You feel ashamed. But it felt good. Maybe the best ever. There is a haze of sharp white smoke in the bathroom, but you no longer have to worry about Harvey. You want him to smell this. To know that you were here. To smell this smoke and realize that he is smelling the real you. The real Billy Smith.
Back in your room, you pick up your mother’s picture again. You can’t look her in the eyes after what you just did, so instead you look at the frame, running your stinging burning fingers over it like a psychic trying to divine a message. Because she made the frame herself. There is something of her in it. She was big into home crafts for a while. Always doing things with felt and hot glue and glitter. You’re about to slip the picture between the rolled-up jeans when you hear Harvey’s voice behind you.
“I smell smoke.”
You freeze.
“I told you what would happen if I caught you burning in the house again. Like I told that doctor. You don’t need pills. You need your ass whipped.”
He unbuckles his belt while he looks at you. Then he sees the bags. The photograph. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Harvey staggers up to you, into the light cast by the bare 100-watt bulb in the ceiling over your bed. The light used to be covered by a square opaque white glass fixture, but it got broke during one your fights with Harvey.
“I said what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m leaving for a while.”
“You’re what?”
“Moving out.”
“The fuck.”
“I mean, we haven’t been getting along.”
Shockingly, Harvey nods. Then he says, “That picture belongs to me.”
“It’s the only picture I have of her.”
“No, it’s mine,” and he snatches the picture away from you.
And both of you are surprised when you snatch the photo right back out of his hands.
“Please, Harvey. This time, this one time, let me win. Let me go.”
“I don’t give a damn whether you go or not, but the picture belongs to me. Everything in this house belongs to me.”
Harvey holds his hand out and waits for you to comply. To obey. To submit.
And the moment stretches out and you decide that you will not comply. You will not obey. You will not submit.
You bolt. You feint left and as Harvey lunges to grab you, you pivot to pass him on the right. And you think you’re free. But not quite yet. His meaty hand catches the back of your shirt collar and reels you back into the room.
He delivers a solid backhand blow across your face and you feel your nose pop like the skin of a fruit that is too ripe. Blood flows.
Harvey grabs the photo. If that is all he wants, then give it to him. Give it to him and get out of here. Get yourself free. Get your soul free. But Harvey has put his thick hand around your throat just under your jaw. He squeezes and lifts and he is picking you up one-handed by your neck. He pins you against the wall. With your windpipe pinched shut and your blood flow cut off you feel your face turning red and probably purple. And Harvey keeps his eyes locked on your eyes. And as you drain away, you receive the message those eyes are sending.
Comply.
Obey.
Submit.
And just before you pass out, he releases his grip. You fall to the floor and gasp for air. Feel the blood squirt through your carotid feeding your brain. Fresh red oxygenated blood spurts from your nose. The smoke from the bathroom has made its way to the air in here and traces of it burn the back of your throat.
“Leave now. Or die now.”
You struggle to your feet. You leave.
You thought you had finally licked the violence thing. But it’s back. You don’t feel it. You know other people feel it. Have emotions about it. But you don’t feel it. You just do it. You don’t get pleasure from it, though. It just pops into your mind to grind up Sid’s arm like you’re sharpening a pencil and you do it. Lack of impulse control is what they called it in prison. Explosive Personality Disorder. Something.
You pop the glove box and grab the package of Bronkaid you stashed in there. You had to drive to seven pharmacies before you found one that would sell it to you without a driver’s license. Fucking pharmacists think they’re something special. They’re just pill counters. Bronkaid has 25mg of ephedrine sulfate per pill. Primatene only has 12.5mg of ephedrine, and it’s ephedrine hydrochloride—harder for your body to absorb. You bust out four of the Bronkaid tabs, pushing them through the foil blister pack and into a bandanna. You fold the bandanna into a pouch so that the pills are in a little pocket. You crush the pills. You have to use your lighter to get them broke up, using it like a hammer, pounding the pills against the dash, then rolling it and working it like one of those crushing things pharmacists used in the olden days. Mortar and pestle. You could have been a doctor or something you bet. You like helping people. You unfold the bandanna and you have a nice mound of white powder in there. Up in Hays they called it riding the Bronk. You scoop the powder onto your thumbnail and snort it. Three snorts per nostril and it’s all gone. Burns like a motherfucker. Like battery acid or something. It’ll hit you in a minute. Sometimes up in Hays, a cook would be able to get the right chemicals and mix up a batch in the sink and turn this shit into crank. You could really focus then. You felt like it helped with the violence thing too. But not always. You were still prone to outbursts. They transferred you to Reidsville. That was not a promotion. On the Internet it said Reidsville housed the most recalcitrant and aggressive male adult offenders incarcerated in the Georgia Prison System. You don’t know what the fuck recalcitrant means, but you by God understand aggressive. You took classes there. Positive Mental Attitude. Anger Management. Confronting Self Concepts. Corrective Thinking. Stuff like that. You never did shake the violence thing, though. Maybe it’s the music. Maybe you listen to too much Slayer and Eyehategod and stuff, but you love death metal. Thrash. That Swedish stuff is killer. You really like that group Mayhem. You remember they got into trouble about some kind of ritual murder or something. Satanism. You wish you could kick back and ride the Bronk and chill out to some Cannibal Corpse. Even if you had some, maybe that is not the kind of music you should be exposing Billy to. He’s just a kid. Still innocent. Where is he? You wish he would hurry up. Police could be on their way here to his house. Not cool. And no, you really shouldn’t expose him to thrash metal. You would like to listen to some kind of music, though. This Cutlass you took only has an AM radio and a tape deck. You saw some cassettes in the glove compartment so you dig through them. Carole King. Joni Mitchell. Leo Sayer. Fuck. You put in the Joni Mitchell because it’s got a song called “Woodstock” and you wonder if that is the Crosby Stills & Nash song. That was pretty mellow. Hippie shit. Hippies could rock back in the day. Steppenwolf. Heavy metal thunder. Fire every motherfucking gun you got and explode right the fuck into outer space. Shit like that. And you can imagine yourself out there in space. With the stars. Stars everywhere. Just surrounded by stars and rocking the fuck out. You fast-forward to the Woodstock song. Track eleven. It starts to play, and holy fucking shit, yes, it is mellow. It is far, far too mellow. It feels like a funeral in your brain, like church music or something. Just exactly like the shit that doped-up lady organist played at the church your old man dragged you to every Sunday and then beat your ass when he got you back home while your mom read Bible passages to scare the demons out of you. The spooky druggie organ music lets up after a minute and the Mitchell chick starts singing and her voice is just so squeaky like a little rat, like Mickey Mouse singing for a bunch of old women sitting in pews. We are stardust, she says, golden. And you can’t believe you are sitting here listening to this hippie trippy crap. Golden? No fuck, no we are not golden. We are not golden. We are not stardust. It’s just crap. Billion-year-old carbon she says, that’s what we are. And it seems like this song has been playing for a billion years and fuck this noise, you just can’t handle it. This is ruining your high. It puts your nerve
s on edge. You eject the tape and throw that shit out the window. You turn on the AM receiver. Talk radio. Neal Boortz. What a jackass. That will do.
The kid has been in there too long. At the very least the cops will send a patrol car by the house to make sure he made it home safe. To get his statement. Or maybe they would just call and talk to the father. Ask him to bring the kid to the station.
You don’t want to examine why you did what you did. It is right there for you to see. Inside of you. The violence thing. The root of it. But you have to go in to get it and you don’t want to do that. You did what you did.
It’s pretty fucking simple. You like Billy. He reminds you of you. The kid that you used to be for maybe two seconds. Scared of every goddamn thing in the world. But then you toughened up and the world was scared of you.
And being around this kid has awakened something in you. Something dangerous. You want to find every ugly hateful thing in this world and destroy it before it destroys him. That is what you feel.
You are the kid and the kid is you. And maybe if you can protect him, if you can keep the world from having its way with him—you can see what you could have been.
And all of that somehow went through your mind when you decided to fuck Sid up. To give him something he can’t take back.
Somehow, in that split second, you decided that if you save the kid you save yourself.
And then Billy is back in the car with you and you look at the blood drying in snotty scabs under his nose and you ask him where is his stuff.
“Harvey won’t let—”
“I’ll talk to him.”
And you get out of the car and walk into the house. You decide to not think. Just do what needs to be done. You are riding the motherfucking Bronk.
The TV is on in the living room, but nobody is watching it. You can hear snoring. Drunk slobbery snoring. You head to the back of the house and find the kid’s bedroom. It’s a mess. Not really anything in there that would make you think it was a teenage boy’s room. No posters. No baseball glove. No video games. But there is a picture on the floor in a broken frame. You pick it up and look at the photograph of the woman. You look in her eyes for a long time and then put the picture on the bed.
You go into the other bedroom where you heard snoring, and you look at the man passed out on the bed. You have decided to not think. Just do what you want to do. Let the Bronk take you where it will.
There is a cigarette burning in the ashtray next to the bed, so the guy just now passed out or is faking. You see that he smokes Marlboro Lights and that’s your brand so you pocket the pack.
You lean over the guy and spit in his face. He wakes up. You pivot a little bit, balancing on your plastic leg, lifting your other leg high, rocking back to bring the heel of your boot squarely down on the guy’s face. He screams. His hands go to his mouth and nose, feeling the damage. He inspects the blood on his fingers.
“Why?” The broken mouth can’t actually form the word, but you know that’s what he’s saying.
“Because children are God’s gift to us.” You speak the words that were spoken to you by another man, and you cannot believe those words crossed your lips.
The guy scrambles across the mattress to the bedside table. He yanks open the drawer and pulls out what looks to be a .44 Magnum. It’s certainly big enough. The bore wants to swallow you.
You look the guy in the eyes and you shrug. This confuses him, and you are pivoting again to give him a boot to the temple when he pulls the trigger and the revolver goes off like the cannon it is. The door frame behind you just fucking explodes and sharp pinewood splinters sting going into the back of your neck, penetrating so deep that they will still be working their way out of your flesh when you die a violent death—your limbs torn from your body—exactly one month from today.
You rush the guy, drag him from the bed, and take the gun away. You throw the .44 across the room. You don’t want it. You don’t like guns.
You pull the guy to his feet and punch him in his already shattered nose. He screams again but it’s pretty muffled because of the fragmented bone and warped cartilage and the blood coating his vocal cords. It’s just a kind of deep wet sound. Like pulling your boot out of sucking mud.
Then you give him one in the stomach. Not as hard as you can. Not nearly as hard as you can, but hard enough. He is completely in your control now. You ease him down back onto the bed and grab his right hand around the wrist. You extend the hand so that both of you can see it, like it was something interesting you found at a garage sale and you were showing it to him.
“Is this the one?” you ask.
The guy is not really capable of speech right now, but you pretend you don’t know that.
“Is this the one?” Your voice is still calm, but there is something underneath.
The guy shakes his head. He heard that thing in your voice, that something underneath, and wants to avoid it.
“Is this the one?” And this time you roar it. Spit flies from your mouth. Years of pent-up rage.
The guy nods his head. Like a dumb animal. No, like a scared first-grader.
“I thought so,” you say and you stroke the hand as if it’s a woman’s tit. “I thought this might be the hand you raised against a child.”
You break each of the fingers on that hand. Slowly, deliberately, the way a little girl plays he loves me, he loves me not with daisy petals. You break them one at a time, at the knuckle. Bones crunch. Tendons pop. Pain squirts. Each broken finger punctuated by one of those deep wet bootsucking sounds you know are screams. And when you’re done, the guy’s hand looks like a cow’s udder, the fingerteats pointing every which way.
The guy has fainted from the pain. You look at him lying there in the bed, and you see that the ashtray was jarred in the struggle and the burning cigarette has ended up in the folds of the blanket. Of course, they make cigarettes different now. They go out on their own if you don’t puff on them every few seconds. You always have to relight them. Cuts down on house fires. People falling asleep smoking in bed.
You retrieve the cigarette and light that fucker up. You hotbox it until the cherry is a long fat glowing coal and you throw it into the blankets. And you lean down and blow on it like a boy scout in the rain, like Jack fucking London, yeah, you read that story, and you keep at it and keep at it, blowing on it until the blanket material darkens and wisps of smoke curl up and you keep at it and keep at it until a lick of flame pops up and you coax it just a little more to make sure it’s took hold good.
You go back to the kid’s room and get his clothes and the picture of the woman who is probably his mother. And you stop a minute to look into her eyes again because you are not thinking. You are doing. And what you do is put the picture back down. You leave it. Sometimes you have to do what you are told. Sometimes you have to listen to the Bronk.
On your way out you look into the burning room and the whole goddamn bed is blazing with poisonous black smoke rolling through the top of the doorframe. And you listen a minute for the deep wet sound but you don’t hear it anymore and finally the heat is too much for you and you leave.
Frank gets back in the car and hands you your stuff. He smells like smoke. He smells good.
“What did Harvey say?”
Frank reverses out of the driveway, shrugs, and says, “The man just won’t listen to reason.”
“He’s not a nice guy.”
“Trust me, he’ll burn for it,” is what Frank says, and it sounds like something Arnold Schwarzenegger would say, like “I’ll be back” or “Hasta la vista, baby” in one of those movies from the ’80s.
“Amen,” you say and the car is speeding away and you can see the house in the side mirror. See the flames raving inside.
And yes, it’s true, you’ve always been with Frank.
* * *
Frank says he has a friend who lives in the North Georgia Mountains. Stockmar County. About two hours north of Atlanta. But you can’t go straight there. Frank s
ays you can’t approach Chandler in the middle of the night. Too dangerous. No telling what his frame of mind might be. He gets paranoid. He’s into that bathtub speed, Frank says.
That is what you are doing, driving around the mountains until it is light enough to approach Frank’s paranoid friend. You need a place to stay, and neither of you has any money. You will need money to get to Canada. Frank’s car could never make it that far, so you guys would have to save up for bus tickets. Or a train. You will need to get jobs, but probably not at Shoney’s. Ha-ha. Hasta la vista, baby. I won’t be back.
Frank listens to the radio. He doesn’t listen to music. Frank likes the news. Your dad always listened to talk radio, too. He liked to listen to Paul Harvey, and you liked listening to Paul Harvey with him. You liked how Paul Harvey would tell stories, describing people so that you could see them in your mind like a little movie. And you can remember in particular one story Paul Harvey told about a kid growing up in a little small town on a mountain somewhere and how the kid liked to go fishing at this lake and how he had an old tire tied to a rope in a sycamore tree and the kid would just kick back in the tire swing and take it easy all day. Enjoying the good life. The simple life. The kid even played the harmonica. But at the end of the summer, the leaves in the sycamore turned brown, and the maple trees “exploded in crimson and yellow flames,” and the kid had to go back to school. And the rest of the story was that the kid grew up and moved to Hollywood and he was really Andy Griffith and he invented Mayberry and The Andy Griffith Show. In real life, though, “the rest of the story” would have been that at the end of the summer when the trees exploded in crimson and yellow flames and the kid went back to school, he and a bunch of his friends stormed the school with the weapons and IEDs that they had amassed over the summer, and they killed about a hundred students and teachers before taking their own lives, and the police and media would spend years analyzing the journals, online videos, social media rants, and blog posts they had left behind and why hadn’t anybody recognized that those boys were troubled and who was to blame, was it the families or was it society?
Abnormal Man: A Novel Page 4