Random & Rare

by Cat Porter

  “Oh, yeah. Look at that. I’m gonna have to have a piece of that later.”

  I couldn’t blink. I couldn’t move. The stale smell of plastic, metal and wool stifled me. The sky had finally fallen. Armageddon was here, in my very own living room.

  “Fuck me. That was good shit.” He let out a lazy laugh.

  He unzipped his pants in a slow long slide, the sound echoing in my eardrums, ripping at my insides. I glued my face to the edge of the doorjamb. His pants dropped, and he positioned himself on top of my mother gripping her arms with his hands. Her head rolled to the side. The flood of tears had smudged her pale face with the makeup she had so carefully put on this morning. Her red eyes found mine and widened once again.

  My pulse hammered as she stared at me. “Mom,” I whispered. The word vibrated through every vein.

  Staring at me, she slightly shook her head. The monster raised himself up and plunged his body into hers. Her body jerked forward, and she grimaced, her eyes squeezing shut. He shoved himself into her, faster and faster. He was talking to himself and grunting out ugly words, a mudslide of dirt and nastiness.

  I clutched my hair and ground my head into the doorjamb, unable to look away. My mother’s eyes opened again and found mine. I wanted to take this pain, this horror, away for her, siphon it off through her gaze like gasoline from a car. My eyes were lasers now, beams of light. I was sending her the white blue light of the Force, filling her with my love, pushing out his revolting, foul ugliness.

  I’m here, Mom. I will save you!

  I went to move, tumbling forward out of my hiding place. Now that he was distracted, I could pounce on him, hit him over the head with something.

  Do something!

  Mom’s eyes hardened, warning me, stopping me. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. Do not move.

  A loud wail mixed with brittle laughter rose in the room. Eve’s horrible sobbing filled my ears. My blood froze in my veins, my heart clenched tight. Mom’s face was so red and blotchy now. Her eyes closed, and our laser-eye-Force connection was lost. I shook, all alone in the hall that seemed like enemy territory all of a sudden, not my home any longer. I scurried back into the stuffy closet. My head knocked against a cold metal rod and I grabbed it, but it was no Jedi lightsaber, only the stupid vacuum cleaner. My chest was crushed. I couldn’t breathe anymore.

  Couldn’t breathe.

  Yes, the sky had fallen. No escape.

  I was trapped in that closet,

  listening,

  listening,

  listening—

  “Dig!”

  Jarring movement, shaking. A small fist pounded on my chest.

  “Dig! Please, baby!”

  A choking sound, gurgling.

  My eyes flew open. I heaved for air.

  Grace’s watery eyes bulged before me. My hands were at her throat, her hands gripping my wrists. Our room at the club. I’d been drinking last night, and we’d stayed here instead of driving home.

  “Fuck!” I unlatched my hands from around her neck.

  She gulped for air, her chin quivering. I let out a low growl as I shoved my face in her chest, wrapping my arms around her. I pulled her down under me and sucked on the side of her throat. My knee separated her legs, and I steadied my raging cock with my one hand and plunged inside her.

  “Dig—”

  We convulsed together.

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t form words, couldn’t connect my thoughts. I just wanted release, relief, to forget, to be washed, to lose myself inside my wife. To make it up to her.

  I fucked away Eve’s yells, my mother’s anguished face, my father’s blood all over the foyer. I fucked away Wreck’s eyes sinking closed, his blood staining my fingers, Miller’s impenetrable silence.

  Drilled and thrust through all of it.

  All of it.

  My balls tightened, the rush pulled me in, twisted me, catapulted me over. Grace gasped sharply, her body tensing and I groaned. I extracted myself from her and curled up in a ball.

  Fucking ugly.

  Grace’s hands touched my back. “What the hell is going on with you?” Her voice creaked. “Why won’t you talk to me? Since you came back from Texas, you’ve been…it’s been over a month since Wreck died, and you still can’t talk to me about it. You’re dreaming about your sister again, and you were yelling for your mom just now.”

  My fingers dug into the pillows underneath me.

  “Please tell me what’s going on.” Her voice was pointed now, demanding. “I swear to God, I’m going to go assault Boner and make him tell me. Because if another living soul knows, it’s got to be him. You two have been together since you were kids.”

  “Let it be,” I spit out.

  “No, damn it, I won’t.”

  I turned over and blinked up at her. Her jaw was set, her eyes ablaze, as she sat up on her knees beside me, wearing one of my old T-shirts, wiping at the cum seeping down her thighs.

  “Well?”

  I turned over again.

  “I don’t need Boner.” Her voice snapped like an old branch underfoot in a quiet forest. “I did a little digging on my own, Jake Pence.”

  My eyelids shot up. My name. She knew my real name.

  “There’s this thing called the Internet now. You can do research from a computer and go all around the world. From our town library, I got as far as Denver, Colorado.”

  “Grace…”

  “You want to hear what I found out?”

  “How? How did you—”

  “I was cleaning out Boner’s room. I found an envelope with paperwork in it from the Welfare Department of the State of Colorado. With his real name on it. I traced him to find you.”

  A chill settled over my skin, my heart slowly filling with cement.

  “Jake and Eve Pence, the children of Amelia Pence, a prominent lawyer, and Michael Pence, a successful investment banker living in an upscale suburban community of Denver. Their two children attended an exclusive private school, and the family lived in a very expensive beautiful house on a hill. One day—”

  “Shut up, Grace!” I sat up.

  Grace pushed me back on the mattress and straddled my torso, pinning me down. My fingers dug into her thighs. She winced, but she didn’t budge, not a fucking inch.

  “One day, Mrs. Pence and her sixteen-year-old daughter were attacked as they entered their home by two men who had followed them there. They were held hostage, raped repeatedly, and the house was ransacked. When Mr. Pence arrived home that evening, he was brutally attacked with a hunting knife and bled to death in the entryway.”

  My eyes bore holes into hers.

  She swallowed hard. “The lone survivor was their son, Jake who had gone home early from school that day, and witnessed…witnessed everything from a hall closet where he’d been trapped for hours.”

  “Stop!” I fought for air.

  “Mrs. Pence was choked to death on the staircase, but the two perpetrators decided to take Eve with them. They dragged her outside, but she managed to get away. They shot her and ran her over on the road with her own father’s car until she stopped screaming. They drove off with thousands of dollars in cash and jewelry from the family safe. They were pursued by police and federal agents as they had invaded a house in New Mexico as well as two other houses in Colorado. They were finally caught and remain on death row.”

  I stared at her, my jaw clenched.

  She leaned over, her hands pressing down on my chest, her face inches from my own. “Jake Pence, you remember it so well that it twists your insides, pours out of you in your sleep. That’s why you can’t sleep. Can barely sit still. Have a chronic stomach ulcer, suffer from migraines.”

  “Get off me and leave the room,” I breathed, my insides simmering.

  “Oh, I’m not going anywhere.” She tilted her head. “How did you get here?”

  Another metaphysical question.

  “Here? To Meager? Or do you mean here, to being able to steal, kill. Deal d
rugs. Pimp. Lie without feeling bad about it or second-guessing myself?”

  “Yeah, Dig. Here, to being the VP of the One-Eyed Jacks. Jake Pence was hardly a candidate for an outlaw bike club, let alone an officer.”

  “Like you were the perfect candidate for a biker’s old lady?”

  “More so than you becoming a biker, Jake.”

  I winced. “Don’t call me that.”

  She raised her head. “Tell me. You and Boner both told me you met in a group home, but I figured you had done time in juvie or something before that.”

  I shook my head against the pillow and took in a deep breath to steady my swirling brain. “After all that, an uncle took me in. A college professor cokehead, who was screwing his interns—boys and girls—every chance he got. He was full of shit. He liked me because I came with a trust fund and the money from the sale of the house. One night he came to tuck me in and tried to suck my dick. I knocked him out. He was afraid I’d ruin his career by spreading the story, so he dumped me in the foster care system just as he came down with AIDS.

  “Foster care was another barrel of laughs. I was an undesirable; an aggressive teenage boy and got tossed from home to home. Eventually, I got placed in a group home where I met Boner. We didn’t last too long in the system. By the time we turned seventeen, we ran off, hit the streets, stole, got into drugs, got out of drugs, dealt drugs. We got into biking and sort of cleaned up our acts. We managed to make the pilgrimage to Sturgis one year where we met Wreck, as you know, and the rest is history.”

  Tears streamed down her face, her eyes wild. “Why couldn’t you ever tell me? You know everything about me. Everything. But you never let me in.”

  “In? I don’t want you in there! I don’t want to be in there either, Grace. But it won’t let me go. No matter what I do, who I’ve become, it will not let me go.”

  She wiped at her eyes, but the tears kept spilling. I didn’t want her crying for me, not for me.

  “This is why I like living poor, by the seat of my pants, in a small, nondescript house. I like living on impulse. I like the burn of gasoline and oil and metal in my lungs, the wind beating at me, as I tear down the road. Knowing it’s me moving through the air, over that road. No one, nothing, holding me back, holding me in.

  “Then I met you, and that kind of crazy free wasn’t necessary anymore, but you were. You were another kind of necessary. Wanted you for myself. When I had no right to that sort of life and no right to pull you into my shit. But I did. I wanted you that bad. Even your sister made me promise to stay away from you, but you showed up at the club that night and tilted my world upside down, broke the axis I’d had in place, broke it in fucking two. So I destroyed that promise.

  “I knew what that meant. Putting down roots didn’t bother me. I like having enough money in my pocket to get by but not the fancy house, the cars, the clothes. That excess doesn’t mean shit to me. That only attracts bullshit and the wrong kind of attention. They targeted my mother at the parking lot of the fancy mall where she and Eve went shopping after school. They followed my family home and salivated over our house and what was inside. It was a random pick. That’s what the policeman told me.”

  “Oh God.” Grace’s shoulders sagged.

  “My mother came from a small mountain town in Colorado, Grace. She worked hard, got educated, and made something of herself. She could afford nice, pretty things for herself, her house, her family. Where did it get her though? Watching her teenage daughter get raped and tortured over and over again and getting raped herself over and over again. And on top of all of that, knowing her son was watching and listening to everything.”

  Her useless, helpless son.

  My hands covered my eyes. My chest caved in.

  “Dig—”

  “I should’ve been at football practice that afternoon, but I had pulled a muscle the day before and used it as a last-minute excuse to cut out because I wanted to go home and play my new video games. I knew Mom and Eve would be out shopping.”

  “You must have been terrified! You didn’t want to leave her.”

  I ran my hands up and down Grace’s bare thighs. “No, I didn’t want to leave her alone on the living room floor where they had thrown her like yesterday’s garbage. But I was an idiot. Instead of running outside when I had the chance and finding a neighbor like she was begging me to do the whole time—I can still hear her voice in my head, Grace! Did I do what she asked me? The very last thing my amazing, brave beautiful mother asked of me? No, I didn’t do it.”

  “Honey—”

  “I held her hand. I tried to pick her up off the ground. But there wasn’t time for all that. I should have gone for help. She kept begging me ‘Go! Go!’ She was so freaked out that she lapsed into her country mountain twang. ‘Get gone, Jake!’ She pleaded with me, pleaded with me to be safe so that they wouldn’t see me. I was supposed to save her. Instead, she saved me. While she was suffering, being tortured, she fucking saved me, Grace.” My throat stung.

  “They found the cold pizza I’d been eating in the kitchen when they broke in.”

  “You’re not allergic to ...”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh God.”

  “They asked her about me. They started looking for me in the house, but she stopped them. Stopped them with her quick thinking, her powerful words, her power of persuasion. She led them to the safe upstairs in her room, gave them whatever they wanted and more. And they kept taking more. She sacrificed herself for me, her worthless piece-of-shit son. ‘Get gone!’ she’d begged me. But I hadn’t listened.” My fingers curled in the hem of Grace’s shirt.

  “I’d only panicked. I froze. Fucking useless!”

  “You were thirteen.”

  “I was an idiot! A helpless idiot. And I humiliated my mother even more by her knowing that I was watching and listening to all that shit they were doing. And Eve—” The breath burned in my lungs. “Eve killed herself that day, and no one can tell me different. Her screeching ripped me in fucking two as she tore out onto the street. Once the police finally arrived and I crawled out, I saw the pieces of her on the road in front of that grand palace we called home.”

  “And your dad?” she whispered.

  “My dad?” My head sank into the pillow and I swallowed hard. “My dad had come home earlier than usual to surprise my mom. He had just landed a big deal account out of New York, and we were supposed to celebrate that night. That was what his secretary told me at the funeral. Celebrate his success.” I inhaled a deep breath. “My mom had panicked when they heard Dad’s message on the answering machine, saying he was on his way home, that they ended up choking her after doing her one last time on the stairs. Both of them. She had gotten all her jewelry out of the safe and whatever cash was in there, the silver in the dining room, and that was their big thank you for all your trouble, ma’am.

  “They were waiting for my dad when they heard his Cadillac roll up in the driveway, his key in the door. I threw up in the closet, ticking down the seconds till I heard his key scrape in the lock, then turning it. ‘Amelia?’ He always called out her name the second he stepped through that door. They hacked him with a hunting knife they had and one of the gardener’s tools they’d found out back. I had to walk over him to get out.”

  “Jake—”

  “Don’t fucking calling me that! Don’t ever! Jake Pence died that day. He was raped by what he saw, what he heard. He was cut and hacked. He bled out, was run over, and crushed to pieces. And all those pieces were left smashed on the road in front of that fucking house. He’s gone. Gone!” I roared, bucking her off me.

  The door burst open.

  “What the hell are you doing, motherfucker?” Boner shouted.

  He darted over to Grace, who was crumpled at the edge of the mattress, crying. He ripped the sheet off the bed, wrapped it around her naked lower body, and held her in his arms.

  Her sobs ripped through me and squeezed in my chest.

  “Don’t cry for me,
Grace! Goddamn it! Stop.”

  “I will!” she sobbed. “You need someone to cry for you! You need me to do it!”

  Boner’s huge eyes glinted at me. He shook his head as he cradled her, tucking her deeper in his embrace “Not like this, man. Should have told her a fucking long time ago. Not like this.”

  My jaw stiffened. I moved to the edge of the bed near them but said nothing. All of it was a jumble in my brain, tying my tongue, mangling any sense left in me.

  “How do you think we managed to buy this dump for the club and fix it up? Huh?” I asked. “For years, we’d been living in flophouses, abandoned warehouses, motels gone bankrupt, here and there, moving around the area. Wreck had found this go-kart factory, but the club didn’t have the money for it. I bought it for the club with that trust fund money and we fixed it up. Whatever I inherited that evil fucking day, I put it down here and gave the rest away.”

  Grace’s head sagged against Boner’s arm, her watery gaze never wavering from mine.

  “The one good thing that remains from all that was a terrific lesson, Gracie. The cop who found me in the closet told me I shouldn’t worry. He said these sorts of bad things were random occurrences that happened rarely. What a fucking joke. All through our meaningless little lives, random, chance acts blow by you, or they blow at you. Just maybe, on the rare occasion, they explode in your face. Poof! Or they don’t. What is sure is that you have no control over it, so the faster you learn that and accept it, the better off you’ll be.” I reached over to the nightstand and lit a cigarette, tossing the lighter back on the table.

  I exhaled a thick stream of smoke, staring at her. “When I met you, I saw it in your eyes, that random blowback. It had touched you, too, but you’d kept your head high through all of it. Not me. I stuck mine in the gutter, in the dirt, down real low. My parents used to tell me and Eve, ‘You’ve got a bright future ahead of you.’ Yeah, me and Eve sure did.” I rubbed a hand down my chest, letting out a heavy breath.