White Trash Warlock

by David R. Slayton

  “When he left,” she said. “I never wanted to see this car again.”

  “You asked Sue to take it,” he said, wondering how he could get her to circle to the topic of his father and the details he needed.

  “Yes,” she said. “I couldn’t bring myself to sell it, but I didn’t want it around either.”

  “Did you feel the same way about me?” he asked, keeping his tone even. “When Bobby dumped me at Liberty House?”

  “Adam Lee,” she said, her tone sawing that way it did to warn him he was near a line. As a boy, it would have earned him a spanking or a lengthy time out. “You are my son and I love you.”

  “You’re not answering the question, Mom.”

  “You’re not easy, Adam,” she said, her back stiffening. “You’re more like your father than you’re like me.”

  “Magical?” he asked. He sincerely wanted, needed, to know. It was hard enough to get his mother to talk about his dad. She’d never given any hint that his father might be a witch.

  “Stubborn,” she said. “And a smart ass.”

  “You don’t talk about him,” Adam said, his voice quieter.

  Most of what he could remember was anger, temper tantrums. He remembered a flare of crimson when Bobby called their father “Daddy,” not Dad. He’d backhanded his eldest. When Adam had asked Bobby why, all he’d muttered was something about John Wayne and an old movie.

  Remembering it now, Adam touched his own cheek and struggled to pull the real memory out from the decade of time that had eroded it and layered on confusing notions. His father was angry. His father loved him, adored him, made him laugh, and called him “tiger.” His father hit his sons. His father left.

  “There’s not a lot to talk about,” his mother said, oblivious to the scene Adam had relived. “But Bobby was older. He knew him better. Maybe you should ask him about your father.”

  Adam sank further into his seat. The cushioning had almost given out. He could feel the metal frame digging into his back. The old cloth was time-stained, with black starburst burns from cigarette ashes. Once, two people, his parents, had ridden in the car and smoked together. Once, they’d been happy. Now, he knew next to nothing about his father. Maybe he was the warlock Adam had chased across southern Oklahoma. Maybe he wasn’t. Argent was his only hope on that front. And as he had wondered so many times, Adam wasn’t certain their father should be found.

  “Maybe I will,” he said, knowing he wouldn’t.

  Their dad was a tough topic between the brothers. Bobby avoided talking about it with Adam, like he was too delicate to handle it. Sometime, long ago, Bobby had decided Adam couldn’t handle emotional discussions, like his sensitivity to magic or strong feelings from others meant he was too delicate for anything too heavy. Adam resented the hell out of that.

  After a while, when they’d turned onto Broadway and neared the suburbs, his mother said, “I know you are still mad at him, over Liberty House, but he did only did what he thought was right, what the counselors told him to. That’s all he’s ever done, what he thought was right.”

  “I’m not mad, Mom, not like I was. But what he did, locking me up, it broke me.” Adam didn’t think he’d ever put it all out there before. Liberty House had changed him, not for the better. He’d met Perak. He’d learned magic, to control his powers, but he’d never been able to get over feeling like a freak. He’d never felt at ease in his skin.

  “I’ve always found it strange,” his mother said, looking to the back door in a way that told him she longed for a cigarette. “That you weren’t as angry at me.”

  His mom turned to face him. She crossed her arms and met his gaze.

  “I was your parent, not Bobby. I signed the papers. Yes, he talked to your counselor for me. I was working. I was always working, but I could have made a different decision.”

  “Then why didn’t you?” Adam asked, thinking that maybe, yeah, he would try being angry at her for a change.

  “I didn’t know better,” she said. “And your brother didn’t know better either. I think you need to forgive him. And if you can’t, I think you need to be mad at me too.”

  Adam had never thought about it before. He’d never doubted that Bobby deserved his anger. He couldn’t really say why he didn’t the feel the same way about his mom. But it was Bobby who’d held him during Dad’s rages, Bobby who’d sworn to keep Adam safe. Mom had just stood by during the beatings. She’d cowered, and maybe that had been her Liberty House, the time that had broken her, left her incapable of mothering him at all.

  “Maybe I should be,” he said.

  “Bobby thought he was doing the best thing for you when he put you there,” she said. “We both did.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t just the best thing for you two?” he asked.

  “I can’t say,” she said.

  It was more than he’d expected from her, but still, it wasn’t near enough.

  20

  Robert

  Robert collapsed into “the chair” as soon as he got home from work. They’d fought about it, gently, the ridiculous cost of the poufy, floral-patterned thing. Annie had insisted it tied the room together. He’d never seen her sit in it. In fact, he was pretty sure no one had used it until he found his mother reading in it one day. He pressed down into its firm, plush fabric and remembered how much he’d looked forward to their kids vomiting on it. The thought still brought a little smile.

  He very badly wanted a drink, but Robert never drank. Too many on-call shifts, too many chances for the memories to catch him if he slipped into that particular fog.

  His mother warded the past off with a box of cheap wine in the kitchen, sipping it through the day as she picked out passages from her bible. Robert pretended not to notice the wine. He didn’t approve, but he understood.

  Adam approached the chair. He came cautiously, like he had as a little boy, like Robert might explode. He nodded, and Adam perched on the edge of the ottoman like a bird. Whispering, so quietly that Robert almost shouted at him to speak up, Adam explained the plan. Robert could not absorb half of it. He wanted that drink. He wanted two.

  “When?” Robert asked.

  “They’ll come for her at midnight,” Adam said.

  It would be so easy, to just let Annie go with them, to excise the problem and pretend all was well, the way he’d thought all was well with Adam in Liberty House, despite the whispers that said otherwise.

  “Us,” Robert snapped. “They’ll come for us at midnight.”

  Adam opened his mouth to protest but Robert cut him off. “I’m not sending my wife to some magical asylum without checking it out first.”

  He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

  He heard the anger in his voice. He hated seeing Adam cringe, like he had so often when he hid in their room, under the frame of the plywood bunk bed when he was still small enough to squeeze beneath it. He was cocky, so headstrong as an adult. Robert had thought it then, and perhaps he still thought it. Adam might be too delicate, too breakable for the world.

  “I don’t know what you’ll see,” Adam said. “Or how much.”

  Adam was so eager for Robert to know, and all Robert wanted was to get on with being Robert, to be nothing like his little brother or their father.

  He’d tried to forget. He’d tried to move away and leave it behind, but here it was. Here they were—his mother, his brother. The past wouldn’t stay buried, would not let him move on.

  Robert sort of wanted to explode, like Dad had exploded, with shouts and thrown objects and holes punched into the walls. He forced all that down, swallowed it, though it filled his guts like tar.

  He didn’t want to see things that weren’t there. He didn’t want to hear what wasn’t said aloud, but maybe it was all real. Maybe he’d been wrong all along, about so many things.

  The room felt gloomy, the
lamplight heavy and slow as Robert sank.

  Adam would show him this hidden world. After all, that was the plan, take Annie to the spirit realm and freeze her in time. If this was real, he was going. If this was some kind of con, the people running it would pay.

  Robert unfolded himself from the chair.

  “I’ll get ready,” he said.

  He could have dozed off in the ugly floral chair, but he fought the lethargy and stood. Magical beings were about to take his wife to the Other Side, the “spirit realm,” as Aunt Sue and Adam called it.

  They’d spent a Thanksgiving or two with the woman, at their father’s insistence, at their mother’s reluctance. She wore floral house dresses and proudly served them TV dinners. She’d always lived in squalor. Robert could scarcely believe the old bat was still alive.

  Now he was sounding like her, preparing for some adventure out of make-believe.

  All he truly wanted was to sleep through it, but he would not let them take Annie without being there. He needed to see where they’d keep her.

  He’d delivered Adam to Liberty House, and he’d seen it for a modern, clean facility. Mostly. When he looked from the corner of his eye, there’d been mold on the walls. More than a few of the fluorescent bulbs buzzed and blinked, but if he stared, if he looked directly at things, they seemed fine. Robert had taken Adam to Liberty House and left him there, looking back once to confirm that his brother would be safe. He’d never been able to bury the doubt he’d felt since.

  Heavy limbed, heavy footed, Robert trudged upstairs. He became Bobby again, for all intents and purposes, all control and cultivated order lost. He heard his mother whispering to Annie as she dressed her in the guest room that had become hers.

  Robert did not know what to wear. Adam would wear worn jeans and an ironic T-shirt with a flannel over it. Robert cared quite a bit more. He found a pair of jeans with the tags still on them.

  They were new, unworn. It made sense. He had two uniforms lately, two looks: what he wore to work, and sweats. Robert pulled on a button-up, white with blue lines in a grid pattern. The night wasn’t cool enough for a jacket, but he tugged one on anyway. He’d need the pocket. Robert found the hiking boots he’d purchased when he’d first reached Colorado, intending to go to the mountains every day off and enjoy the outdoors. They were almost new. He pulled them on and laced them up.

  Then he loaded the gun.

  Adam and his mother thought he’d forgotten all about where they came from, the red dirt and scrub oak of the backwoods, but Robert remembered. He remembered the stories about feral dogs who’d tasted human flesh and escaped convicts hiding in the woods.

  The gun, like so many things, had been his dad’s. A Ruger .22, so old it couldn’t be registered.

  Robert kept it clean. He promised Annie he’d use a small gun safe and a trigger lock when the baby came, even before the kid could crawl. Still, she hated that he kept it in the house. But Robert remembered—his father, red-faced, screaming. He remembered hiding beneath the bed, first alone, then with Adam clutched, shivering and pink, in his arms.

  And he remembered standing in the way as Adam hid, letting their dad explode onto him, battering him with fists and cursing until, rage expended, Dad stomped outside to have yet another beer while Robert nursed his fat lip.

  Safety on, the gun went into the jacket pocket.

  Dressed, Robert returned to the living room. Adam sat with Annie on the couch. She looked alert, awake, more focused than he’d seen her in a while, just when he would have preferred she didn’t know what was happening, what they were doing.

  Their mother sat in the den, bible open. She’d left most of the lights off.

  The doorbell rang, shattering the quiet she’d drawn over the dark house.

  Adam opened the door. A woman strode in. She looked like an old movie star, all curves and beauty drawn in white and silver. There was something familiar about her, and Robert might have sworn he’d seen her once on an old black and white movie, the kind their mom had let run on channel thirty-four while their dad worked on the Cutlass.

  The woman ran a hand through her perfect hair. It didn’t upset the careful upswept style, but it revealed the dagger point of her long ear. That little touch of inhumanity made Robert freeze. They said spirits didn’t like iron. He’d see how they felt about lead.

  “Lady,” Adam said with more deference than Robert had ever heard him show anyone. Adam bowed, actually bowed, to her in a graceful, old-fashioned way that he had to have learned from another old movie.

  There were times when he felt his brother wasn’t his brother, that they could not have come from the same place.

  “How did you get him to do that?” Robert asked. Adam shot him a look of warning, no—fear. What was this woman that she could make surly Adam Lee sit up like a puppy?

  “Oh, Adam Binder,” she said, swinging her purse off her shoulder. She beamed at Robert’s brother like he was some pet who’d performed a trick. Robert tensed. “Aren’t you going to introduce us?”

  Adam stepped in front of Robert and said, very carefully, “Lady Argent of the Winter, Queen of Swords and Guardian of the Watchtower of the North, I present my brother, Robert Jack Binder, doctor, eldest of my generation. Second of his name.”

  The way Adam spoke, with such care, gave Robert pause. Kings and queens—he felt like he’d been dropped into Comic-Con. The woman moved with an impossible, avian grace, but she was real. Those pointed ears were not fake. He felt the weight of the gun in the pocket of his jacket.

  “There’s about five more, but we don’t have the time,” she said.

  “I don’t want to not show the proper respect,” Adam said.

  “You act as though I would eat him,” the queen said, her gray eyes sparkling.

  “Would you?” Robert asked.

  “Robert,” Adam hissed in warning.

  “Elves are vegans,” she said. She glanced at the watch on her wrist. “We should get going. We need to be downtown and traffic is horrible these days.”

  “We’re not going to the watchtower?” Adam asked.

  “We are not going to the Watchtower of the North,” Argent said. “To save your marriage-sister we must take her out of time, and time is the purview of the East. The Gaoler shall keep her safe.”

  “Gaoler . . . jailer?” Robert asked. “You’re going to lock her up?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Lady Argent said. Her neck moved with too much grace, too much flexibility, like an owl or hawk.

  “But we don’t have all night,” she continued with a little tap of her foot. “And you just had to live in the suburbs.”

  Robert shot the elf woman a glare and leaned over Annie.

  She sat on the couch, staring blankly into space.

  “We’re going to go now, okay, Annie?” Robert asked.

  Annie lifted her head, cowed and furtive. She nodded, but did not speak. His heart twisted to see his Annie, so proud and capable, reduced.

  Argent frowned.

  “You were correct,” she said. “She doesn’t have much time.”

  She led them outside, to a plain white van parked on the street. It looked like the perfect vehicle for a kidnapping.

  Mom closed the door behind them. She did not watch them walk to the curb. She had not said much about any of it, just retreated into her Bible and muttered prayers. Adam frowned, but Robert understood.

  He did not know what to say to Annie as he held her hand and guided her along. Soothing noises and soft whispers poured out of him. He realized he’d been saving them up for the baby. With each muttering, each spend from that piled stock, he felt the dream, their perfect life, recede a little farther.

  The woman, Argent, took the passenger seat, riding shotgun beside another elf, this one dressed like a chauffeur.

  Robert helped Annie into the van. R
eaching over, he fastened her seatbelt.

  “No,” Annie said. “I don’t—I don’t want that.”

  Tears brimmed in her eyes.

  “You can’t make me,” she said.

  “Shh,” Robert said. His heart felt like glass, cracking and breaking into cutting shards. “We’re going to make it better.”

  21

  Robert

  He didn’t know if he was lying to her. He held her for most of the drive up the long stretch of Broadway toward the small copse of tall buildings comprising downtown Denver. Adam sat behind them, silent.

  Annie pushed Robert away. She stared at him, trying to focus, trying to see him through the haze that had darkened their life. He closed his eyes, hoped she did not see him struggle to swallow it all down and keep it off his face. But his gut had no more room. He choked up, couldn’t find air, drowning on dry land.

  She did not struggle further, did not strike him or speak. When she relaxed, the pressure in her hands letting up, he opened his eyes. Downtown loomed.

  The slight canyons of lights and buildings swallowed them. The driver pulled the van into an alley.

  “Stay with the van,” Argent told the driver.

  The four of them, Annie, Robert, Adam, and Argent, filed out into the bustling night. Denver always seemed busy these days, even this late on a weeknight. People walked in pairs or groups. Most of them were college-age. Some of the young men, skinny, in jeans so tight that Robert could almost tell their religion, might have been gay. They looked happy. Robert shot Adam a look, trying to say that could be you. He wanted to see his brother free, not weighed down by the shadows and visions that swirled around him.

  There was a nearby campus, shared by three colleges. Adam could go there if he wanted. He could get his GED, go to community college. He could be happy, could leave it behind too. It was all Robert had ever wanted for him, and maybe the past would fade if Adam left it behind.

  But Adam didn’t seem to notice the sights or even the young men. He kept walking, following the elven woman toward the clock tower.