by Andrew Pyper
He didn't answer, didn't move.
We're going to have quite a time.
The coach stood across the room, in the same place where the boy had stood over the body on the bed. In the dim light, his degradation was fully visible: soiled pants, running nose, the beginnings of grey beard. And he was wearing lipstick. A smearing of rosy red extended beyond the lines of his thin lips, yet still carefully applied, a drawn mouth of female wantonness, all curves and pucker. It was the lipstick colour Heather wore—no, it was Heather's. Taken from her before she died, before the coach left her in the cellar.
He looked terribly afraid.
Isn't he pretty? Go on. Give him a kiss.
"You have to go," the coach said, his voice raw from laughter. Laughter, I could see now, he'd been forced to perform.
"Not without you," Carl said.
"You'll die if you stay."
"Nobody's dying here."
"Too late." The coach showed his teeth again in that not-smile of his.
"Come with us," I said.
"I can't leave now."
"Why?"
"If you're here long enough—if you listen—he won't let you."
"There's nobody here but us. It's just an empty house."
"No such thing as an empty house."
That's when the coach raised the gun. It had been in his hand the whole time, but it hung so loose, aimed at nothing but the dust bunnies at his feet, that we hadn't noticed it. He brought it level to his waist. Aimed it at us.
"He told me to hurt you," he said.
The coach stuck the index finger of his left hand in his ear, as though blocking out the sound of a passing siren. And with his right hand he raised the revolver. Screwed the end of its barrel into the other ear.
"But I'm not listening anymore."
Carl started toward him first. And though I couldn't see his regret, his wish to fix what he'd been a part in breaking, his already enveloping grief, I knew that it was in Carl as much as it was in me, and that the coach saw it in both of us. Because, right at the end, he was his real self again. Not the boy's taiking dummy, but our guardian. Fighting off the voice so loud in his head we could hear it too—Wait! Not yet! You don't want to be alone in here, do you? Don't you want to keep your boys close?—to push the revolver's barrel a half-inch deeper into his skull and pull the trigger.
* * *
[13]
At first, what is even stranger than seeing that it is Carl descending the stairs of the Thurman house and passing between us is the way he simply turns the bolt lock on the front door, pulls it open and steps out onto the porch.
"I never knew you could open that thing," Randy says. "I never knew you could just walk out."
Tracey tried to, I think. But the house wouldn't let her. From the threshold we peer out over a front lawn carpeted in leaves midway through their transformation from brittle yellows and oranges to black custard. And Carl squishing his boot prints into them as he walks to the sidewalk, where he faces us. Slips his hands into the pockets of his jeans and shudders at the night's chill.
"You faggots coming or not?" he says.
We follow him, equalling his brisk pace but not quite catching up. He stops at the railway tracks that cross Caledonia and starts left, crunching over the gravel that aprons the long, steel tongues. It is as it was before: Carl leading us into some nighttime adventure, a bit of badness we trusted him to guide us through, even if we knew it was not entirely safe. Driving too fast in his dad's LTD II with the headlights off Vandalism. Trespassing. Smoking homegrown possibly sprayed, he said, with angel dust or PCP or acid, evil-sounding supplements whose potential harms we had no clue of but did not ask about before inhaling.
In fact this was one of the places, hidden within the web of metal struts that buttress the tracks over our heads, the traffic of Erie Street passing in a tidal wash thirty feet below, where we would gather to smoke or pass one of Randy's father's Hustlers between ourselves. (I have just now the memory of a twelve- year-old Ben studying one of the centrefolds and, pointing at the complicated mechanics of the model's upturned hips, asking, "Does the pee come out there, or there, or there?" and none of us certain of the answer.) What's different is that, unlike then, it is now something of a struggle—and not only for me—to crabwalk up the cement slope of the trestle and into the weeds that have pushed through the cracks. By the time the three of us have found positions where there is limited risk of our sliding down onto the pavement below, we are panting like dogs.
"I hope your feelings won't be hurt," Carl says eventually, "if I say that you both look like hell."
"Funny thing to say. Coming from you," Randy says.
"But I'm the junkie, remember? I'm not even supposed to be alive."
"That's your excuse?"
"That and the fact I've gone three days without a shower."
"So we smelled."
If I didn't know better, I'd say Carl was the actor among us, not Randy. Of course Carl would be up for different parts: the mob hitman, the craggy roughneck, the retired boxer looking for one last bout to redeem himself There is the aura of brutal experience about Carl that would be useful to the camera. He is lean too, his face pulled back over hard cheekbones and chin. The years, however harsh, have left him with a mournful handsomeness.
"That was you at the Old Grove, wasn't it?"
"Hello to you too, Trev."
"I saw you."
"You think I'd miss Ben's funeral?"
"That's what we were betting."
"Well, I was there."
"But you were hiding."
Carl doesn't flinch at this. As though he hadn't heard it at all. "I came as soon as I heard."
"How did you hear?"
"You left a message. It went down the line of some people I know. And when I got it, I called in some favours and got enough money to get a standby ticket."
"You took a flight?"
"From out west."
"Where out west?"
Carl grinds his teeth. "You sound like a cop."
"I just think it's strange, the way you've turned up."
"You mean me being in the house?"
"Yeah."
"You were there too, weren't you?"
I let this go for the moment. "Why did you run? When I saw you at the cemetery?"
"I didn't want you to see me."
"Why not?"
"I came for Ben. To say goodbye. That's all I had the strength for."
"And spending five minutes with me and Randy would have been too much for you? Saying hello might have tired you out?"
Carl scratches his ankles. He's not wearing socks, and the skin is blue from cold. "You sound angry, Trev."
Below us, another eighteen-wheeler hauling pigs to the slaughterhouse in Exeter wheels by, and I have to wait for the echoes of its shifting gears to dissipate before speaking again.
"Where's Tracey Flanagan?"
"I heard she's missing. That's it."
"Is she in the house?"
"What?"
"Did you see her?"
Did you hurt her? I want to ask. Were those your hands that pulled her back into the dark?
"I didn't see anybody."
"Because that's why we were in there. We were looking for her."
"Good for you."
"So you don't know anything about it?"
Carl places his hands on his knees. Shows us the dirty fingernails. The pale knuckles.
"If you want to accuse me of something, say it so I can walk over to where you're sitting and stick my fist down your throat," he says. "But if you're just a little worked up, if those shakes of yours have eaten away at your brain and twisted the wires in the part that tells you when it's time to calm the fuck down, then I'm ready to forgive you. Which is it?"
"It's Parkinson's. And if you talk about it again the way you just did, I'll be the one to take some of your teeth out the hard way Understand?"
Carl starts over toward me. But when he gets
within range of my trembling, cross-legged self, instead of throwing a punch as I—and a stiffened Randy—expect, he places his hand against the side of my neck.
"Look at us," he says. "A pair of grey-haired geezers."
"I tried to fight it, then I tried to ignore it. Nothing worked."
"Me, I tried to end it," he says. "That didn't work either." He spits a thick gob and watches the white foam snake down the concrete away from our feet. Then he elbows me in the ribs.
"I'm still waiting for you to tell us," Randy says directly to Carl.
"Tell you what?"
"Why you were in that house."
Carl climbs up onto one of the steel struts and sits on it, perched with his legs swinging beneath him.
"You own a nightclub or something, right, Trev?"
"Used to."
"Get a nice price?"
"My real estate agent is still sending me flowers."
"There you go. Even Randy here has been working. I saw you in that Rug Rubber ad a few months back."
"You saw that?" Randy says, clearly touched.
"You were dressed up in fur or something?"
"A dust bunny."
"Yeah! And then this giant worm—"
"The Rug Rubber."
"It ate you."
"More like it sucked me."
"That's right! You were good, man."
"What's your point here?" I ask.
"My point is I don't have any money. And not just 'I'm a little short this month,' but nothing.'''' With the departure of his smile he grows instantly thinner. "My plan was to come into town, pay my respects to Ben and get out on the train that night. It was pretty much all I could afford to do anyway."
"But you didn't go."
"No."
"Why not?"
Carl is standing now. He'd like to pace, but the slope of the trestle makes it too difficult, and he is left bent over at the waist, shuffling under the girders.
"I haven't used in over six months," he says. "It's been hard. The hardest thing I've ever done. But I've been clean for longer than a week for the first time since I was thirteen years old, and it feels good. I'm actually proud of myself, know what I mean? Then I come here. And as soon as I get off the train I can hear his voice. The boy's voice. Telling me to do things."
"Like what?"
"Give in. To go out and cop a rock, fuck myself up. He wanted to see me fail. No, not even that." Carl wipes the back of his hand under his nose. "What he really wanted was to watch me die."
"It didn't work," Randy says.
"But it almost did. The first night I'm here and I'm calling up some guys I know, asking who's dealing in Grimshaw these days. Less than an hour after they put Ben down in the ground and I've got a loaded crack pipe in my hand, sitting on a bed out at the Swiss Cottage, where they've given me the off-season special, telling myself that if I smoke this shit, if I go back to that life, it'll kill me."
I don't want to ask this, but I do. "Did you light it?"
"I wanted to. The voice was telling me to. The boy was saying how my life was never worth much anyway, so why not enjoy myself a little before joining my old buddy Ben for a nice, long dirt nap. I came close about seven thousand times over the next day and a half. But no, I didn't."
"You could have come to us," Randy starts. "We would—"
"I know you would have helped, Randy. Or tried. I know you both would. That's why I came to look for you tonight."
"You looked for us in the Thurman house?" I ask.
"Over the nights I stayed at the Swiss Cottage, I'd go for walks around town. One way or another I'd always end up at the bottom of Caledonia Street, keeping away from the streetlights, looking at that fucking house. And then I saw Trev going into the McAuliffes'. Figured that's where you were staying. So that's where I headed first tonight, to see if you were there. But I didn't get as far as Mrs. A.'s door."
"What stopped you?"
"The house." Carl looks up through the slats at the slices of night sky overhead. "What I saw in the house."
Randy shoots me a look. One that says that he's not going to ask, so it's up to me.
"What did you see, Carl?"
"A girl in the window. One of the upstairs bedrooms. Remember, Trev?"
A picture of the boy returns to me: standing over the bed, over a girl's body, the pattern of blood on the walls. I have to squeeze my eyes shut and open them again to push it away. "I remember."
"She was looking down at me," Carl says. "Just a kid. A totally scared-shitless kid. Trying to claw her way through the glass
but at the same time not wanting anyone to hear her, y'know?
Because she wasn't alone in there."
"Was it Tracey Flanagan? Heather?"
"No. It was nobody I knew."
"Okay. So you went in."
"The truth? I wasn't looking to rescue anything other than my own ass tonight, but yeah. I ran in there and up the stairs and kicked that door open—all the very last things in the world I wanted to do—and nobody was there. Then, maybe a minute later, I heard sounds downstairs. Footsteps. I went to the top of the stairs and looked down and there was Randy. And then you too."
From far away there comes a low roar. At first I take it as the approach of a freight train that we can feel through the trestle's rails and ties—cattle cars and fuel tanks and Made in China whatnot that will soon be passing over our heads. But the sound rolls on a moment, growing in intensity, before abruptly receding. Thunder. Unseen clouds that have stolen the few stars from the sky.
"We were talking yesterday. Me and Randy," I find myself saying when the air is still again. "About what we saw in the house when we were kids."
"The real things? Or the other things?"
"You saw him too then, didn't you?"
Carl locks the fingers of his two hands together. A here's-the- church-and-here's-the-steeple fist. "Him?"
"The boy in the house."
"We were boys. And we were in the house."
"It wasn't us. You just said you heard him as soon as you got off the train."
"Heard. Not saw."
"C'mon, Carl. We all saw him."
"Then tell me. What did he look like?"
"Look like?"
"His appearance. If you both saw the same person—if I saw him too—we should be able to agree on the colour of his hair, his eyes, the length of his nose. All that."
It's the damnedest thing. But no matter how many times I have returned to the boy in my mind, no matter how vivid his presence in my dreams, I cannot conjure him in the details Carl has just asked for.
"Randy," I say, "why don't you start?"
"I'm not sure I can."
"Why not?"
"It's like being asked to describe, I don't know, air or something. Or loss, or anger. You can't say what shape it takes, only what it does to you."
Carl claps his hands together. "If that's what you saw, then I've seen him too."
"I could say more than that about him," I say. "He looked a lot like me."
"Or like me," Randy says.
"Or me," Carl says.
A second rumble of thunder reaches us from an even greater distance than the first. Yet this time, it continues to widen its sound. Bearing down on Grimshaw with sustained fury.
Carl says something, or tries to but the noise is too great for us to hear him. It's just his mouth opening into a circle and clenching shut, over and over.
Pain! Pain!
Then the terrible clatter of the wheels rolling over us. The trellis's steel crying under its weight.
"Train! Train!"
I wait for the black cars to pass, my arms around my knees.
Close my eyes against the glint of Carl's teeth.
It's only the train, I know. But something sounds as though it has joined us down here. Something that is screaming and will never stop.
Over the time it takes to reach the Queen's and check Carl in with my credit card, I am wondering the same thing
. I wonder it all the way to Caledonia Street, where I stop at the curb opposite the Thurman house.
Why don't we talk about it?
Why, after all these years, do we not even mention the elephant in the room—the elephant in our lives—that is what we did and saw in the winter of 1984? One reason is that we promised never to speak of it again. And none of us wished to be the first to break this promise.
But it's really more simple than that. We are men. Defined by the bearing of terrible truths more than a fondness for sports, for sex, for the wish to be left alone. It is as men that we remain silent to our horror.
I totter up the stairs to Ben's room. Roll onto the bed and sit up against the headboard, planning to record another entry for my Memory Diary. But when I reach for the Dictaphone on the bedside table, it's gone. At first, I assume I put it down somewhere else. Twenty minutes of upturning pillows and cheek- to-the-hardwood scans of the floor prove that it's not here.
I look out Ben's window. Wonder if the boy took it, and is now listening to it over and over for his own pleasure.
Then I wonder something worse. What if it is now in the hands of someone who hears it for what it really is, not a diary at all but the confession of a crime? What if Betty McAuliffe is holding it to her ear under the sheets of her bed? What if someone who knew it was here—Randy, or Carl, who would have seen me in the window—came in and stole it? This last one being the worst possibility of all. Not because my friends might be thieves, but because from this point on I will be unable to prevent myself from wondering if they are.
What I need is a little bedtime reading. Something to slow my mind from its restless thinking. Trouble is, the only thing I'm interested in is Ben's journal. This time, as I curl up in his bed, I don't have the patience to move forward from where I left off last time, and skip ahead to the final pages.
September 14, 2008
Woke up this morning feeling strange. Not something strange in me-, but something that had touched me in the night. A stranger in my room.
I sat up in bed and saw that I was right.
A message smudged onto the inside of the bedroom window:
i found him