by Oak Anderson
But after her death, he began to think more seriously about the sacrifices his mother made for him, which included marrying a man like Brad because she wanted to make sure her son was taken care of, and staying with him in spite of his cheating and mental abuse for the same reason.
In his mind, Charlie’s mother was a hero, and heroes did not act in a cowardly fashion.
Charlie couldn’t even consider her demise self-inflicted. For a time he described it as an assisted suicide, but that gave Brad too much credit. Assistance sounded like there was something positive in what he’d done.
So Charlie settled on murder.
As far as he was concerned, his stepfather had murdered his mother.
And that was how the seeds of TOWY began to form in his mind. Out of grief and anger and his own warped sense of his mother, who, like most parents, was neither saint nor sinner, just a woman who tried to do her best for her child. Even her prescription drug abuse became, in the mind of her son, an act of nobility.
The worldwide TOWY movement began because Charlie fervently wished that his mother had thought of one more thing, one more heroic act, to take his stepfather with her.
Sometimes he dreamed of the day his mother died. In his dreams, Charlie wasn’t stopped for speeding mere minutes from his house. He wasn’t held up for those crucial moments. In this dream, he always arrived just as she stepped off the stool, and he would rush in to catch her. She would cry and hug him, and then Charlie would cut her down with a knife that always seemed to appear in his hand, and the two of them would leave the house and never return.
It was a nice dream, a sweet dream, but he never felt satisfied when he woke up. There was no residual good feeling at all, even for a moment. Not because he knew it wasn’t real, but because it did not satisfy his need for revenge.
The dream that haunted his thoughts was a dream that he wanted to have. A dream he laid awake at night imagining in the hopes he could will it into being.
In this dream his mother did not live, however. In this dream his mother still committed suicide, but first she killed her husband.
She took Brad with her.
It was a dream that Charlie so desperately wanted to experience, even once, but which never came. Since his mother would still be dead when he awoke, Charlie saw no need for a nice dream to mock his reality. He preferred a nasty, darker dream, something that could give him a taste of what he needed.
Something that would give him the courage to kill Brad.
That was the real reason he never breached the wall he’d built between himself and Sarah after his mother’s death. Sure, he had blamed her for insisting they meet that fateful night, but his anger at Sarah had faded within hours. He knew his mother would have just chosen another day when he wasn’t home. After all, it only took minutes for her to die. She could have even killed herself when he was online in the next room and he never would have known until it was too late.
The real reason he cut off all communication from Sarah was because he knew she would talk him out of what he planned to do.
Soclairebear became his confidant. He was still resentful of Sarah, but that was something, deep down, he knew was illogical. But he kept it alive to keep himself from contacting her. To stay focused. He needed the illusion to stoke the fires of revenge in his heart. He was like a blacksmith holding tongs in the fire, waiting for the right temperature so he could pound and shape the iron into his weapon of choice.
Charlie would never stop hating Brad, but he couldn’t quite manage the strength to kill him, either. He was getting a taste of what had torn his mother apart, a feeling of helplessness.
Ironically, it wasclairebear, a girl who had earlier seemed to him the epitome of weakness, of depression unfettered by will, who both gave Charlie the courage to kill and prevented him from using it.
She also brought Charlie and Sarah back together, in a way. clairebear and the one who would come to be called the Pioneer did.
***
JT discovered completely by accident that the little old man he knew as Mister Tee, short for Mister Thomas, was actually Rodrigo Umberto Espinosa, also known as El Culo de Arica, also known as the Asshole of Arica. And even if he had known, JT probably would not have had the strength to do what he did, except for a transcontinental phone call that the old man himself had insisted on.
Each morning, Mister Tee was waiting when JT unlocked the doors to the pool room, which was actually more of an enormous lanai that covered the Olympic-style lap pool in which the old man swam.
On the one morning that he was late unlocking the pool, Mister Tee took notice, and JT told him the reason had been a call from the tiny hospital in Spain where his maternal grandmother lived. Her health had taken a turn and JT had spoken only with her caregiver, but the old man wanted to hear all about it.
JT, who had a good relationship with everyone at the club and looked at the older members almost like family elders, was eager to share. He had only recently reconnected with his grandmother, an early widow who’d left for Europe with a wealthy suitor many years before the death of her only daughter, JT’s mother.
JT had discovered his illness about a year before they reconnected, and his symptoms had rapidly worsened. He’d gone through months of panic attacks and irrational fears, dealing with sleepless, sweaty nights with the alarm clock his only salvation.
Recently he’d been hallucinating quite a bit, which made him think more and more of his father and the stories he’d told of his grandfather, who had died with the reputation of mental illness instead of the sickness which had finally overtaken him.
JT could only imagine what it must have been like for someone who went through such turmoil without a diagnosis, as his grandfather did. He also gained new respect for his father, who was spared the genetic malady, but would be waylaid by a much more common enemy of their people, alcohol. As far back as he could remember, his father had been described as a crazy drunk, even by his own relatives, but his old man had always been steadfast in his defense of his father.
“He warn’t crazy, son,” his dad would say, “just bad spirits,” which JT always thought was his dad’s way of saying that JT’s grandfather was also fond of the bottle, but hadn’t been so sure. More and more, JT had seen spirits in the night, hallucinations like the ones he imagined had tormented his grandfather. He dreaded that he would be completely overtaken by them.
JT didn’t want to see anything like that in the light of day.
One night he was visited by the spirit brothers Iktomi and Iya, the shape-shifting trickster and his younger sibling, whose stories JT had heard as a boy.
“Jesus,” Iktomi screeched, “Jesus Two Bears!”
The spirit spread out his arms, which became eight, and his little brother Iya appeared from his loins and sliced a razor-thin finger lengthwise along the flesh of each of his brother’s limbs, releasing the bloody veins like flags unfurled on a windy day.
At the end of each vein was a tiny version of JT, hanging from a noose and laughing and dancing like a crazed marionette. Blood flowed from each tiny eye, which Iya happily sucked through a straw.
JT tried to scream himself awake, but he was not sleeping. He simply had to endure this and other hallucinations as a prisoner of his rapidly deteriorating mind.
Soon he would sleep less and less, eventually remaining awake for weeks or even months, after which the final stage would deliver dementia and death to his doorstep.
Faced with his mortality, he had been thinking more and more of ending his life. JT had no family left that he knew of besides his maternal grandmother, and he had not seen her for many years, not even when his mother died. He was well-liked by the members of the country club, but he had been a drifter for years and so had a loner’s mentality, acquiring not so much friends as many useful acquaintances.
JT had no allusions that he would be missed, but the thought of descending into madness as his grandfather had done bothered him a great deal.
&n
bsp; He found suicide a complicated issue, however. Historically the Native community had a high rate of suicide that the elders believed were tied to the historic loss of lands and the slow erosion of their heritage and traditions, and which the younger generation saw as poverty on the reservations and the resulting lack of opportunity. JT had always been proud of the fact that he had risen above his circumstances, and his mother, in particular, had always encouraged him not to be bound by such things. He knew the idea of suicide would disappoint her spirit, and leave his to walk the earth wailing until the date of his natural death arrived.
At least that was what his mother believed.
After her death, his father’s friends held a ceremony to wipe away the tears, as they had for his dad, followed by a good sweat, during which Jesus’ dad had seen his first vision in the small wood and rock structure buried halfway below ground.
He saw the face of his father across the steaming rocks. Once again, he told his son the story of his grandfather’s bravery at Wounded Knee.
As he reached the climax of the tale, his father’s face morphed into that of Iktomi, who repeated the words his father had so often used as both admonishment and encouragement. “Take your stand, boy,” he said. “Look it in the eye, and take your stand.”
“It”, of course, had been the 7th Cavalry to his ancestors at Wounded Knee, the U.S. Marshals to his grandfather at the same location, and the bottle to his father, wherever he happened to be at the time.
Evil was many things to many people.
But Jesus Two Bears could not bring himself to do it, if ‘it’ referred to suicide. He could not dishonor the memory of his parents and grandparents in such a way.
And that was how he came to search for his grandmother, an old woman with Alzheimer’s living in a tiny hospital-clinic in Spain, who would eventually lead the entire world to the Asshole of Arica.
1 MONTH AFTER TOWY WEBSITE
Fax Details (from top): To: Det. Thane Parks, From: S. Harrison, (Fax # illegible), Re: Accident Rpt. 3765213 Williamson Melissa, *Do not redistribute, Comments: Attached as per request. Coroners pic from scene. Note – left portion of tattoo missing due to avulsion trauma. Higher res unavailable, but can send color if needed.
Chapter Nine
Melissa thought both of them were acting like children.
She had met Charlie first and then Sarah, although “met” was always a weird way to describe any online relationship, at least the way she conducted them.
It was always one way or no way.
If she had thought about it on a conscious level, she might have realized that she was looking for another Claire, someone to tell her exactly what to do at exactly the right time, but as it was, no one ever got enough information out of her to even begin to address what was bothering her. She would never again let anyone close to her.
Melissa was like a sponge that never dried up or allowed evaporation, sucking up the pain of others but never releasing her own. She just wanted it all to be over. In the river of life, she was treading water as she floated downstream, praying her limbs would give out and she would find blessed release.
But she found something, a bit of hope, maybe, in Charlie.
Both of them knew that she had lost a sister, but the details were never divulged outside of her being murdered. It was as if the tiny part of Claire that still lived inside her was too fragile to be exposed even for a moment, lest she be lost in the wind like a statue made of dust.
And because no details were offered, all advice and counsel was rendered meaningless platitudes, which were Melissa’s only comfort.
She had constructed for herself a fortress of pain, and ironically, she needed help maintaining her isolation. Charlie and Sarah provided that. Anything more was anathema to the memory of her sister. So she used them, used their obvious compassion, to assist in her self-imposed confinement.
Had she not had their contact, Melissa knew she would go mad from the depression, and madness would not allow her to feel the agony she needed to experience.
The pain she deserved.
When she and her sister were young, waiting for a family who would accept both of them into their home, Claire and Melissa would play a little game. They would sit at whatever window was available at whatever time it was free of prying eyes, and they would wait for their Bandit.
Bandit had been a puppy owned by the cook at the group home they were sent to immediately following the death of their parents. He was such a happy little dog that the woman began to bring him to work with her, in the hopes it might cheer up the two new girls, who were frightened and inconsolable.
The cook would arrive at the home every day six o’clock on the dot, and little Bandit would tumble out of her old beater station wagon and onto the gravel driveway, following her into the kitchen. The other children there were singles, and the young ones went to families fast. The older ones were generally sullen and angry and uninterested in the cook and her little rat dog, and so Claire and Melissa had the pup mostly to themselves.
They would wake up early every morning to wait for the sight of that dog, play with it as much as they were allowed between chores and lessons, and then watch again in the evening when it would follow its owner out the door at six.
Once they left the home for their first foster family, and throughout their time between and with others, whenever Melissa got depressed, Claire would make her sit by the window to wait for her Bandit, which might end up being anything from a shooting star to the mailman to the backfire of a neighbor’s car.
Whatever it was, they would both know it, and then they would look at each other and giggle. Melissa caught on pretty quickly that it was just a game of concentration. If she was waiting for something to happen, eventually something would. And as she waited, whatever sadness she was feeling would dissipate, at least for a time.
Until the next Bandit.
Neither Sarah nor Charlie was her Bandit, but rather they served as her Claire, or at least a shadow of her sister. They were her reminder that a Bandit was coming, that a Bandit was always on its way, whether it was a shooting star or a mailman or the backfire of a car or a motorcycle, eventually her pain would be relieved.
Charlie and Sarah never knew until later that Melissa had been communicating with them both during their estrangement, though they might have assumed so. She had no inclination to be some kind of mediator; it was obvious they would end up together because they were so clearly in love.
Even online and in er stupor, she could discern that. But her interest was not in their personal lives. The truth was, she couldn’t have cared less about their problems or their lives. All human feeling had died in her. With her sister.
Melissa was mostly just killing time until she found the guts to kill herself. Her online friend Charlie told her that one day, she would snap out of it. He assured her that she would experience something or meet someone who would change everything, although wishing his mother took Brad intrigued her, mostly.
And then she “met” Jesus Two Bears.
***
After speaking with his doctor, a very compassionate man to whom he was referred after several others had failed to diagnose his disease, JT was convinced to seek out his grandmother. In reality, his physician thought the search might help take his patient’s mind off suicide, which he was clearly considering even though JT had not come right out and said so.
From what the doctor was told by JT, his grandmother had disappeared overseas years ago, and it might take him some time to find her. The doctor, an elderly man nearing his retirement, had a lot of experience over the course of his career with the terminally ill, and if there was one thing they all could use, it was time and something worthwhile to occupy it.
But JT had found her almost immediately. She was as crazy as a rabid bat and twice as irascible, but she remembered everything from thirty years ago as clear as if it happened yesterday.
JT was able to communicate with her via email, and sp
ent hours writing long, involved missives to her, to which she would often respond with a single sentence which didn’t reveal whether or not she’d understood a word he’d written, or even read it. He was sure that her caregiver was unenthusiastically responding on her behalf most times.
He wasn’t even convinced that she understood who he was until he mentioned the story of his name, and then she replied with a message that was written in such a way that it might have been a transcript of his mother’s version he had been so familiar with. It amazed him, and gave him some hope that she might understand who he actually was.
She became his quest, his reason to get up in the morning, his excuse to go on living even as he felt like he was slowly becoming as dotty as she was. She gradually warmed to him, although he still wasn’t entirely sure how much she understood, and sometimes her caregiver would write to tell him she was doing poorly or unable to sit up at the computer. He would send her a little note each day, sometimes for weeks on end, until she would finally respond and then they would continue their electronic correspondence.
Sometimes it seemed to JT that as he declined, she became a little more lucid in their exchanges, but it may have been his mind playing tricks on him.
He called to speak to her only once but it went badly, and she didn’t return his emails for weeks. He worried that the tenuous connection had been irreparably damaged, but then one day she emailed him with a sweet story about his mother, and their relationship continued.
It wasn’t until he suddenly lost consciousness at the country club that he tried to call her again, goaded by El Culo de Arica.
***
JT had been feeling weaker lately, sleeping less and less, with his visions becoming more terrifying. The spirit brothers were arguing over him in these hallucinations, sometimes pulling him back and forth like a ghostly tug-of-war. Often he woke up the neighbors, none of whom knew his condition, and there was talk around the building he would be asked to leave his little studio apartment.