can I take that chance? The answer to that fucking question, my friend, is absolutely no fucking way.
“And, and, to do that one better, I can’t go up and take one of my wife’s Valium because I don’t know if the same thing happens if I do that, too. I know that Gerald said drinking, but I drank that day, too, only not so much. This is not a time to be doing any experimentation.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I screamed.
“Maybe I’ll go for a walk in the park. Maybe if I walk until my feet fall off, I’ll feel better because then I’ll be thinking about my missing feet and I’ll have a butt-load of endorphins running around my head and I won’t feel so fucking sorry for myself about all the shit that’s happened to me,” I thought.
“That’s what I’ll do,” I said to the wall.
I went upstairs to get my running shoes. I didn’t normally run, but I liked them better for walking. On the way up the stairs I glanced at all the pictures that lined the stairway. That happened to be where Donna liked to hang the family portraits. There were pictures of the kids for just about every school year. There were family Christmas portraits for almost every year since Kate was born. And there were various picture of Donna and me mixed in with the lot. There must have been fifty total. That wall of memories, that big fucking wall of my life, was the last thing that I needed to be burdened with.
I hurried up the stairs, put on my running shoes, and looked straight ahead when I walked back down the stairs.
“Maybe I won’t come back either,” I said to myself, as I locked the door and left all those smiling faces behind it.
~
As I walked through the park I wasn’t very observant to the goings-on around me. It was a gorgeous spring afternoon with the smell of lilac in the air. Birds were singing, squirrels were chattering. It was a perfect day to be alive. For everyone but me. My world was a gray dull tunnel from my eyes to my feet. In fact, I almost ran into Gerald Evans before I heard his eerie voice say “hello” to me.
When I looked up, I wasn’t quite sure if I was relieved or furious. He was just the man that I wanted to see; only he was also the last man on earth that I wanted to see. I had never had so much hatred for one person.
“Gerald,” I said.
“Mr. Cushman, I know I’ve asked you to please call me Mr. Evans,” he replied with a snarl.
“What the fuck ever.”
“You don’t look so good, Mr. Cushman.”
I glared at him.
“In fact, you look almost exactly how I saw myself in the mirror on the day my wife died, and on the day my daughter died.”
“You are a funny man,” I spat back at him.
“This is exactly the way that I wanted you to feel, Mr. Cushman. I wanted you to feel like the world has come to an end, like you have nothing left to live for. Now that your daughter doesn’t want to come home, I think that statement is rather correct, isn’t it?”
“How the fuck do you know so much about me, Gerry?”
“Now, Mr. Cushman, that is just impolite. I approached you because you looked like a man that needed clarification. You looked like a man that could use a few drinks to help that clarification process.”
He continued to speak but I didn’t catch much of what he said after that. I heard drinks, clarification, and my mind clicked right back to the dilemma that I was in before I left the house.
“But why, Gerald, I mean, Mr. Evans. Why did my wife have to die? I quit drinking that night.”
Gerald looked at me just like my fifth grade teacher used to look at me when I had interrupted her.
“It doesn’t matter if you quit, Mr. Cushman. The fact that you drank at any time before falling asleep made your nightmares a reality.”
“But I finally remembered what happened. It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t kill your daughter. Why are you doing this to me? I need you to make it stop. Can you make it fucking stop?” I could feel the blood pulsing in my veins.
Just like in the pharmacy, he ignored the last thing I said. “I always knew, Mr. Cushman, that you didn’t kill her on purpose, but it really was your fault. Your truck was on top of her head. Do you realize that your truck squashed her head?” he asked. “It practically flattened it.”
“Yes,” I mumbled and nodded my head, as he continued without paying any particular attention.
“Do you have any idea how that made me feel when I had to identify her at the morgue?” he asked. “Do you have any idea what Janie must have felt when your truck landed on top of her head? She wasn’t without feeling at that moment.
“No matter what happened, Howard, the fact that you are alive, the fact that you were in that old truck when most of the new cars on the road don’t have a chance against an old boat like that. You take all of those facts and assumptions and rationalizations and you come up with one conclusion. It actually was your fault,” he said, and hesitated while he swatted the hair away from his forehead.
“However much you rationalized your owning of that dinosaur, however much you loved that truck of yours, you didn’t love it as much as I loved my daughter,” he snarled.
“Yes, but...”
“But, nothing, Howard. My wife was killed on the same road some five years ago. It was a dark and rainy evening, a Tuesday even, just like when my daughter was killed, only my wife was killed by a drunk driver. A speeding drunk driver. They found him on the floorboard of his 1973 Chevy ½ ton. They thought that he’d fallen asleep wh
ile driving without his seatbelt. It was the only thing that made sense as to how he ended up pinned between his seat and the engine. If he was sitting up, he would have crashed through the front window.
“I was broken beyond repair because of it. I felt as if my God had deserted me. I felt as if He didn’t exist, because if he’d taken care of my wife, the most wonderful person I’d ever known to walk this earth, then he would have saved her that night. That was when I turned to worship other deities. Deities that listened to me when I asked them to do something for me. Deities that worked with me to accomplish the things that I wanted accomplished. Your God in heaven did nothing for me. My lords of damnation do anything that I ask of them.” His eyes flashed red as he snarled at me. I started to feel his voice vibrate my bones.
“Now, the paper didn’t mention whether you were drunk or not, and I didn’t really care if you were. The same mentality that makes a drunk turn the key in the ignition and drive away is the same mentality that you had every time you started that monstrosity of yours and took it on the interstate with all the cars half its size. Especially on a rainy night.”
“But I lost my son, and I lost my wife, Mr. Evans.”
“That wasn’t entirely my fault, Mr. Cushman. I gave you a bottle full of placebos and one active pill. You were the one that picked the only pill out of 60 in the bottle that was accursed. All the bad things that happened to your family were taken from your bad thoughts. I gave you a 59 to 1 chance to escape unscathed. Your own guilt, perhaps, whatever made you pick that one out of the bottle was all you. The fact that you chose to take the pill with alcohol after being duly warned was all you. And after that, anytime you tried to capture sleep with alcohol or by any other chemical means, as long as you drank that day, you slept the sleep of existential nightmares. Your wife died after I warned you again. I wasn’t going to just come out and tell you, sir, you are not a child; that was your choice. That was all your mind, your head, your decisions!” his voice boomed.
“When you took the pill with alcohol, you slept. You slept well. Whoever was closest to your heart when you fell asleep was the victim of whatever dark demented dreams that you projected into the dark. You dreamed everything bad that happened. You made everything happen. When you drank at any given time before going to sleep after that, bad things continued to happen. I only gave you the avenue in which to make them happen. You wanted them to happen, Mr. Cushman. It was all you!” he screamed, as the low vibration and pressure of his voice actually popped my ears.
I looked at him in dumbfounded helplessness.
“But I think I was dreaming of my wife with Jim for days prior to the incident in the car.”
“But did anything horrible happen to them in those dreams?”
“Well, no.”
“Because you didn’t drink, right?” he asked.
“Actually, I think I did, once.”
“Perhaps you dreamt of something that you didn’t think was horrific at the time, but ended up being so. What did you dream of that particular time?” he asked.
Before I answered, I thought about that dream and realized that Jim sodomizing my wife in our bedroom was actually much more horrific when you think about it. I didn’t know that it was happening because I was at Frank’s house.
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied.
“Anyway, Mr. Cushman, the dream that you had about Jim and your wife that you didn’t influence with alcohol, was just simply clairvoyance. Everybody is clairvoyant to some degree. Whether or not you realized it consciously, your wife was having an affair with your daughter’s boyfriend. You subconsciously knew and your dreams tried to warn you. Your brain was injured and your brain became more sensitive. I would even bet that you had other dreams without the influence of alcohol that gave you insight into other things in your life at the time that you just didn’t realize.”
I paused for a moment. His explanation was making more and more sense. “But, even if that is true, how can you say that I wanted those awful things to happen? I love my daughter, and I loved my son and my wife.”
“Yes, but you felt remorse, didn’t you? You knew that you had something to do with Janie’s death. Perhaps your subconscious was looking at things in terms of an eye for an eye. Like I said, Mr. Cushman, your dreams came from your mind. You made them real with the help of the lords of damnation.”
I looked at his blood red eyes and asked, “You mean, like, the Devil?”
“Well, now that you mention it, you probably have called them something like that before.”
Silence. I furrowed my brow. “Them? There is more than one?”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Cushman. Oh, yes. There are even some that walk the earth that you would not even notice them to be anything other than a person. You’ve met some. I know.”
“But?” I didn’t finish my question. My head was burdened with too many thoughts. I was dumbstruck.
31
I sat in front of the television set in my favorite chair, in the basement. What few windows there were, the blinds were drawn which made the basement as dark as a crypt, except for a small table lamp in the corner of the room. It was daylight outside, but you’d have to stick your nose between the blinds to notice.
I didn’t mind at all. I had come to like the dark. Comforting. Soothing. Ever since I killed Janie Evans, and my daughter was raped, and my son was murdered, and my wife was obliterated while sucking my daughter’s boyfriend’s cock, I’d felt the need for darkness.
There were three newspapers sitting under a glass of scotch on the table next to me - about half-empty. I had been nursing it for the last hour. It was my third of the afternoon.
The front page of the bottom paper had a horrific picture of my son being wheeled into the emergency room, moments before he died. The one on top of that had a gruesome picture of a flattened heap of metal that somewhere contained parts of my wife. And the one just under the scotch had a picture of Gerald, with a bullet hole in his head, lying on some lawn, with some passage about the police were looking for any information pertaining to the person or persons responsible… “Yeah, whatever. If anyone deserved it, it was that motherfucker,” I said to myself.
A .380 Beretta Cheetah was lying next to me on the couch. I had sat in that same position, in mourning, when my son was killed. Although losing one’s wife to a horrible event is supposed to be ten times more horrific than losing one’s son, I could not support the theory because I had the double horror of mourning both. Not to mention, another small matter.
My daughter had been living with her aunt Karen for the past three weeks and showed no indication of wanting to come home and live with the man who was responsible for the death of her mother and her brother.
“I have no reason to live. At least I can’t think of one. The scotch isn’t helping matters, except I do seem to act more like my father when I’m drunk. Is that irony or what? And, since I am way beyond buzzed and I don’t want anything else to happen to the people that I love that are left, I can’t dream. Which means, I can’t sleep. Which means, I have to obliterate the head that houses the brain that causes so many horrific things to happen after it’s had a drink,” my mind raced.
“My daughter was the last person I was close to before I drank. It’s inevitable that something will happen to her if I fall asleep ever again.”
I picked up the gun and balanced its weight in my right hand. It was a beautiful gun as guns go. “An exceptional instrument to relocate my gray matter to the wall behind me,” I said aloud, laughing.
All I had to do was stick the barrel into my mouth and pull the trigger.
I practiced the maneuver again as I had practiced it numerous times the night prior and through the morning.
“I’ll just have one more drink, and then, well,” I hesitated as I pushed the safety one last time, “then I will meet my new lords.”
Thank you, reader.
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Dream Sweet Page 14