His bladder ached suddenly. He needed to pee, just like when he played hide-and-seek with Damon and Ray-Ray. But this was hide-and-seek for real, and it was a lot scarier.
The men were talking. Joking around. Lijah couldn’t make out all the words, but it seemed jovial. Light.
And then things shifted into some kind of argument. Something personal. Something heated. The little guy in the nice clothes tried to calm everyone down, but it wasn’t working.
And then the one guy, the one that seemed sort of in charge started lacing into the big one. Calling him names. Sneering at him.
“Who the bleep asked you, you stupid motherbleeper?”
He thought the medium guy must be the big guy’s boss or something, because if he was that guy, he wouldn’t be mouthing off to the big one. No way.
The medium one said something mean. Called the big one a name Lijah couldn’t understand. A slur of some kind.
He should not have done that, even Lijah could see that. The big guy had been taking it, but then something in him snapped, a change in his eyes. His hand reached inside his jacket, pulled out a gun. The little man tried to say something, but it was too late. Before the medium one could do anything about it, there was a loud bang and the big man extended his arm, and he pulled the trigger.
It all happened so fast, Lijah almost couldn’t believe it was real.
The volume made him cringe. A head-splitting crack. His ears rang for a long time after that.
The medium man collapsed to the floor, dead. Blood seeping into the carpet.
And the big man just stood there, staring down at his dead boss, and that was when Lijah realized he was looking at a striga.
Lijah couldn’t believe he didn’t notice it right off, because he’d watched his cousin James play all the Witcher games. He’d asked Grandma Opal to buy him the games every birthday and Christmas for the last three years, but she always said no, because they were rated M for Mature and said right on the box that you had to be 17 years old to play. Lijah knew that wasn’t true, because James was only fifteen.
It was maddening, not being able to play the games himself. Having it just out of reach like that seemed to make him even more obsessed. And he couldn’t be around to watch James play from start to finish, so he missed parts. Luckily, he could watch all of the cutscenes on Youtube. The opening scene of the first game was his favorite. That was the first time you see the Striga, and Lijah had probably watched that opening a million times.
He should have recognized it immediately, but then the Striga wasn’t in his monster form, so it was hard to tell. But the cold look in his eye when he killed… there was no doubt. Definitely a striga.
The little guy just stood there for a minute, looking down at the medium guy on the floor.
“Aw, bleep,” he said, hopping away from the blood so it wouldn’t touch his fancy shoes.
He was still gazing down at the body, just like the big guy was, and then the little guy said, “Well… I don’t wanna eat that for lunch.”
He kind of smiled at the Striga like it was a joke or something, but the Striga didn’t laugh. He just stood there with that cold look in his eye.
Chapter 14
Jaworski was fourteen the first time he killed someone. He hadn’t meant to do it. Or maybe he had. He could never decide — not now, and not back then.
By the time he was finishing 9th grade, he was a big kid. Already six feet tall and closing in on 180 pounds. Shoulders broadening. Chest filling out. Arms thickening from little sticks into redwood branches.
His demeanor hadn’t quite matured along with his body, though. He still walked the halls of the school with his head down. Back stooped. He let his arms dangle like limp noodles at his sides just like they had when he was a child comprised of gawky limbs.
He had a beaten dog look about him, a flinching passiveness the bullies in the neighborhood could see like it was a shimmer rising off of his skin. A wave in the air.
He’d earned this body language at home. Had it pressed into his being with slaps and punches. Marked there with bruises and black eyes.
His dad was a mean drunk. The kind of guy who stole all of his son’s paper route money for beer one month and then beat the kid when he complained about it. The kind of guy who gave encouragement like “shut ya head” and “stop acting like a little faggot all the time.” The kind of guy who enjoyed doling out punishment with his hands, thrived on conflict and anguish and violent moments.
Back then, Jaworski’s only respite from this abuse came when the old man disappeared for weeks at a time, abandoning him and his mother to drink and gamble, a fate that felt no better to a sensitive child, inflicting mental wounds in place of the physical ones.
But soon enough the abuse would end for good. When the boy was twelve, his father was diagnosed with liver cancer. He was on the young side for onset of the disease at 39, but the disease was already pretty advanced by the time he went to the doctor. There were multiple tumors, one of which had already invaded the portal vein and begun its rapid spread through the rest of his body.
Treatment was ineffective. Some clinical trial Jaworski could no longer remember the details of. His dad was dead within three months.
In the final days, Jaworski spent a lot of time in the hospital room alone with his father. The old man — he seemed much older than 39 — always wanted the shades drawn, so the room was shadowy and strange like a tomb.
He had lost weight so rapidly that his skin couldn’t keep up. His cheeks looked baggy and wrong. Two deflated balloons sagging off his cheekbones. All loose and puckered like a dog’s mouth.
He was standing at the window when his father told him about it, just the two of them in the room.
“Come here,” the old man said. He looked frail, could barely even sit up, but his voice remained strong, still had that hard edge to it.
Jaworski turned and looked at him, unsure what to think.
“Get over here.”
He tilted his head toward the wooden chair next to the bed, and Jaworski moved to it and sat.
Now the old man’s voice softened.
“I don’t have much to leave you, boy. I’m sorry to admit that. You’ll never know how sorry until maybe you have kids of your own. But I do have one thing to give. Something I think you’ll need.”
Jaworski scooted forward on his seat.
“You know the closet at the end of the upstairs hall? The one just off the bathroom?”
Jaworski nodded.
“Up on the top shelf, there’s an old hat box. Some ancient thing I found in the attic when we moved in. It’s way the hell in the back, OK? You’ll probably need a step stool to get at it.”
He blinked a few times.
“There’s a gun in the box. Your gun. An old .38 snubnose. Belonged to my Uncle Jakub. He left it to me, and now I’m giving it to you.”
Jaworski struggled after words. When none came to him, he nodded again.
“You have to protect your mother now. Protect the house. Protect what’s yours. That falls on you. You’re young, but you have no choice, OK? Not anymore.”
His father’s eyes swiveled to the ceiling as he spoke now.
“Truth is, if you wanna make anything of yourself in this life, you have to be hard. Have to let the cold feelings guide you. You have to be the meanest son of a bitch in the room. In any room. That’s why I pushed you like I did. Hell, maybe I went too far sometimes, used a little too much force, but I didn’t want you to be soft like me. Too soft for this world. Going out fast like I am. My fucking liver eating itself, eating the rest of my insides. You have to be tougher than that, OK? Harder than that.”
Now his eyes met his son’s again.
“We all die in the end. So in a way there’s nothing to fear. Nothing to lose. Protect what’s yours, and take what you want from the world. Take everything. That’s what I’d do, if I could do it all over. I’d take whatever the fuck I wanted. Or die trying.”
That night, Jaworski waited until his mom was asleep and crept out into the hall, into the dark. He dragged an end table out of the guest room and stood on it so he could reach.
A pull string flicked on the light. Sliced a wedge out of the darkness of the hallway. Made him squint for a second.
And now his hands disappeared toward the back of the shelf. Reaching past piles of old blankets and a few boxes of defunct board games.
He felt around for the box. Found its rounded shape. Plucked it from the junk heap. Pulled it into the frame of his field of vision.
His heart hammered in his chest. Electricity thrumming up and down his limbs.
He’d planned to rush the box into his room discretely. Put the table away and hide all evidence of what he’d done. And only then would he open it. Maybe even with the lights off to be safe. Just touching the gun in the dark. Getting used to the concrete reality of the thing before he even laid eyes on it.
But now that the box was in his hands, in his grip, he couldn’t resist.
He sat down on the end table. Took a few breaths. Peeled the lid off the top.
The smell of antique furniture wafted up at him. Must and dust and the soapy notes of some indefinable grandmotherly smell.
It was dark inside the box. A shadowy hole the closet light couldn’t reach. It looked like a well sitting in his lap.
He reached in. Found the solid object. Fingers tracing the barrel to find the grip. The cold of the steel leeched into his hand, and it felt right. The chill of it felt right.
It’d be a little over a year before he used it to take a life.
Chapter 15
He never let the bullies faze him. Jaworski endured mostly verbal abuse, progressing from simple to more graphic insults. What started with calling him a gay Polack shifted to calling him a Polack cocksucker, and finally a butt-fucking Polack bitch boy.
Occasionally they pushed him around, knocked his books out of his hands, slammed him into the lockers.
It was nothing compared to what his dad had done at home. Not even close.
Outside of the house, he mostly faced the shallow cruelty of the standard school bully. Impersonal to some degree. None of it really hurt. None of it left a mark.
But Joey Crampton was worse than the others, always had been.
Two years older, Crampton lived in one of the Brewster Homes just five doors down from Jaworski. He became a juvenile delinquent as soon as he could walk upright. The meanest kid on the block. Smoking and drinking by the time he was ten. Shoplifting daily even younger than that. He slashed a kid’s lip with a switchblade when he was thirteen and spent a year in a juvenile detention center. He’d missed, he said. He’d been going for the kid’s eye.
Jaworski was nine the first time he had an encounter with Crampton. They crossed paths in an alley a few blocks from home, a shortcut on the way back from school.
Dumpsters lined the narrow strip of asphalt. Butted up against the brick side wall of a butcher shop and a couple of liquor stores. The steel trash bins left a gap only about the width of a man’s shoulders — a little path where the kids streaming to and from school had to walk single file.
All told, the alley ran the width of a city block, crossing one side street along the way.
It grew shadier as Jaworski progressed toward the middle, the place where all those bricks blocked out the sun. Muddy water perpetually filled the potholes here to the brim. A little dank with heavier air. Felt like walking into a cave.
Jaworski always held his breath when he walked between the buildings. The smell of rotting meat scraps and booze made him dry heave if he didn’t, the way the dead flesh stink intermingled with the stench of sour beer and sickly sweet Schnapps billowing out of the liquor store dumpsters. Vomitous.
He’d been holding his breath when it happened.
The bully stepped out from behind a dumpster and ripped off the smaller boy’s glasses all in one motion. Jaworski stutter-stepped back, fingers grasping at the empty space along his brow where the glasses had been.
Crampton’s friends practically danced around behind him in some celebration of cruelty. Bodies mashed together, filling the little gap between the dumpster and the bricks.
Jaworski reached for the glasses, but the taller Crampton lifted them up over his head. Held them out of reach.
“You want ‘em back?” the bully said, laughing as he spoke.
Jaworski said nothing. Looked at the ground.
“Just tell me if you want ‘em back.”
Jaworski hesitated. It didn’t feel right.
“I want ‘em back.”
Crampton smiled.
“Good.”
The bully crushed the glasses in his hands. Folded the wire frames into a mangled coil, something so small he now concealed it in one fist, the lenses squeaking against the metal and crunching a little within his fingers.
Now Jaworski held his breath for a different reason. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Couldn’t believe someone could be so mean. A child, even.
Crampton took two steps back and crouched next to the grated piece of metal set in the blacktop there, the storm drain at the very center of the alley’s path. He cupped the bent glasses in his palm, hovered them over the opening in the sewer, and he made eye contact with Jaworski before he turned his hand over.
The glasses rattled against the grate, bouncing twice before gravity sucked them down into the black void and they disappeared.
Five years later, they had another encounter in the same spot.
Crampton’s voice rose above the din of the traffic downtown.
“The Polack’s dad drank himself to death. Ain’t that right, Polack?”
A fluttery echo of his insult bounced off the brick walls of the tight space.
Crampton followed just behind him, and the bully’s friends shuffled with him, the pack of jackals laughing once more at Joey Crampton’s cruelty.
“Rusted his liver right out with vodka and Stroh’s. Nothing to live for, I guess.”
Jaworski kept his face angled at the ground. Didn’t look back at them. It was usually worse, he thought, to make eye contact. They took that as a challenge, like dogs or something.
“Motherfucker used to piss himself at O’Malley’s Pub down there off Gratiot. Pass out on the floor in the corner and piss his goddamn pants like a toddler. He’d wake up in pee-pants hours later and order another drink. Reeking like a dog kennel. That tangy piss smell that makes your eyes water and shit. Fuckin’ loser. Ain’t that right, Polack? Tell ‘em how that’s right.”
By now they’d spilled out of the alley onto the street, the whole pack of them forming a semi-circle around Jaworski and Crampton.
Jaworski remained silent, but now Crampton stepped in front of him, forced him to a stop, lowered his voice.
“What’s the matter, Polack? Gonna cry, are you? Gonna pee your pants like your old man?”
Jaworski had no real memory of what came next. Everything went red.
The next thing he knew he was on the ground, rolling around on the sidewalk, and they were beating him. The whole lot of Crampton’s jackals. Hands and feet raining down on his head. Stomping his chest. Kicking him in the junk, in the ribs, in the back of the head.
But he could see that Crampton was laid out on the sidewalk a little ways off. Flat on his back. Blinking. Dazed.
Had he done that?
Yes. Yes, he had.
He couldn’t remember striking the bully, couldn’t call the picture of the punch to mind, but some part of him remembered the feel of it, of all that force being expelled, all the anger, all the pain, all that he had ever been discharged through his fist, transferred to Crampton’s jaw.
The notion emboldened him.
He gripped an ankle and shoved the leg straight back into the hip socket as hard as he could, a jolting movement. It tipped the kid over onto his back where he wobbled like a turtle stuck on its shell.
That provided the opening he needed.<
br />
He flopped onto hands and knees. Scrambled over the wet asphalt. Into the gap. Climbing through kicks and punches to his feet. Hurdling the fallen bully and moving into the open. Picking up speed.
A fist that felt like the head of a golf club clobbered him in the back of the head just as he moved clear of his circle of attackers. The blow wobbled him for a few steps, knocked fresh confusion into his head, but he kept his feet, and his jog progressed into a run.
He sprinted all the way home, and the bullies didn’t give much chase. He’d escaped for now. But he knew this wasn’t over.
* * *
Hours later, in the dark, Jaworski huddled in the alley, a green dumpster’s shadow shielding him from view.
The gun nestled in his waistband. His dad’s gun. He had it, but he didn’t plan to use it. It was for protection. Just in case.
The hammer in his hands, though? That he would use. Just enough to send a message. Make a point to Crampton and everyone else in the neighborhood.
His injuries from that afternoon’s beating continued to swell, the pain morphing from the shock of the acute trauma to the stabbing ache of the wound left behind. All the bruises killed. All the scrapes stung. A few of those had scabbed over, but most were still wet and open. Hurt worse whenever the breeze fluttered past.
Still, he barely noticed the pain.
Hatred flooded his skull like boiling water. Some switch had been flipped on in his head earlier that day, some primal aggression he didn’t understand. He couldn’t turn it off, nor did he really want to.
He would get Joey Crampton alone now. And they would settle it.
No. He would settle it. Himself. With a hammer. And if anything went wrong, if the settlement didn’t take, he’d use the gun.
He snuck a peek around the edge of the dumpster, looked down the length of the alley both ways. Empty. But he knew Crampton would be coming this way before long. Knew he usually hung out around the Frederick Douglass projects deep into the evening. Stumbled home drunk. On his own.
Violet Darger (Book 4): Bad Blood Page 8