Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “Hello yourself, little man.” I reached into my coat pocket and brought out the comic books he’d left back at the park. “I grabbed these up for you. Didn’t think you’d want them getting ruined in the rain.”

  He nodded his head and reached up for them, but the IV tube and needle wouldn’t let him reach very far so I laid them on the bed next to him. “That new issue of Ghost Rider got pretty wet, so I stopped off and bought you a new copy, plus they had this Special Issue just come out, so I got that for you, too.”

  He looked at the comics, then at me, and smiled under his mask. He looked like he was gonna cry again and I didn’t know that I could handle that, so I pulled up a chair next to his bed and said, in as light a tone of voice as I could manage, “So ... they treating you good here so far?”

  He nodded.

  “I half expected you to be conked out after what happened. Gave us all quite the scare, is what you did.”

  He pointed to something in the corner. There was a small black-and-white television on a wheeled stand, tuned to the local PBS channel. Even though the sound was turned down pretty low, I recognized the theme they play at the start of the National Geographic shows.

  “You want me to turn it up a little bit?”

  Nod.

  I did, then adjusted the rabbit ears for a better picture, rolled it closer to the bed, and sat back down next to him. “You know, I watch this sometimes, too” I told him, which was true. “This is what you wanna watch, right?”

  Nod, nod.

  “Okay, then.”

  It was a special about this thing called the “Bog Man” they’d found in the Netherlands. The narrator said the man had been buried in this peat bog for over two thousand years. They had film of it. His brow was furrowed and there was this serene expression on his face. He wore a leather cap that reminded me of my own work hat and he lay on his side. His feet and hands were shriveled (I wondered how seeing those shriveled feet made Kyle feel about his own problems but didn’t say anything) but aside from that, he looked no different from any number of guys that worked the line. Put a metal lunch bucket in his grip and it might’ve been me two thousand years from now.

  The narrator kept going on about well-preserved the Bog Man was, and likened it to a similar discovery made in Siberia a few years back when they’d found a fully-preserved Mammoth.

  Sometime in there Kyle reached out and took hold of my hand and gave it a little squeeze. I squeezed back.

  He fell asleep after about fifteen minutes, so I got up, made sure the comics weren’t going to fall off the bed, and then did something that surprised even me; I bent down, brushed some of the hair from his forehead, and gave him a little kiss there. It seemed right somehow. I started to walk away as quiet as I could and then bumped into a clipboard hanging at the foot of his bed. I caught it just in time. As I was putting it back I glanced at what the doctor had written, then read some of the typed material.

  On top of everything else, Kyle was diabetic. I felt my heart jump a little. My Maggie had been a diabetic, it was what killed her eventually. Thinking this made me sad and I missed her all the more for the thinking, then I saw something about “... macular degeneration,” and “... visual hallucinations commensurate with Charles Bonnet Syndrome.” I knew that it was pronounced Shaz Bone-eh because my Maggie’d had the same problem. You see things that aren’t there. She used to tell me toward the end that she always saw this well-dressed Negro butler following me around the house, and then she’d joke about how we could use some extra help, seeing as how she’d be blind soon enough. She was totally blind the last ten days of her life.

  And Kyle Hogan was slowly losing his sight just like her.

  There’s some anger that takes on a life outside your power to do anything about it, and sometimes this anger comes wrapped up in sadness like a mummy in bandages. I was that kind of angry. Didn’t seem fair, this great kid who held my hand and smiled at me having so many problems and not even ten years old yet. Hell, I’ve know people my age who couldn’t handle half of what this kid was dealing with on a daily basis. Don and Cathy had themselves one great boy here, and needed to be reminded of it. So I put the chart back and marched out to the waiting room, all set to cross yet another line.

  Don was by himself. “Cathy and me had some words and she took off,” he said. “I was hoping I could trouble you for a lift.”

  “No problem.” I figured it’d give me a chance to say a few things to him.

  We’d been driving along a couple of minutes when Don said, “I suppose Kyle gave you quite an earful today. Kid’ll talk your head off you give him half a chance.”

  “Right before he passed out in the park, he tried to say something to me. Sounded like ‘sore hay’ but that don’t make any sense.”

  “‘Dinosaur Day,’ is what it was. Sunday is Dinosaur Day.”

  “That something else you use to scare him with?” I asked, making sure I put a hard emphasis on the else so Don would know that I knew things.

  He eyeballed me for a second, then grinned. “Yeah, it is. He hears old PIP start up and feels the ground start shaking and he thinks it’s monsters, so, yeah, I go with it. I tell him that it’s the sound of big old dinosaurs waking up and going for a walk. I tell him that on Dinosaur Day he needs to behave himself or else I’m gonna lock him outside so the dinosaurs can step on him or eat him. Goddamn sissy thinks that pile driver is a dinosaur’s footsteps. No kid of mine’s gonna have an imagination like that. Won’t do him a damn bit of good later on in life.”

  “But he’s a great kid, Don. He’s smart, and he’s sensitive—”

  “Don’t give me that ‘sensitive’ shit, okay? ‘Sensitive’ and ten cents’ll get you a cup of coffee over at the L&K Restaurant. Big deal. He’s a sickly kid who ain’t never gonna get any better and on account of the way he is, Cathy doesn’t want to have another one ... so I don’t get to have a boy that I can cheer on while he plays football, or teach him how to duck-hunt, or how to drive—no. I got the likes of him to deal with. You think I don’t know how the other guys at work are gonna look at me come tomorrow? ‘Too bad about Don, having himself a boy like that. Makes you wonder about his being a real man.’ And don’t tell me they ain’t gonna think that. A man’s son is the measure of his father, and I don’t want anyone thinking that Kyle is any measure of me.”

  “That may be the lousiest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say.”

  “I’ll thank you to mind your own business, Jackson.”

  “For god’s sake, man, don’t you see what you’re doing to that kid? Scarin’ him like that all the time and—”

  “—and if he’s gonna stand any chance in this world, then someone has to scare him! Don’t you get it? I got to put the fear inside of him so he’ll know what life is like. I figure there’s only so much that a kid can be scared before it becomes a permanent part of him, and then he won’t be scared of nothing anymore, and that’s the only way he’s gonna survive in this life. He’s got to have the fear within him.”

  “You’d best watch out, Don. Things like that have a way of coming back on you.”

  “What the hell would you know about it? You and Maggie never even had any kids.”

  Goddamn good thing we were on his street already or else he’d’ve had himself one long walk home.

  * * *

  Don and I avoided each other at work for most of the next week, but we weren’t what you’d call obvious about it. We sat at different tables during break, and when the other guys went out after work, I’d beg off if Don was going along, or he’d make some excuse about getting home to tend to Kyle if I was gonna be there. I don’t think the other guys suspected anything other than Don being embarrassed about his boy.

  An offer a voluntary overtime came up for that Sunday, and I was the first to get my name on the list. Don signed up for it, as well. I was getting ready to head home that Friday when he stopped me near the doors and said, “I hope everything’s okay with you and me.”
<
br />   I shrugged. “How’s Kyle feeling?”

  “He should be able to go back to school next week. Listen, uh ... Cathy’s gonna be using the car Sunday to take Kyle over to see his grandma. Could I get you to swing by and pick me up on your way in?”

  “Don’t see why not. I’ve got some comic books that I think Kyle might enjoy.”

  “You read comic books?”

  “Bet’cher ass I do. Some of the best stories being told anywhere. Kyle got me interested in Ghost Rider. You ought to give it a read sometime. Might teach you a thing or two.”

  He stared at me for a minute to see if I was joking. When he saw that I wasn’t he broke out laughing anyway, pretending that I was joking. I went along with him thinking that.

  “See you Sunday,” I said, punching the clock and heading out to my car.

  That Saturday night I sat down to watch another special on PBS about how children’s personalities are shaped during the first ten years of their lives. A lot of it was a bit over my head, but then they got to this one psychologist who started talking about something called “... consensual reality.” Way I understood it is that a child is taught from its first day on earth to see the same world their parents see. That seemed simple enough to me, but then the psychologist showed this film of a nine-year-old girl who’d been raised by her mother who was a schizophrenic. The girl had even worse delusions than her mother did, because she’d been taught to see the world her mother saw and once she got old enough to let her imagination kick in, she “… amplified the disorder” because she thought she was dealing with the world her mother gave her, “... one of sleeplessness and incoherence and dementia and paranoia.” She was ruined. It broke my heart.

  I started to drift off. It’s strange the connections your mind will make when you’re falling asleep. I thought about the Bog Man and how he looked like the guys I worked with. Then his face became Don Hogan’s and he got up out of the bog and said his name was Chaz Bone-eh. He started screaming at Kyle. Kyle was crying because he was scared and was trying to tell Chaz he could see monsters. Chaz said that was good because monsters were real and they were coming for Kyle. Then he lay back down in the bog and his face became mine, so I curled up with my lunch bucket next to the Wooly Mammoth and went to sleep, waiting for someone to find me in a couple thousand years.

  * * *

  They were screaming at the Hogan house when I knocked on the door.

  “... have my goddamn lunch ready on time is all I ask!”

  “So because you got to work today that means I can’t sleep in an extra half-hour?”

  “Bitch! I got a long day ahead of me and—”

  I knocked louder and they got real quiet. Cathy answered the door in her bathrobe. She glared at me and then blew smoke in my face. “Your ride’s here.” She walked away, leaving the door open but not inviting me inside. Don peered out of the kitchen doorway and shouted, “Be with you in a minute, Jackson.”

  “I got them comics for Kyle,” I said. “Mind if I come in and give them to him?”

  “Oh, for chrissakes!” said Cathy. “That’s just what he needs, more comic books!”

  “I’ll thank you not to speak to my friend like that,” shouted Don.

  “Screw him—and screw you, too! And screw that little useless piece of shit of a son you’ve got!”

  That’s when I decided Cathy Hogan was as big an asshole as her husband.

  “You go on up,” said Don to me. “His room’s right at the end of the hall.”

  I knocked on Kyle’s door and he opened it just a crack, then smiled when he saw it was me. “Hello, Mr. Banks.”

  “Hey, Kyle. Got some more comics here for you. Creepy and Eerie and an issue of Famous Monsters.”

  “Thank you very much.” He seemed a bit nervous to me. No wonder, if the screaming I’d heard from his parents was the norm around here.

  “You feeling better?” I asked, ruffling his hair.

  “A little.”

  Downstairs Cathy was shouting, “Pimento loaf’s all we got for sandwiches! I haven’t been to the groceries yet.”

  “I hate that shit!” Don shouted back about twice as loud.

  “Then fuckin’ go hungry today, I don’t care!” This followed by cupboard doors being slammed and a glass being broke.

  Kyle looked at me and shrugged. “They yell a lot, I guess.”

  I nodded. “So you’ll be visiting with your Grandma today?”

  He brightened. “Yeah! My gramma’s really cool.”

  “Treat you nice, does she?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was good to know that there was someone in this world who was good to this kid.

  I started to say something else, but then PIP kicked in over at the quarry and every window in the house shook. I checked my watch and saw that it was only nine-thirty in the morning; they usually didn’t get started until noon on Sundays.

  “Now, don’t you go gettin’ all excited, Kyle,” I said. “That’s just—”

  I got real quiet when I looked back up.

  When I was over in Korea during the war, my unit came across a little boy whose entire village had been wiped out the night before. He’d been the only survivor, and our interpreter told us that the kid had seen the whole slaughter. I never forgot the look on that kid’s face. There was this gruesome calm to his features that somehow got worse when you looked into his eyes; he was staring at something only he could see, something so far away and so terrible there would never be words to describe it, so he’d just decided to embrace it.

  The look on Kyle’s face made the one on that kid’s seem like a grin over a birthday cake.

  “What is it, buddy?” I said.

  “You need to leave, Mr. Banks.”

  The whump-whump-whump from PIP was getting a lot louder and a lot stronger.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, sir,” he said, taking hold of my hand and leading me out of the room. “But you really need to go outside.”

  “You sure you’re okay?” I asked him as he led me out onto the front porch. I figured there was something he wanted to tell me and didn’t want his folks to hear. ‘Course, he could’ve done that upstairs, but that look on his face and the hollow sound in his voice told me this was serious, so I went along.

  “I’m fine, Mr. Banks. See? I’m not scared anymore.”

  The next bunch of whumps from PIP were so violent I thought for a second the sidewalk was going to crack open. I could hear Cathy screaming at Don about how it was his fault they couldn't afford to move someplace where this goddamned noise wouldn’t shake loose her fillings every week, and Don shouted something back at her that I couldn’t make out but I heard the slap clear enough, and by then I couldn’t hear or feel anything else but the noise and vibrations from PIP.

  Kyle yanked me off the porch and all but dragged me to my car. “You have to get in now,” he shouted. “Please, Mr. Banks.”

  “What the hell is wrong, Kyle?”

  He stared at me, and then blinked. “Can’t you see it?” He pointed over the roof of the house.

  “See what?”

  Whump-Whump-WHUMP!

  “Please get in your car, Mr. Banks.” He opened my door and started pushing me. He was a lot stronger than he looked. Before I could say anything more, he slammed closed the door and turned back to house, looking at something over the roof, and then the noise became these explosions that rocked the ground so bad I actually hit the top of my head against the inside roof of the car, and by the time I got my vision cleared there was another series of explosions that shattered every window of the house, and then another one that shook the trees and then another one that caused one of the streetlights to come loose and fall across the middle of the sidewalk in a shower of sparks and broken glass and by this time I was so scared I couldn’t move so I sat there gripping the wheel and wishing to hell I’d never said yes to coming over here today but wishing and ten cents’ll get you a cup of coffee and then
Kyle spread his arms wide and lifted them over his head and started laughing as the explosions kept coming closer and harder and louder and faster, and I didn’t think that PIP could work that fast, and then another part of my brain said I don’t think it’s PIP and I closed my eyes as the vibrations rattled my bones and my dentures and everything there was inside me, right down to my nuts and all the way up to the stalks of my eyes, and all the time I could hear Kyle laughing laughing laughing—

  —and then it all stopped.

  No noise.

  No vibrations.

  No sound or movement at all.

  I didn’t want to open my eyes, I was still that scared.

  “Mommy, Daddy,” called out Kyle. “Come out and look. It’s so cool!”

  I heard the front door open and then I heard Cathy and Don start yelling for Kyle to get his ass back up on the goddamned porch they were going to give him what-for real good and then Cathy gasped and Don shouted “Jesus H. Christ!” and then they both screamed but that was drowned under the sound that came next.

  It was a roar from something so big and so angry that it swallowed nightmares whole for breakfast.

  I pressed my head against the steering wheel and whispered Maggie’s name over and over.

  Then the roar came again, twice as loud as before, and then Kyle laughed again and the whole world became noise and thunder and one massive explosion and then there was a sound like a jet engine sucking in all the air from the earth and then there was a silence the likes of which I hope never finds me again.

  I don’t have to tell you what I saw when I finally opened my eyes, do I? You’ve seen the pictures of the house, the way the whole front of it was smashed to rubble. There wasn’t enough left of Don and Cathy Hogan to scrape up with a shovel. The official explanation was that PIP had accidentally hit on a batch of dynamite embedded in one of the quarry walls and caused an explosion that sent rocks and boulders flying, and that one of them landed on the Hogan’s house and killed them. Which would’ve explained the indentations in the ground, all six-feet-wide and three-feet-deep of each one, except that there was no boulder. They say it must have hit with such impact that it broke apart, because there was plenty of rubble. The fact that the gravel company denied any such accident and that PIP was unharmed didn’t come into it. Every house on that street lost its windows that Sunday. A couple of family pets were killed by furniture toppling over on top of them. One woman had a heart attack from the noise. The gravel company got the pants sued off them and pulled up stakes and Cedar Hill was no longer in the gravel business by fall.