by Newman,James
I swallowed, and there was a taste in my mouth that made me think of wet clothes neglected in a hamper and left to mildew.
It was over. Here. Now.
I took a deep breath, rolled Burner slowly through the front yard toward my house.
The time had come to look the Devil in the eyes, I decided. I could run, I could hide. That’s what kids do, after all, ninety-nine percent of the time. They run away from trouble as fast as their legs will carry them. But my time had come at last.
I knew I could not run and hide forever.
After what I had done at Storch’s Rim, Burt Baker and his son would get me. Eventually.
I licked my lips, swallowed nervously once again, and prayed they would do it fast.
“Please, God,” I cried. “Just let them end it quickly…”
Behind me, the rain plinked and plunked upon the sheriff’s patrol car. From beneath the vehicle’s hood came a dull, insect-like ticking. The sound of the engine cooling. He hadn’t been here long.
My heart pounded frantically as I moved like a zombie toward my front porch. I winced, held one hand to my chest. Wondered if I was having a heart attack. The house no longer felt like my home at all anymore as I drew closer to it. It seemed to loom over me so large and black and quiet. It had become a strange, dark site sheltering all of the evils of the world.
I did not want to go in there.
But knew I had to. I had no choice.
It was time to end this.
When I reached the porch steps I let Burner clatter to the ground, not caring in the least who my racket awakened.
My shoes made gentle chuffing noises as I ascended the steps. The sound echoed in the night, seemed to come from the Freemans’ yard across the street. I flinched, glanced back in that direction, but saw nothing but Sheriff Baker’s patrol car in the corner of my eye.
Mom had been considerate enough to leave the patio light on for me (wonders never cease, I thought with a smirk as I approached the screen door). A swarm of loudly fluttering moths fought over its sickly yellow glow, their fat, feathery bodies bouncing off the bulb like tiny kamikaze pilots. A few of them tickled at my ears and neck, and I batted them away as I bent to retrieve the single gold key Mom kept hidden for me beneath our WELCOME (“To Everyone But Traveling Salesmen and Holy Rollers”) mat.
My hands trembled as I unlocked our front door, wondering just where the sheriff would be waiting for me.
Behind the door? In my room? In my father’s favorite armchair?
Or would I never know? Would a bullet pierce my brain before I took even a single step inside my home?
I pushed the door inward. Waiting for whatever was to come.
But nothing happened.
Several seconds passed before my eyes adjusted to the darkness of my living room, yet immediately a cacophony of strange noises arose from the other side of the house, seeming to leap out at me from the murky darkness to pummel me with their awful, awful truth.
I knew right away what I was hearing, though I certainly did not want to believe it.
I stumbled, grabbed onto the doorjamb to keep from falling to my knees.
My guts roiled. My face felt hot—and tingly, somehow—as if I had stepped too close to a raging bonfire.
“How could she?” I cried, as salty, stinging tears filled my vision and spilled down my cheeks.
And the sounds grew louder back there in my mother’s bedroom…
“Oh, Jesus!” her voice came to me from down the hallway. “Yes, Burt! Yes! Yes!”
Her sounds of passion were accompanied by a rude animal grunting. As if a wild dog had broken into our home, and it was back there mauling her now.
“Oh! Oh, God! Oh, God!”
I slammed my hands over my ears, not wanting to hear it. But those terrible sounds would not go away. They grew…rising to a fervent climax the longer I stood there…
“That’s…so…good!” I heard my mother moan in between harsh, rasping breaths of passion.
She had betrayed everything my father stood for. Everything our home had ever stood for.
I gnashed my teeth, shook my head back and forth.
“No,” I growled. “Shut up…”
“Yeah, baby,” Burt Baker’s voice came to me from out of the darkness, as he did vile things with my mother—to my mother—in the very room where my father had once slept. Where Dad had dreamed his dreams and dressed for work and loved Mom in ways that were so natural and so good and so right.
“That’s good, Darlene…mmm-hmm, baby, that’s so damn good…”
I wanted to die. I gnashed my teeth, tried to block out the mental images bombarding me like quick, choppy cuts on a movie screen. I didn’t want to imagine him on top of her, didn’t want to see them rolling about all shiny and slick beneath the sheets as I had once seen her doing with Dad when I’d walked in on them after a terrible nightmare…
But I couldn’t help it. My mind insisted upon torturing me. Showing me, again and again and again, what it must look like in there.
Him. On top of her. Grunting, grunting, grunting…groping my mother…touching her…putting his thing inside of her…
The living room seemed to shift and then swirl three hundred and sixty degrees around me. I gripped the doorjamb tighter than ever, so sure I would pass out any second.
“You like that?” Burt Baker asked my mother. “Mmm-yeah, honey…oh, Christ…”
Mom’s reply was a cross between a reptilian hiss and a long, sated whine. If I had not known better I might have suspected he was hurting her, from the sound of it.
Then: “Fuck me! Oh, God, Burt—harder! Harder! I’m gonna cum!”
It was the most unsettling thing I have ever heard. I felt so unclean, filled with a terrible knowledge I wished I could give back. During that cruelest of moments I did not feel twelve years old at all, but far, far beyond my years. Innocence died screaming. Somehow I knew that every last morsel of childhood naivety I had savored up till then lay rotting in the grave. Like Cassie Belle Rourke. Like Mike Linder and Calvin Mooney. Like my father.
“Fuck me, Sheriff! Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!” Mom’s orgasmic shriek filled the house, and as it built to a crescendo there was something almost musical about it.
As if she were singing it to him. A nocturnal song of filth from the mouth of a woman who had kissed me and fed me and…given birth to me…
That did it. I could take no more.
I sincerely believe, as I look back now on those next few minutes or so after I whirled around and headed back out onto my front porch, that I might have been certifiably insane. Everything that had transpired since the night of the Apple Gala—all of my anger and fear and hatred and confusion and guilt and regret and sorrow—became a swirling maelstrom of emotions I could not have kept in check even if I tried.
My feet felt heavy, the air around me somehow thick and syrupy as if I moved through a fever dream, as I trudged through the wet grass of my front yard and around the side of my house.
I could still hear them by the time I reached the storage shed out back. Through the walls. A muffled duet of urgent grunts and groans resembling some dark tribal rhythm coming from inside my home.
“I hate you,” I said. To both of them, and to everyone in the world all at once. “I hate you…”
As I opened the shed’s heavy wooden door, the squeaking of its ancient hinges echoed throughout the neighborhood, sounding so much louder than they did in the daytime, but I did not care.
Somewhere down the block a dog barked five times, then twice more, before finally shutting up for good. As if it had decided no one was listening so why bother.
What are you doing? screamed a boyish voice from somewhere deep inside of me when I stepped into the shed. It was the rational side of myself, I know now, trying to stop me before it was too late.
Think about this, Kyle, it pleaded with me. Surely you can’t be serious…
But I ignored it. I told it go to hell.
>
I did not know what I had come for until the second I saw it sitting there. Everything before me had converged into a disorienting, foggy wet blur—even the sounds of the drizzle around me faded away to little more than a dull background buzz like faint static on a radio station headquartered several counties away—beneath the distant sounds of Burt Baker having sex with my mother.
A mischievous grin spread across my face as I hefted in one pale, sweaty hand that single can of Banner Red Krylon spray-paint. The same paint Dan had used the previous summer to help his friend Chris turn an ugly puke-green dirt-bike into a vehicle the color of freshly-spilt blood.
I carried it with me back the way I had come…across the yard, to the driveway. Never thinking once about the consequences of my actions.
I shook it violently once I’d reached my destination, shook that long white can as if it were the source of every horrid thing that had happened to me since the night of the Apple Gala. Its metallic rattle seemed to fill the night like the mating call of some lonely robotic cicada.
I had always loved that sound. Not to mention the strong chemical smell of the paint itself.
I savored both more than ever as I walked around Sheriff Baker’s patrol car, squatted down beside the driver-side front tire, and went to work.
The can hissed like an angry snake. My hands no longer trembled at all as I spelled out a single word in wide, vibrant crimson letters, a word that stretched across that side of the vehicle from below its side mirror all the way to its rear tire.
I stepped back to admire my handiwork when I was done.
The paint can dropped from my hand into the grass below.
The rain grew heavier as I stood there, pelting me with its icy spray and soaking my clothes, but I hardly noticed it at all.
I glanced toward the house. Then back to Sheriff Baker’s desecrated patrol car.
And I smiled.
Lightning struck somewhere close by. The night lit up, and for those few seconds when my entire neighborhood was illuminated as bright as day, my impromptu message for Sheriff Burt Baker appeared to stand out in bright, bloody relief against his patrol car’s slick tan body. The letters had already begun to run in the rain, dripping down the vehicle’s undercarriage and onto the driveway in thin, wormy rivulets, but the word could not have been more clear if I had spent hours carving it into the hood with a rusty old key:
It felt good. Damn good.
I licked my lips, tasting the dirty rain. Gave myself a “thumbs-up” gesture.
But then thunder boomed overhead, a resonating crash that seemed to originate right in my backyard.
The sound of it woke me from my trance-like state.
I sucked in a bitter breath of damp air, stumbled backwards and nearly tripped over the empty can of spray-paint lying in the grass behind me.
When the night lit up again, brighter than ever, the hard reality of what I had just done to Sheriff Burt Baker’s patrol car burned through me as if I had been struck by the lightning. An electric tremor of white-hot fear shot from the top of my head down to my toes, and the tiny hairs on my arms stood up.
I covered my mouth with one hand, and seemed to view the vandalism from outside of myself, as if someone else had done the deed.
Not me. It couldn’t have been me…
What did I just do?
I glanced toward the house again. Back to the car. Toward the house.
Then down at my hands, which were smudged with sticky red paint like the bloody palms of a serial killer.
“No,” I whined. “Oh, God, no…”
I ran to Burner where I had left him sprawled by the porch steps. He even seemed to glare at me for a second or two as if he could not believe what I had just done. I pulled him upright, and the rain assaulted his shiny silver spokes with a sound like dimes being dropped through a slow-moving fan.
I glanced toward the patrol car, felt a sharp pain in my chest. From a distance the letters I had painted on the car’s beige body appeared black, black as a word drawn in tar or some foul putrescence from beyond the grave. The message I had left for Burt Baker seemed to scream at me as I crawled atop my bicycle.
KILLER.
KILLER.
KILLER.
With one last nervous glance toward the house—had the noises inside there finally ceased? I couldn’t be sure beneath the roar of the rain around me and my own frenetic heartbeat pounding like a bass drum in my skull—I pushed off down the driveway.
I had no idea where I was headed. I did not even bother to flee from the scene of my crime faster than the speed of light. Instead, I pedaled at a slow, almost leisurely pace back toward town.
It did not matter anymore.
Wherever I went, he would find me.
I felt numb. Resigned to my fate. And so, so tired.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
We passed through my sleeping hometown like phantoms in the night, and at some point it almost seemed as if Burner took over completely, slipping into autopilot mode as I hunched over him in a stunned daze.
I barely noticed how the sharp sting of the rain upon my flesh had eased off to a soft, chilly drizzle once we reached the town common, nor how the rain soon dissipated entirely by the time my feet left Burner’s pedals and we took a hard left off of Tenth Street into the parking lot of Trinity First Baptist Church.
Our momentum carried us up into the hillside cemetery behind the church. We came within an inch of crashing into a large white tombstone (D.H. BULLARD, read the name there, 1919-1974), but I jerked Burner’s handlebars to one side just in time.
Though I had not known—consciously, at least—where Burner and I planned to go, it appeared we had reached our destination at last.
I jumped off of my bicycle, eased him to the ground beside a mossy gray stone that said only FLYNN.
And I headed toward my father’s grave.
Behind me, the church was a monstrous black shape in the night. Its stained-glass windows resembled four giant, lifeless eyes watching me with a sort of drowsy, half-hearted interest. Off to my right, toward the westernmost edge of the cemetery, loomed the Snake River Woods, but I didn’t dare look their way. They were so, so dark—darker than anything I had ever seen—and I feared if I got too close or even glanced in their direction they might suck me into another evil dimension.
A single light-pole in the far corner of the church’s parking lot bathed the cemetery in its bright white glow. It buzzed faintly, like a dying housefly. Beneath it, the hundreds of tombstones sprawled about the hillside cast long, slender shadows on the wet green lawn like open graves hungry for new corpses.
Despite all the monster movies I had watched over the years with my big brother at the Lansdale Royal Drive-In, no matter how many times we had stayed up for Night of the Living Dead on the Late Show even though I knew it would give me nightmares, I was not afraid. I might have been visiting the cemetery in the middle of the day, for all such thoughts of wandering ghosts or maggoty hands bursting from the earth frightened me.
I did not fear creatures otherworldly or supernatural at all. No, ever since the night of August 5, I feared only what was real. What I knew could truly harm me.
My fellow man.
I welcomed the darkness, knew there was nothing that could hurt me in that place of the dead.
At last I had found sanctuary. If only for a little while.
For the first time in over a year, I knelt before my father’s grave, and as I did so I felt a strange sense of peace. As if I belonged there all along, had been shirking my duty, yet all was forgiven now.
SGT. DANIEL EMMETT MACKEY, SR., read Dad’s wide square tombstone. NOV. 1, 1936—APR. 17, 1970. Beneath that was an engraving of a purple heart flanked on either side by bronze and silver stars, and the words LOVING FATHER/DEDICATED PATRIOT.
A crooked bouquet of fake carnations sat at the head of Dad’s grave. Mom had left it there last Father’s Day, I was pretty sure. The flowers might have once been white, but
now they were drooping and brown.
I took a deep breath, bowed my head, and clasped my hands in front of me.
“Dad,” I said. “I’m here.”
Lightning flickered in the starless black sky, beyond the pasture on the other side of the cemetery. A short, basso cough of thunder echoed beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains.
I sniffled softly, ran one hand through the bright green grass atop my father’s grave, and remembered how I used to love to do that to Dad’s short brown hair when he was alive.
“I miss you, Daddy,” I said. My voice cracked. “I miss you so much.”
Crickets chirped in the pasture several feet away, and in that sound and the whisper of the soft autumn drizzle and the gentle sigh of the wind between the graves, I imagined I could hear my father’s reply…
He missed me too. A lot.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been to see you lately,” I said. “It’s just that…I don’t think you’re down there, you know? Buried under all this dirt and grass. I like to imagine you’re looking down on me, watching out for me all the time from a much better place than this.”
I peered heavenward, toward the infinite black dome of night above me. When thunder rumbled again, closer this time, I could feel it in my knees like a faint seismic tremor in the earth.
“I know I’ve probably disappointed you,” I went on. “I know I haven’t done the right thing. I should have. I know it could have all been over that next morning, after the Apple Gala, if I’d just taken Dan’s advice. But I messed up, Daddy. I was so, so scared. I messed up bad…and I’m sorry.”
I peered down at my trembling hands.
“It’s going to end,” I said. “Tonight. Isn’t it?”
Far off, in the distance, I could hear the blare of a train whistle. I wished I could jump aboard that train, and it would take me far away.
And that’s when I heard it.
As if on cue.
Something closer than the train.
The sound of a car engine. Nearby. Tires on wet pavement.
A vehicle, pulling into the church parking lot.