by Cora Brent
What would the boys have said if they were here now, if they’d been dragged down here to sit where I was sitting? Maybe I had no right to keep this from them. No right at all. I took my phone out of my pocket and got ready to call Creed. But then Maggie stirred and sighed my uncle’s name. I set the phone down.
Tonight, however briefly, she’d remembered that she once had three babies. She’d tried to do something for her boys. Only they weren’t boys anymore. She’d missed it all.
Suddenly I couldn’t stand looking at that stupid box of cake mix anymore. I threw it atop a pile of trash where it should have been tossed years ago. It was useless now. Maybe Maggie herself had obtained it on a long forgotten day and intended to make it for her sons. Then she’d forgotten, instead choosing to remain suspended in the same nightmare she’d been living for so long. I upended the bowl in the sink, turned the water on and watched the stale chocolate wash down the drain.
It was all too late. Far far too late.
Maggie had passed out altogether. I was afraid to leave her alone so I sat down and prepared for a long night.
When I woke up in a chair I thought of Jenny. Maybe it was because the last time I’d slept in a chair was on Christmas night, when I sacrificed my own comfort and offered her my bed. I was never sorry that I hadn’t fucked her that night. Jenny deserved better, so much better, and I found myself wanting to give it to her. Her face was the last thing I saw in the split second between sleep and consciousness and the swell in my cock told me I must have been dreaming about her. Over the past few weeks her defiant stare had turned into hopeful trust even though she still kept a lot of things to herself. I knew Jenny wasn’t a girl who trusted easily. She had good reason. Shit, I would have given a lot to have her with me just then.
But after I blinked a few more times I realized where I was. Benton and Maggie’s trailer, which was actually two double-wides fused together eons ago, was even more heinous in the daylight. Bent still smoked like a fire pit and the paneled walls were coated with tobacco stains. The floors were filthy, the kitchen unusable and I would rather piss in the yard than venture into the bathroom.
Maggie was still on the sofa, one bare arm hanging out of the blankets and over the side. Gruesome scars were pockmarked across the delicate inner flesh – old tracks. I stared at the sorry piece of human flesh and listened to the ragged breathing of its owner. Maggie was only in her early forties, not too far from the ages my own parents had been when they died three years earlier. They should have all been in their prime, reveling in the long years ahead and enjoying the satisfaction of grown children. Maggie let out a raspy cough and then resumed her slow breathing. She wouldn’t live to be an old woman.
All the nice thoughts – thoughts of Jenny - were gone. I was glad I was the only one here to see this shit. I stood up and kicked the chair over, nearly slipping on the dirty floor. This place was fucking disgusting. I couldn’t do much to help Maggie out of her inner hell but I could at least clean the hell she was surrounded with.
After removing several months of accumulated garbage and dumping it into a trench in the backyard, I went on a search for something to clean with. I shouldn’t have bothered. Beneath the sink was a pile of old rags and a bottle of something that might have been vinegar but might have been something else.
After checking on Maggie I headed across the bald sandy lot separating their trailer from mine. The other day I’d padlocked the door on my place, sealing the windows from the inside. Benton had either lacked the tools or the balls to break in because nothing appeared to be disturbed. I checked on the safe beneath the floor and sighed with relief that it was still there, even as I cursed myself for the stupidity of leaving it behind. I supposed I’d been careless because I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do with the money. It didn’t seem to matter. But lately I’d started thinking more, thinking about the future. I wouldn’t leave it behind again.
As I headed back to Maggie with a roll of paper towels and a two bottles of multi-purpose cleaner under my arm I heard the crunch of gravel at my back. I was slightly shocked to see John McCann there, setting his truck in park and climbing out.
“Hey, Deck,” he greeted me a little warily.
“John. What can I help you with?”
John sighed and looked down at his paunchy gut. He’d always struck me as a do-gooder weasel. He was also Saylor’s father, which made him family in a roundabout way. He and Benton had battled since the beginning of time and he wouldn’t have come out this way just to shoot the shit. Then I remembered what Charlie had told me, that John McCann and Benton had some kind of argument in the Dirty Cactus, which set in motion the chain of events leading to Benton’s arrest.
John wasn’t thinking about his arch nemesis though. “She doin’ better today?”
“Maggie? She’s still breathing even if she don’t know what decade she’s doing it in.”
He winced and closed his eyes. “Didn’t know she was so far gone.” He gestured behind me. “Benton’s kept her holed up in there for so long that catching a glimpse of her last night was like seeing a chupacabra.”
“She’s hardly a supernatural legend. Just a sadly fucked up woman.”
He twisted the lanyard on his key ring around his fingers and I tried to remember what Maggie could have meant to him. Nothing, so far as I ever knew. She hadn’t arrived in Emblem until she was a teenager and Bent had grabbed her immediately. At least, that was the way my father always told it. Maybe John never really did know her that well but yet could still regret the sad evolution of her life.
“Talked to Gaps,” he said. “He had to write a report because Bent went for his gun.”
“Figures. Dumb piece of shit. So what’s that mean?” I had a pretty good idea what it meant.
John looked at me. He didn’t seem sorry to deliver the next sentence. “Means that asshole could be away for a while.”
“Well, I won’t be shedding a tear for that and neither will you.” Indeed I wouldn’t. But it was going to leave me with a sizeable problem. Maggie was obviously unfit to take care of herself. Without Benton around to keep her from wandering around the desert barefoot, she would wind up either dead or committed.
John nodded and appeared to relax. “Saylor tells me you’ve been up in the valley a lot lately.”
“Yeah, I’ve been over to their place a few times. She’s a little bummed these days at needing to stay off her feet.”
He looked surprised, and upset. “What do you mean? She didn’t say nothing about any trouble.”
I knew John hadn’t bothered to trek up to Tempe lately to see his daughter. That was their business though. If Say didn’t want to tell him she was having some trouble with her pregnancy it sure as hell wasn’t my place to spill the news.
“Cordero just says she’s tired is all. Don’t worry, he takes damn good care of her.”
John’s face soured a little at the mention of his son-in-law. Of course, there was still that old story of how Cord had treated Saylor terribly all those years ago. Some people forgave more easily than others and John didn’t look like the tolerant sort. Not only was Cord a former punk who once humiliated his daughter, but he was also Benton’s son, born to be no good.
“Well,” he said with a dry cough, “that’s nice, that he’s doing what he’s supposed to do for once.”
I was on the verge of telling him to go to hell. Cord was about as different from Benton as a jackrabbit was from a rattlesnake. But I held back. I didn’t really feel like starting an argument with this guy. After all, I couldn’t really blame a man for feeling protective of his daughter. Sooner or later he would realize what Cord was worth.
John McCann was looking at the dark windows of the trailer. “You know Deck, there are still folks around here who would do a thing or two to help Maggie. The only reason they don’t come around is because of him.” He scratched the back of his neck, looking sheepish. “What I mean is, don’t be shy about reaching out if she needs it.�
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That might be true. However, I couldn’t imagine what good it would do at this point.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I told him. Then I thought of something. “Hey John, I haven’t said a word to the boys about last night; Benton getting locked up, Maggie showing up at Charlie’s place.”
He frowned. “Aren’t you gonna?”
I sighed. “Yeah, I guess. For today though, it’d be a favor to Saylor if you kept the news to yourself. She and Cord don’t need this kind of noise right now.”
He didn’t even pause. “She won’t hear about it from me.”
We said our awkward goodbyes and I watched him take off in his truck like he couldn’t get out of there fast enough all of a sudden, as if the Gentry stench might cling to him if he stayed.
Maggie woke up and silently watched me as I cleaned her house. After four hours of hard elbow grease and scrubbing until my hands were raw, there was a pile of trash outside big enough to require its own zip code and the front rooms looked marginally better.
I found a can of soup and heated it up for Maggie, feeling relieved when she actually stumbled to the kitchen and attempted to eat it. She was struggling to be alert but kept mumbling about her ‘stuff’. I had a pretty good idea what she meant.
“I’ll get it for you,” I offered. “Where is it?”
Benton kept an old office cabinet in their bedroom. I broke the lock and found a tattered shoebox inside. I didn’t look at the contents too carefully. There were needles. There were pills. Benton must dole them out to her as he saw fit. My fist closed around the cardboard, crushing it, and a flash of red rage nearly blinded me.
Maggie wasn’t watching when I came back into the room. She was staring into her bowl of soup with a weird kind of fascination as her left hand clung to a bent spoon. She was already getting the tremors. They would get worse.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t give her this shit, even if it meant she’d be even sicker without it. I tossed the box into the garbage heap out back with everything else.
“You got a girl, Deck?” she asked me abruptly when I returned.
“I don’t know,” I answered even though I instantly thought of Jenny, of the way she lit up whenever she saw me and tenderly put her head on my chest at the oddest moments. “I might have one.”
“That’s good,” she nodded, staring into her soup once more. “That’s good.”
If the kitchen was a disaster then the bedroom was a tragedy. The decrepit furniture wasn’t the problem; it was the sheer gloom, the foul odor, the appalling reek of so much wasted life. I stripped the bedding off even though the grimy, stained mattress was disgusting to behold. I balled up the sheets and threw them on the floor. Maybe later, when Maggie passed out again, I could chance a trip to the Laundromat in town.
Benton’s cabinet was still open and I noticed he had stuffed all kinds of crap in there. I didn’t feel any shame in rifling through it; only real men deserved that kind of respect. There were assorted invoices related to his former painting business, bank statements showing regular overdrafts, warnings from the town of Emblem to clear out debris on the lot, the freight car of an old train set, and a stack of photos in the back. These I removed with some reluctance, unsure I wanted to see who was in them. I stared for a while at the one of my grandparents posing with their two sons. They’d also had a daughter, born between Benton and Chrome. She’d died as a toddler when she stumbled into a cleaning bucket and drowned. In this picture my father looked to be around twelve, which would have made Benton only nine. Chrome had his arm around his brother and it didn’t look like a forced gesture. It looked like the place he wanted to be. No matter what his little brother ever did, Chrome could never find the will to cut him loose completely. Benton smiled at me innocently from beneath the protective arm of his old brother. There was no hint in this photo, none at all, suggesting what kind of monster he would become. I kept flipping through the photos. The only pictures of the triplets were three individual wallet-sized photos mounted on some stiff cardstock. They looked to be about kindergarten age, all alike, yet all different, easily distinguishable. All three of them bore a fierce resemblance to Benton’s childhood photo. Gently I set them down. Finally I came to something that knocked the wind out of me; Benton and Maggie’s wedding photos. They weren’t professional pictures, all taken in the informal setting of Uncle Foster’s backyard, apparently before he started using guests as target practice. I actually remembered that day well. It had been early summer and hot as a furnace. I saw the faces of Gentrys; some living, many dead. In one picture Benton had lifted Maggie off her feet and their mouths were locked in an eternal kiss. They looked like a pair from Nordic mythology; golden, beautiful and ultimately tragic. I saw myself in the corner of one photo, scowling in cranky four-year-old fashion as my mother straightened my collar.
The last photo was of Maggie, just Maggie. Her dress looked like it had been hastily selected off the rack from the nearest department store. The youth and wonder in her face as she beamed at the unseen photographer broke my heart in half. I remembered her like this. I remembered it all. That was why I was here now, because of who she had been in this picture. That was why at the fucked up age of nineteen I’d unknowingly fastened myself to a girl who reminded me of that very first infatuation. That girl was gone too, just like the sweet bride in the photo I held. Gone in a different way, but gone just the same.
I shoved all the photos back in the cabinet as my brain searched for something better to think about. It immediately chose Jenny and I had to shut my eyes for a second to force away the damnable wish to be with her. That’s not what I should want, not if I really gave shit about her.
Every woman I’d ever loved was lost.
She would end up that way too.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
JENNY
Deck had said he might be gone for a few days. A few days had passed. It was now nearly a week since he’d left me in front of my dorm with a promise and a look of regret in his eyes that said he was telling the truth.
Stephanie tended to breeze into class at the last minute. She looked surprised to find me waiting outside the door to the lecture hall but she smiled.
“Are you the welcoming committee?”
“I was wondering if you’d heard from Deck.”
She looked puzzled. “Me? No. Declan and I aren’t all close like that.” She frowned. “He hasn’t been around?”
“No. He hasn’t been around. I stopped by the suite he rented but there was no sign of him. I’ve called, texted, no answer.”
“Hmmm.” She started to look uncomfortable. “Well Jen, Chase would always say that Deck operates under his own set of rules. He shows up or doesn’t show up as he pleases and he doesn’t make a point of broadcasting his intentions.” She shrugged. “That’s just what he’s like.”
She was trying to be honest, not rude, but I felt defensive of Deck anyway. “Not with me he’s not. Deck doesn’t say things to me that he doesn’t mean.”
Stephanie looked curious. “And what did he say to you?”
“There was some bad news from Emblem,” I sighed. “Something that made him drop everything and haul ass down there. I really don’t know what it is, Steph, but it seemed to shake him up a lot. Still, he said he’d be in touch within a few days and he hasn’t.”
She listened and then withdrew her phone, quickly typing out a message. “Asking Chase,” she explained. As she finished texting I could hear the professor beginning to lecture on banking and financial regulation, which sounded about as stimulating as observing paint drying on the wall.
Less than a minute after Stephanie texted Chase he answered. Stephanie squinted at her phone. “He hasn’t heard from him. Doesn’t know anything about any trouble in Emblem.” Her phone buzzed again. Apparently Chase had something else to say that Stephanie couldn’t share. She blushed and laughed.
“Come on,” she nudged me. “Let’s go get a bagel or something. We won’t miss anythin
g here.”
Stephanie was the opposite of nosy. She didn’t even try to find out anything else about what was going on between me and her boyfriend’s cousin. She was happy to sit outside and chew on her bagel while staring absently at everyone who passed. A pair of obnoxious jerks passed and let out a whistle.
“Work it, baby,” one of them laughed. Stephanie reddened, dropped her bagel, and then angrily flipped them off.
“Sorry,” she muttered, swallowing hard and staring down at the table. “Assholes like that never say a goddamn thing when Chase is around.”
I wasn’t going to ask her what she meant. Stephanie lifted her head and gave me a small smile like she appreciated the fact that I didn’t pounce on her and pry. Maybe that’s why she told me about it anyway.
“Something happened,” she shrugged. “A few months ago a video surfaced. Yeah, it was that kind of video. It was something that I was forced to do, Jenny, for reasons that aren’t important right now. But it was out there and it was me so people assumed they knew the story behind it.” She glared off into the distance and her eyes welled with tears. “They don’t.”
“I’m sure they don’t,” I said gently. “People don’t actually have half the knowledge they flatter themselves with.”
She cocked her head, then nodded slowly. “Yeah, you know that. I thought you might be someone who would understand.”
“I understand too well,” I said rather sharply and she looked at me funny.
So I took a deep breath and told Stephanie about where I’d come from, and who I was. I gave out details I’d never shared before. It was all surprisingly easy to say. Maybe that was how it was supposed to be; the more you spoke the most painful words the easier they were to part with.
Stephanie didn’t interrupt. She listened to every word. I even told her about Reese, about our reckless rebellion and what happened after.