A Guardian of Innocents

by Jeff Orton

  I found a gray t-shirt with a small hole in the tail on the back, a pair of faded jeans with a blue ink-stain on the inside of the right leg and one missing belt loop. While I was at it, I bought a worn-out pull-over hat, a black and white checkered flannel shirt, figuring I could wear it like a jacket like so many of the headbanger/stoner kids did at school.

  After only five minutes, I had everything I needed. I wanted to breeze in and out, talk to no one. I didn’t want to be remembered. But of course when I got to the check-out counter, someone noticed me.

  She was working the register, a pretty girl of about seventeen or eighteen with light brown hair pulled back in a pony tail. She looked bored and tired with the customer in front of me, but as soon as I approached the counter, her whole body language changed.

  “Hi!” she said as she took the clothes from me, “So what brings you here?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. I was feeling a little too jumpy, and she picked up on it. I had to remind myself I was just here buying clothes.

  But then a voice from somewhere down below the gutters of my conscience said, Yeah, and they just happen to be the clothes you’ll be wearing when you put a bullet in the back of your father’s head.

  “I’m sorry,” she continued, “it’s just—you don’t look poor, and you don’t look like the kind of guy who normally shops here.”

  I’d invented a story on the drive out to Dallas and realized now would be a good time to put it to use.

  “It’s just for a costume. I’m playing a homeless guy in a play at school.”

  “Oh, really?” she asked, genuinely enthusiastic, “I’m in Drama too. What school do you go to?”

  Think of a Dallas high school. Quick.

  “Lake Highlands,” I answered after a brief pause.

  “Really? My friend, Alan, goes there. He does Drama there too. You know him?”

  Shit Shit Shit

  I probed her mind as hard as I could and got a clear mental picture of her friend. Red hair, with even redder freckles peppering his face. Twerpy looking. Has a dorky laugh that irritates the fuck outta her.

  “Yeah, I tease him about those freckles all the time.”

  “Ahh,” she cooed with sympathy. “He’s real sensitive about that!”

  “Nah, he laughs with me. You know. . . Heeheehee—HEEEEEE!!! Heeheehee—HEEEEEE!!!”

  She squealed with laughter, but covered her mouth with her hand as if ashamed of it. Another customer came up behind me, forcing the girl to add up the prices on each of the tags of the items I had picked out.

  Remember why you are here, the voice from the gutters demanded again.

  “That’s $8.50”

  I gave her cash in exact change, said, “Thanks,” and was on my way towards the door when she called out to me.

  “Oh, wait! Let me give you your receipt!”

  She tore the paper from the register and scribbled something on the back with a pen. She stuffed it into a plastic bag along with the clothes I had stupidly left sitting on the counter in my rush to get out.

  “Here ya go!” she said as she handed me the bag, the blushing of her face clearly visible from her lack of make-up.

  On my way out of the shop and into the old Nova I’d inherited from Jack, I fished out the receipt from the bag to check out what the girl had written.

  The cursive handwriting was large and loopy, typical of a teenage girl. It read, “Melanie,” and had her phone number scrawled beneath it along with a little message, “Call me if you need someone to help you with your lines or something!”

  I smiled. “Or something. . .”

  When I was safely out of Melanie’s view from the front store window, I crumpled up the receipt and dropped it onto the sidewalk, adding to the already excessive trash littering this particular neighborhood.

  Now don’t get me wrong. The girl was sweet and definitely pretty enough, but I knew she would be talking to her friend soon and would then find out her wonderful boy-buddy, Alan, has no idea who the hell I am and that there is probably no play going on at Lake Highlands, at least none that involve homeless characters.

  * * *

  And so here I am sitting in the vehicle Jack used to own, parked in front of a double-wide trailer that serves as an office for a small construction company. I chose to park there due to the absence of streetlamps, no one would be able to see me sitting in my car for the hours it took to wait for Jack to leave the titty-bar across the street.

  I had a lot of time to think during those hours. I thought about all the shit Jack had done to me over the span of my short life, as far back as I could remember. I thought about the little boy at church he fantasized about. But mostly, I thought about the conversation I’d had with Jack earlier that day.

  It was 6 am, the time when he was getting ready for work and I was just waking up for school. He was already thinking about how much he was looking forward to going to Stiletto’s tonight.

  Doris had already fixed our breakfast and was now putting together our brown bag lunches. Jack’s wallet and car keys were sitting on the table where they always were. Part of the morning ritual. Doris always put them there so her husband wouldn’t forget them on his way out.

  “Hey, Dad, need to borrow ten bucks for gas.”

  He looked disgusted, “You got a job at the dollar theater, didn’t you? Don’t they pay you over there, or do you just work for free?”

  I hated him, absolutely and undeniably hated him at that moment. It wasn’t just because he was cheap when it came to borrowing money either, it was because I knew why he was so reluctant to hand over ten dollars.

  Tuesday nights, between five and eight, all lap dances were half-price at Stiletto’s. That meant ten bucks could buy him a four-minute cheap thrill. I saw it all in his mind.

  But I also knew he was running late this morning due to the extra-long shower he had indulged in. He had been taking his morning shit while looking over one of his favorite porno mags, and had decided to spend some quality time with himself immediately after.

  I hid my anger as best I could, “Yeah, they pay me, but not until Friday, and my gas gauge is currently sitting on E. . . If you want, you can take me to school on your way to work.”

  The problem there was my school was ten minutes in the opposite direction from where Jack worked. That was ten minutes there and ten minutes back, which added up to twenty extra on his drive. Twenty minutes that he knew he couldn’t afford, especially since Jack’s boss had jumped his ass last week about his increasingly frequent tardiness.

  Jack was pouring himself a cup of coffee while he mulled it over. Finally, after a few long seconds of internal debate, he opted to cough up the money.

  “Alright, ten dollars, but no more! Ten bucks’ll get you to school and work till Friday.

  Proud that I had stolen away some of Jack’s whoring money, I glided over to the table and caressed the brown imitation leather wallet. I deliberately mashed my fingertips down on it so I would leave fingerprints for the police to find later. That was the whole point really. I had thirty bucks tucked away in my own wallet and half a tank of gas in the Nova, the ten dollars I said I needed was just an excuse to touch his wallet... with Doris as a witness. By the end of the night, I knew Jack’s fingertips were going to be all over his wallet from buying table dances and tipping the girls working the stage-poles. And all my fingerprints would then be directly beneath his, most of them probably smeared off, but I figured there would be at least one or two of mine they would be able to make out beneath Jack’s prints. And that was exactly how I wanted it.

  I took out a ten dollar bill, slowly, so Jack could see that it was a ten, and a ten only (but also cuz I enjoyed agonizing the son of a bitch) then placed his wallet back down on the table.

  Next, I did something that completely caught him off-guard. I hugged him.

  “Thanks, you’re the best, Dad!” I said, a saccharine sweetness ringing in my voice. I felt sick touching him, and I remember thin
king that I couldn’t remember a time before this when I had touched him willingly.

  As I hugged him, I grazed the side of my head against his shoulder, hoping to rub some hairs (and skin cells) off onto his blazer, thinking if the police forensics team found some of my hairs at the crime scene, it would look plausible they had just been blown off his suit when Jack fell dead onto the concrete of Stiletto’s parking lot.

  After school that day I came home, changed clothes and borrowed a posthole digger from the garage. Jack wouldn’t miss it, but that was only because he was never coming home. I then headed out to a wooded area behind an apartment complex I knew of in Watauga, a small town about twenty minutes west of where I lived.

  I only knew of the place because my adoptive parents and I went there every third or fourth Sunday to visit Doris’ mother, an old woman I lovingly called Grandma Eunice. She was really the only good-hearted person in the family that I knew of growing up. She hated Jack and seemed perpetually suspicious of him. Grandma liked to give him hell anytime he opened his mouth to say something stupid. A lot of times he didn’t even have to say anything, he would just look at her wrong and, “Who the hell do yuh think yuh are? Idiot peckerhead! Ain’t got nuttin tuh say? Stick that lip out a bit more! If yer gonna pout, then for godsakes, POUT! Yeah, yuh heard me, fatboy. What, are yuh gonna cry now?”

  I always loved watching her rip into him; she had this power to make Jack hang his head like a whipped dog.

  When Grandma died a couple of years ago, we of course stopped going over there but I always remembered where the apartments were and how to get there. Sometimes when Jack and Doris had to go out of town, I would stay over there with Grandma a few days and play in the wooded area behind the complex. No one besides me seemed to like to go out there, I was always alone. It felt safe, like the safest place in the world to me.

  So when I forced myself to think of a place where I could dispose of the evidence of my crime, this was naturally the first place that popped into my head.

  I was nervous on the drive out to Watauga, thinking this was a bad time of day to be digging a hole on private property. I wouldn’t get there until probably 4:20 in the afternoon, and that was just when kids were returning home from school and their parents were on their way home from work, but when I got there I suddenly remembered this place was a retirement village, not a “home” like those cruel places you hear about on the news that abuse their patients, just a few apartment buildings that cater to the elderly only. “Assisted Living,” I believe is what they call it now.

  I pulled into the parking lot, and saw absolutely no one outside except an old man on a second story balcony smoking a cigarette and thinking about how much he hates his life since his wife of fifty-something years died six months ago.

  I made a conscious effort not to hear his grief, I had problems of my own. The last thing I needed was to feel sorry for someone having suicidal thoughts while I was planning a murder. He never noticed me, which I was grateful for. He was lost in his own world of emotional anguish.

  When I pulled up to the end of the complex, I was pleasantly surprised to find the same entrance to the wooded area that I remembered as a child was still there, an entire plank missing from a rotted-out seven-foot fence that separated the apartments from the uncleared land that lay beyond. After all this time, that one board had still never been replaced.

  I backed my car into the parking space directly in front of it, my rear bumper only two feet from the fence. After putting the car in park and killing the engine, I closed my eyes and bowed my head, placing my hands on the steering wheel. If anyone had seen me just then, I’m sure it would have appeared I was praying. I reached out with my mind, scanning the area for thoughts of others. Is there anyone looking at me? I thought, Is there anybody watching me?

  Vague images floated up from behind my eyes. An old woman watching Ricki Lake, thinking her daughter was a whore and should be up on that there stage parading around in slutty clothes with the rest of those whores. Another elderly woman was cooing to her three cats as spooned out their canned food into a plastic bowl that said, “Muffy Buffy Scruffy” around its perimeter.

  After about thirty seconds passed with that kind of information, I was satisfied none of the residents had taken an interest in my actions. I got out, unlocked the trunk, yanked the posthole diggers out and gently closed the deck lid so as not to make too much noise, and slipped into a place of fond memories.

  There was all kinds of litter and trash within the first few feet of the fence, junk thrown over by kids, I imagined, who rode their bicycles around this neighborhood. Images were still coming at me, even though I no longer wanted them. That’s the way it works sometimes, like an overheated engine that has to cool down before it runs properly again. Sometimes after a broad scan like that I get dizzy and have to sit down, but so far I was feeling fine.

  I found a spot past a large tree where the dirt seemed pretty soft and the weeds weren’t too high and I went to work. The first foot was so easy I thought I would have this hole dug in two minutes. But then I found out what a lot of Texans already know. The first foot or so of topsoil is soft, but then you hit that tough motherfucker known as Red Clay.

  If I had known then about the trick of pouring water into the hole to loosen up the clay, I would have left then, gone to the nearest grocery store and bought maybe ten gallons of water. But unfortunately, I knew next to nothing about digging through three feet of what is possibly the toughest earthen substance next to solid rock.

  For those who don’t know what a pair of posthole diggers is, it’s like two shovels joined together like a pair of scissors, only it works the opposite way. You push the handles together to open the blades and thrust them into the ground. You then pull the handles apart to bring the blades together to scoop up the dirt. What you should end up with is a perfectly square hole going straight down.

  The blisters on my palms were stinging like hot needles. Like a dumbass, I’d forgotten to bring a pair of work gloves. When I was done, I scavenged the area for some twigs and leaves and covered up the now three and a half foot deep hole. I just hoped that some kid didn’t come down here in the few hours I needed it to remain open and break his ankle by stepping in it.

  I wondered if I would be able to find my way back here in the dark of night. I thought for a few seconds and went back to the fence and looked for some large pieces of broken glass. I found an empty bottle of Corona with the bottom shattered off. A circular piece of glass about two inches wide, exactly what I needed. I walked back over and ever so gently placed it upon the twigs and leaves. It would twinkle nicely in the dark should a flashlight happen to pass over it.

  Before exiting back through the missing plank, I kicked the dirt off the posthole diggers and brushed the dirt off my tennis shoes.

  I escaped the retirement village easily enough. I got home as quickly as I possibly could without speeding, all the rush-hour traffic seemingly flowing in the opposing lanes of the highways. I made it back, thankful to have arrived at just a few minutes before seven.

  I changed out of my sweaty, soiled clothes and threw them in with some other laundry I had piled in a basket in front of my closet, dumped it in the washer and then headed for the shower. Once dry, I viciously brushed my hair, removing all the loose strands the metal wires could find. (Though I’d intentionally placed hairs on Jack’s blazer. I still didn’t want any police forensics team, to find too much of my hair, especially on the run I planned to make after I shot him.)

  I was in my room, sitting in front of my desk with an open textbook and a worksheet from my physics class, with a pen in hand when Doris arrived and opened my door.

  “Hello, I’m home. Have you eaten yet?”

  “Uhhh, no, not yet. . .” I answered without looking up.

  “Well, if you get hungry, there’s some leftover spaghetti in the fridge. I’m sorry, but I’m just not up to cooking tonight. My tootsies are so sore! I’m just gonna lie down and get o
ff my feet.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  Doris was working full-time at the diner now. Over the years, Jack had been increasingly pooling more of their money into the sex industry and letting his wife pay the price.

  I thought about taking her up on the offer of leftovers. I had skipped lunch at school, but decided it would be for the best if I didn’t have anything sitting on my stomach when I put a large hole in Jack’s head. All the stuff I knew was bound to fly out of his skull would probably make me pretty nauseous and I figured leaving a puddle of puke behind for a forensics team to analyze wouldn’t be to my advantage.

  At eight o’clock, still in her uniform, Doris lay in a heavy, open-mouth sleep with the bedroom TV playing a Who’s The Boss? re-run. I went into my room, grabbed my plastic grocery bag of thrift store clothes from the bottom of my closet and then reached way underneath my mattress to find my new, little six-shooter. I put the gun in one pants pocket and some bullets in the other, and headed out the door to the Nova.

  I gently closed and locked the front door, got into my car and placed the bag on the passenger seat next to me.

  Before I started the vehicle, I sat there for a moment.

  Oh shit! Am I really going to do this? Am I?

  Until that moment, it seemed as though I’d been under a spell the past few days. I’d been telling myself I was going to kill him, but somehow the full comprehension of that idea had never really sunk in until now.

  I could end up in prison for the rest of my life... It could really happen.

  There was a part of me just then that didn’t believe I could ever go through with the murder. But like a heroic knight on horseback, another thought came racing into my mind: Yeah, and if you stand back and do nothing like a damned coward, that little boy will get raped, choked to death and buried out in the Piney Woods! And that’s not even something that could happen. That’s something that will happen.