Revelation

by Wilson, Carter;

  “I didn’t even wait for him to start moving. I smashed the rock down on his skull, hard as I could. Then I did it again. And again. I pounded his face with that rock until there seemed to be nothing left of his face at all.” There was no emotion in Coyote’s voice. No remorse. No sadness. Not even the slurs of drunkenness. He took another drink. “He didn’t scream or move. He just laid there and died, those stupid freckles painted over with his blood. I knew he was dead the second the blood stopped bubbling underneath his nose.”

  “Holy shit,” Jacob said. Trina didn’t move.

  Coyote looked up again, his eyes looking at something that was far from this room. “There was something, you know? I’ll never be able to explain it, but there was something. The first time I hit him, all I needed to do was call my dad and this kid would’ve been okay. I had his life in my hands, and I could either save it or destroy it. I had the power to wipe out fifteen years of living, breathing, walking, communicating. Gone. Like that. Animated to lifeless, all based on what I felt like. I didn’t have to kill him, but I wanted to. I wanted to. I wanted to feel what it was like, not to hurt someone, but to control them on the ultimate level.”

  “Consume them,” I whispered.

  Trina finally spoke. “How did it feel?”

  He considered this. “Like . . . like swimming in the deepest water. In the water, you can float. Carry things that are too heavy on land. Drift. Fly. Anything. Killing that kid was just like floating. I could do anything, and that was all that mattered.”

  “Jesus, Coyote,” I said. “Please tell me you’re making this up.”

  Coyote said nothing.

  “What did you do after?”

  “I found the softest spot of earth I could find, and I started digging. Just my bare hands. Took me forever, and I kept thinking how my dad was waiting for me. I got about six inches down, and I put him in there, just covered him up best I could. Dirt, leaves, branches. Anything I could find. We weren’t near a path or anything, so I just hoped it would be a while before anyone found him.”

  “You didn’t tell anyone?”

  “No. Not even my dad. I washed away the blood, covered myself in dirt, and when I got back to the camper, I told him I fell down a creek bed and got banged up against some rocks. He wanted to take me to the hospital, but I convinced him I was okay. We left for home that afternoon.”

  Jacob’s back was straight as a plank. “Did they ever find him?”

  “A few days later. There was a search party, and they found him. I saw it in the newspaper. But no one ever came to question me, and my dad never mentioned it. I’m not sure he’d even heard about it.”

  My brain was sluggish with that sense of taking one drink too many, but it was Coyote’s story that put my world in an uncontrolled spin. “What . . . what did you do after? I mean, that must have messed you up.”

  “Not as much as I would have thought,” he said. “After a few months, I just stopped thinking about it. I mean, every now and then I would, but not every day. But I never felt guilty. Just human nature.”

  “Human nature?”

  He nodded. “Kill. Breathe. Fuck. Laugh. It’s all human nature. That kid wanted to kill me, and I wanted to kill him. I just got there first. Simple as that. We’re all just animals, and there’s really nothing wrong with that.”

  It took me this long, but this was the moment I realized with final certainty that Coyote was a psychopath. I had many senses about him before, and many of them flirted with malevolence, but now he proved there was something definitively evil inside him. He stood and walked over to the bathroom, where he washed his face and dried it with a thin, faded towel. I looked at Jacob and Trina, but they were off in their own worlds. No one spoke. When Coyote returned, he went around and poured us all shots. He got to Trina last, and he spoke as he handed her another drink. She took it and set it down immediately on the nightstand.

  “I don’t judge you,” he told her. “We all do things society doesn’t accept. Do whatever the hell you want, and don’t set boundaries on yourself. You’re a whore now, simple as that. You won’t be forever, but that’s what you are now.”

  Trina’s eyes welled with tears, and it was a pitiful sight.

  “If anyone mistreats you, you don’t have to accept it because they’re paying you. Do what your nature tells you to do, and don’t listen to anyone else.”

  Coyote took one last drink, the only one of us who did. On this night, Coyote was the drunk and vulnerable one, and here we saw him as who he really was. The last thing he said before stretching out on the bed and falling asleep was, “If someone hurts you, hurt them back. It doesn’t have to be complicated.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  JULY 1990

  Charlotte was back and she looked curious.

  Harden lay on the floor, his hair clumped in dirt and dried sweat. He had never felt in so much pain and yet at peace as he did now. The drugs injected into him were wearing off, as was his adrenaline, and though every joint ached with the slightest movement, there was comfort in succumbing to it all. There was a sweet relief in defeat. He floated alone in the middle of the ocean and soon he would slip painlessly beneath its surface.

  “Come over here,” he whispered. His throat raged for water. He reached his fingertips out, and like a dog, Charlotte obeyed. She crawled closer to him until she reached his hand. The black widow hesitated one last moment, then delicately crept up his hand and along his arm. Harden could feel her, the whisper of her legs on his skin as she glided along.

  “Come on,” he said. “Do it.”

  He wondered what it would be like. He assumed the bite would sting, then the area of skin around it would swell and throb. He couldn’t remember if a black widow’s bite could actually kill a grown man, but in his weakened state and left unattended, he figured there was a fairly good chance of it. How long would he have? Hours, days? There would be suffering, he knew, but then there would be none.

  Harden closed his eyes and waited. In the depthless dark behind his lids, he saw shapeless images, like the mucusy bubbles of a lava lamp, floating, coming together, combining and then splitting apart. Then he saw defined shapes. A flash of his father on the day Harden first flew a kite, which harshly dissolved into Derek’s torn and discarded body. His lifeless eyes. Then he saw Emma, frightened and screaming, the bandage around her hand black with dried blood.

  Emma.

  Harden opened his eyes and suddenly he didn’t want to die. Well, that wasn’t true, was it? He couldn’t die. He had to help Emma, and she had to help him. She was his only purpose now, and he couldn’t just give up.

  Little hairy legs on his throat, just to the left of his Adam’s apple. He fought the urge to slap at Charlotte, or to move even in the slightest. He was being held captive with the knife point on his throat, and the smallest movement on his part could be his last.

  He stilled his mind and waited it out. She would either bite him, or she wouldn’t. That was how it would be.

  Harden tried to remember what had happened after being injected in Emma’s cell. The immediate aftermath was a fog, and all he knew was he woke on the floor back in his own cell with a fresh series of bruises along his abdomen and chest. Kicked, he figured. Baby Face laid into me good. The dull throbbing in his ribs seemed a permanent part of his being now. There was also pain on the side of his head. He had probably passed out and knocked his head after being drugged.

  The lights went out. The metal door slat slid open.

  “In the corner. Turn around.”

  Harden thought, I can’t move. I can’t talk.

  “In the fucking corner!”

  Harden spoke through his teeth, moving his mouth as little as he could.

  “Wait, goddamnit. There’s a black widow on me.”

  “I will come in there and fuck you up if you don’t get in the corner right now!”

  “Just hang—”

  “NOW!”

  Harden counted to three in his head the
n swatted at his neck. Three swipes, hoping in the dark to knock Charlotte off and onto the floor. He felt nothing, but she could already be elsewhere on his body by now. Maybe down his shirt. He scrambled to his feet and pain shot down from his neck to his toes, not the sting of a spider bite but of the accumulated damage to his body. As Harden tried to find the corner in the dark, he waited for the bite.

  Would it be sharp like a doctor’s needle, or a heavy, dull pinch?

  When he reached the corner, he used his arms to support himself against the walls. No bite, yet.

  “Try anything again and we’ve been authorized to kill you.”

  “Fuck you,” Harden mumbled.

  The slat closed. The door opened.

  “Don’t move,” Baby Face said.

  He heard a shuffling along the dirt. Then, the sound of a tray—maybe trays?—being placed on the floor. Before he knew it, the door shut again and the room enveloped him once more in stifling darkness.

  Harden turned.

  Silence.

  For a moment, he thought he felt Charlotte on his neck. He didn’t move.

  The light turned on.

  Harden sucked in a breath.

  Emma.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  DECEMBER 1989

  The bus ride home to Owen, Pennsylvania, was everything not expressed in Simon and Garfunkel’s America. There was no beauty in taking any bus for any kind of distance in the Northeast. It was only something you did as a last resort, when money was tight and you had to be somewhere.

  Unfortunately, at Christmastime, lots of other people also had somewhere to be. I squeezed into the last remaining seat next to the bathroom, the morbidly obese woman next to me sleeping across both seats and mumbling profanities as I made her sit up to give me space. We were not destined to be friends.

  The bus spat me out near central Owen just after eight in the evening, and nightfall had blotted out the gray, industrial smoke that covered my hometown like a coffin’s heavy lid.

  My father was waiting for me, and after a single-pump handshake and a “How ya doin’,” I collapsed inside his Dodge Challenger, and we journeyed home. Home was ten minutes away, but I wished it to be farther.

  Owen was the place my darkest memories nested. Ridge Creek Elementary School was just a few blocks from our house, and I knew we would go past it on our route. It was closed now, but not because of what happened there. I think there just weren’t enough kids left in the area to keep it open. That’s a good thing.

  The worst part is I never told anyone about it. Mr. Kildare told me not to, but it wasn’t like he threatened my life or anything. He just made me promise, telling me the others wouldn’t understand. I never told my father, as much as the thought of it burned in me every night as I tried to sleep. I had to see Mr. Kildare every day in class for the next three months before he suddenly moved away. He never took me into that closet again. Barely even acknowledged me, actually, which somehow made me feel even more violated.

  Sometimes when I was alone, I could smell his meaty breath.

  After a while, I went from being scared to tell anyone to being ashamed to tell anyone. That’s the horrible cycle of silence.

  It wasn’t until my freshman year at college that I allowed him back into my thoughts for a brief time. The library where I worked on campus had a LexisNexis database, and I searched his name. Charles Kildare was arrested in 1984 in a small town in Oregon. Still an elementary school teacher, he’d been found guilty on seven counts of sexual assault of a minor. The sentence was sixty years in prison, but he’d only made it six months. Somebody strangled him to death just before lockdown on a Thursday night.

  I suppose I should have felt good about how it all ended up, but I didn’t. Someone else had to do what I was supposed to do. It was supposed to be my hands around his throat, at least metaphorically. That man had gone on and hurt other kids because I never told anyone. I was a fucking coward, and every time I came back to Owen the memories of it settled on me like a chilling morning mist.

  We passed the elementary school, and I stared straight, silently counting. When I reached twenty-two, my dad pulled the car onto the cracked driveway of my childhood home.

  Inside, I got a better look at my father. Reston Campbell was an old fifty-two, a man who lived hard for the first thirty years of his life and then paid for it each day after that. He kept his Harley-rider long hair and beard from those days. Most of it was now gray, as was his pallor, giving him a look of someone covered in dust. His craggy face and hard eyes kept any homeless person from ever seeking spare change from him, although he’d probably be one of the first to give it. My father was a beautiful person, but few people, including me, often saw that side of him.

  Before I was born, he drank hard, smoked two packs of unfiltered Camels a day, and was a faithful parishioner at any hole serving Jack Daniels. He managed to stay single and carefree—a rarity in working-class Owen—until he met my mother. She was ten years his junior and fell hard for the part-time auto mechanic and aspiring guitarist. I’ve been told more than once that his talent should’ve taken him far away from Owen, but he never got the chance. Mom got pregnant, they got married, and I’ve never heard my dad play guitar.

  Having a baby scared the shit out of him, enough so that Dad replaced Jack with Jesus, being born a second time just after my first. No alcohol. No cigarettes. No more aimless nights. He married my mother, found a steady job as a property engineer at a Holiday Inn, and committed himself fully to the Lord, his wife, and his son. Pretty much in that order.

  Mom lasted until I was ten, deciding church and family interfered with her ability to get high and fuck other men. She left for California with the assistant manager from the local A&P. Dad got custody, and Mom last sent me a birthday card when I was fourteen. I still think about her and wonder what I would say if we ever see each other again. I’d probably say nothing at all.

  “You eat yet?” My dad walked over to the refrigerator and opened the door. Light shone in a solid beam from the inside, having no food to have to pass over. “Don’t got a lot. Could order a pizza, s’pose.”

  “That’s fine, Dad. I’ll call.”

  As I ordered, I did my own search of the fridge. It made me wonder if the electricity to power the thing was worth it just to keep a few pops and a jar of mayo cold. Probably not.

  The pizza came an hour later. Even though the dinner was informal and barely edible, my father insisted on grace. He reached across the table and grabbed my hands. I could feel the calluses on his leathery palms.

  “Bless, O Lord, us and your gifts, which from your bounty we are about to receive, and grant that, healthily nourished by them, we may render you due obedience, through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

  I mouthed an “amen,” which came out as more of a mumble. I picked up a slice and managed to get about half of it in my mouth.

  “How’s school?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Busy.”

  “Busy is good.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Still majoring in English?”

  My neck tensed. Here it comes.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How you gonna pay bills with that?”

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  He coughed, and I could hear the wet rattle of a thousand consumed cigarettes in his lungs.

  “Not a lot of money in that, I would think. Graduation’s coming up. Gotta have a plan.”

  Like you had a plan at my age, I didn’t say. I glanced around at the sparse kitchen, the cheap plastic dining chairs, the ten-dollar coffeemaker next to a can of Folgers.

  “No,” I said. “Probably not a lot of money in it.”

  I finished off the slice but wasn’t feeling hungry anymore. I leaned back in my chair and thought about my writing, about what made me interested in it. I considered the essay on religion I’d turned in, the one inspired by Coyote. It then occurred to me my dad was the person I’d been writing about. Here was a man who
found his God late in his life and followed blindly.

  “Why did you decide to turn religious?” I asked.

  I had never asked the question before, and it just shot out of me.

  He let the question sit long enough I thought it would just die there. But then he shot me a glare with his hard brown eyes and said, “I didn’t decide to turn, Son. We all have it in us. It’s a matter of maturing enough to let it all come out.”

  “Mom was pregnant, right?”

  He nodded. “That’s right.”

  I could tell he wasn’t sure where this was headed. Neither was I. We weren’t used to talking like this.

  “Did it just happen, like all of a sudden?”

  “Why are you asking me all of this?”

  “I wrote something for a class on a similar topic.”

  “About me?”

  “No. Not you. Just . . . an idea about how religion starts.”

  He opened up his can of pop and took a few gulps before putting it back on the table.

  “Sometimes it takes a man a crisis to find Jesus, Harden. Like Paul on the road to Damascus. He was persecuting the Christians, you know. Putting ’em in jail before Jesus came down and blinded him.” He shook his head, as if reliving a memory. “Your mom was pregnant, and we were both living as hard and wild as ever. I was drinking at least a six-pack a day, and your mom wasn’t far behind me.” He shook his head. “It’s a miracle you turned out healthy.”

  “Yeah, no shit,” I mumbled.

  “I won’t tolerate profanity at my table.”

  “Sorry.”

  Dad shifted in his seat and stared at the table. “When I found out your mother was pregnant, I’m ashamed to admit I wanted her to . . . for us to terminate the pregnancy. She refused. The hard truth is if it was up to me, you wouldn’t have ever lived.”