Take One With You

by Oak Anderson

  When he released his son, there were tears in Jim’s eyes, something Charlie had never before witnessed, not even when his grandfather died, and at first he was even more scared and unsure than before.

  But his father smiled that Jim Sanderson smile that so melted the heart of his wife and amused the grocery store checkers, and Charlie smiled back, and that was that. It was a moment they shared and seemed to understand without any more discussion, and Charlie went back to his room.

  He went to sleep that night as happy as he had ever been, but he would end up haunted by those last words to his father for the rest of his life.

  Charlie woke up early the next morning. He could see kitty-corner across the hall into his parents’ bedroom. His dad had rolled out of bed again, and was fast asleep on the floor. Jim had gained a little weight during the last year, and usually snored like a truck driver, but that fact didn’t register with Charlie at all, and he went back to sleep for another twenty minutes.

  When he woke up, it was to the smell of bacon in the kitchen, and he padded out of his room and into the hall, where he could see his father was still sleeping in the same position as before.

  Something didn’t seem quite right, so Charlie went to where his father lay and touched his shoulder.

  “Daddy, time to get up.”

  There was no response. His father was lying on his side, facing away from Charlie, so Charlie reached again for his father’s shoulder and this time he shook him. Jim Sanderson rolled over, and his face was very dark.

  The curtains were drawn, so Charlie flipped the light switch and turned back to his father. His skin looked blue, with lips an even darker, almost purple tint.

  Still, Charlie was not fully aware of what had happened. It did not register to this highly intelligent boy of eleven that something momentous had occurred, something that would deeply affect him and alter the course of his life. All he knew was that, in his words to his mother, “Daddy won’t wake up.”

  His mother was sitting in the chair she had slept in, reading the morning newspaper. When she looked into the eyes of her son, that was when Charlie knew his father was dead. He could tell by her eyes.

  His mother jumped up and went to the back of the house, followed by her only child, and the two of them shared a moment no mother and son, or anyone, should ever have to share.

  They looked down at the corpse of their husband and father.

  “Call 9-1-1,” she said, and sank to her knees, trying some crazy television version of CPR, to no avail. She was not crying, just working feverishly. Anne Sanderson was not generally one for histrionics. She was a doer, someone who saw a task to be performed and did what had to be done.

  It was the words of her son from the hall that finally caused her to break down.

  “My daddy’s dead,” Charlie said into the phone, as positive of that fact as he’d ever been of anything.

  Anne burst into tears and ran to the phone.

  “Please send an ambulance!” she yelled, and gave them the information they needed. As frantic as she sounded, she knew, as did her son, that there was no more need for CPR.

  She left the line open and made the attempt as instructed, however, more out of duty than hope, until finally she told Charlie to hang up and help her move his father.

  “What?”

  “Help me move him,” she said, and Charlie didn’t question her again. The two of them each took an arm, and dragged his body out of the bedroom, down a short expanse of hall, through the kitchen, where the smell of bacon still filled the air, and into the living room, finally laying him beside the chair in which Anne had slept the previous night.

  It was not a long distance, probably less than thirty feet, but it seemed to take forever, and several times Charlie had to stop, each time carefully putting one hand beneath his father’s head so that it wouldn’t bump against the floor. Then the two of them would straighten up, breathing hard, never looking directly at each other or the deceased, and somehow sensed when it was time to continue.

  Charlie never asked his mother why she insisted the body be moved before the paramedics arrived; his thoughts were more on blaming himself for going back to sleep after first seeing his father on the floor.

  The funeral was much as those things go, a blur of emotion and tears and relatives with food and awkward neighbors. There was a freshly stained wooden box sent from Jim’s work containing a special bible, with a small insurance policy that enabled Anne to buy Charlie a computer, which changed the trajectory of his life, and the lives of a great many people afterwards, though not in the way that Charlie, or anyone, could have possibly imagined.

  Charlie grew his hair long and became a handsome young man, a real head-turner, but he never quite escaped that inner lonely child, and thus lost himself in an online world, much as other kids do but not at all for the same reasons.

  He and his mother became even closer after that, and were almost like best friends, at least until she met Brad, which was when everything really started to fall apart.

  Brad owned what Charlie assumed was a shady insurance business, and he was slick and handsome and rich, everything his father was not, and it broke Charlie’s heart when his mother took him aside and told him that they were to be married. Somehow that moment would be just as clear in his memory as the moment he saw the look in his mother’s eyes the morning his daddy wouldn’t wake up, and that only made him hate his stepfather more.

  It was almost as if his mother had given up, held out as long as she could until her son could fend for himself, and at last decided, at seventeen, that Charlie would be okay if she took a husband.

  It was not long after the wedding, that, still filled with fresh hatred and resentment he could never share, Charlie found a forum to vent his feelings.

  The person he found to listen, or read what he had to say, was someone else who needed a virtual shoulder, a girl whose real name Charlienever knew until much later, who went by the screen name ofclairebear.

  Chapter Three

  No one would have ever guessed by looking at him that the little old man with the shy smile who spoke in the soft, cultured tones of a world traveler had once ordered the deaths of several dozen illiterate villagers deep in the jungles of Peru on little more than a whim, and worse. Nor would they have imagined that same man, at his advanced age, could have helped spark a global epidemic of bizarre homicides the likes of which the world had never seen.

  Rodney Oscar Thomas, Mister Tee to those on staff at the Williamsburg Country Club with a sense of humor, which seemed to be restricted to those whose wages were earned hourly, was a genial old fellow who inspired no more fear in those he met than your average newborn kitten.

  He was odd but amusing; seemingly harmless. But when his sordid past came to light in the months to come, his true nature would shock the world.

  He was Chilean by birth, but adopted into a Peruvian family at the age of three after his father killed his mother in a fit of rage subsequent to his discovery of her in bed with his neighbor and his neighbor’s wife and his neighbor’s wife’s sister. It was never known why the cuckold left the other members of the orgiastic enterprise alone, but the murderer was gone before his wife was cold and later presumed dead himself. The mountains into which he fled in the middle of winter were particularly inhospitable to those in such a rush to explore them that they would leave behind their coat.

  TOWY Zero, as he would come to be called in the media some eighty years after his birth, was handed over to wealthy relatives of the man who’d last enjoyed the fruits of his poor mother and given the name Rodrigo Umberto Espinosa, as well as an upbringing as fine as could be hoped for in that part of the world in the years after the Great Depression and before World War II.

  Chile was particularly hard hit economically, and little Rodrigo’s new family was soon split up, with the boy sent to Lima, Peru to live with an uncle from his adopted family whose position in the military meant discipline and a better life than his adopt
ive parents could have ever hoped to provide in the port city of Arica.

  He was later enrolled in military school and soon impressed both his uncle and instructors with his intelligence, fine marksmanship, and exceptional leadership abilities.

  In his spare time the boy read and studied and mostly kept to himself, except for excursions into the Andean hills to capture and torture to death small animals, eventually working his way up to a nameless younger child he’d managed to lure away from one of the poor neighborhoods near downtown.

  Rodrigo also was quite skilled at keeping secrets.

  It was years later, as a Lieutenant General battling the terrorist group Shining Path under the direction of President Fujimori, that all of little Rodrigo’s skills finally came together. He was now known as a particularly ruthless purveyor of punishment upon those who ran afoul of his superiors, and seemed to almost enjoy the suffering of his enemies, whether actual or imagined.

  The rise of Shining Path in the 80’s and Fujimori’s death squads in the early 90’s was just an example, as Rodrigo saw it, of being in the right place at the right time.

  It was not long after Rodrigo led a small, secretive offshoot of Grupo Colina into the mountains in search of two suspected terrorists who were never found, slaughtering villagers on the way, that two truck bombs went off on Tarata Street in Lima, an upscale district of the city.

  As a result, El Culo de Arica, as he was now informally known to both the men under his command and the terrorists he was assigned to kill, was unleashed with a vengeance.

  He liked his nickname better in English, which he spoke fluently and with almost no accent. The Asshole of Arica just had that alliterative flair, and some even thought he had come up with it himself since, given his background, he would have been the only person to know the city of his birth, but what no one ever questioned was its legitimacy.

  Rodrigo had indeed grown up to be an asshole. What he had still managed to hide from the world was the fact that he was also a sociopath.

  Until La Cantuta Massacre.

  Less than seventy-two hours after the bombings, Rodrigo and his men burst into a dormitory at the Enrique Guzmán y Valle National Education University, also known as La Cantuta, and kidnapped nine students and a teacher.

  None of the abductees were ever heard from again.

  Even his men were shocked at what they were ordered to do, but to the Asshole of Arica, information and interrogation seemed beside the point. Of course everyone knew the students had to die, but the manner of their demise was so terrifically gruesome that two of his men actually refused to continue and were immediately shot in the head by the Asshole himself, who then ordered the others to continue the grisly torture for his own amusement.

  They did as they were told.

  In the years after the prosecutions and the amnesty and then the repeal of the amnesty, two more of the soldiers involved “committed suicide” and the others somehow never told anyone how, after his men had interrogated and tortured the students, the Asshole of Arica had methodically sliced open one of them as he writhed in pain and fed the innards to his friend, suffocating him in the process, just as he’d done to the animals in the forest as a boy.

  Even the president of Peru eventually went to jail as a result of the massacre, but few of the men there ever spoke of what they’d seen to anyone, being either too frightened or too certain they would not be believed, or both.

  Rodrigo himself managed to publicly feign outrage at the massacre, even appearing to be on the side of justice, which led to death threats and his forced emigration, something he’d hoped for all along.

  He was able to leave the country just before the release of damning documents released by a group of anonymous military officers, changing his name and appearance and, for all intents and purposes, ceasing to exist in terms of his adopted country’s war on terrorism.

  That was something even the men who witnessed his atrocities could not have possibly imagined, but as is sometimes the case with such things, the powers that be had bigger fish to fry.

  Rodrigo Umberto Espinosa had become a ghost.

  He traveled through life from Chile to Peru to Argentina to America, occasionally indulging in his dark pastime, but he was always very clever and very careful and was never really bothered or even paid much mind by others, despite the monster that he was. So when he found himself a member of the Williamsburg Country Club, where all anyone ever saw was a sweet old man who smiled and tipped well and swam early each morning, mostly before any other club members had arrived, it was simply the expected penultimate chapter of the darkly charmed life to which he had grown accustomed.

  What he did not know, nor could have even imagined, was that there was one other person who would soon know his secret, and that person would rouse his inner monster once more.

  ***

  To say Jesus Two Bears was a young man of mixed descent was like saying El Culo de Arica was an old man with a secret. Both were grand and sweeping understatements truly appreciated only by their subjects.

  JT, as he preferred to be called, was born to a Lakota Sioux father and a Yaqui-Mexican mother in the back of a Volkswagen camper parked in a lot which served both the Catholic church to the north and a dive bar to the east, just off Road No. 1 in the tiny town of Pantisuth, MI.

  A clinic and nurse practitioner’s office on the other side of the store and church, respectively, were both locked up and dark for reasons never quite understood beyond the fact that it was the night before Christmas Eve, which wasn’t a holiday even to the local Catholics.

  JT’s father always told his son that he was named after his grandfather who had been involved in the incident at Wounded Knee and gone stark raving mad, but his mother told a completely different story.

  “I was hurtin’ pretty bad, but your pops was so damn drunk I did’n trust him to drive around and find a hospital. He was nervous, y’see, cause you was our first. So’s I kept makin’ him go check that clinic to see if anyone come ‘round, but in between was that booze bar, and you know your daddy.”

  At that point in the story JT would always laugh, more out of respect than anything else. He’d probably heard the story a hundred different times. His mother always enjoyed talking about his father after he passed, said it made her feel close to him, and whenever he had the chance to make his mother happy, JT took it.

  “So’s I was screamin’ bloody murder, jus’ cussin’ him a blue streak, and he’d leave me alone and go check the clinic. But we both knew what your father was doin’.”

  “I knew, mama?” he’d ask, as he always did.

  “Oh, you knew, son,” she’d cackle, reflexively rubbing her belly. “Trus’ me, you knew.”

  What it boiled down to was the last time he came back to the camper, his father’s face was as white as the snow on the ground outside, and he began frantically searching for the keys so he could drive away.

  “What’choo doin’ you dumb sonuvabitch?” his wife screamed.

  “They’s after me!” he shouted back. “Couple of big ‘uns!”

  “What the fuck you talkin’ about you crazy bastard?”

  JT’s mother swore like a sailor even then, a habit that never diminished with age.

  “Bears!” his father screamed. “Jesus!”

  The entire camper went quiet then, as if the air had suddenly been sucked out of it like a punctured balloon. JT’s father was nearly weeping, trying to find his keys, and his mother, who was very close to giving birth, was suddenly unsure if what her husband said was complete bullshit from the bottle, or actually true. It was a fairly remote area and bears were certainly not outside the realm of possibility.

  “Then there’s this scratchin’ at the door,” she whispered, like an old fabler across a campfire.

  At this point in the story, JT’s eyes usually grew wide, not out of artifice, but because he would by then be genuinely entranced by the story. His mother should have been an actress.

  “Yo
ur father turns to me, his face like death itself, and then…wham! The door flies open!”

  JT always jumped when she whammed him. Even though he knew it was coming, he couldn’t help but flinch.

  “And sonuvabitch if it wasn’t a bear!” she laughed. “Only it was really just a doctor from the clinic all dressed up in his big winter coat an’ hat.”

  They always laughed together at that point, a little sadly, as the end of the story was close and always a little melancholy.

  “You came out so nice and easy your father hadn’t even sobered up when they put you in his arms. He named you Two Bears ‘cause of those two big ‘uns he thought he saw, not your grandfather. And not only was there not two bears, there wasn’t even two doctors. Your pops was just so damn drunk he was seein’ double.”

  JT and his mother would laugh again, this time a little less enthusiastically, and then his mother would end the story.

  “He kept askin’ an’ askin’ where the other doctor was so he could thank him, too, so the one what found us finally borrowed a pair of glasses from the nurse and pretended to be the other bear.”

  His father died in their home on the Pine Ridge Rez at the southern edge of the South Dakota Badlands, not far from Wounded Knee, where he swore to his dying breath that JT’s grandfather had taken a stand against evil in the world.

  “I ‘spect the same from you, son.”

  Those were the last words JT ever heard his father say. He was thirteen years-old.

  JT’s mother lived all the way until his sixteenth birthday, at which time he could finally take to the road and see what the world had to offer him, but it was, in the end, his grandfather who finally caught up to him to make sure he’d take the stand against evil his own father had always implored.

  JT bummed around the country for over a year before ending up in a sweat lodge with two wealthy Anglos who liked the nice, polite kid with the great story about his name, and who just happened to be members of a country club that was looking to hire a new pool attendant.