A Guardian of Innocents

by Jeff Orton

  As the minutes whittled away and the sobs became less frequent, I began to ask myself why in the hell did I feel this way. My logical brain was telling my convulsing body this wasn’t a big deal; Dez is a good friend, a friend we can confide in and...

  I love her

  Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re twenty-one, just barely old enough to legally consume alcohol, what the fuck do you know about love? So far’s I can tell you’ve never felt love for anyone.

  I’m in love with her

  Oh no no no! We are not going down this road! It’s nuttin but a fuckin crush and you’ve had two years to try to get something started and you did nuttin but pussyfoot around with her, talking stupid shit like—

  I know i’m right I love her it’s that simple

  How in the holy flying motherfuck can you possibly know that?

  How does anyone know the first time? I just do

  * * *

  Over the next two weeks, I did absolutely no socializing. I didn’t return anyone’s phone calls except for Desiree’s—only because I had to keep up appearances. She wanted to go do other stuff with me before she left, but I kept feeding her excuses. Unfortunately, it was summer. The only responsibilities I had were a part-time job and maybe a few chores around the house, and she knew it. Bo and I had already made plans to go do this, and, no, I can’t do anything that day because Lloyd and I were gonna do something.

  But even over the phone, it seemed I was still transparent to her. “Are you avoiding me?” she asked.

  “No, I’m not avoiding you,” I lied, “I just—“

  “Good, then you’ll come over Wednesday night. I’ll rent some movies; you pick up some fast food. You know what I like. Alright?”

  I was inhaling a breath of air that was almost exhaled as a sigh of protest, but I caught it just before she would have heard it. I couldn’t give Dez any more grounds for suspicion than what she already had.

  “Okay, cool,” I agreed, trying to sound pleasant.

  “Alright, babe. See ya then.”

  I spent the next few days alone in my room, practicing ways to keep my thoughts from being read. Surely there must be a way.

  * * *

  I arrived at Desiree’s apartment around seven that Wednesday night armed with nothing but a thin plastic bag full of Taco Bell.

  “Hey, sweetie,” Desiree said as she opened the door.

  As the previews on the first tape rolled, we ate our food sitting next to each other on her loveseat. I used to be so comfortable next to her, but now felt nothing but panic. I kept reciting two lines from an oldies song over and over again in my head...

  Ooowa ooowa cool cool kitty

  Tell us about the boy from New York City

  I did my best to pretend I was relaxed while we watched the movie. It went pretty well for the first thirty minutes or so. The movie proclaimed itself to be an uproarious, outrageous, hilarious comedy (don’t they all) on the back of the cassette box, but neither of us had laughed. No giggles, no chuckles. Neither of us had even coughed.

  I didn’t dare try to read her. I would have to let my defenses down for that. My heart froze as she hit the pause button on the VCR remote.

  “Sorry. Be right back,” she said as she got up and walked to the bathroom. When she came out, she grabbed her pack of cigarettes off the kitchen counter and lit one up.

  I expected her to come back to the couch, but she stood there for a moment. She leaned against the wall that separated the kitchen from the living room as she inhaled a long drag, wanting to make it last as she thought something over. I suspected she was contemplating her plan of attack.

  “So, are you going to tell me what the hell’s up with you, or are you going to make me pry it out of you? Because I have to tell you, if I hear the words ‘cool cool kitty’ one more time out of you...”

  I couldn’t answer her. I didn’t feel like a deer caught by a pair of headlights. I was the deer that already has its guts strewn over the road, taking its final dying breath.

  She stared down at the floor, visibly upset. “Please tell me you haven’t killed someone again.”

  Is THAT what you think! I cried out mentally before I could catch myself. The question was asked so hastily mostly out of shock, but there was also an undertone of joyous relief that I felt Desiree detect.

  “Well, if that’s not it, then what the hell has you so wound up you—Wait. Does this have something to do with me going to New York?”

  “No.” I spat the word out quickly, resuming the song in my head. My nervousness was speeding the song up a bit. I’m sure to Dez it sounded like the Alvin & the Chipmunks version.

  “You just lied to me,” Desiree said matter-of-factly, “First time you’ve ever done that.”

  “Believe me, that’s not something I want to do,” I said, “But this is just something very embarrassing for me and I just couldn’t stand it if you found out.”

  “Even after everything I already know about you?”

  “Especially after everything you know about me,” I replied.

  We argued about it back and forth, nip and tuck, for awhile but I eventually won. I had to concede one issue, though. She made me agree to tell her one day, even if it meant waiting a whole year or two or even five. One day I would have to reveal this secret to her.

  I opted not to attend the farewell party, choosing instead to be the only person that offered to give her a ride to the airport the next day. She left me with a gift, a rather odd one for an atheist.

  It was a large metal cross, ornately decorated, about eight inches long—and heavy. I gripped the end of it in my hand and was certain I could hurt somebody with it if I brought it down hard enough.

  “Why are you giving me this?” I asked.

  “I want you to hang it on your bedroom door... Might help keep, uh, you-know-who away.”

  “Oh, I haven’t seen him in... God, has it been two years already?”

  “Going on two and a half,” Dez added. We were sitting in one of the many rows of brutally uncomfortable chairs that were parked in front of Terminal 31 in DFW International.

  “Still not gonna tell me, huh?”

  “One day,” I said, faking a smile.

  Ooowa ooowa cool cool kitty

  “Stop that,” Desiree growled, “You have no idea how irritating that is. I could pry you open like a can of sardines, and the only reason I don’t is out of respect for you.”

  She was a little mad, true, but she was really only half-mad and half-playing. And just to egg her on a bit, I silently produced another solitary “ooowa.”

  “Okay. That’s it. I’m gonna hurt you,” Dez declared as she turned suddenly and frogged me three times in the shoulder. We were both laughing. But the laughter had a woeful sadness behind it neither one of us wanted to acknowledge.

  When it came time for her to board the plane, I realized who this person was that I was losing. I recognized just exactly how much she meant to me. If I didn’t start to force my thoughts in other directions, I was going to break down. I was about to really fuckin’ lose it.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  I knew I couldn’t sing the song again, so I used a technique I’d developed in my childhood for my own psychological survival. I called it ‘going cold’ at first, when I was little, but later came to think of it as ‘going dead’ as I grew older. I think the only people truly capable of this are the serially traumatized.

  Going cold (or dead) means simply turning off my emotions as though they’re connected to a light switch. It’s probably difficult for most people to grasp that this is even possible. All I can tell them is living with Jack had made going cold a vital necessity in the preservation of my sanity.

  And now it was working; at least most of the way. The emotional dam I’d built up for myself was now cracking and springing leaks I couldn’t patch up fast enough.

  Desiree’s mild worry turned into genuine concern. “Hey sweetie, what’s the matter?”

  “
Nothing,” I said, my voice cracking. “Just gonna miss you. That’s all.”

  I was barely holding on, slipping off the edge of a cliff, futilely digging my fingernails into the rocks trying to find some purchase. My chin was quivering sporadically now, as the tears threatened to spill.

  “Ahh, sweetie, I’m gonna miss you too,” she said as she leaned over and hugged me. The right side of her head touched the right side of mine. And... oh, God. . . Something. Something was transmitted.

  She had kept her word. She had pulled nothing from me. It was my own fault. The floodgates just couldn’t take the pressure anymore and they had buckled long enough that it didn’t matter if they stood now till the end of days. The game was over.

  I didn’t hear what went on in her mind as this knowledge was passed to her. I was too busy regrouping my defenses. What I did feel was her entire body stiffen against mine. Her hands reflexed by curling into claws, one of which had a hold of a good-sized chunk of the back of my shirt.

  I was terrified. Strangely more so than I’d been on the night I killed Jack. I still cannot comprehend (even as I’m writing this years later) why the hell I was so damn scared of telling Desiree that I love her, of letting her know. I wasn’t ashamed of my feelings for her. I know that.

  She pulled me away and glared at me with large eyes that appeared to no longer trust me.

  “What?” she whispered, as though out of breath.

  A uniformed airline employee announced from Gate 31’s intercom that Flight 98 to New York was now boarding.

  I’m sorry, I said telepathically. If I had spoken those words out loud, it would have sounded like a frog’s croak.

  “Sorry?” The look on her face was incredulous. She reverted from verbal language to telepathy, You hide something like this from me for years and all you can say is you’re sorry?

  Hey, I just found out myself about two weeks ago. Do you think I could have hidden something like this from you for two freaking years?

  She sighed, “And you can’t handle the fact that I’m leaving. Is that it?”

  “There’s really not much I can handle right now,” I said out loud, “Including this. I’m sorry but I really have to get out of here now. And you’ve got a flight to catch.”

  What I felt coming off Desiree sickened me. It was pity.

  “I’ll call you when I get to the hotel, alright?”

  I nodded my head.

  “Will you answer the phone when I call?”

  “Of course,” I whispered, my voice raspy.

  “Okay,” she said as she stood up, leaned down and then gently kissed me on the forehead, “Take care of yourself.”

  My eyes were fixed on the floor. I couldn’t bear to look up until I knew her back was turned to me as she presented her ticket to the flight attendant and walked down the aluminum hallway leading to the plane.

  I stood up, ready to leave. A true romantic would have wanted to watch her flight take off. I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of there, go home and lock myself in my room for a few decades.

  Chapter 10

  It’s amazing how your perceptions are altered once you begin suffering from a deep manic depression. The colors of the world fade into a lackluster mediocrity. You can still tell blue from red and green from yellow, but it’s as if everything your gaze falls upon has been placed under an ashen gray shadow.

  No matter what good fortune is bestowed upon you, you’ll find no joy in it. Your attitude is we are all going to die and burn in hell; we’re just drifting through this earthly purgatory till we get there.

  So when I received some lottery scratch-off tickets in the mail from an aunt on my birthday, my disinterest led me to just drop them in the top drawer of my desk and forget about them. Most guys would have immediately taken a quarter and started shaving the thin gray film off of each one.

  But I just didn’t give a fuck.

  One day, a few weeks later, that aunt calls and talks to Doris for an hour, then decides she wants to say hi to me for about ten seconds (this is typical of most my relatives.)

  “So did you win anything with those scratch-offs I sent you?”

  “Uh, what? Oh. Oh! Nah, I didn’t win anything. But thanks for sending them. That was nice.”

  From more out of guilt than curiosity, I sat at my desk after the phone call and scratched off the first of the three tickets with a pocketknife. It told me I’d won three dollars and I knew right then it was going to be the only winner.

  But then the second one said I could add ten dollars to that, which would put my winnings at thirteen bucks. Two out of three. Holy shit.

  As I wondered what the odds were on that, I also began to secretly hope I might be able to pull off a hat trick and maybe win a buck off the third one. I slid the pocketknife back and forth, picking up the pace a bit, but my hopes were dashed as the numbers were slowly revealed. It was one of those ‘match the numbers’ games; whatever number you get a pair of is the amount of money you win.

  What I had so far out of six numbers was:

  5,000 20 1

  100 5

  I knew I coulnd’t even hope the last number on the bottom right corner would be a 5,000. I was viewing the world through those ashen gray sunglasses after all. I figured if it was anything, it just had to be another 1.

  But as I removed the metallic film and blew away the little slivers it left behind, I saw a 5.

  Woohoo. My winnings totaled eighteen bucks. But the 5 looked out of place; it wasn’t evenly spaced with the rest of the numbers... And there was still some gray to the right of that little 5.

  * * *

  Winning $5,000 hadn’t perked me up much (although I have to admit, it did perk me a little) and all I did was deposit it into my savings account at the bank immediately after my visit to the Texas Lottery’s Fort Worth branch office.

  Dez and I still talked on the phone, but long distance was expensive and Doris bitched about it after the first month’s bill came in, even after I offered to pay the full phone bill, long distance and everything else.

  I was stumped as to what to do with the money. I thought about using some of it to visit Dez, but decided against it when I realized I would just come back more depressed and melancholic than ever.

  I thought about getting my own apartment, but with a seven dollar an hour job, I knew the $5K wouldn’t last long, especially since the $5K had actually only come to just a little over $3,200 after the teller at the Lottery office had deducted the taxes from my winnings.

  I couldn’t get a real job because I still wanted to go to school, even though I was only taking about nine to twelve hours a semester. It was just easier to stay home with free rent and free food, a place where someone else does your laundry for you. All in exchange for doing a few household chores every week.

  So I saved the money and watched it grow in tiny, infinitesimal increments in my monthly bank statements. But eventually it did get put to good use.

  At least, I felt it was a good use.

  On Friday, October 31st 1997, that money helped me kill twelve men in a bloody rampage, all in one night.

  * * *

  After several failed attempts at convincing me to get my mopey ass out of the house and raise some hell with the boys, Bo called and told me to get dressed.

  “I am dressed,” I said with a yawn, “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “I meant get dressed in some nice clothes, dipshit. Bunch of us are going out to Dan & Bruno’s for Nancy’s birthday.”

  I sighed, “And why would I want to go since I hardly know Nancy?”

  Bo snorted. “Hey, it’s not from her lack of trying! You know that better than I do and you know she’s gonna get stone fuckin’ drunk tonight and you of course could play the gentleman and drive her home and then screw her fuckin’ brains out... She’s got her own place.”

  I closed my eyes and shuddered. Maybe I was just being a ridiculous asshole, but the last thing I needed right now was Nancy Kellerman (a needy and sl
ightly dumpy looking girl) sinking her claws into me and smothering me with an insatiable need for attention.

  “Listen, I don’t want to hear you sigh, moan, bitch or complain. I already told Nancy you’d be there and I saw how big her eyes got. Now do you wanna be an asshole to Nancy on her birthday? Good. Now go get some nice clothes on and meet us all down there.”

  The decision to go wasn’t so much his as it was my own, although Bo was one hell of a persuader when he wanted to be. I don’t think he would have stopped at anything short of kicking down my front door, snatching me by the scruff of the neck like a dog and throwing my ass into his van. He had lost a best friend just before high school graduation to suicide, and the way I was acting, the way I was retreating into myself, reminded him too much of the way his friend had behaved shortly before he’d taken a swan dive off the roof of a three-story apartment building.

  I arrived at Dan & Bruno’s purposefully late, but apparently not late enough. There were only four others who had arrived before me. I made conversation as best I could while I mentally cursed Bo for being late, at least later than I was. Nancy was the only one I knew even vaguely. The others were friends of hers from outside school.

  I silently prayed for Bo to show up soon. Hell, I’d even settle for Lloyd. Nancy was already halfway finished with her second hurricane and the goo-goo eyes and hair-tossing laughs were already being aimed my way.

  Out of desperation and an uncomfortable level of awkwardness, I excused myself and strolled over to the bar to order myself a drink, preferably something that would be hard to make. I gave them the excuse that I wanted to make sure the bartender made it correctly, why I didn’t want to just let the waitress bring it to me.

  As I approached the bar, an unsettling, ominous feeling stole over me, like I was a priest walking along a dark alley amongst murderous thugs, protected only by the whiteness of my collar. This was by no means a low-class establishment, in fact, quite the opposite. There was no reason why I should suddenly feel this way; I’d been to this place several times before.