by John Brhel
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AmITYVILLE BEACH
unaware.
It wasn’t until he stopped thrashing about in the water that he drew my full attention. He was standing in the shallows, and I could tell that he was talking to someone, but a group of bathers obstructed my view of the person with whom he
was chatting. Jesse’s body language was guarded, but that was natural for a child talking to someone they didn’t know. He looked my way and we made eye contact, then he nodded to
the other person and came running up the beach.
“Mom! The lady who looks like you came over and
talked to me.” He was getting a little red from the sun. I realized that I probably should have put more sunblock on
him. “She warned me about the current—and was kind of a
bitch about it.”
“Watch your mouth, Jess!” I almost smiled. He was the
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spitting image of his father. His dead dad. Would’ve been a better day for everyone if Jeff was still around.
“She talked to me like she knew me, Mom. I swear.”
“Yeah? Did she know your name and date of birth?”
He crinkled his nose at me. “C’mon, come take a look
at her. I think I know where she’s at.”
“No way. Missy is asleep. Which means she’s not whining
at me.” I waved him off, playfully. “Just ignore the woman and go build a sandcastle, or bodyboard or something.” He
ran off, and I returned to the Isle of Skye.
Unfortunately, not long after, Missy awoke and was
hungry. I fed her graham crackers and asked her if she’d
like to try dipping a toe in the bay. But she refused that rite of passage and rudely sunk that photo op.
As I was attempting to get the darned wrapper off the
straw for her juice box, I spotted a woman in khaki pants
and a white blouse yanking my son by the arm out of the surf.
I nearly screamed. Sure, he was probably farther out than I would have liked, but there was no reason for her to do that to somebody else’s child. This was my son.
I sprung up, my book fell from my lap, and I grabbed
Missy. I practically had to drag her down the beach to
catch the woman who I believed was either inappropriately
chastising my son, or worse.
“I wanna go home, Mommy!” said Missy.
I ignored her.
“Hey! Hey there!” I yelled, but it was too loud with
the whipping wind, crashing surf, and throngs of people
milling about. I could even hear a fire or ambulance siren whining nearby. I panicked when I lost sight of the woman
and my son, behind a group of college guys playing football.
“Jesse!”
When I spotted them again, I could tell Jesse was scared.
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AmITYVILLE BEACH
I yelled his name a few more times and waved my free arm.
Finally, he heard or saw me, and we locked eyes. I don’t
know if seeing me gave him the encouragement he needed,
but he broke free from the woman’s grasp and ran through
the crowd, over a family’s beach area, knocking over a tent and an umbrella, and practically dove into my arms.
“What the heck is going on, Jesse?!”
“The woman! It was her,” he yelled into my arm. He
was panting, trying to catch his breath. “I don’t know why, but she grabbed me and was going on about the current, or
tide, or something.”
I examined him. One of his arms had bruises from her
tugging on him. I was furious, to say the least. But I didn’t have time to dwell on the marks on his arm, as there was
quite a commotion going on nearby. People were parting,
moving their belongings out of the way, to make room for a lifeguard on an ATV. Missy finally came to life and showed some interest in the goings-on as an ambulance followed
the ATV down to the water.
“Truck! Fireman!” Missy laughed. It seemed almost
inappropriate, how giddy she was at seeing the emergency
crew.
“There she is, Mom!” screamed Jesse, pointing down
toward a crowd that had formed near the water.
I saw a woman dressed as he described, with a similar
hairstyle and color as mine. I was going to confront her—she left marks on my boy. I grabbed both children and hurried them toward the gathering of looky-loos.
“I wonder what’s up?” asked Jesse. “Shark attack?”
“That’s not funny. Someone’s either sick or hurt down
there.” I steeled myself to the possibility that I might be exposing my children to a half-eaten torso.
We beelined straight for the woman, who waded into
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the crowd. As we came up on the scene near the ambulance,
I could see someone was lying on the sand. Their legs and
torso seemed intact, to my relief. Still, I was determined to confront this woman.
Someone was being given CPR; I could practically hear
the chest compressions. Women were crying. I could catch
glimpses of the medical team working through the crowd.
The victim was a small person, a child. I hesitated, but only briefly. I was going to confront my double, let her know she couldn’t strong-arm, discipline, or whatever, my son.
“Jesse, hold her hand and wait here.” He knew the
tone. He knew this wasn’t something to be taken lightly.
I didn’t push, so much as nudge, my way through the
crowd. It was a boy that had drowned. His skin was already blue. He was long gone. But the woman who had grabbed
my son was there, on her knees, beside the paramedics. Her head was down, her hair obscuring her face. I guess she
kind of looked like me.
I approached her, slowly. “Ma’am! Ma’am?” She took
a moment, but she eventually looked up. I was perhaps two
paces from her then.
Christ. She really did look like me. We locked eyes;
she seemed to recognize me in the way that you recognize
someone but don’t know from where, or why, you do. When
her eyes shifted to the drowned boy, mine did too. I hadn’t gotten a decent look at him, so fixated was I on my double.
The boy looked about ten, wearing the same pair of
navy blue board shorts Jesse had picked out at Target—and
he reminded me of my deceased husband. That chin, those
eyes, ears… What are the chances? Why was this happening?
I felt nauseous and nearly puked, as I imagined my own
son’s drowning. I pushed my way back through the crowd
and gathered my kids to me. I rushed them away from the
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ocean, and never looked back. “It’s time to go.”
“What about the lady, Mom? Why was she crying over
the kid who drowned?” asked Jesse.
He must’ve overheard people talking about it. The
details. “It was her son, Jesse. Her son drowned.”
“Really?! Jesus! Why?! ” He began crying. Missy saw that he was crying, and not knowing why, she started crying herself.
“She must’ve been distracted, Jesse. The rip current is
really bad today.”
• 64 •
• VI •
A mORNING FOG
Not only were the windows of the pickup clouded from
respiration, but the truck was also surrounded by a
thick fog, as Karl Salisbury discovered that morning
when
he wiped his hand across the windshield. He had awoken
just past dawn in the pickup, unsure of what he had been up to the previous night, whose truck it was—sore, hungover,
and especially disoriented.
He sat up on the seat, sweating on the worn upholstery
of the older-model truck cab, stretching out after a rough night’s sleep. It was a cold sweat, and the chill morning
air creeping in made it particularly uncomfortable for
the 29-year-old man. His boots and leather jacket were
missing. He never went anywhere without that old bomber
jacket.
It was dark in the cab, and when Karl slid toward the
door and reached for the handle, he caught only air. Odd,
he thought, noting the missing handle. He was shaken when
he fully took in his situation. Both doors and windows were missing their handles. He pushed and kicked at the doors,
which did little but drain him further, due to his already weakened state, and the fact that his shoes were missing.
“What the actual fuck?” yelled Karl, out of frustration.
He lay on his back and kicked as best he could at each of the
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four windows, neither breaking nor even spider-webbing
any of them. He was trapped, and eventually had to consider that he might be a prisoner. Worse, he remembered nothing
from the previous night. Had he been drugged? Or had he
just gotten obscenely drunk and stumbled into a junkyard?
He considered his situation for a few minutes, nose
pushed against the passenger side window, searching for a
break in the fog. He could make out the edge of a cornfield, not twenty yards off. Last he knew he was in Binghampton,
a quick fifteen-minute drive from his home in Owego.
There were plenty of woods, back roads, and farms between
the two towns—he was at ease with hitchhiking on Route 17.
Karl searched the truck, the glove box, beneath the seat,
but found nothing of note, other than a few of the broken
handles—which couldn’t be used to manipulate the doors
or windows, he quickly discovered. He caught a glimpse of
his face in the rearview mirror. It was bruised, welted, and cut—he looked like a boxer who had gone a couple rounds
too many with a prime Mike Tyson.
“Let me the hell out of here!” He screamed, hoping to
contact the outside. The time spent struggling and peering out into the unknown was slowly starting to eat at Karl. He had awoken only thirty or forty minutes before, but it felt like hours to him, and the fog wasn’t yet burning away from the early morning sun.
Was it even morning? Karl thought. He knew he had
been on Clinton Street in Binghampton at some point the
evening before. Everything after that was a blur.
He had to get out of the truck. He knew once he got out
he’d have it figured out, and it would be one of those great drinking stories, down the line. ‘There was this one time, after drinking all night, where I woke up in someone’s
junker pickup in the country…’
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“Hello? There’s someone out there, isn’t there?” Karl
thought he detected movement at the back of the truck, and peered out the rear window like a caged rat. “I fucking saw you. Did you lock me in here?!”
A breathless minute passed. Karl lost it then. He
yanked his dirty socks off and placed them over his fist and began punching at the rear window, over and over. “I fucking saw someone walk past the tailgate, dude. I’m going to kick the shit out of you when I get out of here.”
His fist went numb, from his mangled knuckles to
his broken fingers. But he kept on punching at the back
window until it was spider-webbed, and eventually he made
a quarter-size hole. He then looked over his blood-soaked, sock-covered hand and grimaced at the pain which radiated
from his wrist to his shoulder. A cool spout of air whisked his cheek from the small hole, as he paused to take in his first minor victory over his confinement.
Blood trickled from his hand onto the car seat as he
used one of the broken window handles to widen the hole
he had made. It took some effort, but he eventually had
enough glass knocked out that he figured he could squeeze
through.
“Here I come, motherfucker!” Karl stepped through
to the truck bed; the small glass shards tore at his pants and into the soft flesh of his legs and thighs. “Fuuuuuuuck!” He cried out, as he forced his torso through the glass and cut up his shirt, stomach, and chest.
As Karl stood triumphantly on the bed of the pickup,
his arms raised, one hand still covered by a bloody pair
of socks, he could make out a farmhouse in the distance.
But the next thing he saw in the heavy morning fog was the silhouette of a man with a shotgun. Karl had little time
to process that final image, as the silhouette soon fired a
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A mORNING FOG
round into his chest, killing him instantly in the bed of that old truck.
The county sheriff arrived not long after at the Pennsylvania farmstead, questioning the farmer and his family about
what exactly had transpired that morning.
“Sheriff Keefe, I swear on my children. He came up
here, out of his mind on drugs or alcohol, rampaging
on my front porch at about four this morning. I was just
getting up to tend to the cows and I hear him downstairs,
and chased him off with my shotgun,” stated Lewis Kilmer,
the farmer and truck owner. “He broke a few windows and
all of Ellie’s potted plants and knickknacks. He understood the barrel of that gun, though, and ran toward the field
and dove into my old junker. He was going on in there,
smashing his head against the console, and he didn’t even
notice me and my son planting shovels against the doors.
When he figured out we had him stuck, he tried to tear the doors off from the inside. Thank God, he finally conked
out and Ellie called you all—and goddamn if it didn’t take you three full hours to get here!”
The sheriff and his deputies nodded at the man’s story,
blaming their tardiness on a four-alarm fire on the other
side of the county. “Lewis, I’m surprised you didn’t shoot him dead before you did. It sounds like you had every right to.”
“Sir, I felt honest Christian pity for the man. My
brother was an addict and I know how they get sometimes.
I was hoping he’d wake up a little more sober and sane this morning, or at least that he would’ve slept until you all
came to get him,” replied Lewis.
“We see it more and more, Lewis. They get all hopped
up on that PCP, it’s unlike any drug we’ve seen before.
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Some call it ‘Angel Dust,’ and it makes ‘em think they’re
goddamn Superman or something. I’ve seen ‘em run
through plate glass windows in town, get all cut up and keep on going.”
• 70 •
• VII •
FRIENDSHIp:
DEAD AND BURIED
FRIENDSHIp: DEAD AND BURIED
“You guys gonna give me even the slightest hint where you’re taking me?” asked Kevin, blindfolded, as he
sat in the backseat of a moving SUV. “Strip club, casino,
cliff jump
ing, maybe?”
Tom and Mickey, his buddies since college, laughed.
Kevin was getting married the following morning and
they were determined to make his last day as a bachelor a
memorable one.
“You wish. C’mon, Morrissey. It’s a surprise. You’re
gonna love it,” said Tom, who was driving.
Judging by all the turns they had made outside of
Ithaka, Kevin could only assume they were somewhere out
in the country.
Mickey inserted earplugs into Kevin’s ears. “Don’t take
these off or you’ll ruin the fun.”
“Earplugs? The fuck do I need these for?” said Kevin.
“Just chill, dude,” said Tom. His and Mickey’s
relationship with Kevin had always been an uneven one.
Kevin thought he was God’s gift to the world, cocky and
hardheaded. Over the years, he had gotten Tom and
Mickey in some bad situations, at times involving local law enforcement, and the two regularly questioned whether
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their friendship with the guy was one worth having. But
Kevin was about to marry Tom’s sister, Wendy, and the
occasion called for celebration.
Kevin shifted to the left as he felt the car pull off the
road. He gripped the seat as the vehicle bounced over
uneven terrain. When they stopped Mickey helped him
out. Kevin felt his shoes press down into the spongy, wet
sod as he stepped out of the vehicle.
“Where are we?” asked Kevin, but he heard only
muffled voices in reply. As they walked away from the car, he relied on his still-accessible senses. He began to hear dull noises, but couldn’t identify them. Aromas both sweet and metallic filled his nose.
They walked for about ten minutes before stopping.
He heard other voices around him but couldn’t make out
what they were saying, and what he believed to be laughter.
Tom and Mickey had only said “it’s right up your alley”
when they had left the parking lot of the diner that evening.
Kevin was attempting to determine his surroundings