Kneeling down, Judson saw the square dent in the top of her head, the calling card of a sledgehammer’s blow. He lifted her broken skull and saw the deep cut that ran along her throat, the very neck he had kissed and inhaled the sweet scent of just months before. Grief fought horror for control of him then, and the lump in his throat was suffocating. But toppling them both was the fear, for he had yet to find Billy.
* * * * *
The corn wasn’t just brown and ready for the harvest. It was caked in a blackness that resembled gunpowder. Each time he crashed through some of the stocks, the black dust filled the air for a moment before vanishing.
He stopped cold when he came across his son’s Wranglers lying in the row. They were slick with blood. His belt and boots lay just before them, and Judson realized that it was bloody footprints that he’d been trailing through the corn.
He started to sob even as he pulled back the hammer on his revolver.
Please, Lord. Not my son. Not my only begotten son.
He followed the splatters in the dirt to the end of the cornfield, where a small hill led to the stretch of open valley. It faced east, and the light of this awful new day blinded him so that he could only see a silhouette, one so still that he at first mistook it for a scarecrow, even if it was a bit short for one.
“Billy …” he said, recognizing the boy.
His son stood before him on the peak of the dirt mound. He was naked, and his nubile body was taut against the backdrop of the tangerine haze. In his hands was a scythe that dripped so thickly that Judson could make out the outline of every drop.
Judson wasn’t even aware of the pistol dropping from his hand.
“My God, boy. My God, what’s happened?”
Judson wanted to run to his son, but something held him back.
“I’m not a boy no more, Pa. Don’t you see?”
The lump in his throat returned, bigger now, a monstrosity.
“I’ve done it, Pa,” the boy said with pride. “Done it proper, like a man. Like a real man.”
Judson felt his legs give out, and he crashed to his knees, too numb with shock to feel the pain of the impact.
Lord, what have I done?
“Have I made you proud, Pa?” Billy asked, and Judson was frightened most by the lack of sarcasm in his voice. The boy was serious.
“The livestock, son …” he began, but couldn’t finish.
“To prove to you that I wasn’t soft anymore. Not your Little Boy Blue.”
“But son, your momma. Your momma that done raised you, that loved you so much …”
He looked up to see a genuine look of befuddlement upon the boy’s blood-smeared face.
“She’d grown too sick to love back, Pa,” Billy said. “And a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, love ain’t go no part in it.”
At the raising of the scythe, the crows hidden in the corn took flight as if it were their lives that were in danger and not Judson’s. The movement shook more of the black dust from the husks as the boy stepped forward, and the last thing Judson saw before the blade entered his neck were his son’s vacant eyes staring deep into him, looking like two black planets, gleaming.
Reunion
If nothing else, I’m glad we killed Donnie in January.
I can’t stand to be in Florida at any other time of the year. The humidity works into my flesh and drives up into my brain like some damn parasite. It’s one of the many reasons I so rarely return to this upturned bucket of alligator dung. The only reason I ever do visit is for Angie. One way or another, I find my way down here every January 30th. I tell myself that at least I’m escaping the snow, even if it is for a morbid ritual of sorts. But I know it hasn’t got anything to do with snow, or even the ritual, really. It’s just about Angie, just like everything always was.
“Every year you surprise me,” she says. Her eyes glow under the streetlights, like a kitten’s, shimmering with the same pale gold that bounces off the water in the pot-holes. For all her wounded beauty, Angie still stuns me, more so now than when we were kids, age being so good to her.
“Come on,” I say. “You should know by now that I keep my promises.”
“Does it still feel right to you, Hank?”
“I don’t know that it ever did, sugar.”
She looks away, guilt adding weight to her sigh.
“How’s the babies?” I ask, letting her know I understand.
“Good. Kyle is gonna be 3 next month, and Fay has started to crawl.”
“Rob?”
“He’s good too. Making better money on the night shift. I don’t see him as much, but we get by better.”
I almost say that I’m just glad she doesn’t have to do anything harsh to get the money, but I agreed last year not to bring up her stripping days no more.
“Well,” I say, looking out at the shore, “I’m glad Rob’s good too.”
I’ve never met Rob. I sometimes wonder if he knows I exist, considering how much I know about him. We leave the parking lot and start making our way onto the boardwalk. The sea air is nicer than I remember, and the dried palm trees are noisy in the wind.
“So when are you gonna get married?” she asks.
“I have to fall in love first, don’t I?”
“I guess you’re too tough for that, huh?”
“Some might say.”
“Would they be right?”
“Don’t know.”
I look at her. Her smile is like a lantern in the coal-black chambers of my rotten heart. I can’t ever imagine having children of my own, but if I did, I’d want her to be their mother. It goes beyond any kind of concept of love, as far as relationships are concerned. Some would say she’s the one that got away. But it’s not that. Angie’s like family. The only family I’ve got.
“You working?” she says, asking much more.
“I get by fine.”
“Just not honestly.”
“If I tried to be anything but what I am, that would be the lie.”
“I worry about that.”
“Don’t.”
“Can’t be helped.”
“Can’t be changed either. A man’s gotta work, and there’s only one thing I’ve ever been good at.”
She pulls her feathery bangs away from her eyes. They dance backward as the wind picks up, writhing like a snake when you take a shovel to its head. I can see the scar above her right eye. Fifteen years of creams have hardly made a difference. Angie hates it. Not because she’s vain, but because it reminds her.
“It’s a nice night tonight,” she says. “We don’t get many cool nights here.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
There’s an awkward silence for a moment before she speaks.
“How much do you remember?”
“We’re not quite there yet, you know. We still have some walking to do.”
“I wish I could forget.”
“It’d be easier if you ignored the anniversary.”
“Respect for the dead, Hank.”
She puts her hand in the nook of my arm, and we stroll like old lovers. Beer cans and burrito wrappers from the nearby fast-food joint lay half-buried in the sand. Nothing ever really changes in a place like Satellite Beach. The moonlight bounces off the shards of broken glass, just like it did that night when I was 19.
I had never done a deal with Jerry, but I knew about him. He was a few years older, much deeper in the shit than any of the rest of us. Donnie was our hook-up when it came to Jerry, ’cause Donnie’s older brother knew him. He’d score a little cash from one end, and a little dope from the other. For Donnie, being the connection was sweet and relatively safe.
When Jerry had first started getting edgy that night, Donnie had tried to mellow him out, telling him that Angie and I were cool. Jerry had Angie confused with some girl he’d heard about who had narced on somebody from his old gang. Said she fit the description too well. When he said that, it’d seemed like his whole head itched. She started to say somet
hing to reassure him, and his butterfly knife came out quicker than a finger snaps. He went for her eye, and she bent away from the blade. He got her right above the eye, the knife ricocheting off the bone. I pounced on him without even thinking. The broken bottle was right there, and I knew it, but the thought wasn’t in my head in that flashing moment of rage. I busted my knuckles into his teeth, and he stabbed at me, catching only a shred of my jacket. But I stumbled, and he used my momentum to knock me to the ground. Donnie actually tried to pull Jerry off of me, to his credit. But Jerry was big and Donnie just wasn’t — and for that matter, neither was I.
Jerry turned the knife upside down to plunge it into me, and that’s when the crack had echoed out across the beach. I heard a broken moan, and Donnie crashed into the sand without even trying to break his fall. Jerry had been distracted by it just long enough for me to grab that broken bottle and twist it deep into his neck, breaking glass off into his Adam’s apple. I didn’t know much about cutting throats at that point in my life, but I either got lucky or there’s just no wrong way to do it, ’cause in no time at all Jerry was off of me, shaking and clutching his neck, which pumped out his blood like a geyser.
Angie was shaking too, the .38 in her hands still coughing up cordite. She was staring at Donnie, who was crumpled on the beach like some forgotten rag doll. He wheezed for every pained breath. She hadn’t meant to shoot him; he’d just been too close to Jerry, and had to shoot at him cause he was about to stab her boyfriend.
I’d had no idea she’d been carrying a gun. It was one of her many secrets.
I walked up to her and took the pistol from her before she could drop it. For all the misery her life had slung at her beforehand, there was never pain in her eyes like this before. I saw it glowing, there in the moonlight. It’s been there ever since.
Jerry went still. Donnie, however, was wheezing and grabbing his chest with blood-soaked fingers. She’d hit the poor bastard in a lung. Blood bubbled out of the corners of his mouth when he gasped for air. Angie started to cry. She’d been the toughest girl in the halfway house, and yet there she was, weeping like a Girl Scout with a wagon full of rained-on cookies.
I was young then, but I’d already learned that it’s easier to live with something when you feel like you had no choice in the matter. I didn’t want her to have to decide. So all I said was: “There’s no good way out of this.”
Angie looked away. Then I shot Donnie in the head.
I turned around and shot Jerry in the face, just to be sure.
It was all over a lousy 600 bucks’ worth of cheap nose candy that was probably cut with talc anyway, a typical drug deal for people in their early 20s.
“Here’s the spot,” Angie says. “Remember how they had used pieces of palmetto bushes as extra posts for the police tape?”
“Yeah.”
They’d never found anything they could use. Not that the lives of two low-life drug peddlers meant much to the local police anyway. We’d thrown the pistol into the Indian River and kept our mouths shut. Just another drug-related homicide.
“You know,” she says, “I say this every time, but I think about Donnie every day.”
“I know you do.”
“I wish I didn’t. I wish I could be like you.”
“No you don’t.”
Angie thinks I’m stronger than her, somehow. But it’s not strength. When I killed Donnie and Jerry that night, whatever remained of the little boy in me was also killed by my actions. No more smiles. No more tears. Once you’ve killed, you never feel the need or desire to do either.
Donnie and Jerry were the first men I had ever killed. The more lives you take, the less personal murder seems. But Donnie is Angie’s first and last kill. That’s why she can’t shake loose the ghost. Whereas with me, well, it’s funny how the poison can be the cure.
“I wish I could make it better, Hank,” she says.
“It was an accident on your end, and I finished him out of mercy. The way his life was going, he would’ve ended badly anyhow.”
“We can’t know that for sure.”
“His older brother’s in prison for arson. His little sister started hooking a few years back. She’s been missing for over a year, and nobody’s even searching for her anymore.”
“That’s Donnie’s kin. It don’t mean it’s Donnie too.”
“Don’t regret it.”
“Why the hell shouldn’t I?”
“Because him losing his life saved yours.”
She looks at me, blinking, lost.
“You went straight that night, Angie,” I say to her, touching her fingers, feeling Rob’s ring there. “After that, there was no more dealing. No more drugs and thugs. If Donnie hadn’t died, you may not even be here now. No home. No husband. No babies reaching for you, calling you ‘Mommy.’”
She starts to cry just a little bit. It doesn’t ugly her at all.
“You see,” she says, and smiles, holding my hand, “this is why I need you here with me, Hank.”
“I know,” I tell her. “That’s why I’ll be here next year.”
Before the Boogeymen Come
“I can’t believe you pulled me out of the closet for this, Fred-Fred. The little brat’s got his comforter on — you know damn well we can’t get past protection like that!”
“Yeah,” Fred-Fred admitted, his yellow fangs smiling on only one side of his mouth. “But ya see, his toes are exposed on his right foot. I thought maybe we could drag ’im out by them.”
Meanie rolled his blood-red eyes in his oversized skull, smacking his furry forehead with his paw. He liked Fred-Fred well enough, but he was one of the dumbest goddamned Underbeds he’d ever lived next door to. Underbeds were notoriously dimwitted, but Fred-Fred was as empty-headed as a jack-o-lantern rotting on a stoop. While always well-intentioned, his plans to nab The Kid were always as half-cocked as a broken BB rifle and stupider than the tall tales The Old Lady would tell The Kid at night, just before it was time for Meanie, Fred-Fred and Slithers to get to work.
“Fred-Fred, you nimrod!” Meanie snarled. “Don’t you remember the last time we tried that shit?”
Fred-Fred bowed his head in deep reflection, the bone and sinew of his brain hissing steam inside his lumpy cranium. Memories often evaded him, and this reference of Meanie’s was no exception. He shrugged in reply. Frustrated, Meanie grabbed Fred-Fred’s left arm. It was a fat log covered in purple, papilloma-riddled scales that seeped rank pus. He held it up to Fred-Fred’s many eyes so that he could see the gnawed stump where his claw used to be. Now Fred-Fred remembered.
“Mr. Rex,” Fred-Fred said in a sigh.
“That’s right, pal. That little shit there keeps one of them stuffed puppies by his tootsies each night to protect him from ghouls like us. He already nabbed one of your talons there — don’t let him run off with the rest of ya.”
They both sighed now, looking at The Kid defiantly lying there in his bed with his Aquaman covers draped over him, snoozing away like they weren’t even there. It was insulting to them at best, and threatening at worst. The deadline was drawing nearer, especially for Meanie. Fred-Fred figured that was why Meanie had been so irritable lately. Fred-Fred was worried too, but as a Monster Under the Bed he still had a few good years left with a 7-year-old boy. Slithers, being a Shadow Monster, still had time too, probably even more than he did. But Meanie was a Monster in the Closet. He was an old-school, hairy, goblin-like abomination. He was terrifying to young squirts but slowly became more laughable to them as they aged. Particularly because he lived in the closet, he would be the first to go, because the closet would have to make room for newer, different fears. It was only a matter of time before Meanie would be replaced by a boogeyman, some tall, male figure in black with a chalky face, often just a simple amalgam of cheap slashers from late-night movies the little brats would sneak a peek at.
“I’m sorry, Meanie. I just wanted to help. I’ve just been lying there at home with all them dust bunnies every ni
ght, worrying about the neighborhood and about our positions.”
“Hey,” Meanie said, “there ain’t nothing to worry about here. I know we’re short on time now, what with these kids maturing earlier and earlier, but we’re good monsters, and we can get the job done.”
“You don’t think we’re getting too old?”
“Why are you so negative all the time? We’re not old, we’re old-fashioned, and old-fashioned is good! We’re the things that go bump in the night, the true classics. I keep telling ya, Fred-Fred, these zombie video games and teenage vampire sagas aren’t going to steal our thunder forever. They’re all just a fad. In the deep, dark of the night, we’re still king shit.”
Fred-Fred grinned wider. He liked seeing Meanie all riled up and brewing piss. For too many nights Meanie had just stayed in the closet, almost like he had given up. Fred-Fred was glad he had dragged him out tonight, even if his plan was as bad as they always were. At least Meanie was working again, basking in the pale moonlight by the edge of The Kid’s bed.
“Well, we need to do something, gentlemen,” a voice said from the chair in the corner. They turned and watched the small pile of clothing upon it suddenly transform into their neighbor, Slithers, the shape-shifting Shadow Monster. Tonight Slithers was comprised of dirty laundry, one of his more common forms. A long-sleeved shirt was wadded up for his head, two buttons forming his eyes and one sleeve slung forward at an angle to work as his mouth. His tongue was a soccer sock, long and yellow, with dirt stains on it. It hung out of his mouth as he spoke.
“I hate to alarm you,” Slithers said, “but The Kid brought home a horror comic this evening. He must have borrowed it from a school chum. He’s hiding it from his mum and dad, so we’re in luck if they confiscate it before he reads it. Otherwise, he is going to have bigger, scarier things to cause him trepidation.”
Meanie could not hide the consternation that flushed across his face like the surge of a urinal. Fred-Fred gulped, and Slithers waited for what he thought would be a hotheaded reaction, which was typical of Meanie’s disposition. After all, he was an old-school monster, and his name suited him.
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