The Tale of the Swamp and the Rose (Parker's Bluff)

by Jake Williams

  I nodded. “Yep. He was elected mayor, appointed himself chief of police, and nobody else wanted to be the coroner.

  “So, Betty stared at me and said, ‘I need to tell you the rest, and things are going to sound a little crazy.’ I nodded and told her my definition of crazy was going through some changes. ‘I was sitting at his desk a few days after the funeral, Jason. Just going through old photos, letters, little souvenirs he had picked up on vacation, things like that. I picked up the dagger and held it up to the lamp on the desk, turning it in the light and really seeing it for the first time. The handle had a beautiful pattern of perfectly set jewels—diamonds, rubies, and other precious things on a gold background. Some of the decoration was bone-white ivory, but there were tiny brownish flecks in the fine carvings. I knew it had to be blood, something told me it had to be blood. I thought about calling Bucky and showing it to him, but what could he do with a murder weapon from a crime that happened over three hundred years ago? I also thought about calling my nephew, Jonas, and passing it on to him as the next guardian of it. But he was too young, I reasoned, and he seemed to have odd…personality flaws.’

  “I warned her to tread lightly, I didn’t want her considering Jonas’s interest in me—or any other guy, as a flaw. ‘That’s not what I meant, you rainbow-flag waving dwarf. He was…greedy, and devious even at a young age. I could see him selling it online or to a pawnshop. He’s greedy, you’re going to find that out soon enough.’ It took ten years but she was right. I mean two months ago he was plotting to kill me to get his hands on my money.”

  “Little did she know,” Billy commented, “that she was gonna team up with Jonas to kill you, Jason. And I don’t think either one of you would have predicted that you were gonna blow her into confetti with a rocket-propelled grenade.”

  “Shit happens, Billy. So, she wasn’t going to give it to Jonas, and she didn’t want the thing in her house anymore. ‘That night I had terrible dreams of something, a bird maybe, trying to come through my window. Every night it got worse, and I began seeing scratches under several windows. They were long, and dug deeply into the siding. I was wondering if I should call an exterminator when things started to get worse. I found a few white puffy feathers in the front hall, inside the house. I just knew whatever was coming to the house at night wanted the dagger.’

  “She decided to bring it to the town hall. ‘I knew there was an old safe in a storage room here,’ she said. ‘It made it through the fire when the old town hall burned down. I hired a locksmith to reset the safe’s combination and replace the lock for the storage-room door. It’s been in that old safe for years, and I really never wanted to see it again. But lately something’s been…stirred up. A few weeks ago I noticed some muddy footsteps in the hallway, leading right to that storage room. Then there were feathers floating around in the hallway last week. I couldn’t take it anymore and I found the key and checked the room. Let me show you what I found.’

  “We went down the hall and she pulled the door open. ‘The door won’t lock anymore. It’s like the insides of it, the mechanism, is melted or something.’ She stood in the doorway and when I tried to slip past her she grabbed my elbow to stop me. ‘Just look at the safe from here, Jason. Don’t go in there, look at the walls.’

  “There were splotches of black mud covering the walls,” I told them.

  Foster asked, “Like in Ty’s stairway?”

  I nodded against his shoulder and said, “Yeah, but kinda worse. The room was little, it had one panel of fluorescent lights in the ceiling and the bulbs were buzzin’ and flickerin’. The walls were cinderblocks painted gray. The safe was against the back wall, about five feet or so away from us. It looked like somethin’ out of an old Wild West movie—it was big and black, with a giant brass lever and combination lock on the front of it. It looked a little burnt around the edges and you could smell a little soot in the room. I studied the walls and realized the mud was different than at Ty’s place. It wasn’t like footprints or whatever. There was a pattern in the mud and I realized it was little crude drawings—the kind of shit you see on cave walls or wherever. There were little pictures of somethin’ that looked like dinosaurs—”

  “Maybe gators,” John suggested.

  “Yeah, maybe. And clumps of stick trees above wavy lines—”

  “Maybe the island? But no, it’d be the swamp. Here.” Sam said.

  “Yep, probably. And a big hill in the water, that would be the island, I guess. In a line over the safe there were alternating pictures of big-eyed birds and little flowers, it looked like—”

  “Owls and roses,” Foster finished for me.

  “Bingo. I looked back at Betty and you could see the bones in her face under that creepy clown makeup. I had this flash of fear that Betty was lying to me about the door, that she was going to shove me into the little room and I’d hear the door lock snapping behind me. She just pointed at the front of the safe and I took another look at it, but not before I grabbed hold of the door frame and braced a foot against the edge of the door. The safe looked like it weighed about a ton, and I couldn’t imagine how many people it took to shove it into the room. Then I noticed some shiny places at the edges of the safe’s door or hatch or whatever. The metal was gouged somehow, like somebody had tried to force it open with a crowbar. I leaned forward and looked closer, the scratches hadn’t been made by a crowbar or anything like that. They were sharp and narrow and in parallel lines along the gap. I looked at the owl drawings and pictured a giant bird trying to pry the safe open with its paws—”

  “Talons,” John corrected me.

  “I started backin’ away from the door and the light bulbs exploded behind that glass panel in the ceiling. I grabbed Betty by the elbow and kicked the door shut with my foot. ‘Ouch, Jason! Let go of me.’ She turned a little red and said, ‘I think I may have just…peed a little.’

  “I nodded and told her I knew the feeling, and then checked the front of my jeans. ‘It’s still in the safe, whatever tried to get it out wasn’t strong enough to do it,’ she said. ‘Not yet, anyway. But I’m leaving it in there—I mean, where would I move it? I could toss it into the sound or into the swamp, but I think I’d just be helping…it, him, whatever.’ She got that commander-in-chief Hitler look back on her face and started walking down the hall. She glanced over at me and said, ‘Just leave it, leave all of it, alone, Jason. You’ve heard and seen enough. Don’t bring any more attention to yourself, these aren’t your run of the mill shimmery-gliding-down-a-staircase kind of ghosts. They can hurt you, don’t kid yourself. Leave it alone.’

  “I left there in a cold sweat, and when I got out to the sidewalk I saw Pete waving at me from the front of his father’s restaurant.”

  “You know, Jason, I just realized something,” Foster said with a little wonder in his voice. “We both had best friends named Pete in high school. What are the odds of that?”

  “How much pot have you smoked, Foster?” Sam said, “You’re amazed that you and Jason both have friends named Pete? What about the odds of this adventure? What Foster, are the odds of you and Jason sharing a sleeping bag in the middle of a creepy old abandoned hunting camp, in what Jason’s now telling us is a fuckin’ haunted swamp, while we’re waiting for one of your ex-fraternity brothers to try to kill us?”

  A Brave Thing

  I had to agree with Sam. “He’s right, Foster. But light another joint anyway. So, I walked over to Pete and he patted me on the back and invited me in for some fries and a Coke. ‘They’re setting up for dinner, but I can get the cook to hook us up.’ He studied me and asked, ‘You okay, buddy? You’ve been acting kind of...different lately.’ He turned a little red and said, ‘Cindy and I have noticed something goin’ on between you and Jonas. I’m not sure if you wanna talk to Cindy or me, but I just wanted to let you know we’re here if you need any help.’ I changed the topic and we talked about the party coming up at Ronnie’s. ‘Not to keep buggin’ you about it, but I know for a fact Jon
as will be there. And the whole football team’s going, from what I hear.’ He gave me a good-natured wink and we both turned a little red. We parted ways after I promised I’d ride with them to the party.

  “I got home in time to enjoy a little bit of sanity before one of Mom’s special dinners—rice patties cooked in ‘free-range peanut oil’, whatever the hell that meant, with a fern and daisy salad. I sat with my parents watching a PBS documentary on the matin’ habits of rare satanic leaf-tailed geckos—that’s a real kind of lizard, believe it or not. When it was over they went to their bedroom on the first floor, and I climbed the steps to mine. My bedroom was the only one on the second floor and I liked the peace and privacy. The one drawback was that if the sun had been out all day the room would get hot and kinda stuffy. I opened two of the dormer windows to let some cooler air in, and sat at my computer finishing up my homework and was surfing the internet—”

  Sam cut me off. “When a horny teenage guy is ‘surfing the internet’ it means checking out porn sites.” There were quiet sounds of confirmation from the group.

  “No! But okay, yeah...that’s what I was doin’. I got pretty horny, and I thought I’d, you know...I looked at my bed and thought I’d just do it there, but then I remembered the housekeeper was coming the next morning and I didn’t want to leave any...evidence. So—”

  “So,” Sam said, “you didn’t want to mess up your Scooby Doo sheets and have your mom or the maid know that you were doing something every teenage guy in the world does.”

  Billy chimed in, “I always kept a box of Kleenex on my nightstand. I thought it was...tidier I guess, but looking back it must have been pretty obvious.”

  “It’s amazing how many young guys have boxes of tissue on their nightstands,” Foster observed. “I guess they get wicked hormonal allergies or something.”

  “C’mon guys, let me just get through this with a friggin’ shred of dignity. So, I looked at the open window and figured why not? I took off my pajamas—”

  Foster poked me in the gut. “Seriously, Chief? You were in high school and you still wore pajamas?”

  “Probably Sponge Bob Square Pants,” Billy said.

  Sam said, “Possibly Hello Kitty.” I grabbed a stone from the ring around the campfire pit and chucked it in his direction.

  “So, like I said, for some reason I decided the window was the answer. My brain was telling me how crazy it was, but I tossed my pajamas and boxers on the floor and—”

  “Sorry to cut you off, Jason.” I heard a glug and a gasp before John started talking again. “Somebody take this homemade wine away from me, fast. But really, Chief Rumpholt? Pajamas and underwear? In high school? I think even Mormons wear less than that when they sleep.”

  “Ha fuckin’ ha. So, once I’m buck naked I stood on the bench thing built into the window and started goin’ at it.”

  “Weren’t you afraid of being arrested for exposure or something?” Billy asked. “What if your neighbors saw you? You would have died from embarrassment if anybody witnessed that.”

  I shook my head. “The window was at the back of the house, facing the woods, and the nearest neighbor was about a quarter mile away. And it was a fairly complicated thing to pull off, so to speak. I mean, you’ve obviously got one hand busy, and the other one is holding on to the window frame. It takes a lot of multi-tasking to...do that out a window. And then I saw him, perched on a branch. And I almost did die, then.”

  Sam sounded like a ten year old. “You saw White Owl? Holy crap. Did he really look like an owl, or was he part-man part-owl, or did he look like the devil or something?”

  “I saw the brave, not the owl, or maybe both. There were flashes when I could have sworn that the branch was crowded with Rose wearing Ty’s sweater, Elizabeth clutching the dagger, the owl on a branch above them and the brave. The brave was the only one who was all that clear, that visible. He was just standing on a tree branch and smiling at me. And he had to have been the brave Elizabeth fell for. He was ripped, bronze, chiseled, and uh, naked—he was the best lookin’ guy I’d ever seen.”

  “Sounds like you saw a Parker guy to me, if you thought he was that hot,” Sam said with a grin in his voice that I could see in the dark.

  “Sorry, Sam. The Parker genes produce good-looking guys, but he was in a whole ‘nother league. He had a shaved head and war paint on his face—”

  John laughed. “The only time someone from my tribe has worn war paint was when the town used to do the Thanksgiving Day play at town hall. We’ve always been a peaceful tribe.”

  “No doubt, your tribe was living in a swamp filled with weed,” Sam pointed out.

  “This guy looked like a warrior, he was…intense. Let me finish telling this part before I get too embarrassed. The brave just keeps staring at me and I’m staring at him, this warrior standing up in a tree and watching what I consider to be a pretty private thing.”

  “It’s not private when it’s hangin’ out a window,” Billy said.

  “Yeah, I guess not. But, things start coming to a head or whatever, and I start to feel like I really might fall out the window. So I started, you know, and I just didn’t think it would ever end. When I was done I felt this tug forward, like gravity was pulling me down toward the brick patio in the backyard. I kind of swayed there until I finished shaking, and then I felt a push backward, into my room. I cracked the hell out of the back of my head on the wood floor, but after a minute or two I stood up and climbed into bed. My knees were shakin’ and my whole body ached like I’d run a marathon. I looked at the clock and it was so late it shocked me a little bit more awake. I had to have been up in the window for like two hours.”

  “No wonder you were sore, that’s a long time to be standing in a window pulling on your junk,” Foster observed. “Even for a horny high school kid.”

  “No shit. When my alarm went off in the morning I hit the snooze button and had flashbacks of the brave and what had happened. I was sure it was all some kind of dream until I stood up and realized I was naked. I felt the knot on the back of my head pulsin’ and that confirmed it.

  “I got showered and dressed and ran downstairs. When I got to the kitchen my mother was waitin’ for me. ‘What happened last night, Jason?’ I froze and tried to produce a casual shrug. ‘You didn’t hear it? It was crazy, it sounded like someone was beating the side of the house so hard the walls were going to come down.’ I think I made an odd meeping strangled kind of sound as she handed me a cup of organic, free-range, hand-picked-by-local-artists, free-trade African coffee. She pointed at the back door leading out to the deck. ‘Your father wants you out there.’ She picked up a digital camera off the counter and handed it to me. ‘He says he wants pictures for the biology department at the college.’

  “My coffee mug was trembling so fast it was blurry in my hand, like one of those paint-stirring machines in a hardware store. My head was throbbin’ and my knees were weak as I saw him standin’ under my window. I walked over to him and he pointed at the ground and asked, ‘Do you have an explanation for this shit, Jason?’

  “I was about to say somethin’, but I couldn’t decide if a full-blown confession or pleading ignorance was the way to go. Then I realized what he was pointing at. There were white feathers and tiny rose petals all over the backyard, from the brick patio under my window to the pine needles on the branches of the tall trees. The wind had stirred them around a little but the majority of the feathers in the limbs were directly across from my window, where the hot brave had watched me, you know. I wondered why they had all come to my window to watch me in the first place.”

  “Well,” Sam commented, “it sounds like you put on one helluva show.”

  Foster speculated, “Maybe they didn’t come to watch you, maybe one or two of them wanted to do something…worse than that.”

  “Right, I wondered that, too. I knew I couldn’t explain the whole clusterfuck that was going on to my father. I studied the ground around us and threw up my hands. ‘How
the hell would I know, Dad? We both know there’s a chance I might flunk biology. Maybe a seagull got hit by a plane, fell out of the sky, and fell through a rose bush?’

  “He picked up a feather. ‘This feather didn’t come from any seagull, Son. It’s too...fluffy.’

  “He had me on that one, I’d never seen a fluffy seagull before. ‘Maybe a...parrot? Or an eagle, yeah, a bald-headed eagle.’

  “He held the feather in front of my nose. ‘You really, really, need to spend more time studying biology. Maybe spend a little more time on web sites that don’t involve porn. And another thing, maybe I didn’t cover it in our talk about the birds and the bees, but masturbating out an open second-story window is not normal behavior.’ He pointed at the milky streaks on the bricks. ‘Based on the big mess you made I have to admire your...gusto, but most guys your age use tissues, a gym sock, something less...dramatic. It’s definitely not a habit you want to take with you to college—I think it would be a surefire way to get beat up or booted out of your dorm.’ I looked for a rock to crawl under but I just nodded and hopped into my car and hauled ass to school.

  “I got caught by a girl at a drive-thru window at Burger King,” Foster admitted. “And I was driving the car.”

  “Well, that’s disturbing on a lot of levels. But even with my father callin’ me out on it, I was really more focused on what happened outside my window— why Rose or Elizabeth or the brave or the white owl had paid me a visit.”

  Shopping Trip

  “School was a blur that day. I sat with Jonas in the cafeteria and we ate lunch and made some small talk about the football game comin’ up. I think we agreed to meet in the bleachers to watch it with Pete and Cindy, and he mentioned the party coming up. ‘But,’ he snapped me out of my daze, ‘it’s up to you, man. Just let me know.’ He gave me an odd look and walked away. I had a really hard time at the end of gym class, so to speak. I kept seeing the naked brave in my mind and baseball, nuclear war, Betty starring in a porn video, even my embarrassment I felt about the talk with my dad didn’t really help. I rinsed off and got dressed in about two minutes. I still had plenty of time to get to my next class so I wandered around the halls to kill time. I was walking past the school office when Emma Rumpholt, the secretary or receptionist or whatever pointed at me and said, “Well, speak of the devil! Are you trying to duck out of your dentist appointment, Jason? I understand getting wisdom teeth pulled is tough, but they’ll give you some great drugs. Plus you have the whole weekend to recover. Your ride’s already here.’