by Russell Moon
I start walking faster again.
“Who are you, my dad?”
I hear it come out, and suddenly find that awfully funny. I laugh out loud.
“Yes.”
“Well, don’t bother. You have enough on your plate with the job of being the devil and all.”
“This is serious, Marcus. It isn’t good for you to be drinking. Especially you.”
“Especially me? Oh, this will be good. Are you about to spring another one of your amazing facts about why it’s different being me than being anybody else in the universe and why it sucks more being me than being anybody else in the universe?”
But just now I freeze. We are passing under a willow tree that looks like it is ready to fall into the water, looks like it has been ready to fall for about a century. He comes right up and stops at my shoulder. I put my nose in the air and my muscles become rigid, like those of a pointer dog on a scent.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see it coming toward me like a black javelin.
Snag—I have it in my hand, its hateful mouth open wide enough to swallow a baseball.
It is my old friend, Eartha’s familiar, and it’s all too familiar to me.
“Good sense,” he says coolly. “And good grab. Your skills are developing nicely.”
I can’t stop staring at it. I bring it as close as possible to my face without risking a bite. I can see well down its rotten throat. I am squeezing hard on its neck.
“Why does it keep coming after me?”
“It’s a simple beast. Not like your Chuck. You can tell a witch’s status by the sophistication of her familiar. This snake doesn’t like what you are doing right now. Doesn’t like the company you are keeping, the conversations you are having.”
It spits at me.
“Marcus,” he says, “remember what I said before. The act becomes you. Are you ready to become the act?” He begins walking on without me. “There is a time for restraint and a time for action. The important thing is that you decide between them.”
As he walks on, I feel it, a rage in me like nothing I have ever felt toward any dumb animal before. I feel my eyes bugging, and I feel my grip tightening. We have been here before, this snake and I and my father. He held me back, then. He convinced me toward restraint.
There is no such discussion now.
I squeeze the snake. I squeeze as hard as I can, until the hissing stops. I squeeze longer, until the coiling stops, and then the switching of the tail, and then any sign of life.
There is a part of me that wants to resist, knowing that this is not what I want to become. But it is not the part of me that is in control. I squeeze until I feel blood—or whatever awful mush is inside a snake’s head—building pressure, until … until I flick my thumb like a knife blade up through the bottom of its head, through the underside of its mouth, through the roof of its mouth, through the top of its head.
I am breathing heavily as I stand there holding the limp, headless son of a bitch. My ears are pounding in tandem with my heart and at this moment my only true regret is that it is not still alive so I could do it all again and more. Only, as the anger subsides, I am suddenly, fully aware of what I’ve done, and I am horrified.
He is back with me now.
“Well done,” he says, looking at the snake, nodding at it, smiling proudly. “There was no other solution with that creature. It was getting worse, more serious. As everything is.”
I watch the snake a few seconds more before opening my hand, letting it fall through my fingers, then float downstream until it is out of sight entirely. I feel no more connected to the Marcus who did it than I feel to the snake itself, than I felt to the Marcus who mangled Baron’s tongue. And I cannot share in my father’s sadistic enthusiasm. An icy chill cuts through the heat, cuts through me, followed immediately by a rush of hot blood to my head as I realize that a distinctly vicious part of me has once again taken over, and once again done what I would never do.
I step away from the bank into deeper water, and I dunk myself. I stay under, immersed, cooled, and almost calmed, for several seconds—then I stand up in the potent sunshine, sweeping my hair straight back over my head. I hear it slap onto the back of my sopping shirt, and only then do I realize how long I’ve let it get. I dunk myself again, washing myself completely of all that has attached itself to me recently. Though really it’s the inside needs cleaning most.
When we begin to walk again, side by side, I feel different. I’m not at all certain what the difference is, but it is undeniable all the same.
“Well executed,” he says, his hands now folded behind his back as if he were a professor pacing the front of the class, rather than a spook evil magician splashing upstream. “Especially taking your drunkenness into consideration.”
“I am not drunk,” I say.
“How is your mother?” he asks, sticking to his own agenda no matter what I say. Which is a now familiar pattern. “Is she drunk too?”
“My mother,” I say, “is none of your business. She is no concern of yours, and hasn’t been since—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” he says, as if this is all suddenly tiresome for him.
We walk, we splash. We pass no other people, animals, or familiars, unless a butterfly counts.
“I never left you alone, really,” he says. “I left you Chuck.”
I turn my head entirely in his direction to see if he’s toying with me. There is no sign that he is.
“Chuck.”
“Chuck, yes.”
“Ball-licker Chuck. Chuck the Rug. That Chuck?”
“He is a magnificent creature, and he has done very well with you and your mother over the years. You are very lucky to have him. You don’t even know how many times he has saved you.”
“Right. I do feel lucky. He’s been a great dad. All the other kids were jealous.”
“I couldn’t stay. It was for your own good.”
“Forgive me, but I don’t believe you are the first guy to make use of that line.”
“You’d have been dead long ago if I had stayed. This … conflict, this thing you are just becoming aware of? This started the day you were born. They wanted you, needed you, as the only means of destroying me.”
“If that’s true, which I doubt, we could have all hidden together. Why could we not have all stayed together and hidden?”
“Marcus, this thing, our magic, an obair, is not a smattering of magics across the world. It is one thing, like a fabric that connects us all. The magic, wherever it is, attracts like to like. We can always find one another, anywhere in the world. So as long as I was with you, you could be found, and it would have been all but impossible for me to keep you safe, vulnerable as you were. You could hide in plain sight, in your mother’s world, as long as I was not with you. Until, of course, the day when you developed powers of your own. Until you came into an obair, at the age of seventeen.”
“Right,” I say. “Which explains my sudden fit of popularity this year.”
“Precisely.”
“But they could have killed me. They could still kill me.”
“Why would they?” he asks. “When you are their key?”
“Key to what?”
“Their key to me, son. Why not use you to bring me close, then destroy the both of us?”
I stop short and start walking back in the direction we came from. I have a sudden pang, a powerful feeling of sorrow for my mother, up there innocent and alone. Caught in the middle of all this …
“Bullshit,” I yell, borrowing her word for this magic scene.
“Oh yes,” he says wryly, “I’m familiar with that euphemism.”
Up there alone, I’m still thinking. Alone except for the vodka and magnificent Chuck.
“Maybe my mother and I don’t give a good goddamn about your conflict,” I say, turning on him, pointing at him, and continuing to walk backward through the water. “And don’t follow me,” I say, before catching my heel on a rock, falling backward, and
smacking my head hard.
“I think maybe it’s not good for you to go on sleeping through the day,” Eleanor says as she crouches beside me.
My eyes open. I take it in. The ceiling, the heat, Eleanor, Chuck. All still here. Or rather I am still here.
“How long have I been asleep?” I ask.
“Most of the day,” she says. “It’s just about dinner time. I was making you lunch when …”
I sit up. My head hurts. So what? It hurt before I went to sleep. But it should be better now. Yet it’s worse.
I turn to face Eleanor full on. She looks so soft, so completely at the ready for me, if a little weary at the same time. She deserves better than this. She deserves not to be dragged along through whatever muck I am being dragged through. She deserves to be spared this….
“Bullshit,” I spout.
She snaps back from me, nearly toppling over before steadying herself with a hand on Chuck’s face. He doesn’t react at all.
“Sorry,” I say.
Eleanor stands up, stands over me, and shakes her head with great drama.
“This can’t go on, Marcus,” she says.
“What can’t go on?” I make a very poor stab at casual ignorance.
“This … erratic behavior,” she says. “I understand your grief for Jules, and grief is good. Until it becomes craziness. You have to watch for that, Marcus, or it becomes difficult to pull out of it.”
“Craziness,” I echo, and I nod. “No, I suppose it can’t go on.” If only I knew how to stop it. If only I felt I controlled it.
The grief though—any way you slice it, there’s no end in sight. I can’t imagine an end, can’t imagine hearing Jules’s name and not feeling the stab of pain in my chest. I don’t know where this goes, this pain, where it will take me. I fear I will have to follow it to its end, its very bottom, and I fear that ultimately, there is no bottom.
“Dinner is almost ready,” she says with unusual synthetic sternness, as if rigidity is the ticket for me. “When it is, I want us to sit down, out on the porch, and have a real talk over a good meal. Right?”
“Right,” I say, thinking, wrong. What if he’s still out there, lurking in the shallow water? What would happen if she saw? I think we could assume she wouldn’t invite him up for a bite—unless it was to bite off his head.
“It’s a date,” I say. “But no lemonade,” I add, as she heads back to the kitchen.
She stops to look at me over her shoulder with one cocked eyebrow.
“And no wine either, okay?” Not that the bastard’s inquiry as to our alcohol intake matters at all. Not that what he thinks matters at all. Just … enough, right now, is all.
She takes a pause. Takes three or four of them, actually.
“Okay, Marcus,” she concedes.
“Is he out there?” I ask Chuck as soon as she’s gone.
He raises his head to look at me dumbly.
“Don’t play that with me, Chuck. Is he out there or not?”
He gets to his feet with great effort and drama, as if he were climbing up on stilts. Then he proceeds ponderously to the French doors overlooking the porch, overlooking the stream, overlooking …?
I watch him as he appears to scan the outdoors.
I watch, I wait. He is stalling.
“Well?” I ask, and the tail starts to wag.
It’s safe. I go to the kitchen to get stuff to set up our little picnic. Fold out TV dinner trays with artists’ panoramic renderings of Montpelier, Vermont. Mismatched silverware. Paper towels instead of napkins because paper towels are what we have.
I truck it all out through the living room to the doors, open them up to the beginnings of a finally heat-breaking summer evening breeze.
And to him. The bastard.
I calmly put the Montpelier TV dinner trays down on their stands, put the silverware and paper towels down on top of them, and turn and slap my dog on the rump.
“Are we suffering divided loyalties all of a sudden?” I ask Chuck. “Because if we are, all I can say is beat it. Go on. Go with him. I don’t care.”
“Are you talking to the dog?” Eleanor says, nearly making me leap right off the porch.
I whip around to see her standing there with two dinner plates in her hands, heaped with food.
I spin again, in the opposite direction, and he is gone.
Once more I whirl in her direction.
“Is it ballet now?” she asks. “No wonder you wanted to skip the wine tonight.”
“I think maybe I was a little bit hasty about that,” I say.
“Too late,” she says. “You’ve already got me thinking pure and healthy. Go grab us two chairs, and I’ll get us two glasses of sparkling water.”
When we do sit down—and he still has not reappeared—it is to a minor feast. For the first time in a while, Eleanor has made one of her hearty staple dishes. Folded into a fresh baguette is her combination of wafer-thin roast beef, caramelized onions, mushrooms, Worcestershire sauce and Muenster cheese, woven through to use the maximum amount of the orange stuff around the edges. Keeping the sandwich company is a pile of hand-cut fried potatoes with generous coatings of salt, vinegar, and black and red pepper. Raw cucumbers and carrots are placed around the edges of the plate to provide color and coolness and a reason to feel a little better about ourselves, even if we only pick at them.
This is, no question, a meal designed to soothe my soul.
“So, what did I do to deserve this?” I ask, while simultaneously tearing into my sandwich. “Is this just for going nuts?”
“Pretty much,” she says, also chewing away, “but also for taking me with you.”
I put my sandwich down and stare off over the burbling water.
“Sorry, Eleanor,” I say. “I don’t mean to be doing that. I’ll get myself together.”
“I’m certain you will. Could we start with a little enlightenment as to what has been going on in your head since … you heard? I think you haven’t been quite open about it all.”
I nod. Take one deep breath and several quick laps around the dirt track of my head.
“It was a car crash,” I say, popping a potato into my mouth to cover the catch in my throat. “She went off the bridge in Port Cal. Getting a ride home … from that party…. You remember the party.”
“Oh dear,” she says, a small gasp escaping with the words.
“Can’t be gasping, Eleanor. It’s hard enough, but if I catch you being all moony and astonished, I don’t think I’ll be able to keep talking.”
“Right,” she says, and puts on her brave face.
“I received a call … went to Port Caledonia, and found out all about it.”
“Who made the call?”
I realize now I hadn’t banked on any questions from her. I don’t know why I hadn’t, since I’d sure be asking a lot if I were her.
But the real problem is that I don’t have all the answers.
“I don’t know,” I say, falling back on the truth out of desperation. And then I remember what Eleanor must remember.
“Didn’t you get a call from Jules the other day? Long after the party? Didn’t I talk to Jules?”
God, no. I can’t do this. I am not equipped to go through with this.
“It was somebody else, I guess. It was a crank, El. Some sick jerk.”
She makes the astonished noise again.
“Please,” I say, and she covers her mouth with her hand.
But just as she seems to have gotten it under control, her eyes turn to wide white holes.
“Marcus,” she says with controlled calm, “you were with Jules that night.”
“I know. I met her at the party.”
“No, you were with her later. When you … when you got your sleeping bag. After the party, Marcus.”
I can’t believe where I am. I can’t believe how far this is going, how deep I am getting.
I put down my sandwich, take the plate off my lap, and place it back on the tray. I
couldn’t even force the food down now. My throat is too closed.
“It wasn’t after the party, El. The party was still going.”
“But you and Jules weren’t there anymore. So for you, it was after the party.”
I try to drink my sparkling water, but even that is a no-go. My hand is shaking so much that I have to nearly bite the glass to hold it steady.
“Well, Jules went back, okay?”
Eleanor and I are out in space at this moment. Floating in some faraway universe we have never seen before, only just barely tethered to each other.
“And you?” she asks very, very tentatively. “You didn’t come home until early morning. Where did you go after Jules went back to the party?”
Where was I then? Where am I now? is as good a question. I am writhing inside, lost in the thought that, one way or another, I am going to make Eleanor even more upset than I already have.
“Marcus?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“What. What don’t you know, Marcus?”
“Anything. I don’t know anything.”
Clinical Eleanor comes back to us now. I have backslid so much, so rapidly, that her own troubles recede, and she has to carry us both.
“Is Jules really dead, Marcus?”
“She is completely dead, Eleanor,”. I say in a voice equally lifeless.
“Where were you when she died, Marcus?”
“I don’t know. I might have still been in the woods. I wasn’t with her.”
“Why are you talking like that? Why are you talking to me like a zombie, Marcus? What are you hiding?”
I want so much right now. I want to slither away. I want to turn back time. I’ll have to ask Father, I’ll have to ask the old man next time I see him, which will probably be in ten minutes or so, if stopping and reversing time is in my bag of tricks. I’d like to go back to sixteen, when I had no magic, when I had Port Caledonia and simplicity. When I had no father. When I had Jules. I want Eleanor to stop being a dogged rationalist and go back to being my wounded, sympathetic mother.
“Can we have some of your special lemonade now?” I ask.
“No,” she says firmly.
I am running out of directions. I have to tell. I have to tell her everything.