White Trash Warlock

by David R. Slayton

  Bobby only half-turned his head when Adam entered. What Adam felt from him, resolution like raw iron and some blue feeling he couldn’t name, was a sobering mix.

  “It was good to see you again,” Bobby said to Mrs. Pearce. “Let’s go, Adam.”

  Bobby carried a paper shopping bag. Adam guessed it held the meager contents of his locker.

  “Where?” he asked, looking to the counselor. Her smile, terse today, flattened as she looked down at a stack of papers on her desk. She wasn’t memorable, his counselor. She didn’t really even seem to react when he saw her. Her name dropped like a fish into water.

  “Where are we going?” Adam asked Bobby, following him out.

  Outside, he caught the smell of roses, of blooming flowers, so cloying that he almost gagged. He sneezed, even though the school had little green and the blooming field of toothed snapdragons should have been a parking lot. Another vision, another delusion.

  “You haven’t been taking your medication,” Bobby said. “Have you?”

  Adam was distracted by a four winged, two-headed eagle. Pretty. It saw him too.

  Bobby sighed and led Adam to his car, something dark, something battered and Japanese.

  “I hope you’re happy,” Bobby said as Adam settled into the passenger seat, his head pressed to the closed window. The tinted glass felt warm against the skin of his face. “I had to drive down from Norman for this.”

  Bobby went to Oklahoma University in Norman. He said “Norman” like he was proud of it, like it wasn’t a football-obsessed enclave for jocks and morons.

  “I’ll have to make up a test,” Bobby said.

  “Sorry,” Adam said.

  Bobby liked taking tests. He liked being right. He liked proving it, having it on paper.

  In the distance, in the fields, Adam saw figures. Sometimes they were almost too far to make out their features. Then he’d blink, and they’d be so close he could count their nose hairs. Old men, young women. Children. They wore the timeless clothes of the rural poor. They might be the ghosts of pioneers, the first settlers in Oklahoma during the land rush, which they’d acted out every year in elementary school.

  A dragon snatched one up. A second dragon fought the first for the prize. Adam blinked and the landscape returned to oak-dotted plains. It took him a while, struggling to sort this from that, to discern that they weren’t headed for the trailer, for home and another night of Mom working late or locking herself in her room to whisper white, gauzy prayers, her hopes. Once there’d been the red of Dad, his anger and the brighter yellows of his happy or funny moments. Since he’d gone, and Bobby had gone off to college, there had only been blue when it came to Mom.

  “Where are we going?” Adam asked . . . the first time? The fifteenth? He wasn’t sure.

  “It’s near the lake,” Bobby said, turning off the main road.

  Adam didn’t have to ask which lake. He didn’t have to ask which end. Their end was the poor end, no real dock except the one Dad had built, now fallen apart, and no houses, just scrub oak and snakes. Still, their trailer was a short walk.

  The spirit roared back, washing away the real world. Adam saw the fields, the endless grass on both sides, mixing with forests and waves of flood water, though it hadn’t rained in weeks.

  He’d had too much. He needed to sleep, to reset his sanity before another day.

  Then the spirit water receded. Around it, cottonwood trees sprinkled white across the air. It mixed with the fireflies from the spirit realm until the house solidified. It looked like a plantation home out of the Gothic South, like something from Gone with the Wind. Only this home had no grandeur.

  It was more like a varsity athlete gone to seed. It could have been a contender, once. Time had worn away the paint on the large wooden pillars lining the front. The tall doors stood open at a crack. The wind didn’t shift them. They looked too thick and sturdy, designed to keep things inside. The lake water lent everything an odor of sweet dampness tinged with rot.

  Gnats swarmed in clouds across the yard, which was filled with mud puddles and yellowed, uncut grass. The mailbox, a brick column nearly Adam’s height, sported a brass plaque that could use a cleaning. Its address, 1212 Seward Road, lay beneath its name: Liberty House.

  “What is this?” Adam asked as Bobby pulled into the driveway, which were just bricks pressed into the mud. The car tires ran like a thumb over a washboard.

  “Your new school,” Bobby said. “They can help you.”

  “This dump?” Adam demanded, taking in the faded, peeling paint and the curling wooden shingles. The whole place had an air of rot, or age and faded glory.

  “It’s a modern school. I’m amazed it’s out here. And it’s close to Mom. She can see you anytime you want. She’ll bring your clothes and things later.”

  Then Adam understood the blue feeling Bobby had hid under that resolution. Guilt.

  39

  Bobby

  Bobby ran beneath the scrub oak, along sandy paths flecked with bits of their gray-black bark. Some sense told him to hurry, that he had to hurry home. He went from tree shade to sunny clearings. He’d always avoided those bright patches and kept off the rocks. Rattlesnakes liked to sunbathe atop them.

  He avoided the tall grass for the same reason, didn’t take any shortcuts but stuck to the sandy path. They didn’t have a fence, but the former owner had buried old car hoods in the path to tell Bobby when he’d crossed back onto the Binders’ property.

  The trailer came into sight, a long, shabby box without a skirt. His parents had piled sandstones into rings, cemented them together with concrete and filled them with dirt to make planters. It added some decoration to the mud and weeds, but the flowers his mother planted withered in the shade of the oak trees.

  They sprouted from the ground in clumps of three or five, casting shade over the trailer, but not quite so much that they didn’t run the window air conditioning units or that his mother didn’t tape aluminum foil and black plastic over most of the windows to keep the heat out.

  Bobby passed the shed where his dad stored all the fishing gear and the tent they never used since a cow had peed on it. Carried on skinny legs. Bobby heard a sound he knew too well, the slap of leather on skin. Adam wailed.

  “I told you not to cry,” his dad said. Another slap. “And I’m going to keep going until you stop crying, you little faggot.”

  Another slap. Another wail from Adam.

  Bobby’s feet, too slow, carried him up the wooden steps Dad had built for them to reach the trailer door.

  Inside, Dad held a squirming Adam across his knees with one arm. His bare bottom, red and welted, lay exposed to the air. Dad didn’t see Bobby. He had his back to the door. How did he not hear him, with his heart beating so hard in his chest?

  “I told you,” Dad repeated.

  The belt slapped again. Adam sobbed.

  Mom cowered in the kitchen, her eyes warning Bobby not to interrupt.

  Last time, Dad had put him in a sleeper hold until he’d passed out. Then he’d gone back to beating Adam.

  Their father had wrestled in high school. He’d always been proud of that, liked to brag that he could have gone professional if not for Bobby, if not for getting Tilla Mae pregnant in their senior year.

  Bobby remembered the feel of Dad’s hairy, sweaty arm around his neck, and the words before he slipped into darkness, “Next time you won’t wake up.”

  Mom’s eyes flicked to the windowsill. A hammer and a box of nails sat there, dusty, waiting for Dad to fix the loose curtain rod like she’d asked him to a dozen times.

  Bobby stood frozen in the doorway, the windowsill, the hammer a few feet away.

  Do it. Her voice, silent, was as clear as if she’d spoken aloud.

  His eyes met hers.

  Do it.

  Dad had his back to Bobby. He sat
on the couch, Adam stretched across his knees. Bobby didn’t think Dad even knew he’d come in.

  The belt came down again, and again, slapping against Adam’s ass. He wailed, weeping and begging Dad to stop.

  Bobby stopped thinking. He grabbed the hammer. He swung. The impact with Dad’s skull made a dull, almost squishy sound. Another swing, harder, and a crunch, against something that gave way.

  Dad stood. He staggered. He fell to the floor and did not move again. Adam rolled to the floor. He fell silent. The world fell silent.

  Bobby exhaled. It was like there was air again, like he’d been drowning and reached the surface.

  “Bobby,” his mother said from what felt like somewhere far away. He didn’t answer. He didn’t move.

  “Bobby Jack,” she repeated. “Give me that.”

  Numb, slow, like he’d been the one struck, Bobby passed her the hammer.

  “Take your brother to your room,” she said. “Then come help me.”

  Bobby remembered how to make his legs work. He found Adam, still crying and curled up in front of the couch. He made no sound, didn’t fight when Bobby scooped him into his arms.

  Walking stiffly, awkward with his brother’s weight, Bobby took Adam to their room, tucked him into the lower bunk.

  He was so small, like a miniature person.

  “Stay here,” Bobby whispered. “It’s going to be all right.”

  He didn’t know why he said it, only that it was the sort of thing you were supposed to say, but Adam nodded.

  Outside, his mother had taken her husband by his feet.

  “Get his arms,” she said.

  Together, they dragged him outside, over the hard ground, rocks and soil digging at him.

  “Where are we going?” Bobby asked, gulping air from the exertion. They’d made it about ten feet. Dad, the body, weighed too much.

  “Out back,” she said. “To the pond.”

  He knew where she meant. A little gulley led to a hollow, a dip in the land that lay dry most of the year. When it wasn’t, they caught tadpoles there, came back to see them become frogs.

  “Wait here,” Bobby said.

  He hadn’t touched the ATV since Dad had bought it. It sat in the shed, beneath an old tarp. Dad would start it from time to time, to keep it working, but he never rode it.

  Together, Bobby and Tilla wrapped the body in the tarp. Bobby wound it in ropes and hitched it to the back of the four-wheeler. All of it, every bit of the work, went sluggish and hard.

  Bobby drove into the woods. Mom walked behind. No one would think of the noise as out of place, not in the country.

  He kept thinking of Adam, alone in the trailer, hopefully asleep after crying himself out. Hopefully he did not awake alone. Hopefully, he wouldn’t remember what Bobby had done.

  The tarp was mud- and grass-covered when they reached the pond. Bobby tried to ignore the shape when they had him placed in the dry bottom. There were granite stones there, all different sizes. Without a word, Tilla shifted them. Lead-limbed, Bobby helped.

  They kept it up long after he was buried, long after the tarp and its contents were gone from view. Then they hauled dead wood, the fallen oaks Dad always said he’d cut and sell as firewood.

  It was dark when they went back to the trailer. Bobby drove slowly, not wanting to leave his mother behind. He watched for drag marks, but the grass had already started to spring back from where they’d crushed it. A few good rains and the mud would swallow any trace. It would fill the hollow. There’d be animals, the feral dogs that roamed the woods, and maybe coyotes, but they wouldn’t easily shift the cairn Bobby and Tilla had piled.

  “What do we do now?” Bobby asked her, as they climbed the little porch.

  “We go on,” she said. “You’re the man of the house now, Bobby Jack.”

  In the little room he shared with Adam, the tears came. The afternoon had already faded. He thought the sheriff would come, that someone would call, yelling, “Murderer. Murderer.”

  But they did not come. Not that night, not in the week that followed. They didn’t speak of it, and slowly, Mom burned his papers and his things along with their other garbage, in the cinder block furnace behind the trailer. Still no one came.

  When Bobby came home at twilight, he’d spy the orange starburst of his mother’s lit cigarette. She always seemed to be out there, smoking on the steps, staring into the dark. Maybe she was waiting for someone to come too.

  No one did. No one cared that a white trash man lay buried in a dry pond beneath a pile of stones. Bobby skirted it, did his best to forget it existed. Adam did not ask to go see if the August rains had started to fill it up.

  He would not leave Bobby’s side. At night he insisted on sleeping in Bobby’s bunk, curled against his older brother, too hot, like he ran a fever. Though it made Bobby sweat, he didn’t make Adam move, let him stay put. When Adam stirred, restless, Bobby would hold him closer and whisper into his sandy hair.

  By day, Adam often asked when Dad would come home.

  Mom would shush him, but Bobby would say, “It’s just us now, Adam Lee.”

  40

  Robert

  He’d always known he’d never get to escape. Not really, not after he’d killed his father.

  He sat in darkness. It smelled of antiseptic, too sweet, like candy mixed with bleach.

  It never lightened. His eyes did not adjust. He didn’t know how many hours he’d listened to his own heartbeat, listening to his own breathing. He felt the floor beneath him, found thin, almost imperceptible lines. The slick, waxy feel of Formica or vinyl, something synthetic, not wood or stone.

  He crawled, cautious, until he found a wall. Cinder blocks, by the cold feel and rough, gritty texture. Hands lifted to make sure he didn’t bang his head, Robert stood. He stretched, but felt no ceiling.

  He wanted to call out, shout for help, but every instinct told him not to, that there were things listening, watching for something just like him. So he kept quiet, and circled the room. He bumped into no furniture, felt no window. He exhaled, too loudly for comfort, when his hands found a door. The knob, cold aluminum or some other metal, surprised him by turning. It was unlocked.

  Robert swung the door open and stepped into a hallway.

  Finally, some light. Incandescent bulbs hung at intervals above him. Some were out. The rest were yellow. They buzzed as they cast a sallow, flickering glow over the hallway. Painted green halfway up and white above, the place tugged at Bobby’s memory, but he did not recognize it. The floor, gray flecked with white, was old, cracked and gouged.

  There were doors to other rooms, but he did not open them, felt he must not open them. He didn’t feel thirsty or hungry. Ahead, double swinging doors, like at the hospital, stood closed. More and more this place felt familiar, and yet he did not know it.

  No light peeked from beyond the doors ahead. Robert straightened at the sight of them, at the chill running down his spine at the perfect black beyond their round glass windows.

  “Not that way then,” he muttered.

  He turned to reverse course, and the doors creaked open.

  “Hello, Robert,” a voice said. A petite black woman stepped out of the darkness beyond.

  “Mrs. Pearce?”

  His high school counselor, who’d set him on the road to college, to freedom, who’d helped him get Adam into Liberty House.

  “Yes, Bobby,” she said. “That’s the name you knew me by.”

  His skin crawled. He felt the need to run, to scurry back into the dark. He took a backward step.

  “What are you?” he asked.

  “I am inevitable,” she said. Smiling, she extended a hand.

  He did not take it. She shrugged, didn’t seem offended.

  “You haven’t aged.” He said, scanning her eyes for circles, or crow’s feet. Her
hair no more gray now than it had when he’d been in high school.

  “Well, ain’t you sweet,” she said.

  “Why am I here?” he asked.

  “The long version is that a long time ago, something tried to escape me. In its defense, it predated the natural rules, so it was grandfathered in and allowed to linger. That needled me. So I engineered a solution, maneuvering this witch and that, letting you all do what’s predictable when you put horny mortals together, until I had the results I needed.” Pausing, she removed her glasses, polished them on her shirt, and took a long breath. “The short version is that you sort of died.”

  “Sort of ?” he asked. “I’m in a coma.”

  “That is astute, Doctor Binder.” She put her glasses back. “The spirit took quite a bite out of you. Specifically, it took the magic out of you. As I’m certain you’re tired of your family’s witches saying, magic is life.”

  He nodded. Sue and Adam had muttered the expression from time to time. He’d always thought it sounded a little cultish, hadn’t known they’d meant it literally.

  “Am I going to recover?”

  “The prognosis isn’t great,” she said. “Normally I wouldn’t drop by personally, but I feel I owe you, after the whole thing with your wife and your brother.”

  “You talked me into sending Adam to Liberty House,” Bobby said, his chest tightening. He clenched his fists. He hadn’t felt this angry since—since his dad. Bobby relaxed his grip.

  “He hates me for it,” he said, almost quietly, almost a whisper.

  “Oh, I did far worse than that,” she said. She sighed. “I made him hate you.”

  “Why are you telling me all of this?” Robert asked.

  “I felt I owed you an explanation,” she said. “You’ve been a good tool, you and your family. I like to see my tools put to proper rest when their use is done.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked as she pushed the door into the blackness open. “What happens to me?”

  “Just wait here,” she said, smiling over her shoulder. “Someone will be along for you shortly.”